THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS
(Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966)
The political-military defeat suffered by the Algerian National Liberation Front against the French Paras (paratroopers) ends a long period of organized and controlled fight called "The Battle of Algiers".
In the global framework of the Algerian Revolution, "The Battle of Algiers" may be a (negative) key moment of a revolution characterized above all by a spontaneous and total resistance movement fought mainly on the countryside: if one does not highlight this fundamental characteristic – that is, its condition as a peasant revolution, wherein the countryside functioned as a way to oppose the geographically-concentrated French control, a complete control of the entire country and its means of communication – then it is impossible to understand and reconsider the episode of "The Battle of Algiers" in its correct terms. The strategical error of the French has historically been that of believing they're able to appease the revolutionary spirit by attacking the leaders of the Liberation Front's military organization, and to resolve a war by controlling Algeria's vital center, that is, its capital. In Pontecorvo's film this fact ends up being "suggested" by the context in such a way (the film's ending) as to favor an easy interpretation of the events linked to the Battle of Algiers as being central and determinant in the Algerian Revolution. The absence of any dialectical reference to the spontaneity of the fight in the countryside reaffirms the possibility of this error. Except that the intention that led Gillo Pontecorvo and his collaborators to reconstruct that particular moment of the Algerian War is not a historicistic intention. That's what we intend to demonstrate by examining the film in its "cinematographic form", the only form that allows for a non-generic discourse, even an ideological one.
In its general structure, The Battle of Algiers presents itself as an epigonic phenomenon of resistance-oriented literature, wherein traditional ideological tendencies subsist intact, borrowed from pre-existing stereotypes and wherein the novelty of the historical events described is reinserted into a preconceived schema; schema in which the events reported by the film are inserted not with historical-informative functions, but emotional-spectacular functions.
The particular type of commitment the film highlights is filtered through a conception of cinematic spectacle that takes its indications from Brecht and Gramsci, trivializing them, and they in fact seem to be more a cultural alibi than concretely assimilated elements.
While valid in a general sense, these indications are met in the film with such a restrictive and schematic application that it completely distorts the positive application they could have had. Let's see, for example, the narrative schema adopted by the film: the director entrusts the reconstruction of the most important moments of the "battle of Algiers" to the recollections of one of the protagonists, Ali-la-Pointe, moments before his death. This narrative expedient should have a double function: to eliminate the knowledge barrier separating the author from the material, allowing him to relive the drama of the Algerian people from within – taken in its most typical environment (the casbah) – and frequently allows for a sort of poetical transfiguration of the images, justified precisely by the subjectivity of the point of view.
A second presence – the Brechtian one – is given by the alternation between rigorous communication of historical content and information, carried out by an off-screen voice or written captions, and epic-spectacular moments. Furthermore, a critical detachment is sought after in two or three moments featuring Yacef Saadi, one of the leaders of the revolution: from the clash of different ideological positions (for example, his and that of general Mathieu), there arises dialectically the ideological meaning of what is posed as unquestionable truth. However, by resorting to a protagonist, some conventional narrative procedures must be adopted which immediately push the film away from its newsreel-like pretensions, and make it more akin to well-established narrative and filmic models.
So that the casbah, as a geographical and human unity, remains only a scenic background for the events paratactically accumulated and described in their dynamic succession; and the ideological message is born from the
accumulation of some of the most worn-out generalizations of revolutionary tactics, which in this context do not find any historical justification, in that they fail, as we've said before, to concretely communicate the specific sense of the Algerian peasant revolution.
A cinematic example of a pertinent adoption of Brecht's thought can be found in Gianfranco De Bosio's Il terrorista: the dialectical clash of different stances and the possibility of critical judgement offered to the spectator were obtained with an absolute respect for the historical correspondence of the various stances and, therefore, of the subsequent effects of certain behaviors. The pretension of extending the historical meaning of the events was coherent with the possibility by the spectator to verify it in the following years of Italian social life. In Il terrorista, historical judgement actually imposed itself upon the narrated episodes, while in Pontecorvo's film, on the contrary, one verifies a compromise between historical reasoning (which intends to place itself in front of the material by documenting it journalistically) and the persistently pathetic, elegiac, dramatic resolution of the images on the level of emotional expression.
The prevalence of this emotional-spectacular aspect (which aims at breaking up all the episodes and resolving each one of them autonomously on a cinematic level in order to provoke various sentiments and reactions and dose their progressive "epic" intensification up to the end) is structurally strange for a film constructed around two equally (and therefore, equivocally) "heroic" characters – Ali la Pointe and colonel Mathieu –, placing the film in a worthy spectacular level, but also placing serious doubts on its correspondence to the filmmaker's intentions of historical representation.
Moreover, the film denounces its absolute inability in characterizing its subject on its own terms, in a credible way: this can be particularly observed by analyzing the relation between the Algerian and French populations as they are presented in the film. In fact, the French that appear can be assimilated in their characterization as the evil or indifferent bourgeois characters of photo-novels or popular literature.
To show the irrational hatred that arises in the French from their ignorance and fear, Pontecorvo indeed resorts to three scenes of collective hysteria – of which two end violently, with one's violence being inflicted upon a child, where the insults resort to the same hysterical and programmatically "dosed" intonation ("bastard pig", "black rat", "sewer rat", etc.), denouncing remnants of comic book stories rather than a serious attempt at a credible representation of these events. Other examples of how these French are shown by Pontecorvo in their most typical everyday life: a moment before the chief editor of the French press agency decides to "do something" with his friends, going on to execute the attack in Thèbe street, we see the garden of a villa where many couples dance while the editor's wife walks into frame asking, with a "mundane" voice: "Oof, what a bore! Couldn't you play your poker here instead of going to the club?". With this little joke, full of information, we come to know that these French, besides dancing, also play poker and regularly go to a club, and we also understand how frivolous and politically unaware are the French women. But Pontecorvo goes even further when he wishes to show the irresponsibility of the French and in particular of the youth: just after it is decided to blockade the casbah, the camera catches two French teenagers who walk between the barbed wire, and the boy says to the girl: "I don't care, I'm going to the beach anyway".
Fortunately, these worn-out representational schemes of the bourgeoisie remain somewhat isolated and strange in relation to the film's unity, wether due to their condensation (desired for suggesting the presence of the French) or wether because of their absolute generality and therefore narrative and contextual non-functionality.
The events that, in an opposite procedure, Pontecorvo abnormally dilates are the attacks; the scenes of the three simultaneous terrorist attacks, minutely described to the point of creating thrilling suspense, are interesting only in the reality of the way they are crafted, while precisely because of their unjustified interaction they lack any possibility of being inserted into a historical discourse. The historical fact of these attacks becomes a pretext for spectacle in the film: the same recourse to a precise temporality given by on-screen text demonstrates the need to override logical discourse in order to connect events that were arbitrarily chosen during the research phase of the production. Lastly, the figures of Yacef Saadi, chief of the Liberation committee, and of Omar, the little kid, end up being sketched according to the models of the most conventional of traditions. The first one descends directly – although in a reduced manner – from the traditional outline of the "revolutionary leader" figure: the same physical characteristics – short, wearing glasses, big forehead with receding hairline –, he stays in rooftops listening to Ali la Pointe's opinions on the strike, he embarrasses the paratrooper colonel during the press conference; the second one belongs to the heroic gallery of children which no filmmaker dealing with stories like these seem determined to renounce.
The scene where he takes over the microphone of the French by sliding unnoticed under the barbed wire and infuses new courage into the hearts of his fellow countrymen is one of the numerous effective scenes that hit the viewer in the weakest points of his sensibility. The rest of the children are used somewhat frequently with a pathetic (the kid who's beaten at the stadium) or heroic function.
If all of this wasn't enough, Ennio Morricone's music raises some serious suspicion: an effective music, which enormously dilates scenes that are already intimately dramatic: for example those where the consequences of both French and Algerian attacks are described, where the same "false" music involves the dead of both sides in a single feeling of pity.
The film's most authentic moments, the ones that are not filtered by a more or less present schema, are only a few: the illegal marriage and the ending seem to us of a particular intensity, even if, as we already said, logically and structurally strange in relation to the way the film is carried out.
In the current political and historical moment of Italy, it is easy to make a film like this: the press of whatever political side (besides the fascists, of course) is willing to support it. This film presents itself with all the correct paperwork in order to enjoy a good success on all levels: the ideological commitment, and therefore ideological blackmail necessary to subject critics and leftist intellectuals to itself, plus a good dose of spectacular elements accompanied by a pretended objectivity with which to obtain the public's favor.
A regime film, conventional and banal in its pretension to simplicity: we believe that the one million dead of the Algerian revolution demand a more serious and historically more rigorous effort of comprehension.
– GIAN PIERO BRUNETTA
In: Cinema & Film #1 (winter 1966-67). My translation.