Country: Algeria
Director: Gillo Pontecorvo
Time: 2 hours and 1 minute
What It Elicits: Insurgencies, multi-faceted struggles, neo-realism focused on war
Where Can I Get It: Kanopy (free w/library card) and Amazon ($3.99 to rent)
The Battle of Algiers isn’t an overlooked film. From its initial release, it has drawn massive praise and controversy. France banned it for five years, arguably the highest compliment payable to a film. To this day, it gets shown at theaters and remains a staple of college courses on film (or anti-colonialism, or war, or contemporary MENA politics). Even the Pentagon screened it in 2003, presumably drawn to its depiction of insurgent tactics and great power strategic missteps in the Arab world. At the same time, Pontecorvo’s film, working off the Algerian FLN fighter Saadi Yacef’s memoir, remains the rare example of an overtly and highly contemporary (in its time) political movie to which posterity continually returns. It’s difficult to think of “Great Films” (i.e. the films that make “Great Film” lists) that remain so intent on forwarding a topical political message within such specific confines. In this case, the Algerian War for Independence (1954-1962) and, in particular, the FLN’s activities in Algiers between 1954-1957. Indeed, great films often attempt to elide some aspect of their political contemporaneity by working through various levels of allegory, for instance Apocalypse Now (1979) examined a contemporary war by working off nineteenth-century source material.
I want to argue, however, that The Battle of Algiers proves timeless not because it escapes its particular concerns by fundamentally attempting to wrestle with the Big Questions about humanity: desire, hope, sacrifice, redemption, societal organization, aspiration, and political freedom—though it does do this—but instead because its so grounded in its specific place and time, so detail-oriented and faithful to its original material, that it functions like a (good) historian to an archive. This is to say, like any thoughtful work of history its specificities offer suggestive analogies to our world while underlining the impossibility of mapping past onto present. And, like any good work of history, it remains deeply ambivalent about its subject matter—much more ambivalent than I think it gets credit for being. The mistake the Pentagon made wasn’t simply seeing an Algerian anti-colonial struggle borne of over 120 years of uneasy co-existence as a stand-in for Iraq—though had they taken the analogy seriously it might have led to some uncomfortable conclusions. The mistake was to try to make this film operable in a different context. The ever-shifting constraints which individuals face (iterated in new sequences for eternity) elucidate, bit-by-bit, aspects of ourselves. Drop the particular constraints, lose the particular insight. Burrow deep into the specifics and, finally, you may find something universal.
Go Down the Rabbit Hole With:
Sergei Eisenstein — Battleship Potemkin (1925)
Hany Abu-Assad — Paradise Now (2005)