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London: A Study in Scarlett and Other New British Dances

DVDs. This is a powerful and complex work, now almost half a century old, that in its scenes of terrorist attentat and military reprisal will inescapably bring the Middle East or the North Africa of 2013 to mind. The film’s central figure is Ali La Pointe, a young Muslim Algerian radicalized by the actions of gendarmes and especially the pieds noirs, the French colonists who in their effort to keep Algeria French are not above planting a bomb in the Casbah, to kill Arabs. Ali suffers defeat but inspires the ultimately successful war for Algerian independence, and interestingly The Battle of Algiers is more concerned with foredoomed defeat than eventual success. It opens with Ali’s entrapment, in a device borrowed from Marcel Carné’s 1939 melodrama Le jour se lève: a wrongdoer on the run from the police is tracked down and surrounded, in an extended flashback we learn what has led up to this moment, and then we return to the present for a violent climax. So Pontecorvo and his screenwriter Franco Solinas reach back into French cinematic history for their dramatic structure. But equally they situate the film in the midst of contemporary events, giving it a strongly documentary look, with jittery handheld camera work, grainy black-and-white film stock, and non-actors in nearly all the roles. It is a non-professional Algérienne who plays an Arab woman planting a bomb in a disco full of French teenagers. Dressed in Western clothes, her hair bleached blond, she feigns naturalness, even moves tentatively to the music, but cannot help looking about her with dismay, perhaps at all the death her bomb is about to bring about, perhaps at a way of living so different from her own. The film’s sympathies are tilted toward the revolutionaries but reach out to the colonialists too; the extraction of bombing victims from the bloodied rubble is accompanied by the same tragic music whether the victims lie in the Casbah or the European quarter. Music plays a crucial role in The Battle of Algiers. Over a mercifully brief montage of torture scenes an organ prelude sounds; earlier, in a parallel to The Burmese Harp, Bach’s St Matthew Passion comes on to Pontecorvo’s soundtrack, as we witness the outcome of a successful interrogation—the half-naked victim trembles, is given coffee, treated not unkindly by the French troops who have just been torturing him. Asked at a news conference about torture, the French colonel in charge, himself not an unkind man, responds “The word ‘torture’ isn’t used in our orders . . . We use interrogation as the only valid police method.” And then, turning the question back on the reporters, “What form of questioning must we adopt?” He receives no answer. This is of course exactly the question raised by Zero Dark Thirty. Some things, it appears, never change.