Five Broken Cameras

This is essentially a Palestinian film made with the assistance of an Israeli filmmaker and funded by companies in nine different countries, developed through a European media project. It fits well into the concept of ‘Imperfect Cinema’. The film is constructed from the footage that the main protagonist, Emad Burnat, recorded on a series of domestic video cameras. Burnat lives in the Palestinian village of Bill’in. The village is over looked by the Zionist settlement of Modi’in Ilit and was a target of the so-called security wall which is encroaching and stealing Palestinian lands in the occupied territories. The film is similar in topic to the 2009 Budrus, another Palestinian village threatened by the wall. In fact, both were able to achieve some re-routing of this monstrosity. However, whilst Budrus tended to celebrate this as an unconditional victory, Five Broken Cameras is much clearer about the limitations of what was achieved.

Burnat has bought six cameras: the first five were smashed in confrontations with Israeli security forces and Israeli settlers. We get a very personal view of five years [2005 to 201] of protest and conflict as the Palestinians defend their lands, their rights and their livelihoods. Burnat’s film focuses on his experiences and that of his fellow Palestinians. These include his family and his two friends: Adeeb and Bassem. Both the later are active in the protests, which are supported by fellow Palestinians, international volunteers and the small minority of Israeli’s who oppose the state’s neo-colonial occupation.

What the film offers little of is the wider context: among Palestinian forces, of the larger Zionist project of Israel, or of the international aspects including the media. Such subjective limitations restrict any analytical discussion of the situation but it does present a powerful and emotive presentation of the conflict. We see repeated violence by the Israeli military, and also by Israeli settlers. Emad is arrested and jailed: Adeeb is shot in the leg and Bassem is killed by a gas grenade. And there are other Palestinian fatalities including children. This is emotive material, but only part of a much larger picture of a brutal occupation and expropriation.

The film has won wide praise and a nomination for an Academy Award for Best Documentary at the 2013 Hollywood event. There has also been some interesting criticism: one can discount the ‘gnashing of teeth’ by Zionist supporters. On The Case for Global Film Roy Stafford expresses the following reservations:

“What is slightly sinister is the film’s depiction of the settlers – Orthodox Jews who are perhaps the least ‘humanised’ by the camera’s gaze. The Israeli settlers seen here trouble me deeply – I can’t think of anything about them that would attract my sympathy – but I don’t want to feel that way about anybody and I wonder if the filmmakers’ decision not to invite them to speak or not to attempt to present their perspective, somehow damages the strength of the film’s polemic. I’m not asking for ‘balance’ – the settlers are in the wrong, that’s the starting point. But we’ve got to try to treat them like human beings, otherwise they are trapped behind their fences in the same way that they have deliberately put the Palestinians behind a fence/wall.”

In part Roy appears to be arguing that Israelis, including settlers, should be given a voice in the film. This is a valid point in many cases: I have argued that a serious problem with Israeli films like Waltz with Bashir (2008) or Western films like One Day in September (1999) is that the Palestinians are mute victims in the films. However, I would argue that this is not a universal requirement. In Waltz with Bashir the lack of a ‘voice’ for the Palestinian s and Lebanese is part of the films refusal to confront the actual social actions taking place: the invasion which is not only illegal under the laws of bourgeois states but which is a blatant suppression of what are generally accepted as basic human rights. This is part of a general conventional approach in Israeli films and the mainstream films from Hollywood, which support Zionism.

It seems to me that Five Broken Cameras is a different case and needs to be judged somewhat differently. The film follows an artistic form which has resonated powerfully fore centuries: most notably in Goya’s great and famous painting: The Third of May 1808. These are agitational artworks which dramatise both the oppression and the resistance of a people. Emad’s narrative is presented as a ‘representative story’ for Palestinian resistance. Hence there is a clear awareness [absent in Budrus] of the need for the struggle to continue.

It is worth pointing out that the Israelis in Five Broken Cameras do have a voice, both the military and the settlers. They appear frequently on camera barking out orders, threats and insults. Their voice is as revealing of their standpoint as are their actions. And the ‘voice ‘ they present in this film is typical of the actions of the larger Israeli State. Juan García Espinosa writes:

“Should we ask for a cinema of denunciation? Yes and no.  … Yes, if the denunciation acts as information, testimony, as another combat weapon for those engaged in the struggle.”

My differences with Roy Stafford also turn in part on the language one uses. Rather than ‘less than human’ I would use ‘inhuman’. That is, ‘brutal, unfeeling, barbarous’. In fact, such actions treat the recipients as ‘less than human’.

One of the most positive aspects of this film is the extent to which Emad Burnat, as an ordinary working farmer, has been enabled to develop a cinematic voice.

“There is a widespread tendency in modern art to make the spectator participate even more fully. If he participates to a greater and greater degree, where will the process end up? Isn’t the logical outcome – or shouldn’t it in fact be – that he will cease being a spectator altogether?”

My more serious concern with the film’s lacunae is the absence of a larger contextual aspect. The policies of the Israeli State are absent: and more importantly, the complicated nature of the Palestinian forces and resistance is not presented.

“We maintain that imperfect cinema must above all show the process which generates the problems. …To show the process of a problem … is to submit to judgement whiteout pronouncing the verdict.” And, in fact, Five Broken Cameras ends with the historical verdict remaining open. But its powerful presentation of Palestinian struggle makes it a very effective agitational work. The film is definitely a key expression in the increasing catalogue of Palestinian film.

Quotations from For an Imperfect Cinema by Julio García Espinosa, translated by Julianne Burton.

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia / Bir zamanlar Anadolu’da

A friend identified this film [directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan] and the 2011 Iranian film Nader and Simin A separation as the outstanding releases of the last two years. I was so impressed with Once Upon a Time in Anatolia that I saw it three times and I now think it is the outstanding film so far of the century. Like Nader and Simin it is a film about the human process: beautifully crafted and full of complexities that repay several visits. However I think Anatolia has the greater complexity of the two films, especially in its address of class. The film comes out of the director Ceylan Bilge own experiences in the area of Anatolia in modern Turkey. However, it is not actually set in the past [even if the time is indeterminate}: a misapprehension created by the UK trailer for the film.

The plot is simple: we follow a Prosecutor with a police team and army personnel as they drive round the countryside with two prisoners seeking the grave of a murdered man. The drive is interrupted at one point when the men stopped at a village for rest and refreshment. When the body is finally found the group return to the nearby town where the suspects are imprisoned and an autopsy is carried out on the body.

These events in the plot are the occasion for a close scrutiny of the main characters, who themselves offer a reflection on the larger Turkish society. They include Doctor Cemal (Muhammet Uzuner), who has moved from larger city to work in this relatively remote area. He talks frequently with Prosecutor Nusret (Taner Birsel), the most important official here, and a man who we learn is haunted by the past. The Police Commissioner Naci (Yilmaz Erdogan) also has a burden, a son with an unidentified but serious illness and disability. Naci has an assistant Arap Ali (Ahmet Mümtaz Taylan), who has married a woman from the village that they visit. And there are the prisoners, two brothers, Kenan (Firat Tanis) and Ramazan (Burhan Yildiz): Ramazan is clearly slow-witted. There are several assistants and a jeep of Gendarmes. Finally there is the corpse Yasar (Erol Erarslan), about whom we learn quite a lot in the course of the search.

This group offers a cross-section of the local society – bourgeois, petty bourgeois entrepreneur, state functionaries, urban and rural proletariat. Class differences clearly impact on their relationships, though these are also affected by ethnic and regional factors. There is deference shown, but social antagonism also seep into actions. But parallels also cross the class divide: there is a potent shot of Kenan in the rear sit of the police car which is matched in framing and lighting by one of Prosecutor Nusret much later in the film.

And gender is another potent factor. For what is immediately apparent is that the main characters are all male. Women do appear, and in fact, they are central to the focus of the story. But they are always presented as subordinated to the men. In fact, the four important women in the narrative hardly speak at all. The only words by a woman are from the wife of the murdered man, Gülnaz (Nihan Okutucu): a yes and a couple ‘ah-hums’ in response to questions at the autopsy. All the other women are kept both completely silent and mainly hidden from view. Cemal’s love, from whom we learn he is now divorced, is seen only in some old photographs. Nusret’s wife appears merely in his reminiscences, though he tells Cemal [and us] what she said and did. And Naci’s wife is only a voice on the other end of a cell phone.

The one other woman that we actually see is Cemille (Cansu Demirci), the daughter of the Mayor or Mukhtar (Ercan Kesal) of the village where the team and their prisoners stop for refreshments. They [and we] see her only by the light of a lamp as she serves drinks: then briefly in the dark outside. She is beautiful but mysterious. She is in fact the first woman seen onscreen in the film. And her appearance launches and demonstrates how potent is the suppressed femininity of this society. Following her appearance Kenan sees an apparition of the murdered man. This is followed by a fuller confession by him to the Prosecutor and the Police Commissioner. A sort of motive emerges here for the crime, as Kenan claims that he is the father of the son born to Yasar’s wife. Ceylan’s film offers seemingly unrelated incidents that are full of allusions: during this sequence Arap sits by a fire, behind him a moth circles and then flies into the lamp previously held by the mayor’s daughter.

Similar opaque allusions occur during the drives and search for the corpse. At one point Cemal walks up a hillside as thunder and lighting crackle overhead. The flashes reveal a large carved headpiece on a small rock wall. All we learn is from Arap, who remarks that they are common in the area. At another point the convoy stops above a slope with several trees and a small stream running through them. After an important conversation between Cemal and Nusret [in term of the plot] the Prosecutor has to upbraid Naci who loses his temper with the prisoners. Meanwhile Arap surreptitiously picks apples from one of the trees. His actions cause several apples to fall to the ground: one slowly rolls down the slope and a little way along the stream. The camera carefully follows its roll: it is an exquisite shot, which seems to speak volumes on the protagonists and their activities.

Whilst the film is extremely serious, it also offers moment of humour and irony. Early in the drive Naci and the other policemen discuss the qualities of ‘buffalo yoghurt’. At the place where they finally find the corpse there is an argument over who has forgotten the body bag, resulting in it being wrapped in a car blanket. The team has a struggle to fit it into the boot of one of the cars. Then, Arap who has picked up some melons in the field nearby surreptitiously places these alongside the corpse in the boot.

The Sight &Sound review remarked that the film was more ‘talky’ than Ceylan’s earlier work. And the conversations between the characters are absorbing and extremely important in interpreting the film. However, Ceylan and his team also raise ambiguities about these. There is an extended conversation between Cemal and Arap at one of the sites searched. Cemal sits by a car door, Arap stand alongside the vehicle. When I saw the film again I realised from the camera angles that they do not actually appear to be talking to each other. Is this a reverie by one character: are there two separate internal monologues: or is Ceylan positioning us to have to rethink our response. There is a similar moment at the hospital. Cemal is waiting to commence the autopsy and he is remembering times past. Suddenly, with a cut to a new shot, he is talking with Nusret who sits opposite him. Is this an ellipsis? Is Cemal really talking to Nusret? By the end of the film it is the past that haunts Nusret that seems to figure largely in the film’s resolution. However, it is clear from the sequence where Cemal looks at old photographs that he is too haunted by a past. The line that elides the memories of Cemal and Nusret seems rather ambiguous.

This is not to suggest that Ceylan’s film offers a resolution that can be read innumerable ways. During the autopsy there is a discovery by the technician Sakir (Kubilay Tunçer) and Cemal that alters their [and our] perception of the crime and the perpetrators. Yet this is followed by a series of relatively long takes as Yasar’s widow and her son leave the hospital and return home. Whatever the men have decided has to be seen against the context provided by gender and class. This ending has all the resonance that was also created in the final long take of Nader and Simin: an ending that positions the viewer to consider carefully the story and characters they have watched over two hours.

The film is also graced by exceptionably fine anamorphic cinematography and sound design: Gökhan Tiryaki and Thomas Robert respectively. The films open with a pre-credit sequence, the only scene where we see Yasar alive, drinking and socialising with Kenan and Ramazan.  The sequence of shots shows us the trio through a window, then an interior mid-shot, and then exterior long shots. The dark gloomy atmosphere is depicted in shadowy twilight images with the ever-present thunder rumbling on the soundtrack. A passing lorry on the road effects a cut as the credits roll. Then the main narrative opens as the headlights of the convoy are picked out in a dusky road and darkened landscape. The effect is luminous. The film is shot on 35mm though some reviews suggest digital: in fact the film has circulated on DCP in the UK.

If the style of the film illuminates the landscape and setting’s then the scripting illuminates the characters and their situations. The screenplay was written by Ercan Kesal, Nuri Bilge Ceylan and the latter’s wife Ebru Ceylan. I find it difficult to believe that the film could deal so directly but deftly with gender with out her input. All the major characters face a crisis of emotion and conscience in the film: in particular Nusret and Cemal find that the past is inextricably connected to their actions in the presence. Ceylan in interviews has mentioned his admiration for the writer Anton Chehkov. In fact, whilst watching the film I was reminded once or twice of one of Chekhov’s masterpieces, The Seagull. Late in that play Kosta tells Nina “You have found your right path, you know which way you are going – but I’m still floating about in a chaotic world of dreams and images, without knowing what use it all is …” [translation by Elisaveta Fen].  One feels that several of Ceylan’s characters could utter this line, though by the resolution there is a suggestion that one or more has found [like Nina] the ‘right path’. The reviews of this and earlier films clearly place Ceylan as an auteur. However, it should be noted that his films cross over strongly with other work from Turkish cinema. Kosmos [2010] shares the terrain with Ceylan’s earlier Climates (2007): and there are parallels in it exploration of region, class, gender and ethnicity. Both these films also seem to reference the work of Yilmaz Güney, in particular his 1982 film Yol. Turkey is a society involved in rapid change and development where social contradictions and social values are thrown up in the air: I feel sure that this is one factor in the quality of much of its recent cinema.

The Silences of the Palace / Saimt el qusur

 

I want to discuss this Tunisian film with some comparisons with a Senegalese film. Moufida Tlatli’s film appeared 20 years after Ousmane Sembène’s Xala. The changed context is clearly responsible for many of the differences. Silences is a French / Tunisian co-production and has circulated in the European and North American art cinema circuits. Tlatli herself studied at the IDHEC, the Paris film school. In her interview [see Sight & Sound, March 1995], whilst the film is obviously seen a part of Arab cinema there is also a concern with the western audience. The last is a funding factor. From critical responses it would appear that many people have perceived it not as a Third Cinema film but as a feminist text.

Ella Shoat writes; “Moufida Tlatli’s Silences of the Palace … break away from the earlier meta-narrative of anti-colonial national liberation. Rather than a unified, homogeneous entity, these films highlight the multiplicity of voices with the complex boundaries of the nation-state.” [In Givanni, 2000]

She goes on to draw critical comparisons with The Battle of Algiers. The exploration of feminist readings of the film is a fertile area, but other readings would equally address the national and class dimensions found in the film.

The film open with the main character, Alia, beset by professional and personal problems. She is living with, but not married to, a member of the nationalist elite, Lotfi: she is also pregnant. Her memories take us back to the 1950s, when Tunisia is still under French colonial rule, though this is exercised partly through the traditional ruling family of the Bey. The central narrative charts Alia’s exploration of her early life and the rediscovery of her mother’s. She was raised by her single mother, Khedija, in the Palace of the Beys. Khedija is a prime example of the double oppression of the Palace serving women, economic exploitation, in her case she was bought as a slave: and sexual oppression. It is clear in the film that Khedija co-operates, at least in the early stages, in her sexual exploitation. Alia herself is divided, as Lotfi points out, partly attracted and partly repelled by the world of the Beys: she thinks her father was Sidi Ali, head of the ruling family. The film evocatively uses sound and silence to chart the changing positions and relationships within the Palace. Likewise, mirrors provide visual metaphors for the two worlds, opposite but totally interlocked.

mother and daughter

These enclosed worlds are only faintly invaded by the turbulent events outside [a growing nationalist movement], but these contacts provide poetic comment. Lotfi’s, a nationalist and activist, hides out in the Palace where he provides a contact for Alia with powerful repercussions. It is his influence that causes her to launch into a banned nationalist song at an engagement function. Alia’s nationalist song provides a musical accompaniment to Khedija’s tragic end, resulting from an amateur abortion. The metaphor is clear? The liberation that should free her destroys her?

Khedija’s fate in the film stems from two contradictory impulses. Firstly her co-operation in her own exploitation, which would appear fuelled partly by the favours it produces, but also partly by the status she supposes it awards her. But the increasing likelihood of her daughter sharing this fate makes her conscious of the negative side of her situation. Desperate because of her new pregnancy, [possibly due to the rape by Si Béchir, brother of Sidi Ali] she resorts to traditional remedies. In one sense her estrangement from the liberation movement is her downfall. Walled up in the Palace, and in traditional mores, she has access to no other options.

Alia, in post-independent Tunisia, suffers from the same imprisonment. Her singing at the wedding reception which opens the film is a reprise of her position in the Palace. She is subject to the same condescension as then. And the insults that stem from her unmarried status replicate her mother’s experience. Notably, Lotfi appears not to suffer the same problem. And, finally, she is about to repeat the tragic experience of her mother in having an abortion. The sense of liberation at the end of the film is Alia’s decision to take a stand and change things.

The central thrust of the narrative posits the continuing problematic for women. Oppression under colonialism, oppression under independence. However, such a position leaves unanswered questions about the actual independence situation. Silences concentrates on the world of the women. The viewer’s portrait of the world of the Beys is the subjective view provided by Alia. We know even less about the nationalist world represented by Lotfi. Intriguingly, the reception that opens the film appears a mirror image of that which closes it. If Alia’s position appears to have little changed, neither has the world in which she moves. The parallel movement by the camera towards the viewing of Alia’s singing by both Sidi Ali and Lotfi at the engagement party are a part of this. Yet the film is clear about the class divide that exists between the Bey family and their servants. Just as vicariously we become aware of the gap between the colonialists and the nationalist Tunisians. To adequately read Alia’s position under independence we need a statement of the class alignments. This is only suggested by the parallel condescension by the two sets of guests for whom Alia’s sings and, by, for example, the fact that Lotfi has to wait outside in the car to take Alea home. In Xala Sembène also deals with gender politics. And in these, as in the class depiction’s, the film explores both worlds. So we, as viewers have a strong sense of the world of male and female: of bourgeois and proletarian. Sembène’s narrative is Brechtian in its invitation to the viewer to both understand and evaluate the conflict of these worlds. It is an ‘epic’ and symbolic cinema. Silences of the Palace is much more subjective film, and closer in its psychological portrayal to art cinema [auteur's cinema].

This is apparent not only in the form and narrative of the film but also in its style. Whilst the characters and some of the mores the film are unfamiliar to a western viewer, the form is accessible. The film’s reliance on close-up, directed lighting and constructed mise en scène is most similar to art cinema conventions. The differences from these conventions, the editing and the soundtrack, both work to re-inforce the subjectivity of the narration and the linearity of the narrative.

Silences of the Palace does provide a critique of both post-independence Tunisia and gender discrimination. It certainly goes beyond the ‘content to recall’ category posited by Fanon. But it does share attributes with the second category posited by Solanas and Getino, auteur cinema. I would suggest this is not to do with the film’s feminism, which makes point also made by Sembène [for example] in Xala. It is that this film is less clearly demarcated from the conventions of western art cinema, most especially in the subjectivity of its stance.

Some sense of this divide can be found in the interview taken from Sight & Sound. Most revealing is the comment by Laura Mulvey in the introduction to the Tlatli interview,

“The polarisations of gender, which had formerly co-existed with a world divided by class, have once more risen to the surface.” [Though Mulvey’s stance in the interview is not neutral, she awards herself a final comment after Tlatli].

This would appear to suggest an expectation that class is not relevant in the neo-colonial society. Whereas, as Sembène clearly shows, neo-colonialism restructures class divides, it does not rise above them. Silences of the Palace would appear to adhere to the western feminists’ aphorism, ‘the personal is political’. Xala illustrates the converse, the political is personal. And this is Lotfi’s failure in the film, the political has not become personal.

father and daughter

 

SUMMARY.

There is no doubt that both Xala and Silences of the Palace are challenging films. They confront dominant ideologies and their manifestations, and at the same time [to different degrees] they work against the conventions of the dominant cinemas.  So, how do they fit into the systematic and worked out model offered by Teshombe Gabriel in his study of Third Cinema [Towards a Critical Theory of Third World Films in Questions of Third Cinema edited by Jim Pines and Paul Willemen, 1989].

Gabriel’s model is complex and multifaceted. It really requires a hologram so that the different ways of regarding Third Cinema are clear. He posits several interlocking sets of concepts, including:

Film / text                     Production                    Audience

Assimilationist.          Remembrance.              Combative. 

Whilst the film text, Xala, can be placed under combative in an unqualified manner, the positions of Production and Audience are more contradictory. Xala was produced in a period when Senegalese cinema was unusually productive. This was due to the introduction by the state of the Société de Cinéma. However, whilst his providing funding, it did not develop production resources and the increase in films was short-lived. This meant, that as was the norm, Xala was dependent on production support from the French Aid, the Ministère Coopération. Equally, as Senegal had not taken control of exhibition and distribution, the film relied on foreign control to circulate to an audience. Ad additional barrier was the censorship imposed on the film by the State: a later film Ceddo was banned. Sembène himself has been involved in rural screening so some of these films, which seem to include discussions with the audience. But in the early 1990s he was still meeting young people who had not heard of Xala until then.

Silences of the Palace is one of those films dependent on western finance and the western system. It is clear that even now, Africa has not been able to develop a self-sufficient cinematic apparatus, and Tlatli relied on the same Paris-based film school, as did the pioneer African filmmakers in the 1950s. The production itself was reliant on the French Ministries of Foreign Affairs and of Culture, Canal and Channel 4. Canal, in particular, is increasing dominant in that sector of the art cinema market where ‘Third World’ films circulate. Like Channel 4, through Canal-plus, it is a major consumer of such films for its television channel. The increasing range of Film Festivals provides a circulation for such films. The varied awards a marketing device for such as Canal. It can be argued that films in this situation, whilst critical in the way that western independent films often are, lacks the direct and combative stance found in directors such as Sembène.

Unlike the situation in Cuba [for example] the African arena appears to rely heavily on the individual artist. Senegal cinema’s own development would appear to be disproportionately influenced by individuals. The question need to be put as to wherewith the combative phase has been achieved in the arena s of production and audience. Certainly despite the work of FEPACI and the collective work at the Festivals, African cinema still appears in the west as a cinema of auteurs.

The Silences of the Palace – Les Silences du palais – Saimt el qusur 1994.

Direction, screenplay and editing by Moufida Tlatli, who earlier had worked as an editor. Adaptation and dialogue Nouri Bouzid. Director of Photography Youssef Ben Youssef. Music Anouar Brahem. 127 minutes, in colour, with English subtitles.

Cast: Ali – Ghalia Lacroix and Hend Sabri as her younger self. Khedija – Ahmel Hedhill. Lotfi – Sami Bouajila. Sidi Ali – Kamel Fazaa, Si Béchir – Hichem Rostom.

The Echo of Pain of the Many

The title of the film is a line taken from a poem, ‘They dressed Me in Mourning’ by the mother of a ‘disappeared’ in Guatemala’s long and brutal war against its own people. The line was chosen by the writer, director and narrator of this powerful film, Ana Lucia Cuevas. Ana Lucia lost family members to the secret death squads operated by a military dictatorship, supported by the US Government and the CIA. It one sense it is a familiar and sobering story from the Latin American continent, but it also brings a distinctive and effective narration to a recurring set of tragedies.

Guatemala is a relatively small country with a population of over 13 million. It is situated between Mexico, Belize, Honduras and El Salvador, the last-named country having received most attention in the media. Colonised as part of the Spanish Empire, the country achieved full independence in 1839. The population includes the India people descended from the Mayan nation and a mixture of Europeans, Black African descendants and mestizos: the Indian population is found predominantly in the countryside. There were a number of dictatorships in the years following Independence. In 1944 the election of a reforming president initiated a period of social reform including land re-distribution.  Agriculture is a substantial sector of the economy with up to 50% of its exports dependant on the USA. This included plantations owned by the United Fruit Company [a familiar player in neo-colonial relations in Latin America]. A CIA- backed coup took place in 1954. Over the next 40 years military dictatorship were interspersed with civilian rule, but all directed towards the interests of the wealthy, the landowners and US State and Corporations. There was an intermittent but ongoing civil war from 1960 to 1996. Then a peace treaty bought a return to civilian rule and a greater degree of the rule of law: though the Presidents have continued to be representative of the right wing. The current is an ex-General.

The Cuevas family – Carlos and Rosario lower left – Ana upper left.

Ana Lucia’s film takes the form of a journey, a familiar narrative strategy for investigating and presenting events. In this case it is a journey into the past, and into the memories of the people of Guatemala.  Her own journey is to discover the truth about the death of her brother Carlos, a political and human rights activist murdered in 1984. But as she explains she discovers that her personal pain is part of the much larger national pain. In the course of the film she sketches in the outline of the events in Guatemala since the changes of the 1950s. Here the film uses archive film and photographic material: testimonies from survivors: her interviews with people: and information in titles. As in other countries on the receiving end of US imperialism, this tale features secret and subversive machinations: extreme and often systematic brutality: surveillance, harassment, rape, murder and genocidal actions. Even though I have seen such scenes played out in films from other countries in the continent, the events are often shocking. The film uses frequent cuts to a black screen – offering pauses where one can momentarily consider the revelations and then follow the tale further.

The statistics provided in the film are appalling. There were 200,00 victims in the 36 years of civil war. The number disappeared by secret squads is about 49,000. We hear that even now 20 to 30 years on families are still waiting to discover the truth and the remains of lost members. Many were civilians, often activists, and they included men, women, pregnant women, the elderly and children. Carlos’s wife Rosario and his young son were abducted tortured and murdered. This is a level of indiscriminate violence that even now is difficult to comprehend. Ana Lucia narrates how only now are the secret police and military papers being unearthed, as are the unidentified remains of victims. She observes the researches into the records of the dictatorship: tellingly a key Military ‘death diary’ is lodged in Washington. More painful, along with other bereaved women, she observes the excavation of mass graves and the painstaking forensic work to identify the victims.

The film opens with a series of testimonies of survivors from the war years. These include Mayan peasants from the countryside. Later in the film Ana Lucia attends a trial in 2009 of former military officers involved in a massacre at the village of Choatalúm. This was part of a ’scorched earth’ policy to eradicate support from the rebels fighting the government. The forces were trained and equipped by the USA. There were numerous massacres, villages were destroyed and the communities forced to flee to the mountains, and then re-housed in carefully controlled newly built villages. The Choatalúm trial is important in that it is the first time that any military personnel have been held accountable for atrocities. The conviction and sentencing of one of the former commanders is a key event in the changing response to the war. Earlier times saw an enforced silence, a silence that attempted to suppress criticism and pain. So the film stresses the importance that the opening up of memory brings to the survivors.

It is clear in the film that whilst here is now a continuing opening up of the past and increasing judicial treatment of the crimes that this has definite limits. Two of the Generals who supervised the criminal activities in the war are seen campaigning for the Presidency. We also see an interview with a right-wing leader lauding his Christianity at the same time as he vows to deal with ‘subversives’: a moment as chilling as any scene in the Hollywood melodramas set in the region.

Ana Lucia is though, positive at the end of the film. A trial of a commander involved in the murder of her brother Carlos has begun. A large public meting applauds the memory of him and other victims: she suggests that though small these are actions that have ‘never been before’, that there is a recovery of hope.’

I found the film compelling and at time moving. It manages to be informative about a neo-colonial war that is little known. Yet is does this without overburdening with historical explanation: the inferences are there, as in the telling photograph of US President Eisenhower with CIA-Chief Allen Dulles. The treatment of the long war is similar; the criminal events are presented simply without to large an emphasis on the awful statistics. The film melds very effectively the personal and the political. And what is most memorable is the restraint and dignity of the many survivors as they recount another unacceptable chapter in recent history. The parallels with other struggles, not just in Latin America, but among other oppressed peoples are clear. The producer told me that they recently screened the film to an audience in Cairo and a member immediately spoke of the parallels with their own experiences.

Armadillo Productions 2012.

There is a screening of the film at the WFA in Manchester on May 19^th 2012.

The Battle of Algiers

 

STUDY NOTES. 

Made in 1966, the film has remained a classic of political cinema. It is one of the most powerful records on film of a people’s struggle to be free. And it has continued to exert a strong influence on filmmakers in mainstream and alternative cinemas. The varied audiences over the years have included the Black Panthers in the USA: and from the opposite end of the political spectrum, the Pentagon. The film sets out the struggle, the violence and the suffering,  ” the pains and the lacerations which the birth of the Algerian nation brought to all its people” [Hibbin, 1981] Today, even for viewers who know little about the actual historical events depicted, it remains an enlightening experience. Its continuing relevance is in part due to the film being much copied, but its content, form and style are the outcome of the specific context of 1960s.

Synopsis:

From 1954 to 1962 there was a war in Algeria against the French occupation of that country. It was led by the Front de Libération Nationale [FLN], a coalition of nationalist forces. The film’s particular focus is the on the battle in the city of Algiers, between the FLN, organised in the Casbah, and the French paratroopers. The film is set in the city between 1954 and 1960, a period of intense violence in the struggle between the Algerian and the French colonial rulers.

The film opens in 1957 as French paratroopers use torture to discover the hideout of the leader of Algerian resistance in the city, Ali la Pointe. Ali and three comrades are trapped in their hideout and a flashback returns us to 1954. The plot follows the development of armed resistance organised by the FLN and Ali’s recruitment and training as a volunteer. The City-based resistance is centred in the Casbah, a tightly packed warren of streets and buildings. The FLN strike at the colonial police, who retaliate by using bombs that target Algerian civilians. The FLN then organises bomb strikes against French targets in the city.

The French bring in the elite paratroopers under the command of Colonel Mathieu. During an 8-day strike organised by the FLN the paras go on the offensive. The Paras identify the pyramid structure of the FLN organisation and they use torture to extract information from suspects. Gradually they identify and capture the FLN leadership in the city. By 1957 Ali is the sole leader at liberty and he is executed when the paratroopers blow up his hideout.
The FLN rebellion seems defeated but a coda in 1960 shows the mass demonstrations erupting from the Casbah onto the streets. And a voice-over announces that independence was achieved in 1962. 

The Algerian War of Independence.

Algeria was colonised by the French in the early C19th. After a rebellion in 1871, Algeria was incorporated into Metropolitan France and maintained a large French-speaking settler population among the indigenous Arab and mainly Muslim people. A rising tide of National Liberation dominated the world following the 1939 – 1945 War. In 1945 there was a large-scale massacre by the French of Algerians demonstrating for greater freedom and civil rights. The most notable nationalist force was the Algerian People’s Party, committed to legal means in its struggle. Disillusioned with such tactics, a small group launched an armed rebellion in 1954. The rebels formed a coalition of groups into the Front de Liberation Nationale, the FLN: though there were also opposing organisations like the M.N.A. [Mouvement National Algérien]. There were different political strands within the FLN, notably a secular, socialist oriented faction, and those with a more traditional Islamic orientation. And there were violent vendettas between the FLN and the M.N.A., and within the FLN. However, the FLN became the leading organisation in the liberation struggle, and was seen as the representative of the Algerian people. Their initial successes bought a brutal response from the French colonialists, who used modern military technology such as aircraft and tanks combined with surveillance and torture. Probably the most vicious example of this was the suppression of the Casbah-based resistance in Algiers itself by the elite corps of paratroopers. But the contradictions of the French repression created both protests and conflict within France itself. There was always leftist opposition to the colonial policy, and organised support by Algerian migrants living in metropolitan France. Rebellions by right-wing army and settler groups aimed at preventing a negotiated peace led to the ascent to power in France of General Charles de Gaulle. Whilst the FLN was unable to defeat the French directly in battle, the French could not suppress the rebellion. Support from other Arab countries, especially Tunisia, Morocco and Nasser’s Egypt was important. In 1962 a cease-fire was agreed and full independence was achieved on July 3^rd 1962.

Pontecorvo with the production team on set.

The Property. 

The initial source for the film is a memoir by a participant in the Algiers resistance, Saadi Yacef, Souvenirs de la Bataille d’Alger, [1962]. After Independence, with the support of the new Government, Yacef set up Casbah Films with the idea of turning his memoir into a film. An aide, Salah Baazi, took a script to Italy, seeking technical and artistic help. One possible director for the film was Gillo Pontecorvo. He had already visited Algiers in 1962 and together with his collaborator Franco Solinas, had an idea for a film set during the War of Independence. The two approaches were rather different. Yacef envisaged a heroic portrayal of the FLN resistance: Pontecorvo a story about a French photojournalist and ex-paratrooper, possibly using a Hollywood star.

However, the two sides came together and Solinas produced a new script, which used Yacef’s memoir as a staring point. But there was also extensive research on the ground. Pontecorvo and Solinas spent several months interviewing participants in Algeria, [about 10,000 eyewitnesses]; they also visited Paris and interviewed members of the military who had served in Algiers.  Apparently there were five major revision of the script before both the sides were satisfied. The finished film closely follows this final script. The funding for the production was partly provided by Casbar Films and partly by funds raised in Italy by Pontecorvo. The Italian producer Antonio Musu, involved in Pontecorvo’s previous film Kapó, was key to raising the money and enabling the final production go-ahead.

Preparing a scene.

Production.

The director, Gillo Pontecorvo, bought a small team with him from Italy, including his fellow scriptwriter Franco Solinas and cameraman Marcello Gatti. But the bulk of the production and practically all the cast were local people. The film was co-produced by the Casbah Film Co. headed by Yacef Saadi, who had been the organiser of the Casbah resistance. During filming Gatti was giving lessons in cinematography to Algerian after the day’s shoot. The controlling hands of Pontecorvo [in particular] and Solinas is evident, but the film is also the product of a collective memory and a collective viewpoint.

The only professional actor in the film is Jean Martin who plays Colonel Mathieu. His distinction included experience in French film and theatre, but also being a signatory to an anti-war letter by French artists. Inhabitants of the Casbah play the Algerians. Saadi Yacef plays himself in the film. Pontecorvo recruited the other lead actors. He tended to use typage, a technique developed in Soviet cinema, where performers are chosen because their looks seem to represent the ‘type’ in the story. Western tourists in the city were recruited to play the parts of Europeans.

Pontecorvo aimed to produce a visual style to the film that resembled documentary or newsreel footage. He had experimented with these techniques in his previous film, Kapó, set in a Nazi Concentration camp. The Battle of Algiers was shot in 16 mm and then dupes [duplicates] were made of the negative. This produced the grainy effect associated with newsreel. However, it also tended to exaggerate contrasts, so a very soft focus film stock was used and the camera apertures were stopped down [reduced]. The whole process tended towards a rather flat image, and because of the bright sunlight in which most of the film was shot, even open-air sets tended to be covered in white sheets [or scrims] and filters placed over the camera lens to reduce the light.

Pontecorvo also wanted to mirror the position of the newsreel camera and produce a sense of distance in the audience. [An approach he calls the ‘dictatorship of truth’]. Much of the filming used a telephoto lens to effect this, though such a lens also foreshortens the seeming distance between characters and between objects. The film utilises the long shot [distance] and the long take [duration], but also sequences of relatively fast editing and close-ups for particular characters or gestures. The camera is mostly handheld; this was not just an aesthetic choice, as the narrow streets of the Casbah did not allow the use of a dolly [mobile camera platform]. The camera is always on the move, creating a dynamic sense of movement and action.

There are a large number of scenes in the film involving multiple characters. Since not all the crew and very few of the cast had professional experience, this demanded careful planning and organisation. This generated much noise, including the use of megaphones to orchestrate performers. But the actual sound during filming was only used as a cue track and the dialogue, effects and music dubbed on later. This practice was common in Italian Cinema in this period.

Several key scenes proved difficult to capture in the style Pontecorvo wished. The dramatic scene where the Algerian women change into European clothes before their mission to plant the bombs was originally written with dialogue. But instead, Pontecorvo used a musical accompaniment [a 'baba saleem,' Arab music with a strong percussion element] that was played as the women performed to create the particular tense sequence. The final demonstration, when a single woman dances out from the crowd was shot three times, finally uses drifting smoke to create the desired visual effect.

There were a few post-production effects; one important one being the optical dissolve that is achieved as a close-up of Ali La Pointe changes to the flashback of 1954. There was, of course, the soundtrack work, and the title cards that frequently add to the visual information. Mario Serandrei commenced the editing whilst waiting for Pontecorvo in Rome. The latter discovered on viewing two reels that Serandrei was following the conventions of mainstream continuity, which Pontecorvo wished to avoid. In fact, Serandrei was taken ill and died suddenly. Pontecorvo worked with the assistant editor, Mario Mura, on those two reels and the rest of the film. He also worked with the composer Ennio Morricone to develop the score, which is such an important part of the film. The use of chorales by Morricone as viewers contemplate the chaos and death after the bomb explosions are key emotional points in the film. Pontecorvo [as in all his feature films] also composed themes used in the film, and chose some of the music.

11th December 1960

Analysis

The Battle of Algiers would seem to be informed by the challenging and passionate dictates of Frantz Fanon.

“To fight for national culture means in the first place to fight for the liberation of the nation, that material keystone which makes the building of a culture possible. There is no other fight for culture, which can develop apart from the popular struggle. To take an example: all those men and women who are fighting with their bare hands against French colonialism in Algeria are not by any means strangers to the national culture of Algeria. The national Algerian culture is taking on the form and content as the battles are being fought out, in prisons, under the guillotine, and in every French outpost which is captured or destroyed.” [Fanon, 1961].

Franco Solinas and Gillo Pontecorvo’s script organises events into an episodic plot, with linkage provided by on-screen titles and voice-overs. This structure effects one of the maxims of Bertolt Brecht, that the potential to re-arrange events in the plot is one way to contest conventional narratives. It also mirrors the ebb and flows of the struggle in Algiers and in the city. The alternation of the European and ‘native’ city, a distinction from Fanon’s writings, is reinforced in the mise en scène. This is also true of the characters’ dialogue, direct and committed on the part of the Algerians, conversational and sometimes circular on the part of the Europeans. The film presents two opposing cultures, crucially centred on the figures of Ali la Pointe and Colonel Mathieu.

Whilst the main narrative privileges Ali La Pointe as an individual hero and draws out the emotional sympathies of the audience, the opening and closing codas are crucial in suggesting the full meaning to us as viewers. We open in the territory of established society and cinema, as the controlling French paratrooper use torture to break the resistance. With the closing coda the Algerian people, ‘a choral personage’ in Pontecorvo’s word, have taken control. Seemingly spontaneous demonstrations throw down a fresh challenge to the French occupation. Hence the power as we see the bemused French policeman with his loudhailer whose uncomprehending question ‘What do you want?’ receives its dramatic answer in actions of the demonstrators and their calls of “Independence. Our Pride. Freedom!”.

The importance of the involvement of the people in the resistance is stated in the dialogue, by Ben M’Hidi, but reinforced visually by the way the lead characters and their actions are placed in the wider world of the Casbah and Algiers. The film develops a clear and supporting relationship for the FLN among ordinary Algerians. It is this relationship that an audience is meant to see as the basis for the apparently spontaneous fresh uprising in the film’s coda. Leading to the statement that ‘an Algerian Nation was born’, the resolution is clearly the triumph of the people’s struggle.

As leaders of this struggle the FLN are the good guys in this film. But Pontecorvo and his colleagues achieve a dispassionate gaze that has continually evoked praise over the years. The fact that the French colonialists are in the wrong is signalled by the racism experienced by Ali. This is reinforced when the French police are the first to target civilians. And then by the brutal methods of the paratroopers who use of torture during the campaign. However, the film does not counterpoise a heroic to a non-heroic mode. Both sides are clearly involved in actions against civilians and the victims on each side are treated with comparable dignity. This is made especially powerful by the use of a chorale after both acts of ‘terrorism’, but also accompanying the scenes of torture by the French paratroopers.  Whilst Pontecorvo may evoke the sympathy of the audience for both sets of victims, the film is clearly unwavering in the rightness of the FLN’s cause.

Paisa - people watch on the bank as the corpses of the Partisans float pass in the River Po.

The Battle of Algiers is clearly influenced by the movement known as Italian Neo-realism. Parallels can be seen both in the production process followed and in the style of the finished film. Neo-realism was coined in 1943 by the scriptwriter Antonio Pietrangeli when talking about the film Ossessione, directed by Luchini Visconti. Influenced itself by French poetic realism of the 1930s, full-flowered neo-realism had a documentary feel with non-professional actors, location shooting and the frequent use of the hand-held camera. This was a reaction against both the studio based artificial melodramas of mainstream Italian film and against the Fascist politics that dominated Italy up until 1944. Neo-realist directors like Roberto Rossellini and Victoria de Sica aimed to show a ‘slice of life’, social reality, in particular the condition of ordinary people, the working classes. Neo-realism had a considerable impact outside Italy, both because it offered a differing filmmaking process from the studio system that dominated popular cinema, and also because its style offered a sense of authenticity lacking in mainstream features. Neo-realism was to influence the new cinemas in ex-colonial countries. A number of young filmmakers trained at Cinecittá in Rome and took the ideas and practices of neo-realism back to their own cinemas. 

Pontecorvo has recounted how he was struck by a screening of Rossellini’s Paisa. Not only can one see the approach of neo-realism in Pontecorvo’s film. There is a particularly strong sense of the style of the final episode of Paisa, which recounts the doomed resistance of Italian partisans against the occupying Germans late in W.W.II.

People watch as the paratroopers 'execute' an FLN cell.

Criticisms.

If The Battle of Algiers remains a widely acclaimed and seminal film it has also had its critics. One recurring reservation is the way it uses mainstream narrative form and style to present the drama to an audience.  Some argue that to ‘make films politically’, [as advocated by Jean-Luc Godard], requires a different set of conventions, for example, in the fashion of Brecht’s theatrical work. One critic quoted by Joan Mellon criticised the film’s use of Ali La Pointe as a ‘hero’, “The presence of a hero “becomes a barrier to the clarity of what is politically, as opposed to romantically, significant. ” Pontecorvo responded to such criticisms, “It [also] seems to me that to renounce films that are made for the normal market in the normal way – narrative, dramatic, etc – to consider them not useful is a luxury of the rich, of people probably not really interested in political results. … If you consider this problem [the alliance of the working class with other classes] to be one of the most important, you must also see that it’s important to make films for the normal channel.” [Pontecorvo, 1984]. And Ali La Pointe is certainly not a conventional hero. Edward Said has argued that the heroes of the film are the oppressed Algerians. The Battle of Algiers certainly tends to arouse an audience by identification and passion on behalf of the oppressed Algerians, [a classic protest format].

There is a little space dedicated to questions of analysis in the film: [see below]. The Battle of Algiers has frequently been described as propaganda, usually in a conventional sense of supporting a particular point of view. However, in Soviet politics a rather different meaning was used. Propaganda was complex material and analysis for the more advanced stimulating ideas and analysis. This was counterpoised to agitation, less complex material that roused emotional involvement. Pontecorvo’s film is closer to agitation, and this would seem to be the intended function of the film. But whilst the film does operate through arousing emotions, it also has sequences that tend to create a more dispassionate distance for the spectator. The Battle of Algiers is an agitation for the values of Liberation, both for the Algerian people and, in a wider sense, for the all those oppressed by colonialism. In the context of the reactionary stances in most western countries, which were also deeply racist, The Battle of Algiers provides an affirmation of the struggle. This aspect is less powerful forty years on, just as the torture scenes are less shocking for most modern viewers. Developing conventions and other film’s use of similar techniques mean our susceptibilities are different from the 1960s.

In terms of analysis the film does pass over, without comment, important issues. The film does not address the contradictions within Algerian resistance, including opposition by some groups to the FLN. There is no real focus on the struggle in the countryside, which continued after the defeat in Algiers. The society of the occupation, and the settlers are not seriously analysed.

Actually there were considerable contradictions of class, gender and religion. Some criticism has especially focused on the question of women’s role in the struggle. But the film does include active women who are important in the struggle. What is missing is an examination of the particular problems for women that need to be faced: an obvious question would be the influence of Islamic mores typified by the veils that so many of the women wear. This contradiction underlies the powerful scene where the women dress in European style, but it is not examined elsewhere. Pontecorvo, aware of this contradiction; chose to ‘end the film symbolically, with one woman!’ That the film does not actually analyse this is partly a question of context. The film is reflecting the politics of the movements. These stressed the unity across struggles in a popular front against French colonialism. Thus the FLN members in the hideout are a young married man, a women, [probably unmarried], a young boy, [possibly an orphan] and an ex-criminal.  The very stress on the unity of these disparate characters precludes the examinations of what divides them. The subsequent history of politically independent Algeria points to the problematic this creates, but this is something that is more easily addressed with hindsight.

Another issue raised in criticism is the film’s treatment of Islam.  Such criticism seems to comment on the film from the standpoint of the present. In the 1960s liberation movements were more secular, more influenced by ideas and practices from the Soviet Union and China, rather than religious ideas, including Islam. Still, Islamic culture was fairly strong in Algeria. Saadi Yacef explained about the ‘tensions’ between religion and secularism within the FLN. “It’s the fault of the French who, since 1830, had discriminated against the Islamic religion. During the war, Islam was legally pushed aside, in a situation similar to apartheid. People conserved all the practices of the religion …and that remained constant.” Pontecorvo added, “At that time, the presence of religious beliefs in their revolutionary political ideology was extremely positive because it gave a solid foundation to that struggle.” Fanon’s idea of ‘building a national culture’ was to be inextricably entwined with traditional patterns including Islam. This was one factor in the internal struggles in the FLN. But the film passes over those during the battle and subsequently after independence. In fact, a coup by the military wing of the FLN deposed President Ben Bella whilst the film was in production. One scene does, though, present Ben M’hidi telling Ali that “once we’ve won, the real difficulties start.”

A recent book on Pontecorvo has suggested a critique of ‘terrorism’ in his work. Carlo Celli’s title ‘From Resistance to Terrorism’ gives flavour of his argument. However, contemporary ideas of terrorism are very much post-1960s and post-Battle of Algiers. Celli includes comments on Pontecorvo’s final feature film Ogro. This dealt with the Basque separatist Movement ETA. After finishing the film Pontecorvo made public self-criticism. However, this would seem to have much to do with Italian politics in the 1980s as with the Basque question. This was the period when there were the events involving the Red Brigade, right wing terror groups and the death of Aldo Moro. The content for Battle of Algiers was the wars between colonial powers like France and Britain, and the indigenous peoples fighting for freedom. As the film itself shows and Ben M’hidi explains to the journalists, the F.L.N. fought bombs with bombs. Many Algerians had been recruited into the allies’ World War 11 armies, where violence against civilian populations was endemic on both sides. Ben M’Hidi’s has another line in the film, “Wars aren’t won by terrorism, neither wars nor revolutions. Terrorism is a beginning but afterward all the people must act.”

In an interview Franco Solinas commented, “the most important fact among all others, which the film intends to emphasise, is the reason for Algeria’s final victory – armed struggle. I am convinced that Algeria did win with its own means because if the Algerians had not acted as they acted, suffered as they suffered, resisted and fought as they did, then Algeria might still be French today.” [On Criterion DVD].

The Paratroopers in the opening sequence.

Placing the film.

The Battle of Algiers does not fit easily into the familiar film genres. If it is a war movie, then it is a very unusual war, and of a type that mainstream cinema rarely offers. It does however use some common generic characteristics. In particular, whilst the film offers a ‘choral hero’ of the people, the plot does use the conflict between to opposing figures, Ali the revolutionary and Mathieu, the soldier. This was a familiar trope in Italian westerns, in which Franco Solinas also worked. And there are echoes of this conflict relationship in Pontecorvo’s subsequent film Queimada! ! [Burn 1968], also featuring a black revolutionary and white European adversary – Jose Dolores played by Evaristo Márques [a non-professional] and William Walker, played by Marlon Brando. 

One type of film narrative, possibly a genre, which does link with The Battle of Algiers, is the melodrama of protest. The influential Soviet classic The Battleship Potemkin is a melodrama of protest, and there are clear influences in Pontecorvo’s film. A recent example would be Ken Loach’s The Wind that Shakes the Barley [dealing with the Republican forces in the Irish War of Independence and subsequent Civil War].

There is an alternative category of film in which Battle of Algiers can be placed. Two Argentinean’s, Fernando Solanas and Octave Getino argued in an important political manifesto [1983] that there were three types of cinema: ‘first cinema’, mainstream entertainment films; ‘second cinema’, artistic films by auteurs; ‘third cinema’, direct oppositional film. Where might we place The Battle of Algiers in this typology? Fairly clearly, whilst the film’s narrative form and style are accessible to a mainstream audience, the film is very different from mainstream film, both in style and content. It does, as Solanas and Getino advocate, ‘directly and explicitly set out to fight the system.’

What about as an auteur film? Whilst Battle of Algiers is most frequently referred to as ‘a film by Gillo Pontecorvo’ in fact, it is the result a combination of different viewpoints, both Franco Solinas and Saadi Yacef being important contributors. Yacef’s role has often been overlooked, and not all versions of the film credit his source memoir. Many critics draw comparisons with Pontecorvo’s other films as exemplifying a pattern of ‘auteur’ filmmaking. Some of these can be attributed to Franco Solinas. And there are also striking differences with the other films. Notably there is the absence of a Hollywood star actor: the use of which created problems in Pontecorvo’s other films. This can be seen in Queimada where Marlon Brando famously fell out with the director over having to work with non-professional Evaristo Márques. Another aspect of Queimada! is that the ‘choral voice’ of the people seems much less developed than in The Battle of Algiers. Whilst the latter film ends on the mass demonstrations of the people of the Casbah, Queimada! ends with the death of the main protagonist, William Walker: a rather conventional motif.  Collective action is a feature of all of Pontecorvo’s feature films, but none seem to dramatise this as powerfully and centrally as The Battle of Algiers.

This last point would introduce a qualification about assigning the film unproblematically to Third Cinema. In a parallel manifesto another Latin-American filmmaker, Jorge Sanjines argued forcibly for the involvement of the participants in creating film records of events. Sanjines worked as director on films made by the Ukamau film collective with Andean Indians:

” … many scenes were worked out on the actual sites of the historical events we were reconstructing, through discussions with those who had taken part in them and who had a good deal more right than us to decide how things should be done.” [Sanjines, 1983].  Pontecorvo was clearly the deciding voice on the film, and in that sense the film is still an authorial product, and it is in this sense that it circulates, as ‘a film of Gillo Pontecorvo’.  Solanas and Getino [following the ideas of Frantz Fanon] also placed much emphasis on films by people fighting colonialism and neo-colonialism. To a great degree The Battle of Algiers was in the hands of the European crew of filmmakers, and it has circulated mainly under their auspices. There are other film dramatisations of the Algerian struggle. At the time of the release of Pontecorvo film there was an Algerian feature, Lakhdar-Hamina film, The Wind of Aurès. In fact, The Battle of Algiers was preferred over this Arab film for the prestigious Venice Film festival, where it won the award. And even now it is much harder to see Algerian films on this subject than Pontecorvo’s. Thus the film does not essay some of the conventionally very different formal and stylistic approaches to be found in films made by Arab and African directors.

The Battle of Algiers should probably be thought of as a transitional film. Whilst clearly embracing the value system of the oppressed Third World peoples it is still positioned within the cultural expression of the first and second cinemas. Originally Pontecorvo envisaged the film circulating in ‘film clubs and festivals’. Given that cinema was invented and generally controlled within the imperialist west this can be seen as a possibly positive step as the Third World filmmakers master and take possession of this cultural machinery. This would seem to be the attitude of the Algerians involved, as Pontecorvo’s film was also a training ground in cinema production and techniques.

On a personal note, on once more revisiting this classic film I found it still extremely moving and inspiring. It is also a record of a historic event in the C20th anti-colonial struggle.

References.

Roy Armes, Postcolonial Images Studies in North African Film, Indian University Press, 2005. It includes fair detail on Algerian cinema and the most notable films. Roy Armes has written a number of excellent books on North African cinemas, and other cinemas among the oppressed peoples. 

Carlo Celli, Gillo Pontecorvo: From Resistance to Terrorism, Scarecrow Press 2003. The book includes a biography of Pontecorvo and discusses all his major films.

Frantz Fanon, On National Culture in The Wretched of the Earth, [translated Constance Farrington] Grove Press, New York, 1968. There is a 1996 film Franz Fanon Black Skin White Mask [UK / France, director Isaac Julien, which combines documentary material with re-enactments, a unsatisfactory mixture that does not fully elucidate Fanon and his ideas, but is an interesting introduction. 

Sally Hibbin, Battle of Algiers (1966) in The Movie, Chapter 70, Orbis Publishing, UK, 1981.

Joan Mellon, Filmguide to The Battle of Algiers, Indiana University Press, Bloomington London 1973. Out of print, however there are copies in the British Library and the BFI Library. 

Fernando Solanas & Octavio Getino, Towards a Third Cinema, in Twenty -five Years of the New Latin American Cinema, edited by Michael Chanan, C4 TV / BFI, 1983

Jorge Sanjines, Problems of Form and Content in Revolutionary Cinema, also In Chanan, 1983.

The Dictatorship of Truth, An Interview with Gillo Pontecorvo by Edward Said. Cineaste, Vol. XXV, No. 2, 2000 

The Making of The Battle of Algiers by Irene Bignardi. Cineaste, Vol. XXV, No. 2, 2000. There is an abbreviated version of this at http://www.arts.arizona.edu/mar453/Making%20of%20Battle.htm

Terrorism and Torture in The Battle of Algiers, An Interview with Saadi Yacef by Cary Crowdus. Cineaste, Vol. XXIX, No. 3, Summer 2004 

Rear Window, 1992. Pontecorvo - The Dictatorship of Truth. Channel 4. A programme about Gillo Pontecorvo and his films presented by Edward Said.

NB Media Education Journal, Issue 42 will have an overview of the films of Gillo Pontecorvo by the author. 

There are a number of Websites that address the film and the filmmakers

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/jun2004/pont-j09.shtml has an interview with Gillo Pontecorvo and a review.

http://www.marxists.org/history/algeria/1956/ali.htm is part of a site on The War of Liberation and has an extract from Saadi’s Memoir.

http://www.filmreference.com/Writers-and-Production-Artists-Sh-Sy/Solinas-Franco.html has a profile of Franco Solinas.

http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/boa.htmlhas an English version of the script for the film. 

THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS (1966).     Produced by Antonio Musu, Igor Films of Rome, and Saadi Yacef, the Casbah Film Company (Algiers). Filmed in Algiers in 1965. Screenplay - Franco Solinas and Gillo Pontecorvo. Direction -  Gillo Pontecorvo. Director of Photography   Marcello Gatti. Editing -   Mario Serandrei, Mario Morra. Art Direction -  Sergio Canevari. Music -  Gillo Pontecorvo and Ennio Morricone. Special Effects      Tarcisio Diamanti and Aldo Gasparri. Algerian Assistants             Ali Yahia, Moussa Haddad, Azzedine Ferhi, Mohamed Zinet. Algerian "Opérateurs"       Youssef Bouchouchi, Ali Maroc, Belkacem Bazi, Ali Bouksani. In French and Arabic. Time: 123 minutes. 

CAST: Djafar -  Saadi Yacef [sometimes shown as Yacef Saadi]: Ali La Pointe  - Brahim Haggiag: Colonel Mathieu – Jean Martin: Captain Dubois -  Tommaso Neri: Le Petit Omar  -  Mohamed Ben Kassen: Hassiba -  Fawzia El Kader: Fathia  - Michele Kerbash

The film won the Lion of St Mark at he 1966 Venice Film Festival. It also received three Academy Award Nominations, Best Foreign Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay. It was banned in France for over five years, which also led to its delayed release in the UK.

Argent Films have a DVD version, which also includes an interview with Pontecorvo. At one point he illustrates the editing style followed in the film. Note the subtitles do not provide a complete translation of dialogue and text.

Criterion has a three-disc DVD set. Its version is the 1999 restoration, with excellent visual and sound quality. There are also fresh subtitles, which translate the entire main dialogue and text. Extras include a Making of…, Remembering History, and Gillo Pontecorvo’s Return to Algiers in 1992 and a booklet with an excerpt from the script and an interview with Franco Solinas. 

Interesting companion films: There are several films made in Algeria about the liberation struggle. During the war a group of French supporters made Algeria in Flames [Algérie en flammes, 1959]. A documentary compilation Dawn of the Damned [L’aube des damnés, 1965] was directed by the Algerian filmmaker Ahmed Rachedi. The Wind from Aurès / Assifat al-aouras  [1966] by Mohamed Lakhdar-Hamina was a fictional story set during the war, and follows a mother who seeks her son captured by the French. The Way / La voie [1968] Slim Riad deals with his experiences of the French policy of internment.  More followed in the 1970s, mostly treating the Algerian resistance in a heroic mode. However, except for Festivals, these films are almost never available in the UK. 

The Battleship Potemkin / Bronenosets Potemkin, USSR 1925. Sergei Eisenstein. The most famous example of Soviet Montage. The film, like The Battle of Algiers, is a melodrama of protest. It uses typage, and whilst there are individual leading characters, the heroes and heroines of the film are the mutinying sailors and the supporting townspeople of Odessa.

The Betrayal / La Trahison, France 2005. Phillipe Faucon. One of several French films that deal with the atrocities committed by French police against Algerian migrants demonstrating in favour of the Algerian resistance. Many innocents’ participants were killed. The subject was taboo in France for decades. The suppression of the event is one theme in Michael Haneke’s 2005 Hidden [Caché]. 

Days of Glory / Indigènes, France / Belgium / Morocco / Algeria, 2006. Rachid Bouchareb. North Africans from Algeria and Morocco serve in the French army in World War II. Whilst exposing European racism the film fails to fill in the North African context. A much more biting depiction can be found in Camp de Thiaroye, Senegal 1988. Ousmane Sembène.

Queimada / Burn, Italy / France 1968. Gillo Pontecorvo. Produced with funding from Hollywood, hence the star Brando. The distributors cut the film by 20 minutes. Both Solinas and Morricone contributed to the film. The plot follows a slave rebellion on a fictional Portuguese island. Jose Dolores, the leader of the rebellion, is clearly modelled on the great Toussaint L’Ouverture, leader of the Haitian revolution. William Walker is based on an actual C19th US adventurer in Central America. The film is more analytical than The Battle of Algiers, but offers less focus on the ordinary people.

Paisa / Paisan, Italy 1946. Roberto Rossellini. There are six episodes, which follow the allied armies in the liberation of Italy in 1943. The final episode, a masterpiece among war films, deals with the resistance of Italian partisans, assisted by US soldiers, as they fight and die in the Po marshes. 

Silences of the Palace / Saimt el Qusur, France / Tunisia, 1994. Moufida Tlati. Through flashbacks the film explores the situation of women in domestic service to the elite during the period of the Tunisian struggle against French Colonialism. A very different world from that of the Casbah depicted in Battle of Algiers.

The Wind That Shakes the Barley, UK, Eire, … 2006. Ken Loach.The national liberation struggle in 1920s Ireland. The film offers a firm commitment to the Irish rebels, but also shows ‘atrocities’ by both sides, and the new socialist culture developing during the struggle. Unlike The Battle of Algiers it also details the divisions within the rebels forces.

Nader and Simin, A Separation / Jodaelye Nader az Simin

This is the most recent feature in a cycle of Iranian films that have now impressed for over two decades. The films that enjoy recognition in the west are not a popular Iranian cinema but more akin to European art films. They endure strict control by the Iranian government, and several seen in the west have not been screened in Iran itself. These are predominantly films in the great Neo-realist tradition that developed in Italy in the 1940s. They frequently used actual locations, and often non-professional casts, show a tendency to longer shots and longer takes than in the mainstream cinema, offer stories set in everyday life, and follow simple, recognisable events. Most notably, the great neo-realist films [like Roberto Rossellini’s Paisà (1946) or Vittorio de Sica’s Umberto D (1952)] display an immense compassion for their protagonists. It is the last quality that struck me most forcibly in the film written, produced and directed by Asghar Farhadi. In fact, it lacks some of the other characteristic that often grace neo-realist films: a non-professional cast and an open script that can include improvisation. A Separation enjoys a mainly professional cast [but some are family members] and the scripting is clearly very carefully drafted and implemented. The film does offer the long shot and long take, but interspersed within a highly mobile camera, with at time frequent cuts and noticeable close-ups. But what these display is an everyday world, with the events, conflicts, emotions and responses that audiences will recognise from their own lives, [allowing for the distinctive facets that are part of an Iranian story].

It is not a militant film: indeed few Iranian films are. So it is clearly not Third Art or Cinema in the sense discussed by Franz Fanon or Fernando Solanos and Octavio Getino. However, Third Cinema is a dynamic category, and like all cultural movements, it has a dialectical relationship with society. One important manifesto on this type of cinema is For an Imperfect Cinema by Julio García Espinosa, the Cuban filmmaker. He described ‘mass art’ as ‘leftovers to be devoured and ruminated over by those who were not invited to the feast.’  He then argued: “We maintain that imperfect cinema must above all show the process which generates the problem. It is thus the opposite of a cinema principally dedicated to celebrating results, the opposite of a self-sufficient and contemplative cinema, the opposite of a cinema that ‘beautifully illustrates’ ideas or concepts which we already possess. … To show a process is not exactly equivalent to analysing it. To analyse, in the traditional sense of the word, always implies a closed prior judgement.”

This seems to describe exactly the treatment presented in A Separation. Most critics have commented on how the film does not offer a judgement on the characters and events depicted, but leaves this to the audience for consideration and reflection. In line with the neo-realist tradition the story is very simple. Nader  (Peyman Moadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami) have submitted a divorce petition to the Iranian court. They have a daughter, eleven year old Termeh (Sarina Farhadi), but neither is willing to concede custody to the other. The fourth player in this conflict is Nader’s father (Ali-Asghar Shahbazi) who has Alzheimer’s and require constant care in their relatively affluent apartment. Simin returns to her family home. Nader hires the working class and traditionally religious Razieh (Sareh Bayat) to care for his father during the day. Razieh wears the full chador. She comes with her daughter Somayeh (Kimia Hosseini), who is younger than Termeh.  Returning one day Nader finds his father alone and collapsed. on the floor. When Razieh re-appears there is an argument and Nader pushes her from the flat. Later her husband, Hodjat (Shahab Hosseini), takes out a complaint against Nader when the pregnant Razieh has a miscarriage. So a new court case intervenes in the process of the original divorce case.

What one notices first is the feel of complete authenticity of the range of characters. The film won the coveted Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival: it also won the Best Actress Award shared by the female cast, and the Best Actor Award shared by the male cast. And the film enjoys ensemble acting where even minor characters are convincing. Apart from the courthouse, [for which permission for filming was refused] all the settings are actual locations. The colour palette is often subdued, with greys and drab blues. The camera work at times uses relatively long shots and long takes, but for much of the character interaction it becomes very mobile with frequent and sometimes very telling cuts.

This is a film of exchanges and looks: in some ways reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman’s work. Characters talk, they look and frequently there is a close-up which remains on one character. There is a powerful moment as Termeh opens the door of the apartment to see the fallen Razieh on the stairs. She remains for a time, framed in the doorway. On two occasions Nader and Termeh stand in the apartment and watch as Simin leaves in her car. Somayeh watches her mother on a bus journey when Razieh starts to display symptoms of illness. And most tellingly, towards the end of the film the families met to discuss possible payment of ‘blood money’.  The meeting breaks down and in a final moment Termeh and Somayeh, young victims in the process, exchange a glance.

There are also many moments when a character is framed alone, frequently betraying emotions repressed in company. So we see moments in which all the characters are caught crying. Simin in her car as she leaves the apartment: Termeh several times as she witnesses parental conflict. And Nader, after the argument with Razieh, cries as he washes his invalid father. Razieh and Somayeh both weep after particular traumas. And Hodjat, an aggressive character, weeps in frustration as a possible solution evaporates in conflict.

The editing is also very precise and effective. The film works by letting the audience gradually discover the complications in events. In that sense it works like a judicial hearing as we acquire greater knowledge. Cuts also increase the impact and comment on the action. Thus there are short inserts of Razieh travelling to and from her work. There are shots of one character edited alongside that of another: as in the case where we see the differing responses to crisis by Simin, Termeh and Nadir. And there is a really effective moment, late in the film: there is a long shot of Simin at the close of an evening class, she stands and adjusts her head scarf [maghna'eh], and the camera changes to a shot of Razieh, adjusting her chador, at home preparing for the meeting of the two families.

The travails that afflict these characters are not melodramatic but as series of tiny mistakes, and misconceptions that gradually build the conflict. Termeh believes, and I think the audience is likely to agree with her, that neither of her parents really wants the separation. She herself seems genuinely torn between them. Razieh’s situation as a carer gradually slips out of control. Hodjat’s aggression springs from a class-conscious sense of secondary treatment: in work, in society and [crucially] in the court process.

And none of the main characters are exactly innocent in the conflict that develops. We see scenes where Nader is obviously attempting to explain and justify his conduct. Nader also accuses Simin of  ‘all your life  … you’ve [either] run away …’ We cannot know whether this is fully justified, but it does describe Simin’s behaviour at time in the film. It becomes apparent in the film that both Razieh and Termeh tell a formal lie, though the former’s is probably more serious. Somayeh inadvertently undermines her mother’s testimony. And Hodjat responds with aggression on nearly every occasion.

In this conflict the nearest to innocents are the daughters Termeh and Somayeh. It seems important that neither couple has a son. In what is a frequent representation in Iranian cinema men are frail and ineffectual. Nadir seems not only unable but also unwilling to compromise. There are at least three major points in the film where his conduct pushes on the conflict. Hodjat’s behaviour follows a parallel, though he lacks the education and sophisticated behaviour of Nadir. And Nadir’s father is stricken by Alzheimer’s. The two married women, Simin and Razieh are not completely innocent. But in both cases there is a point when they face up to the conflict and offer a possibility of resolution.

It struck me that this gender discourse is re-inforced by the Iranian judicial system presented in the film. Whilst it uses draconian punishments, for example, the blood money option, at first glance it seems humane and fairly even-handed. However, it is also part of male dominance apparent in the society. We see one judge and hear another. Both are clearly male. In the case of the divorce the law takes Nadir’s side. In the case of involving Razieh the hearings are completely dominated by the two men. The women’ evidence, including Termeh and her tutor, is subordinate.

There is a telling moment at the opening of the film. We hear that the petition for divorce is because Simin wishes to leave the country, but Nadir wants to stay and care for his father. Evidence about the visa that has been obtained suggests that initially Nadir was willing to emigrate, but his father’s disability has changed his mind. And now the conflict involves the fate of Termeh. There is a hint that the idea of emigration is as much about Termeh’s future as it is about Simin: she responds to the judge by saying that she would ‘rather [Termeh] didn’t grow up in these circumstances.’ Simin then fails to answer the judge’s question about ‘what circumstances?’. In one sense, the rest of the film demonstrates that even at the personal level, the domination of a male centred society inhibits and restricts women.

But the film is less developed in terms of the class dimension. I assume that the film’s stance reflects the experience of the director in that its prime focus is on the professional family. Whilst there is a degree of empathy for the situation of Hodjat and Razieh, we do not get the close presentation of their situation. The film opens and closes on Nadir and Simin. To the extent that there is a resolution in the film it is one that leaves the future of Hodjat and his family hanging in the air.  This could be argued to be a reflection of the auteur approach of the film. A production that had a greater collective involvement might well have given more attention to the working class characters.

Of course, that is my interpretation. As Espinosa suggests, avoiding the convention of closure puts the audience in an unusual but rewarding position. These final minutes of the film feature another long take, with the position of the characters speaking volumes about their situation. As in classic neo-realist films this moment is both extremely moving but is likely to leave the audience thinking deeply. 

Nader and Simin, A Separation / Jodaelye Nader az Simin.

Iran, 2011. In colour, with English subtitles. Now released on DVD.

Note: The are many specific Iranian inflections in the film. One particular issue is that of ‘blood money’. Nader can avoid punishment in the court case if he can reach a settlement with Hodjat. The official rate is 15 million, but Simin proposes 4 million. It is not clear whether this is the Iranian Riall or the Tomin, a note of ten Riall. It was quite hard to find an exchange rate on the Internet, possibly due to sanctions. I think 15 million is near to £10,000 whilst 4 million is about £2,500.  This seems to fit as at one point Simin offers to sell he car to raise the money.

For an Imperfect Cinema

Julio Garcia Espinosa was a member of the radical University group Nuestro Tiempo. After visiting Italy and being impressed by the neo-realist films he made a documentary about Charcoal Burners, El Megano. Baptista’s police banned it because it gave an unacceptable but realistic image of Cuba. After the revolution he was involved in filmmaking but also in the debates in ICAIC about the correct way to develop revolutionary film. Out of this came a critical essay, For an Imperfect Cinema, which remains one of the most important theoretical statements in Latin American cinema. An imperfect cinema is one that eschews technical perfection. Espinosa does not argue that technical and artistic perfection are wrong in them. He argues that they can become ends in themselves: both for filmmakers and audiences. Aesthetic perfection can demand of spectators that they only passively view and enjoy. An imperfect cinema is one that addresses the issues and interests of its audience. It therefore requires audiences that participate in that art.
“ Popular art has absolutely nothing to do with what is called mass art. Popular art needs and consequently tends to develop the personal, individual taste of a people. On the other hand, mass art, (or art for the masses), requires the people have not taste. It will only be genuine when it is actually the masses who create it, since at present it is art produced by the few for the masses.” Espinosa’s argument is two-fold: that audiences must be involved in making the meanings of films, rather than just consuming them. Hence the sort of film represented by Memories of Underdevelopment, where the audiences has to read and interpret. He is also looking forward to developments that will enable audiences to be involved in making films.
“ The task currently at hand is to find out if the conditions which will enable spectators to transform themselves into agents – not merely more active spectators, but genuine co-authors – are beginning to exist.” His arguments clearly parallel those made by Solanas and Getino in their manifesto and by Sanjinés in his. It also shares an approach to cultural activity with Fanon and the authors of the Algiers Declaration. The argument is about artistic criteria, which should be seen to be not aesthetic or entertainment values, but political and ideological.

 Jump Cut provides a translation by Julianne Burton.

 

Franz Fanon

Fanon was born in the French colony of Martinique in 1925. He studied medicine in France and then psychiatry. He went to work in Algeria during the Liberation war against French rule. He later joined the Front de Libération Nationale and became one of their most articulate spokesmen. He died of leukaemia in 1961. He left a legacy of writings and contributions to international debates in the anti-colonial struggle. There is a film portrait made in 1996, Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Masks, [a reference to his most famous book]. Fanon was clearly influenced by preceding theorists of liberation and also responded to arguments within the contemporary liberation movement. But he brought a distinctive strand in his study of the psychology of the oppressed and on the importance of culture in the struggle. In Black Skin, White Masks he writes:
”The problem we confront in this chapter is this: The Negro of the Antilles will be proportionately whiter – that is, he will come closer to being a real human being – in direct ratio to his mastery of the French language. I am not unaware that this is one of man’s attitudes face to face with being. A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language. What we are getting at becomes plain: Mastery of language affords remarkable power. …
Furthermore, I will broaden the field of this description and through the Negro of the Antilles include every colonised man. Every colonised people – in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality – finds itself face to face with the language of the civilising country. The colonised is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of his mother country’s cultural standards. He becomes whiter as he renounces his blackness, his jungle.” 
This sort of analysis became extremely influential, not just among the colonial oppressed, but also among oppressed minorities in the countries of the coloniser. Thus we can see Fanon’s ideas feeding into the Black Consciousness movements in the USA and UK. His ideas can be seen at work in Ousmane Sembène’s film Camp de Thiaroye. Set in a Senegal still controlled by the French, the film details the experiences of a force of tirailleurs (colonial troops) waiting repatriation. The main African protagonist is Sergeant-Major Diatta, who is a master of European languages and culture and possesses a white wife. His extreme opposite amongst the troops is Pays (country} who has been rendered mute by the horrific experiences in a Buchenvald concentration camp. When the French offices attempt to defraud the African soldiers Pays is leader in an act of rebellion – the kidnapping of a French General. It is Pays alone that tries to warn his comrades of the planned massacre by the French military. Diatta knows French culture, but Pays has experience of the racism endemic in European culture. 


Fanon recognised that there was a commonality of black oppression, In The Wretched of the Earth he argued:
” The Negroes who live in the United States and in Central or Latin America in fact experience the need to attach themselves to a cultural matrix. Their problem is not fundamentally different from that of the Africans. The whites of America did not mete out to them any different treatment from that of the whites that ruled over the Africans.” 
But that there were also different situations,
”The test cases of civil liberty whereby both whites and blacks in America try to drive back racial discrimination have very little in common in their principles and objectives with the heroic fight of the Angolan people against the detestable Portuguese colonialism.” 
Fanon argued for a national struggle in the fight against colonialism. He also argued that this struggle was violent, necessarily violent in order to throw off the chains of colonialism. However, Fanon argued that this struggle is also cultural.
” For culture is first the expression of a nation, the expression of its preferences, of its taboos and of its patterns. It is at every stage of the whole of society that other taboos values and patterns are formed. A national culture is the sum total of all these appraisals; … In the colonial situation, culture, which is doubly deprived of the support of the national and of the state, falls away and dies. The condition for its existence is therefore national liberation and the renaissance of the state. The nation is the condition of culture, its fruitfulness, its continuous renewal, and it’s deepening. It is also a necessity. It is the fight for national existence, which sets culture moving and opens to it the doors of creation. Later on it is the nation which will ensure the conditions and framework necessary to culture.”

 

There are a number of editions and translations of Franz Fanon’s writings, including an edition by Penguin.

 

Outside the Law / Hors-la-loi

Said, Abdelkader, Messaoud.

France / Algeria / Belgium / Tunisia / Italy 2010, 138 minutes.

In colour and scope. Directed and co-scripted [with Oliver Lorelle] by Rachid Bouchareb.

Franz Fanon in his The Wretched of the Earth writes of the phases through which artists and intellectual develop towards a revolutionary consciousness. In the second of three phases he describes how:

“the native is disturbed: he decides to remember what he is. This period of creative work approximately corresponds to that immersion which we have just described. But since the native is not a part of his people, since he has only exterior relations with his people, he is content to recall their life only. Past happenings of the bygone days of his childhood will be brought up out of the depths of his memory; old legends will be reinterpreted in the light of a borrowed aestheticism and of a conception of the world which was discovered under other skies.”

The key point here is the last sentence, the failure to break away from the conventions of mainstream art [film]. Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino in their Towards a Third Cinema comment that even auteur cinema remains ‘trapped inside the fortress’.

Both comments would seem to apply to the two films directed by Rachid Bouchareb, [the first part of a fairly open trilogy was Days of Glory / Indigènes 2007]. He seems to enjoy the status and commercial support of an auteur whilst he uses the conventions of mainstream narrative and genre in his films.

Outside the Law offers a story of Algerian migrants in France working for the liberation struggle led by the Front de Libération Nationale [FLN]. The three central characters are brothers, and their story uses the familiar motifs of family and gangster genres. Bouchareb explained in an interview:

“The Godfather was a big influence because I wanted to analyse the discipline of maintaining a revolution and also the aspect of family and community in the Paris suburbs during the war.”

Spanning the decades from the 1920s to the 1960s, the film depicts events and offer political stances that even art cinema tends to avoid. The film opens in Algeria in 1925 as a local leader complicit with the French colonialist evicts the family from their land. We then cut forward to 1945 and the massacre of protesting Algerians by French forces and French colonial civilians. I think this is the first time that notorious event has actually been depicted by a non-Arabic or African film.

As such powerful political images continue as we see one brother [Messaoud] enlisted in the French colonial army in Vietnam listen to the speeches of solidarity by the Vietnamese for other political struggles when he is captured and imprisoned. The political story continues in metropolitan France as two of the brothers [Abdelkader and Messaoud] work for the FLN under conditions of secrecy. The conflict involves them both struggling against the Algerian-based MNA [Mouvement national algérien, subservient to the French] and the subversive Red Hand gang organised by the French security service.

The last brother [Saïd] is determinedly apolitical and involved in small time crime and then becomes a boxing promoter. Saïd is the only one of the brothers to survive at the film’s end.

The penultimate scene is of violence meted out to Algerians by the French police. The film ends with footage of the celebration of Algerian Independence.

Compared even to products of European art cinema this film offers a powerful and a political narrative. It also dramatises events in European colonial history that have been suppressed or at least ignored. The latter point seems to be the reason for the demonstrations against the film by reactionaries in France. It is definitely a film to be seen if you have an interest in the struggles against colonialism and neo-colonialism: and it is a good exercise if you a feel under-informed about this area.

Even so it remains a problematic film in terms of that struggle. The review in Sight & Sound is one example of how a sympathetic review of the film fails to grasp the key political issues. What the media described as ‘terrorist acts’ feature in the film and are committed by both the French security forces and the Algerian volunteers. However, in this review the only use of the term ‘terrorist’ is with reference to actions by the FLN. Later the writer suggests that, “While Bouchareb is too sophisticated a filmmaker to come down on either side of the argument, one can’t help but suspect that his sympathies lie with the youngest of the brothers.” [That is, the least political]. Other comments by the director suggest that he supports the struggle led by the FLN. However, I suspect that ordinary viewers may well respond in a similar fashion to the S & S critic. Viewers relate to the film in terms of their own experiences, so I did not feel in the same way as S & S. But in producing a film that is very much within the conventional mainstream Bouchareb seems to want to address those viewers.

Comparisons have been drawn with The Battle of Algiers (1965). Though both films deal with the Algerian Liberation struggle, they are very different, not just in their politics, but in their form and style. I think a good film for comparison would be Ousmane Sembène’s Camp D’ Thiaroye (1988). In some ways this is closer to Bourchareb’s initial film Days of Glory – both films deal with Africans fighting for the French in World War II. Sembène offers a recognisable narrative and individual characters with whom audiences can make some sort of identification. But he avoids the conventional treatment of, say, the war film. The apparently central character is Sergeant-Major Diatta, a cultured non-commissioned officer who speaks French and understands French literature. His situation eventually exposes the way that accepting the dominant values of the colonialists renders resistance impotent. In fact the key character turns out to be an ordinary soldier called Pays [country]. Pays has been a victim of the fascists in a German concentration camp, an experience that has rendered him mute. Without Diatta’s sophistication, he has through experience learnt to understand and recognise European racism. He is the only African soldier to foresee the ruthless massacre by which African resistance is suppressed. It is this type of analytical narrative that is lacking in Outside the Law. The conventions of the gangster film leave little space for such political treatment.

Outside the Law is a very good film, and a rousing one. However, it effectively ends in defeat: though an end title looks forward to Independence. This is also true of Camp D’Thiaroye, but in the latter case the films presents a consciousness which is necessary for a different ending in the next stage of the struggle. Sembène’s film would seem to fit what Fanon terms ‘the fighting phase’, “the native, after having tried to lose himself in the people and with the people, will on the contrary shake the people. Instead of according the people’s lethargy an honoured place in his esteem, he turns himself into an awakener of the people; hence comes a fighting literature, a revolutionary literature, and a national literature.”

 

[Fanon uses the masculine pronoun generically. However, in Sembène’s films it is clear that he takes the issues around gender very seriously. The lack of address on this issue of women, despite their actual historical contribution, as depicted in The Battle of Algiers, is another problem in Outside the Law].

 

Xala

XALA / IMPOTENCE

From a novel by Ousmane Sembène: screenplay and direction by Ousmane Sembène: Cinematography Georges Caristan: Editing Florence Eymon: Sound El Hadji M’Bow: Production Manager Paulin Soumanou Vieyra. Produced by Société Nationale de Cinématographie, Films Domirev.

116 minutes; 35mm; colour.           

Characters (cast in brackets).

El Hadji Abdoukader Beye (Thierno Leye)

            An importer-exporter, recently elected to the Senegalese Chamber Of Commerce.

Adja or Awa, his first wife, (Seun Samb).

The embodiment of African traditions. She has a house for her and her children.

Oumi, the second wife, (Younousse Seye).

Younger, more westernised. She also has a house and servants for her and her children.

N’Gone, the third wife, (Dieynaba Dieng).

            A young, nubile wife. She has a new house for her and her mother.

Rama, Adja’s daughter, (Miriam Niang).

            A young and militant University student.

Gorgui, the Old Beggar, (Douta Seck).

            A peasant cheated in the past by El Hadji.

Ahmed, a client of El Hadji, (Moustapha Touré).

Thieli, a pickpocket.

Seigne, a villager in the city to buy goods.

Sevigne-Madu, a village marabout, Mohammedan religious man.

Dupont-Durand, a European businessman or economic advisor.

Ousmane Sembène died in 2007. He was an established writer as well as a filmmaker: and just as he has fought to make films in African languages and cultural forms, so in his writing he aimed at an African expression. The experience of European colonialism and racism fed into his politics, which had a Marxist understanding of classes and the state, and an awareness, like Franz Fanon, of the particularities of racism. These are central to his 1974 film, Xala. The film centres on the problems of a trader and member of the Chamber of Commerce, El Hadji. Taking a third and much younger wife, [as allowed under Islamic law] El Hadji’s pleasures are frustrated by impotence, apparently the result of a curse. The film follows his increasingly desperate efforts to reverse the curse, which also undermines his social and business position.

He, and the Chamber of Commerce, are both depicted as subservient to foreign capital. Thus the continual framing of Dupont-Durand [the representative of the neo-colonial economic power] in the frame behind the president. [The hand behind the throne]. Xala in the film refers not only to El Hadji’s lack of potency in the sexual arena, but also to the lack of potency of his class in the economic field. They buy, sell, cheat and swindle, but they cannot exploit on the level of the neo-colonialists.

The narrative is complex, with a number of apparently minor characters who are key in the development of the action and the film’s comments upon this and the characters. Whilst the film appears to be quite slow, with frequent long-shots, as the narrative develops there are increasing number of very short scenes, which are very important. The style appears familiar, but often [as in the exchange between Rama and her father] it is slightly idiosyncratic and deliberately emphasises the seemingly inconsequential.

In a number of scenes, as in the pre-credit sequence, or as when El Hadji appears to have flashbacks about his sexual humiliation, the dialogue is non-simultaneous, i.e. from elsewhere in the narrative.

The sub-titles do not distinguish between French and Wolof, and the latter is used frequently in the film. In the scene between El Hadji and Rama and at the final Chamber meeting the dialogue refers to this. Elsewhere it can be distinguished if one listens carefully to the soundtrack.

Also, there are as number of commentative songs on the sound track, these are not translated in the subtitles.

In Xala, the contrast between El Hadji’s three wives is important.  Françoise Pfaff interviewed Sembène in 1984; and he commented,

“He [El Hadji] married his first wife before he became somebody. Having improved his economic and social status, he takes a second wife [Oumi], who, so to speak, parallels the second historical stage of his life. His third wife [N’Gone], who is his daughter’s age but without her mentality, is only there for self-satisfaction.”

His daughter, Rama, on the other hand, is

“aggressive and assertive as N’Gone is passive and submissive. She is as articulate in her speech pattern as N’Gone is silent. As an unmarried student with intellectual potential and as a young militant for Africanization. Rama often defies her father by speaking Wolof, knowing that he prefers to use French. … Sembène visually stresses her independence of mind as well as her freedom as a character by presenting her alone in many more shots than the other female characters.”

The women are central to the problem of the narrative, and to the various symbols that add meanings. A key signifier is the map of Africa, seen behind Rama as she defies her father, he himself fronting a map of Africa broken up and partitioned by colonial boundaries. These portrayals of women are expressive of the ant-colonial stance found in Franz Fanon. These films do actually position women within the revolution, and they also raise the contradictory position of women.

Xala displays several formal and stylistic trends that are common in Sembène’s work. Foremost, he privileges African linguistic and stylistic traditions. Hence the use or non-use of Wolof is central to the development of the narrative. Whilst El Hadji is neither redeemed nor converted by the end of the film, his attempt to speak in Wolof at the Chamber of Commerce is both highly poetic and metaphoric. Similarly African or European clothes and accessories provide a continuing commentary on the characters.

It is clearly a factor of the circumstances that Sembène uses the production approach pioneered by Neorealism. He also favours the use of non-professionals to a degree in the film and also actual locations. Many sequences share the same rough and impromptu feel found in Neorealism. However, there is also a powerful overall formal control. Sembène uses variations on the ideas of Sergei Eisenstein on montage and film rhetoric. The mental flashbacks by El Hadji of a sexual humiliation are clearly montage editing. But Sembène is more inclined to use montage in the wider sense, both visually and aurally. The elliptical development of the narrative is thus modelled on Eisenstein’s wider categories of montage. The editing together of scenes, especially the short scenes as with a robbery, produces a constant clash of characters and ideas. Sembène reinforces this by using the type of rhetoric favoured by Eisenstein: clothing and objects both represent characters traits and functions and comment upon these. Thus the ubiquitous briefcases in the Chamber of Commerce are a shorthand symbol for the corrupt bourgeoisie. Among the counter-Africanist symbols is the map that frames Rama in her dispute with her father.

Sembène offered some explanation of the songs in an interview:

“Ghali: There are many songs in the film’s soundtrack which have not been sub-titled.  What do they say?

Sembène: It’s a sort of popular song that I wrote myself in Wolof In one sense, it calls to revolt, to the struggle against injustice, against the powers-that-be, against the leaders of today who, if we do not get rid of them, will tomorrow be trees which are going to overrun the place and have to be cut down.  The songs are tied in with the deeds and gestures that 1 have written.  They did not come from folklore.  I had thought at the start to have them translated, but in the end I gave up the idea because it is unnecessary for a European public.

It is the allegory of a kind of lizard, a lizard who is a bad leader.  When he walks in front and you behind, he kills you while saying you want to murder him.  When you walk as tall as he does, he kills you while saying: “You want to be my equal.” When you walk in front of him he kills you while saying: “You want to profit from my good luck.” The song says we have to think very seriously indeed about these leaders who resemble this animal and get rid of them.  It ends something like this: “Glory to the people, to the people’s rule, to the people’s government, which will not be government by a single individual!”

(Interview published in 1976. It was translated by John H. Downing and appears in Film & Politics in the Third World, edited J Downing, Autonomedia, 1987.)

The film has been screened on Channel Four in the past: and issued on a VHS video. It was then cropped to 1.37:1 ration. This means visual material on the left and right of the screen is missing. This is noticeable in some scenes, as in the family quarrel at Adja’s house.