Short Film Program
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Tuesday, 18 November at 7 pm at the
Festival de Cinema independiente de L'Alternativa
CCCB Auditorium
Moira Vautier, the filmmaker’s daughter, will introduce the program.L’Alternativa Parallel Sections presents tributes, premieres and works from lesser-known film traditions.
This programme brings together four short films by René Vautier:
Les Trois Cousins (1970), a heartbreaking account of the living and dying conditions of Algerian immigrants in France;
Techniquement si simple (1971), a fiction that exposes the banality of evil and the responsibility of French soldiers in the Algerian War;
Les Ajoncs (1970), a poetic and empathetic fable about an Algerian worker in Brittany;
Le Remords (1973), an intimate and confessional portrait of silence and cowardice in the face of racist violence.
Technically Very Simple
The medium shot cuts to the table where a mercenary, specialized in laying mines during the Algerian War, eats while recounting his exploits. Not a single gesture of exasperation. He eats and talks about the effectiveness of his assignments: destroyed civilians, children maimed by explosions. René Vautier, who followed the Algerian maquis with his camera in the mountains, filming military trains blowing up as well as civilians massacred by the French air force, does not give free rein to the disgust evident in the former colonial soldier’s gluttony. No emphasis is needed. The sequence speaks for itself.
At the time, the French army was the fourth most powerful in the world. It fought against barely literate peasants and villagers. It killed between 1,000,000 and 1,500,000 civilians, approximately 10% of the population. More than two million Algerians, including the elderly, women, and children, passed through concentration camps. French torturers and death squads even created a kind of school, later useful in 1970s Latin American dictatorships. Before retreating, they destroyed dams, critical electrical and sanitary infrastructure, and the dean and chief librarian of the University of Algiers set fire to 500,000 books “so they wouldn’t fall into the FLN’s hands.” At independence, 2.5 million children suffered from tuberculosis or rickets, and half the population lived in extreme poverty.
For the former assassin, these figures meant nothing. The Algerian adventure ended satisfactorily for him, like the small banquet Vautier likely paid for his cooperation. Eichmann was executed in Jerusalem. No one would judge him as a war criminal. He finishes by smoking a cigarette.
Regrets
Cinema has an off-screen that is rarely shown. An ideological off-screen. Elements of censorship, correction, twisting, and rewriting of scenes are invisible. Thirty or forty years later, some persistent scholar discovers that a certain scene was deleted for being uncomfortable, that a powerful hand altered the script to remove lines that clashed. By the time these discoveries come to light, the battle has long passed. They belong to archaeology. Museums and film libraries welcome them as a curiosity.
René Vautier and Nicole Le Garrec dedicated a piece to this impotence always left off-screen. The story is simple: a filmmaker, played by Vautier himself, recounts witnessing police beat an immigrant, perhaps to death, on the street before his eyes. He did not react at the time, but now he will. He will make a film of denunciation. Nicole does not allow herself to be swept away by hysteria. She questions him incisively. Gradually, fear and petty-bourgeois narcissism reveal their true faces. Perhaps he cannot make the film now. Funding is impossible, and this will mark him. He will do it later, within a few years, and, with genius, will call it Remorse.
This small, almost metalinguistic work, built hand in hand with the filmmaker who in 1980 would direct Plogoff, des pierres contre des fusils about a small Breton village resisting a nuclear plant, connects with Fassbinder’s intervention in Germany in Autumn. The impotence and remorse Fassbinder experiences, playing himself, for not daring to shelter two colleagues pursued by the police, confronts the viewer with their own misery.
Capitulation stinks; it is a physically verifiable fact. Bringing that stench from off-screen to the foreground constitutes an intellectual act of rebellion.
Les Ajoncs / Gorse
A newly arrived young man tries to make a living in the Promised Land. The Promised Land is a working-class neighborhood on the Normandy coast. The streets are empty, and the only neighbors he encounters are old fishermen smoking on the pier, staring out at the gray ocean. Many factories have closed, they tell him. There is no work here.
The young man does not give up. If there is no work, he will invent one: selling flowers collected from the fields, using a cart he finds partially sunk in the mud at low tide.
Then a police officer appears. A French police officer who does not at all resemble the one played by Jack Lemmon in Irma la Douce. This one recalls the excessive, brutal, and somewhat foolish characters who chased Laurel and Hardy. The officer scatters the wildflowers the young man collected with care and destroys the cart. Some factory workers who see the scene approach the young man and, defying the policeman, buy the flowers from him. They are communists, he is Maghrebi. 1970.
Today, on these same northern coasts, many other young people from distant lands gather seeking their future. But the landscape has changed, and so have the faces. News reports no longer show dunes covered in flowers, but plastic shacks, and the police are no longer merely stupid—they are riot police armored behind balaclavas.
Only the ocean remains. Gray, immense.
Daydreaming is the root of both love and revolution. Against the ideological functionaries of capitalist realism, those who repeatedly remind us to be pessimistic, egotistical, and pragmatic to face the diffuse dangers around us, Vautier offers a hymn to fraternity. Beauty is always light.