Avoir 20 ans dans les Aurès (1972)
Directed by René Vautier

Film Review

Of all of the subjects that a French filmmaker might be tempted to broach in the 1960s and '70s none was more taboo than the Algerian War.  At the time, the state censor was no more than an agent of the French government, and the government line was that this great colonial escapade was strictly off-limits as far as public criticism went, in whatever medium.  Jean-Luc Godard was one of the first filmmakers to test the mettle of the censor with Le Petit soldat (1963), but his exposé of French torture in Algeria proved to be a flaming red rag that resulted in the film's immediate ban.  Ten years on, French censorship was as unbending as ever over the Algerian question, even though the war was long over and Algeria was now an independent state.  So when René Vautier served up his own characteristically out-spoken critique of the war he was not dealt with kindly by the censor.  In fact, he was denied a visa for the film's distribution and this led him to resort to a hunger strike in January 1973 to get this decision overturned.

By this stage in his career Vautier was Enemy Number One as far as the French censorship office was concerned.  A militant polemicist of the most virulent kind, he had gained a high profile in the 1960s with a slew of films that appeared calculated to antagonise the French establishment.  (Most of these ended up being destroyed by the censor.)  Particularly forceful were his heated assaults on French colonialism, although he drew just as much critical fire with his rants against racism, pollution and female exploitation.  He was twenty when he was sent to prison for his short film Afrique 50, which dared to depict life as it really was in a West African village.

With Avoir 20 ans dans les Aurès Vautier must have known he was skating on very thin ice - particularly after he had already made a film about the history of Algeria's National Liberation Army, Peuple en marche (1963).  No one had dared to make a film like this before in France, one that not only sought to bring the truth of the Algerian War to the French public, but to do so with a biting in-your-face realism and a devastating sense of humanity.  Vautier confronts the sheer inanity of the war head-on and what he delivers is nothing less than the most savage indictment of a conflict that had no basis in morality and even less in logic.  To him, the war was a futile End of Empire gesture, one that was bound to end in Algerian independence and the complete humiliation of the French nation.  No wonder the French government sought so strenuously to lay it to rest.

Avoir vingt ans dans les Aurès does not make for comfortable viewing, and for the most part it feels more like a shoestring documentary than a filmed drama inspired by real events.  Philippe Léotard, in one of his earliest big roles, is the only recognisable face on screen, and the stark naturalism of his performance prevents him from stealing the focus as a lead actor would no doubt have done in a comparable Hollywood offering.  The rough-and-ready feel of the film is jarring but it endows it with a chilling immediacy, and brings home both the injustice and horror of its subject matter.

Although intended as an all-out attack on French militarism at the time of the Algerian conflict, the film has a much wider resonance and serves as one of French cinema's most eloquent and most effective anti-war films.  The film was widely acclaimed on its release and was honoured with the FIPRESCI Prize at the 1972 Festival de Cannes.  Despite the prominence of Vautier's film, the Algerian War remained an exceedingly touchy subject in France for at least another decade, and attempts by other filmmakers to cover the same territory were just as fiercely opposed by the censor, most notably Yves Boisset's R.A.S. (1974) and Laurent Heynemann's La Question (1977).

Film Synopsis

It is 1961 and France is locked into a seemingly interminable war with its North African colony of Algeria.  The French government of course does not recognise this as a war as such, but rather a 'campaign of pacification'.  To wage this campaign and bring the troublesome rebels to heel, young French conscripts are sent to Algeria by their thousands, to serve and die for the honour of France.  Of course there are some who refuse to participate in this noble escapade, young men who had other career plans in mind.  A group of such misguided souls find themselves interned in a military camp where they are subjected to a brutal training regime to transform them into mean fighting machines.  They have the resourceful and charismatic Lieutenant Perrin to thank for this remarkable metamorphosis.  The same party, now hardened warriors, arrive in Algeria and find themselves stationed in the Aurès mountains where fighters in the National Liberation Army are putting up a fierce resistance against what it sees as an illegal occupying power.  In the ensuing frenzied battle an Algerian is taken prisoner, his fate: to be executed the next day.  For one member of the French rookie battalion this is one injustice he cannot stomach...