Made by the Algerian film director Ahmed Rachedi during his management of the ONCIC (Office National pour le Commerce et l'Industrie Cinématographique) from 1967 to 1973, L'Opium et le bâton (directed in 1969 and released in 1971) chronicles the uprising of a rural peasant village located in the mountainous Berber region of Kabylia (Wilaya 3). The narrative itself begins when Dr Bashir Lazrak (Mustapha Kateb) decides to leave Algiers to fight amongst the moudjahiddine in the rural village of Tala Athmane (the centre of which is named Thala), located 15 km east of Tizi Ouzou in Kabylia. Joining his brother Ali (Sid Ali Kouiret), Bashir quickly learns of the difficulties experienced by the ALN in the face of the oppressive colonial forces which preside over the region, ruling through the twin tactics of “hard” violence (le bâton) and “soft” persuasion (l’opium). The trajectory of the film thus revolves around the gradual revolt of the community through increasingly frequent instances of violent insurrection led by the nationalist hero Ali (and involving a significant cameo from Brahim Haggiag), who is finally shot after being captured in the penultimate scene. The narrative concludes with the complete destruction of the village by colonial forces.
Influence: literary realism, Soviet cinema and Hollywood spectacle
This chapter has previously illustrated how post-independence Algerian cinema appropriates often surprising transnational cinematographic techniques and
iconographic tropes in its representation of rural revolution (Soviet cinema and colonial discourse in Le Vent des Aurès, the classic Western in Les Hors-la-loi). To some extent,
L’Opium et le bâton differs from these two works by instead drawing from the work of the Algerian Francophone (Berber) writer Mouloud Mammeri, whose eponymous 1965 novel provides a narrative and aesthetic blueprint for the film. Certainly this
appropriation seems applicable to the ways in which Rachedi’s use of realist formal techniques mirror the ‘brutal realism’ employed by Mammeri in order to document the everyday existence of a rural community living under colonization (Poole 2013: 189).
In particular, the film appears to support dominant historiographical accounts of the later stages of the conflict, when FLN leaders took the strategic decision to shift the revolution to the rural areas of Algeria (including the Aurès Mountains and Kabylia) after the politico-military failure of The Battle of Algiers (1956-1957) (Revere 1973:
486). As in the film, during this stage in the revolution ALN fighters would often descend from the djebel (mountain) in small groups in order to conduct a number of dangerous and often violent missions; destroying colonial infrastructure (power pylons, train tracks, army convoys), assassinating pro-French sympathisers (including the infamous figure of the caïd [see Les Hors-la-loi]) and ambushing ‘the isolated outposts of French SAS officers’ before vanishing into the night’ (Horne 2006: 330). L’Opium et le bâton also mirrors the French response to this shift in operations (overseen, in reality, by General Maurice Challe and his ‘Operation Binoculars’) through the ruthless
behaviour of the French officer Delécluze (Jean-Claude Bercq) and other military officials. One of the most significant scenes in the film occurs when colonial forces decide to blow up the olive trees located on the peripheries of the village in order to expose the ALN fighters supposedly hiding in this area. This scene is important for a number of reasons; if only as it forms a historically accurate representation of how colonial forces targeted the indigenous landscape – including livestock and farm and forest lands – as part of the tactic of ‘pacification’ that will reach its violent apotheosis with the destruction of the entire village at the end of the film (Horne 2006: 336; see also Knauss 1977: 65). In terms of formal techniques, this scene is also significant as an example of Soviet montage (see above for a discussion of how this is used in Le Vent des Aurès). In accordance with the rules of montage, Farès thus establishes a simple visual dialectic: between the trauma of the rural community (who are framed
individually using a series of short close-up shots), and the origins of this trauma (the desecration of the indigenous landscape framed using medium and wide-angle shots).
Interestingly, a third element in this dialectic is then introduced when the camera shifts to the figure of Tayeb, who is implicitly defined as responsible for the trauma of the community (as opposed to the colonial forces). As I will later show, this choice of shot
is arguably symptomatic of a larger atmosphere of suspicion within the narrative
regarding the allegedly neo-colonial corruption of the urban bourgeoisie. I will also later illustrate how the process of urban to rural migration visualised at the beginning of the narrative acts as a symbolic antidote to this corruption.
Viola Shafik has also drawn attention to the ways in which the film includes certain ‘mythological’ and ‘commercial’ elements devoid from Mammeri’s largely realist text and instead characteristic of the conventions of Hollywood cinema (2007:
30, 174). Of particular note is the battle-sequence which takes place towards the end of the film. During this long extended sequence (completely absent from Mammeri’s novel),fidayine (ALN militants) including Dr Bashir, Ali and Bougeb descend from the djebel in order to ambush a French military convoy on one of the winding streets located high up in the Kabyle mountains. After a brief although violent spell of active gunfight, Dr Bashir is forced to abort his mission due to injury, whilst Ali and Bougeb fight on, evading an airstrike orchestrated by French forces before they are both captured and eventually killed after being paraded in front of their fellow Talaens (see following section for a discussion regarding the representation of martyrdom and mourning in this sequence). What is immediately apparent from these bombastic scenes is that they neither draw from French film history (in which Algeria was represented as a passive landscape devoid of conflict), nor from the embryonic Algerian national cinema, which had previously depicted the revolution as allegorical quest (Le Vent des Aurès), mythical pre-war resistance (Les Hors-la-loi), or, in the case of Pontecorvo’s Italo-Algerian co-production, La Bataille d’Alger (1966), urban, guerrilla warfare (see chapter four, section two). Instead, these scenes appear to draw from Hollywood
representations of World War Two, for example, Sands of Iwo Jima (Dwan 1949), Halls of Montezuma (Milestone 1951) and D-Day the Sixth of June (Koster 1956), all of which represent military conflict as a form of Manichean spectacle, between a number of heroic warriors bound together by fraternity and blood (in the Hollywood tradition this is the allied forces, whilst in L’Opium et le bâton it is the ALN militants); and an impersonal and ultimately weak opponent (represented by the Nazi forces and colonial officers, respectively). With this in mind, L’Opium et le bâton appears to share certain parallels with Mark Robson’s 1966 Lost Command, a Hollywood blockbuster which reiterates similar militaristic iconography in its depiction of French conscripts
‘pacifying’ Algerian rebels in the Aurès Mountains.92 As Lotfi Maherzi claims of
post-92 Although apparently set in the Aurès Mountains, Lost Command was actually shot in Spain.
independence Algerian cinema, ‘la démarche sociologique empruntée par les cinéastes s’appuie sur “le spectacle-récit”’ (1980: 278).
From urban to (revolutionary) rural space
In its representation of rural revolution, Rachedi’s film mirrors a number of trends in the pre and post-independence nationalist imaginary.One of the major figures which
“haunts” the narrative is the philosopher and revolutionary cultural theorist Frantz Fanon, whose status as a cult nationalist figure was appropriated by the one-party state (and thus the state-endorsed cinema) in the immediate aftermath of independence (see for example, the creation of Frantz Fanon Day in 1963 to mark the first anniversary of his death). The author of a number of anti-colonial/nationalist works, including Peau noire, masques blancs (1952), L'An V de la révolution algérienne (later translated as A Dying Colonialism) (1959), and Les damnés de la terre (1961), Fanon had been
instrumental in advocating the Algerian Revolution within the Francophone intellectual elite – primarily through his close relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre with whom he shared a theoretical approach combining phenomenology and existentialism and an interest in the politics of identity and nationhood. Furthermore, Fanon’s work was important in that it involved a powerful spatial dimension which preceded the so-called
‘spatial-turn’ in European social theory by at least a decade (see, for example, the work of Foucault, Lefebvre, de Certeau, and Virilio et al). This spatial element is particularly applicable to Fanon’s conception of a pure rural rebellion ‘fought by the peasantry [for example Ali] to regain land taken by the French’ (Kielstra 1978: 5).
In reality, this conception of the revolution was only partly true. Whilst certainly fought by combatants of rural/peasant origin, the war was nevertheless orchestrated and led by representatives of the recently urbanized petty bourgeoisie, frequently former minor officials and paid employees (see also Perinbam 1973: 428; Revere 1973: 486-487). However, in the post-colonial era, the one-party-state would appropriate Fanon’s idealized notion of the rural peasantry (as a method of legitimizing the new socialist sector in agriculture), despite the fact that it was, to some extent, a myth. It is this quasi-myth that is evident in Rachedi’s film (as a project funded by the state); primarily through its rural setting, but also during the numerous scenes in which the whole community is forced to gather in front of the colonial offices in order to ascertain information regarding the ALN members fighting in the maquis. Despite the threats made by officer Delécluze and the translator, Tayeb, the villagers frustrate the wishes of
the colonial officials through their staunch silence. It is for this reason that the film has been described as dramatising ‘un “TOUT” qui résiste […] ce tout c’est le village, donc l’Algérie’ (Aissaoui 1984: 78 cited in Austin 2012: 55). This observation is equally applicable to Les Hors-la-loi, Le Vent des Aurès and Lakhdar-Hamina’s later work Chronique des années de braise (1975), all of which feature a similar
monumentalisation and mythologisation of the rural peasantry. Rachedi’s representation of the Kabyle community also chimes with Fanon’s description of the rural peasantry as a gentle and supportive network of individuals, each willing to protect the ‘militant nationalist [for example, Dr Bashir] who decides to throw his lot with the country people instead of playing hide-and-seek with the police in urban areas’ (Fanon 2001 [1961]: 126). Finally, L’Opium et le bâton reflects Fanon’s argument that, in the
postindependence period, Algeria could prevent the neo-colonization of the postcolonial nation-state in facilitating bipartite ‘socio-spatial alliances’, between those associated with the urban ‘bourgeoisie’ (urban government officials, technocrats, Third-Worldist intellectuals) and the rural communities (Kipfer 2007: 703). Without such a broad socio-spatial alliance, Fanon prophetically feared that postcolonial regimes were likely to descend into warped, neocolonial caricatures governed by overblown administrative centres and antidemocratic centralism. It is for this reason that he claims that ‘the leading members of the party ought to avoid the capital as if it had the plague. They ought, with some few exceptions, to live in the country districts. The centralization of all activity in the city ought to be avoided’ (2001 [1961]: 126). In the film itself,
Fanon’s fears are crystallised in the figure of Tayeb (the pro-French translator played by Rouiched), who appears ‘frustré et sadique mais également fasciné par la puissance de la France’ (Maherzi 1980 : 261). This observation is also applicable to the similarly demonized figure of the caïd in Les Hors-la-loi.93
3.1.5 Conclusion
93 It is important to note, however, that these national “traitors” are conspicuously absent from Le Vent des Aurès, which casts the Algerian population in unequivocally positive terms. This monolithic portrayal of Algeria is arguably linked to the state’s early desire to cleanse the nation of any elements that could be hypothetically associated with Algeria’s colonial past, notably colonial officials (for example le caïd), but also women who were influenced by (or who were perceived as being influenced by) European feminism, for example Assia Djebar (see chapter four, section two).
This analysis has tackled the question of narrative space in post-colonial Algerian cinema. In the first part of this section, we saw how images of spatial transgression in Lakhdar-Hamina’s film act in order to subvert the representational logic of colonial discourse, which traditionally confined Algerian women to a state of sub-erotic imprisonment. However, the radical potential of this imagery is also undercut by the fact that, firstly, the film makes no mention of the ways in which women were subtly coerced back into the private sphere in the immediate aftermath of decolonization (a theme that would only be addressed twelve years later with Assia Djebar’s La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua), but also in that the central female protagonist remains to some extent spatially restricted by her veil (or, more specifically, headscarf), a form of clothing that arguably functions metonymically for domestic, spatial segregation
(Austin 2012: 62 [see next section for a more in-depth discussion of the act of veiling]).
In this respect, patterns of narrative – and what could be termed corporeal space – are unquestionably linked to the conservative sexual politics of the film. As for Les Hors-la-loi, I illustrated how Farès’s narrative defines the post-colonial nation-state as a Manichean dichotomy (between the heroic maquis and the weak and ineffective
colonial town), as such arguably reiterating the binary logic of colonial discourse under a different guise. In the following section of this chapter, I will show how Farès’s narrative is split along another binary, in associating men with the public space of the houma (or the Berber thajma’th), whilst relegating women to a state of passivity in the domestic realm (the hurma-haram). In this sense, spatial patterns will again prove instrumental in the subtle gendered conservatism which characterises the film. In the final part of this section we saw how L’Opium et le bâton mirrors the work of Frantz Fanon, firstly in representing the Algerian rural peasantry in monolithic and mythical terms, but also in depicting socio-spatial alliances as crucial to the success of the revolution and construction of the post-colonial nation-state. In the following section of this chapter, I will explore how Rachedi’s film also mirrors the Fanonian notion of the New Man by depicting men in terms of a sublimated virility masquerading as heroism.