Matthew Croombs — The Colonizer Who Refuses: René Vautier and the Horizons of Solidarity

This talk analyzes René Vautier’s cinema with the FLN in view of two broad historical problems: the mutation of one form of cinema into another, and the emergent image of the Algerian people as a collective.

Part one examines how Vautier’s cinema in Algeria harks back to the political modernisms of the 1920s and 1930s as it presages the third cinemas of the late 1960s. In analyzing the trajectory from Algérie en flammes (1958) to the omnibus film, Peuple un marche (1963), which both stemmed from direct negotiations with the FLN, I show how Vautier re-routes the key thematic motif of this earlier iteration of the international solidarity documentary—namely, the triangulation of the people, the military, and the landscape—into the context of anti-colonial, guerilla warfare. Algérie en flammes and Peuple un marche are revealed as films of major historical significance, insofar as they formalize a Fanonian-inspired model of nation-building, in which the unstoppable movement of the people goes hand in hand with a figurative reimagining of the landscape.

Part two, however, opens Vautier’s work in Algeria onto a broader web of political relations. For throughout his time in Algeria, Vautier continued to frame the Algerian cause as an extension of French communist values, and thus remained out of joint with both the conditions of the Algerian peasantry and the internal dynamics of the FLN. Vautier’s films would themselves become objects of internecine warfare between rival factions of the Algerian leadership. By examining this discord between the utopian history depicted in Vautier’s documentaries and the fragmented history of these documentaries, I position the Breton filmmaker as a profound example of what Albert Memmi called, “the colonizer who refuses,” a figure who confronts the horizons of solidarity.

BIO

Matthew Croombs is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication, Media and Film at the University of Calgary. His work focuses on the intersection between documentary film, political modernism, and anti-colonialism and has been published in Discourse, Cinema Journal, Third Text, The Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and Screen. At the moment, he is completing a manuscript entitled: Cinema Against State Terror: Documentary Aesthetics and the Algerian War.