I saw The Battle of Algiers for the first time in many years today and it remains a very impressive film. Though his sympathies plainly lay with the FLN Pontecorvo’s gaze spares no one, neither the French who torture nor the FLN who have no hesitation in slaughtering innocent people with bombs in bars. I can’t think of anything comparable in cinema to the scene where the camera pans around the Milk Bar that is about to be ripped apart by a bomb, taking in and personalizing for the viewer the faces of many of those who are about to be exterminated. Perhaps someone should tell Eoghan Harris that this is the sort of thing that many countries, not just Ireland and Algeria, had to stoop to in their fight for independence.
All that said though, judged by the standards of contemporary cinema and even those of TV, the effects of violence on bodies are soft-pedaled quite a bit, we see bloodied bodies but not dismembered ones, those shot at close range fall theatrically without any spray of blood or matter and the focus is more on the moral effects of torture on the victim – his becoming less than a person, a plaything of his captors – rather than the horror of the means necessary to achieve this. It’s interesting that the film doesn’t even hint at the torturers themselves suffering psychological damage as a result of their activities.
Looking at it now, the ending seems like the film’s weakest point. Algeria didn’t become independent until five years after the defeat of the FLN in the Algiers Casbah and the viewer innocent of history – apart from some scenes of subsequent street demonstrations – isn’t really given much of a clue how this occurred and is somewhat left hanging. Anyone who wants to know more about this or any other aspect of the Algerian War of Independence could do themselves a big favour by reading Alistair Horne’s A Savage War of Peace.
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