Review: The Battle of Algiers Gillo Pontecorvo was a director way ahead of his time. He directed two anti-colonialism in the 1960, when most of the movie-going audience was probably comfortably numb to the plight of the Third World. He created a film genre (anti-colonialism) that while at first controversial would eventually become a mainstream source for modern classics. He was one of the first directors to take on the challenging subjects of terrorism and torture, in an era where the preferred treatment of the historical film was sterilization, not realism. Pontecorvo portrayed women realistically, not as an idealized pieces of scenery. Most important, Pontecorvo achieved the admirable feat of creating films that accurately reflected historical accuracy and cinematic excellence. And he did all this while advancing a political thesis. In The Battle of Algiers (1966) Gillo Ponetcorvo uses factual content extrapolated from the history of the Algerian War to demonstrate a historical lesson: to defeat an ideologically entrenched, locally supported underground nationalist movement, you must employ measures (suppression of civil liberties, police brutality, military aggression, and eventually torture) that while crucial to winning battles against underground networks (like the FLN in Algiers) in the short run, these counter-insurgency actions will ultimately serve to bolster the opposition to authority in the long run. Eventually, as Pontecorvo's coda suggests, the tactics of the counter-insurgency will validate the nationalists' ideological protests and the result will be a revolutionary tidal wave against the colonizer (France) making occupation untenable. Pontecorvo's film is framed, quite dramatically around the death of an FLN (Front de Libération Nationale) leader, Ali la Pointe. The film opens with the surreal interrogation of one of la Pointe's men, who unable to hold out against the French paratroopers and their painful devices, gives up la Pointe's location. After surrounding the safe-house, French paratroopers give la Pointe a final ultimatum: surrender or the entire building will be demolished with you inside it. Then the film flashes back to la Pointe's days as a low-level hoodlum working the streets of Algiers. He is sentenced to prison for assaulting a police officer and while in prison he undergoes the process of radicalization. Here becomes aware of the penalty the French have reserved for those who dare to wage war in the name of Algerian nationalism: the guillotine. Upon his release from prison, la Pointe is asked to assassinate a French policeman who is gleaning information about the FLN from a local merchant. La Pointe follows through with his mission, only to learn that the gun provided by the FLN had no bullets in it. Initially enraged, he learns that he has past the FLN's "test" for new recruits. Had he been a spy, he would never have fired the weapon at a policeman. La Pointe meets El-Hadi Jaffa, who is played by Saadi Yacef (a real FLN leader involved in the Battle of Algiers). Together they attempt to reform the Casbah, which is truly an effort to remove the European cultural elements from local Arab society. As such, drinking alcohol and smoking are immediately banned. It is significant to mention that the European descendents living in Algeria, or pied noirs (literally "black feet") built a prominent economy in Algeria based on tobacco and viticulture. Thus this when the FLN denounced alcohol and tobacco, they are denouncing economic imperialism as well. Further, la Pointe and Jaffa will not stand the prostitution of Arab women to the pied noirs and la Pointe makes this clear when he guns down a known pimp. With the 150,000 inhabitants of the Casbah seemingly in-step with la Pointe and the FLN, the battle turns to the pied noir. There are series of assassinations of policemen and politicians perpetrated by the FLN. The French respond with increased security, including sealing off the Casbah and monitoring the entry/exit points. When the leaders of the FLN get word that the Algerian Question is not receiving much attention at the UN headquarters in New York, the organization decides to draw attention to the issue by issuing a general strike. The French respond by calling for reinforcements, and the paratroopers descend on Algiers lead by the cool, unflappable Colonel Mathieu, who wears sunglasses and a beret. Tensions escalate when the paratroopers use brutality to end the strike, asserting primitive force over the ill-equipped civilian population in the Casbah. Not satisfied with the breaking of the strike, a group of unnamed pied noirs take matters into their own hands when they slip into the Casbah to plant a bomb at what they believe to be an FLN safe-house. The bomb takes the lives of many innocents in the Casbah and the FLN acts immediately and vengefully. Three women disguise themselves as Westerners, slip past the paratroopers and plant bombs that devastate the pied noir community. Unwilling to accept the continuation of a conflict where civilians fear for their lives while trying to lead routine lives, the French approve the use of torture to obtain valuable intelligence concerning the whereabouts of key FLN members. Colonel Mathieu gives a convincing explanation of these processes and proclaims that "torture is not a word we use." However, torture is what he and the paratroopers use to tack the FLN apart one cell at a time. Some FLN members choose suicide over surrender, and other decide that suicide is pointless before dropping their arms. In the climactic final sequence, Jaffa surrenders to the French and the plot arrives at the beginning, with Ali la Pointe and two accomplices trapped by the French paratroopers. They refuse to surrender, Mathieu gives the order to demolish the building, and so ends the Battle of Algiers. However, the film's coda skips ahead to 1960 and the spontaneous protests against French rule that eventually forced Charles de Gaulle to grant Algerian independence in 1962. Pontecorvo's focus on women in Algiers may be at times subtle, and the female characters are certainly portrayed as subordinate to the male characters (such as Colonel Mathieu, Ali la Pointe or El-Hadi Jaffa), but Pontecorvo clearly establishes the significant role played by women during the Battle of Algiers in 1956-1957. Early in the film women are defended by FLN as a crackdown on vices such as drugs, alcohol and prostitution filters through the Casbah. Women are on several occasions shown as accomplices in assassinations, risking their lives to deliver weapons and even shield the assassins as they take aim. The film's most crucial sequence, that of the September 1956 bombings, is centralized around the three women who delivered the bombs. Later, an Arab woman risks her life to hide Ali la Pointe and El-Hadi Jaffa. When the French Paratroopers snare Jaffa in a hidden compartment, at his side and ready to die for the cause is Zohra Drif. And as the film reaches its dramatic conclusion, a steadfast Samia Lakhdari chooses death over surrender beside Ali la Pointe when faced with the same fate as Jaffa and Drif. In additional footage provided with the Criterion Collection version of The Battle of Algiers, Zohra Drif comments on this theme by asserting that despite popular myths about the Arab suppression of women and the nature of European gender roles, in Algeria women have long since been equal partners in society. In one of the film's most griping and more intensely dramatic scenes, Pontecorvo recreates the September 1956 bombings of three pied noir targets with near-perfect historical accuracy, but also with the dramatic elements which a film needs to satisfy a non-academic audience. The bombings, which were in fact retaliations for the horrific pied noir bombing of a residence believed to be housing FLN rebels in the Casbah, were carried out by three young Arab women: Zohra Drif, Djamila Bouhired and Samia Lakhdari. Pontecorvo's sequences of the September 30 bombings begins in the Casbah, as Morricone's sullen death-score conveys the sense of tragedy in the aftermath of the attack on Rue de Thebes. While the bombing may have been meant to target an FLN safe-house, the explosives planted by pied noir members acting in the role of precursors to the O.A.S. had enough force to level three buildings and kill seventy Arabs. Most, if not all, of these victims were innocent and among them were scores of women and children. The director then cuts to three women who remove their veils and immediately begin the methodical transformation from Arab to European appearance as they lighten their hair, apply make-up and adorn clothing that might suggest their destination was the beach. Playing himself under the pseudonym El-Hadi Jaffa, Saddi Yacef reluctantly wishes the women good luck as they are about to become cold-blooded killers in effort to advance the cause of Algerian nationalism. When the women pass through the security checkpoints at the border between the Casbah and pied noir Algiers, their intent is rendezvous with Jaffa/Yacef's chief technician Taleb Abderrahmane. Once armed, the women plant several deadly bombs in public places frequented by pied noir men, women and children, including a cafeteria frequented by pied noir families on their way back from the beach and a milk bar popular with young pied noirs. Here, as the women deposit their deadly cargo in non-military destinations, Pontecorvo uses historical truth to create dramatic irony for his audience. First, as Zohra Drif passes through a tightly guarded security checkpoint on her way to set a deadly explosive at a pied noir milk bar, she is stopped by a Zouave not because he suspected her involvement with the FLN, but because he wanted to flirt with her. Later, the director chooses to show a subtle, almost superfluous interaction between a pied noir man in a suit and Samia Lakhdari at the cafeteria's bar. The unknowing pied noir first offers his seat to Samia, and after she has plants her bomb and tries, coolly, to escape he remarks what a pity it is that she is leaving so suddenly, as he looks her up and down with an air of arrogance and of chauvinism. But Pontecorvo's Algiers is no blind pro-revolutionary propaganda film either, and while his favoritism for the nationalists is noticeable, his treatment of these atrocious events is both delicate and admirably balanced. In the sequence he gives the innocent victims of the FLN retaliatory bombings ample and favorable time on screen. Unknowing civilians congregate around tables: men, women and children. A child licks a scoop of ice cream right and then the first bomb explodes. Young pied noirs hear the explosion and almost avert disaster as they exit the milk bar where music blares from a jukebox, but they unknowingly go back to their dancing when the second bomb explodes, turning the glass covering the walls turns into deadly shrapnel. The nature of these bombings is certainly not heroic, but rather brutal, callous, and intentionally deadly. The sequence concludes as it began, with Morricone's same sullen score mourning the pied noir dead innocents, just as it did for the Algerians. The only inaccuracy in the scene is the quite audible third explosion, which suggests to the viewer that Djamila Bouhired's third device exploded successfully at the Air France terminal where Pontecorvo shows her placing the bomb. In reality, a faulty timer prevented the detonation of this third bomb, and Pontecorvo never addressed the reasoning for this subtle alteration of history. Another major criticism of the film is that of Pontecorvo's decision to omit the context of overall Algerian War from his film. In fact, without reading a work of historical scholarship such as Alistair Horne's A Savage War of Peace, the casual viewer would be completely devoid of the true nature of the conflict, and how exactly the Battle of Algiers fits into the context of the war. For example, it may be convenient for Pontecorvo to start his film by showing the process of radicalization of Ali la Pointe, but he does not consider extending the same courtesy to the French composite character Colonel Mathieu. Had he done so, he might have drawn on countless recorded incidents of FLN sponsored atrocities against pied noir civilians (including women and children) that occurred in places like Philppeville. As Alistair Horne recounts, the Algerian War was noted for atrocities committed by both sides:
Among the other butchery, at Ain-Abid an entire pied noir family called Mello perished atrociously: a seventy-three-year-old grandmother and eleven-year-old daughter, the father killed in his bed, with his arms and legs hacked off. The mother had been disemboweled, her five day-day-old baby slashed to death and replaced in her open womb.
One other opportunity was missed by Pontecorvo in the production of this film. While the conceptualization of the Casbah as separate from the rest of Algiers is consistent, the film does little to show the racial segregation which defined Algiers prior to the escalation of the conflict. In one of the special features which accompanies the film, Saadi Yacef and Zohra Drif comment that the beaches in Algiers were strictly segregated, with the best beaches being reserved for pied noirs. By omitting this "North African Apartheid", Pontecorvo misses and opportunity to engage the topic of race in colonialism, something a historian would not forgive were Mr. Pontecorvo's film be used as a substitute for a scholarly text. Several historical circumstances make Pontecorvo's treatment of this sequence so profoundly significant. First is that he shot Algiers (1966) at what can generally be called the end of postwar decolonization. The story of French Indochina (Vietnam) and the British partition of India and Pakistan have been quite publicized. France granted independence to Tunisia and Morocco in 1956, although neither had anything close to the pied noir presence of Algeria, where a population of French descendants totaling over one million grew between 1830 and the time of the Algerian War. Thus, it can be asserted that Pontecorvo's film marks the beginning of the modern anti-colonial film genre. Pontecorvo's subsequent Burn! (1969) reaffirms Pontecorvo's anti-colonial sentiments with equal complexity, balance, and historical basis. Several other films tap into this vein of anti-colonialism, such as Régis Wargnier's romantic drama Indochine (1992) which portrays a postwar French rubber plantation and the subordinate colonial subjects ("coolies") whom are slowly become involved in the nationalist revolution. Other examples include of this genre include notable films such as Richard Attenborough's Gandhi (1984), David Lean 's A Passage to India (1984), and Sydney Pollack 's Out of Africa ( 1985). Second, Pontecorvo's Algiers is the one of the earliest films to deal with the subject of state sponsored torture in the era of decolonization. Only the legendary French film maker Jean-Luc Godard dealt with the subject as centrally before Pontecorvo, in Le Petit Soldat (1963). Godard's film was banned in France, as Pontecorvo's would be as well. While the bombing sequence masterfully encapsulates the escalation of violent hostilities between the French and Algerian nationalists, the sequence concerning the French use of torture to combat the FLN is equally significant. The sequence is carried by a fictional monologue given by a fictional character, Colonel Mathieu. Here Pontecorvo is using what we might call 'artistic license' as he adds an editorialized dimension to the film by having Mathieu, the French representative for much of the film, riposte to reporters asking about the use of torture. Mathieu's defense, and that which Pontecorvo is ascribing to France in general, is that due to the nature of the FLN network the use of torture was necessary to prevent future bombings, assassinations, or terror attacks. In a line which was never spoken by any of the figures Mathieu is based on, but that convey the enlightened ideals of French General Jacques Masu, the fictional Mathieu declares that as long as France insists on staying in Algeria, such methods will be required. In other words, Pontecorvo is noting that so long as a colonizer sees fit to maintain control over a colony, the cost of the process will at the very least compromise the so-called enlightened values of the colonizer. As this important monologue ends, the sequence moves on to show some of the common methods of torture used by the paratroopers during the Algerian War, notably the electrocution of sensitive body parts. Thus the film reveals what can be called "the darker side of Western imperialism", as French paratroopers look on with apathy as Algerians are tortured until they give up the names and whereabouts of their associates before the process repeats itself. Ultimately, these barbaric practices deliver a victory, for the short run at least. Through torturous interrogation the paratroopers are able to decapitate the FLN in Algiers and return the city from the brink of chaos. However, as the viewer is able to feel quite emotionally, this is a Pyrrhic victory for to defeat the FLN cell in Algiers the paratroopers have sacrificed the ideological foundation that their empire was based on. Lastly, Algiers is significant because it has the distinction of both being about history and being history itself. While it is quite impossible to measure the impact that a film has on the generation(s) that views it, Algiers can none-the-less be placed in the context of the wave of global terrorism which it precedes as at least a document testifying to the motives of the terrorist. Pontecorvo's film is an undoubted masterpiece, but it is also a dangerous film that can be interpreted as sympathetic to the use of terrorism, including the killing of innocents, women and children, to achieve political goals. While Pontecorvo might have meant for the film to lack a protagonist, it is easy to mistake the fanatical Ali la Pointe as the film's hero; a martyr who killed in the name of a just cause and then chose death over surrender. Viewed in the context of the mid-century global terrorism, including: The Red Army Faction, The Italian Red Brigade, Hezbollah, Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and most recently Al-Qaeda, the existence of a film sympathetic to this form of activism seems doomed to condemnation. However, this is not the case, as Pontecorvo's film has not been banned but re-released in a prestigious three-disc Criterion Collection format. Is this indicative of an audience naive to the historical realities portrayed in Pontecorvo's film? Evidence of global popularity of the midcentury nationalist movements? Is it indicative of such widespread global liberalism that authorities dare not attempt to block the film? In truth, it is probably none of these, and the film's praise is more a celebration of Pontecorvo's art than his politics. The director's musical composition training is quite apparent as the film unfolds in a fashion similar to a symphony. Pontecorvo conducts a chorus of characters (in truth, some figures in the film are anything but "characters") in and out of the film's storyline at the exact tempo he chooses. He manipulates the viewer with his pacing, often incorporating devices such as dramatic pauses and crescendo to make his point. Then, of course, there is the question of the actual music in the film. Pontecorvo himself worked with the venerable and accomplished Ennio Morricone as the two composed a soundtrack that would accurately reinforce the motion of Pontecorvo's story. Then there is the astounding fact that despite both the authentic "feel" of the film and the abundance of available material, Pontecorvo used not one foot of French newsreel footage from the Algerian War.
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