The Great Movies III

This reasoning is chilling, and carries a terrible weight of logic. The strength of The Battle ofAlgiers, the reason it is being viewed in the Pentagon thirty-five years after its making, is that it is lucid and dispassionate in its examination of the tactics of both sides. It shows the French setting up roadblocks and checkpoints between the Casbah and the European quarter. Then it follows three women, one with a child, who walk right past the checkpoints with bombs in their purses. One woman plants her bomb in a cafe and then, in a disturbing scene, watches the customers eating, drinking, smoking, and talking-customers who will soon be dead. The parallel with bombings in Israel, the U.K., and Iraq is prophetic and chilling.

Colonel Mathieu does his job well. His chart of FLN cells has squares that are gradually filled in until, with the final defeat of Ali and three others, trapped in their hiding place, he declares victory.' he FLN has been eliminated. Two years later, the film notes, "for no particular reason that anyone could explain," the uprising began again as mobs poured out of the Casbah and overwhelmed the police. In 1962, the French granted Algeria its freedom.

What lessons a modern viewer can gain from the film depends on who is watching and what they want to see. Those who study the French tactics should note that they failed. Although the American use of torture at Abu Ghraib has been credited, at least, with producing the names and locations of many enemy fighters, the scale of urban warfare in Iraq is escalating. A few days before I wrote this review, some thirty-five children were killed by a bomb while being given candy by Americans. The moral paradox is that many Iraqis will blame the deaths on us, because if we were not there, the bombing would not have taken place. Certainly the bombers were the murderers. But The Battle of Algiers shows now, as it did when it was made, that for nationalist resistance movements, the end justifies the means. President Bush said something in the debate that this film abundantly illustrates: fighting terrorism is hard work.

he great subject of the cinema, Ingmar Bergman believed, is the human face. He'd been watching Antonioni on television, he told me during an interview, and realized it wasn't what Antonioni said that absorbed him, but the man's face. Bergman was not thinking about anything as simple as a closeup, I believe. He was thinking about the study of the face, the intense gaze, the face as window to the soul. Faces are central to all of his films, but they are absolutely essential to the power of what has come to be called his Silence of God trilogy: Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Winter Light (1962), and The Silence (1963).

In the conventional language of cinema, a closeup is part of the grammar, used to make a point, show a reaction, emphasize an emotion. Closeups fit into the rhythm of the cutting of a scene. But in these three films, and many others, Bergman was not using his close shots that way. His characters are often alone, or in twos. They are not looking at anything in particular-or, perhaps, they're looking inside themselves. He requires great concentration on the part of his actors, as in Through a Glass Darkly, where Harriet Andersson's face is held in the foreground and another character in the background for a long span of time in which she focuses on a point in space somewhere to screen right, and never blinks, nor does an eyeball so much as move.' he shot communicates the power of her obsession, with her belief that voices are calling to her.

Frequently Bergman uses what I think of as "the basic Bergman two-shot,"which is a reductive term for a strategy of great power. He places two faces on the screen, in very close physical juxtaposition, but the characters are not looking at each other. Each is focused on some unspecified point offscreen, each is looking in a different direction. They are so close, and yet so separated. It is the visual equivalent of the fundamental belief of his cinema: that we try to reach out to one another, but more often than not are held back by compulsions within ourselves.

In framing these shots, Bergman works hand-in-hand with his cinematographer, Sven Nykvist, one of the greatest artists of his craft. Nykvist makes us realize that most movies simply illuminate faces, while he lights them. Especially since the advent of television, movies have used a lighting style that flattens the image and makes it all seem on one plane. One reason we like film noir is that it uses angles, shadows, and strategic lighting more boldly. In a Bergman film, if you freeze a frame on one of his two-shots, you'll see that Nykvist has lighted each face separately, and often not from the same source; he uses the lights to create a band of shadow that is like a dark line drawn between the faces, separating them.