News of the World

How Gillo Pontecorvo created the realest of fictions.

interview: gillo pontecorvo

Initial American prints of The Battle of Algiers (1965) were prefaced with the statement that the film contained "not one foot of documentary or newsreel footage," a fitting, if backhanded, tribute to the skills of director Gillo Pontecorvo and cinematographer Marcello Gatti. If, according to Pontecorvo, few viewers were fooled into thinking they were watching actual newsreel footage, the film’s techniques were designed to give a ripped-from-the-headlines immediacy to a story whose outcome was never in doubt.

"I tried to look at the way in which the audience gets attached with the story," Pontecorvo says from his home in Rome. "I tried to have a photo similar to [a newsreel], if not equal." But Pontecorvo wanted more "formal dignity" than newsreel-quality footage could provide. As a result, he and Gatti spent a month experimenting with photographic techniques, leaving only four days to audition actors.

"Actors" is, of course, something of a misnomer, since acting was the last thing Pontecorvo wanted from his cast of nonprofessionals. Though the movie begins with the capture of rebel leader Ali La Pointe (Brahim Haggiag), the objective was to film "a collective story in which the protagonist is a town, and these people." Using a technique perfected by Kurosawa, crowds were shot with telephoto lenses to decrease the sense of distance and make the masses as a mass, a collective body rather than a collection of individuals.

A former member of the Communist Party, Pontecorvo was one of three leftist Italian directors approached by Algerian revolutionary Yacef Saadi to recreate the successful ouster of the French colonial government on film. (The other two directors were Luchino Visconti and Francesco Rosi.) Despite Saadi's involvement in the film -- he produced and plays rebel commander Jaffar -- the film scripted by Pontecorvo and Franco Solinas after months of research is surprisingly evenhanded; while Battle looks sympathetically on the terrorist bombing of civilian targets, its unflinching depiction of their aftermath paves the way to an understanding of the French government's use of torture. "I don't like to make the whole thing black and white," Pontecorvo says. "I try to be more near to the truth. I met a lot of colonialists, not knowing that side," and realized that "you can be an honest person and be in favor of something like colonialism, something completely wrong."

Pontecorvo initially says that he set out to tell "a story that we like, an action story," and the connection with other anti-colonialist revolutions happening around the world became apparent only as the film was distributed. But then he reverses himself: "We were thinking that colonialism and any other kind of oppression from a man to another man, this we hate. So we tried to bring a little help to the great fight in the world."

Whether or not Pontecorvo set out to make a parable of successful guerrilla warfare, the fact that the film has been used as a training tool on both sides -- by the Black Panthers, for instance, and most recently by the U.S. military -- does not surprise him. Regardless of the particulars, Pontecorvo says The Battle of Algiers can convey the visceral sense of what it's like to be on either side of a protracted struggle between First World military and Third World guerrillas. "It can give, and I believe it does, the smell of the situation."

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