French director Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Petit Soldat (The Little Soldier) is the Classic Tuesdays film which will be shown on Tuesday at 6pm at the National Gallery, Castellani House, Vlissengen Road.
The public is cordially invited to attend this event and admission is free, a press release from Castellani House said.
Le Petit Soldat was Godard’s second film, the release said, and its explosive subject matter was the war of independence the colony of Algeria was waging against France (1954-62).
The film raises the use of torture by both sides in the conflict – represented by the two lead actors, Anna Karina and Michel Subor, who fall in love and find their loyalties compromised. This caused the film to be banned by the French government until 1963, after Algeria had obtained its independence.
The film will be introduced by anthropologist Christopher Carrico, who is quoted as saying that the political and ethical questions Le Petit Soldat raises forces us to ask about terrorism and anti-terrorism, and “are as relevant today, in the hour of American empire, as they were 50 years ago when Godard made the film in the era of a dying French colonialism.”
Godard has long been recognized as the most influential, albeit highly controversial film director of French cinema in the second half of the twentieth century, who along with François Truffaut and others formed the New Wave in French cinema.