So I'll try to stick to discussing it as a movie. As a cinematic work, it’s a stunning example of neo-realism (director Gillo Pontecorvo was Italian, and a communist to boot). The handheld camera gives you a sense of immediacy and intimacy; much of the movie looks like newsreel footage. Most of the cast were not actors and, of course, were only a few years removed from the events they were depicting, enhancing the realism. Pontecorvo dispassionately shows the strategizing of both the Algerian revolutionaries and the French occupiers, and he escalates the tension subtly and effectively. His detailed explanation of terrorist tactics prompted many revolutionary groups, including the Black Panthers, to use The Battle of Algiers as an instructional video on guerrilla insurgency.
It’s amazingly even-handed, humanizing both sides of the conflict. The French and the Algerians both commit cold-blooded, indefensible acts of violence, but they each enlist our empathy, caught in a sort of vicious cycle that, as individuals, they can't escape. On another level, my sympathies usually tend toward the underdog (basketball excepted), and of course the French are in the wrong with their colonialism (and if you know anything about Algeria, you know that the French were right bastards – though I guess there aren’t really any nice colonialists), but I couldn’t help equating the French soldiers, uneasily patrolling the streets of Algiers, with the American soldiers in Iraq.
Colonel Mathieu (Jean Martin), the commander of the French paratroopers who storm into Algiers to quell the uprising (and, the movie makes a point of noting, a veteran of the French Résistance and Dien Bien Phu -- he's been on both sides of insurgency), gives a gripping speech that illustrates vividly the divide between the military and the political. If you want France to win, he coolly tells French journalists who are hounding him about his use of torture, you have to accept the consequences of what it is necessary to do to win. It's chilling -- and inarguable. It brought to mind Mark Bowden's article a few months ago in The Atlantic Monthly on the United States' use of torture for interrogation -- is this what's necessary to win the war on terrorism?
Well, I feel like I should be saying more insightful and
intelligent things about this film, but I just can't come up with them
(it's been a long week). So I'll leave it at recommending the movie
highly. If you're interested in learning more about the context,
here’s
a fascinating interview with one of the actors and producers of the film,
who lived through (actually, "perpetrated" might be a better word) many
of the events shown, and a primer
on the film.
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