Flak Magazine: Review of The Battle of Algiers, 02.20.04

To Americans seeing it for the first time in 1967, The Battle of Algiers must have seemed a disconcerting echo of the tumult in their own streets. Gillo Pontecorvo's revolutionary epic arrived in a year of riots and burbling radicalism, culminating in the 50,000-strong march on the Pentagon in October, peace protesters' first violent encounter with the Establishment in its own back yard. As much a warning shot as a call to arms, this snapshot of the revolution still strikes a collective (and badly frayed) nerve — a testament to the potency of its vision and the direness of the times.

Bristling with newsreel verisimilitude, The Battle of Algiers chronicles the Algerian struggle for independence from France during the 1950s. The movie was banned in France for years, its depiction of riots, torture and terrorism deemed too traumatic for the erstwhile home front. Though heralded for its formal innovations, the movie's claim to fame is its reputation as a primer for revolutionary groups, from the Black Panthers to the Tamil Tigers to Yasir Arafat's Fatah faction. Last year, it reportedly won new — and unlikely — pupils: the Pentagon, which sponsored a screening for its special operations department as a lesson in "how to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas."

The Pentagon viewing seems to have signaled an auspicious rebirth. Long unavailable on video, The Battle of Algiers has been re-released by the invaluable Rialto Pictures in major cities across the country, and on DVD by the Criterion Collection later this year. Coming on the heels of another exhumation of a '60s relic — Errol Morris's The Fog of War, which recasts Vietnam bogeyman Robert McNamara as world-weary sage — the revival of The Battle of Algiers occasions, if only fleetingly, movie culture's welcome re-engagement with the nation's political life.

The Italian Pontecorvo, an avowed communist, had wanted to make a tract against colonialism. It wasn't until Saadi Yacef, a hero of the Algerian nationalist movement, got in touch with him that he found his material. Yacef, the former chief of the FLN (Algerian National Liberation Front), had written his memoirs while in prison. Released following Algeria's independence in 1962, he set out to produce a film about his country's experience and hired Pontecorvo to realize his vision. The shoot had the full backing of the new Algerian government; indeed, the city of Algiers and its people are the movie's biggest stars.

Despite its collective hero, The Battle of Algiers refracts the Algerian mythos through the prism of two characters. On one side is Ali La Pointe (Brahim Haggiag), an illiterate petty criminal who undergoes a political conversion in jail. Once free, the radicalized Ali signs up with the FLN and quickly rises through the ranks. (His superior is played by Yacef himself.) On the other side is the methodical Col. Mathieu (Jean Martin, aptly enough the only professional actor in the cast), who assumes control of the French command after the FLN launches a bombing campaign targeting civilians. The dispassionate colonel proves to be an articulate defender of the military's dubious anti-terrorist tactics ("the innocent deserve more protection than the guilty"), even as he coolly acknowledges that the French are ultimately on the wrong side of history.

As crucial as the setting and the source are to the movie's authenticity, Pontecorvo's sheer mastery of the form transforms inchoate conviction into political art. The velocity and force of his images overwhelm the mustiness of the movie's unreconstructed Marxism. Using hand-held cameras, grainy film stock, natural lighting and nonprofessional actors, Pontecorvo achieves a bracing you-are-there rigor that prompted the film's original distributors to attach the disclaimer, "This dramatic re-enactment of The Battle of Algiers contains NOT ONE FOOT of Newsreel or Documentary film."

Heavily influenced by the Italian neorealists, Pontecorvo shares their aesthetic, if not their moral objective. The neorealist ideal was the dignified representation of the everyday; Pontecorvo's film seeks to re-create the extraordinary. His fusion of neorealist techniques and blockbuster tropes is the movie's breakthrough. The brilliant use of voice-over exposition, the ruthlessly effective montage and a pulse-pounding score (by Pontecorvo and Ennio Morricone) enhance, rather than undercut, the movie's harsh immediacy.

Their politics notwithstanding, the filmmakers strove for fairness in their portrayal of the violence inflicted by each side. Yacef, in an interview with the Village Voice, says he "tried to make the film as balanced as possible" and show the horror of both French torture and FLN bombs. Despite Yacef's intentions, however, The Battle of Algiers can't shed its agitprop skin. You can see what got those radical audiences cheering. Pauline Kael, in her grudging rave, hyperbolically compared it to Triumph of the Will, calling it "the one great revolutionary 'sell' of modern times." The movie's Marxist ardor reaches its orgiastic high point in the coda, when the city explodes in a spontaneous display of mass protest, three years after the FLN's ostensible defeat. The piercing ululations of the Algerian women seem to be ushering in nothing less than the next phase of history.

Pontecorvo's dialectical reading of the Algerian fight has vexing implications. By subsuming individual choices and lives to the revolution, the movie becomes an implicit endorsement of the FLN's tactics. Try as he might to humanize the victims of the FLN's terrorist campaign — there is a montage of their smiling, oblivious faces before the bombings — Pontecorvo ultimately sees them as casualties of history: sad, but inevitable, collateral damage. He may have wanted to be even-handed, but the movie's exultant ending — like other mass revolt scenes in the movie — tilts the political balance. Perhaps unwittingly, The Battle of Algiers offers just the balm a troubled radical conscience needs.

Pontecorvo's doctrinaire Marxism, as dated now as it was au courant in 1967, also seems to have obscured the role Islamic fundamentalism played in the revolt. The secular FLN's communique upon the launching of hostilities in 1954 exhorted Algerians to join in the struggle to reclaim Algeria "within the framework of the principles of Islam." In the movie, the FLN asserts its control with a crackdown on drugs, drinking, prostitution and other vices of the Western world. One shocking scene shows street children assaulting a wino and gleefully rolling him down the stairs, punishment for his spiritual and physical corruption. More tellingly, La Pointe's first murder victim isn't a French policeman, but an Algerian pimp who refuses to follow the FLN's directive. Seeing the Algerians as Marxist revolutionaries, Pontecorvo turns a blind eye to Islam's animating influence in their struggle — an oversight that seems conspicuous now.

Pontecorvo's prophecy of history's leftward march may have proved to be a fiction, but it doesn't make his masterpiece feel any less real. If Sept. 11, 2001 inevitably colors our viewing experience, so does America's Baghdad adventure. Writing in Slate, Christopher Hitchens roundly dismissed any analogy between the Algerian war and the Iraqi occupation — without even addressing why the Pentagon viewed the movie in the first place. While it's true that French colonial ambitions have little in common with America's geopolitical aims, focusing on that essential difference misses the point: It is what the Iraqis think of the occupation, not what we claim it to be, that may matter in the end. More than its methodical study of anti-terrorist tactics, the movie's distressing portrait of a tone-deaf occupation may well offer the most valuable lesson.

— Elbert Ventura (elbert_ventura@yahoo.com)