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=> 50 Years Later, The Battle of Algiers Remains a Cinematic Astonishment

50 Years Later, The Battle of Algiers Remains a Cinematic Astonishment

Posted by Marcello (Guest) - Friday, October 14 2016, 15:48:57 (UTC) from 47.138.220.146 - 47.138.220.146 - Windows NT - Safari Website: http://www.us.mg1.mail.yahoo.com/dc/launch?.g)x=1&.rand Website title: Document Has Moved

-- This year is the 40th anniversary of Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver", in which a young Robert De Niro plays the alienated, invisible cabbie, Travis Bickle, "God's lonely man", who drives down the dark underworld of post-Vietnam War 1970's New York, hopped-up on speed, booze and pornography... while asking for advise from fellow cabbie, the existential "Wizard" (played by the late, Peter Boyle), because Travis "got some bad ideas in my mind", which leads him to perform a baptism of blood, to clean up the stink of the city, like a rain that "one day will wash all the scum off the streets." In L.A., the 1976 film will be playing for two days, with cast De Niro, writer Paul Schrader and director Scorsese available both nights for a Q & A. I may miss both nights, since it's showing in Hollywood, and I'm not too crazy about big crowds. But last night, I was lucky enough to walk down my block and hit the art house theater, Nuart Cinemas to catch the last show, of the last night of the 50th anniversary of Gillo Pontecorvo's, "La Battaglia di Algeri" (THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS), about the 1954-'57 armed resurection against the 130-year French occupation of Algeria, led by the illiterate anti-hero, Ali La Pointe, and the FLN. So glad to have seen this film again... and this time on a big screen. What a classic! 50 Years Later, The Battle of Algiers Remains a Cinematic Astonishment BY ERIC HYNES WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 12, 2016 http://www.westword.com/film/50-years-later-the-battle-of-algiers-remains-a-cinematic-astonishment-8371408 Half a century after its debut, The Battle of Algiers has a permanent parking spot in the film canon. After taking home the Golden Lion at the 1966 Venice Film Festival, it was nominated for three Academy Awards (one in 1967 and two in 1969, oddly) and now ranks within the top 50 in Sight & Sound’s all-time poll. It’s a film so clear-eyed and thorough in its tick-tock dramatization of a failed but historically influential uprising of Algerian natives against their French occupiers that it’s been studied and celebrated by revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries alike. It’s proven relevant at almost every anxious turn of post-colonial global politics, speaking to questions of terrorism, torture, guerrilla resistance and racial profiling. Maybe you watched it in school. Perhaps you’re among the top ops who watched it at the Pentagon as research during the early stages of the invasion of Iraq. Either way, you’ll get another chance starting this week, thanks to a new 4K restoration. In light of such enduring approbation, it can be difficult to appreciate how divisively Gillo Pontecorvo's film was received at first. After its delegation stormed out of Venice when the top prize was announced, France banned the film for five years; its release was similarly stalled in the UK. Even after the prolonged delay, pro-military and reactionary elements protested violently in both France and Italy. Meanwhile in Algiers, as well as among international critics, the film received criticism for being too sympathetic to the French, particularly in its depiction of the dashing intellectual Colonel Mathieu (Jean Martin) and some merciless acts of violence by the revolutionaries. And for all these historical and political concerns, it also can be difficult to appreciate the movie as a movie, to see it for the genre-promiscuous procedural thriller that it also is. Like a Billy Wilder noir, The Battle of Algiers starts at the end, with a distressed (and likely tortured) Algerian man coughing up the hiding place of Ali La Pointe (Brahim Hadjadj) and three comrades from the National Liberation Front (FLN). “You’re the last one. It’s all over,” La Pointe is told from behind a tiled wall, where seemingly the entire French army has gathered, their advance scored to Ennio Morricone’s military-march-by-way-of-Dragnet music. Thus the Battle of Algiers is already, or about to be, lost. But not before a close-up of La Pointe’s pained face fades from focus and we’re thrust back three years to 1954. Here Pontecorvo toggles to a mode popularized by his elder countrymen, that of Italian Neorealism. La Pointe isn’t the educated, charismatic leader we’re accustomed to seeing onscreen — he’s shown to be an illiterate, petty hustler who’s radicalized in prison after witnessing a dissident killed by guillotine. Back on the street a few months later, he’s less revolutionary leader than impassioned assassin, willing to kill for his convictions — an important attribute as the FLN begins to incorporate violent methods. Broke, disserved and exploited by the capitalist colonial system, and brought to life by a nonprofessional actor with stratospheric cheekbones, Ali inhabits a universe similar to that of the characters in, say, The Bicycle Thief or Rome, Open City. From there, events hustle forward, toward a present tense, with sequences organized by dateline and eventually timeline. A card informs us that it’s 11:20 a.m., and suddenly we’re in the moment: aware of the clock, represented by Morricone’s drum beat, and aware of the stakes as three female revolutionaries don street clothes as if they’re putting on fatigues, planning to carry out syncopated terror strikes in three different public spaces. It’s a sequence that’s been analyzed for 50 years, yet largely through lenses of politics, interrogating where the film’s empathies lie at any given second. Whereas cinematically, it’s simply astonishing. The clock-as-monster device evokes Kubrick’s The Killing, the merciless/merciful montage of faces in the moment right before they’re made to suffer recalls Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and the interwoven acts of violence offer a blueprint for the ritual score-settling of The Godfather films. Yet Pontecorvo’s most innovative and persuasive genre play was to crib from observational documentary, shooting whole sections of The Battle of Algiers as if its incidents were being spontaneously recorded. Riffing on the emergent Pennebaker-Leacock-Maysles approach, Pontecorvo and cinematographer Marcello Gatti often let the camera react to events, rather than overtly blocking them for the best exposure. Characters slip out of focus and off frame. When guns are fired or bombs detonate, the camera shakes and adjusts, subtly persuading viewers that what we’re watching is really happening. As technique, it’s wildly effective, such that audiences might still be fooled into thinking that news or documentary footage has been edited into the narrative. On an ethical level, it’s a whole other ballgame. For all of its revolutionary ambitions and implications, this formal audacity is one of the film’s most enduring provocations. It uses realism as an effect, documentary as a style. You feel that you’re really there, and you can’t help but be moved. It certainly serves the movie, but has it served reality, especially as this fictional account of the Algerian uprising remains the definitive one? 50 years, thousands of fake-blood-splattered lenses and the full development of a docu-style aesthetic later, the question remains open. --------------------- - BACK TO INDEX - REPLY - QUOTE - EDIT - DELETE -

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