Ici on noie les Algériens: 17 Octobre 1961 / Here We Drown Algerians: October 17, 1961 by Yasmina Adi (review)

With the recent commemoration of Algerian independence, it is essential to underscore the forgotten histories, their episodes voluntarily put aside. While the demonstrations in Sétif on May 8, 1945, the subject of Yasmina Adi’s first documentary, prepared the way for this independence, the drama around the fierce suppression of the peaceful demonstration of October 17, 1961, had an impact on the negotiations leading to the Evian Accords on March 18, 1962.

Recall the context: in office since 1958, French president Charles de Gaulle recognized Algeria’s right to self-determination on September 16, 1959. This recognition led to the attempted April 22, 1961 coup by generals Raoul Salan, Maurice Challe, André Zeller, and Edmond Jouhaud. While the Algerian FLN (National Liberation Front) and the French government negotiated the terms of independence, attacks on both sides escalated tensions. At the same time, police unions were demanding increased resoluteness on the part of the prefecture of police, headed by Maurice Papon—the very man who led the repression in Algeria in 1945.

In her courageous desire to reestablish the historical facts, Adi has done truly painstaking work unearthing a variety of documents including newspaper articles, radio and television reports, and previously unpublished photographs, then putting them into perspective with actual eyewitness testimonies and accounts from the families of the disappeared. Conducting her interviews mostly in Arabic, the filmmaker enjoyed a cultural proximity that enabled her to get past unspoken modesty and pain. Perhaps benefiting from her position as a woman, Adi was able to talk with other women whose husbands had died, capturing very moving details of lives destroyed, memories repressed, husbands and fathers who never returned. On top of this, Adi’s interviewees also faced institutional contempt, beginning with denial of their plight, then falling into oblivion.

From these numerous documents the hard facts emerge: the beatings, the spilled blood, the bodies lined up, spread out, piled on top of each other, huddled together, humiliated. The testimonies reveal stories of arrested demonstrators herded into the basement of the Palais des Sports and tortured, the atrocities supervised by a cold-blooded apparatus where the police were free to run amok. The records show overwhelming proof of the violence that cost many demonstrators their lives, some of whose bodies were eventually found, often dredged out of the Seine, while many others were wounded, imprisoned, even sent to Algeria, exhausted, dirty, and without any belongings.

Adi’s project, in her own words, is to “shed light … reveal the truth … make it available to the public.” A quest for truth, however, presupposes an objectivity that is far removed from the cinematic practices of a filmmaker’s particular vision. One could therefore understand Adi’s intended desire to reinstate an awareness of the facts; the means that she employs to do so, though, must be viewed with caution.

As is always the case in situations such as this when the efficacy of visual evidence is maintained, it is difficult to counter the documentation of both propaganda and news reports of the period. To discern between the two, Adi uses peoples’ testimonies: the human against the institution—powerful and sufficient in itself. To show the ruthlessness of the police force specifically, however, she adds audio to the photographs. It is here where viewers are taken aback, unaware of the source of the sound, finding themselves dealing with a situation that goes from giving the audience information, to guiding them toward what the filmmaker wants them to believe. They are no longer able to determine the line between intention and facts, between the message given by the filmmaker and the freedom to form their own opinion.

This unpleasant feeling is reinforced by the confines of political contex-tualization. In the film the words of the Algerian victims and the propaganda of the French government meet head...