Summary
Italian film director whose The Battle of Algiers (1965–1966) and Burn! (1969) are, in Edward Said’s opinion, the two greatest political films ever made, and the subject of Said’s interview essay “The Quest for Gillo Pontecorvo” in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.276).
Details
- Reclusive and remarkably unprolific, Pontecorvo is given in the essay as now sixty-eight, with no widely distributed films since Burn! (also known as Queimada!); the more recent Operation Ogro (1976) was never shown outside Italy, and his earlier Kapo (1959) was a concentration-camp drama about a young Jewish girl who becomes a collaborationist Kapo (PDF p.276-277).
- On The Battle of Algiers he valued its symphonic structure and its collective subject — “personnage choral” — the logic of colonialism against the logic of nationalism; on Burn!, the next phase, postcolonialism, in which the battle to be free led new states into new dependence. He would strike one rooftop sequence in Battle as “much too preachy and didactic”, and named Franz Fanon — first The Wretched of the Earth, then A Dying Colonialism — as his major overall influence for both films (PDF p.278-279).
- He told Said: “I was a member of the PCI [Italian Communist Party] until 1956, when I quit it”, Hungary having figured in his decision; “Later, I became a left independent. Hence it was logical to treat imperialism.” Eqbal Ahmad told Said he originally met Pontecorvo when both, and Costa-Gavras, were working for the FLN in the late 1950s (PDF p.279). Gramsci was, he told Said, his most important formative influence, his first remark on Gramsci concerning his “divergences” from the PCI (PDF p.281).
- Disagreeing with Said’s charge of a “fascinated” portrayal of his imperialist villains, Colonel Mathieu and William Walker, he claimed he had to treat them seriously and not as caricatures while as director and author being “against them” (PDF p.279).
- Music — “l’image sonore”, the second half of every “image visible”, and his word “counterpoint” for the interplay of image and music — characterized his aesthetic sense; he studied composition with René Leibowitz in France, said of Marlon Brando that he “is the greatest film actor in history”, and named Bach, Stravinsky and Brahms as the music he listens to, his sons called Sebastiano, Igor and Johannes (PDF p.279-280).
- On his long silence: “Each of my films gives me enough money for eight or nine years. I read and write constantly, either looking for subjects or actually sketching out treatments.” — and “I can never make a film unless I do it myself from start to finish”, of his collaboration with the scriptwriter Franco Solinas. The film he wanted to make was about Archbishop Romero of El Salvador, a man suddenly converted into a political cause; its finances were ready in Europe but incomplete in the United States (PDF p.281-282).
- On the Palestinian intifada, asked whether, as a Jew, he felt reservations about supporting the “other” side: “Absolutely. I support the Palestinians,” he said matter-of-factly; “it is a colonial situation.” He rejected the suggestion that the complications mitigated his solidarity, holding that film requires certain “elementarities” and is “an extremely unductile medium” compared with print (PDF p.282-283).
- The essay’s conclusion, at PDF p.284, has him doing hack TV work and saying he has no plans to direct more features; his two greatest films are read as important documents for understanding the age of empire in which we live — empire updated, renovated and proliferated in the age of American hegemony — and benefit from his understanding of power, astuteness about institutions and understanding of political forces; Burn! (his openness to ambiguity) ends with three omniscient shadows trailing a fleeing black laborer, and its ending questions are quoted: “are we once again to repeat the murderous cycle? Is there ever to be a conclusive victory against empire?” (PDF p.284).
Related pages
Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, The Battle of Algiers, Frantz Fanon, Antonio Gramsci, Edward Said