In the history of cinema, few films have been able to transcend their cultural milieu and acquire universal political relevance. One of these films is The Battle of Algiers, directed by the Italian filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo and released in 1966. Shot in Algeria just a few years after the country gained independence from France in 1962, the film revolves around the events of 1957, the year in which the battle between Algerian rebels and French soldiers escalated to a new level of urban violence, featuring indiscriminate torture and terrorism on both sides.

What differentiates Battle from so many other war films is the realistic style in which it was shot, and the intricate details it provides while commenting on the psychology and circumstances of torture and terror. A lean film bereft of superfluity, Battle rarely dallies for long on any one character; the film swiftly moves back and forth through time as it connects different events to provide an understanding of the war with minimal exposition.

Partly based on the prison memoirs of Saadi Yacef, a military commander in the Algerian revolutionary group Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), and partly on ideas developed by Pontecorvo and his regular screenwriter Franco Solinas, the film was also jointly produced and co-financed by Yacef’s production company, Casbah Films. Given this level of involvement by Yacef, and the fact that Pontecorvo and Solinas were Marxists who had fought the fascists in the Second World War, and were influenced by figures such as Frantz Fanon and Antonio Gramsci, one might have expected Battle to be a propagandistic paean to the Algerian struggle. But the creators of the film recognised the importance of not demonising the French or shrinking away from displaying the consequences of Algerian acts of terrorism.

One indicator of this even-handedness appears in the film’s musical score, whereby the cue accompanying scenes of devastation in the Muslim Casbah is the same as that of overlaying scenes of French bombing victims — suggesting an emotional equivalence between deaths of both sides. The historian Alistair Horne, in his seminal book on the Algerian War, titled A Savage War of Peace (i), wrote: “How many other peoples could — within two or three years of the close of an eight-year war that cost the lives of almost one tenth of the population — make a film, La Battaglia di Algeri, where a colonel of the dreaded French paras[paratroopers] appears almost as its hero?” That being said, the film’s ultimate allegiance is to the rebelling Algerians.

The Battle of Algiers gives insight into guerrilla tactics and warfare like no other movie or documentary; a must-watch film, even 50 years after its release

Pontecorvo brought his knowledge of documentary filmmaking to Battle, and his technique was also informed by the Neorealist school of Italian cinema. The result was a film shot in grainy black-and-white with the visual texture of a newsreel; hand-held cameras added to the authenticity, leading to a verisimilitude so great, that even the bold statement at the beginning of the film — that no documentary footage had been used in the making of it — is difficult to believe. Comparing newsreel footage and photographs from the period with scenes from the film demonstrates how little there is between them. But the camera-work alone was not responsible for the film’s realism. Apart from the prominent role of the French Colonel, Mathieu, all of the actors in Battle were non-professionals, chosen more for the character of their faces than for any acting skills they might have possessed.

A scene in which a man is being hauled away to his execution was performed by a man who really was on death row. The role of El-hadi Jaffar, a leader of the FLN, was played by Yacef himself, who insisted on filming in the actual locations where events occurred. This blurring of the line between fiction and reality raises some intriguing questions. When Yacef repeated on set the lines he had uttered years ago in the same location, was he acting? Re-enacting? Is Battle a recreation, a reinvention, or a reimagining? Certainly, the conflating of multiple real-life figures into a single character, the changing of names, and the odd anachronism would seem to indicate the fictional nature of the film. But these cinematic devices all serviced what Pontecorvo called the “dictatorship of truth”, and it is through artifice that the director achieved verity.

To highlight the uniqueness of Battle, one can contrast it with another film on the same subject, released in the same year (and similarly prohibited from being shown in France for years): Mark Robson’s Lost Command. Now largely forgotten, Lost Command features major stars such as Anthony Quinn, Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale, and tends to focus more on the French than the Algerians, but similarly tries to explore the ethical and political questions of the conflict. Its imagery, however, is less energetic than the unforgettably vibrant scenes of Battle that with only minor modifications could be pulled from today’s news screens: the ululations of Arab women, Western soldiers handing out food to natives in order to win their “hearts and minds”, bloodied bodies being pulled from wreckage in the wake of a bomb blast, and so on.

“You know, Ali, 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.” — Ben M’hidi, The Battle of Algiers

The Lost Command, while a notable effort, is a conventional war tale; the darkening make-up applied to the face of a professional American actor in order to make him look like an Arab is miles away from the approach of Pontecorvo. And the uninvolving musical score for the Lost Command does not possess the comparable effect of Ennio Morricone’s use of tense Algerian music in Battle.

Battle’s impact, both in cinematic circles and outside of it, has been immense. Filmmakers inspired by the film over the years include Mira Nair, Oliver Stone, Bernardo Bertolucci, Spike Lee and Costa-Gavras. Steven Soderbergh pointed to it as an influence on his Traffic (2000). Mathieu Kassovitz, whose own masterful La Haine (1995) goes some way to deconstruct notions of Paris as a ‘city of light’, described Battle as “the most beautiful movie ever […] the most amazing movie about war”.

The film has been studied by diverse revolutionary groups across the world such as the Black Panthers, the Red Brigades, the Irish Republican Army and the Tamil Tigers. In 2003, the Pentagon screened the film, and in the same year former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski stated: “If you want to understand what’s happening right now in Iraq, I recommend The Battle of Algiers.”

But one wonders what these groups learned from the film, if anything. Yacef, when asked about the use of the film by both state and non-state organisations, was sceptical: “One has to be very naïve to try to adapt our particular experience to another group’s situation.”

In 2004, an anonymous American soldier told The Washington Post that the mistreatment of prisoners in Iraq was warranted, and paraphrased the character of Colonel Mathieu as saying: “You’re all complaining about the tactics I am using to win the war, but that is what I am doing — winning the war.”

Unfortunately, the American soldier’s understanding of the film and the history it depicts was somewhat limited, for the tactics used by the French were one of the primary reasons that they lost the war. This is not to say that the film does not possess instructional merit; it certainly does. Terrorism expert J. Bowyer Bell in his book, A Time of Terror — How Democratic Societies Respond to Revolutionary Violence (ii), positively cites an assessment made by a former graduate student of his: “All anyone need to know about terrorism could be gained from seeing the film Battle of Algiers”.

But while the film’s insights into the mechanisms of guerrilla operations and counterinsurgency warfare cannot be denied, it should be noted that the film is not by any means a complete account of the Algerian War, and there are many aspects of the conflict that are not touched upon. French involvement in Algeria dated back to the early 19th century. The war for independence lasted almost eight years, with important affairs transpiring in Tunisia and France, and involving other political players ranging from Gamal Abdel Nasser to the Corsican mafia. The infighting within the Algerian leadership and the conflict between De Gaulle and the French military — leading to dozens of assassination attempts against him and near civil war in France — are not referred to in the film. Fortunately, the Criterion edition of the film contains a wealth of contextualising documentary materials and interviews which provide critical perceptions of the war.

The intellectual Edward Said described Battle and Burn! (another anti-colonial film by Pontecorvo) as “the two greatest political films ever made”, adding that both films together “constitute a political and aesthetic standard never again equalled”. Unfortunately, Pontecorvo made very few feature films during his career. “I don’t like the cinema very much,” he once said in conversation with Said. “Film is an extremely unductile medium. On the page, you can be subtle; you can render things with different shades. It’s hard to do the same with film.”

Yet, Pontecorvo’s use of sound and image does manage to invoke sentiments and impart ideas that are not unsubtle. In the final analysis, whatever its limitations, half a century after it was produced The Battle of Algiers still serves as a powerful introduction not only to the Algerian War, but to warfare itself.

The author is an antiquarian and freelance writer

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, July 10th, 2016

(i) The Viking Press, 1978

(ii) Basic Books, 1978