The Battle of Algiers was designed to be authentic. Gilo Pontecorvo’s influential ground-level guerrilla war film has often been called a docu-drama, which I suppose is a designation that fits. It is not a documentary, but it is a very attentive re-enactment of how the Battle of Algiers of 1957-58 shaped out on both the side of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) and the French Army brought in to quell an uprising -which they eventually did through violence and war crimes. Four years later, Algeria was liberated. Four years after that, Pontecorvo made his film, with the experience still fresh in the minds of everyone in Algiers -several people who had experienced the fighting firsthand appeared in the film. It is one of the most modern movies to come out of the 1950s -which might be said of a lot of its contemporary works of Italian Neorealism, but there is an urgency to its presentation that transcends even those others. Pontecorvo frames it with a newsreel conceit and the r...
By the end of Óliver Laxe’s Sir ā t , the initial plot set-up that began the film has been largely forgotten -lost in a tense haze of the drug-induced, possibly apocalyptic miasma its characters find themselves in. Harrowing stuff happens and priorities shift, the outside world -its mysteries elusive in the isolated heat of the Sahara- changes dramatically. And what began the journey of a concerned father becomes a radical test of survival and endurance. Though for what purpose remains somewhat unclear. It reminds me a little bit of a Wim Wenders road movie, though not so much Paris, Texas -which it shares certain aesthetics with- as Until the End of the World , a more obscure, challenging, and lengthy film that also resembles by the end very little what it started as. Sirāt though is less meditative than anything by Wenders, in fact it is rather pulse-pounding even through stretches devoid of action. The characters may even be enjoying themselves and yet there is some...