Summary
On June 10, 1956, a group of civilians assembles for a wedding in the courtyard of a residential building. An FLN member walks in to act as the officiant of a traditional wedding that is being held in secret, in defiance of the French government. He laments that it can’t be in the open for now.
Ten days later, in broad daylight an FLN member follows a French policeman, stabbing him in the neck and taking his gun. He runs away. Later that day, a group of FLN enter a police station and fire on police. Ali and other members meanwhile do a drive-by shooting of more officers.
A French police officer speaks on the phone to a superior, presumably in France, while looking through photos of the assassinated colonial police officer. After hanging up, he says, “Well, they’ll slaughter the lot of us” with resignation. The officer looks out the window while drinking and wiping sweat from his brow. He tells his subordinate that in Paris they’re saying the solution is to increase the number of officers and close off streets. He says he doesn’t agree.
A voiceover explains that the governor of Algeria is not allowing people to buy medicine to treat gun wounds without approval from the Prefecture. Also, hospitals must inform the police about all patients admitted for treatment. In response to the attacks, the government is sealing off the Casbah, where the FLN are presumed to be hiding. The is footage of barbed wire going up around the neighborhood and French guards checking people’s bodies and identity papers. However, they don’t touch the women out of respect for the Muslim religious laws against women being touched by men who are not their husbands.
Exploiting the loophole, a woman member of the FLN is shown smuggling a gun out of the Casbah under her all-white full-body covering. She hands the gun to a male assassin, who shoots another policeman. There is footage of several other assassinations of colonial police carried out by lone assassins.
One assassin evades capture by posing as a homeless man. The police drive straight past him. However, civilians shout at him from their balconies, calling him a dirty rat. One person says they’d have peace if all the assassins were shot. He runs away, giving up his cover; he is arrested around the corner. At the police station, a cop reads into the official record his name as Laknan Abdullah, a laborer with a wife and three children who has killed three people.
At a late-night garden party, the same cop gets into a Citroen DS with several other men. They drive to the Casbah and the cop flashes his ID to get their car in past the curfew. The cop gets out in an empty alley and hands another man a package, which the man brings to a doorway. He then lights a fuse and the package explodes, collapsing much of the brick passageway between residences. In the morning, Algerians sort through the flaming rubble, pulling out the dead bodies of men, women, and children. Onlookers watch in a state of grief and despair. Men pull back women who try to get close to their dead loved ones. Mournful music plays as more limp boys’ bodies are carried out.
The shot cuts to Algerians chanting in unison as they march through the streets. Ali leads the way as a boy tries to get his attention and tell him to stop. The boy says Djafar has ordered them to stop. Ali stops the people and Djafar joins, saying they will kill them all. He assures them that the FLN will fight for them. Rhythmic music plays as several FLN women change out of their Muslim robes and cut their hair short and apply makeup. One bleaches her hair blonde. Ali and Djafar enter the room and appraise the women’s transformations. He hands them each a purse containing a short-fuse bomb. He tells them they must hurry and that they’ll have only twenty-five minutes.
Dressed in secular clothing, one of the women goes to the checkpoint. There is a holdup because a man forgot his papers. The woman calmly proceeds past others, asking in French if she can proceed. They do not ask for her papers or check her purse as she moves through. Another of the three women makes it past a checkpoint with her child. The third, who has gone blonde, is held up while a guard flirts with her, asking if she would like company to go to the beach. She smiles and says she is meeting friends, so not today.
Analysis
With the Casbah under the FLN’s control, the rebel group begins a coordinated campaign of terrorism against the French occupiers. Pontecorvo shows how the group, having bided its time, unleashes its aggression against the French with simultaneous attacks and killings of police officers across Algiers. The chaos of the day of attacks contrasts with the calm of the police official dealing with the aftermath that night. Speaking to his superiors in Paris, the pied noir police chief comments on how he doesn’t believe it’s much of a solution to increase the number of officers. However, he leaves unsaid what he thinks a better solution might be, foreshadowing a plan we later see him put into action.
A montage of footage follows with a newsreader-style voiceover announcing the French governor of Algeria’s new rules about reporting medical treatment performed on any gunshot victims. With this montage, Pontecorvo builds on the major theme of verisimilitude. Although the film is a dramatization, Pontecorvo’s use of black and white film and a long-range telephoto lens makes sequences such as this appear to be documentary footage of the Algerian War. In fact, no footage of the real-life conflict was included in the film; it is simply an aesthetic choice that underscores that the film is based on real events.
With the French government’s increased security around the Casbah, the FLN needs to think of new ways to undermine their authority. Pontecorvo depicts an instance of situational irony in which a female FLN member exploits the French guard’s cultural expectation that Muslim women will refuse to be touched by men who aren’t their husbands. After getting through a checkpoint without being searched, the woman delivers a concealed pistol to a male FLN member who would have been searched, and he assassinates a police officer in broad daylight.
The FLN conducts several more assassinations of this kind, resulting in a clandestine retaliation by the police chief we earlier saw disagreeing with his superiors’ approach to the conflict. In the dead of night, he and several accomplices set off an explosion at the base of a residential building in the Casbah. While the FLN so far has been shown only assassinating police officers, the police chief’s bomb kills innocent Algerians, including women and children. This act of covert state-sponsored terrorism prompts the people of the Casbah to assemble a march against the French.
However, Djafar intervenes to assure the citizens of the Casbah that they mustn’t risk their lives: the FLN will fight for them. This scene is significant because it shows how the police’s cowardly bombing promotes solidarity among the FLN and regular citizens, who increasingly see the FLN as having their interests in mind and the French as their oppressors. Pontecorvo next depicts the FLN’s retaliation to the retaliation: no longer only targeting police, the FLN plans an act of terror that will bring regular pieds noirs into the conflict. But first, three female FLN members remove their burkas and style their hair and makeup so that they resemble members of Algeria’s secular community. This transformation allows each of them to move through checkpoints without scrutiny, the bombs in their purses undiscovered.
