THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS Movie Review
La Bataille d'Alger
La Battaglia di Algeri
1966 Gillo Pontecorvo
In the mid-1960s, while Truman Capote was creating his “non-fiction novel” In Cold Blood, Italian writer-director Gillo Pontecorvo applied the same techniques to film. The Battle of Algiers has been just as popular with critics and audiences as Capote's work, and, if anything, it has grown more impressive with age. Pontecorvo's cinema verite style has often been copied, but his ability to combine passionate political belief with cold professional style is His subject is three critical years in the Algerian rebellion against French colonial occupation.
He begins the story in 1957, with a stunning scene. French soldiers have just finished the successful torture of an Arab prisoner. None of the horror is shown; the man's shattered reaction is enough to tell us what has happened, and his captors' solicitous reaction to his confession makes the scene even more unnerving. As the French close in on their real target, Ali La Pointe (Brahim Haggiag), the scene shifts to 1954. Ali's transformation from street hustler to revolutionary leader parallels the growth of the F.L.N. (Front de Liberation Nationale) as a significant opposition force to the French. Through assassination and intimidation, the group spreads its message of Islamic fundamentalism. Eventually, Col. Mathieu (Jean Martin) is brought in to deal with them. That's where the film begins to confound expectations and conventions.
Mathieu, who should be the villain, is an attractive figure—Martin is the only professional actor in the cast—who's simply there to do a job. If anything, he is in agreement with the aims of the F.L.N., but that doesn't change his tactics. And while Pontecorvo is clearly sympathetic to the Arab cause, he takes pains to show the human cost of terrorism. Perhaps the finest sequence follows three Arab women as they alter their appearances and identities, then are given bombs in handbags to plant in public places. At the time the film was made, it was criticized as an instruction manual for terrorists, and was banned in France. Today, the methods that it details are commonplace. Anyone who has followed the news has seen the same scenario played out from Belfast to Beirut. In 1965, it was more exceptional.
Pontecorvo, however, handles the distribution of the bombs with matter-of-fact realism. He and cinematographer Marcello Gatti use hand-held cameras, grainy black-and-white film, and long lenses to give the action a depersonalized quality. The characters deliberately lack identities, too. The audience is not meant to empathize with any of them on an individual basis. Instead, like Eisenstein's sailors in Battleship Potemkin, they're part of history in the making, replaceable figures who either advance or retard inevitable political tides. Despite that emotional detachment, the film is remarkably involving. Pontecorvo knows how to create and sustain suspense, and so he engages the audience on a voyeuristic level, if not an emotional one. You want to know what's going to happen next.
In fact, the film so deftly captured the tumultuous politics of the time that it was nominated for a Best Foreign Language Academy Award in 1966, and two years later, Pontecorvo was nominated as Best Director.
Cast: Yacef Saadi (Kader), Jean Martin (Col. Mathieu), Brahim Haggiag (Ali La Pointe), Tommaso Neri (Captain), Samia Kerbash (One of the girls), Fawzia el Kader (Halima), Michele Kerbash (Fathia), Mohamed Ben Kassen (Petit Omar); Written by: Gillo Pontecorvo, Franco Solinas; Cinematography by: Marcello Gatti; Music by: Gillo Pontecorvo, Ennio Morricone. Producer: Antonio Musu, Yacef Saadi, Casbah Igor Films. Algerian, Italian. Awards: Venice Film Festival '66: Best Film; Nominations: Academy Awards '66: Best Foreign Film; Academy Awards '68: Best Director (Pontecorvo), Best Story & Screenplay. Running Time: 123 minutes. Format: VHS, Beta, LV.