I found the film very interesting and the Criterion release of this is excellent and answered all the questions I had at the end of the film - how true to the real events was it, why hasn't Pontecorvo made more than a handful of films since (and I now really want to see his ETA film Ogro), and partly answered my questions about what has happened in Algeria since, though I really need more information about both the period between 1965 and 1992 (when Pontecorvo's documentary was made) and what has happened post 1992.
I'm no historian and my viewpoint on the film is definitely biased and most probably naive given my knowledge of world events, but the film certainly gave me a lot to think about:
One of the things that I did not see discussed with relation to the use of torture on the disc extra features (and the use of torture was covered from many other different angles) is how if you have a government that is putting pressure on those carrying out the torture to get results then in a way that can take precedence over getting any useful information - I am thinking of the Irish situation and the way that the police in cases like the Guildford Four or Birmingham Six were under such pressure to get a conviction that they led their suspects into confessing by telling the suspect what they wanted to hear which they would then confess to after enough 'coercion'. It becomes about the person being tortured working out what the torturer wants to know and telling them that to stop the treatment, because the torturer will only stop when they are satisfied they have all the information. So unless they already know what the person being tortured knows and just want corroboration, the torturer probably will not know the full extent of the persons knowledge of the situation - they may have told everything they know, or still be holding something back - so it falls to the individual torturers judgement about how far they are willing to go.
Perhaps in the Irish example, this is a testament to the power of the media that needs quick victories and a defined 'bad guy' to pin the blame on to provide closure - as could be seen in Iraq by using the statue being pulled down to signify that the war had ended. But that just causes more problems as those who committed the act are still free and others are sent to prison under false charges. I think a lot of what is going on with the war in Iraq is that the government and military are trying to put this media friendly spin on things which is just going to backfire when the reality of events is uncovered, as with the Abu Ghraib prison, or the Jessica Lynch 'rescue'.
Also one of the things that struck me while watching the film was how throughout history there have been a series of invasions followed by settling in an attempt to, bluntly, breed the indigenous peoples out or kill them to replace them with their own. You can see it in Ireland with the attempts by Cromwell in the 17th Century to replace the Catholics with Protestants, in this film with the Pieds-noirs, the Australians over the Aborigines or the Americans over the Native Americans, the Israelis over the Palestinians. And the most seditious part of it is that once the people have settled in the area and bred, their children are now French-Algerian, Northern Irish, Israeli, Australian, South African, American etc and have as much of a birthright to the land as the indigenous population. So now there is a terrible situation where both peoples have a claim and the only truly 'wrong' in that situation are those who first decided to settle in land that was not theirs. Should the children be condemned for the actions of the parents because by simply existing they are continuing the oppression of those who were colonised (and thereby in a terrible sense having been used both by their home country and their parents as a means of rooting themselves further into their new land and in another sense becoming legitimate targets for the people opposed to their being there)? Can we fault those peoples being slowly bred out or killed from fighting back against it, as now they exist between having been forced from their homes and wanting to keep their identity? It's a very difficult question, since now the damage has been done we are all living with the scars.
You get the sense that in colonisation or the case of the US attempts at regime change such as Noriega etc leading up to the Bush Jnr's stated regime change policy there is a view that the people of the country being colonised or invaded are 'lesser' or subhuman. Its never explicitly stated that way but to me that could be the only answer to the thinking that allows one set of people (through their government and their value system, their hegemony) to take over another country and implement its own regime � they either believe that the peoples being colonised are unable to rule themselves properly to the extent that they must be controlled by a colonial or invading power to bring a �peace� and prevent them becoming a danger to other countries, which is kind of a patronising view because it suggests that the people are not smart or able enough to run their own affairs.
So that would be an aim that a colonial power would push as its main message, because it suggests that they are acting altruistically. Underneath that of course there are other reasons for colonisation or invasion, practical securing of resources either things like oil (as we�re seeing at the moment) or land (e.g. Nazi Germany's Lebensraum) or people (such as the way people in countries like India would produce goods to ship back to England, or how slaves were used in the 'cotton triangle' by being shipped to America from Africa to work in the fields with the crop sent to Europe for manufacture and ships from Europe going off to Africa to collect more slaves - sorry its been a while since I studied it so I'm not sure the details are of the cotton triangle are correct but the system of slavery for money in which the people are as much of a commodity is what I'm getting at)
Both the stated and unstated reasons for colonisation or invasion treat those being colonised like dirt. Even the altruistic one of changing the regime for the good of the people is like someone coming into your house and changing the wallpaper because they think you will like it more � if you wanted to change it you would. There are a lot of more complex factors muddying this issue - such as how far people in a country can be claimed to influence its government or support its policies. No one would be likely to say that the Taliban or Sadddam Hussain were great leaders (although there must be some support otherwise it would have been impossible to sustain their system of government), but for example if Spain invaded America and killed George Bush Jr for the good of the world (and I�d say there was a case to be made for assassinating him, even if it did make him a martyr!) and then held elections where Amercians could only vote between two Spanish appointed leaders, America would be up in arms at being pushed around and told what to do by another county with its own aims and hegemony. After all wasn't that what the American War of Independence was about, not being pushed around by a power thousands of miles away?
When you treat people, consciously or unconsciously like they are less than human and not worthy of even the simplest respect that you don't even think about them when you take over their country and put your own people there, or give their country away to a third party as could be shown by the British and Americans in the creation of Israel, you are going to cause a lot of ill-feeling and backlash amongst those who have been treated unfairly. Now I think that the reason you get a lot of people feeling wronged when they are kicked out of a country is because they feel that have done so much good (say the British in India or how America might feel now they have 'saved' Iraq with the thinking that Iraq should unquestionably get behind the US) and do not realise that even the good things were done in a patronising "this is the best way", imposed manner, similar I think to the way master would treat a pet - in need of guidance because they cannot do it for themselves. People feel wronged because they cannot understand that for example Indians are people too and want to take control of their own lives and be responsible for their own achievements and mistakes in government, something which colonial powers cannot understand because of the mindset about the abilities of the indigenous people to govern themselves that had to be adopted to invade a country in the first place! So the colonisers or invaders' grief may be genuine and may have the best interests of a colony at heart, but in the end like a parent learning to give its child freedom, people have to govern themselves.
Unfortunately after a long period of being under someone else's control, there will always be problems in getting used to governing yourself, for example India's difficulties and eventual partition and the danger that a dictator ends up in power. And this can lead some to say "well we shouldn't have left, they obviously can't cope without a guiding hand", but this disregards the fact that a move from complete colonisation to complete freedom is a major philosophical change that would not have happened so powerfully had a colonisation not taken place in the first instance. This kind of climate does mean that radical and extremist views get more prominent because there is a lot of disorder and a need for a controlling force to replace that which has left - hopefully things will settle down eventually, and this can be helped by a controlled handover (for example the stepped handover of Hong Kong as opposed to a seemingly "let's get the hell out of here!" attitude of say the British in India or Vietnam by the French that can leave a dangerous power vacuum)
One other thing that struck me when watching the film is how distanced the political actions seemed from the people. There's been a lot of talk about which side the film was on, and I'd agree it was on the FLN side, but it struck me very powerfully that the FLN action was presented as action for their own political purposes, which incidentally involved winning the people over for their cause. It wasn't presented as a 'people's revolution' like say the Russian Revolution or was an uprising that gathered the force of a lot of people, like say Gandhi (and it seems interesting that when politics entered India once the British had left and Gandhi had been assassinated things became less idealistic and took on the more political dimensions, with all the personal infighting and power struggles at the expense of the country itself that was caused). In a sense it was more calculated - I don't really mean to put a negative spin on calculated, since I think all politics is that! It was mentioned in the Battle of Algiers: A Case Study discussion, where they talk about causing a state to crack down on the 'average' people so they gravitate towards your cause, so if that was the way of thinking of the FLN there is a certain attitude towards the people being expendable, such as the massacres mentioned in the Remembering History documentary that only helped to strengthen the FLN's cause.
I'm not sure that the Islamic state mentioned in the communications from the FLN in the film would be any better for the 'people' than the French (although at least, as in India, self-government is a first step), and I felt that the cause was portrayed as more for the ends of the FLN than for the people, just as the actions of the French were more in their interests. In this sense I found the film amazingly even handed, not just a paean to terrorism and made me think seriously about how the people of a country are in service to any political system, rather than the political system being a means of expression of the people.
I've never seen the battle of hegemonies so amazingly described as in this film. It suggests very powerfully the struggle between 'values and ideas' as Richard Clarke put it and that whether the struggle is done for a 'good' or 'bad' reason, there are always innocent victims such as those caught up in both the Casbah and restaurant bombings.
THE DOCUMENTARIES
I really enjoyed the documentaries, there was a good mixture between the talking heads of the Criterion produced extras and the more archive footage style of the French and reportage-style of the Italian documentaries which I really appreciated. The Etats D�Armes documentary was excellent, it was very interesting to get the former torturer being interviewed (and I guess this was the main reason for the programme�s inclusion) and the footage of Algiers at the time. Does anyone have details of what the other two programmes were about?
And wasn�t that Italian �Mixer� programme strange? I don�t think they could have put any more television screens into that studio! The documentary was invaluable and very interesting as a return to the locations and an idea of political climate of 1992, even if a lot of the graphics were overly flashy and worked against the overall serious tone of the content being covered.
But the crowning achievement were the Criterion documentaries especially the Remembering History documentary which gave the historical background that had been changed to make an exciting film. They give so much information about such an important subject that I think this is definitely going to end up being my Criterion of the year despite my love of Cronenberg and especially Videodrome (which I thought nothing would be able to surpass for me!)
This is an interesting article on the history of Algeria up through the War of Independence to the present day.
