Reopening the Past

This essay interrogates The Battle of Algiers (1966) as a film that actively theorizes the inner workings of colonial power, anticolonial resistance, and the unstable futures produced in the aftermath of the revolution. I contend that the film is a cinematic argument shaped by military doctrine, decolonization, and the politics of censorship that defined its reception in France and elsewhere. Reading the film alongside French counterinsurgency texts, such as Roger Trinquier’s Modern Warfare, this essay substantiates how The Battle of Algiers refracts and critiques the logic of French counterinsurgency, particularly its emphasis on intelligence networks, mobility management, and the biopolitical control of the Casbah. Drawing on Frantz Fanon’s writings as a primary source of the exact historical moment, this essay posits that the film can be read as a work of “Fanonian cinema” that articulates the psychological, gendered, and racialized apparitions of colonial domination while also imagining the contours of a revolutionary future. Placing the film in conversation with current scholarship, this essay suggests that The Battle of Algiers endures not only for its depiction of colonial violence but also for its illumination of postcolonial contradictions in which institutionalized resistance risks reproducing the hierarchies it sought to dismantle. Ultimately, the film maintains its relevance by revealing how cinema operates as a site where historical memory is contested and decolonial futures are imagined.

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 The Counter-Archive and The Battle of Algiers

Fredrick Cooper argues that historical analysis can “make the past seem less closed” and thereby, “help us at least recognize the possibility of a more open future” (Cooper 2005, 93). His point pushes against the way historians and states often compress the past into a linear ledger of events that smooths over conflict, contingencies, and contradiction. The French-Algerian colonial encounter demonstrates what is at stake in this restrictive strategy with lucid clarity. After Algeria gained independence, French officials reframed the war as a “natural transition” in global history and simply a moment when France followed in lockstep with broader geopolitical trends. Todd Shepard coins this rhetorical maneuver as the “invention of decolonization” – a narrative that recasts military defeat and political crisis as, rather, a measured step in the “tide of history” (Shepard 2006, 5). Within this framework, the brutality and ambiguities of the French Algerian colonial encounter are obfuscated and, as a result, define an official archive that perhaps “made the past seem closed”.

This essay argues that Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film The Battle of Algiers functions as a cinematic counter-archive that restores the very histories, contradictions, and forms of violence that French narratives of decolonization attempted to erase. The corollary to this official amnesia is precisely this counter-archive, which insists on preserving the messy, contradictory, and brutal experiences the French state sought to elide. By illustrating the regimes of surveillance, spatial control, the FLN’s contradictory governance practices, and the generally unstable conditions out of which postcolonial futures emerged, Pontecorvo’s film disrupts this erasure by reopening what the official record sought to seal off. In doing so, the film moves within a Fanonian register, revealing how colonialism distorts humanity and how revolution inherits the fissures and paradoxes it produces.

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Neorealism and The Politics of the Mundane

Much of the film's political and historiographic force, as well as its challenge to the French understanding of “decolonization”, stems from its adoption of the principles and strategies of Italian neorealism. The film’s style reveals the ordinary experiences of everyday people in a quotidian register, emphasizing the mundane and banal crises they face in a world undergoing rapid change. By highlighting the everyday, Ruth Ben-Ghiat suggests that the cinematic grammar of neorealism conveys how issues deemed “trivial” by the elite play a significant role in the lives of the working class and consequently force viewers to confront unfamiliar worldviews (Ben-Ghiat 2001, 42). By placing the viewer in a world outside their own and depicting the daily rhythms of this alternate landscape – such as the density of the Casbah streets or the layered soundscapes of market life -- neorealism enables audiences to sense life in registers beyond their own.

The specific cinematic strategies that define Italian neorealism -- such as nonprofessional actors, close camera shots, overlapping ambient noise, and an attention to the material environment that the subjects occupy -- are prevalent throughout The Battle of Algiers. In the initial sequence of shots that illustrate the Casbah, these techniques convey the daily rhythms of its residents, placing the viewer on the ground with them rather than above them. The camera lingers over children playing in the street, men carrying food, and elderly residents moving through space without acknowledging the camera’s presence. The ambient soundscape of footsteps, children shouting, bits of conversation, and the rough texture of the ground deepens this immersion. Stora's claim that the film seems “newsreel-like” is pertinent (Stora 2007, 365). Yet, the neorealist register also allows the viewer to step into the everyday world of the Casbah and comprehend the humanity that animates it.

In the film's trajectory, this scene establishes the baseline necessary for viewers to understand the world that the French official archive attempts to delegitimize. By presenting the Casbah as a coherent social environment, overflowing with life and culture, the film counters claims that it is inherently a site of perversity, disorder, or degeneracy. At the same time, the scene does not romanticize the environment; it simply presents it as it is, rather than framing it in exceptionalizing or demeaning terms. The underlying argument is that this place is not the “void of chaos” the French register insists upon. Juxtaposed with Todd Shepard’s account of the French “invention of decolonization” (Shepard 2006, 1-12), this baseline clarifies the emptiness of the French claim that the Casbah was naturally “destined for decolonization” or waiting to be reshaped by liberal humanism. Nothing in the scene suggests a desire for assimilation or a longing to become more “French”; instead, the film reveals a world structured by its own traditions and everyday practices, which is indexed through features that the neorealist register restores visibility to in ways the official French archive sought to suppress.

Read through a Fanonian lens, this opening sequence intervenes directly in what he calls the colonial “Manichaean geography” (Fanon 1963, 6), where the colonizer imagines the Casbah as permanent disorder and their own environment as sustainable and pure. By emphasizing the daily rhythms of Algerian life, the film disrupts this binary. Fanon writes that the colonial world is “a world divided in two,” and that this division depends on denying the colonized world’s coherence (Fanon 1963, 3). The Battle of Algiers restores that coherence by instantiating the frame of reference the official archive sought to suppress, offering a cinematic counter-archive in which the Casbah’s lived social world becomes legible on its own terms.

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Borders, Bodies, and Colonial Optics

As the first scene illustrates the Casbah’s lived realities, the subsequent militarization of the land by the French is what proceeds. The French government rapidly alters the textures and contours of the Casbah as it securitizes the “Muslim quarter.” Barbed wire, fencing, and narrow passageways siphon Algerian residents into long lines, embedding surveillance and control into the fabric of everyday life. In particular, the military distorts the Algerians’ sense of time by forcing them to wait for hours. Additionally, the French authorities treat the Algerian bodies as inherently suspect as they search, seize, and interrogate them without probable cause. However, by contrast, French civilians cross the border area freely and never encounter the same spatiotemporal restrictions. The operation rests on a racial register, in which the military grants passage to anyone who can appear and perform “Frenchness”. Muslim men, meanwhile, are profiled and detained for beards, turbans, or traditional clothing. In Fanon’s formulation, the colonial world is divided by barracks and police stations (Fanon 1963, 3); here, that divide becomes literal as the authorities impose and extend these barriers across the Casbah.

Yet, the imposition of this regulatory schema also exposes its own porosity. To sustain resistance, the FLN deploys Algerian women who can appear and behave like French women, allowing them to cross the border with little scrutiny. By mimicking the colonizer’s comportment, these women puncture the supposed stability of “Frenchness”, revealing it as merely a performance. Their movement across the checkpoint evokes Fanon’s claim that the unveiled Algerian woman moves like a “fish in Western waters” (Fanon 1959, 58); they gain mobility by being misrecognized as French. The colonial state’s dependence on racial optics and its reliance on reading the body as evidence become a caveat to controlling the Algerian body politic.

In both the securitization of the Casbah and the FLN’s resistance to these impositions, The Battle of Algiers maintains that colonial power operates by reading bodies and tethering them to political and moral meaning. At the same time, the film exposes the loophole in this racialized optics: insurgent guerrilla tactics exploit the cracks within the system, allowing certain bodies – particularly those of Algerian women – to slip through by adopting the colonizer’s practices, while Algerian men remain coded as threats regardless of how closely they approximate “French” appearance. The film thus reveals both the rigidity and fragility of the colonial gaze and posits that the spatiotemporal restrictions placed on the colonized are ultimately circumvented by the same logical pivots that uphold the surveillance state.

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The FLN’s Double Bind: Contradictory Sovereignty

As the FLN exposes the faulty logic that undermines the colonial encounter, the organization simultaneously reveals its own contradictions and elucidates the messiness of power in a decolonial apparatus. This complicates the reading that casts the FLN as purely acting on behalf of the Algerian people. Just as the organization positions itself as the agent of liberation, it simultaneously adopts aspects of the colonizer’s worldview and tactics, exposing the paradoxes that emerge beneath the colonial dialectic. From a Fanonian perspective, the FLN functions as both a disciplinary authority and a liberatory movement, demanding obedience and silence even as it mobilizes resistance (Fanon 1963, 126). This aligns with Rahal and White’s description of the FLN as a “national counter-state” (Rahal and White 2002, 336), an organization that seeks to shape the future nation by drawing on the grammar of state-building before sovereignty formally exists.

The FLN’s contradictory approach appears most clearly in its condemnation of vice in the Casbah. As FLN leaders announce their intention to eliminate gambling, prostitution, drugs, and related practices, the film focuses on an older gentleman who is drunk and stumbling through the streets while the community ostracizes him. Children soon swarm him and drag him down a flight of stairs. Although the scene carries a comedic tone, the musical score that plays signals that the moment is more harrowing than humorous. The man, who may simply be struggling with a difficult life, is treated not as someone in need of help but as the antithesis of the “progress” the FLN seeks to institute. The movement’s embrace of moral purification pathologizes the vulnerable populations of the Casbah and frames them as obstacles to the nation’s flourishing. In Fanon’s terms, revolutionary leaders often behave “like sergeants major” (Fanon 1963, 126), enforcing discipline and demanding conformity as a prerequisite for liberation; beneath this description, the FLN is no exception.

This disciplinary logic intensifies when Ali la Pointe executes a pimp for refusing to follow the demands of the FLN. Through this killing, the FLN reveals that to sustain the revolution, it relies on coercion and fear tactics to secure popular support. Fanon’s claim that colonialism is “naked violence” (Fanon 1963, 23) that yields only greater violence reverberates here: the FLN’s willingness to eliminate those who resist its authority reflects the contradictions and paradoxes of the struggle due to the organization’s reliance on violence against its own population. Jaffar’s later remark that “people who talk” must be removed reveals how suspicion shapes the movement’s understanding of its own base. Just like in the colonizer/colonized relationship, vulnerable residents – the “surplus population” in Marxist terms – are treated as liabilities, reduced to bare life in the name of revolutionary order.

Within its disciplinary framework, the FLN adopts a form of biopolitical governance that resembles a proto-state, relying on its capacity to inflict violence to maintain authority. In this vein, revolutionary sovereignty may perhaps follow directly in the footsteps of colonial structures, and the colonized must adopt the colonizer’s tactics to legitimize their project. Rahal and White note that FLN institutions handled refugees, diplomacy, and administration in ways that mirrored state functions (Rahal and White 2022, 335-336), and these responsibilities require forms of regulation that marginalized and debilitated those deemed “unreliable”. The film’s attention to these practices underscores the precarious emergence of a new political order shaped as much by the requirements of resistance as by the lingering residues of colonial rule.

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Torture and the Making of Intelligence

While the FLN adopts the practices of the French colonial authorities, the film simultaneously shows the French escalating their own tactics in increasingly destructive ways and illustrates the core logical pivot that undergirds French counterinsurgency. In fact, Roger Trinquier, a French military official who served during the Algerian war, asserts that torture is not a superfluous detail, but rather the central mechanism for producing intelligence. He asserts that if a prisoner refuses to divulge information, “specialists must force his secret from him” and that the prisoner must then “face the suffering, and perhaps the death, he has theretofore managed to avoid” (Trinquier 1964, 21-22). The film makes clear that intelligence gathering and lethal force are two parts of the same doctrine.

In Modern Warfare, Roger Trinquier argues that “control of the masses through a tight organization” is the “master weapon of modern warfare” (Trinquier 1964, 31). To this end, he details a system of census cards and house-group leaders designed to “enable us to keep tabs on each individual” (32). Rahal and White elaborate upon this logic, describing torture as part of a broader strategy of making Algerian life “legible” through what they call “barbed-wire imperialism,” in which regroupment camps, checkpoints, and interrogation share the same goal of population control (Rahal and White 2022, 343). Fanon understands this as a world in which the colonized have “no space” (Fanon 1963, 4) as torture collapses the colonized’s world into a tightened grid that reduces life's aperture.

In the film’s torture montage – coming immediately after Mathieu claims that the French merely “interrogate” and do not torture – the logic of French counterinsurgency is concretely put on display. The French military waterboards, electrocutes, and burns Algerians, reducing their bodies to bare parts and stripping away their humanity. Faces are bloodied, expressions erased, and voices silenced. An Algerian woman watches in horror as her eyes well with tears. Meanwhile, French soldiers stand either disturbed or indifferent, some watching with casual detachment and others staring with unease at what they are supposedly complicit in. The montage includes images of Algerians suspended in the air, their bodies wrapped around chairs, and their bodies arranged in poses that resemble crucifixion. The somber soundtrack mutes their screams and replaces them with a choral-like song that heightens the scene’s brutality. In this context, the opening scene of the film, where a man is attempting to run from the French authorities, is subject to reinterpretation; the man who reveals Ali la Pointe’s location is not acting out of betrayal, but out of an understandable desire to avoid the violence to which he has been subjected.

Through this torture montage, The Battle of Algiers demonstrates how the “smooth” story of decolonization masks a system of organized violence and information extraction. In this montage, there is nothing that suggests that the “decolonization” of Algeria was gentle or inevitable; instead, it required the literal and psychological debilitation of a population. By picturing the intensity of torture, the film exposes the authentic architecture of French counterinsurgency and restores visibility to the brutality that the official French record attempts to suppress.

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Reopening the Past

The Battle of Algiers counters the French historical amnesia that assumes “decolonization” was a necessary step in the Algerian people's historical trajectory. By framing independence as an expectation, French authorities folded Algerian history into a Western telos that prevented meaningful historical interpretation, foreclosed the possibility of genuine liberation, and cemented Algerians as perpetual “others”. Stora notes that this was literal -- French public censored the film because it forced them to confront realities they preferred to forget (Stora 2007, 369); Shepard’s historiographical work forwards that the “tide of history” narrative assembled by the French shows how independence was recast as inevitable, orderly, and nonviolent. With both the literal and historiographical context in mind, the film dismantles the reductionist reading of the colonial encounter by keeping the contradictions of decolonization visible, and it refuses the comfort of closure or the satisfaction of a finished chapter. Instead, it insists on depicting the instability, fracture, and unresolved legacies that define the period. In doing so, The Battle of Algiers performs the precise work Cooper envisions by reopening the past and demanding that viewers face the unsettled terrain of colonial rule, while enabling the audience to acknowledge the futures that remain possible, as it refuses to let history harden into de facto memory.

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References

Ben-Ghiat, Ruth. 2001. "The Italian Cinema and the Italian Working Class." International Labor and Working-Class History, no. 59 (Spring): 36–51.

Cooper, Frederick. 2005. "From Imperial Inclusion to Republican Exclusion? France's Ambiguous Postwar Trajectory." In Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History, 91-119. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Fanon, Frantz. 1959. A Dying Colonialism. New York: Grove Press.

Fanon, Frantz. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press.

Pontecorvo, Gillo, dir. 1966. The Battle of Algiers. Italy/Algeria: Casbah Films.

Rahal, Malika, and Benjamin Thomas White. 2022. "UNHCR and the Algerian War of Independence: Postcolonial Sovereignty and the Globalization of the International Refugee Regime, 1954–63." Journal of Global History 17 (2): 331–352.

Shepard, Todd. 2006. The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Stora, Benjamin. 2007. “Still Fighting: The Battle of Algiers, Censorship and the ‘Memory Wars.’” Interventions 9 (3): 365–370.

Trinquier, Roger. 1964. Modern Warfare: A French View of Counterinsurgency. Translated by Daniel Lee. London: Pall Mall Press.