Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Battle of Algiers
1966 · Gillo Pontecorvo · The Battle of Algiers on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch for grain and long-lens shots that look like stolen footage. (camera)
Gatti pushed his stock for contrast and grain and shot scripted scenes on telephoto lenses, which compress space and make people look unaware of the camera. The film opens by telling you that not one foot of newsreel was used.
Payoff: The texture is manufactured to carry the authority of a document, and knowing that changes what the authority is doing to you. In the reading: powers of the false. An image openly forged in order to be believed is what the reading calls the powers of the false.
Listen for where crowd noise stops and Morricone's music begins. (sound)
The two are deliberately hard to separate. Demonstration noise bleeds into the score and back out. Algerian ululation and chant arrive at moments of victory and of mourning alike, which gives a Western ear no code to fall back on.
Payoff: You cannot use the music to tell you how to feel, because you often cannot tell whether it is music.
Watch how calmly Mathieu sits through the press conferences. (performance)
Jean Martin was the only professional French actor in the cast. He plays a methodical officer with no taste for cruelty who explains the logic of torture in even, reasonable sentences, and nobody in the scene answers him.
Payoff: His composure is the system itself, which is colder than a villain because it runs on method rather than appetite. In the reading: the gest. A bearing that exposes a whole social arrangement without arguing it is what the reading calls a gest.
Notice the cutting speed change between raids and conversations. (cutting)
Bombings and cordon-and-search operations are cut like newsreel compilation, with images arriving faster than you can take them in. Interrogations and political scenes slow right down and let an argument accumulate.
Payoff: The film runs two clocks, one for what happens to bodies and one for the reasoning that produces it.
Look at the stairs, alleys and rooftops in the wide shots. (staging)
The Casbah is filmed with an anthropological eye, its geography laid out until you can follow a chase through it. French power arrives with checkpoints and aerial photography, trying to map a quarter that will not be mapped.
Payoff: The architecture is the argument. Surveillance fails against this terrain for reasons that are social before they are technical.
Once you have seen it
Compare the first scene with the place the story comes back to. (structure)
The film opens at the end of the manhunt and then drops back to 1954 to work forward. Everything you watch is already settled before it happens, and nothing in the chronology can surprise you.
Payoff: Retrospect strips any triumph out of the outcome and leaves the sequence of causes as the only thing to study.
Watch the faces in the cafés during the bomb-planting sequence. (cutting)
Three women change their appearance to pass the checkpoints, and Pontecorvo cuts the placing of the bombs against close-ups of the people who will be sitting nearby. No shot in the sequence tells you what to conclude.
Payoff: The discomfort is constructed as a structural effect, handed to you as a problem rather than settled as a verdict.
Watch the crowds in the final section and look for a leader. (staging)
The film leaps past its manhunt to the demonstrations of 1960 and stages them as one pulse of bodies. No individual organizes them. The camera stays among faces that belong to nobody in particular.
Payoff: The subject turns out to be a collective rather than a hero, and the film is filming that collective into existence. In the reading: fabulation / a people is missing. Catching a people in the act of legending itself into existence is what the reading calls fabulation.
Watch Hadjadj's face in the stretches where Ali says nothing. (performance)
He was cast off the street with no acting experience, and Pontecorvo used that. The stillness reads as a man occupying his own life rather than an actor building a character. Nearly the entire cast is non-professional.
Payoff: The leveling of faces is the method, and it is why no performance in the film can pull rank on the crowd around it.
Carry this in: Pontecorvo used no newsreel. Every rough, grainy, stolen-looking shot was staged, so watch the texture as an argument.