Max Silverman Quote

'My purpose is not simply to seek out narratives which deal with colonialism and the Holocaust together. It is rather an attempt to unearth an overlapping vocabulary, lexicon, imagery, aesthetic and ultimately history shared by representations of colonialism and the Holocaust'  (Silverman 2008: 420)

In relation to Chris Marker's La jetée (1962)

'While the tolls of France's colonial wars in Indochina (1948-1954) and more
immediately in Algeria (1954-1962) are not as evident as in Marker's biography, La jetée's
bleak, post-apocalyptic setting attests to World War II's enduring malaise' (Bravo 2009: 2)

Night and Fog/The Battle of Algiers/Kapò

From top: Night and Fog (Resnais 1955), The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo 1966), Kapò (Pontecorvo 1960)

Although ostensibly about the Algerian War, Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers (1966) simultaneously makes reference to earlier films about the Holocaust, including Alain Resnais's Night and Fog (1955) and his own work Kapò (1960), both of which display similar representational and formal patterns . . .

Charles Jones Quote

'It may be true that a curious empathy arising out of their experience of irregular Resistance operations against the German occupying forces in the 1940s affected many of the officers who were to serve in Algeria' (Jones 2007: 451)

Neil Macmaster Quote

'The argument developed in 2000–02 was that French society could only come to terms with, and lance the abcess of, systematic colonial violence through a travail de verite and by formal government recognition of responsibility for past war crimes, just as the state had for its participation in the Holocaust under the Vichy regime' (Macmaster 2004: 9)

In relation to Micheal Haneke's Hidden (2005)

'The store of interconnecting and superimposed images that returns is thus composed of different
sites of horror in which, perhaps inevitably, echoes of the Holocaust invade the memory of a
Franco-Algerian past' (Maxim Silverman 2010: 59)

In relation to Jean-Luc Godard's Le Petit Soldat (1960)

In its ethics and aesthetics of ambiguity, Jean-LucGodard's narrative simultaneously  bears witness to a moment of multidirectional memory, in which discourses surrounding the Holocaust and the Algerian War appear to converge. In particular, the film's antihero Bruno forms a complex composite of O.A.S. agent and the French Resistance hero Pierre Brossolette; his torture thus emerging as a means to unite two forms of collective trauma traditionally regarded as distinct . .