Visibility, speech and disembodiment in Jacques Panijel’s Octobre à Paris

Octobre à Paris (1961) was a clandestine documentary executed after one of the most notorious yet occulted state massacres in French history, conducted after approximately 20–30,000 Algerians had flooded the streets of Paris in order to protest against police persecution. In existing scholarship on the film, critics have generally tended to historicise Octobre à Paris in largely politically progressive terms, as a rare example of anti-colonial cinema produced during a particularly stringent period in the history of French film. As the first part of this article will argue, this interpretation is not without justification, especially in relation to Panijel’s arguably pioneering use of the ‘masked interview’ (an interview technique predicated on a conception of the auteur-as-absence). Yet, as we will see in the second part of this article, such a politically progressive reading of Octobre à Paris is also undermined by the non-diegetic authorial commentary that appears in the final act of the film. Controversially, it is Panijel rather than his Algerian subjects who has the last word on the massacre.