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-45th 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!