Battle of Algiers tells the story of the FLN campaign of terror in Algiers in the years 1954-1957 through the eyes of its participants, centering on Ali la Pointe, the hoodlum turned revolutionary, Colonel Mathieu, the good soldier doing what it takes to keep Algeria French, El-Hadi Jaffar, the FLN operative leading a movement, the French journalists covering the story, etc.

It is one of those films that you could build a course around. It is, to begin with, a gut wrenching (jaw dropping? heart stirring?) film, the kind of movie you remember where you were when you first saw it. It offers a hot take on the history of decolonization – debuting in theaters in 1966, just a few years after the conclusion of the Algerian War (1962). It is an important addition to the history of cinema, a perennial entry on “greatest films of all time” lists, a film that appears pulled from weekly newsreels (though there is not a moment of documentary footage in the film) with a brilliant soundtrack. It is, moreover, a powerful moral reckoning with the history of colonialism and its violent undoing. In the years since 9/11 it has had a second life as a touchstone for conversations on guerilla warfare and torture (yes, really).

The story is based on real people and real events from the so-called “Battle of Algiers,” in 1956-1957, in which FLN operatives targeted pied-noirs (European settlers) and pied-noirs organizations targeted Algerian Arabs. The short story is that the French handed over control to the Army, which eliminated the FLN from Algiers with a brutal campaign of torture and executions. The larger story is of a Pyrrhic victory that would give way shortly to the fall of the French government (and return of DeGaulle), the failure of the French war effort in Algeria, and a negotiated settlement that would hand over power in Algeria to the FLN.

The film “takes us there” – but we have to be careful of being swept away by its immediacy. Battle of Algiers is the work of the Italian filmmaker, Gillo Pontecorvo, together with the screenwriter Franco Solinas. Together – and with the support of the Algerian government that supported the filming and Italian backers that helped pay for it – they offered up an interpretation of recent events. It is to us as historians to take the measure of their story…