Nonstop Revolutionary Film Series - Aug. 2

Gillo Pontecorvo's film The Battle of Algiers (1966)
(followed by discussion with Bob Devine)

Monday, August 2
7:00 PM
Nonstop Institute
305 N. Walnut Street
free admission

The Battle of Algiers by Gillo Pontecorvo, Franco Solinas, and Saadi Yacef (Italy/Algeria, 1966) is a narrative re-creation, shot in a documentary newsreel style, of a major battle in the casbah of Algiers in the Algerian war for independence from France (1954-62). While awarded the grand prize at the Venice Film Festival, nominated for 3 Academy Awards, and critically praised for not romanticizing either the Algerian or French combatants, it was banned in France for 5 years. The cast of mostly non-professional actors includes Saadi Yacef, who authored the book Souvenirs de la Bataille d'Algier while in a French prison and plays a fictionalized version of his own real life role as a leader of the FLN (National Liberation Front). Pontecorvo enlisted one professional actor, Jean Martin, who had been fired from the Theatre National Populaire for signing a manifesto against the Algerian War. Evocative sound includes an orchestral score by Ennio Morricone and Algerian drumming. The film focuses less on the violence than on the fundamental characteristics of urban guerilla warfare and organization. Director and co-writer Pontecorvo was inspired as a filmmaker by postwar Italian neorealist films, and had himself fought as an anti-Fascist partisan in the Milan Resistance in 1943. The Battle of Algiers was co-written by Franco Solinas, who would later write Costa-Gavras' State of Siege.

This is the third film screened in Bob Devine's 6-part Workshop on Revolutionary Film. Over the next 4 weeks film scholar Devine will present revolutionary international narrative films produced from 1925 to 1996 as part of this workshop series. The public is invited to attend the individual films or to engage these important historical films as an integrated series that runs every Monday through August 23 (cost of each screening is pay as you are able). For this series Devine has programmed narrative films that are radical or oppositional in terms of (a) production circumstance, (b) form, (c) content, or (d) circumstance of reception. All films will be followed by discussions of their respective historical and cultural contexts, in order to discern patterns across cultures that might be considered revolutionary. Selected films in the series are from Russia, the U.S., Algeria, Cuba, Senegal and Zimbabwe. For more information on the workshop series see http://nonstopinstitute.org/workshops/workshop-in-revolutionary-film/

Bob Devine is a film scholar, filmmaker, educator, and internationally respected public access media consultant.

For further information:
Contact Chris Hill (chris.hill@nonstopinstitute.org), 767-2327