Algerian War (1954-62)

Subterms

    Latest story

    88 Shares129 Views

    France’s Colonial Conflict, Filmed From Both Sides

    by

    “The Olive Trees of Justice,” a neorealist take on the Algerian War made with nonprofessional actors, is newly restored and still resonates today.Shot in Algeria on the eve of independence, “The Olive Trees of Justice” is the only fiction film by the American documentarian James Blue and, based on a novel by the French Algerian writer Jean Pélégri, one that acknowledges colonial oppression as well as post-colonial displacement.Blue’s movie, which had its United States premiere in 1963 as part of the first New York Film Festival, has been revived at Metrograph, newly restored and still resonant.Unsurprisingly, “Olive Trees” has a strong neorealist component. A pre-credit statement announces it as a movie without professional actors. The protagonist Jean (Pierre Prothon) is a young pied-noir — a settler of European descent — who has returned to Algiers from France to be with his dying father (played by Pélégri, who also wrote the screenplay). Some of the strongest scenes follow him through the city’s barricaded streets, hillside slums and bustling markets. In a moment that feels more stolen than staged, French soldiers shut down traffic to check an abandoned shopping bag for explosives. Evidently, the production was itself targeted by right-wing settlers.The movie also has an existentialist aspect. Like the antihero of Camus’s “The Stranger,” also set in Algiers, Jean experiences the death of a parent and views himself as a foreigner in his native land. Prothon has the anguished blankness of a Robert Bresson principal. (Not coincidentally Pélégri had just played the police detective in Bresson’s “Pickpocket.”) Maurice Jarre’s solemn, modernist score adds the underlying angst, as do the helicopters hovering over the city, which, midway through the film, shuts down for Ashura, an Islamic day of mourning.Jean’s return is a trip into his past, shown in extended flashbacks. His dying father, a self-made man, is not so much nostalgic for his lost vineyard (taken by creditors) as for a world “where everyone knew their place.” Jean’s memories are now tainted by a relative’s desire to hold on to her farm by any means necessary and the news that his childhood best friend has joined the National Liberation Army in the mountains.The pervasive sense of impending conflict evoked an unusually personal response from the New York Times reviewer Howard Thompson. Self-identified as a “moviegoer from Dixie who has never set foot in North Africa,” Thompson wrote that the portrait of French settlers forced to enclose their vineyards with barbed wire “suggests trouble clouds scudding over a placid but firmly run plantation of yore.” This nostalgic characterization of slavery notwithstanding, Thompson praised the film’s balance. And indeed Blue is a sympathetic witness to a zero-sum conflict.Having won an award at Cannes in May 1962, “Olive Trees” opened in Paris that June, eight months after hundreds of Algerians were massacred in the city, with French revanchists still planting bombs. The war had come home. Some found the film’s measured gravity a palliative. The Times correspondent Cynthia Grenier reported its praise by critics across the political spectrum who “seemed to have but one regret: that no Frenchman had the courage to make such a film” — perhaps with good reason. The movie utterly failed to attract a French audience.“Olive Trees” is steeped in ambivalence — a dilemma manifest in the abrupt, impulsive decision Jean makes in the movie’s final moments.The Olive Trees of JusticeFriday-Sunday, in person and streaming at Metrograph, Manhattan; metrograph.com. More

    More stories

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      Saadi Yacef, ‘Battle of Algiers’ Catalyst and Actor, Dies at 93

      by

      At the center of the Algerian effort to throw off French rule, he re-created that role in Gillo Pontecorvo’s searing 1966 movie, based on a book by Mr. Yacef.Saadi Yacef, a revolutionary leader who fought French rule in Algeria in the 1950s and then set in motion — and acted in — “The Battle of Algiers,” Gillo Pontecorvo’s acclaimed 1966 film about the long anti-colonialism struggle, died on Sept. 10 in Algiers, the capital. He was 93.His daughter Zaphira Yacef, who confirmed the death, said he had had heart problems.Mr. Yacef became involved in opposition movements while still a teenager and in 1954 joined the Front de Libération Nationale, the F.L.N., the leading nationalist organization during the war for independence. The war lasted from 1954 to 1962, ending with the country’s liberation from France.He became the organization’s military chief in Algiers in 1956, ordering bombings and other guerrilla attacks until his arrest by French paratroopers the next year in the part of the city known as the casbah. He was sentenced to death.“While I was in prison the executions were always done at dawn,” he told The Sunday Herald of Glasgow, Scotland, in 2007, “so when I saw the sun coming through the prison bars I knew I was going to live through another day. But I was very certain that I would be executed.”Charles de Gaulle, who was elected president of France in 1958, eventually set Mr. Yacef free. That began an entirely different chapter in Mr. Yacef’s life. While in prison he had written “Souvenirs de la Bataille d’Alger” (“Memories of the Battle of Algiers”), his account of a particularly violent three-year portion of the war.Once Algeria became independent, the F.L.N., ruling the country, sought to commission a film about the freedom fight, with Mr. Yacef leading the effort.“At that time,” he told Le Monde in 2004, “everyone swore by Italian neorealism. That’s why I went to Italy to look for a screenwriter and a director for ‘The Battle of Algiers.’”With a script based on his book, he met with Mr. Pontecorvo, who was said to have been considering his own movie about the Algerian War, one that he hoped would star Paul Newman as a French paratrooper turned journalist. Mr. Yacef and his backers nixed that idea, and Mr. Pontecorvo found Mr. Yacef’s script propagandistic, but they continued to talk. Mr. Yacef arranged to bring Mr. Pontecorvo and his screenwriter, Franco Solinas, to Algiers for an extended stay so they could study up on the revolution, see locations where the fighting had occurred and meet people who had fought.The resulting movie, filmed in Algeria with Mr. Yacef as a producer, had its premiere at the Venice Film Festival in 1966 and caused a sensation for its startling realism. Some scenes, especially of bombings, looked so authentic that the film in its initial showings was preceded by a disclaimer saying that no newsreel footage had been used.“There are a couple of sequences which look very dangerous,” the director Steven Soderbergh said in a video for the Criterion Collection when it released a fresh version of the film in 2004. “I don’t know if you could do them now.”Mr. Pontecorvo, who died in 2006, used nonactors almost exclusively, including Mr. Yacef, who played a character largely based on himself.“Pontecorvo insisted that I appear in the film,” he told Le Monde. “I had to play in the movies moments that I had lived seven years before. The war, the prison, the torture — all of this was still fresh in my memory.”Mr. Yacef in 2012. “While I was in prison the executions were always done at dawn,” he said of his incarceration by the French, “so when I saw the sun coming through the prison bars I knew I was going to live through another day. But I was very certain that I would be executed.”Ryad Kramdi/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSaadi Yacef was born on Jan. 20, 1928, in Algiers to Mohamed and Keltoum Yacef, who were bakers. His schooling was interrupted by World War II when the Allies commandeered his school for use as a barracks.After the war Saadi was apprenticed to become a baker as well. He also played soccer for one of Algeria’s top teams, the Union Sportive de la Médina d’Alger, from 1952 to 1954. By then he had also been pulled into the growing anticolonial movement.In addition to his daughter Zaphira, Mr. Yacef, who lived in Algiers, is survived by his wife, Baya Boudjema Yacef, whom he married in 1965; four other children, Salima, Saida, Omar and Amin; and nine grandchildren.The revolution that Mr. Yacef helped further was known for atrocities on both sides, and Mr. Pontecorvo’s film, which focused on the fighting in Algiers from 1954 to 1957, did not pull punches.“Apart from Orson Welles, no one before had so imaginatively imitated the look of a newsreel,” the film critic Stuart Klawans wrote in The New York Times in 2004, “although Welles had pulled the trick only for the ‘March of Time’ segment of ‘Citizen Kane,’ whereas Mr. Pontecorvo kept up his illusion for 123 minutes.”The movie won the Golden Lion in Venice, that festival’s top award, and in 1967 it was chosen to kick off the New York Film Festival. It was nominated for Oscars for best foreign language film, screenplay and director.The movie has been studied over the years both by militant groups like the Black Panthers and by the Pentagon. Mr. Yacef, who later in life served as a senator in Algeria’s national assembly, readily acknowledged that orders he had issued resulted in many deaths, but he drew a distinction between actions committed in the cause of liberation and the actions of more recent groups in exporting terrorism. He had particular disdain for suicide bombings, a tactic his resistance fighters did not employ.“The fight gave meaning to our lives,” he said in 2007. “We weren’t in it to die.” More