Back to Back 43 - Return of The Wretched of the Earth Strike Back

Contrasting two films about anti-imperalism that don't have any Wookies or Ewoks

The Battle of Algiers (1966) - director Gillo Pontecorvo, co-writer Franco Solinas
The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2006) - director Ken Loach, writer Paul Laverty

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.

US Department of Defense, flyer for The Battle of Algiers, private Pentagon screening, 2003¹

The first modern war film, all previous efforts deliberately looking staged and theatrical, and one of the very few films to ever examine an insurgency with honesty and objectivity. This is not to say that the film takes a neutral stance, as legions of Anglo-American liberal critics have deluded themselves into thinking; far from it, it clearly supports the FLN insurgency and the fight for independence from colonial French rule.

But it does so with a clear-eyed awareness of what needs to be done, the terrible cost in suffering and innocent lives that is required to achieve that freedom. The situation is clear, as Colonel Mathieu sets out with a welcome lack of adornment or bluster: the Algerians want the French to go, the French want to stay. All other actions, for liberation and for repression, follow from that simple conflict of interests. No amount of liberal hand-waving or wishing can make it otherwise.

The original scheme for the movie imagined an American reporter, most likely played by Paul Newman, covering the conflict and coming to realize the justice of the anticolonialist cause. It would have been a very different film from the one that resulted, in fact yet another in the series of 'American testifies to his own essential goodness while doing nothing' movies such as The Quiet American (1958; remake 2002) The Year of Living Dangerously (1982) The Killing Fields (1984) and Salvador (1986).

These films are remarkable for their interchangeability, as they are essentially the same film made over and over again in different locations. Thankfully The Battle of Algiers avoided this fate and carved its own niche. The ostensible purpose of such stories, to highlight the injustice of a historical episode of war or repression, is undermined by the inelegant and overblown theatrics of making it in effect a film about a yanqui liberal's journey into his own futility and impotence. Tragic indeed, but very far from the actual struggle taking place in the fields of history, where material interests are locked in conflict.

But this is essentially what liberalism is: the display of the correct emotional state (sadness and impotent rage), and the absence of coherent and effective action to remedy what's making you feel all weepy. Voilà, one Oscar please (or several if your conflict is particularly bloody and your American hero particularly lachrymose, as with The Killing Fields). Before such anodyne centrist classics as Forrest Gump (1994) or Green Book (2018) came to define Oscar Bait, this journo-in-peril story was the go-to model.

Let's take Roger Ebert as a model of the contemporary liberal consensus around Pontecorvo's film. Writing in 1968, Ebert claimed that

Pontecorvo has taken his stance somewhere between the FLN and the French, although his sympathies are on the side of the Nationalists. He is aware that innocent civilians die and are tortured on both sides, that bombs cannot choose their victims, that both armies have heroes and that everyone fighting a war can supply rational arguments to prove he is on the side of morality... it is both passionate and neutral, concerned with both sides.

The absurdity of the first sentence and its evident self-contradiction hardly needs pointing out. What's more interesting is this intense liberal urge to 'both-sides' the issue despite everything that is right there in front of the viewer. It defies even the evident intelligence of the reviewer, this particular form of blindness. It is the mind-fog of consensus.

It never ceases to amaze me how Americans, particularly, coming from a nation founded in anticolonialist revolt, can somehow see both sides in a conflict between an imperial power and an oppressed colonialized people. It's almost as if Americans considered themselves somehow uniquely special and solely deserving of freedom from imperial domination, while all others are destined to languish under that same yoke. If only there were some pithy phrase for such a feeling of absolute specialness and exclusivity!

Naturally the director Gillo Pontecorvo is well aware that "innocent civilians die and are tortured on both sides", but that doesn't magically imply that there is a neutral stance at play. It is an objective stance, which is not the same thing. It objectively shows the terrible cost to those innocents, but also objectively takes the stance that imperial domination is unsustainable and wrong, and that therefore the struggle is justified.

The only 'both-sidesing' here comes in the mind of those delusional enough to watch this film and think it somehow is "passionate and neutral". Anglo-American centrist liberals, in other words, with their doctrinaire fantasies that "violence is always wrong" and "there's virtue to be found on both sides of an argument". But people who actually work to free countries from imperial domination (including ‘patriots’ of the US in 1776) know better than that:

National liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to the people, commonwealth: whatever may be the headings used or the new formulas introduced, decolonization is always a violent phenomenon.
Franz Fanon "Concerning Violence", The Wretched of the Earth (1963)

The French state of 1966, ruled by the conservative General Charles de Gaulle, was under no such illusions about the neutrality of the film’s perspective, and recognized the film as a clear call to action for anticolonialist movements everywhere.

Consequently the film was banned until 1971, five long years whenit was allowed to open once, very briefly, but closed again under pressure from extreme right groups including threats to bomb the cinemas where it was showing. In one theatre a sack of home-made explosives was actually discovered. ("La Bataille d'Alger" Le Monde. 10 March 2012).

In subsequent years the film would be used as training material for both insurgent groups like the IRA, the PLO and the LASV ("Viet Cong") and for counter-insurgency agencies like the CIA. It was even made required viewing by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as late as the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 for the lessons it could provide over the possibility of COIN tactical success but ultimate failure.

In that respect the film would prove highly prophetic of US efforts in Afghanistan, where exactly this dynamic prevailed. Only the rigorous research and faithful translation to the film of historical objectivity by Pontecorvo and his crew would make this film such a valued document for both sides of the insurgency divide.

The book by Sohail Daulatzai, Fifty Years of The Battle of Algiers: Past as Prologue (2016) charts the effect of the film in the radical world from the Black Panthers and Latino groups of the US, to Mexican Chiapas (the FMLN) and the Middle East. It's extremely rare for a film to have such artistic success and at the same time such far-reaching repercussions in historical conflicts. The true successors to it in that respect are Ken Loach's The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2006) and Steven Soderbergh's two part biopic of Che Guevara, Che (2008). The Soderbergh effort even provoked the wrath of the inimitable A.O. Scott of the New York Mutha-Fuckin Times, who penned the following pearl:

Benicio Del Toro’s performance is technically flawless... He also infuses the character with the full and considerable measure of his own charisma. But the charisma is the whole of the performance.
Jean-Paul Sartre once called Guevara “the most complete human being of our time,” a description that in a way means the opposite of what it seems to. Che represented, to Sartre and others, and perhaps to himself, a new kind of person, a creature of pure revolutionary integrity free of the usual trappings of bourgeois subjectivity. Those trappings, of course, are part of what make characters in movies interesting...
With diagrammatic rigor, it lays out how one revolution succeeds by cultivating popular support, by marshaling a disciplined and growing contingent of troops... such naïve and fuzzy politics...
As history, though, Che is finally not epic but romance. It takes great care to be true to the factual record, but it is, nonetheless, a fairy tale...²

Such nonsensical outpourings from Mr Scott and the NYMFT were scarcely needed in any case to effectively suppress Soderbergh's film, which was treated like a radioactive turd by distributors in the US simply based on its "controversial" subject matter.

I only quote this stinkpiece at such length because Scott’s brand of enraged gibberish amuses me to show that if there's one thing the liberal hates above all others, it's a narrative that takes a position on history. The correct centrist thing to do with regard to history and historical conflict is to gnash your teeth, curse both sides equally (while surreptitiously supporting the dominant side), and weep at how frustrating it is that your letter-writing campaign to stop the horridness has borne no fruit.

Leaving aside all this metacommentary on libs and their discontents, let's centre our attention back to the actual film of The Battle of Algiers. The thing that stands out after nearly 60 years is the astonishing realism of the images, which at this distance look more real than anything filmed as an actual documentary of the time. The scenes of bombing and of rioting are absolute tours de force of handheld camera technique and cinèma verité-style editing.

Above: real-life Battle of Algiers, 1956; below: scene from the film Battle of Algiers

Meanwhile the soundtrack by Ennio Morricone is a wonderfully restrained piece of music, allowing the sounds of Algiers itself - the hubbub and the striking ululation of the local women's laments and protestations - to take full effect.

It's remarkable how much the film creates drama from essentially very simple elements. Take what is perhaps the centrepiece, the sequence in which three female volunteers pass through the security checkpoints, receive timebombs from a workshop, then plant those bombs in three different locations frequented by the French. On the superficial level the sequence follows the formula for suspense set out by Hitchcock in 1970 (it's not known if he'd seen the Pontecorvo film, but probably unlikely)

The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it... The public is aware the bomb is going to explode at one o’clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions, the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: “You shouldn’t be talking about such trivial matters. There is a bomb beneath you and it is about to explode!” In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense.

But there's more going on than that. The man at the bar, and the soldiers at the checkpoint, show great courtesy and gentlemanliness to the disguised Algerian woman. Would they show such consideration to a "native woman"? Absolutely not, which is why the women have taken such trouble to pass as white Europeans. At the same time, the milk bar scene cuts repeatedly to the people gathered there, including the young children (in historical fact two young children were victims of this attack). Though the scene naturally questions the necessity of involving such innocent victims in the armed struggle, it is very far from condemning violence as a method of resistance.

A later scene puts this earlier bombing sequence right in the centre of the film's dialectic, again without stipulating a "correct answer". When FLN leader Ben M'Hidi (played an uncredited and unnamed real-life FLN fighter) is captured and put on show to a crowded press conference by counter-insurgency leader Colonel Mathieu (played by real life veteran paratrooper Jean Martin), the journalists confront him, saying it's cowardly to use women carrying baskets to plant bombs and take innocent lives.

Ben M'Hidi answers "Isn't it even more cowardly to attack defenseless villages with napalm bombs that kill a thousand times more innocents?... Give us your bombers and we will give you our baskets." Whatever the merits of this 'what-about' answer, it is at least an answer, and one guaranteed to make audiences in the US uncomfortable in the late 60s context in which it was seen. For the Gaullist France of 1966 it was nothing short of treason.

In the end, then, a hugely influential film that set standards of documentary style realism that would be seen in all kinds of war films to come, from the rigorously historical to the Ridley Scottical, for Black Hawk Down (2001) is in its most effective sequences merely a louder and higher-budget version of the action seen in Pontecorvo's film, a shuddering translation of neorealism into hyperrealism.

But the strongest influence would surely come among films that followed a similar path towards historical realism, most significantly Ken Loach, whose stories of Republican Spain and Independence Era Ireland would form a solid legacy to the rigour of The Battle of Algiers.

— INTERMISSION —

To tell the truth, the proof of success lies in a whole social structure being changed from the bottom up...
Franz Fanon "Concerning Violence", The Wretched of the Earth (1963)

If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organisation of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists.
Socialist leader James Connolly, speech quoted by Damien and Dan in The Wind That Shakes the Barley

Like the historical events that it depicts - and in fact just like its Hollywood predecessor Michael Collins (1996) - it has essentially a two-part structure. First there is the War of Independence, the anti-colonialist struggle against the British that was so successful in such a short time that it became a model for all other liberation movements to come. Then there is the truly painful part of Irish history, the dispute over the Anglo-Irish Treaty leading to the short but intense Irish Civil War, and the partition of the nation that persists a full century after.

There are those who say that Ken Loach and Paul Laverty's film is quite staid and conventional and that the Golden Palm at Cannes that year should have gone to something more radical and groundbreaking. But what that overlooks is that the film breaks the conventions of realist drama quite radically by dropping the narrative flow at several key points to engage in actual living dialectic over the issues, scenes that are no mere token of disagreement to drive the drama forward but delve deeply into the issues in lengthy improvised arguments, seething with passion and realism.

The questions about whether the insurgency should become a socialist revolution, as well as a national liberation struggle, and whether to continue the fight against the Free State after a truncated 'independence' is achieved, are made into vibrant living discussions with the clear aim of bringing these issues out of academic history and into contemporary conversations about Ireland and elsewhere (the names Palestine and Oslo resonate strongly with these Treaty discussions).

If we compare the issue of the Treaty versus Anti-Treaty forces with the treatment of the same in Michael Collins, the contrast is stark: the Hollywood film deals with it essentially by making deValera, leader of the Anti-Treaty forces, into a Hollywood nasty opposing our virtuous hero Collins, moralising as well as personalising the struggle into a fight between Great Men, goodie and baddie.

Loach's approach, of breaking off the 'story' completely in favour of a sustained debate, would be taken in a much more radical form by Steve McQueen in Hunger (2008), where the largely silent progression of the film is broken for a sustained and abrasive conversation on the ethics and efficacy of violent struggle. Curiously, Liam Cunningham features in both films, his impassioned and naturalistic brilliance illuminating both the political discussion in the earlier film about the earlier phase of the conflict as well as the absolutely peerless one-on-one with Michael Fassbinder as Bobby Sands in the later Troubles movie.

It's true that the cinematography and editing in this film is quite conventional, the wide sweep of the landscape doing a lot of the visual work in the key central segment of the film. But there’s an artistry in the way the film returns time and again to the same house, Sinéad Ní Shúilleabháin's little cottage. This place becomes the symbolic locus for nearly all the traumatic events, from the murder of Sinéad's brother Micheál, to the assault on Sinéad and its burning, to the final indignity of a raid by Free State forces which comes to nothing but in a way is the most devastating of all as it signifies betrayal. Finally Sinéad is confronted by Teddy in this burnt-out wreck of a home as he delivers his crushing news. It's not hard to see this house as representing Ireland in allegory, a place which the old grandma flatly refuses to leave, but the younger woman says is too painful to stay in, but where she finally stays.

There is moreover an artistry in the simple Western-inflected way that the centrepiece ambush is carried out, and the breathtaking shot of the IRA detachment emerging from the morning mist that precedes it.

Though unflashy, with a complete absence of cuts to close-up or tight shots of any kind, this sequence has a direct energy of action that comes from the authenticity of the action itself rather than any overt demonstration of why it should be considered an action scene. As specified, it is very much like the Howard Hawks westerns of old, and Loach has no intention to break new ground as a creator of spectacular action when this model suits him just fine.

The performances throughout are strong, by Cillian Murphy as Damian, by Pádraic Delaney as Teddy, Orla Fitzgerald as Sinéad and of course the incomparable Liam Cunningham as Dan the True Red socialist. Roger Allam as doomed Anglo-Irish landlord Sir John gives a wonderful supporting performance, with a wise authorial choice to make him intransigent but courageous instead of a snivelling villain, which would be the clear choice of an equivalent piece of Hollywood schlock - see, for example, The Patriot (2000) and its caricature baddie-Brit Tavington.

It's not Loach's best film, but it really isn't that far off from reaching his highest standard. Though it sins at times by an excess of sincerity, turning the characters into rather stiff versions of historical-mouthpiece personages rather than messy-type real people at key moments, there's plenty of authentic passion and fire in the performances to compensate for any inadequacies in the writing.

1. Quoted in Sohail Daulatzai, Fifty Years of The Battle of Algiers: Past as Prologue (2016)

2. I wish I could somehow make sense of this. Is Del Toro manifesting charisma or isn’t he? It seems he is… charisma but not personality (perhaps). Is it good or bad that there’s personal charisma present (or absent)? What are the ‘trappings of bourgeois subjectivity’? Are they like charisma or different? Is ‘diagrammatic rigor’ required to present ‘naïve and fuzzy politics’ or can it be fuzzier than that? Are all fairy tales ‘true to the factual record’ or just this one?