Studies in European Cinema

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Gillo Pontecorvo's ‘dictatorship of the truth’—a legacy

Thomas Riegler

To cite this article: Thomas Riegler (2009) 's ‘dictatorship of the truth’—a legacy, Studies in European Cinema, 6:1, 47-62 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1386/seci.6.1.47/1

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Studies in European Cinema Volume 6 Number 1 © Intellect Ltd 2009. Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/seci.6.1.47/1 Gillo Pontecorvo’s ‘dictatorship of the truth’ – a legacy Thomas Riegler

Abstract Keywords The article explores the impact and legacy of the ‘dictatorship of the truth’ exem- Gillo Pontecorvo plified in Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of (1965). Its central claim of realism has left an extraordinary impact on viewers: the film was (and still is) Algerian of seen as a truly authentic depiction of the Algerian FLN’s successful struggle independence against French rule. Thus, The Battle of Algiers influenced leftwing revolutionary dictatorship of the groups, but it was also screened at military academies for training in anti-guer- truth rilla warfare. The image of the ‘dictatorship of the truth’ has since grown to cinematic realism almost ‘mythical’ proportions, while necessary questions about accuracy tended Italian cinema to be sidelined. Therefore, it is necessary to scrutinize its central claim – offering a view of an historical event as it ‘really’ was – not only on matters of bias and his- torical accuracy, but also along the inherent limitations of cinematic ‘realism’.

The Battle of Algiers and ‘the dictatorship of the truth’ The Battle of Algiers dramatises a well-known episode during the of Independence (1954–1962). It began as the National Liberation Front (FLN) made a calculated decision to move the existing conflict into the capital. Years of rural had achieved little for their cause; by making Algiers a central battlefront and deliberately striking against civilians, the rebels could count on media coverage as well as French reprisals that would in turn gain them popular support. Their move was effective: in January 1957, after a string of bombing attacks on cafés and public places, the army was called in to deal with the ‘emer- gency situation’. General Jacques Massu and the 6,000 men of his 10th Paratrooper division responded with indiscriminate violence, torture and repression. This event was only afterwards called ‘Battle of Algiers’ and it lasted until September 1957, when the last FLN-activists were either killed or arrested. Even though the French won it, they proved to lose the war, granting independence to in 1962 (Horne 1977: 183–202). The Battle of Algiers would probably never been made, had the FLN not displayed an interest in telling its story. , who had com- manded the bomb-network during the last months of the Battle of Algiers and had come to hold the post of government minister afterwards, proved critical. Not only did he publish a memoir, but he also founded the first pro- duction and distribution company to make a movie about the struggle. He

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enlisted Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo and script writer Franco Solinas, who had already planned to make a movie about the war, but from a western perspective – through the eyes of a French journalist (and former paratrooper). Yacef initially offered a script he had composed out of his memoirs, but the Italians rejected it as ‘awfully’ propagandistic. Instead Solinas composed a much more balanced draft, although it kept the main structural elements of Yacef’s version (Forgacs 2007: 357). With a budget of US$ 800,000, half from private sources and half from the Algerian gov- ernment, The Battle of Algiers was then produced on location during 5 months in 1965. The film was an outstanding success: it won the grand prize at the , and survives as one of the most important movies in cinema history (Mellen 1973: 16–23). Putting it first in context of Pontecorvo’s filmography, The Battle of Algiers exemplifies the ‘dictatorship of the truth’. One has to refer first to a unique visual style that echoes both Pontecorvo’s training as professional photographer and the aesthetics of post-war Italian Neorealismo. Shot in black and white with high contrast, giving it a ‘grainy’ look, The Battle of Algiers has the tone and atmosphere of a documentary, a historical ‘cinema vérité’. Marcello Gatti’s mostly handheld camerawork resembled newsreel so closely, that an American distributor inserted a disclaimer: ‘This dramatic re-enactment [. . .] contains NOT ONE FOOT of Newsreel or Documentary Film’. Second, since Pontecorvo considers a ‘contrapuntal relationship’ between image and sound, music is a vital element (Said 2000: 24, 25). In the case of The Battle of Algiers, one reviewer went so far to call it a ‘musical’. Indeed, ’s themes structure the movie: it is the same scored mourning for both French and Arab victims. In this way, intimidating drum beats mark the appearance of Paras, and the war woops echoing from the old Arab quarter towards the splendid ‘European’ city underline the impression of unbroken, defiant spirit, that cannot be broken. The baba salem (an African percussion instrument) is also used in many key scenes, reinforcing the underlying tension with effect. Third, showing ‘real faces’ was always a concern for Pontecorvo than casting big stars. In The Battle of Algiers, he used an all-amateur ensemble, with the notable exception of French theatre actor in the role of Lt. Colonel Mathieu. For the counterpart on the insurgent’s side, ‘El-hadi Jaffar’, Pontecorvo convinced Yacef Saadi to play himself as the leader of the FLN bomber-network. When he had been captured by the French in 1957, Yacef had already given the personal impression of being more an ‘actor’ than a ruthless guerrilla (Morgan 2007: 231). As his trusted adju- tant and short-time successor, , Pontecorvo selected Brahim Haggiag, a poor and illiterate peasant, whom he had picked up by chance on a market because of his fitting looks: ‘His was the face we were imagin- ing when we were writing the screenplay – the exact face!’ (Holmes 2004). Haggiag had to be coached step by step, but grew accustomed to his part and in this process resembled the conversion of the real Ali La Pointe from a crook into a ‘conscious’ resistance fighter.

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It was in the alleys of Algiers old Muslim quarter, the Casbah, where Pontecorvo found all the faces he envisioned for his central hero – the ‘choral personality’ of Algerians winning their freedom through collective effort. Many of these people simply ‘re-lived’ the conflict a second time: ‘[. . .]; the wounds of the war were still raw. [. . .] That’s why we didn’t use actors’, Yacef recalled. For example, the condemned FLN prisoner, who is led to the guillotine in one of the opening scenes, had in fact been sen- tenced to death during the struggle: ‘So he knew his role, without Pontecorvo saying anything to him’ (Harrison 2007b: 407). The fourth formal element is the recherché: Pontecorvo and Solinas spent 8 months not only researching all aspects of the conflict, meeting representatives of the FLN in Rome, and Algiers, but also taped inter- views with some Para-commanders and veterans. For days, former FLN- activist Sala Bazi toured the film-makers around the Casbah, and told them how his organization made explosives and put them to use. Pontecorvo described the result of this process: ‘We came away with an idea of the situ- ation as complete as if we had lived it ourselves’ (Solinas 1973: 181). Saadi Yacef advised on castings and secured anything they needed from the Algerian government: tanks, firearms, trucks and helicopters. However, it was the historical setting that contributed most to the work’s authenticity – shooting in the narrow streets only 3 years after the end of that bloody con- flict certainly was an achievement. Even the locations for some of the key events in the film were the ‘real’ place as Saadi claimed in an interview: ‘My arrest in the hideout. All details were recreated. The bombs were exploded in the same locations. [. . .] Where Ali La Pointe died behind the false tiled wall, we rebuilt exactly the same house’. All those stylistic elements – the grainy newsreel-like cinematography, a propulsive score, preferring physical resemblance over professionals and a pedantic observance of both factual information and set design – result in what Pontecorvo called the essence of his film-making: ‘staying close to reality’ and conveying a ‘sense of truth’. He credits the BBC for calling this the ‘dictatorship of the truth’ (Esposito 2004).

A model for revolution? Because of Pontecorvo’s goal of authentic representation through a dis- tinct visual style and profound knowledge, the film still resonates across the years. Indeed, The Battle of Algiers not only reveals much of the tactics inherent in asymmetric war – such as random shootings, bombings of public places and even a ‘suicide’-like mission – but also explores the ratio- nality and effectiveness of in the context of a confrontation between unequal opponents. In a memorable scene, the FLN dispatches European-looking women as bomb layers since they can pass through the roadblocks without being searched. Correspondingly, when a captured rebel leader is questioned by journalists as to whether it is/was ‘cowardly’ to use women’s baskets and handbags to deposit bombs, he replies: ‘Of course, if we had your airplanes it would be a lot easier for us. Give us your

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bombers, and you can have our baskets’ (Solinas 1973: 122). The adapta- tion of a ‘cell’-like organizational structure is explained in detail as well as the propagandistic aspect of pamphlets and communiqués. ‘Perhaps no other film in the history of the art has shown so sympathetically and so minutely the delicate workings of a revolutionary organisation’ (Mellen 1973: 68). Influential public figures indeed cautioned that the film could be used by revolutionaries as a blueprint for action. For instance, Jimmy Breslin declared on TV in 1968 that The Battle of Algiers is a ‘training film for urban guerrillas’. Correspondingly, the script-editor Piernico Solinas noted that the film ‘teaches guerrilla warfare’. Pontecorvo did not challenge such assessments: ‘The film champions everyone who is deprived of his rights, and encourages him to fight for them. But it is an analogy for many situations: Vietnam for example’ (Egbert 1969). Indeed, The Battle of Algiers had ‘stirring’ effects upon its audiences. At the New York Film Festival in 1967 a Newsweek commentator noticed an aspect that troubled him: ‘Many young Negroes cheered or laughed know- ingly at each terrorist attack on the French, as if The Battle of Algiers were a textbook and prophecy of urban guerrilla warfare to come’ (Hoberman 2004). Within the radical Afro-American community, there was a heated discussion, if and how the film could be used in the major black ghettos. ‘Are The Revolutionary Techniques Employed in The Battle of Algiers Applicable to Harlem?’ asked an essay by Francee Covington in 1970. ‘What are some of the reasons for the success of the Algerian Revolution? Can those reasons be transported and used in the United States, Harlem, Watts, Howard University? What are the parallels between the French colonialist army approach and that taken by the US army and National Guard?’ Covington reached negative conclusion, arguing that ‘importing’ revolution- ary techniques may prove disastrous results, since popular support for a rev- olution was lacking even within the Black community (Covington 1970). Yacef Saadi could not agree more – in a recent interview he was quite critical of how The Battle of Algiers was used as ‘a kind of manual’ through- out the world. Both the Black Panthers and the IRA screened it for its members exactly for that purpose and the film is said to have been the ‘favourite’ of Velupillai Prabhakaran, late leader of the Tamil Tigers (Hoffman 2002). ‘Using it like that, however, suggests a lack of perceptiveness’, Yacef stated, ‘one has to be very naive to try to adapt our particular experience to another group’s situation’ (Crowdus 2004). It is however difficult to determine if there was any direct nexus between the viewing The Battle of Algiers and the evolution of insurrectionary strat- egy/tactics. Certain is that the film’s inspirational force roused passions, made people identify with the cause of anti- and international struggles, which were in full swing at that time. Time magazine observed that the leftwing radicals of the early 1970s looked up to the depicted Algerian rebels as role models for their own fight: ‘Young people have plenty of examples of glamorous, if not always successful revolutionaries [. . .] Cops

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in San Francisco and New York both say that the movie The Battle of Algiers influenced much of the bombing surge. It centres on the moral dilemma of killing innocent people in the cause of revolution’ (Time 1970a). Bill Ayers, a former member of the ‘Weathermen Underground’, remembers in his memoirs how he watched the film with some friends in a campus Cinema Guild. The experience left him and his companions ‘with a brimming sense of our specialness, the exceptional good luck at being young and awake and eager to take on the waiting world’ (Ayers 2003: 97). During the ‘Days of Rage’, a violent 1969 demonstration in Chicago’s fashionable Gold Coast district, the ‘Weatherpeople’ imitated the terrifying war woops of the Algerian women. ‘We shrieked and screamed as we ran, ululating in imitation of the fighters of The Battle of Algiers’, Ayers tells us, ‘I saw us become what I thought was a real battalion in a guerrilla army, and it felt for the moment like more than theatre, more than metaphor’ (Ayers 2003: 170). A few months later, Weather Underground leader Mark Rudd would urge his comrades to wage their own their own Battle of Algiers against military installations and police departments in the United States (Time 1970b). The spectacle of a defying people succeeding in their fight for liberty and especially the active role of women within this struggle, left also an everlasting impression on Student activist Paula Rabinowitz, who saw The Battle of Algiers ‘a dozen times’ during her first year at Berkley: ‘We came back over and over to the crowds of veiled women ululating in the streets, their high-pitched, unearthly sound disrupting the flow of traffic in downtown Algiers; [. . .] The scenes were so powerful that despite not having seen the film in twenty-five years, I can both hear and see these women as if I had watched them yesterday’ (Rabinowitz 1994: 181). Of course young Western European spectators were not ‘immune’: Hans-Joachim Klein, member of the Revolutionary Cells who would hold the OPEC-ministers for ransom during a hostage taking in Vienna (1975) saw the film during the Paris student riots (Klein 1979: 152). For him it meant getting involved for the first time with the revolutionary ‘third world’, whose spectacular successes in Algeria, Vietnam and Latin America promised not only the practical possibility of revolution but also the appar- ent demise of capitalism. In a very similar way, Inge Viett, member of the ‘2 June’-movement, which would kidnap a prominent West German offi- cial in 1975, called seeing The Battle of Algiers a ‘peak’-event in her ‘guer- rilla-existence’ – beside the Vietcong entry in Saigon (1975) and the Sandinistas taking power in Nicaragua (1979) (Viett 1997: 79). Another admirer and observing student was Andreas Baader, leader of the Red Army Fraction, Western Germany’s most prominent urban guer- rilla group, regarded The Battle of Algiers as his favourite movie. Biographers Klaus Stern and Jörg Herrmann noted remarkable analogies between the movies and Baader’s path. They even claim that Baader orchestrated the ‘Dreierschlag’ of 1970 – three bank robberies in West-Berlin during only 10 minutes – after the model of guerrilla action as depicted in The Battle of Algiers (Stern and Herrmann 2007: 104, 105). Only 3 years before, when

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the Student revolt was in full swing, Baader had planned to make a ‘social- ist’ movie about the events in West-Berlin – closely modelled on The Battle of Algiers. He is said to have handed director Peter Fleischmann a script, which is now lost (Stern and Herrmann: 90). As film critic Pauline Kael polemically argued, the film even made ‘middle-class audiences believe in the necessity of bombing innocent people’. So when it was screened by the prosecution as evidence during the lengthy ‘Panther 21 trial’ in New York (1967) the intent was to shown how the Panthers were ‘influenced by African terrorism’. However, the effect was exactly the opposite: ‘It took the jury just ninety minutes to reach “not guilty” verdicts in all 156 of the charges against the thirteen defendants who ultimately stood trail’ (Churchill 2001: 103). Juror Edwin Kennebeck meant ‘the film did more to help me see things from the defence point of view than the DA suspected’ (Hoberman 2003: 264). Today The Battle of Algiers and the memory of the French-Algerian War are no longer perceived as a revolutionary call to arms. As Donald Reid has emphasized, the movie resonate today for Europeans and Americans in the left as well, ‘but less for lessons to be learned than because they evoke a world we have lost. A Solinas of today would be hard pressed to identify the in Iraq as a catalyst for revolution in Europe and North America’ (Reid 2005: 111).

A model for Counterrevolution and ? A surprising after-effect of The Battle of Algiers is that it not only inspired rev- olution, but also counterrevolution. In some paradox way the movie can be read as an ode to the Para, which projects all those familiar clichés of mili- tary precision, virility, stealth, and omnipotence. Also, the film’s insight and documentary quality has been crucial in attracting the attentions of right wing dictatorships and many different militaries across the world. From their perspective, the movie, with its attention to the mindset of the French military, can function as a model case in defeating revolution and insurgency. This ‘expertise’ is articulated in The Battle of Algiers through Lt. Colonel Mathieu, described by one reviewer as ‘the very model of the modern coun- terinsurgency warrior’ – handsome, supremely confident, steely and by far the most developed character in the film (Hunter 2003). Mathieu is ‘virtually the star of the drama’ and his character is not demonized or moralized in any sort of way (Roberts 2002). Through him the viewer becomes familiar with the tactical dilemmas of the paratroopers and their counterstrategy: they have to fight an enemy, who not only disregards the ‘rules of war’, but moves unrecognisably within a densely populated urban area. The FLN is protected by its clandestine structure in different ‘cells’ of only three activists with the least possible contact one below the other. Thus according to the Colonel, the challenge is to ‘know’ an enemy, who does not know even ‘himself’ – which means collecting any kind of relevant information – names, addresses, and hideouts: ‘For this we need information. The method interrogation. [. . .] We need to have the Casbah at our disposal. We must shift through it [. . .]

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and interrogate everyone’. In a very graphic way, Mathieu compares the FLN to a tapeworm, who can only be killed, if it loses its head: ‘The tapeworm is a worm that can grow to infinity. There are thousands of segments. You can destroy all of them; but as long as the head remains, it reproduces itself imme- diately. It is the same thing with the FLN. [. . .] Until we are able to eliminate them, we must always start from the beginning’ (Solinas 1973: 117). Quotes such as these form together an effectively compressed analysis of the thinking behind the French counterinsurgency approach. Mathieu is in fact a ‘composite’ character combining several key officers, one of them Colonel Yves Godard, who served as Chief of Staff during the battle. Like his alter ego in the film, Godard emphasized the overall necessity of gaining intelligence. For him a bomb layer was only an ‘arm’ that could be replaced, so it was much more important to identify the ‘brain’ behind the attacks. Without a ‘brain’ there would be no more terrorism (Hoffman 2001: 81). That meant of course subjecting the Muslim population of Algiers to an indiscriminate and complete ‘screening’ process in order to get the needed intelligence. In the process of ‘fishing’ through the cordoned off casbah the French arrested between 30 and 40 per cent of the male popu- lation according to some estimates. The film shows some of these ‘methods’, such as electric shocks by attaching electrodes to sensitive body parts, the forced swallowing of large amounts of water, and burns by blow- torch. When the battle was concluded, police commissioner Paul Teitgen, who had personally signed warrants for 24,000 detainees, reported 3.024 persons ‘missing’. Many of the ‘disappeared’ had been thrown out of heli- copters into the sea or were shot in secret by an execution squad outside Algiers (Horne 1977: 201). In The Battle of Algiers a blank ‘organigramme’ is filled little by little with information coming directly out of the torture centres, symbolizing the dis- mantling of the FLN network through a long and painful process. The cor- nering of the last remaining leader Ali La Pointe brings the film to its conclusion. Unwilling to surrender with three companions, their hideout is blown apart. A General present at the scene comments: ‘And so the tape- worm no longer has a head’ (Solinas 1973: 153). It is one of the strengths of Pontecorvos and Solinas work that they por- trayed an officer like Mathieu not as a one-dimensional sadist or monster, but as a ‘perfect’ product of western civilisation. The veteran of the , Indochina and the Suez campaign is above all a rational techno- crat, firmly believing in military efficiency overcoming all obstacles. In case of the ‘emergency’ situation in Algiers, ‘all necessary’ actions have to be taken to stem terrorist violence and defeat the FLN. When journalists ques- tion these methods, Mathieu cuts them short: ‘We are soldiers. Our duty is to win. [. . .] Is to remain in Algeria? If your answer is still yes, you must accept all the necessary consequences’ (Solinas 1973: 125). Although the French eventually lost the Algerian War, the Battle of Algiers was considered a victory. The military’s accumulated expertise was in demand and France established several missions to war academies and

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training centres both in the United States and a number of Latin American countries. For instance, the teachings and instructions of Algerian War veterans such as Colonel , who had been in charge of secret torture teams in Algiers, fell on fertile ground within the Argentinean military. From 1975 on, the Junta was involved in ‘crusade’-like struggles against ‘subversives’ and, in this ‘Process of National Reorganisation’, many of the ‘methods’ which had been used by the French in Algeria were applied. That meant for example making torture victims ‘disappear’ by dumping them from ‘death flights’ into rivers and the ocean. As General Reynaldo Bigone told researcher Marie-Monique Robin, he and his com- rades had learned ‘everything’ from the French: ‘the squaring of territory, the importance of intelligence in this kind of war, interrogation methods. Our model was the Battle of Algiers’ (Robin 2005: 50). However, this ‘model’ inspired not only Latin America’s Dirty , but also the US- Army in its fight against communist guerrillas in Vietnam. The infamous ‘Phoenix’-program wars practically ‘copied’ the real Battle of Algiers, but failed as Colonel Carl Bernard recalled: ‘We imitated the French army’s torturing and killing of captured revolutionaries in Algiers in Vietnam. It did not work. We knew almost nothing of our so-called enemy; we knew very little more of our supposed allies beyond what we assumed to be common goals’. (Anderson 2002). The Battle of Algiers which was praised by Aussaresses in an 2003 inter- view as ‘superb’ and ‘very close to the truth’ (Robin 2003, Author’s transla- tion), was itself was integrated into counterinsurgency teachings as a visual aid: In 1967 The Battle of Algiers was screened at the School of Naval Mechanics (ESMA) in Buenos Aires, an infamous covert torture centre of the Argentine military. One cadet recalled: ‘They showed us that film to prepare us for a kind of war very different from the regular war we had entered the Navy School for. They were preparing us for police missions against the civil- ian population, who became our new enemy’ (Verbitsky 2005). The movie was used during courses for Latin American police officers at the International Policy Academy (IPA) in Washington. One scene was picked out in particular: therein French policemen and hardcore elements of the settler population conspire to counter-terrorize the Muslim popula- tion by putting a bomb in front of a block of flats in the Casbah, which is promptly destroyed with loss of innocent live. In reference to clandestine police tactics used by some Latin American dictatorships, A.J. Langguth, for example, has pointed out, that The Battle of Algiers was in fact used as a blueprint for police-terror (Langguth 1978: 120). Martha Huggins reached the same conclusion: ‘Interestingly [. . .] The Battle of Algiers was banned from movie houses in Brazil during most of the military period for fear that Brazilian victims of security force violence might recognize that the French techniques of search, arrest, and torture depicted in the film were those used by Brazilian security forces’ (Huggins 1998: 135). The film was also studied by the British and Israeli Army in their searches for tactical clues regarding urban warfare. In 2004

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reported an example of imitation: Two years earlier, when Israeli forces invaded Tulkarem, their commanding Colonel Tamir seemed to have been inspired by The Battle of Algiers: ‘The TV crews invited to document the occasion were confronted with the familiar image from the film of mili- tants climbing out of their hiding places with hands raised, as the para- troopers marched into the casbah. But the artistic-minded officer seems not to have watched that movie to the end: for although the French won the battle, they lost the war’ (Dudai and Baram 2004). It was the Iraqi insurgency that aroused a renewed interest on part of the American military. One film critic even claimed, that ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom, which officially began March 20, 2003, started at the movies’. This referred to the special screening of The Battle of Algiers by the Pentagon’s Office for Direction for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflicts on 27 August 2003 (Hornaday 2006). The flyer announcing the event read: ‘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 fever. Sounds famil- iar?’ One Washington Post journalist joked that one of the main points of the closed discussion might have been: ‘Who is cooler, Col. Mathieu or Ali La Pointe?’ (Hunter 2003). As New York Times writer Michael Kaufman noted, the Pentagon audience – a civilian led group with ‘responsibility for thinking aggressively and creatively’ on issues of guerrilla war – 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’ (Kaufman 2003). The film was generally highlighted as particular insight- ful on the American military’s dilemma in the Middle East. On 28 October 2003, former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski took part in the Washington conference ‘New American Strategies for Security and Peace’ and told the audience that ‘[i]f you want to understand what is happening right now in Iraq, I suggest a movie that was quite well-known to a number of people some years ago. [. . .] It's called The Battle of Algiers’. The Village Voice’s Michael Atkinson commented ironically on statements like these: ‘Is it tragic irony, or merely the evolutionary nature of realpolitik, that such a passionate, righteous revolutionary document is now most famous as an ostensible training film for neocon strategists?’ (Atkinson 2003). In a 2004 interview, Pontecorvo said that he had found the Pentagon’s interest in his film ‘a little strange’. The most The Battle of Algiers could do, he said, is ‘teach how to make cinema, not war’ (Povoledo 2004). Yacef Saadi was equally critical: ‘[. . .] contrary to what they think, the situation of guerrillas in Latin America, China, South Africa and so on is not com- parable to what is happening in Iraq. Algeria was a settler colony. Iraq is a modern colonial occupation; geographically, economically and sociologi- cally it’s unlike the Algerian situation. The Battle of Algiers should be able to teach people some lessons, but the Americans are bad students, like the French were, and they are making things worse’ (Harrison 2007b: 411).

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Utilizing film as a showcase in counterinsurgency was a poor choice in the first place: What it did not portray was how non-violent means, like the recruitment of informers, worked much more effective than simply tor- turing people indiscriminately. The French even operated a group of FLN- turncoats, who infiltrated the casbah and reported on the whereabouts of their former comrades. Their information proved critical for the arrests of almost the entire FLN leadership in Algiers (Martin 2002: 237–242). ‘The French had gained accurate intelligence through public cooperation and informant, not torture’, notes Darius Rejali and criticises the The Battle of Algiers strongly for promoting the ‘myth of professional torture’ (Rejali 2007: 481) since the FLN in the movie is defeated solely because ‘torture worked’ (Rejali 2007: 546). The history of the Algerian war tells a far dif- ferent story on this alleged effectiveness of torture: The violence and repression merely antagonised the Muslim population, harmed France’s international reputation as well as the support for the war in the main- land. Further, it happened to be the best ‘recruiting agent’ for the rebel movement: ‘Actually torture helped the FLN enormously, because what it did was to expose the real face of the French military’, Saadi Yacef recalled (Crowdus 2004). In the end, torture was not an efficient mean against ter- rorism, but proved counterproductive with disastrous consequences for ‘L’Algérie française’. It is both ironic and deeply troubling that a movie, which is so commit- ted to reveal the horrors of torture, was indeed used as a blueprint for further violence and repression. Obviously the depiction of a ruthless, but somehow very successful counter-terror-strategy employed by a text book officer like Mathieu had found a cheering audience of its own.

Questions of historical accuracy and artistic originality Much of the attraction of The Battle of Algiers can be explained by its central claim of realism. But how accurate and faithful is that ‘realism’? First of all, the movie leans towards the concerns of the Algerian govern- ment, which co-produced it. Much of the original outline by Saadi Yacef was kept by scriptwriter Solinas. According to David Forgacs, ‘[. . .], the screenplay and the completed film largely reproduce Yacef’s account of the FLN’s role. They make no allusion to either to the presence of other parties in the nationalist movement or to the acts of violence perpetrated by the FLN members against some of their political rivals or to the differ- ences that existed within the FLN leadership itself in Algiers’ (Forgacs 2007: 357). For instance, there is no reference to Ramdane Abane, who was after all the ‘brain’ behind the strategic shift towards urban terror. The very first communiqué of the FLN, which is read out in one of the opening scenes, was drafted by Abane, but since he was killed shortly afterwards by political rivals, he goes unmentioned. Conversely, the heroic role of central characters was overstressed and their background altered. Thus, in The Battle of Algiers we are told that Ali La Pointe was a boxer and draft dodger, but in reality he was also a pimp

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and street fighter with a criminal background. He was imprisoned for a gun battle and not for street gambling as shown. Further Ali was not a main FLN-player after being recruited, instead of leadership he provided his skills as a mason and built some of the hideouts for the guerrillas. He eventually died in one of them (Mellen 1973: 56). Most revealing probably is that the fate of the ‘real’ Ali seems to have been sealed by a coerced FLN- prisoner, who was very close to him: ‘In the movie, a tortured informer gives away Ali-la Pointe. In reality, it was Yacef who led the paras to his colleague, and the girl and two boys with him’, claims Journalist Ted Morgan, then Duc de Gramont and a member of General Massu’s staff (Morgan 2005: 232). Another major theme, which is completely left out by Pontecorvo and Solinas, is the usage of terrorism by the FLN against internal political opposition such as the rival Algerian Nationalist party that is also unmen- tioned. As FLN-dissident Mohammed Harbi has laid out in a series of books, popular support for the revolutionaries, as depicted in some crucial scenes in The Battle of Algiers, was in effect small. The overall population remained passive, with only a minority actively involved in the insurgency. Due to this weak support, Harbi argues, the FLN chose an authoritarian path and maintained its control over the population by force. So, in the early years of the war, the overall majority of FLN-victims were Algerian peasants who failed to rally behind them and were considered traitors (Shatz 2002: 53–57). In retrospect, this reproduction of autocratic and repressive tendencies during decades of FLN single party-rule contrasts deeply with The Battle of Algiers euphoric closing spectre. When Pontecorvo re-visited the Algerian capital in his TV-documentary Return to Algiers (1992) the situation dif- fered from the promising early 1960s. This time Algeria was on the brinks of a long and bloody civil war after the government had called off the first free elections which would have brought the Front of Islamic Salvation (FIS) party to power (Celli 2005: 111). In order to prevent that threat, the Algerian military even applied lessons of the French doctrine of counterin- surgency in order to crush the insurgents. Questioned should also the notion that terrorism ‘pays’. Terrorism in The Battle of Algiers is the result of escalating violence on both sides, with French settlers setting off the first bomb in the Casbah. The immoral means of the rebels – blowing up civilians indiscriminately – are eventu- ally justified by the outcome. Bearing that in mind, Carlo Celli has argued, that The Battle of Algiers rationalizes the use of violence as a political tool, whether clandestine or state sponsored (Celli 2005: 67). That alleged effectiveness of terrorism is scrutinized by scholars of the Algerian War. As Martha Crenshaw points out, terrorism was a weapon of choice, employed when the FLN was under heavy pressure in the countryside. The bomber network was already in place and ready to strike by September 1956 – therefore precipitated any ‘provocation’ on the French part (Crenshaw 2005: 487). Further, there can also be no doubt that the original outcome

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of the Battle of Algiers was a heavy blow on the FLN, not only in man- power but also in matters of prestige. ‘No one could doubt that the paras had scored a major victory for the French army, the first clearly definable one of the war. They faced up to a confrontation with the FLN and won hands down’ (Horne 1977: 218). In that sense, employing terrorism had failed, it did not spark any popular insurrection but left the isolated network to be crushed. ‘The myth of the efficacy of FLN terrorism was false’ (Crenshaw 2005: 509). It was a combination of political and military failures, a sceptical French homefront and an extremist, uncompromising stance of the settler population and continuing support for the guerrillas from outside that made ‘L’Algérie française’ a lost cause. The movie tends to oversimplify this outcome. Depicting the mass demonstrations of 1960, when protest- ers almost overran the European quarter, the voiceover tells: ‘Two more years of struggle lay ahead. And on 2 July 1962, with the advent of inde- pendence, the Algerian nation was born’ (Harrison 2007a: 401). Constructing this casualty between the Battle of Algiers, which was in fact only a minor episode, and Algerian independence is misleading in many ways: It leaves out the long and desperate guerrilla war in the mountains as well as the difficult path to the settlement. Because of the experience of leftwing terrorism in Italy, especially the kidnapping and killing of Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades in 1978, Pontecorvo later took a different stance on terrorism. In , his 1979 movie about ETA’s killing of General Franco’s designated successor, Pontecorvo questioned the legitimacy of political violence: Once the overall context changes, armed struggle was no longer a morally valid option once was in transition to democracy. As Pontecorvo stated in an interview terrorism is ‘justifiable under fascism, but erroneous today’ (Georgakas and Rubenstein 1983: 308). What is also not reflected in the reception of The Battle of Algiers is the fact that Pontecorvo was himself part of broader context of other ‘pioneer’- directors, who already experimented with newsreel and documentary-looks. David Forgacs has noted that the film was ‘in a loose sense, a remake of Roma citta aperta.’ There are indeed many similarities between Roberto Rosselinis 1945 movie about the last days of the German occupation of Rome during the Second World War and The Battle of Algiers: Both films depict the struggle of a partisan/guerilla movement against a brutal occupier in detail. Its black and white images, shot on real locations only months after the event, make Roma cita aperta the epitome of Italian neorealist cinema – exactly 20 years before The Battle of Algiers (Forgacs 2007: 357). Apart from neorealists like Rosselini, whose following (1946) influenced Pontecorvo’s decision to become a film-maker in the first place, one fitting example might be British director Peter Watkins. His first film Culloden (1963) – a dramatic re-enactment of the ‘last charge’ of a ill fed and under equipped Highlander Clan-Army against an over mighty British army in 1746 – exhibited practically all those stylistic elements so much

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familiar from Pontecorvo: It was shot on location, in newsreel-look, with non-professional actors, and radical political reference to the ongoing Vietnam War (Rapfogel 2007). The War Game (1965), which won an Academy Award, simulated a nuclear attack on Britain in such a shocking way that the pressured BBC first refused to televise it and then tried to sup- press it. Thus, the dictatorship of the truth should seen as part of a wider ‘verite’-style developed in the postwar-decades.

Conclusion After having evaluated historical accuracy and originality, the dictatorship of the truth is to be challenged on its central myth: How ‘real’ is cinematic realism? It is above all an aesthetic concept, which recreates its own ‘reality’, tied to its own time, place and moment. In a critique of United 93 (2005), a recent film by Paul Greengrass about the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 that is alike to The Battle of Algiers, Daniel Mendelsohn argued further, that there can only be a ‘symbolic and perhaps sentimen- tal’ value in the decision of casting ‘real people’: ‘By emphasizing such authenticity and realism, the film reassures its audience [. . .] that what they are seeing is not, in fact, “drama” (and therefore presumably mere ‘entertainment’), but ‘real life’, and hence in some way edifying’ (Mendelsohn 2006). So while Pictures and style create the sensation of ‘being there’ and ‘living through’ those events, one has to state clearly: The Battle of Algiers simply is not an accurate depiction of history as it occurred. Therefore it should not be seen as documentary truth but – in Pontecorvo’s words – ‘a hymn in homage to the people who must struggle for their independence, not only in Algeria but everywhere in the third world’. The movie is tied to the specific context of the late 1960s, and a distinct Marxist worldview, wherein decolonialization was seen as an inevitable outcome due the necessity of history. ‘Pontecorvo’s approach is lyrical, rather than analytical. He is not concerned with providing a how- to primer of urban guerrilla warfare, [. . .], but rather with presenting the example of the Algerians to inspire oppressed peoples’ (Mellen 1973: 24). It is Pontecorvo’s and Solina’s achievement that they did not make a movie as propagandistic as the FLN and Yacef Saadi envisioned it first. Despite leaving room for ambivalence and exploring the motives of the enemy, The Battle of Algiers is firmly in the insurgent’s camp, simplifies and distorts history in that process. Further, it’s ‘truth’ is thoroughly arranged, choreographed, and stylised towards the sublime. As Carlo Celli noticed ‘the Paul Muni-like Kader, the Pepe le Moko-like Ali La Pointe, and the Algerian bomb setter wearing dark sunglasses like a beatnik poet as he sets the timers for the FLN women bombers are all figures who emanate a brutal appeal’ (Celli 2005: 62). This sets Pontecorvo apart from a fellow political film-maker like Peter Watkins who presents action as ‘real’ as possible, but at the same clarifies that this is an artificial reality: In Culloden and in later works like La Commune (2000) – a reconstruction of a famous uprising in Paris

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(1871) – the whole ‘newsreel’-action is transmitted through ‘TV-reporters’ camera lenses. These ‘journalists’ function as narrators – they analyze events and interview participants, who speak directly into camera. In doing so, Watkins dismantles not only any safe distance between the audi- ence and the historic distant events, but keeps the viewer constantly aware of the gap between the ‘real’ and the way it is presented through a medium like film (Rapfogel 2007). Pontecorvo dictatorship of the truth in contrast does not leave itself open to any irritation: It ‘wants’ to be the real thing and the result is an aesthetic hyper-reality glossing over the actual event by obscuring its complexity and ambivalence. So when both insurgent groups and military counterinsurgents looked up to the movie as model to follow, they committed a serious mistake: Western Germany was not Algeria, nor were the black Ghettos of the United States. ‘Thus the film has been misunderstood, particularly by the Black Panthers who have used it as a manual for guerrilla warfare, because it has not recognised that the terrorist tactics carried out by Ali La Pointe and the others were the means not the victory but to temporary defeat’ (Mellen 1973: 64). On the other side, the notion of torture as an efficient weapon against a hidden enemy was a false lesson too. If one con- siders the widespread revulsion in the Muslim world and beyond over the prisoner-abuses or the practice of ‘outsourcing’ torture by transferring suspects to Middle Eastern countries, it is not farfetched to argue that US strategists probably applied the wrong lessons as many other militaries before. They responded to terrorism only with force and little respect for international law, while political or social grievances were not addressed in any sufficient way. ‘The ‘war on terror’ has become a war of terror. Just like the French officers who decided to turn the army into guerilla bands to “counter” the FLN guerillas operating day and night, the US military feels free to arrest, detain, interrogate, and torture anyone it deems sus- pects anywhere in the world. The circle of torture is drawn wide; it links Algiers and Baghdad through Washington, D.C., and her satellite cites and states around the globe’ (Lazreg 2008: 269). In conclusion, the dictatorship of the truth should not be taken for granted and needs to be evaluated: As described the claim of ‘truth’ – the central myth of The Battle of Algiers – is contradicted by certain compromises towards the Algerian government’s point of view, but there is also no self- reflection about the film’s artificiality. Despite these shortcomings The Battle of Algiers is one of the few examples where one can apply Siegfried Kracauers remark, that the images ‘retain a degree of independence of the intrigue and thus succeed in summoning a physical existence’ (Kracauer 1960: 231).

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Ayers, B. (2003), Fugitive Days. A Memoir, New York and London: Penguin. Celli, C. (2005), Gillo Pontecorvo. From Resistance to Terrorism, Lanham, Toronto, Oxford: Scarecrow Press. Covington, F. (1970), ‘Techniques in the Battle of Algiers’, in T. Cade (ed.), The Black Woman. An Anthology, New York: Signet, pp. 244–251. Crenshaw, M. (2005) (ed.), Terrorism in Context, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Crowdus, G. (2004), ‘Terrorism and Torture in The Battle of Algiers: An Interview with Yacef Saadi’, Cineaste, 29: 3, pp. 30–37. Churchill, W. (2001), ‘To Disrupt, Discredit and Destroy: The FBI’s Secret War Against the Black Panther Party’, in K. Cleaver and G. Katsiaficas (eds.), Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party, New York and London: Routledge. Dudai, R. and Baram, D. (2004), ‘The second Battle of Algiers’, The Guardian, 30 October. Egbert, E. (1969), ‘Pontecorvo: We Trust the Face of Brando’, The New York Times, 13 April. Esposito, E. (2004), ‘Stay Close to Reality’, http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/ jun2004/pont-j09.shtml. Accessed 12 August 2004. Forgacs, D. (2007), ‘Italians in Algiers’, Interventions, 9: 3, pp. 350–364. Georgakas, D. and Rubenstein, L. (eds.) (1983), The Cineaste Interviews on the Art and Politics of the Cinema, Chicago: Lake View Press. Harrison, N. (2007a), ‘Pontecorvo’s “Documentary” Aesthetics. The Battle of Algiers and the Battle of Algiers’, Interventions, 9: 3, pp. 389–404. ——— (2007b), ‘An interview with Saadi Yacef’, Interventions, 9: 3, pp. 405–413. Hoberman J. (2004), ‘Revolution Now (and Then)!’, The American Prospect, 1 January. ——— (2003), The Dreamlife. Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties, New York and London: The New Press. Hoffman, B. (2002), ‘A Nasty Business’, The Atlantic Monthly, 289: 1, pp. 49–52. ——— (2001), Terrorismus. Der unerklärte Krieg (trans. K. Kochmann), Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag. Holmes, E. (2004), ‘A with Striking Relevance’, The Los Angeles Times, 4 January. Hornaday, A. (2006), ‘Boots on the Ground, Fingers on the “Record” Button’, The Washington Post, 12 November. Horne, A. (1977), A Savage War of Peace. Algeria 1954–1962, London: Macmillan. Huggins, M. (1998), Political Policing: The United States and Latin America, Durham: Duke University Press. Hunter, S. (2003), ‘The Pentagon’s Lessons from Reel Life’, The Washington Post, 4 September. Kaufman, M. (2003), ‘What does the Pentagon see in “Battle of Algiers”’, The New York Times, 7 September. Klein, H. (1979), Rückkehr in die Menschlichkeit. Appell eines ausgestiegenen Terroristen, Hamburg: Rowohlt. Kracauer, S. (1960), Theory of Film, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Langguth, A. (1978), Hidden Terrors. The Truth About U.S. Police Operations in Latin America, New York: Pantheon Books. Lazreg, M. (2008), Torture and the Twilight of Empire. From Algiers to Baghdad, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Suggested citation Riegler, T. (2009), ‘Gillo Pontecorvo’s ‘dictatorship of the truth’ – a legacy’, Studies in European Cinema 6: 1, pp. 47–62, doi: 10.1386/seci.6.1.47/1

Contributors details Dr. Thomas Riegler is a historian and journalist based in Vienna. He has published on a wide range of topics, including terrorism, film studies, and contemporary history. Contact: Dr. Thomas Riegler, Vorgartenstraße 145-157/3/9, A-1020 Wien, Austria. E-mail: [email protected]

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