The following notes on The Battle of Algiers were written by John Bennett, PhD candidate in the Department of Communication Arts at UW – Madison.A 35mm print of The Battle of Algiers will screen at the Cinematheque on Friday, March 14, 7 p.m. The location is 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Avenue. Admission is free!
By John Bennett
In 1830, the territory we know today as Algeria was seized by the French, thus ending three hundred years of Ottoman rule. After 120 years of French colonialism—characterized largely by the political, economic, and cultural disenfranchisement of Arab and Berber populations—a nationalist rebellion set off by the Algerian Front de liberation nationale (or FLN) on All Saints Day, 1954 roiled the French colony. This rebellion was to plunge France into a protracted war to retain its colonial holdings. After eight years of brutal warfare, the FLN successfully expelled the French and established independence after the signing of the Evian Accords in 1962. The most famous episode of the war is, no doubt, The Battle of Algiers. Beginning in 1956, the battle was marked by an Algerian general strike to draw international attention to the Algerian cause, aggressive French retaliation, Algerian escalation in the form of bombings, and rampant French military use of torture as an interrogation tactic to attempt to crush the FLN’s urban cells. It also marked the arrival of the rebellion to populous urban centers, as most of the war’s action scaled the rugged Atlas Mountains and fringed the barren Sahara. Yet if the Battle of Algiers still burns in our historical memory, it is largely thanks to Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film, The Battle of Algiers, an explosive blow-by-blow account of the battle that seized and squeezed the city in its intense and tragic grasp.
The Battle of Algiers was initiated as a project by Casbah Film, the production house of Saadi Yacef, the FLN leader of the Algiers Autonomous Zone cell of the rebellion during the events depicted in the film. Documents in Pontecorvo’s archive at the Museo nazionale del cinema in Turin indicate that Yacef had approached several Italian directors with experience in political filmmaking, including Francesco Rosi and Luchino Visconti. Eventually, Casbah Film recruited Pontecorvo, not a stranger to political filmmaking: his grim 1960 drama Kapó was one of the very first feature films to depict Nazi extermination camp atrocities in harrowing detail. Pontecorvo and Yacef collaborated closely on the realization of the project, coordinating on the historical fidelity of the battle’s events. Yacef, who had spent much of the war squirreled away in seclusion—first in hiding as a rebellion leader, next in prison awaiting the guillotine after his apprehension by the French (Charles de Gaulle commuted his sentence shortly after coming to power in 1958)—now stepped in front of the camera to play Jafar, a thinly veiled version of himself. Within the drama of the film, Yacef’s associates Larbi Ben M’Hidi and Ali la Pointe were real historical figures, as were Djamila Bouhired and Zohra Drif, the female FLN operatives who Westernized their appearances to pass through French military checkpoints to plant retaliatory bombs in European centers of leisure. The swaggering French Colonel Mathieu, who imposingly storms into the film’s second half, was a composite of French military brass like Jacques Massu or Raoul Salan (the latter of whom helped bring Charles de Gaulle to power in 1958 only to stage a failed putsch against him in dissatisfaction with the prosecution of the war in 1961).
Much has been made of the documentary look and feel of The Battle of Algiers; startling violence spills out of labyrinthine Casbah alleys in ways that feel disturbingly naturalistic, and orienting voice-overs in the form of FLN directives and French military orders float over the film as though they were tapped and recorded from some stolen or confiscated radio. But the film is also a gripping political thriller of the highest order. The film’s framing device—the entrapment of Ali la Pointe in his hideaway—provides the film with a tense dramatic scaffolding. The sequence depicting the planting of the bombs in European milk bars uses cross-cutting to a superlatively suspenseful effect. So remarkable was this combination—a film so realistic in texture yet tenser and more engaging than any action movie—that it was celebrated throughout a world deeply riven by Cold War geopolitics. The film won the Golden Lion at the 1966 Venice Film Festival. In the United States, after opening the New York Film Festival, The Battle of Algiers earned Oscar nominations for Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Foreign Film. In the African context, the film played at the key 1969 Panafrican Cultural Festival in Algiers. The film fared well in revolutionary circles as well; in his thorough tracing of the film’s global circulation, Sohail Daulatzai indicates that the film was embraced by Castro’s Cuba and Palestine’s PLO alike. Only in France (unsurprisingly) was the film’s astounding contribution to world cinema resisted; it was banned from French screens until 1971, when diplomatic relations between the nations experienced a slight thaw. Nevertheless, the unanimity of its global acclaim illustrates how The Battle of Algiers’ ferocious roar of truth could pierce through to hearts and minds, no matter how blinkered by any ideology.
The Battle of Algiers was a crucial early work in Algerian cinema. It is ironic, then, how atypical the film’s production was in the national cinema’s wider context. By 1968—after coproducing Visconti’s 1967 adaptation of Camus’ The Stranger and (somewhat oddly) Enzo Peri’s 1967 spaghetti Western Death Walks in Laredo—Casbah Film had closed shop, and the government had nationalized all aspects of film production, distribution, and exhibition. Through the Office national pour le commerce et l’industrie cinématographique (or ONCIC), housed within the Ministry of Information, the Algerian government produced (on average) a handful of films each year, making for the most robust and structured film industry on the African continent outside of Egypt. In the late 1960s, the Ministry of Information made movies about the FLN’s bid for independence, such as the lyrical The Wind of the Aurès (Lakhdar-Hamina, 1966), the POW drama The Way (Riad, 1968), and the rousing war film Opium and the Stick (Rachedi, 1969). As the 70s progressed, state-produced films turned their attention to pensive studies of belonging in an industrializing society, as in the candy-colored labor dramedy Leïla et les autres (Mazif, 1977) or the power-struggle drama Barrières (Lallem, 1977). The best of these, Omar Gatlato (Allouache, 1976) is one of the very few state-produced Algerian films that can be found on YouTube with English subtitles. These films are all, to one extent or another, political films that tacitly support Algeria’s brand of Arab nationalism as an ideology. Still, despite their state affiliation, they are not jingoistic paeans to the military-backed regime that ran the Algerian government after wartime Colonel Houari Boumediene toppled the government of President Ahmed Ben Bella in a bloodless coup in 1965. Like The Battle of Algiers, they are thoughtful, often stylistically bold and experimental works, and they deserve to occupy a similarly vaunted perch in the history of global cinema as Pontecorvo’s and Yacef’s singular and exciting depiction of the Algerian War’s most dramatic days.