Gillo Pontecorvo's recreation of the Algerian War's urban guerrilla phase. The film the Pentagon screened for officers in 2003 to help them understand the Iraq War.
Algiers, 1954-1957. The film recreates the urban guerrilla phase of the Algerian War of Independence — the period in which the National Liberation Front (FLN) conducted bombing campaigns against the French colonial administration in Algiers, and the French paratroopers under Colonel Mathieu (a composite character) responded with systematic torture and population control. The film tracks both sides: the FLN cell leaders (particularly Ali la Pointe, based on the real Ali Ammar), and the French military apparatus.
The film's specific achievement is structural impartiality. The FLN's bombing of civilian targets is shown in detail. The French military's torture of suspects is shown in equal detail. Neither side is treated as morally pure; both are treated as operating within the logic their political circumstances have produced. The film closes with the French having militarily defeated the FLN in Algiers but with the broader political movement intact — Algeria would gain independence in 1962.
The Battle of Algiers is shot in a documentary-realist style that has fooled multiple subsequent audiences into believing the film contains actual newsreel footage. There is no archival material in the film. Every shot was recreated by Pontecorvo's crew, using non-professional actors (most of the Algerian cast had no prior film experience) and shot on location in the actual neighbourhoods where the historical events had occurred only a decade earlier.
The technique was a direct extension of the Italian neorealist tradition (Pontecorvo had worked as an assistant to Rossellini). What Pontecorvo added was the explicit construction of documentary-style framing — the handheld camera, the high-contrast black-and-white photography, the deliberate avoidance of music during action sequences. The result is a film that audiences read as a documentary even when they know it is a fiction. The technique has been imitated extensively across subsequent political cinema.
The film's central structural argument is that the question 'is terrorism justified?' cannot be cleanly separated from the question 'is torture justified?' Both are tactical choices made by parties whose political objectives are themselves morally weighted. The FLN's bombings target civilians; the French military's torture targets suspects. The film does not endorse either, but it also does not condemn either in isolation — the moral weight of each tactic is bound up with the moral weight of the broader political situation in which it occurs.
Colonel Mathieu's press-conference monologue — the famous sequence in which the French commander openly tells journalists that the French military uses torture and that the FLN uses civilian bombings, and asks the journalists which side they would actually choose if forced to — is one of the most-quoted single sequences in political cinema. The film is, in some sense, an exam question with no clean answer, addressed to every audience that has ever watched it.
In August 2003, with the Iraq War increasingly producing the urban-guerrilla conditions that the Algerian War had produced fifty years earlier, the Pentagon's Office of Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict screened The Battle of Algiers for officers and government officials. The flier for the screening reportedly read: 'How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas. Children shoot soldiers at point-blank range. Women plant bombs in cafés. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervour. Sound familiar? The French have a plan. It succeeds tactically, but fails strategically. To understand why, come to a rare showing of this film.'
The screening's existence is a kind of structural argument for the film's continued relevance. Almost no other 1960s film has continued to be operationally studied by working military and political institutions across the half-century since its release. The film is now used as required viewing in counter-insurgency programmes at multiple military academies and political-science departments.