THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS A
Italy Algeria (123 mi) 1965 d: Gillo Pontecorvo
God be with you.
—Jaffar (Saadi Yacef ), FLN military chief as he sends women with explosives in their baskets to bomb French targets
It’s hard enough to start a revolution, even harder to sustain it, and hardest of all to win it. But it’s only afterwards, once we’ve won, that the real difficulties begin.
—Si Ben M’hidi, FLN leader
Legality can be inconvenient.
—French reporter at a news conference, commenting on the methods of torture used by Colonel Mathieu
Should France stay in Algeria? If your answer is still yes, then you must accept all the consequences.
—Colonel Mathieu (Jean Martin) in 1957, followed by a montage of graphically horrific methods of torture, shown to the music of a Bach organ Prelude
Often imitated, but never equaled, as bold and raw a film as one is ever likely to see, a thrilling, in-your-face examination of the last bloody vestiges of the French colonial occupation in Algeria in the 1950’s, street by street, house by house, shown with such realism that it resembles a documentary. This strikingly original Black & White film proves you don’t need a big budget, great actors, or beautiful photography to produce a masterpiece, instead this film relies on precise and meticulous direction which relies on suspenseful storytelling which never lags, using real people and locations and what resembles a hand-held, cinema vérité camera style to lend an extraordinary authenticity to the people inhabiting the streets of the Arab Casbah region of Algiers. Also noteworthy is the objective balance in getting both sides right, where neither side's conscience survives unscathed, from the exhilaration of the Arab resistance fighters, who rely on terrorist measures in their battle for liberation, including moments of horror when the bombers themselves realize that, by their actions, Arabs would be killed alongside the French, to the French, who express an admiration for the determination of the opposition, yet they rely on their much greater military firepower, turning the region into a police state, but are reduced to using methods of terrorism and torture themselves to counter a largely invisible enemy whose ability to stay united with what seemed like so little was shocking to an established European power that inhabited Algeria for 130 years. This is Frantz Fanon style filmmaking, as never has there been a more Wretched of the Earth style exposé of the devastating effects of Colonialism, where the Motherland pretends to be paternalistically friendly and helpful while draining the nation’s wealth and resources, continually undermining the colonized citizens with humiliating and demeaning racist depictions, where the colonizer continues to exploit the colonized as second class citizens. The similarities to Iraq and the Gaza Strip remain powerfully unsettling. The film was banned in France at the time of its release while winning the Golden Lion as the Best Film of the Venice Film Festival in 1966.
The film remains the seminal work on documenting revolutionary tactics, which includes targeted assassinations of police and bombings in heavily populated European areas, including a truck driver showing early signs of the inclination to become a suicide bomber, while also depicting the anti-terrorist police methods as well, which also include bombings, mass arrests, guarded security check points, and the routine use of torture in interrogation methods. Wasting no time, the film gets into the heart of the action with an opening segment of torture that could just as easily be from Rossellini's OPEN CITY (1945), leading the French to the hiding place of the last head of the Algerian Resistance movement in 1957 before telling the rest of the story in flashback motif, going backwards in time and showing the earlier meetings of organizing the structure of various militant cells which were designed specifically so that information was spread to as few people as possible, limiting the knowledge that each individual may know while still allowing the entire organization to make strategic strikes. My guess is that this technique is still used today, which shows how relevant the film really is, offering what amounts to a timeless perspective while actually documenting a specific historical event. Structurally, the film plays out much like Eisenstein’s BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (1925), which shows the mutiny on a Russian battleship and the rallying of the sympathetic masses in 1905 only to lead to their crushing defeat, documenting the preliminary events that led to such outrage that it sparked the Russian Revolution in 1917. Similarly, Pontecorvo, an Italian Marxist director who commanded the anti-Fascist Milan Resistance in 1943, painstakingly reconstructs actual events that visualizes the birth of Algerian independence, which began as an idea, requiring education of the masses, mobilization of contacts, acts of resistance, and eventually a call to arms. But the French response was swift and demonstrably harsh, turning Algiers into an occupied police state where citizens could be rousted out of their beds at any time and subject to brutal interrogations, with their leaders targeted for arrest, assassination, or extinction. The irony, of course, is that some of the heavy handed French police were former Resistance fighters themselves against the Nazi occupation or survivors of the Holocaust.
Much of the accuracy and rich detail comes from Saadi Yacef, playing Jaffar, who was the actual FLN military chief in 1956 and ‘57, the brains behind the resistance operation until he was captured and sentenced to death, writing his memoirs in prison, Souvenirs de la Bataille d'Alger, published in 1962, the year Algeria obtained their independence, which were used in the making of this movie, where he is also one of the film’s producers. Yacef was eventually pardoned when Charles De Gaulle returned to power and currently serves as a Senator in the Algerian National Assembly. One can’t say enough about the sheer artistry in making this film, where the construction of the story and the use of editing is simply outstanding, while the cinematography by Marcello Gatti shooting without a tripod captures the seedy authenticity in a manner that is unrivalled, taking Italian realism to new heights, displaying the vibrancy of the impoverished Arab quarters like its rarely been seen, using all non-professional actors (except for the French Colonel played by Jean Martin, himself a fierce critic of the French occupation), who comprise a multitude of human faces, showing narrow streets that are always crowded and overpopulated, like a labyrinth where the density is unimaginable, with women dressed from head to toe in long, flowing robes, where the French police in their uniforms couldn’t appear more out of place. Particularly compelling is the integration of sound and music, using the bold percussive sounds of Ennio Morricone to move the action along contrasted against the soft, spiritual sounds of a Bach Passion or an organ Prelude while prisoners are being tortured, also the opening movement of Shostakovich’s 11th Symphony, which was written to commemorate the eerie calm outside the Palace Square in 1905 before unarmed protestors were massacred by the Tsar, mournful music which is heard as the French are conducting raids to round up Resistance fighters who would later be tortured or killed. The film retains an impassioned honesty and a no-nonsense sense of outrage using a staggering, newsreel-like authenticity, providing us with a time capsule view of history in the making. Really, nothing this riveting has ever been made—either before or since.
