E-Mail This Article to a Friend Battle plan? (continued)

Point taken: you must control the media and withhold or distort the truth to achieve victory. Mathieu’s fatal error is not his use of immoral methods such as torture, but being honest about it. He holds press conferences with adversarial journalists and bluntly acknowledges the "T" word and the covert murder of imprisoned rebel leaders. And he is dismayed to hear that L’Express has published a hostile article by Jean Paul Sartre. "Why are the Sartres always on the other side?" he laments.

Well, with the possible exception of the marginalized Noam Chomsky, they aren’t any more. They might not have the intellectual credentials of a Sartre, but the Sean Hannitys, Robert Novaks, and Rush Limbaughs of today are at least as strident and far more scurrilous. Whatever remains of the alternative or even neutral press has long cowered before this Greek chorus of pseudo-journalism manufactured over the years by the powers of the far right.

Nor is there any pretense to full coverage of the issues and events that might embarrass the powers-that-be in "wartime." This kind of folly ended for good during Gulf War I, when the media transformed the brutality of that conflict into an awe-inspiring video game of smart bombs and surrendering Iraqis. During the recent sequel, the administration added the brilliant new strategy of "embedding" journalists, thereby utterly co-opting the media and achieving unprecedented news management.

Not only does Algiers teach repressive regimes that it’s necessary to lie to win, it also suggests ways to do so. Algiers is one of the first films (Potemkin and Triumph of the Will come to mind as possible earlier examples) to synthesize documentary style seamlessly with both factual and fabricated content for ideological intent. According to Pontecorvo, who remembers with amusement how he spent "over a month trying to find the right lens and film stock to achieve the documentary look, and only five days casting actors," that style was the only way to convey the "truth" of the film and the subject.

But couldn’t those same methods be used to deceive — by Oliver Stone, perhaps, or Fox News? "Maybe so," Pontecorvo replies. Despite the documentary style, facts are less important in Algiers than images. Pontecorvo’s favorite scene in the film demonstrates his poetic, or propagandistic, intent: a defiant Algerian woman, dancing and chanting with a handmade flag, transfixed in a freeze-frame.

Past critics have also questioned the validity and ethics of Pontecorvo’s technique. Film critic and New Wave film director Jacques Rivette denounced the director’s first film, Kapo (1959), a realistic drama set in a concentration camp, for aestheticizing the Holocaust, exploiting its horrors for political and sentimental purposes. He singled out for particular scorn a stylish shot of yet another woman, a camp inmate murdered by the Nazis. A dolly shot frames the tragedy in a pleasing, poignant composition. "The man who did this traveling shot," wrote Rivette, "is worthy of the most profound contempt."

Calm down, Jacques; Pontecorvo’s artistic failing pales before the crimes performed by Rivette’s countrymen in Algeria. How much more outraged must Rivette be, then, to witness how the Bush administration has been using the same techniques with more insidious intent and far graver consequences.

The manipulative image is everything now. It doesn’t just conceal the truth, it replaces it. To this purpose, the Bush administration has turned to the experts, Hollywood. After 9/11, several Hollywood filmmakers offered their services to help the government "fight terrorism." Among them was producer Jerry Bruckheimer, whose films include Top Gun (1986) and Black Hawk Down (2001), which recreated the disastrous Clinton-era Battle of Mogadishu. Perhaps Bruckheimer felt he owed Bush one since the Department of Defense had been so generous in assisting him with making Pearl Harbor (2001), even loaning him the aircraft carrier John C. Stennis for the film’s world premiere in Honolulu.

At any rate, you can see Bruckheimer’s influence in Bush’s Tom Cruise–like star turn in the now notorious "Mission Accomplished" carrier landing. It’s perhaps also evident in the Saving Private Jessica farce (eerily reminiscent of the "Sergeant Schumann" episode in 1997’s Wag the Dog, a film proving more and more prescient), with its raiding party of troops firing blanks and shooting video. And, of course, there was last March’s six-episode ABC "reality show" Profiles from the Front Line, in which viewers got to meet the soldiers fighting in Afghanistan and other trouble spots — basically an infomercial for the upcoming invasion of Iraq.

Strangely, we haven’t heard much about those publicity stunts lately, except from the administration’s detractors. Only recently has the press shown some assertiveness, the stonewalling of those who’ve misled us, some cracks. Maybe they have made their big lies a little too big. It seems that when you try to rewrite history, history has a way of coming back and biting you in the ass. With satisfying ironic symmetry, candor proves fatal to Colonel Mathieu in Algiers; likewise, deceit may be the undoing of those who brought us the war in Iraq. As for Pontecorvo, he had the truth, or at least the ideal of truthfulness, in mind when he made his film, not cynical deception. That is why it still endures, while the current administration, one hopes, will end in November.

Peter Keough can be reached at pkeough[a]phx.com