The Battle of Algiers - Movie Review Example

Film Analysis: The Battle of Algiers Writer and director of the film The Battle of Algiers (1966), Italian born Gillo Pontecorvo, was able to look at the events leading up to the independence of Algiers after 150 years of French colonialism, and put that important period of historical significance into perspective. Algerians, much like the indigenous peoples of other countries colonized by European imperialism, were treated as irrelevant service workers in their own country, while the country’s aesthetic and natural resources were exploited by the French colonials. By the time the film opens, the battle for Algerian independence has been going on for years, since the early 1950s. The opening scene in the film depicts the French interrogating an Algerian national, who has just given up the secrecy of the Algerian freedom fighter, Ali La Pointe. La Pointe, who actually began his life as a laborer, turned petty thief when the economy turned severe. He was apprehended following one of his acts of petty theft, but not before he was humiliated by a French elite, and, as La Pointe experiences his political epiphany, an angry crowd of French surround and attack him. La Pointe becomes a notorious terrorist, and a key figure and leader amongst freedom fighters through the National Liberation Front, FLN. As is so often the case in the history of colonialism, insurgency is born out of the hardships of the indigenous peoples during times of severe economic hardship, and especially, as was the case with La Pointe, while incarcerated for crimes arising out of the desperate need to survive. In prison, he meets other insurgents, and his life as an Algerian independence freedom fighter is born. Their means for achieving independence is actually not conventional warfare, but acts of terrorism, bringing about the disruption of life, economy and governmental processes to weaken and collapse the reigning French government. Pontecorvo, whose writing and directing film career spanned fifty years of filmmaking with early films like The Wide Blue Road (1957) (English title), was able to look at the events with the eye of the film director, and capture on film the most poignant moments in the action and in the storyline. For instance, the dramatic nature of the storyline of liberation depicted when the French are in the apartment in the Casbah (Algerian section of the city), where La Pointe is hiding behind a kitchen wall. With La Pointe are another male freedom fighter, a young boy who has served the movement as a lookout and messenger, and a woman, who has worked with La Pointe. The French are on one side of the wall encouraging La Pointe to surrender himself, and to send the woman and the young child out first. The camera then cuts to behind the wall, and the close up shots of the freedom fighters whom knowing they have been found out, show a calm fear, each one realizing that they face death. The director captures what is indisputably real fear in the faces of the actors. In the lead character, Brahim Hadjadj, as La Pointe, there is in the appearance of the actor a real terrorist leader. Perhaps this is because as an Algerian, Hadjadj knows first-hand the discrimination, the humiliation and pain and suffering of the Algerians under colonial rule. While on the other side of the wall, the French lead character, Colonel Mathieu, played by the French actor Jean Martin, who captures the charisma, magnetism, confidence and strength of a military colonel backed by a military machine with the right to decide who lives and who dies. Jean Martin draws on each of these points of the character’s persona and successfully conveys them in the most important scenes. He renders strikingly memorable and strong performances in each scene in which he takes command with a realistic authority. Like the prison scene, after the informant has been tortured into confessing the hiding place of La Pointe and one of the French Legionnaires wants to ridicule the prisoner, Mathieu commands the Frenchman to stop clowning around with the tone and authority that is real and helps put the viewer in the moment such that it is easy to understand the prisoner’s humiliation without having actually seen on film the acts of violence committed against him. This is a combination of strong and powerful acting and directing in order for the viewer to come away that sense of abuse, which then can be applied to the Algerian people as a whole under French authority and colonialism. Those parts of the film depicting the life of the Algerian people, especially in the Casbah, and the life of the French in the French section of the city, take on the appearance of documentary filmmaking because of the realness of the setting and the people. When Muhamad and Fatiah are married in secrecy, this scene has a mixed combination of reality and fiction. It depicts the union of two young resistance fighters, in love, but embroiled in their battle to win independence from the French occupiers. There is almost an immediate switch back to the sense of documentary as the French policeman walks through the city, then, the dramatic film and fiction sense of creative liberty in recreation when the policeman is murdered. This begins a string of violence against authority depicted in the film. In the scenes that follow, hours 15:30 and 16:15, as we see the resistance attack French police and soldiers from moving cars, then a shootout on a thoroughfare, it takes us into the moment of the present and is strikingly similar to the scenes we see on the nightly news out of the Middle East today. The immediate reaction, especially knowing the outcome the Algerian resistance, is one of whether or not this is not a precursor as to how events in the Middle East will go today. Will efforts to establish democracy in the Middle East give way to the terrorist tactics that have proven successful in the past, and continue to hammer away at the infrastructure until, as in the film, the opposing forces just finally give up? That is the question that is perhaps answered by the film, and the film should serve as a lesson in what not to do as an opposing force in a Muslim land. There is the sense of dramatic action and fiction when La Pointe confronts Jafar, the opposition Algerian leader, who is striving for control of the resistance fighters and for the Cabah in order to rise to power nationally once the resistance movement is successful in ousting the French occupation. La Pointe kills Jafar, and warns his men to leave the Casbah, and to remember what they have seen and not to pose a threat again. Here, again, perhaps more than any other scene in the film is the sense of creative liberty. It is difficult, as the viewer, to put yourself in the moment when Jafar is dressed like an Italian Mafioso character. While the scene may be historically accurate, it loses the viewer because of its sense of Italian Mafioso over that sense of Muslim terrorist. However, Hadjadj is convincing in his role, again, perhaps because he maintains the appearance, and, thusly, the sense of the Muslim resistance fighter. Two other important scenes depicting the bombing in the Casbah, which was a historical turning point for the resistance, and the bombing in the French café, which is perhaps the first time that the French public felt involved in the struggle between the French and the Muslim Algerians. These are two scenes of opposing perspectives, and the viewer becomes emotionally involved in the decision as to where one’s loyalty lies. Pontecorvo does not make the choice easy. One the one hand, it is very easy to empathize with the Algerians, especially from the place of modernity because we have seen colonialism succumb to independence world-wide. But at the same time, it is the modern experience that post colonialism often results in social and political chaos and upheaval, and especially economic hardship for the average citizen as competing factions, like those represented by La Pointe and Jarfar depict. This film stands as a historic and filmmaking masterpiece. It is one that brings the lesson of oppression and suppression to the forefront, and at the same time carries the message of the need for indigenous people to pursue self-determination. Reference List Pontecorvo, Gillo (1966). The Battle of Algiers, (Motion Picture Film). Casbah Film, Algeria. Read More