Cinema: Winning the battle, losing the war
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.