Curating the best and the bizarre in Netflix’s ever-growing ‘Watch Instantly’ library.
Each week we’ll select worthy titles: sometimes old, sometimes new, sometimes popular, sometimes not.

The Battle of Algiers
By Tim Kennedy

Midterm elections are on Tuesday.  They’re important.  You should vote.  Accordingly, I wanted to devote this week’s Netpix to something vaguely topical but came up short.  Hollywood has never been very devoted to contemporary political movies.

But the Italians were, for a lot of reasons that I once had to write a term paper about.  Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers is the best of the politically minded films that dominated Italian cinema in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and it’s not even about an Italian conflict.  Instead, it loosely recreates the Algerian War of Independence against France with a documentary-like commitment to realism.  Almost all of the actors are non-professional, the line between the good guys and bad guys is blurry, the conclusion is drawn out.  Just like the real Algerian War.

The film’s best scene details an attempt by a young Algerian woman to blow up a crowded French café.  The audience, at this point, is totally in the bag for the Algerians—the French have a bad habit of torturing people—but it’s not until the scene is over that you realize you were rooting for a suicide bomber.  Pontecorvo plays with morality a lot like that, and the result is a lot more affecting (and politically conscious) than your average war film.

At the risk of getting preachy, let me bring this full circle.  The Battle of Algiers was actually screened at the Pentagon about six months after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a little before the Iraqi insurgency had reached its full strength.  Apparently, the film was chosen as an illustrative example of the problems the United States might face with the local population.  Having seen the film and lived through the next seven years of the Iraq war, I’m forced to conclude that the military and political leaders in attendance were either too dumb or too ignorant to glean anything.  I don’t really care whom you vote for on Tuesday—liberal, conservative, whatever—as long as you don’t pull the lever for a candidate publicly proud of being dumb or ignorant.  One Battle of Algiers is enough.

Powaqqatsi
By Colin George

Where there is strife, there is elsewhere peace. Powaqqatsi, the second film in director Godfrey Reggio’s non-narrative documentary trilogy, is a breathtaking visual journey in celebration of human industry. Viewer beware, Powaqqatsi, like its prequel Koyaanisqatsi, features no dialogue whatsoever; it is a hypnotic, thought-provoking experience with no conventional beginning, middle, or end.

Koyaanisqatsi (from the Hopi Indian meaning “Life Out of Balance”) sets a critical eye on the development and proliferation of Western society, while Powaqqatsi (“Life in Transformation”) examines third world cultures and the impact of industrialization on their society. It nevertheless offers a more optimistic outlook than its predecessor, and fosters the notion of harmony between all walks of life. Brazil, Peru, Nepal, Egypt, India, and Kenya are all featured —eventually juxtaposed to major Eurasian metropolises like Berlin, France, and Hong Kong.

Without the aid of speech, Reggio’s films place extra emphasis on their score, composed by brilliant minimalistic composer Philip Glass. Through the repetition of simple melodies, Glass helps create a sense of constant motion, of both the magnificent scale of human accomplishment and our humbling smallness relative to our planet.

But the real genius of the Qatsi trilogy, which ends in the epileptic Naqoyqatsi (“Life at War”) is their ability to communicate fully realized ideas without the conventional crutches of storytelling: plot and character. The ideas they communicate are deeper, because they come from our minds rather than the director’s. Transcending their beautiful imagery and score, the films are not documentaries about life—they are life.

Koyaanisqatsi is not currently available to stream instantly, but the trilogy needn’t be seen in any particular order. Powaqqatsi is a great place to start, and with its incredible photography, rich color palette, and fascinating chronicle of cultures, it’s a revelatory experience you won’t soon forget. My personal interpretation of the film can be summed up with a concept many of today’s politicians could benefit from putting into practice: we’re all in this together.