m.guardian.co.uk Even a cursory look at the news over the past few months will tell you one thing: street protests and radical movements are gaining traction. Our students would seem to so far have had somewhat less political impact than the demonstrators in Tunisia , but they don't appear to have been disheartened, calling for a national walkout in favour of the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) on Wednesday, and a national demonstration on Saturday against fees, cuts, and general swinishness from those on high. So what can our own young radicals learn from the movies?
The first port of call for any budding revolutionary has to be The Battle of Algiers , Gillo Pontecorvo's thrillingly realistic recreation of the urban guerrilla campaign during the Algerian war of independence. Obviously, the stakes were higher back then – it's unlikely paratroopers will blow up Laurie Penny 's house, and however they carp, 19-year-olds are hardly a colonised people – but still, what lessons can be drawn? In the film, Algeria's National Liberation Front, the FLN, adopt a pyramidal structure, where each combatant will only know the person who recruited him, and someone who he recruits. Clearly, with recent police infiltration of the green movement , any self-respecting subversives would do well to look at this system, which baffled the French authorities in Algiers. That said, given the prevalence of Twitter and Facebook in student demos and the revolution in Tunisia, the secrecy the pyramid structure produces wouldn't last especially long – unless the plan is to distract the fuzz with endless tweets about triumphant sandwich making, or Embarrassing Bodies. What else? Well, when the French get serious about quelling the insurgency, they bring in Colonel Mathieu and his paras. No caricature, he's frank about the methods (torture, assassination) needed to fight this dirty war, and has little taste for them. He's also blunt about the fact his capacity is limited, that the battle of ideas has to be won – otherwise his violence is useless. At one point he even bemoans Sartre's articles in Paris, reacting as if they were a military setback rather than an ageing Rive-Gauche type sounding off. This is more heartening for students seeking to embarrass David Cameron – as long as they can keep themselves on the news, whether it's by smashing up a police van or getting narky on Newsnight, the debate continues, and their chance of winning it grows. The Battle of Algiers closes on some French officers reflecting on their success in decapitating the FLN, but then leaps forward a few years, and we see the mass street protests that swept the colonial government from power. The message is, you can smash people's heads in, but if the opposition's ideas are there, you're never safe from being swept out – a heartening idea for anybody kettled (or worse) last year. Still, The Battle of Algiers looks at a pretty extreme revolutionary situation – nobody's saying the National Union of Students (NUS) is about to form an armed wing. But the lessons are there, especially since most films about youthful radicalism are either preposterous ( The Baader Meinhof Complex romanticises people who were essentially nuts) or comic (for all its charm, little-seen comedy The Trotsky is no handbook). Ken Loach has the unique ability to make political discussion thrill, but the gripping debates in Land and Freedom and The Wind that Shakes the Barley are from another time, and eloquent as they are, speak little to a movement that has more in common with the campaign against the poll tax than that against fascism. Cinema has rarely served radicals well – and why would it? A slave to the market, much has been written over the years about its inherent conservatism; but then again, not every film needs to keep the boat steady enough to secure a Burger King tie-in deal. In Britain we like our movie radicals to be safely in the past, comic, or foreign ( Carlos is the biggest recent example); down with that sort of thing. What price a film about them so that their descendants don't have to learn how it's done by looking at 50s Algeria? -- http://m.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2011/jan/31/movie-tips-revolutionaries-cinema-protest?cat=film&type=article Via InstaFetch -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en.
