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By PAUL BRENNER
One of the great films, a
film whose influence has extended well beyond the
world of cinema, one of the most chilling and
prescient films ever made, Gillo Pontecorvo's
incendiary political film, "The Battle of
Algiers," is now available on a comprehensive
three-disc set from The Criterion Collection.
In college, I had taken a course on "Citizen Kane"
and that is all that the course was about. First,
the film was viewed, after which the film was
dissected and then placed in its social,
political, and historical context. That course
went on for a semester, but Criterion, in 3 discs,
utilizing "The Battle of Algiers" rather than
"Citizen Kane," uses the same technique for a
portable course on the importance of a
groundbreaking film, augmenting the film with
supplements about Pontecorvo's career, the
historical background of the film, and its
importance to contemporary times and a warning
call to the hegemony of the United States and the
current situation in Iraq.
"The Battle of Algiers" is one of a select group
of films that deserves this kind of examination.
The immediacy and charge of the film hasn't abated
one bit since the film's premiere in 1966.
Pontecorvo's radical technique (co-scripted by
Marxist screenwriter Franco Solinas) recounts the
events leading up to the independence of Algeria
from the French in 1962. But in recreating the
events in the 1950s that led to independence,
Pontecorvo rejects centering the film on a single
protagonist. Instead, the protagonist becomes the
Algerian people and the events gather force
through an inevitable Marxist logic. As a
complement to Pontecorvo's Eisensteinian
narrative, "The Battle of Algiers" is shot in a
ragged and raw black-and-white, utilizing (except
for one key role) non-actors, creating the
impression of captured on-the-spot newsreel or
television footage.
But what makes the film seem brand new today is
that the backbone of the film is terrorism,
charting the efforts of the Algerian underground
organization, the FLN, to enlist terror to provoke
the French occupiers into utilizing strong-armed
counter-terrorist tactics to lose the hearts and
minds of the Algerian people. As Pauline Kael
famously stated about the film, "The Battle of
Algiers" is "the only film that has ever made
middle-class audiences believe in the necessity of
bombing innocent people." The development of
terrorist tactics and response unfolds like a
field manual. In fact, the stages of terror
planning are depicted in the film so clearly and
precisely that the film has been used as a
training film for shady terrorist groups from
Hezbollah to the Pentagon.
But although Pontecorvo is clearly on the side of
the Algerian freedom fighters, he depicts the
tactics of terror in a dispassionate way. For
Pontecorvo, a bomb is a bomb and whatever the
reason for planting a bomb, victims are victims no
matter what side they are on. In "The Battle of
Algiers," Pontecorvo does not permit clear-cut
heroes and villains, both the FLN and the French
are right in their own ways. But the slow,
mournful musical eulogy by Ennio Morricone as
victims are removed from bombed out rubble, shows
the ultimate results of terrorism.
In the film, the pendulum continues swinging from
cause to effect in an inexorably increasing arc.
The most unsettling moment in the film occurs from
just such an arc. The French, in an effort to
dispirit the Algerians, plant a bomb in the dead
of night in the heart of the Casbah. The explosion
causes the deaths of innocents. In retaliation,
the FLN devices its own reprisal. Pontecorvo
follows three women, who take off the veils to
dress in European fashions. Secreting bombs in
their handbags, they easily make it through police
checkpoints and enter the European section of
Algiers. There, they casually leave their handbags
in bars and restaurants. One woman kicks her
handbag under the bar and then glances at the
innocent, laughing faces in the bar -- a
middle-aged man looking for friendship, a young
girl laughing, a child eating ice cream. In a few
moments, all these people will be dead.
This three-tiered attack that Pontecorvo depicts
in the film would later become the casebook
terrorist scenario for Al Qaeda.
Criterion has intelligently organized the
supplements to brilliantly enhance the film. Disc
One includes the film, a production gallery, and
theatrical trailers. Disc Two deals with
"Pontecorvo and the Film" and includes a
documentary on Pontecorvo's career, hosted by the
late political writer Edward Said, a documentary
on the making of the film, and an interview
section in which directors Spike Lee, Mira Nair,
Julian Schnabel, Steven Soderbergh, and Oliver
Stone comment of the influence of "The Battle of
Algiers" on their own work. Disc Three, "The Film
and History," puts this new addition over the top
as one of Criterion's best. The disc begins with a
fascinating new documentary, produced by
Criterion, on the historical background of the
Algerian crisis. Then there is an excerpt from a
French documentary series on the Algerian war.
Following that is a gripping interview with
Richard A. Clarke, former National
Counterterrorism Coordinator and author of
"Against All Enemies" and Michael Sheehan, former
State Department Coordinator for Counterterrorism.
The disc concludes with an Italian documentary
from 1992, part of which was shot by Pontecorvo,
"Gillo Pontecorvo's Return to Algiers." Also in
the set is a 56-page book that further enhances
the viewing of the film. |
