BFI Friday: The Battle of Algiers

For this BFI Friday, we'll be looking at The Battle of Algiers, in at number 48 on the BFI's all time greatest movies, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo and released in 1966. Pontecorvo's film is based on the uprisings and bombings in the 1950s and 60s, during the French occupation of Algeria. The Battle of Algiers was banned in France until 1974 and only then was released with cuts. Pauline Kael in 1973 said of it that it is 'Probably the only film that has ever made middle-class audiences believe in the necessity of bombing innocent people', and indeed, the The Battle of Algiers' great controversy, that it is told from the perspective of the Algerian insurgents, still resonates in the year that Zero Dark Thirty is released in cinemas. Its contemporary relevance as a portrayal of terrorism is perhaps no better demonstrated than by the fact that in 2003 the Pentagon screened the film to demonstrate 'How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas'. The Battle of Algiers, is terrific, thrilling cinema, with wonderfully drawn characters and a tension that few modern thrillers can match. Indeed, Paul Greengrass, director of two of The Bourne films and of the superb  Green Zone, has spoken of its influence on him as a filmmaker, explaining that, 

The reason that I think [The Battle of Algiers] will endure and continue to speak to future generations is because it's essentially about change, and the way that change can be accomplished, whether through violence or through protest [...] It's got all the elements of our contemporary landscape: political violence, military intervention [...] and a common humanity.

'Not one foot' of newsreel was used in the film,
but you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise.

One of the triumphs of The Battle of Algiers is its use of a documentary style, shot in black and white, with many scenes resembling news footage. Thirty years before 'found footage' and shaky-cam got in on the act, Pontecorvo brings an immediacy and reality to the narrative that few other directors in the 1960s were doing. If further evidence of the film's enduring relevance were needed, take a look at this article on Zero Dark Thirty, written by my colleague Alex Adams, who briefly compares Bigelow's film with The Battle of Algiers. As Adams points out, The Battle of Algiers exhibits a balance that is often lacking in modern films that deal with similar material. Indeed, to draw another comparison, Ben Affleck's Argo, a strong contender for this year's Best Picture Oscar and an otherwise excellent thriller, deals with issues of insurgency and terrorism. But just as with Zero Dark Thirty, Argo's story is told doggedly from the perspective of the the occupying force, which in that case is the Americans. In so doing, both Argo and Zero Dark Thirty invent a manichean world of goodies and baddies, despite the lip service Bigelow and Affleck pay to notions of 'balance' and self-proclaimed objectivity. In contrast, The Battle of Algiers, while clearly sympathising with the insurgent Algerians, does not demonise the French occupiers, but rather, represents both sides of the conflict in a way that is almost entirely absent from its modern counterparts.

In The Battle of Algiers, Pontecorvo crafts a nuanced, emotive and technically brilliant film, one that is as thrilling and compelling on a purely cinematic level as it is vital and important on the political. The Battle of Algiers is proof that cinema can be a powerful tool in political discourse, especially for something as sensitive, and as it was, urgent, as the Algerian War. Our own historical distance from the subject matter notwithstanding, the impact of Pontecorvo's film is as strong as ever, perhaps stronger, given its relevance in the face of modern Western occupations in the Middle East, and the contrast between Pontecorvo's masterpiece and contemporary political and war cinema. The Battle of Algiers is, in many ways, cinema at its best: vital, immediate, technically flawless and both emotionally and politically challenging. 

Project Tyneside: West of Memphis, Django Unchained, McCullin, Zero Dark Thirty

With four more films notched up on the proverbial bedpost, it's time for another update on Project Tyneside. This batch was as unusual as it was varied, featuring two documentaries, the new Tarantino film, and an Oscar-nominated picture that's sure to become one of the most controversial of the year. Let's get to it!

Sunday 20th January, 14:55 West of Memphis
Amy Berg's meticulous documentary on the Memphis Three is one of the most frightening and disturbing accounts of a miscarriage of justice I have seen. Berg's film follows the story of Jason Baldwin, Damien Echols and Jessie Misskelley, three teenagers who were convicted of the brutal murders of three eight year-old boys in 1993 in West Memphis, Arkansas. Baldwin, Echols and Misskelley maintained their innocence throughout their trials and subsequent incarcerations. West of Memphis is not the first documentary on the Memphis Three, but rather, builds on and refers to the numerous other films about the case, such as the Paradise Lost documentaries. What Berg's film offers is a painstaking presentation of the case's particulars, only to retread them over and over with increasing rigour and scepticism. What initially is presented as a strong verdict of guilty quickly becomes a saga of police incompetence, investigative negligence, unreliable witnesses and a disregard for forensic evidence and the advice of properly qualified experts. While Berg's film, co-written with Billy McMillin, has a clear agenda - that the Memphis 3 were innocent, pointing towards one of the boys' step-fathers as the real killer - West of Memphis presents an incredibly strong case for that perspective. A persuasively-constructed, haunting, and vital documentary.

Monday 21st January, 14:35 Django Unchained
I've already reviewed Quentin Tarantino's latest here, but for those of you that have yet to see the film, Django Unchained is one of the year's most provocative, and arguably, best films of the year. Very much a companion piece to Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained tells the story of Django, a slave freed by Dr King Schultz, on his quest to save his wife and exact bloody revenge on her masters. Reigning in the self-indulgence that badly hampered Death Proof, Django is amongst Tarantino's best, using the tropes and motifs of the Spaghetti Westerns of the 1960s and 70s to craft a wildly entertaining, occasionally grand, and thrilling adventure.

Wednesday 30th January, 21:00 McCullin
The second of two documentaries on this round of Project Tyneside, David and Jacqui Morris' documentary on photo-journalist Don McCullin, best known for his technically astonishing and often disturbing war photography. The Morris siblings do a tremendous job of teasing out the internal conflicts of a man whose job it was to document the absolute worst of human misery and atrocity, with one of the great ironies of McCullin's life suggested when he describes his early successes at The Observer newspaper. He explains that this was the moment that he realised that he could escape his violent home of London's deprived Finsbury Park, only to find himself in the poorest and most violent places in the world. Structurally, the film is conventional, sticking to a linear narrative of talking heads and stills from McCullin's portfolio, but this lessens neither the remarkable - and terrible - images presented, nor the impact of the anecdotes and commentaries that accompany them. Fascinating, disturbing, at times even sickening, McCullin is a terrific portrait of an astonishing career, and for the merit of the photographer's work alone, this deserves to be seen.

 

Thursday 31st January, 14:05 Zero Dark Thirty
In what has already become one of the most controversial films of the year, Kathryn Bigelow's follow up to her brilliant The Hurt Locker is a superbly well-crafted, intelligent and complex thriller, with an excellent central performance from Jessica Chastain as CIA agent Maya. Having gone in aware of criticisms that Zero Dark Thirty endorses torture or implies that torture led to the killing of Osama Bin Laden, I was wary of the early scenes that depict waterboarding and other forms of interrogation. But although there's room for debate here, I came down on the side that Bigelow shows torture - albeit relentlessly from the torturer's point of view - without telling us what to think of it. Rather, the film is more concerned with what effect these interrogations have on investigator Maya, as we witness her develop from a reluctant, cautious rookie in 2003, to an obsessive and tenacious operative determined to capture her quarry. This, for me, is the key to Zero Dark Thirty, and equal credit goes to Chastain and Bigelow for crafting a nuanced, compelling bildungsroman, particularly given that there are no grandstanding scenes for Chastain to chew scenery, as one might expect if Michael Mann and Al Pacino had made the film. There are conflicts with colleagues, yes, but there is no courtroom scene, no rhetorical battle to win that suddenly changes the tide of events; just a gradual development of story and character that leads to the discovery of America's most vilified boogeyman. The climax of that discovery - the scene where a crack team secretly infiltrate Bin Laden's occupants and kill (some of) its occupants, is done with a skill that manages to be thrilling and tense without feeling exploitative. And what of the comedown after that climax? Bigelow saves her most poignant moment for last, hinting at a post Bin-Laden identity crisis that befalls both her main character, and by extension, the country that she represents.

The BAFTAs, the Oscars, and the Bechdel Test: Part 1

This week, I'll mainly be talking about the Bechdel Test, which is a method of determining how present female characters are in a film. It's something that I've wanted to discuss for a while, as I think the lack of women characters in films is a real problem in cinema. There's a lot of ground to cover, so we're going to do a two-parter, to be followed up in a fortnight. 

For a film to pass the so-called Bechdel Test it must have two named female characters, they must talk to each other, and they need to talk to each other about something other than a man. The test originates from a comic strip published by Alison Bechdel in 1985, from a comic called Dykes to Look Out For. Here's the strip for your viewing pleasure:

The original Bechdel Test

Sounds simple, right? Surely many films pass a test in which the only criteria is that women talk to each other? Nope. Ah, I hear you say, most of those that don't pass must be dumb action movies aimed at adolescent men, what do you expect? Surely more sophisticated films, or even films that are supposedly aimed at and about women (more on this next time), would naturally pass the Bechdel Test? Sadly not, dear reader. I consider myself a reasonably enlightened man, with a relatively diverse taste in films. I like Westerns, film noir, animation, spy thrillers, dramas, indie, and even I'm partial to a good romantic comedy. But out of the first 200 films in my collection how many do you think pass the test? 100? 50? Not even close. It's 8. A paltry 8 of the first 200 films I own have two women characters that talk to each other about something other than a man. And it's not as if those two hundred films are all 80s Arnie-fests, either. Amongst others, the genres this sample covers include gangster flicks, documentaries, monster movies,  science fiction, political thrillers, comedy, romance, and children's films, all ranging from the early 1930s all the way up to 2010. With the exception of silent films and blaxploitation, I don't think there could be much more diversity in terms of genre, style and period, and yet ninety six per cent (ninety six per cent!) of those films do not involve conversations between women that don't involve men. Think about that for a second. I don't think my DVD collection is particularly unusual, either: go and check your own film collection and see how many of your films pass the test. How many was it? Did any of them pass at all? This is a problem endemic within the film industry and it seems to pervade through almost every genre,  from small indies to massive summer blockbusters, from the earliest films to the latest Oscar nominees. The fact is, women just aren't present in films, either in front of or behind the camera. Out of the four hundred and fifty or so films I have on DVD, only two (TWO!) have been directed by women, namely Kathryn Bigelow's 2009 The Hurt Locker, and Sofia Coppola's 2003 Lost in Translation, and guess what: neither of those even pass the Bechdel Test.

Awards Season

Speaking of the Oscars, in the eighty two years the Academy awards have been running, only one woman has ever won best director, which was Bigelow for her superlative The Hurt Locker in 2009. At this year's Oscars, there are no female nominees for best director, and of the twenty one producers nominated for best film, only four are women. Last night's BAFTA ceremony painted a similar picture: best film and best director were given to The Artist, directed by Michael Hazanavicius and produced by Thomas Langmann, and the outstanding debut award went to Paddy Considine for Tyrannosaur. Incidentally, neither of these pass the Bechdel Test, either. Similarly, Kathryn Bigelow is the only woman to have ever won a BAFTA for best director, and one of only two women to have ever been nominated for one, the other being Copolla for Lost in Translation. I think these figures speak for themselves: the British and American film industries have always and continue to be run by men, for the entertainment for men. Even the few women film makers that achieve success in the industry tend to make films about men and for a largely male audience. 

Witness the apocalypse

More to the point, it shows that the Bechdel Test isn't about quality. The Artist, Tyrannosaur and The Hurt Locker are all terrific films, as are many of the other BAFTA and Oscar-nominated films that don't pass the Test. What the Bechdel Test shows, however, is that even great films, made by talented, enlightened, modern film-makers, some of whom are even women, still struggle to represent half of the human race. And I don't even mean represent them well, I just mean represent them at all. Thankfully I haven't seen the Sex and the City films, but if we applied the Bechdel Test to the TV show, even though it's a vacuous wasteland of revolting characters, obnoxious writing, and cynical world views, it would still pass because the horrible characters talk occasionally about other things than men, like the virtuous pursuits of shopping and being over-privileged whiny little shits. The Bechdel Test is not an indicator of quality but it is an indicator of a gross and bizarre misrepresentation in cinema. Surely we can't leave the Sex and the Cities of this world to fill the gap of representation left by otherwise quality films? Why does the film industry continue to be dominated so overwhelmingly by men? I'm not entirely sure, but it's a problem that can be dated well before the advent of Hollywood. 

The Madwoman in the Attic

Historically, literature has been dominated by male writers writing about male characters, with female characters defined strictly in relation to their male counterparts. Even major novels by women, whose main characters are female, tended to focus on who their heroine would marry, and both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, written by Charlotte and Emily Bronte respectively, were originally published under the names of male pseudonyms. Ironically, when the novel as a form was developed it the eighteenth century, it was perceived as a somewhat crude and intellectually vapid degeneration of literature, and was therefore associated with femininity. There are two aspects here that modern films share with literature that I want to pick up on. The first is the way women are typically portrayed in film, and the second is the difference between 'guy' films and 'chick flicks', which I'll be discussing next time. In 1979 Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar published a seminal essay on the portrayal of women in nineteenth-century fiction, entitled The Madwoman in the Attic. Their essay argued that women in Victorian literature are typically represented eihter as either pure, virginal and innocent, or dangerous, monstrous and exotic. It's a dichotomy that is best exemplified by Jane Eyre's own madwoman Bertha, who is directly contrasted with the innocent Jane, and whose husband Rochester has hidden in his attic. 

Beautiful and deadly: Veronica Lake as the
archetype we've all seen a thousand times

Any of this sound familiar? Well, it should do, because it's a model for femininity that Hollywood continues to frequently use to represent women. You can often see this dichotomy in film noirs such as Double Indemnity, The Maltese Falcon, and The Big Sleep, where the only two women, who invariably never interact with each other, are the erotic, dangerous femme fatale, and the bookish assistant / victim character. The James Bond franchise continues to trade on this very formula, with 2008's Quantum of Solace's female characters still filling the roles of either 'early love interest-cum-victim', and 'dangerous female lead-cum-love interest', that typify the Bond girls of every decade since the 1960s. For other recent examples, see Christopher Nolan's 2010 Inception, whose Mal, played by Marion Cotillard, is the archetypal femme fatale. Mal is particularly interesting because all we ever see of her is the version in Cobb's imagination. She is a meta-character, quite literally a concept and not a real person. In the publicity for the film, she is labelled as 'The Shade', alluding both to her non-reality, and to her conceptual femme fatale forbears. Mal is essentially a self-conscious reflection on female characters in film. Nolan alludes to the femme fatale trope, but he doesn't really deconstruct it either, and instead reverts to the demon / angel female dichotomy by contrasting Mal with the only other named female character, Ariadne, played by Ellen Page, who is herself defined only in relation to Cobb's struggle banish Mal from his subconscious and return home. I think this is a real problem for a lot of films, because while men are typically cast in a variety of interesting roles, women too frequently end up playing the same tired, cliched and boring parts that are rooted in anachronistic conceptions of gender. Literature in the twentieth century underwent a wake-up call, and there have been many works that have attempted not only to present better, more developed female characters and female-centric stories, but also to co-opt classic literature into modern gender discourse, as in Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, which acts as a parallel to Jane Eyre, telling the story of the 'mad' Bertha Mason. I think it's about time that something similar happened in cinema, as too often women continue to be marginalised and written as boring archetypes instead of real people. It's bad for cinema, it's lazy on the part of screenwriters and directors, it's cowardly on the part of studios not to distribute films that aren't squarely aimed at young men, and it's fucking boring for the rest of us to have sit through another bloody sub-plot about a 'hooker with a heart of gold'.

Films with Julia Roberts are always boring and stupid

Next time, I'll be wrapping up our little discussion with a look at the so-called chick flicks, and arguing that they're even worse than 'men's films' at representing women, and I'll also be taking a few pot shots at recent poisonous pseudo-feminist horseshit like Sucker Punch. Tune in next time for the exciting conclusion!