The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966)

Another “from real events” film involving the question of torture and this one was also made very close in time to the events described but this is a very different film to Zero Dark Thirty, with an almost documentary feel to it throughout.

As the film opens, we are near the end of the story, as terrorist / freedom fighter (delete as appropriate) Ali La Pointe (Brahim Hadjadj) is about to be captured following the torture of one of his fellows. He is the last of the FLN terrorist network and has been in hiding. We then move back a few years to Ali as a non-political young man on the edges of society, illegally running simple card swindles and constantly in trouble with the authorities. We see him beaten by white colonial settlers and we see that he doesn’t take this quietly. Arrested, he sees a guillotine execustion of a rebel and becomes politicised, finding a vocation in the Islamic resistance to the French authorities.

A tit-for-tat exchange of atrocities quickly escalates. The FLN repeatedly attack police and army; an (off-duty) officer bombs the Kasbah, and the FLN widens its attacks, with civilians now targeted. What is impressive is that we see the motivations of each side and how they regard their actions as justifiable and necessary, all the while seeing how wrong and brutal they are and how inevitable the retaliation each time.

In a sign of the scale of the problem, the French bring in Colonel Mathieu (Jean Martin) a hero of the resistance, to take whatever measures necessary to stop the FLN. Fully conversant with guerilla warfare and how a very small force of committed terrorists can wreak carnage if not actively opposed by everyone, he takes on the role of his erstwhile opponents in making warfare effectively on a whole community in order to defeat just a few individuals, and is fully aware of the irony of his situation. Just as in asymmetric conflicts throughout the world, an initially indifferent population can be radicalised by a small number of activists if the means of defeating them involve excessive force by the authorities, playing into the wider narrative of oppressor versus oppressed.

If there is a “villain” in this, it is the French colonial settler, casually and thoughtlessly racist, dismissive of the african Algerians as sub-human and all too quick to attack any africans who were unfortunate to be in the vicinity when the FLN attacked. It is hard to see how Mathieu or anyone else could ever convince the Algerians that Ali and his fellows were the real enemy when every day, they could see how ordinary white Europeans viewed them.

An extraordinary film.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog, 2010)

Being a documentary about the Chauvet Cave of in the Ardèche valley, and its haunting prehistoric pictures of animals – aurochs, rhinos, reindeer, lions and horses. The caves were sealed off by a rock-slide 20,000 years ago and so remained unspoilt and unknown until discovered by cavers in 1994 and Herzog was given limited and very precious access to film the rock paintings that most people will never see (the moisture caused by breathing can destroy the paintings), although a recreation of them is proposed as a theme park nearby.

Some of the pictures, dating back to 35,000 years at a time when early humans shared Europe with Neanderthals and ice-sheets covered much of the Earth, have a sense of movement and grace about them that are reminiscent of Picasso and the lions are far more impressively realistic than any I’ve seen in early mediaeval art (more familiarity with the subject, of course). There is one section with four horse heads, to which the camera keeps returning, that could either be representing a herd or else the movement of a single animal, and which is particularly special. This had a cinema release in 3D though, as we were watching on DVD, I can’t judge how reliant the movie is on that effect.

This is by no means a perfect film. Herzog, faced with a limited amount of (admittedly amazing) footage of the caves, pads it out with some talking heads, some of whom are more interesting and reliable than others. There is an “experimental archaeologist” who wears seal furs and goes by the rather marvellous name “Wulf”, a master-perfumier who might be employed by the theme park to reproduce the smells, not of the caves as they were discovered, but as they are imagined they might have been if the various animals depicted on the walls were present though, apart from humans, only cave bears were ever resident in them. Even one of the archaeologists goes a bit loopy, suggesting that the pictures can be “heard” as well as seen.

There is an attempt to put the cave into a wider European perspective with comparisons to other ‘artworks’ from the period but this is all rather perfunctory and half-hearted. Herzog seems to want to tell a story about what it means to be human and push the idea that it is not just our ability to communicate through language but to also to record and transmit ideas across time but, when his material is too thin to support his thesis, just retreats to vague talk of “spiritual” and similar guff.

Finally, there is a barking-mad postscript featuring a section, for no apparent reason and now known to be totally faked, about “nuclear mutant albino crocodile doppelgangers”. I cannot think of anything this adds to the film except a talking point. It is nonsensical and stupid and it diminishes the whole.