Zineb

Sedira

review:

A

chic

ode

to

revolutionary

cinema,

brainy

boozers

–

and

exceptional

berets

WHEN WORDS FALL SILENT, CINEMA SPEAKS …” announces a giant sign. “CINEMA AS A WEAPON” is among the slogans pinned to a board. So it is clear from the start that Zineb Sedira’s exhibition at Tate Britain is intended as a manifesto as much as an aesthetically pleasing arrangement of films and sculptures. And these phrases raise questions: if art is a weapon, then who gets to use it, what war is being fought, and is it any longer effective? What silence is being maintained, and who is speaking out against it?

To answer these questions, Sedira presents a case study of La Cinémathèque Algérienne, which became a mecca for leftist African film-makers after its foundation in 1965. Screened in a model movie theatre complete with flip-down seats, this short documentary film revolves around the cinema’s director, Boudjemaâ Karèche. That he wears a beret very well might tell you something, and this something is confirmed by his accounts of the cinema during its heyday in the 1970s. Here was a place in which clever and idealistic young people could meet to watch important works of revolutionary art, argue about how to construct a better world, and hope to sleep with other clever and idealistic young people.

That isn’t meant to sound flippant. The artist’s recreation of an Algerian cafe in Paris, circa 1974, makes an argument that those aspirations need not be mutually exclusive. Music plays through a jukebox, the bar serves wine and couscous, and the tables are scattered with books about leftist cinema. Enjoying the heady atmosphere, I take the point to be that intellectual life should not be separated from the pursuit of pleasure, and that there is no contradiction in talking about injustice while in the process of drinking with friends. This is a very Francophone point to make, for all that I agree with it, and the phrase “radical chic” might at this point be taking shape in readers’ minds.