The Battle of Algiers (1966)
★★★★ — The Battle of Algiers (1966)
Sixty years on, and we haven't learned a single bloody thing. That's the thought that stayed with me long after the credits rolled on The Battle of Algiers, and I can't shake it. It's not a comfortable feeling. It's not supposed to be.
Gillo Pontecorvo's film drops you into the streets of Algiers with no warm-up and no apology. It's raw in the way that only the best cinema can be raw: not gratuitous, not showy, just honest to the point of discomfort. You're watching what looks, feels and sounds like a documentary. The handheld camerawork, the grainy black and white photography, the non-professional faces in the crowd. It genuinely fooled me more than once. There are sequences here where I had to remind myself this wasn't archive footage. That's not a small achievement. That's filmmaking of a rare and serious kind.
What the film refuses to do, and this is where it earns real respect from me, is pick a comfortable side to stand on. It shows you the Algerian independence fighters planting bombs in civilian spaces. It shows you French paratroopers using torture as a matter of policy. Both sides are capable of horror. Both sides visit that horror on people who had nothing to do with starting any of it. Innocent people, as always, caught in the machinery of a conflict bigger than themselves.
I'm not going to use this review as a soapbox for the politics, and I don't think the film wants me to either. What it wants, I think, is for you to sit with the reality of what organised political violence looks like up close. Not the clean, heroic version. The actual version. It's thought-provoking in the truest sense: it puts thoughts in your head that refuse to queue up neatly or resolve themselves into a tidy conclusion.
The film reminded me a little of 1917 in the way it creates an almost unbearable sense of presence, of being physically inside a conflict rather than observing it from a safe distance. But where that film follows a single urgent thread, The Battle of Algiers pulls you in multiple directions at once, between communities, between commanders, between the people giving orders and the people burying the dead. It's a broader and in some ways more demanding experience.
And then there's the weight of watching it now. When this film came out in the mid-1960s, it was provocative and controversial and banned in several countries. Decades later, you'd hope we'd be watching it as a historical artefact, something to learn from at a comfortable remove. But we're not, are we? The same patterns are playing out. The same arguments about security and resistance and who counts as a civilian and who gets to decide. Watching it in the present tense is just sad. A genuine, heavy sadness that the film earned and that I'm still carrying a bit.
Four stars. Essential, and not in the way that word usually gets thrown around. I mean essential the way a difficult conversation with someone you respect is essential. You might not enjoy every moment of it, but you'd be less without it.
Rating: ★★★★ | Year: 1966 | Watched: 2025-05-21
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
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Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
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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)
