Gillo Pontecorvo Research Articles

Constrained Militants: Algerian Women ‘in-between’ in Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers and Bourlem Guerdjou's Living in Paradise

Beur filmmaker Bourlem Guerdjou's 1998 film Living in Paradise follows the divergent trajectories of a young Algeria couple (Nora and Lakhdar) living in the Nanterre shantytown during the Franco-Algerian war. Although the focus on Nora may seem on the surface to subvert the film's male-centred narrative as her growing political conscience leads her to harbour FLN militants from the French police, the film's gender politics are in fact complex and even problematic. Drawing on theories of women and nation in Algerian literature and film (Woodhull and Hadj-Moussa), this paper argues that Guerdjou is working within a stock set of images of women in Algerian society during the Franco-Algeria war, inherited from newsreels, documentaries and film classics such as Gillo Pontocorvo's The Battle of Algiers. Women of Living in Paradise embody contemporary Algeria's irreducibly contradictory identity. Expected to be both courageous militant and guarantor of traditional national culture, they are, in fact, asked to negotiate the ‘betweenness’ (Woodhull) of Algerian society in ways that have proved disastrous for them immediately after liberation and that continue to haunt contemporary gender relations in their country.

WOMEN AT WAR

Gillo Pontecorvo's documentary-style film The Battle of Algiers centres on the military techniques used by a powerful modern army against an urban guerrilla force that was led by small groups of civilians who were poorly armed and lacking in training but who had the benefit of popular support. Women played a major role in the resistance and without them it could not have lasted the eight months that it did. However, that role is not entirely apparent from Pontecorvo's film, whose main concerns are elsewhere; women are on screen for only about fifteen of the film's 121 minutes. It is clear that the director wished to pay them hommage, as the film begins and ends by showing us the faces of women involved in the struggle. Nevertheless, much remains to be said, and more research is needed, on this topic.

ITALIANS IN ALGIERS

Why did Saadi Yacef decide to go to Italy in 1964 to find a director to make a film based on his memoirs of the Battle of Algiers? How far was the resulting film shaped by its Algerian producer and how far by the Italians who worked on it – director Gillo Pontecorvo and screenwriter Franco Solinas, but also cinematographer Marcello Gatti, editor Mario Morra and composer Ennio Morricone? How far did it differ on the one hand from Yacef's original story idea and on the other from the film called Parà that Pontecorvo and Solinas had originally intended to make in Algiers and for which they already had a complete script ready? This article looks at the making of The Battle of Algiers and considers these questions in relation to the film's politics, its narrative construction and its style. It also considers some parallels between the film and the work of Rossellini, in particular Rome Open City.

The Battle of Algiers (La battaglia di Algeri)

ABSTRACT A consideration of the Criterion Collection DVD release of Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers (1966), discussing how the edition's accompanying documentaries help in the interpretation and contextualization of the film.

The Ecology of Destruction

I would like to begin my analysis of what I am calling here "the ecology of destruction" by referring to Gillo Pontecorvo's 1969 film Burn!. Pontecorvo's epic film can be seen as a political and ecological allegory intended for our time. It is set in the early nineteenth century on an imaginary Caribbean island called "Burn." Burn is a Portuguese slave colony with a sugar production monoculture dependent on the export of sugar as a cash crop to the world economy. In the opening scene we are informed that the island got its name from the fact that the only way that the original Portuguese colonizers were able to vanquish the indigenous population was by setting fire to the entire island and killing everyone on it, after which slaves were imported from Africa to cut the newly planted sugar caneThis article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Staging Memory and Trauma in French and Italian Holocaust Film

Reading Memory in French Documentary and Italian Fiction Film The lapses of trauma are conjoined with tendency compulsively to repeat, relive, be possessed by, or act out traumatic scenes of past ... In this sense, what is denied or repressed in a lapse of does not disappear; it returns in a transformed, at times disfigured and disguised manner. (10) --Dominick LaCapra History and Memory after Auschwitz This essay is about enactment of and trauma in !our films on Holocaust, two French documentaries--Alain Resnais's Night and Fog (1955) and Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1984)--and two Italian fiction films--Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful (1997) and Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter (1973). A comparison between French and Italian Holocaust cinema is not an obvious one in that filmmakers from both countries have approached subject in quite disparate fashions. In such films as Shoah, Night and Fog, The Sorrow and Pity (Marcel Ophuls, 1969), Weapons of Spirit (Pierre Sauvage, 1988) and Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie (Marcel Ophuls, 1988), France is well-known for its documentary treatment of Shoah, representing at times banal or bureaucratic side of evil. (1) Italian directors, however, have produced various fiction films centered on grey areas of survival. This is case of Kapo (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1959), Seven Beauties (Lina Wertmuller, 1976), The Night Porter and The Damned (Luchino Visconti, 1969), in which survival is often connected with sexual deviance. (2) Despite their apparent differences, both genres deal profoundly with staging trauma and memory; that is, representing protagonists who relive past event, thereby accentuating impossible gap between narrative present and past. In History and Memory after Auschwitz Dominick LaCapra discusses sites--Pierre Nora's well known lieux de memoire--in terms of their connection to trauma. LaCapra contends that sites are usually also trauma sites, and degree to which trauma affects individual is marked by the extent to which has not been effective in coming to terms with [trauma], notably through modes of mourning (10). Mourning, however, came with difficulty, as post-war European society appeared to obtain a certain mask of normality. The economic booms all over Europe were of course one crucial factor in these delayed reactions to Holocaust experiences. Many survivors, it seemed, were not ready to enter into trying course of remembering, reliving and commemorating their pasts. Memory came later, and, as argued by Henry Rousso in The Haunting Past: History, Memory and Justice in Contemporary France, we are now living in an age of memory as relationship with painful past has been repeatedly fore-grounded in survivor's accounts, fictional films and novels, historical works, and so on. The basic premise of this article is that, in these four films, remembering Holocaust recalls original trauma, as wound is by no means healed. Trauma does not belong exclusively to past, and these films make explicit how trauma perpetually re-represents itself in present. Dori Laub in Bearing Witness, or Vicissitudes of Listening discusses incomplete nature of traumatic response. She argues that, as event never came to completion, survivors perpetually live with truncated versions of their past, and for survivors, trauma continues into present and is current in every respect (69). Traumatic response is also connected to how several characters or interviewees in these films assess their own survival in that many, both historical (Shoah) and fictional (Life is Beautiful and The Night Porter), have yet to come to terms with machinations of their continued existence. Cathy Caruth points out a critical parallel between trauma and survival in introduction to Trauma: Explorations in Memory. …

Re-viewing The Battle of Algiers with Germaine Tillion

There is an important scene missing from the film, The Battle of Algiers. In July and August 1957, Yacef Saâdi, the nationalist leader in Algiers and a motivating force behind Gillo Pontecorvo's film, met secretly with the French ethnologist and Resistance heroine Germaine Tillion. This essay explores the relation established between the Gaullist Tillion and Yacef. They recognized the resister in one another and during the Battle of Algiers sought to create the conditions for a new relationship between Algeria and France. The essay concludes by looking at the ways this event is interpreted in different memory traditions in contemporary Algeria, and what resonance it has for the Euro-American left today.

Women in a Widening Frame: (Cross-)Cultural Projection, Spectatorship, and Iranian Cinema

Lindsey Moore is lecturer in English at Lancaster University, UK. She has published articles on Algerian revolutionary women in the texts of Frantz Fanon and Gillo Pontecorvo and on Shirin Neshat, an Iranian artist resident in the United States. She is currently completing a monograph on the representation of Arab/Muslim women in contemporary literature and visual media.

Gillo Pontecorvo's Return to Algiers

Abstract Gillo Pontecorvo made The Battle of Algiers (1965), a documentary about Algeria on the brink of civil war. In Gillo Pontecorvo's Return to Algiers, the elderly Pontecorvo conducts interviews and comments on the changes to Algeria in a manner that provides an epilogue to his sporadic career.

Aldo Vergano's IL SOLE SORGE ANCORA/OUTCRY (1946) as Influence on Gillo Pontecorvo

Aldo Vergano's <i>IL SOLE SORGE ANCORA/OUTCRY</i> (1946) as Influence on Gillo Pontecorvo