The Battle of Algiers

125 Pages·2019·13.304 MB·English

by  Alan OʼLeary

MIMESIS
INTERNATIONAL
ITALIAN FRAME
n.5
Directed by Andrea Minuz (Sapienza Università di Roma) and Christian Uva
(Università Roma Tre)
Editorial Board:
Pierpaolo Antonello (University of Cambridge), Luca Caminati (Concordia
University), Giulia Carluccio (Università di Torino), Francesco Casetti (Yale
University), Roberto Cavallini (Yaşar University), Roberto De Gaetano (Università
della Calabria), Giovanna De Luca (College of Charleston), Stephen Gundle
(University of Warwick), Giancarlo Lombardi (City University of New York), Giacomo
Manzoli (Università di Bologna), Millicent Marcus (Yale University), Nicoletta
Marini-Maio (Dickinson College), Alan O’Leary (University of Leeds), Catherine
O’Rawe (University of Bristol), Francesco Pitassio (Università di Udine), Veronica
Pravadelli (Università Roma Tre), Dana Renga (The Ohio State University), Paolo
Russo (Oxford Brookes University), Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg (Brown University),
Antonio Vitti (Indiana University), Vito Zagarrio (Università Roma Tre)
THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS
Alan O’Leary
MIMESIS
INTERNATIONAL
© 2019 – Mimesis International
www.mimesisinternational.com
e-mail: [email protected]
Book series: Italian Frame, n. 5
isbn 9788869770791
© MIM Edizioni Srl
P.I. C.F. 02419370305
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements 7
chApters
1.InterstItIAl populAr cInemA 9
2.Into AlgIers 23
3.out of AlgerIA 47
4.tIme And AgAIn 83
5.the poetIcs of the contAct Zone 111
BIBlIogrAphy 117
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This is a short book, but it has been a long time in development.
I would firstly like to thank series editors Andrea Minuz and
Christian Uva, and Lorenza Novelli at Mimesis International for
their patience.
Very many people have helped with my research about
The Battle of Algiers, with the drafting of the book itself, or with
opportunities to think about and discuss the film. Thank you to
all the following, which cannot be an exhaustive list: Laura Ager,
Salim Aggar, Mads Kristian Andersen, Luca Antoniazzi, Jamal
Bahmad, Ferzina Banaji (and ‘The Butterfly’), Zyg Barański,
Nesroun Bouhil, Robert Burgoyne, Luca Caminati, Enrico
Carocci, Francesco Caviglia, Carla Ceresa and Mauro Genovese
and their colleagues at the archives of the Museo del Cinema
in Turin, Leonardo Cecchini, Clarissa Clò, Jonathan Combs-
Schilling, Paul Cooke, Allison Cooper, Sheila Crane, Silvia
Cravero, Amanda Crawley Jackson, Benoit Vincens de Tapol,
John Davidson, Derek Duncan, Claire Eldridge, Martin Evans,
Austin Fisher, Maggie Flinn, David Forgacs, Shoba Venkatesh
Ghosh, Robert Gordon and the members of the Cambridge
Italian Research Network, Shelleen Greene, Nicholas Harrison,
Alex Hastie, Chris Homewood, Giulio Idone, Tajul Islam, Beatrice
Ivey, Rachel Johnson, Robert W. Jones, Angelos Koutsourakis,
Boukhalfa Laouari, his wonderful family and his students and
colleagues at the Mouloud Mammeri University of Tizi-Ouzou,
Chuck Leavitt, Cristina Lombardi-Diop, Regina Longo, Father
Guillaume Michel and the staff of the Glycines Centre d’Etudes
Diocésain in Algiers, John Mowitt, Jonathan Mullins, Paolo Noto,
Áine O’Healy, Elizabeth A. Papazian, Ivelise Perniola, Erin Pickles,
Alice Potter, Leo Rafolt, Shomikho Raha, Marianne Rasmussen,
8 The Battle of Algiers
B. Ruby Rich, Kamal Salhi, Richard Samuels, Andrea Sartori, S.
Sayyid, Mustapha Sheikh, Neelam Srivastava, Rob Stone, Vlad
Strukov, Cheikh Thiam, Matthew Treherne, Vidya Vencatesan,
Carl Vincent, Lucie Vrsovska.
I am grateful to the following colleagues and friends who read
and commented on draft chapters: Fozia Bora, Denis Flannery,
Catherine O’Rawe, Luca Peretti, Dana Renga, Martin Thomas.
My very special thanks to Jim House, my colleague at Leeds,
for sharing his research and knowledge about Algiers in 1960,
and to Ahmed Bedjaoui (Algeria’s ‘Monsieur Cinéma’) and artist
Amina Menia, both of whom showed me exceptional kindness
and generosity when I visited Algiers.
Special thanks also to Niels Andersen and Kirsten Hallager
for always making their home in Horsens a congenial place to
study and write. And finally, love and thanks to my partner Marie
Hallager Andersen, who always asks the right questions, and to
our daughter Lisa, who knows exactly when to interrupt.
All images are taken from The Battle of Algiers unless otherwise
stated. Frame grabs from The Battle of Algiers have been taken with
permission from the DVD/Blu-ray issue of the 4K restoration
released by Cult Films, January 2018, copyright Casbah
Entertainment. The photographs in figures 6 and 17 are used
by permission of Getty Images and Reuters Pictures respectively.
Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders and
obtain permission for the use of other visual materials.
Chapter 2 contains material published in an earlier form as
‘The Battle of Algiers at 50: The End of Empire and Start of Banlieue
Cinema’, Film Quarterly 17: 2 (2016), 17-29.
This book is dedicated with respect and gratitude to the
memory of two pioneers of Italian film studies, Peter Bondanella
and Christopher Wagstaff.
1
INTERSTITIAL POPULAR CINEMA
I don’t think I need to begin this book by arguing the
significance of its subject. The importance of The Battle of Algiers
(Italy/Algeria, 1966) is attested, among other things, by the fact
that it may be one of the most discussed films in the history of
political cinema, and it has inspired some excellent scholarship1.
Still, such an imposing body of criticism means that this book
comes late, and so I do have to begin by asking the question: why
study The Battle of Algiers, once again?
1 Among the works that have especially informed this study, I will immediately
mention the following. I have found an early book-length study of Battle
by Joan Mellen (1973) still to be useful. In various writings, sometimes
co-authored, Robert Stam has considered Battle in relation to discourses
of imperialism and postcoloniality (among these, Spence and Stam
1983, Stam 2003, Shohat and Stam 2014). An important piece by Murray
Smith (2005), originally published in 1997, raises the crucial question
of the film’s address. Emily Tomlinson (2004) has written on the ethics
and temporalities of the film’s portrayal of torture. Nicholas Harrison’s
invaluable 2007 special issue on Battle of the journal Interventions reconsidered
a range of topics from the film’s ‘documentary’ style to the place of women
in it, and it hosts an indispensible article by David Forgacs (2007) on Battle’s
production history. (Harrison is also the author of an excellent annotated
bibliography on The Battle of Algiers, available from Oxford Bibliographies at
<http://tinyurl.com/mxdo5s6> [accessed 10 September 2017].) Antioco
Floris (2010) has analysed the screenplay, while Guy Austin (2012) and
Ahmed Bedjaoui (2014, 2016) have discussed Algerian cinema in terms
of its national themes and in relation to the Algerian war. Nancy Virtue
(2014) has examined the rhetoric of the film in terms of how its hybrid
style serves its political ends. More recently still, Ivelise Perniola (2016)
has given an attentive analysis of Battle as part of an auteurist study of
director Gillo Pontecorvo that corrects some of the excesses of Carlo Celli’s
politically hostile interpretation in his earlier book on the director (Celli
2005). Notwithstanding the aggressive tone of Celli’s book, I have found
his material on the carnivalesque in Battle to be particularly suggestive.
10 The Battle of Algiers
An answer often given by previous writers to this question
concerns the ‘relevance’ of the film for contemporary conditions
and its ‘resonance’ across time and space. Prochaska (2003: 135)
talks of how events leave one with a sense of ‘déjà-vu, déjà vécu’ in
relation to the film. Celli (2005: v) writes that Battle ‘has attained
new relevance due to the rise of Islamic terrorism’, and again that
it has ‘gained a renewed relevance due to the persistent plague
of politically motivated terrorism worldwide’ (ibid.: 67). Srivastava
(2005a: 98) talks of the film’s ‘disquieting topicality’ in relation
to the Iraq war, while for Haspel (2006: 33), Battle ‘remains one
of the most relevant and contemporary films ever to examine
terrorism’. Harrison (2007a: 337) speaks of the film’s ‘endlessly
renewed contemporary resonance’. Likewise, for Shapiro (2008:
182), quoting Michael Chanan, Battle ‘is especially relevant now
when the use of torture and “the dividing line between the
‘resistance fighter’ and the ‘terrorist’” have become contentious
issues’, hence the film’s ‘strong contemporary resonance’ (ibid.:
191). Other writers emphasize the film’s exemplarity. Slocum
(2005), in a piece entitled ‘The Recurrent Return to Algiers’,
refers to Battle to illustrate a whole range of points about the
mediation of terrorism. The ‘relevance’ and ‘exemplarity’ of the
film and the events it recounts are combined as the explicit motive
for Daulatzai’s recent book on Battle, which begins by stating that
‘the Battle of Algiers is still being waged, only now on a planetary
scale. […] Though The Battle of Algiers […] was made fifty years
ago, it’s as if it never ended’ (Daulatzai 2016: xi).
What are the effects of this routine assertion of the relevance
of The Battle of Algiers (hereafter ‘Battle’) and the exemplarity of
the film itself and the events it depicts? One possible effect is to
‘flatten’ the film as it comes to be deployed in political debates.
This is perhaps especially the case with those accounts sympathetic
to the film’s anti-imperialism, in which (as in Daulatzai 2016)
good political intentions distil the film to the approximation of
a plot summary and overlook its ambiguous status in left-wing
film theory. Such accounts adduce the film as holy writ, allusion
to which is enough to signal a set of values we are all assumed or
enjoined to share, and they ignore what Battle does not represent
–the voice (or at least the speech) of Algerian women, for example
(see Khanna 1998, 2006; see also Chapter 3 here).
Interstitial Popular Cinema 11
A second effect can be observed in some of the reaction to the
film’s re-release in 2004 in the wake of the invasion of Iraq and a
notorious screening of the film at the Pentagon (Kaufman 2003,
O’Reilly 2010). The distribution of Battle in 2004 was marked by
uneasy ruminations on the film’s argument for urban terrorism
in the service of national liberation. Commentators put a new
emphasis on the film’s picturing of Islam, a dimension of Battle
which (for some) came to the fore only in the light of the attacks
of 11 September 2001. ‘What does it mean that in today’s context
The Battle of Algiers has begun to look like a recruiting film for
Al-Qaeda?’ asked the distinguished critic B. Ruby Rich (2004:
111). Certainly (to give one answer to her question), it meant
that commentators found in the film features that reflected the
news, whatever their objective presence in the film itself. Meddeb
(in Frodon et al. 2004: 68) inaccurately characterized as suicide
bombers the three women in the film who disguise themselves
in order to plant explosive devices in the European part of the
city. Stone (2003) wrote of the same female characters: ‘Watching
them today, it seems clear that Islamic faith, not revolutionary
solidarity, made their mission sacred.’ Director Gillo Pontecorvo’s
‘artistry’, Stone continued, ‘reveals the holy-war horror of the
Casbah uprising against the decadent West.’ If discourse like
this reflected the news, it is also the case, as O’Reilly (2010) has
argued, that criticism situating Battle in relation to contemporary
Islamist or Islamist-inspired violence partook of an old-fashioned
Orientalism based on the idea of a clash of civilizations. For some
commentators writing after 9-11 and the invasion of Iraq, the
portrayal of Islam in Battle comes ‘to symbolize terror, devastation,
the demonic hordes of hated barbarians’, just as Edward Said, in
his classic Orientalism (2003 [1978]: 59), had shown Islam had been
made to do for centuries in the West2.
Much of the writing on Battle is most usefully considered as
part of its history of reception. As Shohat and Stam (2014: 404)
suggest, Battle ‘offers a particularly vivid example of the ways that
films are received differently over time as they are interpreted
through different national contexts and changing ideological
2 The ‘Islamic elements’ in Battle are persuasively analysed in Harrison
(2014) along with the problems in critical discourse concerning these.
12 The Battle of Algiers
grids’. Is there something in the film itself that invites this
awareness of what Shohat and Stam (ibid.) dub the ‘historicity of
spectatorship’? To what extent is the perception of its exemplarity
invited by the film itself? Pontecorvo (in Srivastava 2005b: 108)
spoke of the film ‘as a homage to a struggle that was emblematic
of all the liberation struggles taking place in the world’. In
Battle, ‘a “local” struggle […] becomes a universal battle for the
redemption of the oppressed’ (Srivastava 2005a: 98); the film
presents the Algerian war of independence ‘as an inspirational
exemplum for other colonized peoples’ (Stam 2003: 25). Battle is,
then, an exemplary film about an exemplary set of events – the
historical battle of Algiers – that itself stands for the liberation of
Algeria, which in turn comes to represent anti-colonial struggle
around the world.
The film is a figure for the achievement of freedom. Moore
(2008: 41) has written that Battle ‘is indicative of a “euphoric”
period in anti-colonial cinema’, and it still communicates this
euphoria to many who experience the film. Such euphoria can
be deplored as ersatz, seen to substitute for political engagement
and activism, or merely to console for political failure or
disappointment, but it is what I hope to interrogate and also to
celebrate in this book. The purpose of my study is to account
for the power of The Battle of Algiers, and to locate this power in a
description of the film’s complexity and ambivalence.
Ecology and agency
It has been argued that a national cinema is comprised of
those films recognized abroad as the cinema through which
a country speaks (Nowell-Smith 1999). By this definition,
Battle is quintessentially national Algerian cinema. Advertised
(inaccurately) on its international release as the first Algerian
film, it is ‘a political film for international festivals and art-house
circuits’ (Forgacs 2007: 354) that nonetheless came to have a quasi-
official status in the young country whose birth it recounts. This
national status, already qualified as international in terms of the
film’s address to audiences beyond Algeria, might be seen to be
contradicted by the fact of the film’s transnational co-production,