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It's hard to start a revolution. Even harder to continue it. And hardest of all to win it. But, it's only afterwards, when we have won, that the true difficulties begin. In short, Ali, there's still much to do.
The Battle of Algiers (La battaglia di Algeri), Gillo Pontecorvo (1966)
Col. Mathieu: “We aren't madmen or sadists, gentlemen. Those who call us Fascists today, forget the contribution that many of us made to the Resistance. Those who call us Nazis, don't know that among us there are survivors of Dachau and Buchenwald. We are soldiers and our only duty is to win.”
Viva la revolución? The four Zapata Westerns (co)written by Franco Solinas, (co)writer of Salvatore Giuliano (1962), La battaglia di Algeri (1966) and État de siège (1972).
La resa dei conti (Sergio Sollima, 1966) aka The Big Gundown
Quién sabe? (Damiano Damiani, 1967) aka A Bullet for the General
Il mercenario (Sergio Corbucci, 1968) aka A Professional Gun
The Battle of Algiers (1966). In the 1950s, fear and violence escalate as the people of Algiers fight for independence from the French government.
To say this is a harrowing film is a pretty significant understatement. It’s incredibly dark, violent and difficult to watch, but also reflective of a time that was difficult to live. It’s compelling, with brilliant performances and some terrific cinematography. Definitely one to check out. 8/10.
[Originally published in Movietone News 30, March 1974]
Several months after its intended opening and a good seven or eight months behind the rest of the country, State of Siege has arrived. If the event is somewhat anticlimactic, it was scarcely expected to be otherwise. Costa-Gavras’s previous picture, The Confession, while exemplarily evenhanded in terms of the director’s career (leftist…
You don't attack colonialism for using torture. If you like, you can call torture only the 'signal' indicating a decaying situation; but do not wait for the exposure of torture to become aware of the colonial situation. If you do, you are both irresponsible and naïve. The Algerian colonial situation was rotten long before torture became an issue. The truth of the matter is that France never considered the problem. The colonial situation interested her only indirectly and vaguely. Even the French Left held an ambiguous position regarding the problem. Suddenly the question of torture explodes and in France they say it's 'unethical' to torture. Then and only then is the Algerian war a 'dirty war,' colonialism wrong, and the French position anti-historical. In my opinion, this kind of reasoning is hypocritical because war is -not- ethics, war is -not- fair play. You can find the same attitude in the U.S. now where every once in a while people remember to be shocked by Vietnam. They are shocked by the occasional newspaper disclosures about the shattering effect of some of the weapons being used in the war. Yet they never really question the war itself. Once it was napalm for the defoliants, then the plastic pellet bombs or carpet bombing. Those plastic pellets, for example, are not detected by X-rays and inevitably cause death. It is the same attitude--a romantic, nineteenth-century attitude--that led to the Geneva Convention, which established the rules for the kinds of bullets allowed in war. For instance, the dum-dum bullet is not permitted. Bullets must have a copper nose, which, unlike lead, has some solidity and does not expand upon hitting the bones. Thus, only if a man is wounded in a vital part does he die; if he's wounded in nonvital parts, he survives. This kind of reasoning is ridiculous. For centuries they've tried to prove that war is fair play, just like duels; but war is not, and therefore any method used to fight it is good. When French intelligence proved that the Algerians also used torture--and they did, too--the entire group of French intellectuals was again shocked and began saying, 'Well, if the Algerians do it too, then...' So the discussion was again about fair play. But that's not the point. It is not a question of ethics or fair play. What we must attack is war itself and the situations that lead to it, not the methods used to fight it. Actually, [Colonel] Mathieu is extremely sincere when he rationally and pitilessly says that torture is inevitable and that those who want a French Algeria must steel themselves to it. If his position is immoral and inhuman because it tries to halt a historical process, at least he is honest in his dishonesty. He dispenses with hypocrisy. He has no use for it.
Franco Solinas (from a 1972 interview about The Battle of Algiers)
Introduction to LA BATTAGLIA D'ALGERI (THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS, Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966)
Born in blood
La battagli d’Algeri is a film about terrorism that celebrates the violent ritual of the birth of the nation of Algeria. In this 1966 film, by the Italian director and screenwriter team of Gillo Pontecorvo and Franco Solinas, the death of the ‘terrorists’ is the necessary blood sacrifice that releases the popular uprising, and ultimately therefore the Algerian nation from the yoke of the coloniser.
The production
Algeria achieved liberation from the French in 1962 after a very bitter struggle. Some years later Pontecorvo and Solinas were approached by Yacef Saadi, a former commander of the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) which had fought against the French in Algeria. Saadi owned a production house, Casbah Films, with considerable funds at its disposal and was looking for a director who would immortalize on screen the Algerian war for national liberation. He had already been rejected by the French film world (and The Battle of Algiers would eventually be banned in France for some years) and so approached Pontecorvo and Solinas with, apparently, a crudely celebratory script. Pontecorvo and Solinas accepted the project on condition that they could re-write the script in a more ‘objective’ mode.
Arguably, The Battle of Algiers is a choral film whose protagonists are the Algerians themselves, even if the film focuses on two main protagonists – a thief turned liberation fighter called Ali La Pointe and his nemesis, a French colonel called Mathieu (see the images above). Their story is superseded, though, with an exhilarating closing sequence showing the Algerian ‘crowd’ demanding independence… pride… freedom…
Violence, legitimacy and history
Notice the careful balance maintained in the film between the representation of French and Algerian violence, even if viewer empathy will ultimately reside with the Algerians. There are terrorist bombings on both sides (the first is committed by the French), and images of the victims are accompanied by same music (the St Matthew Passion by JS Bach, also used elsewhere to indicate the cost of war). The assassinations of police by Algerians is juxtaposed with the torture and killing in captivity by the French of the Algerian fighters. Notably, however, the torture by the French is not sadistic (that is to say, it is not arbitrary) but associated with Colonel Mathieu, the soldier in charge of repressing the Algerian rebellion in the casbah. Screenwriter Franco Solinas stated that Mathieu ‘was not a realistic character in the traditional sense but an embodiment of rationality’ (Harrison 2009: 393). We’re used to the term ‘senseless violence’, but Mathieu’s is shown to be a violence with ‘sense’: it is thought through and rational. So, however, is the revolutionary violence of the Algerians (apart from an odd scene where two men cause carnage in a stolen ambulance – perhaps included to indicate the desperation of the local populace, and to balance the racist violence that the pieds noirs, the French settlers, are shown to perpetrate on Algerian workers).
Viewer sympathy is encouraged to be with the Algerians: but how so? A scene where a French policeman is shot in the back by an Algerian teenager is indicative. The handsome young man is first bullied by the suspicious policeman, so that our sympathy goes to the boy before he guns down the Frenchman in cold blood. But most importantly, his action is seen as part of a collective action against the French: this is a national war of liberation and the film ‘knows’ that history is on the side of the Algerians. It requires us to consider the terrible cost of violence, but asks us to agree that Algerian violence was justified because necessary as part of a collective struggle to achieve liberation (and, again, this is something emphasised by the exhilarating final sequence).
Space
Michel De Certeau has talked about two different modes of experiencing the city: that of the overview, the high viewpoint and the map, associated with surveillance, planning and control; that of the street level, of walking rather than mere vision, a mode associated with resistance. In the film, this division is rendered relatively neatly, respectively as a division between the French and the Algerian perspectives, something also encouraged by the very design of the old (Algerian) and new (European) parts of the city. In the seminar, my host Shoba Ghosh of the Mumbai dept. of English also pointed out how the spaces were associated with particular sounds (of which more below).
Photography
The first thing to notice is that the film is in black and white – a conspicuous ‘choice’ by 1966 of course. Here it is used for a cinema vérité feel, and the film stock is deliberately distressed to recall the grainy images of newsreel. This effect is aided by the frequent use of telephoto lenses, which flatten the space, and of apparently hand held cameras (which were heavy at the time); both give a sense of witnessing as if we are present at history being made. There is also, however, a striking use of wide angle lenses for unusual compositions, often with an extra located in the extreme foreground. The images seem to be a combination of artfulness in the powerful composition and a seeming randomness that connotes ‘reality’, because of regular foregrounding of non-protagonist.
Soundtrack
All the dialogue in the film is post-synchronised (recorded and dubbed later) – typical of the approach in Italy at least until recently. This post-synchronisation is one facet of a soundtrack designed with extreme care. I’ve already mentioned the use of the music of Bach, but the great Ennio Morricone was responsible for the composed score (along with the director himself), and it makes use of what I suspect are indigenous drums and wind instruments, as well as conspicuous and spare ‘tension raising’ motifs, and so on. Many scenes have no musical accompaniment though – like the disorientating opening scene showing the aftermath of torture. At other times, images are rendered more potent by not being granted the soundtrack we expect. The most powerful example is of the local women keening in grief for the victims of a bomb: we hear the Bach music and the sound of rubble being cleared, but no sound of the wailing so strongly present on the visual track.
You will certainly be struck by the amazing ululation sounds made by the local women during protest sequences – especially during the closing scenes. Is this use of ululation intended to give a sense of the alien? If so, it raises the question of address; that is, who is the film intended to be seen by? Another aspect of the soundtrack might suggest the answer: the use of voiceover. The authoritative commentary, often implied to be the voice of anonymous journalists, is in French. Of course, many Algerians speak and spoke French, but the tone and language of the voiceover suggest that this is a film made to be seen beyond Algeria: if it’s a film commissioned by the Algerians to celebrate their own liberation, it is also a celebration that is addressed to, and intended to be seen, beyond Algeria’s borders, by the ‘world’. As I discuss below, the film seems to fulfil the function of a ‘national cinema’ as described by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (1999: 76): ‘not just the national production registered in a particular country but a cinema which in some way signifies itself to its audiences as the cinema through which that country speaks.’
Women and children
A quick web search reveals that the use of women as revolutionary agents (and ‘gendered nationalism’) in the film has been discussed by several writers, as here and here, and in the special issue of the journal Interventions (9: 3, 2007) devoted to the film.
For more on these images, see my discussion of Pina in Roma città aperta
The powerfully emotive and rhetorical use of children in the film seems to have been less discussed (see here for one take, really on the representation of violence in the film). It’s worth simply registering every time a child or children feature in the shot, and asking yourself why they are there. The fraternal relationship of Ali and the boy who dies with him - along with a female revolutionary we have seen earlier plant a bomb, and a young husband – is of obvious importance. (We have seen the young man marry earlier in the film. His wife survives the French crackdown on the FLN in the casbah and her pregnancy signifies futurity and hope, even if this is contradicted by the death of the young boy with Ali.)
I hate to do this (for reasons explained here), but I think we need partly (only partly!) to contextualize the use of children in terms of the filmmakers’ acknowledged debt to the Italian neorealist filmmaking of the immediate post-WWII period.
Just a pair of images to illustrate this. The first shows a child abanadoned after its parents are murdered by German soldiers in Paisa' (Roberto Rossellini, 1946). The second, from The Battle of Algiers, shows a child distraught and abandoned after its parents are taken away by the French. The fate of both children is never clarified.
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References
Harrison, Nicholas (2007), “Pontecorvo’s Documentary Aesthetics: The Battle of Algiers and the Battle of Algiers”, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 9: 3, 389-404
Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey (1999) ‘Italian Neo-realism’, in Pam Cook and Mieke Bernink (eds), The Cinema Book, 2nd edn (London: British Film Institute), pp. 76-80
The first part of this introduction relies on material co-written with my good friend and colleague Neelam Srivastava (Newcastle University) in our article 'Violence and the Wretched: The Cinema of Gillo Pontecorvo', The Italianist, 29: 2 (2009), 249-64.
Other literature on the film
There is a lot of material available on The Battle of Algiers, or on its director and other filmmakers, but it is rather dispersed, and much of it is repetitive across texts; some of the material is celebratory, on the one hand, or critical (even outright disapproving) from ideological or historiographical perspectives, on the other. There is a virtual hillock of short analyses of the film on the web, often written by those who teach the film. An excellent annotated bibliography of printed material, by Nicholas Harrison, is available (for a charge) from Oxford Bibliographies at http://tinyurl.com/mxdo5s6, and Harrison is also the editor of one of the two essential volumes on the film, a special issue of the academic journal Interventions (9: 3, 2007); this has material on the film’s production, reception and aesthetics, as well as on questions of historical and gender representation. The other essential volume, and the closest competitor for a BFI Classics book, is Joan Mellen’s Filmguide to ‘The Battle of Algiers’ (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973). This is an intelligent and well informed short introduction to the film, but it is (inevitably) rather dated and has long been out of print.
I am writing a book myself on the film, which argues that The Battle of Algiers is that it is a birth of a nation film unabashed in its employment of a melodramatic mode – and that this is no bad thing. The goal of the book is to recuperate melodrama as a powerful, complex and pre-eminent mode of historical representation, as exemplified in the film. This theme will be articulated through three main sub-themes: the telling employment of location in the film; the extent to which The Battle of Algiers ‘speaks for Algeria’, and in what ways this might be so; the multiple character of historical temporalities as constructed in the film.
Apart from the material above, the following two essays have particularly informed my thinking in planning the book:
Murray Smith “The Battle of Algiers: Colonial Struggle and Collective Allegiance”, in Terrorism, Media, Liberation, ed. by J. David Slocum (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005), pp. 94–110 (originally published 1997). Uses Smith’s own influential notions of ‘alignment’ and ‘allegiance’ (with characters) to enable a sophisticated analysis of the address in the film. Smith considers what the film presents to deliberately appeal to the European (and culturally Christian) viewer.
Emily Tomlinson ‘“Rebirth in Sorrow”: La bataille d’Algier’, French Studies,58: 3 (2004), pp. 357–70. Close reading which makes use of Derrida’s idea of ‘hauntology’ to discuss questions of torture and temporality in the film.
I am also very interested in the challenge to ideas of periodicity by German historian Reinhart Koselleck, who argued that multiple temporalities co-exist and overlay each other in so-called unitary periods – and in individual texts. Koselleck has an analysis of the historical painting ‘Alexanderschlacht’ (1528) by Albrecht Altdorfer in which he argues that the painting at once ‘freezes’ history (it pictures the moment of the rout of the Persian army by Alexander the Great) but is rich with traces of the longue durée and future in its employment of anachronism and hindsight. Such an analysis offers a means to better understand the positing of historical inevitabilities that have offended some critics of The Battle of Algiers.
