[Mb-hair] Guardian Unlimited Film: Back to the future

[Michael Butler]

Thanks I sent it to the Civic List.
Interesting article about Jane Fonda on the Guardian link.
Michael

> vincent edwards spotted this on the Guardian Unlimited Film site and thought
> you should see it.
> 
> -------
> Note from vincent edwards:
> 
> worth a read  
> -------
> 
> To see this story with its related links on the Guardian Unlimited Film site,
> go to http://film.guardian.co.uk
> 
> Back to the future
> Ian Jack on the chilling prescience of a 1960s art-house film
> Saturday July 30 2005
> The Guardian
> 
> 
> I first saw Gillo Pontecorvo's film, The Battle of Algiers , in a cinema about
> a hundred yards from King's Cross station. This must have been more than 30
> years ago, long before King's Cross became a byword for death and disaster;
> the fire in 1987 and the bomb in July. In those days, what the name mainly
> suggested to me was the Edinburgh train - that and the area's reputation for
> streetwalkers and exiled Scottish drunks ("I wiz at El Alamein, I need tae get
> to Tooting, would you have two bob?"), and the fact, if it is a fact, that the
> station architecture was modelled on the tsar's riding stables in St
> Petersburg. The cinema specialised in films that weren't on general release -
> foreign films, old films - which was brave of its owners, considering its
> tatty location, and later it closed and became a rock venue or maybe a club.
> The building, I think, is still there.
> 
> Had it not been for the bomb on the Piccadilly line and its awful
> consequences, I would probably never have remembered where I saw The Battle of
> Algiers. Then, after July 7, I became slightly obsessed with a particular
> memory of the film, rented it on DVD, watched it twice, and recalled how much
> it had troubled me in 1971 or 1972 or whenever it was, and the argument I'd
> had with a friend as we walked together from the cinema to the tube, an
> argument about terrorism.
> 
> The first thing to say about The Battle of Algiers is that it's a thrilling,
> unsettling film, a tribute to the script of Franco Solinas and the music of
> Ennio Morricone as well as to the direction of Pontecorvo, who made nothing
> nearly as good before or after. It tells the story of the Algerian
> insurrection against the French in the late 1950s: first the revolt in the
> Algiers casbah, and then the repercussions from the French paratroops who were
> sent to quell it - terrorism and counter-terrorism - ending with a postcript
> that shows Algeria about to win independence from France in 1962. Pontecorvo
> shot his film only three years later - in Algiers, recreating real events and
> real characters in grainy black and white. It employs only one professional
> actor - Jean Martin, who plays the commander of the French paratroops, Colonel
> Mathieu. Sometimes you think you're watching a newsreel and sometimes a
> documentary. In fact, what you are always watching is a brilliant confection
> of r
> eality.
> 
> Pontecorvo was a politically committed film-maker, a Marxist who had joined
> the anti-fascist resistance in Italy during the second world war, and his film
> came out of a desire to dramatise and humanise the struggle against
> colonialism. If the key text of the time was Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of
> the Earth, published in 1961 with an introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre, then
> The Battle of Algiers, which was banned in France for several years, could be
> seen as its cinematic equivalent. Except that it isn't. Such was the spirit of
> the mid-60s, at least among the kind of people who went to art-house cinemas,
> that Pontecorvo seems to have taken it for granted that his audience's
> sympathy would instinctively side with the rebellious Algerians, the Muslims
> of the casbah. The historical injustice of their situation is never spelled
> out. Instead, Pontecorvo focuses narrowly on the conflict, trying to deepen
> our understanding of the barbarous behaviour on both sides, bombs from the
> Alger
> ians and torture from the French.
> 
> As I looked at it again, what struck me was its prescience; how it described a
> world now familiar to all of us, when at the time of its appearance in 1965 it
> described only a particular Algerian world that had recently been left behind.
> As paratroops raid a house, a helicopter hovers overhead. Hidden cameras film
> Muslims as they leave the casbah for the French quarter and the footage is
> played before an audience of paratroops. (How can you spot a terrorist? You
> can't.) Mathieu draws the cell structure of the rebels on a blackboard, three
> or four people to each cell, no cell knowing another. "Four hundred thousand
> Arabs live in the casbah," Mathieu says. "Are they all our enemies? We know
> they're not." He cuts a sympathetic figure, despite his dark glasses and his
> brutal strategy - the only workable one he knows, - which is to find some
> likely suspects and torture information from them. He has fought in the French
> resistance as well as Vietnam. When at a press conference someo
> ne mentions a pro-independence newspaper piece by Sartre, Mathieu wonders why
> "the Sartres are always on the other side".
> 
> The most terrible moments come when three women leave the casbah to plant
> their bombs. First, they are asked to dress as Francophile women to avoid
> detection at the checkpoints. Then they rendezvous with a bomb-maker who
> attaches a timer to each device. Each woman now goes her own way with a bomb
> in her basket - to a café, a milk bar, and the offices of Air France.
> There they slyly slide their bombs under their stools and chairs they sit on,
> pushing them back with their heels. The French are entirely innocent of their
> fate, ordinary people doing ordinary things. Young couples dance to jukebox
> music, a little boy licks an ice-cream, a Frenchman offers his seat to one of
> the bombers as she stands at the bar and orders a Coke. Pontecorvo splices the
> scenes of their unbearable unknowingness with shots of a clock as its hands
> move towards 5.45. The women leave, the bombs explode. The camera captures the
> shock and incomprehension of the bloodied survivors as they stumble from
> the wreckage. We never see the boy and his ice-cream again.
> 
> Even though the Provisional IRA had begun its bombing campaign in Northern
> Ireland when I saw The Battle of Algiers I think it was the film rather than
> any news coverage that made terrorism real to me. It was those scenes that led
> to the argument with my friend as we walked towards the tube. I said something
> like: "Terrorism is an awful thing." My friend wasn't so shocked. What he saw
> in the film was the difficult route to victory in a liberation struggle - the
> omelette that needed the broken eggs. He pointed out, rightly, that the French
> had air-bombed Algerian villages. A leader of the FLN, the Algerian liberation
> movement makes the same point in the film when he is verbally attacked by a
> French journalist for deploying bombs in baskets to kill innocent civilians:
> "Give us your bombers [your aircraft] and you can have our baskets."
> 
> My problem may have been -may still be - a want of empathic imagination. I
> could see myself as a European in a café, my son eating an ice-cream, but
> less easily as a Berber villager cowering under the sound of French jets. That
> is a common problem (Pontecorvo himself may have been afflicted by it). I
> don't say that it accounts for July 7, far less excuses it. Still, you don't
> have to be George Galloway to see some truth trickling down from Sartre's
> statement about the liberation struggles of 50 years ago. In the introduction
> to Fanon's book, he wrote: "It is the moment of the boomerang."
> 
> Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited
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