`Battle of Algiers': rewinding a history that repeats itself

AMuslim country seething with discontent. A Western occupying force using strong-arm tactics to root out a terrorist army. Tanks in the streets. Contrary to what you're thinking, this is Algiers in the mid-1950s. The film is Gillo Pontecorvo's 1965 classic "The Battle of Algiers," an electrifying reenactment of Algeria's struggle for independence. The Pentagon has for years screened this film to military personnel, and it's easy to see why. "Battle" is cauterizing in its evenhandedness, showing the vengeful madness and the passionate reason on both sides of the conflict.

Pontecorvo came up through the Italian neorealist boom of the postwar years, but he was first and foremost a documentarian. In "Battle," his camera is everywhere: in the torture cells of the French Foreign Legion, in the Casbah meeting rooms of the Algerian resistance organization.

Violence escalates in "Battle" with a horrible tit-for-tat logic -- an execution leads to an assassination campaign against French policemen, which leads to the cops bombing the Casbah, which leads to resistance bombings -- and only the French military leader, Colonel Mathieu (Jean Martin), is willing to articulate the hard line. "Should France stay in Algeria?" he coolly asks a hostile reporter. "If you answer yes, you must accept all consequences."

As "Battle" shows, the terrorist cells were eventually snuffed out, but mass protests later led to Algerian independence in 1962. The final shots of the film aren't so much a celebration of liberation as an acknowledgment of historical inevitability. The filmmakers are too fatalistic, or exhausted, to join the party.

Extras: Making-of featurettes; three documentaries; director commentaries (Criterion, $49.95).