Revolution Now (and Then)!  The Battle of Algiers is back --
along with The Battle of Algiers scenario. At a time when Gillo
Pontecorvo's documentary-style account of a bloody, anti-
colonialist urban uprising has been used by commentators from
Tariq Ali to Zbigniew Brzezinski to describe the situation in
occupied Iraq, and only months after a well-publicized screening
at the Pentagon, the movie itself is poised for re-release in
January.  "Articulating the past historically does not mean
recognizing it 'the way it was,'" Walter Benjamin wrote in his
final essay. "It means appropriating a memory as it flashes by
in a moment of danger." Arguably the key political movie of its
period, replete with a reception comparable in tumult to that
accorded Battleship Potemkin, The Battle of Algiers was produced
in the mid-1960s, set a decade earlier and made in the style of
a 1940s newsreel. Which memory has been appropriated in 2004?
Authenticity has always been crucial to the movie's authority.
If The Battle of Algiers