[Marxism] Gillo Pontecorvo

[Louis Proyect]

NY Times, October 14, 2006
Gillo Pontecorvo, Director of ‘Battle of Algiers,’ Dies
By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO

ROME, Oct. 13 — Gillo Pontecorvo, the Italian 
filmmaker who explored terrorism and torture in 
colonial Algeria in the powerful and influential 
1965 classic, “The Battle of Algiers,” died here on Thursday. He was 86.

His death was confirmed by a hospital spokesman, 
Nicola Cerbino, but no cause was given, The 
Associated Press said. Other news reports said he 
had suffered a heart attack a few months ago.

A documentary maker for much of his career, Mr. 
Pontecorvo made only a handful of feature films, 
writing and directing them. Most have political 
overtones. In his first, “The Wide Blue Road” 
(1957), the theme is class struggle in a fishing 
village; “Kapo” (1960), an Academy Award nominee 
for best foreign film, depicts the lot of a 
Jewish girl in a World War II concentration camp; 
“Ogro” (1979) concerns terrorism in Spain at the end of the Franco regime.

Another major film, “Burn!” (1969), starring 
Marlon Brando and released by United Artists, 
centers on a slave revolt against colonial 
masters on a Portuguese-controlled Caribbean 
island. Though set in the 19th century, it 
contains overt references to the film’s own time.

But Mr. Pontecorvo will be remembered best for 
“The Battle of Algiers,” a stark portrayal, shot 
in black and white, of the bloody uprisings that 
led to Algeria’s independence from France in 
1962. Admired and honored when it first appeared, 
it received renewed acclaim when it was 
rereleased in the United States in 2004. A. O. 
Scott, writing in The New York Times, called the 
film “astonishing cinema vérité” and “a political 
thriller of unmatched realism and a combat picture remorseless in its clarity.”

The movie was based on a book by Saadi Yacef, who 
had been the leader of the insurgent cell in the 
Algiers Casbah that the French crushed in 1957. 
He survived capture and, after Algerian 
independence, approached Mr. Pontecorvo to make the film.

“Had it been up to Yacef, the result would have 
been pure propaganda,” the author Michael 
Ignatieff wrote in The New York Times Magazine in 
2004. “Pontecorvo held out for a deeper vision, 
and the result is a masterpiece, at once a 
justification for acts of terror and an unsparing 
account of terror’s cost, including to the cause it serves.”

The film depicts a cycle of escalating violence 
and torture as revolutionaries of the National 
Liberation Front attack fellow Arabs and the 
French police, who then retaliate, only to provoke more attacks.

Mr. Yacef also produced the film and had a 
starring role as the leader of the 
revolutionaries. Indeed, the cast of the film, 
shot on location in the Casbah, consisted almost 
entirely of nonprofessional actors, adding to its grim documentary quality.

“The Battle of Algiers” won the Golden Lion for 
best film at the 1966 Venice International Film 
Festival. (Mr. Pontecorvo directed the festival 
for four years, starting in 1992.) But its legend 
grew as it was used as a kind of training film by 
both urban guerrillas and the authorities trying 
to suppress them. The Black Panthers studied the 
film in the 1960’s, and in 2003, months after the 
war against Iraqi insurgents began, the Pentagon 
screened the film for military and civilian war planners.

In a 2004 interview with The International Herald 
Tribune, Mr. Pontecorvo said he had found the 
Pentagon’s interest in the film “a little 
strange.” The most “The Battle of Algiers” could 
do, he said, is “teach how to make cinema, not war.”

Gilberto Pontecorvo was born on Nov. 19, 1919, in 
Pisa, Italy, one of 10 children of a wealthy 
Jewish industrialist. He was a steadfast 
Communist, and his older brother, Bruno 
Pontecorvo, became a prominent nuclear scientist 
who defected to Moscow in the 1950’s.

Mr. Pontecorvo moved to Paris after the Mussolini 
government passed laws in 1938 discriminating 
against Jews. When Nazi forces invaded Paris in 
1940, he moved to St.-Tropez. He later joined the 
anti-Fascist resistance in Italy, becoming leader 
of a faction in Milan. He was a tennis teacher, a 
deep-sea diver and a newspaper correspondent in 
France before he turned to film.

After the war, he became an assistant to the 
directors Yves Allégret and Joris Ivens in Paris. 
Returning to Italy, he made documentaries. Though 
he stopped making feature films in 1979, with 
“Ogro,” he continued to make documentaries, shorts and television commercials.

He is survived by his wife, Picci, and three sons, Ludovico, Marco and Simone.

Mr. Pontecorvo was to lie in wake at City Hall in 
Rome until Saturday morning. The Italian news 
agency ANSA said that the government of Algeria 
had sent a crown in his honor to be placed near the bier.