7 REVOLUTION
The Battle of Algiers Gillo Pontecorvo (1966) Algeria
Pontecorvo, Gillo. The Battle of Algiers. Rizzoli, 1966.
Gillo Pontecorvo was a journalist and communist. He made The Battle of Algiers to “re-examine and re-evaluate the basic concept of a historical event.” He uses a neo-realist style not to present the Algerian Revolution objectively, but to “make a subjective statement employing objective fact.”
He wanted Europeans to see the Algerian battle for autonomy as an archetypal struggle against oppression. Filmmaking for Pontecorvo was “a deliberate rearrangement of chosen fact for a didactic purpose.”[1]
He began working on the script with the Algerian revolutionaries and planned to cast the leaders of the Liberation Front in his film. Pontecorvo was Italian, not a native filmmaker, but his express goal and philosophy was anti-imperialist. He wanted to present the view and experience of the anti-imperialist forces in Algeria who were fighting for freedom from France. The National Liberation Army fought France from 1954 to 1962.
In an Interview for PierNico Solinas’ Book on The Battle of Algiers, Pontecorvo explains:
In times like these when so many countries are still grappling with the problems of the struggle for independence and freedom we thought it both stimulating and important to focus not only on the techniques of urban guerilla warfare and partisan war but also on how, with the right timing, a people or ethnic group need simply set its mind on independence in order to begin an irreversible process which will eventually achieve that goal despite momentary defeats and setbacks.
The Battle of Algiers shows the defeat of the NLF; then after two years of silence, the leaders dead or exiled, the organization destroyed, just when everything seems over for good, the movement explosively sets itself in motion again, thereby proving that nothing is lost on revolutionary ground because what has been sown springs up multiplied and thousand-fold.
I did photo tests with my own camera and a 16mm. Then with Marcello Gatti we made more tests with a 35mm camera. What we were searching for was a kind of photography that was… visually pleasing, but at the same time would contain the rough quality of a newsreel.
We met with Algerian partisans, talked with the people of the Casbah, got direct emotions. I spent days with Sala Bazi, who had been a member of the NLF. He explained step by step how the organization functioned, how they made their bombs, placed them, etc. We came away with an idea of the situation as complete as if we had lived it ourselves.
Cinema can be a way of revitalizing a people’s deadened responses. We have been conditioned to absorb a false vision of reality that is dominated by the tastes, morals, and perceptions of the establishment. To forego the possibility of opposing the fictions diffused by this establishment is in the least irresponsible. That is why I believe in a cinema which addresses itself to the masses and not a cinema d’elite for an elite.[2]