by Alexis Jenni
* * *
I write for you, my heart. I write so that you will continue to fight me, so that the blood will go on gliding beneath your skin, beneath my skin, in the pliant vessels sheathed in silk. I write to you, my heart, so that nothing will stop, so there will be no lull of breath. In order to write to you, to keep you alive, to keep you supple, warm, flowing, my heart, I must use all the resources of language, all the tremulous, almost hazy verbs, the sum total of nouns like a casket of precious stones, like a huge trunk, each gleaming through every facet worn smooth by use. I need everything in order to write to you, my heart, to create a mirror of words in which you see your reflection, a shifting mirror that I hold between my clasped hands, in which you gaze upon yourself and do not fade away.
I reflect, I fashion a mirror, all that I do is reflection. I examine each detail of your appearance, every epiphanic detail of your body, all of which echo in the reality of the blood beating within you, my heart, of the rhythmic pulse of blood through your vessels encased in silk, resonating in the crimson cave I enter, oh! velvet cave! where I stay, in a swoon.
And most of all I love in you the blending of time, that state of presence which is a perpetual gift to me, these marks which shape you and which are parts of your life, some past, others present, still others yet to come; I love this energy at work like the flow of blood that is the promise that nothing will cease, that later will come, like now, like a perpetual present created for me.
More than anything I love the rough edges of your appearance; they demonstrate that life has been for ever passing and will pass for ever and that in its flow, in its very movement, it is possible. Oh, my heart! You pulse within me like the rhythm of time itself. I love the flesh of those lips that smile when I speak to you, that give and receive those caresses that hands cannot; I love the quivering down of your hair, grey, white, a cloud of swan feathers framing your features. I love the heft of your breasts, which swell slowly like soft clay taking the form of that which contains it; I love the flare of your hips, which gives you the pure, curved almond shape, the curve of two hands pressed together, thumb to thumb, forefinger to forefinger, the precise form of timeworn femininity, the shape of fertility. You are fertile; the Word flourishes all around you; I hear time gliding through you, my heart, time which has no beginning and no end, like blood, like the river, like the word that runs through us all.
That you are my age, my heart, exactly my age, is part of what I love in you. Men of my age strive to dream of something that does not exist, they dream of a still point in the flow of time, of a stone placed in the river, a stone that emerges from the water, one that will never be wet, one that will endure, unmoving, for ever. Men of my age dream of coagulation and death, of everything finally coming to a standstill; they dream of women so young they bear no marks of time and have all eternity before them. But eternity does not move.
You cannot imagine what I have in you. Those fine wrinkles at the corners of your eyes, which you sometimes lament, that you think of hiding and I immediately kiss, offer me the whole span of time. This I owe to Salagnon. I am grateful to him for giving back to me the whole of time, for having taught me – perhaps he did not know it, but he showed me – how to seize it, how to slip into it without creating ripples, how to float peacefully on its irrevocable surface; following the same rhythm, precisely the same rhythm. The mystery, I whisper in your ear. The mystery, I murmur softly, lying next to you. The mystery is that I did not have to fight to attain it. Treasures are guarded, yet I found you without having to fight. ‘Because I was waiting for you,’ you whispered. And that answer explained everything; it was enough.
I would take her to the cinema; I love the cinema. Of all the ways of telling a story, it is the one that shows the most, the one that is most accessible, since all you need to do is look; the one most common to us all. We see the same films; we see them together; the stories told by cinema are shared between us.
I would take her to the cinema, holding her hand. We would sit in the huge, red plush seats and together we would look up towards those vast, luminous faces that spoke for us. In a cinema we are silent. Cinema recounts invented stories that are played out in bright light, while we sit, barely moving, dark forms in neat rows, open-mouthed before these huge, dazzling faces that speak.
The stories are captivating, but there are too many, and gradually we forget them. It serves no purpose to collect more. We might wonder why we press inside, why we come to see, again and again, these fabricated stories. But on the other hand, cinema is a process of recording.
The camera, the little chamber, captures and preserves the image played out before it. In twentieth-century films, sets had to be built and actors found to play out these scenes. What was filmed, misrepresented as fiction, had actually existed. And so, in the cinema, our eyes wide, gazing up in hushed silence, we watched, enlarged, in dazzling light, the dead in their eternal youth, places long since vanished reappear, cities now destroyed rise up again and faces whisper their love to other faces that now are dust.
Cinema will change. It will become a minor subdivision of comics. It will require no real locations, no living faces. Film-makers will paint directly on the screen. The story itself will be played out on the screen, but when that comes it will no longer concern us. I am passionately interested in the beginnings of the technology, this story machine that was a contemporary of the steam train, the internal combustion engine, telephones, this physical machine that made it necessary for people to play out scenes in actual locations; and what we were seeing on the luminous screen, the only light in the darkness apart from our rows of shining eyes, apart from the green box indicating the emergency exit, what we were watching had actually taken place. The screen we stared at in silence was a window on to a vanished past, an open window in the wall of time that closes as soon as the houselights come up. Peering through this window, forbidden to go outside, sitting in rows in the darkness, we watched, uncomprehending, the paseo of the dead.
I would take her, she trusted me to choose. I had lived so long with the magic lantern that I knew what would give us the most pleasure. And so I went with her to see Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers.
The film was legendary, because nobody had seen it. It had been banned; people talked about it in hushed whispers; it was a left-wing legend. ‘A magnificent film,’ it was said. ‘Magnificent because of the people, the actors, some of whom were real protagonists… There is almost no restaging… You have a real feeling of being there… It is a great film that has long been banned… in France, of course,’ so it was said.
When it was finally possible to see the film, I wanted to take her. I explained it to her. ‘This old guy I’m seeing, he’s teaching me to paint. In exchange, he talked to me about the war.’ ‘Which war?’ ‘The one that lasted twenty years. He was there from start to finish, so I’d like to see this movie everyone is talking about; I want to see what they filmed, so I can understand what he’s been telling me.’
We finally saw this left-wing legend, this film that had been banned for so long, written by the military chief of the Autonomous Zone of Algiers, who played himself. I saw the film. I was surprised that anyone had ever felt the need to ban it. Everyone knows about the violence. Everyone knows that when Faulques and Graziani said that they got information with a couple of slaps, it was a lie. Everyone knows that ‘a couple of slaps’ is a piece of metonymy, the visible part one can admit of the dark mass of cruelty and torture that is passed over in silence. We know all this. The film evokes it, but does not linger on it. Torture is a long and demanding technique that is ill-suited to the demands of cinema. The paratroopers interrogating suspects are doing their jobs. They are hunting information in the body where it is hiding, without sadism, without racism; the film shows no excesses. They track down the members of the FLN, find them and arrest or kill them. These military operatives feel no hatred. Their professionalism may be frightening, but they are waging a war and trying to win
it; in the end, they lose.
The Algerians, for their part, have the nobility of a Soviet people; each one of them on the film is a Marxist exemplum, filmed by the director as he might a sculpture. He shows close-ups of the people in the street scenes, nameless individuals in the midst of a crowd of their fellow men, joyous when necessary, angry when appropriate, always dignified, and each of these portraits hints at how we should feel when they appear.
The film has an admirable clarity. The Algerian heroes die, but the anonymous people will replace them; the unrest on the streets is irrepressible; the technicians of war are powerless against the direction of history. The film will be shown to all Algerian children; they will learn about their heroic struggle; they will be proud to belong to this tenacious people; they will wish to be like the handsome portraits of people in the crowd, in the grainy black and white of left-wing fictions that try to pass for documentaries. Colonel Mathieu – it is obvious who he is meant to be – is remarkably intelligent. Without a trace of hatred, he conceives and carries out the perfect plan. Yacef Saadi is the epitome of swaggering heroism. Ali La Pointe, the killer, has the romanticism of the lumpenproletariat, and he dies in the end, because no one knows what to do with him – he is provisional. Everything is neatly tied up, everything is clear, nothing is unresolved. I had no trouble understanding this film. No one is bad, but there is a sense of history that cannot be defied. I could not understand why anyone thought it should be banned. The reality was much more sordid.
It was much more sordid than the film dared to show. The FLN cut off noses, lips and balls with secateurs; the paratroopers electrocuted men fouled with their own shit, their feet drenched in their piss. Everyone was fair game: the guilty, the suspect, the innocent. But there were no innocents, there were only actions. The meat-grinder ground people up without asking their names. People killed mechanically; they died by accident. Race, the rough-and-ready attribution to a group, as read in people’s faces, brought death. People betrayed, they liquidated, they did not really know who belonged to what, they were murdered on the strength of physical resemblance; duplicity was the indefatigable engine that powered the war, a combustion engine, an electrical engine, wedded to a violence we strive not to depict.
But let us forget that. Now is the peace of the brave. Trinquier the paranoiac and Saadi the ham actor can chat together on television. The people united will never be defeated. Everything is clear in Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers. But I found it strange, this simple film. Something intangible in the locations left me with an uneasy feeling I did not understand. I knew that it had been filmed in Algiers itself, using the people who lived there, those who are now call Algerians. The locations seemed empty to me. The Europeans stood on the balconies like puppets in a toy castle. The stadium we see during one of the terrorist attacks is filmed in a tight medium shot, like scenes in historical films, where the cameraman is trying to avoid electric wire and passing aeroplanes. A jeep filled with soldiers marches down an empty street, its doors closed, its shops closed, with a handful of Europeans planted on balconies like geraniums, a scant few, standing stiffly. The setting for this simple screenplay caused a nagging disquiet of which I was barely conscious. I did not really think about it; then finally I saw the tanks.
I say ‘tanks’, but there was only one, surrounded by officers from the Garde Mobile at the hairpin bend above Climat de France. It alone represented the tanks, which in left-wing mythology represent the forces of law and order, the subjugation of the people. In the final scenes of Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, we see the repressive engine of the proto-fascist French state trying to bring the Algerian people to heel – I have avoided adding ‘progressive’ to ‘people’, it would be redundant – and failing, despite its immense technical resources. The vitality of the people triumphs over the repressive machinery of state. Beneath the walls of Climat de France, between the black-clad officers of the Garde Mobile, a tank appears. I burst out laughing.
I was the only one to laugh and, sitting next to me, she was shocked, but I squeezed her hand with so much love that she smiled in turn and snuggled closer to me.
I recognized the tank that had just appeared at the bend in the road above Climat de France. As a child I read the Encyclopédie Larousse, the illustrated version with colour plates, and my favourite parts were the ‘Uniforms’ page, the ‘Aeroplanes’ page and the one on ‘Armoured Vehicles’. The tank on the screen was not French, but Russian. It was an ISU-122, a heavy-armoured vehicle, a tank-hunter. It’s recognizable by the low gun barrel set into a fixed turret with a hull that looked like a pair of hunched shoulders, and the canisters at the back used for storing I don’t know what – maybe nothing. I know about armoured vehicles. I used to doodle them in the margins of my copybooks at school; and I had drawn this one, with its low canon and its rear tanks. Pontecorvo had filmed on location in Algiers, with the people who lived there. In the left-wing legend, this was proof of authenticity. But shooting a movie set in 1956 in Algiers in 1965 is a lie. By 1965 the city of 1956 no longer existed. Where would you find Europeans in Algiers in 1965? They would have had to be shipped back from God knows where and positioned on the balconies like so many potted plants; and the stadium shot would have to be carefully framed, because it would be impossible to fill. The only way to film in the European quarter in 1965 was to evict its current inhabitants, to close the shops that had been abandoned in 1962 and hope no one would notice; to blockade the streets so that the crowds of new inhabitants would not be seen. Where could you find paratroopers and Garde Civile officers in 1965, except by dressing up Algerian soldiers and policemen? How could you find a French tank in Algiers in 1965, except by using one of the ALN tanks supplied by the Soviet Union and hope no one would recognize it? There were lots of those tanks in the streets of Algiers in 1965 after the ALN seized power. The army was there with its troops and its tanks, all that was needed was to dress them up to shoot the film. Pontecorvo was in Algiers in 1965, the official film-maker of the coup d’état. He was a vile human being, film-makers understood this. Several years before he had used a tracking shot in a different film that became a moral issue. He had set up the tracking shot to begin at the moment when a young girl in a concentration camp commits suicide, throwing herself on to the barbed-wire fence, and at the moment of the electric shock, at the moment of her fictional death on the fictional electrified barbed wire, he used a travelling shot to reframe it as a tableau of suffering. Leaving aside the fact that the act was improbable, according to inmates of the camps, there are moral rules in film-making. The man who decides at this moment to make a forward tracking shot to reframe the dead body, this man is worthy of the most profound contempt.
At the moment the coup d’état took place, Pontecorvo was packaging history and handing the military republic of Algeria the basis for its myth. The Battle of Algiers is the official film of the Évian Accords: the treaty between the two politico-military systems, the one leaving and the one replacing it. Saadi, the murderer of passers-by, and Trinquier, the electrocuter general, signed the peace of the brave. In a confused free-for-all in which so many adversaries were battling it out – three, six, twelve – these two alone had the last word. They divided up the spoils and made the others disappear. This was the unease I felt, I finally realized: the European quarter of Algiers was deserted, too deserted for a Mediterranean city. It had just been emptied. Those who lived there had just been obliterated.
Trinquier and Saadi can chat like old comrades; they have a tacit agreement to speak only of a single Algerian people, a united people, radiant in their new-found identity, a people that does not exist; they came to an agreement to say nothing about the pieds noirs evacuated in the space of a few weeks. They were an embarrassment; their very existence was uncomfortable; they were denied the right to History. When empires are transformed into nations it is important to erase those for whom there is no sense of belonging.
These, then, are the only bad g
uys in the film, the people we never see in close-up, those we see only from a distance, who are loudmouths, racists, lynchers of children, lynchers of old men, yelping, cowardly mutts who no longer have the right to exist. They are wrong simply to exist, the film maintains, history has left them by the wayside, abandoned corpses already beginning to rot. The tank that climbs the hill at Climat de France concludes the history, and the fact it is camouflaged shows what is happening. The fake French tank which is a real Soviet tank surrounded by extras dressed as French soldiers, who are actually Algerian soldiers oppressing genuine Algerians playing Algerians. But they are the true oppressed. Parked in the surrounding streets are the tanks of the ALN; they control the capital; they have seized power. This image, the tank at the bend in the road above Climat de France, could be used as a still and blown up into a poster bearing the slogan: The Tomb for the whole of the Algerian People. The Algerian people who had been either slaughtered or subjugated, twice in the same image. The Armée des frontières was seizing power; Gillo Pontecorvo was filming The Battle of Algiers in the deserted city; they were writing history. In this war which went so far as to divide individuals in their inmost self, in which betrayal was the driving force, two parties spoke clearly on behalf of all: one for France, the other for Algeria. And that is lying.
Cinema is a fiction; it is also a means of recording. The tanks had been there, the deserted streets had been there, the crowd of costumed extras had been there: reality was fixed on to the light-sensitive film and there it remained. When the screen went dark and the murmuring cinema was once again bright, when the lights were inverted, I jumped to my feet, rigid and furious; and she was worried by my anger, since she did not understand the cause. I would have liked to explain why a single image had riled me so, but I didn’t know how to say it in a few words. I would have had to start by explaining about the illustrated Grand Larousse, how I knew so much about tanks because of my hobbies as a kid, and then tell her Salagnon’s life story as he had told it to me and as I had understood it, and explain what has been going on in this country for the past forty years. People were leaving the cinema looking excited. They felt they had just seen a banned film, one that must be telling the truth since people had tried to suppress it. It’s likely that no one there saw the lie on the screen, because no one there knew anything about tanks.