La battaglia di Algeri (The Battle of Algiers). 1965. Italy/Algeria. Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo. Screenplay by Franco Solinaso. With Jean Martin, Saadi Yacef, Brahim Haggiag, Tommaso Neri. 4K digital restoration by Cinecittà and Cineteca di Bologna; courtesy Cinecittà. In Italian; English subtitles. 120 min.
Gillo Pontecorvo’s urgent dispatch from the streets of Algiers during its war of independence from France, a tense eyewitness account of a city under siege and inflamed with counterrevolutionary ardor, was a jolt to the consciousness of colonized people everywhere. Ennio Morricone’s dirge-like score—a musique concrète of military drums and fluttering flute, gunfire and grinding machinery—is a threnody to the fallen and the lost: the young French soldiers blinded by perverted and vengeful ideas of racial superiority; the FLN insurgents whose own brutally violent acts are born of desperation; and the innocent bystanders whose fate is caught in the balance. “So many critics see The Battle of Algiers as propaganda," Pontecorvo observed, “but in the scenes of death the same religious music accompanies both the French and Arab bombings. I am on the side of the Arabs, but I feel compassion for the French even if historically they were at fault…. My subject is the sadness and laceration that the birth of a nation means in our time.”