La battaglia di Algeri

Gillo Pontecorvo (1966)

A phenomenal piece of film-making – what seems most phenomenal is the reserves of passion and tenacity Gillo Pontecorvo must have had to get it made at all – in Algeria, so soon after the War of Independence.  The logistics of the project are daunting and its execution, especially Pontecorvo’s handling of the crowd scenes, is amazing.   His quasi-documentary approach – both the visual style (to suggest newsreel footage etc) and the structure of the narrative – is interesting to compare with what Kathryn Bigelow did in The Hurt Locker.   Bigelow used documentary techniques to draw the audience in but had to switch to more conventional character-focused narrative to keep us absorbed.  Pontecorvo – with the help of his director of photography Marcello Gatti and editors Mario Mora and Mario Serandrei – sustains a highly realistic style much more strongly.  His casting of largely non-professional Algerians is an important element of this.  The people we are watching, although their experiences are intensely dramatic, don’t come across as characters invented for the purpose of the film – yet Pontecorvo chose such a remarkable collection of faces that they lodge in your mind as firmly as people created by excellent professional actors might do.   Brahim Haggiag, in the central role of the independence fighter Ali La Pointe, is outstanding in this respect.  Ali is a petty criminal, radicalised while in prison and recruited to the National Liberation Front (FLN) by a character based on and played by Saadi Yacef, a former FLN military commander, who wrote Souvenirs de la Bataille d’Alger, the memoir on which Pontecorvo and Franco Solinas based their screenplay.

With so many fine passages it feels almost wrong to choose among them – the simplest criterion for selection is which I remember most vividly several weeks on from seeing The Battle of Algiers.   On that basis, I would single out the sequences involving three female FLN terrorists – each leaves a bomb in her handbag to explode in a crowded location.  The moment when young people drinking in a milk bar hear the explosion of one of the other bombs, go curiously out into the street then back inside, themselves to be blown up, is appallingly strong.  (When, at the end, we see the three terrorists’ faces in crowds in the street celebrating Algerian independence, the recognition is a shock – so too is the disappearance of the strain that showed in these faces when we saw the women earlier, preparing to commit mass murder.)  A later episode of a terrorist explosion in the stand at a trotting track is equally brilliantly staged.   Among several scenes of freedom fighters being tortured by the French, one stands out.  This particular torture includes application of a blow torch.  We see the blow torch then a close-up of the man’s face but we don’t actually see the implement in action.  It can hardly be said that this sensitivity on Pontecorvo’s part makes the treatment any less gruelling but you still register it as sensitivity.  Then Pontecorvo cuts to a European bar, with people talking and drinking and music playing.  It seems momentarily an obvious contrast with the treatment we’ve just been watching – then you remember the handbag bombers and that mayhem can also occur in a bar just like this one.

Gillo Pontecorvo, while he isn’t crudely partisan, leaves you in no doubt where his sympathies lie.  He uses Ennio Morricone’s elegiac score very sensitively – to mark deaths of Europeans and Africans alike.   (I found the familiar Morricone cadences helpful in giving me some bearings early on the film – even though I knew I should be trying to do without them.)   The colonialists aren’t humanised, however, to anything like the same extent as the fighters for Algerian independence.  Jean Martin, the one well-known actor in the cast, plays Colonel Mathieu with integrity but the purpose of the character is to articulate a political point of view.  You’re all the more conscious of this because the movie as a whole contains relatively few spoken words and most of them seem to come from the mouth of Mathieu.  The lines given to him and other officers of the French establishment are occasionally a bit too pointed.  When one of them remarks with satisfaction, after a leading FLN figure has been dispatched, that once ‘the tapeworm has lost its head’ it’s to all intents and purposes dead, the words recall the leaden how-wrong-they-were ironies of lesser historical films.

In all other respects, The Battle of Algiers is a million miles away from conventional drama.  It doesn’t have either the gradually shaping effect of a well-made documentary, whose themes gradually emerge from the information being conveyed.  But it does have an extraordinary one-thing-after-another cumulative power.  Watching the newsreel sections here is like watching history in the making.   And watching the film as a whole is like watching an important part of the history of film-making.

3 July 2010