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19.3.04
 
The Battle of Algiers, cont.
Contributed by Charles T. Downey at 1:36 PM | Link to this article
In an article (The Pentagon's Film Festival: A primer for The Battle of Algiers, August 27, 2003) for Slate, Charles Paul Freund gave a long and thoughtful response to this news. He answers a series of self-posed questions, including these thoughts in response to this one, "What does any of this have to do with Baghdad?":
Terror. The Mideast learned the efficacy of insurgent terror from Algeria. The PLO, Hamas, and other groups are indebted to the Algerian strategy of so-called "people's war." Its lessons are now apparent in Iraq, too. Yet the film treats the Algiers terror campaign as a failure: its later bombings and shootings are made to appear increasingly desperate and strategically pointless. "Wars aren't won with terrorism," says one key revolutionary. "Neither wars nor revolutions." But that depends at least in part on how the other side reacts to terror, whether the other side is France in Algeria or the United States in Iraq. Wars may not be won with terror, but they can be lost by reacting ineffectively to it.
Now, thanks to an article (Pontecorvo and the rebirth of 'Battle of Algiers', March 17) by Elisabetta Povoledo in the International Herald Tribune, you can learn something about what the film's director thinks about all this attention:
When Gillo Pontecorvo heard that the Pentagon had organized a screening of his 1965 film "The Battle of Algiers" for a group of military and civilian experts last summer, he said he found it a "little strange." If anything, he conceded, his movie about the bloody uprisings that led to Algeria's eventual independence from France in 1962 was useful to "give an idea of the horror of the situation," not necessarily to teach Guerrilla Warfare 101 to a roomful of strategists pondering the current war in Iraq.

"I don't think that any film can teach anything," Pontecorvo said. "I think that the most that 'The Battle of Algiers' can do is teach how to make cinema, not war." The Pentagon viewing—to which participants were invited via a flier declaring, "How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas"—came a few months before the re-release of the film in a new 35mm print. "Perhaps the reason they've dusted it off is Iraq," Pontecorvo said in an interview in his Rome apartment. "But action and love always work in the movies. They never get old and this is above all an action film."
To be sure, the movie shows some things that are horrible to watch, but it does so in an objective and unbiased way, creating the same sense of revulsion for the torture of Algerian informants by the French army as for the terrorists murdering civilians by placing bombs in crowded restaurants. When it was first released, of course, The Battle of Algiers was banned in France, a place where the collective guilt for national atrocities is assuaged only by denial of their existence. However, the tactics used by the French army in Algeria have been the subject of national debate in France for the past several years. In 2000, a group of intellectuals made a national call for a full investigation and public disclosure of the torture practiced in Algeria.

The following year, an 83-year-old French Army general, Paul Aussaresses, broke the code of silence and published a book, Services spéciaux, Algérie 1955–1957 (that's a link to amazon.fr; here it is, translated into English), about his experiences in Algeria as the Army's Coordinator of Information Services, where he served under General Massu, the cold-hearted leader of the French crackdown depicted as General Mathieu in The Battle of Algiers. (Sadly, Aussaresses is not a whistleblower interested in bringing the Army's crimes to light: he apparently describes his involvement in the "torture, summary execution of suspects sometimes disguised as suicides, and massacre of civilians" with pride in having acted as any dedicated soldier would.) You can find out a lot more about this issue, if you read French, at La torture pendant la guerre d'Algérie, from the Association Internationale des Droits de l'Homme in Geneva.

Not to harp on the same string (see post on March 15, about the Academy missing out on the chance to recognize The Triplets of Belleville and Destino), but this film was nominated for an Oscar in 1966 as Best Foreign Language Film. It didn't win.

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