Opens Fri Feb 13.
What will become of Iraq? Will it one day blossom into a sturdy bed of self-governed democracy? Or will it remain under U.S. control for an interminable amount of time, having been parceled a puppet government from Washington?
The jury, as they say, is still out on the matter; the Bush administration's rush into the conflict appears to have trumped its exit policy, and now all we can do is sit and wait. But while soldiers continue to die in Iraq (at an average rate, alarmingly, of more than one a day so far), and our reasons for invading the country in the first place become more and more cloudy, a film is reemerging that offers a glimpse of what may be even more turbulence awaiting us in the decade to come.
Released in 1965, The Battle of Algiers was directed by an Italian named Gillo Pontecorvo and produced by an Algerian named Saadi Yacef. There are three languages spoken in the film--French, English, and Arabic--and the fluency with which conversations weave in and out of one another adds an encompassing feeling to the action. Pontecorvo's picture may be about a single disastrous event, but it should be viewed as if from space, with the entirety of our little blue marble sitting squarely within its sights. The film is both a document and a cautionary tale, and we would be wise to pay it attention, for the document belongs in the history books (under the headings "Important Events" and "Important Films"), and the cautionary tale speaks to our concerns at this very moment, because The Battle of Algiers is about three rather pertinent things: terrorism, Islam, and Western hegemony.
Resting in northwest Africa, Algeria was overrun by France in 1830, and remained under its rule until July 1962. For the bulk of that span, Algerians and French co-mingled comfortably--or, if not comfortably, at least tolerably--but in 1954, when a group calling itself the Front de Liberation Nationale (or National Liberation Front) appeared, the country suddenly found itself in the midst of a revolution. The NLF's chief concern: a liberated and devotedly Islamic Algeria, a country free from most Western smudging. On September 30, 1956, after two years spent fighting in the mountains, the NLF brought its revolution to the streets of Algiers.
The city of Algiers (now the capital of Algeria), at the time of the NLF's arrival, was essentially divided into two sections: the Muslim Quarter and the French Quarter. When the NLF brought its bloody campaign to the city, it began, at first, by making a declaration that Algiers--and all of Algeria--would soon be under Islamic rule, and it is through this rule that we meet our first major character in The Battle of Algiers, a petty thief named Ali La Pointe (Brahim Haggiag). His face pockmarked, his outlook decidedly desperate, Ali first hears of the NLF while incarcerated, and the group's message immediately feeds into his anger. Once released, he takes up the campaign and quickly rises through the ranks, eventually joining El-hadi Jaffar (Saadi Yacef--acting and writing, as well as producing) at the head of the table. Calm and educated, El-hadi lays out the NLF's intentions, beginning with scattered acts of violence--usually to the detriment of the city's police officers--and, eventually, resorting to organized bombings of civilians. The scattered acts of violence surprise the French leaders; the bombings lead them to commit their own atrocities, much of them courtesy of the torturing hand of Colonel Mathieu (a perfect Jean Martin, playing a character based on real-life General Massu), who was brought in by the French to end the escalating violence. And it is this shared bloodiness of hands that is at the heart of The Battle of Algiers. Both sides are left filthy by their actions--the NLF through their bombing, the French through their use of torture on NLF suspects--and throughout the story, Pontecorvo's film refuses to take sides; presenting the facts as plainly as possible, using a masterful form of vérité, the film, in the end, is completely maddening due to its evenhandedness. And this is exactly as it should be.
The sad truth proven by The Battle of Algiers is that terrorism, as a means to an end, can often work. This is not to say that it is a worthwhile venture, by any means, but that shootings and bombings orchestrated by a determined group can, as the French learned, bring about change. And in reconstructing the NLF's terror, and France's counter-means of torture on suspected NLF members, director Pontecorvo managed, along with Yacef (who was himself a part of the NLF during the campaign), to re-create the fighting in the streets of Algiers with breathtaking honesty. Shot in stark black and white, the camera often handheld, the film achieves a level of realism that is really quite startling. It is not documentary-like, but something else, and that something brings me back to the word "document"; feeling as if it were living and breathing history, the film is so masterfully assembled that it is a perfect piece of cinematic art--one of the most vital and important films to come along in years, and one that just happens to have been released nearly 40 years ago.
