The Battle of Algiers: a film for our time

By Digby Warde-Aldam

On a warm evening in a French seaside town, casually dressed pedestrians throng the length of an elegant promenade, filling its restaurants and bars. Suddenly, an ambulance speeds down the road, its siren cutting through the chatter. The rear doors are flung open and a white object is thrown into the street. It’s the corpse of a doctor, who’s been stabbed. The occupants of the ambulance then start shooting at the crowd, before hurtling at top speed into a group of people sheltering at a bus stop.

The scene, grimly reminiscent of the terrorist attack in Nice this summer, is the opening to Gillo Pontecorvo’s film “The Battle of Algiers”. First released 50 years ago this autumn, it recounts the central episode of the eight-year guerrilla war waged by the resistance fighters of Algeria’s National Liberation Front (FLN) against the French colonial regime. What begins as an amateurish insurgency by a couple of unemployed youths explodes into full-scale urban warfare. The French administration sends in the army to quell the disturbances but only succeeds in making the situation worse: bombs are planted in bars, suspected terrorists are rounded up and tortured and innocent people are shot in the street. Having razed large parts of the city to the ground and alienated even the least politicised Algerians, the French army triumphs – but their victory is a hollow one. Within two years, the French are forced out of Algeria.