The Battle Of Algiers

CRITERION COLLECTION

IRONICALLY, THE deluxe packaging of The Battle of Algiers (a three-disc set with elaborate essays and vivid graphics) contradicts the film's urgent salt-of-the-earth plea for Third World liberation. But it does honor the film's cultural importance.

Director Gillo Pontecorvo recreated the 1950s Algerian struggle for independence without using a single piece of documentary footage. Made in the mid-1960s, his vision is the result of both Marxist fervor and scrupulous political detail. The result is unmistakable propaganda, but the same must be said for Eisenstein and Pudovkin's great Soviet films in the 20s. Pontecorvo has made a modern equivalent. The you-are-there quality of his images, the immediacy of the sound effects (and the wholly deceptive rhythmic editing) changed the course of filmmaking.

It's easy to get swept up in such majestic filmmaking, especially as it plays to one's sympathy for oppression and admiration for the rebellious social instinct. As an art work The Battle of Algiers stands apart from our current trepidation about terrorism, even as Pontecorvo sympathizes with the bomb-planting Algierians' need to rout the French occupiers. This is a specific history and it can be viewed as a special case; there is no need to make facile parallels with post-9/11 realities. They simply do not apply to Pontecorvo's argument. His moral, though history-based, is abstract. Always was, even though in the 60s, American dissidents-the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground-all took the film to heart as a cinematic textbook of insurrection. But today The Battle of Algiers presents an object lesson to filmmakers-and audiences-that history deserves their imagination, that politics are inseparable from the uses of art, that this medium is a powerful loaded weapon.

Several unusually informative actual documentaries on the film's production and its influence are included. But the craziest supplement is a series of interviews with directors Spike Lee, Mira Nair, Steven Soderbergh and Oliver Stone, testifying to the film's importance-although only Stone has anything intelligent to say and the others sound particularly silly considering that their personal filmographies evince none of the political commitment Pontecorvo espoused. How embarrassing to hear these guys brag about admiring the film's style. It's the shame of the American indie movement. A couple of them even submit to the current fallacy that biased documentaries are the way to go. How's that for completely missing Pontecorvo's point!