The Battle of Algiers - Movie

"I hadn't looked at The Battle of Algiers, that classic 1965 film about urban guerrilla warfare, for at least twenty years, but once seen it tends to linger undiminished in the mind's eye. Made by Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo, the film deals with the bitter struggle in the 1950s between French colonials and settlers and the Algerians they had colonized. The film has the grainy look of a documentary, but as the opening trailer proudly proclaims, not a foot of newsreel was actually used. Back in the 1960s, when it first came out, it was watched with romantic fascination by young American radicals, eager to absorb the experiences, a million miles distant from their own lives, of Third World revolutionaries. In the 1980s my husband used to show it in a political science class he taught about revolution. And now the Pentagon has recently shown it to its functionaries, even as our own troops are deeply mired in urban guerrilla warfare. I wondered what tips and instruction they were intended to glean from it, and so I slipped our copy into the VCR and watched it again..."

Full text: The Battle of Algiers and Its Lessons by Sheila Johnson
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0907-07.htm