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 result is it feels very documentarian -even through sequences that could never be caught for a documentary, such as the detailed executions of terrorist attacks or the up-close discussion of military operations are included. And there is too much consideration to how the scenes are shot and edited. It’s in a manner thrilling, seamlessly jutting between sequences that have a really organic pace and composition and others that do feel scripted in the fashion of general drama -particularly in the scenes between the various Algerian fighters.
For being non-professionals the actors are all stupendous, likely in part because most of them did experience the Battle of Algiers firsthand. Brahim Hadjadj may not be the real Ali La Pointe, but his performance speaks to a real sense of lived-in trauma from the Algerian War. Others, like Saadi Yacef’s character merely bear a different name but is essentially who the actor was within the FLN. Of course it does say something that real members of the FLN play themselves or allies, while nobody in the actual French military is cast as their own equivalents -indeed the one professional actor of the piece is Jean Martin (incidentally a prominent anti-war activist) playing Colonel Matthieu, a fictional stand-in for Jacques Massu, the real commander who put down the insurgency.
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Pontecorvo claimed, and somewhat unconvincingly, that he took no political side in the movie. And while it is certainly true that he doesn’t shy away from depicting the crimes of the FLN against civilians -such as in the brutal way that they take control of the Casbah and the bombing of the Milk Bar Cafe in the city’s French quarter. This is paired with scenes of the brutality of the French army in putting down the resistance, their methods of torture and random murder, Matthieu’s apathy towards Algerian civilians, and the cavalier attitudes of some soldiers in exercising their new power in the city. And yet in spite of this apparent impartial assigning of blame, reflected also in the narrative device, Pontecorvo spends far more time with members of the FLN and the native people of Algiers than their French colonizers. Whatever he may make of their methods, their cause is seen as a righteous one of decolonization. Pontecorvo does not comment directly but his framing is honest to what really went down in Algiers, what the motivations for the battle were must be understood, and he is conscious of the judgement of history.
The movie is shot stupendously by Marcello Gatti -intimate and naturalistic. The city of Algiers is rendered in both chaos and glory, and the scale applied to the film with thousands of extras is astonishing to watch. The music carrying through, part and parcel with vivid sound engineering, is powerful too -featuring ample notes of Indigenous Algerian motifs, arranged by Pontecorvo himself in collaboration with the great Ennio Morricone. And while the film is very documentary-like in approach and structure, Pontecorvo does weave the narrative very well -the scenes of tension before an attack being some of the best, the hectic yet focused pace of the critical scenes of conflict or oppression deftly ahead of their time. You can see the legacy palpably on everything since from Saving Private Ryan to Children of Men to Andor.
On that latter point, Andor creator Tony Gilroy has specifically referenced The Battle of Algiers as a major influence on the series, and specifically this year’s pivotal episode “Who Are You?”. The imagery there as in this film is stark, but it must be remembered Pontecorvo didn’t invent it out of thin air, nor is it or its circumstances unique to 1950s Algeria. Everything about the circumstances, the factions, the fighting rings strongly right now to the genocide in Gaza -the only difference being the power and destructive imbalance between the French and Algerians, for as great as it is not being nearly as vast as their modern-day cousins. It is no surprise the film has long been acclaimed by Palestinian activists.
And for the same reason such a film would face challenges today, The Battle of Algiers was highly controversial in its time through parts of Europe -banned outright in France for a time (the Americans, an impartial party on this issue, naturally had no problem with it). As much as there was outrage there was praise for its courage and political boldness, and the outrage has waned with time the further out from the war that we have gotten, the more foundational a free Algerian state has been. All that has stayed are its vivid contours and its parallels, radical still.
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The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon are both in the Criterion Collection, so why not a Peter Bogdanovich movie that is more entertaining than both? The zany, fourth-wall breaking screwball comedy named after a Looney Tunes gag is one of those light caper films (like Charade or The Great Race) that has found a greater audience in the decades since its release than when it first came out. In her funniest performance -and one of her most breathtakingly charming- Barbra Streisand plays an aimless troublemaker pursuing a timid neurotic academic played by Ryan O’Neal, who is himself constantly under the pressure of his overbearing fiancé (Madeline Kahn) -the two through a farcical series of shenanigans winding up involved in a jewel heist. The movie is a cornucopia of sharp wit and contrasts, centred in the primary couple, who have such good anti-chemistry as these mismatched characters that it comes right back around to being romantic. And the gags are exemplary, from the under the table dinner conversation to a subversion of the famous glass window bit. As fitting a tribute as can be to the likes of The Lady Eve or Bringing Up Baby. And a great bit of 70s cinema in its own right.
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