For Your Anti-War Viewing Pleasure
Press Action
Monday, July 12, 2004
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/mickeyz07122004/
More Pontecorvo and Less Moore
By Mickey Z.
"The most electrifyingly timely movie playing in New York was made in 1965.” —Peter Rainer, New York Magazine
"Hollywooders are really not too bright. It’s easy to lose sight of that unglamorous fact.” —Richard Oxman, Press Action
With the wife enjoying a much-deserved weekend away with friends, I decided to take a leisurely Saturday evening stroll to one of my local theaters and catch a flick with bite. The multiplex was showing 13 films...one of which was “Fahrenheit 9/11.” Just a few blocks away, the American Museum of the Moving Image (AMMI) offered a revival of Gillo Pontecorvo’s “The Battle of Algiers.”
I think you might guess where this is going…
So, there I was...seated in the dark AMMI theater with a room full of movie buffs and more than a few subversives who—judging from their mocking laughter—recognized the congruences all too clearly. After all, it’s not every day one gets to see a movie that was used as a training film for the Black Panthers in the 60s and was screened by the Pentagon in 2003.
Nearly 40 years old, “The Battle of Algiers” (in French, with subtitles) inevitably evokes comparisons to current events. The humiliating checkpoints, the inhuman interrogation tactics, the use of dogs, prisoner torture (with no shortage of public excuses), suicide attacks, mass roundups, assassinations, ambushes, dead and dying children...all set to the familiar tune of media acquiescence.
Unlike Moore’s Republican/Saudi targets, “Algiers” broadens the scope of blame to a much larger scale and one cannot help but discern parallels to Israeli occupation tactics (also unmentioned in “F911") and the current situation in Iraq. Discussing Pontecorvo’s classic in the New York Times, Michael T. Kaufman wrote of the “the problematic but alluring efficacy of brutal and repressive means in fighting clandestine terrorists in places like Algeria and Iraq. Or more specifically, the advantages and costs of resorting to torture and intimidation in seeking vital human intelligence about enemy plans.”
Corporate media propaganda aside, the conquest-mad inhabitants in Washington fully grasped the import of “The Battle of Algiers.” The flier inviting guests to the Pentagon screening declared: “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.” Former national-security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski added: “If you want to understand what’s happening right now in Iraq, I recommend ‘The Battle of Algiers.’”
Such a response—interpreted from either the left or right—does honor to Pontecorvo’s hard work and integrity as an artist.
“Although the time spent writing the script was very brief—only two months—the research phase was extremely long,” the director explains. “Scriptwriter Franco Solinas and I spent weeks and weeks inside the Casbah in order to get an idea of the reality of the horror that had taken place. Then we went to France and had long discussions with high officials who had been paratroopers.”
The uniqueness of this film also serves as a brutal reminder of the sad state of filmmaking in the early 21st century.
“Unfortunately there has been an ugly lowering of filmmaking standards compared to 15, 20 or 30 years ago,” says Pontecorvo. “There is less interest in politics by filmmakers, in other words there is less interest shown in the problems of other people. This is expressed by the fact that producers who in an earlier time would have accepted certain themes are no longer interested because they think the public would not like them. For directors it’s a bit different because their interests are not entirely economic but political and moral. There are people that want to make serious films, but they have problems finding producers.”
For your election-year, anti-war viewing pleasure, I submit “The Battle of Algiers.”
Mickey Z. is the author of two brand new books: “The Seven Deadly Spins: Exposing the Lies Behind War Propaganda” (Common Courage Press) and “A Gigantic Mistake: Articles and Essays for Your Intellectual Self-Defense” (Library Empyreal/Wildside Press). For more information, please visit: http://mickeyz.net.