| When cinema and politics converge, the results are rarely as urgent or as timeless as those captured in The Battle of Algiers (Italy, 1966), Gillo Pontecorvo’s masterful examination of the conflict between Algeria’s National Liberation Front (FLN) and their French colonial oppressors in the mid-1950s.
But, with this year’s re-release of the landmark film, which screened at the Calgary International Film Festival (CIFF) earlier this fall, pundits everywhere are proclaiming it to be more relevant than ever. One can’t help but make a connection between the unsuccessful attempts of the French to use force, torture and other questionable tactics to quell a rebellion among insurgent Algerian freedom fighters and those of the United States to eliminate al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations by carpet-bombing Afghanistan and Iraq.
And while there are undoubtedly many highly profitable reasons why George W. Bush would be quite content for his "war on terror" to continue unabated through the end of his next term, one of the most basic lessons we learn from The Battle of Algiers is that violence begets violence.
In the case of the French, they won the battle, but lost the war, leaving Algeria in the hands of the FLN in 1962. Pontecorvo shot his film in Algiers in 1965, when the French occupation was still fresh enough in the minds of the Algerian people that the director’s dramatic re-creations of key events in the conflict take on the appearance of reality. The film is not completely impartial – Pontecorvo’s politics tend to the side of the Algerians – but its pseudo-documentary style perfectly conveys the ruthlessness of both sides, the FLN’s terrorist tactics met stroke for stroke with greater and greater displays of force from the French military.
If you missed the film when it played at CIFF, the Criterion Collection has recently issued it in a three-DVD set, which reaffirms its status as essential viewing for anyone with even a passing interest in international politics. The film takes up one disc, while the remaining two discs are devoted to making-of featurettes and various other discussions of the film’s impact on both cinematic and political history. While it’s not particularly interesting to hear Spike Lee, Steven Soderbergh and Oliver Stone pontificate on the influence of the film, other features are much more illuminating.
Perhaps the most valuable element of the set is Disc Three, which includes Remembering History, a 69-minute documentary that features interviews with key figures from the FLN, including military leader Saadi Yacef, who both produced the film and played a role modelled after himself. As the Algerians defend their actions, so do the French, in États d’armes, a shorter doc in which military officers are interviewed about their use of torture and execution as means to combat the rebels. This is truly harrowing material, some of the officers’ evasions bringing to mind Robert McNamara’s dodgy revelations in The Fog of War.
In addition, there is a brief discussion between American counter-insurgency experts, who discuss the contemporary relevance of Pontecorvo’s film, and Pontecorvo’s own documentary, Return to Algiers, which, having been produced in 1992, is somewhat out of date, but shows a country now struggling not for independence, but to define itself in a region of fomenting Islamic fundamentalism.
With all these extras, there’s plenty of political perspectives to consider as you watch the film again – in an excellent transfer, as one has come to expect from the Criterion Collection. |
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