Avoir vingt ans dans les Aurès
Monday, November 17, at 7 p.m.,
at the French Institute of Barcelona.
Moira Vautier, daughter of René Vautier, will present her father’s work:
“Avoir vingt ans dans les Aurès”
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Foto: Félix Le Garrec
“Avoir vingt ans dans les Aurès” René Vautier
1972. Algeria, France. Original French version. 90’
In April 1961, in the Aurès Mountains of Algeria, a hunting unit made up of Breton soldiers faces a group from the National Liberation Army: they capture an Algerian prisoner. A French soldier, wounded during the clash and a schoolteacher in civilian life, recalls the events he experienced with his comrades over the previous months: their opposition to the Algerian War had led them to a camp reserved for the insubordinate. He remembers how their commander managed to transform them—from young Breton anti-militarists into fearsome hunters of fellaghas, ready to kill… and to enjoy it. All, except him, gradually succumb to the spiral of violence.
Avoir vingt ans dans les Aurès is a fiction film based on eight hundred hours of recordings of French conscripts during the Algerian War.
Free entry
Foto: Félix Le Garrec
From his earliest works, Vautier understood cinema as an instrument of political expression and a form of social intervention committed to the struggles of colonized peoples. Nicole Brenez, in her essay "René Vautier: Duties, Rights and Passion of Images"*, describes this as a conception of the autonomy of images: "This autonomy (in the literal sense of a singular law) belongs to no one, not to filmmakers, nor to cinema, nor even to the peoples whose oppression and struggles the images document". The autonomy of images derives from their responsibility toward history, whose fundamental meaning is that of a realist claim.
The writing of history in images, as defended by Vautier, does not oppose fiction, contrary to what a hasty reading of his first principle might suggest. Vautier’s cinema is perhaps predominantly documentary, but he also wrote and/or directed significant and award-winning works of fiction, such as Avoir 20 ans dans les Aurès (1972). It was not his first fiction film, but certainly one of the most celebrated. The film received an award at Cannes’ Semaine de la Critique, although no member of the crew remained until the end of the festival to receive it, and the prize was later given to Vautier.
Avoir 20 ans dans les Aurès was born from Vautier’s desire to understand how it was possible that many Frenchmen like himself were sent to fight in defense of French domination in Algeria, continuing the colonial practices of violence and pushing them even further in scope and arbitrariness. Among his motivations was the comparison between the French army in Algeria and the German army in occupied France, both brutally and criminally suppressing any form of resistance.
The question that motivates Avoir 20 ans dans les Aurès is, in fact, a crucial one for the history of the twentieth century. It acknowledges that "the barbaric acts" that "outraged the conscience of humanity" are not confined to the traumatic past, since barbarism continues to repeat and reproduce itself. Algeria is one of the places where that experience reappears, and Vautier addresses one of the central problems of modern ethics: the emergence of radical evil. This resonates with what Hannah Arendt described as "the banality of evil", the idea that ordinary people, placed in subordinate or collective situations, are capable of committing the greatest atrocities and then carrying on with their lives. They merely obey orders. Or, as it was said, everyone else did it.
"How was it possible to put young men in a situation where they behaved like war criminals?" asks Vautier. To find answers, he spent years talking with those conscripted by the French army and sent to Algeria between 1954 and 1962. He interviewed between 500 and 600 recruits, recording their conversations on magnetic tape, amounting, according to him, to some 800 hours of unedited sound material. From that material he created the script for Avoir 20 ans dans les Aurès.
"Why a script?" he asked. "I no longer remember the most decisive reasons at that moment: perhaps because the young men who had agreed to speak with me, with considerable hesitation, would have been even more reserved before a camera. Perhaps also because it seemed necessary to reach a broad audience that only a fiction film could attract." Fiction thus emerges as a means to address trauma and the missing images of history, whether repressed in individual experience or denied in collective memory, while also serving as a strategy for the film’s dissemination.
Within the film’s narrative, the work of fiction operates in various ways, always grounded in a conception of the authenticity of the staged images. Avoir 20 ans dans les Aurès had very limited funding and failed to obtain support from producers, leading Vautier to seek the help of friends and colleagues so that the Unité de Production Cinéma Bretagne (UPCB) could produce the film independently.
He wrote:
Given that we could not afford the money needed to shoot, what kind of film could we make with the money we had? The answer came naturally through action, step by step: we had no producer or co-producer? Then the Unité de Production Cinéma Bretagne would produce it itself. No possibility of shooting in a studio? Perfect, we would make a reconstructed documentary. No means to pay actors or most technicians for more than two weeks? Then we would invent a happening-like shoot, during which each actor would live his own character, immersed in the context of the Algerian War reconstructed from the testimonies of those who had lived it.
What does it mean "to be twenty years old", then and now, in a context of war and oppression? How does cinema act when it denounces the system’s complicity and brings silenced narratives to light? May this screening be the beginning of new conversations, crossings between past and present, and an active memory that refuses to be subdued.