The Franco-Algerian War through a Twenty-First Century Lens

Film and History

Nicole Beth Wallenbrock

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781350246805
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781474262828
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

The Franco-Algerian War (1954–62) remains a powerful international symbol of Third Worldism and the finality of Empire. Through its nuanced analysis of the war's depiction in film, The Franco-Algerian War through a Twenty-First Century Lens locates an international reckoning with history that both condemns and exonerates past generations.

Algerian and French production partnerships-such as Hors-la-loi, (Outside the Law, Rachid Bouchareb, 2010) and Loubia Hamra (Bloody Beans, Narimane Mari, 2013)-are one of several ways citizens collaborate to unearth a shared history and its legacy. Nicole Beth Wallenbrock probes cinematic discourse to shed new light on topics including: the media revelation of torture and atomic bomb tests; immigration's role in the evolution of the war's meaning; and the complex relationship of the intertwined film cultures. The first chapter summarizes the Franco-Algerian War in 20th-century film, thus grounding subsequent queries with Algeria's moudjahid or freedom-fighter films and the French new wave's perceived disinterest in the conflict.

This book is an invaluable resource for scholars seeking to understand cinema's role in re-evaluating war and reconstructing international memory.

1

The Twentieth-Century Screen Geography of the Franco-Algerian War

There has been considerable academic reflection on cinematic depictions of the Algerian Revolution in the twentieth century (largely in association with the historical interest in the time period and its consequences in contemporary France).¹ However, Algerian and French depictions of the shared war have been studied separately. Generally speaking, Algerian cinema and French cinema have been critiqued as independent entities, in large part because they did work autonomously in the twentieth century. The Algerian government pursued the moudjahid or freedom-fighter cinema and filmed in Algeria, while the most well-known features by French new wave directors that addressed the Algerian Revolution—Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Petit Soldat (The Little Soldier) filmed in 1959 and censored until 1963 and Alain Resnais’s Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (Muriel or the Time of Return) also released in 1963—were filmed and set in Europe with European actors. In league with both governments’ postcolonial Mediterranean maps, one finds few efforts to locate the ties between the two countries’ portrayals, and little exploration of a latent awareness of one another’s cinematic presence.

Yet on closer examination we find a history of productions between Algerian and French people: René Vautier’s and Pierre Clément’s leadership in the FLN’s (Front de libération nationale) early cinematic endeavors, 1980s’ auteurs living in France and yet funded by the FLN—such as novelist and filmmaker Assia Djebar, and actor and director Mahmoud Zemmouri—are just a few examples this chapter explores. Such twentieth-century films elude a coproduction label, as their funding, target audience, and/or cast and crew were national. Nonetheless, these films represent an effort to expose the complications of the revolutionary era and/or employ the apparatus to include the ideas and opinions of the Other. In brief, this chapter reviews the various ways in which the Franco-Algerian War was cinematically depicted before 2000. However, in coalition with the following chapters’ emphasis on coproductions, I underline the ways in which the two nations’ vision of the war era reveals partnerships and, even when antagonistic, a cinematic conversation.

Consequently, the term “transpolitics,” coined by Paul A. Silverstein, applies to the relationship between the nations’ cinemas in the twentieth century. Silverstein’s 2004 sociological study Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race, and Nation reveals how activities that take place exclusively in one nation reverberate and extend to political events in the other—the shared history and geographic proximity of Algeria and France exemplify such tensions. During Silverstein’s period of study, the Algerian Civil War (roughly 1992–2002) notably affected opinion and policy toward Islam and immigrants in France—the Islamic headscarf, the construction of mosques, and the like. Reversing this power dynamic, Silverstein also finds the Algerian communities in France largely inspired the Berber movement in Algeria (and the Berber Spring of 1980 in particular). Silverstein writes, “The processes of collusion and contention, of appropriation and transformation, that link Algeria and France—Algerians and Franco-Algerians—constitute what I refer to as transpolitics.”² Such a concept transcends the transnational, for in these historic examples, Algerians and French citizens are not obviously partnering a final project that blurs their national distinctions. Instead the brutal legacy of colonization and its memory link the two nations’ consciousness, resulting in distinct political acts that evoke an internalization of events abroad.

As we consider films as political acts in and of themselves, we find an awareness of the former colony/of the former colonizer bleeding into the national imaginary, and integral to both nations’ portrayals of their shared war. In the struggle to cinematically depict the eight years of warfare in the twentieth century, Algeria and France assessed one another’s cinematic output. The damning insider portraits of the French military, Avoir 20 ans dans les Aurès (To Be 20 in the Aurès, René Vautier) and R.A.S. (Nothing to Report, Yves Boisset) were released respectively in France in 1972 and 1973 in part refuting the war-era censor. These small productions prepared Europe for an Algerian film, Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina’s Chronique des années de braise (Chronicle of the Years of Fire, 1975); although financed and produced by the Algerian state, the film garnered a European public by entering the festival circuit and winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festival. Such lightly sketched examples illustrate transcinema, citing Silverstein’s transpolitics as a point of departure. This twentieth-century international film-dialogue between Algeria and France can be read as epistolary—space and exclusion inform national responses. Nevertheless, both Algerian and French films concerning the Algerian Revolution depend on one another for contestation and/or motivation, revealing traces of one another even when scarcely touching. Again, when reading films as political acts, we expose cinema’s pivotal role in the transpolitical realm, most obviously in concerns of immigration; both the growing Algerian population of France and the departed European population of Algeria find significant expression in national cinemas that cross and contaminate. Undoubtedly, the transcinema between Algeria and France in the twentieth century and its evolution toward the twenty-first merit their own book-length investigation. Nonetheless, this chapter’s investigation of Franco-Algerian transcinema (or the ways in which films of one nation affect the mood and portrayals by the other) imparts a chronological outline that introduces the following chapters’ study of early twenty-first-century films.

This chapter unearths a foundation of both exchange and dissidence, one that hints at the broader revelations that soon advance and consume the Franco-Algerian War in the popular imaginary. During this half-century, cinema’s mapping of the Algerian Revolution guards a Mediterranean border, while the films’ existence and response to one another simultaneously suggest a courier passage. In order to situate transcinema within an ideological history, we will first view Jean-Paul Sartre’s influence on understandings and portrayals of the Revolution. I then move from the beginnings of independent Algerian cinema to chronologically expose productions key to the exchange and evolution of the symbolic Algerian Revolution. The few exceptional productions and individuals of the twentieth century that bridge national barriers (either through funding, setting, or casting) pave the way for the war’s twenty-first-century screen cartography, a grouping largely determined by immigration that seeks to merge memories and terrains.

During the War

The SCA and the Censor

France’s military provided television and news reel coverage through the SCA (Service cinématographique de l’armée), in both French-Algeria and France.³ The SCA created propaganda films in order to present the draft as pacific—footage of soldiers offering food and health care services to Algerian children was common. The SCA films denied the violence of the French military by singularly representing the French military’s benevolence toward Algerians. As Benjamin Stora stresses by employing the second-person pronoun, a personal interaction with the French public took place in these moving images that sought to bolster French national identification and pride: “French soldiers had but the uniform of the soldier … one always sees them caring, constructing, teaching … The legend explains: ‘You are the best elements of contact with the population.’”⁴ Through carefully constructed and selected footage, the French government largely controlled the warfare from reaching global mainstream media circuits; as ambassadors of goodwill, the young French men appeared as the viewers’ idealized likeness, in stark contrast to the blurred Algerian population, who appeared poor and foreign, virtual props for the French military. The films were not only produced for French consumption, they also aimed to indoctrinate Algerians. Equipped cinébuses (discussed in Chapter 2) would tour the Algerian countryside projecting appropriate SCA films to educate and tame the rural population.

In this manner, the SCA reinforced la commission de contrôle (or censor), which helped to ensure French public support by banning any media that exposed or questioned the violence of French involvement, and whose decrees became increasingly strict when General Charles De Gaulle returned to presidency in 1958.⁵ In fact, during the conflict, Fox Movietone diffused the only moving images of warfare in Algeria, but exclusively for an American public.⁶ Although the censor always aimed to control straying French morals and youth culture, its primary goal after World War II was to eradicate any trace of Vichy support. While the Fifth Republic created a ministry of culture headed by author André Malraux that encouraged the new wave financially by basing government funding less on box office receipts, the commission de contrôle restricted the new artists’ creative impulses, as a pre-censor review of scripts banned any possible portrayal of the recent events in Algeria. Metaphor also incited censorship, as in the case of Moranbong, une aventure coréenne (Moranbong, a Korean Adventure, Jean-Claude Bonnardot, 1959), which was banned until 1963. The censor also banned two films set during World War II due to parallels to the contemporary draft and desertion: Les Honneurs de la guerre (The Honors of the War, Jean Dewer, 1960) and Tu ne tueras point (Thou Shalt Not Kill, Claude Autant-Lara, 1961).⁷

An underground press ignited the French movement for Algerian independence, and the cinema linked to such literary currents and against the censor emerged as part and parcel of the anticolonial French voice. Perhaps the most successful of such literature was La Question⁸ a pro-independence journalist’s account of torture (and survival) at the hands of the French military in Algeria.⁹ The shocking truth of French military torture sold over 60,000 copies in its first two weeks before being banned and confiscated, an act that only increased public interest in the short book.¹⁰ Nevertheless, by the end of 1958, many French homes owned copies of La Question, while the scandal had made the text and its claims familiar to the general public. Journals such as Les Temps modernes and Vérité liberté as well as El Moudjahid (the smuggled French language FLN newspaper in which the psychoanalyst from Martinique turned theorist Frantz Fanon wrote) inspired many porteurs de valises—the term commonly employed for the French who secretly transported money to the FLN. Furthermore, the reports depicting the French military’s heinous behavior abroad posed larger questions to French history, interrogating the roots and reasoning of colonialism. Such a clandestine press through its printing, distribution, and purchase represented a cluster of anticensor/antistate acts.

A French philosophical approach largely influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre informed the Algerian independence posit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Twentieth-Century Screen Geography of the Franco-Algerian War
• 2 The Algerian Revolution in Three Transnational Documentaries
• 3 The Specter of Torture and Atomic Bombs
• 4 Reclaiming the Screen Algerian Revolution
• 5 A Scission in the Memory of the Franco-Algerian War
• 6 The Revolution through Utopian Dialectics
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index
• Copyright Page