Initial reception
Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo (second from right) with his wife Picci and Algerian actor and co-producer Saadi Yacef posing beside some guests at the 27th Venice Film Festival, in which the movie won the Golden Lion.The film won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and was nominated for three Academy Awards (in non-consecutive years, a unique achievement): Best Foreign Language Film in 1966, and Best Screenplay (Gillo Pontecorvo and Franco Solinas) and Best Director (Gillo Pontecorvo) in 1968.[16] Other awards include the City of Venice Cinema Prize (1966), the International Critics Award (1966), the City of Imola Prize (1966), the Italian Silver Ribbon Prize (director, photography, producer), the Ajace Prize of the Cinema d'Essai (1967), the Italian Golden Asphodel (1966), Diosa de Plata at the Acapulco Film Festival (1966), the Golden Grolla (1966), the Riccione Prize (1966), Best Film of 1967 by Cuban critics (in a poll sponsored by Cuban magazine Cine), and the United Churches of America Prize (1967).
Given national divisions over the Algerian War, The Battle of Algiers generated considerable political controversy in France. It was one of the first films to directly confront the issue of French imperialism that reached the French Métropole; earlier films like Godard's Le petit soldat had only addressed such matters in passing.[17] Its initial festival screenings sparked nearly unanimous backlash among French critics. At the Venice Film Festival, the delegation of French journalists refused to attend the film's screening and abandoned the festival altogether when it received the Golden Lion.[18] Despite the high international acclaim, the national press and film industry united in opposition to the idea of releasing the film in French cinemas.[19]
The Battle of Algiers was formally banned by the French government for one year, though it did not see release in France for several more years because no private distributor would take the film.[18] Pontecorvo maintained that he had made a politically neutral film, contrary to the reaction of a French government that he described as "very sensitive on the Algerian issue," and he said "The Algerians put no obstacles in our way because they knew that I'd be making a more or less objective film about the subject."[20] In 1970 the film finally received a certificate for distribution in France, but release was further delayed until 1971 because of terroristic threats as well as civil opposition from veterans' groups.[19] The Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS), a far-right paramilitary group, made bomb threats to theaters that sought to show the film.[18] Pontecorvo also received death threats.[17] Upon its release, reviews in the French press were generally much more favourable. Anti-censorship advocates came to the film's defense, and many critics reevaluated the film in light of the country's recent protest movements.[19] Most French audiences found its portrayal of the conflict to be nuanced and balanced, and the only disruption occurred in Lyons when an attendant threw ink at the screen.[18] Also, The international version of the film was shortened with torture scenes cut for British and American theaters.[1]
In the United States, the response to the film was altogether and immediately more positive than it had been in France.[18] The film achieved a surprising degree of popular success at the American box office, stoked by anti-war sentiments amid the movement against military involvement in Vietnam.[21] In a review for the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert called it a "great film" that "may be a deeper film experience than many audiences can withstand: too cynical, too true, too cruel and too heartbreaking. It is about the Algerian war, but those not interested in Algeria may substitute another war; The Battle of Algiers has a universal frame of reference."[22] Robert Sitton at The Washington Post called the film "One of the most beautiful I have ever seen" and said it "is just as important for our times as the works of Griffith, Leni Riefenstahl, Carl Dreyer and Luchino Visconti were for theirs."[18] Pauline Kael championed the film in The New Yorker, writing: "The burning passion of Pontecorvo acts directly on your emotions. He is the most dangerous kind of Marxist: a Marxist poet."[18]
Retrospective appraisal and influence
On review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 99% based on 93 reviews, with an average rating of 9.10/10; the site's consensus reads: "A powerful, documentary-like examination of the response to an occupying force, The Battle of Algiers hasn't aged a bit since its release in 1966."[23] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 96 out of 100—indicating "universal acclaim"—based on 22 reviews collected since its 2004 re-release.[24]
By the time of the film's 2004 re-release, French reception was much more positive, with most critics accepting the film's aesthetic merits and historic significance as a given. A review in Libération deemed it the "best film ever made about the Algerian war" because it had been "the most credible and the fairest". A notable dissent came from Cahiers du Cinéma, which devoted a special feature to the film comprising five articles by various authors; the magazine's collective editorial denouncement of the film was "cast in such strong terms that it undermined, on moral grounds, the legitimacy of any critic or analyst who did not condemn the film, let alone anyone who dared consider it worthy of filmic attention," though ultimately their disapproval exerted little influence upon the broader French media.[19]
Roger Ebert added the film to his "Great Movies" series in 2004.[21] The film occupied the 48th place on the Critics' Top 250 Films of Sight and Sound's 2012 poll of the greatest films of all time,[25] as well as 120th place on Empire magazine's list of the 500 greatest movies of all time.[26] In 2010, Empire ranked the movie 6th in its list of the 100 Best Films of World Cinema.[27] It was selected to enter the list of the "100 Italian films to be saved". In 2007, the film was ranked fifth in The Guardian's readers' poll listing the 40 greatest foreign films of all time.[28]
The Battle of Algiers has influenced numerous filmmakers. The American film director Stanley Kubrick praised the film's artistry in an interview with the French magazine Positif: "All films are, in a sense, false documentaries. One tries to approach reality as much as possible, only it's not reality. There are people who do very clever things, which have completely fascinated and fooled me. For example, The Battle of Algiers. It's very impressive."[29] Also, according to Anthony Frewin, Kubrick's personal assistant, he stated: "When I started work for Stanley in September 1965 he told me that I couldn't really understand what cinema was capable of without seeing The Battle of Algiers. He was still enthusing about it prior to his death."[29] The Greek-French political filmmaker Costa-Gavras cited the film as an influence on his filmmaking.[30] The American filmmaker Steven Soderbergh took inspiration from the film while directing the drug war drama Traffic, noting that it (along with Costa-Gavras's Z) had "that great feeling of things that are caught, instead of staged, which is what we were after."[31][32][33] The German filmmaker Werner Herzog admired the film and made it one of the few films designated as required viewing to his film school students.[34][35] The English filmmaker Ken Loach, who saw the film in 1966, listed it among his top 10 favorite films of all time and mentioned its influence on his work: "It used non-professional actors. It was not over-dramatic. It was low key. It showed the impact of colonialism on daily lives. These techniques had an important influence on my filmmaking."[36] The American actor and filmmaker Ben Affleck said The Battle of Algiers was a key influence on his film Argo (2012).[37] The British-American filmmaker Christopher Nolan has named the film as one of his favorites and has credited it as an influence on his films The Dark Knight Rises (2012) and Dunkirk.[38][39]
The film has also received praise from political commentators. The Palestinian-American academic Edward Said (famous for his work Orientalism) praised The Battle of Algiers (along with Pontecorvo's other film, Burn!) as the two films "stand unmatched and unexcelled since they were made in the 60s. Both films together constitute a political and aesthetic standard never again equaled."[40] The British-Pakistani writer and activist Tariq Ali placed The Battle of Algiers in his top 10 films list for the 2012 Sight and Sound poll.[41] In 2023, the progressive American magazine The New Republic ranked it first place on its list of the 100 most significant political films of all time.[42]
The Battle of Algiers and guerrilla movements
The release of The Battle of Algiers coincided with the decolonization period and national liberation wars, as well as a rising tide of left-wing radicalism in European nations in which a large minority showed interest in armed struggle. Beginning in the late 1960s, The Battle of Algiers gained a reputation for inspiring political violence; in particular, the tactics of urban guerrilla warfare and terrorism in the movie supposedly were copied by the Black Panthers, the Provisional Irish Republican Army, the Palestinian Liberation Organization and the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front.[43] The Battle of Algiers was apparently Andreas Baader's favourite movie.[44]
Pontecorvo, hearing that the journalist Jimmy Breslin had characterized The Battle of Algiers as a guerrilla warfare training film on American television, replied:
Perhaps he is right, but that is much too simple. The film champions everyone who is deprived of his rights, and encourages him to fight for them. But it is an analogy for many situations: Vietnam, for one. What I would prefer for people to discover is something that is in all my films, a certain kind of tenderness for man, an affection which grows from the fragility of the human condition.[45]
