The Battle of Algiers

By the end of World War I, the Arab rebellion against foreign domination had become widespread, and this fact was reflected in the film depictions of the region, though with an inherent Western bias that made use of Arab stereotypes to promote the view that the people of the West were a cultural force for civilization while the Arab was a more primitive throwback to an earlier era:

Thus the colonial film was born and became popular in the 1920s and 1930s. This kind of film glorified the skills of the colonizers. . . and what were known as "peacekeeping" operations. . . Its heroes were the legionnaires and soldiers of the colonial armies, and the villains are the "recalcitrant" Arabs (Fahdel 26).

The "good" Arabs are those who choose to join the colonial forces and fight against their rebellious countrymen. Arab revolts were depicted as embarrassing incidents. The revolt in Algeria would be addressed in a way that showed the Arab point of view by only one Western filmmaker, the Italian Gillo Pontecorvo, and his film, The Battle of Algiers, was long banned in France precisely because it showed the view of the other side in the conflict.

Islam is the element that has linked the different periods of Algerian history since the conversion of the region in the eighth century and before the advent of political nationalism could compensate for the lack of a clear-cut national identity. Virtually all Algerians profess the religion of Islam, which has continued to provide Algeria

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ers, who had themselves prayed for that release from the enclosure of the Nazi occupation. The city of Algiers is similarly depicted by Pontecorvo, though Pontecorvo is deliberately evoking the same sense of place as Rossellini without the added burdens facing Rossellini more than two decades earlier. Pontecorvo has stated that he saw Open City in 1946 and was inspired to become filmmaker of the neorealist school himself. He was a photojournalist when he joined the Italian communist party in 1941 as a member of the Italian resistance, and he fought as a guerrilla in northern Italy and served as a resistance leader in Milan. After the war, Pontecorvo continued working for the Communist party but was at the same time increasingly uneasy at the policies of the Soviet Union. He left the party in 1956 after the Soviet invasion of Hungary, but he says his leftwing politics and his commitment inspires his work as a filmmaker. He further states, "I am not an outandout revolutionary. I am merely a man of the Left, like a lot of Italian Jews. I come from Pisa and I lean that way naturally" (Thornton chomsky.arts.adelaide.edu.au). Pontecorvo tells the story in way intended to bolster the idea of revolution as something to uphold

Category: Film - T