The Battle of Algiers (An episode of The World Today with Tariq Ali on Venezuelan Television, narrated by Edward Said)

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The Battle of Algiers transposed into a Palestinian key

by Jacob Norris, Open Democracy

In May 1989, Edward Said arrived at the Rome apartment of Gillo Pontecorvo, eager to press the Italian filmmaker on the connections between The Battle of Algiers and the First Intifada that was then raging in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. In his account of the interview, Said presents the discussion of these connections as the climax of his conversation with Pontecorvo: “Finally…I was able to get to what seemed to me to be the logical contemporary extension of the political situations represented in The Battle of Algiers”.

In his eagerness to relate Pontecorvo’s 1966 masterpiece to Palestine, Said was voicing a much wider fascination among both Palestinians and Israelis with establishing the film’s relevance (or irrelevance) to the contemporary Middle East. The potential parallels are there for all to see. From the brutality of France’s colonial occupation (complete with checkpoints, house demolitions and separation barriers), to the FLN’s targeting of civilians and urban warfare tactics, The Battle of Algiers seems to invite comparison with Israel’s on-going military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Gender, myth, nationalism: Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers

by Mani Sharpe, Open Democracy

Inspired by Yacef Saadi’s account of his experiences as an F.L.N (Front de Libération Nationale) military commander, Gillo Pontecorvo’s seminal 1966 work The Battle of Algiers dramatises Algeria’s struggle for independence between 1956 and 1957, during which the nationalist movement shifted its focus from rural Kabylia and the Aurès mountains to the capital, Algiers.

As the film illustrates, this renewed emphasis upon guerrilla warfare attracted both the attention of the international community and witnessed the increasing participation of women within the conflict, as female nationalists (known asmujahida) were tasked with carrying information and weapons through the besieged city.

The Battle of Algiers (film)

Post-Palliative: Coloniality's Affective Dissonance

by Ranjana Khanna, Postcolonial Text, Vol.2., No.1 (2006)

"Is the alibi still avoidable? Is it not already too late?" (Derrida, Without Alibi 280)

Debate concerning field formation and demise is often accompanied by language of birth, newness, and radical hopefulness in the first instance, and melancholia, disappointment, and outdatedness in the second. Some fields that have announced their "newness" with the prefix "post": postmodernism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, for example, have often suggested a critical engagement with and surpassing of that which has preceded the former in political and/or disciplinary terms. Others, like postfeminism, have simply announced the demise and lack of importance of the field, and the death-notice is often accompanied by a sense of despair on the part of those who conceptualize a continued need for the field and the politics associated with it, seeing its hasty burial as testimony to the necessity of its revitalization.