…The Battle of Algiers
As the moving finger of chaos hovered over Mali and Algeria
last week, I took another look at Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 masterpiece, The
Battle of Algiers.
I am somewhat puzzled that this movie is not at the heart of
the Zero Dark Thirty debate.
Because in many ways, perhaps intentionally, ZDT is the
mirror-image doppelganger of Algiers.
Both of them effectively employ an objective documentary
style to depict a brutal, successful exercise in counter-terrorism.
And both of them deal with torture.
In The Battle of Algiers, torture works! Right away! In the very first scene! Short-circuiting any need for liberal
handwringing or right-wing defensiveness for the next two hours of the film!
The film opens with Colonel Mathieu, the supremely able, intelligent, and ruthless commander of the French
counter-terror effort in Algiers against the Algerian National Liberation Front
or FLN, striding in to confront a scrawny, scraggly, beaten little man
surrounded by a crowd of sturdy, confident French soldiers in crisp camo (in an
interesting irony, Pontecorvo revealed that the “soldiers” were cast from students
from Kabilye—an Algerian district known for its light-skinned Berbers--
at the local university).
“He’s come clean,” a soldier tells the general and, sure
enough, in the very next scene the troops are outside the refuge of FLN leader
Ali la Pointe, setting in motion the final confrontation that will 1) serve as
the framing for a movie-length flashback depicting the FLN’s struggle in
Algiers against the French and 2) signal the virtual annihilation of the FLN as
a significant force inside the city.
The big difference, between the two films, of course, is
perspective.
In Algiers, we are immersed in the perspective of the Algerian
revolutionaries. Even in the first
scene, before anyone is introduced or anything explained, we witness the misery
and anguish of the distraught informant, his chest disfigured by the flame of a
blowtorch, who, as he is clad in French camo to serve as Judas goat by the cheery
soldiers, runs to the window and cries out in despair before knuckling under to
a soldier’s matter-of-fact persuasion: “Do you really want another round?”
In Zero Dark Thirty, the emphasis is on the determination,
forbearance, and the frustration of the torturers, especially Jason Clarke, as
they struggle to crack the Bin Laden case.
Here I must thank ZDT director Karen Bigelow for seconding
my previous assertion that she has a fascination with torture as a transgressive test of heroism (for
the torturer), not as a police tactic.
In a statement she gave to the LA Times as part of her effort to repair
and advance the prospects of ZDT as best-picture Oscar bait, Ms. Bigelow
stated:
Bin Laden wasn't defeated by superheroes zooming down from the sky; he was defeated by ordinary Americans who fought bravely even as they sometimes crossed moral lines, who labored greatly and intently, who gave all of themselves in both victory and defeat, in life and in death, for the defense of this nation.
Unfortunately for Ms. Bigelow and ZDT, I think that most
people—including most Oscar voters—reflexively sympathize with the torturee,
rather than the torturer.
And that is what gives Pontecorvo’s film a great deal of its
power. It immerses us in a world—and shows
us the faces and motivations--of people who do things that can and do get them
tortured. (One can only thank the movie
gods that the filmmakers did not—or could not—follow through with their
original plan of parachuting Paul Newman into the script as a western
journalist in order to give Western audience somebody to identify with.)
Given America’s foreign policy obsession with the Muslim
world and Arab politics over the last decade, it is surprising that The Battle
of Algiers doesn’t come up more often.
There was a mini-boomlet of interest in 2003, when the
Pentagon announced a screening to educate officers on the dynamics of urban
counterinsurgency during the difficulties in Iraq. And there was a flurry of showings on the 50th
anniversary of Algerian independence last year.
But the film is pretty much MIA.
I guess it has something to do with the Marxist politics of
Pontecorvo.
Anti-communist conservatives presumably hate TBOA for its sympathetic portrayal of anti-Western lumpen militancy.
But it certainly made modern neo-liberals uncomfortable that
the Black Panthers and the Weather
Underground reportedly screened TBOA as a training film (presumably skipping
over the parts where the militant organization is totally destroyed by The Man)
and, perhaps, inspired efforts to consign the film to the end-of-history
rubbish heap as a piece of naïve agitprop.
Therefore, I detect certain anxious efforts to disparage the
film’s impact and its relevance with derisive sneering along the lines of “Well,
your precious people’s revolution didn’t turn out so great in the end, now did
it?”
Certainly, the Algerian revolution turned to sh*t with the
usual alacrity—even during the period depicted in the film there were
apparently some factional rubouts and after independence there was a great deal
of unpleasant fighting between rival armed groups and a quick resort to authoritarian
rule, punctuated with the suspension of the second round of democratic
elections in 1991 to prevent a victory by the Islamist Party, the FIS.
However, the hope and enthusiasm depicted at the close of
the movie—when, in 1962, two years after the French win the “Battle of Algiers”,
the French occupation crumbled before a wave of national unrest and
insurrection originating beyond the capital—was real.
And Pontecorvo does not shy away from showing the bloody
dynamics of the struggle from the FLN side as well as the French side. French torture practices are shown in a brief
montage including hanging, electric shock, burning, and our old friend,
waterboarding (for a devastating, in-depth look at how the torture regime in Algeria worked, and didn't work, read Dr. Darius Rejali's 2004 piece in Salon). But the centerpiece of
the film is the horrific simultaneous terror bombing of a bar, a milk bar
filled with teenagers and a baby, and the downtown Air France office in Algiers
by the FLN, using Arab women in European disguises to place the explosives.
The Battle of Algiers paints a convincing picture of the
collapse of Western colonial rule, a process that even a no-holds-barred
commitment to torture and the triumphant dynamiting of Ali la Pointe in his
lair cannot forestall.
Zero Dark Thirty, on the other hand, puts us inside the
national security bureaucracy instead of out on the Arab street, and depicts the
devotion of all this torture, anger, and effort toward the destruction of a single
man—Osama bin Laden—perhaps in the vain hope that the forces that obsess and
threaten the United States will die with him.
Pontecorvo demonstrated a perspective that was more
Marxist-objective than Leninist-doctrinaire or Maoist-groupie in a film he made
for Italian television, Return to Algiers, in 1992.
Fortunately, the film with English subtitles has been posted
on Youtube
and you can join the five hundred or so people who have already seen it there. It is well worth digging out the six clips
(takes a bit of doing) and watching.
Pontecorvo records the rancor and frustration following the
suspension of the 1991 elections. When
he tries to return to his old haunts with his film crew, he is harassed and
harangued by bearded Islamists. In the
Casbah, housewives point out the general decrepitude and neglect of their
homes, making Pontecorvo draw the conclusion that the revolutionaries have
taken the place of the French—both as privileged insiders, and as targets for
the revolutionary resentment of the insulted and injured poor of Algeria.
He reports on the fear and anger of educated women at the
threat of the threat of Islamic anti-feminism; he also interviews some giggling
girls who would prefer that their school institute sex segregation.
After a lot of miserable contention, the government media informs
the public that the visiting European is the filmmaker responsible for The
Battle of Algiers, and Pontecorvo and his crew finally get some love from the
crowds on the street in Algiers. And he
films a probing interview with Mohamed Boudiaf, the exiled FLN warhorse
installed in the presidency by the military after the election fiasco, just
before the old man was assassinated.
As far as Pontecorvo is concerned, you get the image of a
filmmaker prepared to look reality in the face, both in 1966 and in 1992.
Kathryn Bigelow also wants to look reality in the face. Too bad it’s the face of a torturer.
P.S. Criterion did their usual magnificent job on The Battle of Algiers, with a three-disc package of film and documentaries. For me, not steeped in the lore of TBOA, it was a genuine shock and surprise to learn about the background of the actor who played FLN leader El-hadi Jafar. He is interviewed on one of the disc 3 documentaries.
P.P.S. Screengrab from Todd Alcott's blog, which has a very interesting discussion of the cinematic merits of TBOA.
23 comments:
Thank you for writing such a cogent analysis of "perspectives". I watched 'Algiers' back when the Pentagon made me aware of it and I still remember it now nearly a decade later. That says a lot as most movies or pieces of art are instantly forgotten.
And another thanks for sharing the 1992 documentary which I was unaware of. Not only its age but its whole format seems unusual and foreign today. Though his sympathies are clear he is not out to bash their culture as inferior or in need of a lesson or two from the west. They're learning their lessons in that chaos we all inhabit. Indeed he is "prepared to look reality in the face," and may I add, not be afraid to tell it how he sees it.
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