Marxist poetry Revisiting Gillo Pontecorvo’s Algiers BY STEVE VINEBERG
	The Battle of Algiers (1965) Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo. Written by Pontecorvo and Franco Solinas. With Brahim Haggiag, Jean Martin, Yacef Saadi, Samia Kerbash, Ugo Paletti, and Fusia El Khader. In French with English subtitles (117 minutes). At the Cable Car.

Writing admiringly about The Battle of Algiers, Pauline Kael called its director, Gillo Pontecorvo, "the most dangerous kind of Marxist, a Marxist poet." She was right: this gripping 1965 movie, which may have invented the docudrama form, has been used as a training film by organizations around the world that think of themselves as freedom fighters — and by their opponents. It’s hard to think of a political film that’s proved more effective since Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. Set in Algiers between 1954 and 1960, both inside and outside the Casbah (the Arab ghetto that Julien Duvivier’s romantic 1937 melodrama Pépé le Moko made famous to international audiences), Pontecorvo’s movie chronicles the struggle of the Algerian people for independence from their French masters. Its collective hero, the National Liberation Front, is embodied in the figure of Ali-la-Pointe (Brahim Haggiag), a petty thief who’s radicalized in prison by the execution of an NLF inmate. But its spokesman, in a brilliant strategic move by Pontecorvo and co-writer Franco Solinas, is Colonel Mathieu (Jean Martin), the imported French officer in charge of the counter-revolutionary campaign, who phrases the Marxist arguments that his enemies act out by instinct.

Pontecorvo and Solinas don’t stoop to caricature to build their case against colonialism. Martin is not only articulate but elegantly civilized, and none of his men is a brute. When they capture members of the revolutionary cells, these captives are tortured with the cool indifference that accompanies professional efficiency. Pontecorvo’s camera barely takes in the torturers; it’s the faces of their victims he’s interested in — especially the hollowed, bony, sad-sack countenance of the man pummeled into giving up Ali’s hiding place. (Most of the picture is a flashback from the moment when Mathieu’s men corner Ali and three companions in the Casbah.) That’s also the case in the horrifying scene where a French bomb blows up a crowded apartment house and most of the bodies retrieved from the rubble are those of children. And the movie treats the racism of the white Algerians almost casually, as an inevitable consequence of the colonial system (a non-Marxist observer like Orwell might have depicted it in precisely the same way), refusing to use it to dehumanize them.

In the centerpiece sequence, the NLF sends three women out of the Casbah to pick up bombs and deposit them in crowded public places — the Air France terminal, a café, a milk bar where young people go to dance. Removing their veils, the women dress and make themselves up Western style so they can slip past the checkpoints manned by French policemen, and in this almost silent scene you can see what it costs them to violate their Muslim traditions. As each woman reaches her target, she looks around at the people she knows will be killed or maimed by the bomb inside her handbag — like a toddler at the milk bar licking an ice-cream cone. The three women’s faces are remarkably expressive, though they hold themselves absolutely in check. After they’ve departed, Pontecorvo lingers on these bystanders moving inexorably and unknowing to the last moment of their lives — the dancing teenagers, the laughing bartender. His acknowledgment that revolutionary action claims real victims, not just statistics, tears you apart, because he’s employed all his filmmaking skill to make the case that terrorism is the one of the few effective resources open to the NLF. Watching The Battle of Algiers — and especially this sequence — in today’s political climate doesn’t mitigate its power; if anything, it’s more disturbing now than ever.

When Mathieu finds Ali, the last of the NLF leaders to elude him, one of his colleagues remarks that at last they’ve beheaded the tapeworm, picking up on Mathieu’s own metaphor for the NLF from earlier in the film. It’s 1958. But two years later, revolutionary activity flares up again, first in the mountains and then in the city, and though an aerial pan across the nighttime Casbah reveals no one, we hear the Arab slogans of the men and the strange, shrill bird cries of the women from every corner. By 1962, Algeria has won her independence. The tapeworm turns out to be a phoenix.