THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS AT FIFTY: END OF EMPIRE CINEMA AND THE FIRST BANLIEUE FILM Alan O’Leary La bataille d’Alger (The Battle of Algiers, Gillo Pontecorvo), which premiered at the Venice Film Festival on September 3, 1966, has turned fifty. In itself, this fact is trivial; after all, a great many films are reaching their half-century mark these days. The difference is that The Battle of Algiers—an Italian- Algerian co-production commissioned by the Algerians themselves as a hymn to their achievement of independence from France in 1962—seems to reach far beyond cinema itself to attain an “endlessly renewed contemporary resonance.” 1 The re-release of Battle in 2004 was marked by ruminations and polemics regarding the film’ s argument for urban terror- ism in the service of national liberation. 2 Commentators put a new emphasis on the film’ s picturing of Islam, a dimension of Battle that seemed to require comment in the light of September 11, 2001. 3 Today, attacks inspired or directed by ISIS seem to ensure that the film and its sympathetic version of “Islamic” violence retain a controversial visibility. 4 At the same time, the film’ s presentation of the “rational” argument made by the French military for the use of torture as a means to gather intelligence speaks to Battle’ s ambivalence about its anticolonial theme. 5 Let it be said immediately that discourses situating Battle in relation to contemporary Islamist or Islamist-inspired violence partake of an old-fashioned Orientalism that pos- its a clash of civilizations, homogenizes North Africa and the Middle East in terms of a “pan-Arab terrorism,” and obscures the history of Western occupation as itself terror- istic (whether as the direct violence of oppression or as the structural violence of racial hierarchies and economic ex- ploitation). 6 But such discourse is also of a piece with the negative reception of Battle that dates back to its original premiere at the Venice film festival, when the French delegation walked out in protest. 7 Subsequent denuncia- tion was as loud from the left as from the right, with the former dismissing the film’ s “objectivity”—that is, its pre- sentation of the human cost to both sides and its refusal to demonize even the torturers—as a sop to bourgeois sensi- bility. 8 In fact, any film dealing with the ugly circumstan- ces of political violence will inevitably generate debate and controversy, but it is valid to ask whether, apart from its relevance to world affairs, there is anything left to say about Battle today. 9 Its fiftieth anniversary offers an occasion to challenge some of the commonplaces about the film and to show that there remains much to be clarified about its character. An attention to location in the film and a focus on its little- discussed coda can resituate Battle as a film that, going beyond its well-recognized revolutionary narrative, deals with the end of the French empire and represents the first in a line of banlieue cinema—that is, as a film that presciently antici- pates postcolonial conditions on the territory of France itself. End of Empire Cinema As archival material related to Battle becomes more readily available, several commonplaces about the film can be inter- rogated or discarded now, on the tenth anniversary of Gillo Pontecorvo’ s death. Consider an illustrated press release from the archive at Turin’ s Museo del Cinema dedicated to Pontecorvo. 10 Apparently produced to support the distribu- tion of Battle in the United States, the press release asserts that “the realism achieved by director Pontecorvo is accom- plished by using the actual Casbah locations and residents as well as a cast that is almost entirely nonprofessional.” These terms––realism, nonprofessional actors, Casbah location, even the auteurist focus on the director himself––remain today the default lexicon in discussions of Battle, obscur- ing important aspects of the film. The emphasis on the intentionalityand creative will of its director disguises the extent to which the film was the expression of anticolonial sentiment worldwide: Battle took the form it did in order to reach and address both national and international audiences. 11 FILM QUARTERLY 17 Film Quarterly, Vol. 70, Number 2, pp. 17–29, ISSN 0015-1386, electronic ISSN 1533-8630. © 2016 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www. ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: 10.1525/FQ.2016.70.2.17.