The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Gillo Pontecorvo · a film in Arabic and French · 1966 · about 121 minutes · the full-length version as restored in 1999
Mode
Historical reconstruction in the grammar of the newsreel; procedural, chronicle and political argument in one
Mythos
The conversion at the scaffold; the martyr walled in a tomb; the Casbah as a labyrinth and one body; a nation born out of mist
Phase
October 1957 as a frame, a flashback from 1954 through the bombs, the strike and the breaking of the organisation, and a coda in December 1960 and 1962
Presentation
Feature film in black and white, about 121 minutes, in Arabic and French, the full-length version as restored in 1999; shot on location in Algiers in 1965 with a cast almost entirely non-professional
Register
Reportorial, cold and fast, under dated captions; dread and lament rising through it, to a drumbeat for action and a lament for the dead of both sides
Scale
One city in two halves, an insurgency and the army sent to end it, and a nation at the close
Governing Proposition
Over three years an insurgency in the Casbah of Algiers fights the colonial city with guns and bombs, and the paratroopers sent to end it break it cell by cell, by torture, until its last leader is walled up behind a tile. The wager of the film is that a reconstruction made to look like the record no one could have filmed, played by the people of the streets where it happened, can show colonial war and the insurgency against it as two systems with one logic, each side’s violence against the innocent following from its aim.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins at the end. In October 1957 an old man has been tortured, and he gives up the hiding place of Ali La Pointe. The soldiers give him a soldier’s shirt and lead him into the Casbah to point at a wall. Before the battle is shown, the method that will win it has been shown: information taken from a body by pain and turned into a place on a map. Everything that follows is told backward from this moment, a flashback that will come round to the same wall.
The flashback opens in 1954, and the film takes its armature from the record. Dated and timed captions mark the days; voice-over communiqués read out the orders of the insurgency; later a police diagram will lay out its cells. The photography is black and white, contrasty and grained, the camera often handheld or held at the far end of a long lens in a crowd. Not one frame of newsreel is used, and the film looks throughout like the newsreel no one could have filmed.
Gillo Pontecorvo directed it from a screenplay by Franco Solinas, on a story by the two of them. Marcello Gatti photographed it, Mario Morra and Mario Serandrei edited it, and the music is by Ennio Morricone with Pontecorvo. It was produced by Antonio Musu for Igor Film of Rome and by Yacef Saadi for Casbah Film of Algiers, and shot on location in Algiers in 1965, three years after independence. The cast is almost entirely non-professional: Brahim Hadjadj as Ali, Saadi as El-hadi Jafar, a figure drawn on himself, Fusia El Kader as Hassiba, Mohamed Ben Kassen as Petit Omar, and Jean Martin as Colonel Mathieu. It won the Golden Lion at Venice in 1966, and it was kept from French cinemas until 1971.
Movement II
Ali is an illiterate petty criminal, and the film finds him in prison. From his cell he watches a prisoner taken to the guillotine. The scene is the whole of his conversion: the sight of a man going to the scaffold turns a thief into the people’s fighter, and his life becomes the thread on which the chronicle is strung, from the cell to the wall.
Out of prison, Ali joins the organisation, and the organisation sets about the Casbah. It purges the quarter of drugs, drink and prostitution. Children chase a drunk down the stairs and beat him. A wedding is held without music. The film shows the coercion of its own people as purification, and it does not look at it from the other side. It is one of the two places where the even hand of the chronicle tilts.
Then the killing of policemen begins, and the police answer. In the night a bomb is set in the rue de Thèbes, in the Casbah, and in the morning the bodies are carried out of the rubble to a lament on something like an organ. The first answer to a killing is a killing of the innocent. Each phase of the chronicle produces the next, and the film has set the chain going.
Movement III
Three women of the Casbah prepare to answer the rue de Thèbes. At a mirror they cut their hair and put on European dress, and the veil worn and removed is the instrument of the plan. Each carries a basket. They pass the checkpoints between the two halves of the city in the coloniser’s dress.
In the European city each woman sets down her basket. Before she leaves she looks at the faces around her, and the film looks with her, at the people she is about to kill, among them a child with an ice cream. Morricone’s percussive pulse runs under the waiting. The suspense is moral as well as physical: the viewer is held between the bombers and the dead, and the film refuses to let either be forgotten.
The bombs go off. The film has shown the bomb against the café as plainly as the bomb in the Casbah. It is here that its claim is clearest: colonial war and the insurgency against it are two systems with one logic, and each side’s violence against the innocent follows from its aim. Neither side is acquitted by the other’s crimes.
Movement IV
The paratroopers arrive under Colonel Mathieu. Jean Martin plays him precise, dry and charming, and the film gives him its clearest mind. At a briefing he draws the organisation on a blackboard as a pyramid of cells. The diagram is the film’s structure laid bare: to break the pyramid, find one member and make him name the rest.
The organisation calls a general strike of eight days. The streets of the Casbah empty, and the soldiers break it open, forcing the shutters of the shops and dragging men to work. The strike gives Mathieu his map. The torture follows, in rooms with a blowtorch and water, and the pyramid is taken apart cell by cell. Ben M’hidi, a leader of the organisation, is captured, and his death follows.
At a press conference Mathieu explains that torture is the consequence of wanting to stay, and turns the question on the press: do they want France to stay? The method is charged to the nation rather than to the soldier, and the soldier is allowed to be honest about it. Jafar is taken. Only Ali is left.
Movement V
The flashback reaches the frame. Ali is behind the wall the old man pointed to, in a hole behind a tile, with Hassiba, Petit Omar and Mahmoud. The charge is laid, the wall is blown, and the dust settles slowly over the rubble. The scene is quiet and terrible, and it closes the martyrdom the film has built from the scaffold onward: a conversion, and a tomb.
The battle is lost. The organisation in the city has been destroyed by the method shown in the first minute, and the chronicle, which has followed that method step by step, has nothing left to show. Then the film leaps to December 1960. In fog and noise, crowds fill the streets, dancing, and a woman’s cry is held over the chaos. The ululation that the film has let rise over the Casbah before rises again.
The coda runs on to independence in 1962. The leap is the film’s one change of form, from chronicle to lyric, and its one change of law: the battle shown as lost by method is won by a force the method did not include, a people the pyramid could not draw. The film has earned the battle step by step; the nation it asserts. What it has shown, from both sides, is how such a war is fought, and what each side does to the innocent in order to win it.
Act III · The Twelve
A chronicle, and it resists the subtractive test more than chronicles usually do. Each phase produces the next: the police killings bring the rue de Thèbes bomb, that bomb brings the women’s bombs, the bombs bring the paratroopers, the strike gives Mathieu his map of the Casbah, the map gives him the pyramid, and the pyramid closes on Ali. The frame is required, since opening on the old man’s torture tells the viewer from the first minute what method will win. Ali’s conversion at the guillotine is required, his life being the thread. What gives: the purge of the Casbah makes its point twice, some raids repeat each other, and the coda is compelled by the thesis rather than by the plot.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: colonial war and the insurgency against it are two systems with one logic, and each side’s violence against the innocent follows from its aim. Mathieu is given the clearest mind in the film. He explains that torture is the consequence of wanting to stay, and asks the press whether they want France to stay, so that the method is charged to the nation rather than to the soldier. The bomb in the café is shown as plainly as the bomb in the Casbah: the women look at the faces they are about to kill, a child with an ice cream among them. Held short of the top by partisan sympathy where it matters: the coercion of the Casbah is shown as purification, and the coda’s rising is asserted more than disclosed.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The register is reportorial, cold and fast, and elevation comes through it often, most often as dread or lament. The three women at the mirror, cutting their hair and changing their dress, passing the checkpoints and setting down their baskets to a percussive pulse, is one of the great suspense passages of its decade, and its height is moral, the viewer held between the bombers and the dead. The rue de Thèbes aftermath, bodies carried from the rubble to an organ-like lament, rises to grief. The ululation over the Casbah, the strike broken open, the crowds in the fog of 1960 and Ali’s death in the wall are summits. Held at the figure because the register refuses to linger, and some rises lean on the score more than on the image.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The myth is partly built, and that is what holds the axis lowest with The Encompassed. Ali La Pointe, the illiterate petty criminal who becomes the people’s fighter at the sight of a man going to the scaffold, is a conversion, and his end, walled in with a woman and a child, is a martyrdom in a tomb; the whole structure falls toward that wall. The Casbah is a labyrinth and an organism, and the coda is a birth out of mist. But the chronicle evokes its archetypes more than it carries them. Mathieu is a type, the rational officer; the collective protagonist is a political idea more than an archetype; and the people’s rising is the thesis put in images, not built from the events shown.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The inheritance is Italian neorealism, Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945) and Paisà (1946) above all, with the newsreel and the reportage of the early 1960s; Pontecorvo’s own Kapò (1960) had already set fiction in history. The turn is far: a war ended three years before, reconstructed to look like the newsreel no one could have filmed, with crowds of non-professionals in the streets where it happened, a commander of the insurgency co-producing and playing a part drawn on himself, and a protagonist who is a city and a people. The stake was large: a subject France would not show, and a film that could have been propaganda made to give the enemy the best argument. Held short of the top because neorealism had proved the path.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The grain, the handheld camera, the long lens in crowds, the dated captions and the police diagram make the viewer a witness to evidence rather than a spectator of a drama, and that is the knowledge: the battle as a system, read as an intelligence officer or a historian reads it, from both sides. The procedural form is even-handed by structure, each move shown from the side that makes it and then from the side that suffers it. The frame tells the story backward from the moment the method succeeds, and the pyramid on Mathieu’s blackboard is the film’s structure laid bare. Held below the top because the coda turns from chronicle to lyric, and the turn is willed rather than grown.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Sixty years of return are evidence. The film has been read as instruction in counterinsurgency, screened at the Pentagon in 2003; as a document of Fanon’s account of colonial violence; as a study of gender, of the veil and of the women who change their dress to pass; and as an argument about the ethics of terror against civilians. Each new war has reopened it, from Vietnam and Northern Ireland to Iraq and Gaza. Whether it endorses the bombs or refuses to judge them has not been settled, and its even-handedness has been read both as its truth and as its trick. Held at the figure because its argument is lucid and largely stated, so that much of the yield is the use others make of it rather than depth found in it.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Field: the cinema of the 1960s, the decade of Godard, Antonioni, Bergman and 2001. The intrinsic force is strong: the film made the reconstruction of recent history in the grammar of the newsreel into a form, and the collective protagonist and the system as subject into a political cinema that argues rather than preaches. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Costa-Gavras’s Z (1969) and State of Siege (1972, written by Solinas), the Third Cinema of Latin America and Africa, Pontecorvo’s own Burn! (1969), and the docudrama through Paul Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday (2002) and United 93 (2006); beyond film, the study of insurgency in military colleges. Held short of the top because that reach lies chiefly in one genre, and cinéma vérité was a parallel source.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across sixty years. The form survives whole: the full-length version exists and circulates in restoration, and the shorter and dubbed prints of the first years are variants that take nothing from it. Presence has been continuous but not unbroken. The film was kept from French cinemas until 1971, and in the English-speaking world it passed from political screenings and repertory to a wide revival in 2004; since then it has been constant in teaching, on television and on home formats. The surface ages little, since the film was made to look like record and record ages as history, and its subject has not aged at all. The fabric is coarse monochrome by design. The narrowed presence holds it under the widest.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout. Marcello Gatti’s photography, contrasty and grained to the look of news footage, holds both a face at a checkpoint and the mass of the Casbah’s roofs. The direction of crowds in their thousands, on the streets where the events took place, is exact; the non-professionals are cast for faces and bearing, and Brahim Hadjadj’s Ali is all presence. Jean Martin’s Mathieu is precise, dry and charming. The editing keeps three bombers in parallel without loss of clarity. The score by Ennio Morricone with Pontecorvo, a drumbeat for action and a lament for the dead of both sides, is among the most exact in film. The costs: the post-synchronised sound is loose in places, some readings are stiff, and the expository lines are on the nose.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the children of the Casbah chasing and beating a drunk down the stairs during the purge, and the paratroopers’ rooms of torture with their blowtorch and water. One law governs both: in this war each side makes a people obey by violence, and every act is a move in a system that answers it with its countermove. The wedding without music, the strike, the women’s bombs, the police bomb and Mathieu’s press conference obey the same law, the method that follows from the aim, across a range from the comedy of the purge to the death of a child in a wall. The strain is at the close: the coda replaces the law of system with the law of a spontaneous people, a force the method did not include.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Many orders are held in one structure. The state, in the administration, the police, the army, the press and the courts. The city, in two halves with checkpoints between. The people, as a collective body. Religion, in the purge and the wedding. Gender, in the women who carry bombs and the veil worn and removed. Labour, in the general strike. History, in the colonial order and a nation’s founding. Death and its rites, in the guillotine, the bombs, the torture and the tomb in the wall. The chronicle joins them, since strike, bombs and torture are one campaign. What holds the axis lowest with The Archetypal Deep: consciousness is absent by design, no one being given an inner life, Ali least of all; the family is glimpsed; the European city’s people are faces, not a society; and the natural order is absent.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Unconcealment at 8.9 and The Living Form at 8.9, then The Made at 8.8. A disclosure held from both sides, that colonial war and the insurgency against it are two systems with one logic; a form of evidence and procedure that makes the viewer a witness to a system rather than a spectator of a drama; and a making that directs thousands of non-professionals in the streets where it happened and holds three bombers in parallel without loss of clarity.
Limiting Dimension
The Archetypal Deep at 8.2: Ali’s conversion and his tomb are built, but the collective protagonist is a political idea more than an archetype, and the people’s rising is the thesis put in images. Level with it, The Encompassed at 8.2: the orders of state, city, gender, labour and death are joined in one campaign, but consciousness is absent by design, the family glimpsed, the European city’s people faces rather than a society.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.5 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.9, The Made at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Unconcealment at 8.9, The Swerve at 8.7, Pressure on Tradition at 8.7 and The Imperishable at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.2 falls three tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.2, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.2. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate and by the aggregate, 8.6 from a sum of 103.4, below the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of The Battle of Algiers (La battaglia di Algeri) as released in 1966, in the full-length version of about 121 minutes as restored in 1999 and in circulation since its reissue in 2004, in Arabic and French with some sound post-synchronised, from the tortured old man to the coda of 1960 and 1962: directed by Gillo Pontecorvo from a screenplay by Franco Solinas on a story by Pontecorvo and Solinas, photographed by Marcello Gatti, edited by Mario Morra and Mario Serandrei, with music by Ennio Morricone with Pontecorvo, produced by Antonio Musu (Igor Film, Rome) and Yacef Saadi (Casbah Film, Algiers). Shorter and dubbed prints that circulated in some markets in the 1960s and 1970s are variants and are not judged. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Every axis is judged on the film in its original languages; English renderings are a reader’s aid rather than the object, and nothing here is charged to them. No dialogue is quoted; the speech is described. Details that could not be verified, among them the aspect ratio, the means by which the grain was achieved, the wording of any title card on the absence of newsreel, the means by which the French release was held back, the markets and languages of the shorter prints, the use of the film by insurgent groups, the scene and shot counts and the share of the dialogue by language, are not given.