Gillo Pontecorvo says: Arise, Wretched of the Earth!
Through an incisive comparison of Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 La Bataille D’Alger and Frantz Fanon’s 1961 Wretched of the Earth, Umar Al Khair pens a powerful essay about colonialism, rooted in both the past and the present.
In 1961, Frantz Fanon wrote, “The colonial world is a world divided into compartments… Yet if we examine this system of compartments, we will at least be able to reveal the lines of force it implies.” In 1966, Gillo Pontecorvo, Franco Solinas and the score of Ennio Morricone would bring this world of coloniser/colonised compartments from the distant land of Algeria onto the screens of the French imperial core. From April 1948 till the moment you read this essay, the settler-colonial state of Israel has imposed this world of compartments onto reality with blood-soaked efficiency.
In my view, the award for best film adaptation ever goes to a film adapting an entirely different book. (The Battle of Algiers was based on the memoirs of Saadi Yacef). Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 La Bataille D’Alger (The Battle of Algiers), not only serves as a documentary for the real Battle of Algiers that occurred 10 years prior, but visually brings to life Fanon’s diagnosis of the colonial disease with an uncanny accuracy. When you read of the “frontiers (which) are shown by barracks and police stations” in Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (1961), one must imagine Pontecorvo’s depiction of the sandbags and barbed wire that separate the Casbah from the European quarter in the Battle of Algiers. Taken together, Pontecorvo’s 1966 La Bataille D’Alger and Fanon’s 1961 Wretched of the Earth offer an unrivalled instruction for understanding all states, regimes and societies infected with the disease of coloniality.
Fanon and Pontecorvo expose the bifurcation of space of the colonial world in all of its senses. Most of all they demonstrate that though these worlds exist side by side and are violently brought forth simultaneously through colonisation, there is to be no reconciliation between the two. Fanon and the film’s reproduction of his work demonstrate this irreconcilable bifurcation thrice-fold. They begin with the most immediate, the eyes. Depicting the physical division of the colonial world into clean, defined compartments of coloniser and colonised. Upon this visual dichotomy, they demonstrate the sociality of this bifurcated space; which ultimately reveal themselves through psychological alienation, when the two attempt to cross into each other.
Physical Depiction of the Coloniser's World and the World of the Colonised
When we first think of the physical bifurcation of space we most immediately think of the sandbagged and barbed fenced checkpoints that cauterize the Casbah from the European quarter halfway through the film. To be sure this is the most visceral visual appearance of the borders between the world coloniser and colonised. Where the lines of force are no longer implied, but right in your face. However, Pontecorvo does not actually wait that long to reveal the bifurcation of space. From the opening of the film, the tight backalleys of the Casbah are juxtaposed against the wide thoroughfares of the European quarter. The juxtapositions between the two worlds build till one of the film’s many stellar moments of cinematography: the camera pans across all of Algiers contrasting the entire European Quarter against the Casbah. In what can only be described as a visual translation, La Bataille D’Alger reproduces Fanon’s description of the physical disjoint between the European quarter and the native settlement pixel for word.
Fanon describes “The colonist’s sector is a sector built to last, all stone and steel. It’s a sector of lights and paved roads,”
7:02 La cite europeenne (the European quarter), a world of stone and steel.
The European quarter, the coloniser's sector, is a world characterised by order and homogeneity. Its ordered rows of stone and steel predictable. In the mind of the colonial urban planner, where every window and every streetlamp occur with predictable regularity, predicts no reason for why the coloniser’s world should ever disappear. It is the coloniser’s world that will remain.
7:15 The Casbah – “people are piled one on top of the other, the shacks squeezed tightly together.”
The Casbah, or the realm of the native, on the other hand is according to Fanon, “superfluous”. There is no order that guarantees that it will remain. One “shanty” flows into another and one struggles to make out one definite house from another. There is no order in the construction; it is all a haphazard, inchoate mass. As Fanon notes, “The colonized’s sector, or at least the “native quarters”, the shanty town, the Medina, the reservation, is a disreputable place inhabited by disreputable people. It’s a world with no space, people are piled one on top of the other, the shacks squeezed tightly together.”
7:08 The Casbah juxtaposed side by side with European Quarter
In this frame, the Casbah and the European quarter are placed side-by-side; though they coexist so very intimately, they are simultaneously polar opposites, impossible to reconcile. It captures in a single frame the ultimate struggle of the film; the conquest of hierarchical ordered colonial structures of steel over the disordered, superfluous, inchoate native mass and the defiance of organic human plurality against rigidly inhuman colonial systems.
The Illegal Israeli Settlement of Eli and the Palestinian village of قريوت (Qaryout)
Not to be outdone, the settler colonial state of Israel offers a 2024 update. This time in 4K full colour. Colours so real you can taste the subjugation. An even more vivid reproduction of the visual dichotomy between the coloniser’s quarter and the native’s reservation. The neat rows of the illegal Israeli settlement, more at home in a posh American suburb than the ancient land of Palestine, threaten to subsume the almost random smattering of homes that form the Palestinian village. A village which at a glance bears more resemblance to a series of natural stone outcroppings on a green hill.
Fanon and Pontecorvo’s portrayal of the Casbah as an unordered inchoate mass of buildings is but a metaphor for the coloniser’s gaze towards the native. Just like how the buildings of the Casbah flow into each other, impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins; there are no individual natives. They are one single inchoate mass. Nothing more than back drop for the coloniser to impose his violent will and create history.
7:32 -7:35 The inchoate mass of natives stares back
Here Pontecorvo simultaneously depicts this European gaze of the natives as this superfluous inchoate mass through fast panning shots which blur the crowd of natives at times. However, Pontecorvo subverts this by letting the camera rest at certain points, forcing the viewer to dispel this gaze. As the camera rests, multiple members of this so-called indistinguishable native mass stare directly into the camera forcing the viewer to engage with the reality of their individuality and above all, humanity. You need not know who this person is but by staring at the viewer, with the veil of abstract otherness dispelled, the viewer is forced to recognise their common humanity.
The 2 Species: Who belongs in the Casbah?
“What parcels out the world [into a world of compartments] is to begin with the fact of belonging or not belonging to a given race, a given species.” Here Fanon like Pontecorvo in the film, seeks to illustrate that the bifurcated space is inherently social. It is its social content that reveals the bifurcation and its irreconcilability. The division into world of coloniser and colonized is to determine whether one belongs to the species of the coloniser and native. These are not members of a common human species. They are coloniser and native with their distinct patterns of behaviour in their respective habitats. Never shall the sheep become the lion. Reconciliation is impossible.
So who is the native?
8:21 Ali La Pointe; the swindling native who covets the wealth of the colonizer.
“The colonized man is an envious man.” “The look that the native turns on the settler’s town is a look of lust, a look of envy; it expresses his dreams of possession; … to sit at the settler’s table, to sleep in the settler’s bed.” The native deprived of so much in his reservation, desires all of the colonizer’s world. Pontecorvo answers Fanon’s description with the character of Ali La Pointe.
He is first introduced as nothing more than a low life who is in the business of swindling the good standing European citizens of their money through a rigged game of chance. He embodies the colonial gaze of the native, a good for nothing trickster who leeches upon the enterprise of the coloniser. Most importantly, however, Ali La Pointe is in the world of the coloniser. It is one thing to be a low-life native in the native reservation. However, for a native to enter the colonizer’s world, bringing his native ways — the coloniser’s world cannot let this stand.
8:29 The native is unwelcome in the colonised world
The native and his nativeness, his alien-ness is an aberration that must be corrected. This is a native who has broken out of the place designed for him in the colonial world; as labourer, servant, official – a cog in the colonising machine. Ali La Pointe’s failure to submit to the productive order of the coloniser is what marks him as alien in the ordered world of the coloniser.
8:26 The colonial police stands ready to correct the aberration that is the native’s intrusion into the colonizer’s world.
And thus, the frontier of force which holds the colonial world together acts to correct this aberration. Ready to return the native to its appropriate place.
8:41: Police or civilian, the coloniser’s world recognises the alien-ness of the native. Simultaneously, from La Pointe’s perspective, the coloniser’s world as a whole appears to conspire against him to reject him.
However, Pontecorvo here demonstrates that the policeman is but the pointed expression of the force of the colonial world. A force that is held by all colonisers that form the colonial world. Various Europeans in the colonial world sell Ali La Pointe out to the policeman and some as in the still above, directly act to correct the native’s expression of his nativity. In essence, the colonial world as a whole, civilian or police cannot stand the alien intrusion of the native.
If Ali La Pointe’s introduction is insufficient to reveal the alienness and irreconcilability of the native and the colonial world, Pontecorvo repeats this dynamic of the colonial world as whole, both civilian and police, rejecting and throwing out a native once more.
After a spate of police shootings, the French colonial police are on the hunt for the perpetrators. The city as a whole is also on edge as for the first time the colonial world, which for so long directed violence against the native, finds the native directing that violence against it.
33:30 – 34:20 For the simple fact of being a native, the harmless destitute man is rendered criminal by the colonial world itself.
However, the FLN (the Algerian resistance) is nowhere to be found. Instead, the colonial world directs its paranoia to an elderly man. The elderly man, destitute and clutching a piece of bread hardly strikes the image of committed terrorist. Yet, for the simple fact that he is a native shamelessly displaying his native destitution and misery, is marked as criminal. Not by a formal trial, but by sheer mob identification of the destitute’s alienness. Europeans of every kind come out of their homes onto their balconies to curse the nativeness of the destitute with little care for the fact that the destitute had little to do with the shootings. The coloniser recognises that the native desires his place; “when their glances meet he ascertains bitterly, … “They want to take our place.”” Thus, the coloniser, in truth, understands that violence by the native towards the coloniser is only rational. Only realising that, then must every native be seen as potential criminal. Their destitution is seen by the colonial world as latent violent intent.
We’ve covered how the colonial world responds to the native. How then does the coloniser act in the realm of the native?
The sector of the native is termed as a reservation as the native and the world he inhabits is a world that is hemmed in. From the cramped depictions of the Casbah to the repudiation of the colonial world of his nativeness, the native is constricted and imprisoned into his Casbah. Surely there must be a counter-reaction. How does the colonial world keep the native hemmed in so long; in the case of Algeria, 132 years?
Violence.
In The Battle of Algiers, the Uniform is the glove by which the colonial world “advises him (the native) by means of rifle butts … not to budge”. If one were to observe throughout the film the instances when Europeans enter the Casbah there is one thing that unites them all. From the beginning of the film till its end, the only Europeans who enter the Casbah are uniform wearing men whether that of the Policemen of the first half or the army once the battle is in full swing.
14:19 A European policeman pushes the native aside without second thought.
The only time the colonisers enter the colonial world is to enforce upon the native his lack of spatial freedom, to enforce the colonial straitjacket. The natives marry in cloistered internal courtyards rather than celebrate their matrimony out in the open. In large part, the native lives his life in private. The native’s unfreedom in both the colonial world and his own Casbah is juxtaposed against the freedom the coloniser experiences in both. The policeman displays an ease of movement within the Casbah. He pushes aside the native as if he were leaf in his way.
36:34 The commissioner and his accomplice on their way to plant a bomb in the Casbah
The above shows the one exception to the rule of the uniform. In response to the natives’ challenge to the coloniser’s monopoly on violence, and frustrated with what feels to be the limitations of the colonial system’s system of ordered violence; the police commissioner seeks to shed the uniform and take matters into his own hands. It may appear that the policeman has now descended to the level of the native; gone native so to speak. However, there is nothing native about his violence and the way it invaded the world of the colonised. He flashes away the checkpoint with his ID. He does not need to muscularly overcome all the barriers to his entry of the colonial world. All he has done is translate the formal colonial violence he executes by day into informal medieval colonial revenge. It confirms that the only meaning behind the uniforms of the colonial order is violence. Sure, the commissioner is no picture of the “civilised European” but none are Man in the colonial world. In forcefully depriving the colonised of their humanity, the coloniser has murdered his own.
The duality of the violence of the colonial order by both uniformed men who appear to execute a rational system of law and by activist settlers who execute a far less restrained form of violence but maintain the frontier of violence against the native remains no less true today in Palestine as it did in Pontecorvo’s Algiers.
Left, Israeli Police in the West Bank. Right, Armed Israeli Illegal Settlers
Whether donning the formal uniform of the colonial world’s formal system of ordered violence or taking violence into their own hand, that violence is the only dialogue by the colonial order to the native, whether in 1960s Algiers or present-day Palestine, remains the rule.
Psychic Alienation
The French commissioner’s violence against the Casbah seals the fate of the Casbah. Any doubters in the decolonial cause are gone. The Casbah knows there is to be no quarter. Thus, the FLN devises a plan. 3 women are tasked to place bombs in 3 different locations throughout the European quarter. Most often when discussing this scene, most are drawn to the discourse on violence and the role women play in revolutionary movements. However, for me, the bombs the women carry and the entire sequence represent an exercise in alienation. How the colonial world on a psychological level will remain alien. Not only does the colonial world reject the native, the native mind recognises the repressed hostility and violence of the colonial world towards it.
41:36 - 42:51 In 1966, Pontecorvo is saying makeup is revolutionary.
Even before the 3 women enter the European quarter, they must abandon their native appearance and look more European so they may evade the watchful gaze of the colonial soldiers that now encircle the Casbah. The unveiling, the shearing of her hair and the corrosive chemical conquest of her hair by hydrogen peroxide represent the violent abandonment of their physical native identity that entry into the colonial world demands. They abandon, as many natives do under the rule of coloniser, their native self and attempt to remake themselves as poor ersatz of the colonizer species. As Fanon warns, the colonizer attempts to call the native to “the ways of the white man, of the master, of the oppressor. And as we know, in this matter many are called but few are chosen”.
The 3 مجاهدات (Mujahidaat — women who struggle) of Algiers; زهرة ظريف بيطاط (Zuhra Drif-Bitat), جميلة بوحيرد (Djamila Bouhired), سامية لخضاري (Samia Lakhdari)
The women are scarce, making small movements, clearly uncomfortable and nervous. Their eyes dart constantly, on the lookout for danger. Though bearing bombs, it is the women who resemble the prey in a sea of sharks. In reality, the bomb is but an excuse for them to honestly grasp their unwelcomeness and alienation in the colonial world. The alienation and unwelcomeness of the colonial world that every native experiences, understands and internalises, bomb or no bomb. The native knows she must never let her guard down. The bomb brings the terror that haunts the mind of every other native without a bomb in the colonial world to an irrepressible intensity. Even when the colonial world appears to welcome the native, she knows within her mind that she is not welcome; that this world is not her own. The native must make herself scarce — she polices her own movement fearful of revealing her inherently alien nature, fearful of revealing her nativity. When the bombs go off, all the women have done is return that very same terror back onto the colonial world.
Spatial Liberation
The people, no longer just natives, of Algeria assert their nationhood.
What follows the trio of bombings by the women is a spiralling descent into violence. However, that is not the focus of this essay. Many who approach both Fanon and the Battle of Algiers reduce both into a discourse on violence. While yes, both argue violence is an important if not the critical aspect of decolonisation, I wish to centre how both depict the way colonialism shapes the relationship between people and the space they occupy. In this final moment of the film, Pontecorvo depicts the inhabitants of the Casbah marching triumphantly onto the wide streets of the European quarter. No doubt the colonial troops aim their weapons at them and attempt to arrest their march. At this point colonial rule seems to remain present. However, the natives no longer submit to the restricted space the colonial order has long sought to impose upon them. They assert confidently upon all of Algiers that this their land, their home and that they are men and women. They are the people of Algeria. It is the restoration of their relationship to their land, and their rejection of the bifurcation of space that allows the people of Algeria to reassert their humanity.
Palestinian women leading the charge during the First Intifada (1988)
In much the same way, Palestinians have time and time again rejected the colonial bifurcation of space, and the damning title of native or Arab and assert their claim to their land and through that their humanity and personhood. Let me end this essay with the first line of The Internationale which inspired the title of Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth that this essay is based on.
Debout, les damnes de la terre. Arise, wretched of the earth.