Cold Open · Essay · dec 14, 2023

Reflections on Oppression & Revolution in the Battle of Algiers (1966)

In the weeks following Hamas's October 7th attacks and Israel's campaign in Gaza, Celebrating Cinema turns to Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers — one of cinema's most forensic examinations of colonial violence and the conditions that produce resistance. The episode asks what it means to watch this film now, how cinema can try to make sense of atrocities without instrumentalising them, and what the French colonial mindset Pontecorvo documented reveals about contemporary systems of occupation. A sober, necessary episode made in the urgency of the present.

By Elliot Bloom

Film Journalist · Celebrating Cinema

Movies have always been a way to understand the world around us, and so, confronted with the brutal horrors of both Hamas’s attacks on October 7th and Israel’s disproportionate slaughtering of thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians, we question if cinema can try to make sense of such atrocities.

For this episode of Celebrating Cinema, we focus on Gillo Pontecorvo’s seminal classic The Battle of Algiers, a brutally candid exposé of the French colonial mindset, which recounts a similar bloody struggle for the liberation of the Algerian people in the 1950s. Ultimately, this film both humanises and complicates the reality of violence between the oppressor and the oppressed.

As we discuss public oppression, organised resistance, how violence begets violence, as well as the media’s power in ‘selling’ a colonial occupation and the consequences for the civilian people caught in the middle of all this. But most importantly we focus on how a film like The Battle Of Algiers can offer hope for freedom in these tragic times.

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