The Battle of Algiers (1966)

Hollywood keeps going back to war for stories of combat and the impact at home. Perhaps given the complexities of America's War on Terror and the situations on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq, these movies are aiming at telling smaller stories against the backdrop of the war.

No movie can pretend to tackle all the complexities of occupation and insurgency, particularly in Iraq, where shifting loyalties, old hostilities, cultural distrust, and guerilla tactics of systems disruption and demoralization have created what can safely be called a mess. Worse, any step the U.S. takes at this point—including staying the course—is fraught with peril and the potential for greater disaster.

In August 2003, the Pentagon's office of special planning screened a movie for its employees that dealt with similar, but my no means identical, situation that foreshadowed the one we find our military embroiled in within Iraq. As the Washington Post's David Ignatius related, a flier Inviting staffers to a special screening of Gillo Pontecorvo's 1966 film The Battle of Algiers put it this way:

"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."

Pontecorvo's documentary-style retelling of this pivotal struggle in Algeria's fight for independence from France portrayed two characters with especially stunning clarity, each on the other side: Ali La Pointe, an Algerian terrorist and leader of the FLN, and Col. Mathieu, the French commander opposed to him. Pontecorvo's narrative is clearly tilted toward the Algerian resistance, but he shows a remarkable sympathy for Col. Mathieu—including Mathieu's very public justification of using torture as a legitimate method for quelling the resistance. Meanwhile, Algerian women dress in French fashions and plant bombs in cafes.

The film's stars are mostly amateurs, including several of the actual participants in the FLN's operations. (Indeed, FLN military chief Saadi Yacef portrays El-haddi Jaffar, a lightly fictionalized version of himself.) Pontecorvo and his screenwriter, Franco Solinas, spent months in Algiers finding ordinary people to play key roles in the film, tipping their hats to the post-World War II Italian neorealism and the documentary approach of cinema verite. Only French actor Jean Martin, who plays Col. Mathieu, had film experience. And while the depictions of main characters betray the filmmakers sympathies with the Algerian side, some sequences reveal the brutality of the insurgents toward each other.

In attempting to re-create the events of 1956-61, The Battle of Algiers takes a few liberties and necessarily leaves much of the story untold. Indeed, though the French withdrew from Algeria in 1962, the native government that succeeded French occupation was in some ways more corrupt and at least as eager to use torture to suppress dissent. (The Leftists who protested France's use of such tactics, along with the colonial government's general oppression of Algerians, were strangely silent when Algerians used it against their own.) Yet it remains remarkably faithful to the main thrust of the historic events that took place there, and in attempting to document not only the insurgency that triggered continent-wide rebellion against European colonizers in Africa, it also hailed a new era of asymmetrical warfare—loose confederations of mostly independent cells, using terrorist tactics to weaken French resolve to remain in Algeria. While the tactics were nothing new, their specific application would inspire or re-ignite terrorist operations in Africa, the Middle East, and Europe.

The Battle of Algiers is as significant for its cultural impact as it is an interesting document and powerful film in its own right. Even the Academy Awards took notice; the film was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film in 1967, and received nominations in the best director and screenwriting categories in 1969. It was required viewing for many '60s and '70s radical groups, including the IRA and the Black Panthers, and was the subject of violent protests when shown in France and Italy. It was required viewing for Pentagon staffers in August 2003, in the early days of the Iraqi insurgency. Its limitations acknowledged, it should still be required viewing for anyone curious about how a film can confront the harsh realities of military occupation and guerilla insurgency, realities we will be confronted with for many years to come.