The Battle of Algiers: The Criterion Collection [Blu-ray]

Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers is one of the most powerful political films about terrorism and guerrilla warfare and its political themes and ideologies are frighteningly still relevant in today's universal headlines. The Battle of Algiers was a film that was made in 1965 but released in late 1967 as it tells the fights and emerging tactics in Algeria between the years of 1954 and 1962, where France tried and failed to contain a nationalist uprising, and as its methods were successful in Algeria they would later be adapted by the Cubans, the Palestinians, the Viet Cong, the IRA and South African militants, and the United States of America. The Battle of Algiers is legendary in its explicit documentary-like detail of its iconography of police shootings, terrorist bombings, child martyrs, interrogation rooms, general strikes, torture chambers, security breaches, riot demonstrations, and violent reprisals; which supposedly adapted the film into a training manuel for the Black Panthers, Provisional Irish Republican Army and the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front.

For The Battle of Algiers, Gillo Pontecorvo and cinematographer Marcello Gatti shot the film in stark black and white cinematography and casted non-actors in the roles of its Algerians; all which would help create an authentic look of newsreel and documentary like footage. When the film was released this effect convinced audiences into believing they were watching real life war footage and so Americans released a disclaimer for the film that said "Not one foot of newsreel was used." Even today, The Battle of Algiers is still a cinematically important and crucial film, and as of recently in September 2003 the New York Times reported that the movie was being shown in the Pentagon to military and civilian experts, regarding it as a useful illustration of the problems faced in Iraq. One of the most unforgettable moments in the film is the sequence in which three Algerian women masquerading as upscale French women, plant bombs at various public hangouts in the French quarter. We then get vivid snapshots of teenagers dancing, men sipping drinks and a toddler licking his ice cream cone, all before its unenviable explosion. This disturbing act of terrorism followed by the powerful and unsentimental score by Ennio Morricone is still relatable to us all as it is a frightening and prophetic parallel to the bombings in Israel, the U.K.,  Iraq, and of the tragic 2001 September 11th attacks in the United States of America.