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.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Pontecorvo used no newsreel. Every rough, grainy, stolen-looking shot was staged, so watch the texture as an argument.