Happy Birthday, Gillo Pontecorvo! Born today in 1919 as Gilberto Pontecorvo, this controversial yet brilliant Italian filmmaker worked as a film director for more than a decade before his best-known film was released.
Born in Pisa, Tuscany, Italy, Pontecorvo was the son of a wealthy secular Italian Jewish family.
Years later, Pontecorvo studied chemistry at the University of Pisa, but dropped out after passing just two exams.
While enrolled, he first became aware of opposition political forces, coming into contact for the first time with leftist students and professors.
In 1938, faced with growing anti-Semitism, he followed his elder brother Bruno to Paris, France, where he found work in journalism and as a tennis instructor.
Pontecorvo became involved in the film world, and began by making a few short documentaries. He became an assistant to Dutch propagandist and documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens ('A Tale of the Wind').
Later, Pontecorvo also assisted French film director Yves Allégret, known for his work in the film noir genre
In addition to these influences, Pontecorvo began meeting people who broadened his perspectives.
According to Pontecorvo's motivations, he directed films with an eight- or nine-years gap in between.
These included Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, and French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic Jean-Paul Sartre.
During this time, Pontecorvo developed his political ideals. He was moved when many of his friends in Paris packed up to go and fight on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War.
In 1941, Pontecorvo joined the Italian Communist Party. He later traveled to northern Italy to help organize Anti-Fascist partisans.
Going by the pseudonym Barnaba, he became a leader of the Resistance in Milan from 1943 until 1945.
Pontecorvo eventually broke ties with the Communist party in 1956 after the Soviet intervention to suppress the Hungarian Revolution. He did not, however, renounce his dedication to Marxism.
Post-World War II and his return to Italy, Pontecorvo decided to leave journalism for filmmaking, a shift that appears to have been developing for some time.
The catalyst was his seeing Roberto Rossellini's ('Rome, Open City', 'Europa '51', 'Journey to Italy') 1946 Italian black and white war/drama film 'Paisà' ('Paisan'). After this, Pontecorvo bought a 16mm camera and shot several documentaries, mostly self-funded.
In the late 1950s, Pontecorvo directed the 1957 Italian/French/West German/Yugoslavian Ferraniacolor drama/romance film 'La grande strada azzurra' ('The Wide Blue Road').
This would be the film of which foreshadowed the mature style of his later works.
Afterwards, Pontecorvo spent months, and sometimes years, researching the material for his films in order to accurately represent the social situations he explored.
In the next two years, Pontecorvo directed the 1960 Italian/French/Yugoslavian black and white war/drama film 'Kapò', a drama set in a Nazi death camp.
The plot of the film is about an escape attempt from a concentration camp by a young Jewish girl.
The following year, 'Kapò' was the Italian candidate for the United States' Academy Awards.
It was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. However, it didn't win. This occurred at the 33rd Academy Awards in mid-April 1961.
Five years later, Pontecorvo co-scored (along Ennio Morricone), co-wrote and directed the film of which he is best known. This was the 1966 Italian-Algerian black and white war/drama film 'La battaglia di Algeri' ('The Battle of Algiers').
The film concentrates on the years between 1954 and 1957 when guerrilla fighters regrouped and expanded into the Casbah, the citadel of Algiers.
Paratrooper commander Col. Mathieu (Jean Martin), a former French Resistance fighter during World War II, is sent to 1950s Algeria to reinforce efforts to squelch the uprisings of the Algerian War.
It is there he faces Ali la Pointe (Brahim Haggiag), a former petty criminal who, as the leader of the Algerian Front de Liberation Nationale, directs terror strategies against the colonial French government occupation.
As each side resorts to ever-increasing brutality, no violent act is too unthinkable.
Though very much Italian neorealist in style, Pontecorvo had co-produced 'The Battle of Algiers' with an Algerian film company.
In 1968, American journalist and author Jimmy Breslin declared on television that 'The Battle of Algiers is "a training film for urban guerrillas."
Despite this remark, the film is widely viewed as one of the finest films of its genre: realistic though fictionalized documentary.
'The Battle of Algiers', however, being a subject of socio-political controversy, was not screened for five years in France; it was finally later released in 1971.
Death threats deterred cinema owners, and it was only through pressure from Pontecorvo, Louis Malle ('Murmur of the Heart', 'Atlantic City', 'Au Revoir Les Enfants'), and others that it was eventually shown.
Its portrayal of the Algerian resistance during the Algerian War uses the neorealist style pioneered by fellow Italian film directors Rossellini and Giuseppe De Santis.
The film employed newsreel-style footage and non-professional actors, and focusing primarily on a disenfranchised population that seldom receives attention from the general media.
One of the most influential political films in history, Pontecorvo vividly re-creates a key year in the tumultuous Algerian struggle for independence from the occupying French in the 1950s.
As violence escalates on both sides, children shoot soldiers at point-blank range, women plant bombs in cafés, and French soldiers' resort to torture to break the will of the insurgents.
Shot on the streets of Algiers in documentary style, the film is a case study in modern warfare, with its terrorist attacks and the brutal techniques used to combat them. Pontecorvo’s tour de force has astonishing relevance today.
Pontecorvo had actually filmed in Algiers, using real locations in the European quarter and the Casbah.
Everything, including the riot scenes in which police battle civilian demonstrators, was shot live. Even today, 'The Battle of Algiers' remains a triumph of realistic production values.
'The Battle of Algiers' achieved great success and influence. It was widely screened in the United States, where Pontecorvo received a number of awards.
This included winning the Golden Lion and the FIPRESCI Award at the 28th Venice Film Festival in 1967.
This also included being nominated three Oscars for Best Foreign Film, Best Director and Best Screenplay. However, the film did not win. This occurred at the 41st Academy Awards in mid-April 1969.
Morricone continued to write scores for Pontecorvo's films, maintaining that they were structured with his music in mind. The composer regarded 'The Battle of Algiers' as having a "sympathetic structure".
Pontecorvo continued his series of highly political films one decade later with the 1979 Italian/Spanish thriller/drama film 'Ogro'.
It addresses the occurrence of terrorism at the end of Spanish general, politician and dictator Francisco Franco's dwindling regime in Spain.
Its influence can be seen in the few surviving works of West German filmmaker Teod Richter, made from the late 1960s up to his disappearance, and presumed death, in 1986.
The semi-documentary style and use of an almost entirely non-professional cast in 'The Battle of Algiers' (only one trained actor appears) was a great influence on a number of future directors and films.
In addition, more recent commercial American films as 'The Blair Witch Project' (1999), 'Paranormal Activity' (2007) and others draw from these techniques for less lofty purposes.
In 1980 and 1982, Pontecorvo served as Member of the jury at the 37th and 39th Venice Film Festivals.
In February 1991, Pontecorvo was a member of the jury at the 41st Berlin Film Festival. During this time, he continued making short films into the early 1990s.
In an interview that Pontecorvo gave that same year, when asked why he had directed so few films, his response was that he could only make a feature with which he is totally in love.
He also stated that he had rejected many other films. Pontecorvo was a director who only directed features in which he was going to be able to give it his all.
The following year, Pontecorvo directed a follow-up documentary to 'The Battle of Algiers'.
This was with the fifty-eight-minute 1992 Italian black and white/color made-for-television documentary film 'Ritorno ad Algeri' ('Return to Algiers') for Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI), airing on May 13.
Later that same year, Pontecorvo replaced Italian critic and film festival director Guglielmo Biraghi as the director of the 49th Venice Film Festival in September. Pontecorvo was also responsible for the festivals of 1992, 1993 and 1994.
On October 2004, Roger Ebert wrote of 'The Battle of Algiers': "The most common form of warfare since 1945 has involved irregular resistance fighters attacking conventional forces and then disappearing back into the population.
Bombs planted by civilians, often women and children, have served as deadly weapons in this war.
The United States, France, Russia, Israel, Northern Ireland, South Africa and several South American states have all had their experiences with urban guerrillas.
What lessons a modern viewer can gain from the film depends on who is watching and what they want to see. [...]
But "The Battle of Algiers" shows now, as it did when it was made, that for nationalist resistance movements, the end justifies the means.
President Bush said something in the debate that this film abundantly illustrates: Fighting terrorism is hard work."
Two years later, Pontecorvo passed from congestive heart failure at the Agostino Gemelli University Policlinic in Rome, Lazio, Italy on October 12, 2006. He was 86.
Pontecorvo is survived by his three sons, most notably Italian cinematographer and film director Marco Pontecorvo and Italian painter, writer and director Simone Pontecorvo.
Although he only mad twenty films throughout his career, Gillo is regarded as one of Italy's greatest directors.
As a filmmaker, he was concerned with the oppressed, those kept down by the unjust and cruel use of power—and who would eventually rebel against the oppressor.
Pontecorvo had been active from 1953–2003.
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