They reappeared one day. Who, they? And also, what, do they? What? Film coils. But not only. People. And stories.
Because there had been a man, his name was Yann Le Masson. With a few others, very few, he had been from those who helped the Algerian people to conquer, at the cost of immense suffering, their independence. Independence is neither freedom nor happiness, but that is their business, to those who fought for what they wanted and deserved.
French citizen, Yann Le Masson has made his duty as a citizen, helping those who fight for their legitimate citizenship. Director and cameraman, he did it among others by filming, when filming could help. It mainly earned him trouble in his country.
Long later, the age came, the same Yann Le Masson lived on a barge. And one day, therefore, he found boxes of dandruff, placed on the bridge of his floating house moored on a quay in the Rhône. What was on these dandruff was he who filmed it. Long, long before.
He had almost forgot that he had recorded these faces of young women, released from French jails in April 1962, just after the signing of the Evian agreements (March 18, 1962). Incarcerated in Rennes prison, these independence fighters in their country, imprisoned, certain tortured, had just been brought back to Paris by their French support, including Yann Le Masson, before returning to Algeria. During a meeting in an apartment in the capital, he filmed them.
Flag passage
And then the films have disappeared. They too, these young women have “disappeared”, at least in the sense that none has become a visible figure in their country, unlike many men who participated in the fight for independence.
And now, as in a tale or a song, they came back from the past. But he was too old now to do something, despite the desire he had.
Fortunately, as in a tale or a song, there was someone else, younger. This one had just made a film on the cinema people-Année Vautier, Olga Poliakoff, Cécile Decugis, Pierre Clément … and of course Yann Le Masson-who had in these years helped the struggle of the Algerians,
Algeria, other looks (2004). This one, who is called Raphaël Pillosio, director and producer of documentaries, took up the torch.
And here is his film today, this disturbing object that results from it, on the borders of historian research and the almost mythological legend. Because the reappeared boxes contained the images, but not the sounds. Not the voices of these young women, around twenty, gathered in Paris in the joy of their fresh liberation and that one feels so close to each other with the fights waged, including together in the prison.
There are men too, two, in the background: we will not know who they are or what they do there, they do not intervene. They speak. They also laugh, they look at each other, take themselves by the arm or in the shoulders. We perceive that sometimes speech is vehement or murmuring, voluble or restraint. In the presence of these juvenile, luminous faces of 1962 and in the silence imposed by the loss of sound recording, unfolds an imaginary, a memory, a thousand and one stories.
Images of the past, investigation in the present
These very beautiful black and white plans, in group or insulating a face, to which no voice is replaced, in return receive attention and a condition absent. Let’s say, a possibility of projection which intensifies the relationship of any spectator, of any spectator to those people who are very little known.
Not that ignorance is held for virtue. To re -register these faces, these bodies, these presences and the stories of which they carry in their context, Raphaël Pillosio inquired. In France, he found people who had attended the shooting and, in Algeria, almost sixty years later, some of those who had been filmed: Salima Sahraoui-Bouaziz, Zhora Driff-Bitat, Malika Ouzegane, Fatouma Kiouane…
There are those who remember well, those who barely remember, those who do not want or cannot remember. Those who are dead or that we do not find; And what we can know about what has happened to them since.
Those who speak do not tell their war, they tell what they had dreamed of, they tell (a little) what happened to them afterwards. The tomorrows of what presented itself as a revolution are so often bitter.
How then not to think about this other film, also returned from the past and released in France after decades, at the beginning of May, Leila and the wolves Lebanese Heiny Srour? In another context, he said, otherwise, women’s commitment to Arab liberation movements and their instrumentalization by men, their companions of struggle.
This is one of the dimensions, but not at all the only Words they had one daywhich flourishes in multiple ways of relating to the past and the present, to the historical events and to the echoes which they awaken today, romantic, joyful, disturbing, melancholy, vibrant vitality, inhabited of ghosts, regrets, pride, sororal attention, hopes and despair.
Of course comes the moment, watching the film, when the request is born that someone comes to read on the lips of these women who, the day of their release, the day of the release of their country, the day which was to do justice to all those who had not returned, had these words that we will not hear. Raphaël Pillosio is right to delay this moment of translation, decryption, which will ultimately come.
What is the result – you have to see the film for know -how – but the fruitful beauty of Words they had one day It does not depend on it. The images at the time, the absence of the words that we see these young women pronounce, the words and the silences of today populate the film of their multiple powers of invocation. And that’s what matters.
