Screenings for counterinsurgency agencies
1960s screenings in Argentina
President Arturo Frondizi (Radical Civic Union, UCR) directed introduction of the first course on counter-revolutionary warfare in the Higher Military College. By 1963, cadets at the Navy Mechanics School (ESMA) started receiving counter-insurgency classes. In one of their courses, they were shown the movie The Battle of Algiers. Antonio Caggiano, archbishop of Buenos Aires from 1959 to 1975, was associated with this as military chaplain. He introduced the movie approvingly and added a religiously oriented commentary to it.[46] ESMA was later known as a center for the Argentine Dirty War and torture and abuse of insurgents and innocent civilians.
Anibal Acosta, one of the ESMA cadets interviewed 35 years later by French journalist Marie-Monique Robin, described the session:
They showed us that film to prepare us for a kind of war very different from the regular war we had entered the Navy School for. They were preparing us for police missions against the civilian population, who became our new enemy.[46]
2003 Pentagon screening
During 2003, the press reported that United States Department of Defense (the Pentagon) offered a screening of the movie on August 27. The Directorate for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict regarded it as useful for commanders and troops facing similar issues in occupied Iraq.[47]
A flyer for the screening said:
How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas. Children shoot soldiers at point-blank range. Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar? The French have a plan. It succeeds tactically, but fails strategically. To understand why, come to a rare showing of this film.[48]
According to the Defense Department official in charge of the screening, "Showing the film offers historical insight into the conduct of French operations in Algeria, and was intended to prompt informative discussion of the challenges faced by the French."[48]
2003–2004 theatrical re-release
At the time of the 2003 Pentagon screening, legal and "pirate" VHS and DVD versions of the movie were available in the United States and elsewhere, but the image quality was degraded. A restored print had been made in Italy in 1999. Rialto Pictures acquired the distribution rights to re-release the film again in the United Kingdom in December 2003 as well as in the United States and in France on separate dates in 2004. The film was shown in the Espace Accattone, rue Cujas in Paris, from November 15, 2006, to March 6, 2007.[49]
