Film master shot through political lens.....

[KiwiCoromandel]

IF Battleship Potemkin (1925) is the most celebrated work of propaganda in the history of cinema, then Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers (1966) is certainly the most watchable.

Ideology and entertainment rarely mix well in film, which probably explains why the picture was the only one made by the unashamedly political Pontecorvo that enjoyed any success. The odds were against that happening even when he first took on the proposal of the newly independent Algerian government to tell the story of the country's liberation from French colonial rule.

The subject matter was potentially powerful, but Pontecorvo dismissed the suggested source material -- the prison memoirs of one of the leaders of the revolt -- as too subjective and fretted about the film's financing by the Algerians and the difficulty of generating audience sympathy for characters deeply implicated in acts of terror.

It took several years of planning before he arrived at a solution: to shoot the film in a neo-realist documentary style without professional actors. The result is a masterpiece of compelling storytelling that depicts a spiral of violence which ultimately overwhelms all its initiators, in particular the French forces, whose use of torture only fans the flames of rebellion.

The film, which benefits from Marcello Gatti's cinematography and a score by Ennio Morricone, is surprisingly even-handed, but was immediately banned in France. It later won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and was nominated for three Oscars, including best foreign language film.

Its influence endures: it has been cited as an inspiration to activists and revolutionaries from the Black Panthers to the Palestine Liberation Organisation, and has been shown to members of President George W. Bush's administration as an example of how not to deal with political discontent in an Arab country.

Gilberto Pontecorvo, one of 10 children, was born into an affluent Jewish family in Pisa in 1919. He was intellectually overshadowed by several brothers, including Bruno, who went on to shock western Europe in 1950 by voluntarily moving to the Soviet Union, taking with him his knowledge of atomic physics.

Gillo studied chemistry at Pisa University, but when racial laws were implemented against the Jews by Mussolini, he fled to Paris, where he found work in newspapers. When the Germans arrived, he moved to St Tropez and gave tennis lessons.

In 1941 he joined the Italian Communist Party and returned home to fight with the Partisans. After the war, having been strongly impressed by the polemical films of Roberto Rossellini, notably Paisa (1946), he took up acting and then directing, initially as an assistant to Mario Monicelli.

After shooting several documentaries, he made La grande strada azzurra (1957), an earnest tale of the struggles of a humble fisherman and his wife, played by Yves Montand and Alida Valli. He followed this with Kapo (1960), a Holocaust story that attracted controversy for the rhetorical manner of its staging and its blatant politics.

They were faults that also marred the only other two films he made after the acclaim attracted by The Battle of Algiers. On the back of it, he was invited to Hollywood to shoot a picture with Marlon Brando. Like its star, 1969's Queimada (also known as Burn!) looked handsome enough, but its confused and allegorical plot about colonialism in the Caribbean blighted its chances at the box office.

It was another 10 years before Pontecorvo got behind the camera again, this time to make a film about the Basque campaign for self-rule and the assassination in 1973 of Franco's mooted successor, Luis Carrero Blanco. Ogro (Operation Ogre, 1979), however, flopped and Pontecorvo retreated to Rome.

Pontecorvo accepted an offer to run the Venice Film Festival in 1992. Astutely mixing controversial selections with big American drawcards, in his four years in charge he revived much of the festival's fading lustre, though afterwards he could not do the same for Cinecitta, the Rome film studios of which he was president.

He is survived by his wife, Picci, and their three children.

OBITUARY:Gillo Pontecorvo. Film director. Born November 19, 1919. Died October 12, 2006, aged 86...

source:THE TIMES

image:www.orgs.bucknell.edu:THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS...Ideology and entertainment rarely mix well in film..

[DudeAsInCool]

Pontecorvo

I like a film called Lucia by Humerto Solas--it's a Cuban film which covers its evolution from the early 1900s thru the 1960s and is done in 3 parts--the first act is a self contained silent picture; the second act is a mob picture; and the third act is a pop/60s picture. Hard to find, but it's brilliant , both thematically and stylistically

Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will and DW Griffith's Birth of a Nation and Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator are also notable political classics

[slum_goddess]

RIP Pontecorvo.