Torture & Art in Wars on Terror: A Comparative Analysis of "Zero Dark Thirty" and "The Battle of Algiers" (Part 2 - Battle of Algiers)

"The basis of our job is intelligence. The method: interrogation. Conducted in such a way to ensure that we always get an answer. In our situation, false humanitarian considerations can only lead to despair and confusion. I am certain that all units will understand and react accordingly."
                                                                         - Colonel Mathieu, The Battle of Algiers 

Alright, folks, we are back again for the second post in our multi-part comparison of artistic depictions of torture in Zero Dark Thirty (ZD30) and The Battle of Algiers.  This post will focus on the latter of the two films, while a discussion of ZD30 itself will largely be reserved for the next post.

Why The Battle of Algiers?
Perhaps the first question that should be asked and answered is, "why are we comparing ZD30 to The Battle of Algiers, rather than, say, 24, Homeland, or some other more modern cinematic allegory or depiction of the War on Terror?"

There are two main reasons that I selected The Battle of Algiers as the subject of this comparative analysis.  The first is fairly straightforward: unlike most of the post-9/11 films/television programs that depict or allegorize the War on Terror, The Battle of Algiers is, like ZD30, a fictionalized representation of real events.  Where ZD30 tells the story of the United States' 10-year hunt for Osama bin Laden after the September 11 terrorist attacks (which the movie bills as the "Greatest Manhunt in History"), The Battle of Algiers depicts one of the pivotal moments in the Algerian War: the titular Battle of Algiers, in which urban guerillas aligned with the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) engaged in a protracted campaign of bombings and shootings against French interests in the Algerian capitol.  In response, the French dispatched General Jacques Massu and a division of French paratroopers, who restored order in the restive city through a heavy-handed campaign of coercive interrogations and torture.

And therein lies the second reason for my selection of The Battle of Algiers.  For all their differences - and, indeed, the differences between the films (to say nothing of the real-world situations that inspired them) are profound - ZD30 and The Battle of Algiers share a number of significant similarities: both concern Western nations battling terrorism and the dark extremes that even "civilized" nations will go to protect their perceived interests or accomplish their goals.  Both depict the regional environments in which the respective Western militaries or intelligence agencies must work.  Both acknowledge and depict - although with stark differences with respect to the level of sympathy induced in the viewer - the terrorist actions against which the Western nations are fighting.  And, most importantly for our purposes, the plot lines of both films are intricately bound up with the question of torture.  Indeed, this questionable theme is so significant that both ZD30 and The Battle of Algiers open with scenes involving torture.

(NOTE: for those unfamiliar with The Battle of Algiers, the entire film can currently be viewed on YouTube, although I'd get on that, since it could probably be taken down at any time as a copyright violation)

The Depiction of Torture in The Battle of Algiers:
And now we get to the meat of the matter: the depiction of torture in the The Battle of Algiers and the central role it plays in the film.

As in ZD30, the viewer know what he is getting into as soon as the movie begins: a half-naked man, beaten and dejected, sits in a French interrogation room, as a soldier speaks the film's chilling opening line, "Why couldn't you have talked sooner?  It would have gone easier for you."  The man, who is revealed to have a large burn covering the entire left part of his chest, is then pressed into a French military uniform and brought into the Casbah - the city's largest Arab quarter - to finger the location of the fighter he has given up: Ali La Pointe, the last free FLN member in the city of Algiers.

Street in Algiers' Casbah
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Notice then, what is conveyed even within the first several minutes of The Battle of Algiers: torture has not only been routinized by the French in their battle against the FLN, but, much more significantly, it is effective.  So effective, in fact, that Colonel Mathieu (a composite character representing General Massu and other French military leaders in Algeria) and his men have broken the back of the FLN's organization in Algiers.  La Pointe, betrayed by the man in the film's opening scene and trapped in his hiding place behind a false wall in an apartment bathroom, is the last loose end for the French to tie up. With his death, the French victory in the Battle of Algiers is assured.

Thus, the first several minutes of the film can be summarized in three steps: 1) Western nation tortures in pursuit of its goal; 2) this torture is effective and results in concrete leads; and 3) Western nation is able to follow these leads to achieve its goal.  To boomerang away from the Battle of Algiers for a moment, I will note that this three-step formula is, to a significant degree, a one-sentence plot summary of Zero Dark Thirty - although, admittedly, with two hours of well-developed, well-paced, and interesting detective work (punctuated by repeated al-Qaeda attacks) thrown in for good measure.

But few (decent) movies are willing to give their game away in the first few minutes, and The Battle of Algiers is no exception: the three-step formula described above may be a useful vantage point from which to view the movie's events, but it is merely the surface level of a much deeper - and much more morally convoluted - whole.  Unlike ZD30, which depicts torture as something that simply is, The Battle of Algiers provides the viewer with a much broader picture of torture.  The film examines the spiral of violence between the FLN and the French colonial police/military that led to the tactic's adoption; the physical brutality of the torture methods employed; the justifications offered by the French military; and, perhaps most importantly, the effects of the tactic on the local population and its ultimate failure to save the French colonial venture in Algeria.  This is a nuanced treatment of the question of torture in cinema, and, in the next blog post, I intend to show why ZD30 fails to live up to this thought-provoking standard.

For now, however, let us continue our examination of The Battle of Algiers.  What does the movie do right?

1) Well, for one thing, the film actually talks about torture and refuses to present the tactic as a mere fait accompli or to treat it merely as a very big and very obvious elephant in the room.  As the movie shows, the French police in Algeria were not originally in the torture business: while the police, frustrated at their inability to prevent their own officers from being gunned down by FLN assassins, certainly engaged in some despicable, extralegal tactics (the bombing of a suspected FLN member's family home, for instance) in their attempts to get FLN violence under control, torture was not among them.  However, after a series of FLN bombs kill dozens of French Algerians in near-simultaneous explosions at a restaurant, dance club, and airline ticket counter, the French substantially up their game.  Colonel Mathieu and his paratroopers are deployed to Algiers with orders to crush the FLN.  And so it is that, shortly after their arrival, the viewer is treated to this speech from Colonel Mathieu, briefing his troops on the enemy that they are charged with destroying - a speech that, if disconnected from Algeria's FLN and applied to al-Qaeda and the broader Muslim world, could easily have been given by an American military commander in the years after 9/11:

"There are 400,000 Arabs in Algiers. Are they all our enemies? We know they are not. But a small minority holds sway by means of terror and violence. We must deal with this minority in order to isolate and destroy it. It's a dangerous enemy that works in the open and underground . . . . It's a faceless enemy, unrecognizable, blending in with hundreds of others. . . . . Among all these Arab men and women are the [terrorists]. But who are they? How can we recognize them?" (NOTE: see YouTube film at 55:38 for footage)

Having explained the overarching problem that his troops will face - the problem of determining who is and is not an enemy in a native population of hundreds of thousands of individuals - Colonel Mathieu elaborates their second predicament: the FLN is structured in such a way that its members are insulated from one another.  Each member of the organization knows only three others: the higher-up that recruited that member, and two underling that that member himself recruited. In order to crack the FLN, the French paratroopers must break through this defense by working their way up the chain, eliminating the organization's "triangle" sections one by one until they reach the top: the military head of the FLN.  And how will they do this?  Colonel Mathieu has the answer: the use of what the CIA would later call "enhanced interrogation techniques" to "convince" captured FLN members to finger their immediate superiors in the organization.

"The basis of our job is intelligence. The method: interrogation. Conducted in such a way to ensure that we always get an answer. In our situation, false humanitarian considerations can only lead to despair and confusion. I am certain that all units will understand and react accordingly."

And his paratroopers do understand.  They react accordingly.  And, as the beginning of the movie shows, their tactics meet with resounding success.  But, as the video clip below (depicting a press conference between Mathieu and members of the French-Algerian media) shows, questions remain:

Colonel Mathieu is insistent that the success his troop have achieved is directly related to the tactics they have employed, and he gives the very post-9/11 dismissal to his journalist critics that, "The word 'torture' isn't used in our orders."  He goes on to detail the FLN's strategy of requiring captured members to stay silent for 24 hours after their capture so as to give the organization time to make any information they then give to French authorities useless.  "What form of questioning must we adopt [to combat these tactics?]" Mathieu asks incredulously, "Civil law procedures that take months for a mere misdemeanor?"  He then presents the assembled journalists with his stark picture of the conflict:

"The problem is this: the FLN wants to throw us out of Algeria, and we want to stay. Even with slight shades of opinion you all agree that we must stay. When the FLN rebellion began, there were no shades at all - every paper, the communist [or left-wing] press included, wanted it crushed. . . . . Therefore, it's my turn to ask a question: should France stay in Algeria? If your answer is still 'yes,' then you must accept all the necessary consequences."

It might not be much - e.g. no reporter seriously challenges the paratroopers' use of torture to put down the FLN - but it's something.  The characters in the movie recognize torture as being a subject of significance, whether from a moral or a tactical standpoint, and they discuss it!  Mathieu offers his justifications for the use of torture during the two scenes I've described, and there is at least a little push-back from the assembled reporters ("Legality can be inconvenient").  But the key point is, again, that the question of torture is recognized and discussed, and the viewer, who has been exposed to the atrocities committed by both sides of the conflict, is, for the moment, left to consider whether the tactic can truly be justified.

2) Secondly, The Battle of Algiers does not shy away from depicting the brutality of torture.  Indeed, the scene that follows the press conference scene shown above demonstrates just what grim "necessary consequences" Mathieu is referencing.  It is in this scene - one of the most harrowing in classic cinema (beginning at 1:35:18 in the full-length YouTube video) - that we see the full brutality of Mathieu's techniques.  And this is not "mere" waterboarding - although two forms of water-torture (forced ingestion of water and repeatedly holding a prisoner's head underwater) are depicted.  No, this goes far beyond that: this is torture with blowtorches; torture by hanging bloodied and beaten hog-tied men from the ceiling; and torture by electrocution.

No artistic depiction of torture can be considered honest if it does not convey the horror and brutality involved in such tactics.  In this sense, both The Battle of Algiers and, as we will see, ZD30 succeed.

3) Most significantly, however, The Battle of Algiers shows the ultimate futility - and, indeed, the counter-productivity - of the French military's use of torture.  The French may have won the Battle of Algiers by killing or imprisoning the entire leadership of the FLN, but a battle is not the war, and France's brutal actions in Algiers resulted in a significant increase in the popularity of anti-colonial and anti-French ideology among the native Algerian population.  Left to metastasize for several (relatively) peaceful years, this anti-colonial sentiment burst back into the open in December 1960, with mass demonstrations in support of an independent Algeria.  This is depicted in the film's final 10 minutes, with the film's finale showing a scene from the last day of the 1960 demonstrations while the narrator states that two years later Algeria achieved its independence.

In other words, torture isn't something that occurs in a vacuum.  While it may - and let's really stress that "may" - be useful for achieving certain goals, its consequences and side effects should not be ignored.  Indeed, as The Battle of Algiers shows, the consequences of torture are far more significant than their limited successes: while it is unclear whether France would have been able to maintain control over Algeria without using torture and other brutal tactics to cripple the FLN, its very use of torture and brutality played a central role in turning the native Algerian population against the French and making France's eventual ejection from northern Africa all but certain.  This is one of the key points of the film, and it is a point that other filmmakers, to say nothing of other governments, ought to take note of.

As we will see in the next post (which will likely take several days or so to write . . . sorry), this point is one that was decidedly lost on Kathryn Bigelow when making Zero Dark Thirty.  Rather than depict the large-scale consequences of torture - a precipitous decline in the United States' popularity in the Arab/Muslim World, a loss of stature among even the US's staunchest allies, and justification for greater radicalization and more terrorist attacks - Bigelow chooses, instead, to depict . . . well . . . NO negative consequences of torture.  Not even such comparatively mundane problems as faulty intelligence are treated in Zero Dark Thirty.

But this is the topic of the next post in this series, and I would hate to rant too much about it now.  Until then, I hope you enjoy the early part of your week and I really do recommend that you take some time, if you have it, to watch The Battle of Algiers.  It is truly an excellent film.