Gillo
Pontecorvo, 1965, Italy/Algeria, 120 mins, subtitles
Cast: Brahim Haggiag, Jean Martin, Saadi Yacef
Review by Michael Bartlett
As the crisis in Iraq
rumbles on and threats of terrorism still hang in the air,
it may seem an odd – or
is that very apposite – time to wheel out a film which
celebrates the victory of Islamic guerrillas over a white
colonial force. Pontecorvo’s film of the Algerian struggle
for independence has always been a hot potato – it
was banned in France for many years and the graphic scenes
of torture inflicted by the French on their prisoners were
cut from British and American release prints. It trails an
uneasy history of being used by the Black Panthers for training
purposes and the US government for developing anti-terrorist
strategies. All allegedly, of course. Now resurrected in
a restored version, it can’t help but be seen in the
light of the equally uneasy developments in the Middle East.
The important thing to remember about
Pontecorvo’s
film, however, is that, while it is extremely partisan towards
the Algerian fighters and not “admirably unbiased” as
some critics have claimed, it still recognises that their
use of violence causes agony and misery. The scenes where
French victims are dragged from a bombed-out café are
horrific and never stint from showing the true devastation
of the explosion. On the other hand, in this new print, one
can see just how far Pontecorvo went in representing the
horrors endured by prisoners under the French regime. In
other words, it’s a political film that does not load
the dice in its favour. It doesn’t omit any details
to make its argument easier to swallow – instead, it
takes account of both sides’ point of view, and, in
doing so, makes its pro-Algerian stance all the stronger
and more supportable.
But if this makes The Battle of Algiers
sound like dull, didactic agitprop, it’s also worth noting that Pontecorvo
puts film first, argument second. The whole thing is driven
along by a pounding Ennio Morricone score and is dynamically
shot and edited. But it’s no Hollywood blockbuster,
either – this isn’t politics served up as melodrama
or middlebrow entertainment. In fact, it’s a “naked” film,
where the style is shorn of fancy effects and lush cinematography.
Pontecorvo was bitterly criticised by Jacques Rivette and
Serge Daney, among others, for a particular sequence in his
Holocaust drama Kapo (1960), where he was accused of using
a long tracking shot to compose a tableau of a woman spreadeagled
on barbed wire. The critics felt this “prettification” of
misery was abhorrent. In The Battle of Algiers, nothing is
elegant, every resource is limited to make the film seem
more like newsreel, shot as it is on hand-held camera with
cheap stock and using diffused light. Each stretch of action,
each murder, each sacrifice is treated with the same bluntness,
so that the removal of a veil and the cutting of a woman’s
hair can seem as brutal and as shocking as the bomb she will
lay in the city streets.
And this “nakedness” is wholly apt for a film
that presents its point of view in similarly stark terms.
No woolly liberalism here, but harsh truths – that
violence is necessary to overcome an oppressor, is necessary
to get the international community’s attention, is
necessary to win freedom. And as in Pontecorvo’s much
underrated Burn! (1970), the director has the courage to
show that the violence will have to be led by those that
are capable of carrying it out. Not the diplomats, the talkers,
but perhaps the drifter with a history of juvenile delinquence,
as is the case here, or the slave who is so recklessly aggressive
as to fight back, as in Burn! And in a superb twist, Pontecorvo
forces the French audience to recognise themselves in this
struggle by making the colonial general an ex-Resistance
member, another man who once needed recourse to sabotage
and terror.
In other words, this film is informed
by the rhetoric of true revolution, not the “champagne socialist” revolution
dreamt about by the Leftist intellectuals of ’68. We
may see Pontecorvo’s film as an antecedent or even
cause of their delusions but let’s not “shoot
the messenger”. Ultimately, The Battle of Algiers is
a searing indictment of imperialism and the bloodshed it
enforces both upon the oppressors and the oppressed. That
it remains supremely relevant today is a compliment for Pontecorvo
but a bitter reproach for the rest of us.
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