The Battle of Algiers (1966)

Rating:	★★★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Drama

The Algerian War of Independence went on for roughly seven years and at a cost of 500,000 lives, mostly Algerian civilians but thousands of French civilians as well, according to the documentary which accompanies the Criterion Collection's 2004 DVD version of Gillo Pontegarvo's 1966 film.
It is a movie that looks like a documentary, but has not one foot of film reportedly taken from newsreels. It depicts urban warfare and civil disobedience in Algeria's main city in the 1950's and early 60's. The film opens with a hapless, thin old man being tortured by French paratroopers--think Abu Gahib in our own time--and later depicts soldiers and Arab partisans machine-gunning each other in ambushes in narrow winding streets. Next we are behind the scenes where the commanders on each side plot to win over the separate populaces they wish to serve that the war is worth fighting.
In one of most harrowing scenes, three female FLN fighters, disguising themselves as Western women, plant powerful handbag-hidden bombs in European cafes. A woman who plants one bag stares around at the faces of young French teenagers in a cafe, knowing that what she is doing is in effect a mass murder. This moment, and others, shows the filmmakers are not without sympathy for the side of the innocents who are always victims in every war.

Toward the end of the film, the FLN network is crushed in Algeria by mid-1958, but that is not the end of the conflict because a military solution will not stop this revolution.
The film ends on a day in 1960, when, seemingly out of nowhere, thousands of Arabs storm the European quarters of the city and demanding independence. This went on for two years until an accord was reached in 1962 with President DeGaulle's 5th Republic government granting independence to Algeria and sending hundreds of thousands of Europeans back to France as refugees from the failed effort to incorporate Algeria into Europe. It is the civilians' willingness to strike and to die in the face of superior arms, the film shows us, that is the payoff for North African independence --the French can no longer control affairs in a foreign nation that they have unilaterally made part of their nation. The Algerians are politicized in a way many of the "Enlightened" French were were in 1789 when the Bastille came down and in the 1940's when the Resistance groups fought the Nazi occupation machine.

All the headlines and stories about the situation of the USA and its dwindling allies in the current war are reflected in the clash between French police, hard-nosed paratroopers and the determined and fatalistic men and women in the Algerian FLN. It's a movie that recalls not only the war in Baghdad but the loss and madness of human conflict you can see in any struggle.


It has also been an influential film with directors with Stephen Soderbergh, Spike Lee and Oliver Stone. This is a gripping film and if you haven't seen it before it will stay with you.