Yesterday's Mujahiddin: Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers (1966)

Across five decades and many different cultures, audience reactions to Gillo Pontecorvo’s masterpiece The Battle of Algiers (1966) have been extraordinarily varied, divided, and fraught. In France, screenings of the film continued to provoke violent attacks on cinemas until the early 1980s. Elsewhere it has reputedly been required viewing for diverse insurrectionary groups including the Black Panthers, the IRA, and the PLO. 1 It can be regarded as the most successful Algerian film ever made: it was an Italian-Algerian coproduction that did well internationally at the box office and won critical acclaim, including three Oscar nominations, and has been shown regularly on Algerian television. However, not all Algerian nationalists have approved of it, or for that matter considered it Algerian. And for many audiences around the world-notably, for my present purposes, in postcolonial studies, where the film is widely admired and frequently taught-it has served as a prominent source of images and understandings of the Algerian war of independence.