a beautiful lie
by
Douglas Messerli
Gillo
Pontecorvo and Franco Solinas (writers), Gillo Pontecorvo (director) معركة الجزائر (La battaglia di Algeri) (The
Battle of Algiers) / 1966, USA 1967
Gillo
Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers is
a carefully crafted fiction, based on real facts, pretending to be a
documentary. It’s also a work in which writers Pontecorvo and Franco Solinas
appear to be objective while basically siding with the Algerian revolutionary cause and the
National Liberation Front (FLN). While the film appears free from romanticizing
the city and its people, it, nonetheless, still represents a slightly glorified
notion of both. And because of these contradictions it still remains a
powerfully watchable from today, some 50 years after its making.
Originally, the film was to have been a
psychologically based study of an American journalist who gradually loses his
faith in the French rule. The role was to have been played, astoundingly, by
Paul Newman. One supposes it might have been a film somewhat like the cinema
versions of Graham Greene’s The Quiet
American. And later, with a different script by Saadi Yacef, it might have
been more of a propagandistic work had Pontecorvo not rejected it. In short,
the remarkable film that today exists is somewhat of a miracle.
Yet, as critic Peter Matthews observes, we
cannot help but agree with history, realizing the necessity of the Algerians to
take back their own country from the often brutal French, particularly when the
local police chief retaliates by bombing a supposed address of a suspected murderer,
killing innocent children, women, and men in the process. And, as Matthews
suggests, the natives, far from being exoticized, in Pontecorvo’s work seem the
be made of flesh and blood, while it is the ruling French police and wealthy
elites who are pale and distant; the director hardly ever allows them even a
close up, while we get beautiful details of each of the terrorists’ face.
History, after all, is on their side.
How shocking this film must have seemed
upon its first release. The French banned the film for five years, even after
it had won several awards. Today, of course, several of the same methods—the
use of both women and children to do bombings, the existence of sleeper cells,
etc.—are writ large in newspaper and magazine articles. But at the time, what
the public knew about terrorist methods had mostly to do with World War II
underground activities. Pontecorvo’s film changed all of that.
In fact, the unstated heroes of this
film of the FLN, a the film makes clear, did not even win the fights of 1954
and 1957, and the film begins and ends in their betrayal by a tortured Algerian
which results in the French discovery of the “heroes’” hiding place. Only a
coda reveals the actual results of their activities, with the French being
ultimately forced to give up their control of the country. The vast atrocities
of the Algerian War, with the death of thousands on both side, in short, is
presented as almost a footnote. The
Battle of Algiers is presented simply as a trigger, a beginning of the end,
which, in turn, further helps to objectify it from the messy truths hinted at
in Resnais’ earlier Muriel and
expressed in far more surreal terms in Mohammed Dib’s 1962 novel Qui se souvient de la mer and his
so-called Algerian trilogy.
Much has been made of this film’s ties to
Rossellini’s neo-realist movies, Open
City and Paisan, the latter of
which influenced Pontecorvo to begin making films; but those cinemas, as great
as they are, are far more straightforward about their narrative-based
structures, while The Battle of Algiers is
simply a more beautiful lie.
Los Angeles,
January 27, 2017
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