The Dark Side of France on Film

For nearly five decades, when asked for a film on the Algerian War, most scholars, historians, and film buffs would immediately point to The Battle of Algiers. Indeed, there is much to admire about Gillo Pontecorvo's 1966 classic. While the film's political impact and its artistic merit are undoubted, it is not without its faults and obviously more can always be said on such a complex and critical historical event. To many present-day viewers the film's radical chic politics are a tad embarrassing and the decision to use terrorism for any end, no matter how noble and just, is difficult to swallow in the post-9/11 world. We might even argue that it romanticizes the Front de Libération Nationale while ignoring the internecine Algerian violence of the era (Rachid Bouchareb's 2010 Hors la loi covers this in brutal detail). Perhaps the strongest criticism of The Battle of Algiers is not that it offers a hagiography of the FLN but that it presents the French military as ready and willing to torture and terrorize in order to squelch the counter-insurgency campaign. In this regard, the film is short on context. Yes, there is passing reference to the NAZI occupation, the recent defeat at Dien Bien Phu, and the struggle against the Vietnamese freedom fighters, but Pontecorvo's sparse contextualization leaves us with sui generis French officers and soldiers who appear to be enthusiatic war criminals. There is little to indicate that these men had to develop into monsters. In contrast, René Vautier's 1972 Avoir vingt ans dans les Aurès and Costa-Gravas' 2006 Mon Colonel take us into the disturbing transformation of what Christopher Browning would call “ordinary men” into the criminals who committed the crimes for which the Algerian War is so famous, what Vice President Dick Cheney referred to as working “the dark side, if you will.”[1] Separated by four decades and markedly different cinematic styles, the two films explore the path that led French enlisted men and officers from their homes in the métropole to the torture chambers of the colony.