A new look at The Battle of Algiers.

A new look at The Battle of Algiers.

A new look at The Battle of Algiers.

Arts, entertainment, and more.
Aug. 27 2003 7:59 PM

The Pentagon's Film Festival

A primer for The Battle of Algiers.

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Will The Battle of Algiers teach us anything?

A column in the Washington Post 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:




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 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. * 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.



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 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 François Mitterrand, who had directed it at the insurgents.

Is there anything important that the film leaves out?

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.



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?

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.


