The Battle of Algiers (1966)
★★★★ — The Battle of Algiers (1966)
There are war films that reconstruct history at a safe, cinematic distance, and then there is The Battle of Algiers. Released in 1966 and co-produced between Italy and Algeria, Gillo Pontecorvo's film drops the viewer directly into the streets of Algiers during the Algerian War of Independence, covering roughly the period from 1954 to 1957 when the National Liberation Front, the FLN, was waging an urban insurgency against French colonial rule. The conflict itself was one of the bloodiest and most politically charged decolonisation struggles of the twentieth century, and the film arrived while the wounds were still fresh, Algeria having only gained independence in 1962. It was banned in France for several years, which tells you something about how close to the bone it cut.
Pontecorvo, an Italian director whose earlier work had already shown an interest in resistance and political conflict, made a number of choices here that set the film apart from its contemporaries. Shot in black and white with a newsreel-like visual style, largely on location in the Casbah of Algiers, and using a cast made up almost entirely of non-professional actors, the production has a texture that sits somewhere between documentary and drama. It is a quality that would go on to influence generations of filmmakers working in politically engaged cinema. Yacef Saâdi, who plays a senior FLN figure in the film, was himself a commander in the actual FLN during the events depicted, and co-produced the picture through Casbah Film alongside Igor Film. Jean Martin, as the French paratrooper Colonel Mathieu, is one of the few professional actors in the principal cast, and his performance gives the French military operation a cool, bureaucratic logic that is, in its own way, as unsettling as anything else on screen. Brahim Hadjadj plays Ali la Pointe, the former street criminal turned FLN operative at the centre of the Algerian side of the story.
The film sits comfortably alongside other ambitious productions coming out of Italy and from the broader world cinema of the 1960s, a period that produced some genuinely challenging work. If you have been reading along with the blog, you may have seen reviews of other Italian productions such as Cemetery Man and Call Me by Your Name, or the equally serious-minded Persona, another film from 1966 that was wrestling with identity and complicity in its own very different way. War cinema in particular has always faced the challenge of representing violence without either glamourising it or reducing it to spectacle, something also examined in the review of 1917 elsewhere on the site.
60 years later and we haven't learned a thing. The battle for Algiers is raw, unapologetic and brutal. It depicts both sides of a conflict in Algeria because her people and the French. The effects in this film were so realistic. You'd be forgiven if you thought some of this was real footage. I'm not going to comment on the politics but BOTH sides were engaged in horrific acts where innocent people suffered. It was thought provoking then... now 60 years later it's just sad that we're still doing the same old stuff.
That sense of circular, exhausting repetition is something I keep coming back to with this film. It is not comfortable viewing, and I do not think it is meant to be. The craft is polished but entirely purposeful, every stylistic decision in service of placing you inside an impossible situation rather than above it. For a film made sixty years ago, it has a moral seriousness that puts a lot of modern conflict cinema to shame. If it has been sitting on your watchlist, move it to the top. Some films age into footnotes. This one just keeps getting more relevant, which is not really a cause for celebration.
Rating: ★★★★ | Year: 1966 | Watched: 2025-05-21
Trailer
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Italy: Nightmare City (1980) · Cemetery Man (1994) · One Way or Another (1975) · Chicken for Linda! (2023)
More from the 1960s: Viy (1967) · Persona (1966) · Carnival of Souls (1962) · Daisies (1966)
More drama: Viy (1967) · Wonder (2017) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Beautiful Boy (2018)
More war: Lessons of Darkness (1992) · The General (1926) · Men Without Wings (1946) · Fires Were Started (1943)
