France’s Bitter Retreat from Empire
French cinema has had more difficulties than many other countries in bringing to screen films portraying insurgent warfare, counter-insurgency and terrorism. War films have never had the same sort of popular appeal in France as they have in Anglo-American cinema, despite deep-rooted myths of Napoleonic and imperial greatness. It has sometimes been suggested that the war genre sits uneasily with French film producers and directors, who often appear to be more concerned with human and personal relations on the small scale. Even now, there has been no major French film dealing with aerial combat, submarine warfare or the military and political decision-making behind the collapse in 1940, the debacle in Indochina in the early 1950s or the crisis of the Fourth Republic in 1958 leading to Algerian independence in 1962.
This chapter will look at these issues in three parts. Part one will examine the importance of an early period of cinema up to the early 1960s centred on three key films: Alain Resnais’s Muriel (1963), Pierre Schoendoerffer’s La 317 Section (1963) and Jean Luc Godard’s Le Petit Soldat (also released in 1963) and Lost Command (1966). Next, in part two I will examine the emergence of a more gauchiste cinema that attempted to examine the Algerian war in three films Avoir Vingt ans dans les aures (1972), R.A.S (1973) and La Question (1977). In the third part, I will look at the renewal of the memory of colonial wars in the four films Dien Bien Phu (1992), Mon Colonel (2006), Hors la Loi (2010) and Forces Speciales (2011).
The early period
From the era of silent cinema, the war genre was a difficult subject for French film producers given the way the French memory of war was so heavily shaped by the massive carnage of the First World War. One of the earliest French war films was the 1928 anti-war movie Verdun Visions of History (Verdun visions d’histoire), directed by Leon Poirier. The film explored the havoc wrought by war not only on the men fighting in it but on the civilian population as well. It stands alongside Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) as one of the great anti-war films of the inter-war years and helped set the tone of much subsequent French film making. Over the next thirty-odd years there was the added shame of defeat and capitulation in 1940 followed by the humiliations in and defeat in Vietnam at Dien Bien Phu. Then came the withdrawal from Algeria in 1962 following a seven-year war in which the French army remained militarily undefeated but bitter, compounded by the arrival in France of many former pieds noirs and a terrorist campaign mounted by the right-wing OAS.
It was only in the early 1960s that, officially at least, France finally recognized the concept of ‘decolonization’ as it reluctantly abandoned the idea of ‘Algerie Francaise’. The French republican left, in particular, gave up its commitment to the idea that Algerian Muslims could be assimilated into French culture, though the actual meaning of ‘decolonization’ would continue to be debated by intellectuals on the left and right, ranging from exponents of national liberation and social revolution, such as Sartre, De Beauvoir and Fanon; champions of an Algerian ‘nation’ such as the PCF and the ‘national liberalism’ of Raymond Aron, who saw Algerian independence as part of ‘wave of history’, a view similar to the Whiggish idea of a benign ‘transfer of power’ in British official circles in the 1950s and early 1960s.1
In Britain, post-war decolonization did not lead to the same sort of debate on national identity, which was postponed until at least the Thatcher years of the 1980s and, arguably, until more recent debates on union with the Scottish independence referendum of 2014 and the Brexit referendum of 2016. In France, by contrast, decolonization impacted on debates surrounding national identity in the Fifth Republic forged by De Gaulle in 1958. Under the mantle of withdrawing from Algeria, the French government began a process of redefining French identity to exclude ‘Muslims’, marginalizing in the process the imperial doctrine of a nominally colour-blind assimilation but also failing to confront head-on the long tradition of republican racism.2
For French film producers, releasing any films on the Algerian War risked not only raising painful memories of a bitter and brutal conflict but also intruding into a sensitive debate on what modern French identity actually meant. This double restriction ensured that French cinema never generated anything like a distinctive mythology of colonial war like the United States and Britain. Relatively few films in the 1960s and 1970s attempted to engage with Algeria, and, even when they did, they preferred to fall back on oblique references, often to escape a draconian policy of film censorship.
Two films stand out from the nouvelle vague (new wave) that did address the Algerian issue, though both from a distance: Alain Resnais’ Muriel ou le Temps d’un retour (1963) and Jean Luc Godard’s Le Petit Soldat, released in 1960 but first shown in France in 1963. Before we turn to these films, it is important to note that the historical memory of colonial rule and withdrawal from Indochina and Vietnam are by no means the same, given that France had different relationships with the two colonial territories. Vietnam was a colonie d’exploitation where a small class of French colonial administrators, mining interests and commercial planters took advantage of a cheap work force to produce huge quantities of rice, tea and coffee as well as raw materials such as rubber, coal, zinc and tin. Algeria, on the other hand, had a rather different sort of relationship with the French metropole since – along with plantations and the exploitation of cheap Algerian labour – it had a population of one million white colons or pieds noirs who saw Algeria as ‘Algerie Francaise’ and part of metropolitan France. While both colonies experienced intense forms of racial discrimination, the level of racism in Indochina was partly attenuated by the small size of the white French colonial presence and widespread sexual relationships between French men and Vietnamese women. In Algeria, on the other hand, a pattern of racial segregation emerged that displayed some of the features of the apartheid model in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia.
Both wars were underpinned by a powerful colonial myth stretching back several generations to the original colonial conquests in the nineteenth century, but fortified by the revival of French imperial elf confidence in the aftermath of the 1931 Colonial Exhibition in Paris.3 The exhibition stimulated considerable interest in the French colonial empire that would continue until well after the Second World War, leaving French society remarkably unprepared for the era of post-war decolonization.4 The myth was exemplified by the 1935 film Princesse Tam Tam, which dramatically stressed the propinquity of the French presence in North Africa with the cultural movements in metropolitan France. The film starts with a French novelist suffering writers’ block seeking inspiration in Tunisia. Here he encounters a local girl Alwina (played by the black American singer and actress Josephine Baker) whom he teaches the manners and customs of the ‘civilized’ west. He reinvents her as ‘Princess Tam Tam’ from Africa and brings her back to polite bourgeois Parisian society. In a glitzy party hosted by an Indian Maharajah, the princess regresses to type by dancing an oriental dance; she is feted by other party-goers, though the Maharaja comments that ‘some windows face to the West and others to the East’.
Infused with cinematic orientalism, Princesse Tam Tam exemplified pre-war French cinema’s tendency towards ambivalent narratives revealing a declining faith in a hierarchy of cultures. Moving beyond the supposed boundaries of cultural identity, the films created a space for transgression from bourgeois morality, themes perpetuated in recent movies such as Indochine (1992) and The Lover (1992) that depict sexual relationships across the racial and cultural divide of pre-war colonial Vietnam.5 Such narratives of wilful cultural transgression provided an alternative myth of empire that later veered towards an imperial nostalgia that avoided confronting directly the political complexities of decolonization.
This would prove easier in the case of Indochina than Algeria. In Indochina, the defeat at Dien Bien Phu ensured a dramatic and final closure to the seventy-year period of French colonial occupation that had started in the 1880s; although still painful, the withdrawal, following the Geneva Accords of 1954, provided a welcome relief. Many military strategists and political leaders had come to view the war as increasingly unwinnable against well-disciplined Viet Minh guerrillas operating with relative impunity in vast jungle terrains and with apparently limitless weapons and supplies from China following the communist revolution in 1949. The finality of the French departure from a colony lacking any extensive settler population ensured that the later memory of it would eventually be refracted through a rather nostalgic gaze, different in kind to the brutal and chaotic departure from Algeria. This nostalgia has thus tended to blur the intensity and bitterness of the Indochinese conflict. By the 1990s, France was able to open diplomatic avenues to a modern Vietnam confident about its own identity. The Vietnamese government later supported the 1992 war film Dien Bien Phu, directed by the right-wing director Pierre Schoendoerffer.
Algeria was a different matter. The war from 1954 to 1962 challenged the very core of the French colonial idea of mission civilisatrice which had been forged by successive generations of empire builders since the early nineteenth century. The French imperial ethic tended to be more self-consciously ideological compared to the more empirical approach of British colonial rulers, reflecting the fact that its nineteenth-century imperial soldier-administrators such as Bugeaud and Lyautey were far less beholden to the diktats of central government or even of interested economic parties. They liked to talk of the need for building a new culture in a manner that would have shocked the far more money-oriented Randlords in South Africa whose horizons never moved much beyond the making of profits.6 As A.P. Thornton has observed, the French imperial ethic remained quite closely linked to Jacobin principles of revolutionary universalism even if this did lead, in some cases, to the creation of colonial Jacobins only too ready to use such concepts against their colonial masters.7 Jacobin ideas of fraternity, however, could all too easily slip into a form of cultural civil war. This would be the case in Algeria where a war was eventually fought between ‘intimate enemies’ – the title of a 2007 film on Algeria directed by Florent Siri.
The latter stages of the Algerian conflict proved to be especially bitter, bringing down the Fourth French Republic in 1958. The French military used extensive torture in its counter-insurgency, which some military analysts rationalized as part of an ideologically driven counter-insurgency against FLN guerrillas they described as guerre revolutionnaire. The logic of this type of war undermined the moral compass of the French colonial cause.8 It produced an intensely ideological, racial and political polarization that ensured, before final independence, an attempted military putsch in Algiers in 1961 by a group of disaffected French generals, an upsurge of terrorism by the underground right-wing OAS in both Algeria and metropolitan France and the departure of virtually the entire pied noir population. It was not even clear what exactly the war was about since the French government refused to accept, until 1999, that this was even a ‘real’ war given that the conflict took place in a region it saw as part of metropolitan France. The official title for the war was operations de maintain de l’ordre – operations in the maintenance of public order – a term not markedly different to the British notion of ‘emergencies’ in Malaya and Kenya. This term represented a refusal to accept that this was any sort of ‘war’ in the proper sense of the term and so markedly differed from the era of initial colonial intrusion into Algeria in the years after 1834 when the operations against indigenous guerrillas had been broadly seen as an example of une petite guerre or ‘small war’.
The French memory of war became increasingly politicized in the course of the 1960s on ethnic and generational grounds. The historical recollection of the conflict became intertwined with wider battles for status and recognition in metropolitan France by Muslim and North African ethnic minorities in a manner rather different to Britain and the United States. The memory of Britain’s ‘colonial emergencies’, for instance, never linked up particularly closely with issues concerning Afro-Caribbean and South Asian ethnic minorities in post-war Britain, perhaps because relatively few came from Malaya and Kenya.9 By contrast, the memory of the Algerian War remained an explosive issue with the younger North African population confined, in many cases, to bleak outer suburbs of French cities called banlieues blighted by high unemployment and racial discrimination.
The Algerian War was a sensitive subject for French cinema to tackle, even though over 1.5 million French soldiers had served in it and some 27,500 died there. Benjamin Stora has suggested that the Algerian War became effectively amputated from French historical consciousness ensuring that the issues surrounding it largely festered outside public memory. Neither in France nor Algeria has it been possible to move to the stage of formally commemorating the conflict, or even erecting statues and naming streets recalling the war and those involved in it. It will be hard to find a rue Ben Bella in any French town or city while there are, equally, no roads named after Albert Camus or Jean Paul Sartre in Algeria, though there is, interestingly, in the heart of Algiers close to the university a place Maurice Audin named after a white communist activist murdered by French paras during the Battle of Algiers in 1957.10 Nevertheless, in terms of cinema, it is not true that French film producers entirely neglected France’s colonial wars since over fifty French feature films were released by the early 1990s dealing with Algeria in one form or another.11 Algeria remained buried in the French folk memory in a complicated and highly contested form.
For the radical French director Bernard Tavernier, the Algerian War was a ‘guerre sans nom’, the title of a documentary he released in 1991. This uncertainty reflected a wider French military problem with both its colonial wars in Indochina and Vietnam. In neither instance was it able to fight a counter-insurgency war around any credible myth that bore a close relationship with the original mission civilisatrice that had underpinned nineteenth-century French imperial expansion. In Indochina, the French return to its former colony of Vietnam at the end of the Second World War was hampered by the destruction of much of the former colonial administrative infrastructure following the outright Japanese annexation of March 1945. The resulting military counter-insurgency against Viet Minh guerrillas proved to be remarkably narrowly based, mainly involving a series of alliance with indigenous tribal minorities that ensured that the French military lacked any real support among the Vietnamese peasantry as it attempted to blockade enemy areas with a strategy of quadrillage de l’auto defense.12 None of this proved effective against a resolute enemy impelled by an ideology of Vietnamese nationalism combined with a programme of peasant-based social revolution replicating the Maoist revolution in China.
The same sort of problems emerged in the case of Algeria, though here French counter-insurgency against the FLN was at least impelled by a myth of ‘Algerie Francaise’ and the idea that a colony the other side of the Mediterranean was both part of metropolitan France and a lost ‘Latin Africa’ now being reclaimed by the industrious colons as heirs to earlier Greek and Roman conquests in the Mediterranean.13 This mythology became one that the French government found increasingly hard to sustain in the context of wider Cold War ideological conflict over the rights of subject peoples. Following the crisis of 1958, and the emergence of Charles de Gaulle as President of the new Fifth Republic, there was a significant shift in the government’s propaganda line in its ideological war with the FLN. Government propaganda films such as Visages d’Algerie and The Falling Veil, a film aimed at American audiences, attempted to define the traditional conception of mission civilisatrice to uplift an ‘undeveloped’ Algeria. This was partly an extension south of the Mediterranean of a modernization project known as the trentes glorieuses underway in metropolitan France.
Spanning the thirty or so years from the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s this involved the massive reconstruction of many French cities, the building of vast numbers of apartment blocks and major new industrial plants. It contained a dynamic that, by the late 1950s, led to a growing recognition by the French state on the need to relinquish its hold on Algeria and decolonize it as part of a continuous pattern of modernization. To explain this, it found itself heavily dependent on the use of film and cinema in a strategy to cover the retreat from Algeria that Matthew Connelly has described as a ‘glowing vision … like celluloid wrapping around another, classified version of independent Algeria’.14 It was a vision that, in the end, failed to stem the drift of the Algerian War into a civilizational conflict in which extremists on both sides goaded on their followers into ever more stark and bloody excesses. However, as an apparent political programme, it secured a pis aller for the Gaullist regime in Paris to extricate itself from the Algerian conflict.15
The culturally shallow nature of the modernizing vision was also one that would be wide open to being pilloried by the new arts-based cinema of the early 1960s. In 1963 the director Alain Resnais released his third feature film, Muriel ou le Temps d’un retour (Muriel or The Sign of a Return). The film followed Hiroshima mon amour in 1959 and L’Annee derniere a Marianbad in 1961 and was set in the town of Boulogne, almost at the northernmost point of France and, by extension, as far north in France as it is possible to get from Algeria in the south. The story takes place over fifteen days in September–October 1962, some six months after the signing of the Treaty of Evian and the French departure from Algeria. The film centres on the arrival of the middle-aged Alphonse and his young lover Francoise to stay with Helene, an antiques dealer working out of her apartment. Helene lives with her stepson Bernard, who has returned from military service in Algeria apparently traumatized after his involvement in the torture and probable murder of a victim known only as Muriel, a character who never appears in the movie. Helene, on the other hand, is a gambling addict and mistress of Roland de Smoke, a property developer partly responsible for the extensive rebuilding going on in Boulogne, a town which appears during the film as a silent character its own right and defined by the juxtaposition of new apartment blocks going up alongside older decaying buildings from the past.
This is a film that avoids any serious engagement with the recent historical past in favour of the fractured nature of modernity and memory.16 Such memories surface during the movie in a discontinuous manner paralleled by the discordant musical score by Hans Werner Henze and some 800 static camera takes, twice the number for an average movie of this length. The memories contrast and battle against each other in an apparently vain effort to establish significance: Helene has been sometime in the past the lover of Alphonse, who has formerly run a bar in Algeria. A pattern of miscommunication, it emerges, prevented them getting married, while Bernard’s memories of Algeria remain largely bottled up in a young man who finds social relationships difficult and eventually abandons his fiancée Marie-Do. In one scene, we learn something of Bernard’s former activities in Algeria through a short movie to which he gives a running commentary. The film is apparent evidence of Muriel’s torture, a terrifying memory of the past that has now become an obsession with Bernard, who is a casualty of war in the sense that he is wracked by guilt but powerless to know what to do about it. Resnais had been a signatory in 1960 of the Manifesto of 121, in which a group of French intellectuals organized by Jean Paul Sartre protest the French government’s counter-insurgency in Algeria. Muriel was not, though, an overtly political film and the theme of torture was dealt with obliquely. It thus escaped being banned, unlike Jean Luc Godard’s Le Petit Soldat that was completed in 1960 but only released in 1963, a year after Algerian independence.
Le Petit Soldat has been, until relatively recently, one of the more neglected films of Godard’s early period, despite the fact that it was begun before the more iconic Breathless (1960). It marks a rather tentative turn by Godard into political film making in the face of charges from left-wing critics that the films of the nouvelle vague were only really concerned with individual bourgeois fulfilment and existential self-assertion. The movie centres on a French deserter, Bruno Forrestier (Michel Subor), who has fled to Geneva to escape fighting in Algeria. Bruno works as a photojournalist, while being drawn into a shadowy French counter-terrorist operation, apparently financed by an ex-Poujadist and former Vichy collaborator. The organization orders him to kill a leading figure of the exile FLN, oddly named Palivoda, to prove he is not a double agent. By the time he attempts the assassination, Bruno has met and fallen in love with a beautiful Russian woman Veronica Dreyer (played by Anna Karina). Veronica is also rather enigmatic, with little to say for most of the film and spending much of the time combing her hair in front of a mirror and smiling as Bruno takes photographs of her. She starts a rather torrid affair with Bruno and late in the film discloses that she is an active supporter of the FLN, seeing them as an organization with ideals, unlike the French, whom she considers are destined to lose the Algerian War.
There is little to like about Bruno, who is part Jimmy Porter complaining of the lack of real causes to fight for in the modern world and part rich playboy, standing in as a kind of mirror for Godard himself at this early stage in his career. He rather implausibly declares himself to be a ‘secret agent’, but there is a feeling that this is just an attempt to clutch at some sort of identity. He never lacks money and it is not really clear, until close to the end of the movie, what he really believes in, eventually confessing to Veronica that he is ‘proud to be French’ while Arabs are generally ‘lazy’ and he hates the Mediterranean world and the fiction of Albert Camus. He is broadly right wing and a supporter of the lost cause of Algerie Francaise, though not fanatically so. He understands only too well the penalties for being found out in the world of intelligence and counter-intelligence, which appears to be little more than an elaborate game, though one whose precepts are well expressed when one of the French anti-terrorist agents, Jacques, reads from Jean Cocteau’s novel Thomas the Imposter. Thomas vainly attempts to pretend to be dead before finally dying at the end of the novel: ‘For him’, Cocteau wrote, ‘fact and fiction were one and the same. William Thomas was dead’.
Le Petit Soldat can thus be seen as a movie that, somewhat unwittingly, looks forward to the contemporary era of ‘fake news’ and uncertain or unprovable facts. There is never any real certainty about the central character’s real aims in the movie, though it is clear that Bruno is half-hearted in his efforts attempts to kill Palivoda in a moving car, with the attempt descending into black comedy as various vehicles keep getting in the way. Bruno then attempts to flee with Veronica to Brazil, but is captured and tortured by the FLN. Here he at last displays some serious professionalism as an intelligence agent, enduring both electric shocks and water boarding before managing to escape from his captors by jumping out of a window. By now, though, the French intelligence agents have discovered Veronica’s links to the FLN and she is captured and tortured to death, an event that occurs off-screen. The final denouement of the film is narrated by Bruno in a down-beat matter-of-fact manner, recalling the similarly bleak ending to Rossellini’s Paisa.
What is perhaps most memorable about the film, and which saves it from the obscurity of some of Godard’s other early films, is the brutal torture scene in which Subor underwent real water boarding before the camera, a trope that would take decades to be repeated in cinema with Kathryn Bigelow’s rather more stylized torture scenes in Zero Dark Thirty in 2012. The FLN torturers place photographs of other victims before Bruno, warning him that the same thing can happen to him unless he talks; a little later, a narrator with Bruno’s voice narrates that as a cloth over his head becomes saturated with water he is unable to breathe. The very starkness of the scene puts Le Petit Soldat into a rather different category to other post-war movies that attempted to deal with torture: Rome Open City in 1945, Chahine’s Djamila in 1958 and Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers in 1966, which all dramatize such brutal events with considerable emotion and even melodrama, either with protesting speeches such as that of Don Pietro Pelegrini in Rome Open City or Morricone’s iconic organ score in Algiers.
Interestingly, none of the scenes in Le Petit Soldat have any direct Algerian context and even the FLN agents closely resemble their French opponents, a trope that reinforces a narrative stressing how torture was a weapon used by both sides in the Algerian conflict (a trope incidentally that was sufficient to secure the film’s banning by the French government). The apparent remoteness of the film from real events in Algeria led the film to be rather neglected by critics, who remained preoccupied with the apparently more obvious successes of the French new wave such as Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour or Francois Truffaut’s Jules et Jim.
For a later generation, the very bleakness of the torture scene ensures the film’s enduring importance, confirming at least some of the precepts of cinema verite that was so ably demonstrated by the movie’s cinematographer Raoul Coutard. As Roger Ebert has pointed out, Bruno has no real cause to defend when he undergoes torture and the film reflects the moral confusion felt by many people in the face of the bitter brutality of the Algerian war that, like the United States a few years later in Vietnam, tore French society apart.17 Despite its evident limitations in not actually probing the real war in Algeria, Le Petit Soldat remains a major film interrogating the pitiless consequences of insurgent war on ordinary civilian life, though its improvisational style avoided the obvious artifices and stock formulae of Hollywood cinema. Nevertheless, the film emerges as an unconventional political thriller that both confirmed and amplified one of the central themes of Godard’s film making, namely that love and betrayal are two sides of the same coin.18
Confronting the Algerian conflict head-on, like later films on the Vietnam War, proved hard for French film makers, though Hollywood itself released in 1966 one major feature film, Lost Command, that included scenes from both the Vietnamese and Algerian Wars. It is questionable whether the achievements of French cinema should be judged by a Hollywood standard; Philip Dine has suggested that the French films that have been released on Algeria (as well as Indochina) should be judged on their own terms and assessed in relation to ‘geopolitical and institutional challenges presented by decolonization’.19 Neither the United States nor Britain confronted a near-breakdown of their political systems like France, so it is not altogether surprising that the French cinematic treatment of these issues emerged rather differently.
Moreover, French cinema’s treatment of colonial wars was shaped by a range of cultural factors. France had a highly self-conscious intelligentsia that had exerted considerable influence over social and political debate since the era of the Popular Front in a manner that was rather different to the Anglo-Saxon world. By the middle 1950s, the French intelligentsia had become polarized ideologically over Algeria at a time when intellectuals could exert considerable influence over film making.20
Behind these debates of the intelligentsia lay differing ideas about France and its identity and purpose. Naomi Greene has outlined four main periods for this debate and the way it shaped much French cinema. The first emerged in several films from the 1930s to 1950s directed by auteurs such as Jean Renoir, Marcel Carne and Rene Clair. They celebrated the lives of ordinary working-class men and women (often played by actors such as Jean Gabin, Fernandel and Arletty) in an urban setting centred on streets, hotels, bars and cafes. This period of French movie making would be later viewed as a ‘golden age’ of films that defined the essential ‘Frenchness’ of popular life in France and become, by extension, a yardstick by which to judge what had been lost in the era of post-war modernization. It was mostly a white cinema with little space for other ethnic groups; thus, Josefa, early in Jean Renoir’s early neorealist masterpiece Toni (1935), is warned by her uncle to beware of ‘Arabs’ while even the iconic gangster movie Pepe le Moko is essentially a French gangster film in an exotic oriental location where the Arab characters, while often portrayed sympathetically, serve essentially as background props for Gabin’s doomed character.
This was also a cinema that contributed to the construction of post-war French identity as it moved away from life in small towns and working-class city suburbs to a wider exploration of cultural life centred on families, relationships, affairs, marital breakdowns and the upbringing of children. This identity was again largely white that excluded the Arab underclass living in banlieues or run-down inner-city apartments, a theme that has only recently attracted some French film makers such as Michael Nanneke in his iconic thriller Hidden (Cache) in 2006, exploring the dark past of Francophone relations with the Arab world including the massacre of Arabs in Paris on 17 October 1961 at the hands of the police led by Maurice Papon.
Greene’s second theme is one of national grandeur that has been traditionally linked to the French right. At first sight, it might be assumed that this was closely linked to the cult of Napoleon that had flourished during the nineteenth century, though the portrayal of this on screen was by no means as simple as one might suppose. Decades before the birth of French cinema the Napoleonic legend had been dealt a serious blow with the defeat and abdication of Napoleon III after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. It was further weakened by the disasters of the First World War, though it still shaped Abel Gance’s iconic silent film Napoleon in 1927 where Napoleon is depicted as a Carlylean great man of destiny.21
This idea of French grandeur linked to the figure of Napoleon would haunt some films in the post-war years: Gance’s 1960 film Austerlitz, for instance, began with Napoleon’s crowning as emperor of France in 1804 before his famous military victory the following year. But the Napoleonic legend did not sit especially well with the De Gaulle’s own project to serve as saviour and protector of France. The very idea of French national and imperial grandeur also seemed increasingly outmoded to a younger generation of film-goers in the 1960s, though Pierre Schoendoerffer tried later to revive it in his various war films.
By the late 1960s, Greene has suggested, a third period emerged in wake of the evenements in Paris in May 1968. This led to the construction of a self-consciously gauchiste French cinema looking at issues from a Marxian and anti-war perspective. This leftist impulse would shape and influence several films in the 1970s, but begin to run out of steam by the 1980s as the Cold War between the superpowers wound down. A fourth period that began to emerge by the early 1990s centred on a return to the earlier politics of memory, leading in some instance to a new nostalgia for the French colonial past including its colonial wars after 1945.22
Of these four periods, only the third and fourth phases of gauchiste cinema of the 1970s and a renewed engagement with a politics of memory offered any real space for tackling themes relating to France’s colonial wars. The third phase led to releases such as Rene Vautier’s Avoir Vingt ans dans les aures in 1972, Yves Boisset’s R.A.S the following year and Laurent Heynemann’s La Question (1977). This era of cinema burnt out in the 1980s and the fourth phase became evident by the time of the release of Indochine in 1992 and Schoendoerffer’s Die Bien Phu. But events in Algeria in the early 1990s ended up delaying the emergence of a serious attempt by French cinema to break the amnesia over the Algerian War. In 1992, a bitter civil war broke out between the secular supporters of the Algerian state and radical Islamist insurgents organized around the Front Islamique du Salut, or FIS. The war occurred after a military coup in January 1992 pre-empted the Islamist-aligned FIS from attaining power following its victory in a relatively free election. The movement went underground and started waging an insurgency that was carried to a more murderous level by the Groupe Islamique Arme (GIA), whose terrorist activities spread to metropolitan France. This was a war about the identity of a nation involving the widespread torture and killing of civilians by both sides. It delayed any attempt to recall the history of the seven-year war in the 1950s. The conflict fizzled out by the end of the decade and the French government opened up the archives on the war in 2002, which prompted a new historical debate on the use of torture in the war in the 1950s.
It was, though, a figure from the political right, Pierre Schoendoerffer with La 317e Section, who got in first with an actual feature film. This came after several documentaries on France’s colonial wars from a school of radical film makers known as ‘parallel cinema’ who employed similar devices to the nouvelle vague, with amateur actors, impromptu scenes requiring only slender scripts. Acting in contrast to the politically silent mainstream, directors such as Pierre Clement and Rene Vautier made several documentaries in the late 1950s and early 1960s which ended up being shown in secret after they were formally banned. Vautier’s 1956 film Algerie en flames was a good example of this sort of film, being shown mainly to trade union and left cinema club audiences.23 Its grainy black and white narrative of the war being waged by ALN guerrillas included a sequence involving the sabotage of a train; it had a rather retro quality reminiscent of heroic images of the French resistance in the early 1940s. The documentary viewed the war from an external, sympathetic perspective and failed to get inside the mind-set of the FLN leadership and its supporters. This was really a film aimed at disillusioned appeles (recruits) returning from the war rather than any wider international audience.
It is thus possible to see the 1965 film La 317e Section (317 Platoon) as partly a response to the radical documentaries that had been released over the previous decade. Unlike Clement and Vautier, Schoendoerffer had a military background. Born in Alsace in 1928 he became a war cameraman in 1947 in the French Alpine 13e Bataillon de Chasseurs Alpins (the 13th Alpine Hunters Battalion) before moving as a corporal to Saigon in 1951. Here he developed his filming skills under the wing of Sergeant-Chief Jean Peraud of the Service Presse Information, producing in 1952 a 9-minute documentary, First Indochina War. Schoendoerffer scripted and directed La 317e Section based on a novel he had published with the same title in 1963. He would later go on to become a leading director of French war films, crowning his career with the 1992 film Dien Bien Phu.
By 1954 Schoendoerffer had volunteered to be parachuted into Dien Bien Phu with the 5e BPVN (Vietnamese Parachute Battalion) where he ended up a prisoner of the Viet Minh. Before his capture, he destroyed most of the film he had shot of the fifty-seven-day siege, excepting six 1-minute reels later used by the communist film maker Roman Karmen in the Soviet propaganda film Vietnam in 1955. He then went through the re-education programme that French prisoners were made to endure at the hands of the Viet Minh before being released on 1 September 1954. His experience served in good stead when he came to film the Viet Minh in later features. He continued as a war correspondent and photographer in North Africa and South Vietnam before being asked in 1958 to direct an adventure move La Passe du Diable, a film shot in Afghanistan. He directed a few more feature films such as Ramuntcho, where the hero also ends up a prisoner of war in Indochina, before finally releasing La 317e Section in 1965.
Schoendoerffer had been inspired from his early years by stories of epic adventures as well as Hollywood adventure yarns, and we can see signs of this in La 317e Section. However, what makes the movie so important is the way that Schoendoerffer also drew on his experiences as a war photographer to follow the fortunes of a small group of French officers commanding a platoon of forty-one Laotian soldiers on their way to safety from a remote outpost on the border with Laos. They are one of the Groupes Mobiles that operated in remote locations and performed similar sort of operations comparable to those of the Chindits in Burma in the Second World War. By the early 1950s, they were engaged in counter-insurgency involving small numbers of French officers commanding Thai or Lao mountain tribes, a form of war that would be continued by the Americans in the early 1960s with the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG).24
La 317e Section is set in early May 1954 when the French army is facing imminent defeat at Dien Bien Phu. This is no static narrative about a siege but one of movement as the Section makes its way through the jungle, engaging superior units of the Viet Minh and suffering casualties and loss. Schoendoerffer took his cast to Cambodia to shoot the film over a month in the rain forest, after being granted permission by the state’s ruler King Sihanouk. He used many low-level shots as he follows the soldiers around in the manner almost of a documentary. This is a Francophone neorealism, inspired by Rossellini, Visconti and Renoir but with less emphasis on cultural or class struggle, reflecting perhaps the rather more ad hoc and situational approach of la nouvelle vague. Early in the film the camera stands behind the Section as they wait to ambush some Viet Minh guerrillas in the distance crossing a river. They fire and hit several targets but it soon becomes clear that they are up against a superior enemy, who swiftly mounts a counter-attack by rushing to outflank them. The Section hastily retreats through the jungle. This is not evidently a group of soldiers with much training in jungle warfare and they appear to be driven mainly by a desire for revenge.
317 Section is led by a young officer sous lieutenant Torrens (Jacques Perrin) who has only arrived two weeks previously and is unfamiliar with either the terrain or the enemy. His face reveals doubt and lack of self-belief as he orders his men to leave the post in a column: they set off in pouring rain, leaving cooking utensils behind as well as a small squealing pig. The sounds of soldiers on the move mingle with those of the sounds of the jungle which is no dark mysterious interior like that portrayed in The Planters Wife but simply a difficult terrain needing to be navigated. Torrens listens to some of the advice from his adjutant Willsdorf (Bruno Cremer), a cynical former Wehrmacht soldier who has been in Indochina for several years. But he also discusses plans with the rest of his team and clearly cares for them. Eventually, Torrens abandons the Laotian villagers the French army has been protecting to their fate. They are not indigenous Vietnamese and we can see this as the visible collapse of a military strategy that had evolved in the years after the Second World War and would lead, after the partition of Vietnam, to many fleeing to Thailand. Away from the post, the Section comes across the bodies of some villagers who have been tied up before being murdered, apparently as a warning to others. This is a story of group survival in which there cannot be any heroes in the conventional military sense.
La 317 Section was a generic film that established many of the basic themes of the modern French war movie.25 Certainly, Schoendoerffer emerged from no identifiable school of group of French film directors in the post-war period despite the association of some of those working with him, such as his nouvelle vague cinematographer Raoul Coutard, who had shot Godard’s Breathless in 1960). La 317e Section owed little to post-war French cinema, which, as we have seen, was extremely sparse in the way it dealt with war and certainly avoided low-level neorealist depictions of soldiers in combat. There was little, in fact, for Schoendoerffer to refer to when he embarked on the movie, with the notable exception of the little-known film L’Escadron blanc (The White Squadron). Directed by Rene Chanas in 1949, this grainy black and white film was a typical colonial film of the era with predictable orientalist imagery. It was also shot on location and several scenes have the camera tracking the French camel corps crossing the desert in pursuit of some bandits. This was more of a bottom-up movie with a remarkable neorealist sense of place and atmosphere compared to David Lean’s polished and sanitized imagery of the desert in Lawrence of Arabia.26
Schoendoerffer adopted a similar approach as he tracked the 317e Section in its flight through the Vietnamese jungle. He was in effect searching for a cinematic authenticity he saw as largely lacking in French films of the era. This was also a historically driven realism since just as the events in L’Escadron blanc had been based on a real chase across the desert in 1928, so the events in 317e Section occurred at a critical historical conjuncture of peace negotiations taking place in Geneva and the conflict at Dien Bien Phu.
The film Lost Command, by contrast, was an important American version of the Algerian War, serving as a kind of Hollywood response to The Battle of Algiers. The film was directed by Mark Robson and distributed by Columbia Pictures. It was released the same year as The Battle of Algiers and ended up being banned for ten years in France, longer even than its Italian-Algerian rival. The film’s title changed more than once during production: originally it was From Indo China to the Gates of Algiers, then it became Not for Honor and Glory before finally becoming Lost Command, though in France it was called Les Centurions.
The film was influenced by a Francophone understanding of the war even if it lacked the neorealism of Pontecorvo. For some critics, the movie was little more than another routine war feature coming from a director known for successful war movies such as the Korean War movie The Bridges of Toko Ri in 1955, and Von Ryan’s Express ten years later. However, for all its melodrama and stereotyping of the Arab characters, Lost Command contains themes that might well have been developed by French film makers in a more permissive cultural climate than the one that existed in France in the post-Evian 1960s. For all its Hollywood gloss, the film is strongly Francophile. Though the script was written by the American screen writer Nelson Gidding, the narrative was based on the novels Les Centurions and The Praetorians by the former French paratrooper Jean Larteguy. Apart from Quinn and George Segal, many of the actors were also French, including Alain Delon, Michele Morgan and Maurice Ronet along with the Italian actress Claudia Cardinale implausibly playing a middle-class Muslim girl. The film goes some way to recreate the mood among the French army in a situation of defeat and humiliation.
The film starts with the paratroopers beleaguered in the final days of the siege of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The commander of the garrison, Lt Col Pierre-Noel Raspeguy (Quinn), calls for reinforcements but these turn out to be a single plane load of paratroopers under the command of Major De Clairefons. The paras land disastrously in front of Viet Minh fire and Clairefons is killed along with many of his squad. Raspeguy’s men attempt to fight on but are soon overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of advancing Viet Minh and surrender. The line of French prisoners is bullied and abused by the Viet Minh rather like Americans at the hands of the Japanese in the Second World War, though they are not beaten and randomly executed. Indeed, the Viet Minh look rather incompetent as Raspeguy steals the key from a jeep and the Viet Minh frantically try to locate it. These scenes gloss over the full scale of the French defeat: a total of 11,721 French soldiers were taken prisoner while hundreds died of disease before the arrival of the Red Cross, who took out 858 of the most incapacitated. This was not another ‘Bataan Death March’ after the Japanese conquest of the Philippines in 1942 and Raspeguy’s men are eager to return to the military and reform the regiment.
Lost Command operates on a far wider scale than The Battle of Algiers. Starting with the Vietnam sequence it moves to Paris before shifting to Algeria, where Raspeguy’s Regiment is involved in rural counter-insurgency among Algerian mountains and villages as well as in Algiers itself. The Paris scenes reveal something of the growing desperation of the senior French military command at the situation in Algeria, while in Algeria Raspeguy hardly acts under any sort of ideological influence of guerre revolutionnaire intellectuals. The nearest to a military intellectual in the movie is Alain Delon’s character of Esclavier who is described as the regiment’s ‘historian’. It is Esclavier who eventually loses faith in the war and walks out at the end in civilian dress, while Raspeguy stays on to be promoted to general for his apparent success in combatting the FLN insurgency.
The film has a largely stereotyped image of FLN insurgents. It fails to get inside the FLN insurgency like The Battle of Algiers, though the Algerian para Mahidi (Segal) changes sides following the murder of his brother by the French. At points, the film is little more than a revenge narrative and we learn nothing about the radicalization of Algerians at the popular level. The insurgents in the rural scenes mostly conform to traditional cinematic stereotypes of tribesmen firing down on the French from mountain ridges, though they do end up in later scenes with bazookas and heavy machine guns captured from the French.
Raspeguy is no simple saviour of the colons like the urbane General Matthieu in The Battle of Algiers. He has a difficult relationship with a local mayor who demands he split his force into small squads to protect individual farms. Raspeguy refuses and instead purloins the mayor’s helicopter to use in support of his men operating in the mountains. The resulting battle scenes involve the requisitioning by the paras of a Red Cross helicopter against the insurgents, reflecting by the centrality of helicopters in US ‘air power’ and counter-insurgency doctrine in the middle 1960s when the film was made. But the French lack helicopter gunships in Algeria and Raspeguy fires at the guerrillas with a hand-held machine gun, in a scene reminiscent of the First World War. The helicopters prove valuable assets though in later combat scenes when they are used to surprise the guerrillas from the rear.
Lost Command is interesting for its focus on rural counter-insurgency as opposed to the largely urban terrorism and counter-terrorism of The Battle of Algiers. The narrative centres on a small group of paras drawn from Larteguy’s novels; Esclavier gets involved with Mhidi’s sister Aicha (Cardinale) even though she is a secret supporter of the FLN. The film wanders into Algiers with the Paras and shows their efforts to crush the urban insurgency centred on the Casbah. These scenes seem a desperate Hollywood attempt to emulate The Battle of Algiers and are interesting for showing the use of hooded informers to pick out members of the underground network. Such methods conflict, apparently, with the paras’ ideas of military honour and the hood is (implausibly) removed, leading the informer to be threatened with death. The torture scenes are not as harrowing as those in Pontecorvo’s movie, though they were sufficiently controversial to ensure the film’s banning. Aside from the torture scenes, there is also a growing loss of belief by the paras themselves, a theme never confronted by Pontecorvo but one Schoendoerffer would later attempt to challenge.
It is the paras’ supposed ‘historian’ Captain Phillipe Esclavier who sees the counter-insurgency operation as ultimately futile, even as Raspeguy trains his team in unorthodox methods of warfare. Esclavier recognizes that the war that cannot be won when most Algerians seek independence; he eventually resigns from the regiment and walks out in civilian clothes as local Arab boys paint ‘Independence’ on the walls. The film challenges the image of a strongly cohesive 10e Para Regiment in The Battle of Algiers that many members of the French military found easy to embrace, despite the film’s searing attack on the way France fought the war in Algeria.
Gauchiste treatments
The student revolt in Paris in May 1968 was as an important cultural turning point in France that would have a considerable impact on cinema over the following decade. It led to a revitalization of Marxist discourse on the French intellectual left, now often called the ‘new left’, as well as providing a moral and ideological impetus behind radical film making in Europe that led to films such as Pontecorvo’s Burn in 1969 and Costa Gavras’s Z in 1969 and State of Siege in 1972.27
Not all the films from the French left followed the precepts of the new left. Low budgets and a focus on ideological conflict hampered many films, ensuring that they would be directed at small and largely student and underground audiences. This was especially true of Avoir Vingt ans dans les aures directed by Rene Vautier in 1972. This 97-minute film followed a group of Breton military recruits fighting the FLN in the Aures Mountains in 1961, one year before the final the war: at one point, we hear the sounds but never see an invisible helicopter in a generally sparse film. The film was widely attacked by conservative critics for its apparent approval of military desertion though it managed to escape being banned since it avoided dealing in any real detail with the still-sensitive theme torture, even though at one point a woman is the victim of multiple rapes. Vautier himself had served in the French resistance in the Second World War and had run into problems with his film making as early 1950 when his documentary Afrique 50 was confiscated by the police for its critical view of the way that Africans were treated in French colonial territories.
In Vingt Ans, Vautier is concerned with the way that the military can break the spirit and independence of a group of men and turn them into an effective fighting and killing. The Bretons have an image in France of rebellious independence vaguely comparable to the Irish in English culture. Their distinct culture is played up by the musical score that irritated some film critics, but certainly helped achieve a remarkable tonal quality for a film with limited funding. The film was released before serious public debate on torture took off in France, although the issue had been rumbling in anti-war circles since the late 1950s when two books were published on the issue. The first, La Question, was by a communist journalist Henri Alleg, narrating his own torture at the hands of French paras during the Battle of Algiers in 1957; the second was L’Affaire Audin (1958) by Pierre Vidal-Naquet, which formed the basis of the 2010 documentary film Maurice Audin – la disparition (dir. Francois Demerliac) recounting the arrest and disappearance of a young mathematics instructor at the University of Algiers, Maurice Audin. Despite censorship both books gained a wide readership among the French intellectual left though ‘l’affaire Audin’ failed to achieve anything like the same status as the Dreyfus scandal earlier in the century, even though Audin’s body was never recovered and it was widely suspected that he had been accidently murdered while under interrogation.
The end of the Algerian War led the French government to issue a decree giving an amnesty to all those who had been involved in ‘deeds committed within the framework of operations of the maintenance of order directed against the Algerian insurrection’. A long-running enquiry being conducted into Audin’s disappearance came to an end with the magistrate conducting dismissing all charges of homicide. No one was apparently responsible for Audin’s death, even though he was in many respects untypical of the many thousands who had similarly died during the seven-year war: he was white and well educated while his well-connected wife had been able to pursue an investigation that many others had been loath to do, either through a simple lack of resources or fear of the consequences.28
There the matter rested until something resembling a proper historical narrative of the Algerian War was brought to the screen by two documentary film makers – Yves Couriere and Philippe Monnier – in a two-and-a-half-hour film La Guerre d’Algerie in 1972. This was remarkable documentary for the way it assembled a huge range of film footage narrating the story of the Algerian War from its start in 1954 to its dramatic climax in 1961–1962 and detailing atrocities on both sides and even a scene where Algerians are gunned down by French troops in full view of the camera. For some critics, the documentary was little more than a photo album as it failed to explain the reasons for the war in any depth or why the French government decided eventually to withdraw.29 Nevertheless, La Guerre d’Algerie contributed to the gradual re-emergence of Algeria in French political memory.
Laurent Heynemann’s film La Question, released in 1977, dramatized the events surrounding the arrest and disappearance of Maurice Audin and that were recounted in Henri Alleg’s book with the same title. The film creates a very different image of the French Paras familiar to audiences from La Bataille d’Alger and Lost Command. Even Pontecorvo’s neorealist treatment of the 10e Para Regiment in the Battle of Algiers had shown torture as a harrowing, but apparently logical, strategy in the counter-insurgency war against the underground urban network of the FLN. By contrast, Heynemann’s film shows the paras to be brutal and apparently wanton killers in a film that is largely set in a series of domestic interiors, prison cells and offices. The film tracks the disappearance of Audin and films his apparent murder at the hands of the paras, who have been allowed to use torture without any form of external check or control. The narrative hardly added anything new to the narrative that was already familiar to readers of Alleg’s book but it did much to pour scorn on the idea of French military honour as the paras appear as little more than sordid gangsters desperate to cover their tracks once they realize the implications of the murder.
The film thus exposed the brutality and terror at the heart of what has sometimes been called the ‘French school’ of counter-insurgency.30 The French military underwent far more politicization compared to their British and American counterparts, and some French COIN theorists became advocates of an ideologically inspired form of warfare known as guerre revolutionnaire. Some of the exponents of this form of war had been exposed as officers to communist indoctrination as prisoners of the Viet Minh in Indochina in the late 1940s, though the concept of ‘revolutionary war’ continued to meet resistance from many senior French military commanders.31 The theory was first introduced into military debate by Colonel Charles Lacheroy, an intelligence officer with Catholic and conservative views who saw France as at the centre of a Cold War battle with international communism. Along with politically oriented officers such a Roger Trinquier, David Galula and Marcel Bigeard, Lacheroy expounded the precepts of guerre revolutionnaire at a time when a considerable section of the French officer class, along with many political decision-makers in Paris, were becoming increasingly demoralized given the failure to make progress in Algeria. There were growing fears indeed that France faced the prospect in Algeria of another humiliation on the scale of Indochina.
As a concept guerre revolutionnaire provided some sort of intellectual coherence to the counter-insurgency thinking that was going on inside the French army in the five or more years after the Suez debacle in 1956. However, it never amounted to a credible long-term strategy since it was developed far too late to have much serious impact at the local level, where the war had been largely lost among the broad bulk of the Algerian population. The disastrous ‘Phillipeville massacres’ in August 1955 were, in many ways, a turning point in the war since they led the colonial government to declare a state of emergency. In the late 1950s, the French army found itself fighting an uphill battle to win back the central body of Arab opinion from the FLN that looked increasingly victorious in both its command of majority Arab opinion in Algeria and wide international support in bodies such as the UN.
Douglas Porch has argued that the real effect of guerre revolutionnaire was an ‘over-militarisation’ of French strategy that prevented French political leaders from negotiating with the moderate nationalist movements in Algeria such as the Mouvement National Algerien of Messali Hadj, who continued to clash with the FLN not only in Algeria but among the Algerian population in metropolitan France.32 This ‘over-militarisation’ certainly brought some short-term successes in the late 1950s: The Constantine Plan, for instance, led to fences being erected along the borders with Tunisia and Libya to prevent the infiltration of guerrillas, while the Challe Plan in 1959 led to a renewed French military offensive against the ALN using mobile units called Commandos de chassee that recalled the Groupe Mobiles used in Indochina. The units infiltrated FLN ‘liberated zones’ and led to ambushes against FLN insurgents backed up by artillery, air power and the dropping of napalm in a manner that would become all too familiar in Vietnam in the next decade. This strategy certainly produced high casualties among the ALN, though it failed to prevent De Gaulle in 1961 from opening negotiations on independence with the FLN.
In the wake of the French departure from Algeria the theory of guerre revolutionnaire appeared to retreat into the shadows: in the decade of the 1960s it gained scant response from the wider intellectual community beyond the right-wing German philosopher Carl Schmitt, who defended the French theorists for the way they espoused what he termed ‘partisan warfare’, a form of war that he argued was increasingly displacing the industrial wars of the first half of the twentieth century. ‘Partisan warfare’, Schmitt wrote in an influential essay in 1975, was a form of war that displaced the ‘technical military consciousness’ of the nineteenth century. It still led, though, to modern French ‘partisans’ such as General Raoul Salan, resorting to the same sort of terrorist actions as the FLN, creating what Schmitt termed a ‘landscape of treason’ that resulted in the 1961 military putsch.33
Schmitt was a lone voice in the middle 1970s, though his writing has been seen by some as prophetic of later ideas on ‘new war’ that emerged in the years after 9/11 and debates on emerging ‘global insurgency’. The French withdrawal from Algeria confirmed for some strategists that guerre revolutionnaire was marginal to France’s political interests beyond the lone example of colonial counter-insurgency surfacing briefly in the massacre on 17 October 1961 in Paris of several hundred Algerians by the police under the former Vichyite police chief Maurice Papon, who had also been prefect of the Constanois Department in Algeria. The police remained the main instrument of the French state’s strategy of maintaining control and public order, especially via the paramilitary CRS. It would be this, rather than the military as such, which would be used in the May 1968 student riots, though it seems that De Gaulle’s disappearance to Germany was to secure the support of the French army on the Rhine should anything resembling a serious threat to state authority have occurred.
Further afield, the doctrine of guerre revolutionnaire was exported to military academies in South and Central America where they helped to shape violent counter-insurgencies against left-wing groups in states such as Brazil, Chile, Argentina and Paraguay – connections later revealed by the documentary film maker Marie Monique Robin in her documentary Les Escadrons de la Mort (The Squadrons of Death) in 2006. French theory indeed became part of a much wider military debate in parts of the developing world before the more recent emergence of US and British COIN thinking that emerged in the wake of the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
The renewal of a politics of memory
By the early 1990s there were signs of a renewed interest by French film makers in the colonial past. There was a strongly nostalgic tinge to some of the resulting films such as Indochine (1992), directed by Regis Wargnier, set around a French colonial plantation in inter-war Vietnam. The movie was likened by some critics to a French version of Gone with the Wind or at least some comparable British films such as A Passage to India and White Mischief though it largely failed to engage in any depth with the reasons for the growth of the Viet Minh. The revival of such colonial nostalgia was, at one level, a rather belated bid to reshape French popular memory at a time when more radical interpretations of the wars of liberation post 1945 were still largely unknown among French cinema audiences. Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers was released into French cinemas in only November 2004. It had never been formally banned but cinema owners had been inhibited from showing the film due to the threat of riots or sabotage of cinemas. Even when it was released, the film tended to be widely ignored by a largely indifferent public who refused to allow the film to shape their memory of the war. Right-wing directors and producers were unacknowledged victors in what Stora calls French ‘memory wars’ that had been rumbling on since the 1960s.34
Indochine acted like the sudden release of gas in an overheated pressure cooker as it encouraged a series of films over the next few years that began to confront the French colonial past. In this last section, I shall examine some of these films, starting with Pierre Schoendoerffer’s Dien Bien Phu (1992), followed by the controversial Outside the Law directed by Rachid Bouchareb in 2010 and finally a film set in Afghanistan Special Forces, directed by Stephane Rybojad that was released in 2011.
As I have already pointed out, Pierre Schoendoerffer had been making a series of films since the 1960s dealing with the French colonial past in one form or another. These films culminated in what he saw as his magnum opus of Dien Bien Phu in 1992. He had always seen his films as vehicles to reassert French pride in its former empire as well as establishing a cinematic response to the cinema of the left in movies such as La Question and Battle of Algiers. With Dien Bien Phu he was able at last to engage with one of the most sensitive moments in French post-war history with a battle that ended once and for all the French colonial presence in Indo China.35 The film appeared the same year as Regis Wargnier’s Indochine and appeared to be a somewhat belated example of imperial nostalgia. However, the fact that it appeared at all was due to a political shift by the government in Hanoi government that actively cooperated in the shooting of the film. The Vietnamese film industry had already begun to experience a considerable relaxation of government controls following the shift in Vietnam to a market economy in 1986. The collapse of the Soviet Union five years later in 1991 removed another major prop for the country’s nominally communist ruling regime, which by the early 1990s began seeking closer western economic contacts. Dien Bien Phu was made as part of a set of diplomatic feelers put out by the Vietnamese government to its former colonial ruler, probably as part of a wider game plane which would in the end secure an opening to the United States and other major western economies.36
Dien Bien Phu was thus made at a time when older mythologies about wars of national liberation were beginning to be rethought to relate to an era of globalization in which Vietnam, with a low wage but disciplined workforce, sought a secure niche in a variety of export markets such as coffee, tea and tourism. Considerable negotiations went into the making of the film, which shocked some Vietnamese film critics by the lengths to which it went towards rescuing French military honour. Eventually, a Vietnamese film was released in 2004, on the fiftieth anniversary of the battle, Ky uc Dien Bien Phu (dir. Do Minh Tuan) emphasizing the moral integrity of the Vietnamese cause and depicting the French as fighting a futile war.
The battle at Dien Bien Phu between 13 March and 7 May ended in a decisive Vietnamese victory over a demoralized French army that found itself encircled despite superior American weaponry. The battle field was on the far north-west of northern Vietnam close to the border with Laos. It occurred after the French high command under General Henri Navarre decided to construct a military base there to interdict supplies to Viet Minh guerrillas from communist China; this proved a catastrophic mistake as the French garrison ended up being surrounded by Viet Minh forces controlling the surrounding hills and able to use artillery to fire down on the beleaguered French outpost after large numbers of peasants transported heavy guns up steep slopes, in many cases with bicycles. Battle casualties were not especially huge; the French dead ranged between 1,571 and 2,293, with a further 5,000–6,000 wounded, though the Vietnamese death toll was over 4,000 with a further 9,100 wounded. But this was a decisive demonstration that the French army was no longer able to control a key part of northern Vietnam and confirmed for many that now was the time for a French exit from the colony.
The defeat came while the French government was in negotiations at Geneva over the future of its Indochinese colonies. The battle was a good example of the Clausewitzean dictum that war is an extension of politics in the sense that it helped increase the leverage of the Vietnamese negotiators, though they could still not prevent the Chinese, under Chou en Lai, insisting at Geneva on the partition of the country at a time when they feared a return of US forces to the Asian mainland and even the possible use of nuclear weapons. France finally withdrew from Vietnam, leaving a country divided between a communist north centred on the Hanoi and a pro-American south that would soon come under the tight control of the anti-communist regime of Ngo Dinh Diem.
Dien Bien Phu lacks any historical perspective and is, for the most part, a conventional military narrative told largely from French point of view and visiting American journalist, providing an opportunity to suggest some parallels with the later US war in Vietnam. It was a marked departure from La 317 Section films for this was not a film apparently about guerrilla war but a spectacular conventional battlefield defeat that hastened the end of the French empire. It is hard to find an equivalent film in British and American cinema; there has been no major feature on the fall of Singapore, the 1942 retreat in Burma or the Japanese invasion of the Philippines, though General MacArthur’s departure from the islands was depicted as a heroic flight in the 1977 biopic MacArthur (dir. Joseph Sargent) starring Gregory Peck.
Hollywood’s interest in major battles, beyond those of the Civil War, was mostly to celebrate American military victories or at least extraordinary endurance in movies such as Guadalcanal Diary (1943) and The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), or sometimes the pointlessness of war, as in Porkchop Hill (1959). The disaster at Arnhem eventually came to the screen in A Bridge Too Far (1977), but once again this was not depicted as all that major a defeat for the advancing Allies, though it was clearly a different story for the Dutch. Military disasters that have become feature films have often tended to be set conveniently well back in the past, and to be part of wars that were won by Britain anyway, such as the brutal exposure of military incompetence in The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968) and Zulu Dawn (1979).
Dien Bien Phu was thus an important war film for its acknowledgement of a major French historical defeat, though one that told a story largely divorced from the wider guerrilla war that had been escalating in Vietnam since the late 1940s. The film marked a serious, if perhaps belated, development of the French cinema of war, and has, to some degree, succeeded in generating a new French cinematic myth of war suited to a post–Cold War climate of closer understanding with a former colony. Like Rossellini’s Roma Citta Aperta and Pontecorvo’s La Bataille D’Alger, the film operates at three distinct levels: firstly, the Hanoi opera house at the start of the film where a rehearsal is in progress for a concert (eventually performed in the middle of the film) where a new musical work, specially commissioned for the film and written by Georges Delerue, is to be performed later that day; secondly, the streets of Hanoi over which moves an inquisitive French-speaking American journalist Howard Simpson (Donald Pleasance) who attends the concert in the evening; and, finally, the actual battle field of Dien Bien Phu itself, far away in the north-west of the collapsing colony, where the beleaguered garrison is being desperately replenished by air drops of arms, equipment and fresh men by America-supplied Dakotas that come under constant artillery bombardment from Giap’s forces on the surrounding hills.
The opening of the movie in the Hanoi opera house signifies Schoendoerffer’s commitment to the idea of a mission civilisatrice at the heart of the French colonizing project. The orchestra performs against a large backdrop based on Delacroix’s painting of the 1848 revolution ‘Liberty Leading the People’. But is the half-naked goddess of liberty leading a French revolution or one by the Vietnamese against French colonial rule? The orchestra is Vietnamese as is the conductor; only the solo violinist, Beatrice Vergnes, is French (played by the French actress Ludmila Mikael). Delerue’s work is a lament for the passing of French colonial rule as well as a plea for a cultural dialogue – or what the French critic and novelist Lucien Bodard has termed a ‘symphony’ – between France and Vietnam as two apparently interlocking cultural entities.37
The film frequently cuts to Howard Simpson’s travels around Hanoi where he picks up news reports of the battle from French military men as well as an Agence France Presse correspondent and a Vietnamese nationalist news editor (played by the Vietnamese actor Long Nguyen-Khac). Simpson manages to send out the news to the San Francisco Chronicle via a Hong Kong–based news agency to evade the French military censorship. The nearest Simpson ever gets to the actual war is to stand by one of the Dakotas as the paras pass by to fly off to the war zone. He is better versed in the underworld of Hanoi’s newspapers existing alongside seedy opium dens and gambling houses where he picks up all the gossip that is apparently going. It is not altogether clear whether Schoendoerffer was nostalgic for this lost world that would soon be shut down by the new Communist government or whether he simply wanted to tell the story based on his own experiences as a reporter and war cameraman.
Dien Bien Phu divided French film critics and prompted an intense debate on how to remember France’s colonial wars. Some saw the film as being really two separate films since the apparent links between the world of Hanoi and the actual battle at Dien Bien Phu appeared unconvincing. Others criticized the film’s lack of any strategic context and the lack of focus on the senior high command. The French soldiers fighting the battle seemed completely at the mercy of decisions made on high that were left unexplained. Likewise, the Vietnamese enemy remained faceless until the later stages of the battle as waves of Vietnamese troops assaulted the French redoubts. Nevertheless, the film was interesting for the ingenious way images of a collapsing colonial society in Hanoi were spliced with battle scenes where the Viet Minh guerrillas only emerge with any sort of human identity in brief final scenes when they overrun the French.
Nevertheless, Schoendoerffer went further than most Hollywood directors in showing a catastrophic French military defeat, even if it is alleviated by some sense of honour among the French soldiers. For Hollywood to have released any sort of equivalent film would have meant producing a film, for instance, that focused on the retreating South Vietnamese Army in 1975 in the face of the rapid advance of the NVA together with the mounting chaos and panic in Saigon itself as refugees desperately attempted to get on helicopters taking off from the roof of the US embassy. This remains an arena covered only by documentaries such as Rory Kennedy’s film Last Days in Vietnam in 2014 along with a few brief scenes on the Tet Offensive in the 1998 TV movie A Bright Shining Lie (dir. Terry George).
In contrast to the nostalgic but honourable tone of Dien Bien Phu came a film in 2006 Mon Colonel (dir. Laurent Herbiet). The film was based on a novel of the same title by Francois Zamponi and was scripted by Costa Gavras and Jean Claude Grumberg. The movie moved away from the by-now familiar terrain of a squadron or platoon of soldiers stranded somewhere in the Aures and confronting the almost inevitable problems of fighting an immoral war in which it is increasingly impossible to believe. Mon Colonel adopted a rather different angle which made it unique to French – or for that matter any other – cinema, namely the theme of guerre revolutionnaire and the way this intensely ideological form of warfare helped shape the mind-set of senior French officers during the Algerian War.
Mon Colonel starts with the shooting of the elderly Colonel Duplan at his home by an unknown gunman. The police investigation leads nowhere and the army are put in charge, leading to a young female officer Galois being put onto the case. She starts to receive sheets of a photocopied hand-written memoir apparently written by a young Lieutenant Guy Rossi, who served under Duplan in Algeria. As she starts to read the account we are plunged from the world of colour of the present back into the black and white world of colonial Algeria of the middle 1950s where we follow Rossi’s progressive disillusionment with Duplan.
This is a film that attempts to show a dialectic between modern France and its colonial past, though it does not entirely succeed since the world of the present lacks characters with a clear vision or ideal of where they are heading compared to their colonial forebears. This is not some Francophone version of The French Lieutenant’s Woman which poses a lively contrast between the Anglo-American world of the 1970s and Victorian England. The world of the present in Mon Colonel is static; and the audience can do little more than share the apparent shock and disgust of Galois, a dutiful young officer, as she sits reading more and more of the narrative as it unfolds from the sheets of the memoir arriving in the mail.
Despite these limitations, the black and white narrative unpacks the delusional world of Duplan. He is a figure drawn from some of the real figures in French counter-insurgency in Algeria such as Bigeard and Aussaresses. He is widely read in both the ideology and strategy of irregular warfare, though one of Rossi’s leftist friends at one point describes his ideas as a combination of ‘bad Marxism and Catholic fanaticism’. Even the walls of Duplan’s office are marked by Mao’s oft-quoted nostrum that guerrillas swim like fish in the sea of the population, though Duplan likes to see himself as a latter day colonial builder in the tradition of Bugeaud. He takes Rossi to a meeting with an Algerian caid (judge) amid the Roman ruins of Djemila (standing as the apparent embodiment of the myth of Latin Algeria), along with a group of pieds noirs out for a picnic. Here he makes a speech about the need for Algeria to have a new civilizing mission after that of the Romans and later Christians at the time of St Augustine, though the message is clearly not understood by those present.
Rossi becomes in time disillusioned with Duplan’s empty rhetoric that fails to disguise a brutal war where atrocities are committed by both sides and the moral base for French rule has collapsed. There is a sense of inevitable retribution from the angry Rossi for the failings of his former commanding officer. Mon Colonel was released in 2006 at a time of a resurgence of interest in the Algerian War. The same year, Algerian director Rachid Boucharbe’s Days of Glory (titled Indigenes in France) was released dealing with the neglected topic of Algerian soldiers who had fought in the French army in the Second World War while four years later Des Hommes et des Dieux (Of Gods and Men) (dir. Xavier Beauvois) tackled the tragic story of a group of monks in the Tibhinine monastery in the Atlas Mountains who refused to leave despite being in a GIA stronghold during the brutal Algerian civil war in the early 1990s.
All three films were directed at French-speaking audiences. By this time, French cinema was undergoing a major transformation as it became increasingly open and receptive to Hollywood-inspired action movies. Dien Bien Phu, particularly, represented a major shift in French war movies that opened this cinema up to more American-inspired narratives. Ennemi Intime (2007) (Intimate Enemies) was another example of this new type of film, displaying a strong indebtedness to Hollywood as both a war film and a western as well as Gillo Pontecorvo and neorealism. The film was directed by Florent Emilio Siri, who had begun his career in 1998 with a short film Une minute de silence before later directing Bruce Willis’s action thriller Hostage in 2005. Born in Lorraine in 1965 Siri had no direct experience of French colonial war like Schoendoerffer and preferred to focus on the psychological damage incurred by counter-insurgent warfare.
The movie starts with an aerial view of the harsh and rugged landscape of Kabylia in Algeria, a landscape that almost seems to overwhelm the combatants as well as determine the direction of a pitiless war. It is easy to make mistakes in this sort of terrain, and the first action sequence involves a French squad perched high on a cliff side firing down on what they think is the enemy below, only to discover that they have accidentally killed a popular officer, Colonel Constantin. He is replaced by the young Lieutenant Terrien (Benoit Magimel) who comes into the war with an idealism viewed as naïve by the cynical Sergeant Dougnac (Albert Dupontel).
The trope of playing off the naivety of the young recruit against the older experienced but hardened veteran has a long history in American war films and westerns; it recalls the young Lt Garnett DeBuin in Ulzana’s Raid (1972), who realizes the true horrors of Indian warfare under the guiding hand of Burt Lancaster’s gnarled Indian tracker McIntosh. Like DeBuin, Terrien had volunteered to fight in this war, seeing it as a better alternative to being confined to a desk job in Algiers. But he is soon commanded to lead a ‘search and destroy’ mission into a zone interdite where French troops have the right to shoot on sight. The team searches for an FLN or ‘Fellagha’ leader who was a former French soldier who, like Ben Mhidi in Lost Command, had fought in Indochina but now changed sides.
The patrol enters a village suspected of aiding the FLN, even though it is the home village of their own Arab tracker: when they return later they find the population has been massacred as a warning to other villages in the area not to collaborate with the French. Terrien manages to rescue a boy trapped down a well and promises to look after him rather like John Wayne’s Colonel Kirby in The Green Berets. He also tries to make a stand against the army’s use of torture to extract intelligence, arguing with an intelligence officer Barthoud (Marc Barbe) that it is pointless to descend to the same level of ‘barbarism’ as the enemy. But Barthoud is later found murdered and mutilated and the French in turn burn a village and murder many of its inhabitants.
This is a film, then, that depicts the spiralling descent of the Algerian war into massacre and counter-massacre. Even the hardened Dougnac takes to drink as the system of command appears to break down, with a drunken soldier vainly trying to blow the bugle with the tricolour. Terrien’s squad attempts to track down the ‘Fellaghas’ under Slimane, but they end up being pinned down in a firefight with ALN guerrillas and, like in an American war movie, call for air support and the dropping of napalm. Unlike Apocalypse Now, though, the film tracks the French squad wandering among the burnt-out and blackened bodies of the Fellagha guerrillas they had been fighting minutes before. The film serves as a retort to to Kilgore’s loving the smell of napalm in the morning, as it depicts the terrible effects on the human body; a French soldier, at one point, finds a wallet beside one blackened body containing a photograph of the guerrilla with his family.
Unlike many American war films, this is an enemy with a human face. Some of the ‘Fellaghas’ like Slimane have served in the French army and they are ‘intimate’ in the sense that they share many of the values of French culture. Intimate Enemies also attempts, like The Battle of Algiers, to be even-handed in its portrayal of atrocities by both sides in Algeria as well as depicting an inevitable French military defeat, though the FLN remain voiceless in the film. The French lose the war through their inability to win the trust of the population and there is a sense, by the end, that Terrien’s own death is inevitable too as he is cut down by rifle fire. The French moral defeat is symbolized by ‘Fellaghas’ appearing with the young boy Slimane had earlier found down a well. But this is a film where the FLN are never able to voice exactly what they are fighting for and the film’s efforts to appear impartial remain flawed.38
Intimate Enemies at least does not glorify the Algerian War and lacks the nostalgia of Dien Bien Phu. It is impossible to retain any sense of ‘la gloire de la guerre’ in such a psychologically brutalising conflict. The leading French characters are tragic rather than noble characters, as they become lost in a conflict they cannot control. It is often hard to know who is really friend and enemy. Rachid Bouchareb’s Hors la Loi (Outside the Law) was a rather more serious attempt at being depicting the Algerian conflict. The film was shown at Cannes Film Festival in 2010 and led to angry demonstrations by former colons and right-wing protesters claiming it was a gross distortion of the war.39 The film indicated just how difficult it still is to put onto screen a reasonably accurate portrayal of the events of the 1940s to 1960s, even after Bouchareb’s earlier film Days of Glory (2006), focusing on the plight of Algerian veterans who had fought for France in the Second World War. This movie at least led to a change in the law so that the veterans could at last receive war pensions like their French counterparts.
Hors la Loi went some way towards underplaying the scale of the conflict in Algeria and metropolitan France from the mid-1940s up to independence in 1962. The film was as much an action and gangster movie than a conventional war film, centred as it was on three brothers Said (Jamel Debbouze), Messaoud (Roschdy Zem) and Abdelkader (Sami Bouajila). As boys, the brothers witness their parents’ removal from their ancestral land in the mid-1920s in the Setif region of Algeria by a white landowner. The film fast-forwards to 1945 to depict, for the first time in a major feature film, the Setif massacre on 8 May 1945, an event often forgotten or underplayed in the narrative of the Algerian War. What started as a demonstration by local Algerians quickly descends into a blood bath as police, soldiers and white settlers blindly shoot ordinary civilians in a massacre estimated to have killed at least 15,000 Arabs, though some put this as high as 45,000. Bouchareb’s film tends to understate the event; only a few hundred bodies are lined up after the shooting in the central area of the town, while large numbers of Arabs march in a column out of the town to an unknown destination. The massacre appears to have occurred over a day, though in fact it happened over several weeks as the French army returned to the area to exact a brutal and bloody reprisal at the end of the Second World War for apparent Arab collaboration with the Germans. This prompts the film’s revenge narrative as one the younger of the three brothers, Said, uses the confusion of the massacre to kill a pro-French caid (Islamic law maker), who had legitimized the expropriation of Said’s parents’ land twenty years before.
Themes of revenge and counter-revenge continue as the film moves to the bleak urban setting of 1950s metropolitan France and the banlieues, where many Algerian immigrants come to live seeking work, in this case at a Citroen car factory. Said gets involved in a life of crime as he moves up the social scale by opening a boxing club and a night club pertinently called ‘The Casbah’. His brother Abdelkader goes to jail and gets involved in politics, rather like Ali La Pointe, after seeing another prisoner guillotined; his brother Messaoud (Roschdy Zem) disappears to join the French army fighting in Indochina only to reappear later.
The interconnected narratives of the three brothers lead to an epic recounting of the experience of Algerians in the twilight stage of French colonialism. Unlike Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers the film does not impose any obvious moralism on the script, The three go down different career paths available to young Algerian men at this time, though even living in France can mean involvement in Algerian politics and the bitter rivalry between the FLN and Massali Hadj’s Mouvement National Algerien. The rivalry seems pointless, given how Algerian communities in France are kept under constant police surveillance; and the film starkly brings to the screen for the first time the massacre of Algerians in Paris on 17 October 1961, when the Prefect of Police Maurice Papon, a Vichyite with a record of repression in Algeria, ordered a severe crackdown on an FLN demonstration, leading to the arrest of at least 11,000 people from the Maghreb and over 200 deaths, many of whom drowned after having their feet bound and being thrown into the Seine.
Hors la Loi uses tropes familiar from The Battle of Algiers but has a considerably different moral compass. Fanonist ideas of violence to cleanse a society of colonialism are depicted as ultimately counter-productive, since they breed a destructive fanaticism on both aides, evidenced by the terrorist-type warfare within the Algerian community in France as well as the terrorism exerted by the French police and military against Algerians, whether at Setif in 1945 or in Paris in 1961.40 The film has an obvious message for a newer generation of angry Muslims in France at the present time, while also feeding into wider debates about the rationality of violent responses that emerged in underground white and black radical movements in the United States in the late 1960s and 1970s.
To conclude this chapter, I will examine one film that exemplifies the tendency among some French film makers to emulate the model of the Hollywood action movie. Forces Speciales (Special Forces) in 2011, directed by Stephane Rybojad.41 Forces Speciales was a rather belated attempt to establish a Francophone myth of special operations rivalling those of US and British special forces. Shot in France, Djibouti and Tajikistan, the film had a large budget of $10 million and received support from French naval Special Forces, who also helped to supervise the action scenes.
The film wanders into the adventurous terrain of the Khyber Pass as it focuses on a small French force of naval commandos sent to rescue a female journalist, Elsa Casanova (Diane Kruger). She had written a critical article about an Afghan warlord Zaief (Raz Degan), whom she calls the ‘butcher of Kabul’; despite warnings, she returns to Zaief with a friend Salemani (Greg Fromentin), though Salemani gets murdered while Elsa is taken hostage.
The French commandos are now inserted to rescue the beleaguered journalist who has, so far, appeared to be little more than a stereotypical irrational female bringing on needless disaster. Elsa, however, displays courage and resourcefulness during the dramatic flight of the Special Forces team, who become cut off from their base after their radio is destroyed, a familiar war movie trope. The party flees across a dramatic rocky landscape pursued by Zaief’s fanatical followers. Zaief is no noble savage but a psychopathic killer who has terrorized his followers as much as his victims. He is a character familiar to cinema audiences from Hollywood terrorism films, though he lacks the evil cunning of Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber in Die Hard (1988) or David Suchet’s Nagi Hassan in Executive Decision (1996). Zaief wantonly kills both his enemies and his followers if they stand in his way and is inevitably doomed to some sort of comeuppance. His men track down the French Commandos to a village where they have been given traditional Afghan hospitality. A shoot-out ensues in which Hassan takes Elsa hostage before he is killed by one of the commandos, Kovax (Djimon Housou – familiar from the film Gladiator). Elsa and two surviving marines – Kovax and a wounded marine Tic Tac – flee over the mountains, though it is now nature rather than human enemies they confront in the form of an avalanche, which breaks Kovax’s leg. Elsa continues alone to be eventually rescued in a desert area she attempts to cross. She is able to spot the two surviving commandos on the mountain side in a dramatic helicopter rescue.
Despite its spectacular cinematography, Special Forces grossed only $1.3 million worldwide. The problems lay in the fact that cinema audiences were only too familiar by the time of the film’s release with the rocky and stark Afghan landscape from several previous Afghan movies, including Rambo III, while the thin narrative and predictable action scenes hardly sustained interest, given the movie lacked major stars. The film confirmed that entries by European film producers into the arena of action movies is a risky business; it was not helped either by the film’s limited release in the United States on its first weekend that led it to gross a mere $10,000. The film was viewed as too ‘foreign’ by many action movie-enthusiasts while it lacked an intelligent enough plot line to satisfy a more critical cinema audience, especially in the way it avoided any historical and strategic context of western involvement in Afghanistan. If it had done the latter, Zaif might have been developed into a rather more complex character than the stereotypical thuggish warlord of the movie, and it might also have led to an examination of the important role of warlords in Afghan society and politics, one that is not likely to disappear at any early date given the collapse of civil society.42
Summing up
French cinema turned to themes of insurgency, counter-insurgency and terrorism rather belatedly compared to other cinematic cultures such as the United States, Britain and Italy. This was rather paradoxical, given that France had fought such bitter colonial wars in Vietnam and Algeria. However, at a deeper level, the paradox can begin to be explained when the issue of painful public memories of war are acknowledged. The French memory of colonial wars bears some comparison to the American memory of the US defeat in Vietnam; both exemplify the point that war cinema is often a difficult public terrain in which entire careers can be put at stake if a film is released which offends certain basic moral boundaries of what the cinema-going public chooses to see as the ‘proper’ memory of war. Such memories, of course, are always contested ones, but the recollections of wars fought in the recent past usually end up as part of a public memory of war, especially when these are sustained by war veterans and their supporting organizations.
The veterans of the two countries were different in both their composition and behaviour. Like US veterans from Vietnam, French soldiers in Vietnam and Algeria were largely draftees fighting against indifference, if not active hostility, from their home society, though in the French case the veterans were supported by a large and vocal minority of ex-Algerian colons as well as politicians and intellectuals on the Right. The screen myth forged around Sylvester Stallone’s character of Rambo was a cinematic success in the 1980s and early 1990s because it played on the deep-seated resentment felt by many vets who had returned to face social ostracism, if not active hostility, by the US public who had not fought in the war. The vets did not really challenge the idea that the war was an unjust one, only that it had not been fought properly due to inept political leaders and senior commanders unfamiliar with the war being fought at the local level. The Rambo myth gained much of its impetus from the idea that, at least on screen, the United States could get to win the war that its military had in fact lost due to a stab in the back.
French veterans, by contrast, never came to be defined around a Francophone version of Rambo, though a few films briefly dealt with traumatized war vets. The French veterans were defined differently to their American counterparts because they were fighting not just to retrieve some sort of honour from one lost war but two – Vietnam and Algeria – and even three when the defeat of 1940 is included. They were fighting to retrieve some sort of honour for an army that had apparently failed for over twenty years to defend French interests as well as considerable shame by the widespread use of torture in the counter-insurgency war fought in Algeria.
The very sensitivity of the French veterans to public slights on their honour made it difficult for French cinema producers to release any major feature film dealing with the France’s conduct of its colonial wars, a genre that was never very prominent in French cinema. The threat by veteran organizations in 1966 to bomb cinema showing Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers pinpointed only too clearly the issues at stake and the high risk of any serious feature film that dealt with the issues honestly being banned by a highly sensitive French government. Even the French war in Vietnam in the years between 1945 and 1954 became off limits with Algeria, a country many French film producers preferred to bury as a subject that was not really fit to show for at least a generation. One of the few films released to show French forces fighting an insurgency was Pierre Schoendoerffer’s La 317e Section in 1965, remained a neglected and isolated minor masterpiece.
It was also not surprising that when French film producers did start to deal with its colonial wars in the 1990s they would begin with Vietnam. Pierre Schoendoerffer’s 1992 film Dien Bien Phu stands as a major French war feature that grapples with the issue of military defeat in a manner that has been largely avoided by American and British cinema. The film uneasily juxtaposed battle scenes reminiscent of an action movie with scenes of the collapsing colonial society in Hanoi and proved to be a landmark in French war cinema. Several subsequent releases such as L’Ennemi Intime and Hors la Loi suggest a growing interest in the Algerian war, while the action movie Forces Speciales hints at a possible Francophone genre of action thrillers.