Gills Pontecorvo, producer
LE JEUDI, 16 NOVEMBRE
à
18h30
Amphi 2
Gills Pontecorvo’s famous
film, Battle of Algiers (1966), was recently released in
French
army confronts demonstrators for Algerian independence in 1960
The film concerns the
career of one Ali
In the film, the FLN starts
off its campaign of national liberation by attempting to purge the
Algerian
people of what the political organization sees as decadent Western
influences.
One of the FLN’s communiqués reads:
"People of
One can only wonder if the
permissiveness and hedonism that is such a prominent aspect of Western
democracy will be any more welcome in the Arab world of today than it
was in
the 1950s.
Then begin the murders of
French policemen, who are usually shot in the back. The incidents
multiply, and
the prefect of police decides to take extra-legal measures that involve
the
bombing and complete destruction of an inhabited building associated
with the
FLN in the Arab quarter. Thereafter, the FLN starts it own bombing
campaign. In
the film’s most famous sequence, three Arab women made up and dressed
as
Frenchwomen manage to sneak bombs into the European quarter, which has
been cut
off from the Kasbah by checkpoints. Their targets are a bar, a milk
bar, and
the Air France office. In one scene, the youthful, carefree French –
teenagers
and children among them – socialize, drink, and gyrate to the Latin
tune
"Hasta Manana" in the bar, while one of the women hides her bomb and
leaves. What happens next in all three places is as horrific as it is
familiar.
On the 11th of September,
2001, we saw another example of this strategy of hitting three targets
simultaneously in order to disorient and demoralize the enemy: The
attack on
the
As the situation
deteriorates, the French send in reinforcements, which arrive marching
to the
applause of the French residents. The narrator informs us that "the
Inspector General of the Administration has taken drastic steps to
ensure law
and order and to protect people and property. In particular, to bring
the 10th
Para Division into
Commander Lt. Colonel
Philippe Mathieu tells his men: "The problem, as usual, is: first, the
enemy; second, how to destroy him. There are 400,000 Arabs in
The Lt. Colonel also tells
his men that they need an excuse to go on the offensive, and if the
Arabs don’t
provide one, he himself will. But the Arabs do give him his excuse in
the form
of a general strike: anyone participating in the strike is considered
an FLN
member. In an operation code-named "
But even as the FLN is
being broken up, the bombings continue. A horse race is interrupted by
two
explosions, and the French spectators attempt to wreak their vengeance
on an
Arab boy selling refreshments in the stands. As the mob moves towards
him, the
boy’s eyes become filled with terror – a terror that is also wary,
doubtless
because the boy has feared the wrath of the French before and
intuitively
understands the workings of corporate guilt. The lad, who ironically is
wearing
a cap with the Coca-Cola logo, is reminiscent of the little Jewish boy
with
hands raised in the famous WWII photograph – a comparison made almost
certainly
on purpose by Pontecorvo.
Immediately after the
explosions, while the bloody victims are being carried to safety, the
French
pounce on the child, striking and kicking him, shouting: "Salopard!
You’ll
pay for the rest! Little rat! Get going! Son of a bitch!" The child is
saved
by a French policeman, who puts himself between the boy and the mob
while
shouting, "Take it easy! He’s only a child!" To which someone in the
mob responds, "So what? Don’t they kill our children?!" The officer
and his colleagues succeed in carrying the boy to safety – an
intentional
endorsement, possibly, by Pontecorvo of the Western sense of justice
and fair
play.
This is certainly the most
moving scene in the film, and it is the one that stayed with me vividly
all
during the thirty years after I first saw the movie.
In a following scene,
Pontecorvo deals with the issue of the killing of innocents by an army
vs. such
killing by an irregular force. During a press conference, a reporter
asks a
captured official of the FLN: "Isn’t it a dirty thing to use women’s
baskets
to carry bombs to kill innocent people?" To which the official answers,
"And you? Doesn’t it seem even dirtier to you to drop napalm bombs on
defenseless villages with thousands of innocent victims? It would be a
lot
easier for us if we had planes. Give us your bombers, and we’ll give
you our
baskets."
In a second press
conference, another reporter questions Colonel Matthieu about the use
of
torture against FLN members. The colonel responds: "I’ll ask you a
question myself: Should
There follows a graphic but
at the same time stylized sequence of the torture of suspected
terrorists.
The colonel finally
succeeds in destroying the terrorist cells. He is convinced that if the
head of
the organization is taken or killed, the organization itself will die.
And he
does succeed in blowing up Ali
But the peace does not
last. The narrator informs us: "It is not known why, but after two
years
of relative quiet, apart from the guerrilla war in the mountains,
trouble has
broken out again."
The demonstration scene at
the end of the film, with its Algerian-flag waving, ululating
protestors, is
where Pontecorvo indulges and celebrates his communist convictions –
the
victory of the people over their imperialistic oppressors – not
foreseeing
where liberation and independence would lead: in 1991, the FLN
government of
Algeria cancelled the results of a free election in which the decidedly
un-communist FSI (Islamic Salvation Front) was poised to win a majority
and
banned the party. In response, a splinter group of the FSI, the Armed
Islamic
Group (GIA), set out to purify
Battle of Algiers is
gripping with its scenes that seem to have been shot today in
The question that the film
poses to us present-day Americans is the same, mutatis mutandis, that
Lt.
Colonel Matthieu poses to the journalists: Should France stay in
If the answer is yes, I’m
afraid that, like the French, we’ll have to accept all the necessary
consequences.
Gillo Pontecorvo and
In her biography of
Pontecorvo, Memorie Estorte a uno Smemorato (Memories Wrung from a
Scatterbrain
– a reference to Pontecorvo’s famed absent-mindedness) Irene Bignardi
tells us
that the future director of the Battle of Algiers was born into an
Italian-Jewish family of
The director was introduced
to communism in the late ’30s by an older brother, Bruno, who worked as
an
atomic physicist in
During WWII, Pontecorvo
worked as a courier and journalist for the Italian Communist Party. But
he
became disillusioned with the party in 1956 as a result of its support
of the
Soviet invasion of Hungary: "For a long time, I had begun to criticize
that which I had liked for so long: those [Communist Party] grooves
that had
given me a great sense of security, the romanticization of the working
class...the
romanticization of the Soviet Union and the myopia concerning certain
facts....
This series of small delusions had brought [me and others] to the truth
and had
separated us from the religion. When the suppression [of the revolt] in
Hungary
took place, all these feelings came to a head, and I decided to leave a
party
in which I had believed blindly, but which had deluded me in many ways."
Pontecorvo’s brother
Bruno’s disillusionment with the
Like many other Italian
communists who left the party in disgust at the Soviet invasion of
Pontecorvo wanted to shoot
his film without using professional actors (in fact, the only
professional is
Jean Martin, a French stage actor who plays the part of the French
commander
Matthieu). He found the 138 faces featured in the film while wandering
the
streets of
If one has not seen this
film, one cannot begin to imagine Pontecorvo’s extraordinary
achievement. The
acting is so natural and convincing that many viewers and even some
critics
assumed that the movie was a documentary. Only a master director could
have
taken this raw acting material and gotten such performances out of it.
And
despite his leftist viewpoint, Pontecorvo neither ridicules or
demonizes the
French, as does Michael Moore the Americans in his recent putative
documentary
Bowling at Columbine – though I do a disservice to Pontecorvo to
compare his
work to that of
Although nearly forty years
have passed since its creation, Battle of Algiers is more timely than
ever –
especially for Americans, given the American involvement in a
contemporary
colonial war in the