Customer Reviews

La Battaglia Di Algeri

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Morricone is a sublime and powerful composer. Just hearing the music makes me wish I had the DVD. I bought it for the raspy flute solo one of the local radio stations played during a fund drive. It was so haunting I had to have more of it. The flute solo evokes the heat, dust, and quiet of North African desert towns mixed with a
brave, complicated, flawed human struggling to make things right. I was surprised to find this theme taken up
by the orchestra in other tracks, in a long conversation between the solo flute and the orchestra. The beginning of the CD has a lot of martial music - probably accompanying the scenes when the French enter Algeria as they begin to quell the uprising in their colony. The Battle of Algiers speaks to the arrogance of Western culture as it deals with a civilization far older, wiser, more enduring, and more devious. Morricone's music is both appropriate as music to drive the emotions of a movie and stands up well next to the works of any other modern composer. I just don't like martial music - that's why the 4 stars.

The music in the film is varied, in that, with the flutish sounds, it echoes Arab mysticism whilst viewing the city itself, at the beginning of the film, then extremely beautiful requiem music, following both the bombing in the Casbah, then in the modern French quarter.I found it moving, that this music was the same for both cultures; sadness; as the same emotions must have been felt by both groups. The military music and drumming, with a sense of urgency, evokes the methods used by the French, in order to maintain control, whilst Arab drums and the ululah was reminiscent of the Algerian counter-attack.
Perhaps the tune played on the jukebox in the cafe, and the actual dance moves were slightly futuristic for the year it was set; however, I was not around in North Africa and I could be wrong!
Altogether, this film and its music score are emotional, real and wonderful. This was a video I got at a discount, with La Republicca, in Naples, Italy, in the early '90s, then bought the DVD on my return to the UK, in the 2000s.
Personally, I believe it was Pontecorvo's best film.