The Battle of Algiers
1966, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo
Lieutenant-Colonel Philippe Mathieu, the French army commander in The Battle of Algiers, speaks to the press after breaking up a strike organized by the Front de libération nationale (FLN). One reporter compares the situation to the Battle of Điện Biên Phủ. Mathieu replies, “Exactly. But in Indochina they won.” France’s victory now, he tells the reporters, “depends on you.” He then clarifies: “Just do your reporting and do it well. It’s not warriors we need.” Ironically, Pontecorvo’s film, though an inexact reenactment, is exactly the kind of document the reporters might have made if they had followed the commander’s advice. Not only is it made in the style of a newsreel, it also shows every appearance of exemplary reporting – yet its effect is opposite to what the colonel envisioned. Despite its extraordinary balance, it comes across clearly in support of the Algerian cause.
The Battle of Algiers opens onto the aftermath of a torture scene. A member of the FLN has just agreed to betray the hideout of Ali La Pointe, the group’s last leader in Algiers. What happens next is strange. Mathieu comforts the tortured man, scolds a soldier for horsing around with him, and dresses him in camouflage out of concern that he’ll be recognized in the Casbah. In no way do these actions diminish the crime of torture, but they’re the focus of the opening scene. It’s as if the film deliberately wastes an opportunity to demonize the French.
This pattern will hold all the way through, and it cuts both ways. After busting the strike, French soldiers hand out bread in the Muslim quarter. Mathieu speaks admiringly of Larbi Ben M’hidi, affectionately of Djafar, and respectfully of the Arab population. He’s concerned for the safety of an Algerian woman relaying a message to Djafar, and for the lives of the three companions hiding with Ali La Pointe. Rebels stab and shoot French police in the back. Following a graphic montage of torture by French soldiers, Algerian insurrectionists spray European civilians with machine guns and plow a van into a crowded bus stop. A French policeman bombs a house in the Casbah, then a trio of FLN women plant bombs in the European quarter. Each explosion buries innocent Algerians or pieds-noirs in rubble, and each aftermath is set to the same mournful music. Again and again the film seems to complicate its pro-Algerian message, yet all this nuance doesn’t diminish the force of that message.
As if to symbolize the dual point of view, we’re given a couple of actual repetitions. Eleven minutes after the three Algerian women infiltrate the European quarter, we see two of the same checkpoints again in Mathieu’s surveillance footage. We catch the same people at the same moments, only now at a slightly greater distance. In each case the camera remains an objective observer, but the narrative point of view in one case is Algerian and in the other French. Also symbolic of this duality, the film’s dialogue is split between the Arabic and French languages.
The point here is not merely to show a cycle of reprisals, nor is it to draw an equivalence between colonizers and colonized. Rather the film scrupulously reports the faults and virtues of all participants, laying out the struggle’s complexity with the faith that a just understanding will emerge from rigorous honesty. If the audience is to be persuaded of the rightness of independence, the conclusion must rest on the merits of the idea itself, not on the behavior of its proponents or opponents, and not on the manipulations of the filmmaker.
Besides avoiding any overly weighted commentary on the Algerian conflict, the film also avoids excessive emotional manipulation. The injustices and suffering, the children’s bodies and victims of torture, pass quickly across the screen. We’re left to take note of them as facts, with scant time to dwell on them. Though the film mentions the achievement of independence at the end, there’s no forgetting the cost of triumph. The dominant emotional effect is sadness, particularly at human nature’s readiness for cruelty and injustice.
This balancing act must have been difficult to achieve, and The Battle of Algiers is a rarity among political films. One could imagine this approach applied to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but the challenge of remaining fair to everyone’s humanity would be even greater. After making this and Queimada, Gillo Pontecorvo’s directing career was a long disappointing series of concepts and projects, all aborted at his own discretion, as if the kind of film he wanted to make were nearly impossible. His inability to proceed, however, must have been more than a lack of confidence. Rather it shows the good instincts of a director running up against the limits of honest filmmaking. To appreciate these limits, we must acknowledge the shortcomings in The Battle of Algiers – not to deny its value, but to examine the nature and potential of film as a persuasive medium.
When Mathieu shows his paratroopers the checkpoint footage, and we recognize those flashes of two recently seen moments, the effect is like a whiff of the avant-garde in an otherwise matter-of-fact film. The repetition, with its shift in point of view, precedes by less than two months a similar repetition in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona when Alma rails at Elizabet’s motherhood – except that unlike Persona, and contrary to the whole definition of cinema in Persona, there is no ambiguity in Pontecorvo’s repetition. Seeing the checkpoints again through the hidden camera adds a narrative dimension (the women were being recorded unawares), but it presents no alternative viewpoint; it gives us no cause for interpretation.
The same goes for the film as a whole. Despite its complexity and its balanced points of view, there is no ambiguity in it. If any two viewers differ in their understanding, the difference owes more to their varying levels of attention or their varying prejudices than to the film itself. On the spectrum of showing and telling, The Battle of Algiers always tells – it’s just that it pushes telling to its limit. The carefully balanced points of view permit the film to tell with a minimum of preaching. It leaves virtually no room for a pro-colonial interpretation, yet it studiously avoids doing anything to force the viewer’s hand. It has the effect of propaganda without the usual sins of propaganda. The alternative, if it wanted to show instead of tell, would surely be less accessible to audiences. Nevertheless, because The Battle of Algiers relies on telling, its intended effect depends on our trust in its fidelity to reality. We must take the film’s word for its own accuracy.
All of this is not to say that The Battle of Algiers lacks insight. Because it presents its material with minimal commentary, the audience has space to draw its own conclusions. One political insight, possibly unintended, is especially relevant today. We’re told and reminded that Mathieu and other French soldiers had fought in the Resistance during World War II, and some had been in concentration camps. The commander uses this to dismiss allegations of fascist behavior. Of course there is no force of logic in his dismissal. It’s common for people to cross from the right side of one struggle to the wrong side of another. The danger of having belonged to a just cause is that it can breed smugness.
Another insight, which must have preoccupied Pontecorvo, stems from Mathieu’s speech at the press conference:
“The problem is this: The FLN wants to throw us out of Algeria, and we want to stay. Even with slight shades of opinion, you all agree that we must stay. When the FLN rebellion began, there were no shades at all. Every paper, the communist press included, wanted it crushed.”
More than describing a history of events, The Battle of Algiers traces the arc of an idea. As Mathieu notes, Algerian independence was unthinkable – until it wasn’t. After first drawing attention, the FLN gave the idea legitimacy in 1957 by involving the wider Algerian population in a strike. The French government then crushed the movement, but the idea remained alive and resurged three years later, as if spontaneously. By July 1962 Algeria was an independent nation. A similar arc repeats throughout history, advancing ideas such as abolition (the focus of Pontecorvo’s Queimada) and gay marriage, which were once so unthinkable that the most progressive leaders wouldn’t touch them.
Toward the end, right after Ali La Pointe is killed and the “tapeworm” of the FLN is decapitated, Mathieu remarks nostalgically about the Arab population of Algeria: “We got on fine for 130 years. Why shouldn’t it continue?” His words express the blindness that once made Algerian independence so unimaginable. The object of The Battle of Algiers is to cure this blindness.
CONNECTIONS:
Black Narcissus – Story of a colonized nation’s independence and the errors of colonialism
Caché – Franco-Algerian relations from different points in history