The Atlantic has been aptly described as a river; the earth as a contracting ball. Thus when a tribe of primitives suddenly surfaces in a magazine or a movie, it comes first as a shock and then as a consolation. The century is not quite so pervasive as it seemed; somewhere, time has stopped.
For the villagers in Ramparts of Clay, yesterday, today and tomorrow are one. The muezzin's chant, the shepherd's flock, the inexorable rhythms of the desert—all seem to have been delivered whole from the verses of the Koran. In Director Jean-Louis Bertucelli's first feature, that isolation has the dimension of tragedy. Though France has granted Tunisia her independence and social change has been promised, the citizenry are still degraded, the colonial mind is still at work.
Bertucelli begins with an excerpt from Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth. It makes the not very unique observation that bourgeois influence does not vanish when the bourgeoisie depart. Fortunately Bertucelli then propels language into gesture and diurnal life into dramatic text. Ramparts of Clay has but one vital incident. A company official travels a great distance to pay the quarriers of the village. The wages are arbitrarily halved; the men go on a sit-down strike. Soldiers are called in, ringing the strikers who cannot join their families a few hundred yards away. Food is denied them, then sleep, then peace. Still the men remain as immobile as desert rocks.
In the end, the functionary surrenders, calls off the troops and moves out. The pocket revolution has succeeded, and now the village sinks back into its archaic life. Only one girl, Rima (Leila Schenna), cannot return to the old ways. Somehow she has responded to the clamorous century outside the village walls. In a galvanic move, she runs away into the parched land, farther, farther, until she becomes an imperceptible part of it.
Bleached by Sun. Such elementary symbolism has a superficial resemblance to primitive art. Actually Ramparts of Clay is one of the most sophisticated protest films ever made. Like The Battle of Algiers, it is a re-creation of an actual incident, recalled in a spirit of quiet fury. Working with only two professional actors, the maiden and the official. Bertucelli persuaded the inhabitants of a remote village—who had never seen a motion-picture camera—to perform their lives without a trace of self-consciousness or restraint. As a result, watching Ramparts of Clay is like looking at the sun—almost unendurable for long. The ritual slaughter of a ram, for instance, becomes a cataract of blood and pain.
There is not enough dialogue in the film to cover a gravestone; nonetheless the folk chants commemorating the dead fall on the ear like sonnets, the ululations of the women like a biblical plague. Adapted from a sociological study, Ramparts seems to have begun as a propaganda movie. It has succeeded, but not as intended. Its politics have been diverted by the villagers and bleached by the African sun. If this evocative work manages to "sell" anything, it is the idea of Jean-Louis Bertucelli, 28, as a director of fresh and major significance.