"it's the same old story"/"it was only yesterday"

Just watched "The Battle of Algiers" in its new Criterion Collection DVD format, having never seen the movie before, though i'd heard a great deal about it from various friends who'd seen it in various contexts. That it reminds me, to a certain extent, of Sembene Ousmanne's novel God's Bits of Wood, shouldn't really surprise, i suppose, since both Pontecorvo's film and Sembene's novel attempt to document the disciplinary practices of and the tactics of refusal and resistance directed against french colonial power in North and West Africa, respectively, and if Sembene's novel predates Pontecorvo's film, (as the Senegalese general strike predates the Algerian Liberation Front's guerilla mobilizations.)

Much of the recent attention given Pontecorvo's film, which is certainly bolstered by the dvd commentary by none other than Richard Clarke (yes, that Richard Clarke) has concerned its frank depiction of the tactics of anticolonial insurgency - bombings, suicide attacks, children gunning down colonial soldiers, women concealing bombs beneath burqas, but for me what are more powerful are the ways in which the film deconstructs colonial knowledge itself, pointing towards the gaps in colonial reason, the moments at which that which can not be understood as possible, that which had been previously unthinkable, occurs.

Pontecorvo's narrative returns at several points to the shrill ululating of the arab women as a gesture of resistance and outrage against colonial rule. French and european narration finds this noise frightening and incomprehensible, impenetrable. The colonial news report which frames the penultimate scene of the film, in which the algerians, despite supposedly having been made quiescent two years earlier, with the deaths of the FLN's leadership, attempt to storm the european quarter and brave the machine guns of distraught french soldiers, narrated by French journalists, is punctuated by the ominous observation that the "muslim quarters still echo with those unintelligible and frightening rhythmic cries" of the arabs. This is the final line of voiced-over text for nearly a minute, as the colonial narration is silenced by the shouts of protest of the street demonstrations, the winding of the headless "tapeworm" toward the european quarter, until the report resumes, announcing that the french political class now strongly favors negotiating independence with the algerian insurgents. Is the subaltern speaking here? Maybe, though if so, through a lens firmly held by cultural producers grounded in the colonial Metropole. The more interesting question to ask concerns what the film attempts to say about the politics of knowledge, language, and speech. John Kerry speaks of the (p)resident's failure to "win the peace," a thinly coded nod to the language of empire and hegemony. Yet Pontecorvo's film suggests the instability and even impossibility of such an endeavor, as well as the violence and repression it is likely to involve.