‘War is an openly declared state of organized violent conflict, typified by extreme aggression, societal disruption, and high mortality.’
‘Guerrilla warfare is a form of irregular warfare and refers to conflicts in which a small group of combatants including, but not limited to, armed civilians (or “irregulars”) use military tactics.’
This week our class watched The Battle of Algiers (1966 Gillo Pontecorvo). The film is set between 1954 and 1962 in Algiers during the Algerian war of independence. The film is striking because of its almost documentary style portrayal of war and also its ability to address the brutality of the French Colonists. It was banned in France for a time after it’s release as it showed the French occupation as a mass oppression of the Algerian people.
The opening scene of torture from the French towards an Algerian man is one of horror, but eaqualy shocking is the scene where a group of ordinary people are relaxing in a cafe when a rebel bomb suddenly explodes among them. Here the Algerian people are using the controls that are used against them. They persue urban guerilla warfare as a way to regain control of their land and to fight for freedom.
Pontecovo’s use of a hand-held camera to capture manic crowd scenes depicts war in such a real way that as an audience you would be forgiven for thinking some of the footage was from the years when Algeria was at struggle. However this leads me to think about Naomi Klien’s ‘Shock Doctrine’. The violence in The Battle of Algiers is explicit, but is it still as shocking today as it was in 1966? In Klien’s Shock Doctrine she talks about the way the public is taught to accept ‘shocks’ or crisis as normal, even if it affects their way of living.
“The dumping of private debt into the public coffers is only stage one of the current shock. The second comes when the debt crisis currently being created by this bailout becomes the excuse to privatize social security, lower corporate taxes and cut spending on the poor.” (http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2008/09/now-time-resist-wall-streets-shock-doctrine)
Klien’s arguement can relate to modern culture, for example film. We are exposed to images of extreme violence in a way that normalises this kind of dehumanisation. The Battle of Algiers was shocking in it’s day because it showed the violent conditions that the Algerian people had to struggle against. It also has relevence to today’s events in the Middle East and North Africa, which are in many ways, a continuation of the struggle against colonialism.
The approach used in The Battle of Algiers contrasts to the ‘shock tactics’ imposed by modern mainstream cinema which are more stylised and offer little in the way of reality. In a critique of Quentin Tarantino’s use of violence, Marty Jonas writes:
“Into this closed system, little of reality can intrude. Neither Kill Bill nor its director shows any interest in or consciousness of what motivates human beings, how they live and (especially) how they really die.” http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/nov2003/kill-n11.shtml
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