The Battle of Algiers as Reconstruction

What the film reconstructs

The page identifies the work as a 1966 Italian-Algerian war film co-written and directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, with a screenplay by Franco Solinas and a story by Solinas and Pontecorvo. It is based on Souvenirs de la Bataille d'Alger by Saadi Yacef and follows actions by rebels during the Algerian War from 1954 to 1962 against the French government in North Africa, with attention to the struggle for Algiers, the capital of Algeria. The credits name Antonio Musu and Saadi Yacef as producers, Igor Film and Casbah Films as production companies, and Allied Artists as distributor in the USA.

You meet Ali La Pointe, played by Brahim Hadjadj, as a petty criminal who becomes politically radicalized while in prison and is recruited by FLN commander El Hadi Jafar, played by Yacef. Lieutenant Colonel Philippe Mathieu, played by Jean Martin, stands as the principal French paratroop commander, with Captain Dubois, Little Omar as a young FLN messenger, Larbi Ben M'hidi as a political leader, and Djamila, Zohra and Hassiba as three FLN women who carry out an urban attack. The narrative opens in 1957 after torture leads French soldiers to Ali, then moves back to 1954 to trace revolutionary cells in the Casbah, partisan violence between Algerian locals and pieds-noirs, the arrival of paratroopers, and a closing coda of demonstrations that suggests France won the battle for the city but lost the wider war.

Why does it look like a newsreel?

Pontecorvo and cinematographer Marcello Gatti shot on location in black and white and worked for a documentary-type edit, in a manner linked on the page to Roberto Rossellini and to Italian neorealist cinema. Telephoto lenses and handheld cameras place much of the action at what the page calls a safe distance, with French soldiers often set between the crowd and the lens, while television sets inside the story connect Western viewers to images presented as truth. The result was persuasive enough that American prints carried a notice stating that not one foot of newsreel had been used.

The editing by Mario Morra and Mario Serandrei supports that impression, and the music by Pontecorvo with Ennio Morricone contributes to the same effect. Indigenous Algerian drumming replaces dialogue when the women prepare bombings, while gunfire, helicopters and truck engines mark French methods and bomb blasts, ululation, wailing and chanting mark Algerian methods. The solo military drum heard through the film is played by Pierino Munari. Pontecorvo is described on the page as a melodist composer in Italy, which required collaboration with another composer, and Morricone joined him as a friend and partner.

Who stands in front of the camera?

Apart from Martin, the cast was drawn from Algerian nonprofessionals whom Pontecorvo met and chose for appearance and emotional effect, with many lines later dubbed. Thousands of Algerian extras fill the streets and courtyards, and the page notes that Pontecorvo directed them as a Casbah chorus through chanting, wailing and physical movement. Yacef, a veteran FLN commander, and Samia Kerbash, who plays Fathia, were both members of the FLN, and their accounts shaped the staging.

Martin brought a different history. He had worked mainly in theatre, had served in a paratroop regiment during the Indochina War, had taken part in the French Resistance, and had been dismissed from the Theatre National Populaire for signing the Manifesto of the 121 against the Algerian War. Pontecorvo wanted a professional actor who would remain unfamiliar to most viewers so the realism would hold, yet the page records a debate about whether Martin would contrast too strongly with the nonprofessionals. The published cast also names Tommaso Neri, Ugo Paletti, Fusia El Kader, Franco Moruzzi and Mohamed Ben Kassen, alongside the four leading names.

How was the script shaped from a memoir?

The starting point was the 1962 book by Yacef, written while he was held as a prisoner of the French and used to sustain FLN morale. After independence and his release, Yacef became a leader in the new government, the Algerian government supported a film adaptation, and FLN leader Salash Baazi, exiled by the French, brought the project to Pontecorvo and Solinas. To fit the screen, the writers used composite characters and changed some names. Colonel Mathieu draws on several French counterinsurgency officers, especially Jacques Massu, while Yacef linked the part more to Marcel Bigeard, with a resemblance also noted to Roger Trinquier.

When critics accused the film of making Mathieu too elegant and noble, Solinas answered that the colonel is elegant and cultured because Western civilization is neither inelegant nor uncultured. The original version runs 136 minutes and a cut version for theaters runs 120 minutes, in Arabic and French, and the listed release dates are August 31, 1966 in Venice, September 9, 1966 in Italy and September 27, 1966 in Algeria. The budget is given as $806,735 and the domestic gross as $879,794. You can place that production history and reception beside later classroom discussion of point of view, since both colonizer and colonized are shown committing atrocities against civilians, from FLN summary executions and the Milk Bar Café bombing to routine torture, intimidation and murder by paratroopers.

Why did France refuse the film at first?

The film won the Golden Lion at the 27th Venice Film Festival and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film in 1966, followed by nominations for Best Screenplay for Pontecorvo and Solinas and Best Director for Pontecorvo in 1968. The page also lists prizes from Venice, critics' groups, Imola, Italian Silver Ribbons, Acapulco, Riccione and Cuba, among others. In France the same success provoked opposition. French journalists at Venice refused to attend the screening and left the festival when the Golden Lion was announced, and the national press and film industry opposed a French release.

The French government formally banned the picture for one year, and no private distributor would take it for several more years. Pontecorvo described his work as politically neutral and said the Algerian side placed no obstacles because it expected a more or less objective film, while he called the French government very sensitive on the Algerian issue. A certificate for distribution came in 1970, release waited until 1971 after threats and opposition from veterans' groups. The far-right Organisation Armée Secrète threatened theaters, and Pontecorvo received death threats, and the only disruption noted at release occurred in Lyon when an attendant threw ink at the screen. The international version was shortened with torture scenes cut for British and American theaters.

How did the United States read it differently?

In the United States, the response was immediate and more positive, helped by anti-war feeling during the movement against military involvement in Vietnam, and the film found a surprising degree of popular success at the American box office. Roger Ebert described it as a great film that some audiences might find too cynical, too true, too cruel and too heartbreaking, and argued that viewers not interested in Algeria could substitute another war. Robert Sitton in The Washington Post placed it beside Griffith, Leni Riefenstahl, Carl Dreyer and Luchino Visconti for its importance to its time, and Pauline Kael in The New Yorker praised its emotional force and called Pontecorvo a Marxist poet.

Later notices consolidated that standing. Rotten Tomatoes records 99 percent approval from 94 reviews with a consensus about documentary-like realism on the front lines, and Metacritic records 96 out of 100 from 22 reviews collected since the 2004 re-release, described as universal acclaim. Sight and Sound voters in 2022 placed it 45th with critics and 22nd with directors, after a 48th place in the 2012 critics poll, and Empire placed it 120th among 500 films and sixth among world cinema titles in 2010. Filmmakers cited as admirers include Stanley Kubrick, Costa-Gavras, Steven Soderbergh, Werner Herzog, Kathryn Bigelow, Alfonso Cuarón, Ben Affleck, Christopher Nolan, George Miller and Paul Thomas Anderson, alongside notice of Red Dawn, Children of Men, Argo and Andor. You can compare those later judgments with the world cinema entries for curious viewers when you frame a season around postwar political cinema.

What remains for a classroom screening?

The page gives the film a second life as a teaching object for irregular warfare. Beginning in the late 1960s, it gained a reputation for inspiring political violence, with tactics said to have been copied by the Black Panthers, the Provisional Irish Republican Army, the Palestinian Liberation Organization and the Jammu-Kashmir Liberation Front, and Andreas Baader is reported to have counted it as a favorite film. Argentine naval cadets at the Navy Mechanics School were shown the film in counterinsurgency classes, with Archbishop Antonio Caggiano of Buenos Aires introducing it approvingly as the military chaplain. The Wikipedia page dates those classes to 1963, which cannot be right for a film first shown at Venice on August 31, 1966, so treat the year as unsettled; and a cadet later said the lesson prepared them for police missions against civilians.

In 2003, the United States Department of Defense held a screening on August 27 for commanders and troops facing related problems in occupied Iraq, with a flyer asking how to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas. A restored print had been made in Italy in 1999 after years of degraded VHS and DVD copies, and Rialto Pictures re-released the film in Britain in December 2003 and in the United States and France in 2004, with a Paris run at Espace Accattone from November 15, 2006 to March 6, 2007. The Criterion Collection issued the film as number 249 on DVD on October 12, 2004, and reissued it on 4K Blu-ray on October 19, 2021 from a 2018 restoration. Check the permission rules for small societies, confirm whether your booking is the 136-minute or the 120-minute version, and keep time after the credits for a guided exchange on reconstruction, torture and point of view.

The Wikipedia entry

The Wikipedia entry titled The Battle of Algiers documents the 1966 Italian-Algerian film and its making.

It lists direction, writing, cast, photography, editing, music, companies, dates, languages, budget and gross.

It details plot, visual style, sound, festival prizes, French controversy, American reception and later military screenings.