ABSTRACT
What can we understand by ‘tunisianité’? And how is such a national identity expressed through such varied artistic works? Or rather, how does the ideological expression of ‘the national’ manifest itself, on different levels, according to different viewpoints and approaches? In other words, what we are seeking to isolate, in sociological terms, is the relation between the material bases of social organisation and the most highly elaborated forms of intellectual, artistic and cultural production; taking the Tunisian cinema as a case study, I observe in this article the field constituted by 40 years’ production of films in order to test a grille de lecture, experiment with certain definitions, and advance a certain number of hypotheses.
