Background

The "battle for Algiers" refers to the events of 1957 in which the FLN, who had begun the active guerilla war of liberation in 1954, called for a general strike in Algiers. The FLN included the French definition of human rights as an "equality of rights and duties, without distinction of race or of religion" in their Charter (1954) and pursued them alongside the armed struggle. They hoped for United Nations intervention on their behalf and claimed that their action was justified by the right to strike under the French constitution. Led by the infamous General Jacques Massu, French paratroopers repressed the strike and the FLN by the widespread use of torture to extract information. Nonetheless, the battle of Algiers came to seem a turning point in the liberation struggle that was finally successful in 1962. Looking back on the events at a distance of forty years, the Communist activist and journalist Henri Alleg, who was "disappeared" and tortured by French troops, reconfigured what had happened: "In reality, there never was a battle; only a gigantic police operation carried out with an exceptional savagery and in violation of all the laws."  Just as Antonio Gramsci had understood the fascist "Caesar" in Italy to be the product of the police state, so too was the imperial President sustained and produced by colonial policing under martial law.

The consistent and persistent return of the battle for Algiers in art, films, television, literature and critical writing in the period and subsequently as a figure for war, nationalism, the migrant, torture, colonialism and its legacies suggests that what was in the period known as the "Algerian question" remains unanswered.

The Battle for Algiers (1965)

The FLN cadre and former businessman, Yacef Saadi, created Casbah Films in 1962 and collaborated with Italian film director Gillo Pontecorvo in filming of The Battle of Algiers.  As Pontecorvo had himself been the leader of the youth section of the Italian resistance, in which screenwriter Franco Solinas had also been involved, the film was a collaboration between anti-colonial and anti-fascist resistance fighters. The Algerians financed 45% of the costs of the film and Saadi helped Pontecorvo identify the exact locations in the Casbah where the events on which those depicted were based had taken place. For example, the newsreel footage of Saadi's arrest in 1957 was accurately recreated in the film for the resistance leader Ben H'Midi.

Yacef Saadi was concerned to produce "an objective, equilibrated film that is not a trial of a people or of a nation, but a heartful accusation against colonialism, violence, and war."  In fact, Pontecorvo had rejected his original treatment as being too much like propaganda and instead worked with Solinas to generate a neorealist film under a regime that he called the "dictatorship of truth." Pontecorvo shot the film on low-cost stock to enhance the grainy newsreel feel, while exposing for very strong black-and-white contrasts in the Italian neorealist style. As a result, The Battle of Algiers allows for different points of interpretation. It is clearly anti-colonial, but also anti-war, while arguing for the inevitability of armed conflict given the intransigence of French colonial policy.

The film begins just after the breaking of an FLN operative by torture, who has revealed the hiding place of FLN leader Ali La Pointe. From these opening moments in a French torture chamber, the viewer is plunged into the conflict. By its nature, torture is a practice that wants to be off stage, literally ob-scene. To be confronted with the tortured body, even in the current era of official avowal of so-called "harsh techniques," is a visual shock. 

In using
this shock in the opening, rather than as a central moment, as in more recent films like Rendition (2007, dir. Gavin Hood), Pontecorvo visualized the normalization of torture. Henri Alleg, a French Communist newspaper editor in Algiers who was tortured by paratroopers, described this as the "school of perversion" for the young French conscripts and volunteers.  The actor used to play the torture victim was serving a sentence for theft in the notorious Barberousse prison, from where he was released to play the part, no doubt accounting for his confused air.

Pontecorvo further implicates the implied viewpoint of the spectator with the FLN. When Colonel Mathieu, the fictional representation of General Marel-Marice Bigeard, sets out his information strategy to his colleagues, he shows them films taken at French checkpoints to point out that, although surveillance was in effect, Algerian activists were succeeding in evading the checkpoints. At that moment, a woman that we already know to have to planted a bomb passes by. Mathieu presents to his staff a means of overcoming their inability to see by transforming people into information. He demonstrates what Saadi called the "pyramid" scheme in which each person in the organization knows only two others. In order for the French to reach the top level commanders, information must be obtained that allows them to particularize the pyramid with names. This "method" is Mathieu's euphemism for torture, under the excuse that there was a twenty-four hour period to act before the organization modified its structure. This rhetoric is what is now known as the "ticking bomb" justification for torture. Unlike present day politicians, Mathieu does not shy away from the realities of the question at stake. If, he demands, you want Algeria to remain part of France, then this is the way to do it; and he reminds the journalists that even L'Humanité, the Communist newspaper, adhered to the notion of Algérie française, French Algeria.

In later interviews, Saadi argued that Mathieu had to be played by a professional actor (Jean Martin) in order for this explanation of the pyramid system to be convincing. Indeed, some have argued that it was precisely this professionalization of bureaucracy that limited the radicality of the FLN to that of a nationalist revolt, rather than a socialist or self-directed revolution. The French tactic rendered the body of the tortured into data, disguising the erotics of violence that generated it, as part of an information flow that would have been understood as "cybernetic" in the period. As N. Katherine Hayles has summarized it, Norbert Weiner decontextualized information "as a function of probabilities representing a choice of one message from a range of possible messages."  Thus the paratroopers find the leader of the Organization (FLN) by means of tracking "messages" around their information system. This rendering of information into binary code was the reality that colonial authority now sought to find in its subject peoples, abstracting their individual identities but ensuring the free "flow" of information. Its obscene counterpart was that such information was obtained by the flow of electricity, the predominant method of torture used in Algeria.

Resources

NB These clips open onto separate pages because of their length: please follow the path Battling for Algiers

The FLN tactics--allegedly later used by other insurgents and now counterinsurgents.

The switch to a bombing campaign carried out by women.

Part two of this sequence.

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