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The Battle of Algiers (La Battaglia di Algeri) [DVD]

Director : Gillo Pontecorvo

Screenplay : Gillo Pontecorvo & Franco Solinas (based on an idea by Saadi Yacef)

MPAA Rating : NR

Year of Release : 1965

Stars : Brahim Haggiag (Ali La Pointe), Jean Martin (Colonel Mathieu), Saadi Yacef (El-hadi Jaffar), Samia Kerbash (Fatiha), Fusia El Kader (Hassiba), Ugo Paletti (The Captain), Mohamed Ben Kassen (Petit Omar)

For many, Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers is the pinnacle of leftwing oppositional cinema, a sharply political film that draws the viewer in with its documentary aesthetic as it relives a crucial moment of anti-colonial resistance. Made in 1965, a scant three years after Algeria had won its freedom from France, The Battle of Algiers is shockingly relevant today in the way it casts a troublingly symapthetic light on those who are so easily deemed “terrorists.” Pontecorvo, who was active in the Italian resistance to Mussolini during World War II, puts a human face on the atrocities committed by both sides, showing that war is always ugly, particularly in its necessity.

Drawing from the socialist imperative best exemplified in the early works of Soviet directors like Sergei Eisenstein, Pontecorvo resists the urge to locate heroism in a single individual, instead relying on a collective protagonist to tell his story. No one man or woman was responsible for Algeria winning its independence after nearly 150 years of colonial rule, thus Pontecorvo focuses on dozens of major characters, some of whom only occupy the screen for a few moments, but still leave a lasting impression. It is tempting to see Ali La Pointe (Brahim Haggiag), an illiterate thief whose political consciousness is raised and who eventually becomes a crucial leader in the Algerian resistance, as a protagonist of sorts, but at best he is a metonym, a cinematic symbol who stands in for the hundreds of young men who found a calling in political resistance, thus giving definition to their lives. We remember Ali La Pointe because he appears in more scenes than any other character, but he is no more memorable than the faces we see standing in lines waiting to go through checkpoints or the three young women who disguise themselves as Europeans in order to plant bombs in French cafes.

Part of the film’s success is due to Pontecorvo’s insistence that nonactors fill the majority of roles. Like Vittorio de Sica and other proponents of neorealism, Pontecorvo realized that real faces have an incredible power on the screen that transends any lack of formal training in the art of acting. Because most of the people cast in The Battle of Algiers were essentially playing themselves, there was little or no “acting” required. They simply had to project themselves back a few years into history and relive the struggle. Pontecorvo even got Saadi Yacef, a leader in the Algerian Liberation Front (FLN) who produced the film and whose memoirs served as its inspiration, to play a variation of himself on-screen. The only professional actor who appears in the film is stage veteran Jean Martin, who plays French Colonel Mathieu, the man taxed with the difficult job of putting down the resistance.

The effectiveness of the nonactors is enhanced by Pontecorvo’s decision to shoot The Battle of Algiers in a handheld documentary style that makes it at times indistinguishable from the newsreels documenting the actual events. He refused to shoot in color, and even selected film stock that would enhance the graininess of the image, giving it a rough texture and feel of actuality. However, as powerful as the documentary style is, particularly when depicting moments of violence, the film works so well because Pontecorvo seamlessly integrates it with subtle moments of subjective filmmaking that draw us into the characters’ experiences in the way a newsreel never could. The best example of this is the sequence when three Algerian women secretly plant bombs in crowded civilian locations. One woman who leaves hers in a French cafe can’t resist looking around at all the people—innocent and otherwise—who have absolutely no idea that they are about to die. Pontecorvo dares us to look these people, knowing that they will soon be victims, which forces us to ask the hard questions about the nature of war and resistance and what is justified and what is not.

The Battle of Algiers could have easily become a simplistic romanticization of leftwing rebellion against colonial oppression, but Pontecorvo again refuses to go with easy answers. Rather than portraying everything from the Algerian point of view, he also looks at things from the French side, showing that colonialism is a complex cultural phenomenon that cannot be simplisticly diluted down to a binary of evil oppressors and innocent oppressed. This is best illustrated in the film’s use of the same music at two different points in the film as the camera surveys the death of destruction caused by both sides; the message is that death is always a tragedy.

As much as it looks at both sides, though, The Battle of Algiers does have a clearly distinguished point of view. Pontecorvo is on the side of the Algerians, and he views their fight for freedom as necessary and moral, despite their use of tactics that are, for lack of a better word, “terrorism.” Yet, this does not mean that he wholeheartedly embraces the violence that emerges from such resistance, and the film continues to move audiences precisely because of the poetic way in which it depicts the humanity of all sides, even when one is in the wrong.

Copyright ©2004 James Kendrick

All images Copyright © The Criterion Collection