The Battle of Algiers, an Example of Third Cinema - Movie Review Example

The Battle of Algiers: An example of Third Cinema 2008 Filled with newsreel clippings, Director Gillo Pontecorvo's 1967 film, The Battle of Algiers, based on the violent Algerian struggle for independence from France during the 1950s, is hailed by several film critics, researchers and Left Wingers as a glowing example of Third Cinema1. Especially, the Black Panthers and other extreme leftist groups greeted considered the film as a guide to urban revolution. It was banned in France for many years because of the vivid descriptions of riots, torture and terrorism, which showed its former rulers in a negative manner. The film was released when the world was divided - through the Warsaw Pact (creating the communist East Europe) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (creating a capitalist world on the West). The two political ideologies were also in relentless battle in Asia, Africa and Latin America as the Western World refused clung on to their colonies. The U.S. was also preparing for war against Vietnam. The backdrop is quite evident in the film. It is a sharp and realistic portrayal of the anti-colonial struggle by impressively confirming the right of the masses in every exploited country that opposed imperialism. During the 1950s and 1960s, a great part of the world got liberated from colonial occupation; the British Empire waned from maps in many areas. Yet, their control remained indirectly. For example, the French continued their economic power in West Africa and parts of Arabia. Economic intervention of the US in Cuba and direct military involvement of the British and French in Egypt led to armed and cultural confrontation against both the neo-colonial powers in these countries. This revolutionary fight was mirrored in The Battle of Algiers. In the 1950s, there were many films with a willful political theme vouching for liberation from colonialism. In the 1960s, there was a flood of this genre of cinema in the three continents where young filmmakers were committed to their political causes in both concept and practice. By the 1980s, the notion of Third Cinema was decisively established, both in the countries subjugated by neo-colonialism and in intellectual circles. In the Edinburgh conference in 1986, filmmakers, activists, critics and academics debated over a number of issues in Third Cinema. In the 1990s however, such films have made a setback with the end of the Soviet Union and the idea of a Second World, a socialist camp evidently flagging anti-colonial forces, a number of movements making compromises with the imperialists. In South Africa, albeit with the black majority rule, the influence of multinationals and white colonizers of the key economic resources has not changed (Third World Third Cinema, dc5b.com). Yet, Third Cinema is not dead. Further, early films can inspire those who are interested in a cinema that directly opposes the system of colonialism and neo-colonialism. Battle of Algiers is surely, one of them. The film begins with a boom shot over Algiers with a 1954 message to the people of Algeria: Our revolt is against colonialism. Our goal: restore independence to the Algerian state within the framework of Islamic principles with respect for the basic freedoms, regardless of race or religion (cited from oldschoolreviews.com) It then moves over to a street scene where uneducated young hoodlum Ali La Pointe (Brahim Haggiag) tricks locals with a three-card Monte swindle before getting arrested. A believer in Algerian liberation, the ex-boxer is recruited to join the organization (F.L.N. the Algerian Liberation Front) after passing their security checks, showing how the leadership is shaped. By portraying violence created by both sides - the French colonial authorities and the Liberation leaders - Pontecorvo maintains the cinematic tension with dourly excruciating political insight. Pontecorvo balances cinematic tension with grimly acute political insight. He doesn't shy away from showing the civilian cost of the F.L.N's bombings, as Colonel Mathieu (Jean Martin), the French office started to suppress the nationalists. The highlights include an early series showing the F.L.N. setting terrorist bombs through Muslim women covering themselves as Europeans to cross French security guards easily to the Casbah2 , while some of those wild Frenchmen even coming near one good-looking terrorist to go out with. In suspenseful montages3, the bombs are minor irritants as local caf clients and club dancers casually get on with their business. The film's strongest character, Colonel Mathieu, smugly directs French paratroopers into Algiers. A former French Resistance fighter, Mathieu appears to be the right person to suppress the uprising. Experienced and fast in his movements, he has admirations for the aims of the Liberation although he realizes his mission has to succeed. He understands the natural cycle of terrorism in which guerrilla war leads to the unavoidable total war. So, he stresses on police inquiry to find out the ancestry of the F.L.N. His use of the tapeworm image (an organism of endless length that revives itself from its head, regardless of how many parts are severed) describes any extremist group fighting for an ideology perfectly (oldschoolreviews.com). The Italian Pontecorvo, a declared communist, had wanted to make a piece of art against colonialism. It wasn't until Saadi Yacef (a hero of the Algerian nationalist movement) contacted him that he found his material. Yacef, the ex- chief of the FLN was in jail till Algeria's independence in 1962 when he started to produce a film about his country's experience and hired Pontecorvo to make his vision real. The film had the full support of the new Algerian government. In fact, the city of Algiers and its people are the movie's main stars (Ventura, flakmag.com). Algiers has been described in films in various roles --from the sensuous colonial world of Pp le Moko4 to the colonially collapsed frontage of Bab el-Oued City5. In spite of its different portrayals, Algiers, in most films, appears to carry an odor of the French-Algerian clash. In Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers, however, the city has a larger role to play than just being a backdrop. The film's title exposes its historical background pointing out that the action will take place in the unclear space of the capital city and more notably, it refers to the film's method of depiction. The preposition, "of" in the title shows that the city is caught up in the clash between the French and the Algiers but the main action is in Algiers. All through the film, the characters represent Algiers. The power struggle turns around, taking control of the city but, more importantly, the way the characters control the space are also formed by this same space. The use of the background in character development undertakes a special significance in The Battle of Algiers. The space of the city doesn't just mirror a character but exposes that character's actions as well. The city is not just a combat zone for the militaristic French and Algerian sides, but also is a vehicle for the surfacing of a political Algerian identity. In Frantz Fanon's6 critical work on the process of decolonization, "The Wretched of the Earth" he puts forward the need of a totally cruel revolution, making no distinction in its method to pounce on any means to impel the colonizers go back the soonest possible. In this course, Fanon justifies the aggression of the native towards the load of Western values and mores as a need to totally dismiss the western heritage to rightly counter to the their status on hold (everything2.com). Jean Paul Sartre7 introduced the book as a thesis advocating violence. To Sartre, violence, like Achilles' spear, can cure the injuries it has caused. "Every day we retreat in front of the battle, but you may be sure that we will not avoid it; the killers need it; they'll go for us and hit out blindly to left and right", he said.( Sartre,1961). Fanon's book also deals with areas like the psycho-pathology of colonization. The Third World revolutionary Fanon, who wrote The Wretched of the Earth, is remembered for his apocalyptic idea of just violence and revolution as the theorist of the 'psychopathology of colonialism'. For Fanon, the black man's initial distress - an ordeal echoing in several his memorable, hardnosed expressions: 'the Negro is comparison,' the 'black man must be black in relation to the white man', ,etc. - is the fundamental psychological force of the colonial situation. The black man becomes the storehouse of the most primary sentiments of revulsion and craving on the part of whites by which he is paralyzed , 'stricken and immobilized' by white psychic requires. In Fanon's theory, the colonial relation is not a two-way traffic. In fact, it is not a relation at all but a one-way protrusion. Under these situations, Fanon writes, the black man has no free existence (Vaughan, Book Review). Third Cinema, can be depicted as a direct upshot of this "psychological force of the colonial situation" by differing from the First and Second Cinema through politically by showing the poor historicisation and carelessness in the methods of Hollywood films in which people are explicitly politicised and discreet but without open commitment to the Algerian freedom fight. This approach stresses the importance of emotional commitment in Third Cinema (Wayne, 2003). In Fannon's notion, even when the natives rise in protests against the colonisers, the latter's lasting influence on the former cannot be negated out completely. Fannon advocates uprisings against imperialism at any cost through an emergence of the natives from a state of prolonged limbo. In The Battle of Algiers, Fannon's vision is tryly demonstrated, as the natives rise in rebellion through a subvertion of French cultural imperialism. Works Cited Notes: (1) Wayne, Mike, Political Film: The Dialectics of Third Cinema, London: Pluto Press, 2001 (2) The Kasbah of Algiers, http://www.flickr.com/groups/casbah_of_algiers/ (3) Knight Arthur, The Liveliest Art, Mentor Books, New American Library, 1957, p. 80. (4) Carvalho, Claudio, Plot summary, Pepe le Moko,retrieved from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0029453/plotsummary (5) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109185/plotsummary (6)Frantz Fanon, A cloak of Western skin: The Battle of Algiers and decolonization, retrieved from http://everything2.com/index.plnode_id=1735821 (7)Jean Paul Sartre (1905-1980), retrieved from http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/sartre.htm (6) Gigure, Nolle, Characterizing the City: Space and Identity in The Battle of Algiers, Equinoxes, retrieved from http://www.brown.edu/Research/Equinoxes/journal/Issue%205/eqx5_giguere.htm References Battle of Algiers, released in 1967, Director: Gillo Pontecorvo, Stars: Jean Martin, Brahim Haggiag, Yacef Saadi, Release Company: The Criterion Collection Third World Third Cinema, http://www.dc5b.com/twtc/chronology/chronology.html http://www.oldschoolreviews.com/rev_60/battle_algiers.htmThe Battle of Algiers (1967) Ventura, Elbert Flak Magazine, retrieved from http://www.flakmag.com/film/algiers.html Sartre, Jean-Paul, Preface to Frantz Fanon's "Wretched of the Earth" , 1962, retrieved from http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/1961/preface.htm Vaughan Megan, "Review, Frantz Fanon: A Life by David Macey", Granta, 8 September, 1 86207 458 5, retrieved from http://www.caribvoice.org/Profiles/fanon.html Mike Wayne, Political Film: The Dialectics of Third Cinema, London: Pluto Press, 2001. 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