Review of Battle of Algiers / معركة الجزائر, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo

The Battle of Algiers is one of those movies I watched for the first time in graduate school. Before now, I had heard of it multiple times in passing, as it’s kind of hard to escape a movie like this when it comes to word of mouth.

It’s become a classic over the years, that’s for sure, despite it initially being banned in countries like France for a hot minute (what a shocker—the colonizer is very upset about being depicted as such).

I first watched the movie in a class called Power, which was about how we exercise power historically over marginalized groups of people, then we watched the film in my nationalism class a year later. It’s always interesting returning to this movie and applying the different kinds of theorists we spent an entire semester mulling on.

Switching from the power to nationalistic sentiments certainly feels interconnected, but becomes a different conversation depending on what you’re field you’re approaching the topic with.

Before I start rambling too much, let’s get into the review then!

The story of Algerian resistance against the French in the midst of the Algerian War.

So this is a movie that mixes together a series of events and characters throughout the Battle of Algiers, which began in 1954 and didn’t end until three years later.

The Algerian War for Independence, like many other wars, was fought with many casualties, and it was not something to be taken lightly at all. We focus first on the revolutionaries working within the resistance movements against the French. The French have brought in their army from the homeland, and are trying to get ahold of the leaders of the movement to squash it down brutally.

It’s important to note that both sides, as seen in the film, were prone to using violence to try and get their ultimate solution.

The French especially were assassinating specific figures involved with it, and we see several influential leaders throughout the course of the movie and enacting their plans.

One of the more striking moments to me was the three young women involved with the resistance end up putting bombs in public spaces, leading to a lot of people either injured or killed.

Many of the fighters against the French in the movie are real people, and when we see them getting picked off by the French, this actually happened.

Something I always consider when we see movies is how we have a tendency to fictionalize and rationalize everything we see on the screen, even if it’s presented as a true story.

Nothing is ever truly authentic (how do we know the exact details and dialogue in a certain moment historically), but we have a tendency, as an audience, to associate things with fiction (“Oh, what a great movie” we say and then never acknowledge any sort of Algerian history again).

The film ends declaring that while the French may have ultimately won this battle in Algiers, they would go on to lose the war. They lost Algeria, which became its own state at the conclusion of the fighting, and the French lost their colonial powers even more so.

The fifties and sixties were a wild time when it came to rapid decolonization, and many empires were no longer really empires in their 1800s and early 1900s heydays. And, as seen in the movie, decolonization is not a pretty thing at all sometimes.

Overall Thoughts

From an academic perspective, as I mentioned before, this is such an interesting movie to approach because you can utilize it and its format from a wide variety of angles.

I also work as a film critic and have a bit of an education in filmmaking, and this is also a classic realism style that I’m unsurprised to see from this period.

There’s a reason why this movie has become a classic in the years, despite the French initially turning their noses away from it and denying their past—it’s got some brilliant shots throughout and a sustained aesthetic, despite it being about events that are pretty ugly. Go watch this if you haven’t already.

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