algeria

Strife Feature – Imagining War in Film: The Algerian War in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Winds of the Aures

June 30, 2017 by Uygar Baspehlivan

By Uygar Baspehlivan

In Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) or Michael Cimino’s Deer Hunter (1976) after the Vietnam War, the medium of cinema performed as an agent for shaping how war, conflict, and trauma were visualised and resonated in collective memory for years to come.

Cinema – with its potential for access, emotional resonance, and for creating visually-charged meaning – has been significant in the construction and dissemination of cultural ideas and identities and for the molding of specific, nationalized narratives of historical events in the last century.

During the presidencies of Charles de Gaulle in France (whose strict censorship policies meant the state had a monopoly in the representations of Algeria in France [1]) and Houari Boumédiène in Algeria (who, with the National Liberation Front –FLN- owned and funded almost the entire Algerian movie industry in the 60s [2]), popular cinema functioned simultaneously as a medium of distraction from the post-independence realities both countries were facing, and as a form of nationalist propaganda. In France, this control of the movie industry served to promote a denialist narrative of the struggles and sufferings of the Algerians as well as the dangers faced by the French soldiers in the Algerian War. Similarly, in Algeria, movies of the so-called cinema moudjahid were instrumentalised as means to producing a new post-colonial mythology of the new Algerian nation. In the absence of a strong academic infrastructure or established national history, movies produced by the FLN that told the story of courageous Algerian guerrilla who emancipated the nation from colonial forces became the primary agents for constructing a national history and collective identity. In addition to being a part of FLN’s Islamic Socialist propaganda, these movies also acted as a distraction from problems of corruption, economic crisis and women’s rights that the newly-founded Algerian state was struggling with after its independence.

This article observes how the Algerian war and the colonial experience were perceived and constructed around a binary depicting the visual imaginaries of the colonised and the coloniser.

Umbrellas of Cherbourg

“Umbrellas of Cherbourg”, directed by Jacques Demy in 1967, is a cheerful and romantic musical that portrays the struggles of two young French lovers as Guy – the male protagonist- is drafted to fight in the Algerian war. The movie depicts the love triangle Genevieve (the female protagonist) finds herself in, undecided between waiting for her lover fighting in Algeria or choosing a rich and handsome Roland Cassard who can provide her and her mother with economic stability. As one of the first French movies that attempted to deal with the Algerian War after its independence, the fact that Algeria itself is not even shown in the movie but rather depicted as a distant and exotic place that became an inconvenience and a simple plot point in the love lives of two French lovers is arguably a testament to the reduced status of the war in the French national imagination. War, in post-war French memory, was relevant only to the extent of its effects on the lives of the French, completely disregarding the amount of mutual destruction inflicted during the war.

The Algerian philosopher Mostefa Lacheraf called cinema moudjahid “a pseudo-patriotic exploitation of war heroism…which diverted the people from the new realities”.[3]

The movie’s use of bright colours, fancy costumes and depiction of the domestic space as a place of comfort from the problems outside lent a false optimism and luxury that was contrasted with the unknown space of Algeria, where the main protagonist has to go to “serve his country.” Considering how post-war France was struggling with the influx of Algerian immigrants and refugees entering the country, the creation and representation of a safe, hygienic domestic space established an exclusionist logic where the streets of France are full of Algerian immigrants who are treated as the “outsider”.

Continuing the colonial tradition of representing Algeria without depicting Algerians, observed in earlier famous colonial films such as L’Atlantide (1921) or Le Grand Jeu (1935), the movie treats Algeria as an exotic yet dangerous landscape. The only shot of Algeria present in the movie is when Genevieve looks at a postcard sent by Guy where he is standing next to a Moorish archway.

The only shot of Algeria present in the movie is when Genevieve looks at a postcard sent by Guy where he is standing next to a Moorish archway.

In this representation, Algeria is merely a touristic landscape that is protected by the French soldier. Algerians or signs of Algerian life are non-existent. As Guy Austin interprets it aptly; “Algeria and its population are out of sight, through the empty arch, while the photo itself is framed by Genevieve’s letter written naturally enough in French. The war is framed by a French romance, and exists only insofar as it tells about French lovers; Algerians remain invisible – always off-screen.”[4]

The reduced status of the war becomes clearer when Genevieve reads a letter from Guy where he talks about how a patrol was ambushed by Algerians. However, immediately after this anecdote, he emphasises that there actually “is not much danger in Algeria”. The war isn’t important; it is a minor inconvenience that poses little threat to the protagonist’s life. As the audience, we know that he will survive. Not only the suffering of Algerians, but also the danger the French soldiers found themselves in during the war is disregarded and put aside in the movie.

Winds of the Aures

Winds of the Aures (1966), an Algerian movie directed by acclaimed director Mohamed Lakhdar Hamina which won the Palme d’Or prize at the Cannes Film Festival, on the other hand, paints a completely opposite picture of the Algerian war that catered towards an Algerian imagination. A war-time drama about the journey of a mother trying to find her son who was kidnapped by French colonial forces, the 90-minute showcase of Algerian suffering acts as a propaganda tool for FLN’s specific form of Islamic Socialist nationalism. As per FLN’s official policy of bringing about “the restoration of the sovereign, democratic and social Algerian state within the framework of Islamic principles[5]”, the movie’s depiction of how religion and collective Algerian activity worked jointly to bring an end to the century-old colonial rule is an endeavour in constructing a direct link between Islam and Collectivism. As the movie starts with the the adhan (the Islamic call to prayer) suppressed by sounds of conflict, symbolising how colonial domination subjugated the Algerian Islamic identity, it aspires to show how Islam and Algeria’s Islamic identity endured despite the efforts of the colonisers. Representing the Algerian villager as pious and devout, Hamina performs a normative identity making that connects the struggle to religion.

The first thirty minutes of the movie keep up with this collectivist narrative and is dedicated to the daily routines of Algerian peasants working in the village and bringing help to FLN fighters. While French cinema largely attempted to empty Algeria of Algerians, this film defied colonial narratives, showcases the daily lives of Algerian villagers working the soil, producing and consuming. It transformed the exotic landscape of French imagination into a territory filled with indigenous people. This representation of collective activity, playing into the FLN’s socialist Islamic identity, functions in creating a mythology of common collective struggle against colonialism.

Rather than a realistic representation of wartime rural Algeria, the movie’s narrative attempts to reproduce, in the words of Mani Sharpe, “a monolithic Algeria as a tabula rasa cleansed of cultural, social, economic, religious and gendered tensions that in reality characterised the post-colonial nation-state.

Unfortunately, Winds of the Aures can’t escape from the nationalist logic of inclusion and exclusion as it fails to reflect the historical reality of the Algerian war that was rife with internal strife and elite intervention. Disregarding diversity, individuality, and locality in favour of a homogeneous representation of collective peasantry; Hamina uses cinema as an attempt to draw a unified national history. The movie, as it represents a collective struggle of emancipation against the French, therefore, appears to conform to Ella Shohat’s definition of third-world films as using “the expulsion of the colonial intruder” in a cinematic praxis of “national becoming” This depiction of collective wartime heroism – similar to France – diverts attention away from the economic, political and social realities of post-independence Algeria. The glorification of the movie’s female protagonist, as she goes through hell to save his son, for instance, distracts from the fact that many women lost their privileged wartime status after independence and were forced to return to their Islamic domestic lives.

The emotional resonance of an audio-visual representation becomes a medium through which national and cultural ideas and stories are cultivated and disseminated.

The historical context in which the movie came out is also important, in that cinema is particularly receptive and representative of the cultural environment of its period. A year before the movie was distributed, in 1965, Colonel Boumédiène seized power following a coup d’état. His project entailed a rewriting of Algerian history to provide the country with a unitary national identity. Since there had not really been an Algerian national identity until the 1950s, the peoples living in Algeria found in Islam a central mark of their identity, as it was the element that united them all despite the local differences. Thus, he was able to affirm that Algerians were Muslims and Arabs, a claim that disregarded the wide variety of non-Arab tribes that had lived in Algeria for centuries. This dismissal of the country’s diversity is reflected in the movie itself, which constitutes an attempt to create a unitary, post-colonial national identity, rooted in Islam, in line with Boumédiène’s plan.

The analysis of these two movies reveals that the memory of trauma and conflict can be shaped by nationalist narratives. This constitution and disciplining of memory is primarily exercised by state-controlled or state-censored cinema serving specific narratives regarding the nature, subjects, and motives of the Algerian war. In the end, we observe how both representations of the conflict divert attention from the realities of post-war nation-building. This helps recognise the (re)productive power of visual media in framing and constituting meaning and identity. The struggle for narrative eminence between Algerian and French filmmakers is a testament to the fact that artistic expression is yet another site for political struggles over power and identity.

Uygar Baspehlivan is a graduate of War Studies at King’s College London. He is about to commence his postgraduate studies in Theory and History of International Relations at the London School of Economics. His research interests include nationalism, critical theory, and film theory.

Notes:

[1] Guy Austin, “Trauma, Cinema and the Algerian War” New Readings 10 (2011), p.18-19

[2] Guy Austin, “Representing the Algerian War in Algerian Cinema: Le Vent Des Aures”, French Studies 61:2

[3] Cited in Guy Hennebelle, “Cinema Djidid”, in Algerian Cinema, p.28

[4] Guy Austin, “Representing the Algerian War in Algerian Cinema: Le Vent Des Aures”, French Studies 61:2

[5] Daho Djerbal, “The National Liberation Front (FLN) and Islam Concerning the Relationship between the political and religious in Contemporary Algeria” The Journal of Sophia Asian Studies No.25 (2007) p.1.

[6] Mani Sharpe, Gender and Space in Post-Colonial French and Algerian Cinema

[7] Mani Sharpe, Gender and Space in Post-Colonial French and Algerian Cinema

Lessons from Algeria: counter-insurgency, commitment and cruelty

February 20, 2015 by Strife Staff

By Ethan Brooks and Thomas Giles:

French troops in Oran, northwest Algeria, 1956. Photo: JP Vasse (CC)

In the Algerian War of 1954-62, the belligerents tore apart a society that had coexisted for a century. The wounds they left were too deep to heal. But the continuation of theviolence after the war and the spiraling civilian-targeted terror campaigns conducted by both French colonists and Algerian independence fighters was not inevitable. Avoiding this type of outcome is the point of counter-insurgency operations today. More than sixty years later, we can see that no counter-insurgency campaign can succeed with aggressive ‘search and destroy’ tactics against embedded insurgentsif the ultimate aim is peaceful coexistence in a divided society. The United States failed to take this lesson to Iraq and as a result had to adapt during its operations. Any country considering a counter-insurgency operation in the future must weigh up the extra costs of attempting it without this tool. France’s experience in Algeria shows that restraint and long-term commitment are vital if conflicts are to be resolved without the kind of fallout seen in Algeria in the 1960s and Iraq since 2011.

***

Even today there are parts of France that have been part of the country for less time than Algeria was. Fully incorporated as an extension of metropolitan France from 1881 under the Second Republic, it was organized into départements like continental France and was complete with all the trappings of the French state.^[1] After the war, the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan spoke of ‘Winds of Change’ drawing the imperial era to a close, but in French Algeria the reality was different. For the colons (the Europeans living there) Algeria could never be just another colonial outpost to abandon during the seemingly inevitable tide of decolonization.

The French Empire was a civilizational mission to make Algeria and the rest of the colonies part of France. By contrast, while India had been ‘the jewel in the crown’ of the British Empire and its loss in 1947 had meant a loss of prestige, Britain did not feel as if it was losing a part of itself. The opposite was true of France. In the words of the French Prime Minister at the start of the conflict, Algeria was “irrevocably French”.^[2]

If we read history through the lens of its destination, the gradual build-up of Algerian nationalism after the First World War is plain to see. Our eyes are drawn to the violent elements we recognize as important later on. But this is a mistake. The savage war and terror campaigns can in no way be described as inevitable.

Up until the end of the Second World War, French Algerian society was able to function as normal. Terrible violence did occur in the Sétif massacre in 1945 that followed police clashes with Muslim Algerians celebrating the German surrender, but Algeria was to have another decade of the peaceful coexistence it had enjoyed for over a hundred years. The majority of Arab Algerians favoured – or at least saw as the only viable outcome – a variation on the status quo with more political rights and the accompanying economic benefits.^[3] Demands for violent overthrow of French rule were limited to the fringes. Nor for that matter were the colons too worried about their future. The idea of having to flee for their lives across the Mediterranean with their worldly belongings in suitcases would have seemed absurd.

To find the cause of the horror story, we must point to decisions made by both sides. In this case, to blame are, on the one hand, the civilian-targeting tactics of the Algerian revolutionary National Liberation Front (FLN), and on the other the unrestrained response of the French army and their failure to control the illegitimate combatants on their side. These combatants included the colon paramilitaries and the French intelligence services which operated in secret via proxies. Aggressive ‘search and destroy’ tactics cannot succeed in the long-term if the insurgents cannot be separated from the population. Hearts and minds cannot be won later on when the force aiming at ‘pacification’ is indistinguishable from the insurgents in the brutality of its tactics. Seen in this light, the bulk of the population can be seen as bystanders who were gradually sucked into the conflict as it grew in intensity. Civilian-targeting forced people to choose sides. The resulting divide was unbridgeable after the fighting. The only option for the Pied-Noirs and the Harkis (the Muslim Algerians who sided with the French) was to flee to France.^[4]

The spark for the war came in November 1954 when the FLN carried out its first attacks, a series of over thirty bombings that left seven people dead, five of whom were European civilians. This shocked the French and triggered the deployment of paratroopers to Algeria. But even this event is easily exaggerated in importance. It was the response that leant the attack its significance.

At this point, the FLN was estimated to have only around 500 fighters and was only one small, albeit very violent, group within the broader Algerian independence movement. Before FLN ascendency, there were many moderate parties. These included the Mouvement National Algérien (MNA), which desired Algerian independence, but did not wish to achieve it by violence, the moderate republican party known as the Amis du Manifeste et des Libertés, and the Algerian Communist Party. The FLN rose to prominence because the French authorities allowed it to violently consolidate its dominance over other pro-independence groups, especially the MNA, a failure that stemmed from an unwillingness to distinguish between ‘good and ‘bad’ anti-French factions and engage with them politically before it was too late. Without the MNA, there was no Muslim Algerian voice arguing for a non-violent political solution. FLN dominance dictated the intensity of the conflict and the escalating response of the French authorities sealed Algeria’s fate. Fighting fire with fire, the French military establishment and the colons hit back hard, meeting the FLN’s terror war in Algiers with equal savagery.^[5] The popularity of the FLN rapidly grew as ordinary Algerians turned against France.

While the aggressive French tactics were in part the result of existing military doctrine that advocated fierce repression, they were also a product of the military leadership. After humiliation in 1940 at the hands of the German Army, another defeat in Indochina in 1954, and the meekness that accompanied the Suez withdrawal in 1956, another military rout or feeble acquiescence would have shown France to be a cripple on the world stage.^[6] The rot had to stop in Algeria. Left to their own devices by politicians in Paris stuck in the deadlock of the Fourth Republic, the generals took the responsibility for holding France together upon themselves. Political oversight should have led to tighter bounds placed on the use of force and long-term goals kept more clearly in mind. Without it, the army made its own decisions as to the lessons it believed it had learned in Indochina. Blaming defeat on a lack of toughness and panicked by the threat of communism, they resolved never to come second best in resolve or forcefulness again. The lack of restraint and the surprising cruelty of the French campaign was a direct result of this. A policy of summary killings, torture, intimidation and terror was carried out. By 1960-61, the FLN had been defeated militarily in Algiers and only small pockets of resistance remained. But during the fighting, aggressive tactics had turned the population of Algeria against the French.

In hindsight, it is difficult to imagine how France ever thought it could keep a peaceful hold on Algérie Française. The Arabs in Algeria were denied many of the political rights that the Europeans had and as a result felt treated as second-class citizens, but the anger and hatred that existed by 1962 did not exist in 1954. French rule could never have lasted in the long-term. However, the massacres, continued terror campaigns and the heart-breaking exodus of colons that followed Algerian Independence in the years 1961-1962 could have been avoided had a different approach been taken.

In looking back at the Algerian War, the goal is not to see how France might have held onto Algeria had it made better decisions. The goal must be to understand how western countries can carry out effective counter-insurgency efforts and avoid the level of suffering and bloodshed that is indelibly linked to Algeria’s independence experience. After the civilian-targeted violence of the war, there was no possibility that Muslim Algerians and the colons could continue to live together as they had done before. The precedent set by both the FLN and colon paramilitaries of targeting civilians with reprisals meant that the cycle of retaliatory massacres was and would have remained intractable.

Any mission that seeks to uphold a central authority against violent challengers must be willing to see the job through without allowing the fight to become personal in the way it was for the French in Algeria. Maintaining this sort of distance above the fray requires enormous sacrifice, restraint, and a willingness to let crimes against you go unpunished. On this last count the United States struggled in its Iraq mission and became the target of violence aiming to provoke a response similar to that of the French in Algeria. The sixty years that have passed since the Algerian War have seen many more counter-insurgency operations, including several in North Africa and the Middle East. Since the Arab Spring, we have seen that nearly every country in the region could find itself needing military help to avoid a drawn-out civil war and mass killings. Given this, it is probable that new counter-insurgency operations will be undertaken. Nor are they likely to be as easy as France’s mission in Mali, where the insurgents were mostly rural and the rebel fighters were geographically, religiously and ethnically distinct from the rest of the population. This especially applies today as events in Syria, Iraq and Libya progress. A lack of long-term commitment wrecked the mission in Iraq. The results of that failure are all too clear today.

Ethan Brooks is in his third year of a BA in International Politics at King’s College London. Thomas Giles is in his third year of a BA in War Studies, also at King’s.

NOTES

^[1] Evans, Martin. Algeria: France’s Undeclared War, 2012, p.19

^[2] Merom, Gil. How Democracies lose small wars: State, Society, and the Failures of France in Algeria, Israel in Lebanon and the United States in Vietnam, 2003, p.90

^[3]Evans, Martin. Algeria: France’s Undeclared War, 2012, p. 101

^[4]Horne, Alistair. A Savage War of Peace. p. 537.

^[5] Branche, Raphaëlle. La torture et l’armée pendant la guerre d’Algérie. France: Gallimard (2001), p. 423-24

^[6] De Saint Marc, Hélie. Mémoires les champs de braises. France: Perrin (2002), p.173

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