The Eternal Return: The Battle of Algiers at 60

The opening title card of La battaglia di Algeri (The Battle of Algiers, Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966) announces that this is “the first great Algerian film production”. This makes it technically an African film delving into Arab content, directed by a European, specifically an Italian Neorealist director, Gillo Pontecorvo. It premiered on 31 August 1966 at the Venice Film Festival, and it went on to win the Golden Lion grand prize. Six decades later and, alas, nostalgically remembering some of the films released that year alone, it is fair to wonder whether the art of cinema has evolved or devolved; in addition to The Battle of Algiers, just consider these three masterpieces: Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966), Au hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966), and Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966).

True to content-driven form, The Battle of Algiers has a nonlinear, circular structure that supports the metaphor of the eternal return applicable to colonialism, the resistance to it, and the consequences thereof. The film starts near the end of its chronological Act Three, in 1957 Algiers, the capital of a nation colonised by the French since 1830. The first spoken dialogue is a loaded question – “Couldn’t you have talked sooner?” – asked by a French soldier to an Algerian prisoner whom he and his army buddies have been torturing with a blowtorch, judging from the scorching scar on his chest. The question foreshadows the journey on which we’re about to embark. The Battle of Algiers is as much of a wakeup call as a film can be, as relevant now as when it first came out 60 years ago; as when it reemerged during the so-called War on Terror to help us realise that “terrorists” do not just happen overnight; and as in our present day, when the US and Israel have engaged in yet another unwinnable war, this time with Iran. As soon as it talks to us, The Battle of Algiers forces us to reassess our preconceptions of civilisation, morality, and freedom.

With that question still hanging in the air, Colonel Mathieu enters the torture room and finds out that the prisoner has revealed the hideout of the last standing rebel, Ali La Pointe. Mathieu has him wear a French army uniform to keep him from being recognised when he leads them to the Casbah, the segregated section of town where the native population lives. Ethnicity may be masked by appearance, but the soul remains raw and exposed. Despite the promise of freedom, as the informant turns towards us in close-up, he starts disintegrating before our eyes: the overwhelming guilt of having betrayed one of his own, the loss of cultural identity, the dehumanisation of body and spirit… The opening chords of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Passion According to St Matthew punctuate this moment as we feel empathy for this broken man. A connection has been made. As we understand what is going through him, he summons the courage to resist. He shakes his head, screams “Nooo!” and runs for the door, to no avail. 

Bach’s spiritual music is aggressively interrupted by the iconic percussive score, Algeri: 1 Novembre 1954, by Ennio Morricone, as the French army invades the Casbah in a predatory hunt for Ali La Pointe. They raid a building and evacuate everyone in the process. Inside an apartment the informant points to a tiled wall, and we cut to its interior – the dark, ominous womb where Ali, a man, a woman, and a boy (Mahmoud, Hassiba, and Le Petit Omar) await their fate. 

A French soldier informs Ali that the organisation is finished, everyone is dead or in prison, and he must surrender or else. The image becomes grainier and the camera pans purposefully from Omar to Ali, implying that Ali’s decision will determine whether the boy lives or dies. Ali’s extreme close-up turns into a freeze frame that blurs out visually and distorts aurally. In terms of film grammar, we get a sense that a bookend has been established, that we’ll come back to this moment after a long, gruelling journey, for as history often proves, in the end is the beginning. At this point we might feel some degree of empathy for these four human beings grappling with the last moments of their existence, but the truth is that we don’t know who they are, nor do we know anything about them. Our response is primarily a rational one. When we do indeed come back to this moment, an intense one hour and 42 minutes later, we will have bonded with them in an irreversible way, and we will understand their reasons, regardless of whether we justify them morally or not. Such is the power of cinema. One of Pontecorvo’s main achievements with this movie is to humanise “the other” (from the West’s perspective), give ethnic representation its perpetually overdue three-dimensional complexity, and help the viewer understand that the unfailing outcome of colonisation is, above all else, resistance. Human history insists on demonstrating that no culture will allow itself to be ruled by another group with a different value system or set of beliefs, especially when these are imposed by force and under the fallacy of the oppressor’s inherent superiority. 

A flashback takes us back three years, from the abstraction that Ali La Pointe has become – the blurry image with distorted sound – to Act One properly, in 1954. A bird’s-eye view sharply contrasts the European quarter with the crammed dwellings of the Casbah: the alleged first and third worlds tensely adjacent to each other. A series of shots emulates documentary footage as we hear the first radio communiqué of the National Liberation Front (FLN) – in French, as a warning to the occupying power – calling the Algerian people to arms in their fight for self-determination. 

We meet Ali La Pointe again, on the day of his cinematic origin story. Ali makes ends meet playing tchi-tchi, a type of gambling game scam, on the streets of Algiers. His victims approach him voluntarily, wishfully thinking they can outwit him. He does this every day, as the French woman who rats him out to the police complains, “He’s always there!” It’s not really what he does that bothers her, as much as his mere presence. The sight of a native Algerian in the streets of Algiers gets under her skin. As the cop approaches him, Ali takes off, a conditioned reflex by now. So what is different today, why has Pontecorvo decided to set up Ali’s character through this daily occurrence? Because today there is a group of preppy BCBG (bon chic, bon genre) young French men and women hanging out on a street corner who decide to have fun at Ali’s expense – a forthright metaphor for pure, indiscriminate racism. One of them trips the runaway Ali, who lands flat on the kerb. Ali looks at the cop, getting closer and closer to him, and then at the smirking young man who tripped him. It’s a matter of timing; he has to make a choice: escape and freedom or dignity and loss of freedom. The latter. He punches the halfwit in the mouth with all his fist and soul. If there was ever a textbook case in film of a character’s essence being revealed by action, this is it. 

Ali gets arrested and an instantaneous mob gives free rein to its hatred of Arabs. French settlers shove him, insult him, spit at him, and wish him dead as he’s stoically led to prison in a rite-of-passage long take, evocative of Jean Renoir’s best moments of poetic realism, to the cadence of Morricone’s spellbinding Tema de Ali (Ali’s Theme) on the soundtrack. Cinema at its best.

A voiceover informs us that this is not Ali’s first stint in jail; but again, something will be different this time round. Another man, an FLN resistance fighter, is being led to the prison courtyard, almost like a continuation of the preceding long take of Ali’s arrest. He defiantly shouts, “Allah is Great! Long live Algeria!” Other prisoners start echoing his chant, so a guard covers the prisoner’s mouth but cannot stop him. Ali makes a run to the window to have a look. In the context of the film, what he sees is the catalyst for his political awakening. Without any ceremony or parting words, the man is put into a guillotine rack and beheaded. This is as shocking for Ali as for us, since we tend to associate the guillotine with the 1789 French Revolution, not with 1954, the year in which Elvis Presley recorded his first single, That’s All Right. Which this isn’t; it is a horrifying moment delivered with pure cinematic poetry. An elegiac flute, evocative of the Algerian ghasba, mourns as three shots in succession reveal a growing number of prison windows: a sea of Alis-in-the-making. Right after we hear the blade fall, the camera snap-zooms into Ali’s eyes, and on that precise film frame, in that 1/24th of a second, a revolutionary is born, diligently delivered by French colonialism. Ali’s purpose in life has been sealed. 

Five months later Ali is out of prison. Le Petit Omar, the boy from the opening bookend, brings him a handwritten message from the FLN. Except Ali is illiterate. Omar reads him the note and we hear the boy’s voiceover as the scene plays out. Ali has been ordered to kill a French policeman by shooting him in the back. Not one to do quite as told, Ali makes sure that he comes face to face with the cop and turns the would-be execution into a street spectacle: “Watch me, brothers! (…) Look how the organisation deals with traitors.” Ali’s moment of showmanship turns sour when he finally pulls the trigger and… nothing. He has been given an empty gun – a true rite of initiation. Ali has proved his loyalty but also that he’s a hothead. 

Next, Ali meets one of the principal heads of the FLN, El-hadi Jaffar, played by no other than the man to whom we partly owe The Battle of Algiers: Saadi Yacef who, as the lead producer for Casbah Films, had the foresight of collaborating with Pontecorvo to do what few political films do – explore the motivations on both sides of the conflict, a task that understandably would have been a lot more trying for an Algerian, let alone a French director. As critic Joe Morgenstern put it, “(Pontecorvo and his associates’) sympathy is plainly with the rebels, but their allegiance is plainly to the truth”¹ – i.e.: Pontecorvo’s quest is for a subjective universal truth, since this is a self-contained work of fiction based on historical events. Aside from the edge given by his nonpartisan nationality, Pontecorvo was a committed Marxist with enough independence and presence of mind to manoeuvre on both sides of the fence. It was surely not lost on Jaffar that Pontecorvo had left the Communist Party in 1956 after the USSR smothered the Hungarian Revolution. A great film tends to bear self-critique and, in order to remain honest, question its own ideological framework.

Jaffar is as rational as Ali is impulsive. The former explains to his sceptic, would-be disciple that the movement requires organisation from within before it can spring into action. Only then will they be able to confront the French effectively. It is refreshing to see members of the Algerian resistance represented this way, with internal contradictions and differing opinions; in other words, as complex human beings, rather than stereotypes. The Algerians in this film are not a monolithic group whose members all think, feel, and behave the same way. That said, Jaffar’s dictum to Ali ominously prefigures Islamic fundamentalism in that there will be no tolerance for any form of deviation: “there are still too many drunks, whores, junkies, people who talk too much (…) We must win them over or eliminate them. We need to clean house first.” 

It is now April 1956, and the FLN’s communiqué no. 24 declares that the French colonial administration is responsible for impoverishing, corrupting, and degrading the Algerian people; hence, from now on, as Jaffar foretold, drugs, alcohol, and prostitution are forbidden in the Casbah, and a repeat offence is punishable by death. A slightly inebriated local man is accosted on a stairway by a gang of children led by Omar. Their average age is under ten. They call him “wino”, harass him, and in the blink of an eye start hitting him. It is fun and games until it morphs into Lord of the Flies² fodder. They drag him down the stairs, his face against the pavement. 

These kids are already embarked on a journey of unlikely or no return. Indoctrination has taken them from a place of respect for one’s elders, whether they reek of alcohol or not, to treating this man as subhuman. Could we be witnessing here early signs of the ideological radicalisation that a couple of generations later will lead young men to fly planes into the World Trade Centre in the name of a higher truth?

Preaching by example, Ali La Pointe goes around the Casbah leading his own rituals of purification. He strikes a man who is smoking and lets the now dregs of the earth know that he’s looking for Hassan El-Blidi, drug dealer and pimp. He visits a brothel and the madam greets him in a familiar tone – “Ali, where’ve you been?” – that implies he might have been a regular. That is the thing with radicalisation. You wake up one morning and selectively forget what you’ve been up to until your new dawn of self-awareness, often without sharing the memo of your conversion with those who’ve known you all along. And because people don’t read minds, they see the same old, flawed you. To make things even more dogmatic, show zero tolerance for anyone who reminds you of yourself until now. In that frame of mind, Ali finally meets El-Blidi, who stretches out his arms like a long-lost dad and assures Ali, “We’re friends. Have you forgotten? (…) What’s happened to you?” Good question, even if it’ll be his last. Ali tells him that either he joins the FLN or he’s been sentenced to death. Hassan lurches towards him and Ali mows him down with a submachine gun he was hiding under his loose clothing. He lets Hassan’s goons live so they spread the word that there’s a new order in the Casbah.

A wedding ceremony between Mahmoud, who was also in the hideout at the beginning of the film, and his young bride Fatima, one of Algeria’s first unveiled brides³, shows us another form of resistance. An FLN civil servant performs an abbreviated ceremony, skipping formalities and promising that the day will come when Algerians can have their weddings out in the open. This scene truly brings home the impossibility of colonialism. Imagine not being able to marry the person you love in your own language and under your own religion or belief system. The foolproof reaction to those prohibitions is that people will preserve their culture clandestinely, embodying a form of creative resistance that will make their social bonds even stronger. In due time, this form of civil resistance to oppression will have more tangible long-term effects than bullets. But it requires a level of patience that sooner or later exhausts itself. After 126 years of colonisation by the French, the Algerians are fed up. End of Act One.

Starting on 20 June 1956, the FLN orchestrates a series of assassinations where French men in uniform become the targets. The film neither condones nor condemns. Not to say that military policemen are not human beings who have families and some, perhaps, even good intentions of upholding the peace, but by the same token, they know the risk inherent to their profession. They start getting killed systematically, with little recourse against the locals who know the streets infinitely better than they do and count on a sophisticated network of visible and invisible accomplices. The murders range from solitary affairs, like a cop getting stabbed in the back, to shootouts in plain view. Whenever possible, the guns of the dead policemen are retrieved, enhancing the FLN’s arsenal. We get a sense of the perpetrators’ resourcefulness; e.g.: a group of men pretend to be arguing and they’re called inside the police station, where they open fire on all the men in uniform. 

The prefecture of Algiers puts out its own communiqué. Since the assailants are multiplying and emerging from Muslim abodes, the Arab quarters will be sealed off. The Casbah is turned into a pig pen, with checkpoints at all access points. Its inhabitants have always been regarded as second-class citizens, and now there’s barbed wire to prove it. Segregation won’t be nuanced anymore.

The killings of French policemen continue with exponential collaboration from the Algerian populace. Hidden guns materialise inside the traditional white haïks of Muslim women, as well as in vegetable crates and rubbish bins. A young lad’s innocuous stroll to the beach turns into the coldblooded execution of a cop. By extension this reverberates as blatant psychological warfare on French civilians, who now feel unprotected and, consequently, that they might come next. How long will it take for the FLN to go from men in uniform to random attacks? As soon as it takes for the French to retaliate. Such is the logic and folly of war.

Impotence breeds an irrational need for scapegoats. French soldiers and policemen are dispatched to find the perpetrator of the latest killing. Passers-by point in the direction of a neighbourhood in the European quarter. Exasperated, self-righteous civilians have come out to their balconies faulting the government and demanding immediate action. Soon enough they work themselves into a bloodthirsty, racist frenzy: “Murder all the bastards! Then we’ll have some peace!” Down below, an unassuming elderly Arab streetcleaner wearing a chechia is sitting on the footpath, about to have a bite of his sandwich. He looks around bewildered, trying to make sense of it all. Since Pontecorvo made us privy to the “stroll-to-the-beach” murder, we know that this particular man had nothing to do with it. But he’s conveniently at hand, so why not blame him. A woman yells, “Murderer! Murderer!”, promptly echoed by, “He looks like a dirty fellagha! (…) Filthy Arab! Don’t let him get away!” Instinct prompts the man to let go of his sandwich and turn the corner. In a paroxysm of unabashed, blind hatred, the onlookers insist that they saw him, it’s him no doubt, and he shouldn’t be allowed to escape. The fact that he’s trying to run away doesn’t help and turns their bias into a corroboration of guilt. An army jeep and police motorcycles arrive and he’s dutifully, albeit unjustly arrested.

At the office of the police commissioner, he and his assistant have to go through the bureaucratic headache of processing the incident. Carbon copies are filed for the prefect, the press, multiple archives, and for the commissioner himself, who casually asks the assistant where Rue de Thèbes, the allegedly guilty man’s home address, is located. Somewhere in the upper Casbah. We also learn that the streetcleaner has a wife and three children. Is the commissioner thinking of taking matters into his own hands? That would be inconceivable if he abides by the notion that the French, like most colonisers claim, have brought “civilisation” to Algeria, but there’s that porous dimension of morality that sees vigilantism as a form of righteous retribution.

Cut to a villa where the police commissioner, his friends, and their wives are enjoying drinks at night in a pleasant haute-bourgeois garden. The scene could well be a precursor of the idyllic domesticity featured in The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer, 2023) within the confines of Rudolf Höss’ house adjacent to the Auschwitz crematoria. Here, attended by their Algerian nanny, French children bid mummy good night, everyone is having a jolly good time, and the wives half-heartedly protest that their husbands must leave early to go play their card game. The commissioner and three acolytes get into a car and drive to the Casbah. In true vigilante fashion, one of them plants a bomb at Rue de Thèbes. A huge explosion ensues that not only kills the streetcleaner and his family but also destroys the whole block as gratuitous collateral.

Many corpses are dug out of the rubble the following morning, including those of children. As far as retaliation goes, the bombing response was out of proportion and asymmetrical since the FLN had so far only targeted men in uniform, and we in the audience know that the streetcleaner was a patsy. Diegetic sound is muted and we only hear Morricone’s melancholy score, Rue de Thèbes, which sublimates the horror to ensure that we never forget these images: the impotence of the men struggling with the collapsed slabs of concrete, women wailing soundlessly and contorting in pain, children experiencing the adults in their lives at their most vulnerable. The musical chords might be Western in form, but clearly universal in meaning; likewise, the iconography of an Arab man carrying a dead child evokes a Christian pietà. 

The bombing in the Casbah will unleash a chain reaction of cause-and-effect events. One tragic incident will lead to another, and in the process they will grow in scale – the inescapable snowball effect. Sooner or later we will be compelled to wonder how this whole mess began. But truth be told, it did not really start with that bomb, or with the killings of men in uniform that in turn led to the act of vigilantism. Just as one act leads to another in this causal relationship, we can apply that logic backwards and retrace events one by one until we get to square one: what is France doing in Algeria in the first place? 

And so it is that, in an Eisenstein-like cut of contrasting emotion, Ali La Pointe aggressively takes to the streets of the Casbah, followed by a scantily-armed mob craving their own form of retribution. They scream, “Murderers! Murderers!”, mirroring the French woman on the balcony earlier on. Those words linger as loudly in the Casbah as in the European quarter. Calling “the other” a murderer is a euphemism for stating how much you wish them dead. 

The problem is that Ali is handing it to the French authorities on a platter. This is a one-way march to the slaughterhouse, and Ali is too impulsive to realise it. From the labyrinth that is the Casbah, Le Petit Omar emerges from a converging street and fights the crowds to intercept Ali. By order of Jaffar and the FLN, Ali must stop. Against all odds, Ali listens to the boy and halts the crowd. Jaffar comes out of a dark alley and vows that the FLN will avenge the crowd. The ululations of Algerian women erupt, an exultant war cry foreshadowing what is about to come.

The form that revenge takes is unexpected and memorable. Unexpected for those whose connotation of the role of women in Arab societies is one of passivity, oppression, or being relegated to the background. Memorable due to its ingenuity and efficacy. To the trancelike rhythm of the Gnawa-inspired percussion⁴, three Algerian women from different generations transform their physical appearances, and in doing so, embody the concept of creative armed resistance in a far more pragmatic way than Ali’s belligerent and potentially suicidal march. They are Zohra (the youngest), the enigmatic Hassiba (based on the real-life martyr Hassiba Ben Bouali), and Djamila, an older woman. The scene starts with Zohra asserting her ethnic identity by, lo and behold, stripping herself of its symbols; facing a mirror, she removes her Algerian haïk and adjar.⁵ Here’s another example of flawlessly convincing, believable, empirical acting – more like being, actually – on the part of the nonactors who were unreservedly committed to the making of The Battle of Algiers. Her expression is a mixture of resolve and a hint of uncertainty. She is a warrior with ideological convictions, and she is also an attractive woman about to sacrifice something she holds precious, her long hair, in the name of a cause she believes in – a negligible price to pay as retribution for the indignities suffered by her people. She looks at the mature woman standing next to her, who is doing something analogous by transforming her look (hair, makeup, lipstick, clothes) in order to be perceived as Western. We recognise her from the opening scene of the film: Hassiba, who will end up in the hideout with Ali La Pointe. Her determination is uncanny. No hesitation here. Just pure resolve, which also gives her poise and serenity. Empowered, Zohra cuts off her long braids and then proceeds to uncurl, straighten, and dye her hair blonde. Djamila does her best too, though she’s aware she comes across as more ethnic than her younger counterparts. They are all appropriating the symbols of the coloniser and, in masking their own ethnic identities, will repurpose and use their assumed appearances as weapons against the French. Significantly, the room is full of mirrors, echoing the theme of “doubling up”.

Jaffar arrives and inspects the women. Zohra playfully speaks to him in French. Is there more between Jaffar and Zohra than meets the eye? He approves of her and of Hassiba, but is unsure about Djamila who, not wanting to be excluded, suggests bringing along her son. Jaffar agrees, hands them bomb-laden baskets, and assigns their targets: Hassiba, a cafeteria on Rue Michelet; Zohra, the popular Milk Bar Café; and Djamila, the Air France office in the Mauritania building. Pontecorvo places his artistic bet on suspense, rather than shock. We already know what they intend on doing, so the next few scenes will allow us to focus more on character development than on plot. It is also worth mentioning that, unlike a generic Hollywood movie, the measured tone of the film is such that we’re not rooting for the Algerian women to carry out a bloodbath of innocent French civilians. 

At a checkpoint, Algerians are being stopped and routinely mistreated by French soldiers. Racism is palpable all around. A man is arrested because he doesn’t have his papers on him. Hassiba gracefully makes her way through the crowd, passing as a classy “French” woman. Easier done than said, the first bomb has effortlessly made its way into the French quarter. As predicted, Djamila’s child gives her the required immunity and she also gets through. A soldier flirts with Zohra. Seeing the towel protruding from her bag, he asks if he can accompany her to the beach. In the same tone she used with Jaffar, she coyly responds that maybe some other time.

Both racial profiling and sexism are turned on their heads and put to good use by the Algerian women. After making it to the other side, they all meet at the fish market with Taleb, the man with the dark glasses, unparalleled intensity, and surgical precision who sets the bomb timers for them. Though he’s only on screen for about a minute, Taleb manages to make a long-lasting, indelible impression. 

The women have less than 30 minutes to fulfil their missions. We first follow Hassiba into the cafeteria. The moment she steps in, diegetic sound turns into nondiegetic and we hear the tension-ridden percussive track, now a battle cry. She scans the room, like a tigress entering a field full of pigeons. She asks for a Coke and a French man gallantly offers her a seat, which she kindly accepts. She now zones in on her would-be victims. The nature of the war has changed; these are not men in uniform anymore. She is surrounded by innocent civilians having coffee or wine in a tranquil locale on a pleasant late afternoon. If anything, what puts their innocence in question is whether they shouldn’t be enjoying themselves in France, rather than in a country that has been colonised by design and deed. But as far as they know and according to their government, there has always been a peaceful relationship between the two dissonant countries, as a byproduct of which Algeria – on the receiving end and never really having asked for it – has benefitted from first-world, altruistic, civilisatory perks. Tell that to Hassiba, who now focuses on a toddler licking an ice cream. Some audience members will no doubt project and think that she might be having second thoughts…. 

Hassiba calmly looks at the clock on the wall, takes a sip from her Coke, and uses her foot to gently slip the basket containing the bomb under the seat of an oblivious French woman sitting next to her. In hindsight, we realise that looking at all those people, including the ice-cream toddler, was only strengthening her resolve, as if she were thinking, “Yes… you, you, and you, and even you deserve this because you shouldn’t be here. This needs to stop. Now.” The beauty in the horror of this scene is that she comes across as a conscientious, committed fighter who is taking responsibility for her actions, amoral as they may be. She is a three-dimensional, complex woman who has decided to take action to achieve an objective she believes in, not a heartless killing machine. Paradoxically, this female “terrorist” is not only humanised in a way usually granted to heroic misfits in movies, but we also feel for the cafeteria victims, hence the moral complexity. By the same token, when Hassiba is found along Ali in the hideout at the end of the film, she remains perfectly collected, with only the vein on her neck pulsating. “Live by the sword, die by the sword.”⁶ She is willing to unleash and receive violence. But that unique demeanour of hers – exquisitely portrayed by Fouzia El Kader – transcends martyrdom; it’s more like Socrates drinking the hemlock when he chooses principle over self-preservation.

Hassiba takes one last sip of her Coke, excuses herself, and leaves. The courteous French man, who is about to die along with most people in that cafeteria, says to her, “Leaving already, Miss? Dommage!” What a pity, indeed, that it has come to this. For some of us, there is no justification for terrorism as a collective punishment in which people who committed no direct crime are mercilessly killed, but The Battle of Algiers helps us understand how it all got to this bloody mess, literally. With the Algerian women, we are not yet at the stage of suicide bombers. They are delivering their baskets and exiting the scene, but it’s clear that this is the historical process that inevitably leads in a direction from which there is no way back. Meanwhile, Zohra is sizing up her would-be victims at the Milk Bar Café, where young French people are dancing to cha-cha-chá music, the lyrics of which ironically speak about “tomorrow”. Her demeanour is not quite as self-possessed as Hassiba’s, and consequently her point-of-view shots, handheld, are more restless. Still, she places her basket behind the jukebox and walks away. Djamila also does her due diligence at the Air France office. Now it’s only a matter of waiting for the ticking bombs… 

The narrative returns to the cafeteria. Hassiba has already left the premises; her poised subjective shots are now replaced by omniscient close-ups of people who, the film seems to reiterate, at a fundamental human level do not deserve what is about to befall them. And then, at 5:50 pm, the first blast erupts, shot by Pontecorvo and his team in their signature style: the explosion is executed in painstaking hyperrealism, a feat of physical production with clever mannequin placement and actual people in the foreground. Did any of the nonactors get injured? Was anyone’s hearing affected by the blast?

The film now cuts to the Milk Bar, where the loud explosion from the cafeteria was heard. The dancers step outside for a moment, and fate cruelly has them go back inside believing that a propane tank must have exploded. The second blast goes off, and in the first three shots, filled with people, no mannequins are in sight. In the fourth shot, a couple of mannequins tumble down with the collapse of the balcony, but to be sure, the level of realism here is also remarkable. 

We don’t see any images of the Air France aftermath, giving credence to the historical account of a bomb malfunction. Shots of death and destruction follow, and Pontecorvo and his editors, Mario Serandrei and Mario Morra, have made a brilliant creative choice: they bring back the same music cue, Rue de Thèbes, that was used for the aftermath of the bombing in the Casbah. It balances the scales, it humanises the tragedy, and it makes it clear that the ultimate victims of war are and will always be the general population, regardless of nationalities, caught in the crossfire of self-serving decisions made by those for whom vulnerable civilians are little more than statistics.

Mirroring but also contrasting Ali and the mob’s chaotic descent from the Casbah, the French paratroopers make their entrance into Algiers on 10 January 1957, marching at a steady and resolute pace. Lieutenant Colonel Philippe Mathieu (played by Jean Martin, the only professional actor in the film) is at their lead – the very same army officer who at the beginning of the film appeared when the Algerian prisoner betrayed Ali’s hideout. A voiceover informs us that, among other military accomplishments, Mathieu is a veteran of the Italy and Normandy campaigns in World War II; he was a member of the French resistance against the Nazi occupation, and until recently he fought in Indochina and will now tackle Algeria. Oblivious to the irony of it all, the French population pours out on the street, welcoming their redeemers. They clap enthusiastically and wave little French flags. A new chapter in the French-Algerian conflict has begun.

In an example of meta-cinematic film technique, The Battle of Algiers has Mathieu show documentary footage from The Battle of Algiers to his paratroopers in order to explain the faceless enemy’s methods and tactics. We recognise the checkpoint where Hassiba was stopped, though she’s barely in frame – we only see her fragmented body on the upper lefthand corner. Mathieu elucidates, “Among all these Arab men and women are the perpetrators. But who are they? How can we recognise them?” Like in a good thriller, the audience has more information and is steps ahead of Mathieu, the character trying to figure it all out. Then we see footage at the other checkpoint of Zohra teasing the soldier who offered to accompany her to the beach. A tongue-in-cheek cut back to the paratroopers watching the film shows them with smitten expressions, unaware that this alluring woman is carrying the bag with the bomb that killed all those young people at the Milk Bar. The last clip shows an incident that we hadn’t witnessed before. Mice come out of the box of a man undergoing inspection. It comes across as a comedic moment until we notice that the child who helps him chase after the mice is no other than Le Petit Omar, which makes us, the meta-audience, reassess the moment. 

Mathieu proceeds to explain that interrogations must be conducted “in such a way as to ensure we always get an answer,” which is of course doublespeak for torture. Some of the paratroopers can’t help but gulp. Mathieu concludes that as of now Algiers will no longer be a holiday resort but a battlefield, and the French army will welcome any excuse to justify an intervention. Since the United Nations is about to open a debate on the Algerian question, the FLN is calling a week-long general strike to make their case for self-determination in the international arena by showing the breadth of their movement. This scenario will allow the French paratroopers to raid the Casbah. Anybody who joins the strike will have identified themselves as a visible, certifiable enemy. For Algerians, the strike signifies the next step in revolutionary warfare, where the whole population joins the struggle and proves to the world that every Algerian stands united – including, in the last shot of the scene, a little boy selling newspapers who at his young age already shows a political conscience light years away from the tragic French boy licking the ice cream. 

On the Algerian end, one of the main leaders of the FLN, Si Ben M’Hidi, makes it clear to Ali that he knows that the strike is a big gamble. World opinion cannot be taken for granted when it comes to Arab affairs and, as Mathieu pointed out, every striker will become a new, self-advertised enemy. Ali is not in favour of the strike for different reasons; namely, that militants have been ordered not to use weapons, which is how he would rather cope with the enemy – bullets over unreliable diplomacy. The leaders of the FLN are all for resisting French colonisation but believe in different ways of doing so: Ali is for armed confrontation, an eye for an eye; M’Hidi is for ideological confrontation, trying to get world opinion on their side so political pressure can be exerted on the French, ideally by other members of the U.N. charter. And in a way Jaffar is the synthesis of these two approaches, striving to find the balance between praxis and theory. After all, according to the film, Jaffar is the one who was behind the female bombers, an act of retaliation that was a turning point in the battle for Algiers by forcing everyone to start paying attention to what was going on in Algeria. As M’Hidi puts it to Ali, “Terrorism is useful as a start. But then, the people themselves must act.” 

That is the whole point of the strike, to gauge their own true strength, even if the strike itself doesn’t do much good. Revolutions can only happen when people take to the streets by their own will, impetus, and convictions. But all fires eventually die out… It is hard to start them, harder still to maintain them, and as M’Hidi articulates it in the most haunting quote of The Battle of Algiers: “It’s only afterwards, once we’ve won, that the real difficulties begin.”

On the French side, Colonel Mathieu is a rather complex character. Because he was a member of the underground resistance against the Nazis, he understands better than anyone else what the FLN is fighting for. Notwithstanding, he is a French soldier who has been assigned the mission to behead the rebellion, and there is no question that he will do his utmost to fulfil that. Whether that will restore some sense of order or wreak havoc is not his purview. He is well aware that in Paris influential intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre are opposing colonialism and supporting the Algerian War of Independence. A journalist even asks him, “Then you like Sartre?” “No,” Mathieu promptly replies, “but I like him even less as a foe.”

This is part of the brilliance of The Battle of Algiers: the audience gets a fresh perspective on “the other” through Mathieu, the nemesis who on principle should reject everything his enemy stands for; instead, even though he’s fixated with destroying the Algerian insurrection, Mathieu somewhat empathises with the resistance fighters and, in articulating their ideology in a less predictable way than when an FLN leader does it, engages with the viewer by humanising the plight of the Algerians and drawing us near them. Much credit belongs to screenwriters Franco Solinas and Gillo Pontecorvo for coming up with this approach. What makes The Battle of Algiers more morally complex than other films that have followed a comparable, Oscar-winning path – Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962), Dances with Wolves (Kevin Costner, 1990), Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993) – is that Mathieu will carry out his mission to its bitter end, rather than “going native”. 

Predictably enough, the UN General Assembly passes a resolution ruling out any direct intervention in Algeria. Its purpose defeated, the strike comes to an end. Like a scene from an absurdist comedy, a French military band marches through the streets of the Casbah and soldiers pass out morsels of bread to those who will take them – mainly children, out of hunger – while for most it is daunting to process charity from the same hands that deliver blowtorches.

Aside from Ben M’Hidi, Mathieu’s main targets are Jaffar, Ali, and two other insurgents, Si Murad and Ramel, all of whom are being hunted down like rats in a maze. Jaffar tells them they must split up to reconstitute the movement. 

Ali doesn’t agree but will heed Jaffar’s authority. One wonders if the real-life Ali (Ali Ammar, a street criminal and boxer) was as disciplined as the cinematic Ali, who comes to us filtered by Yacef’s, Solinas’, and ultimately Pontecorvo’s retelling of the story. Be that as it may, nonactor Brahim Hadjadj incarnates Ali’s duality with maximum impact. His whole being is the battleground between a free-spirited soul, constrained by the lack of education that makes him defer to Jaffar, and his loyalty to the FLN, limited by his own empirically savant instinct.

To set the reconstruction plan in motion, Le Petit Omar leads four rather virile women down the Casbah. Easier to make the Algerian women pass for French than to disguise Ali, Jaffar, Si Murad, and Ramel as veiled women in the traditional haïk and adjar. A French soldier notices the male shoes and gunfire erupts. Jaffar and Ali split and run for their lives. There’s a wonderful shot of two stray dogs running for cover in the middle of this chaos, as an associative metaphor. 

Jaffar and Ali go inside a random house, and two women recognise, embrace, and protect them by hiding them inside a deep well. It is worth noting the courage displayed by the Algerian women in this film. Their behaviour is simple, direct, and discreet, completely geared towards effective results. From the young woman who gets married by the faith of her own culture, to the women who plant those murderous bombs, to these women who hide Jaffar and Ali without the slightest hesitation, they all selflessly risk it all. Whether we agree with their actions or not, they embody unadulterated courage and make us understand how much resilience can lie hidden behind the veil. Whether Pontecorvo intended it or not, it is tempting to take as a nod to Algerian women the sight of the leaders of the FLN dressed in female garb, sitting at the bottom of a pit, well aware of their current plight but also harbouring some sense of hope about the future.

A day at the races, 25 February 1957, turns into pandemonium when more bombs go off, per usual in incredibly realistic cinematic execution, with live people occupying all film planes and reinforced by a mannequin in the upper-left corner of the frame doing an intrepid somersault. 

This time a scared Algerian boy wearing a Coca-Cola visor and selling snacks to the public is the one who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, reminiscent of the streetcleaner whose house and neighbourhood were bombed at the Rue de Thèbes. On familiar impulse, a number of French civilians target the boy as the scapegoat to pay for this bombing. They start harassing and kicking him, wholly intent on lynching him until a middle-aged French policeman comes to his rescue. Since the boy appears unconscious, he has to rush him out of there, cradling him as if he were his own son, thus proving that even a French cop is capable of humanity. 

The implied paradox, of course, is that we have no tangible proof that it wasn’t this boy who planted one of the bombs. At a purely humanistic level, does it matter? Should he be ripped to shreds by the mob if he was indeed the culprit? This kind of moral ambiguity is typical of Italian Neorealism, the movement that shaped Pontecorvo’s sensibility. Pontecorvo is exhorting us to err on the side of humanism, no matter the moral murkiness.

In a press event intended as a publicity stunt, Mathieu stands next to a handcuffed Ben M’Hidi who, the French colonel is the first to admit, was apprehended virtually by mistake. Notwithstanding, the FLN has been dealt a considerable blow, M’Hidi being a pillar of the insurgency. In a lesser movie Mathieu would show his contempt for M’Hidi and what he stands for; here, Mathieu’s respect is self-evident in his attitude and composure towards his enemy while M’Hidi replies to the journalists’ questions with incontestable conversation stoppers. A reporter’s query of “Isn’t it cowardly to use your women’s baskets to carry bombs?” is met with the iconic “Give us your bombers, sir, and you can have our baskets.” Firm in his belief that the press shapes public opinion, Mathieu puts an end to the questioning before it has the opposite effect of what the French originally intended by exposing M’Hidi to the world as the leader of a terrorist organisation. 

In a later press conference imbued with a grimmer tone, it is announced that Ben M’Hidi has hanged himself, despite the fact that his hands and feet were bound at all times. This time Mathieu spells out his position on the matter, asserting that he wasn’t the one who came up with the preposterous suicide statement and, most importantly, that he respected Ben M’Hidi’s courage and moral commitment to his ideals. A journalist urges Mathieu to be forthright about the elephant in the room and to acknowledge once and for all that the French are torturing Algerian prisoners.

It is in the simple logic of his reply that Mathieu articulates better than anyone else the crux of the matter. The FLN asks its members to withhold information for 24 hours after capture so as to reorganise themselves. After that period, any information they give will prove useless. Hence, Mathieu’s challenge is to make prisoners speak within 24 hours, aka “the ticking bomb” argument. Call it what you will, torture or enhanced interrogation, the real issue is not whether it is being employed – it is – but whether the French should stay in Algeria or not. In a way, Mathieu is washing his hands like Pilate, under the excuse that he is a soldier following orders – the eternal conundrum afflicting those who choose to suspend thought and, along with it, morality. Per Mathieu’s reasoning, as long as the politicians don’t decide otherwise, torture is the only way tangible results will be achieved and French lives spared from those who plant bombs in public spaces. Mind you, there’s also the ingrained conviction that French lives have more value than Algerian ones. Is there anything more human or natural than to resist and fight against such a notion? Bottom line, The Battle of Algiers makes a convincing case that colonisation yields an endless, vicious circle that invariably ends with the invader’s demise.

A quasi-religious montage with nondiegetic organ music shows Algerian men being tortured in private and in public. By way of the former, we see the blowtorching of a man in a crucified position – again, with graphic realism, as in the case of the explosions – while two soldiers chat in the background, not giving a damn. For the public variant, a form of waterboarding takes place in a courtyard, for the sake of the inhabitants of an apartment complex. In the background, a woman carrying a toddler reaches for an elderly woman’s hand, while a young French soldier smokes a cigarette in sadistic glee. Algerians are linked both by edits and by the mise-en-scène within the frame in such a way that they form a unified whole of spiritual suffering that sublimates physical pain and turns it into a humanistic plea for empathy. It is the cinematic equivalent of a Renaissance tableau, forcing us to engage in honest soul-searching. All these complex feelings converge in the unforgettable image of a strong, resilient woman who sheds a tear. 

After the spiritual interlude of the torture montage comes the exact opposite, a scene completely devoid of any lyricism that, in its stark objectivity, is closer to the way one experiences violence in reality. An ambulance speeds down one of the Frenchified avenues of Algiers and a stabbed doctor is dumped into the middle of the street. Despite the blatant mismatch – the driver and passenger morph from Caucasian men in white shirts and ties in the first shot to Algerian young men in the following shots – the editing suggests that Algerian rebels have taken control of the ambulance. One of them starts spraying bullets on French civilians. Irreversibly gone are the days of only targeting men in uniform or discreetly placing baskets under counters with the tip of your toes. The only axiom at play here is “Kill them all, the more the better” to the extent that when the shooter is out of ammo he steers the ambulance towards a cluster of people so as to score more lives, including his accomplice’s and his own. Was this attack orchestrated by the FLN or was it a rogue act – the equivalent of the French vigilantes who planted the bomb in the Casbah? In any case, we have now entered the realm of suicide attacks. Once people are willing to become collateral in their own killing sprees, all bets are off.

Consciously or not, Pontecorvo is still keeping the playing field level. For all the sacred aesthetics of the torture montage (in which Algerians are the victims), the psychotic behaviour shown in the ambulance scene creates a dialectical tension that pushes back against the humanistic empathy achieved in the previous scene. Or to put it more accurately, it draws a line between instigators and victims of violence on either side of the equation. It links the Algerian and French horizontally, though at the same time acknowledging that it’s an asymmetrical situation, as is always the case with historical scenarios of conquest, colonisation, and attempts at forced conversion. And this is why The Battle of Algiers is transcendental; it rises above propaganda and manages to get under our skins. Just as we are rooting for the Algerian resistance, this scene makes us cringe… I hope. Filmmaking is all about tone and execution. The last shot is a freeze frame of the two Algerian youths dead in the ambulance, after murdering dozens of random passersby. The still moment gives us pause to take in the overwhelming futility of their interrupted lives and of what we just witnessed.

In the penultimate sequence of The Battle of Algiers, we follow how the remaining leaders of the resistance are hunted down by Colonel Mathieu, and how they respond differently to similar scenarios. In the case of Ramel and Si Murad, they’ve been cornered on a top floor at a cul-de-sac, from where they are exchanging fire with paratroopers. To put an end to the standstill, Mathieu promises them a fair trial if they surrender. They want his offer in writing, he agrees, and they lower a basket (“give us your bombers and you can have our baskets”) for him to put a handwritten note inside. In another example of creative resistance, they load the basket with a bomb, with 30 seconds to go. Ramel and Si Murad barely exchange a glance. They do what they need to do; there is no sentimentality or glamourised heroics. They are willing to sacrifice their lives as long as they can take Mathieu with them. Tension ensues in real, continuous time as the basket slowly descends. But the colonel’s survival instinct kicks in and he bids someone else to deliver the notice on his behalf – a boyish paratrooper whose last words are “Faster, dirty Arab!” before he’s blown to bits along with Ramel, Si Murad, and the entire building. Mathieu remains unscathed.

Jaffar finds himself in a similar situation, joined by Zohra, the young woman who planted the bomb in the Milk Bar Café. The moment rekindles the hint of a possible intimacy between them. She has reclaimed her ethnic appearance and is burning FLN papers in their narrow hideout. Mathieu sends the woman who owns the house to tell Jaffar to surrender or else he’ll blow up the entire house. Predictably, Jaffar says Mathieu can blow up anything he wants. The fuse is lit. Zohra stares at it and then at Jaffar, perhaps seeking a whiff of meaning during their last moments alive. And then, the unpredictable happens: Jaffar puts a hand on Zohra’s shoulder and tells her that it is pointless to die like this. So he surrenders and saves her life and his own. Compared to Ramel and Si Murad’s actions, Jaffar’s behaviour might come across as borderline cowardice. Is there any point in him surviving? 

This is where it’s pertinent for us to remember that Jaffar is the fictionalised alter ego of Saadi Yacef, who “substituted the camera for the machine gun”⁷ and whose memoir, Souvenirs de La Bataille D’Alger⁸, served Pontecorvo as a point of cinematic departure. Within that logic, had Jaffar played the martyr, this film wouldn’t exist and you wouldn’t be reading this. Not that Yacef/Jaffar is already thinking of that when he’s sitting next to Mathieu, inside a car, in the following scene. But one could argue that he put his survivor’s guilt to good use. Even Mathieu acknowledges that he’s glad Jaffar didn’t succumb to empty gestures. Zohra is less resigned to her fate. She yells at Mathieu in Arabic, calling him a monster and reminding him that Ali La Pointe is very much alive. Jaffar translates Zohra’s words with as much defiance as his situation permits. They all know that, as long as Ali is free, the spirit of the Algerian insurgency goes on.

It has all come down to Ali, whom we now see in the company of Mahmoud (the groom of the wedding), Hassiba (who planted the bomb in the cafeteria), and Le Petit Omar – the three figures with whom we met Ali at the beginning of the film. This can only mean that we know what’s coming… But we’re not there quite yet. First, Ali announces to his comrades that they have a job tomorrow, and it includes Omar planting a bomb, which brings a big smile to the boy’s half innocent, half all-knowing face. He is now, for real, one of them. Still, Ali, like a conscientious father figure, doesn’t let Omar grab the gun that he has placed on the table.

The following morning Ali hears a truck and looks out the window towards a luminous sky. It is a beautiful moment, both poetic and harshly realistic. Ali’s expression reveals that he’s not taking anything for granted. Life is happening one moment at a time. Suddenly it feels like we’re in one of those movies Italians excel at, where domesticity reveals the true meaning of life. The opening shot of Una giornata particolare (A Special Day, Ettore Scola, 1977) comes to mind, in which we get both the set-up of Sofia Loren’s character and the gist of her family’s dynamic, courtesy of one of the most memorable long takes in cinema history. Ali wakes up Omar affectionately, Mahmoud brings everyone tea, and Hassiba emerges from behind a curtain. Proving that an icon can also be human, Hassiba even smiles as she asks Mahmoud how his pregnant wife is doing. This is what everyday life could be like without the yoke of colonisation. 

Morricone’s serene music creates an effective counterpoint of relative peace and tension, soon to be interrupted by gunshots and the familiar, pulse-racing Algiers, November 1, 1954 percussive motif. The four of them hurriedly hide inside the wall, and Mahmoud’s wife, the now-pregnant Fatima, only has a few seconds to remove any trace of them and pretend she lives there alone. All of which is moot because we know, as well as Mathieu and his paratroopers do, what brought us here in the first place: the forced confession with which the film opened. Fatima is yanked out of bed and evacuated from the house, along with all other neighbours. Another freeze frame and the distortion in the soundtrack bring us back to the same moment where we left off one hour and 42 minutes ago. The image might be the same but we feel very different about Ali, Hassiba, Mahmoud, and Omar, if nothing else because we understand (if not necessarily justify) the reasons that brought them here. The terrorists have been rendered fully human. 

These are not people who woke up one morning and irrationally, on the spur of the moment, decided to start going around planting bombs. Quite the contrary, The Battle of Algiers leaves little doubt as to how much the Algerian resistance fighters and the population at large crave freedom from the day-to-day oppression imposed by an alien power making the decisions that affect every aspect of their lives. At the very least, they will put up a creative – if not an armed – de facto resistance to preserve their dignity and cultural identity. 

The paratroopers place the explosives on the wall and Mathieu urges Ali to let the others out; Omar will just have to attend reformatory for a while. As Mathieu says this, an elegant edit links a head turn from the devastated informant to a close-up pan that lands on Ali, as if the wall separating them were invisible. Like Judas and Jesus, the traitor’s betrayal inadvertently confers the sacrificial victim with immortality.

We are probably wondering the same as Ali: Why let his companions die? After all, we just saw Jaffar choose life for himself and Zohra over palpable nothingness – and with it the inherent possibility of still doing something of consequence for the dying movement. Mathieu gives Ali 30 seconds to make up his mind… 

Mahmoud braces himself and covers his face, his wedding ring not lost on us. Ali says what he wouldn’t have said at the beginning of his character arc: “Whoever wants to, can go.” And he means it. What is relevant here is that Ali respects his companions enough to let them make the choice for themselves. In response, Omar embraces him. It is a role inversion where the fully-adult child now gives moral support to the doubting adult. Le Petit Omar is little Bruno holding his father’s hand near the end of Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, Vittorio De Sica, 1948). As for Hassiba, she defers to Ali and asks him what he’ll do. Ali replies, “I don’t trust them,” which is what the subtitle reads in the Criterion Collection edition I’m referencing for this article. When I first saw the film four decades ago in a theatre in New York, that subtitle said, “I don’t bargain with murderers.” A zealous translator was probably making the subtext explicit.

The clock is ticking, mirroring the moment when Hassiba planted her bomb in the cafeteria. We spend these nerve-racking moments with the Algerian people united in the loss they’re about to experience, and there is a charged energy in the visual poetry, the hypnotic music (Tema di Ali), and the absolute honesty of every single individual wherever you look in the frame. Something will come out of this nothingness, and what makes the moment so poignant is that we feel it but Ali and his companions don’t. They are acting – or not acting – out of conviction, unaware of the masses gathered outside who support them and are there to witness their fate as it takes shape and grows in meaning. The long-shot pan with people praying in the foreground is one of my favourite shots ever. Not only is it elegantly composed and pregnant with latent emotion, but it also serves as a metaphor for the communion of disparate souls that happens inside a movie theatre. I can’t imagine any viewers – not even at the infamous 2003 Pentagon screening of The Battle of Algiers⁹ – not being touched by this moment, as solemn as imminent. Even the paratroopers play their part here, aligned in the background like in a Neoclassical painting by Jacques-Louis David. 

Time flows and is frozen. Women touch their foreheads, noses, and mouths, a cultural signifier for “Oh god, we are nothing but dust”. Among the onlookers is Fatima, whose child, still in her womb, is now destined to grow without a father. A tear runs down her cheek, but her expression is stoic – the impenetrable shell that arises when hope is futile. 

This is how the young, observant women on the receiving end of history become the proactive Hassibas of the world. Is there meaning to any of this? Will her own child become a premature adult like Le Petit Omar whose rite of passage is to plant bombs? Will she or he be able to marry within their own religion? And as we ponder this, Ali hugs Omar one last time and the bomb goes off.

Film validates reality. Right after the explosion, Mathieu sends a cinematographer and a still photographer to take footage of the wreckage. A French General who has come to oversee the last stroke against the FLN congratulates Mathieu on decapitating the tapeworm, confident that they’ll hear about it no more. In their own rather peculiar way, considering the public execution they just brandished, they’re trying to be decent, blaming the FLN, not the Algerian people, for the insurrection, though it comes across as both patronising and in denial of everything we’ve experienced so far in this film. “They’re basically decent people. We got on fine for 130 years,” another officer adds. Racism usually comes veiled in condescension. It’s like the dog who is treated well as long as it obeys commands, and the moment it doesn’t, it gets punished “for its own sake”, to reestablish the unnatural order of things.

A straight cut takes us from the congratulatory military handshakes that bring Operation Champagne to its formal conclusion to a swarm of people pouring out into the streets of Algiers in a wave of spontaneous combustion that, if we’ve been paying attention, is anything but – it is more like a toxic potion that has been brewing for 130 years. The transition is both a bold cinematic ellipsis compressing three years into 1/24th of a second, and it is also a drastic, highly emotional shift of tone. The way Pontecorvo tells the story, the sinking feeling that accompanies Ali and his companions’ deaths turns into a different kind of explosion. Until this point The Battle of Algiers has had a very rigorous structure in terms of causality: an effect is brought on by a cause, and that effect in turn becomes a new cause that will generate its own effect, and so forth, in a seemingly perpetual cycle that reveals historical processes and our fallible, all-too-human condition. At the heart of colonisation lies the impossible proposition of not being able to live life per your own cultural values, a symbolic example of which is the surreptitious wedding ceremony of Mahmoud and Fatima. This and much more lead to the FLN killing French men in uniform, which leads to the French planting the vigilante bomb in the Casbah, which leads to the Algerian women’s bombs in baskets, which leads to Colonel Mathieu and the paratroopers’ arrival, which leads to the Algerian general strike and the UN’s consequent failure to act, which leads to the arrest of Algerian civilians, which leads to prisoners revealing intel and hideouts as a result of being tortured, which leads to the French systematically hunting down all the leaders of the FLN until the last standing operative, Ali La Pointe, is summarily executed. The End? The French seem to believe so, but not quite. Pontecorvo now integrates into the narrative the sort of experimentation with plot construction that one associates more with the Nouvelle Vague filmmaking style than with Italian Neorealism. We’re not quite sure why things are happening, where this impromptu outburst is coming from, but the Algerian population suddenly pours out on the streets. Causal connections have become loose. The ending is a universal truth in the form of a poetic statement: everything you’ve seen, experienced, and felt in this movie inevitably led to this irreversible outburst. The dam gates are open and the flood cannot be contained.

Why today in particular, 11 December 1960, seems to be a bit of a mystery, a French journalist’s voiceover tells us. “For some unknown reason, due to some obscure motive (…) disturbances broke out without warning, and nobody knows why or how.” Incidentally, this is the same journalist who had urged Mathieu to call torture by its name at the press conference where it was announced that Si Ben M’Hidi had purportedly hanged himself while cuffed. There is an incredible energy and a sense of urgency in the air. We need to remind ourselves, once again, that this is not in fact archival footage but that every shot has been staged, with thousands of extras rising to the occasion in unison, many of whom participated in the actual events roughly six years before, in these very same streets now turned into visceral film sets. The French men in uniform are outnumbered. This is the equivalent of when the sailors in Bronenosets Potyomkin (Battleship Potemkin, Sergei Eisenstein, 1925) decided they had had enough and started throwing the Czar’s naval officers overboard. But here the masses are engaged in something above and beyond revenge against their material enemy. It is an overt demonstration of their collective thirst for freedom. They are in a different plane of reality, symbolised by the appearance of the new Algerian flags with crescent and star. Despite orders to the contrary, impotent soldiers open fire, but the voices cannot be silenced… literally. The women’s rhythmic ululations and the overall chanting echo in the Casbah resonate throughout the night. Day follows with more fighting on the streets. It seems as if the whole population has, at long last, come out to the open without trepidation, ready to carry on the fire ignited by the FLN leaders. Everybody has become Ben M’Hidi merged with Ali La Pointe. Chaotic harmony, the unity of these demonstrations against all odds, continues for ten straight days and nights. Public opinion in France concedes that the situation is untenable. 

The last scene of the film bears a truly haunting quality. It starts with a moment of tense stillness. A police officer confronts an invisible crowd shrouded by the fog of war. He yells through a loudspeaker, “Qu’est-ce que vous voulez?” (What do you want?) 

Which brings us back to the opening dialogue of the film, “Couldn’t you have spoken sooner?” This is the eternal return of history. The question hangs up in the air yet again. Engaged audience members can provide their own answers, most likely in tune with the Algerian people’s response that comes a few seconds later. As the mist dissipates, a unison response is heard: “Independence. Our pride. We want our freedom!” The piercing female ululating and chanting start again. The Gnawa percussion relapses with a new frenzied intensity, like the surreal Calanda drums in Buñuel’s films, signalling the end of life as we knew it and the dawn of a new, exciting, thoroughly uncertain way of experiencing the world. Women march forward and are pushed back by men in uniform, only to propel themselves forward again. 

And again, and again… to no end.

Endnotes