Jon Mirsalis on Piano. Commissioned by the Algerian colonial government and the Société des Grands Films Historiques to commemorate the centenary of the "pacification" of Algeria by France, Le Bled skirts rather than confronts that dubious subject for a cross between a Douglas Fairbanks adventure and a Western. This is set against some remarkable historical documentary footage for which the film is best known (though never shown, even in France). Two young people from metropolitan France, both having come to Algeria to inherit a new life from their older, more hardened pioneer relatives, fall in love, to the dismay of an insidious cousin who has designs on the girl. Stay with this shallow story for the camelback gazelle hunt through the desert, which is as startling in cinematic terms as it is in climactic terms (looking forward to the hunt in Rules of the Game) and you have yourself a film experience-one which Antoine de Baecque in Cahiers du cinéma reminisced, "rebounds (in the memory) as a film of pure fantasy, almost a phantasm of a film."