| Battle of Algiers, The |
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  (9/10)
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Runtime: 136 |
| Public Rating: 8.22 (23 votes) |
Director: Gillo Pontecorvo |
MPAA Rating:  |
| Genre: Political Drama |
Year: 1966 |
| Writer(s): Gillo Pontecorvo & Franco Solinas |
| Distributor: Criterion Collection |
| Reviewed by: Mel Valentin |
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Political tract, paean to nationalistic liberation struggles, and guerilla warfare and counter-insurgency textbook, Gillo Pontecorvo's incendiary, controversial, political film, The Battle of Algiers recreates the Algerian struggle for independence from France that began almost fifty years ago. The struggle against French colonial rule, a struggle that last 130 years, ended with Algerian independence in 1962. For France, the loss of Algeria, after a long, costly struggle and the loss of Indochina to the Vietminh signaled the end of its own colonialist aspirations. Creating the template for subsequent radical filmmakers, Pontecorvo employed quasi-documentary, cinema verité methods to portray the violent struggle for Algerian independence. Integral to this approach was Pontecorvo's use non-professional actors in most of the leading roles, natural lighting, actual locations in Algiers, Algeria's capital, and street-level, handheld camerawork. Pontecorvo's quasi-documentary approach suggests an (illusory) unmediated reality reminiscent of the Italian Neo-Realists, whose own filmmaking clearly indicated a social, cultural, and political agenda.
The Battle of Algiers meticulously explores the consequences of the anti-colonialist struggle against the French in the mid-1950s, primarily by eschewing a strong central narrative, guided by a single protagonist. Structurally, the film unfolds in a series of flashbacks, after the audience is briefly introduces to Ali La Pointe (Brahim Haggiag), a petty criminal turned leader of the National Liberation Front (FLN). As the film opens, Ali, along with several, unidentified compatriots, awaits capture at the hands of the French military. Their decision, surrender or death, is postponed to the penultimate sequence in the film, as the film flashes back to Ali, first as a petty criminal operating a sidewalk scam, his imprisonment, where he witnesses the methodical execution of an FLN member by the French, and, in the first of a series of flash forwards, five months later, as he emerges from prison, politically transformed into an action-oriented, anti-colonialist guerilla fighter. Pontecorvo and his co-screenwriter, Franco Solinas, avoid examining Ali's transformation in any depth, political or psychological, instead preferring context and shorthand to signal his transformation to the audience. This strategy also indicates a wider narrative strategy, a strategy that becomes evident once Ali is freed from the prison, joins the FLN, and aligns himself with El-Hadi Jaffar (Saadi Yacef), a principal FLN leader. The FLN, like anti-colonialist movements beforehand and afterwards, employs terror (i.e., first the assassination of French police officers, and later, after the imposition of a curfew and checkpoints separating the Arab quarters (the Casbah) from the European quarters, the bombing of public spaces frequented by French civilians) and civil disobedience (i.e., a weeklong general strike). Pontecorvo and Solinas show the detailed preparations for each step in the struggle, the execution and aftermath of those plans, including the wreckage, human and material, that results from the targeted civilian bombings.
The characters under examination expand to include Jaffar, other leaders of the anti-colonialist struggle, and later, the foot soldiers, their families (including several women, who volunteer to deliver bombs targeted at civilians in the European quarters of the city), and even children involved in the liberation struggle against the French. Taking their cue from traditional Marxism that favors movements over individuals (as well as the influence of Sergei Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin), the filmmakers chose the revolutionary struggle itself as their protagonist. With that choice, the filmmakers also allowed themselves a critical distance from the struggle and its participants that would otherwise be missing in a traditional, character-centered narrative. This means that most of the participants, Algerian or French, remain nameless (if not faceless), with the exception of one French character, a composite of several, real-life officers who served in Algeria, Colonel Mathieu (Jean Martin).
Colonel Mathieu leads the newly arrived paratroopers, an elite counter-insurgency force. The French military's counter-insurgency tactics are viewed dispassionately, even as their tactics, including torture of suspected FLN members and sympathizers, is likely to lead to the loss of audience sympathy for their cause or their own loss of life. Mathieu has learned counter-insurgency tactics firsthand, as a French Resistance leader and as a military officer in Indochina. His obvious loyalty to France, and by extension, the colonialist enterprise, while superficially commendable, hides a darker, amoral personality, one who, like his opposite number in the FLN, will use any tactic, including torture and extrajudicial killings (both shown in The Battle of Algiers) to defeat the FLN, and with it, the struggle for liberation. As Mathieu reveals through dialogue, he is haunted by France's defeat in Vietnam, and refuses to accept the repetition of that defeat in Algeria. Nonetheless, Colonel Mathieu is a study in contradiction. Although Colonel Mathieu is willing to use violent, brutal tactics to obtain information and defeat the FLN, he also expresses his admiration for the FLN's tactics, their organization, and their willingness to die for their goals. Doubts or skepticism, however, remain unvoiced, at least until the ostensible climax of the film, with the apparent defeat of the FLN. That foresight, of course, was likely inserted by the filmmakers to underscore the futility of the colonialist project in the developing world, but it's more than likely that other French officers serving in Algeria at the time expressed sentiments similar to the fictional Colonel Mathieu.
As political cinema (with an emphasis on cinema), The Battle of Algiers succeeds in exploring the inner dynamics of anti-colonialist liberation struggles that followed the close of World War II in the developing world. Pontecorvo's approach to filmmaking suggests an (illusory) unmediated reality reminiscent of the Italian Neo-Realists, whose own filmmaking clearly indicated a social, cultural, and political agenda. For France, the loss of Algeria, after a long, costly, ultimately futile struggle to reacquire Indochina after World War II marked the end of its remaining colonial aspirations. Colonialism, the military and political domination of indigenous peoples by Western European nation-states had arrived at a historical cul-de-sac, and the defeat of the Algerian independence movement in the 1950s temporarily postponed the inevitable collapse of the colonialist enterprise in the developing world.
As political tract, however, The Battle of Algiers betrays an unsophisticated (read: dialectical) approach to political and social complexities, circa 1966. The film says little about Algeria's post-independence problems, including a weakened economy, government corruption, and the inevitable conflict between secularism and sectarianism in public life already present in the mid-sixties. Pontecorvo instead preferred to end The Battle of Algiers on a triumphant note, with the Algerians descending from the Casbah into the European quarters to participate in massive demonstrations, demonstrations that ultimately helped to convince the French government to enter into negotiations with the FLN. Pontecorvo, following other Marxists and other members of the radical left, however, underestimated nationalism (and its corollary, ethnic conflict) as an often-destructive force, as well as the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East and in Northern Africa. As a textbook for anti-colonialist guerilla warfare, The Battle of Algiers remains a chilling reminder of the probable consequences the so-called “war on terror” in the Middle East.
©Mel Valentin, 29th October, 2004
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 Printable Version
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Available subtitles: English
* Available Audio Tracks: French & Arabic (Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono)
* Disc One: The Battle of Algiers
* New high-definition transfer, supervised by cinematographer Marcello Gratti
* Theatrical and re-release trailers
* Production Gallery
* Disc Two: Pontecorvo and the Film
* Gillo Pontecorvo: The Dictatorship of Truth: a 37 minute documentary
* The Making of The Battle of Algiers
* Directors on The Battle of Algiers featuring Spike Lee, Mira Nair, Julian Schnabel, Steven Soderbergh, and Oliver Stone
* Disc Three: The Film and History
* Remembering History (2004)
* Etats d'armes, a 30-minute excerpt from Patrick Rotman's 3-part documentary, L'ennemi intime
* A Case Study, a conversation with former National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism, Richard A. Clarke, former State Department Coordinator for Counterterrorism, Michael A. Sheehan, and Chief of Investigative Projects for ABC News, Christopher E. Isham
* Gillo Pontecorvo's Return to Algiers (1992, 55 minutes)
* A booklet featuring a new essay by film scholar Peter Matthews, a reprinted interview with writer Franco Solinas, brief biographies on the key figures in the French-Algerian War
* Number of discs: 3
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