The Great Movies III

In the factories, the high-angle camera shows rows of these workers reaching to the vanishing point. These are not computer graphics. The images result from painstaking care and perfectionist detail in the filming and restoration, and thoughtful camera placement. Consider a shot from above looking down on the great hall of Grand Central Station. Two movements at once: commuters dashing across the floor in speeded-up time, while the camera pans across them in slow motion. It is easy enough to achieve fast motion, but how difficult with a camera that is panning with exquisite slowness. There's an overhead shot of an intersection in Tokyo, with alternating swarms of thousands of cars and thousands of pedestrians. Escalators on the subway system, a speeded-up shot, pour out travelers as the conveyor belt poured chicks.

An orangutan stands shoulder-deep in a warm pool, steam rising around it. We regard it. The eyes look old and thoughtful. The sky is filled with stars. The same thoughtful eyes again. What is it thinking? W. G. Sebold: "Men and animals regard each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension." What are the people thinking? The man waits for a light to change in Tokyo, inhaling his cigarette. Prostitutes gather outside their brothel. Steelworkers are covered with grime. Monks, girls at a subway stop, kabuki dancers. Why does no one make eye contact with the camera during crowded street scenes? Where was the big Todd-AO camera? How was it concealed? Why did it not frighten a herd of springboks, standing at rest in perfect focus?

Will the aliens viewing this film comprehend some of the scenes? Tiny bright plumes in a desert are revealed as the burning oil fields of Kuwait. Mothballed B-52 bombers reach to the horizon. Manhattan. Corpses are burned on the banks of the Ganges. Will they know the donkeys are pulling a cart much too heavy for them? They will probably understand mountains, waterfalls, volcanoes. Do we? Baraka is paced so we can contemplate the places we will never go, the places we are destroying, the places where we might find renewal. It is like a prayer.

"Baraka" is a Sufi word meaning "a blessing, or the breath, or the essence of life, from which the evolutionary process unfolds."In Islam generally, it is "a quality or force emanating originally from Allah but capable of transmission to objects or to human beings." In Judaism, it is a ceremonial blessing. In Swahili, it means "blessing." In French slang, it means "good luck." In Serbian and Bulgarian, it means "shack." In Turkish, it means "barracks." All over the world, it is the name of a character in the Mortal Kombat video game.

The most common form of warfare since 1945 has involved irregular resistance fighters attacking conventional forces and then disappearing back into the population. Bombs planted by civilians, often women and children, have served as deadly weapons in this war. The United States, France, Russia, Israel, Northern Ireland, South Africa, and several South American states have all had their experiences with urban guerrillas.

George W. Bush complained in his first televised debate with Senator John Kerry that he thought Saddam's army would stand and fight, but it melted away into the city streets. He blamed some of the problems in Iraq on the fact that the initial U.S. victory came too easily and quickly; if the lessons of other conflicts are a guide, it may be too soon to declare that victory. The army disappeared, but it didn't leave.

Gallo Pontecorvo's The Battle ofAlgiers, filmed in 1965, released in late 1967, is the crucial film about this new kind of warfare. It involves the proving-ground of the emerging tactics in Algeria from 1954 to 1962, as France tried and failed to contain a nationalist uprising. Methods that were successful in Algeria would be adapted by Castro and Guevara in Cuba, by the Vietcong, the Palestinians, the IRA, and South African militants, and are currently being employed in Iraq. One conventional response has been the capture, interrogation, and sometimes torture of the fighters, who are pressured to betray the names and plans of their co-conspirators.

This theory is described by a French military commander in The Battle of Algiers: terrorist groups are like tapeworms-they keep reviving unless you destroy the head. That's not easy, because the groups are broken up into cells so that no member knows the names of more than a few others. As a consequence, neither side can really know how many (or how few) insurgents are involved.