Something to watch tonight: Friday 12 September

The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo, 1966)

On this day in 2023, I pos­ted anoth­er edi­tion of one of my more quix­ot­ic pro­jects — the attempt to watch all 50 of the 2022 Sight & Sound Greatest Films of All Time list before the next list comes out in 2032.

The first few of these were pub­lished on the RNZ web­site but they decided last year that it wasn’t really work­ing for them and I now send these updates to you lovely people1.

Equal-45^th on the list is Gilles Pontecorvo’s incen­di­ary feat of neo-realism, The Battle of Algiers:

Director Gillo Pontecorvo (an Italian former journ­al­ist and anti-fascist) wanted to make a film that told the story from both sides and that would feel to a view­er as real as doc­u­ment­ary. He suc­ceeded spec­tac­u­larly, to the extent that for US audi­ences a title card had to be added telling audi­ences that no doc­u­ment­ary foot­age had actu­ally been used.

Filmed in gritty, ver­ité, black and white, the film starts with a raid on the hideout of Ali la Pointe, a former petty crim­in­al who was rad­ic­al­ised in pris­on and who became an import­ant revolu­tion­ary lead­er. As he hides in the shad­ows wait­ing for the French secur­ity forces to find him, we flash back to his earli­er life and the begin­ning of the long and ter­rible battle for the Casbah.

To help audi­ences sus­pend their dis­be­lief, Pontecorvo cast unknowns and non-actors includ­ing one of the actu­al lead­ers of the National Liberation Front, Saadi Yacef, play­ing a dram­at­ised ver­sion of him­self. The only pro­fes­sion­al in the cast was former French para­troop­er and theatre act­or Jean Martin who plays a com­pos­ite ver­sion of the French counter-insurgency lead­er­ship and who, with his implac­able bear­ing and ever-present sunglasses makes him seem rather cool­er than he should be con­sid­er­ing the character’s leg­acy of tor­ture and brutality.

The same week­end we watched this, my wife and I also screened Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and in that film (also set around 1957), hero Guy is draf­ted for the Algerian War not long after fall­ing for Deneuve’s beau­ti­ful shop assist­ant and I couldn’t help ima­gin­ing that, des­pite being com­plete oppos­ites styl­ist­ic­ally, the two films were set in a shared uni­verse where Guy finally stops singing and everything changes from Technicolor to black and white and back again.

You can read the rest here.

This week has turned out to be quite polit­ic­al, so I’ll look for some more purely enter­tain­ing options in next week’s selec­tions. Have a great weekend!

Where to watch The Battle of Algiers

Aotearoa and Australia: Streaming on Beamafilm2 or digit­al rental

Canada: Streaming on Criterion Channel

Ireland: Streaming on Prime Video

India: Not cur­rently available

USA: Streaming on Criterion Channel, HBO Max or Kanopy3

UK: Streaming on Prime Video