It’s one of the most famous sequences in cinema – three young Algerian women remove their veils and cut their hair in a ‘decadent’ western fashion. They dress accordingly.
Once they pass undetected through the barriers erected between the Kasbah and the European quarter, they calmly leave bags of explosives at a bar, a milkshake bar and an Air France office. The camera pans across dancing teenagers and smiling children as Ennio Morricone’s terse score punctuates. The bombs detonate on schedule.
Dissatisfied with your colonial oppressor? Fed up with imperialist aggression? Flummoxed by economic inequalities? Then might we suggest you check out the spanking new 35mm print of The Battle Of Algiers, Gillo Pontecorvo’s fiercely dramatic account of guerrilla warfare.
With a nod to early Italian neo-realism, in particular Rossellini’s Rome, Open City, Pontecorvo’s 1965 masterpiece re-enacts events from the Algerian rebellion against the French between 1954 and 1960. The starkly authentic docudrama style is an achievement in itself – American prints carried a disclaimer that “not one foot” of newsreel was used. On the recent US DVD release, contributions from Spike Lee, Mira Nair, Julian Schnabel, Steven Soderbergh and Oliver Stone confirm the film’s lasting aesthetic influence.
Fair enough. As pure cinema it’s as dazzling and thrilling as it gets. But further DVD extras featuring the late Edward Said and former United States counter-terrorism advisors Richard A. Clarke and Michael A. Sheehan set The Battle Of Algiers apart from your average canonical text.
Since its initial release into an era marked by national liberation conflict, left-wing radicalisation and decolonisation, the film has been hailed as a DIY blueprint for revolution. Over the years its depictions of recruitment and urban guerrilla warfare have been emulated and adapted by the Black Panthers, the Irish Republican Army and countless Islamic militants.
Odd then to think that Pontecorvo’s vision was a compromise of sorts.
When the first independent Algerian government commissioned the project, they were hoping for a straightforward adaptation of ‘Souvenirs de la Bataille d’Alger’, the memoir of National Liberation Front (FLN) military commander, Saadi Yacef.
Together with exiled FLN activist Salash Baazi, Yacef, by then a part of the new Algerian parliament, approached the Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo and screenwriter Franco Solinas with the idea. Parà, Solinas’ first draft told the story from the perspective of a disenchanted French paratrooper, whom he and Pontecorvo hoped to be played by Paul Newman.
Baazi rightly dismissed the notion of turning the revolution into a White Man’s Burden drama, while Yacef wrote his own screenplay, which the Italians then rejected as outright Algerian propaganda.
The final draft was sympathetic to the cause of Algerian nationalism but it was far from the bald agitprop it ought to have been in the circumstances. Composed primarily of vignettes depicting the tactics of both the FLN insurgency and the French counter strategy, Battle follows a grimly familiar trajectory of military escalation. One side uses police killings. The other resorts to explosives. The paratroopers are sent in. A general strike is called. And so it goes.
The protagonist, in so far as this ‘people’s film’ of a ‘people’s war’ has one, is Ali la Pointe, an illiterate petty criminal who is politicised in prison after seeing the execution of a fellow Algerian. Back on the streets, Ali is recruited by the FLN, the insurgents who, fighting from 1954 to 1962, forced the French colonisers out after 130 years. His opposite number is Colonel Mathieu, a French commanding officer modelled on Jacques Massu and a noble sort who fought against the Nazis.
Superficially, the Algerians emerge as romantic revolutionaries fighting a political Goliath. During a press conference, a reporter asks a captured official of the FLN: “Isn’t it a dirty thing to use women’s baskets to carry bombs to kill innocent people?” To which the official answers, “And you? Doesn’t it seem even dirtier to you to drop napalm bombs on defenceless villages with thousands of innocent victims? It would be a lot easier for us if we had planes. Give us your bombers, and we’ll give you our baskets.”
But Pontecorvo never allows the audience to forget the means to the end. Both sides are seen to commit atrocities. The French use torture and raze entire neighbourhoods. The Algerians bomb civilians and ‘police’ their own community according to Islamic dogma.
This aspect seems particularly chilling now. If any scene can match the bombing sequence for horror, it is the sight of small children swarming menacingly around a wino or Ali killing an old friend from his pre-revolutionary days.
Yet the film is less about the nationalists’ victory than France’s loss. Colonel Mathieu succeeds in destroying all the terrorist cells, but new volunteers quickly replace the dead. The colonisers simply cannot stop the inevitable.
Still, in 2003, when ‘victory’ in Iraq sparked an unprecedented wave of insurgency fighting, the Pentagon’s Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict office sent out an e-mail advertising a private screening of the film. “How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas,” the flyer said. “Children shoot soldiers at point blank range. Women plant bombs in cafés. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervour. Sound familiar? The French have a plan. It succeeds tactically, but fails strategically. To understand why, come to a rare showing of this film.”
Oh dear. We’ve missed the point entirely, haven’t we?