The Battle of Algiers
Gillo Pontecorvo's landmark film vividly recreates a key moment in the tumultuous Algerian struggle for independence from the French in the 1950s.
With its documentary-style immediacy and its vivid depiction of the struggle between oppression and resistance, The Battle of Algiers is one of the most influential and important of all political films. This cinematic tour-de-force is more relevant now than ever—and not just because it is so heavily referenced in Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another.
It's 1957. French paratroopers inch their way through the labyrinthine byways of the Casbah to zero in on the hideout of the last rebel still free in the city. Flashback three years earlier, as the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) decides on urban warfare. Thus begin the provocations, assassinations, hair-breadth escapes and reprisals; Algerian women—disguised as chic Europeans—depositing bombs at a sidewalk café, a teen hang-out and an Air France office; and massive, surging crowd scenes unfolding with gripping realism.
D: Gillo Pontecorvo, Algeria/Italy, subtitled, 1966, 2h
Programmed as part of the Dartmouth Film Society series "Borders and Belonging"
Borders and Belonging Film Series
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Black Family Visual Arts Center
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