Instant movies on Netflix, streamed through my son's hand-me-down xBox (he's traded up) brought me to the teeming streets of a North African revolt a few weeks ago, in my insanely prescient choice of The Battle of Algiers for a night of solo viewing on my nifty home office screen while the family chose alternate entertainment downstairs. In truth, I watched Gillo Pontecorvo's masterwork as a follow-up to a semi-recent jag through Camus, particularly The Plague and its terrifying social descent into ever-narrowing tribal circles of survival and sacrifice in the walled Alergian city of Oran.
The Battle of Algiers, with its verite style, incredible locations, and cast of mostly non-actors felt like the perfect documentary, the inside story of revolution and vicious urban guerilla warfare that even Al Jazeera couldn't possibly tell. It's rightly famous for its clear-eyed depiction of violence, and for its uncondescending portrayal of the Algerian revolutionaries. There is a "right" side in Pontecorvo's film, and the director's heart lies with a poor, debased majority under the French colonial heel - yet there is no sentimentality about the killing on either side or the brutal cycle of terrorism and reprisal; indeed the film nearly succeeds in making the viewer understand the methods of torture employed by the infamous French paratroopers brought in to quell the revolt. The lone professional among the cast was actor Jean Martin, who played a composite character, Col. Mathieu, the French commander and a veteran of both Indochina and the Resistance. He's decisive, cold, and the picture of authority and colonial arrogance - yet he seems to sympathize with the sheer bravery of the men and women he must hunt down and kill.
Made in 1966, after the Algierians won their independence, the film depicts the period before 1960, when the French succeeded at least partly in putting the rebellion down. Based on the memoirs of Saadi Yacef, a National Liberation Front commander who fought the French, it remains a crucial cultural document both in the history of North Africa and in guerilla struggles against oppression. As the Self-Style Siren noted a few years ago, The Battle of Algiers was reportedly screened by Bush Administration planners before the Iraq invasion: "Did the Defense guys really watch the full two hours of French forces torturing, interrogating, cracking down, going house-to-house and throwing their full military might at Algiers? I do hate to post spoilers, but I think Pontecorvo's film should be screened again for Mr. Cheney and the Pentagon, with special attention to the part near the end."
Watching the rebels in Egypt this week, I couldn't help but be reminded of The Battle of Algiers and its whitewashed back alleys; it's not a colonial struggle, yet it clearly involves large numbers of frustrated, under-employed, economically-depressed young people willing to die in a longshot throw of the dice for political freedom. And as Mubarak's police mounted their own violent counter-demonstrations today, I remembered the scenes in Pontecorvo's film of huge crowds overwhelming armored cars and tanks, swarming and disarming troops, and marching on government buildings. Like Mubarak, Col. Mathieu also wondered about the mob and the majority, and the knife's edge between a country's desire for order and an insurgency's desire for freedom.
"There are 80,000 Arabs in the Kasbah," Col. Mathieu told the French journalists gathered in his office. "Are they all against us? We know they're not. In reality, it's only a small minority that dominates with terror and violence. This minority is our adversary and we must isolate and destroy it."
Mubarak, an important ally of the United States until approximately Sunday at 9 am Eastern time, may be thinking the same thing.
Here's the trailer for The Battle of Algiers - if you need a break from the live images on Al Jazeera, this is the clear choice.


In the Elizabeth-Diana spectacle, Michael Sheen portrays a bounding, tail-wagging, eager terrier of a Prime Minister - fully three-dimensional as the young, suburban emblem of a younger, suburban nation. Pre-9/11 Britain was proud of its boutique size and the speed with which it could adapt to the modern. It was like the cool, smart ad agency next to the plodding old-world behemoths. (I remember vividly the kangaroo steaks in a St. John's wood dungeon-bistro, followed by a wild ride to the museum of cinema, closed for a strange dot-com party in the late 90s).
And it's what is happening all over this country with increasing rapidity - the cold realization of not only failure in Iraq, but weakness of it all, the gullibility of us all, our failure to see, our willingness to trust and believe and follow. Like E.G. Marshall's stockbroker, a legion of upstanding citizens is realizing tehri gross, mass mistake - its happening in Connecticut, where the war far more than the game, blogging volunteers, are spelling Democratic doom for Joe Lieberman. And I think it's going to happen elsewhere, as the jurors begin to switch their votes one by one. After an 11-to-one vote in the sweltering jury room on Centre Street, Henry Fonda explains his refusal to convict:
With the exception of Tobey Maguire's brooding, troubled, deeply ambiguous Spiderman, comic book super heroes brought to life on the screen tend to suffer from a kind of bland stoicism. Call it costume-doping: the cooler the threads and capes, the more the man inside tends to fade away. Then too, the requisite feats of strength divert attention from the figure to his powers - and these days, powers are written in gorgeous special effects, utterly encouraging the suspension of disbelief.
It's very hard to do a better job of describing the thespian arts than art, and Lemmon didn't just say it - he lived it. The antic comedy of a skinny young stage actor morphed into the serious, internal stories of a middle-aged man not afraid to show his age, and his sense that the world is moving on and he cannot crontrol it. Of course, his work with Billy Wilder was among his best and they span the full range - Some Like It Hot, the Apartment, Irma La Douce, The Front Page.
Alone on our block, we have the full series of W&G shorts on DVD, the W&G clock radio, the W&G comb and brush set, the W&G cookie tin, the W&G video game, the W&G fridge magnet, even the rare W&G Christmas short from the BBC a few year's back. Alone among my children's peer group of cousins and friends, we worshipped the genius of Nick Park and re-ran the "Classic Three" countless times over the last decade; indeed, they made the big move from VHS to DVD with us. They accompany us on long plane flights and longer car rides, cued up on the the laptop and the portable DVD player.


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