The Battle of Algiers

Today is 14 October, the 120th anniversary of the birth of Hannah Arendt (born 14 October 1906 in Linden, Germany).

Tonight's first film, The Third Man, is about a man who can turn himself into someone who legally does not exist inside a city cut into sectors. This one reverses the question — how does a governed people turn "not existing" into existing?

In November 1954 the National Liberation Front (FLN) began armed action in the city; in 1957 France sent paratroopers into Algiers and sealed off the Casbah. The film records those three years. It gives no narration to either side and refuses to judge on the audience's behalf — which made both sides uncomfortable when it premiered in 1966: France did not allow it to be shown for years, while other viewers read it as propaganda.

In the archive it fills in Algeria — Senegal had been the only African country, and this is the second. The 1960s already held six films, but none that films a contemporary war with the grammar of a documentary, and none that records both sides' methods and leaves the verdict to the viewer.

It forms a diptych with tonight's first film: one searches a divided city for a man who does not exist; the other lets a man who does not exist become a name in a besieged one.

阿尔及尔，法属阿尔及利亚的首府。城市的一半是欧洲区，宽阔、明亮、有咖啡馆；另一半是卡斯巴——一片顺着山坡长起来的旧城，屋顶连着屋顶，巷子窄得只能过一个人。

一个在街头混日子的年轻人 Ali La Pointe 在监狱里被人拍下一张照片，登在报纸上。从那以后，他有了名字。

1954 年 11 月起，民族解放阵线在城里组织起一套系统：谁负责放炸弹，谁负责掩护，谁负责执行内部裁决。1957 年，法国的伞兵部队开进阿尔及尔，接管了治安。两套系统在同一座城市里开始互相寻找对方的每一个节点。

影片从两边轮流拍摄，谁也不比谁更清楚。

（这里不再往下说。）

A staged film that looks like a newsreel

1966, an Italian-Algerian co-production. 121 minutes, black and white, Arabic and French. Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, co-written with Franco Solinas.

The grain was designed

Cinematographer Marcello Gatti shot on 35mm and produced the grain and contrast of 16mm newsreel. The editing offers no causal cues; it simply places events side by side in time. The impression is of a documentary — and nearly every shot in it was staged. This is not documentary truth; it is the credibility you get from reassembling the real.

An FLN commander playing himself

One of the producers was Saadi Yacef. He had been one of the FLN leaders in Algiers; the screenplay adapts the memoir he wrote in prison, and he plays a character based on himself. Beyond him the cast is largely non-professional, including Algerians who had lived through the actual battle. A film about a historical event that sends the participants back on set to perform it again.

Colonel Mathieu

The film's principal opposite is played by a professional actor, Jean Martin. Mathieu is a composite of several French commanders, and the film refuses to make him a personalised villain. His most famous scene is a press conference: he does not repent, he simply states the method. It is the coldest scene in the film, and the most Arendtian.

The Casbah is a map

The film turns the Casbah into a vertical labyrinth: you can walk on the roofs, hide inside the walls, and the stairways are the only map. The paratroopers have to learn to read it, which yields the film's finest sequences. The architecture of a city is itself the tactics of this war.

A Golden Lion and three Oscar nominations

In 1966 the film won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. At the 39th Academy Awards in 1967 it received three nominations — Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Foreign Language Film for Italy — and won none.

A teaching text cited from both sides

The film was not permitted to open in France until 1971. For decades afterwards both sides used it as a case study: in 2003 the US military organised a screening at the Pentagon to discuss irregular warfare. It is rare for one film to be consulted by both parties to a conflict.