»Gillo Pontecorvo
Mr. Pontecorvo will be remembered best for “The Battle of Algiers,” a stark portrayal, shot in black and white, of the bloody uprisings that led to Algeria’s independence from France in 1962. Admired and honored when it first appeared, it received renewed acclaim when it was rereleased in the United States in 2004. A. O. Scott, writing in The New York Times, called the film “astonishing cinema vérité” and “a political thriller of unmatched realism and a combat picture remorseless in its clarity.”The movie was based on a book by Saadi Yacef, who had been the leader of the insurgent cell in the Algiers Casbah that the French crushed in 1957. He survived capture and, after Algerian independence, approached Mr. Pontecorvo to make the film.
“Had it been up to Yacef, the result would have been pure propaganda,” the author Michael Ignatieff wrote in The New York Times Magazine in 2004. “Pontecorvo held out for a deeper vision, and the result is a masterpiece, at once a justification for acts of terror and an unsparing account of terror’s cost, including to the cause it serves.”
The film depicts a cycle of escalating violence and torture as revolutionaries of the National Liberation Front attack fellow Arabs and the French police, who then retaliate, only to provoke more attacks.
Mr. Yacef also produced the film and had a starring role as the leader of the revolutionaries. Indeed, the cast of the film, shot on location in the Casbah, consisted almost entirely of nonprofessional actors, adding to its grim documentary quality.
“The Battle of Algiers” won the Golden Lion for best film at the 1966 Venice International Film Festival. (Mr. Pontecorvo directed the festival for four years, starting in 1992.) But its legend grew as it was used as a kind of training film by both urban guerrillas and the authorities trying to suppress them. The Black Panthers studied the film in the 1960’s, and in 2003, months after the war against Iraqi insurgents began, the Pentagon screened the film for military and civilian war planners.
