Cinema in an Age of Terror: North Africa, Victimization, and Colonial History

1. Resuscitating The Battle of Algiers: The Politics of Race in the War on Iraq

1 Resuscitating The Battle of Algiers The Politics of Race in the War on Iraq In late summer of 2003, when resistance to the American occupation in Iraq acquired the profile of a war of guerilla insurgency through increased bombings and acts of sabotage, the office of Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict at the Pentagon designed and distributed e-mail flyers for those involved in “wot,” or war on terror. The e-mail with the cautionary heading “How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas” was an invitation to a special screening of the 1966 masterpiece film The Battle of Algiers, by the Italian Marxist director Gillo Pontecorvo.1 Based on the book Souvenirs de la bataille d’Algers, by Saadi Yacef, former leading figure of the fln (Algerian Nationalist Liberation Front) up until his arrest in 1957, Pontecorvo’s film opens on 7 October 1957 as an Algerian nationalist is tortured at the hands of the French Colonel Matthieu. Of course Yacef, who not only served as producer of the film but also starred in it as El-hadi Jaffar, leader of the fln, acts out events of the battle that led to his own arrest. After the Resuscitating the Battle of Algiers 23 opening scenes of torture, the film returns us to the beginning of the Battle of Algiers on 1 November 1954 to follow the three-year war. A political epic that employs no real documentary footage, the film depicts the conflict between Algerian nationalist insurgents and French colonial forces in the late 1950s (1954–57 to be precise). It is perhaps of interest to point out that the French government referred to this conflict, until as recently as 1999, as the “events,” before finally admitting the struggle into official historical record as the Algerian War. The U.S. Pentagon, too, was not immune to such deformations of colonial history, particularly in its description of the battle for independence from the colonizer in language that focused on Arab terrorism: “Children shoot soldiers at point-blank range. Women plant bombs in cafés. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar?” (U.S. Pentagon flier). Given a few inaccuracies suggestive more of governmental fantasies that superimpose the situation in Iraq and the situation in Algeria (children actually shoot a police officer, and the Algerian population builds more to a sullen withdrawal than to a fervored engagement), the Pentagon identified with the material in Pontecorvo’s film as if it were derived from documentary footage.2 In a New York Times article in 2003, Michael Kaufman wrote of a Pentagon screening where “forty officers and civilian experts were urged to consider and discuss the important issues at the core of the film . . . 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.” Such identifications were also suggested by former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, who stated, “If you want to understand what’s happening right now in Iraq, I recommend the Battle of Algiers.”3 Of course the U.S. government was not the only party interested in Pontecorvo’s classic, although it undoubtedly contributed in great measure to popular interest. The film has recently benefited from 24 Resuscitating the Battle of Algiers release in an enhanced dvd format from the Criterion Collection replete with documentary and interviews, and from ongoing runs at the New York Film Forum, as well as movie houses in Washington, Chicago, LA, and San Francisco. In addition the film has been subject to a slew of reviews and reports in major newspapers and magazines in the United States and Europe. The understandable paradox of such identifications remains that the film is largely known as a film related to the anticolonial struggle. Like films such as Bernardo Bertolucci’s Il Conformista (The Conformist) and Liliana Cavani’s Il Portiere di notte (The Night Porter), Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers participates in the 1960’s and 1970’s Italian cinematic tradition of revising fascist oppression and depicting criminality as an ambiguous category. Associated with the Algerian War of Independence, the Cuban revolution, Vietnam, the Black Panthers’ resistance movement, and, more recently, with the training of troops in Northern Ireland in their struggle...