The Battle of Algiers

Ennio Morricone died recently, and when I put up a quick obituary post, I overlooked that one of the movies for which he did the score is The Battle of Algiers. I happened to have it on my DVR, and it's available on DVD and Blu-ray on a pricey Criterion release, so I sat down to watch it and do a post on it here.

For those who don't know their history, Algeria was a French colony for about 130 years until being granted independence in 1962. It wasn't a straightforward handover of power to the locals, however; for years in the 1950s a group of revolutionaries called the FLN had been agitating for independence since the early 1950s.

The film starts in 1957, when the French military, which had been called in since the police were ineffective, are busy torturing a man looking for information on the whereabouts of the FLN leader, Ali La Pointe (Brahim Haggiag). He's hiding with his family somewhere in the Arab Casbah district of Algiers, which is a stark contrast to the fashionable European quarter with its bars and nightclubs.

Flash back to the early 1950s, where we learn that as a youth, La Pointe had been involved in the juvenile justice system on the wrong end; naturally, as tensions began to increase after the end of World War II, somebody like him might get involved in fighting the French authorities just because. He and the FLN start off small, gaining arms along the way, but as the cycle of violence ramps up, they engage in bombings of those fashionable places in the European quarter.

It's unsurprising that the police alone didn't know what to do, and since the military had been involved in World War II and Vietnam, the French bring in Col. Mathieu (Jean Martin) to quell the uprising. He's got good knolwedge of the way groups like the FLN work, with a sort of pyramid scheme structure wherein each commander recruits two people below him, such that anybody in the organization only knows three other people: the one who recruited him and the two he recruited. Mathieu realizes the way to go after them is systematically, bringing in people for interrogation and getting them to reveal the names and locations of the three people each person being interrogated knows.

Of course, the FLN aren't so dumb, and use their advantages. First there's the support among the regular Arab population, allowing them to stage a general strike that brings the UN's attention. But on a darker note, they're also able to use the covered-up women to get around the military checkpoints since going after women the way they go after men is something that looks very hard.

In 1957, after years of operations, the French are able to get La Pointe, and that brings one phase of the independence struggle to an end. But we know from history that the Arabs did ultimately gain their independence. It was much easier to operate in the mountains outside the big cities, so the spirit of independence remained there, to come out of the woodwork at an appropriate time some years later.

The Battle of Algiers is a fascinating movie, since it's shot in docudrama style and takes a relatively uncompromising look at both sides, although it clearly does have more sympathy toward the drive for independence. It's easy to understand why the French look bad 60 years on, but for the independence movement it's more sublte. I couldn't help but think of the movie Crisis at one point where the FLN announces they're going to ban alcohol and prostitution, and execute recidivists. The question of what to do with locals who don't want the sort of independence the revolutionaries are proposing is a vexatious one that doesn't have a good answer, as we can see in the tragedies that befell India at partition, or places like South Korea and Taiwan having to live under martial law for decades while their nearby neighbors were even more ghastly dictatorships.

TCM ran The Battle of Algiers last year as part of The Essentials, and it is most definitely an essential film. I just wish it were available at a lower price point than the Criterion Collection.