This is a remarkable and powerful movie.
It was filmed in 1965, and described the tumultuous events of only a few years earlier which led to the French quitting their colony of Algeria. It is compelling propaganda which is as relevant and as contemporary now as when filmed 40 years ago.
Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo was invited in 1965 by an Algerian revolutionary leader Saadi Yacef to make a movie about the Algerian insurrection, based on Yacef's memoirs.
The movie which resulted tells the story of the half-dozen years leading up to the French giving Algeria its independence in 1962, after more than 130 years of colonial rule.
It's a bloody story, of oppression and shootings and bombings, and of brutal retaliation from the special French squad of paratroopers brought in to maintain control of Algeria's capital city, Algiers.
Given that Pontecorvo was a left-wing film-maker who detested colonialism, and given that he was asked to make this movie by a leader of the Algerian revolt, it's only natural that the film is told very firmly from the Algerian point of view.
But it is interesting how, if obliquely, the film foreshadows the present. Interesting that the film hints strongly at Algeria's post-colonial future, with its internal war between moderate Muslims and fundamentalists, in that the most hard-headed and extremist of the revolutionaries shown in this movie are fundamentalists.
There are layers of prescience and meaning in this movie which have become more obvious since the movie was made -- which even Pontecorvo would probably be astonished at. The most obvious one, with reference to the West's excursions into modern-day Arabia, with the Gulf War and the invasion of Iraq, is that no matter what the cause, as soon as the Western world engages in conflict with the Muslim world, the only long-term winners are the most extreme, bigoted fundamentalists -- on both sides.
The movie was made with the total cooperation of Algier's citizens, who flocked to the streets in their thousands to work as extras to tell their story of revolt. French actor Jean Martin seems to be the only professional actor in the cast, playing the ultra-professional and ruthless Paratrooper leader Colonel Mathieu. The rest of the cast seem to be amateurs -- but you could never tell. Their performances are, without exception, flawless.
This in fact doesn't seem to be a dramatisation at all. For most of the time we're persuaded that we're watching true, gritty reality. Much of it seems to be authentic newsreel or documentary footage -- the reality of it all is overwhelming.
The Battle of Algiers is overtly political, but is powerful drama as well. It stands as probably the finest example of its genre. It is an outstanding cinematic achievement, and it has not dated a single day.
The print has no obvious major flaws; it appears to have come from the same film source as used for the renowned American Region One Criterion DVD edition, since the 'Janus' emblem appears at the opening of the movie -- 'Janus' was the distribution company owned by the father of the head of Criterion, and appears at the opening of many classic Criterion releases.
The DVD label states that the film runs for 117 minutes. It actually runs for 121 minutes. The label also states that the movie's ratio is full-screen. It is in fact an anamorphic transfer at 1.85:1.
Image quality is grainy, quite dark at times, and does seem intentionally to be avoiding a slick total-clarity appearance, to present the semblance of documentary or newsreel footage. The effect is very convincing and totally in the mood of the story it tells.
