ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses American populist film of the 1930s to an Italian-Algerian film made in the late 1960s about the Algerian Revolution that took place in the 1950s and early 60s. The Battle of Algiers, a film directed by Gillo Pontecorvo in 1966, is a fictionalized documentation of the struggle of the FLN against the French force of occupation. The film emerges from of a period of intense political experimentation in European and, to lesser extent, in American film, sparked somewhat by the worldwide political resistance to the Vietnam War. Rossellini’s film was made as the Germans were fleeing Rome. He borrowed unused film stock from the US Signal Corps. The film is unflinching in its view of German atrocities and at the same time tender toward the spirit of resistance and endurance of ordinary people. Bicycle Thieves focuses on one man whose livelihood—putting up posters of American movie stars—depends on his having a bike.
