The Battle of Algiers (1966)

It's a bit ironic that one of the finest film indictments against Western colonialism sounds like the title of a bad History Channel documentary.  Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers, released in 1966, is infinitely more complex and fascinating than its title lets on.  It stands, along with Costa Gavras's Z, as one of the few truly essential political films to come out of Europe in the 1960s and, even today, still holds great relevance to the current political situation in North Africa and the Middle East.

As World War II ground down, one overarching concern began to preoccupy London and Washington: there were tens of thousands of liberated partisans across Europe, and most of them were still armed.  Almost all had suffered greatly under the occupation, where they cut communication lines and staged quick attacks.  In short, they had done their bit, and they all now wanted some say in how the governments returning from exile patched up their nations.  Support for former leaders, while easy to keep congealed during the Axis occupations, started to dissolve rather quickly as the parades ended.  In Italy, this took the form of increased radicalization away from the right wing, with Communists, Socialists, and to a lesser extent Anarchists, all making giant political headway.  In 1946, the Italian Communist Party and the Socialist Party took the majority of seats in the Constituent Assembly, the provisional body in charge of drafting a new constitution for Italy, which meant that the Christian Democrats were now the minority clerical party.  This was totally unheard of and reflected an increasing public hostility towards Catholicism and its complicity in the dissemination of Fascist doctrine.  U.S. policy makers were terrified by this power shift and now saw a legitimate Communist victory in the 1948 electoral process--not a Bolshevik-style coup--as a real possibility.  To compromise and control these free elections, U.S. funneled huge amounts of money into a propaganda campaign and used Italy as the first testing ground for its newly-formed National Security Council, which was created to advise the President on matters of foreign policy.  That crucial counterinsurgency operation is beyond the scope of this blog but does make for enlightening reading of declassified government documents; suffice it to say, the Fascists would have been proud, particularly since many of them were elected back into the posts from which they had only recently been displaced.  This became the pilot project for subsequent CIA-backed attacks throughout Latin America, where the violence and atrocities mounted tenfold.

For North Africa, the rotating door of European imperialists fighting self-serving wars on the backs of their colonial subjects meant the arrival of an unexpected power vacuum.  The same occurred in southeast Asia, where the Japanese occupiers vacated parts of French Indochina (Vietnam).  The U.S. shrewdly put the final nail in Britain's colonial coffin by stipulating, in the terms of its Anglo-American Loan of 1945, that the U.K. first liquidate its overseas assets in the Commonwealth, thereby ensuring American global dominance for decades to come.  Britain would be paying annually on that bill until 2006.  As for France, I'm not sure of the whys behind its staunch determination to stay in the colonial game when it was so clearly outclassed by the new heavies, but they went at the task with considerable enthusiasm and arrogance.  Vietnam's war of independence against France and the U.S. is well documented, although you're supposed to call it something else I think.  The last-minute cancelling of the North/South unifying elections due to fear of Communist victory, just as in Italy, says all you need to know about the U.S./French dedication to democracy abroad.  In Algeria, France also had, well, some trouble letting go.

Gillo Pontecorvo is perhaps the best directorial example of the swing towards radicalism in Italy during the 1950-60s.  His output next to his peers is minuscule, with primarily just The Battle of Algiers and Quiemada (a.k.a. Burn! in the U.S.) commonly discussed today in film circles.  It was Italian socialist Antonio Gramsci who first coined the term subaltern, which advocated that indigenous histories be told from the perspective of the colonized rather than the colonizers; and although Algiers cannot be said to be a true subaltern film due to Pontecorvo's direction and Italian financing, it nevertheless reflects a thorough understanding of the mechanisms of oppression and dominance, and their impact on human rights.  More importantly, the idea for the film originated with the Algerians themselves.  It was Salash Baazi, a former member of the FLN (the Algerian freedom fighters, by then victorious) that first approached Italian producers with the idea of filming the memoirs of Saadi Yacef, the FLN commander imprisoned by the French and later freed to become a long-standing member of the Algerian government.  The first draft, done by an Italian screenwriter before Pontecorvo's  involvement, reflected the angle still so prevalent today, that is, the narrative vis-a-vis the conscience-stricken imperialist soldier who uncovers the "truth" about his nation's actions.  Thankfully the FLN rejected this idea and a second draft was produced that provided a more balanced approach.  This persistence of the FLN, that their story be told with some modicum of fairness, is a very important point to keep in mind since it is this exact fairness to which Pontecorvo respectfully adheres when coming on board.  Indeed, Pontecorvo went to great lengths to include the past participants, including the casting of Yacef himself as the FLN leader.  The secular, politically-driven FLN were as ruthless and tenacious as their French occupiers; in that sense, it mirrors almost exactly Israel's ongoing dominance of the Palestinians through their illegal occupation of the West Bank, with the endless checkpoints, harassment, torture, and indiscriminate bombings.

Pontecorvo admired and loved early Rossellini, particularly Paisan and Rome Open City, citing the latter, which he called the best Italian film of all time, as his main artistic inspiration for filmmaking.  In Algiers, the gritty realism and sense of immediacy is to such a degree that the original marketing materials assured audiences that no newsreel footage was used in its production.  In another nod to the man that he felt to be his mentor, the only professional actor in the film is Jean Martin, the French paratrooper colonel.  In this sense, Algiers is both a refinement of an older neorealist aesthetic and a segue into the 1960s "direct cinema" documentary movement best exemplified in the D.I.Y. works of Frederick Wiseman, D.A. Pennebaker, and the Maysles Brothers. 

In 2003, as Iraq spiraled into chaos, the Pentagon held a special internal screening of The Battle of Algiers.  Staff invitations read:

"How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas.  Children shoot soldiers at point blank range. Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor.  Sound familiar? The French have a plan.  It succeeds tactically, but fails strategically.  To understand why, come to a rare showing of this film."

Old wine, new checkpoints.


Jim Bunnelle
Acquisitions & Collection Development Librarian
Lewis & Clark College

La ciociara (Two Women) (1960)

(Note About Version: Only available domestically in poor quality "budget" editions, many of which are dubbed, the copy of La ciociara/Two Women being presented is the recently released, definitive European version restored by Fondazione Scuola Nazionale di Cinema, with English subtitles transposed and synched.)

Although Italy did have a nascent film industry in the silent era--its most significant contribution being Cabiria, which influenced segments of D.W. Griffith's Intolerance--it never achieved the heights of other nations. Its mediocrity was further cemented by the Fascists' 1922 "March on Rome" and their assumption of power.  From then on, artists and intellectuals were subject to suspicion.  Some, like politician Giacomo Matteotti and Marxist intellectual Antonio Gramsci, were assassinated or imprisoned until death; others, like writer Alberto Moravia, author of the 1957 novel on which Vittorio de Sica's film is based, were luckier.

While his peer Italo Calvino is probably more familiar today in the U.S., Alberto Moravia was one of the most widely read and translated Italian writers from the 1950s-1960s.  Barely into his twenties, he self-published his first novel, Gli indifferenti (The Indifferent Ones/Time of Indifference) in 1929, setting off a literary firestorm in Italy.  The darkly comic, bleak novel of a corrupt and crumbling bourgeois family earned Moravia a coveted spot on the infamous Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the list of banned books maintained by the Vatican.  Politically, the Fascist state saw Moravia as a bit of a dilettante with leftist leanings; that is, a corrupting influence on Italian culture, to be sure, but not really worth their time otherwise, and certainly not a threat to match that posed by their Marxist opponents.

Because of this, Moravia wouldn't really hit his creative stride until after the war, when most of his greatest works were written--La ciociara (Two Women), Il conformista (The Conformist), La noia (Boredom), Il disprezzo (Contempt)--most of which were transformed into classics of European cinema during the 60s and early 70s.  La ciociara (literally The Woman From Ciociaria but released in the U.S. as Two Women) was the first adaptation to be filmed.  It was based on the experiences of Moravia and his wife, writer Elsa Morante, as they took refuge from the war in the countryside east of Rome, in the hills of Ciociaria.  There, the couple slept in barns and lived off the hospitality of the rural village communities, Elsa Morante working on the initial framework of what would become her great first novel, Menzogna e sortilegio (House of Liars).  The awful events in Ciociaria that followed provided Moravia with his own inspiration.

(Elsa Morante, early 1940s)

(Alberto Moravia, 1943)

On the night of May 19th, 1944, as the hills and valleys around Ciociaria were liberated by the Allies, Moroccan colonial troops of the French Expeditionary Corps went on a celebration spree to commemorate their victory over the Germans.  The numbers are still contested, but it's estimated that between 1,500-2,500 Italian women, including children and the elderly, were raped in the region.  Estimates of the murdered go as high as 800, some of these the raped themselves but the majority being family members who tried to intervene.  Eventually, 15 Moroccans were court-martialed and shot for their participation, with scores of others sentenced to hard labor.  In Italy, the raped came to be known as "marocchinate", or roughly "those who've been 'Moroccaned'."  Concerned about the brewing public relations firestorm, it is rumored that the Allies clandestinely arranged for women from North Africa to be brought in and serve in the expeditionary corps' camp as "volunteers" in hopes of preventing future incidents.  The "marocchinate" later received compensatory pensions from the Italian government for their suffering.  Moravia shows the origins of this suffering for what it is: random, indifferent, "liberating."  Obviously a film from 1960 cannot push the same boundaries as its fiction counterparts, but de Sica's naturalistic approach to the material does justice to the indictments in Moravia's source text.  

In a genre dominated by plots about Roman males, La ciociara stands apart from other neorealist films through its emphasis on women protagonists and provincial Italians, and also through its relative absence of children as a driving motif.  Cesira and Rosetta drift from place to place, directionless and in survival mode, wanting only to exist and be left alone.  The character of Michele (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is the conflicted, schooled voice of intellectual conscience, embodying elements of both priest and partisan, ready to assume his measure of guilt for twenty years of his nation's destructive apathy.  His gentleness, inner conflict and existential hopelessness is a far different amalgamation from the black-and-white, good vs. evil stereotypes so prevalent in earlier war films, like Rossellini's Rome Open City; to some degree, this shift reflects a greater willingness for Italians to question their own complicity ten years after the fact.   

Since the script sticks closely to the novel's narrative, it can be argued that La ciociara owes more to the combination of Sophia Loren and Alberto Moravia than to director Vittorio de Sica and screenwriter Cesare Zavattini.  While the latter can be felt as the driving creative force behind their early collaborations Umberto D. and Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thief), the strengths of La ciociara really lie elsewhere, which is probably why it is the most overlooked film of de Sica's career.  When Anna Magnani turned down the role due to other obligations, it was she that suggested Sophia Loren to de Sica.  The director took a lot of heat for her casting, both because of her young age and her attractiveness, which critics saw as a softening of the novel's hard edge.  But after seeing her, it's hard to imagine anyone else commanding the role of Cesira with such power and strength.  At the 1960 Academy Awards, Loren achieved the unimaginable feat of taking Best Actress for her performance, the first ever given to a non-English language role and a huge coup for the Italian film industry (the fully-fluent Loren did her own English dubbing for the film, which no doubt carried much weight in this decision.)

La ciociara was Loren's big break and sparked a creative resurgence in de Sica as well, as he entered the last decade of his career.  Over the next four years, he would complete two more outstanding films with Loren--Oggi, ieri, domani (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow) and Matrimonio all'italiana (Marriage Italian-Style)--making her an international sensation on par with Marcello Mastroianni, with whom she often starred.

Jim Bunnelle
Lewis & Clark College
Acquisitions & Collection Development Librarian