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Years of fire
Two very different films explore Algeria’s turbulent past
Films about Algeria
Feb 17th 2011 | from PRINT EDITION
OF THE many troubled chapters in modern history, few have left so deep a legacy of distrust, grievance and hurt as the 1954-62 Franco-Algerian war. Unlike France’s other territories in the Maghreb, Algeria was a French administrative département, run and settled not as a colony but as an extension of France itself. This stirred quite particular passions. Albert Camus, the Nobel prize-winning novelist who was born and educated in French Algeria, wrote in 1955 that he was “hurting about Algeria the way others hurt in their lungs”. Some 1.5m French soldiers fought to keep it French. The war brought down the Fourth Republic, returned Charles de Gaulle to power, and left rage in its wake.
“The loss of Algeria was experienced in France as a sort of amputation,” says Benjamin Stora, a French historian, “The subject is still burning, and the war of memories is fierce.” To this day, there is no historical consensus across the Mediterranean, only rival versions of the events that led to Algerian independence, after 132 years of French rule. They divide not only French and Algerians, but the French and the pieds-noirs, white settlers who fled after independence with their belongings in a suitcase. For years France covered up the use of torture and summary executions; Algerians also denied atrocities against the French.
Even now, neither side seems able to let the wound heal. As recently as 2005 the French parliament passed a law referring to the “positive role of the French presence overseas, notably in north Africa”, a clause later removed after an outcry. Furious Algerian deputies then tried to criminalise French colonialism. Within France a big population of Algerian descent wrestles with the conflicted identity. In Algiers there is still no road nor public building named in memory of Camus.
Amid these competing narratives, film-makers have also had their say, starting with Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 masterpiece, “The Battle of Algiers”. This year Algeria and France each nominated a film about Algeria for an Oscar in the best foreign-film category. Algeria sent “Hors-la-Loi” (“Outside the Law”), directed by Rachid Bouchareb, and France selected “Des Hommes et Des Dieux” (“Of Gods and Men”), by Xavier Beauvois. The first, partly backed by French money, was a commercial flop in France; the second, which opens in America on February 25th, an unlikely hit. Only the Algerian entry made it into the final Oscar line-up, which is a pity because the French one stays in the mind longer.
“Outside the Law” is a fast-paced glossy gangster movie out to make a political point. Mr Bouchareb’s previous film, “Indigènes” (“Days of Glory”), brought home to French audiences the contribution of north African soldiers to liberating Europe from Nazi occupation. Embarrassed, the French government promptly raised the pensions of such veterans to match their French counterparts’. This time Mr Bouchareb’s starting point is the 1945 Sétif massacres, which began when unarmed Algerians, marching to celebrate victory in Europe and to press nationalist demands, were gunned down by French forces; many thousands died in the subsequent repression. Told through the eyes of three Algerian brothers, who lose their father in the massacres, it follows their reunion years later in France, and the different choices each makes as an underground Algerian resistance movement takes hold among automobile workers and the shantytowns of 1950s Nanterre, in the outskirts of Paris.
“Outside the Law” is a respectable action film, which turns the spotlight on a disturbing episode of history. Mr Bouchareb says he wanted to show that revolution “chews people up and spits them out”. He unflinchingly depicts the barbarism on both sides.
“Of Gods and Men”, by contrast, is not about politics. It is a remarkable study of spirituality and sacrifice, and how men of faith cope when their ideals are challenged by violent reality. Based on a true story, it follows a group of Cistercian monks, living modestly among poor villagers in the little Tibhirine monastery in the Algerian Atlas Mountains. As the Algerian civil war and Islamist terrorist attacks intensified around them in the mid-1990s, they were warned that their lives were at risk, but chose, after much collective agonising, to stay. In 1996 seven of them were kidnapped; only their decapitated heads were ever found. An Islamist terror group claimed responsibility.
The film has spellbound French audiences, moved by the simplicity and faith of the Tibhirine monks, in an age of materialistic excess, celebrity froth and empty churches. Its cramped cinematography mirrors their daily lives. The monks are human, and they rage and doubt, torn between a survival instinct to leave and a spiritual calling to stay. They run a health clinic for villagers and fear abandoning them to terror. “It is mad to stay, like it is mad to become a monk,” says Brother Christian wryly, the group’s leader, played by Lambert Wilson.
“Of Gods and Men” is not without flaws. Its “Last Supper” scene at the end, at which the monks share red wine, tears and smiles in silent contemplation of their fate, to the swelling chords of Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake”, is not quite controlled enough to sustain the heavy emotion. Nor does the film ever confront the post- colonial questions that hover over the Algerian villagers’ dependence on the French monks. But such shortcomings are readily forgiven. It is a deeply affecting film, with a forceful message. In a posthumous letter, delivered as a voice-over as the monks are led away to their deaths, Brother Christian urges those who outlive him not to caricature Islam, nor to blame all Algerians for his murder—a message more pertinent today than ever.
from PRINT EDITION | Books and Arts
Source: The Economist.
Two very different films explore Algeria’s turbulent past
Films about Algeria
Feb 17th 2011 | from PRINT EDITION
OF THE many troubled chapters in modern history, few have left so deep a legacy of distrust, grievance and hurt as the 1954-62 Franco-Algerian war. Unlike France’s other territories in the Maghreb, Algeria was a French administrative département, run and settled not as a colony but as an extension of France itself. This stirred quite particular passions. Albert Camus, the Nobel prize-winning novelist who was born and educated in French Algeria, wrote in 1955 that he was “hurting about Algeria the way others hurt in their lungs”. Some 1.5m French soldiers fought to keep it French. The war brought down the Fourth Republic, returned Charles de Gaulle to power, and left rage in its wake.
“The loss of Algeria was experienced in France as a sort of amputation,” says Benjamin Stora, a French historian, “The subject is still burning, and the war of memories is fierce.” To this day, there is no historical consensus across the Mediterranean, only rival versions of the events that led to Algerian independence, after 132 years of French rule. They divide not only French and Algerians, but the French and the pieds-noirs, white settlers who fled after independence with their belongings in a suitcase. For years France covered up the use of torture and summary executions; Algerians also denied atrocities against the French.
Even now, neither side seems able to let the wound heal. As recently as 2005 the French parliament passed a law referring to the “positive role of the French presence overseas, notably in north Africa”, a clause later removed after an outcry. Furious Algerian deputies then tried to criminalise French colonialism. Within France a big population of Algerian descent wrestles with the conflicted identity. In Algiers there is still no road nor public building named in memory of Camus.
Amid these competing narratives, film-makers have also had their say, starting with Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 masterpiece, “The Battle of Algiers”. This year Algeria and France each nominated a film about Algeria for an Oscar in the best foreign-film category. Algeria sent “Hors-la-Loi” (“Outside the Law”), directed by Rachid Bouchareb, and France selected “Des Hommes et Des Dieux” (“Of Gods and Men”), by Xavier Beauvois. The first, partly backed by French money, was a commercial flop in France; the second, which opens in America on February 25th, an unlikely hit. Only the Algerian entry made it into the final Oscar line-up, which is a pity because the French one stays in the mind longer.
“Outside the Law” is a fast-paced glossy gangster movie out to make a political point. Mr Bouchareb’s previous film, “Indigènes” (“Days of Glory”), brought home to French audiences the contribution of north African soldiers to liberating Europe from Nazi occupation. Embarrassed, the French government promptly raised the pensions of such veterans to match their French counterparts’. This time Mr Bouchareb’s starting point is the 1945 Sétif massacres, which began when unarmed Algerians, marching to celebrate victory in Europe and to press nationalist demands, were gunned down by French forces; many thousands died in the subsequent repression. Told through the eyes of three Algerian brothers, who lose their father in the massacres, it follows their reunion years later in France, and the different choices each makes as an underground Algerian resistance movement takes hold among automobile workers and the shantytowns of 1950s Nanterre, in the outskirts of Paris.
“Outside the Law” is a respectable action film, which turns the spotlight on a disturbing episode of history. Mr Bouchareb says he wanted to show that revolution “chews people up and spits them out”. He unflinchingly depicts the barbarism on both sides.
“Of Gods and Men”, by contrast, is not about politics. It is a remarkable study of spirituality and sacrifice, and how men of faith cope when their ideals are challenged by violent reality. Based on a true story, it follows a group of Cistercian monks, living modestly among poor villagers in the little Tibhirine monastery in the Algerian Atlas Mountains. As the Algerian civil war and Islamist terrorist attacks intensified around them in the mid-1990s, they were warned that their lives were at risk, but chose, after much collective agonising, to stay. In 1996 seven of them were kidnapped; only their decapitated heads were ever found. An Islamist terror group claimed responsibility.
The film has spellbound French audiences, moved by the simplicity and faith of the Tibhirine monks, in an age of materialistic excess, celebrity froth and empty churches. Its cramped cinematography mirrors their daily lives. The monks are human, and they rage and doubt, torn between a survival instinct to leave and a spiritual calling to stay. They run a health clinic for villagers and fear abandoning them to terror. “It is mad to stay, like it is mad to become a monk,” says Brother Christian wryly, the group’s leader, played by Lambert Wilson.
“Of Gods and Men” is not without flaws. Its “Last Supper” scene at the end, at which the monks share red wine, tears and smiles in silent contemplation of their fate, to the swelling chords of Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake”, is not quite controlled enough to sustain the heavy emotion. Nor does the film ever confront the post- colonial questions that hover over the Algerian villagers’ dependence on the French monks. But such shortcomings are readily forgiven. It is a deeply affecting film, with a forceful message. In a posthumous letter, delivered as a voice-over as the monks are led away to their deaths, Brother Christian urges those who outlive him not to caricature Islam, nor to blame all Algerians for his murder—a message more pertinent today than ever.
from PRINT EDITION | Books and Arts
Source: The Economist.
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