People who boasted of coming of age in the 1960s often scorned the 1950s as a “dark age of conformity.” Progressives were apt to smugly accuse incorrigible fossils of longing for “a return to the 1950s.” Although it seemed a pretty dynamic and entertaining time for many of us who were young and impressionable at the time, the decade became an early candidate for the historical dustbin, transcended more or less overnight by enlightened newcomers.
Well, no decade or mind-set is immune to the ravages of time, so a curious nostalgia test awaits art house moviegoers who long to relive fond enthusiasms of the 1960s: a revival of Gillo Pontecorvo’s “The Battle of Algiers,” a once-acclaimed and controversial polemical thriller about the waning days of French colonialism in North Africa.
An opening week revival attraction at the new E Street Cinema, the film was an Italian production shot with the cooperation of the Algerian government. Released in most of Europe in 1966 and in America in the fall of 1967 (the French imposed a ban until 1971), it got a big send-off by winning the grand prize at the Venice Film Festival.
The movie enjoyed a considerable vogue, aided by the perception that it could serve as both a rallying cry and operational blueprint for aspiring radicals and urban guerrillas in places far beyond the French-controlled Algiers of the recent past. Ultimately, admiration for the movie involves a certain cost: the recognition that it probably inspired future members of the Weathermen or Symbionese Liberation Army in this country or the Red Brigades in the homeland of Mr. Pontecorvo.
Most of the events depicted in the movie occur during the last half of the 1950s. The battle in question proved a defeat for nationalist or anti-colonial insurgents: their ranks, concentrated in the legendary portion of Algiers known as the Casbah (already a haunted movie setting on the strength of “Pepe le Moko” with Jean Gabin), were successfully infiltrated and dismantled by French paratroopers, summoned after the police proved unequal to the challenge. The most impressive single figure in the movie remains Jean Martin, a minor French character before and after, as Lt. Col. Philippe Mathieu, the lean and incisive commander in charge of suppressing the revolt.
Although ideologically committed to the defeat of reactionary European colonial regimes, Mr. Pontecorvo (a former partisan guerrilla and Communist Party member during World War II) and screenwriter Franco Solinas (a party member when the movie was made) cannot conceal a grudging respect for the lieutenant colonel. They salute him as an effective instrument of French policy — unjust and doomed though it might be — untainted by hypocritical rationales. Indeed, the movie’s kinetic impact derives from the fact that these filmmakers find it easier than most to acknowledge coercive brutality on both sides of the struggle: torture from the French army and terrorist bombings from their adversaries.
The “victory” of the Algerian uprising is declared during the epilogue, which re-enacts a surging mass demonstration in the city that occurred in 1960, three years after the scenario per se concludes. The narrator gets in a closing reminder that “another two years had to pass, with infinite losses on both sides” before France relented and Algeria could claim self-government in 1962.
It still seems odd that the movie doesn’t flashback from the resurgent opposition of 1960. On the contrary, it begins with a small party of rebels surrounded by French troops in 1957, then backtracks to 1954 in an effort to account for their participation in a losing effort.
One of the least productive of famous modern directors, Mr. Pontecorvo completed only two features before “The Battle of Algiers,” made when he was in his middle 40s, and only two in subsequent years. “Burn!,” which starred Marlon Brando and appeared in the winter of 1970, reworked the themes and character contrasts of “Battle” in a 19th century colonial setting. It retains a comparable pictorial gusto and curiosity interest.
Shot in what seemed sumptuous color at the time, “Burn!” may already “date” less drastically than “Battle,” which imposed an impromptu, newsreel-style look in order to appear “stolen from reality,” to quote the director himself. That look no longer conveys unrehearsed immediacy and authenticity. Instead, it now smacks of grainy, underlit, hand-held cliches.
The dependence on nonprofessional actors has also proven less desirable in the long run. Mr. Pontecorvo invested a good deal of metaphorical significance in faces in the crowd. Reviving one of the doctrines of the Soviet filmmakers of the silent era, he hoped to celebrate a “mass protagonist” in “Algiers”: an entire population rising up spontaneously to overthrow decadent colonialism.
The dubious implication of the finale is that mass sentiments and impulses will always overwhelm resistance. In practice, the filmmakers were very opportunistic in their chosen illustration of this myth: a French colonial retreat rather than an Italian one. It’s unlikely that they could have warmed to the prospect of saluting the failed Hungarian uprising against the Soviet Union, which coincided with events depicted in “The Battle of Algiers.”
It’s hard to remain a political innocent about the partisanship of this movie, but that won’t stop the usual suspects from trying as the revival unfolds. Try as they might, however, “The Battle of Algiers” remains a vivid landmark in the annals of politically tendentious cinema.
**
TITLE: “The Battle of Algiers”
RATING: No MPAA Rating (made two years before the advent of the rating system; adult subject matter, with occasional profanity and graphic violence, set against a wartime backdrop; fleeting depictions of torture and victims of terrorist bombings)
CREDITS: Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo. Screenplay by Franco Solinas and Mr. Pontecorvo. Cinematography by Marcello Gatti. Art direction by Sergio Canevari. Music by Ennio Morricone, with selected themes by Mr. Pontecorvo. In French and Arabic with English subtitles
RUNNING TIME: 120 minutes
MAXIMUM RATING: FOUR STARS
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