The price of freedom

Rating: 10/10 (26 December 2012)

"The Battle of Algiers" undoubtedly ranks among the most unique, innovative and essential war films to date. Especially because it comes entirely without the pathos, glorification, special effects and artificially created drama that crowds want to see to get some entertainment out of war. Instead the viewer gets a fresh historical scenario - the 1956/57 Algerian insurrection of the National Liberation Front (FLN) against the French colonists. Following the events laid out in the "Souvenirs de la Bataille d'Alger", a book written in prison by of one of the former FLN leaders, Yacef Saadi, it is an unvarnished account of a brutal reality that emerged as a natural consequence of colonial oppression. To add to the realism Yacef Saadi - now an Algerian senator - even plays a key part in the production.
Outstanding feature of the film is that director Gillo Pontecorvo opts for a breathtakingly dramatized documentary style, a genre where he came from and clearly feels at home. The result is very close to newsreel footage, which makes it look like no other comparable war picture: Executions, demonstrations, strikes, bombings, interrogations, the house-to-house guerilla warfare look so real that Pontecorvo had to point out explicitly that not a single frame of actual documentary or news footage was used in the film. Furthermore the film stays as unbiased as possible and portrays both sides of the conflict: the rebels with the few, risky and desperate means they are capable of organizing to hurt the enemy, and the French paratroopers under Col. Mathieu striking back with unrelenting force in order to crush the FLN's backbone. The picture hasn't lost any of its relevance since the day it was made, as an uncomfortable question on both sides of a conflict arises again and again: Do the ends justify the means?