Had been recommended this 1965 French movie some time ago in a long and windy AskMefi discussion of classic, forgotten non-English language films and put it in the request queue at the Mountain View Public Library since, fortunately for me, they own a copy. Took a couple of months, guess we have quite the artsy crowd here in town. TS1 brought it home the other day and it turned out to have three discs! So I threw disc one in the player early afternoon wondering how long all of it would take but only 117 minutes for the movie itself, the other two discs are bonus features and related documentaries from The Criterion Collection.
The Battle of Algiers is first and foremost a political film, sort of a docudrama, made only a couple of years after the final events of the struggle it captures. Shot in black and white, little concern for plot coherence, very much about characters; the dialog is in French and Arabic so I had to read the subtitles. The battle is the post-WWII fight between the FLN, Algerian freedom fighters, and the French colonial government in the city of Algiers from 1952 to 1960 but mainly 1954-57 and a voiceover aftermath explaining that independence was finally achieved in 1962.
I’m not familiar with this period of French history, before my time and got wiped away by the Vietnam War, but seems to have been one of the two key conflicts that shaped modern French politics along with their defeat and withdrawal from Viet Nam. Wikipedia has a useful entry on the film and some of the individuals involved.
Director/co-writer Gillo Pontecorvo, working in Rome and Algiers, does a frankly amazing job. Completely ignoring conventional filmmaking and using only one professional actor (Jean Martin as Col. Mathieu, commander of the local French military), Pontecorvo must have had to walk an emotional tightrope filming the crowd scenes. I wonder if there were moments when the recreated riots almost turned into real ones and how many of the people in the crowds were present at the original events.
The film jumps in time every few scenes. The narrator is the only channel holding things together, there is no protagonist or antagonist though the Algerians a given the positive framing and the French negative but not unmixed. Both sides are shown committing abominable acts of violence against civilians. Main characters are composites of real people or just have the name changed. Very powerful emotional impact by the end.
recommended
BillSaysThis 