How many movies do you know that open with a title warning that none of the footage you are about to see is actual documentary footage? While ordinarily such a caution would have made us nervous, one of our favorite films from the past is The Battle of Algiers, one of the most even-handed and affecting war movies ever made.
Directed by the recently deceased Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo, the movie was banned in France. However, it won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and was shown at the Pentagon before the Iraq invasion under the heading "How to Win a Battle against Terrorism and Lose the War of Ideas."
The film details the long, violent and painful Algerian War of Independence from French rule using the true stories behind the battling Algerian insurgency and French counterinsurgency from 1954-1960. Borrowing from Italy's neo-realism movement, Pontecorvo affirmed the authenticity of the film by shooting on location in Algiers a mere four years after the French withdrawal. The film also used local non-actors and was shot in a newsreel style, thus presenting itself as a true historical document. It pulls no punches in outlying what was the birth of modern terrorism, and shows the pain both sides felt as a consequence of their actions. When insurgents bomb a French café, the same somber melody plays in the aftermath that we hear when police retaliate by blowing up an Algerian apartment complex, humanizing both sides only to watch them destroy each other. There is no good or bad in this movie: just the innocent and the guilty, the bystanders and the perpetrators. By even-handedly portraying one of the longest and deadliest independence movements of the 20th century, Pontecorvo did something even France wouldn't allow for over 30 years: putting everything in perspective.
