Word: pontecorvos
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...bloody account of an 1864 massacre of a Cheyenne tribe, Soldier Blue announced in labored fashion that the U.S. military is more barbaric than it cares to admit. But whatever their weaknesses, both films were at least rooted in historical truth. Burn!, by the usually brilliant Italian Director Gillo Pontecorvo (The Battle of Algiers), lacks even that validity. Instead, it is a much-too-convenient contrivance for the director's comments on Viet Nam and racial agony...
After the debacle of Mutiny on the Bounty, Brando should have known enough to stay away from tropical adventurism and English accents. He shows vestiges of genius, but his artistry is subordinated to Pontecorvo's ambition. The earnest director further hedged his bet by substituting full-color flora for the grainy reality that made Battle of Algiers such a masterpiece. But he partially redeems himself with a typical Pontecorvian touch, transforming Evaristo Marquez, an illiterate cane cutter, into an astonishingly effective actor. The growth of Marquez as a leader, his tortuous grappling with the idea of freedom, are poignant...
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...
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...