The Battle of Algiers (1966)
Exploring the film that has served as a guidebook for imperialists and anti-imperialists alike.
Maybe you could use a reprieve from election post-mortems. In that case, may I suggest Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, which Lyle Jeremy Rubin and I just covered on the Bang-Bang podcast.
I had never seen the film before covering it for the pod, but I knew of its legendary status as arguably the most successful revolutionary film of all time. It speaks to so many issues swirling around in our contemporary politics:
Who gets the right of resistance?
What good is a nationalism that justifies empire?
What role is there for violence in liberatory struggles?
How do everyday people take on their ruling classes, and what follows if they succeed?
We get philosophical in this episode, but still manage to crack ourselves up a bit. ✌️
Further Reading
“Big Screen Berkeley: ‘The Battle of Algiers,’ Do Not Resist’,” by John Seal
A Savage War of Peace (1977), by Alistair Horne
Discourse on Colonialism (1955), by Aimé Césaire
The Wretched of the Earth (1961), by Franz Fanon
“Negroes are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White” (1967), by James Baldwin
“Open Letter to the Born Again” (1979), by James Baldwin
On Violence (1970), by Hannah Arendt
“No regrets from an ex-Algerian rebel immortalized in film” (2007), Interview with Saadi Yacef
“The Communists and the Colonized” (2016), Interview with Selim Nadi
Hamas Contained (2018), by Tareq Baconi
The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (2020), by Rashid Khalidi