So far in this study I have been concerned with British and American cinematic depictions of unconventional war. Italy produced rather less films on this form of war, though several are interesting for their neorealist representations of insurgency, terrorism and partisan warfare. In this chapter, I will examine Italian cinematic representations of underground insurgency and terrorism. In the first section, I will look at Roberto Rossellini’s Roma citta Aperta (Rome Open City) (1945); Nanni Loy’s neglected film of the 1943 Naples insurrection Quattro giornate di Napoli (Four Days of Naples) in 1962; and Gillo Pontecorvo’s la Battaglia di algeri (The Battle of Algiers) (1966) and Queimada (Burn) (1969). In the second section, I will examine three films outside Italy influenced by neorealism and cinema verite: Costa Gavras’s State of Siege (1972), John Malkovich’s The Dancer Upstairs (2002) and Uli Edel’s The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008).
The Italian cinema of neorealism
Neorealist film making emerged from the rubble of Mussolini’s fascist regime. Film producers and directors were driven onto the streets at the end of war as the Cinnecitta film studios outside Rome were closed and unusable. With limited budgets and institutional support, directors were forced to shoot on location.1 The first phase of neorealism lasted from the mid-1940s to mid-1950s, exemplified by such classics as Bicycle Thieves (1948) and Umberto D (1952) (dir. Vittorio De Sica), La Terre Trema (1948) (dir. Luschino Visconti) and Federico Fellini’s La Strada (1954). Thereafter, it began to lose impetus in the Italian commercial cinema market as audiences preferred romance and escapism. However, neorealism still retained considerable life well into the 1960s with several further films such as Pier Paolo Pasolini’s remarkable The Gospel According to St Matthew in 1964 and Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers in 1966.
Neorealism had a considerable impact on film-making across Europe. It established the basic conventions of a new cinematic realism centred on the lives of ordinary people, improvised dialogue, the extensive use of amateur actors and quasi-documentary techniques. It would influence the French new wave and several other directors in Europe and the United States, such as the young Elia Kazan, British directors Ken Loach and Paul Greengrass and the Franco-Greek director Costa Gavras. Many neorealist directors hoped their movies would act as radical agents of social and cultural change, empowering working-class people to forge more positive identities, an outlook that did not go down especially well in Hollywood in the Cold War of the 1950s. By the 1960s, this sort of cinematic utopianism had markedly declined, though some directors adopted a neorealist style in arenas of political struggle such as colonial Algeria, authoritarian regimes in South America and terrorism in Western Europe.
Roberto Rossellini was at the centre of the original neorealist wave in Italy. He cultivated a rather self-justifying myth that his classic film Rome Open City was part of new post-war realism in Italy, though it displayed some links to the fascist era as well an indebtedness to Hollywood, especially in the action scenes.2 Rossellini began the film before the Germans had left the city in 1944, and limited funds meant it proceeded in fits and starts. The film is centred on the Italian resistance to the German occupation of Rome from September 1943 to the liberation of the city on 4 June 1944. It covers the period when Rome was declared an ‘open city’ following the flight of the King Victor Emmanuel III and the Marshall Badoglio. The film was shot while memories of the occupation were still very fresh. Production was hampered by a lack of funding and a shortage of suitable film stock and the resulting film has a grainy black and white quality that, over the years, has been admired by many critics for its authentic documentary tone. To modern audiences the film might seem rather dated, given that any citizen journalist can, with care, shoot a competent documentary-type film with a hand-held camera. But Rome Open City was considered on its release to be an extraordinarily imaginative and revolutionary film. Bosley Crowther in The New York Times noted that the movie had the ‘wind-blown look of a film shot from actualities’ as well as a strong note of ‘anger’ that was not so much ‘shrill or hysterical’ but ‘the clarified anger of those who have known and dreaded the cruelty and depravity of men who are their foes’.3
Rome Open City, along with Rossellini’s Paisa the following year, was important for establishing many of the central features of neorealist war films after the war. These movies attempted to break with the narrative patterns of Anglo-American war films, focused on a central hero and single plot line. There is a sharp geographical demarcation in the film between the world of the SS and their Italian collaborators and the Italian partisans and their clerical allies. The world of the former is based on the German police headquarters, torture chamber and seedy night club. Here lurks the main nemesis of the film, the effeminate and psychopathic Gestapo officer and Police Commissioner of Rome, Bergmann (Harry Feist), based on the actual head of the Special Police Unit in Rome dealing with partisan resistance, ‘Doctor’ Pietro Koch.
The other world portrayed in the film is that of the Italian resistance, located in the warren of apartment buildings and tenements of working-class Rome where people struggle to find enough food to eat during the harsh occupation. The film also makes an important foray out of this working-class world into the conservative catholic world of the cleric Don Pietro Pellegrini (played by the professional actor Aldo Fabrizi) who decides to ally himself with the largely communist-led resistance movement. Rossellini’s film helped sustain a widely held post-war myth of a Catholic–Communist alliance established during the German occupation, especially as Dom Pietro’s character was loosely based on the activities of a real Catholic priest in Rome, Dom Pietro Morosini, who was shot for helping the partisans.
The first half of the film focuses on the lives of those in the resistance. It has the SS attempting to arrest the engineer Georgio Manfredi (Marcello Pagliero) in a rooming house, though he escapes over the roof tops. He arrives at the apartment of his friend Francesco, who works for a communist newspaper. Here he encounters Francesco’s pregnant girlfriend Pina (played by the comic actress Anna Magnani), who emerges as one of the movie’s heroes after she stirs up riots against shops enforcing a harsh system of food rationing.4 Pina’s son Marcello (Vito Annicchiarico) is also involved in the battle, and Rossellini shows a whole community in open resistance to the German occupation. In a compelling street scene, Anna runs towards a lorry used by the SS in a roundup of able-bodied men for forced labour. A German soldier shoots her down and her son Marcello sobs over her dead body: the shooting was based on the shooting of a pregnant woman in Rome, Teresa Gullace, on 3 March 1944, a working-class mother with five children.5 Film critics have often viewed Anna’s body as symbolizing what Gottlieb has termed ‘an incarnation of the potentially redeemable body of a mutilated nation’.6
Rossellini’s film also explores the sinister world of the German occupiers. This world, like that of the resistance, is anchored in an alliance with the Italian survivors of Mussolini’s former fascist regime and is carefully organized by Police Commissioner Bergmann. He has drawn up a counter-insurgency plan, called the ‘Schroeder Plan’, that divides Rome into fourteen sections. It has already been apparently successfully carried out, he claims, in other cities and involves using a dragnet to pull in all the ringleaders of the resistance. Its attractiveness lies in the way it involves the use of ‘minimum force’ to avoid urban insurrection. This appears to be the first time the term ‘minimum force’ was used in a feature film in relation to counter-insurgency operations. In practice, the SS in Rome did anything but practise ‘minimum force’ by the early months of 1944.
Bergmann’s plan appears to work as the dragnet eventually secures the arrest of Manfredi, Dom Pellegrinii and an Austrian deserter for whom Pellegrini has been trying to obtain identity papers. They are picked in a dramatic police swoop in a Rome street that is a cinematic triumph as we watch the victims from behind as they walk down a street with a tram coming up of the left-hand side of the frame. Their arrest leads to a dark second part of the film involving the interrogation and torture of Manfredi, a scene that inspired Pontecorvo to use a similar torture scene in The Battle of Algiers. However, Rossellini’s purpose in shooting his torture scene was to celebrate the triumph of the human will as well as the moral impoverishment of the torturers. Pellegrini is forced to watch while Manfredi is tortured. But the cleric’s condemnation of the torturers is somewhat doubled-edged as he sees their actions as God’s punishment for men’s sins. ‘Are we sure we’ve lived in the ways of God?’ he asks of the by-now anguished torturers. ‘God have pity but we’ve much to be forgiven.’ The moral compass of the film is a strongly Catholic one. Dom Pellegrini is centred as the spiritual heart of the resistance as can be seen in some of the posters for the film where Manfredi is absent. Pellegrini is in the forefront of resistance to the dark profile of a German soldier alongside Anna, set somewhat in the background.
The film raises questions over the sort of society Italy might become in the post-war period. The collapse of fascism exposed the various institutional props of the former regime, especially the Catholic Church, as well as the Italian matriarchal family. For communists, organized labour in the form of the trade union movement formed a new sort of prop for the urban working class adrift in the anonymity of Italian cities, though this is a dimension that Rossellini’s film does not explore. What it does examine is the rather complex relationship between the church and domestic matriarchy. The post-war neorealist film Bicycle Thieves shows the hero deprived of any support from the church, the police or organized labour as he attempts to retrieve his stolen bicycle. It is the matriarchal spirit in the form of a female fortune teller who provides any sort of emotional support in his plight, suggesting that matriarchy emerged in post-war Italy in opposition to both church and state.7 This is hinted at in the character of the pregnant but unmarried Pina in Rome Open City, whose heroic death in defence of mothers and children serves as a symbolic act of popular resistance at least equal in importance to anything achieved by the patriarchal political underground.8
The partisans of the resistance achieve relatively little beyond freeing Francesco from a prison truck. Rossellini’s indifference to the partisans’ activity is rather surprising given that they had begun to attack German troops in Rome from as early as December 1943. The attacks were linked to the city’s expected liberation from Allied Forces, rather belying Pina’s doubts in the film when she asks: ‘Do you think the Americans really exist?’ The Allied landing at Anzio in January 1944 led to a decline in the attacks over the next couple of months as hopes rise that there will be an early liberation of Rome; it was possible to hear the guns at Anzio from the streets of Central Rome. But this early liberation did not occur, as Mark Clark’s Fifth Army got bogged down in a bloody war of attrition through February into March. The lull in partisan attacks led to an escalation of arrests in Rome leading the partisans to launch a spectacular terrorist response.
On 23 March 1944, sixteen partisans left a home-made IED filled with TNT in a rubbish cart on the Piazza di Spagna. The bomb was timed to blow up as an SS Police Regiment marched past and the resulting explosion killed thirty-five SS police. The seventy-four men of the Gestapo in Rome, under its commander Herbert Kappler, launched a brutal reprisal in the form of the notorious Ardeatine Massacre, an event overlooked in Rossellini’s film and one that would wait years to appear in Ten Italians for One German (dir. Filippo Walter Ratti) in 1962 and George Comatos’s rather better-known English-language film Massacre in Rome in 1973, starring Richard Burton.9
The Ardeatine Massacre took place the day after the 23 March partisan attack and led to the murder and burial of some 335 victims in the Ardeatine caves outside Rome. Seventy-five of the victims were Jewish but the main body were a cross section of Italian society including doctors, lawyers, schoolteachers, students and teenage boys. The brutal and savage nature of the reprisal was perhaps one major reason why Rossellini felt unable to include it in his film. It might well have detracted from his efforts to portray the resistance in Rome in a heroic light and one that was not burdened by serious political divisions.
The massacre’s exclusion from the film also meant that Rossellini did not need to deal with the ambiguous role of the Vatican in this dark period of Italian history. In contrast to the heroic role of the church in the resistance exemplified by Pellegrini, some historians have suggested that the Vatican, under the fascist-inclined and fanatically anti-communist Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII, knew about the massacre in advance and did nothing to stop it, an event dramatized in Rolf Hochhuth’s controversial 1963 play The Deputy: A Christian Tragedy (it was later filmed by Costa Gavras as Amen in 2002).10 Desperate to defend the ‘open’ status of Rome, Pacelli failed to condemn the massacre and would be later condemned by the Italian partisans after the liberation in early June. His silence encouraged the German commander in Italy, General Herbert Kesselring, to use the massacre to widen divisions among the Italian opposition. The Committee of National Liberation (CLN) met soon after the disclosure of the Ardeatine Massacre and managed to maintain some semblance of unity despite the resignation of its president, Ivanhoe Bonomi, and the demands from the Christian Democrats for greater control of partisan operations. But the price of this unity was a political silence that matched that of the pope.11
From an historical angle, Rome Open City embodies a very selective interpretation of the period of the German occupation of Rome, though this is not so surprising given that Rossellini was looking at spiritual themes that transcend human history.12 Moreover, any faulty historical understanding of the recent past needs to be understood in the context of the film’s central objective, which was to destroy the mythomania that underpinned Mussolini’s fascist regime and to establish a countermyth of its own centred on images of rebirth and resurrection after the dark torment of the soul symbolised by the scenes in the torture chamber. The film was anchored in a project of radical cultural and political struggle at the end of the war in Italy that championed a more democratic notion of il popolo. It was based on a wide range of regional dialects and counter-posed the former fascist regime’s ideal of a popolo italiano rooted in a language of racial purity, violence, obedience and myths of national destiny.13
Rossellini widened this arena of struggle beyond Italy in his next film Paisa, released in 1946, a film that was far more of radical break with conventional film making than Rome Open City and supposedly stimulated the young Gillo Pontecorvo into film making.14 The film concentrates on six separate episodes marking the liberation of Italy that involved American troops as well as Italian partisans. It had a looser episodic structure than Roma Citta Aperta, though it met with a warm reception in both Italy and the United States since it caught some of the post-war mood as it explored various relationships between Italians and Americans. The six episodes act as separate short stories and mark a radical departure from the narrative structure of the conventional Hollywood war film. Rossellini used a documentary style in each of the episodes with a voice-over and the weaving of real film footage with fictional scenes. Each story focuses on different aspects of the American involvement in the war to liberate Italy, suggesting that he envisioned the film as part of a wider cultural and political dialogue between Italy and the United States in the post-war years.
The word ‘paisa’ translates as ‘neighbour’ or ‘kin’ and this is the central theme of all six stories. The GIs in the film are portrayed as positively seeking to engage with Italians despite language difficulties. The British, by contrast, hardly appear at all, and when do, they appear aloof and indifferent to the problems confronting ordinary Italian people. Only two of the six episodes deal with partisan resistance to the Germans and their fascist allies; these are episode four, dealing with resistance in Florence, and the last episode, focused on partisan resistance in the flat reed beds of the Po Valley.
Both episodes display a dramatic cinematography of military conflict. The Florence episode followed an American nurse, Harriet, through the rubble-strewn streets of Florence searching for her lover Lupo, who is a member of the partisans. Harriet is a fluent Italian speaker and there is no difficulty of communication. She encounters partisans at one point executing fascist prisoners and finally learns that Lupo has died of his wounds. During the episode Harriet becomes far more involved in the struggle going on in Italy than previous American character, suggesting an evolution in the mutual understanding of Italians and Americans.15
This progressive involvement goes a stage further in the final episode where one of the central characters organizing the partisans in the Po Estuary is an OSS operative, Dale, who also is fluent in Italian. Unlike the roving camera that wandered round the streets of Florence the camera here is restricted to appearing just above the level of the reeds as the partisans vainly seek to fight off an attack from German water-borne troops, a device that Bondanella has praised as being ‘one of the most intelligent uses of an outside location in all of neorealist cinema’.16 The partisans rescue two British pilots shot down by the Germans though they are all rounded up by the superior enemy forces. After being forced to listen to the boasts of the German commander about establishing a new racial order, the partisans are drowned the following day in the River Po with the sign ‘Partisan’ on them. Dale, attempting to intervene to prevent this, is also shot, though he hardly dies a hero since Rossellini has not intended there to be any hero or heroine to emerge from this episodic collection. This is a film where the viewer is intended, in a somewhat Brechtian manner, to emphasize less with individual characters than with the total situation of two separate cultures colliding during a time of war. The episode ends with the simple announcement, ‘This happened in the summer of 1944. At the beginning of the spring the war was over.’ Partisan warfare is depicted rather negatively; its ultimate success or failure proves really to be of less interest to the director than the relationship portrayed between the partisans and the Americans.
There is within this format a strongly tragic element which Ruth Ben Ghiat has perceived to be a central theme within many neorealist films.17 However, this tendency to dismiss the importance of partisan resistance to the German occupation of Italy underlines the limitations of neorealist cinema in providing any sort of genuine historical guide to the Italian resistance. This, though, overlooks the successful popular insurrection in Naples from 28 September–1 October 1943 leading to the withdrawal of the German army from the city, the one successful example of an urban insurrection against Nazi rule during the Second World War.
The second episode of Rossellini’s Paisa focused on Naples but chose to portray the relationship of an orphaned street urchin, or scugnazzo, Pasquale (played by an amateur young Italian actor Alfonsino Pasca) with a drunken black American GI called Joe (played by a professional American actor Dots Johnson). When Joe falls asleep, Pasquale takes his boots though Joe finds him the next day but lets him keep the boots when he discovers the squalid conditions in which the boy lives. The story verges on melodrama, though the boy is an example of the scugnazzi and their mythical role in the 1943 Naples insurrection. Partly due to the book Four Days in Naples published by an American journalist Aubrey Menem as well as the photographs of Frank Capra in Life magazine, it became a convention in the years after 1945 that the Naples insurrection was largely due to the scugnazzi rather than the adult men and women of the city. The myth effectively infantilized the Napoletani and contributed to the marginalization of the revolt in post-war Italian history, perhaps because, as Rose Maria Celeste has suggested, this was largely written from a northern Italian point of view and one suspicious of a popular revolt that had no central political leadership.18
The scugnazzi were certainly part of the popular insurrection against the Germans that broke out following several key incidents in late September 1943, including the burning of the University of Naples and its historical archives, the rounding up of able-bodied men to be shipped out of the city as forced labour and the shooting of any Italian soldiers or sailors who were found to have deserted. The uprising brought in the mass of Napoletani civilians who appeared, in some instances, to have attacked German troops with their bare hands. One participant, Curzio Malaparte, later noted that many bodies of dead German soldiers displayed ‘lacerated faces and throats mangled by human teeth; and the tooth marks could still be seen on the flesh’.19 Loy interviewed many of the Napoletani who had been involved in the insurrection and Quattro giornate is an important example of a neorealist war film paying considerable attention to historical detail.
Quattro giornate di Napoli portrays a whole urban community in revolt, with a group of women at one point attacking the small numbers of German soldiers taking men to a holding area for forced labourers. Loy’s camera wanders around the narrow streets and alleyways of working-class Naples as people shout across to each other news about the round-up while, in a later scene, the boys in a Catholic reformatory rebel against their fascist head and head off to support the revolt. A street scene towards the end of the film shows the capture of a 105mm light field howitzer by former Italian soldiers, who fire at oncoming German tanks. A block away a young scugnazzo runs towards the same tank with a captured German grenade, though he is machine-gunned before he can throw it. The camera returns to those firing the howitzer; the scene ends with one tank catching fire and its crew attempting to flee. This is really the dramatic turning point of the film as the outnumbered Germans surrender. The end of the film shows them marching under a white flag out of the city.
Nanni Loy’s film is a neglected example of a neorealist war film that compares more to Rome Open City than Paisa; it lacks the latter’s loose episodic structure and contains several key central characters who appear throughout the film. It also avoided using much documentary film footage and is shot mostly in the streets of Naples, together with some interior scenes and one dramatic scene in the sports stadium, where the insurrectionists fire down on the German soldiers holding the men being held for transportation. For all its cinematic realism, the film departed from the tradition of Italian neorealist films, refusing to put children onto any sort of moral pedestal for all its graphic depictions of the scugnazzi. It is a forerunner of films showing children fighting in war zones examined in Chapter 5.
Even so, the film still failed to confront the full brutality of the insurrection. The scugnazzi were used as child soldiers and threw Molotov cocktails at the German troops – none of this was depicted in the film. Neither is the full destruction inflicted on the German armour by the anti-aircraft artillery that were used by skilled gunners from the Italian army and navy. These heavy weapons were far more destructive than the light howitzer shown in the Loy’s film and ended up destroying eight German tanks. A group of insurrectionists also attacked the German barracks at Cuoco in the city and forced the soldiers there to surrender; this was again not portrayed in the film.20 Overall, though, Loy’s depiction of the events in Naples marked a major advance on the previous efforts of Rossellini in the mid-1940s. It also helped pave the way for Pontecorvo’s depiction of the war in Algiers in the late 1950s.
Four Days in Naples suggests a tradition of neorealist war films that is crucial towards understanding Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers. This tradition proved to be a major impulse in shaping The Battle’s format as opposed to the radical spaghetti westerns which Austin Fletcher has suggested was the central genre of countercultural film making in Italy during the 1960s.21 When The Battle of Algiers was released in 1967 in the United States, Bosley Crowther compared the movie with Four Days in Naples, especially for its ‘melodramatic structure’ and staging techniques.22
Like Loy’s Naples, the city of Algiers in The Battle of Algiers is in a state of insurrection during the bitter seven-year war of 1954–1962. There might be doubts, though, over whether the title of the film really fits its subject matter since this was not a conventional urban ‘battle’ like Stalingrad or even Naples in 1943 but rather a terror war in an urban setting with some uncertainty over when it began or ended. Did it start in June 1956 with the execution by the French of two FLN leaders Ahmed Zabana and Abdelkader Ferradj provoking the FLN into some twenty-one attacks? Or perhaps it started with the French bombing of the Casbah on 10 August 1956 leaving seventy people dead? Or perhaps it really began when the French handed over power in the city to General Massu on 7 January 1957? No one seems clear about this just as no one is sure when this ‘battle’ ended, though the final bombing by the French of the safe house containing the last free FLN resistance leader in Algiers, Ali La Pointe, on 7 October 1957 seems as good a date as any.23
The confusion over dates indicates that this was a different kind of military conflict to a conventional war with set piece battles. The film is strongly shaped by a junior figure in the FLN hierarchy of command, Yacef Saadi, rather than Abbane Ramdane, who had assumed the leadership of the internal FLN in 1955. It was Ramdane, though, who decided on the strategy of urban terrorism in Algiers to expose the Algerian crisis to world attention when the UN was due to vote on the issue. Terrorism was also a powerful tactic to test the political will of the French to stay in Algeria as well as radicalizing the urban Algerian urban population as they experienced French military harassment and arrest, a logic that would be later emulated by the Provisional IRA during the Troubles in Northern Ireland.24
The film’s subject presented a huge challenge for any director. The generally cautious Pontecorvo decided to take it up to escape the conventional setting of many Italian post-war films, as well as injecting a more radical edge into neorealism, rather like Pasolini’s remarkable Marxist interpretation of Christ’s life in The Gospel According to St Matthew (1964), shot in a rural setting in southern Italy. Pontecorvo was an upper-class Marxist Italian film director without a huge body of work to his credit, though he had employed neorealist techniques in the film Kapo (1958) centred on a Jewish girl caught up in a round-up of Jews in France during the Second World War. Unlike Rossellini, Pontecorvo brought to his film making less a Christian-inspired humanism than a commitment to radical social revolution through class war. As a cinematic Marxist, he sought what he called the ‘dictatorship of truth’, meaning a level of even-handedness in the depiction of the two rival forces at war in Algiers in 1957.
The Battle of Algiers was a clever propaganda film that emerged from Pontecorvo’s attendance at Algeria independence celebrations.25 Franco Solinas wrote a new script that abandoned the Eurocentric perspective of an earlier script by Salah Baazi. The Algerians, in turn, agreed to fund half the film through a company called Casbah Films, though Pontecorvo also secured a degree of financial independence by securing the backing from the Italian producer Antonio Musu and some Italian theatrical associations.26 President Boumedienne also supported the project, though the film was banned in Algeria on its release for scenes at the end showing crowds apparently shouting for the ousted Ahmed Ben Bella.27
Like Rome Open City, The Battle of Algiers shows a city divided into the two separate worlds of the white colonial French settlers or pieds noirs with their apartments in the ‘European Quarter’, downtown shopping centre and military barracks that house the army that fights to maintain both French colonial rule and the ideal of ‘Algerie Francaise’. By contrast, the world of the Arabs fighting the French is confined largely to the Casbah in Algiers, a warren of narrow backstreets and dark interiors that had been first portrayed on screen, in an interesting early neorealist gangster film Pepe le Moko (1936) starring Jean Gabin, a film in which the young Saadi Yacef was an extra.28
The Battle of Algiers has two contrasting worlds of colonizer and colonized colliding as the leaders of the FLN in Algiers, led by its commander Yacef Saadi (playing himself in the film) plans a campaign of urban terrorism. The Battle of Algiers is less a recreation of urban insurgency but an escalating terror and counter-terror war fought out in the narrow streets of the Casbah and downtown Algiers. The film is shot in a grainy black and white that recreates some of the mood of post-war neorealism, though the setting is the brightly lit Mediterranean world of Algiers.
Pontecorvo avoided using news footage but did employ amateur Algerian actors to play some of the characters, such as the illiterate gangster Ali La Pointe (played by the amateur actor Brahim Haggiag), who is arrested after hitting a young white colon youth and radicalized in jail as he sees a prisoner led out to be guillotined. La Pointe becomes one of the main organizers of the group of FLN terrorists, who start to attack the French by killing police officers. But he is never the main character of a film that is too decentred for one central narrative to emerge. Indeed, for periods La Pointe disappears to reappear dramatically near the end as he is trapped by the French in a hiding place behind the walls of a safe-house. He is blown up after refusing to give himself up.
The Battle of Algiers employs Fanonist ideas in a rather more politically focused manner than the opportunistic clutch of radical spaghetti westerns in the 1960s. As the French analyst of insurgency and terrorism Gerard Chaliand critically observed, intellectuals in both the west and the third world became easily seduced during this time into seeing violence as a sort of therapy for the traumas inflicted by western colonialism; it was an outlook that did not develop a more strategic perspective linking anti-colonial movements to a revolutionary and modernizing ideology.29 The danger here was violence – and by implication terrorism – became a strategy that could polarize the nationalist struggle and undermine the efforts of those whom Fanon dismissed as ‘colonised intellectuals’ to engage in a dialogue with the colonial rulers.30 Fanon’s book The Wretched of the Earth was written in response to the existing pattern of controlled top-down decolonisation in the 1950s, that had led to nonviolent forms of decolonization in French North African colonies like Morocco and Tunisia as well as several other British and French colonies in sub-Saharan Africa.31
Fanonist-type justifications for violence intrude into The Battle of Algiers at several points. La Pointe shoots a prominent pimp in the Casbah who refuses to conform to the FLN’s new ruling on the closing of brothels and outlawing ambling and alcohol. The dark licentious world of the Casbah portrayed through the orientalist prism of Pepe le Moko is now being cleaned up to prepare the people for the popular struggle, despite the fact that some 100,000 Muslims were crammed in the Casbah into an area of just one square kilometre.32
Likewise, in another scene that has attracted the attention of several critics, some young Algerian women recruited by Yacef take off their veils to dress up as French women. This enables them to get past check points and enter the world of the European city area where they can place bombs in offices and coffee bars. Fanon stressed the symbolic importance of this change of dress in the essay ‘Algeria Unveiled’ in A Dying Colonialism published in 1959. Taking of the veil marked the abandonment of what he called the ‘protective mantle’ of the Casbah in the revolutionary struggle, enabling the women to go out into the ‘conqueror’s city’. By entering this European world to place bombs in cafes and offices Fanon claimed that the women were not ‘terrorists’ like the earlier nineteenth-century anarchists (who only had a ‘rendezvous with death’) since the bombers were part of something different for they had a ‘rendezvous with the life of the revolution’.33
The scene with Yacef’s women is re-enacted in considerable detail and its historical veracity has won the praise, among others, of Alistaire Horne. The bombings were shown to be in response to a massive bomb placed by pieds noirs that blew up an entire apartment block at rue de Thebes, killing more than seventy Muslims. However, only two of the three initial bombs planted went off as the one placed in the Air France offices proved to be a dud. The film steps back from showing the full impact of the milk bar bombing on the corner of Place Bugeaud. This was popular with pied noir mothers and children, and several children lost limbs in the explosion. From a feminist point of view, the film also reveals severe deficiencies in its portrayal of the Arab women used by Yacef: they were all from bourgeois backgrounds, so the identity shift involved in removing the veil was not nearly so traumatic as among uneducated working-class Arab women. The milk bar bomber, Zora Drif, was typical of the group recruited by Yacef. She had studied law at the University of Algiers and was, arguably, at least as interesting as the illiterate Ali La Pointe since she had revolted angrily against the shallow lifestyle of the colons with endless parties and trips to the beach and cinema. Terrorist struggle, Drif maintained, involved being absorbed into the anonymity of the group, and it is interesting to compare her motives for engaging in it with later female terrorists such as Gudrun Ensslin of the RAK that I will examine later.34 However, there is no serious debate on the merits or demerits of this use of female bombers, and Pontecorvo decided to remove all the dialogue from the scene where the women put on European clothes and ends up signifying its revolutionary importance through Morricone’s musical score.35
The women in The Battle of Algiers have no independent voice. They also have an uncertain identity as they have to undergo a dress change to become significant players in the terrorist campaign, achieving at best what Norma Claire Moruzzi has termed a ‘multi-layered construction of feminine identity … premised upon a lack of absolute definition’.36 This uncertain identity was, in part, due to the problems Pontecorvo confronted when he attempted to recruit female actresses for the film; many refused to take on the parts given the strict social codes separating men from women in Algeria. Not surprisingly, he ended up with westernised women who had to play more conservative women confronting the issue of wearing western dress for the first time, a multiple change of identities worthy of a Shakespeare comedy.37
The issue of gender also extends to the way the film was shot. The grainy black and white effect recreated the mood of black and white documentaries and post-war Italian neorealism. It won many admirers following the film’s release in 1966, though it has now been pointed out that one of the effects of this was to heighten the masculinity of some of the male characters such as Ali La Pointe and Yacef Saadi (Figure 4.1). Both actors are depicted on occasions in high-contrast lighting known as chiaroscuro or ‘Rembrandt effect’, suggesting psychological depth and the role of the unconscious mind. In comparison, in the scene where the three women bombers prepare themselves by adopting western dress the approach is a largely conventional Hollywood take that would have fitted an actress like Marilyn Monroe (Figure 4.2). It compares poorly too to the character studies of the women guerrillas in Five Branded Women I examined in Chapter 2.38
Pontecorvo’s movie also contrasts quite dramatically with the Egyptian director Youssef Chahine’s less well-known Djamila, the Algerian, shot, like Rome Open City, on a shoe-string budget and released in 1958 at the height of Pan Arabism in the Middle East. Chahine’s film stands as an impassioned plea for Algerian independence less than a year after the conflict in Algiers, and is a remarkable movie about the FLN women bomber Djamila (played by the Egyptian actress Magda al-Sabahi). Djamila was arrested and tortured by the French before being put on trial, which Chahine portrays in a manner recalling pious images from Carl Dreyer’s 1928 silent classic The Passion of Joan of Arc.39 Unlike Pontecorvo’s women bombers, Djamila does not have to remove any veil since she is a middle-class woman studying at university. Indeed, her friend’s father is well acquainted with the local French commander Colonel Bigeard, who visits his house. Bigeard (played by the Egyptian actor Rushdy Abaza) is a composite figure of the French officer corps, though he is easily distinguishable by the fact that he has a patch over one eye like the real Bigeard. It is Djamila, significantly, who plays a major role in the bombing campaign in Algiers, taking over Saadi Yacef’s role of instructing the women bombers in imagery that is, even now, almost unique in the cinema of urban terrorism.
The escalating violence by both sides leads in The Battle of Algiers to the dramatic intrusion of the French paras into Algiers, based on the real decision to cede control in the city to the cream of the French military. By 1956 there were some 1,200 men in the ALN along with a further 4,500 armed members of the FLN against some 1,000 policemen, who were mainly trained to combat ordinary criminals.40 As can be seen, the paras are led by ‘General Matthieu’, a composite character based in part on the character of General Massu, commander of the elite 10th Parachute Division. Pontecorvo’s depiction of the urbane General Matthieu – complete with dark glasses – marching at the head of his troops through the centre of Algiers to the relieved cheers of the pied noirs is one of the most dramatic of its kind in the cinema of war. He is in para uniform, and dominates the scene as he marches with unquestioned purpose towards the camera. This is a display of military power affirming the French right to rule Algeria; the fact that we cannot see his eyes suggests that he is a personal embodiment of French colonialism rather than a more familiar movie hero such as Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo. He also leads a column of soldiers suggesting that it is collective military power that is the full expression of French rule rather than an individual leader, despite the fact that French imperial myth had been frequently centred on the achievements of individual generals such as General Lattre de Tassigny (Figure 4.3).
Like Bergmann in Rome Open City, Matthieu has a plan to sweep Algiers of its underground terrorist network based on the use of intelligence to penetrate the FLN’s hierarchical cell structure. Drawing a triangular pattern on a blackboard, Matthieu reveals himself as an expert in guerre revolutionnaire, learnt through bitter experience in the war against the Viet Minh in Indochina.
The macho portrayal of the French paras is a masterly feature of the film, given the paras’ central mythic importance in French culture. The paras had emerged apparently triumphant from the debacle in Indochina and the defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. They provided an outlet for escapist fantasies that appeared to rival even those of Brigitte Bardot, forming the heart of the French military myth fictionalized by the journalist and novelist Jean Larteguy in the classic war novels The Centurions and The Praetorians – fictions that formed the narrative of the Hollywood movie Lost Command, released in the same year as The Battle of Algiers, and starring Anthony Quinn.41
The urbane Matthieu replicates in the film much of the aristocratic seigneurial authority of the French officer corps, derived as it was from the training and drill at St Cyr and the Ecole de Guerre. He contrasts markedly with the far seedier police chief Bergmann in Rome Open City and Bigeard in Djamila, who haunt night clubs and take great pleasure in torturing and manipulating their victims.42 The real influence on French counter-revolutionary warfare and psychological operations came less from Massu than from Yves Godard. It was Godard who was the most intellectually important of the colonels under Massu’s command forming, in effect, the third component of the character of Mathieu along with Massu and Bigeard. Godard, even more than Roger Trinquier, had been most responsible for the development of the paras’ counter-insurgency tactics, having been put in charge of the ‘dirty tricks’ battalion since 1948. It was also Godard who was most involved in understanding the structure of the FLN in Algiers in 1957 and penetrating its underground cells.43 Godard’s battalion had been instrumental, even before the paras’ takeover of Algiers, in seizing all the police records on the FLN underground and using these as the basis for an elaborate strategy of intelligence collection that proved decisive in smashing the FLN’s city-wide network.44 The strategy relied on informers with heads covered by blankets picking out known FLN cell members – a process not shown in The Battle of Algiers but depicted in the film Lost Command. Equally, one paratrooper was made responsible for one family under an ‘ilot’ system while another might be responsible for a whole house with several families. By such means, Massu built up networks of some 1,500 informants, though none of this was shown in The Battle of Algiers, which focused on torture.45
To a modern audience, tropes like the unveiling of the Arab women and the FLN’s hierarchical cell structure make The Battle of Algiers seem a rather dated movie, though, for student radicals in the west in the late 1960s it provided a sort of template for revolution. In the ‘Days of Rage’ organized by the SDS in the United States in late 1969, many tried to ululate in imitation of the Arab women in the Casbah and the underground cell structure of the FLN probably shaped some of the romantic hopes for revolution by the Weather Underground.46 Modern Jihadist insurgent movements, however, focus on the restoration of ‘traditional’ Arab dress for women as part of their subordination to new and often violent patriarchal structures, such as those of ISIL. So, too, modern jihadist insurgent movements are structured very differently. In a post 9/11 world of horizontally inclined movements with a regional, if not global, reach, these movements linked up through satellite phones and encrypted internet links. The hierarchical command structure of the FLN appears to be a throwback to an earlier era when colonial insurgent movements usually sought to emulate the European armies they were fighting against, often because many of the insurgent leaders in them had had previous military experience in these very armies.47
One central trope casts a long shadow over films dealing with insurgency. Torture is often used to extract intelligence, though it is not always shown to be effective. Rossellini’s Rome Open City had been ambivalent on the issue, since the torture of Manfredi had served, in the end, as symbolic of the agony and passion of the city of Rome under the German occupation. Information securing the actual capture of Manfredi did not come from any torture but his former girl-friend Marina informing on him, given that she is supplied by the Germans with money and clothes. A few years later, Chahine’s Djamila also graphically depicted the torturing of Djamila Bouhired, including the drowning of her younger brother in a barrel, though here too torture becomes a major issue in her resulting trial, where her brutal torture reinforces her role as a female martyr ready to die for the cause of Algerian independence.
The Battle of Algiers avoids the torture of women, perhaps because Chahine’s film had been banned not only in France but also in Algeria after independence in 1962, mainly due to the way the film made clear that Djamila had been raped as well as tortured. Pontecorvo, though, sought to stress the political uses of torture beyond the mere humiliation of the victims. The film starts with the torture of a thin, wizened Arab prisoner (a real prisoner taken from jail during the making of the film). The information extracted from him enables Matthieu’s paras to surround the last remaining FLN stronghold in the Casbah containing Ali La Pointe. Torture is shown to be central to Matthieu’s strategy of urban counter-terrorism, and he even justifies its use at a press conference with a group of critical international journalists.
The long-term effectiveness of torture in securing ultimate victory to the counter-terrorist forces is still, though, ambivalent in The Battle of Algiers, given that the film has two endings.48 The first is the actual military victory of the paras in Algiers following the final bombing of La Pointe’s hideout. As Matthieu walks away with the senior French commander we are confronted by an element of dramatic irony as the commander remarks that the defeat of the FLN in the countryside should prove to be comparatively easy compared to the campaign in Algiers. We know, to the contrary, that this was not the case since the rural FLN insurgency was not broken. The Battle of Algiers never looks at this dimension of the FLN’s resistance, preferring to move to the second ending with the sudden upsurge of popular street protest in Algiers two years later in 1960. The film finishes with a voice-over telling us that this pattern of popular protest led to the eventual independence of Algeria in 1962.
It is as if The Battle of Algiers was relying upon other films to tell the full story of the rural insurgency of the FLN and the final transfer of power in 1962. In the case of the former we have, significantly, the film Lost Command, released the same year as The Battle of Algiers which covered some of the war in Algiers as well as the rural insurgency. Equally, Lost Command is continually pervaded by a strong sense of the inevitability of French defeat without any focus on the actual transfer of power to the FLN in 1962. But, so far, no film has been able satisfactorily to deal with the political decision-making that led to Algerian independence, revealing perhaps the limits of the war film genre and its usual failure to involve military and political decision-making at high levels.
The Battle of Algiers was, for its time, a radical and innovative film that certainly upset many French views of the Algerian War. The French government banned the film for years following threats to bomb cinemas in Paris due to show it in 1966.49 Over the years, the film has haunted discussion on cinematic depiction of war and terrorism, though for some critics the film’s championing of a secular and Marxist-inclined national liberation movement seems disconnected from the modern religiously inspired politics of North Africa and the Middle East.50
This discussion has migrated considerably from the era of the late 1960s and 1970s, when it was deemed essential viewing for all those interested in radical or underground cinema. In more recent years it has become respectable film for showing to military audiences. In 2003 there was a special viewing of the film in the Pentagon at the time of the invasion of Iraq. By this time, the central issue raised by the film was the effectiveness and usefulness of torture in securing human intelligence to defeat an underground insurgent or terrorist movement. The film’s screening did not lead to any revision of US counter-insurgency policies but their reinforcement in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.51
Pontecorvo moved in his next film Queimada (also known as Burn) in 1969 into the terrain of colonial conquest and neo-colonialism. Compared to the historical narrative of The Battle of Algiers, Burn was an historical narrative centred on a Caribbean island, though it continued some of the former film’s Marxist and Fanonist political preoccupations. Pontecorvo focused on the abstract historical dynamics behind western imperialism involving issues of slavery, cheap labour and race. Such themes were hardly ones that leant themselves easily to commercial cinema. However, Pontecorvo found himself for the first time in his career involved with a Hollywood studio, United Artists (UA). This was not just a result of his soaring reputation derived from The Battle of Algiers but a belief by the executives of UA that the film would be like many profitable Italian spaghetti westerns. This studio’s support meant that Pontecorvo had more freedom and autonomy when making Queimada than he ever had with The Battle of Algiers, though this would expose the cultural rifts between Italian neorealist cinema and the action adventure genres of Hollywood, together with some unresolved attitudes on Pontecorvo’s part towards the issue of race and racism.
The narrative for Queimada emerged from Pontecorvo’s reading about the life of the American adventurer William Walker (1824–1860) who became involved in the Central American state of Nicaragua in the 1850s and was briefly president of that country in 1856. Attempting to unite the countries of Central America, Walker ran up against the American business magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt after seizing some of Vanderbilt’s assets. Walker was overthrown in 1857 and captured by the British, who had him executed in Honduras in 1860.52 The story attracted Pontecorvo for the way it revealed both the ruthless self-interest behind western imperialism and its political opportunism. He changed both the character and the location of the story, which was now set on a fictional sugar-producing island in the Caribbean, while Walker was turned from being an American into a British figure, Sir William Walker, acting first on behalf of the British government and later commercial sugar interests. The shift went in reverse to many Hollywood film producers, who frequently turned British characters into American ones, but exemplified Pontecorvo’s belief that US and British imperialism largely ran in tandem with each other.
The film was not easy to shoot as it became bogged down in conflicts between the actors and the director, as Pontecorvo tried to combine the star Marlon Brando with amateur local actors. Brando’s method acting was not one that a European auteur like Pontecorvo found easy to accept. There were growing rifts between a strong-willed and hard-to-control Brando and a doctrinaire Italian director, apparently unwilling to respect major acting talent. The problem was made worse by Pontecorvo’s choice of actor, Evaristo Marquez, to play the black rebel leader Jose Dolores. The amateur Marquez had ‘savage’ facial expressions that Pontecorvo rather liked for the film, even though he had no acting skills. Tensions further escalated when Brando discovered that the black actors were paid at a lower rate than whites and ate separately. Brando left the set and got as far as the airport before Pontecorvo backed down and agreed to treat everyone the same.53
This apocryphal story highlights some of the problems in Pontecorvo’s approach to film making. Even though he was often lauded on college campuses and radical film festivals, Queimada was a rather unexpected follow-up to The Battle of Algiers. Pontecorvo might well have chosen a more contemporary narrative to investigate both imperialism and the third world revolt against it, especially in the context of the radical cinema that was emerging in Cuba in the 1960s and early 1970s before its loss of momentum in the face of strict censorship. Such an opportunity was missed and Queimade became a largely art house film investigating western imperial interests, first fomenting an indigenous revolt against a decadent form of Portuguese colonial rule, and then descending into a counter-insurgency to quell an indigenous revolt. The narrative was a metaphor for the course of modern imperialism and the shift from old-style European colonial rule to more informal patterns of American imperial control in the western hemisphere. Walker acts as an agent provocateur when he first comes to the Portuguese island of Queimada in the 1830s, after an insurrection has been quelled and its leader publicly garrotted.
Walker finds a new leader in the form of water porter, Dolores. He instigates a black slave insurrection though this does not lead to a Haitian-style revolution but the imposition of a new government led by the mixed-race figure Teddy Sanchez (played by the Italian actor Renato Salvatori, who darkened his face to play the part). Sanchez is a weak character and fails to secure any accommodation between black and white communities on the island. This is a colonial situation violently polarized, in Fanonist terms, on racial as well as class lines. But Dolores too is quickly marginalized after the overthrow of the Portuguese and the murder of the governor. He learns from Walker that he has only been trained as a military leader and not an administrative one. He is excluded from power and forced to return to the bush as a guerrilla leader. The final scenes of the film depict the British bombing and burning villages to flush out the guerrillas, though Walker is murdered before he can embark on a ship to leave the island.
Queimada had a positive reception in the United States as well as Europe. Marlon Brando later looked favourably on the film for all his disagreements with Pontecorvo, seeing it as one of the movies in which he did some of his best acting.54 It is questionable how far this is true given that no characters really evolve as autonomous agents when they are in the grip of impersonal forces of capitalist accumulation. The film led to no serious follow-ups, though it is possible to see Richard Lester’s Cuba (1979) embracing some of the themes in Pontecorvo’s earlier epic. In this instance, the imperialist intruder is a British former mercenary Major Robert Davies (Sean Connery) who realizes that it is now too late to reverse the course of the revolution and finally leaves the island with his mission unfulfilled.
For all its apparent success, Pontecorvo’s film ultimately stands somewhat alone and without the same kind of inspiring cinematic buttress as The Battle of Algiers. This can be, at least partly, explained by the way that the film failed to fall into any obvious generic category. Its Marxist narrative and dialogue hardly made it an obvious Hollywood blockbuster and it was clearly functioning on a far more elaborate level than most spaghetti westerns, even if the script was written by Franco Solinas. Likewise, the film failed to engage with wider cinematic movements such as the cinema emerging in post-revolutionary Cuba. It is probably unrealistic to have expected Pontecorvo to have done anything like this while making a film for United Artists. The American cultural boycott made even visiting the island difficult (unlike Pontecorvo’s close attachments with independent Algeria), while his autocratic auteurism set him apart from the mood among many Cuban film makers of the time, defined by Julio Garcia Espinosa in a seminal article ‘For an Imperfect cinema’ published in issue 66/67, 1969, of Cine Cubano (an article that has been rediscovered by young film makers and critics in Latin America). Here Espinosa championed a populist cinema from the ground up that was deeply critical of cinematic approaches that praised films in terms of the standards of high culture. ‘We can denounce imperialism,’ he continued, ‘but should do so as a way of proposing concrete battles.’55
By these standards, Queimada did not exactly fit into cinematic debate pivoted around the one country in Central and South America that had managed to forge a revolutionary break with American hegemony. Beyond the iconic music of Ennio Morricone, its rather stilted narrative and acting compares poorly with some of the Cuban films of the time, especially The Last Supper (1976), directed by Tomas Gutierrez Alea, depicting a slave revolt during Easter on a sugar plantation in Cuba at the end of the eighteenth century. The revolt breaks out after a drunken supper where one of the slaves engages in dialogue with the slave owner. The narrative is infused with a religious language pivoted around rival interpretations of Christian belief, especially the notion of the equality of all men.
The film also shows how the slaves take the Christian message out of the hands of an apparently well-intentioned slave owner and transform it into a revolutionary message. It is popular interpretations of Christian belief that matter in this situation rather than the abstract Marxism of Queimada, one that might appeal to the Western New Left but had little to say to popular audiences at the local level in the Caribbean or South America. For all its use of colour, The Last Supper hearkened back to the earlier phases of post-war Italian neorealism, which was not especially surprising given that Alea had studied at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome. Like other Cuban film makers of the era, he was concerned with the ways beliefs are maintained or broken at the popular level rather than assuming that ideologies work in accordance with a wider logic of capitalist accumulation. This Gramscian approach was one that largely passed Pontecorvo by, though one wonders what he might have done with a script writer not infused with such a Stalinist world view as Solinas. Equally, one is also left wondering why he never seriously attempted any serious follow-up by producing another film on the black revolution in Haiti, a revolution that still has not been treated in any major film feature (though it is referred to in The Last Supper).
Overall, Pontecorvo’s two films have inspired numerous other directors such as Bernardo Bertolucci, Spike Lee, Oliver Stone, Paul Greengrass, Edward Zwick and Kathryn Bigelow. This influence is to some degree evident also in the work of the Franco-Greek director Costa Gavras, the German director Uli Edel and the American John Malkovich that I shall examine in the last section of this chapter.
Urban terrorism in the cinema of Costa Gavras, John Malkovich and Uli Edel
Rossellini’s and Pontecorvo’s iconic films established some of the key determinants of a neorealist semi-documentary style of film making that continued to imprint itself on film making internationally, years after the neorealist wave had gone out of fashion in Italy. This was especially true for State of Siege (1972), directed by the Greek-French director Costa Gavras, set during the terror war waged by the Tupamaros guerrillas in Uruguay. In his previous film Z, Gavras had approaching the crisis in Greece in the early 1960s more as a despairing radical democrat than a Marxist revolutionary, with a strong sense that bourgeois democracy and the rule of law are only thin ideological and political façades vulnerable to being undermined by determined conspirators buttressed by powerful social groups. Much of Z focuses on the efforts of a resolutely neutral magistrate (Jean Louis Trintignant) to find out the full facts of a political assassination. This is eventually derailed by an underground right-wing conspiracy to undermine the constitution of the Greek state, leading to the military coup of 1967.
State of Siege starts with similar crisis in 1969 in Uruguay as the police and the army attempt to smash the Tupamaros underground by mounting road blocks and searching long queues of motor vehicles. The Tupamaros terrorist underground (initially formed in 1963 among radical sugar plantation workers) is not yet destroyed. In a well-planned operation involving several cars, they kidnap an American official Philip Michael. During a prolonged interrogation, they force the cynically calculating Michael to admit that his work for USAID was really a cover for US military assistance to the Uruguayan state’s counter-insurgency. The film’s narrative was based on the real kidnapping of USAID worker Dan Mitrione, who was murdered after the government failed to accede to demands for the release of 150 political prisoners. The film suggests that the Uruguayan government is largely under the control and influence of the United States, though it fails to investigate the wider history of the Tupamaros, which is presented as a movement battling for democracy against a repressive state.
Matthew Carr has criticized the film for presenting an appealing image of urban guerrilla warfare. The Tupamaros are shown, he has claimed, to be young and good looking compared to the ‘thuggish’ Uruguayan police; they also try to reason with Michael, only killing him after the negotiations with the government break down.56 While this criticism is to some degree true, it overlooks the way the Tupamaros interrogate their hostage wearing disguises, the features of apparently implacable urban terrorists, while Michael’s reasonable, if arrogant, defence of his actions as a US counter-insurgency specialist mirrors the ‘reasonableness’ of his guerrilla enemies. This is a war of two contrasting ideas of rational action, and the movie disturbs because it does not link terrorists with familiar stereotypes of the psychologically unhinged or fanatical. The film met with some hostility on its release in the United States and was refused a showing at the Kennedy Center.57
The Tupamaros were, by the late 1960s, activists largely drawn from the educated middle class; over 75 per cent of members had some form of higher education. Many of these well-educated young people were inspired by the speeches of Che Guevara to reject the more compliant and reformist strategy of the Uruguayan Communist Party. The movement was supported at a distance by some liberals, but much of its growth was helped by the government’s weak security forces, amounting to a mere 12,000 poorly trained men. As late as 1971, prison security was so ineffective that a Tupamaros team managed to break into Punta Carretas’s maximum security prison and free 106 captives.58
It was the terrorism of the Tupamaros that led to the militarization of the Uruguayan state. The Tupamaros had, by 1972, forced the other parties of the Left into a popular front, though they did remarkably badly in elections that year winning just 20 per cent of the popular vote. From then onwards, the civilian presidency of Juan Maria Bordaberry Arocena fell under the grip of the military. Within a year, he headed a civilian-military dictatorship that ruled the country until 1976. State of Siege fails to follow these historical trends on the scale of The Battle of Algiers, and is based on a snapshot of a single dramatic event. However, Mitrione’s kidnapping was hardly unusual since the Tupamaros specialized in this activity rather than waging an urban insurgency like the FLN in Algiers.
State of Siege was one of a small number of films in the 1970s investigating US interference in South American politics, while also stressing a theme – prevalent in so many of Gavras’s films – of political and military resistance.59 Like the FLN in Algiers, the Tupamaros remain an amorphous underground urban movement with no identifiable heroic leader. But they also lacked international allies in the UN or the third word anxious to get rid of European colonialism. This was a frustrated and angry section of the young urban bourgeoisie rather than a working-class or peasant movement.
Gavras does not eulogise the Tupamaros, though his style of cinema verite allows audiences to see beyond the usual demonic stereotyping of terrorists. In comparison, the 2002 crime thriller The Dancer Upstairs is ultimately disappointing as a film portraying the terror war waged by Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) guerrillas in Peru between 1980 and 1992. It sees the war through the eyes of a rather jaded policeman, Augustin Rejas (played by the Spanish actor Javier Bardem), working for the Peruvian National Directorate Against Terrorism (DIRCOTE). Rejas is leading a search for the hidden leader of the Sendero Luminoso guerrilla movement, the philosophy professor Abimael Guzman, popularly known as ‘President Gonzalo’ (probably from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest) but called in the film ‘President Ezequiel’. The film was the first movie ever scripted by the British journalist and novelist Nicholas Shakespeare, based on his own novel, as well as the first directed by American actor John Malkovich.
The Dancer Upstairs was not the first movie to focus on Sendero Luminoso, since it came in the wake of two important Peruvian films, La Boca del Lobo (The Mouth of the Wolf) in 1988 and Marianne Eyde’s You Only Live Once (La vida es una sola) (1993). But Dancer was certainly the best-known film internationally, given that it had been directed by a leading Hollywood actor and scripted by an internationally renowned British novelist. This is of some significance when the novel’s depiction of Sendero Luminoso and its bizarre leader is considered, for the film has created a highly misleading image of an insurgency that claimed at least 30,000 (some say 70,000) lives. It is unlikely to be rectified at any early date, since critical film making has become increasingly difficult after the Lima government’s decision in the early 1990s to open cinema to foreign films; the indigenous Peruvian film industry has suffered severely from a wave of Hollywood imports that has undermined efforts by local film producers to make films reflecting the country’s complex identity. The centrality of The Dancer Upstairs in perceptions of the terrorist war in Peru is inextricably linked to wider patterns of global economic and political power in the cinema industry and this industry’s capacity to shape the memory of past events.60
The Sendero guerrilla war was of only momentary interest globally, falling as it did between the earlier phase of international terrorism in the 1970s centred on the Middle East and later terrorism from the late 1990s onwards centred around Al Qaeda and other radical Islamic movements. The fact that it took place for most of the period from 1980 to 1992 in remote Andean mountain regions, and among predominantly Quecha-speaking Indian communities, ensured that it remained of marginal interest to western audiences until the movement moved in the late 1980s into Lima, where it embarked on a campaign of bombings, kidnappings and assassination. In early 1992 the Peruvian state proclaimed a state of emergency and there was a draconian military crackdown before Guzman was finally captured in September that year in a middle-class suburb living above a dance studio. Guzman’s subsequent life imprisonment on an island succeeded in destroying much of the mythology surrounding a movement that looked to the Andean Indian peasantry as the base for a Maoist revolution. The terrorist war continued for a few more years before the army achieved some sort of stable balance in the countryside as a less land hungry peasantry grew increasingly tired of the war.
The personality cult surrounding ‘President Gonzalo’ struck many observers as comical and eccentric, though this detracts attention from a firmly Marxist party desperate to return to the basics of Marxism-Leninism at a time when the Chinese regime of Deng Xiaoping had embarked on a ‘revisionist’ course. Sendero saw itself as a revolutionary ‘vanguard’ that would lead the population into a ‘people’s war’ to overthrow the Peruvian state. The ‘Gonzalo thought’ of the party was anchored in what Guzman cinematically and fancifully termed ‘a fistful of Marxists’ who would guide Peru into a future classless utopia.61 This became somewhat undermined by the discovery by the police of a video showing Guzman and a group of white revolutionary comrades dancing in a student-type party to the music of Zorba the Greek. The video seemed to expose the failure of the party to emerge as a movement that transcended Peru’s deep racial and ethnic divisions, though focusing on the central leadership tends to detract from what was occurring at the local level where Sendero cadres attempted to engage with the Indian peasantry.
Focusing on the mysterious, if bland, character of Guzman in The Dancer Upstairs replicates many of the simplistic generalization of some western journalists of the Sendero phenomenon. Guzman became, in this type of narrative, another exotic form of terrorist, possibly a playboy behind the scenes, but with no obvious personality to write about, unlike fellow South American Che Guevara or well-known terrorist figures like Carlos or Andreas Baader. Shakespeare was intrigued over why a philosophy professor interested in Kant should embark on a such a career, and concluded that a man with such little character was unlikely to have been the main inspiration for Sendero, certainly compared to the anthropologist Efrain Morote Best, rector of the San Christobal Huamanga University in Ayacucho where Guzman taught.
This conspiratorial approach towards understanding Sendero is typical of conventional ‘terrorology’. It is a sub-discipline of the social sciences that generally focuses on the leaderships of underground organizations and their capacity to mobilize and ‘brainwash’ gullible supporters, very often young women, rather than the operation of movement at the local level. In the Peruvian context, this outlook tended to be underpinned by an orientalist variant of anthropology that portrayed Andean Indian communities as largely passive and standing outside history.62 It was an image that Eyde attempted to confront in her largely unknown film You Only Live Once, which focuses on a single Andean village as it comes under intense pressures from a cadre of young Sendero students. They all wear western clothes and might almost be a Peruvian variant of the Uruguayan Tupamaros except that they have left the city for the mountains where they are attempting to mobilize Indian communities into a Maoist revolutionary force.
One of the young Senderitas, Meche, goes into the classroom of the village school and exhorts the children not to listen to the lies taught them about Peru. The struggle is as much one about symbols as sun-worshipping cosmology; the Peruvian national flag is hauled down and the Maoist red flag hoisted up. Community leaders in the village are taken to the square where they are forced to swear allegiance not to the law of the nation but to the law of the party. However, when the army arrives it does not behave any differently and is equally disruptive. Children are taken out of class to possibly be tortured, though the army does create a civil defence group in the village under its own appointed leaders. This proves crucial to the course of the conflict, as the villagers, now armed, eventually drive the Senderistas away. These scenes exemplified the fact that some 3500 rondas campesinos had been created by the late 1980s in the main centres of Sendero activity in the Andes, ensuring that it was already in some decline some time before Guzman’s final capture in 1992.63
You Only Live Once also suggests an Indian people that was neither silent, passive nor superstitious, unlike The Dancer Upstairs. They argue and negotiate with the Senderistas, who, for all their brutality and crude dogma, stand as some sort of template for modernisation and education. This becomes evident in the sub-narrative concerning the young Indian girl Florinda who is seduced by one of the Senderistas, but breaks from the movement when she is forced to execute another village member. At the start of the film she stands as an apparently silent and ignorant Indian peasant girl in marked contrast to Meche; but over time she acquires a voice and stands up to her deceiving lover and the party, finally leaving the village through fear of army reprisals and Sendero revenge attacks. Eyde’s film was a brave feminist interpretation of the brutal guerrilla war in which both sides of the conflict enforce some form of patriarchal domination over women.
By contrast, The Dancer Upstairs was based on a narrative infused with suburban melodrama that ensured Sendero terrorism could never be viewed as anything other than evil irrespective of the actions of the state. It was Malkovich who decided to proceed with a film version of Shakespeare’s novel. It is easy to speculate on the reasons for this, though the novel’s main character, the policeman Augustin Rejas, falls in love with a beautiful ballet dancer who is secretly harbouring the nation’s number one public enemy. This was clearly good material for a crime thriller without getting too involved in the society’s complex politics. The novel contained a theme that Malkovich had tangled with in previous movies, that of ambiguous identity and the willingness of individuals to accept other characters on trust. This was evident in Of Mice and Men (1992) where Malkovich played the backward itinerant farmhand Lennie who appears to his mate George Milton (Gary Sinise) to be just a harmless but hard-working man who would be useful on the farm George dreams of acquiring. Only as the story unravels does Lennie emerge as an unstable and dangerous figure capable of murder.
The theme of ambiguous identity is clearly evident in The Dancer Upstairs, which Malkovich has defended as an entirely personal view of a political war since ‘films don’t do political science … Politics is mostly personal’.64 Rejas becomes drawn to Yolande as his marriage to a wife consumed with having her nose fixed and living a suburban middle-class lifestyle is clearly failing. He is also in the middle of a terror war and desperately trying to give his life some meaning; he was originally a lawyer but resigned to become a policeman in disgust at the corruption he encountered. He is no philosopher like ‘Ezequiel’ or South American existentialist policeman; it is evident that the one person with any meaning for him is his young daughter, a character type that can be compared to the Mossad operative Avner in Spielberg’s Munich.
Only once does the film move out of Lima, as the narrative follows Rejas back to his family coffee plantation, nationalized years before by the military government. We briefly see some of the chaos of the rural guerrilla war, with some gruesome scenes such as a hanging burning body surrounded by chanting guerrillas. The peasants Rejas encounters are usually silent and superstitious, vaguely speculating as to the whereabouts of ‘Ezequeil’ who might, as one old lady states, be blowing like some sort of divinity on the wind. Returning to Lima is a return to surer ground and the film is interesting for its depiction of the relationship between the anti-terrorism police, the military and political ruling class. Rejas’s commanding officer General Merino is suitably cynical, reminiscing that the only two things that seem properly to function in Peru are Sendero and the women’s volleyball team. He is pushed to one side as the military carry out their threat to take over if Ezequiel is not caught; however, the movie avoids seriously confronting the ensuing state of siege, relying on a few scenes as the army takes away police property and swoops on a Sendero woman captured by the police.
The main device used to portray the army take-over is the inter-textual reference to Gavras’s film State of Siege. The end of the film appears on a video captured by the police, revealing the Sendero movie clip of the Zorba dance. This cinematic has been praised by some critics and the reviewer of the New York Times saw it as a ‘homage and reference point’ in the film. But is this a fair way to judge it? On a modest budget of $4 million it clearly made sense to avoid too many expensive military scenes, though at the same time the reference to Uruguay results in South American terrorism and counter-terrorism being represented as being of the generic type Shakespeare simplistically calls ‘extremism’.65 This is manifestly absurd, given the specific nature of Spanish colonial rule in Peru and the failure to include Andean rural communities into a common society. The film fails to explore exactly what motivates many younger people to join it: the young teenage girls who assassinate a government minister outside his home appear largely middle class, comparable to those who supported the Tupamaros, but exactly why are they alienated from a lifestyle that so attracts Rejas’s wife? They are voiceless, and the one wounded girl Rejas eventually finds is shot before she can talk.
For all its weaknesses, The Dancer Upstairs is quite innovative in the use of the trope of dance and ballet as a way of depicting modern terrorism. Terrorist movements can be likened to a form of debased popular theatre, in which the various players all have clear roles to perform, whether these be the shock and horror of victims of terror attacks; and predictable police and army crackdowns and ritualistic condemnations by political leaders, vowing that the terrorists will never win. Theatre from its early foundations has always had a fascination for the occult and the evil and this has been exemplified by some of the exotic features of the terrorist war in Peru.66 This was a war mounted by groups both inside and outside the society at the same time; fighting in the Andes as well as orchestrating attacks in Lima from a hidden headquarters. In Lima, the terrorism war took a highly theatrical form as dead dogs are slung from lamp posts with explosives; fireworks lit after terror attacks; while a bogus Sendero theatrical group invade a performance at a theatre to assassinate a government minister and his wife. The trope is extended to the dance studio where Yolande teaches Rejas’s daughter and harbours Ezequiel; while the state’s response after capturing him is to put him into an iron cage like an animal. The theatricality of terrorism has often been ignored by contemporary film producers and is more like to be found in horror movies such as the bizarre and brutally theatrical Hannibal Lector in Red Dragon (2001).
A rather different set of images emerged in some of the films released in Germany on the Red Army Faction (RAF), otherwise known as the Baader Meinhof ‘Gang’. The movement was the first generation of underground terrorist movements to operate in West Germany in the early 1970s and was followed by second- and third-generation movements known as Revolutionary Cells (RK) that lasted into the late 1990s. The RK have largely escaped the attention of film makers; even the RK terrorists involved in the 1976 Entebbe plane hijacking of an Air France plane to Entebbe in 1976 as they tended to detract attention away from the demonic character of Idi Amin (see Chapter 7).
The RAF cut a raw nerve in the German collective consciousness, given that most of the leaders, Andreas Baader excepted, came from respectable middle-class backgrounds. Their violent revolt against West German society threw up important questions about the nature of the society that was rebuilt in the years after 1945 under the aegis of Konrad Adenauer. Well into the late 1980s, over a decade after their death, a cycle of fifteen paintings by the artists Gerhard Richter collectively entitled 18 October 1977 (the date that Baader, Ensslin and others were found dead in their cells in Stammheim Prison) stirred up considerable controversy as the portraits of the dead terrorists (painted from photographs) continued to disturb in an era when the term ‘terrorist’ had become increasingly associated with new forms of global terror.67
The RAF originally emerged in the wake of the economic ‘miracle’ in post-war West Germany. This led critics on both the Right and Left to complain of an arid materialism that seemed to have reduced the society to a Wirtschaftswunder (department store society). Much of this hostility was linked to a deep hostility to the Americanization of post-war Germany and the supposed destruction of German moral values.68 By the late 1960s a vocal student counterculture had also emerged in many German inner cities as some young underclass took to living in various anarchist communes, the terrain for later RAF and RK terrorism.
The communes attracted not only drifters but exiles from the affluent middle class such as the left-wing journalist Ulrike Meinhof. Even though the main phase of student revolt was over by 1970, the RAF began a spree of terrorist attacks before most of its leadership was arrested during 1972, suggesting that terrorism in this context was impelled by a desire to try and sustain by other means the brief radical upsurge of the late 1960s.69 In prison, the RAF leaders became iconic heroes to much of the German youth counterculture, leading to huge pressure being put on the government to ensure that the leaders were given a fair trial. The West German state was still quite fragile and many intellectuals questioned its democratic credentials. A new court house costing $4 million was built close to Stammheim prison, where the delayed trial of the RAF leaders finally commenced in March 1975. By this time, Baader, Ensslin and Meinhof had become well-known personalities throughout West Germany, though, globally, they never had quite the same notoriety as Carlos.
This was a considerably different terrorist situation to that of Algeria, Uruguay or Peru The RAF’s campaign led to a mere thirty deaths during its short but dramatic existence, a tiny fraction of those in the Andes. The RAF leadership confirmed all too vividly the close links between terrorism and modern media, while the dramatic court trial of the RAF leaders raised important questions about why some individuals choose to go down a terrorist path, though this was not the theme of two of initial German films that vaguely attempted to explore 1970s terrorism. The first, The Third Generation (1979) directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, ignored both the RAF and RK completely for a largely affluent and self-absorbed ‘third generation’ that is muddled, disorganized and very hedonistic. The second film was Margaretha von Trotta’s Marianne and Julianne (Die bleierne Zeit), also in 1979, which looks at two sisters modelled on Gudrun Ensslin and her sister Christiane. The narrative, though, avoids exploring Gudrun Ensslin’s life in any detail as the narrative is from Christiane’s point of view and we only see the consequences of Gudrun’s decisions rather than the reasons that led her to making them.70
A rather fuller cinematic exploration of Gudrun Ensslin’s character and background came with the 2011 film If Not US, Who? (dir. Andres Veiel). Here the focus is on Gudrun Ensslin’s family background and her relationship with her lover Bernhard Vesper before her radicalization in the late 1960s. Both Ensslin and Vesper had Nazi fathers and were broadly ‘Hitler’s children’ though it was their intense political relationship which ultimately ensured that Ensslin would become the most important political strategist in the RAF, politicizing Baader’s chaotic and hedonistic anarchism.71 Veieil’s film is interesting for its focus on Ensslin’s relationship with her sister, who continues to visit her when she is in prison and castigates her for her life choices, pointing out that her concern for the misery being endured by those in the third world might well have led to a more creative career by working for an NGO or overseas charity. Ensslin’s political hedonism and self-concern (she barges into her sister’s apartment to steal clothes without asking) is replicated by her sexual hedonism, noisily making love with Baader while a child-minder looks after her young child in the next room.
At this personal level, there is little in Ensslin’s life history to confirm the theory that terrorists are all psychotic or psychopathic individuals.72 This might be true for some, but hardly amounts to a very strong explanation for how terrorist movements evolve in the way they do. Focusing on deviant and apparently abnormal individuals has appealed to many film makers, especially in Hollywood. But movements like the RAF can also be explained by the operation of a collective psychosis running through certain social groups isolated from mainstream society. This helps explain how individuals get caught up in underground movements as they instil tight codes of internal discipline and an authoritarian leadership, in the RAF’s case the charismatic and domineering, but highly erratic, Baader.
Uli Edel’s film The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008) thus proves to be an important cinematic examination of the collective psychosis that can both galvanize and define a terrorist formation. The film is an ambitious quasi-documentary account of the RAF from its early beginnings to the collective suicide of its main leaders in Stammerheim prison in 1977. In some ways, the movie transfers to the German situation some of the neorealist tropes of The Battle of Algiers and Edel struggles to achieve some cinematic objectivity in the clashing forces of terrorism and counter-terrorism in German cities. Some critics still berated the movie for glamorizing terrorism and representing Baader and Ensslin as latter-day Bonny and Clyde gangsters, though the film also went to some lengths to show how the RAF leaders were part of a wider urban underground that was attracted to terrorism as a form of radical process of group definition.
To this extent, the inclusion of the word ‘complex’ into the film’s title is important for suggesting that this was a terrorism anchored in generational disaffection from the dominant norms and values of West German society rather than through class or religious sectarianism. Edel’s film also plays considerable attention at the start to the political context in which the RAF emerged in the late 1960s: the charismatic appeal of the student leader Rudi Dutschke at a noisy student rally; the violent police response to the demonstration mounted against the visit of the Shah of Iran in 1967, including extraordinarily brutal scenes in which a pro-Shah hit team and the police attack demonstrators with clubs, while one demonstrator is shot dead; and the attempted assassination of Dutschke by a neo-Nazi student. These events served as an important tipping point, after which the extreme end of the student underground was prompted into terrorist action. They parallel, to some degree, radicalizing events in other situations such as Ali La Pointe’s experience in jail and the execution of a political prisoner or the summary executions of the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin on the young Michael Collins.
Covering such a long period was never going to be easy, though the RAF was at least familiar to European cinema audiences given that it was one of the better-known terrorist movements in post-war Europe. Unlike many films on terrorism, especially in Hollywood, The Baader Meinhof Complex draws out some of the cultural and political background to a movement that enjoyed considerable support among a younger German generation, especially women, alienated from the material affluence and patriarchy of post-war West Germany. The RAF organized by Baader, Ensslin and Meinhof was part of a series of interlocking anarchist groupings espousing world revolution, inspired by figures such as Che Guevara and Carlos Marighella in South America as well as the wider global youth counterculture centred on rock music, promiscuous sex and drug taking. But a sizeable number of recruits came from runaways from children’s homes and young criminal delinquents (like Baader himself) rather than politicized university students or the mainstream working class. This was less Guevara or Marighella than the idea of a ‘great refusal’ by an underground counterculture espoused by Herbert Marcuse, the philosopher in An Essay on Liberation in 1969. Nevertheless, few women ever gained major positions of prominence in the either the RAF or the RK and women generally remained ‘followers’ rather than leaders.73
The focus on a group of individuals has been considerably different to many terrorism films set in the Middle East, Northern Ireland or Palestine. The RAF was largely contrived by a group of embittered malcontents who saw it as a further stage in the rebellion of a younger generation against a ‘fascist police state’ constructed by their parents that had little to distinguish it, apparently, from the Nazi regime destroyed in 1945. Here the film investigates, if only partially, some of the backgrounds of its central characters: Ulrike Meinhof walking out of a secure bourgeois family and an unfaithful husband for the harder-edged experiences of anarchist communes; Gudrun Ensslin rebelling against her authoritarian father, though we fail to learn of her previous experiences while on a visit to the United States; while Andreas Baader, dramatically intrudes some way into the film, minus his real-life stammer, with a background that continues to remain a mystery. He is clearly the dominant figure in the group, even though he was one of the few not to have been to university.
It is Baader’s controlling presence which is decisive in pulling together a disparate group of marginal people into a movement with claims to being an urban guerrilla insurgency. In June 1970, a group that included Baader, Meinhof and Ensslin along with lesser-known figures such as Manfred Grashof and his girlfriend Petra Schelm (a hair dresser) went to Jordan to be trained in guerrilla fighting by the PFLP. They never got on with the Palestinian guerrillas, who took exception, among other things, to nude sun bathing. Edel’s film brings out some major cultural divisions between the would-be German guerrillas and Palestinian freedom fighters. Baader resents being trained in desert warfare since the RAF was an urban insurgency – one wonders why he never bothered to check what sort of training that would be likely in the Jordanian desert. He fires off his AK57 as if he is one of Al Capone’s Chicago hitmen, suggesting that this is more a group of urban bandits than seriously disciplined guerrillas, The RAF group is eventually forced to leave, though at least some of the women have by then received training in how to use a pistol.74
The Baader Meinhof Complex is thus important for the way it penetrates the cult of the urban guerrilla. The film largely debunks the urban guerrilla mystique, as Christopher Hichens suggested.75 There is a sense that, in the end, these are fun revolutionaries and the spoilt children of an affluent society, who lack any real understanding of the issues confronting real guerrilla movements in the third world: Baader, at one point, even calling one Palestinian he encounters in Jordan ‘Ali Baba’. The Palestinians never viewed the RAF as real guerrillas at all, but as a ‘gang’, dismissing Baader as ‘a coward who is performing the whole revolt to cover up his cowardice’.76 Edel’s film exposes the existentialist mythology of ‘global revolution’ that was so pervasive in activists on the Left in Europe and the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and for capturing a moment that has now passed into history.
Summing up
Neorealist traditions of film making had a major role in the early cinematic exploration of urban terrorism and guerrilla war. The films that we have examined in this chapter have mostly been in cities, whether this was the Rome of the Italian resistance of Rossellini’s Rome Open City, the Algiers of Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers or the Montevideo in Gavras’s State of Siege As a cinematic movement, neorealism in its initial phase focused more on working-class communities and the lives of the poor than military combat or guerrilla warfare. It proved, in post-war Italy, to be quite short-lived as popular taste turned to the more glamorous films by directors such as Michelangelo Antonioni or Federico Fellini. However, neorealism certainly lived on well in the 1960s as an art house cinematic form, and The Battle of Algiers was mainly viewed, in the first thirty or so years after its release, on university campuses or at film festivals, arguably only becoming mainstream quite recently after its release on DVD in 2009.
The early spate of neorealist films established certainly a benchmark by which to judge many later films, though the message of The Battle of Algiers has now been largely lost on modern audiences. Christopher Cook has suggested that a ‘9/11 filter’ has ensured that the film’s message that an army can win a battle with terrorists but still lose the war has become less well understood compared to the more simplistic and triumphalist message of John Wayne’s The Green Berets.77 The argument overlooks the change of mood among the American public for US military involvement externally in urban counter-terrorism given the insurgency in Iraq post 2004, though some recent Hollywood movies such as The Hurt Locker suggest the ultimate hopelessness in trying to destroy urban terrorism.
On another level, though, there are a huge range of audiences outside the United States who have viewed the film in multiple ways, ranging from idealistic exponents of the New Left in Europe who saw the movie as a rallying cry for an international fight against ‘imperialism’ to some actual terrorists themselves such as the Sri Lanka LTTE who saw the film as confirming the viability of their strategy of urban terrorism. In addition the film has been taught in military staff colleges around the world and confirmed for some military intellectuals, such as the Sri Lankan army officer ‘Thomas’ encountered by Bruce Hoffmann that the film rationalized a draconian strategy of counter-terrorism in order to ‘terrorize’ the terrorists, a mind-set that appears to have underpinned the eventual military defeat of the LTTE by the Sri Lankan army in 2009.78
The films discussed in this chapter all sought to create a quasi-documentary style, sometimes with voice-overs, and a gritty street-level cinematography that brought the audience face to face with conflicts in urban situations. Movements that, at one level, appeared to be ‘terrorist’ were also operating in a situation of conflict with states, armies and police forces that were operating with draconian violence, raising serious questions over whether terrorism as a strategy could ever really work, especially in the urban context. This was exemplified by Rosselini avoiding the issue of the IED bombing of the Germans leading to the bloody reprisal in the form of the Ardeantine Massacre.
Likewise, the FLN’s terror campaign in Algiers failed in the short term, though the later upsurge of popular protest three years later in 1960 was pivotal to the country’s later independence. The RAF, on the other hand, were deluded and quixotic adventurers whose cause is doomed from the start as they lack any serious popular support from a West Germany working class content with rising living standards. Equally the urban struggle of the Tupamaros in Uruguay, as portrayed by Gavras, also faltered as it offered no easy solution to the country’s problems. Compared to these, the most bizarrely theatrical of terrorist movements was Sendero Luminoso in Peru, certainly in the Lima phase depicted in The Dancer Upstairs. But this film ignored the wider rural guerrilla war, rather like The Battle of Algiers, which was already under the army’s control sometime before Guzman’s eventual capture.
Neorealist cinema and cinema verite thus tended to ask, rather than answer, many questions relating to urban terrorism and it would be later generation of film makers who would attempt to grapple with these in other arenas.