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The Battle of Algiers (1966) · Left of the Projector

• 0:16
  Bill: Hello, and welcome to Left of the Projector. I'm your host, Bill,
• 0:18
  Bill: back again with another film discussion from the West.
• 0:20
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  Bill: Wherever you're listening, give us a rating and subscribe so you'll get notified
• 0:37
  Bill: of our weekly episodes that drop every Tuesday. Now, on to the show.
• 0:46
  Bill: This week on the show, we are going to be discussing one of the greatest depictions
• 0:49
  Bill: of revolution ever put to film, the Battle of Algiers.
• 0:52
  Bill: It was released in 1966, written and co-directed by Guillaume Panticorvo.
• 0:56
  Bill: It was filmed on location in Algeria and was received to glowing reviews,
• 1:00
  Bill: winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
• 1:02
  Bill: It was initially banned in France, for obvious reasons.
• 1:05
  Bill: The film only features several actors, primarily Jean-Martin as Colonel Philippe Matteau.
• 1:11
  Bill: It remains one of the most important films depicting the struggles against colonialism.
• 1:15
  Bill: With us to discuss the film tonight is my friend, Aaron, a very good close friend
• 1:21
  Bill: of mine, real life, the real meat space. Aaron is a political organizer.
• 1:25
  Bill: He's a fan of the show of his own admission. He's excited to be here.
• 1:28
  Bill: He watched this film in high school. It helped radicalize him,
• 1:32
  Bill: especially from his family.
• 1:33
  Bill: When his father taught him about decolonization movements from a young age,
• 1:39
  Bill: taught him about leaders such as Nkrumah, Suku Ture, Maria Cabral, and Lumumba.
• 1:44
  Bill: As well as the Algerian War of Independence and the FLN. Aaron,
• 1:49
  Bill: welcome to The Left to Projector.
• 1:50
  Aaron: Hello, thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be on, I'm not going to lie.
• 1:55
  Ward: Happy to have you.
• 1:56
  Aaron: Thanks.
• 1:57
  Evan: Welcome.
• 1:58
  Aaron: So, especially when I talk about this film,
• 2:02
  Aaron: I always have to bring up the historical context because
• 2:05
  Aaron: what we see in the Battle of Algiers
• 2:08
  Aaron: is approximately four years of
• 2:12
  Aaron: 130 long year colonial occupation by france and algeria and i'm going to point
• 2:19
  Aaron: out two different like sort of events comparable events to give scale as to
• 2:25
  Aaron: how long and how close after the independence of algeria this movie was made so,
• 2:32
  Aaron: For how long the colonization, French occupation of Algeria was,
• 2:37
  Aaron: we can look at the U.S. and Hawaii.
• 2:40
  Aaron: And actually, it's scary how close it lines up because France was in Algeria
• 2:44
  Aaron: from 1830 to 1962 and about 132 years.
• 2:49
  Aaron: And so the Queen of Hawaii was ousted in a coup backed by the United States
• 2:53
  Aaron: in 1893 and the islands were annexed in 1898.
• 2:57
  Aaron: So do you want to know what year
• 2:59
  Aaron: 132 years is from 1893 that's 2025 that would have been this year yeah.
• 3:07
  Bill: That really yeah.
• 3:08
  Aaron: And then that.
• 3:09
  Bill: Really puts in perspective.
• 3:09
  Aaron: If it was eight if you're looking at 1898 it would have been 2040 so imagine
• 3:14
  Aaron: if you will and this is how the french viewed algeria they didn't see it like
• 3:19
  Aaron: a colony they saw it as a state like they call it a department similar to how
• 3:25
  Aaron: the United States views Hawaii.
• 3:26
  Aaron: So imagine indigenous Hawaiian people starting an armed struggle and basically
• 3:32
  Aaron: bombing resorts and, uh, uh, you know, attacking the military bases in Hawaii.
• 3:38
  Bill: We can only wish, we could only be so lucky. We could only ask for such a thing.
• 3:46
  Aaron: And then by 2040 or so, cause 2025 has already passed.
• 3:50
  Aaron: They, they liberate Hawaii and then, you
• 3:54
  Aaron: know four years later a film is made about you
• 3:56
  Aaron: know the final final days and to give
• 4:00
  Aaron: an even more like prescient example um we look at october 7th right and how
• 4:07
  Aaron: close this film was to the actual battle of algiers you know from uh 56 to 60
• 4:14
  Aaron: to the uh early 60s you know,
• 4:18
  Aaron: If you're going off of 2023, right, the difference in time would be,
• 4:23
  Aaron: this would be like if a movie was directed,
• 4:26
  Aaron: from the perspective of the Palestinian Liberation Forces about October 7th and released in 2032.
• 4:34
  Aaron: That's how close it would be.
• 4:37
  Aaron: And that gives you kind of an idea of how just controversial and like,
• 4:45
  Aaron: absolutely upended the political landscape in
• 4:49
  Aaron: the 60s and you had the vietnam and i have honestly
• 4:52
  Aaron: so much to talk about this film like for example
• 4:56
  Aaron: in 2003 uh the u.s state the u.s pentagon actually screened this film to study
• 5:03
  Aaron: it before the invasion of iraq because they felt it was one of the best depictions
• 5:07
  Aaron: of both insurgency and counterinsurgency it's been studied by the ira in ireland plo.
• 5:14
  Bill: That's an interesting point because we see you know
• 5:17
  Bill: as as using as an example of counterinsurgency considering
• 5:20
  Bill: the fact that you know they very point you know pointly says
• 5:23
  Bill: at one point like oh and we will see victor despite
• 5:26
  Bill: the fact that uh the colonel himself points
• 5:29
  Bill: out that the in indochina they did
• 5:33
  Bill: the same tactics and they lost there and then
• 5:36
  Bill: what do we see in this it's like yeah they they quote unquote
• 5:39
  Bill: win and like four years later it's algerian
• 5:43
  Bill: independence but i i want to i
• 5:47
  Bill: want to rewind just a little bit and do what we always do
• 5:49
  Bill: which is talk about our everybody's experience
• 5:53
  Bill: or their history with the start you know
• 5:55
  Bill: and since aaron you have the most to talk about in terms of like your history
• 6:00
  Bill: with the film i'm going to leave you for last because i know you have to have
• 6:04
  Bill: a lot to say about that so evan ward uh either of you want to give us your history
• 6:09
  Bill: your personal history with the
• 6:10
  Bill: film you know how when you first saw it you know what we always do here.
• 6:14
  Ward: I'll go first so i've seen
• 6:17
  Ward: this movie probably like a handful of times um a couple times before i was really
• 6:22
  Ward: political and i was like oh sick ass war movie you know didn't really think
• 6:26
  Ward: too much about it just pretty sick war movie and then now being political it's
• 6:30
  Ward: like god this movie is fucking great really really accurate depictions and just
• 6:36
  Ward: what the struggle actually entails,
• 6:38
  Ward: And I love it. And now it's to the point where I try to watch it at least once
• 6:42
  Ward: a year, but that's still pretty, pretty relevantly new thing to me.
• 6:46
  Evan: Yeah, for me, I've seen this maybe, I want to say like four,
• 6:51
  Evan: four or five times, you know, maybe a handful, as you said, Ward.
• 6:54
  Evan: I think the first time I saw it was near the time that I started.
• 6:59
  Evan: My political ideology was drastically changing.
• 7:03
  Evan: I was watching a lot of Soviet films and films that weren't just kind of your typical American fare.
• 7:09
  Evan: And i just remember being struck every time
• 7:12
  Evan: i watched this there's no portion of the
• 7:15
  Evan: film that's more i don't know
• 7:18
  Evan: uh just i'm just i feel like i'm like
• 7:21
  Evan: sweating and my blood pressure is rising when they're when the three women
• 7:23
  Evan: are planting the various bombs in the different locations my
• 7:27
  Evan: like i feel like my heart my like my my blood
• 7:30
  Evan: pressure is rising as probably theirs were in doing this in real life like during
• 7:35
  Evan: the real struggle and I just think that it's such an important film that anytime
• 7:40
  Evan: I watch it I then tell everyone else who hasn't seen it that they should watch
• 7:44
  Evan: it regardless of your political perspective but definitely if you're on the left and it's,
• 7:52
  Evan: I don't own it on, uh, on, uh, I do collect, you know, some physical media and
• 7:57
  Evan: this is what I don't have the criteria collection, a copy of,
• 8:00
  Evan: but I need to change that soon.
• 8:02
  Bill: So this is actually, this was my first time watching it.
• 8:05
  Ward: Oh, Bill.
• 8:08
  Bill: Listen, this has more to do with the fact that, you know, I don't,
• 8:11
  Bill: I don't sit down and watch.
• 8:13
  Bill: There's certain things I just, I just don't like, you know, get around.
• 8:15
  Bill: I, I mean, I have read about this, uh, which is relevant to this in a lot of
• 8:21
  Bill: ways. But yeah, this was actually my first time watching it.
• 8:24
  Bill: And one of the things that really struck me was the manner in which this contrasts
• 8:29
  Bill: with war or like movies depicting conflict from an imperialist perspective made
• 8:37
  Bill: by imperialist media or Western meat.
• 8:39
  Bill: What this was in which that the, it was the way the victims of violence throughout
• 8:50
  Bill: this film were humanized by both sides at the direction of, you know,
• 8:59
  Bill: people who were making this film at the behest of and in celebration of Algerian independence.
• 9:06
  Bill: And yet they still humanized the victims of violence,
• 9:11
  Bill: the French victims of violence in a way that you don't see in Western media
• 9:16
  Bill: when they show movies of Western, you know, military, you know,
• 9:21
  Bill: bombing countries and, you know, murdering innocents or civilians.
• 9:26
  Bill: And they never once even like give them any credence or any,
• 9:30
  Bill: they pay no attention to them. They just move on.
• 9:33
  Bill: Um, and it really struck, you know, it really stood out to me that in terms of like just the, uh.
• 9:41
  Bill: Almost like the ideology but the core philosophy
• 9:44
  Bill: of like humanization and how starkly
• 9:48
  Bill: that stands in in contrast to the western ideology of just dehumanization of
• 9:54
  Bill: anybody that isn't from the imperial core um but um now i know i touched on
• 10:02
  Bill: it very like lightly in your introduction but you know aaron your history with
• 10:06
  Bill: this movie and what it's meant to you i.
• 10:07
  Aaron: First watched this when I was in high school. And this,
• 10:11
  Aaron: I mean, my family had always talked about decolonization, but it never really
• 10:16
  Aaron: registered in the same way before this film is after, because like everybody has said, it feels real.
• 10:26
  Aaron: It is very real. And it, it does not glorify violence, which I think is really important.
• 10:33
  Aaron: Neither the deaths of the Algerians nor the French, like
• 10:37
  Aaron: you see the french stumbling and you see uh the
• 10:40
  Aaron: paint and i want to highlight something especially important especially talking
• 10:44
  Aaron: about the bombings uh depicted in the film um many of the cast were fln members
• 10:51
  Aaron: during the algerian war of independence like these are not people divorced from what happened,
• 10:58
  Aaron: and you know the actually the the the actor who plays jafar um yes of saadi
• 11:06
  Aaron: he was one of the political his character is basically what he did during the
• 11:10
  Aaron: battle it is based on his memoirs and so he knew Ali Lopuant he knew,
• 11:17
  Aaron: according to.
• 11:20
  Aaron: Algerian newspapers I saw apparently his nephew was Petit Omar you know this is not,
• 11:28
  Aaron: this is very real to them. And especially with Ponte Corvo,
• 11:35
  Aaron: as Bill will say, Ponte Corvo is one of my favorite directors because he absolutely
• 11:41
  Aaron: hates using professional actors.
• 11:43
  Aaron: He'd much rather take people from the communities that he's depicting, right?
• 11:50
  Aaron: And you see this in the battle of algiers where the only formerly trained
• 11:54
  Aaron: actor is jean martin as the
• 11:57
  Aaron: colonel who's actually his character that wasn't
• 12:00
  Aaron: a real person it's just an amalgamation of different french leaders
• 12:03
  Aaron: but the the actor who plays ali
• 12:06
  Aaron: la pointe uh brahim hadiji hadaji
• 12:10
  Aaron: he is you know that
• 12:13
  Aaron: was his first acting role pretty much and he
• 12:17
  Aaron: didn't really become an actor afterwards like he
• 12:20
  Aaron: did a few films afterwards but he didn't
• 12:24
  Aaron: make it his career and ponte corvo does
• 12:27
  Aaron: this in all his films especially one i've i hope y'all will do on the left of
• 12:31
  Aaron: the projector kimada which means burn which has marlon brando in it by the way
• 12:36
  Aaron: and he basically got indigenous people from columbia people who are living there
• 12:41
  Aaron: and was like yeah this is a movie about a slave revolt on a you know.
• 12:47
  Aaron: 16th of 17th century island in the caribbean and we want people from the caribbean here and it's.
• 12:54
  Bill: It's a really it's a really interesting thing because you
• 12:57
  Bill: know we we laud i mean we just had the critics choice awards and like you know
• 13:00
  Bill: people were given awards for acting it's like we laud actors and yet these people
• 13:05
  Bill: are not actors but as like evan you know like you said like watching that bombing
• 13:09
  Bill: scene like that's intense acting like they brought that to life in a way,
• 13:14
  Bill: And it's just like, you know, we, we,
• 13:17
  Bill: We hold actors up to such, you know, in the West, like we hold them up to such
• 13:21
  Bill: like high esteem and throughout history, you know, and, and yet these are not,
• 13:26
  Bill: they're not trained actors and yet they brought it to life in a way that you
• 13:29
  Bill: would think that they were, you know,
• 13:33
  Bill: actors that have been spent, you know, decades on screen bringing characters to life.
• 13:38
  Bill: And, and it's, you know, it's more likely because they were still,
• 13:44
  Bill: you know, because to them, this is real, you know, or was real.
• 13:48
  Evan: They're almost reenacting something as opposed to acting.
• 13:51
  Bill: Yeah.
• 13:52
  Ward: I mean, they, these aren't trained actors giving such a real performance that
• 13:56
  Ward: there are certain American releases of this movie that had to like have a disclaimer
• 14:00
  Ward: saying that like no portion of this film is newsreel because American audiences couldn't understand.
• 14:05
  Aaron: And especially to like all the extras are actual Algerian people from Algiers,
• 14:10
  Aaron: like, and they did an interview with Pontecorvo and he said he wanted to create the chorus of the Cosmo,
• 14:18
  Aaron: right? He wanted it to feel real.
• 14:21
  Aaron: And you hear it with the, with the, the, especially like one of the most horrific
• 14:28
  Aaron: parts of the film, in my opinion, is when the French, uh, police commander, it's, it's, it's funny.
• 14:34
  Aaron: Cause he's not even given a name, at least not to my knowledge in my rewatchings.
• 14:38
  Aaron: He goes into, I don't think so. He goes into the.
• 14:41
  Bill: Oh no, he very briefly, he's referenced like, not that it's,
• 14:44
  Bill: this doesn't even, but he is referenced by his name.
• 14:48
  Bill: Like when they leave that like party, which I think is important,
• 14:51
  Bill: which is an important point.
• 14:52
  Bill: Like that man, he is literally at like a party.
• 14:57
  Bill: Like, and then they're just like, Oh, I'm going to leave this party where I'm
• 15:00
  Bill: like, just like living my life. and that's like how divorced these people are from like,
• 15:06
  Bill: their humanity in a lot of ways. Like he's at a party and he's just like living
• 15:10
  Bill: his life and he's like, oh, we have to go bomb somebody.
• 15:13
  Bill: Like just casually, just like, just leaves a party where they're drinking and
• 15:17
  Bill: hanging out with kids and just playing cards and shit.
• 15:20
  Aaron: Especially the, the noise. And it's, it's constantly referenced the chorus of the caspa.
• 15:26
  Aaron: It's called ululation. You know,
• 15:28
  Aaron: the, the noise the community makes is a symbol of the community pain.
• 15:34
  Aaron: And I remember the very first time I watched it, because I had some familiarity
• 15:41
  Aaron: with the subject matter, people were like, why are they doing this at the end of the film?
• 15:45
  Aaron: They've only done it during periods of pain, like when it talks about the independence of Algeria.
• 15:51
  Aaron: And it's sort of like happy that they've won, and it goes to the point of what cost.
• 16:00
  Aaron: And that's like a constant point in the film.
• 16:02
  Aaron: And I, one of my favorite things that I noticed on this rewatch is that Petit Omar's, um,
• 16:10
  Aaron: first lines in the film when he makes contact with Ali LaPointe is men have
• 16:16
  Aaron: two faces, one smiles and one cry, the other cries, which is revolution in a nutshell.
• 16:23
  Aaron: You know, one smiles at the thinking what we, what can, where we can go,
• 16:30
  Aaron: what heights we can achieve.
• 16:31
  Aaron: But one face cry is seeing what's lost, all the death, the destruction,
• 16:38
  Aaron: the pain inflicted by the occupation onto the people living there.
• 16:45
  Aaron: And I also would like to say, you know, this is something that I thought about
• 16:51
  Aaron: and I never really thought about before, too, in the movie, the use of the guillotine
• 16:54
  Aaron: at the beginning, right? In the West, it's a symbol of liberation.
• 17:00
  Aaron: But, you know, and especially as I did research on this, in a lot of parts of
• 17:04
  Aaron: Africa, and especially in the Pacific,
• 17:06
  Aaron: in the French colonies in the Pacific, it's seen as a symbol of brutal occupation
• 17:11
  Aaron: and almost the exact opposite of what we think of it here.
• 17:16
  Bill: We should probably stop celebrating the guillotine in general,
• 17:21
  Bill: especially if you're a leftist and you understand that the French Revolution
• 17:24
  Bill: was not a true revolution. It certainly wasn't a leftist revolution,
• 17:28
  Bill: and it was a bourgeois revolution.
• 17:31
  Bill: Yeah, agreed. It really does change the way it is thought about or what way
• 17:37
  Bill: should be thought about or seen.
• 17:40
  Aaron: I mean, I could just keep going on stuff. I, we could talk about the, um,
• 17:47
  Aaron: in the film itself, how Ali LaPointe, and I think I saw some of the show notes,
• 17:53
  Aaron: you know, he's not some military, like he's not some politically educated guy.
• 17:58
  Aaron: He is the Algerian equivalent of Joe Everyman. He's been in and out of prisons.
• 18:05
  Ward: Not even educated.
• 18:07
  Evan: Yeah, can't read.
• 18:08
  Ward: He's illiterate.
• 18:09
  Aaron: Well, no, that's the thing. And I looked this up for the recording.
• 18:13
  Aaron: At the time of the occupation, roughly 10% of indigenous Algerians were literate.
• 18:20
  Aaron: So he is literally Joe Everyman. Like most of the men could not read.
• 18:25
  Aaron: The people could not read.
• 18:26
  Bill: Do we, this is never covered in the movie.
• 18:30
  Bill: But like, how did he become involved with the FLN? like what led him to that
• 18:38
  Bill: entirely like do we know do we have that information.
• 18:42
  Aaron: It's it's subtext it's they it
• 18:46
  Aaron: Jafar kind of alludes to it he's
• 18:48
  Aaron: like oh lots of Algerians come to us in the prisons because
• 18:52
  Aaron: a lot of FLN are in prisons and it's the same like bringing
• 18:55
  Aaron: it full circle to Palestine like it's the same you
• 18:58
  Aaron: know a lot of these revolutionary people are
• 19:02
  Aaron: imprisoned and they make contact with people in
• 19:06
  Aaron: the prison system and it's like well we got to
• 19:09
  Aaron: prove that you know and he says this in
• 19:12
  Aaron: the sense of like well we got to make sure you're not that works but yeah um
• 19:16
  Aaron: and i love how the film shows that you know we'll he's like why didn't you have
• 19:24
  Aaron: me go after the shop owner or anything else and he's like because the french
• 19:27
  Aaron: would never risk another frenchman They would risk an Algerian person,
• 19:31
  Aaron: but they would never allow like a French officer to come under risk.
• 19:36
  Aaron: And it's important to note too that, you know, LaPointe is told by,
• 19:43
  Aaron: you know, Petit Omar to just casually like assassinate him.
• 19:50
  Aaron: He doesn't do that. He makes a big spectacle of it. He unleashes his rage.
• 19:55
  Evan: He wants to look him in the eye, too, I think, is part of it,
• 19:57
  Evan: right? He was supposed to shoot him in the back, but he wants to shoot him from the front.
• 20:01
  Aaron: And not just that, too. He beats the man when it's a blank. He's like,
• 20:05
  Aaron: oh, I don't have bullets.
• 20:06
  Bill: Yeah, when he can't.
• 20:07
  Aaron: Yeah. Oh, let's go.
• 20:09
  Bill: Not even blanks. It's not even blanks.
• 20:11
  Ward: It's just empty.
• 20:12
  Bill: Oh, yeah.
• 20:12
  Aaron: It's got nothing in there.
• 20:13
  Bill: Just click.
• 20:14
  Ward: This thing's empty.
• 20:15
  Bill: It's got nothing in there.
• 20:15
  Ward: It's still got some weight to it. Let me smack you with it.
• 20:17
  Bill: Yeah.
• 20:18
  Aaron: Yeah, and.
• 20:19
  Bill: For those who have not seen the movie, just to like totally clarify,
• 20:23
  Bill: what happens is that LaPointe is given the task to assassinate a French police
• 20:32
  Bill: officer after making contact with a rat,
• 20:39
  Bill: an Algerian rat, like a coffee shop owner, who is giving information on the FLA and resistance.
• 20:47
  Bill: He is given the task to prove himself to the FLN. He is given the test to assassinate this officer.
• 20:54
  Bill: So for those who have not seen, that's exactly what we're discussing is he is given that task.
• 21:01
  Bill: And then it turns out it's all a test.
• 21:04
  Bill: The proof is that he's not a narc. It's to prove that he is really one of them.
• 21:11
  Aaron: It's phenomenal acting on on behalf of the uh brahim hadagi you know the actor
• 21:18
  Aaron: who plays because you you feel his his rage and frustration you know and this is not just he's.
• 21:26
  Bill: An intense person.
• 21:27
  Aaron: Yeah and uh it i mean you'll see this in a lot of ponte corvo's work you'll
• 21:32
  Aaron: see these amazing people acting in his films and then they just you try to find
• 21:37
  Aaron: other work that they're in and they're.
• 21:40
  Evan: Nothing else i think what what also strikes me i mean you were you're asking
• 21:45
  Evan: bill like sort of how is laplante sort of radicalized how does he sort of get
• 21:49
  Evan: you know um involved with the struggle and i and i think one of the things in
• 21:54
  Evan: my notes that i kind of or in my own personal notes too is.
• 21:58
  Evan: It's sort of like the i lost my train of thought it was like the he was right
• 22:04
  Evan: you know he was he was not like this well-educated person that was radicalized
• 22:07
  Evan: by reading and learning about press revolutions.
• 22:10
  Evan: He was simply radicalized by his life on the street in a colonial empire.
• 22:15
  Evan: The French colonial empire in Algeria.
• 22:17
  Evan: And he is very willing, clearly, to do whatever it takes to be part of.
• 22:24
  Evan: He obviously knows about the FLN and what they are and who they are.
• 22:27
  Evan: And so joining them to me is simply just kind of the, I don't know,
• 22:32
  Evan: I don't want to say like the rest is history, but you know, you live this and
• 22:35
  Evan: you want to do something about it, you're going to find a way to join the struggle.
• 22:39
  Evan: And then I think I put a couple of quotes from Franz Fanon from Wretched of the Earth.
• 22:45
  Evan: And one of the quotes when he was sort of talking about the type of people that
• 22:50
  Evan: are involved in revolutions, he says, the peasantry is systematically left out
• 22:53
  Evan: of most of the nationalist party's propaganda, but it's obvious that in colonial
• 22:57
  Evan: countries, only the peasantry is revolutionary.
• 23:00
  Evan: And we can maybe decide whether that's fully accurate or not.
• 23:03
  Evan: But I think people like LaPont are crucial to the success of these organizations.
• 23:09
  Evan: And we see it later on, sort of post and sort of the epilogue of the film is
• 23:15
  Evan: these guys start the revolution or start this uprising in this battle.
• 23:21
  Evan: And while maybe they lose the battle, they're able to win like the hearts and
• 23:25
  Evan: minds of all the people in Algiers and eventually succeed in their revolution.
• 23:32
  Aaron: I'm really glad you brought up Fanon because Fanon, as those who've read his
• 23:38
  Aaron: work know, was in Algeria during the struggle, the Algerian War of Independence.
• 23:44
  Aaron: And he was so close to the FLN. He was basically like an ambassador,
• 23:48
  Aaron: like a guy going out talking on their behalf because, you know,
• 23:52
  Aaron: they have to go to ground.
• 23:53
  Aaron: They can't do anything. And to speak to the just the reality of this situation,
• 23:58
  Aaron: too, because this is another thing in my notes that I wanted to bring up.
• 24:02
  Aaron: So for those who may not be familiar with French politics, Marine Le Pen is
• 24:08
  Aaron: the head of this far right nationalist party, the National Rally in France.
• 24:13
  Aaron: And her father fought in the Algerian war and he was scathing in his attacks on this film.
• 24:24
  Aaron: He hated it. I mean, obvious, but just to give you an idea of how real this is.
• 24:30
  Aaron: And, you know, even to this day, like between the relations of France,
• 24:34
  Aaron: France and Algeria, like to give you an idea on December 24th,
• 24:39
  Aaron: so like two weeks prior to this recording out the Algerian parliament passed
• 24:44
  Aaron: the law criminalizing the glorification of the colonial regime.
• 24:47
  Aaron: And in 2021, this is actually, this actually drove me up the wall when I heard this.
• 24:55
  Aaron: The Emmanuel Macron said that Algerians have rewritten the history quote,
• 25:01
  Aaron: based on a discord course of hatred towards France.
• 25:05
  Aaron: Like that's how tone deaf and like how, how segments of the French population
• 25:11
  Aaron: see this as like, you know, this, this lost cause sort of fantasy.
• 25:17
  Aaron: Exactly like the confederacy like this lost cause sort of fantasy this what-if-ism.
• 25:22
  Ward: But counterpoint everybody hates the french so like who gives a fuck what they think right yeah like.
• 25:31
  Bill: France i mean come on,
• 25:35
  Bill: Actually, nobody cares.
• 25:37
  Aaron: But yeah. And, um, just progressing through the film as well.
• 25:42
  Aaron: One thing I also really wanted to highlight is that the film does not portray that FLN is saints.
• 25:49
  Aaron: And I think that's really important too, because, um, well, obviously like F
• 25:54
  Aaron: the French, I don't know if I can swear on the podcast, but.
• 25:57
  Ward: Oh, absolutely.
• 25:59
  Aaron: You know, fuck the French. But even in terms of like what they're doing in terms
• 26:04
  Aaron: of sort of administering Algiers, right?
• 26:07
  Aaron: They have this cleanup campaign of like, we need to remove any potentially subversive
• 26:13
  Aaron: elements. And what does that mean?
• 26:14
  Aaron: That means getting rid of junkies. And it says it in the film,
• 26:19
  Aaron: junkies, drunks, prostitution. And some of this is seen liberatory,
• 26:24
  Aaron: you know, when Ali Laplante guns down the pimp, the brothel owner.
• 26:29
  Aaron: But some of it is, it makes you feel a little uncomfortable when you see the
• 26:34
  Aaron: kids, literally, there's a scene in the film where there's kids just beating
• 26:37
  Aaron: a drunken man on the street.
• 26:41
  Aaron: And it's, it's from the perspective of the FLN and a lot of revolutionary forces,
• 26:47
  Aaron: you know, you can't have these elements cause they can be corrupted.
• 26:49
  Aaron: They could be used to, to, to counter infiltrate, you know, our space,
• 26:55
  Aaron: you know, we have to be united.
• 26:57
  Bill: Yeah, that was a very interesting, um.
• 27:00
  Bill: I mean, like on one hand, like criminal, like the direct criminal element,
• 27:04
  Bill: it's like, that's kind of like on one hand, but like the like drunk,
• 27:10
  Bill: I mean, but at the same time, it's like,
• 27:12
  Bill: if we look at a history of the way colonial forces have introduced those elements
• 27:20
  Bill: to a population that they are, uh,
• 27:23
  Bill: colonizing and oppressing, you know, if we look at America,
• 27:26
  Bill: you know, that the United States got deliberately introduced alcohol to the
• 27:32
  Bill: indigenous population and fostered and pushed it and created a.
• 27:43
  Bill: Chemical dependency amongst a lot of people uh in
• 27:46
  Bill: an effort to weaken that group to some degree you
• 27:49
  Bill: know and it's yeah it's it's hard but again
• 27:52
  Bill: we return to like how like this like you said like they don't present them as
• 27:57
  Bill: saints and i think that this is again like when we come back to it's like there
• 28:01
  Bill: is a stark difference that between the left and marxists marcus marcus londonists
• 28:08
  Bill: who call for revolution and want,
• 28:13
  Bill: change, but we also acknowledge, nobody here, we all here acknowledge that to
• 28:21
  Bill: have a true revolution in which we will see a better future will require violence, correct?
• 28:27
  Ward: Mm-hmm.
• 28:27
  Aaron: Yeah.
• 28:29
  Bill: But do, do any of us want that? Do we, are we eager for it?
• 28:35
  Aaron: No.
• 28:35
  Ward: No.
• 28:36
  Aaron: And the film shows that.
• 28:39
  Bill: Exactly and it's like and it's the same thing
• 28:42
  Bill: when it comes to that it's like none of them are like oh this is like great
• 28:45
  Bill: we have to do this it's like yeah they're like another like yeah we gotta do
• 28:48
  Bill: this it's like fuck we gotta do this now it's like fuck suck this sucks like
• 28:52
  Bill: we don't want to have to do this and it's like if this was presented from if
• 28:57
  Bill: this was written by what's his face the mil,
• 29:03
  Bill: Red Dawn. What's his, I forget his name.
• 29:05
  Ward: Milieuse.
• 29:06
  Bill: Milieuse, yeah. If this was written by Milieuse, Milieuse would be like, oh, this is awesome.
• 29:11
  Bill: We're going to glorify all of this violence. It's going to be great.
• 29:15
  Bill: It's awesome. And we're going to kill the drunks. And we're going to hold it
• 29:19
  Bill: up as a monument to moralism.
• 29:25
  Bill: And it's such a stark contrast.
• 29:27
  Ward: Could you imagine like seven scenes in Battle of Algiers where the Ephelon just
• 29:32
  Ward: stops what they're doing, raises their guns up in the air and goes,
• 29:35
  Ward: Ephelon, like Wolverine style.
• 29:38
  Aaron: And I'm sorry. I just want to bring up two quick things. First,
• 29:43
  Aaron: this movie actually was an inspiration partly for Red Dawn.
• 29:46
  Evan: Yeah, unfortunately.
• 29:47
  Bill: Which is horrifying.
• 29:50
  Aaron: Yeah. And then number two.
• 29:51
  Bill: Yeah, we know that. It's terrible.
• 29:53
  Aaron: And number two is, I just want to bring up the counterpoint of the real sort
• 29:58
  Aaron: of rallying cry moments are just people in the streets or people in the prisons.
• 30:04
  Aaron: Like you see in the prison where the guy goes, long live Algeria.
• 30:08
  Aaron: And the prisoners respond so vehemently.
• 30:12
  Aaron: And it's not the French that silences them. It's the guy who says,
• 30:16
  Aaron: we got to see if he's going to have any last words.
• 30:19
  Aaron: We got to see him before they guillotine him. You know, we have to give him
• 30:24
  Aaron: the chance to say his last words.
• 30:28
  Aaron: And especially too on violence and on the glorification of it,
• 30:32
  Aaron: it's important to really know it's, I always highlight this.
• 30:36
  Aaron: The FLN is never the party that really drives the escalation, right?
• 30:42
  Aaron: The, the beginning part, the, and we, they were told at the beginning of the
• 30:46
  Aaron: film, there's been fighting in the mountains. There's been skirmishes.
• 30:49
  Aaron: They only really attack the police and it's really only to just get their weapons.
• 30:53
  Aaron: I don't think they even like ensure that they kill them. They just ambush them,
• 30:58
  Aaron: steal their rifles and guns and then flee.
• 31:00
  Aaron: But once the, and this is another scene that happens in the film,
• 31:05
  Aaron: once the, the residential complex is bombed in the Caswa and the FLN and the
• 31:13
  Aaron: people are angry and, you know, they see the FLN as these protectors, these civic guardians,
• 31:18
  Aaron: you know, they're presiding over weddings. They're doing good things for the community.
• 31:22
  Aaron: The people are like what are you going to do they just
• 31:25
  Aaron: bombed our homes and you know jafar
• 31:29
  Aaron: the supposed head even makes a visible
• 31:32
  Aaron: appearance when you know by all rights that would be really dangerous for someone
• 31:35
  Aaron: in his position and says we will avenge you don't worry we can't just storm
• 31:40
  Aaron: the european quarter and fight them like this because we'll all die and then
• 31:44
  Aaron: you start to see the the bombings of cafes the bombings of the airports the
• 31:49
  Aaron: civilians so they didn't start attacking civilians.
• 31:51
  Aaron: It's more of a rising of the escalation ladder.
• 31:55
  Evan: Yeah, exactly.
• 31:57
  Evan: That's a really good point. And part of, in going back even slightly further
• 32:00
  Evan: for when Jafar meets LaPont for the first time,
• 32:04
  Evan: and I think he's kind of, after he explains to him sort of the reason for his
• 32:07
  Evan: test, he specifically calls out that first we have to organize and then we can take action.
• 32:14
  Evan: And so they focus so heavily on the organization of the FLN to actually be that
• 32:20
  Evan: support system for the community.
• 32:23
  Evan: And as you said, it's only because of these other incidents that they sort of
• 32:27
  Evan: escalate their violence. And I want to just read one other Fanon quote from Wretched of the Earth.
• 32:34
  Evan: It kind of goes back to, you know, the idea of violence. And it's from just
• 32:38
  Evan: the page three, first paragraph of the book for anyone who is reading at home.
• 32:43
  Evan: In its bare reality, decolonization reeks of red hot cannonballs and bloody knives.
• 32:49
  Evan: For the last can be the first only after a murderous and decisive confrontation
• 32:53
  Evan: between the two protagonists.
• 32:54
  Evan: This determination to have the last move up to the front
• 32:57
  Evan: to have them clamor too quickly some say the
• 33:01
  Evan: famous echelons of the organized society can only
• 33:03
  Evan: succeed by resorting to every means including of course violence and so you
• 33:09
  Evan: don't necessarily want that violence but it isn't inevitable when you have a
• 33:14
  Evan: protagonist or a colonizer whose only method is violence so you know that's
• 33:19
  Evan: what you end up getting and.
• 33:22
  Aaron: Yeah and we we look at parallels today
• 33:25
  Aaron: you know in israel palestine you know the the the cries for justice of the people
• 33:32
  Aaron: in gaza in rafa in remote even in the west bank as well in east jerusalem you
• 33:41
  Aaron: know we we see the the the deliberate,
• 33:44
  Aaron: It's like Bill said, like you could, if you took off the grainy filter and, you know,
• 33:51
  Aaron: change the architecture a little bit, you probably couldn't tell the difference
• 33:54
  Aaron: between Ramallah or East Jerusalem and Algiers in this film.
• 34:01
  Evan: And on top of that, as the violence starts to escalate, we see the police's
• 34:06
  Evan: response is to essentially seal off the Arab quarter and creating,
• 34:12
  Evan: and everyone in my notes like apartheid, like this is the apartheid.
• 34:16
  Evan: This is Jerusalem, as you just said.
• 34:18
  Evan: So it's forming the same structures to blockade the undesirables,
• 34:29
  Evan: as the colonizer would say,
• 34:31
  Evan: into a region so that they can be more easily maintained and dealt with.
• 34:37
  Ward: Yeah, it's that escalation that we see from the colonizers first before the FLN has to respond.
• 34:43
  Aaron: Yeah, I would say this, like, I typically divide the film into three parts.
• 34:48
  Aaron: And when I watch it, the first part being like the sort of the organizing of
• 34:54
  Aaron: the FLN, we see the backstories, what's going on.
• 34:57
  Aaron: And then this is the second part, the sort of like,
• 35:00
  Aaron: the FLN has the manpower and
• 35:03
  Aaron: everything and to give you an idea in the
• 35:06
  Aaron: actual like algerian war about like
• 35:09
  Aaron: just to show how brutal it was
• 35:12
  Aaron: i believe 1.5 million algerians died
• 35:15
  Aaron: in throughout the course of this and
• 35:19
  Aaron: you know it is it is a horrifically brutal
• 35:23
  Aaron: occupation it is it
• 35:26
  Aaron: is violent it it does not hide its
• 35:29
  Aaron: violence it does not pretend i mean one of
• 35:32
  Aaron: the generals who was in
• 35:35
  Aaron: charge of the french military in algeria the real generals he even said on a
• 35:40
  Aaron: 60 minute interview um if you don't mind give me a second to get his name he
• 35:45
  Aaron: said on a 60 minute interview that yeah we use torture we tortured them we murdered
• 35:49
  Aaron: people like this is what it took to keep algeria.
• 35:52
  Bill: Matto is very he's very upfront about that. He was like, there's no, he does not like,
• 36:01
  Bill: No bones about it. He's like, yeah, this is what you do. This is what you have to do.
• 36:05
  Evan: He doesn't use the word torture. He basically was like, we used enhanced interrogation.
• 36:10
  Evan: Like he used his little metaphor to make it sound or his, yeah. Anyway, sorry.
• 36:16
  Bill: Very straightforward. It says, like, do you want to, when they have that press
• 36:20
  Bill: conference, he says, it's like, do you want to keep Algeria?
• 36:23
  Bill: Oh, then we got to do this. Did we have to be barbarous? We have to be monsters.
• 36:27
  Bill: Like he's straight up just like, do you want it? Do you want it?
• 36:31
  Bill: Then all right, this is what we're going to do.
• 36:33
  Aaron: Yeah.
• 36:34
  Ward: Slings you have to go to.
• 36:36
  Aaron: And I also bring up, now that we're talking about Mathieu, I also always bring
• 36:41
  Aaron: up, we don't see Ali LaPointe first in the film. We see Mathieu first.
• 36:45
  Aaron: We don't see the resistance first. We see the occupation.
• 36:49
  Aaron: We see a man being tortured. Our first thing is not to draw a parallel. This was Red Dawn.
• 36:55
  Aaron: The first thing we'd see is an American flag and a guy with a fist raised up
• 37:00
  Aaron: in defiance. But no, in this, the folk and it speaks to the focus of the film.
• 37:05
  Aaron: The focus of the film is not violence for the sake of violence.
• 37:09
  Aaron: It is about the earth, like some sort of bombastic violence,
• 37:15
  Aaron: the way it's portrayed in Western media. But it's it's a tragic thing.
• 37:21
  Aaron: It is something that is a last resort and people feel they have no choice.
• 37:26
  Aaron: And also the guy is paul i don't want to attempt his name i'll sorry i'll so
• 37:32
  Aaron: rest is i don't fucking know but this guy it's.
• 37:35
  Bill: Okay to butcher french names remember it's okay and.
• 37:39
  Aaron: To give you guys some context on this dude he's a real piece of
• 37:42
  Aaron: work he went to work with the um with the brazilian um military dictatorship
• 37:50
  Aaron: he went to work with the u.s military this is not a a guy we want to be celebrating
• 37:57
  Aaron: by any stretch of the imagination somehow.
• 37:59
  Evan: He lived to age 95 like all these fucking war criminals do.
• 38:02
  Aaron: Yeah yeah,
• 38:05
  Aaron: I just want to bring up, you know, Mathieu's first thing is about the counterinsurgency.
• 38:11
  Aaron: He has this footage of people, random people, and he's like,
• 38:16
  Aaron: is Algeria our enemy? Of course it's not.
• 38:19
  Aaron: And we, the audience, are kind of like, are you sure about that?
• 38:22
  Aaron: Because it seems like the whole of Algeria is your enemy at this point.
• 38:27
  Aaron: And he's saying, like, we have to live with these people, but we have to be suspect of everything.
• 38:32
  Aaron: And there's the fruit merchant who
• 38:34
  Aaron: spills his stuff and everybody in the thing laughs
• 38:37
  Aaron: at him but Mathieu who's portrayed as this guy who served in Indochina
• 38:40
  Aaron: who was in the resistance and for the record the actual actor was part of the
• 38:47
  Aaron: French resistance against Nazi Germany so even he has radical background you
• 38:54
  Aaron: know he protested the Algerian war from metropolitan France and so which is.
• 39:00
  Bill: It's such an interest out of everybody. Like, I know that he chose him partly
• 39:05
  Bill: because he was a stage actor and like he wanted to keep like,
• 39:08
  Bill: it's like, oh, he's an actor, but also he's a stage actor.
• 39:10
  Bill: So he's not like quite as known. But the fact that he was blacklisted, as you said earlier,
• 39:17
  Bill: for his defiance and his stance against it, like there is no part of this that
• 39:23
  Bill: isn't thought about radically, you know, and in opposition to the empire.
• 39:28
  Aaron: And just to highlight like because
• 39:31
  Aaron: i love guillo pontocorvo's movies right like
• 39:34
  Aaron: to give some context on this dude like this man
• 39:37
  Aaron: was part of the he was part of the italian communist party in 1941 he was he
• 39:43
  Aaron: was uh definitely like part of the resistance part of the resistance there pontocorvo
• 39:48
  Aaron: yeah pontocorvo sorry the director
• 39:50
  Aaron: of the film he is his politics shines through in everything he does.
• 39:55
  Aaron: And he always makes it a point like in these films that he does to get actors
• 40:00
  Aaron: who quote unquote, get it right.
• 40:03
  Aaron: For those who know Marlon Brando, you know, he is a very politically active
• 40:08
  Aaron: actor, you know, they're less savory things about the man too,
• 40:12
  Aaron: but, um, his standing up for indigenous peoples,
• 40:17
  Aaron: um, in the United States.
• 40:18
  Aaron: And he's in one of Ponte Corvo's main
• 40:22
  Aaron: movies uh kimada burn the other big
• 40:24
  Aaron: one besides the battle of algiers and it's funny because
• 40:27
  Aaron: on a separate side tangent columbia pictures
• 40:30
  Aaron: offered to make a movie about you know
• 40:33
  Aaron: like i think like uh like a dramatization
• 40:36
  Aaron: of the sort of indian wars in the united states with uh brando and ponte corvo
• 40:42
  Aaron: and brando refused columbia pictures because they wouldn't give political rights
• 40:48
  Aaron: to the film to indigenous people he said i want them to have creative control
• 40:53
  Aaron: over this film and colombia obviously said no.
• 40:57
  Aaron: And Ponte Corvo was like, yeah, if he's not doing it, I'm not doing it.
• 41:00
  Aaron: And the film never got made.
• 41:02
  Aaron: But yeah. And going back to the movie,
• 41:06
  Aaron: you know, it's like now that Mathieu has entered the spotlight,
• 41:11
  Aaron: we see the occupation becomes even more brutal and how the FLN has to respond even more so.
• 41:24
  Aaron: And also i just want to highlight even matthew says like id checks are pointless
• 41:29
  Aaron: because who is going to have their papers in order yeah the resistance he's
• 41:34
  Aaron: like this is a stupid practice i.
• 41:36
  Bill: Love how during that whole scene they actually they show her they show one of
• 41:40
  Bill: the women that bob like they she's right there.
• 41:42
  Aaron: Yeah there she is.
• 41:44
  Ward: Okay yeah no i like that too because it's like
• 41:47
  Ward: it's very much how like
• 41:50
  Ward: western western societies operate where
• 41:53
  Ward: it's like okay guys let's have our hr meeting on how to
• 41:55
  Ward: fucking be colonizers okay and it's like yeah it really churches up like how
• 42:03
  Ward: they should be doing things but it's only in that meeting for that moment that
• 42:07
  Ward: they talk about oh they need to do it the right way but then we immediately
• 42:11
  Ward: see the reality is no they just got more brutal.
• 42:15
  Evan: They were just aiming to get more permission, essentially, from France to be
• 42:21
  Evan: more brutal during this time.
• 42:23
  Evan: And one of the things I wrote as they were kind of showing that video of the
• 42:26
  Evan: checkpoint is sort of like pre-surveillance state monitoring of insurgencies.
• 42:35
  Evan: Obviously, now we have cameras and drones and AI, you know, insanity in Gaza and other places.
• 42:42
  Evan: And they didn't have that, but they still had this understanding of how these
• 42:48
  Evan: groups work with the sort of the pyramid structure where not everyone knows each other.
• 42:52
  Evan: But if they can get to one person, they can get to the person above him and
• 42:54
  Evan: slowly move their way up the chain.
• 42:56
  Evan: Like the way that he describes their plan to the sort of people living in Algeria is, I don't know.
• 43:05
  Evan: You may not agree with what he's doing, but it's a very well-crafted scene.
• 43:09
  Aaron: And I just want to bring up, you know, Mathieu, he's questioned, too, by the press.
• 43:20
  Aaron: And he says, at some point, people were like, aren't you guys being a little brutal?
• 43:25
  Aaron: Like, aren't you guys being a little fascist-y? And he gets visibly offended,
• 43:30
  Aaron: saying that, you know, I fought Nazis.
• 43:34
  Aaron: If you think we're Nazis, then like, he's basically like, I'll fight you right
• 43:38
  Aaron: here. If you think I'm a Nazi. Okay.
• 43:41
  Aaron: And it really speaks to how close, how similar this is, how this is fascism
• 43:48
  Aaron: and how the interfascist sort of confrontation in a sense between like France
• 43:54
  Aaron: and Nazi Germany, right?
• 43:56
  Aaron: It strikes a chord because you're being identified as the enemy.
• 44:00
  Aaron: Like you're no different from them.
• 44:02
  Evan: I mean, it reminds me also now of situations where like Benjamin Netanyahu has
• 44:08
  Evan: had press conferences where he responds to people calling, you know,
• 44:13
  Evan: the things that Israel is doing as related to Nazis.
• 44:16
  Evan: And, you know, then he's, of course, like, oh, it's Hamas that are the Nazis
• 44:19
  Evan: or the fascists or the people waving Palestinian flags.
• 44:23
  Evan: And it's the true ironic sense of the fascist calling the people trying to protest
• 44:33
  Evan: and, you know, free themselves.
• 44:37
  Evan: They're apparently the fascists, you know, as depicted only by the fascists.
• 44:41
  Aaron: And as we move through the film,
• 44:44
  Aaron: you know, one thing I want to always bring up during to people's attentions
• 44:47
  Aaron: to the use of lighting is really important because the Algerians never like
• 44:52
  Aaron: not until the very end when they're desperate, don't really strike at night.
• 44:56
  Aaron: It's always during the daytime they're in the populace but the French,
• 45:02
  Aaron: and it's flipped are usually in the dark until the very end of the film where
• 45:09
  Aaron: you know the final raid that we see at the beginning and at the end just another thing I thought of.
• 45:17
  Evan: That's interesting. I hadn't, I hadn't, what do you think the reason for that?
• 45:22
  Evan: Is it easier to get around because they have curfews in the evening for,
• 45:26
  Evan: you know, anyone who's, you know, Arab?
• 45:29
  Aaron: Well, not just that, but, well, I think that is absolutely a part of it,
• 45:33
  Aaron: like in a, in a real sense.
• 45:34
  Aaron: But when you think about it, right, like Algerians going into,
• 45:37
  Aaron: and this actually, thank you. Thank you.
• 45:40
  Aaron: Um, uh, Evan for, for bringing this up.
• 45:44
  Aaron: It segues nicely into the next part of the film.
• 45:47
  Aaron: Um, the Algerians have to be in the French spaces.
• 45:51
  Aaron: They have to work there. They have to go there. And so they can choose whenever they want to go.
• 45:58
  Aaron: So, and they got to blend it back into the populace as, you know,
• 46:02
  Aaron: revolutionary movements do.
• 46:03
  Aaron: But the French going into the Casbah is unheard of.
• 46:09
  Aaron: Like, why would a French person go into the Algerian quarter?
• 46:13
  Aaron: Why would you lower yourself?
• 46:15
  Aaron: As is one of the colonizers, we see how powerful this, this ability to go between
• 46:22
  Aaron: quarters is during the strike,
• 46:25
  Aaron: the UN strike where the FLN says, brothers and sisters do not go to the French quarter.
• 46:31
  Aaron: Do not open your shops. Do not do anything. uh we
• 46:35
  Aaron: want to show the u.n what happens and
• 46:38
  Aaron: in the real u.n vote the u.s abstained they saw
• 46:41
  Aaron: that this the french were on their way out they were like and
• 46:44
  Aaron: we see this like in the suez crisis which is mentioned a few times in the film
• 46:49
  Aaron: which for those who may not know is when france and britain had their last hurrah
• 46:55
  Aaron: in an attempt to to maintain their colonial power when And they tried to overturn
• 47:00
  Aaron: Gamal Abdel Nasser's nationalization of the Suez Canal,
• 47:03
  Aaron: working through their best friend of Israel,
• 47:06
  Aaron: you know, and try to seize the canal by force.
• 47:09
  Aaron: And it was defeated. And the U.S. basically scolded them and said,
• 47:14
  Aaron: no, see, we're in charge now.
• 47:16
  Aaron: We're the leaders of the capitalist, you know, imperialist bloc now.
• 47:20
  Aaron: You guys don't get to make these decisions anymore.
• 47:22
  Bill: I did find the, it really was like, it's just like, oh, look,
• 47:27
  Bill: the UN, as useless as it is today, it was then.
• 47:31
  Bill: The UN, a history of not doing anything for anybody being oppressed by the West.
• 47:39
  Bill: Good for you. At least you're consistent.
• 47:43
  Aaron: Well, the actually the really interesting thing, too, is at the beginning,
• 47:48
  Aaron: obviously the UN is a joke now, but at the very beginning in this stage of it,
• 47:52
  Aaron: you know, the 50s and 60s, it had a lot of weight to it because they'd just
• 47:58
  Aaron: come out of the World War Two.
• 47:59
  Aaron: And the US took it very seriously. They didn't veto things as much.
• 48:04
  Aaron: They didn't try to be like the bully that they are now in the UN because they
• 48:08
  Aaron: recognized all these countries are getting independence.
• 48:11
  Aaron: And if they try strong earning people, they will, the Soviet Union's waiting
• 48:14
  Aaron: with the, you know, hey, you hate these guys. And that's why they abstained.
• 48:19
  Aaron: They saw like, if we vote in favor of France, we look horrible.
• 48:25
  Evan: One of the other things I wanted to note, because we've brought up a few times
• 48:27
  Evan: that the press conference and a couple other mentions of, you know,
• 48:31
  Evan: when they're sort of putting to them, you know, oh, you know,
• 48:35
  Evan: don't you want us to stay here? You know, obviously we need to do this.
• 48:39
  Evan: There's something else that I found that maybe there's some like subtext or
• 48:43
  Evan: maybe it's obvious as I'm watching it is it's very clear that the French want
• 48:48
  Evan: to or Matteo wants to control the narrative that the press is also using.
• 48:54
  Evan: There's sort of the moment where they're sort of outside and entering in the
• 48:56
  Evan: press conference or they're maybe he's like leaving and they're all sort of
• 48:59
  Evan: crowding around him asking him questions.
• 49:01
  Evan: And it's very clear he wants them to portray this in a way where he's claiming,
• 49:06
  Evan: oh, like, you know, unbiased, like the way you want to do it.
• 49:09
  Evan: But it's like if you guys do your jobs, meaning for empire, the people around
• 49:14
  Evan: the world will know what's happening.
• 49:16
  Evan: And it's very clear that if
• 49:19
  Evan: they lose the press and they lose the narrative as
• 49:23
  Evan: part of this general strike and everything that's going on the the world will
• 49:27
  Evan: change their perspective i think that's also extremely relevant to palestine
• 49:30
  Evan: where you know maybe five years ago the national or the the global perception
• 49:36
  Evan: of the palestinian struggle was far lower than it is now after seeing.
• 49:42
  Evan: The genocide that Israel has committed and all of these things and seeing what's
• 49:46
  Evan: going on and they can't hide what they're doing anymore.
• 49:49
  Evan: And it did seem like from my reading is that the world was starting to see what
• 49:54
  Evan: the French were doing in Algeria more than they had ever had before.
• 49:58
  Aaron: Well, also, too, and this is mentioned a lot in this sort of press conference part of the film,
• 50:05
  Aaron: the Battle of Dian Ben Fu had just happened and the French were absolutely routed
• 50:11
  Aaron: in what was called Indochina,
• 50:15
  Aaron: now Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.
• 50:17
  Aaron: And for those who may not be familiar like because
• 50:20
  Aaron: this battle was so decisive this is the
• 50:23
  Aaron: equivalent of like oh well why don't you guys have uh
• 50:26
  Aaron: guns and we don't have the same guns and bombs and stuff
• 50:29
  Aaron: well the vietnamese did and they trounced the
• 50:33
  Aaron: the french and that's part of the because the pr was so bad france withdrew
• 50:39
  Aaron: and said okay we're out we're leaving you guys win okay and And that's where
• 50:44
  Aaron: kind of Mathieu is afraid because it's mentioned a lot that he's a veteran of the Indochina War.
• 50:50
  Aaron: And, you know, he was at Dimdenfu and he's trying to prevent that sort of PR
• 50:56
  Aaron: spiral of like, oh, well, we really don't have control of the situation. Maybe we cut our losses.
• 51:02
  Aaron: And to give an idea of what's happening in metropolitan France at this point,
• 51:07
  Aaron: this issue was so divisive.
• 51:09
  Aaron: It brought down the Fourth Republic of France. like soldiers from algeria went
• 51:15
  Aaron: to corsica and were basically like because they were taught debating about withdrawing
• 51:20
  Aaron: and they were like you will withdraw over our dead bodies.
• 51:24
  Aaron: And it almost sparked a civil war and charles de gaulle had to come out of retirement
• 51:28
  Aaron: and was basically like okay guys you win i'm back let's figure this shit out
• 51:34
  Aaron: and that's that's how like Because this is like when I brought up the Hawaii
• 51:39
  Aaron: point, that's what I mean.
• 51:41
  Aaron: This is the equivalent of like a state, like for all the bluster,
• 51:46
  Aaron: like this less revolutionary example.
• 51:48
  Aaron: But if Texas left the United States, like that would be the sort of psychological
• 51:54
  Aaron: damage it would do to the U.S. psyche.
• 51:59
  Aaron: If Alaska became independent or Hawaii became independent, there would be elements
• 52:06
  Aaron: of people who would be like, no, I'm from here.
• 52:10
  Aaron: And like to give a more historical perspective,
• 52:13
  Aaron: like at the time, so as the film goes on, we might be fast forwarding a little bit in the sixties,
• 52:21
  Aaron: France basically decided to dismantle its colonial empire in 1960,
• 52:27
  Aaron: 1961 on its own terms, quote unquote,
• 52:30
  Aaron: really shifting to a neocolonial model.
• 52:32
  Aaron: And they gave independence to every territory in Africa, except for three of them.
• 52:42
  Aaron: The first being French Somaliland, which is now Djibouti.
• 52:47
  Aaron: The second being the Comoros, which is a small archipelago in the Indian Ocean, and Algeria.
• 52:55
  Aaron: That's they gave political independence to everybody
• 52:58
  Aaron: else except those three and to to
• 53:01
  Aaron: give an idea i i looked
• 53:04
  Aaron: at the populations of these places at the time you know jibouti had a population
• 53:10
  Aaron: of 86 000 people right at the time the comoros had 198 000 people these are
• 53:17
  Aaron: not huge like places not to say that colonialism is justified when there's small
• 53:21
  Aaron: amount of people but You can see where I'm getting at.
• 53:24
  Bill: You heard it here first. Baroness and Fabian. As long as, listen,
• 53:27
  Bill: under 200,000 population, totally okay.
• 53:31
  Ward: But Valentine.
• 53:33
  Aaron: In Algeria, there was 11 million people, and metropolitan France had 47 million people.
• 53:41
  Aaron: And of those 11, approximately 1.1 million were basically colonizers from France.
• 53:50
  Aaron: Like, they would not surrender. And as the war became more desperate,
• 53:57
  Aaron: these colonizers formed their own military organizations, their own militias,
• 54:01
  Aaron: and basically did their own...
• 54:03
  Aaron: Pogroms and it got to the point where even today like macron basically in the
• 54:11
  Aaron: sort of you know macronist way said we committed war crimes in algeria and did not apologize for it,
• 54:20
  Aaron: which is basically this is not an apology no he said this explicitly this is
• 54:26
  Aaron: not an apology We're just acknowledging that it happened.
• 54:30
  Aaron: And that's how this whole relationship defines. And there are still the descendants
• 54:36
  Aaron: of these people who live there.
• 54:38
  Aaron: I mean, there was a mass migration. They're called the Pid Noir who left after the independence.
• 54:42
  Aaron: But a lot of them stayed and remained part of Algeria, you know,
• 54:46
  Aaron: because they felt it was part of their home.
• 54:49
  Aaron: And, yeah, that's why I bring up the point.
• 54:54
  Aaron: This is not just, we see colonial, especially when it comes to Africa,
• 54:58
  Aaron: we see, we think of the metropolitan areas as seeing this as far flung provinces
• 55:03
  Aaron: with like, oh, we lost it.
• 55:06
  Aaron: Oh, well, like how Britain viewed India. But this, this one was different.
• 55:10
  Aaron: This is like how the US views Hawaii or Puerto Rico or, you know,
• 55:19
  Aaron: to an extent, indigenous territory, uh, indigenously held territory in the United States.
• 55:24
  Aaron: Like they would rather destroy the country than give it up for the same reason
• 55:28
  Aaron: that we, we, we, for the same reason, you know, we say sovereignty for the Algerian
• 55:33
  Aaron: people. they say is it not our sovereignty to keep our territory united.
• 55:38
  Bill: It is even.
• 55:39
  Aaron: Though it was obtained through horrific means.
• 55:42
  Bill: It just you know i can i cannot help but anytime like seeing it it's just like
• 55:50
  Bill: like oh we're here and it's just like go home like you it's not yours like they act,
• 55:59
  Bill: so the attitude of presumed,
• 56:06
  Bill: It's the entitlement. It's just a constant sense of entitlement.
• 56:11
  Bill: It's like baked in and it just, no matter how cynical and jaded I get,
• 56:17
  Bill: no matter how old I get and how, you know, how much time I spend on this planet watching this shit,
• 56:24
  Bill: there's a little part of me that's still just like,
• 56:28
  Bill: wait, like why do you think you're entitled to this? Like, where do you get off with this?
• 56:34
  Bill: Like, you show up and you're just like yeah this is ours now it's like what
• 56:40
  Bill: in what way why do you think that what makes you think that why do you think you're so fucking.
• 56:47
  Aaron: Speaking of entitlement i want to bring up
• 56:49
  Aaron: something very poignant it's about this is
• 56:53
  Aaron: not the french this is the portuguese but the portuguese if you
• 56:56
  Aaron: think the french were brutal based on this film the portuguese were much
• 56:59
  Aaron: worse in angola in
• 57:02
  Aaron: mozambique but what i really want to bring up is portugal
• 57:05
  Aaron: used to have a province in the indian
• 57:08
  Aaron: subcontinent called goa and the
• 57:12
  Aaron: the indian after indian
• 57:15
  Aaron: independence you know joe aral nehru the indian government
• 57:18
  Aaron: said okay thanks thanks guys you
• 57:21
  Aaron: know the rest of you also have to go france had some possessions
• 57:24
  Aaron: in portugal so france i i'm not
• 57:27
  Aaron: as familiar with how france left uh they called it
• 57:30
  Aaron: pondicherry but in goa portugal was
• 57:33
  Aaron: like what do you mean go this is
• 57:36
  Aaron: our this is a state this is a part of portugal like we
• 57:40
  Aaron: will fight you to the bitter end and they all
• 57:43
  Aaron: they tried to call in like nato over this
• 57:46
  Aaron: and they said nato like our our sovereign territories being attacked back us
• 57:51
  Aaron: up here and that's where the the corollary of only territories north of the
• 57:57
  Aaron: tropic of cancer will be defended because they're not the u.s was basically
• 58:02
  Aaron: like we're not defending your colonial empires.
• 58:05
  Aaron: This is stupid and.
• 58:06
  Bill: You're going to.
• 58:07
  Aaron: Give up doha to india.
• 58:08
  Bill: I mean and that's it we have to that is most likely a political choice on the
• 58:13
  Bill: part of the u.s with like this would serve us very well if their colonial uh
• 58:17
  Bill: properties you know we're not defended there's no way.
• 58:23
  Aaron: Yeah and to go back to the film i want to bring up as the strike is going on
• 58:29
  Aaron: um at a certain point at the end of the strike Like when the conflict heats up,
• 58:35
  Aaron: they capture a guy, Ben Meadie.
• 58:39
  Aaron: This is the guy with the glasses and handcuffs in the press conference with Mathieu.
• 58:43
  Aaron: And I just want to bring up a really quick thing. Because in the film,
• 58:48
  Aaron: and this was a real controversy in French-Algerian relations,
• 58:52
  Aaron: one of the reporters asks, you know,
• 58:55
  Aaron: well, this is after when news of his death arrives.
• 58:59
  Aaron: And one of the reporters is like, so we know you keep FLN prisoners bound.
• 59:05
  Aaron: And you're telling us he ripped up his shirt and hung himself. Like, how?
• 59:13
  Aaron: And it took until Macron's presidency recently to admit, yes,
• 59:19
  Aaron: French paratroopers killed Ben Midi.
• 59:22
  Aaron: That's how long it took for france to basically talk about this and and say
• 59:28
  Aaron: things about this you know.
• 59:29
  Bill: Yeah that felt very uh epstein coded
• 59:32
  Bill: like there was a media came to
• 59:35
  Bill: i was like oh this is epstein like this is an epstein moment like this is you
• 59:39
  Bill: know one day we're gonna come back to this and it's gonna be well maybe i don't
• 59:42
  Bill: you know but i i definitely i would like you to talk more about uh the media
• 59:47
  Bill: like the the real life individual that he you know,
• 59:53
  Bill: and you know like his his position exactly you know um and like what you know his role was.
• 1:00:04
  Aaron: So to give you all an idea, like a lot of the, we don't, we see very little Ben Meadey in the film.
• 1:00:12
  Aaron: But he is part of like the executive committee of, because the FLN is not just
• 1:00:18
  Aaron: in Algiers, as they reference in the film, they're in the mountains,
• 1:00:21
  Aaron: they're in the deserts, they're everywhere.
• 1:00:24
  Aaron: And he was part of the leadership committee in Algiers at the time.
• 1:00:30
  Aaron: And so he is one of the political heads, one of the political and military heads in Algiers.
• 1:00:37
  Aaron: So he's pretty much the equivalent of an Ali Leprunt, a Jafar in terms of rank
• 1:00:44
  Aaron: and influence amongst the people.
• 1:00:46
  Aaron: And you know he was captured in the same way that and he was more politically.
• 1:00:59
  Aaron: Radicalized like he had more formal education than Ali LaPointe he went to a
• 1:01:09
  Aaron: French school he was more but he,
• 1:01:14
  Aaron: He's seen as a hero to the Algerian people. The same as Ali Leprante, the real man.
• 1:01:20
  Aaron: Like, there's statues of him throughout there. The same as Petit Omar.
• 1:01:24
  Aaron: These are all real, like, especially the FLN people, are usually real people.
• 1:01:30
  Aaron: And if they're not, like Jafar, they're played by the people they're supposed to be acting as.
• 1:01:36
  Aaron: Because you're not going to have Yosef Sadi, the guy who's the actor,
• 1:01:41
  Aaron: being like, yeah, I'm Yosef Sadi. I'm also playing myself here.
• 1:01:44
  Aaron: You know, they had to give them a different name, but yes.
• 1:01:48
  Aaron: So Ben Meadie was, was captured and they, they did the interview and everything.
• 1:01:56
  Aaron: And everyone is like, basically the French were like, Oh, we don't know.
• 1:02:00
  Aaron: We don't know what happened. You know, we, we, he, he was alive one minute. He was dead the next.
• 1:02:05
  Aaron: And that's pretty much their, their sort of position on the thing.
• 1:02:10
  Aaron: They tried repeatedly to do it to because this would be like and guess who was in his guess who was,
• 1:02:20
  Aaron: who had custody of him before he died our good friend Paul I was sorry whatever
• 1:02:26
  Aaron: his fucking name is that guy who went to Brazil like the this is the level of
• 1:02:32
  Aaron: brutality of it and people were saying that you know.
• 1:02:40
  Aaron: Everyone, one, Islam, he's a devout Muslim man, and Islam is very clear about
• 1:02:48
  Aaron: not committing suicide.
• 1:02:50
  Aaron: And two, like it says in the film, most of these people, given the chance, would rather flee.
• 1:02:56
  Aaron: They're not going to kill themselves because they see, but they know they'll have a chance.
• 1:03:02
  Aaron: Like, if they can just get that one chance to escape, to go back to the struggle, they'll do it.
• 1:03:08
  Aaron: You know like and we see that like literally in the
• 1:03:10
  Aaron: first in the opening of the film that the guy who is
• 1:03:13
  Aaron: literally crying crying out free algeria which
• 1:03:17
  Aaron: honestly if you take out algeria and you put in palestine i
• 1:03:21
  Aaron: would not it would sound so prescient to today like roaring through the prisons
• 1:03:28
  Aaron: roaring through the streets of the old city roaring through this all of all
• 1:03:33
  Aaron: of historic Palestine and so.
• 1:03:39
  Aaron: He's a very influential figure. We could talk a lot about him,
• 1:03:43
  Aaron: but I especially want to talk about, you know, as the film, the post-climax
• 1:03:49
  Aaron: of the film, you know, when we see the net closing in on Jafar,
• 1:03:54
  Aaron: on Ali LaPrente, and Mathieu's strategy is working, right?
• 1:04:02
  Aaron: And this is also why counterinsurgents love to use this film.
• 1:04:07
  Aaron: They're like Matthew's thing of like the cell structure is what organizations
• 1:04:11
  Aaron: use, revolutionary organizations use.
• 1:04:13
  Aaron: In places like Vietnam, it's mentioned like people from the IRA in Ireland, the PLO in Palestine.
• 1:04:24
  Aaron: This is revolutionary science, as best the word can describe.
• 1:04:32
  Aaron: And we see the net closing in and we see how people react differently to this.
• 1:04:41
  Aaron: And this is where they start attacking at night, like with the ambulance and
• 1:04:47
  Aaron: where the strategy is kind of lost a little bit because everything is dying around them.
• 1:04:54
  Aaron: But as the movie tells us, you know, everything, it's not dead and buried, but it is struggling.
• 1:05:01
  Aaron: And it's important to know you know sadi yosef
• 1:05:05
  Aaron: was was captured and the same fucking
• 1:05:08
  Aaron: general the same asshole the real life
• 1:05:11
  Aaron: general said that oh like trying to
• 1:05:14
  Aaron: disparage the memory of the
• 1:05:17
  Aaron: man said oh he betrayed ali la point he was our
• 1:05:19
  Aaron: informant when you know there are historians who say no that that doesn't track
• 1:05:25
  Aaron: at all like this is this makes no sense and you know we see how different people
• 1:05:32
  Aaron: are responding differently like some are are going out you know to the.
• 1:05:40
  Aaron: The French are blasting over the air raids. Imagine hearing this,
• 1:05:44
  Aaron: like your comrades, like where he's like, um, Simurad, Jafar,
• 1:05:50
  Aaron: all of them have been captured and just listing all the people.
• 1:05:55
  Aaron: And, you know, the guys who hear that, and I'm talking about the scene where,
• 1:06:00
  Aaron: they're like, we need a letter of a fair trial from you, Mathieu.
• 1:06:04
  Aaron: We want to make sure that our rights will be respected. And they basically use
• 1:06:08
  Aaron: it as time to prep, you know, a bomb.
• 1:06:11
  Aaron: And we see you know there are
• 1:06:16
  Aaron: people who just will not be taking and another another quick thing uh because
• 1:06:22
  Aaron: we i kind of uh sped past that a little bit um also the sacrifices especially
• 1:06:27
  Aaron: of the algerian women cannot be underestimated the fact that like such a the veil the veil the
• 1:06:36
  Aaron: hijab is such an integral part of their identity and
• 1:06:39
  Aaron: they shed it in the sake of for the fight of revolution
• 1:06:42
  Aaron: to look french to take on the visage of
• 1:06:45
  Aaron: the colonizer such a powerful scene and it shows the length that they'll take
• 1:06:51
  Aaron: for freedom to to basically sacrifice their culture for others and and i saw
• 1:06:57
  Aaron: especially poignant where jafar talks to the elderly woman who is less French
• 1:07:02
  Aaron: looking, quote unquote, whatever that means.
• 1:07:05
  Aaron: And she's like, I need to be part of this. I'll bring my son.
• 1:07:10
  Aaron: We will make it work. That's how driven these people were.
• 1:07:14
  Aaron: And the brave women and people who.
• 1:07:20
  Aaron: Were in this in the struggle and you
• 1:07:24
  Aaron: know for i also want to bring up because sometimes people
• 1:07:27
  Aaron: poo-poo the film about oh it uses child soldiers like
• 1:07:30
  Aaron: look at petit omar and i kind of
• 1:07:33
  Aaron: push back at that because occupation touches every part
• 1:07:36
  Aaron: of life and so they don't
• 1:07:39
  Aaron: give him a gun and send them to the to to go kill
• 1:07:42
  Aaron: french people they use him in roles that they know subversive roles like passing
• 1:07:48
  Aaron: information like i love the political intelligence when he takes the microphone
• 1:07:54
  Aaron: during the checkpoint and he's like the fln has not forgotten you we will win
• 1:07:58
  Aaron: we will we will survive this i.
• 1:08:01
  Bill: Think that that is a especially in the west that is a a um often used it's similar
• 1:08:09
  Bill: to the um The excuse that, you know,
• 1:08:12
  Bill: Israel uses like human shields and it's like, it is both a...
• 1:08:21
  Bill: Tacit like admittance of
• 1:08:25
  Bill: the actual like criminality and the
• 1:08:28
  Bill: barbary barbarity of the west and how
• 1:08:31
  Bill: like how they use that as an
• 1:08:34
  Bill: excuse while simultaneously continuing to
• 1:08:37
  Bill: do things that put those people put people
• 1:08:40
  Bill: in positions they claim are human shields which
• 1:08:43
  Bill: is not true um but they're still going
• 1:08:46
  Bill: to do whatever they claim you know do um and
• 1:08:50
  Bill: then the idea that like also like people don't
• 1:08:53
  Bill: treat children as humans with
• 1:08:58
  Bill: like full life experiences that with
• 1:09:02
  Bill: agency exactly they don't treat them as if
• 1:09:05
  Bill: they are full people with their
• 1:09:09
  Bill: own minds and thoughts and who have been
• 1:09:12
  Bill: affected by things it's as if they they act like
• 1:09:15
  Bill: because somebody is a because a person as a child
• 1:09:18
  Bill: they are incapable of
• 1:09:21
  Bill: understanding things or being impacted by
• 1:09:24
  Bill: like they they take the notion of western childhood
• 1:09:27
  Bill: and apply it to you know and in the west childhood is treated as basically like
• 1:09:33
  Bill: a bubble it's like they're just totally insulated from everything and they just
• 1:09:38
  Bill: take this like naive presumption and apply it to like a child like petite omar
• 1:09:45
  Bill: who is his circumstances are.
• 1:09:48
  Bill: Vastly different than the average child on the streets of you know new york
• 1:09:55
  Bill: city you know or in the suburbs or anywhere within the you know like it's just wildly different.
• 1:10:01
  Aaron: It is this mentality of segregating adult things yeah and child things like
• 1:10:08
  Aaron: i i mentioned i grew up learning politics
• 1:10:11
  Aaron: in my in my in my household growing up if
• 1:10:14
  Aaron: you if you weren't sharp on
• 1:10:18
  Aaron: your politics you would get clowned on even as
• 1:10:21
  Aaron: a kid and you know that's that spoke to
• 1:10:24
  Aaron: how my parents obviously we're not literally treating they're not
• 1:10:27
  Aaron: literally treating people as kids as adults but like they're
• 1:10:30
  Aaron: not infantilizing them you know saying oh you're
• 1:10:33
  Aaron: too young to understand this like no you need to
• 1:10:35
  Aaron: understand we are under occupation and
• 1:10:39
  Aaron: some children they they chose like petit omar
• 1:10:42
  Aaron: in this too and so it's important to make that distinction versus like the often
• 1:10:47
  Aaron: characterized depiction in western media of oh we're just giving this like 10
• 1:10:52
  Aaron: year old boy a rifle which is the fln would not do that which is done totally.
• 1:10:59
  Bill: For shock value and as a means of ginning up response from the population that you're looking to,
• 1:11:07
  Bill: basically manufacture consent with that's why they do that that's why they make those claims.
• 1:11:15
  Aaron: Exactly and so as the film closes
• 1:11:18
  Aaron: we see the net closing on ali la plant and
• 1:11:21
  Aaron: i want to bring up he does not at no
• 1:11:24
  Aaron: point in the film is he like fearing for his
• 1:11:27
  Aaron: life he's like oh i'm like he knows how
• 1:11:30
  Aaron: this ends on some level like you
• 1:11:34
  Aaron: you see the determination in his face he's not afraid
• 1:11:36
  Aaron: to die yeah exactly and what really
• 1:11:40
  Aaron: speaks to the character and i like this in the portrayal is
• 1:11:43
  Aaron: he gives no qualms to anyone who wishes to
• 1:11:46
  Aaron: surrender he says if you choose to to
• 1:11:50
  Aaron: leave and also i love just as a side note
• 1:11:52
  Aaron: in terms of filmmaking the the the chekhov's
• 1:11:56
  Aaron: gun of making the the wall like hide
• 1:11:59
  Aaron: out and because we saw it at the beginning and we see them making
• 1:12:02
  Aaron: it and it's like oh we know this is coming back oh yeah we know how this ends
• 1:12:06
  Aaron: and he says to the woman there when he's basically talking to what's left of
• 1:12:13
  Aaron: the fln in algeria from from our perspective he's like if you want to surrender
• 1:12:17
  Aaron: that's okay you you can go and he says but i'm not going.
• 1:12:23
  Aaron: And like the real Aledepunt, like the real person, he dies. He dies fighting.
• 1:12:30
  Aaron: And he is seen as a martyr and a symbol of the Algerian defiance.
• 1:12:38
  Aaron: And one thing I really, really absolutely want to highlight is after they blow it up and he dies.
• 1:12:47
  Aaron: And not to mention, and also I just want to make a quick side note. in this
• 1:12:50
  Aaron: in the real life version of this i believe 16 other people died
• 1:12:53
  Aaron: so it's not just he died and they
• 1:12:56
  Aaron: just got him this this kills many other
• 1:13:00
  Aaron: algerians um there's a french soldier saying you know what what do we do now
• 1:13:06
  Aaron: we've we've won right and he's like oh we've gotten along for 130 years before
• 1:13:12
  Aaron: this and even that is just a whitewashing of the history because if you look,
• 1:13:19
  Aaron: Like even if you just do a cursory look at the Wikipedia page of colonial Algeria,
• 1:13:25
  Aaron: French Algeria, you'll see there are rebellions.
• 1:13:30
  Aaron: Throughout the history of the thing it's not what we got along that's from your
• 1:13:34
  Aaron: perspective from their perspective it's like okay this attempt may not have
• 1:13:38
  Aaron: succeeded but we will try again.
• 1:13:41
  Bill: Yeah it's it's it always comes back to that it's like that that notion of that
• 1:13:47
  Bill: the colonizers notion of it like you know um well it didn't affect me so we got along fine.
• 1:13:57
  Ward: Yeah back to.
• 1:13:58
  Bill: Brunch i've been benefiting i've been.
• 1:14:00
  Aaron: Benefiting we got.
• 1:14:01
  Bill: Along fine it's been it's been great it's been you know it's been wonderful
• 1:14:05
  Bill: i love it it's you know meanwhile.
• 1:14:08
  Aaron: I can't help but bring up the hawaii example like
• 1:14:11
  Aaron: imagine if something like this happened in hawaii how many
• 1:14:13
  Aaron: americans would say oh well i mean hawaii was like what's
• 1:14:17
  Aaron: we've never had issues here yeah like indigenous
• 1:14:20
  Aaron: hawaiians what are you what are you talking about like while
• 1:14:24
  Aaron: hawaiian people and i've met hawaiian people who stand by
• 1:14:28
  Aaron: their culture and someday wish to
• 1:14:31
  Aaron: to be free there to see their kingdom restored you know this is not some distant
• 1:14:38
  Aaron: thing for them and it's really important to talk about the ending of the film
• 1:14:42
  Aaron: because the ending of the film is the most Beautiful way to encapsulate it because
• 1:14:48
  Aaron: it doesn't just say, oh yeah, but the Algerians won. Hooray.
• 1:14:51
  Aaron: No, it shows them like, and it's so beautiful because it says,
• 1:14:56
  Aaron: oh, everything was quiet.
• 1:14:57
  Aaron: And then everything just erupted. Like we don't understand.
• 1:15:01
  Bill: Again, it returns to like, I thought we were fine. Like everything's fine.
• 1:15:07
  Ward: Was it not business as usual? I thought we were back to business as usual.
• 1:15:12
  Aaron: And then we get this amazing scene. And I love the description of the Algerian
• 1:15:18
  Aaron: flag is, you know, the star and crescent on a green and white background.
• 1:15:21
  Aaron: And they're like, they just tore bedsheets.
• 1:15:24
  Aaron: They took whatever cloth they could find and made a flag out of it, out of defiance.
• 1:15:29
  Aaron: And in those protests in 1960, hundreds of people died.
• 1:15:34
  Aaron: A lot of people died. but they refused to to surrender and it it culminate and
• 1:15:42
  Aaron: it it's it's not some like,
• 1:15:45
  Aaron: bombastic thing like a red dawn sort of like we fought them off at the end it
• 1:15:49
  Aaron: is it is a very somber thing that it says you know after years of struggle algeria
• 1:15:56
  Aaron: is finally independent in 1964 There's no great glorification.
• 1:16:01
  Aaron: The film recognizes the sacrifices of all the people throughout this film and
• 1:16:08
  Aaron: throughout revolutionary struggle.
• 1:16:11
  Aaron: Revolution cannot glorify violence. It accepts that it's necessary in its places and times.
• 1:16:22
  Evan: There's one quote I wanted to bring up that we kind of went past this before,
• 1:16:26
  Evan: but I think it's relevant to the end of the film and sort of you don't see into
• 1:16:31
  Evan: the future. It doesn't give you the post.
• 1:16:34
  Evan: Again, it only was filmed in 1966.
• 1:16:37
  Evan: But I believe this is when the conversation with Lepland, he is being told sort
• 1:16:42
  Evan: of, or educated, I guess you could say.
• 1:16:45
  Evan: And I'm blanking now on the character.
• 1:16:48
  Aaron: Oh, Ben Meade.
• 1:16:49
  Evan: Yes, Ed Meade.
• 1:16:49
  Aaron: Ben Meade.
• 1:16:50
  Evan: He says, um, it's hard enough to start a revolution, even harder to sustain
• 1:16:54
  Evan: it and hardest of all to win it. It's only after the revolution,
• 1:16:59
  Evan: only after we've won it, that's the real difficulty begins.
• 1:17:03
  Evan: And I think it's like a very poetic way to describe sort of the ever so difficult
• 1:17:12
  Evan: nature of each step in the way.
• 1:17:15
  Evan: And you see throughout the film as sort of like the organization and the start
• 1:17:20
  Evan: of the revolution, but you don't really see the end of it.
• 1:17:24
  Evan: But the way they depict the end of it is, as you said, it's just a beautiful
• 1:17:27
  Evan: way to kind of show the culmination of their efforts.
• 1:17:30
  Aaron: And yeah like your point is absolutely
• 1:17:33
  Aaron: right about the this is where the real work begins
• 1:17:36
  Aaron: and i love that quote you know because when
• 1:17:39
  Aaron: you look at algeria like the referendum to to give independence i said 62 64
• 1:17:46
  Aaron: sorry it's 62 um first 99.72 percent of the people voted for independence So
• 1:17:54
  Aaron: it was pretty much unanimous.
• 1:17:57
  Aaron: But, you know, there you look at the history after the fact and you see like
• 1:18:03
  Aaron: literally the first thing you see on the I pulled up the Wikipedia page because
• 1:18:07
  Aaron: I can't like actively look for sources right now.
• 1:18:10
  Aaron: But the first thing after independence is the 1965 coup.
• 1:18:15
  Aaron: Right. Like literally a few years later, there's political struggles like this
• 1:18:20
  Aaron: is the real work of figuring out a real Algeria.
• 1:18:24
  Aaron: What do we do with the Pinot, the French who choose to stay?
• 1:18:30
  Aaron: You know, what do we do about the inhomogeneity of Algeria? You know,
• 1:18:34
  Aaron: Algeria is not just Arabs.
• 1:18:36
  Aaron: There are Berbers and Tuaregs and other ethnic groups here. Like, how do we build a state?
• 1:18:44
  Evan: And there's multiple parties within Algeria. Like the FLN isn't the only,
• 1:18:49
  Evan: you know, the only party.
• 1:18:50
  Evan: There's the Communist Party there. I think the.
• 1:18:53
  Aaron: Exactly.
• 1:18:53
  Evan: The, I don't know what, I don't know what the initials are, but like the national
• 1:18:57
  Evan: movement, you know, those are, which I think was founded by,
• 1:19:01
  Evan: I actually don't have it open at the moment.
• 1:19:04
  Aaron: I think it's disaffected people from the FLN.
• 1:19:07
  Evan: Yeah, probably right. Exactly.
• 1:19:09
  Bill: Split. Split.
• 1:19:10
  Aaron: Yeah. And this is the difficulty. I mean, we see revolutionary projects like,
• 1:19:16
  Aaron: you know, Cuba, China, Vietnam and say and think, oh, yeah, look at it. There you go.
• 1:19:22
  Aaron: That's it. But we what we like, I love the quote of like, you know,
• 1:19:28
  Aaron: they talk about the failures of socialism, but look at the failures of capitalism
• 1:19:32
  Aaron: in Somalia and in, you know, Afghanistan and all these places.
• 1:19:36
  Aaron: But, you know, we also have to look at, you know, the struggles post-revolution
• 1:19:42
  Aaron: of a lot of these societies because, you know, these revolutionary movements are not homogenous.
• 1:19:49
  Aaron: You know, they're not just one hive mind operating, you know, as one mind, right?
• 1:19:57
  Aaron: People have different opinions and they put aside those opinions for the sake
• 1:20:01
  Aaron: of the independence struggle.
• 1:20:03
  Aaron: But what happens when that unifying force is gone?
• 1:20:05
  Bill: It really makes me think of, and this was in reference to something completely
• 1:20:11
  Bill: different, but Ward and I were discussing the other day, a completely different thing.
• 1:20:17
  Bill: And how Ward said, you know, how it's like, how liberals hate leftists because
• 1:20:24
  Bill: leftists are unwilling to just gloss over things.
• 1:20:30
  Bill: How we're going to point out that it's not real, that you have to confront the
• 1:20:36
  Bill: difficult parts, that you can't just gloss over it. You have to confront it. And like...
• 1:20:44
  Bill: In a world in which we watch media, which co-ops revolutionary struggles,
• 1:20:49
  Bill: like we are fed it by the state.
• 1:20:53
  Bill: Watching this is such a profound difference.
• 1:21:03
  Bill: There is no glossing it over. There is no hand-waving it away.
• 1:21:10
  Bill: There's like, no, this is what it is. this is
• 1:21:13
  Bill: a lesson you need to learn we are
• 1:21:16
  Bill: going to give you it in a movie but this
• 1:21:19
  Bill: is a lesson you need to learn if you want to
• 1:21:22
  Bill: see successful struggle against things you
• 1:21:25
  Bill: need to take this seriously you need to really move forward with this and you
• 1:21:32
  Bill: can't gloss over things you can't ignore things because it makes you feel uncomfortable
• 1:21:36
  Bill: because you don't like it you can't You have to take care of it.
• 1:21:42
  Bill: You have to struggle with it. You have to internalize it.
• 1:21:44
  Aaron: Yeah. I agree 100%, Bill. And for my own personal experience with this film,
• 1:21:50
  Aaron: my fiance, ironically, when we started dating, this is months ago.
• 1:21:58
  Aaron: Into our relationship i was like you need to watch this movie to understand like how i see the world,
• 1:22:07
  Aaron: because i can't not see the world through this lens and this is the easiest
• 1:22:12
  Aaron: way to show you i mean i could go all the live long day about books and like
• 1:22:17
  Aaron: theory and things like that but what is more impactful than watching the brutality
• 1:22:23
  Aaron: of a colonial regime before your eyes,
• 1:22:27
  Aaron: presented in such graphic detail and you know it basically forces you to confront
• 1:22:34
  Aaron: it and i want to bring up a comparison i don't i i there's a lot of episodes
• 1:22:38
  Aaron: of left of the projector i don't know if y'all have covered this movie the patriot
• 1:22:41
  Aaron: you know with mel gibson and all them,
• 1:22:46
  Aaron: and and it's i always because i mean,
• 1:22:51
  Aaron: I hate, it's my, as a leftist, it's my guilty pleasure movie.
• 1:22:55
  Aaron: I enjoy the filmmaking, the making of the movie, blah, blah, blah.
• 1:22:58
  Aaron: But I contrast that quote unquote revolutionary film with the Battle of Algiers.
• 1:23:05
  Aaron: How Mel Gibson is portrayed as this mythic, heroic figure and everything falls on him.
• 1:23:13
  Aaron: Whereas in the Battle of Algiers, yeah, we know Ali LaPante,
• 1:23:17
  Aaron: but we don't know. we we've we get only get passing lines about the rest of
• 1:23:21
  Aaron: the people but they're so integral.
• 1:23:22
  Bill: I think that you
• 1:23:26
  Bill: are not giving those other people enough credit like
• 1:23:29
  Bill: like not that i'm not giving them enough credit but like
• 1:23:32
  Bill: i honestly don't think the film puts that much
• 1:23:35
  Bill: more on ali than jafar like
• 1:23:39
  Bill: the other ones like really like they don't
• 1:23:42
  Bill: there is no like the only reason LaPont is given like any kind of like even
• 1:23:48
  Bill: like I feel like any more like slightly it's just because like he's the audience's
• 1:23:53
  Bill: like he's the audience's proxy but the way it is presented is very much like he's not,
• 1:24:02
  Bill: He's not the hero. He's not, you know, he's not great man. There's no great
• 1:24:07
  Bill: man theory in this at all. Yeah, no. It's not present.
• 1:24:10
  Ward: I really like that too. It's very matter of the fact, like cutting through and
• 1:24:15
  Ward: it's like, there's parts of the whole film where it's like cut like a newsreel
• 1:24:18
  Ward: where it's like this day, this day, this day.
• 1:24:20
  Ward: And it's not like anything like the Patriot, like how you mentioned where it's
• 1:24:24
  Ward: like, oh, his personal relationships.
• 1:24:26
  Ward: Let's get you invested as the viewer emotionally into this person and his family.
• 1:24:32
  Ward: So that that way he seems more righteous when he does things.
• 1:24:36
  Ward: And there's none of that. It's just very matter of fact.
• 1:24:39
  Aaron: I apologize for not correctly conveying this, but like, I agree with you, Bill.
• 1:24:44
  Aaron: Like, and that's sort of what I meant. There's so many characters,
• 1:24:46
  Aaron: so many Algerian characters.
• 1:24:48
  Aaron: And yes, we get, you know, Petit Omar, we get Jafar, we get Ali LaPointe as
• 1:24:55
  Aaron: our sort of like pseudo main characters of the thing. but how many different
• 1:25:00
  Aaron: men and women are active?
• 1:25:02
  Aaron: Like we never really get a name of the guy from the beginning of the film.
• 1:25:06
  Aaron: The first Algerian we see.
• 1:25:08
  Bill: God, that, we don't, man, that is, oh, that's a rough scene.
• 1:25:11
  Bill: And you start off with that.
• 1:25:13
  Bill: You cut the tear, the whole thing.
• 1:25:18
  Aaron: The horror of just seeing literally the, the, the torture sequences.
• 1:25:24
  Aaron: And I will say there is like a, I think there's a version of the film without
• 1:25:28
  Aaron: it when it was first released because it was so graphic for audiences of the day.
• 1:25:34
  Aaron: I mean, now with the hyper violence of today, you know, I fear people have become
• 1:25:40
  Aaron: desensitized, but when it's portrayed like this, it shocks you.
• 1:25:44
  Aaron: Like when they put the electric clamps on the guy, when they have the guy curled
• 1:25:49
  Aaron: up on like a bar and like, like it is.
• 1:25:53
  Aaron: And they drop and they like do the forced drowning of people.
• 1:25:56
  Aaron: Like they do horrific things to these people.
• 1:26:01
  Aaron: And I, I, the, the, the film, it needs to do that. You need to reconcile.
• 1:26:08
  Aaron: Like Matthew said, if you want Algeria, this is what it will take.
• 1:26:13
  Aaron: And thank, God, the French didn't push any further.
• 1:26:19
  Aaron: Yeah.
• 1:26:19
  Bill: Apology not accepted.
• 1:26:22
  Aaron: But yeah, but this, this film is, is especially relevant in this day and age.
• 1:26:30
  Aaron: Cause I know one thing in the show notes was about Venezuela and it's so poignant
• 1:26:36
  Aaron: to talk about because if you want the fruits of empire, this is what it takes to maintain empire.
• 1:26:45
  Aaron: Like like matthew said like you know
• 1:26:48
  Aaron: if you want to keep all the the happy you know privileges of being a superpower
• 1:26:54
  Aaron: and there are no privileges for the working class let's get that straight um
• 1:26:58
  Aaron: it's for really the ruling class it's it's like well you got to deal with this and just like how,
• 1:27:07
  Aaron: maduro was unjustly and viciously kidnapped from his home country you know like
• 1:27:14
  Aaron: we're dealing with the fallout today like like how the,
• 1:27:19
  Aaron: bill said you know oh the tendency to
• 1:27:22
  Aaron: gloss over things like no like we've we've entered a new phase of of history
• 1:27:28
  Aaron: we've entered a new phase of of relations between countries the same way in
• 1:27:34
  Aaron: algeria algerian independence the end of decolonization it's just the world
• 1:27:38
  Aaron: keeps spinning and you know did.
• 1:27:42
  Evan: You have any last uh last thoughts or anything you uh didn't get to.
• 1:27:46
  Aaron: Oh yeah well one quick thing i i'm
• 1:27:50
  Aaron: gonna officially start this and i'm gonna comment on every video
• 1:27:53
  Aaron: y'all post but do kimada do more
• 1:27:57
  Aaron: of ponte corvo's work bill knows this
• 1:28:00
  Aaron: i have been ranting at him to watch more
• 1:28:04
  Aaron: of this dude's work because it is honestly phenomenal
• 1:28:07
  Aaron: um i wanted to thank y'all
• 1:28:10
  Aaron: all for having me and to share
• 1:28:13
  Aaron: my love of this film you know i i love film it's
• 1:28:16
  Aaron: one of the best ways to convey political feelings
• 1:28:20
  Aaron: because you know a picture is worth a thousand words like the ability
• 1:28:23
  Aaron: to to show revolutionary struggle and
• 1:28:27
  Aaron: not just read about it but see it from people who
• 1:28:30
  Aaron: were there who were participants and it
• 1:28:33
  Aaron: especially because the movie is made is
• 1:28:36
  Aaron: the script was written by uh yes of saadi the
• 1:28:39
  Aaron: guy who plays jafar who was one of the political heads
• 1:28:42
  Aaron: of the fln during the
• 1:28:45
  Aaron: battle of algiers he was there he was basically doing
• 1:28:48
  Aaron: what jafar was doing and so to
• 1:28:52
  Aaron: it's it's so powerful like one one can't even call it acting in the same way
• 1:29:00
  Aaron: we call acting in movies here because acting in like a DiCaprio movie is pretending
• 1:29:07
  Aaron: to be someone. These people aren't pretending.
• 1:29:09
  Aaron: This is what they live for.
• 1:29:12
  Bill: It's funny you mentioned DiCaprio considering what he just won a bunch of awards for.
• 1:29:19
  Evan: Well, I think what you did do, Aaron, actually, is volunteer to return to do
• 1:29:24
  Evan: another Pontecorbo film.
• 1:29:27
  Aaron: Oh, I will absolutely. If y'all ever want to have me come back,
• 1:29:31
  Aaron: I will. I love talking about movies. Bill knows.
• 1:29:35
  Evan: I haven't seen Bird, and I've heard of it, and I almost feel like,
• 1:29:39
  Evan: yeah, I need to see that very soon.
• 1:29:40
  Aaron: If you think there were good quotes in this movie, that movie is just completely,
• 1:29:46
  Aaron: it will drown you in great revolutionary quotes.
• 1:29:51
  Aaron: Like, it is such a good film. And the guy, I gotta look him up.
• 1:29:55
  Aaron: I gotta do him justice. Like I want to, I want to explore, I want to just show,
• 1:30:00
  Aaron: um, how just antithesis of, uh, actor he is.
• 1:30:09
  Aaron: Uh, if you'll bear with me for a second, um, the man is named,
• 1:30:15
  Aaron: he plays the, the, like, like we've discussed, there's no like titular characters.
• 1:30:20
  Aaron: There's no traditional protagonist, but his name is Evaristo Marquez and he
• 1:30:26
  Aaron: plays the character Jose Dolores.
• 1:30:29
  Aaron: And just to go off his Wikipedia page, before being involved in the film.
• 1:30:35
  Aaron: Like this is just from his Wikipedia page, so take it with a grain of salt.
• 1:30:38
  Aaron: He was a herdsman and illiterate and he was approached, he was in three movies,
• 1:30:44
  Aaron: I think it was like extras after the film.
• 1:30:48
  Aaron: Um, but he was his, you see, you think of that and then you watch the movie
• 1:30:54
  Aaron: and, you know, Marlon Brando talks about how, how much he loved working with
• 1:31:00
  Aaron: him, how, how great he was.
• 1:31:03
  Aaron: And he basically said, like, he was, they tried to make him into a,
• 1:31:07
  Aaron: like, they tried to get him in movies and he went back to being a herd, a herdsman.
• 1:31:13
  Aaron: Like that is the character of this man's films. And there's actually a documentary,
• 1:31:18
  Aaron: a return to Algiers that Ponte Corvo did decades later about the filming of the battle of Algiers.
• 1:31:25
  Aaron: So if you want me back, I haven't seen that.
• 1:31:28
  Evan: So this is sort of unrelated, but just, I thought would be like a nice bow in
• 1:31:35
  Evan: the 1966 Academy Awards battle of Algiers was nominated for best international film.
• 1:31:40
  Evan: It lost to a french film and i just i feel like that's just like a sorry guys you are not gonna slap.
• 1:31:49
  Ward: In the face.
• 1:31:50
  Evan: And it's also the only film to ever be nominated for academy awards in three
• 1:31:54
  Evan: consecutive academy awards it was nominated for the feature film in 66 i think
• 1:32:02
  Evan: uh screenplay in 67 and then best director in 68 which is crazy didn't win any of them.
• 1:32:09
  Aaron: Yeah no it that the battle of Algiers has been absolutely mistreated by the
• 1:32:14
  Aaron: academy. But then again, we're working class people.
• 1:32:16
  Bill: Yeah.
• 1:32:16
  Aaron: What do we care about?
• 1:32:17
  Evan: The academy is a joke. we, we, I.
• 1:32:19
  Ward: Only care if we can use it to talk shit.
• 1:32:23
  Bill: Yeah. Exactly. But like earlier tonight, I was talking about the house sinners
• 1:32:28
  Bill: got just absolutely shafted.
• 1:32:29
  Bill: And Jackie's like, I've, she's like, you never care about this stuff.
• 1:32:33
  Bill: I'm like, I only care because sinners got shafted.
• 1:32:37
  Bill: I don't give a fuck. I'm mad because I love this that's it I'm only because
• 1:32:42
  Bill: of that movie that's all like I.
• 1:32:45
  Aaron: Well, you got to tell Jackie, this is fueling my fire right here.
• 1:32:51
  Aaron: I already hated the Academy. This is just giving me more reasons to hate me.
• 1:32:55
  Bill: Yeah, exactly. I'm so fucking-
• 1:32:56
  Aaron: Why are you trying to rain on my hate parade?
• 1:32:58
  Ward: Also, I love Andor. So anytime Andor loses to Severance for the pit,
• 1:33:04
  Ward: I put off watching those shows for several months.
• 1:33:06
  Bill: Severance is good. Severance is good.
• 1:33:09
  Ward: Well, it needs to stop winning over Andor or else I'm never going to watch it.
• 1:33:13
  Ward: The ticker just keeps adding.
• 1:33:16
  Aaron: Yeah i'm i'm grateful you all gave me the opportunity to be here i'm always
• 1:33:21
  Aaron: willing to come back uh bill knows how to hit me up maybe i'll get a yeah maybe
• 1:33:27
  Aaron: i'm a ghost actually i'll tweet.
• 1:33:31
  Bill: But that's like it's like how at the end when it's like a hot word how do you know joy.
• 1:33:38
  Aaron: Maybe next time I'll get an actual camera so you all see my face.
• 1:33:44
  Evan: All good well Aaron I really appreciate you uh coming on and talking about this
• 1:33:48
  Evan: always important and also incredible film so much.
• 1:33:53
  Aaron: Appreciated yeah absolutely this was great having me yeah.
• 1:33:56
  Evan: And uh Bill and Ward we will uh catch everyone next time on left of the projector.
• 1:34:05
  Bill: Have a good night, everybody.