Algeria and Women in Two 1960s Film Adaptations of the Carmen Narrative

This paper considers two very different 1960s adaptations of the Carmen narrative − 1-2-3-4 ou Les Collants noirs (1962) and Carmen 63 (1963) − to show how they articulate common social and political concerns. The first of these, common to many of the Carmen films, is the fear of women’s increasing independence, linked to the development of the post-war consumer culture. The second is a converging concern with the Algerian War, hidden deep in the films, but emerging symptomatically through, amongst other features, the choice of star in one of the films (Jacques Charrier), the fear of the ‘foreign’, and the dilution of Carmen as a nineteenth-century French heritage icon.