#guerrillacinema

I once read that, in Barbet Schroeder’s film Our Lady of the Assassins, digital filmmaking allowed for the city of Medellín to appear clearly on screen, on a par with the characters, and not as a blurred background, out of focus of an analog camera. (Our Lady of the Assassins, filmed in 2000 with a Sony HDW-700, was one of the first features filmed with a digital HD camera.)

Whoever wrote this clearly does not remember The Battle of Algiers. Algiers is the main character of the film. Its streets, buildings, rooftops are crisp and clear. The city is not a backdrop; it hugs, cuddles, acts, and suffers, too. “The colonial world is a world divided into compartments,” writes Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth. Algiers is forcibly split between a European and an Arab city, and the French police and army advise Algerians “not to budge” (Fanon again). The indigenous city is “a world without gaps," where the rare openings are created by colonizers bombing houses or creating a no man’s land between the Casbah and the white city.

Fanon writes that, for the colonized, military marches and flags “do not convey the message ‘Don’t dare to budge’ but ‘Be ready to attack’.” The Battle of Algiers painstakingly recreates this readiness, and documents these attacks. It plays on the visibility of the colonized to the colonizer, and of the colonizer to the colonized. Characters spy out, half hidden or in plain sight. They use binoculars and rooftops to dominate the scene or, on the contrary, look out from behind walls and drying laundry. Who is visible to whom is key to an insurrection: the French want to visibly establish dominance; the Algerians want to be visible to one another ("The FLN will avenge you,” Yacef Saâdi tells Casbah residents). They want to be visible to the United Nations. They want to visibly substitute themselves to the colonizer.

Is The Battle of Algiers a case of guerrilla filmmaking? Probably not. In the spirit of Third-Worldism, the film was coproduced by a state-funded company (Casbah Films) on a script inspired by a local FLN leader (Yacef Saâdi, who plays his own role) and its filming in the streets of Algiers was authorized by the Algerian Defense ministry. 

Is the film an act of guerrilla tout court? Maybe. During filming, Defense minister Houari Boumédiène benefited from the confusion of army trucks in the streets when conducting his coup against president Ahmed Ben Bella. The Battle of Algiers, the film that documents the 1957 insurrection and its repression, is a metaphor for another battle of Algiers: Boumédiène’s 1965 bloodless “revolutionary redress.” Documenting colonial domination in the style of Italian neorealism, fiction facilitates the emergence of postcolonial political power, with its violence and ambiguities.

In the end there remains the city of Algiers, and there is much to write about architecture and urbanism in the film. The last scene shows Algerians pouring out of the Climat de France housing estate, built in the 1950s by Fernand Pouillon to rehouse the residents of the Casbah. That this monument of French repression funneled anticolonial protest is a historical reality. Its presence in the film makes The Battle of Algiers “the first banlieue film” and a precursor to La Haine. The housing estate, now renamed “La Colombie” by its residents, also acts as a reminder that the infrastructure of power can always be turned against its creators.

References:

Frantz Fanon, Les damnés de la terre, Paris: Maspéro, 1961.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, London: Penguin, 2004, 1.3: “Resistance,” p. 63-95.

“Resolutions of the Third World Filmmakers Meeting (Algeria, 1973),” in Scott MacKenzie (ed.), Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology, Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2014, p 275-284. 

Alan O’Leary, “End of Empire Cinema and the First Banlieue Film,” Film Quarterly, 70-2, 2016.