Introduction

Keywords::

• auteur
• film directors
• genre
• guerrilla warfare
• Kracauer
• myths
• Philippines
• Vietnam

The cinema intrudes in various and often unexpected ways into discussion and debates in history and the social sciences. Rather like an uninvited guest haunting the fringes of a party, it can pop up with interesting comments, winning – if only briefly – the acknowledgement of other guests before the conversation moves on… Cinema can crystallise the views and ideas of wider intellectual communities and supply pictorial imagery to conflicts or situations known only through written or oral sources. It can also provide a series of aids to those teaching military or political conflicts, though here there are the inevitable caveats over reliability and authenticity.

In this issue we will be presenting a series of articles that deal with a rather neglected area of cinema: the cinema of guerrilla insurgencies. At one level, this might easily be subsumed with the genre of war films that has been firmly established in Hollywood and other national cinemas since World War Two. However, it is also clear from continual cinematic references, in debates on insurgency, counterinsurgency, ‘military orientalism’, and ‘how states lose small wars’, that there is a more specific species of films dealing less with set-piece battles and the exigencies of conventional warfare than small-scale irregular warfare, mercenary conflicts, and guerrilla insurgencies. Indeed what might be termed ‘guerrilla cinema’ can be said to have a hidden history of its own, which has remained largely neglected by scholars despite the extensive range of general works published on the cinema of war.

This issue has been published, therefore, as a preliminary excursion into what can be seen as a vast area awaiting more systematic research. It is one to which some students in military or strategic studies may feel drawn along with scholars in film studies. The questions asked by the two groups of researchers are unlikely to be exactly the same, though they will clearly benefit from each other's respective fields of expertise.

In any such discussions the question is bound to be asked by students of military history: why study films? How can they act as any sort of reliable guide to understanding the past since they are fictional constructs driven less by a desire to understand the truth than basically to entertain and make money? These are valid questions, though they tend to underrate the commitment of many directors to create important cinematic works of art in their own right. The cinema is in most countries an industry driven by production outcomes and performance targets. The very notion of cinema ‘genres’ like Westerns, comedies, and war films can be seen to be driven by a marketing imperative to target certain clear audiences. At the same time, directors can themselves act as ‘auteurs’ in their own right, establishing a clear cinematic identity with the films they direct – this is why film audiences (as well as many actors) came to know and admire the work of major directors such as John Ford, David Lean, Sam Peckinpah, Lewis Milestone, or Francis Ford Coppola.

Similarly, the use of films as teaching aids in the understanding of military conflict has dogged discussion for a good many years. It continues earlier debates over the use of novels and works of fiction in the study of history. Just as those teaching the Napoleonic invasion of Russia might employ Tolstoy's War and Peace (with the added bonus of engaging with the same author's controversial view of history) so might a modern teacher in military studies employ films like A Bridge Too Far to study Operation Market Garden in 1944 or the remarkable portrayal of General Patton by George C. Scott in the film Patton to help examine World War Two US generals. While clearly fictional, these films help to bring issues alive and help foment discussions on truth versus myth.

There is the additional consideration that many historical figures involved in decision-making might themselves have been influenced by a range of important films. Various leaders of the twentieth century such as Hitler, Churchill, and Tito spent many evenings watching films, and it is clear that at least some of their political outlook and understanding of the world was shaped by the cinema. The United States even elected a former movie actor, Ronald Reagan, for two terms as president in the 1980s, and it appears that, at some points, this president had some difficulty in distinguishing hard political realities from what he believed to be true from some lost film. Further down the pecking order, it is also evident that films have helped shape the way that battlefield commanders or the leaders of special operations might define their roles, while even the ordinary infantryman embattled in Iraq and Afghanistan often felt that he/she was in some senses serving as an extra in a ‘movie’.

Many films can also be seen as important for the way they reflecting the underlying thoughts and assumptions within a society. Even poorly directed or produced films can act in some degree as a barometer of a society's mood, not least because most have, in the end, to appeal to a mass audience taste if they are to succeed in making any sort of financial return at the box office: though occasionally, of course, it is possible for individual directors to find suitable funding for an ‘art house’ movie that is at risk of making a financial loss – such as Paul Schrader's remarkable film on the homosexual Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima entitled Mishima: A life in Four Chapters in 1985 (which ended up grossing only half a million dollars on a budget of $5 million).1

Moreover it is possible to see films as historical texts in their own right. Robert A. Rosenstone, for instance, has argued that film is no more of a ‘fiction’ than written history, which is also selective in the sources used and the narrative structure employed to recount past events. Film has the advantage of being able to collapse into one integrated whole a range of different perspectives that are normally separated, in the conventions of written history, into such categories as ‘economic’, ‘social’, or ‘political’. While a film can obviously falsify history, it can also dramatise it and bring emotion into the study of the past, which is otherwise lacking as historians are left, in true Rankean fashion, to interpret the past through the judicious interpretation of documents.2

Many professional historians are unconvinced by such arguments, viewing even the most historically accurate films as little more than guides towards helping students understand some of the basic features of the period being studied.3 There will also be questions concerning the reliability of historical feature films and the way they might differ from more carefully constructed historical documentaries that depend more directly on the accurate use of historical documentation. Even here, though, past events are often re-enacted in modern TV historical documentaries using professional actors or re-created using digital technology.

For radicals and Marxists the issue needs to be defined rather differently: films for this body of critics are to be seen less as the representation of any form of historical ‘truth’ than as a battleground between contending political and ideological positions seeking to understand the past in terms of contemporary structures of power and class interest. In this context, it is not only how the film industry in Hollywood chooses to interpret the past but also what it also leaves out and ignores – the silences that are absent from any film that perhaps tell us something about the ideological mindset of those funding and producing a particular film.4 This of course becomes a major issue when it comes to interpreting particularly sensitive or controversial periods of the past such as the Vietnam War and how we understand the way this war was actually fought – a theme that is part of wider research in which I am currently engaged.5

Feature films have, in any case, the propensity of moving beyond the realm of rational historical debate into an arena of mythology where critical enquiry becomes difficult. This is why philosophers working in a tradition rooted in the tradition of Enlightenment rationalism have always viewed myths as inherently dangerous. The German philosopher Ernst Cassirer, for instance, approached this issue in his seminal study The Myth of the State, published immediately after World War Two. Cassirer set himself the task of trying to understanding the mythological foundations of modern thought and the way these had been deployed to sustain the Nazi regime in Germany. Referring to anthropological work that we would now consider dated, he saw myths as having their origins in ‘primitive’ cultures. He also confessed that ‘of all things in the world myth seems to be the most incoherent and inconsistent’ since it appeared to be a ‘confused web woven out of the most incongruous threads’.6

Cassirer worked largely in the world of written sources and great authors and completely overlooked the world of cinema. In the late 1940s the serious study of film did begin, especially with the publication in 1947 of Siegfried Kracauer's seminal study From Caligari to Hitler.7 Cassirer pointed to the ‘psychoanalytic theory of myth’ as offering at least the promise of demystifying myths in the modern world, though he felt, in the end, that they had still failed to do this since there was a yawning gap between knowing the subject matter of myths and their meaning and function in modern culture.8 By contrast, Kracauer's work was important for stressing the role of German horror films in the era of silent movies in the 1920s, interpreting a popular mood in Germany based on anti-Semitism and myths of blood that would eventually underpin the Nazi triumph in the 1930s. Here cinema acted in advance of formal public opinion, though the thesis can be criticised for erecting a post hoc ergo propter hoc argument benefitting from hindsight. Kracauer stressed the way that certain key films could interpret a collective unconscious when they are developed by acute scriptwriters with a sharp nose for the prevailing public mood. This is also clearly the case of wars of insurgency that have challenged the ethos of the mainstream military, such as that of the US military in Vietnam. The Rambo myth of an alienated ex-special forces soldier turned guerrilla fighter, for instance, was forged in a series of films in the early 1980s as a powerful binding force to consolidate US public opinion after the divisive confrontations surrounding the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The study of myths in contemporary culture has become an increasingly important feature in history and the social sciences on both sides of the Atlantic since the 1950s; in turn, this has become of major importance in the interpretation of film. The work, for example, of the semiotician Roland Barthes was crucial for the decoding of cultural myths following the publication of his seminal collection of essays Mythologies in 1957. The construction of such myths was an essential feature, Barthes argued, of the way that the dominant values and ideology of ‘bourgeois’ society were disseminated. These myths tended to hide behind an illusion of tradition and historicity when they were often quite recent: a pattern that the historian David Cannadine has evidenced in the case of the British monarchy, which has been able to reinvent itself for the modern media age behind a façade of ancient tradition.9

Barthes also stressed that modern cultural myths tend to debase and degrade the language of political debate. It is not surprising that myths were treated with such suspicion by a philosopher like Cassirer, though understanding their power to influence demands attention to the workings of popular culture that many scholars usually chose to avoid before the emergence of cultural studies in Britain in the 1960s. Cinema and film have, of course, been central to this construction of modern mythology, and this issue is thus focused on the degree to which war films – and especially war films dealing with guerrilla insurgencies – have the capacity to create powerful cinematic myths.

Many mainstream war films tend to be based on myths of the nation and patriotism in periods of crisis.10 These were the essential themes in many American war films such as Guadalcanal DiaryThe Sands of Iwo Jima, and Twelve O'Clock High in the two decades after World War Two before a more serious questioning began to occur in the 1960s. The American war film carried many of the mythologies of the Western, already well established in Hollywood by 1941, into war movies, bringing along at the same time some major Western screen actors such as Randolph Scott and John Wayne. The war movie narrative usually centred on a band of men – a ‘band of brothers’ – faced with various tests as they faced an enemy who could be more or less unquestioningly assumed to be both evil and opposed to the core values of the American national myth.

Seen in this light, the conventional war film was sustained for over two decades after 1945 by a series of national myths that did not need to be too closely examined. Even when the central assumptions of these movies did start to come under attack these national tropes were never entirely demolished: the 1959 film Pork Chop Hill, for example, starring Gregory Peck, focused on the apparently pointless waste of men in holding Pork Chop Hill in Korea in April 1953 (foreshadowing the later Vietnam film Hamburger Hill). The hill could not be reinforced but neither could it be abandoned since to do so would weaken the American bargaining hand at the Panmunjom peace negotiations. The film did not, however, question the essential bravery and heroism of the men involved. Likewise, the British anti-war musical Oh What A Lovely War (1969; directed by Richard Attenborough) not only starred many actors familiar from mainstream war films such as John Mills, Dirk Bogarde, and Kenneth Moore, but continued to celebrate the heroism of ordinary men caught up in the conflict, focusing its scorn on the inept military commanders that sent so many of them to their deaths.

By contrast, the ‘guerrilla film’ never fared so well, since guerrilla and insurgent conflicts were seen as largely cut adrift from the mainstream national myths that has sustained the war of national survival in World War Two. The United States had been momentarily engaged with guerrilla warfare in the Philippines as it fell under Japanese control in 1942, and over the next two years over 500 American guerrillas helped organise insurgent formations among the Filipino resistance and provide valuable intelligence for the US invasion force assembling under General Douglas MacArthur that would eventually invade the Philippines at Leyte Gulf in October 1944 (an event that the media-conscious MacArthur managed to turn into a publicity stunt as he waded ashore with his staff for the film cameras).

Hollywood's entanglement with guerrillas in the Philippines thus proved to be short-lived: it was best exemplified in such films as BataanCorregidor, and the 1945 film Back to Bataan starring John Wayne. Most of the films are adaptations of the Western to the tropical jungles of the Philippines where the Filipinos mainly play marginal roles as colonial auxiliaries to the central American protagonists.11 Back to Bataan would be followed five years later by the last major foray into this area with Fritz Lang's An American Guerrilla in the Philippines released in November 1950. This ended up being one's of Lang's weakest movies as it was a largely pedestrian depiction of the American guerrilla role in the Philippine islands in the early 1940s and lacked a strong central narrative. By the time of the film's release the events of the early 1940s had been upstaged by a new insurgency in the post-war Philippines by the Communist Hukbalahap guerrillas as well the preoccupation of the American public with the Korean War that broke out the year of the film's release.

It is of course also true that, strategically, as far as the Western allies were concerned, the guerrilla conflicts were largely marginal and auxiliary affairs compared to the central thrust by large armies and engagement in set-piece battles. Beyond the activities of the early SAS in the form of the Long Range Desert Group in North Africa or the exploits of SOE agents in occupied Europe there were no really systematic or protracted engagements with Japanese or German armies behind enemy lines by Allied guerrilla formations, such as occurred on the Russian front or in the Balkans. In the latter case, Tito's communist partisans in Yugoslavia were able to secure whole ‘liberated areas’ where they developed a new administrative infrastructure in a manner that Ellis has seen rivalling the earlier efforts of the Zapatistas in the years after the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910.12

Hollywood and British cinema thus tended to view post-war guerrilla insurgencies as a continuation of earlier action adventures on the fringes of empire rather than as serious war movies. The era of decolonisation in the 1950s and 1960s provided a suitable terrain for a range of such films such as Simba (1955) set in Kenya at the time of the Mau Mau revolt. Most of these films had brief action sequences that were combined with a romantic melodrama in order to sustain the audience's interest.13 One notable and publicly lauded exception was the film Zulu (1964) starring Stanley Baker and Michael Caine, though this was less a guerrilla insurgency than a spectacular portrayal of the Zulu War of 1879 where a small formation of 150 British soldiers, largely from the South Wales Borderers, are forced to make a last-ditch stand at Rorke's Drift against a large Zulu army armed for the most part with spears and shields. This was a British-style Alamo where there were almost no women and the promise of frequent and colourful action sequences. It was undoubtedly seen as such by its American director Cy Enfield coming as it did only four years after John Wayne's popular film The Alamo: the film went on to make $8 million at the box office with a budget of $3.5 million. It was followed by the later film Zulu Dawn in 1979, which shows the earlier British disaster Isandhlwana in 1879 where an entire regiment was surprised and annihilated by the Zulus due to the inept strategy of the British commander Lord Chelmsford. Although starring Burt Lancaster and Peter O'Toole, the film was not so well received, despite the fact that it does seek to re-create the historical pattern of events with considerable accuracy. Both films can be criticised for failing to provide any explanation for why the war was being fought while continuing the cinema's fascination with the futility of war explored in Pork Chop Hill and Oh What a Lovely War!. To this extent both films ‘call’, as two South African analysts have pointed out, ‘the myth of empire into question even as they dramatize it’.14

This brief survey of insurgency films since World War Two indicates that they face several key problems compared to mainstream war films. They largely failed to interact with the mainstream mythologies of national greatness and resolve that were celebrated by the cinema of war that more or less came to define the ‘war movie genre’ as it was understood by studios and critics alike. They faced, too, the image problem that they were very often cases of ‘dirty’ war that professional militaries largely wanted to avoid and keep at arm's length at a time when the main issues in the era of the Cold War was superpower rivalry and the risk of major military conflict on the Central European Plain involving huge assets of tanks, aircraft, and infantry. It would be hard to gain the support and assistance from the Pentagon to fund a guerrilla war movie compared to a World War Two feature that played to well-established myths.

Many of these issues took decades to resolve. The mythology of guerrillas and guerrilla warfare was sustained in general terms from the 1960s until at least the 1980s through a rhetoric of the global secular left championing guerrilla struggles against ‘Western imperialism’. It was personified by such figures as Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, and Che Guevara, though of these four only Guevara ended up being portrayed in feature films, first in the film Che in 1969 directed by Richard Fleischer and the later film Che directed by Steven Soderbergh in 2008.

The first film Che was bogged down with wooden performances by Jack Palance as Castro and Omar Sharif as Guevara. It was largely panned by critics and even managed to get into Harry Medved and Randy Lowell's 1978 The Fifty Worst Films of All Time. It also ended the career of the producer Cy Bartlett. Looked at over a distance of over 40 years, it is possible to wonder why the film was ever made. The global celebrity status of Guevara clearly had a lot to do with it, and the head of Fox Studios, Richard D. Zanuck, was fascinated by the appeal of Che Guevara to a younger generation markedly unenthusiastic for mainstream feature films such as Doctor Dolittle (1967).15 Che was really done to order by Fleischer, a reliable company insider, as a ‘youth movie’, though a wiser approach might have been to have looked first more closely at the changing mood among the new baby boomer movie audience of the 1960s and to have tested out what exactly they were searching for on screen. Che came out the same year as the cult movie Easy Rider, and it is easy to see why it was such a dramatic failure compared to its low budget rival, though the film did attempt to let the audience make up its own mind by presenting different points of view on Guevara's achievements. But this assumed that the youth audiences of the late 1960s were in the mood for ambiguity over character, whereas the politics of the supposedly revolutionary youth ‘counterculture’ of the era suggested more the idea of radical ‘commitment’ to a cause.16

Costing $5,160,000 Che was no shoestring venture. The film can also be seen as an early political response by Hollywood, along with John Wayne's The Green Berets (1968), to the domestic and international opposition to the Vietnam War. Well before RamboChe was an early example of Hollywood attempting to win on screen what the United States lost on the battlefields of Vietnam as it clumsily attempted to demolish the guerrilla myth of Che. The film starts by picking up on the global fame of Guevara by linking him to demonstrations and student revolts around the world from Chinese Red Guards marching with images of Mao to student rioters in Paris in May 1968 chanting in support of Che and Ho Chi Minh. Guevara is also portrayed as an international revolutionary in the movie as a voice-over, purporting to be his own, announces that ‘revolution is indivisible. He who fights under another flag to liberate a nation takes a giant step in the liberation of his own.’

Che attempts to examine Guevara's cult-like status by adopting a documentary style employing ‘interviews’ with people who had known the man during his life. All significantly are men, and women remain marginal in this generally macho film. Fleischer adopts an apparently balanced approach with a New York taxi driver predictably dismissing Che as a murderer who can ‘burn in hell’ while a Cuban school teacher declares that he was taught to read and write by Che while fighting as a guerrilla in the Sierra Maestra The apparently even-handed tone can be contrasted with Gillo Pontecorvo's attempt at a balanced approach in depicting the urban insurgency and French military response in Algiers in his film The Battle of Algiers (1966), which we will look at more closely in this issue. Fleischer's approach is one that seeks some balance over assessing an individual, while Pontecorvo seeks a balanced portrayal of the effects of warfare by both sides and its consequences for ordinary civilians caught up in the conflict.

Fleischer's Che, in the end, has many of the features of a gangster film where a young would-be mobster takes charge and succumbs to the corruptions of power. In the case of Guevara, this would not be women, drugs, or drink but the allure of a purified ideological vision ensuring that, in time, the revolutionary messiah feels forced to leave Cuba after Fidel's apparently spineless acceptance of the Soviet withdrawal of nuclear missiles from the island after the Missile Crisis of October 1962. Che now departs from a bespectacled, boozy Castro searching for another bottle in a drinks cooler. There is no effort to track his movements around the globe as the film shifts to the mountains of Bolivia where the disastrous guerrilla campaign was fought against the US-trained Bolivian army. Here we are introduced to Latin American mountain scenery that will intrude into a range of films in the years ahead: bird's eye views of dramatic forested landscapes over which a helicopter flies with Andean flute music providing suitable background accompaniment (tropes that would be reproduced in later films such as Clear and Present Danger with Harrison Ford in 1994).

The film cuts between scenes of the increasingly desperate battle for survival by the guerrillas in the mountains of Eastern Bolivia with the alluring figure of the communist spy Haidee Tamara Bunker Bider – otherwise known as ‘Tania’ – who was the only woman to fight alongside Che's guerrillas in Bolivia. Tania had actually been born in Argentina but was brought up in East Germany. She first met Che in Leipzig on a visit in 1960 and was inspired to move to Cuba the following year where she underwent espionage and guerrilla training. None of this emerges in Fleischer's movie where she appears more as a sex siren or radical Mata Hari dressed in a provocative red outfit as part of her disguise as a folklore expert to gain entry into Bolivian high society.

Guevara, though, ends up isolated in the mountains of Eastern Bolivia (far from the main centres of unrest in the country among the western mine workers), and the film focuses on how his remaining forces end up being cornered by the Bolivian Rangers. He is captured after a shoot-out and interrogated by an army captain who has read his book on guerrilla warfare. The captain condemns the whole guerrilla venture for its ‘arrogance’ and failure to understand the mood of the ordinary people: he brings in an old peasant man to show to Che, who has walked all morning to see him. The old man expresses his wish for all the forces to leave his region as the fighting has upset his goats, which will not produce any more milk. Che's project and entire revolutionary vision, the captain declares, have really ‘failed’ and, for a brief moment, we see a moment of self-doubt on Sharif's face. We might thus conclude that Che went off to his death apparently believing that his whole life was in the end a failure.

By contrast, the later film Che directed by Stephen Soderbergh nearly 40 years later presents a rather different portrait of Guevara. This is a far more wide-ranging and ambitious project with budget of $58 million. Despite its great length of 257 minutes, Che ended up being received much more positively than Fleischer's film though the film failed to recover its costs. Given its length, the film is quite demanding and stands out as one of the major cinematic works of guerrilla warfare. The film was screened as a single film at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival where the Mexican actor Bernicio del Toro, who played Che, won the Best Actor Award.

The film is divided in the DVD version into two essential parts with Part 1 focusing on ‘The Argentine’ and the events between Che's initial meeting with Castro in Mexico City in 1955 and the overthrow of the Batista regime in Havana. Part 2, ‘Guerrilla’, focuses in depth on the ill-fated guerrilla insurgency in Bolivia from the time of Che's arrival in disguise in late 1966 to his death at the hands of the Bolivian Army on 9 October 1967. While focusing on the two main events in Che's career this structure overlooks Che's earlier career in the years before 1955 as well as his disastrous foray into the Congo in 1965 before deciding to establish a guerrilla foco in Bolivia.

The film does not follow a simple linear narrative but adopts a more fragmented structure recalling Francesco Rosi's 1962 film Salvatore Giuliano. Unlike this film of an ultimately doomed Sicilian bandit, Soderbergh's film successfully captures something of Guevara's own personal growth and intellectual evolution, a dimension almost completely lacking in Fleischer's film. Soderbergh was especially helped in this regard by Bernicio del Toro's taught and restrained portrayal of Che. Soderbergh used a handheld digital camera to make the film that resembles a 35-mm film in quality. The purpose of this was to attempt to get the viewer to more or less peer over the shoulder of Che in something that we might see as forming a key facet of a ‘guerrilla film’ in the adoption of an agile perspective close to the ground level of actual combat.17

This ground-level approach did not mean, though, that the film was interested in the strategy and tactics of guerrilla warfare and there is no real attempt to deal with Guevara's political ideals. Soderbergh preferred to dwell on the way that Guevara committed his life to the improvement of the lives of the poor around him rather than on the actual violence of the revolution, which he termed an ‘analog revolution’ based on committing works and ideas to paper compared to the modern world of electronic communications. Che's struggle, Soderbergh maintains, was part of a world very different to our own, though how far this renders his ideas of guerrilla struggle obsolete is not really investigated in the film: it might have been by, for instance, using ‘interviews’ with contemporary guerrilla insurgents or even a brief audience view of a lecture by a military expert.

The problem with Soderbergh's approach is that it only partly deals with the historical dimensions of the Cuban revolution. Some critics have pointed to the film's tendency to gloss over Guevara's executions after the revolution, though Soderbergh has pointed out that this needs to be seen in the context of the times in which Guevara lived ‘when every country in the Caribbean and Latin America was run by a leader in the pocket of the United States’.18 But what of the rival political groupings in Cuba before 1959, centred on the urban underground Llano, which sought a more pluralistic form of political transformation rooted in freedom of speech, the press and political parties? The failure of Cuba under Castro to establish a pluralist democracy remained, rather surprisingly, a theme that was never seriously dealt with by Hollywood until the 2005 film The Lost City starring Andy Garcia.

Soderbergh's Che is a film, then, which has a sense of history but one subject to fits and starts and major setbacks: Bradshaw has suggested that it has a ‘kind of documentarian's clampdown on dramatic and narrative temperature’. Soderbergh's Che is distanced from the tradition of Italian post-war neorealism where, as we shall see in the article on Rossellini and Pontecorvo, a documentary quality was established subordinate to the centrality of the fictional narrative. Given that characters and events in Che are widely known, this fictional element has ended up being considerably minimised in the face of a huge array of documentation that Soderbergh assembled as part of the research into the making of the film. Even so, there were considerable areas, such as Che's private relationships with women, that Soderbergh might have chosen to elaborate with an imaginative use of dialogue based on the extensive archives of letters, diaries, and personal interviews. However, Soderbergh chose not do to do this, making the film a signal contrast to many of his previous films where he made major cinematic ventures into the terrain of the private sphere with Sex Lies and Videotape as well as the intense world of personal fantasy in the science fiction film Solaris with George Clooney. In the end, Soderbergh retreated in Che to a more conventional surface portrayal of a key individual's role in revolutionary events.

Both the Che films raise a series of important questions concerning the role of key individuals in revolutionary processes as well as the role of cinema in portraying guerrilla struggles. They challenge the conventional orthodoxy in Anglo-American cinema where guerrilla warfare failed to become an established feature in feature films in the decades after World War Two. To this extent, a thesis can indeed be propounded, requiring more extensive research on audiences responses, that it was precisely this absence of serious interest by Hollywood and other cinemas that helped leave US public opinion so ill-prepared to understand the nature of the war in Vietnam, certainly in its ‘guerrilla phase’ in the early 1960s before the military turning point of the Battle of Ia Drang in 1965. Guerrilla war remained a distant and hazy form of war due to the cinema's reluctance to embrace it compared to the established mythology of conventional war, driven as it was by a large corpus of established war films that tended to feed off each other and reinforce a range of key tropes based on honour, duty, and courage and the decisive projection of firepower at critical moments to overwhelm and defeat the enemy. These films in turn can be said to have underpinned a broader strategy of using the cinema to project the idea of national security in the post-war era and the in the climate of the Cold War.19

The limitations of the mainstream war film genre become dramatically exposed in the disastrous film on Vietnam made by John Wayne in 1968 called The Green Berets. The film was shot at Fort Benning in Georgia rather than on location in South East Asia: this was due to the close cooperation that Wayne managed to secure, on the basis of his established screen reputation, with the US military. It led to some 20–30 Hueys being loaned for action sequences in the film when they were not being used in training exercises.20 The army also brought down a platoon of Hawaiians from Fort Devens, Massachusetts, to serve as ‘oriental’ extras.21

From early scenes of choppers flying over wooded terrains, it is clear this is no Asian landscape as even some of the trees are turning an autumnal gold. Wayne himself as Colonel Kirby is both overweight and too old for any really credible performance while the facilities in the strategic hamlet, complete with fridge and a beautifully designed ceiling made of pinewood supports and bunk beds, suggests more of a holiday chalet than a serious military installation in a war zone. Indeed, as the base camp comes under serious military attack from waves of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese, almost always shot from behind and menacingly faceless, this appears to be more a remake of The Alamo rather than a jungle war movie. When the Viet Cong later manage to capture a part of the camp and strip dead US personnel of their clothes, they are covered in face paint and make Indian-like whoops.

Despite these weaknesses, The Green Berets struck a chord with the cinema-going US public, though the film's ending, with Kirby leading a little orphaned Vietnamese boy towards the beach with the sun setting over the sea, was derided by critics, who pointed out that the sun does not sink over the sea in eastwards-facing Vietnam. This false political geography revealed, apparently, an imperialist mindset at the heart of the film.

The Green Berets ended up being the only feature film about the Vietnam War made while the war was in progress and was followed by an acute loss of nerve by Hollywood for over a decade. A series of films was made that dealt with Vietnam allegorically, starting with Robert Aldrich's The Dirty Dozen in 1967 and encompassing some critical Westerns such as Little Big Man (1970) and Soldier Blue (1970) as well as Robert Aldrich's Ulzana's Raid (1972), which stars Burt Lancaster as an Indian tracker leading a US cavalry detachment after a band of marauding Apaches who use clever if very cruel guerrilla tactics. The film was a notable excursion into the world of Apache warrior culture. The film did not really dwell as length on the Apaches, who for most of the film remain in the distance as part of the rugged landscape: Lancaster's character at one point even says there is little point in hating them because it would be ‘like hating the desert because there's no water in it’. There was little here really to challenge audience perceptions of the Apache guerrillas as ‘dirty’ if not ‘primitive’ warriors who remain signally different to the professional ethos of Western militaries.

Even by the 1970s, therefore, cinema found guerrilla insurgencies difficult themes to handle in feature films. A few films made outside Hollywood had by this time established guerrilla and insurgents as major subjects, most notably the iconic 1966 film of the Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo, The Battle of Algiers, based largely on Italian funding. This established in many ways a new benchmark for future films dealing with insurgency to follow, given its neorealist focus on the terror war in Algiers in 1957 – as I seek to explain in my article on Italian neorealism in this issue. However, this was not a model that Hollywood found easy to follow. In the late 1970s the British film producer David Puttnam went to Hollywood seeking funding for a proposed feature film on the communist guerrilla movement led by Mao Zedong in China in the 1930s based on the 1938 book by Edgar Snow, Red Star Over China. Asked to show a possible film that that might serve as the sort of movie Puttnam had in mind for the Red Star project, Puttnam made the mistake of showing The Battle of Algiers, which had the effect of clearing the auditorium and frightening off the would-be backers.22 As Hollywood went into retreat in the face of the military defeat in Vietnam in 1975, it would be a long time before it would begin to view Pontecorvo's work more favourably, though the release of some more recent films such as Nick Broomfield's Battle for Haditha (2007) and Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker (2008) and Zero Dark Thirty (2012) show some indebtedness to The Battle of Algiers from decades before.

Myth and guerrilla war on screen

The cinema of insurgency and guerrilla warfare is thus still an imperfectly understood part of modern cinema, standing as a kind of ‘sub-genre’ of the war movie genre with its own distinctive features and themes. Its history encompasses films from beyond Hollywood and Britain including Italian neorealism; Russian films on insurgencies during World War Two as well as Afghanistan and the Caucasus; ‘partisan’ films from the former Yugoslavia; Greek cinema in the years after World War Two; films on Mexico and the Mexican revolution by both Hollywood and Mexican cinema as well as the more recent narco wars; and films from India dealing with a bandit or guerrilla leader known as Bandit Queen. This list is by no means exhaustive since there are films from the Middle East, while Africa too needs to be considered stretching back to the Anglo Boer War of 1899–1902.23

In this issue we will attempt to discuss some of these cinemas while looking in a few cases at aspects of filmmaking in Hollywood. Indeed, in the first article, Rose Mary Sheldon examines the rather limited Hollywood interest in guerrilla insurgencies in the Ancient World. She suggests two major reasons for this: Hollywood ‘swords-and-sandal’ dramas were often big budget epics designed to attract mass audiences, and this usually meant that the battles tended to be huge set-piece affairs too. There was little scope in this for any attention to more irregular forms of warfare. In any case, there is a second reason based on the generally Roman orientation of many of these Hollywood films in which the enemy opposition often ends up being shown as primitive tribal rebels against the civilisation and discipline of the Roman army: this is borne out only too clearly in the early battle scenes in the Ridley Scott film Gladiator (2000) with Russell Crowe where the German irregulars appear as little more than Victorian ‘savages’ who emerge screaming out of the forest bedecked in war paint complete with a horse and headless rider.

Relatively few ‘sword-and-sandal’ films have thus attempted to deal with guerrilla warfare in any sort of detail, and there is still only one, hard-to-obtain German film of the ‘Varian disaster’ in the Teutoburg Forest in ad 9 when three Roman legions under Publius Quinctilius Varus were destroyed by a guerrilla army led by the German guerrilla leader Arminius. Colonel Sheldon also looks though at the political battles fought around Stanley Kubrick's 1960 film Spartacus scripted by a former member of the Hollywood Blacklist, Dalton Trumbo. The film angered sections of the US right with its sympathetic portrayal of a slave revolt against imperial Rome in a film, and even President Kennedy had to cross a picket line in order to see it.

The theme of guerrilla insurgents as screaming tribal rebels is also examined in the next article by Mevliyar Er and Paul B. Rich. This deals with the way that the Berber people from North Africa have been portrayed in the relatively unknown ‘Rif Revolt’ in the Rif area of Northern Morocco in the early 1920s, led by the guerrilla leader Abd el-Krim. Between 1921 and 1926 a short-lived republic was established among the Berber peoples in the Rif before it was destroyed by a combined force of Spanish and French colonial troops. Krim was an important North African guerrilla leader, comparable to the Libyan insurgent leader of the same period Omar Mukhtar (the central character of the 1981 film Lion of the Desert graphically portraying Italian counterinsurgency against the Libyan tribes in the late 1920s under Marshall Graziani).24 Compared to Mukhtar, Abd el-Krim has been extensively portrayed on film in a variety of different forms since the era of silent cinema, forming in effect a Krim cinematic legend that can be traced right up to the adventure film The Wind and the Lion (1975) starring Sean Connery as a romantic ‘Arab’ (as opposed to Berber) raider in early twentieth century Morocco. Er and Rich show that much of this Krim legend became linked with a sort of ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ myth transferred to the Rif. It became associated with a white German deserter from the French Foreign Legion, Joseph Klems, who came to fight with the Riffians. Klems was credited with giving the Riffians some military training, though not on anything like the scale suggested in the 1971 Italian film Sergeant Klems since in reality he was little more than a common criminal and serial imposter who was eventually captured after the collapse of the Rif Republic. The Riffians fought in the early years quite a successful guerrilla war against the Spanish and French until it was overwhelmed by the sheer force of the colonial armies brought to bear on them by the mid-1920s. Few films deal with this or Krim's guerrilla strategy, which is seen largely from an external point of view.

The article by Marina Eleftheriadou deals with the way that guerrilla insurgency has been dealt with in Greece since the period of the civil war in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This is a civil war that has never been properly portrayed on screen in Anglo-American cinema and cinema audiences have for the most part been treated to a series of quasi-Orientalist stereotypes of both Greeks and Greek culture. In The Guns of Navarone (1961; directed by J. Lee Thompson), the portrayal of wartime Greeks is astonishingly static as the squad of Anglo-American partisans attempts to hide out in a village community enveloped in tradition while being dogged by an informer in the apparently unreliable Greek underground. This trope of a static and backward-looking culture would be carried further by Zorba The Greek (1967), while the theme of cultural degeneration of modern Greece was, more controversially, explored through the life of a Piraeus prostitute, Ilya, in the 1960 film Never on a Sunday starring Merlina Mercouri (where the character most committed to classical Greece is an American tourist, Homer, from Middletown Connecticut).

Given this relatively unpromising context, Eleftheriadou examines the evolution of post-war Greek cinema and its treatment of political conflict. For most of this period there was a tight government censorship given the legacy of a bitter civil war in the late 1940s and the sharp ideological polarisation of Greek politics. Indeed Greek cinema could only be said to start emerging into a new era in the 1970s, accompanied as this period was by the student uprising in 1974 ending the period of military rule following the coup of 1967. However, even before this (re)-emergence of Greek cinema, the iconic film Z was made by radical film director Costa Gavras in 1969 based on the novel of Vassilis Vassilikos. This film explored the right-wing Greek underground and its plot in 1963 to murder the prominent democratic Greek politician Grigoris Lambrakis. The murder in turn helped secure the political conditions for the military takeover four years later. The film's focus on a right-wing conspiracy served as an early model for some of Gavras's later films, most notably the film Missing (1982) set in the period leading up to the 1973 military coup in Chile that overthrew the Allende regime. It also bears some comparisons to some of the later films made in the United States by Oliver Stone.

Strictly speaking Z was not actually a Greek film but a Franco-Algerian production shot on a budget of $14.3 million. The film's dark satirical tone still makes it, in many ways, a Greek film, though Eleftheriadou points out that this is no simple left-wing film call for popular struggle. Her portrayal of Gavras suggests more a dispirited and self-doubting liberal than any radical exponent of popular revolt against political oppression: it is only the enlightened few who are really up to the task, such as the pacifist deputy, the courageous honourable judge, and the journalist. These ‘vanguard’ individuals', Eleftheriadou suggests, are ‘ideal-types that operate beyond the social and historical forces’ while the figure of Z emerges as only a ‘worthy victim of injustice’ who is ‘depoliticised in his simplistic stoic pacifism’. Despite these apparent limitations, Z can be seen as a major breakthrough in the sub-genre of radical political thrillers that could serve as a kind of cinematic forum for the exploration of ideas on political change more or less shut out from conventional Hollywood films of the period. It also marks a movement of debate forwards from the theme of guerrilla insurgency of the kind espoused by Guevara in Latin America and which was, as we have seen, rather ineffectively attacked in Fleischer's film Che in 1969.

The mythology of guerrilla insurgency intrudes into the arena of Italian neorealist cinema in the years after World War Two, which is examined in the next article by myself. Roberto Rossellini's famous films Rome Open City (1945) and Paisa (1946) have often been seen as celebrating the Italian resistance to the Germans, especially during the period in late 1943–1944 when an alliance of sorts was formed between the Catholic Church and the Communist partisans in a common resistance to Nazi occupation. However, Rossellini's treatment of this was eclectic and focused on the clerical role with relatively little interest being shown towards the actual organisation of the underground partisans. Rossellini was centrally concerned with trying to create through cinema a new counter myth to that of the previous fascist era, though this was largely self-serving since he had himself made many films during this period. At best it could be said Rossellini bequeathed a mixed legacy to later directors such as Nanni Loy who released the remarkable film in 1962 Four Days in Naples. This depicts the popular uprising to the Germans in Naples who were eventually forced out of the city – the only real instance of a successful urban insurrection against German domination in World War Two.

Loy's film helped inspire some aspects of the iconic later film of Gillo Pontecorvo's, The Battle of Algiers (1966), which is frequently seen as a seminal moment in the cinematic history of both insurgency and terrorism. This was a dramatic late example of neorealist cinema being taken in a markedly more radical direction by a Marxist director who was committed to showing what he perceive to be the essential humanity of the FLN struggle against French colonial rule in Algeria and, more specifically, its terror campaign against French colons and police. Pontecorvo's film has frequently been admired for its apparent objectivity and refusal to condemn either side in what is more a terror war than an actual ‘battle’ in Algiers. The urban insurgency under Yacef Saadi is not linked in the film to the wider strategy of the FLN in the countryside, though it can be argued that in the end it was this rural insurgency that was crucial towards fighting the French army to a standstill and the eventual negotiations on independence. The Battle of Algiers might be important as a graphic portrayal of the brutal escalating logic of an urban terror campaign but strangely lacks any really acute political insight. Just like many mainstream war films, it remains limited by its failure to deal with more elite political decision-making and the way these decisions cascade down to the actual conflict at street level.

The theme of counterinsurgency on screen is the subject of Jeff Michaels and Andon J. Gawthorpe's article focused on South Vietnam. The concept of ‘counterinsurgency’ or COIN largely evolved in the Vietnamese context in the era of the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. It also became the subject of some ridicule for its apparent naivety by the British novelist Graham Green who published a novel The Quiet American in 1958. Michaels and Gawthorpe start by looking at the two contrasting film versions of this novel together with some other films of the Vietnam War including John Wayne's The Green BeretsGo Tell The Spartans with Burt Lancaster, PlatoonApocalypse Now, and A Bright Shining Lie. Studying such films can be extremely valuable in helping to understand US strategy in South Vietnam in the 1960s, not least because, as they say, ‘films bring the role of emotion and human frailty to the fore in ways which can be hidden by the clinical models of historians and political scientists.’

Of course the directors and producers operated in a highly political context when making these films and a number of critics have pointed to a general lack of reliability in the way they have portrayed much of the Vietnamese conflict. Indeed, the Vietnam War itself serves as a critical testing ground for the cinema of insurgencies given that such a relatively large number of films have been made that deal with various aspects of the war, including not only scenes of combat in jungles and paddy fields, but the experience of prisoners of war, the difficult facing returning war vets, and the political divisions that occurred in American society as a result of the war. In more recent years, it is evident that Hollywood is perhaps starting to look at portraying the military dimensions of the war with a greater degree of honesty than hitherto. In this regard the 2002 film We Were Soldiers, directed by Mel Gibson, that focused on the Battle of Ia Drang in November 1965 stands out as an important milestone and a pointer to what may be more significant ground-level portrayals of combat in the years ahead.

The next article in this issue by Shanthie D'Souza and Bibhu Routray deals with a rather more dramatic character that some might critics might suggest is less a guerrilla fighter than a ‘bandit’, namely Phoolan Devi or the ‘Bandit Queen’ from the state of Uttar Pradesh, India. Bandits are clearly part of the complex political and cultural history of insurgent movements: Eric Hobsbawm has classically described bandits as being usually quite backward-looking in political orientation, though their activities might at the same time expose major social and cultural rifts within a society that can potentially lead to the emergence of more organised revolutionary insurgent formations.25 Moreover, as John Arquilla has suggested, it is possible to see a number of well-known ‘bandits’, such as Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa in Mexico, as really examples of guerrilla insurgents in the way they led their peasant followers in a revolutionary movement to reclaim land.26 In Phoolan's case it is also possible to see her as standing against the oppression of lower caste Hindus and as a champion of the rights of low caste women in a deeply misogynist society. Her activities can be viewed as part of long tradition of social banditry in India involving both men and women stretching back at least to the period of thuggee in the nineteenth century, even before the establishment of the British Raj.

Phoolan's life is inextricably intertwined with wider narratives of caste and gender oppression: it was these factors that contributed to the film initially being rejected by the Indian censors on its release in 1994. Even though this was later overcome, the film has been rarely shown in India despite its continuing relevance to contemporary debate on violence against women. Conflict with bandits or ‘dacoits’ continues, and De Souza points to the recent example of Dadua, alias Shiv Kumar Patel, in Uttar Pradesh who was killed in 2007 by a special police task force. Dadua came from the backward Kurmi caste and was popular locally. He had operated for over three decades and, like bandits in other parts of the world such as the Sicilian Salvatore Giuliano, had some patronage from the leading political parties in the state.

Given this criminal and bandit context, it is not surprising that Bandit Queen works really as a typical criminal revenge narrative as the assault and rape of the young Phoolan leads her to seek terrible revenge on those involved. The film actually does not show her actual rape, though even strongly hinting at it can be seen to be raising serious issues among the largely conservative cinema audience in India attuned as it is to the usual staples of Bollywood.

The last article in this issue by Robert Bunker and José de Arimatéia da Cruz deals with the theme of narco wars and drug trafficking in Mexico. This has become a feature of both Mexican and US cinema since the late 1970s, though Bunker and Cruz point out that the formal establishment of the Mexican system of drug cartels did not occur until the late 1980s. After this time the Mexican cartels began to ease out the Columbian drug cartels once the trafficking routes to the United States through South Florida were closed down. The focus then turned to trafficking across the northern Mexican border with the United States.

In terms of cinema this border has a long and violent history, replicating in many ways the actual history of the US South West since the middle of the nineteenth century. In part, the present violent conflict in Northern Mexico follows a century of conflict across the Rio Grande: themes that became well entrenched in a huge range of Hollywood Westerns from the era of silent cinema into the 1960s and 1970s. Bunker and Cruz suggest, though, that there are more differences than similarities between the Hollywood and Mexican cinemas given the essential cultural difference of Mexico, which, they argue, ‘has a more intimate relationship with death and its citizens, especially the working class and poor’ who ‘are rather fatalistic about their lives’. This is a ‘culture of poverty’ argument which not all analysts will accept, though it is a thesis that needs more extensive testing.27 By contrast, US ‘narcocinema’ tends to focus on a rather different set of narratives centred on the contrast between ‘good guys’ (the authorities or nice drug dealers) and the ‘bad guys’ (the narcos) with the good guys usually winning (in films such as Training Day and Savages), no one coming out on top (Traffic; No Country for Old Men), or both the good guy (Drug Wars) and the bad guy (Scarface; Not Forgotten) losing in the end.

Bunker and Cruz also point to the continuing fascination with this theme by Hollywood in such films as Scarface (1983) starring Al Pacino and directed by Brian De Palma. This violent film, they suggest, became an iconic screen representation of drug trafficking even though it harked back to the earlier era of domination by the Columbian cartels and Cuban organisations. They also point out that Scarface posters can still be found in the safe houses and residences of narcos, suggesting that this film, as much as any, helped establish the screen myth of violent narco trafficking.

Overall, then, these articles have examined a good number of screen representations of guerrilla insurgencies, counterinsurgency, social banditry, and violent non state formations such as narco gangs. They will serve, hopefully, as pointers to future research and also as guides to the understanding of cinema in wider debates within military and strategic studies. As we pointed out at the start of this introduction, films can help crystallise ideas and provide pictorial images for particular conflicts. While feature films are clearly fictional narratives, they can still provide dramatic reconstruction of past events. Even when shown to be incorrect this comparison between the ‘misrepresentation’ of history on screen and the wider evidence from written or oral sources can itself become a healthy exercise in historical and political debate.

Notes

^1. The film was attacked by right-wing groups in Japan who loathed its portrayal of the homosexual Mishima. It could not, as a result, even be screened at the Tokyo International Film Festival.

^2. RosenstoneVisions of the Past, 59–60.

^3. ToshThe Pursuit of History, 31. See also Sontag, ‘A Note on Novels and Films’, 242–245 for a similar view.

^4. See SaidCulture and Imperialism; KhatibFilming and the Modern Middle East, 2–3.

^5. Rich, ‘Cinema and Guerrilla Warfare’.

^6. CassirerThe Myth of the State, 37.

^7. KracauerFrom Caligari to Hitler.

^8. Ibid., 34.

^9. Cannadine, ‘The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual’. See also NairnThe Enchanted Glass.

^10. See especially Smith, ‘Images of the Nation’.

^11. For a discussion of this film, see FojasIslands of Empire, 47–54; Hawley, ‘You're a Better Filipino than I am’; DelmendoThe Star Spangled banner.

^12. EllisFrom the Barrel of a Gun, 168.

^13. CarruthersWinning Hearts and Minds, 195.

^14. For an analysis of these two films, see Hamilton and Modisane, ‘The Public Lives of Historical Films’, 110.

^15. Cashill, ‘Che’.

^16. See, for example, DoggettThere's a Riot Going On.

^17. BakerSteven Soderbergh, 87.

^18. Cited in Ibid., 88.

^19. Lofflmann, ‘Hollywood, the Pentagon’.

^20. Suid, ‘The Making of The Green Berets’, 116.

^21. Ibid., 117.

^22. Interview with David Puttnam in Edward Said's film Gillo Pontecorvo: The Dictatorship of Truth (1992).

^23. Remarkably few films have been released that deal with that war despite the fact that for the two years from 1900 to 1902 a brutal counterinsurgency war was fought by the British imperial army against Boer guerrillas. Perhaps the best-known film on this war is the Australian film Breaker Morant (1980; directed by Bruce Beresford), dealing with the brutal British counterinsurgency against Boer guerrillas. Lieutenant Harry ‘Breaker’ Morant was an officer in the Bushveld Carbineers, fighting against Boer guerrillas in the Transvaal low veldt north of Pretoria in 1901. After the shooting of some 13 Boer prisoners as well as a Lutheran pastor who might have informed on the Carbineers' activities, Morant was hauled before a military court in early 1902 and shot along with another officer. Most historians accept that Morant was really guilty of the crimes he was charged with. Beresford's film was not made to correct the historical record but to reveal the brutal nature of war and its effect on ordinary men's behaviour. In Australia it was widely viewed as revealing British duplicity, especially on the part of Herbert Kitchener, who was apparently anxious to make the criminals a scapegoat for wider British war crimes over the previous two years or more. The historical evidence suggests though that Kitchener was driven more by the issue of army indiscipline and the desire to set an example rather than a desire to appease overseas opinion. Pakenham The Boer War, 538–539. See Ross, ‘The Truth About Harry’; Wilcox, ‘The Trial of “Breaker” Morant’.

^24. For a discussion of this film, see Jeppie, ‘From Khartoum to Kufrah’, esp. 143–146.

^25. Primitive Rebels; Bandits.

^26. ArquillaInsurgents, Raiders and Bandits, 243.

^27. See the classic essay by ValentineCulture and Poverty.