The Battle of Algiers

The Battle of Algiers (1966)

a film by Gillo Pontecorvo

Watching this film I had the impression I was experiencing a document and the fact that this is real story and the emotions that it awake in me are just shades for reality surprises me and makes me like it more.

The people of Algeria has decided the French colonialist have to leave and this movie is the document that moves this historical fact to posterity as a great movie. There is no main character but the people and the city of Algiers: you see the winding street of the Casbah and the cosmopolitan street of the European town, you see the faces of the people and the terrifying uniforms of the paratroopers, you see the shots and the bombs and cannot remain unemotional about this story. This movie shows the process of independence of Algiers and it does it through the experience of the Algerians as a collective. This is the way to understand the process of decolonization of Africa, is in this images were I have seen it summarized.

This film has an amazing narrative partly powered by the force of the facts but also achieved with great selection of sequences and an amazing soundtrack (no surprise I found Ennio Morricone was behind it). The great achievement of this film beyond the amazing shots and the memorable images is the fact that it seeds ideas that linger and keep rolling in my head after I finish watching it. It shows the struggle of the Algerians but I also see the brutality of terrorism. It shows the opprobrious behavior of the paratroopers but you also see their confusion and their fear. You see the victims of both sides, you see the streets boiling with the popular will and the wish of independence and it is hard to remain apathetic when the story is told a way that is nothing less than memorable.

This movie seems to keep asking for more, I want to know about the way in which it was made and who is the director and who is all the people on it and who payed for it when the cause and the shame were so recent. After the final credits and beyond the controversy is this haunting spirit of curiosity that makes this movie so lasting and then I remember the great photography and the soundtrack and the sequences and...