A war film with striking relevance

“The Battle of Algiers,” Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1965 masterwork chronicling the insurgency and terrorism that brought a violent end to France’s 130-year occupation of Algeria, has won a wide range of adherents in the four decades since its release. Embattled rebels and heads of state waging bloody wars of liberation, from San Salvador to Palestine, have studied it as a primer on spontaneous urban revolt.

And the Pentagon last year invited its staff to view Pontecorvo’s seminal work as a cautionary tale on how a great nation “can win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas.”

This prescient film, which is being rereleased Friday in Los Angeles, is based on the journals of Saadi Yacef, a former director of the Algerian insurgency who was condemned to the guillotine three times by French authorities and wrote the journals while in a Paris prison. Yacef, now 76, came to Los Angeles recently to visit relatives and talk about the film (he’s a co-producer) and the violent moment in history it captures.

“I was commanding the Algerian anti-colonial forces,” Yacef explained. “I was arrested because one of my colleagues betrayed me.” Despite his death sentence, Yacef continued his anti-French activities from his cell in the notorious Barbarossa prison, within sight of his childhood home in the Arab section of inner city Algiers known as the Casbah. “After 1957, I was transferred to a prison in Paris and was reclassified [by French President Charles DeGaulle] as a prisoner of war. It was during this period that I wrote my memoirs. When I got out of prison in 1962, I had this book and a desire to make it into a film.”

Following Algerian independence in that same year, Yacef met with the leaders of the new republic he had helped form. “The president of the Algerian republic loaned me a lot of money to make the film,” said Yacef, who now serves in the Algerian government as a legislator. “With that money I formed Casbah Films. I was not a director or a screenwriter, so I had to find someone who could translate my vision into film.”

A meeting of rebels

Among the directors Yacef interviewed was Pontecorvo, an emerging master of Italy’s school of cinematic realism. “I met with Pontecorvo and I said, ‘Oh this one is good!’ ” Yacef recalled.

Like Yacef, Pontecorvo had been a rebel and war hero (of the Italian resistance during WWII). Already known for his political filmmaking despite his relatively small output (18 films from 1953 to 2003), Pontecorvo was also an amateur musician who valued the art of music as much as he did cinema. He developed “Algiers’ ” acclaimed score (with co-composer Ennio Morricone) before he began filming.

“When I was researching this film on the streets of the Casbah, I heard a beggar who played a primitive instrument,” Pontecorvo, 84, recalled during a recent telephone interview from his studio in Rome. “It was like a drum, and he was accompanied by another ancient instrument. I took this music to establish the rhythm of the film.”

After Pontecorvo composed the music, he and his longtime co-writer, novelist Franco Solinas, trekked the labyrinthine streets of the Casbah for two years, absorbing the moods and faces of the city. They were looking for the kind of faces that even in silence would continue to articulate the pathos and outrage of their story.

“For me it is more important to have the right face than to have a good actor,” Pontecorvo explained. He found his “right face” in a brooding, steely-eyed young sheepherder named Brahim Haggiag, whom he cast as the violent and charismatic young partisan hero, Ali La Pointe.

“I met him by chance in a market. It was the eyes, only the eyes. His was the face we were imagining when we were writing the screenplay -- the exact face!” noted Pontecorvo.

For the film’s unrelenting crowd scenes, Pontecorvo drew chalk lines on the pavement to guide the films’ thousands of background extras and to mimic the ragged complexity of crowd movements. “Our intention was to create a ‘choral protagonist,’ not a single person but the whole people of Algeria as our hero.”

Pontecorvo even cast his co-producer Yacef in the role of El-hadi Jaffar, the handsome, clandestine leader of the Algerian insurgency -- a role that echoed the one he played in real life.

“When I met [Yacef] I realized that he was not only the co-producer, but because he had a very beautiful face, like a young Paul Muni, he could be an actor too.”

Filmed in grainy black-and-white with hand-held cameras that simulate raw news footage, the cityscapes, domestic scenes, and all the explosive action were recorded with mesmerizing authenticity by cinematographer Marcello Gatti.

The film chronicles three years in the life of a once apolitical and illiterate street hustler, Ali La Pointe. Through a series of flashbacks, the film takes us from Nov. 1, 1954, to Oct. 7, 1957 -- the time of the inner-city uprising that became known as the battle of Algiers. The film follows the fugitive La Pointe on his violent sorties, which reach into every sector of the segregated city. Each side is driven to increasing levels of brutality that culminate in terror-bombing campaigns.

Using a cast and crew composed almost entirely of local amateurs, the film was so expert in replicating the violence and chaos of the resistance struggle that the film’s initial distributors felt compelled to issue a notice stating, “Not one foot of newsreel has been used in this reconstruction of ‘The Battle of Algiers.’ ” Following its 1966 New York premiere, critic Pauline Kael proclaimed it “probably the most emotionally stirring revolutionary epic since Eisenstein’s ‘Potemkin.’ ”

It was nominated for three Oscars (for screenplay, director and foreign-language film) and was the recipient of 11 international awards. For the re-release, new 35-millimeter prints have been struck by Rialto Pictures, which added new English subtitles of the original French (by film scholars Lenny Borger and Cynthia Schoch) and the Arabic dialogue (by scholar Tarik Benbrahim). In a phone interview from Paris, Borger said, “The titles for the original U.S. release version were incomplete and wildly inaccurate. Our job was to reproduce the flavor and tone of the original dialogue.”

Both in terms of subject matter and theme, the film remains remarkably relevant today, particularly with the war and ongoing insurgency in Iraq.

“I hold this film very close to my heart because these are the things that I lived,” Yacef said. “I commanded this type of combat, and, yes, I built bombs with my own hands. It is sometimes necessary to build bombs to achieve freedom. But America is the place where people have come to, to escape evils like colonialism. And post-Sept. 11, no one could have expected that America would find itself in a situation like the one she finds herself in in Iraq. In a way, our film offers a sort of parallel.”