THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS (1966) - ***** - MasterpieceI wasn't surprised that V FOR VENDETTA was inspir-ed by Gillo Pontecorvo's masterful docu-drama of revolutionary warfare. Yet, did those filmmakers see a different edit of THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS, or simply missed the damn thematic point?
VENDETTA had this freedom fighter terrorist who practically seems to overthrow that British fascist state by himself. Oh sure that film tries to show the British masses do turn against the regime, but V himself starts and ends the revolution. Save for them dressing up in black and masks, they are irrelevant.
With ALGIERS, the National Liberation Front (FLN) actually lose the title-conflict, all captur-ed/killed by the French army. The victors believe that they have pacified the African colony of Algeria back into their domain, and congratulate themselves.
Three years later, civilian demonstrations cause much duress for the Franco overlords and by 1962, they quit and Algeria gained its independence.
The French had won a potent tactical victory, only to lose a humiliating political war.
But the ending is the beginning. Concentrating on the last militant's face, we warp years ago to his arrest by the French authorities, sent to a prison manned by French jailers, and seeing a fellow countryman be executed by a French guillotine.
Sometime later, the same man is aiming a gun at a French constable, his initiation into the FLN. He pulls the trigger, but its empty. But because he has proven his willingness to murder for his cause, the FLN accepts him.
He isn't the protagonist, but one of many characters within this episodic film. ALGIERS isn't a movie of characterization, but a movie of ideas about insurgency and occupation. That's probably why this movie breezes cleanly without a "plot" to drag it down.
There are the saavy FLN leader who want his group's actions to spark a populist uprising, and the women who use their gender to detonate bombs inside the European Casbah. Members of the terrorized colonial aristocracy launch attacks on their indigenous subjects.
During the course of this conflict, we see the crowds always moving and always emotional, as they represent the general populace. Watch what they do, and what the French do to them, and you'll realize why the French were defeated.
French paratroopers them march in to restore stablity, led by Col. Mathieu (Jean Martin). He is the face and intelligence of France, and I realized, conservative filmmaker John Milius must have seen this movie.
Within his much (wrongly) ridiculed RE D DAWN, there is the Cuban officer, who once like Mathieu, was a patriotic rebel partisan. Now both are the imperialists. Certainly Mathieu knows how rebel cells operate and strive, but how to defeat these people? He employs torture to gain intel and to mentally break them.
What's the most oustanding acheivement about ALGIERS is that despite the subject material and director Pontecorvo's own communist activism, it strives for and succeeds as an unbiased exploration of a modern rebellion. The rebels think bombing civilians is akin to napalm bombs. The French think they have to "crackdown" to defeat such terrorists. Without melodrama or becoming political masturbation, ALGIERS is definitively perfect.
Yet produced in the decade of the revolution, militants ranging from the Viet Cong to the Black Panthers consider-ed ALGIERS a cinema textbook in how to conduct an insurgency. But THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS continues to resonate with us today because of our current headlines.
In the key sequence of ALGIERS, Mathieu is grilled by an international press about the use of torture. He asks them if France should stay in Algeria. If yes, then they must do whatever it takes.
With the current war in Iraq, and its own torture debate, ALGIERS was screened at the Pentagon in 2004. The question I would like to ask those people is, what did they learn from the movie?
