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[Edward Wesolowski <edwes AT idisplay.com>]

Yes. I'd love to see "The Battle of Algiers."
Interesting that the pentagon's showing this!
I saw the film years ago, and then came across the title again in a 
reference, I think it was by Steven Soderbergh when "Traffic" was out.
Let me know a time.
Ed Wesolowski

At 11:16 AM 9/22/03 -0400, you wrote:

> The pentagon is apparently premiering this movie for their people in hopes 
> they will learn something about occupations.  If anyone is interested, I 
> will procure a copy and we can have another movie night.  Send me an email 
> if you are interested in seeing this.  It has English subtitles BTW.
>
>
>
> <http://slate.msn.com/id/2087628/>http://slate.msn.com/id/2087628/
>
>
>
> The Pentagon's Film Festival
> A primer for The Battle of Algiers.
> By Charles Paul Freund
> Posted Wednesday, August 27, 2003, at 4:59 PM PT
>
> <http://slate.msn.com/id/2087577/>image001.jpg
>
> Will The Battle of Algiers teach us anything?
>
> A column in the Washington Post 
> <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45136-2003Aug25.html>reported 
> yesterday that the Pentagon's special operations chiefs have decided to 
> screen The Battle of Algiers, Gillo Pontecorvo's 1965 classic film of 
> urban terrorist insurgency, for Pentagon employees on Aug. 27. The 
> decision to show Algiers, David Ignatius writes, is "one hopeful sign that 
> the military is thinking creatively and unconventionally about Iraq." He 
> even quotes from a Pentagon flier about the movie:
>
> How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas. ... 
> Children shoot soldiers at point blank range. Women plant bombs in cafes. 
> Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar? 
> The French have a plan. It succeeds tactically, but fails strategically. 
> To understand why, come to a rare showing of this film.
>
> It's welcome news that the military is thinking creatively about the 
> American role in Iraq, but the lessons and pleasures of The Battle of 
> Algiers are a lot more ambiguous than this Pentagon blurb implies. To 
> praise the film for its strategic insights is to buy into the 1960s 
> revolutionary mystique that it celebrates; it is the collapse of that very 
> mystique that has contributed to the film's current obscurity and made 
> screenings "rare."
>
> Even so, The Battle of Algiers remains a fascinating artifact of its time. 
> But when the film came out, viewers required a lot of context to 
> understand it properly. Here's a primer about this famous and 
> controversial film, and about how the ever-shifting moral of its story 
> relates to the Battle of Baghdad.
>
> What is The Battle of Algiers?
> The Battle of Algiers was the premier political film of the 1960s. It was 
> studied by the campus left for its lessons in revolutionary-cell 
> organization and was obligatory viewing for Black Panthers.
>
> The first part of the film depicts the campaign of terror launched by the 
> National Liberation Front (FLN, called "the organization" in the film) 
> against French colonial rule in 
> 1956.<http://slate.msn.com/id/2087628/#correct1#correct1>* The story is 
> built around a criminal-turned-revolutionary known as Ali La Pointe, and 
> it details his political epiphany and his terrorist career. The movie's 
> second half concerns the reaction by the French military, which consists 
> primarily of a campaign of torture and murder, and focuses on the leader 
> in charge of that campaign, "Col. Mathieu." Mathieu is by far the 
> best-realized character in the film; his is the only role filled by a 
> professional actor.
>
> From its first release, the film was extremely controversial: When the 
> film was finally shown in France, theaters were bombed. In Italy, viewers 
> were attacked.
>
> Is the movie accurate?
> Within broad limits. Ali was indeed the hero of the Casbah, the Muslim 
> section of Algiers; as the film suggests, his death marked the end of the 
> real battle for the city. The French did torture and murder their way to 
> tactical victory. Mathieu, for his part, is based mostly on the real-life 
> Gen. Jacques Massu, who devised the counterterrorist strategy. Many 
> sequences are meticulously accurate, such as the famous one referred to by 
> the Pentagon in its flier, in which Algerian women put on Western clothes 
> and makeup and then plant bombs at civilian French targets. 
> Unsurprisingly, many characters are composites, and numerous details are 
> fudged, made up, or 
> <http://slate.msn.com/id/2087628/sidebar/2087642/>altered. Among them is 
> Ali's powerful last line in the film, directed at the French: "I do not 
> negotiate with them." The line is actually appropriated from a speech by 
> then-Interior Minister Francois Mitterand, who had directed it at the 
> insurgents.
>
> Is there anything important that the film leaves out?
> The film leaves out the insurrection that was taking place in the rest of 
> Algeria, which makes it impossible for viewers to judge how the FLN 
> finally succeeded in driving out the French, much less what was wrong with 
> French military strategy. (Even now, some blame defeat not on the military 
> but on Charles de Gaulle.) The movie also omits the struggle between the 
> FLN and other anti-French factions for control of the revolution. It took 
> an Algerian filmmaker, not a European, to tell the story of insurgents 
> killing each other (Okacha Touita's 1982 film, The Sacrificed).
>
> Instead of offering an explanation for the ultimate triumph of the FLN, 
> Pontecorvo offers a poetic picture of Algeria's revolutionary resilience. 
> "Even though some rivers seem to disappear," he once told an interviewer, 
> "they run underground instead and always reach the sea." That's an 
> appealing metaphor, but it's neither politically nor militarily instructive.
>
> 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.
>
> This is where The Battle of Algiers is potentially most valuable and most 
> dangerous as a point of comparison for the U.S. military. While The Battle 
> of Algiers has next to nothing to say about overall French strategy in 
> Algeria, its most obvious military lesson that torture is an efficient 
> countermeasure to terror is a dangerous one in this particular instance. 
> Aside from its moral horror, torture may not even elicit accurate 
> information, though the film seems to suggest it is foolproof.
>
> The French military view of torture is articulated by Col. Mathieu in the 
> course of a series of exchanges with French journalists. As reports of 
> torture spread, the issue becomes a scandal in France. Mathieu, however, 
> is unwavering in defense of the practice: To him it is a military 
> necessity. Informed that Jean-Paul Sartre is condemning French tactics, 
> for example, Mathieu responds with a question that would warm Ann 
> Coulter's heart: "Why are the liberals always on the other side?"
>
> At one point Mathieu challenges the hostile French reporters with a 
> question of his own: "Should France remain in Algeria? If you answer 
> 'yes,' you must accept all the necessary consequences." Mathieu might as 
> well be addressing the American military and the American public. Is the 
> United States to remain in the Middle East? If so, what are the "necessary 
> consequences"? Do they include working with former members of the Baathist 
> secret police, as recent news stories have suggested? Do they include the 
> night-time invasion of Iraqi homes and the inevitable shooting of innocent 
> civilians?
>
> To raise such issues is not necessarily to condemn the continued presence 
> of troops in Iraq; there would be disastrous "necessary consequences" to 
> an American withdrawal, too. But moral compromise, according to the film, 
> was inherent in France's position in Algeria. The United States is not 
> France, Iraq is not Algeria, and whatever the sources of resistance in 
> Iraq, none is the equivalent of the FLN. But to listen to Mathieu is 
> nevertheless to be challenged on whether moral compromise is also inherent 
> in the American role in Iraq.
>
> Moral compromise, finally, was also inherent in the FLN's campaign, and 
> not only as a result of terror. Although the FLN was a group of secular 
> revolutionaries, it frequently tried to rouse Algerians with Islamic 
> rhetoric, mostly to appropriate the anti-French movement led by Algerian 
> clerics for decades. And yet upon taking power, the FLN betrayed the 
> promises they'd implicitly made to Muslims. (The Islamists engaged in the 
> current civil war in the country represent a different, Wahhabized strain 
> of Islam.)
>
> So who ultimately won the Battle of Algiers?
> No one. The French won the battle, but in 1962 they lost the war. French 
> soldiers, most of whom hated the idea of torture, were tainted by the 
> association. Algerians got rid of the French but in their place got an 
> authoritarian regime that, before it fell, was itself guilty of torture. 
> In the meantime, French interests maintained substantial control of the 
> nation's resources. The revolutionary left got another regime that lost 
> the support of a culturally suffocated and economically deprived populace. 
> The triumphant FLN was even at war with itself; in 1965 one faction 
> surrounded another with tanks and ousted it from 
> power.<http://slate.msn.com/id/2087628/#correct2#correct2>* The people of 
> the capital literally thought another scene was being shot for The Battle 
> of Algiers.
>
> Ultimately, the film evades answering its own moral challenge. It 
> justifies its support of FLN terrorist murder over French torture by 
> rewriting history. According to the film, terror was futile; it didn't 
> work. What finally drove France out, it suggests, was a spontaneous 
> explosion of popular resistance. That scenario, however, is a fantasy. 
> What drove France out was sustained and bloody insurrection.
>
> As a portrait of revolution and of a war of ideas, The Battle of Algiers 
> suggests that the French went wrong by denying they were foreigners; they 
> treated Algeria as an extension of France. At least one lesson for the 
> United States seems obvious: A liberal Iraqi order is going to have to 
> develop within Iraqi terms, and only the Iraqis themselves can establish 
> those terms.
>
> Correction, Aug. 28, 2003: This article originally stated that the first 
> part of The Battle of Algiers was set in 1954. In fact it was in 1956. 
> (<http://slate.msn.com/id/2087628/#return1#return1>Return to the corrected 
> sentence.)
>
> Correction, Aug. 28, 2003: The article also noted that one faction of the 
> FLN had ousted another in 1967; in fact the ousting occurred in 1965. 
> (<http://slate.msn.com/id/2087628/#return2#return2>Return to the corrected 
> sentence.)
>
>
>
>
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