TV Note: "The Battle of Algiers" (9/7)

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David Shasha

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Sep 5, 2021, 12:05:29 PM9/5/21
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"The Battle of Algiers" will be screened on Turner Classic Movies late Monday/early Tuesday, September 7th at 1:30 AM


Movie Review: "The Battle of Algiers" (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1965)

 

All over the Western world, pundits and policy-makers are looking for ways in which to understand the phenomenon of Arab terrorism.  With word that Gillo Pontecorvo's 1965 film masterpiece, one of the great war films of all time, had been screened this past summer at the Pentagon, the cachet of "The Battle of Algiers" continues to weave its spell on the international audience.

 

Pontecorvo stunned the French establishment in 1965 when he released this film, a film that gave a realistic portrayal of the Algerian struggle against the French colonial occupation of that benighted North African country.  France banned the film until 1971.

 

It should be remembered that the French did not merely occupy Algeria for strategic reasons.  Algeria, unlike Vietnam or Haiti, became a place where Frenchmen went to live and in this sense Algeria is a very close analogue to Israel.  The Algerian situation was exacerbated because there was not simply a foreign military presence in the country, as was the case in the British occupation of India, but there were real civilians who came to Algeria from France to make their permanent homes; French civilians who saw Algeria as theirs.

 

Algeria, as seen by the novelist and colon (they were called in French pied noirs, for the "black feet" that they got by living among the "dirty" Arabs) Albert Camus, was a French country rather than an Arab one.  The battle for Algeria, harsh and unsparing from both sides, was one of citizen against citizen; the very nativity of the Arab and Western inhabitants caused the sort of inter-civilizational tensions that we have seen in Israel.

 

"The Battle of Algiers," as has been widely noticed in the press since its current re-release, is itself a brilliant piece of documentary cinema which stands out in the history of film for the way in which it is able to reconstruct the events of the revolt with such a convincing authority.

 

This fictional film sets out to tell the tale of the FLN, the revolutionary party in Algeria during the revolutionary period.  The FLN is clearly drawn as a violent and reactionary group that on the one hand is set up to preserve and protect the religious dignity and value-system of the Muslim natives, yet also adopts techniques of fighting that are quite modern and quite secular.  In the very beginnings of the process we see the FLN causing mayhem among the Muslim population by threatening not merely informers with death, but the pedestrian criminal element - prostitutes, drug addicts and others - who were seen as decadent and as acting in ways that betrayed a lack of discipline and revolutionary fervor.

 

I was brought to think of the character of the new A.B. Yehoshua novel The Liberated Bride Yochanan Rivlin, an Israeli Orientalist who is searching for the links between the modern emergence of atavistic religious impulses among the Islamist opposition in Algeria as seen through the filter of the French occupation. Like Rivlin, we are tempted to try and analyze the Pontecorvo film in relation to the Palestinian Question and the manner in which FLN-style violence has become ubiquitous in the region.

 

But the film wisely refrains from such prognostications.

 

In the main, the film is a measured study of injustice and the manner in which human beings are forced to use whatever means they have at their disposal to defeat their oppressors.

 

We witness images of French torture of Arab prisoners and the corrosive effects this method of repression serves - not merely in terms of the French themselves, but as a window into the desperation and internal breakdown of many internal Algerian values.  We see the loss of control in the Arab community, a community that was merely used as window-dressing for the French Algerians who saw Algeria as their own private playground.

 

At the film's center is the preparation and detonation of three bombs by the FLN - all three bombs planted by women - in retaliation for a bombing of a home in the Arab Casbah by the French terrorist organization the OAS (left unnamed in the film).  In this episode we see the three Arab women transforming themselves into "French" girls so that they will be able to bypass the checkpoints where only ARABS are stopped - the French go right through the checkpoints.

 

Once the three women are beyond the checkpoint they pick up their bombs which are then hidden in their pocketbooks and those satchels are then placed in an unseen spot in some public location.  These locations show how the French recreated Algiers in their own image - one of the spots is an Air France office, another is a Parisian-style bar-bistro and the last location is a hip, ultra-trendy disco of sorts where French dancers are swinging to the latest musical styles such as the bossa-nova.

 

Pontecorvo's camera and mise-en-scene effortlessly and with great precision portrays the stark contrasts between these two worlds; the Arabs live in cramped, filthy quarters and the French are inhabiting a modern and clean metropolis.  All of this of course takes place within the very same city!

 

In many ways we have become immunized from the Colonial world mainly because independence for most Third World peoples is becoming more and more of a distant memory.  We have become desensitized to the fact that many of the world's most intractable conflicts - including those of the Middle East - were really created by the Imperialisms of the 18th and 19th centuries.

 

We are consistently told that such Imperialisms are of little use for understanding the present, yet it is really impossible to come to terms with the thought processes of the natives; many of whom continue to struggle against a West that has found new and insidious ways to mask its Imperial pretenses. 

 

"The Battle of Algiers" is thus a record of a very important moment in 20th century world history, yet it is also a landmark in the manner in which the cinema was able to develop a new style of narrative to represent war and conflict.  The camera in this film achieves a level of intimacy and verisimilitude that makes it a landmark transitional document - the transition being from the primitive realism developed in Europe from Eisenstein to Renoir (a rejection of the artificiality of the Hollywood system) to the post-modern graphics and technological effects developed by George Lucas and many Hollywood technocrats.

 

Some critics have compared Pontecorvo's technique to "Citizen Kane" and in many ways such a comparison is apt and fitting.  But Pontecorvo, as would befit the socially aware and progressive 60's, used his camera to get deeply inside the world, not simply of an individual, but of an entire culture and civilization.  And not only that, "The Battle of Algiers" shifts its storytelling perspective from the French to the Arab side and continues to work a dual perspective that allows us to see the horrors of this battle from both sides.

 

We meet Frenchmen who are about to be killed by Arabs.  These perspectival shifts permit the viewer to experience the horrors of war and bloodshed from within an indeterminate space.  Not that Pontecorvo is not on the side of the Arabs, he is, but there is a larger and more expansive context in the film that frames the conflict from within a morally gray area that does not uphold absolutes.

 

And perhaps this is why the film has aged as well as it has.  The cinematic technique of documentary realism, quite striking in 1966 as we see from the review of Bosley Crowther in the New York Times, provides the film with a youthful vibrancy and an energy that has not dulled with time.  And the fact that the film is not a naked piece of agitprop (although it has been described as such by critics) but is a cerebral and emotive study of some very complex characters - all of whom are etched with realistic accuracy and with very little sentiment - allows it to continue to bear witness to some very horrible events in the very recent past.

 

"The Battle of Algiers" is the tragedy of two peoples who sought to express their own identity at the expense of the other.  The French sought to erase the Arab from their midst, while the Arabs were left trying to figure out not only how to get rid of those French people, but to understand how the French were able to do what they did to begin with.  Inside the Arab characters of the FLN there is an irrepressible rage, the rage of men who have been raped and must avenge their persecutors.

 

The film portrays the struggle of these two sides.  By the last five minutes of the film, Pontecorvo is almost forced to end the thing on a positive note - as the Algerians did in fact achieve their independence from the French in 1962 - but the essence of the film is that struggle and not its resolution - the final few minutes of the film seem like a forced afterthought.

 

So in the end "The Battle of Algiers" forces the viewer to engage with some very brutal and some very upsetting images; images of death, images of torture, images of poverty and images of ignorance and defeat.  These images are piercing and haunt the viewer in a very fundamental manner.  It is an unforgettable cinematic experience that encapsulates the very destructive inner mechanisms of mankind and represents the very worst of what men can do to one another when they reject a common core of humanity that is universally shared.  What is sad is that this sort of thing continues in our time and will probably continue to exist as long as men reject the fact that God has made mankind in His very image.

 

 

 

David Shasha

 

 

From SHU 87, January 30, 2004 

 

 

Movie Review: "The Battle of Algiers

By: Bosley Crowther

A most extraordinary picture for an opener at the New York Film Festival was placed before the first-night audience in Philharmonic Hall last night. It is Gillo Pontecorvo's ferocious The Battle of Algiers, a starkly realistic reenactment of events as they substantially occurred between 1954 and 1957 in the rebellion against the French in the capital of Algeria.

 

It is extraordinary, first, that such a picture—such a literal and traditional account of intra-urban guerrilla warfare in a wasteful conflict that occurred so long ago—should have been picked to open a festival that has been kicked off in the last four years by noticeably avant-gardish and thematically exploratory films.

 

The supposition is that this departure was made because The Battle of Algiers is an uncommonly dynamic picture that has proved its pulling power at festivals. It pulled down the grand prize at Venice and the top award at London last year, and took a blue at Acapulco last winter. On the strength of this, it was acquired for commercial distribution in this country, and was booked to open here at Cinema II tonight.

 

What could have been more appropriate, then, than to have this much talked-about film rack up two premieres with one show at the New York festival?

 

But more extraordinary and therefore more commanding of lasting interest and critical applause is the amazing photographic virtuosity and pictorial conviction of this film. So authentically and naturalistically were its historical reflections staged, with literally thousands of citizens participating, in the streets and buildings of Algiers, that it looks beyond any question to be an original documentary film, put together from newsreel footage, complemented by staged dramatic scenes.

 

Startling long shots of people and police fighting in the sun-drenched, tree-lined streets, so familiar and recognizable from the photographs of the Algerian strife; shattering close-ups of thunderous explosions in native quarters and crowded French cafés have all the concrete and vibrant "actuality" of newsreels made during the war.

 

Yet Mr. Pontecorvo assures us there's not a scrap of newsreel footage in his film—that he and his crews shot the whole thing very much after the facts, with native amateurs and a few professional actors playing the key and leading roles.

 

This becomes apparent as one follows the narrative account of the violent upsurge of rebellion in Algiers in 1954 and the establishment of a rebel stronghold in the Casbah, from which hit-and-run forays of snipers and women bomb-planters into the French section of the city are made. And it is clear, to anyone who remembers, when the French paratroopers move in and begin the systematic clean-out of the Casbah under the command of a Colonel Mathieu.

 

This lean and relentless officer, played by Jean Martin, is obviously not the colorful and memorable General Jacques Massu, whose 10th Paratrooper Division wiped out the rebel opposition in Algiers in 1957. But his manner is so intense and forceful, and his fairness and even respect for the resistance leaders are so well drawn, that one feels as though one is truly watching the spectacular and compassionate Massu.

 

Likewise, the roles of rebel leaders, played by Brahim Haggiag and Yacef Saadi, are done with such ferocity and fervor that they certainly convince me.

 

In its melodramatic structure, as well as its staging techniques, this film does have antecedents. The excellent Four Days of Naples, done with such documentary stylization by Mr. Pontecorvo's fellow Italian, Nanni Loy, back in 1962, is its immediate model. And the prototype for both of them, of course, is Roberto Rossellini's Open City, a classic neo-realistic film.

 

Essentially, the theme is one of valor—the valor of people who fight for liberation from economic and political oppression. And this being so, one may sense a relation in what goes on in this picture to what has happened in the Negro ghettos of some of our American cities more recently. The fact that the climax of the drama is actually negative, with the rebellion wiped out and its leaders destroyed, has immediate pertinence, too. But eventual victory for the Algerians—and therefore symbolic hope for all who struggle for freedom—is acknowledged in a sketchy epilogue.

 

I must also mention the very interesting and effective musical score prepared by Mr. Pontecorvo and Ennio Morricone for this vivid dramatic reportage.

 

From The New York Times, September 21, 1967 

 

 

 

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