The Battle of Algiers
Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo
After World War II, the last "good" war, movie culture enjoyed a period of righteous imperative. You could call it a moment of innocence, typified by Hollywood’s optimistic, socially conscious progressive dramas and the Italian Neorealist movement that explored people’s difficult struggle for dignity. Identification with downtrodden folk was such a common precept in our popular culture that when Neorealism developed into a more explicitly Marxist genre, it extended the fervor of Second World War reform.
The unprecedented popularity of Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (released in the U.S. in 1967) was a result of that passionate compassion. A fascinating movie achievement, it was hailed by international film festivals and, in the U.S., by student radicals and the Black Panthers as well as the then-moderate media. Even Hollywood’s Motion Picture Academy saluted. Pontecorvo became one of the few non-American filmmakers to be nominated for the Best Director Oscar. That’s how openhearted movie culture was back then.
The Battle of Algiers now plays to a different political climate, an ethically shriveled movie culture. In the midst of the U.S.’s Iraqi war that very few people agree is "good," watching this classic (in a new print at Film Forum) tests one’s tolerance for Pontecorvo’s uncritical depiction of the guerrilla methods that Algerian rebels used in their fight against France’s colonial occupying army. The Algerian National Liberation Front’s (FLN) terrorist game-plans give the film much of its shock and awe–that’s what made the 60s Panthers claim it as a "training" film and recently caused the Pentagon to study it for insight into modern terrorist methods in the Middle East. That dichotomy shows how much cultural sympathies have changed since The Battle of Algiers first appeared.
It’s good news that Pontecorvo’s film eludes both radical romanticism and authoritarian paranoia. The intent was to make the Algerian liberation struggle "real." Its historical recreation is done with startling efficacy. From the pivotal moment when Ali LaPointe (Brahim Haggiag), the last of the quartet of rebel leaders, is pinned down by the French army, the film flashes back to the FLN’s beginning several years earlier. Terse sequences show the mounting insurrection–a mobilization of political activity after almost 130 years of French rule–and the increased, oppressive military response.
Movement is the film’s essential theme: burgeoning Algerian self-awareness and then the activism (even among women and children). Disaffection transformed into an unconventional in-the-streets war. Pontecorvo cannily shot the film to resemble newsreel verite, using mostly non-professional actors according to the Neorealist ethic plus authentic locations. His quasi-documentary approach was and is astounding. However, it had such a huge impact on modern filmmaking that his style was stolen and poorly imitated almost everywhere, although rarely with Pontecorvo’s sense of purpose or fastidious detail. (Today’s use of shaky-cam is a vulgarization of Pontecorvo’s approach, done in a facile and slovenly fashion in tv shows like Homicide, NYPD Blue or feature films like Laws of Gravity.)
Pontecorvo conceived The Battle of Algiers on a grand scale–patterning his view of history after Francesco Rosi’s magnificent Salvatore Giuliano (soon to be released on Criterion DVD). Every shot of Algiers, both its Muslim natives and French immigrants, presents a definitive portrait of modern, teeming colonialism with its mixed hostile and patronizing populace. The imperialist view of Algiers that Julien Duvivier established as exotic in the famous introductory sequences of the 1937 Pepe le Moko is powerfully exposed, showing the division between the French quarters and the Casbah, Algiers’ ghetto. Pontecorvo illustrates the social and psychological conditions that theorist Frantz Fanon described in The Wretched of the Earth, but does so with a visual panache that was also worthy of the sensual fervor in Jean Genet’s Algerian alarum, Prisoner of Love. Pontecorvo catches a passionate, dark-eyed people caught in the whirl of history. That’s why the newsreel look is so appropriate and expressive.
Where DeSica, Rossellini and Visconti sought to bring an anguished people closer to a viewer’s understanding, Pontecorvo reanimated the moment of their crisis. His esthetic responded to the excitement that the Algerian issue had roused among European intellectuals. (Jean-Paul Sartre’s writings on the issue are referred to when a French officer wonders "Why are Sartres always born on the other side?") But he also had to keep pace with the intellectual advances of other films that reflected the Algerian conflict, such as Godard’s Le Petit Soldat and even Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg–movies that pressed one’s awareness and spiritual involvement with the turmoil. His variety of shots–poetic close-ups, wide, chaotic street views, even a few still-image montages–remain remarkable.
This is not guerrilla filmmaking; its perfectly emulated immediacy disguises Pontecorvo and cinematographer Marcello Gatti’s enormous craft. The overhead shot of a bomb being lowered in a basket toward the French soldiers standing underneath yet looking up holds fate, treachery and history in surreally clear focus. Call it a De Palma shot. (Ennio Morricone’s score was reprised in The Untouchables.) When the French roust the Casbah and robed Algerians scatter through the narrow streets, it evokes the frantic, sinister bathhouse sequence of Orson Welles’ Othello.
Such visual sophistication equals the polemic of Franco Solinas’ screenplay, which balances the Algerian plight with French self-awareness. Col. Mathieu (played by Jean Martin), an imposing militarist who leads the French paratroopers into Algiers and strategizes how to break down the rebel cells, is both soldier and diplomat. He sees the Algerians as "a fine people" but does his job, even when it includes a program of torture. To rationalize anti-human militarism this way–in a figure of power who wears dark glasses, then removes them–makes Solinas’ view of oppression more sophisticated than simple villainy. The Battle of Algiers dignifies a peoples’ perseverence but never shortchanges the complexity of history.
Because Pontecorvo creates images of emotional sweep and political rigor (the unforgettable shot of a protesting crowd emerging from clouds of smoke), The Battle of Algiers has been the most effective piece of propaganda since the classic Soviet silent movies. A political film has to be a work of propaganda because it has to take a side, but a great political film cannot only be propaganda. The Battle of Algiers is a thrilling piece of art that embarks on a humanist view of suffering and retaliation.
Almost 40 years later, it is clear that Pontecorvo has not betrayed the sympathies learned from a "good" war. He found the extraordinary and direct means of making the circumstances of the battle for independence clearly understood and absolutely felt.
As for the film’s relevance to the current Iraq war, it is neither a film for Bush-bashers nor Bush-supporters and cannot, sensibly, be bent toward that issue. Contemporary political films like Bloody Sunday and In This World have corrupted Pontecorvo’s "realistic" innovations without the intelligence, coherence or technical elan to penetrate the complexity of modern politics. They simply condescend, catering to liberal self-righteousness. (Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s A Moment of Innocence is the rare recent film that is credible on the personal aspects of both revolution and filmmaking.)
Despite rhetoric about "a training film," the militant groups with which my teenage friends and I first saw Pontecorvo’s movie weren’t bomb-throwers; they only wanted to inspire solidarity, responding to Pontecorvo’s humane urgency. That’s the optimism people have always carried away from this film, especially the scene of Muslim women trilling. The narrator says, "The Casbah will echo with those unintelligible rhythmic and frightening cries." They sound like the great gospel moan of the women exorcising bedevilment at the climax of Beloved. How can you not be stirred?
