There are few classic films with as much and then, inspired by the Cuban relevance to the early 21st century as revolution and Algeria's victory against Gillo Pontecorvo's 1966 re-enactment the French, took up a third-world Outsiders: of the Algerian liberation struggle perspective and made solidarity of the preceding decade. The Battle of with Vietnam. The film was indeed The Battle of Algiers Algiers is a singular film, celebrated on a touchstone for that most politicised the one hand as a paradigm of political of decades, and in France it was cinema, and on the other studied by the banned. But then the French authorities and political cinema military for clues about the problems of were notoriously sensitive about confronting urban guerrillas. Writing the representation of anti-colonial Gillo Pontecorvo's classic about in the New York Times in 2003, when it sentiments even before their defeat was released on DVD in the US, Michael at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Outlawed the struggle to shake off French T.Kaufman reported a screening at the documentaries in the preceding years Pentagon where "40 officers and civilian included Ren6 Vautier's Afrique 50 (1950) colonial rule in Algeria may have experts... were urged to consider and and Les statues meurent aussi(Statues discuss the implicit issues at the core of Also Die, 1953) by Alain Resnais and become a military case study the film - the problematic but alluring Chris Marker. (The statues that die that's used by all sides in many efficacy of brutal and repressive means are African, and they do so when they in fighting clandestine terrorists in are removed by the colonial power and conflicts, but its relevance is places like Algeria and Iraq. Or more enter museums or become curios for the specifically, the advantages and costs western art market, which robs them stronger today than ever. No of resorting to torture and intimidation of their original symbolic functions. in seeking vital human intelligence This is another film with contemporary political film better understands about enemy plans." This was not the relevance, at least in Paris where small first time the film had been paid such left-bank galleries are currently cashing that the dividing line between compliments. Other reports speak of its in on bourgeois guilt about racism use as a training film for the troops in and the price of African sculptures has the resistance fighter and the Northern Ireland during the Troubles. hit the roof.) The paradox here is that as a piece There is no cogent definition of what terrorist is purely a matter of of political cinema, The Battle ofAlgiers a political film consists: on the contrary, sympathy. By Michael Chanan belongs to the left. Specifically, to the there are so many different ways of new left of the i96os, which broke with being political and so many different Soviet communism after the Russian types of political film as to defy tanks went into Hungary in 1956 definition. One mistake is to suppose (though Pontecorvo was still a Party that political means propaganda. This is member at the time he made the film), little different from saying that all films 381 Sight &Sound IJune 2007 are essentially political because they Investigation ofa Citizen above Suspicion express one ideology or another. It's too (I 97o) and Giuliano Montaldo's Sacco simple an approach because it fails to and Vanzetti (1971), not to mention distinguish between, say, Good Night, various films by Francesco Rosi. and GoodLuckand 300, to take a pair of It is common nowadays, especially recent Hollywood examples. Both films in the kind of university courses that are clearly political, but in very different try to survey the whole of world cinema ways. On an ideological level, the former in a term, to cite The Battle ofAlgiers as is a left-liberal reconstruction of a recent an example of'third cinema', which one historical episode of profound effect educational website describes as "the on contemporary US politics, while oppositional cinemas of the colonised the latter is not just silly nonsense but peoples". In that case, however, a reactionary piece of distant historical Pontecorvo's film wouldn't count, since invention to which Iran, which is deeply all the key creative talent behind the conscious of its ancient pre-Islamic camera was Italian, making it not a cultural roots, has quite rightly taken 'third world' film but a European film offence. In filmic terms, however, about the third world. But this reflects there is a more crucial distinction: Good a misunderstanding. 'Third cinema', a Night, and Good Luckis a film of explicit term introduced by the Argentine film- political discourse, which is quite absent makers Fernando Solanas and Octavio in epics like 300. What is at stake here Getino in 1969, is not a geographical is not simply politics, but the politics category but a kind of film-making that of cinema, the gulf between a film also arose in the 196os in the US, Europe that mobilises the viewer's intelligence and Japan in opposition to both first and and the duplicitous idea that cinema second cinema (they cite the examples is nothing but entertainment. As if of the Newsreel collective in the US, entertainment and politics were the cinegiornaliof the Italian student mutually exclusive categories, which movement, the films made by the Etats is clearly not the case. G6n6raux du Cin6ma Francais, and those The Battle ofAlgiers defies description by UK and Japanese student groups). as propaganda because of the way it First cinema is industrial cinema, presents both sides of the conflict, whether it comes from Hollywood, Algerian and French, locked in a Bollywood or Hong Kong. Second dialectical relation with each other. cinema is the 'artistic' type of film There is no false objectivity, and the characteristic of European production film doesn't hide its fundamental models that value the director as an sympathy for the insurgents, but neither auteur; again this kind of cinema is MEAN STREETS Teshome Gabriel, one of the leading does it obscure the contradictions of found across the globe. Solanas and Based on a memoir theorists of third cinema, came to the the liberation struggle. The parallel Getino characterised it as individualistic, of the battle by conclusion that the schema proposed an imprisoned storytelling also answers to the film's bourgeois, full of psychological FLN fighter and by the Argentineans was problematic - classical narrative construction as and social leanings- but politically filmed using non- not because cinema didn't fall into these what Peter Sainsbury back in 197 1 reformist. Third cinema was the professionals three strands, but because the categories called "a suspenseful battle of tactics militant film of opposition, for which in most roles, tend towards schematicism. Often the between hunters and hunted, action one of the models was their own Pontecorvo's most interesting films were those that film charts the fell across the categories or occupied the and counteraction"- and this is precisely 1968 documentary epic La hora de los response of what made it such a good film for the hornos (The Hourof the Furnaces)- once the guerrillas, grey areas of intermediate positions. military analysts to get their teeth into. described neatly by Robert Stam as a film opposite and top, Here a paradigm would be the 1968 But this also sets The Battle ofAlgiers made "in the interstices of the system to increasingly Cuban film Lucia by Humberto Solds, squarely within a particularly Italian and against the system... independent brutal French with its three episodes evoking De Sica, tactics, above predilection for the political thriller, in production, militant in politics, and, Elia Kazan and the nouvelle vague. a current that includes Elio Petri's experimental in language". Another commentator, Mike Wayne,

Sight &Sound IJune 2007139 The Battle of Algiers Gillo Pontecorvo

follows a similar line when he argues that The Battle ofAlgiers 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 that inform it, but a good political film is usually one that articulates its politics within the narrative, as part of the diegesis. This is why Casablanca,for instance, is a political film, though not of the same discursive kind as, say, Ken Loach's Land andFreedom The difficulty here is that the film will be read according to the political culture of the audience that 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. This dialectic between the film and the time and place of its viewing functions in many different ways. When Land and Freedom was first shown in Havana it produced an unexpected effect. You might think it would be the perfect film for such a highly politicised audience, but this was in 1996, when Cuba was struggling to reverse the BAG LADY screening is highly revealing: "How economic disintegration that followed In one of the most to win a battle against terrorism and the collapse of the Soviet Union, harrowing scenes, lose the war of ideas. Children shoot on which it had become financially a woman from the Casbah disguised soldiers at point-blank range. Women dependent. Came that brave long central as a European plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire sequence of discussion about politics, scrutinises the Arab population builds to a mad fervour. and in Havana some of the audience faces of customers Sound familiar?" And the film indeed began to leave: what turned them off in a crowded caft, suggests certain parallels. As Michael T. was what Cubans called teque, mere including a young boy licking an Kaufman puts it, the events re-enacted political rhetoric. But then when ice-cream, before in Pontecorvo's film demonstrate the David tears up his Communist Party planting her bomb effective use of the tactics of a 'people's card, another remarkable response: war', "where fighters emerge from half of the remaining audience burst seemingly ordinary lives to mount into applause, which of course provoked attacks and then retreat to the cover of jeers and catcalls from the other half. their everyday identities." But go back to Let me add a third example: that of the passage from Kaufman with which Missing,by the doyen of the political I began, where he speaks of "fighting thriller, Costa-Gavras. I well remember clandestine terrorists in places like seeing it for the first time in Colombia in Algeria and Iraq." By calling both groups 1982, in a downtown Bogot6 cinema terrorists, all historical distinctions where even the early-evening screening are elided to leave only one essential drew a packed house who rose to their element: that in both cases the feet at the end and applauded long and insurgents are Muslim. The liberation hard. When I got back home to London struggle of the FLN is reduced to the a few weeks later, however, I found a religious sectarianism of competing different response: some of my friends strands of Islamic fundamentalism were suspicious of a film about Latin 50 years later. To avoid this trap, the America that yet again turned the story trick is to see The Battle ofAlgiers as both into a vehicle for stars and focalised it a contemporary and a historical film from the Yankee point of view. at the same time, which is not about The way you understand the renewed the myth of the clash of civilisations, contemporary significance of The Battle but about the incomprehension of the ofAlgiers revolves around the same imperial hegemon. question of the political culture of the viewer- and here the text of the U 'The Battle ofAlgiers' opens at selected flier inviting guests to the Pentagon cinemas nationwideon i i May

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TITLE: Outsiders: Battle of Algiers and political cinema SOURCE: Sight & Sound ns17 no6 Je 2007 PAGE(S): 38-40

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