The Korean Title, “The Battle of Algeria” is itself mistranslated. The title should be translated as “The Battle of Algiers” in Korean becauseالجزائرrefers to the capital city “Algiers,” not “Algeria.” If you had wondered even momentarily why it would matter if “Algeria” or “Algiers” were used in the title, that is exactly why this battle had to take place. The problem is that it doesn’t end there, since “Algiers” was a word coined by the French to call “El Djazaïr” in their own way with the word “Algiers.” In that regard, being a colony means that one would lose one’s name. “The Battle of El Djazaïr.” For most people who don’t know how to locate El Djazaïr, the title “The Battle of Algiers” would be a product of consideration. But the complicated situation in which consideration can become both “friendliness” and “colonialist violence” is the history begotten by colonialism. Colonialism even refracts the title of the film.
Algeria was a “French administrative district” even after Germany’s defeat on May 8, 1945. The film features the irony of history when the resistance that fought against the Nazis later suppresses Algerian resistance, that is the National Liberation Front (FLN) in Algiers’ Kasbah in 1954. After continued struggles, Algeria won independence in 1962. Then was the colonial rule really over? “El Djazaïr” is Algiers with a French name. Although the nation was recovered, the name wasn’t. French soldiers run up and down the stairs. Upward and downward images get repetitive, and merciless violence is intercut on both sides. And such repetition and cuts continue to the point of making us think of the ongoing Hamas-Israel war. Humankind repeats its defeats, and the possibility of hope seems to be slim. “Once we capture the ace, we can get a clean sweep! But if we don’t get the ace, it’ll all be for naught!” Just like the quote from Swindler Ali La Pointe in the film, would capturing the ace guarantee a clean sweep? Let’s listen to the film’s testimony about how hope can grow from the site where the ace is gone after an explosion. Even when the ace disappears, another card remains. History isn’t that simple. (KWON Youngmin)

Italian Director Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 film Bicycle Thieves was an achievement that paradoxically expressed the joy and fear posed by hope in contemporary society. Italy, which was suffering from its defeat in World War II at the time, was filled with unemployment and hunger, and desperate struggles were made to overcome such difficulties. However, the movie reflects the message of how when hope is a target to be achieved after overcoming pain, it is also a result that is given only after pain is disregarded. Hope is usually powerless in the face of despair. That’s why the intention of controlling people and society through subtly negotiating hope and despair is an old manner custom that humankind has conceived time and time again. Employment given in front of the unemployment and despair that brushes against a hopeful future are two heads of Medusa with the same body and myrrh confusing the main agent. That’s why when the protagonist Antonio Ricci decides to commit a rash robbery, he gives a fare to his son Bruno to let the latter escape from the scene. This shows that while hope must disregard despair, despair can only be escaped when it disregards itself. But failed despair cannot reach hope, it turns around and returns to the net of despair. The people’s cheers accompany this process, and people awakened from intoxication push despair and abandonment toward the west where the sun is setting. And the protagonist’s son Bruno grabs the hand of hope. The filming method used in this film is very neutral. The camera never intervenes in the situation and simply observes everything from eye level at an appropriate distance. This method befits the modifier “Neo-Realism” that is attributed to this film.
In that case, would it be possible to take joy in and yet fear hope in reality without intervention? Is hope that uncomfortable? (CHUNG Chuha)

Two thoughts kept getting tangled in my head while I was watching the film. One was a fragmentary thought about the things I felt while watching the film, and the other was a speculation about what Professor Suh Kyung-sik would have said had he been alive to watch the film. That’s why it was difficult to appreciate the film. The awareness toward reading the thoughts of a respected figure of mine during the film poses a giant barrier.,

Horses and People on Red and Dry Land

Whenever I saw steam arising from the manhole lids on the corners of the New York City’s streets during my time studying abroad there, I would gasp out thinking it was a like a scene out an American film. It is a déjà vu moment in which I discover familiar scenes from movies in reality. In My Humanities Trip Around the U.S. (trans. Choi Jaehyuk, Banbi, 2024), Professor Suh Kyung-sik states that after he viewed George Bellows’ 1909 painting of “Both Members of This Club” at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. and had a déjà vu moment recalling American films. “Cigarette smoke rose up and sweat and blood splattered inside the world in the picture in the bellows…” The film Geronimo: An American Legend had red dust filling up the screen during the whole time I was watching it that I felt like I had sand in my mouth. In that regard, Geronimo: An American Legend is a Western film in which not even a slight joke or humor is allowed, in the manner of Gothic architecture, and a typical “American film.” It portrays people being chased away and the greedy usurpers against the backdrop of a vast desert with red cliffs. The film’s storyline is led by the opposition between those who can’t give up on the land and the few “good arbitrators.” There are a few Caucasians and a few Native American soldiers who act as interpreters. Their roles can never change the general trend. We already learned through historical textbooks how the end was for the few native Americans who fought against the endless waves of Caucasians.
Professor Suh Kyung-sik introduces Edward Said’s The Pen and the Sword as an introductory book to the Palestine-Israel issue. He says that “We know that we cannot avoid destruction, yet we keep wanting to go onward.” Even when “there is hardly any possibility of winning, there is the will to ceaselessly tell the truth.” That is expressed like a line from a poem. (My Humanities Trip Around the U.S., P. 232.)
The lines of Wes Studi, the actor who played Geronimo, the character who forgave everything except claiming ownership of the land, resemble short lines of poetry, similar to the expressions used by Native Americans with incoherent English:

With all this land,
why is there no room for the Apache?
Why does the ‘White Eye’ want all the land?

Caucasian Arbitrators and Native American Arbitrators

General Crook, Gatewood, Davis, and Sieber are the Caucasian arbitrators within the act. Within the U.S. Cavalry are also Apache soldiers scouted as interpreters and deemed as tribe betrayers. They joined them to make negotiations and are all banished or driven away after the war. That is the symbolistic ending for the good arbitrators seeking peace. I was among the mourners gathered at the Japanese vacation home of Professor Suh Kyung-sik in the winter of 2023, and I received the closing remarks of his last book, My Humanities Trip Around the U.S. It encouraged the “good people” in the extremely anti-intellectualist era suffering from the wars, massacres, and refugees in the Ukraine War, Myanmar, Israel, and Palestine, and was expressing the imperativeness and difficulty of tenaciously arguing for the importance of humanistic reasoning. The remarks closed with the firm determination to pick up the courage in front of indescribable powerlessness and carry on the role of the good arbitrator.
“However, I wish to offer a little bit of my experience as reference to the people who keep surrendering all hope in the world everyday around the world that doesn’t improve at all. So that they get thrown into despair by humankind itself. That’s a page out of my unending humanities trip.” (My Humanities Trip Around the U.S., P. 261-262.)
Regardless of whether their roles are successful or not in this film, I dare say that Professor Suh Kyung-sik’s wish related to the good arbitrators has been reflected in his recommendation. (JUNG Yeondoo)

In the U.S. in 1979, gay couple Rudy and Paul try to adopt Marco, the boy who lives next door to Rudy. Marco, who has been abandoned after his mother was sent to jail, is a Down Syndrome patient who likes chocolate donuts and happy endings. The two people begin a trial to gain custody of Marco and fight the world’s prejudice, but Rudy’s shout of “Just because we are different does not make us bad parents!” is scattered through the empty air.
The scene where Rudy, who had only given lip-synching performances while hiding himself behind thick makeup until now, gets on the stage as himself and performs Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released” shows how Rudy has changed after meeting Marco and also how determined he is to not be scared of the world’s prejudice.
The film ends with a scene showing a singing Rudy, the opposing counsel attorney who got a letter from Paul, a superior who fired Paul for being a gay man, and the judges who rendered the custody verdict. With subtle facial expressions, they read letters and articles at the houses where their children play, additionally to the courtroom desks and office hallways. Scenes of the people who made the verdict that will change someone’s life and while leading peaceful lives themselves intersect with Rudy singing “I see my light come shining” and “Any day now, I shall be released” leave a lasting impression.
The film’s title Any Day Now means right now, even now, and not before long. Professor Suh Kyung-sik must have chosen the film to say that “Even now, we can change and take action.” Here’s hoping that the scene of Marco who walked through the empty night street alone with a doll in his arms doesn’t get repeated. (JUNG Jieun)

This was a film representing the “social conscience youth films” in the early 1960s when post-war restorations and the beginning of economic growth was taking place by combining the joys and sorrows of a poverty-stricken Japanese family. The protagonist is middle school student Jun who lives in Kawaguchi which is famous for its casting industry (Cupola means a blast furnace in the shape of a circular tower). Jun is portrayed as a positive girl who stays vibrant and confident about pioneering her own way in the world despite the conflict she has with her fired worker and repressive father, her family’s financial problems, and her school and friend relations. Another important axis in the film is the solidarity narrative between the Japanese and the Korean Immigrants living in Japan. Yoshie, Jun’s Korean Immigrant friend in Japan who works part-time at the same Pachinko as her, and her brothers Takayuki and Sankichi enter a friendship based on the reality of poverty that they share, and that is portrayed through various episodes. Cupola, Where the Furnaces Glow, which is the only Japanese film dealing directly with the North Korea return business, conveys the social atmosphere at the time which recorded the discrimination issue against Koreans through a humanist lens, but the reenactment method in which Korean Immigrants to Japan are seen as simple objects of pity was criticized as a limitation. 60 old years after it was released, it is only seen as the film that pushed Yoshinaga Sayuri to stardom as a national actor or as the film related to the comment that Imamura Shohei, its scriptwriter, made against how it was propaganda and that he regrets making it, which has been criticized through an ideological standard. But in this age of intolerance where hate comments do not cease, it is a film that makes us think about many things in which even “loose solidarity” is a rarity. The comment by Yomota Inuhiko on how “It is a film that is a scar made on Japanese Cinema” is also meaningful. (CHOI Jaehyuk)