Gillo Pontecorvo Research Articles

Review: Contemporary Political Cinema, by Matthew Holtmeier

Review: <i>Contemporary Political Cinema</i>, by Matthew Holtmeier

Reimagining the Battle of Algiers

Reimagining the Battle of Algiers Kate Liebman Click for larger view View full resolution Battle of Algeirs, Scene 1 (detail) [End Page 130] Gillo Pontecorvo's 1966 The Battle of Algiers is both an essential piece of political cinema and one of the most important neorealist films ever produced. Its unsparing portrayal of the resistance during the Algerian War, filmed in Algiers's European quarter and Casbah, was so realistic that some early audiences mistook it for a documentary. In her series of paintings Battle of Algiers, Kate Liebman depicts the interior court of Serkadji Prison, where Ali la Pointe—a resistance leader Pontecorvo took as his main character—witnesses the execution by guillotine of a fellow Algerian. La Pointe is radicalized by the death. The prison, a real place, was mediated by Pontecorvo's film, which in turn Liebman uses as the source of these paintings, creating, as she puts it, "a fraught psychological space in which beauty and terror are held in tension." In one of the paintings, Liebman "places the viewer on the ground, looking up," an angle that "evokes the feeling of looking and being looked at, of being trapped, of the harsh midday Mediterranean light, of the pressures of history, of the horrors power commits, of heat, of emptiness, of being hidden, of grief. —eugenia bell [End Page 131] Click for larger view View full resolution Battle of Algiers, Scene 1. [End Page 133] Click for larger view View full resolution Battle of Algiers, Scene 3. [End Page 135] Click for larger view View full resolution Battle of Algiers, Scene 4. [End Page 137] Copyright © 2021 Yale University

Unspeakable: Literature and Terrorism from the Gunpowder Plot to 9/11. Peter C. Herman. New York: Routledge, 2020. Pp. viii+211.

<i>Unspeakable: Literature and Terrorism from the Gunpowder Plot to 9/11</i>. Peter C. Herman. New York: Routledge, 2020. Pp. viii+211.

Colonialismo como laboratório

O presente artigo tem por objetivo compreender como o colonialismo francês utilizou das práticas de tortura na Argélia como controle político através da análise do filme A Batalha de Argel dirigido por Gillo Pontecorvo. Desta forma, estabeleceremos conexões entre a repressão à luta pela independência, apoiado na ideologia da “guerra contrarrevolucionária” e os vínculos com os crimes contra a humanidade cometidos pelas ditaduras na América Latina. Por fim, analisaremos como as experiências de tortura na Argélia refletiram no Brasil através dos treinamentos das “Escolas de repressão francesa”.

Occupying Time: &lt;i&gt;The Battle of Algiers&lt;/i&gt;

This videoessay is concerned with temporalities in the influential political/historical film The Battle of Algiers (Italy/Algeria, 1966, dir. Gillo Pontecorvo). Apart from credits, intertitles and explanatory captions, the essay uses only sounds and images from the film itself. The essay presents nine distinct (though also related) orders or dimensions of time in sections that vary in form, rhythm and length. This list of temporalities does not pretend to be exhaustive, but the variety signals something of the complexity of the film and the essay’s brevity is intended to communicate in a concise manner a sense of the invigorating pace of the original.

Frames of the Algerian War: Pontecorvo’s La Bataille d’Alger and the “War on Terror”

This article examines frames of the Algerian War. Specifically, it brings together Judith Butler’s Frames of War with Gillo Pontecorvo’s La Bataille d’Alger (1966) to analyze the cinematic frame and the film’s reception during the “War on Terror.” It thus plots out three frames. One, Butler’s call for critical analysis of what she terms “the framing of the frame.” Two, Pontecorvo’s cinematic frame, particularly as the film reflects on its own framing. Three, how the “War on Terror” and the Pentagon’s screening of the film in 2003 have reframed how the film is viewed today.I bring these three frames into dialogue in a close reading both of the film and its reception. Drawing on Butler’s argument, I analyze how different critics frame their reading of the film in relation to the “War on Terror.” Turning to the film itself, I argue that its own self-reflective use of the frame reveals an ambiguous and polyvalent layering, one that invites viewers to reflect critically on modes of framing. This, I conclude, is the film’s greatest legacy today: the importance of questioning—critically, affectively, and aesthetically—how debates are framed, staged, and mis en scène.

Let It Burn (Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1968)

Let It Burn (Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1968) Cesare Casarino (bio) Nostalgic commemoration of the glories of the 60s and abject public confession of the decade’s many failures and missed opportunities are two errors that cannot be avoided by some middle path that threads its way in between. . . . Its opportunities and failures were inextricably intertwined, marked by the objective constraints and openings of a determinate historical situation. —Fredric Jameson The time period—it seems—is the early nineteenth century. The setting is the Caribbean island and Portuguese colony of Queimada, which owes its name—“burnt”—to the circumstances of its conquest: when faced by indigenous resistance, its would-be colonizers set it ablaze, thereby christening it and exterminating its entire native population at once. Thenceforth, Queimada was destined to live up to its name, to be enveloped by flames again and again. Many years have elapsed since the inaugural colonial fire, during which the island has flourished as a lucrative cluster of sugar plantations owned by masters of Portuguese descent and cultivated by slaves of African descent, whose ancestors were shipped in by the Portuguese to perform that labor to which the native population had preferred death by fire. It is upon such a perfect colonial paradise that there descends one Sir William Walker, agent of the British Crown, to disrupt the delicate equilibrium between masters and slaves: his mission is at once to foment, aid, and abet a slave insurgency against the masters; to incite the masters to declare independence from Portugal; to convince the slaves to help the masters fight Portuguese colonial rule in exchange for freedom; to convince the masters to free the slaves and to hire them back as wage laborers in exchange for an end to the slave insurgency and for help in breaking free from the mother country; to convince the slaves that they shall share rule over the newly [End Page 28] independent Queimada with their former masters; and, above all, to pit masters and slaves against each other in as many ways as possible so as to secure monopoly on the island’s sugar production for those different types of masters that are the British corporations—and all of this in the name of progress, civilization, and freedom. It is while masterminding such havoc that Walker, at a dinner with the notables of the island, turns away from a window overlooking a harem-like courtyard filled with semi-naked black women, turns his gaze inside onto the distinguished all-male company, and addresses the symposium-like banquet with the following words (through the memorable lips of Marlon Brando): Gentlemen, let me ask you a question. Now, my metaphor might seem a trifle impertinent, but I think it is very much to the point. Which do you prefer, or should I say, which do you find more convenient, a wife or [gesturing toward the window] one of these mulatto girls? No, no, please don’t misunderstand. I’m speaking strictly in terms of economics. What is the cost of the product? What does the product yield? The product in this case being love. Purely physical love, since sentiments obviously play no part in economics. [Laughter] Quite. Now, a wife must be provided with a home, with food, with dresses, with medical attention, etc., etc. You’re obliged to keep her your whole lifetime, even until she’s grown old and perhaps a trifle unproductive. Then, of course, if you have the bad luck to survive her, you have to pay for the funeral. [Laughter] No, no, it’s true! Gentlemen, I know it seems amusing, but actually those are the facts, aren’t they? Now [gesturing to the courtyard below], with a prostitute, on the other hand, it’s quite a different matter, isn’t it? You see, there is no need to lodge her or to feed her, certainly not to dress her and bury her, thank God. She’s yours only when you need her. You pay her only for that service and you pay her by the hour. Which, gentlemen, is more important and more convenient? A slave or a paid worker? Walker’s “metaphor” twists patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism...

Transcending the Paradox of Violence: A Dialectical/Dialogical Interrogation of the Colonial/Anti-Colonial Struggle in Algeria

Abstract The growing complexity of contemporary globalized human culture, while creating greater opportunities for human relation, has likewise generated profound challenges to our human capacity to relate meaningfully. Using Gillo Pontecorvo's 1956 film The Battle of Algiers, Frantz Fanon's paradigmatic text The Wretched of the Earth, and the writings of Albert Camus as representative accounts of colonial/anti-colonial violence in the Algerian struggle for independence, this article will question the legitimacy of a dialectical approach to transcending the paradox of violence, proposing instead a manner of dialogical reconciliation through the human capacity for solidarity-in-relation.

Severed images: Women, the Algerian War of Independence and the mobile documentary idea

During the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62), conflicts over the meaning of appearances, particularly in relation to the bodies of Algerian women, were a major locus for political conflict, subterfuge and violence. As demonstrated in the most famous representation of the war, Gillo Pontecorvo’s widely celebrated film La bataille d’Alger (Pontecorvo, 1966), the strategic use of the veil and of unveiling was the mechanism that produced the Algerian woman as insurgent. What the eyes (or camera) saw was not always to be believed and nor was visual appearance akin, in any straightforward way, to truth. Drawing on key historical examples, including La bataille d’Alger, Marc Garanger’s Femmes algériennes 1960 (1960) and Assia Djebar’s 1979 essay ‘Regard interdit, son coupé’, as well as Zineb Sedira’s contemporary film installation Gardiennes d’images (2010), this article proposes a theory of the documentary image in light of the political complexities over vision and appearance that have continued to haunt the historical representation of Algerian women. Placing an emphasis on the circulation of images and the mobility of meaning, the argument stresses communities of political belief rather than visual truth in establishing documentary meaning.

The Other Battle of Algiers

The Other Battle of Algiers

Movimentos Sociais: clichês e redes educativas no filme Queimada!

Resumo: Através das imagens e sons, tecendo diálogo com as lutas por independência política na América do século XIX, Queimada! (dirigido por Gillo Pontecorvo, Itália, 1969), nos ajuda a compreender a importância das redes educativas na tessitura dos movimentos sociais ao longo da história. A ideia de uma repetição criadora, entre os movimentos do século XIX e entre os atuais, nos auxilia a discutir como os clichês aparecem no filme e estão presentes nas nossas redes, e em formas de perceber esses movimentos. Superar esses clichês parece ser uma boa tática para recriar, no presente, tantas formas de compreender a história e tecer os movimentos sociais atualmente. Buscamos teóricos como Certeau (1994), Deleuze (2005), Castells (2013), etc.

The Event of Charlie Hebdo: Imaginaries of Freedom and Control ed. by Alessandro Zagato

Reviews 287 of Rousseauan relations. Examining a wide range of Rousseau’s works including Émile, Julie, the Discourses, the Social Contract, the Letter to D’Alembert, the Reveries and others, Warner surveys “the major forms of human association” (2) in Rousseau’s thought. Adopting a perspective that is both literary and philosophical, Warner examines relationships based on pity, sexual desire, romantic love, friendship, and political association. In so doing, he seeks to determine whether or not these varied relationships can resolve the fundamental problem of man in society. This problem is defined in the study not as the establishment of freedom, but rather as the creation of inner unity within the fragmented individual. Warner’s keen eye for detail leads to complex and subtle analyses that defy simplistic resolution of the problem. Statements such as “I emphasize the defectiveness of Rousseau’s characterizations of the state of nature and the sentiment of pity not because he was unaware of them, but because he was” (69), or “the cross-cutting pressures that constitute social life overwhelm all efforts at comprehensive resolution, and the hybrid character of political life ends up producing the very dividedness it was set up to prevent” (28), exemplify Warner’s ability to tease out the not-so-obvious complexities, contradictions, and paradoxes of Rousseau’s thought. The author’s firm grasp of Rousseau’s works and modern-day criticism keeps the study on solid ground at all times, and the reader is bound to walk away from the book with much that is new and thought-provoking. Warner’s style is clear, concise, and aesthetically pleasing, with no small amount of wit worked into chapter subsection titles that include pop-culture references such as Lawrence Tureaud’s signature tagline (69) and English punk rock song lyrics (113). Far from diminishing the gravitas of Warner’s argument, such well-placed references provide a topic-appropriate release in tension as Warner dives deeper and deeper into his“tragic” (217) interpretation of Rousseau’s self-conscious “failure” (4, 217) to resolve the problem of the individual in society. Warner provocatively concludes that this selfconscious failure shows Rousseau’s intent was not to reform society, but rather to bring about the“moral improvement and transformation of individual readers”(225). Such a conclusion will no doubt generate discussion amongst specialists, as all worthwhile ideas should. Rousseau and the Problem of Human Relations will be of value to literary and political scholars specializing in Rousseau studies, as well as specialists in other areas of Enlightenment literature, history, and political philosophy. Ohio University Christopher Coski Zagato, Alessandro, ed. The Event of Charlie Hebdo: Imaginaries of Freedom and Control. New York: Berghanh, 2015. ISBN 978-1-78533-079-9. Pp. 114. $13. Les neuf articles de ce court volume s’interrogent sur les conséquences sociopolitiques de l’attaque terroriste du 7 janvier 2015 contre le journal satirique Charlie Hebdo. Dans“The Barbariat and Democratic Tolerance”, Knut Rio établit un parallèle entre les événements parisiens et la violence terroriste de la guerre d’indépendance algérienne (1954–1962)—faisant référence au film de Gillo Pontecorvo, La bataille d’Alger (1966)—qu’il considère comme “a continuing reapparance of the systematic conflicts built into French colonialist relations” (15). Il nous rappelle les rassemblements spontanés de millions de Parisiens, descendus dans les rues de la capitale quelques jours après les drames pour dénoncer la haine et la barbarie. Cette “France debout” (13), défenseuse de la République, fut prise d’un singulier élan de solidarité qui se manifesta notamment par le slogan populaire “Je suis Charlie”, un “global web buzz” (13). D’ailleurs, Mari Hanssen Korsbrekke dans “Where Were You, Charlie?” compare le slogan “Je suis Charlie” à la réplique “I’m Spartacus” du film de Stanley Kubrick Spartacus (1960),reconnaissant un même désir de solidarité,toutefois exprimé différemment. De plus, elle examine comment“Je suis Charlie”a engendré de nouvelles formes d’activisme politique sur les réseaux sociaux. À travers l’exemple d’Ahmed, un élève de huit ans qui n’avait pas adhéré au slogan—“Je ne suis pas Charlie...

The Battle of Algiers at Fifty: End of Empire Cinema and the First Banlieue Film

The fiftieth anniversary of the release of The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966) offers an occasion to challenge commonplaces about the film and to show that there remains much to be clarified about its character. Typically discussed in terms of its debt to Italian neorealism, The Battle of Algiers can also be related to Italian colonial cinema made during the fascist period. The film recounts the genesis of the Algerian nation, but it is at the same time a film about the end of the French empire. Meanwhile, an analysis of location in the film's little-discussed coda shows The Battle of Algiers to be the first in a long line of banlieue cinema—that is, it is a film that presciently anticipates postcolonial conditions on the territory of France itself.

The Modern Political Cinema: From Third Cinema to Contemporary Networked Biopolitics

Political cinema, particularly third cinema of the 1960s and subsequently inspired films, often relies upon the formation and transformation of subjectivity. Such films depict a becoming-political of their characters, such as Ali LaPointe's transformation from bricklayer and boxer to revolutionary in Battle of Algiers (La battaglia di Algeri, Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966 ). As subjects are politicized, they reveal social, moral, existential, or ethical exigencies that drive the politics of the film. In this respect, most narrative-driven political cinema is biopolitical cinema, although its expression shifts from film to film, or from one period of time to another. Gilles Deleuze articulated such a shift in his two works on cinema, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Namely, he points to the breaking of the link between action and reaction that marks a shift from pre-World War II cinema to the postwar filmmaking environment. To update Deleuze's project on political cinema, this article posits another qualitative shift in political cinema stemming from the emergence of neoliberal economic policies and the growth of networked information systems from the 1990s to the present. This shift compromises earlier models of political cinema and results in a modern political cinema based on the fragmentation of political publics and the formation of new political exigencies. Two films set in Algeria will be used to document this shift in political modes, in a move towards the modern political cinema: Battle of Algiers and Outside the Law (Hors-la-loi, Rachid Bouchareb, 2010 ).

Women resisting terror: imaginaries of violence in Algeria (1966–2002)

ABSTRACT This article charts the roles and representations of Algerian Women as both agents and victims of violence in the War of Independence (1956–1962) and the Algerian Civil War of the 1990s in which the role of women emerged as a significant site of ideological, religious, and political struggle. This vision of Algerian Women, caught between models of participation and passivity, can be located within a long imaginary of Algerian women as exposed to colonial, patriarchal, state, or terrorist violence, but also possessing fortitude and resilience in the face of conflict. I examine the model of female agency through the figure of the bomb carrier in Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966), illuminating the gap between the freedom depicted, and promised, and the reality of women’s experience after the war. I then turn to the Algerian Civil War, considering one of the most enduring photographs to emerge from the conflict, Hocine Zaourar’s La Madone de Benthala (1997), an image that inscribes a quasi-universal image of female victimhood. Finally, an exploration of Yamina Bachir-Chouikh’s Rachida (2002) reveals a more complex staging of female resistance in times of terror. The film offers a delicate exploration of the emotional and psychological effects of political and symbolic violence, which troubles a more usual imaginary of Algerian women as noble, suffering, and endlessly resistant or resilient figures.

Films Effecting/Affecting Politics: La Bataille d'Alger (1966) and Indigènes (2006)

Viewed in light of the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo's La Bataille d'Alger, a balanced depiction of a guerrilla war between the FLN (Algerian National Liberati...

Rebecca Weaver-Hightower and Peter Hulme, eds., Postcolonial Film: History, Empire, Resistance

Presenting “a cross-section of cutting edge postcolonial research on international cinema, research focused on more recent chronologies, new spaces and emerging technologies” (2), the book comprises twelve chapters, each analysing a single film plus an afterword. The selection of films spans forty-five years from Gillo Pontecorvo’s Italian-Algerian Battle of Algiers (1965) to Dakxin Bajrange Chhara’s The Lost Water: A Salt Worker’s Life (2010). Including fiction and documentary, the objective...

Rossellini, Pontecorvo, and the neorealist cinema of insurgency

This article examines the tradition of Italian neorealism and the importance it has for films depicting guerrilla insurgencies. It looks in particular at the two films by Roberto Rossellini Rome Open City and Paisa as well as the later film by Nanni Loy Four Days in Naples. It then proceeds to locate Gillo Pontecorvo's iconic film The Battle of Algiers within this neorealist tradition and examines the degree to which the director succeeded in continuing the basic traditions of neorealism into the context of the Algerian war of Independence. The article concludes that while this film remains of great interest it should be situated in the period when it was produced and is in many ways radically disconnected from many insurgent movements of the present day.

Fanon, Violence and Rebellion in Italian Cinema

This essay deals initially with the influence of Frantz Fanon's ideas among filmmakers like Giuseppe Bennati, Valerio Zurlini (Italy) and Glauber Rocha (Brazil), and subsequently focuses in particular on the work of the Italian director Valentino Orsini (1927–2001), friend and collaborator of the Taviani brothers, both a filmmaker and a faculty member at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, Italy. Orsini's work has not received the same attention as Gillo Pontecorvo's, but his films insistently engaged with issues like political violence, decolonization and partisan resistance. His commentaries, published in the most important Italian film journals, profoundly reflected on the role of artists and intellectuals in public life and national and international politics. The essay concentrates particularly on three films directed by Orsini: I dannati della terra (1969), inspired directly by Frantz Fanon, Corbari (1970) and Uomini e no (1981).

‘Will Movies Make Me Forget What I Saw?’ (Youcef, Mohamed Chouikh, 1993)

Youcef (Mohamed Chouikh, 1993) is among the rare Algerian films whose narrative unfolds in the 1990s when Algeria was torn apart by violence. Chouikh's film looks at the past returning in the present, through the re-presentation of an Algerian combatant. It will be shown that the character of Youcef works as a metaphor of Algerian society, as well as of its cinema, since independence. Memories were subject to repression and cinema was under state control and censorship. Algeria is best understood as a culture of forgetting. With the civil war in the 1990s, the past seems about to return. Benjamin Stora suggests a ‘repetition’ of ‘the first war’ in the 1990s, which is illustrated cinematographically in Youcef with the screening of Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers (1966). These central images of/about the past can be interpreted as ‘haunting’—borrowing Jacques Derrida's terminology—current Algerian cinema. This study will thus aim to analyse the presence of a film within the film, focusing on how it addresses the question of memory through the Derridean notion of the ‘spectre’, understood as the unfinished past (of a social and economic liberation), but pointing towards a future (the liberation of Algerian cinema and nation).