Abstract An Opposition in Search of Itself: Modern French Cinema and the Algerian War This dissertation provides a sustained analysis of the politics of French cinema in the 1950s and 1960s from the socio-historical perspective of the Franco-Algerian War. By combining close visual analysis of the Left Bank Group’s cinema, discourse analysis of contemporaneous film theoretical debates, and archival research of images from the popular press, I demonstrate how the Franco-Algerian War played a key role in shaping the cinematic representation of French modernization. Although it has been widely assumed that France’s “police operation” in Algeria between 1954 and 1962 was absent from French screens due to severe censorship restrictions, I explore how filmmakers including Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, and Chris Marker mobilize imagery and discourses unique to the war in order to critique the disciplinary nature of their own “modern society.” In its focus on colonialism, my dissertation challenges the dominant narrative of this influential period in film history as a monolithic New Wave movement reducible to the films of an inner-circle of auteurs and their writings in Cahiers du cinéma. I return to the journal Positif’s under-theorized criticism to illuminate how film culture in France functioned as a heterogeneous field of debate, in which political divisions were largely determined in relation to the question of colonialism’s relationship to modernization. The 1950s mark the flourishing of Les Trente Glorieuses in France, a period of economic acceleration, which contemporary media ii representation often cast in the ambience of science fiction. As the specificities of France’s “dirty war” in Algeria permeated the mainland, however, the frontier dividing the two became increasingly precarious. By placing the mise-en-scènes 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. The conclusion of the dissertation considers how the Left Bank Group’s encounter with the Algerian War conditioned their militant film practice at the end of the 1960s (Loin du Vietnam, 1967), and defines René Vautier’s “parallel cinema” as a necessary future direction for the study of anti-colonial cinema. iii Acknowledgements First, I would like to thank my supervisor, Chris Faulkner, who guided this project with his meticulous commentary and pragmatic advice since its inception. Chris’s supervision will inform the broader, long lasting attitudes and concerns that I bring to my future scholarship. I must also thank my co-supervisor Marc Furstenau, for engaging with me in countless hours of discussion and for his ongoing support. In addition, the members of my committee offered a number of the conceptual and historical threads that came to define this dissertation. Thanks to Aboubakar Sanogo for emphasizing the crucial salience of Positif’s and Jean-Paul Sartre’s writings, as well as René Vautier’s cinema to my interpretive framework during our committee’s first meeting. Jill Carrick’s suggestion to situate the Left Bank Group’s films in relation to contemporaneous literary and artistic movements also had a major influence on my subsequent research. Finally, I am extremely grateful to my external examiner, Adam Lowenstein, for his thoughtful and enthusiastic engagement with the final project. Along with my doctoral committee, a number of the faculty members at Carleton University played a significant role in cultivating my interest in the relationship between European cinema and colonialism. I extend a heartfelt thanks to Barbara Gabriel, who first encouraged and sharpened my thinking on this subject at a very early stage. I thank Charles O’Brien for his interest and for introducing me to some of the period’s films that I have since considered in detail. Faculty members at other universities have also been extremely helpful in their comments, ideas, and iv encouragement, and I am particularly grateful to Mark Betz, Kass Banning, D.N. Rodowick, Erika Balsom, Catherine Russell, and Catherine Grant. This dissertation was born of a communal effort, and I have to thank my amazing colleagues for all of the ways that they helped me see it through, especially: Scott Birdwise, Bruno Cornellier, Owen Livermore, Papagena Robbins, Jenny Wills, David Richler, Ezra Winton, Alison Harvey, Kevin Wynter, Erika Balsom, Nathan Holmes, Svetla Turnin, Andrew Covert, Adam Rosadiuk, Charlie Ellbé, Peter Lester, Andrea Zeffiro, Mél Hogan, Theresa Scandiffio, Owen Lyons, Jeremy Maron, Heather Igloliorte, Jessica Aldred, Murray Leeder, Liz Clarke, Danielle Wiley, Émilie Nollet, and Thorsten Busch. I also extend a very special thanks to Oriane Brun- Moschetti and Orlan Roy for their hospitality and for providing me with a number of René Vautier films that I would never have had the opportunity to see otherwise. Finally, it is my pleasure to thank the family members who helped me throughout this whole process. I devote an immense thanks to my mother, Shirley Croombs, who has always been there for me, but never more so than over the course of this project. I give an equally strong thanks to Larrie and Mika Shepherd, whose steadfast support nearing the end of my writing is what enabled me to meet the final deadline. A necessary thanks goes out to long-time friends, Louis Calabro, Matt Cully, and Marcelo Sanchez. And, above all, thanks to Tamara Shepherd, my love and undisputed champion. Your effort and patience have been supernatural throughout these last four years, and I can’t wait to show you my appreciation during our adventures in the future. v Table of Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgements iv Table of Contents vi List of Figures vii Introduction 1 Chapter 1 An Opposition in Search of Itself: Modernization, Decolonization, Cinema 39 Chapter 2 French-Algeria and the Police: Horror as Political Affect in Three Short Documentaries by Alain Resnais 83 Chapter 3 La Jetée in Historical Time: Colonialism, Consumerism, Displacement 114 Chapter 4 Colonial Abjection: The Question of Torture in Modern French Cinema 144 Chapter 5 Loin du Vietnam: Solidarity, Representation, and the Proximity of the French Colonial Past 173 Conclusion 199 Bibliography 221 vi List of Figures Figure 1. Still from Jacques Tati’s Playtime (1967) 22 Figure 2. Advertisement in L’Express, August 30, 1957 43 Figure 3. Still from 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle (1967) 54 Figure 4. Still from Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962) 64 Figure 5. Advertisement in L’Express, September 13, 1957 69 Figure 6. Photo in L’Express, 3 October 1957 81 Figure 7. Photo in L’Express, 21 February 1962 81 Figure 8. Still from Toute la mémoire du monde (1956) 87 Figure 9. Still from Toute la mémoire du monde (1956) 87 Figure 10. Still from Toute la mémoire du monde (1956) 87 Figure 11. Still from Toute la mémoire du monde (1956) 92 Figure 12. Still from Toute la mémoire du monde (1956) 93 Figure 13. Cover of L’Express, September 15, 1960 94 Figure 14. Still from Les statues meurent aussi (1953) 101 Figure 15. Still from Les statues meurent aussi (1953) 101 Figure 16. Still from La Jetée (1962) 124 Figure 17. Still from La Jetée (1962) 124 Figure 18. Still from Fahrenheit 451 (1966) 127 Figure 19. Advertisement in L’Express, 1960 130 Figure 20. Still from La Jetée (1962) 131 Figure 21. Still from La Jetée (1962) 139 Figure 22. Still from La Jetée (1962) 141 Figure 23. Photo by Robert Capa, Spanish Civil War 142 Figure 24. Photo from the archives of Le Monde 155 Figure 25. Still from Muriel, ou le temps d’un retour (1963) 166 Figure 26. Still from 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle (1967) 196 Figure 27. Still from Peuple en marche (1963) 210 Figure 28. Still from J’ai huit ans (1963) 210 vii Introduction Modernity is, in fact, a European phenomenon but one constituted in a dialectical relation with a non-European alterity. – Enrique Dussel1 Framing Perspectives I was drawn into the question of how France’s colonial war with Algeria shaped the politics of French film and film culture by a feeling I had, and continue to have, concerning Michael Haneke’s Caché. Haneke’s film has emerged as one of the most generative texts of the early twenty-first century, largely because it seems so radically singular and hard to pin down aesthetically, politically, and historically. This dissertation is premised on the idea that Caché establishes a dynamic on these three fronts that is actually very familiar in the history of European art and militant cinema when it comes to the topic of Algeria. Since its release in 2005, Haneke’s detective picture has triggered an astonishing volume of critical scholarship, and even inspired a full dossier of debate in Screen, film studies’ leading international journal. The disposition of these debates, moreover, has been strongly polarized. For some cultural historians and theorists, such as Paul Gilroy and Nicolas Mirzoeff, Caché’s “whodunit” narrative structure and emphasis on French subjectivity combine to create a formally revisionist and embarrassingly Eurocentric picture of the colonial 1 Enrique Dussel, quoted in Walter D. Mignolo, “DELINKING: The rhetoric of modernity, the logic of coloniality and the grammar of de-coloniality,” Cultural Studies 21, nos. 2-3 (2007): 453. 1 past.2 For others, including Martine Beugnet and Guy Austin, Haneke’s investigative framework and (modernist) strategies of indirection work to illuminate the traces of a war whose history has been deferred by France’s ongoing legacy of state sanctioned amnesia.3 Considered collectively, this accumulating body of scholarship reveals that Haneke’s multi-layered aesthetic perspective on the years of decolonization has agitated a cultural nerve, perhaps because this perspective’s political underpinnings remain largely mystifying and un-intelligible.