 is a recent graduate from the, with us. The, normally, I do announce the next one, but the next one will only be in September, so while I don't like to say it, if you ever have any suggestions, we're still putting the list together until about, if you haven't just seen anything African is welcome and we're setting it up for eight more presentations. Also, if some of you are not on the list serve of the Institute of African Studies and you would like to be on it, please, I will circulate my pad here. Please write your name and your email address and we can include you on our list serve, which is published every week and says everything that's happening in the Ottawa region about Africa in the cultural, political academy events. So, Matt, as I said, I just finished this PhD last year on the modern French cinema and the Algerian war and what we're hearing today are the conclusions of his thesis. Before he did that, he did an amazing year as well where he was working about Hollywood and reading recent questions of disappearing reality with the help of the theory of the loads. And he is just coming here for a few days from Toronto where he's currently teaching at U of T, film and memory and film theory. And we're also happy to have with us Chris Faulkner, who was the supervisor of his doctoral thesis. So it's always nice to have cinema people come up here and read and I think it's very well and I understand that some of you also come from that school. So, thank you very much for coming. Okay. Could you switch up? Would that help you to switch up the mouth? That's, either way, it's fine. I don't know if everyone can see this. Okay. I don't know. You may as well switch it up one by one. Thank you. Okay. Well, thank you so much Dominique and to the African Studies Department for having me here. I'm really excited to be introducing this work really for the first time. I'm also happy to see some old school film studies and cultural mediation faces in the crowd. I'd just like to preface my discussion today with a few remarks. The subject I'll be addressing, which is René Voce's anti-colonial cinema represents a sort of crossroads in my own research. It was really the site where my dissertation on French film and the Franco-Algerian War came to an end. And now that the period of teaching and applications are over, it's the site where I'm hoping my future research will begin. So the title's talk, which is about questions of militant cinema is really an authentic one. I see my objective here today as about formulating questions as opposed to posing solutions as I did in my dissertation about the cinema of the left-bank group and the Algerian War. This is a new project and I'm really here to think about what are the most crucial questions when we're thinking about militant cinema and Voce's work. So in the first 10 or 15 minutes of my talk, I'm gonna give you some very broad strokes about the cinematic representation of Algerian decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s French film. And this framing context will illuminate why Voce's cinema is so radically unique among his contemporaries and why it demands study at this particular point in the historiography of European cinema. Then I'd like to move into a slightly more scripted discussion of Voce, introducing his filmography, the various forms of discipline to which this filmography has been subjected, as well as some key points of intersection between the reception of his cinema and the right-wing response in contemporary France to the cinematic memory work surrounding the war. So those are sort of the broad objectives of the talk. So some broad strokes, framing perspectives. My discussion today returns to what is one of, if not arguably the most influential and canonized period in the history of global cinema, the French film culture of the 1950s and 1960s. It was a period which, following the occupation and the censorship of American cinema that took place during the Second World War, gave rise to an aggressive culture of cinephilia. In Paris especially, a series of film clubs and journals emerged in the 1950s that as Dudley Andrew has recently argued, constituted the noisiest forum for debate around the competing ideas of what cinema is. Some of the concepts and methodologies developed during this time, such as auteur and mise en scene analysis in the 1950s and semiotic film analysis in the 1960s, largely set the agenda for film studies as a discipline when it crystallized into the 1970s and well beyond that. Moreover, French film culture in France in the 1960s is widely associated with a certain romantic narrative of the French new wave, who were, I'm sure many of you know, a group of spirited young film critics turned directors who rejected the stodgy costume dramas associated with the tradition of quality. According to orthodox wisdom, filmmakers like Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabral took to the streets amalgamating techniques from documentary in the Hollywood B film in order to take on the accelerated rhythms and shifting sexual mores of post-war European culture. This cinema in turn would go on to influence the formation of new wave cinemas around the world, as well as the emergence of what you might today call new Hollywood cinema or post-classical Hollywood cinema. All of this is to say that the French cinema of the 1950s and 1960s represents a period that film studies thinks it knows extremely well. And yet, at the very same time that France was re-establishing its international cultural capital, it was also engaged in one of the most bloody and prolonged colonial wars of the past century. Like you to consider that over the course of its eight year duration from 1954 to 1962, the war precipitated the collapse of the Fourth Republic, produced ruptures within the French intellectual left and right, eroded France's international reputation as a leader of human rights legislation and forcefully intervened into the lives of a young generation of over two million conscript soldiers. In the final stages of Algerian independence, especially topical issues such as the war's impact on the nation's youth, the rise of the radical right and the state's use of torture made headlines of centrist and left-wing newspapers including Le Monde, Le Express, and texts like Henri Alleg's La question. So the question remains, how did this torrent of events inform the period's cinematic representation? According to Orthodox film history writing, Algeria was totally absent from French screens both during and long after the war. And there are two common reasons suggested for this absence. The first points to what we might call a repressive hypothesis. That is, the French state stringently censored any kind of public dissent against the war, suppressing manifestations, confiscating papers that took even a moderate stance against state policy. The situation was particularly grave in the case of cinema because mechanisms that had been put in place by the film industry since 1916 allowed the granting of commercial distribution visas for films to be determined on a case-by-case basis. Consequently, filmmakers couldn't adjust their work to any kind of normative censorship legislation. Films like Chris Marker and Alan Rene's Le Statue's Mero Si, for example, was banned for reasons that were never even specified to the directors for a period of over two decades. These conditions have led a number of film historians to conclude that film was completely silenced on the situation. Second, we can suggest a set of softer ideological conditions that eclipse the representation of colonialism, which concern the onset of postwar capitalist modernization. The 1950s marked the flourishing of the trans-glorieuse in France, a period of economic growth and acceleration paralleled in its early years only by similar developments in Germany. It was a period marked by intense urban development, population shifts from the provinces to the metropole by a nationalist embrace of American-style corporate capitalism and by the emergence of a new youthful technocratic class of intermediaries. Finally, it was marked by a proliferation of consumer products, gadgets and durables that were propped up by a hyper-mediatized audio-visual culture of print advertising, radio and cinema. The latter often cast modern France in the ambience of science fiction as a sanitized, functional and futuristic world in which humans occupied an increasingly administrative rather than productive relationship to the things around them. Given that French society emerged from the Second World War, eager to forget the legacy of the occupation in Vichy, many historians argue that most French people chose to ignore the reality in the colonies and focus on the American dream of setting up a house. Benjamin Stora notes the common place historical assertion that, quote, within the euphoria of progress everyone gave into the pressure of the immediate, caught up in the avalanche of novelties and consumption, the nascent modernity concealed the issues born of the Algerian years. I'd also like to suggest a third reason why most historians and film historians particularly have failed to see colonialism as figuring into the period's film aesthetics and this failure concerns the schemas of classification that film studies has inherited as a discipline. I'd say right up until the present moment, film historiography continues to devote fastidious attention to the formal innovations of the young Turks of the new wave and to Kaede Sinema's theories of film realism and authorship while leaving the period's countervailing perspectives almost completely unexplored. So whether we reject the new wave as tended to be the case in 1970s and the 1970s or uncritically celebrate it as tends to be the case today, I would argue its legacy stands for the period's film culture as a whole. However, when one explores some of the competing critical discourses, a radically alternative picture of the period's cinema begins to emerge. For example, according to Kaede Sinema's chief theoretical interlocutor, Positif, French cinema of the 1950s and 1960s constituted a radically heterogeneous field. Positif drew clear distinctions between the cinema of the new wave, the cinema of the left bank group, which was the subject of my dissertation and the militant cinema of figures like Rene Voce, we'll be talking about today, and it drew these distinctions on the basis of the problem of decolonization. A little show and tell here. I have this particular issue of Positif, which contains what are the two most devastating and notorious critiques of the new wave written at the time, and perhaps until the day, the new wave's complicity with Gaul's capitalism. You'll note that the issue is actually devoted to the subject of the Algerian War. My point here is that once we expand the disciplinary purview beyond this new wave narrative of French cinema, two myths begin to reveal themselves, as such, as myths. The first is that Algeria was certainly not repressed from media representation. In fact, status discourses often mobilize the image of the dirty conflict against Algeria and the so-called bandits and backward religious zealots who were conducting the war to promote the ideals of modernization, its promise of a sanitized and technocratic future. The second point is that this attempt to define the war as a police action against a few radicals ultimately failed. As early as 1955, left-wing progressive weeklies like France Observateur and Express published reports and photographs of police barbarities in Algeria, conscript soldiers returned to spread news of torture by word of mouth. Demonstrations began to spread across the metropolis. As Jean-Paul Sartre would put things in his writings for the top modern, we are not naive, we are dirty. Everybody has heard about the torture in spite of everything something has filtered through, but we do not seek this evidence because in spite of ourselves, we know. In my dissertation, I demonstrated how French militancy against the war was directed not only against the state's crimes in Algeria, but against precisely this policing of discourse within France against an entire machinery of deception that acted in the French public's name while masking its operations from their view. In the cinema of the left-bank group, and here I'm referring to directors like Chris Marker, Alan Rene and Agnes Varda, the left-bank mobilized discourses and images specific to the war in order to critique the increasingly disciplinary nature of their own modern society. By placing the mise-en-scenes of the modern world, its museums, its department stores, its cultures of objects in a dialectical tension with images of policing, torture, and concentration camps, the left-bank group demonstrate how the horrors of the counter-insurgency in Algeria permeated everyday life in the metropole. So you consider this example here from Chris Marker's rather canonical film, La Jetée, which graph scenes of torture that strongly resemble Henry Oleg's testimony in La Custion over scenes of everyday consumer society. Here are stills from Alan Rene's film, Tut Le Memoir Demand, which satirizes the very notion of a complete and total account of French national history with not-so-subtle images of the internment of books and newspapers, which was of course taking place at the time of the war. Now you'll note the profound ambivalence of this approach to politics, which in some ways resembles what the theorist Nicholas Mirzov has called the Eurocentric critique of Eurocentrism. On the one hand, this break with French identity as defined by the state set the stage for the later rejections of social identity that characterized the May 68 movement. During the events of May 68, students, workers, and anti-colonialists broke with their fixed role in the social structure in order to form a collective front against global capitalism. On the other hand, when the left bank took up Vietnam at the end of the decade, they strove to confer visibility on the Vietnamese's struggle, rendering it directly intelligible within the currents of industrial and intellectual contestation taking place across France. In the case of Algeria, however, the Algerians don't really figure as more than a structuring absence. Their agency in historicity often reduced to idealist meditations on the politics of visibility. So it is against this backdrop that I'd like to consider the work of Rene Voce whose work crossed over to the other side to use Etienne Balabar's phrase daring to interrogate the relation of Algeria to its own interior alterity and its necessary disidentification as opposed to French's disidentification with the state and with themselves. His work illustrates a process of French cinema transforming into a legitimately Algerian cinema concerned with the revolutionary and post-revolutionary aftermath of Algerian society. This transformation began in the late 1940s when, as a student at the Institute for the Invents Study of Cinema, he was commissioned to make a pedagogical film about what was then called French West Africa for secondary school students. Outraged by what he saw as the parallels between the situation in Niger and Nazi violence, he witnessed as a fighter for the resistance. Voce made what some historians call the first ever anti-colonial combat documentary called Afrique Saint-Gon, or anti-colonial documentary, leading to his one year imprisonment for violating a 1934 decree by Vichy collaborator Pierre Laval. In contrast to what he identifies in his memoirs, Caméra Citoyenne, as Jean-Rouche's capitulation to the state's policed and complicit representation of the colonies, Voce developed an undercover identity in the ensuing period and traveled to Algeria to become a filmmaker and educator. There he helped the FLN establish its official film unit in 1957 and trained a number of influential Algerian filmmakers. In the same year, he made one of the first ever combat anti-colonial combat documentaries called Algerie en Flamme, during which his camera was gunned down by the counter-insurgency, leaving a small fragment of the camera embedded in his skull to this day. And you can see, here's the X-ray of Voce actually pointing with his finger to where a little piece of the camera is still lodged in his head. Over the remaining course of the War of Independence, he collaborated with a reluctant Frans Fanon on a short documentary, J'Huitan, which combines ethnography with radical psychiatry to represent the drawings of Algerian children who fled to Tunisia, to a Tunisian refugee camp after their parents were both tortured and killed by French troops. The conclusion of my talk, I'd like to show you a little clip from that film. On the dawn of independence in 1962, he developed the Santra Audiovisual, which in the style of Alexander Medvedkin began what's called a CinePops program that used two projection vans to facilitate agit-prop screenings across 220 locations in Algeria for a largely illiterate peasantry. In addition to key Soviet texts like Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, the project screened Voce's own Hope on Marsh, the first documentary to demonstrate the realities of life in post-war independence Algeria. At the end of my talk, I'd also like to show you the conclusion of that film as well. Now, when considering Voce's work in view of my dissertations, broader themes of policing and horror, it's necessary to return to the disciplinary space. First explored in the film I mentioned earlier, Rene's Tutla memoir Demand, the Bibliothèque Nationale, the France. For France's National Library was not only the subject of Rene's 1956 documentary on the disciplining of historical knowledge, it was also the site where Voce compiled the materials for his first anti-colonial Cine pamphlet in the name of Algerian independence. Wanted by French authorities for Afrique Saint-Con, Voce was unable to secure a visa to travel to Algeria after the FLN staged their first acts of resistance on All Saints Day, 1954. And so he decided to make a research film composed of all the written sources he could gather from the Bibliothèque on France's relation to the Maghreb. After months of research, Voce excavated materials from French generals dating back to the mid-19th century, which provided rather strong evidence that France's history of barbarism in Algeria included the use of gas chambers. With the assistance of his colleagues at the Institute, he made a short documentary entitled Une Nation L'Algerie, whose voice over narration incorporated direct passages from Voce's research findings. This short film, although it was produced with the state's reference materials, had no chance of securing a state visa, and Voce didn't bother to apply for one. He organized clandestine screenings across Paris and was eventually able to place one of the two copies of the film in the hands of France Fanon during a secret meeting in Tunisia in 1956. The latter wanted to present Voce's work to an FLN delegation in South Africa. The first copy was destroyed by the FLN counter movement, the Movement Nationale Algerienne, at a screening in the Latin Quarter, and the other was apparently stolen from Fanon. So here I'm kind of alluding to how questions of militant cinema largely surround not only questions of film aesthetics, but of course, questions of distribution and exhibition. Now, what Voce describes in a 2001 interview with Nicole Brené as a paradoxical sense of the archive as a site that simultaneously exposes history while constituting its repression, is perhaps resident with the fate of his own cinema, now stored in libraries across France, including the Bibliothèque Nationale. I experienced a similar kind of vertigo when I screened a number of his films, including Poupon-Marche and J. Weed-En in the library's audio-visual archive. This encounter with Voce's cinema was admittedly primed by my own subject position at the time as I had arrived in Paris in the midst of mass demonstrations and strikes by millions of protesters in October 2010 against the federal government's pension reform plan. On my first night in the city, I watched as parliamentary riot police cleared the manifestation surrounding the Bastille, putting the principle of nothing to see here and to practice. Here's one of my own shots of what were kind of walls of police. The imprint of the event certainly asserted its relevance in the ensuing days when I started my research at the National Library. Certainly, all archival research demands that the researcher proceed through a series of softly coercive disciplinary checks and mechanisms, be they proof of citizenship, a letter attesting to one's cultural expertise, even physical searches. Nonetheless, the particular topic at hand, the French cinematic representation of the Algerian War, seemed to provoke a prolonged pause at each checkpoint accompanied by some form of reminder that this was a bizarre or loaded topic to be studying, especially for a Canadian student. For years, I had read about Algeria as the specter, the structuring absence of French cinema of the 1950s, 1960s. Now, after succession of what seemed to be interminable escalator rides, security checkpoints, and clearances through metal detectors, I was in a modest room in the library's basement, watching films by a French director in which millions of Algerians and their expansive cultural diversity could be seen manifesting themselves across the country's streets. Vocae's films could not be assimilated into the opaque cinema studied in my dissertation with all of its strategies of illusion and indirection. Instead of Auschwitz and Dekal as allegories or screen memories for Algeria's concentration camps, Vocae's poop on March confers visibility on the real Jelfa and Bousset and all of their architectural and criminal specificity. It also contains the only footage of the massacre at Saki at City Yusef, what the director refers to as Algeria's Guernica. However, it was not only the images, dead bodies, or the testimonies of torture that made the experience of watching the film somewhat chilling, but rather the collision between the disciplinary setting and the film's images of the post-war revolutionary masses. In the vein of Eisenstein and Vertov, Poop on March shows the hardships of post-war reconstruction, the shared efforts among the peasantry and the military to harvest the land still embedded with explosives, the rebuilding of schools and hospitals, and the political demonstrations that involved all classes of society in the cause of socialism. Above all, Vocae's agit-prop film, as its title suggests, shows masses of bodies in the process of taking and giving form and is perhaps even too utopian in its promotion of the unified Algerian society to come. J. Weedon contains a similar combination of trauma and celebration, enforcing the spectator to confront the faces of the five boys whose stories confront the voiceover and in narrativizing their drawings of scenes depicting French troops torturing, killing their parents, the film asks us to imagine how France's presence and now absence modifies Algerian subjectivity and constitutes its interior alterity as opposed to the films that I studied in my dissertation. And like Pope on March, this short film concludes with visualizations of the people reunited to the uncanny soundtrack of a chant for Algerian independence and here are those final images. Encountering these sounds and images, it was difficult not to be reminded of the conclusion of Ponte Corvo's famous The Battle of Algiers, in which a French radio broadcaster defines the undulating sounds emanating from the city streets as something entirely alien to his European ears, even monstrous. Revotier's films now left to languish in the Bibliothèque Nationale, also potentially monstrous to the French Society of Control beyond the library's walls. The source of insight into this question arrived during the final days before I left Paris when the magazine La Nouvelle Observateur, accompanied by a limited edition DVD of Bertrand Tavernier's Laguerre Saint-Name was released. And here I have this text as well in case anyone would like to take a look. Thanks so much. In responding to the arguments made by that film, since expanded by philosophers and historians, including Balabar and Herb and Lvivivics, the articles in the issue describe how the Algerian functions as a synecdoche for the figure of the immigrant or non-European other in contemporary France, a generalized target of right-wing bigotry and scapegoating. This slippage, the authors of the issue rightly point out, is the product of over 50 years of state-sanctioned amnesia, which began with the amnesty agreement secured by the Evienne Accords in 1962 against the re-interrogation of French war crimes in Algeria and continues into the knife-edge present. For example, in the 2005 legislation, which forces educators solely to emphasize the positive role played by France in the former colonies, the state's prolonged refusal to identify historical links between the war, the wave of Algerian immigration to France during the period of modernization and decolonization, and the economic and geographical concentration of Arabs around the banlieue in the wake of deindustrialization has spawned what's now known as the gangrene and forgetting from which current xenophobic anxieties have been allowed to spread. These anxieties are masked in the name of a pious devotion to French cultural sovereignty and the far-rights' so-called defense against the invasion of Arabness into public space and of Arab slang into everyday French vernacular. Yet such observations concerning the consequences of a national inability to count the French-Algerian past as French have been made, and albeit more diffuse form elsewhere, what makes this special issue of Lenoval observateur of particular interest is that it was in part triggered by the cultural response to Rashid Bouchereb's film, Horlalois. A quasi-Western, Horlalois tells the story of three brothers who survived the French militaries and Pied-Noir's massacre of the Muslim population of Satif and become involved in distinct ways with the cause of the FLN in Paris in the 1950s and 1960s. Prior to debuting at Cannes on May 21, 2010, it became the target of pre-emptive attacks by the radical right to halt its distribution. Lionel Luca, a deputy of the National Assembly, belonging to Nicholas Sarkozy's party, condemned the film as anti-French before even seeing it and commissioned the service that belongs to defense, an arm of the Ministry of Defense, to evaluate the film's historical accuracy. In a continuation of the legacy of disinformation that typically characterized the state's official response to the war, this Ministry undermined the film, noting that the director wants to suggest, and I quote, that on May 8, 1945, Muslims in Satif were blindly massacred by Europeans, whereas it's the contrary that transpired. All historians agree on that. Europeans lashed out against Muslims in response to Muslims massacring Europeans. I would suggest, of course, that no Europeans agree with that, especially not French historians. This was an event in which the French killed over 45,000 Arabs in the area of Satif. So the film premiered at Cannes to the scenes you see here of thousands of protesters belonging to the far-rights national front, whose presence led police to frisk all attendees out of fear they might be carrying explosives. The mayor of Cannes responded to the protest by organizing a pro-French rally for all the European soldiers who were lost or injured by the war. If the far-rights' response to Boucherab's film is any indication, then those counter-informational images stored in the bibliotech remain a threat to the state and its ongoing instrumentalization of history. In fact, the simultaneously bureaucratic and repressive character of the intervention against Horlalua looks unfortunately familiar when seen against the backdrop of Boucherab's career. All of Boucherab's anti-colonial films were denied a visa until the 1970s, often for reasons here again that were never even specified to the director. But soft tactics of censorship against his work were also accompanied by incarcerations, lawsuits, assaults, and acts of state terror. This history of violence culminated in the 1980s when Boucherab directed a film called Apropos de l'autre Detail which synthesizes the testimonies of the Algerian prisoners of war tortured by lieutenant and former presidential candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen. Having violated the 1968 law that gave blanket amnesty to all acts committed during the war, Boucherab was sued by Le Pen and lost. When he returned home to Brittany following the court case, he discovered his entire audio-visual library torched by a commando who remains unidentified into the present. In characteristic fighting style, Boucherab would then make a film about the destruction of his own archives, entitled Destruction of the Archives. Nicole Brunet notes how this short documentary which provides a kind of inverse image of the pure presence satirized by the film I mentioned earlier, Tute Le Memoir du Monde, quote, sums up the fate of political cinema today, dispersed, destroyed, shredded in the memories of those younger generations for whom it sought to build a better future. Indeed, Boucherab's entire cinematic and extra cinematic career can be perceived as a lifelong struggle against the erasure of history. It is crucial to remember that the reason films can no longer be censored in France for their political content today is because he went on a 31-day hunger strike. In the cause of another director's film, Jacques Panagel's Octobre Paris. Yet, Boucherab's victories in the name of a cinema of counter-information and social intervention raise another set of questions about the invisibility of his work. Legally speaking, his films could be made widely available to a new generation of activists, cinephiles, and students. Is the eclipse of his filmography solely the consequence and the aftermath of a protracted history of censorship and state terror? Or is there perhaps a more implicit cultural form of discipline that has contributed to the destruction of his archives? In the years following my initial screening of Pouponmarche and Jay-Weet-Anne, I've become attentive to how Vochier is discussed within broader scholarly accounts of the history of French cinema. Across a series of significant film history texts, including those by Susan Hayward, Mark Betts, and Alan Williams, there is a consistent tendency in English-language scholarship to acknowledge Vochier and the militant parallel cinema, which he represents, but only to defer this acknowledgement onto a footnote listing a few sources and scarce sources in French. Why exactly has Vochier been relegated to a footnote or half-sentence in the official narratives of French film history? Late in my research, I came across another such afterthought on Vochier's cinema in a text by Tom McDonough that confirmed my suspicions. And I quote, the point here is certainly not to align political tendency with the overall quality of a given work. Of course, one would rather watch Gadar's La Petite Souda than say Rene Vochier's Algérie en Flème, however much one might admire the latter's support for Algerian independence. This hypothetical one admires and perhaps even sympathizes with Vochier's politics while supposedly regretting his cinema's lack of artistic form. Written with the smug flippancy so characteristic of white male academic discourse, this statement is slipped into McDonough's observations on French aesthetics during the years of de-qualinization, quietly deriding the reader who would have the poor taste to question itself evidence. And yet, as with any slip of the tongue, McDonough's argument betrays the work of a political unconscious that demands interrogation. First, who is this hypothetical one and why would he or she rather watch La Petite Souda, a film that positive critic Robert Benayoun identified? Rightly so, I think as plotting, pretentious and politically reactionary over Algérie en Flème, one of the only films in history to take the spectator directly into the daily realities of the FLN in combat. It is unlikely that this one would be found among the Algerian youth who participated in the screening and lecture session on Boche's early work, as depicted in the recent documentary by Leila Marouche and Oriane Rochetti, Algerie Tour de Tour. At first cynical about the idea that a Frenchman might give them a lesson in Algerian history, the majority of the group is both moved and stunned by the time of the event's conclusion at their own alienation from the national past. So this is a documentary in which Boche travels along with the filmmakers and shows his cinema all over Algeria to a new generation of youth. Let me just show you some of the reactions of the crowd who've never seen his cinema before. I have goosebumps just talking about it. Let me tell you sincerely, I get goosebumps. We, the young generation, we've forgotten, we've been deprived of our history. So these are four different locations in which very different communities are completely stunned by Boche's cinema. So it's highly unlikely that one would rather watch Petit Soldat than, let's say, Boche's cinema. Second, what is the apparent obviousness implied by the course of McDonough's dismissal? Of course we wouldn't want to watch Boche's cinema. Presumably the point is that Gadar makes art cinema, thematically ambiguous, informally rich, whereas Boche's commitment to documenting history consigns him to a less evolved, pre-structuralist faith and the veracity of this image. Yet this kind of thinking betrays what Brene calls one of film studies most convenient misconceptions, namely that politically committed cinema because it is caught up in the practical necessities of history remains indifferent to questions of form. In fact, Brene has gone to painstaking lengths to demonstrate the formal diversity of Boche's cinema through its experimentation with modes, including documented fiction, poetry, and the didactic fable. Boche's key imperatives, an emphasis on polyphonic forms of authorship, the pedagogy of the oppressed, and the citation and recombination of previous work can be seen to actually anticipate the radical collective filmmaking projects of the late 1960s, and particularly Chris Marker's work with the group Sloan and the Medvedkin group. I became personally convinced of the artistry of his cinema when one of those filmmakers who made the documentary was gracious enough to provide me with an extremely rare copy of this film, LaFalle de Touzhan, a feature length film that weaves together footage from all of Boche's previous documentaries on Algerian independence into an extremely formally complex narrative about the lives of a separated Breton couple. So all of this is to say that Boche's occlusion from the canon of film history cannot be reduced to his cinema's supposed lack of artistic quality. This absence is rather a question of the political commitments that subtend our received epistemological approaches to knowing the historical past. Consistent with the fetishistic isolation of form perpetuated by Caillou's cinema throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the historicization of modern French cinema has often been content to divide questions of aesthetics from politics and theoretical innovation from practice. McDonough's disavow of the artistry of Boche's cinema is only one expression of this tendency. The hefty collection of essays that make up recent edited volumes like the one called Opening Bazin, combined to form an image of post-war French film culture in which the journal I circulated positive and its commitment to the cinema as an instrument of decolonization and revolution are completely excluded from the critical frame. By foreclosing perspectives like those of positive as a source of dialogue and debate, film studies tends to present a singular version of the past in which the new wave in Caillou's cinema emerge as the great arbiters of real history and are confirmed as the only lasting voices of philosophical wisdom. In this and other cases, film historiography functions less as a critical space for the promotion and distribution of dialogic narratives and more as another avatar of the police conception of history and its erasure of the memory of resistance. On the other hand, I must note that film studies is also a profoundly disorganized, internationally dispersed and contradictory discipline. Its radically conservative accounts of the post-war European cinematic past are counterbalanced by equally contestatory and politicized currents of historiographical scholarship. Such currents are most forcefully embodied in the growing number of special issues devoted wholly to the question of militant cinema and a number of issues have come out in journals like Framework and Third Text that incite the discipline to reinterrogate the diverse cinematic traditions that were dedicated to the liberation and liberation struggles and revolutions of the late 20th century. And it's particularly the militancy of the late 1960s film culture that has reemerged as a central hub of this critical discourse and has been discussed not only as it was exemplified by particular films but in both its situated production distribution and exhibition contexts and broader historical genealogies. In my dissertation, I aim to elucidate the genealogy of the French militant cinema of the 68 period by tracing its conditions of possibility back to earlier cinematic oppositions to the Algerian war. I tried to return to a canonical body of cinema in order to question the schemas of perception and classification which established the cinema's canonicity and aesthetic value. By demonstrating how the sociopolitical context of decolonization informs the very themes and formal motifs of chief modern cinematic texts, I insist that our received epistemologies for knowing these texts have debased the social significance of colonialism. In my engagements with the largely forgotten writings of positive, I also aimed to reopen a historical perspective that viewed Algeria as a fundamental and palpable dimension of French film aesthetics. In situating these aesthetics within the broader memory of anti-colonial resistance, I hope to show the ways in which modern cinema enacted a refusal of French identity as defined by the state and an impossible identification with the cause of Algerian solidarity, thus setting the stage for the later relational subjectivities that emerged around the time of the late 1960s. Now having concluded my dissertation, however, I recognize the urgent need for scholarship concerning the intersection between the cinema and social struggle to venture beyond the confines of the canon. In the case of the Franco-Algerian war in particular, the time has come for film studies to decolonize its own archive and make visible the anti-colonial cinematic traditions that fought to make film an instrument of both perceptual and political emancipation. So with that agenda in mind, I'd like to show you two very brief clips of voce cinema clips that are very hard to find. The first is the concluding moment of Poop on Marsh, which shows actually demonstrations that took place immediately in the aftermath of independence. The second is the film about eight-year-old children who actually illustrate their experience of the war. So I'll show you just a very brief three to four minute clip of the first film. The second film is nine minutes long. Maybe we can determine after how much of the film we want to watch, but I'll show you a few minutes in any case just to give you an indication, and then maybe we can open it up to a more kind of loose discussion about all of this. So with that said, I'll show you some clips, which I now hope will just work automatically or not. Oh, it's okay because I also have them on a memory stick here as well. The experience is made of 100,000 experiences from the smaller villages, the Guards and the Meshtas. Our force is made of millions of faces, millions of faces of light-bearers, barriers-bearers, millions of faces of light-bearers in the light of the fire, those who will make peace on Earth, the forgets of the peasants, the warriors of the foes, the people of Algeria and the whole world. The people of Algeria are walking on the path that is drawn, the path of the Socialist, united, strong, master of his destiny, he advances. Now, these pacific warriors, part of the extremism of the Depression, have committed all battles against ignorance, against exploiters, against misery, against disease, and above all, for the dignity. A program that was given to Tripoli, and the text of the Constitution that was created and voted, the whole world, our people are walking. We know that the enemies will redress their heads, and we will break them into our walking towards the future. We are not alone in our struggle. To all those who have helped us, to all those who will help us, thank you. Mediterranean, we give you the good day. The past, the borders are broken behind us, the barriers are broken, we will not return them. We will win the battle of dignity. And we have a social legacy that we have won with our blood. We win. Okay, and I'll just show you a clip from the second film. The film is about eight or so minutes long. Should I just show the entire thing at that point? I mean, it's quite short. Is that okay with everyone? Okay. I have a computer and I don't have a real friend. I have been here for 30 days. They told me, if you can help us, at least I have. We have come to the valley and they have taken the coffee. They have been in this company for five days. We have seen yellow planes and planes of the Bézintis. And it started, like me, when we were in the Bézintis. And it started the battle. When we were in the Bézintis, they took the plane and there were people in the Bézintis who were in the Bézintis, and the French asked the Bézintis, why were you in the Bézintis like that? They said, we won the battle for our country. They took the French soldiers and they told me, we will help you, if you can help us, we won't help you. They said, we will help you from there. I said, no. When they told us, we will help you, we won't help you from here. I told them, I told them, they didn't give us anything. There is nothing, and the plane, he told me, he took the plane and he hid it under a big plane. I was scared. I was scared. But then it started. And we went with them. We went, there was a Thursday that we sang, and on the night of March, the day we died, we found the French soldiers of our country. We said, we can't go, if we die, we will be killed, because they told me. We put air on our backs and believed that we were already there. We walked, from the night, we arrived at the border of Tunisia. We took the barrage, we went to the conflict. We cut off the defeat, I went, we took the gun, we took the gun, we took the gun, we went, and we left. We came to rest. They took our arms, and they said, tomorrow, I'll find coffee, I drink, with the bullet. I mean, the bullet, if you don't, how will the French come? I don't. So, you know, as I said at the beginning, this is actually very new material to me, and it's the place where my dissertation, I kind of felt reached its limits, which was really much about French culture, French society, so I'm very curious to kind of open the field, and, you know, engage everyone's thoughts and questions and whatever you might think about. This material. So, in what's not that, they often say, this has always been perceived this way, now I'm telling you, I wanted to present this way, but they don't study why it's always been perceived this way. It was bad, and it's no longer, but the history of why it's been manufactured, that's what it's very, very telling, and history of childhood, so it was really nice to see the thing at the end. You say that, Fanon had something to do with it. So, did you all, I didn't hear anything about that film? A little bit, yes. And what about Fanon? I think that, well, Fanon was actually involved in a project that helped children through a form of therapy illustrate their experience of the war, and then it was Voce and some of the Algerian filmmakers that he collaborated with, they got a hold of this archive and developed the film out of those pictures, and five of the boys, no girls, but five of the boys in the film made some of the drawings. So they basically went to an archive that was created by Fanon and a lab he had in Algeria. And Nicholas Mirzoff writes a little bit about this in his book, The Right to Look, and there are a few other things, but they're very scattered. It's underrepresented, certainly. The boys themselves. No, that's part of the film. That's part of the film. They interviewed the boys as part of the film, the process of the film. The drawings belonged to the archive, but then they just found some of these boys, their pictures, and kind of assembled the narrative out of the drawings. And say that people like Voce have something to do with their aesthetic and their view of the work. Absolutely. So I recognize the battle of Chile all over. Now, I tend to think this is how a political film should look like, but there might be all sorts of ways by which, what you're saying, it's Voce and it may invent the way to show these things with good manners. Well, I think that, you know, they belong to, Voce belongs to a genealogy and cinema that goes back to Soviet propaganda films that weaves a narrative. But I think one particular narrative surrounding French film of the 50s and 60s, which, again, is such a generative kind of place in film studies is that Voce belongs to the past. He belongs to a kind of naive faith in the image, whereas, of course, with the emergence of structuralism and then later kind of Althusserian Marxism, we start to think about structuring absences and how the image is always mediated. And so this kind of might seem old-fashioned and propagandistic that, well, we can just go ahead and blatantly represent or have a transparent relationship between representation and reality. And what I'm trying to say is Voce is certainly not doing that, though. And I don't want to set up some binary between on the one hand a French modern cinema in which this was absent and then here we get presence. I think it's much these categories of presence and absence in which were complicated. And Voce is also aware of the mediated nature of all representation. And it becomes this question of defining, well, what is militant cinema? I mean, a lot of it has to do with questions that are beyond the text. Third cinema circulates in different kinds of reception contexts. It's also something in which the subjects making the film have a totally different kind of skill set. It's not such a specialized division of labor. Anyone on the set has to be able to direct. So it's a different mode of production. It's a different mode of exhibition. And then there is this question of what constitutes the aesthetic of militant cinema. On my way here, I was kind of frantically reading a number of essays that kind of try to define militant cinema. And I think more needs to be done. It's open. It's not a, we don't have a cut and dry answer. It needs to be defined in different historical situations. I mean the documentary that John made seems to suggest that his films are not certainly widely available in, I mean, they're available in archives in Algeria. But the Algeria, this is something I need to think about research more. I'm still trying to understand how I'm going to incorporate this into my existing work. But no, I don't think his work is widely circulated. I mean the film industry in Algeria largely consists of films that are 10 years old in Hollywood and circulated DVD in video stores. And one of the things that happened in Algeria is that even though it created this kind of revolutionary arm of film making, film distribution in Algeria was actually soon kind of locked into other kinds of commercial transnational matrices that kind of prevented it from distributing this work around the world. Like while it was making revolutionary cinema at other levels of the production process, it kind of got shut down. And then when it turned into a one state party, figures like Voce were completely ejected from the country altogether. And he had to go back to Brittany. So I don't think anywhere is this archive something that's really received tons of attention. I mean that's changing a little bit. But in relation to someone like Marker, who's the subject and I'm completely to blame here too of, you know, infinite number of PhD dissertations, you know. Myself included someone like Voce is really just missing. I think on both sides of the spectrum. Yeah. People have access to it. Right. Well, when I went to Paris to find the films in 2010, they were not available on YouTube or Daily Motion. I think you had, what is it called, Karenga? Yeah, well maybe there's one film, but I mean even on these kind of advanced torrent sites, none of it was available. Since that time Jay Weedong has been put on YouTube, I should go ahead and put some of this stuff on YouTube, but it's still very hard to find. So that's just in questions of access. No, I think it's still still repressed. In terms of other, you know, the other maybe interesting question around the archive and aesthetics is, you know, Voce Cinema is also kind of, and this was kind of getting at when I'm talking about the Bibliotech National Archival Project. You know, the archive of course represents official history, represents a narrative of origins. Voce is a sensibly one who's kind of going through the archive, his own archive, and trying to create, infuse it with subjectivity, fantasy in order to create a kind of counter narrative. And his films are actually essayistic in this way, which is again, I know the kind of this is what's strange, the end of the film I showed you, the point about the end of showing the film like, you know, the people on March is just to show the radical contrast between this and modern French cinemas very kind of allegorical representation of the war. Here you have a kind of brute presence, but I don't want to just say again he's a naive realist. I mean, there are all kinds of aesthetic decisions getting made, and I think one of those is archival, and I think maybe with new media, with filmmakers in France, they are starting to take up his work and in that documentary, for instance, and incorporate his kind of visual history of the war alongside official documents and official representation. So I think that will come and attention is kind of mounting towards his work, but I mean for a very long time it's been very suppressed. The, like the making of the film. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, maybe. I mean, they do show clips of the films in the, in that documentary, which I kind of wish I brought now. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, these are, these are you know, militant filmmakers working on the margins. You know, this is not a widely distributed film. When I went to their little one-bedroom apartment, and they were like, you know, here I wonder how many people have seen that film, maybe a thousand at most. But the film does act as kind of a vehicle to screen a lot of his own films. And his own films, he has that film, I mentioned at the end, the Mad Woman of Tujan which actually incorporates his entire archive of films on Algeria into a new narrative. So there is this constant variation of, of the stuff in, in his work. But I don't know how much, how much that film functioned as a vehicle for his stuff. I mean, I found these filmmakers on Facebook. You know, there was a group on Facebook, I contacted them, they were like, oh come on, and then you go to, they were there in this impoverished little apartment, they made this film. I don't think this is like these are not blockbuster reception here, right? So I did find them. New media. There is something. Yeah. Yeah. And we go to think it's available archive. Right. Absolutely. It's possible. I mean, yeah, I definitely think that's a possibility. I've wanted to have a kind of series about the representation of this topic for a while and I have been thinking, I do have some contacts and I'd love to show this stuff as part of that screening, absolutely. I feel like at this point again, like, you know, today all I've really done is introduce this object. I haven't really theorized it, which is what I'd like to do too. I mean Voce is deeply influenced by Eisenstein, by Brecht. So I'd like to understand its aesthetics a little bit better within the genealogy of radical cinema. And, you know, right now, again, I kind of feel like just, I'm just discovering it, right? And discovering its place. Whereas, again, the stuff in my dissertation these are films of kind of theorized and have a matrix to think about. And this is just taking me into areas I'm not certain about. And I think it's a very important role in the Hungarian society for one and a whole different kind of aesthetic. So these are things, you know, it's a very preliminary stage. Something you touched on, I think, the responsibility of this is and has been academic film studies is basically, well, as it's become professionalized, it's American. American American. The pockets are much, much lesser than France, but it's that academic film study has, in a way, failed a lot of work. And to some extent, history of film studies has conceived by academics and has to be rewritten. And frequently have at certain moments even, at certain moments academic film studies has paid attention to so-called third-world cinema alternative cinema and so on. But it's a very inconsistent kind of attention, you know, keeping in mind that academic film studies are from also ways in which because it's primarily North American it kind of got lost on the wrong foot and we still live with that. And so getting access to films making certain films available writing about these films getting one's writing read or heard. And, you know, for my money, that orientation, you know, and I don't want to blanket film studies as a discipline, which is, again, highly contradictory, but in some ways is getting almost more complicit with those processes. Like, I don't know, David, if you have any thoughts about this, but like some of the discourse on global cinema, for instance, and Dudley Andrews are in the number of pieces on global cinema and, you know, the emphasis of those pieces is taking the orientation away from questions of politics and resistance. It's like, well, this strangle holds us into a very kind of limited idea of what world cinema is in which we have a center in periphery and we need to think about why, you know, musicals and Bollywood films are successful and we need to think about flows and there's an almost kind of avowed gesture to say, like, we can't just think about resistance, and for me this actually has the counter effect of naturalizing the American hegemony of Hollywood cinema, right, to say that we don't need to be thinking about resistance. We need to get rid of the category of resistance and thinking about global cinema that seems absurd, you know. I think, if anything, those kind of, like, so I think part of, you know, to follow up what Chris is saying, there is a kind of tendency to now think of third cinema or militant cinema as passe, as belonging to a particular trend in the discipline's genealogy, and that's something, I think, that needs to be countered because, you know, there certainly are a number of film theorists and filmmakers who are very actively thinking about what constitutes political cinema, new forms of contest and neo-colonization, things like that. But, yeah, I mean, my own project's very much about film studies, too. It's part of my interest in this topic. Better at ... Oh, right. I don't know, I'd have to ... I don't know who's better or worse. I'm sure there are all forms of, like, repression in each one of those contexts, right? I don't think you have the Italian context. I mean, these kinds of aesthetic strategies recur in different national situations, you know, in the Giallo cult films of the 1970s also had various kinds of coded attacks on the emergence of fascism. You know, as opposed to something like, yeah, Cuban cinema or yeah, like you mentioned tradition in Chile, I think maybe there is a kind of more, there is a rootedness third cinema. To be clear, third cinema is not a cinema rooted in a particular place. It's an attitude toward filmmaking that has an internationalist agenda. So even at the end of People on March Year, they're like our brothers across the Mediterranean, and so there is an internationalist agenda to third cinema, but I do think absolutely other nations do have a closer affinity with that kind of filmmaking and promoting that kind of filmmaking. And in France, France certainly has an impressive host of militant directors, but there does seem to be a disproportionate amount of emphasis on figures like Marker and Gadar and all the people I talk about too. Can I not be in the film? No, I'm sorry. Thank you. Thanks.