Gillo Pontecorvo, the Italian filmmaker who directed the 1965 classic "The Battle of Algiers," died in a hospital in Rome on Thursday. He was 86. The cause of death was not given, but Pontecorvo suffered a heart attack a few months ago, news reports said.
Though Pontecorvo directed only a handful of feature films, which he also wrote, each was a reflection on some of the most gripping human dramas of contemporary history: class struggle in a village of fishermen in "The Wide Blue Road" (1957); the concentration camp tragedy "Kapo" (1960); and the political thriller "Ogro" (1979), about the killing in 1973 of Luis Carrero Blanco, then prime minister of Spain, by Basque freedom fighters.
But he will be best remembered for "The Battle of Algiers," about the bloody uprisings that led to Algeria's independence from France. The movie had been commissioned by the revolutionary government of Algeria and was based on a book by Saadi Yacef, once a leader of the National Liberation Front, who also produced the film and ended up with a starring role as the leader of the revolutionaries.
It was shot on location in the Algiers Casbah, and almost all the characters were played by nonactors, with a mix of locals and tourists in the roles of the country's French residents, which added to the film's documentary quality. On Friday, Yacef mourned the death of Pontecorvo. "It is my brother who died," he said in an interview with the Italian news agency ANSA. "I will never forget him, not only for what he did for Algeria, but for how he was, for his life. He was a patriot."
The news agency also reported that the government of Algeria sent a crown to Rome's City Hall, where Pontecorvo will lie in state until Saturday morning. "The Battle of Algiers" won the Golden Lion at the 1966 Venice FilmFestival, a festival that Pontecorvo would direct for four years, starting in 1992. But what added to the film's legend was that it served over the years as a kind of textbook of urban warfare for the most disparate of audiences, from the Black Panthers to the Pentagon.
It was shown in 2003 to military and civilian experts in the Pentagon's Directorate for Special Operations and Low- Intensity Conflict for them to reflect on the issue of using tactics like torture to combat terrorism. In a 2004 interview with the International Herald Tribune, Pontecorvo said he had found the Pentagon's interest in his film "a little strange."
The most "The Battle of Algiers" could do, he said, was "teach how to make cinema, not war."
Gilberto Pontecorvo was born on Nov. 19, 1919, in Pisa to a bourgeois Jewish family and was the younger brother of Bruno Pontecorvo, the Italian physicist who defected to Moscow in 1950. Gillo Pontecorvo moved to Paris after the Mussolini government passed laws in 1938 discriminating against Jews, and then to Saint-Tropez when the German Army entered the French capital. He joined the anti-Fascist resistance movement in Italy and became a leader of a partisan group in Milan.
According to his biographer, the film critic Irene Bignardi, Pontecorvo was a "man of many lives." He worked as a tennis teacher, deep-sea diver and newspaper correspondent in France before turning his hand to film, which became his lifelong love. In Paris, after the war, he worked as an assistant to the directors Yves Allegret and Joris Ivens and when he returned to Italy he began making documentaries.
"The Wide Blue Road" was his first feature film, "Ogro" the last.
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