THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I got the 27x41 poster for $5 at the Magnolia. One edge has a few marks, but it looks nice otherwise.

funny, this subject, since jacques rivette (in cahiers du cinéma) accused another pontecorvo film of being a kind of pornography of violence:

Look however in Kapo, the shot where Riva commits suicide by throwing herself on electric barbwire: the man who decides at this moment to make a forward tracking shot to reframe the dead body – carefully positioning the raised hand in the corner of the final framing – this man is worthy of the most profound contempt.

It's a great movie. And its re-release makes us all feel smug, like the kids who bothered to study for the test. The only problem is that the kids who didn't study still get to run things, so fuck whatever good it does us.

Sorry, just feeling bitter tonight.

But no.

I had to do a classroom presentation on the Iraq war and used clips from The Battle Of Algiers - it's scary/sad how right on it still is.

RIP.

Spittle's comment upthread resonates. But of course the only option is no one studying whatsoever. I hope for respectful obituaries that get this film circulating again.

Ah, so I watched Operation Ogre and it wasn't a patch on Battle of Algiers. Main impediment to it being particularly engrossing is that the event that it depicts, the assassination of Carrero Blanco, went off pretty much without a hitch!

I think I mentioned it in another thread, but the special features on this are pretty great, as far as special features go:

the interview with Clarke and the other state department guy is classic ... they discuss how the US does not engage in torture

the contemporary directors one is also good, though the thing I liked most about it is the backdrops each of the five used, and the connotations of each.

i bought Battles of Algiers on DVD like 2 months before this good version came out. Mine has no extra features and the subs are those ones that I don't know how you term but are really annoying in black and white films because they don't float over the action but are like white burned into the frame so when the writing is on a piece of the screen that is white anyway it's hard to read.

haha

When football players seek inspiration they normally opt for a round of golf. Not the Algerians, though. Ahead of their big match with England tonight, the north Africans have made a trip to the cinema to watch a screening of The Battle of Algiers.

Gillo Pontecorvo's 1966 classic is set during the Algerian war of the 1950s and details the emergence of the native resistance against the imperial French. It's a gritty, troubling film that shows the moral compromises that war forces on all sides. It's also over two hours long, but that doesn't appear to have stopped the Algerians from being inspired.

"I had never seen it before. It was very moving, and it was very moving to spend the time together. This is the kind of thing we need to do to feel together," said Hassan Yebda, the 26-year-old midfielder who played in England last season with Portsmouth.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/jun/18/world-cup-football-battle-of-algiers/print

woah

the fuckin' movies!

This is really good but I didn't get to finish it last night. I want to say it's maybe one of the few films that manages to give an insurgency/rebellion some dignity without making it looks saintly, and similarly to portray an oppressor without cartoonish villainy.

Aye,it's obviously pro algerian independence. but not in a stupid way. Like quiet flows the don is with the Russian civil war.

Paratrooper leader is a cool bro,fln murder innocents:shit is complicated basically.to be less tendentious maybe a human pied-noir would be cool but whatever.

I think that would make the film more rounded, yeah. Some guy saying "My family have lived here for generations... if we lose this we are going to be run out of our homeland!" would humanise a lot generally seen as a shower of cons.

Also I didn't know a lot about the conflict before and it seems so clearly to be the antecedent of the more violent Palestinian resistance movements - like I'd imagine Algeria was studied as a blueprint. Although there are key differences that perhaps made the strategy less likely to work -- most significantly that the oppressor, as it were, was much more emotionally attached to its cause than France was to a colony.

this war was more violent than that -- a million dead, i think, in half a decade-ish? and it split france, or came pretty close. but yeah i think both sides left a legacy, were studied.