BURN!

FRI.-THURS., SEPT. 24-OCT. 7

MADE UNDER THE sign of Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, the long-unavailable Burn!, directed by Italian master Gillo Pontecorvo, is a manual of anti-colonialist rebellion fomented, instigated, doused and kept flickeringly alive. With 20 previously excised minutes returned to the film, Burn! is restored as a suitable companion to Pontecorvo's epochal The Battle of Algiers.

The setting is Queimada ("burn" in Portuguese), called thus because the Portuguese colonists burned down the island some years prior to quiet the hostile natives. When Sir William Walker (Marlon Brando) arrives in Queimada, the business of colonization proceeds peaceably, the latest slave rebellion having been crushed and its leader, Santiago, tortured to death. Walker, a subject of the British crown, looks to find a successor to Santiago, and discovers Jose, a porter with the fire to fight the Portuguese. Walker is part college professor, part proto-CIA agent, and his life classes provide Jose with an education in leadership, military strategy and the complexities of the European relationship to their colonies.

He also helps Jose open his eyes to the daily horrors of life in the colonies, and the film is a catalog of brutalities: whipped slaves, burning villages, even the bare-breasted lovelies frolicking in the European brothel. Like another long-forgotten 1960s work, Mikhail Kalatozov's I Am Cuba, Burn! is a horror-show of life before the revolution. One shot in particular, of a sweating, petrified young boy holding his hands up in the face of hostile soldiers, makes me think that Pontecorvo saw and appreciated the Russian film.

Although Walker gets the rebellion going, his loyalties are by necessity more complicated than a simple interest in slaves breaking their chains. He encourages revolution as much as is profitable for England, activating Jose, and then seeing no contradiction in returning to Queimada 10 years later to crush him and his followers. Burn! works the high and low ends, weaving its way through the tangled machinations of governments and the relentless sufferings of their slaves.

While Jose is the rebellion's leader, the film is devoted to Walker, within whom lay all the contradictions of the 19th century. His passion to helping Jose is matched only by his indifference to their cause when hired to put their rebellion down. Walker's motto is, "If I try to do something, I try to do it well, my way, and to the end." The illusion of personal control, even at the colonialist's level, is nothing but a mirage. While sympathetic, Walker is also a demon of inscrutability, leaving destruction and failed dreams in his wake.

It is no small accident in this film, released in 1969, that Walker's next destination is Indochina.

Film Forum, 209 W. Houston St. (betw. Varick St. & 6th Ave.), 212-727-8110; call for times, $10.