From Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media

History 011 – World History II Summer 2004 The Battle of Algiers

From Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London: Routledge, 1994):

Battaglia di Algeria (Battle of Algiers, 1966) kidnaps the techniques associated with TV reportage to tell the story of Algerian independence. (Page 10)

In counter-narratives such as The Battle of Algiers…gender and national disguises carry a very different signification: rebel Algerian women disguise themselves in Western “modern” dress, dying their hair blonde and acting coquettishly with French soldiers. Here it is the Third World that masquerades as the West, not as an act of self-effacing mimicry but as a way of sabotaging the colonial regime. (Page 168)

The importance of the participation of colonized or formerly colonized people in the process of production becomes obvious when we compare Gillo Pontecorvo’s La Battaglia di Algeria (1966)…to his later Burn (1970). In the former film, a relatively low-budget ($800,000) Italian-Algerian co-production, Algerian non-professional actors represent themselves in a staged reconstruction of the Algerian war of independence. The Algerians were intimately involved in every aspect of the production, with actors often playing their own historical roles at the very sites where the events took place. They collaborated closely with screenwriter Franco Solanas, who rewrote the scenario numerous times in response to their critiques and observations. As a result, the Algerians exist as socially complex people, and as agents of national struggle. Pontecorvo’s multimillion dollar Burn, on the other hand, involved no such collaboration. An Italo- French co-production, the film casts Marlon Brando as a British colonial agent against Evaristo Marques, a non-professional actor of peasant background. By pitting one of the First World’s most charismatic actors against a completely inexperienced Third World non-professional chosen only for his physiognomy, Pontecorvo…disastrously tips the scales of spectatorial fascination in favor of the colonizer, in a film whose…intention, ironically, was to support the anticolonial struggle. The lack of Caribbean participation… leads to a one-dimensional portrayal of the colonized, seen as shadowy figures devoid of cultural definition. (Page 188)

…the film re-enacts the Algerian war for independence from France, a war that raged from 1954-1962, costing France 20,000 lives and Algeria a million and a half lives. The Battle of Algiers offers a marked contrast to the French and American films set in North Africa where the Arabs form a passive backdrop to the heroic exploits of European heroes and heroines. Whether French (Pépé le Moko, 1936) or American (Morocco, 1930; Casablanca, 1942), the films exploit North Africa mainly as an exotic setting for Western love dramas, a décor dotted with palm trees and lazily traversed by camels. They illustrate perfectly Fanon’s description of the imperial vision, in which “the settler makes history; his life is an epoch”…while against him “torpid creatures, wasted by fevers, obsessed by ancestral customs, form an almost inorganic background for the innovating dynamism of colonial mercantilism.” A crucial innovation of The Battle of Algiers was to invert the Eurocentric focializations typical of the western and the imperial adventure film. (Page 251)

The dividing line between these two worlds [the native town and the European part of the city], for the film as for Fanon, is formed by barbed wire and barracks and police stations”….While the French are in uniform, the Algerians wear everyday civilian dress. For the Algerians, the casbah is home; for the French it is a frontier outpost. (Page 252)

In most European features set in North Africa, Arabic exists only as a background murmur, an incomprehensible babble. In The Battle of Algiers, in contrast, the Algerian characters, although bilingual, generally speak in Arabic (with subtitles for European audiences); they are granted linguistic and cultural dignity. Instead of being shadowy background figures, picturesquely backward at best and hostile and menacing at worst, they are foregrounded. Neither exotic enigmas nor imitation Frenchmen, they exist as people with agency. While never caricaturing the French, the film exposes the crushing logic of colonialism…. (Page 252)

Colonel Mathieu is not deranged or maniacal; he is charming, articulate, and honourable, straightforward about the reality of torture and “rational” in its defense. He ultimately represents the rationality of a system, the inherent logic of colonialism. Both sides are shown as capable of generosity as well as cruelty. (Page 253)

…the film presents the women’s action [of bombing civilian locations in the French part of Algiers city] as the fulfilment of the earlier FLN promise to respond to the French bombing of the casbah…. For the First World mass media, “terrorism” means only anti- establishment violence, never state terrorism or government-sanctioned aerial bombardments. But The Battle of Algiers presents anticolonialist violence as a response to colonialist terror: in Fanon’s words, “the violence of the colonial regime and the counterviolence of the native balance each other and respond to each other….” (Pages 253-254)

The women in the film largely carry out the orders of the male revolutionaries. They certainly appear heroic, but only insofar as they perform their service for the “nation” The film does not ultimately address the two-fronted nature of their struggle within a nationalist but still patriarchal revolution. In privileging the nationalist struggle, The Battle of Algiers elides the gender, class, and religious tensions that fissured the revolutionary process…. (Page 255)