Abstract
This chapter discusses the double narrative of French modernization and the Algerian War. New Wave films Muriel, Cléo from 5 to 7, Adieu Philippine, Le Petit Soldat, and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg express the myths and anxieties of modernization while critiquing official representations of a prosperous France surging into American-style consumption patterns. References to the Algerian War are sporadic and indirect. Decolonization and accelerated modernization are deeply interrelated, with the war representing a sort of “political doppelganger” of the country’s newly omnipresent capitalist culture. Pontecorvo’s fictionalized documentary The Battle of Algiers applies the aesthetic strategies of Italian investigative cinema to Third World context. Through montage, musical motifs, and a metafictional sequence, he demonstrates that the essence of reality does not always lie on the surface.
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Notes
- 1.
Some pioneering militant short documentaries were shot in Algeria between 1958 and 1959: Sakiet Sidi Youssef and Refuges algériens (both by Clement, both 1958) and Algérieen flames (Vautier 1958), followed by 58/2B (Chalon 1959) and Secteur postal 89098 (Durand 1959). However, these works were denied the license needed for public projections. Some clandestine screenings took place in trade unions and leftist cine-clubs, but none of the films ever reached the commercial circuit. Government officials in Paris at the time, whether they were of the Right or the Left—and in spite of noble declarations concerning the freedom of speech—persisted in keeping under wraps any ideas they considered to be subversive (Austin, “Representing the Algerian War in Algerian Cinema: Le vent des aurès”, 183–4).
- 2.
For an analysis of Cléo’s encounters with unanticipated spaces and objects that surround her, see Tweedie (121–4).
- 3.
Marker also includes some footage of an interview with a young Algerian immigrant who talks about racial discrimination, and of the police’s violent repression of the demonstration of October 17, 1961, against the OAS near the Charonne metro station, where a number of Algerians were killed. Even Enrico’s La belle vie references the same Charonne manifestation, with a newsreel stating “this manifestation reduced to 1500 arrests and 1500 Muslims will be repatriated in their own villages.”
- 4.
In 1958 there were 683,000 television sets in France; by 1959 the number had climbed to just under 1 million, and by 1962 there were 2.5 million sets (Neupert, 10).
- 5.
“People practically never experienced the great events of history with their own eyes – technically speaking you could say that the human eye is like a 32mm focal lens while the mass media audience is accustomed to seeing through the 200mm or the 300mm lens” (Pontecorvo in Solinas , 167).
- 6.
Furthermore, to achieve the rough quality of the images Pontecorvo and Marcello Gatti (the director of photography) made a negative of the positive and compensated the granular texture sought and the violent contrasts by shooting extra smoothly with very soft stock.
- 7.
Because of the anti-semitic laws, on the eve of World War II Pontecorvo left Italy and moved to Paris, where he enrolled in a journalist program that led to a position with Agence Havas (today the Agence France-Presse), and later as a foreign correspondent of important newspapers like Repubblica and Paese Sera. In his travels to the north of France he became interested in the photography and documentary side of journalism. When Pontecorvo saw Rossellini’s Paisan , he decided to change profession: he bought a 16mm camera and started directing documentaries . Pontecorvo’s first medium length documentary Missione Timiriazev (1953) is set in the Po Valley (after the flood of 1951), the location of Paisan ’s sixth episode and one of the key sites of neorealist cinema (cfr. the early works of Antonioni and Visconti’s Obsession , 1943). The following year Pontecorvo made two documentaries set in Rome: Cani dietro le sbarre, showing the city dog pound where the animals were prepared for death, and Porta Portese, describing the activity of the flea market of the capital. The angle shots, contrasts, and photography of Porta Portese recall the long sequence after the first communication of FLN in Algiers. In 1955 he filmed two other shorts: Festa a Castelluccio and Uomini di Marmo. In 1956 Pane e zolfo was shot in Sicily and documented a group of striking miners who occupied the mine. These works are a premise that naturally led to his fictionalized documentaries .
- 8.
In analyzing the often dismissed six-minute coda of The Battle of Algiers , O’Leary draws attention to its location: Climat de France by architect Fernand Pouillon. This is an evolutionary housing project conceived with the aim of transforming the rural Algerian migrants into modern Westernized residents. For most of the film, the European city and the Casbah represent a dramatic dichotomy typical of the colonial era. Nevertheless, Pouillon’s development does not belong to either of them. Such a “third” or hybrid space would soon materialize across the Mediterranean, at the outskirts of many French towns themselves. Thus, The Battle of Algiers is to be considered an end of empire film as much as a work that presciently anticipates banlieue cinema (see Mathieu Kassovitz’s La haine; 1995) (18–25).
- 9.
After the forward tracking shot, the hand of the actress Emmanuelle Riva is not in fact in the corner of the final frame; instead, it is nearly in the center, and the corner of the shot shows in deep focus a group of prisoners pushed by a kapò, who passing by quickly glance at her.
- 10.
On the Italian side, Antonio Musu created a production company, Igor Films, and with the help of Pontecorvo (who reinvested the money earned with Kapò ) covered the remaining 55%.
- 11.
See also Aimé, 20.
- 12.
See Covington’s “Are the Revolutionary Techniques Employed in Battle of Algiers Applicable to Harlem?”
- 13.
Later in the movie, after Ben M’Hidi’s suicide in prison, Mathieu declares to the press his admiration for the moral strength, intelligence, and unwavering idealism of his enemy. Governments, armies , and military colleges of various countries have also screened The Battle of Algiers , including a 2004 screening at the Pentagon’s Special Operations. The flyer described the plot of the movie as “How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas. Children shoot soldiers at point-blank range. Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor” (in McDonald, 74).
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Cilento, F. (2018). Objectively False: French Cinema and the Algerian Question. In: An Investigative Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92681-0_3
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