The festival director of the London Middle East and North Africa Film Festival talks about the place of Pontecorvo’s film within the history of the region’s cinema and about its future.
The seizure of an international gas-plant in Algeria follows closely the escalation of conflict in Mali. The response of western states to both reinforces the worldview of their Islamist adversaries.
On 17 December 2012, Ken Loach summed up the personal significance of The Battle of Algiers for him, in our project situating Algeria’s history, society and politics within the wider context of the Arab world.
The ‘chaos and fear’ inspired by The Battle of Algiers is certainly there, enhanced by another parallel between the two films – the location from which the uprising bursts forth.
A 2006 documentary by Yves Boisset uses uncredited extracts from the film, mixed in with actual news reels, without stating that the film was made nine years after the events which it relates to. Fiction has become a historical document.
The bitter divisions within the FLN are ignored. Instead, Gillo Pontecorvo, in his 1966 film, The Battle of Algiers, presents the war uniquely in terms of the FLN against the French paratroopers. We begin a new series exploring the many facets of this remarkable film.
In its framing techniques, Pontecorvo’s film arguably defines the ‘people’ in fundamentally masculine terms; as a Revolution comprised of male ‘heroes’ and martyrs.
Continuing the openDemocracy series marking fifty years of Algerian independence, one of the series editors, Martin Evans, explores Algerian history through six objects. Lecture (6,500 words)
The political system is closed to Algeria’s citizens, who cannot choose their leadership. Plummeting government revenues and soaring food prices could prompt wide-scale unrest.
The Algerian population is a young one, with 70% under the age of 35. These youths will end up, sooner or later, rejecting the notion that their future is mortgaged – and bitter memories of the violence of the 1990s will not be enough to hold them at bay.
