At first glance Avoir 20 ans dans les Aurès looks like it is a film about the war in Algeria, especially to the people who lived through it, some more than others. Both the script and René Vautier’s personality lead us to think about it. […] On one hand, even if many people in France on both the left and right want to forget about it, it is never useless to reflect on events of such seriousness and try to analyse both their cause and the way they manifest themselves. On the other hand, and this seems more important to me, the main subject of the film goes far beyond the war in Algeria and the story that it tells, even if it is genuine […]. War is a mechanism with its own specific purpose. It implies an out of the ordinary life for the people in it (needless to say, making an exception for professionals), with the rituals, affection and hate that have nothing in common with the so-called civilised world. From the moment when you accept to participate in it, you take the risk of individual degradation, an even bigger risk because we are ignorant of everything in that world and do not know how to measure it. Entering in that system, we accept that we will be absorbed by the machine without knowing to what extent it will destroy us. This is what Vautier’s film demonstrates, repeating the song that accompanies it, like a leitmotiv: “Fous pas les pieds dans cette merde, sinon t’y passeras jusqu’au cou” (Do not tread in that shit, or you will end up with it up to your neck).

The idea that possessing a mature political conscience allows us to maintain our own original purity is an illusion that we willingly nurture before mobilisation. Vatier also breaks this illusion by, instead of choosing the usual criminals, murderers and psychologically disturbed individuals as heroes (reassuring the spectator by eliminating any identification), choosing conscious, militant, pacifist and selfassured individuals who, nevertheless, do not hesitate to commit murder, rape, torture, because this is the way things are. After all, it is exactly what the lieutenant, who is a trained paratrooper, will explain: “I did not need to force you or indoctrinate you, from the moment when you formed a homogenous group, roads which lead you to attack your enemy and act in this way are also formed” (I am quoting very vaguely, but this is the gist of what he said).

François Chevassu, “La Revue du cinéma – Image et son”, n. 262, June-July 1972