The Casbah of Algiers in art and film

The architect Le Corbusier came to Algiers in the 1930s and produced a series of schemes for the city, the best known of them the Plan Obus. His feeling about the old quarter was not hostile. It was the opposite, and he put it more strongly than almost any European of his generation.

He inverted the whole colonial hierarchy. In the modern European city, he wrote, the civilised live like rats in holes, while the barbarians live in solitude and in well-being. He insisted the Casbah had a beauty of its own, that its historic and aesthetic value was real, and that it must never, no, never be destroyed.

Then he drew what he wanted to build. Zeynep Çelik's study of the colonial planning of Algiers sets out what the schemes would actually have done: preserve the upper Casbah while expurgating the lower part of it, replacing what he called slums with parks and gardens, and carry his own structures as a bridge over the quarter. That bridge would have delivered, in Çelik's phrase, constant visual supervision, and it would have written a social hierarchy into the city in built form.

Çelik also documents how he described the place. Algiers was a magnificent body, supple-hipped and full-breasted. The Casbah, in his reductive drawings, became a veiled head. The same body language runs through his drawings of Algerian women.

It is a useful case precisely because it is not simple. A man can mean the praise and still produce a plan that would have put a motorway viaduct over somebody else's city and called it respect.

Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers was released in 1966, produced by Igor Film and Casbah Film, with Yacef Saadi among its producers. It was shot on location in the markets and narrow streets of the Casbah itself, in black and white, with handheld cameras, and a cast of roughly a hundred and fifty non-professionals. Yacef Saadi, who had led the FLN network in the quarter and been captured in 1957, produced the film and played a thinly fictionalised version of himself.

A persistent belief about the film is that it incorporates newsreel footage. It does not. Britannica records that every frame was shot by Pontecorvo. It won the Golden Lion at Venice in 1966, took three Academy Award nominations, and was not shown in France until 1971. The BFI lists it as independent Algeria's first production.

It has since been studied by militaries and by revolutionary organisations with equal attention, which is an unusual afterlife for any film. For this site the relevant point is narrower: the visual idea most of the world has of these streets was made by a camera crew working in them for a few months in the mid-1960s, and the events it dramatises are treated separately here, from documents rather than from the film.

There is a substantial photographic record of the Casbah from before the First World War, and much of it sits in institutional collections outside Algeria. The Hesburgh Libraries at the University of Notre Dame hold a series called the Architectural Lantern Slides of Algeria, photographed around 1910 by the firm G. Massiot et cie, which includes Dar Hassan Pacha.

Lantern slides are worth a second's thought. They were made to be projected to an audience. So a collection like that is not simply a record of what the buildings looked like, it is a record of what European lecture audiences were being shown and taught to see. The framing, the choice of subject and the captioning are all part of the evidence.

The same caution applies to the photographs used on this site's own gallery page, which is why the captions there describe rather than assert, and why the page invites correction.

The nineteenth-century Orientalist painters are missing from this page, and they should not be. Delacroix's Algerian work, above all Women of Algiers in their Apartment, is the single most reproduced image associated with this city, and the scholarship on what he actually saw in 1832 and what he invented is extensive. Renoir worked in Algiers too. So did a long list of others.

They are not here yet because this site's rule is to cite the holding museum's own record for any artwork it discusses, and those records could not be obtained when this page was written. They will be added when they can be.

Also missing: chaabi music on film, the Algerian novelists associated with the quarter, and the photographic archives held in Algeria itself. If you can point to any of it with a proper reference, please write to admin@casbah-alger.com.