From otherness 'over there' to virtual presence: Camp de Thiaroye - the battle of Algiers - Hidden

This work originated in a fascination with Caché/Hidden (haneke, 2005) for its portrayal of the present-day West as inhabiting a decidedly unreconciled postcolonial moment. Before addressing Hidden directly, the chapter ahead seeks to flesh out a select 'back story' through two other films charting important moments in France’s colonial history: Camp de Thiaroye/The Camp at Thiaroye (Sembene and Faty Sow, 1987) and La Battaglia di Algeri/The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo, 1966). The culmination of this process in Hidden presents thus-far suppressed memory, experience, and figuration of the colonial other now operating as a spectral and virtual presence inside the privileged Western subject. Across the films – played out between colonial, anticolonial, and postcolonial eras – I sketch the development of what Edward Said calls this subject’s 'imaginative geography and of the dramatic boundaries it draws' (1979, p. 73). The discussion ahead seeks to chart the spatial eroding of the demarcation between this figure and its colonial other to a point where a virtual image of the latter haunts the former from within