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Outsiders: The battle of Algiers and political cinema

Article · January 2007

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Outsiders: The Battle of Algiers and political cinema
Michael Chanan

Sight & Sound, Vol 17, 6 pp.38-40

There are few classic films with as much relevance to the early twenty-first century as Gillo Pontecorvo’s
highly dramatic 1965 re-enactment of the Algerian liberation struggle of the preceding decade. The Battle
of Algiers is a singular film, celebrated on the one hand as a paradigm of political cinema, and on the
other, a film studied by the military for clues about the problems of confronting urban guerrillas. Writing
in the New York Times in 2003, when it was released on DVD in the USA, Michael T.Kaufman reported
a screening at the Pentagon where ‘40 officers and civilian experts… were urged to consider and discuss
the implicit issues at the core of the film – the problematic but alluring efficacy of brutal and repressive
means in fighting clandestine terrorists in places like Algeria and Iraq. Or more specifically, the
advantages and costs of resorting to torture and intimidation in seeking vital human intelligence about
enemy plans.’ (September 7, 2003) This was not the first time the film had been paid such compliments.
Other reports speak of its use by army officers in Northern Ireland during the Troubles as a training film
for the troops.
The paradox here is that as a piece of political cinema The Battle of Algiers belongs to the left.
Specifically, the new left of the 1960s, which broke with Soviet Communism after the Russian tanks went
into Hungary in 1956 (although Pontecorvo was still a member of the Party at the time he made the
film); and then, inspired by both the Cuban Revolution and Algeria’s victory against the French, took up
a third world perspective and made solidarity with Vietnam. The film was indeed a touchstone for that
most politicised of decades, and in France it was banned. But then the French authorities were
notoriously sensitive about the representation of anti-colonial sentiments, even before their defeat at
Dienbienphu in 1954. Banned documentaries of those years include René Vautier’s Afrique 50 of 1950,
and three years later, Les Statues Meurent Aussi, (‘Statues Also Die’) by Alain Resnais and Chris Marker.
(The statues which die are African, and they die when they are removed by the colonial power and enter
museums or become curios for the Western art market, which robs them of their original symbolic
functions. The authorities considered this an attack on government policies and kept the film back for ten
years. This is another film with contemporary relevance, at least in Paris, where small left bank art
galleries are currently cashing in on bourgeois guilt about racism, and the price of African sculptures has
hit the roof.)
If being banned is one of the liabilities of a political film, it’s not as if there’s a definition of what
a political film consists in. On the contrary, there are so many different ways of being political that
inevitably there are so many different types of political film as to defy definition.
One mistake is to suppose that political means essentially propaganda. This is little different from saying
that all films are essentially political because they express one ideology or another. This is too bland and
simple an approach because it fails to distinguish between, say, Good Night and Good Luck and 300, to take
a pair of recent Hollywood examples. Both these films are clearly political, but in very different ways. On
the ideological level, the former is a left-liberal reconstruction of a recent historical episode of profound
effect on contemporary US politics, while the latter is not just silly nonsense but a reactionary piece of
distant historical invention to which Iran, which is deeply conscious of its ancient pre-Islamic cultural
roots, has quite rightly taken offence. (Of course Iranian cinema has its equivalents, but those are the
religious epics and war movies which are never seen abroad.) In filmic terms, however, there is a more
crucial difference: Good Night and Good Luck is a film of explicit political discourse, which is quite absent
in epics like 300. What is at stake here is not simply politics, but the politics of cinema, the gulf between a
film which mobilises the viewer’s intelligence, and the duplicitous idea that cinema is nothing but
entertainment. As if entertainment and politics were mutually exclusive categories, which is clearly
nonsense.
In any case, The Battle of Algiers defies description as propaganda because of the way it presents
both sides of the conflict, Algerian and French, locked in a dialectical relation with each other. There is
no false objectivity, and the film doesn’t hide its fundamental sympathy for the insurgents, but nor does it
obscure the contradictions of the liberation struggle – the mutual implication of colonial violence and
anti-colonial counter-violence. The parallel story-telling, however, also answers to the film’s classical
narrative construction as what Peter Sainsbury back in 1971 called ‘a suspenseful battle of tactics between
hunters and hunted, action and counteraction’ – and this is precisely what made it such a good film for the
military analysts to get their teeth into. But this also means that The Battle of Algiers belongs squarely
within a particularly Italian predilection for the political thriller, a current which includes examples like
Elio Petri’s Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970) and Giuliano Montaldo’s Sacco and Vanzetti
(1971), not to mention various films by Francesco Rosi.
It is common nowadays, especially in the kind of university courses which try to survey the whole
of world cinema in a term, to cite The Battle of Algiers as an example of ‘third cinema’, which one
educational website describes as ‘the oppositional cinemas of the colonised peoples’. In that case,
however, Pontecorvo’s film wouldn’t count, since all the key creative talent behind the camera was Italian,
making it not a ‘third world’ film but a European film about the third world. But this reflects a
misunderstanding. Third Cinema, a term introduced by the Argentine film-makers Fernando Solanas and
Octavio Getino in 1969, is not a geographical category but a kind of film-making which also arose in the
60s in the USA, Europe and Japan (they cite the examples of the Newsreel collective in the USA, the
cinegiornali of the Italian student movement, the films made by the Etats Généraux du Cinéma Français,
and those of the British and Japanese student movements) in opposition to both first and second cinema.
First cinema is industrial cinema, whether it comes from Hollywood, Bollywood or Hong Kong. Second
cinema is the ‘artistic’ type of film characteristic of European production models, which value the director
as an artist and author; again this kind of cinema is found across the globe. Solanas and Getino
characterised it as individualistic, bourgeois, full of psychological and social leanings – but politically
reformist. Third cinema was the militant film of opposition, for which one of the models was their own
documentary epic of 1968, La hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces) – once described very neatly
by Robert Stam as a film made 'in the interstices of the system and against the system... independent in
production, militant in politics, and experimental in language’.
Teshome Gabriel, one of the leading theorists of third cinema, came to the conclusion that the
schema proposed by the Argentineans was problematic not because cinema didn’t fall into these three
strands, but because the categories tend towards schematicism. Often, the most interesting films were the
ones which fell across the categories, or occupied the ‘grey areas’ of intermediate positions. Here a
paradigm would be the Cuban film Lucia of 1968, by Humberto Solás, with its three episodes evoking de
Sica, Elia Kazan, and the nouvelle vague respectively. Another commentator, Mike Wayne, follows a
similar line when he argues in his book on Political Film that The Battle of Algiers is a work that straddles all
three categories, combining the elements of the thriller (first cinema), the aesthetics of the director as
author (second cinema), and the perspective of the liberation struggle (third cinema).
As a general rule, you can’t give a cogent account of a political film without relating it to the
politics which inform it, but a good political film is usually one which articulates its politics within the
narrative, as part of the diegesis. This is why Casablanca, for example, is a political film, although not of
the same discursive kind as, say, Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom. The difficulty is that the film will still be
read according the political culture of the audience who watches it. Today’s young viewer encountering
Casablanca for the first time will very likely not understand the references to the Spanish Civil War, or even
see the film as political at all, without some learning. Last year one of my students confessed to being
unable to comprehend The Quiller Memorandum because she didn’t understand anything about East
Germany (sometimes the ignorance of recent history among the current generation of British university
students is breathtaking). But this dialectic between the film and the time and place of the viewing
functions in many different ways. When Land and Freedom was first shown in Havana, it produced an
unexpected effect. You might think this the perfect film for such a highly politicised audience, but this was
in 1996, when Cuba was right down in the dumps, struggling to reverse the economic disintegration which
followed the collapse of the Communist camp in Eastern Europe and finally the Soviet Union itself, on
which Cuba had become economically dependent. Came that brave long central sequence of discussion
about politics, and in Havana, some of the audience got fidgety and began to leave – what turned them off
was what Cubans called teque – mere political rhetoric. But then, when David tears up his Communist
Party card, another remarkable response – half of the remaining audience burst into applause, which of
course provoked jeers and catcalls from the other half.
But it’s also true that audiences in different places can be specially receptive, so let me add a third
example, that of Missing, by the doyen of the political thriller, Costa-Gavras. I well remember seeing it for
the first time in Bogotá, the week it opened in 1982, in a downtown cinema where even the early evening
screening drew a packed house, who rose to their feet at the end in a single sweep and applauded long and
hard. When I got back home to London a few weeks later, I found that the film had provoked rather
different responses; some of my friends were suspicious of a film about Latin America which yet again
turned the story into a vehicle for stars and focalised it from the Yankee point of view.
The way you understand the renewed contemporary significance of The Battle of Algiers revolves
around the same question of the political culture of the viewer, and the way it was spelled out on the flier
inviting guests to the Pentagon screening is highly revealing: "How to win a battle against terrorism and
lose the war of ideas. Children shoot soldiers at point-blank range. Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the
entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar?” The film indeed suggests certain parallels.
As Kaufman puts it, the events re-enacted in Pontecorvo’s film demonstrate the effective use of the tactics
of a ‘people's war’, “where fighters emerge from seemingly ordinary lives to mount attacks and then
retreat to the cover of their everyday identities.” But go back to the passage from Kaufman with which I
began, where he speaks of ‘fighting clandestine terrorists in places like Algeria and Iraq’. By calling both
of them terrorists, all historical distinctions are elided to leave only one essential element – the fact that in
both cases the insurgents are Moslem. The liberation struggle of the FLN is reduced to the religious
sectarianism of competing strands of Islamic fundamentalism fifty years later. To avoid this trap, the trick
is to see The Battle of Algiers as both a contemporary and an historical film at the same time, which is not
about the myth of the clash of civilisations, but about the incomprehension of the imperial hegemon.

Michael Chanan is a documentarist, writer and Professor of Film & Video at the University of Roehampton

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