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While the Algerian War of Independence (1955-1962) embroiled half a million French soldiers and brought anguished debate to every French household, the struggle did not produce films of such power as would the Vietnam War in America. Many a great French director had made subtle reference to Algeria, from Agnès Varda in Cléo de 5 à 7, to Chris Marker in Le joli mai. But it required an Italian vigour of voice to create the definitive film on the issue – The Battle of Algiers (1966), directed by Gillo Pontecorvo.

GILLO PONTECORVO: In the 1960s political films did much better than today. There was a necessity for change: it was there in the heads of intellectuals, but there was a trend towards change throughout society as a whole. And it ripened throughout the decade until the explosion in ’68. 

Born into a prosperous Pisan family in 1919, Pontecorvo was overshadowed for many years by the celebrity – and then notoriety – of his elder brother Bruno, a scientist whose political commitment led him to spy for the Soviet Union. Gillo, feisty to his fingertips and reluctant to remain in the margins of a cinema dominated by the glossy names of Visconti, Fellini, and Antonioni, had already shown his skills in Kapò (1960), which resurrected the shame and horror of the Nazi concentration camps.

GILLO PONTECORVO: I would have liked to have been a composer, but when I was very young there was an economic crisis in Italy, and my parents didn’t have a penny. I can whistle the music I dream up, but I need others to write it down for me, and so I did that for all my early documentaries. In fact the most cherished award I’ve received is for doing the music in The Battle of Algiers, a prize handed out by the National Union of Film Critics in Italy!

The Battle of Algiers

Screenwriters contributed fundamentally to the power and density of Italian cinema of the sixties, and Pontecorvo wanted Franco Solinas to impart to The Battle of Algiers the same compulsive narrative drive and incisive dialogue that had marked his contribution to Francesco Rosi’s Salvatore Giuliano (1962.) Solinas, whose credits included Nicholas Ray’s Savage Innocents, always dealt trenchantly with controversial themes until his death in 1982. He could veer from one genre to another – from the spaghetti western A Bullet for the General to Costa-Gavras’s State of Siege, and from Pontecorvo’s later and extravagant Burn! to Losey’s ice-cool M. Klein.

PONTECORVO: Franco Solinas had written two novels, and also worked as a journalist. He loved writing for the cinema, and was extremely committed. He even used to reproach me for being less committed than him!
On Battle of Algiers, we spent seven months in Paris before commencing the shoot, recording interviews with the commanders of the French parachute regiment. Then we went to Algiers and talked to people in the Casbah, because we wanted to get a whiff of reality, and also with the heads of the FLN. Before shooting a single line, we spent at least six months studying the situation. The Algerians put no obstacles in our way because they know that I’d be making a more or less objective film about the subject. They were pleased that we would be discussing the revolution, and the inhabitants of the Casbah were happy that it would involve them, so they talked freely to us. We chose lenses that would give the impression of real-life happenings, and we did hand-held camerawork whenever it seemed likely to produce better results.

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For most foreigners, and not merely the French, the Casbah was thought of as nothing more than an exotic location in films of the 1930s like Pépé le Moko or Algiers. In Pontecorvo’s influential masterpiece, however, the mood of risk and tension in these tumbled alleys and passageways is every bit as authentic as Francesco Rosi’s images of Sicily in Salvatore Giuliano. Marcello Gatti’s hand-held camerawork persuaded us that we were watching a documentary, not a reconstruction, and the acting, in particular by Jean Martin as the French colonel, and by Brahim Aggiag as the revolutionary Ali La Pointe, presented both sides of the conflict in tones of unprejudiced, unvarnished plausibility. The fanatical efficiency of the female bombers still shocks audiences today at a time when suicide attacks are a regular occurrence in the Middle East.

GILLO PONTECORVO: The press has written, wrongly, that the French government banned The Battle of Algiers for four years. In fact the French authorities, who were very sensitive on the Algerian issue, banned the film for three months.  They sabotaged it, in effect, because although it was announced as playing at four big cinemas in Paris, the Fascist organisation, OSS, let the exhibitors know that they would be bombed if they went ahead with the screenings. After four years of this, Louis Malle and a group of French directors who adored the film said, ‘We must fight for this film.’ I made an agreement with various youth organisations, and some thirty of them maintained a round-the-clock watch on three cinemas where the film was screened – discreetly, of course. Nothing happened, and the film was released throughout France. In fact there was only one incident, when someone threw ink at the screen in Lyon.

So The Battle of Algiers finally found its French audience, though it should be said that in the interim years the events of 1968 and the death of General de Gaulle had changed the circumstances fundamentally – and psychologically – in France.

Extracted from Revolution! The Explosion of World Cinema in the Sixties by Peter Cowie (Faber and Faber).