NAROD SE POKREĆE / Peuple en marche

France
1963. / 44’

Directed by :
René Vautier

Written by:
Philippe Sollers

Distribution:
CINEMATHEQUE DE BRETAGNE - Gwarez Filmoù
Responsable du service diffusions culturelles
2, avenue Clemenceau - BP 81011
29210 Brest cedex 1 - FRANCE
Tel. (33) 02 98 43 53 55
Fax. (33) 02 98 43 38 97
claude.arnal@cinematheque-bretagne.fr
www.cinématheque-bretagne.fr

René Vautier, born in 1928, an exceptional personality of radically engaged cinema, French film anarchist and ‘the father of Algerian Cinema’, initiated a collective film of resistance and counter-information in Algeria: ciné-pops (Cinéma Populaire) Peuple en marche, super-individual ‘fusion polyphony’ about the first year of Algerian independence and liberation from French colonialism. Collective images form polyphonic structure, the permanent ethical and creative principle of Vautier’s factuality: necessity of opposing, dialogisation of images on the territory of resistance and conflicts.
Akin to soviet revolutionary forms (by Vertov, Eisenstein, Medvedkin) and a part of international current of political documentary filmmaking and movement of the Third Cinema, Vautier believes in necessity of producing film images on behalf of those the who don’t have the right on images and that the role of a man in a powerful country is to be with the weakest, the opposite. He participated in the work of the Groups Medvedkine after 1968, an initiative by Chris Marker who gathered many film activists, inspired by Medvedkin’s agit-trains and education of workers so that they could describe their life and work conditions by themselves. His testimonies from Algeria were subjected to draconian censorship, forbidden and literally destroyed, while Vautier was imprisoned, condemned, engage in hunger strike. “I believe that these films were valuable even to people who fought against them, who did everything so that nobody could ever see them.”

His first film Afrique 50 (1950), the first anticolonial film, was commissioned by French League for education and it was suppose to emphasize instructive mission in colonies. In 1997, he received a letter from Ministry of Foreign Affairs, saying: “We send you a copy of the film, which was prohibited 46 years ago, which cost you one year in prison at that time, and now is distributed in more than 50 countries, under the aegis of our Ministry. A commission declared that it was useful for the prestige of France to show, by this film, that in our county in the 50s there was feeling called anticolonialist.”