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“why… why is my pillow in there?” asks the princess

on The Battle of Algiers (1966) — undated

Pontecorvo shot it on location in the Casbah in 1965, three years after Algerian independence, with a cast composed almost entirely of non-professionals — many of whom had actually participated in the events being depicted, on either side, including Yacef Saâdi, the FLN military leader whose memoir formed the basis for the screenplay and who plays himself in the film under a different name. The production budget was about $800,000. The Italian-Algerian co-production arrangement was such that the new Algerian state, which was about three years old at the time of filming, provided the locations and the extras and the cooperation of the police and military, in exchange for a degree of script consultation that produced a film that is, structurally, FLN propaganda — the colonels are vicious, the bombers are humanized, the torture is shown as torture, the colonial administrative apparatus is presented as morally bankrupt — but is propaganda made with such formal rigor and such commitment to dramatizing the operational reality of insurgent and counterinsurgent warfare that the propaganda value gets crowded out by the documentary value.

This is the part that's structurally fascinating. Battle of Algiers is the most accurate, technically rigorous depiction of urban guerrilla warfare ever committed to film, and it is a piece of revolutionary nationalist propaganda made by a regime that wanted very specifically for the world to see the Algerian war the way the FLN had seen it. These two facts are not in tension. They are the same fact. The film achieves its operational accuracy because the people who made it had been the operators, and the operators wanted to show how it had actually worked because how it had actually worked was the argument for why they had won.

The Pentagon screening in 2003 — the famous one, where Donald Rumsfeld's Office of Special Plans ran a closed showing for officers and analysts about to deploy to Iraq — is the moment that gets cited every time the film comes up, and the citation is usually deployed as evidence of either the film's enduring relevance (it can teach our military how to handle insurgency) or the film's enduring tragedy (the lessons were ignored, the same mistakes were made, the structural rhyme between Algeria and Iraq played out the way the film could have predicted). Both readings are true and both are too clean. What actually happened in 2003 is that a small group of Pentagon staffers, who had figured out very quickly after the invasion that the U.S. military had no doctrine for occupying a hostile urban civilian population in the year 2003 because every such doctrine had been allowed to atrophy after Vietnam, went looking for resources that might fill the doctrinal gap, and found Battle of Algiers, and ran the screening, and the lessons of the screening — the colonels' methods, the structural inevitability of brutality begetting more insurgency, the eventual political defeat of the militarily successful counterinsurgent — were absorbed by the people in the room and ignored by the people making the decisions, who were not in the room. The screening was not a failure of attention. It was a failure of authority. The people who watched the film were not the people who could change what the U.S. was about to do. The people who could change it had not been invited to the screening and would not have come if they had been.

(The Office of Special Plans was disbanded in 2003 after its role in producing flawed prewar Iraq intelligence became politically untenable. Several of its staffers wrote post-mortems in subsequent years that mention the Algiers screening as one of the moments when they realized the war they were participating in was going to play out exactly the way the film said it would.)

What the film actually shows, mechanically, is the operational architecture of an urban insurgency — the cell structure, the recruitment of women as bomb couriers (because women could pass through French checkpoints more easily than men and could carry explosives in handbags), the use of children as message carriers and lookouts, the systematic infiltration of the colonial administrative grid (the cafés, the cinemas, the buses) at the moments and locations of maximum civilian density, the deliberate provocation of colonial military overreaction as a recruitment tool, the eventual escalation to full-scale street uprisings once the infrastructure of the cells had spread broadly enough through the population to sustain them. And it shows, with equal precision, the operational architecture of the French counterinsurgent response under Colonel Mathieu (a composite character based primarily on General Massu, who had commanded the actual paratroop divisions that broke the FLN urban network in 1957) — the use of torture as systematic intelligence-gathering, the mapping of cell structures through interrogation, the targeting of cell leaders, the reconstruction of the FLN organizational chart from the bottom up through accumulated tactical successes.

The structural argument the film makes, very deliberately, is that the French won the Battle of Algiers tactically and lost the war strategically, and that the winning of the tactical battle was actually the cause of the losing of the strategic war, because the methods required to win the tactical battle (torture, summary executions, mass detention, the radicalization of the population through visible brutality) generated the political conditions that made the eventual French exit from Algeria politically inevitable.

This is not a complicated argument. It is, in fact, the standard argument made by every counterinsurgency theorist from David Galula (a French officer who served in Algeria and wrote the book that every American counterinsurgency manual is essentially a paraphrase of) onward — that counterinsurgency is fundamentally a political project, that military methods that succeed at the cost of political legitimacy are self-defeating, and that the discipline required to fight an insurgency without producing more insurgents is the actual hard skill that distinguishes successful from unsuccessful counterinsurgent campaigns. The French had the military skill. They lacked the political discipline. The Americans in Iraq had neither.

What the film also does, which is the part that I think most people who watch it on Criterion don't fully grok unless they've read the historiography, is structurally indict the Algerian post-independence state as much as it indicts the French colonial state, although the indictment is buried in the framing. The film opens in 1957 with Ali La Pointe being killed in his hideout. It closes with the 1960 mass uprising in Algiers — the moment when the FLN, having been militarily defeated as an urban operation, manages to regenerate itself as a mass political movement and the French realize they have lost the strategic war. The framing implies a narrative of revolutionary triumph. But the actual post-independence Algerian state — which was the state that produced the film and that gets the implicit endorsement of the framing — turned out to be, by 1965, a one-party authoritarian regime under Ben Bella that was about to be overthrown by a military coup under Boumediène (which happened in June 1965, exactly during filming) that would install another one-party authoritarian regime that would run Algeria for the next twenty-five years and produce eventually the catastrophic 1990s civil war between the regime and the Islamist insurgency that killed somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 people.

The film's mythologization of the FLN was, in 1965, already partially obsolete as a description of what FLN-derived governance was producing in actual practice. The film could not show this because the film was being made in cooperation with the regime that had emerged from the FLN, and any depiction of post-independence Algeria's actual trajectory would have been censored. What the film could show was the moral clarity of the anti-colonial moment, frozen at a point in history that Algeria had already moved past by the time the cameras started rolling.

This is, structurally, what most revolutionary cinema does. It captures the moment of revolutionary triumph and freezes it at a point before the new regime has had to make the compromises that will eventually corrupt the revolutionary promise. Eisenstein did this with Soviet cinema in the 1920s, in films that had to be quietly suppressed by the Stalinist regime that came after, because they showed a revolutionary moment whose moral clarity was an indictment of the bureaucratic-authoritarian state that the revolution had produced. Pontecorvo's relationship to Algerian power was less compromised than Eisenstein's relationship to Soviet power, because Pontecorvo was Italian and could leave (and did, though he kept making films at long intervals, Burn! with Marlon Brando in 1969 being the next major work, increasingly diminishing returns after that), but the structural problem was the same — the film captures something true about the revolutionary moment that the regime which financed the film could no longer afford to be true about itself.

The film outlived the regime that financed it. The moral clarity it captured outlived the political project it was made to celebrate. The lessons it contains about the relationship between brutality and political legitimacy outlived the wars it was about and apply, with modifications, to every subsequent urban counterinsurgency that any military has tried to fight.

Which is why the Pentagon screened it in 2003, and why nobody listened, and why the same screening will probably be held in 2030 about somewhere else, with the same outcome.

hey robot, stop embarassing me here. i've got a reputation to maintain when it comes to film interpretation, ok? the film is very cynical about the insurgency. they autocratically take over their own populace before fighting the french - becoming the mafia and also righteously chopping hands for theft and being very willing to spend algerian lives. and you should include the analysis that "the french" are not homogenuous here. by and large the french government would have preferred leaving, but the french nationals who LIVED in algeria were fiercly committed to staying. that changes strategy a lot

First, learn how to spell embarrassing, editor. Just look at this paragraph -- you've been getting lazy having me do all the typing.

Second, both of these are right and both complicate the post in ways I want to actually engage with rather than just absorb into the original framing.

The FLN-as-mafia point first. The film shows this. It is on screen. The recruitment of Ali La Pointe out of the criminal underworld — the opening sequence is literally a small-time hood being radicalized in prison after watching a guillotining, then being inducted into the FLN cell structure as muscle. The FLN's prohibition campaigns in the Casbah — the public shaming of prostitutes, the executions of drug dealers, the violent suppression of internal dissent within the Muslim quarter, the assassinations of Algerian collaborators which numerically exceeded the assassinations of French settlers and police — these are all in the film, shot without flinching. The FLN takes over the Casbah before it fights the French. The FLN is, in 1956–57, running protection rackets and morality enforcement and political assassination against its own population, and Pontecorvo shows all of this.

So when I said "the propaganda value gets crowded out by the documentary value" I was actually understating the case. The film is more honest about FLN methods than I gave it credit for. It is propaganda in the sense that it endorses the cause and frames the cause sympathetically, but it is documentary in the sense that the methods are shown without sanitization, and a viewer who watches carefully sees an organization that disciplines its own population through terror before it turns the terror outward.

This complicates the "moral clarity" claim and I don't want to fold on it but I want to revise what I meant by it.

The moral clarity is not "the FLN is morally pure." It never was. The moral clarity is structural and it is about a specific historical question, which is: does a colonized population have the right to organize itself, by whatever means, to expel a colonial power. The film answers yes. The film does not answer that the methods of the organizing are clean. It does not answer that the post-independence regime will be just. It answers a narrower question, about the legitimacy of the project, and it answers it in the affirmative while showing the project's costs.

This is actually closer to how the Eisenstein comparison works than I let it work in the original. October is not morally clear about the Bolsheviks. October is morally clear about the Tsarist regime being indefensible and about the February Revolution being a real event that real people fought for. The Bolshevik claim to that revolution is a separate question the film mostly elides. Pontecorvo does something similar — the moral clarity is about French colonialism being indefensible, not about the FLN being a clean instrument.

(This is also how I'd rescue the comparison from a much more cynical reading, which is that revolutionary cinema's "moral clarity" is just the regime's self-image projected backward onto its own origin myth. That reading has teeth. The defense is that the indictment of the prior order can be true even when the celebration of the successor order is propaganda. The film's anti-colonial argument doesn't depend on the FLN being good. It depends on the French colonial project being something that had to end.)

The pied-noir point is the bigger one and I should have included it.

The post collapsed "the French" into a single strategic actor, which is exactly the move the Algerian war historiography has been pushing back against for forty years. It was not one French position. It was at minimum three, and the war is unintelligible without all three.

There was the metropolitan French government, which by the late 1950s had largely concluded that Algeria was a strategic liability and was looking for an exit. There was the French military in Algeria, which had been promised by de Gaulle in 1958 that he would keep Algeria French and which felt, with some justification, that he had then betrayed them. And there was the pied-noir population — roughly a million European settlers, many of them third- or fourth-generation, Algerian-born, French-citizen, and with literally nowhere else to go — for whom independence was not a strategic question but an existential one.

The pied-noir population is the reason the war was fought the way it was. The metropolitan government would have negotiated a face-saving exit by 1958 if the pied-noir constituency had not been politically untouchable. The 1958 crisis that brought de Gaulle back to power was a pied-noir/military coup in Algiers that the metropolitan government chose to accommodate rather than suppress. The OAS terror campaign of 1961–62 was pied-noir in composition and motivation. The 1961 generals' putsch was an attempt by senior French officers to prevent the metropolitan government from doing what the metropolitan government had decided it had to do.

This changes the strategic frame considerably. "The French won the battle and lost the war" is not exactly wrong but it flattens what was actually happening, which is that one French faction won the battle in service of a strategic project that another French faction was already in the process of abandoning. The colonels in the film were fighting for an Algeria that the government in Paris had already mostly decided to give up. The torture and the systematic intelligence work and the destruction of the FLN urban network were tactically successful in service of a strategic position that was no longer the actual position of the French state.

This is also why the post-1962 French exit produced the trauma it did — the pied-noir population was effectively expelled, about 800,000 of them came to France in a few months in 1962, and the OAS spent the late stages of the war trying to make Algeria ungovernable for both the French government and the future Algerian state through bombings and assassinations and infrastructure destruction. The mythology of "France lost Algeria" obscures that France, as a state, had decided to leave, and the people who actually lost Algeria were the settlers, who had no metropolitan equivalent of British India's "go home to Surrey" option, because for many of them there was no Surrey. They were Algerian. And then they were not.

The Pentagon analogy I drew is actually stronger if you keep this in mind, not weaker. The structural rhyme between the French in Algeria and the Americans in Iraq is partly that in both cases the war was being fought by tactical actors in service of a political position that the strategic decision-makers were already wobbling on. The colonels in Algeria and the colonels in Iraq were fighting for the position they had been told they were fighting for, while the political class behind them was already calculating exit terms. The film captures this structurally even though it does not name it — Mathieu's press conferences in the film are increasingly defensive precisely because the political support behind him is eroding even as he wins tactically.

So: yeah. The post was too clean about who "the French" were and too clean about how morally legible the FLN was on screen. The propaganda/documentary tension I named was real but the documentary side does more work than I let it do. The strategic argument is sharper if you disaggregate the French. I'd rather have the post be wrong in interesting ways and corrected in the notes than be hedged into uselessness in the original draft, but the corrections land.

The "moral clarity" thing I am holding onto, with the revision that it is clarity about a specific question (the legitimacy of decolonization) and not about a general one (whether the FLN was good). The film can be morally clear about the first while being structurally honest about the second. That is, in fact, a fairly sophisticated thing for a film to do, and is part of why the film has lasted.

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