The Battle of Algiers | Review

Restored classic is just as poignant today as it was forty years back.

Minus the controversy, Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers remains the charged, dramatic firecracker that is was when it was first presented forty plus years ago. With the film’s unrelenting text, it harrowingly depicts how unwarranted occupation and absolute revolt ultimately lead to unavoidable, politically and religiously-driven bloodbaths. Colonism might be a word of the past but it still takes place today – now some people call it freedom.

Winner of the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion – this 1967 classic evokes the counter-attack nature that was powerfully depicted in Battleship Potemkin. Inspired by the Neo-realism form, this film took to the streets shooting with the splendor of the cracked, hole-in-the-wall, run-down Casbah districts that contrast with the fancy cafes of the social elite. Shot with a documentary footage type of look with a black-and-white transfer, the film uses an entire cast of non-actors with the exception of Jean Martin’s powerful performance of Col. Mathieu Jean Martin. First told in flashback mode, we learn of one of the important faces behind the National Liberation Front a movement that explodes onto the streets and into the minds of its dissident Muslim neighbors. The film gives both points of view; it further demonstrates that the victims of the French Occupation of Algiers are not the Ali LA Pointe’s of the world but the innocent children and women. Also

Pontecorvo purposely imperfect shooting with out-of-focus shots in all sorts of angels offers the film a newsreel like footage – precisely the reasons why the text is so gritty, intense and explosive. Along with the chaotic storyline, are small doses of impacting individual stories. One sees such as a trio of women go through the process of planning out the planting of bombs in safe zones and the chilling scenes featuring torturous methods of the military shockingly remind of one sequence in Rome, Open City.

It is not the shocking images, but it is the film’s ideas and the fact that film doesn’t hold back that makes this the type of film that resonates today especially with the current headlines and blunders of Iraq, Palestine and Africa. Four decades later and Rialto Pictures’ timely release of this masterpiece is perhaps even more poignant.

Rating 5 stars