Anti-colonial violence and the ‘dictatorship of truth’ in the films of gillo pontecorvo

Abstract

This article is a companion piece to my interview with the Italian film director Gillo Pontecorvo. The essay presents his two famous anti-colonial films, The Battle of Algiers and Burn!, in the context of Pontecorvo's life and work. His anti-colonialism is related to his anti-fascism, as is evident in the film Kapò, whose protagonist is a Jewish girl struggling to survive in a Nazi concentration camp. His films were influenced by neo-realism and adopted a documentary style of film-making. I examine the strong intertextual links between The Battle of Algiers and Frantz Fanon's writings that emerged out of his involvement with the Algerian war of independence against the French colonizers. I also examine Fanon's and Pontecorvo's different approaches to violence in the context of the anti-colonial struggle.