France's war in Algeria: telling the story

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Strife blog has a new article 'Imagining War in Film: The Algerian War in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Winds of the Aures'.

It looks at two films, both post-independence, one French, the other Algerian and concludes - in academic words:

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

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Thanks to WoTR, once more, for a review of 'Inside the Battle of Algiers' by Zohra Drif, which was published in French in 2016 and in September 2017 in English.

Her importance to many here will be from the film 'Battle for Algiers':

Late on a September afternoon in 1956 a young woman entered the Milk Bar, an Algiers cafe popular with European youth. She looked like an average well-to-do French-Algerian, who had stopped off after a day at the beach. In reality, however, she was an Algerian Muslim, her appearance altered to blend in with café’s clientele. After eating ice cream, she departed. No one noticed that she had left behind a beach bag at the foot of the stool she had occupied. Minutes later, a bomb in the bag exploded.

Link:https://warontherocks.com/2018/03/ro...female-bomber/

From Amazon:

This gripping insider's account chronicles how and why a young woman in 1950s Algiers joined the armed wing of Algeria's national liberation movement to combat her country's French occupiers. When the movement's leaders turned to Drif and her female colleagues to conduct attacks in retaliation for French aggression against the local population, they leapt at the chance. Their actions were later portrayed in Gillo Pontecorvo's famed film The Battle of Algiers. When first published in French in 2013, this intimate memoir was met with great acclaim and no small amount of controversy. It is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand not only the anti-colonial struggles of the 20th century and their relevance today, but also the specific challenges that women often confronted (and overcame) in those movements.

Link to Amazon.com with five * reviews:https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Battle.../dp/1682570754 and Amazon UK:https://www.amazon.co.uk/Inside-Battle-Algiers-Zohra-Drif/dp/1682570754/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1520537043&sr=1-1&keywords=zohra+drif

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The actual title for this article is: France may have apologised for atrocities in Algeria, but the war still casts a long shadow.

It starts with:

Emmanuel Macron, the French president, wrestled with the demons of his country's colonial past this week by acknowledging that the country carried out systematic torture during the Algerian war of independence. After six decades of secrecy and denials, it was a historic first for a country that long refused to even admit that the brutal conflict - in which Algeria says 1.5 million died - was indeed a “war”.

Link:https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/201...r-still-casts/ and yesterday on the BBC (slightly different e.g. Harki's mentioned):https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45513842

Professor Andrew Hussey, a UK historian resident in Paris, adds his commentary:https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...onial-history?

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Hat tip to an excellent War on The Rocks article, which fits here well and has a wider application to fighting 'small wars'. Notably over working with local allies and whether a conflict can be won. I'd never heard of this soldier.

Link:https://warontherocks.com/2019/07/th...odern-warfare/

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Back to the past and distant past, an interesting commentary on the film 'the Battle of Algiers': https://newlinesmag.com/review/a-mov...oss-the-globe/

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A summary of the film by a British commentator after a group watched the film:

Pontecorvo's famous, harrowing, and still horribly relevant, "Battle of Algiers" (1966). The speaker contextualised the moral dilemmas and human damage in a major mechanism of modern history: successful and unsuccessful insurgencies , repeatedly unleashed since the mid 20th century. Protracted strategies of provocative escalation have all too clearly succeeded, in a list extending from Palestine, Indochina, Algeria… to, last year, Afghanistan. They certainly do not always win, but confronting them is invariably painful and demanding of resources, patience and organisational restraint. Long lasting ethnic traumas and religious hatreds are quite consciously detonated or exacerbated. Insurgencies learn from each other and so do counter insurgents. Conclusions are not often gentle. There is no reassuring end in sight to these often very deliberately agonising human crises. But moral as well as operational lessons can be learned about how to avoid and mitigate them. The intellectually and emotionally intense discussion, linked to some participants' personal experiences of real life choices in Northern Ireland, Iraq and Afghanistan, made the previously viewing of the film even more instructively memorable in a way that no other medium could have achieved.