Plot Points: “Battle of Algiers” From the Iraq Surge to the Arab Spring
A woman passes through a checkpoint in THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS
Gillo Pontecorvo was not just a great filmmaker, he was a fine historian. His seminal movie The Battle of Algiers set a new bar for tense, uncompromising storytelling that is committed to balance and objectivity. Completed in 1966 when most of the events dramatized were already ten years in the past, Battle of Algiers was withheld from French theaters for a further five years. By then the iconic nationalist president Charles de Gaulle was dead, and France’s North African empire was a distant memory except for the ever-rising number of Arab immigrants arriving from the former colonial territories.
Pontecorvo’s film is a reflective obituary of French Algeria, not a raw autopsy. It recreates a moment well before independence, when Algerian freedom fighters briefly won the upper-hand before an infusion of French troops drove them back underground. The moment that Algeria actually became sovereign is shown, cursorily, in an epilogue, but Pontecorvo seems to feel that the formal switch from colony to nation is less important than what came before and what comes after. His interest is in the struggle and its aftermath. As a result, Battle of Algiers is about much more than one country’s experience with decolonization: it is a blueprint for modern warfare generally, of the choices available to governments and the friction often seen among insurgents.
I first watched the movie during a particular historical moment that also happened to be the film’s fortieth anniversary. It was 2006, several years into the United States’ war in Iraq. The war had gone badly; body counts were higher among soldiers, enemy combatants, and civilians than anyone in charge had anticipated, and casualties were continuing to rise. Politically, the George W. Bush presidency had squandered much of its post-9/11 goodwill on a case of miscalculation, overreach, and faulty intelligence. Armed with my recent Bachelor’s degree in History, I was wearying my friends with projections of a Vietnam-like quagmire.
Jean Martin in THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS
Battle of Algiers gave me more ammunition. The parallels between the US and France seemed obvious. The French soldiers in the movie used torture, like the Americans at Abu Ghraib. The security checkpoints in the movie, like the ones in real-life Bagdad, were useless to prevent near-daily bombings in cafés and markets. The French colonel in charge of counterinsurgency (Jean Martin, the only experienced actor in the film) spoke of the need for “political will” in France. If the politicians in Paris were willing to give him the support he needed, he would hold Algiers. If not, he would just as gladly surrender — though, as a critic of Sartre, he is clearly no liberal. The colonel reminds the press that the French had recently lost their colony of Vietnam thanks to a lack of political will. Not long after Battle of Algiers was filmed, an insufficient will for war in the United States was cited by hawks as an explanation for America’s own bitter experience in Vietnam. Pontecorvo seemed prophetic.
Just how prophetic, I did not see in 2006. I noticed only the parts of Battle of Algiers most relevant at that moment: the difficulties and the “dark side” (to borrow a Dick Cheney phrase) of pacifying an Arab country.
I rewatched the film in 2015 and found a totally different movie. It is plainly the story of how the French won the Battle of Algiers. The fact that they ultimately lost the war is incidental, if no less inevitable. Pontecorvo’s movie now seemed to predict not just the chaos of 2006 Iraq, but the “successful” troop surge of 2007. A Godfather-like montage of assassinations near the beginning of the film prompts the French police in Algeria to call for reinforcements, who arrive and spend the rest of the film capturing and killing the leaders of the insurrection. The influx of additional American troops in Iraq achieved similar results, though many have pointed out that the US’s bribery of Sunni fighters did at least as much to end the insurgency as new boots on the ground. In any case, Pontecorvo’s plot wraps up pretty much where the American war in Iraq wound down: with the Western forces of law and order seemingly, and temporarily, triumphant.
A vision of torture in THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS
But Pontecorvo’s prophecy doesn’t end there. Woven throughout the film is his pessimism about the future postcolonial government of Algeria. It is not hidden, but I confess I missed it entirely on my first viewing, when the conflict seemed to me to be a simple matter of imperialism vs. independence. Pontecorvo is wise enough to ask not only “imperialism at what cost?” but “independence at what cost?” He is not romantic about Algerian independence or agnostic about its form. He shows hints of religious stridency, intolerance, and ruthlessness. Are the café bombings in the film, which kill children and civilians, a necessary evil for Algerian freedom fighters? (Trivia: this is one of two movies scored by Ennio Morricone in which a child in a pub is killed by a homemade bomb; the other is 1987’s The Untouchables.) When a gang of radicalized Algerian children attacks an old, drunk man in a Casbah alley for failing to live up to the insurgents’ moral edicts, does Pontecorvo’s lingering camera condemn them any less harshly than the French soldiers who torture their prisoners?
In the wake of the Arab Spring of the early 2010s, in which longstanding dictatorships were overthrown only to be replaced by (potentially) new and more ideologically-rigorous dictatorships, the most striking line in the film is no longer the French colonel’s remark about political will, but the insurgent leader’s statement about revolutions: “It’s hard to start a revolution. Even harder to continue it. And hardest of all to win it. But it’s only afterwards, when we have won, that the true difficulties begin.” The truth of these words is evident today from the rise of ISIS in Iraq to lingering uncertainties about the future of Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia.
Insurgents clash with each other in THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS
Gillo Pontecorvo recognized each thread of the Algerian War and committed them to film within ten years of the event. An American filmmaker, or better yet an Iraqi of Afghani one, could do the same for the last 10-15 years, but it would be difficult to escape the shadow of Battle of Algiers. Past was prologue, and history echoed.
Battle of Algiers on Flickchart
- Globally ranked #230
- Wins 60% of matchups
- 794 users have ranked it
It’s my understanding that they occasionally offer viewings of Battle of Algiers to CIA agents to give them a realistic look at insurgencies like this.