A Book and a Movie

Here's a movie to add your Netflix queue or your LinkCat holds:

The Battle of Algiers is a 1965 French film about the independence struggle between the French colonialists and the FLN (National Liberation Front). The movie is subtitled and I generally abhor subtitled films, but this one is riveting. As the battle of terror escalates it's easy to forget you are watching a movie. While the film is clearly pro-FLN, the French colonials (pied noir)are not cartoonishly cariacatured, but are shown as real people. The echoes to Iraq today ring clear: these people primarily wanted to run their own affairs, no matter the intentions - good or bad - of the French .

Here's a link to a story on http://www.commondreams.org/ web site: The Battle of Algiers and Its Lessons

The Pentagon gave them film a screening back in 2003: http://www.slate.com/id/2087628/

Here is Netflix's description:

One of the most influential films in the history of political cinema, Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers focuses on the events of 1957, a key year in Algeria's struggle for independence from France. Shot in the streets of Algiers in documentary style, the film vividly re-creates the tumultuous Algerian uprising against the occupying French. The violence soon escalates on both sides in this war drama that's astonishingly relevant today.

The film is available from the library: Battle of Algiers (DVD) [videorecording]

Here's a link to a story on commondreams.org's web site: The Battle of Algiers and Its Lessons

A great book to fill in the background is A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (New York Review Books Classics) by Alistair Horne. It's one the great series of reprints from the New York Review Books - NYRB.

BTW, I've been really happy with my Netflix subscription. You put your movies in a queue and they mail them to you. Keep them as long as you want. You watch it and send it back (postage-paid) and they send the next one. Netflix has a Madison distribution facility, so local turnaround is very fast. Setting up the queue takes some effort - Netflix has something like 100,000 titles. But as you rate and/or rent movies the Netflix software makes some pretty good guesses about other movies you might like. Blockbuster has a similar program and you can return movies at the store as well as mail. Blockbuster Online - Welcome to Blockbuster