Timeless story of rebellion

Saadi Yacef (second from left) stars as revolutionary leader El-hadi Jaffar and Brahim Haggiag (right) as Ali la Pointe.

More than half a century after the events it dramatises, Gillo Pontecorvo's masterful 1965 film The Battle of Algiers remains a seminal work of political cinema and the prototype of everything in the genre from Costa-Gavras' Z and Peter Watkins' The War Game to Paul Greengrass' Bloody Sunday.

The black-and-white film dramatises the bloody rebellion against French colonial rule in Algeria, part of an eight-year conflict in which the torture and "disappearance" of civilians, including women and children, was common and a "pacification" programme destroyed several thousand villages, leaving 2 million Algerians homeless.

Pontecorvos' film has the urgent whiff of documentary footage - it employs a cinema-verite style that has been widely imitated but never bettered - but every remarkable frame was shot a decade after the events, using thousands of Algerians as extras.

The resulting film has a chilling resonance in the age of American-occupied Iraq and Israeli-occupied Palestine and achieves an awesome cinematic force thanks to Pontecorvo's then-groundbreaking style (including a deeply menacing use of shadow) and the potent score by Ennio Morricone.

While its political sympathies are plain, the film achieves a scrupulous even-handedness, neither romanticising the freedom fighters' terrorist acts nor demonising the French, whose command is embodied in Colonel Mathieu (Jean Martin).

But neither does the director, an Italian who fought the fascists and quit the Communist Party after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, allow that there is some sort of moral equivalence between the actions of National Liberation Front (FLN) and the French.

"I think it is insignificant," he told an interviewer at the time of the film's release, "to say 'They killed 10; they killed two'. The problem is that [the Algerians] are in a situation in which the only factor is oppression. You must judge who is historically condemned and who is right. And to give the feeling that you identify with those who are right."

The film was an immediate success in Algeria, Italy (it won the supreme prize at Venice and nine other festivals) and the US, where it was nominated for three Academy Awards, but it was banned in France and Britain until 1971. It is, perhaps, a testimony to its timelessness that the Pentagon reportedly showed it to Special Operations staff as the resistance against the US military began to stiffen in Iraq.

* The Battle of Algiers, 123 mins, rated PG, at the Academy Cinema in Auckland from tomorrow.