French Cinema After Algeria
The New Wave of French cinema in the 1960s was centrally concerned with Algeria's revolution. In certain cases, such as Jean-Luc Godard's Le Petit Soldat, the main subject of the film concerned Algeria. Godard's film was controversial for its depiction of torture by the FLN: "torture is so monotonous and sad." In Alain Resnais' 1963 classic Muriel ou le temps d'un retour, the "return" of the title is the repressed of wartime violence. Set in a sleepy Channel port, the film explores the fractured family dynamics of two generations traumatized by the war (see the trailer). For the widowed Hélène, the drama centers on the return of her former lover Alphonse, who formerly ran a café in Algiers. For her son Bernard, the film's very title refers to his fictitious fiancée and to a woman who he had tortured to death in Algeria. This traumatic scene was visualized by way of "home" movies shot by Robert, a fellow soldier during the war. The film uses formal means of disjuncture such as jump cuts to express the "out of joint" feel of French life. Characters repeatedly imagine a future, often in a different country, only to be unable to escape the realities of what they have already done.
One of the most remarkable collisions between Algeria and French cinema came in Godard's later film La Chinoise. In the middle of a highly stylized film in which actors portray a Maoist group of students living in one of their parents' homes in a chic neighborhood of Paris comes a scene shot on a train. It is a discussion between Véronique, one of the most radical of the students, and the philosopher Francis Jeanson. Jeanson, who plays himself, had been extensively involved in clandestine support for the FLN during the Algerian Revolution. In this conversation, where he plays Véronique's adviser, he repeatedly and devastatingly critiques her weak plans for direct Maoist action, while himself proposing to leave university life for "cultural action." Jeanson cuts down the students's plans for violent direct action:
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La Chinoise announces itself as a film "en train de se faire" [in the course of making itself]. This scene visualizes that self-referentiality by placing literally on a train. There are numerous cinematic markers being referenced here from the Lumière brothers 1895 film of a train arriving in a station, via the sense that the view from a train is the original "moving image" to Hitchcock's classic Strangers on a Train. In this case, the film steps out of its stylized and theatrical mise-en-scène to a realist scene shot in available light. The debate on the justifications for revolutionary violence, how many people constitute a collective and the possibilities for cultural action is compelling and all the more fascinating because we now know that within a year a student-led revolution broke out in 1968.
After 1968, in a period of active censorship that precluded the Battle of Algiers from being shown in France until 1977, often the reference was by allusion or, just as significantly, by omission. Never properly accounted for, "Algeria" and all it stands for continues to haunt French cinema, just as it does contemporary life. To take two examples from 2010: Rachid Bouchareb took the "gangster" style of the New Wave--as in such classics as A Bout de Souffle--and applied it to the war in Algeria. Telling the story of three survivors of the 1945 massacre at Sétif until independence in 1962, Hors la loi was greeted with unremitting hostility both in France and in the United States.
Framed as a family drama and shot conventionally, the film was nonetheless the target of French right-wing politicians and organizations, who sought to have the film banned, outraged above all by a comparison between the FLN and the French Resistance. For the New York Times, the film was "angry and coarse," especially, in the view of the Times, when compared to the (in my view) sanctimonious Des hommes et des dieux. This latter tells the "largely true" story of the death of seven Trappist monks during the 1996 violence in Algeria. Despite the fact that it has never been proven who was responsible, film and reporting alike indict Islamic groups and elevate the Christians to the status of martyrs in the "war of civilizations."
Later in the year, a typical French love triangle film, Un Balcon sur la mer, was given some spice by the addition of the Algerian war as background. Here the revolution and its causes were elided so that a bombing could act as a plot device. Director Nicole Garcia is herself a native of Oran, which the film uses as its Algerian setting, but any sense of political context or meaning is entirely subordinated to the erotic elements of the plot. The repressed, it appears, still needs to return, as it has been trying to do for over fifty years now. And then came 2011.
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