DVD Review: 'The Battle of Algiers'

The insurgents are engaged in a ruthless bombing campaign with no regard as to who gets killed. Additional foreign troops are brought in to stanch the violence and restore order. The troops seal off the insurgents’ urban enclave and set up checkpoints. They answer the insurgents' violence with even more violence.

Baghdad in 2007? No, it’s Algiers in 1957 and the subject of "The Battle of Algiers," an extraordinarily timely documentary and one of the most influential films in the history of political cinema.

Director Gillo Pontecorvo's 1966 movie concerns the struggle in the late 1950s for Algerian independence from France. The film is so heavy, to use a term from that era, that it was banned on release for fear of creating civil disturbances.

"The Battle of Algiers" was shot in black and white and in a quasi-documentary style using largely untrained actors who play the principles – the FLN insurgents who carry out a series of violent attacks only to have the French push back with a counterinsurgency campaign that is even more violent. And ultimately fails although most of the FLN leadership is captured or killed.

When I first saw the movie in the late 1960s, it was gripping, but today it is profoundly insightful because of the nightmare that the Iraq war has become.

The three-DVD Criterion boxed sex of "The Battle of Algiers" has a timely bonus – an interview with Richard Clarke, the former national counterterrorism expect and author of the seminal "Against All Enemies," and Michael A. Sheehan, the former State Department coordinator for counterterrorism.

The interview, conducted by Christopher Isham, chief of investigative projects for ABC News, took place in 2004 before the war in Iraq had come totally off the tracks.

In one of several prescient comments, Clarke notes that “The Battle of Algiers” had been recently shown at the Pentagon, but says he fears that its major lesson was not taken to heart:

There are no military solutions to insurgencies, only political solutions.

How right he was.

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