EUROPE IMAGES INTERNATIONAL - M5

Synopsis

There are some images that just don't come across, like people say of a past that doesn't come across. This is said about Vichy, and it seems to me it can be said of Algeria, too, i.e. the Algerian War. It just won't go away, even forty years on. It's as if we have only just discovered torture and summary executions. So what? Why didn't we know before, or did we just not want to know?


With these questions in mind, young director Emmanuel Plasseraud went to meet Gilles Perrault. Emmanuel is thirty and was born ten years after the end of the Algerian War. Gilles Perrault volunteered to fight in it as a commando and lived what the younger man considers a disgusting, even monstrous, story. In any case a largely incomprehensible one.


Why did France insist in making war in Algeria for seven long years while the decolonisation process was going on all around them? How could the officers, who were often heroes in the former French Resistance, degrade themselves by using torture in a routine way? Who was responsible for this "nasty business"? The soldiers who did the "dirty work" or the politicians who gave the orders?


In 1956 after war had been going for a year, the French voted the Front Républicain, led by Guy Mollet and the socialists of the time, into power because they promised to restore peace in Algeria. So why couldn't they have chosen another way than war?