Banned French Film to get Irish Premiere at Bloody Sunday Commemoration weekend
international |
anti-war / imperialism |
news report
Monday January 25, 2010 13:39
by Shane OCurry
Film dealing with massacre of Algerians to precede discussion on state massacres and the truth
Saturday 30th January will see the Irish premiere – indeed the first screening in the English-speaking world – of the 1962 film Octobre a Paris [October in Paris] by Jacques Panijel.
The film got its first and only screening in Paris in May 1962, immediately after which the film club where it was being shown was raided by Police and the film seized. Other 16 mm copies being screened around France were seized in the following days. Later in that summer Panijel did manage to get Octobre a Paris shown at the Venice Film Festival, but soon after the film would disappear, not to re-surface for over forty years.
The film is a first-hand account, using eye-witness testimonies and original footage, of the 17 October 1961 massacre in Paris and the events leading up to it.
Mass arrests of Algerians at Puteaux, 17 Oct 1961
On 17 October 1961, Algeria's National Liberation Front, the FLN, defied France's Emergency Powers Act and called tens of thousands of Algerian immigrant workers onto the streets of Paris, to take part in a peaceful demonstration calling for recognition of Algeria's right to self-determination and for peace negotiations with the FLN. French police, under the orders from President De Gaulle's appointed Police Prefect Maurice Papon, attacked marchers with calculated brutality. During this attack thousands were savagely beaten and dozens killed, having been thrown or forced to jump in the river Seine. Thousands were rounded up and interned, many in the same detention centres that the Nazis had held Jews in before transportation to Germany less than 2 decades before.
Inside the police stations Police Prefect Papon had given license to the Police and special Auxiliary units, specially recruited to deal with the “Algerian problem”, and a four-day orgy of torture, including water boarding, and assassination ensued. More bodies were dumped in the Seine, which ran red with blood. The French state, which to this day denies any responsibility, admitted 4 deaths at the time but now officially says that 40 people were killed. More credible estimates, from eyewitnesses, archives and the number of bodies found in the river and graves put the number at more than 200.
Former Paris Police Prefect Maurice Papon died in 2007, having been convicted in 1998 of crimes against humanity for ordering the transportation between 1942 and 44 of over 1600 French Jews to Germany from Bordeaux, where he had been Prefect of Police for the notorious Vichy regime. At his trial, a key witness against Papon was respected historian Jean-Luc Einaudi, who will be in Derry to discuss the 1961 massacre after the screening. Einaudi was able to prove in court that it was Papon who had directed the massacre of the 200+ Algerians in October 1961. This is the closest that the French state has come to acknowledging the massacre.
Director Jacques Panijel, an academic and former resistance fighter against the Nazis, began using film to document the French state’s use of torture and assassination after Paratroopers in Algeria had murdered his university colleague Maurice Audin in 1957. In 1962, after the raids, he is said to have had only two 16 mm copies of Octobre a Paris, one of which was kept in a ‘safe house’ in France. The second was sent with the FLN to a newly independent Algeria, where it was assumed it would be safe. Ironically, it is the latter one that ‘disappeared’. The first one re-surfaced in 2002 when it was shown as part of a historical series.
Octobre a Paris is being premiered in Derry, having been translated and subtitled for the first time, as part of the Bloody Sunday week-end commemorations. It is being screened at 10 am sharp on Saturday 30th January, in Seomra 2 at the Culturlann, Gt James Street.
It will be followed by a panel discussion involving Jean Luc Einaudi, the historian who has been championing the case for acknowledging the truth about the 17 October 1961 massacre, Andree Murphy from Relatives for Justice, on the 1971 massacre in Ballymurphy, Belfast, by British Paratroopers and Eamonn McCann, from the Bloody Sunday Trust, on Bloody Sunday.
Internees in sports stadium where the Nazis had previously processed Jews
Pont Saint Michel, right beside the central Police station in central Paris: "They drown Algerians Here"
Algerians being transported
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Comments (12 of 12)
Jump To Comment: 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1this is an excellent documentary which deals with the life and times of controversial revolutionary lawyer Jaques Verges , who went to Algeria to defend the first wave of resistance fighters who sprung up in Algeria from the 1950s onwards . In later years to the horror and dismay of many Verges acted as defence lawyer for the notorious nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie , the Butcher of Lyon . But the case Verges put for Barbies defence was very simple . Please tell us exactly what this man did to Frenchmen and women in Lyon which was in any manner different to what serving french authorities in modern France did to the inhabitants of Algeria years long after Barbie was put to flight . Torture ? executions ? collective punishments ? Mass murder ? Are these crimes only crimes when they are carried out against white Europeans ? It would seem so . Around a million died in Algeria . from the mid 50s until independence was won .
trailer here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KC_5pnbsWU
part one
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=612068603936940...72202
part 2
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=612068603936940...ew=3#
the events of Algeria gave rise to far reaching consequences accross the middle east and Europe . Notably the political career of the far right Jean Marie Le Pen , who served as a paratrooper in Algeria , the rise of the resistance philosophy of Franz Fanon which was instrumental in so many resistance movements globally in the 60s and 70s including those which sprung up in Europe itself . Nassers material support for Algerian independence fighters was also a major factor in the British and French decision to launch the ill fated Suez invasion , and the fall out and rutptures from that imperialist arrogance . This docuemntary is especially interesting because it tearfully reunites Verges with some of the women resistance fighters he defended in the very french jail were so many were tortured and slaughtered . The very crimes the french put Barbie on trial for .
also here is the seminal " Battle of Algiers" which deals with advent of the urban guerilla strategy of the FLN and the equally ruthless French measures which suppressed it .
in 12 segments
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1g010_battle-of-algiers-1
this film was also part of the induction training of the Black Panthers of the USA in the 1970s .
without wishing to contradict Shane the precedent was well and truly set in the small Algerian town of Setif and its surrounding villages and Hamlets on VE day and the weeks that followed in 1945 as Algerian natives gathered to celebrate the formal surrender of nazi Germany . On the unveling of an Algerian national flag by the procession the french gendarmerie opened fire en masse with machine guns and an orgy of violence followed . Thousands were mown down and hundreds killed in that initial shooting. Villages were bombed from the air and shelled from the sea by the French navy , despite Algeria supposedly being an integral part of the French republic . Women and children herded onto cliff rockfaces and thrown to their deaths . Horrific actions , rapes and mutilations which wouldnt be out of place in the agonies of the Congo took place across the district . French settler vigilantes even went into the jails and lynched hundreds of prisoners . When it was over a fortnight later the death toll is estimated at anywhere between 6,000 by the more polite french historians of today ( the intial french claim was 1020 in the Tubert report , their Widgery) and 45,000 dead by the Algerians themselves . As in this case the photogrpahic and film evidence was largely destroyed by the french authorities . Only a few seconds of the Setif footage remains in existence .
The commander of the french gendarmerie at the time claimed to his superiors " Ive just bought you ten years of peace" . Which was largely true so traumatic was the massacre for the Algerian population who didnt regain their composure until the mid 1950s . And barely a word was ever said about it in cosmopolitan Paris , who didnt even apologise until 2005 .
Just be there at 10 am
:)
do i need to book in advance for the film screening? or will there definitely be places if i turn up the on the 30th?
Gearoid. I'm giving it English subtitles at the moment. I'll have a look around and see if I can upload it onto anarchoTV or some similar website where it can be streamed. I'll also see about loading as a torrent file somewhere.
In all likelihood this will be after this coming week end.
Suggestions as to where I could upload it would be welcome. But I quite like anarchoTV.
Where can the film be got on the internet. Language options???
Puca. Yes. "Caché" is a good film, but as you say, it deals with 17 Oct '61 only obliquely.
And yes, France's republican "race blindness" is just a fig leaf, as anyone from the 18 century Haitian revolutionaries to the present day inhabitants of the 'banlieues' could tell you.
There have been about 20 or so films made in French alone that deal with this, most of them are documentaries, but at least 2 of them feature films, including "Caché" and one called "Meurtres pour mémoire".
I am just finishing subtitling this film at the moment. When it's done I'll throw it up on the net somewhere and stick a link to it here. It's grim as f**k, but well worth watching and the analysis at the end about the true nature of the [French] state is a bit dated in its terms, but basically accurate.
Touche Shane, the French Republic is a sham. They keep no statistics of the ethnic and demographic makeup of the state because "we are all French". It is therefore officially impossible to measure discrimination. It is akin to the US military refusing to record the number of civilians it kills in Iraq and Afghanistan. BTW, the MIchael Haneke film Cache (Hidden) deals obliquely with this massacre and repression.
It is undeniable, so you would hope that any historian worth her/his salt would acknowledge it in a book on the period - how it is acknowledged is another question.
For example, you could argue that Bloody Sunday was "acknowledged' by the Widgery whitewash.
The French state remains in a state of denial, both in terms of the facts, and of responsibility. The archives that Einaudi tried to access in order to present as evidence in the trial of Papon remain closed.
I would argue that to fully acknowledge responsibility for this crime against humanity would unravel the pretence that France is a "republic' and expose the seamless continuity between the collaborationist Vichy state and the IVth and Vth Republics.
It also goes to the heart of French race relations as it sets the precedents and the contexts for how the state has dealt with its "Arab' or "Muslim" minorities ever since.
This event is acknowledged now in most history books that cover the period. I have seen one other film, whose name, sadly, I cannot recall, which also covers this.
"
‘Set the Truth Free’
Today as people here, throughout Ireland and more generally those concerned with human rights and justice everywhere wait to hear what the second inquiry into the events of Bloody Sunday under Lord Saville have to say the families of the dead and surviving wounded raise the call for the British government to “Publish the report and Set the Truth Free”.
Last year we were informed of yet another delay to the publication of the inquiry’s report. At that time we were told it was to be late Autumn 09. This date has now passed and still we wait, more than 38 years on after the events it inquires into. Certainly for the relatives of the dead, many who have since died, and those of the wounded who are no longer with us justice delayed has been justice denied.
It is for this reason the centre point of this year’s rally will see representatives of the Bloody Sunday families and wounded address the gathering in a choreographed series of personal statements calling for the British Government to publish the report now and ‘Set The Truth Free’.
We say if peace is to take hold then it needs to be nurtured and tended with due attention and care and part of building that peace is being able to say with confidence that we are all now moving into a new and more just society. For that to truly happen justice needs to be done and needs to be seen to be done and it is within this context that Lord Saville urgently now needs to publish his findings into the events of Bloody Sunday.
The greatest contribution the British government can make to promoting peace and reconciliation with regard to the conflict in and about the north of Ireland is to come clean about the events of Bloody Sunday and ‘set the truth free’.
"
Poster for this year's w/e