Word: pontecorvo
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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FOLLOWING New York Times procedure, the following selection includes only those films released commercially in the United States during 1968. This excludes films shown only at the New York Film Festival; it also excludes films that arrived in Boston in 1968 but opened elsewhere in 1967 (Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers). To make things simpler, I eliminate European films made over two years ago but released during 1968 (Bunuel's Nazarin and, regrettably, Godard's masterpiece Pierrot...
WITH Guevara killed by CIA-inspired forces in South America, North Vietnam facing total destruction, and U.S. police forces arming to meet future civil rights riots, revolution doesn't look so rosy these days. So it's nice to have Gillo Pontecorvo's superb first film The Battle of Algiers here to remind us that military suppression doesn't always work...
Algiers treats the rise and fall of the NLF from its genesis to the annihilation of its last leader in 1957. Pontecorvo uses the terrorist uprisings for a massive dramatic narrative centering on several NLF leaders and the French colonel who sets out to destroy them. He splits the film into episodes delineated by newsreel datelines; his camera has a journalist's preoccupation with showing all the action, which takes precedence over clean-cutting or attractive composition. But at no point is Algiers a documentary--even when the high-grain high-contrast film most resembles aged newsreel footage--and ultimately...
...tradition of the first neo-realist masterpieces, Rosselini's Open City and Visconti's La Terra Trema. But where those two films dealt entirely with killing and oppression of the weak by Fascists and reactionary capitalists, the killing of innocent people in Algiers is committed mostly by the NLF, Pontecorvo's heroes. In accepting the slaughter of hundreds of citizens, guilty only in their complacent acceptance of a derelict social structure, Pontecorvo emphasizes the validity of necessary social upheaval, regardless of its price. Each death becomes not a crime of the NLF but the tragic consequence of years of unjust...
Proust Is Possible. The New Cinema has been displayed on U.S. screens recently with astonishing variety and virtuosity. Michelangelo Antonioni parodied the modish artsiness of fashion photography to help create the swinging London mood of Blow-Up. Italy's Gillo Pontecorvo faithfully reproduced the grainy style of newsreel footage to restage The Battle of Algiers-a pictorially harrowing exposition of war as an extension of politics. Czech Director Jiff Menzel leaped from tears to laughter in quick sequence to create the moody turmoil of Closely Watched Trains. The "undoable" film can now be done, as shown by the creditable...