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發表於 2006-10-17 16:15:38
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Film Director Gillo Pontecorvo; 'Battle of Algiers' Broke Ground
By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 16, 2006; Page B04
Gillo Pontecorvo, 86, the Italian-born director of "The Battle of Algiers," a fictionalized account of a guerrilla struggle against French rule that set a bold standard in political filmmaking, died Oct. 12 at a hospital in Rome. He had a heart attack months ago, news reports said.
Mr. Pontecorvo made only five feature films and several documentaries. Unsurprisingly for a onetime Communist Party member, most had political sympathies for the left. Among them was "Burn!" (1969), which starred Marlon Brando as a 19th-century English agent who provokes a Caribbean slave revolt. The actor called it his favorite film.
Mr. Pontecorvo is best remembered for "The Battle of Algiers" (1966), regarded by many critics as a masterpiece. Made almost entirely with nonprofessional actors -- some of whom were guerrilla fighters -- the film has a semi-documentary feel with jittery, hand-held cameras that race around the casbah.
This gave viewers a jarring and intimate sense of reality unfolding during the Algerian war for independence (1954 to 1962). Mr. Pontecorvo called his work "fiction written under the dictatorship of fact."
Based on interviews with soldiers and Resistance leaders, Mr. Pontecorvo and his frequent scriptwriting collaborator Franco Solinas showed the cruelty and humanity of all sides in the fight. The scenes of torture by the French authorities are weighed against the insurgents' massacre of young civilians at a cafe.
In another memorable scene, the French colonel who is the chief nemesis of the Algerian guerrillas lectures the visiting press about the political situation. He articulates an awareness that he is on the wrong side of history but that as a soldier, he has a role to fulfill.
The colonel's ambivalence is central to Mr. Pontecorvo's powerful filmmaking. "Pontecorvo makes many French soldiers and colonists credible and sympathetic figures, caught up in a larger, politico-economic pattern of exploitation," film historian David Thomson wrote. "In short, it is the more politically convincing because it does not manipulate its people."
Mr. Pontecorvo's film was a direct confrontation of French imperialism, which had only been touched on in earlier works, including Jean-Luc Goddard's "Le Petit Soldat." As a result, "The Battle of Algiers" was banned in France for five years even though it won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival. The director received death threats from those sympathetic to the military forces in France.
"The Battle of Algiers" was often mentioned as an influence on director Costa-Gavras ("Z," "Missing" ) and reportedly was a primer on insurgent strategy for the Black Panthers and the Defense Department.
"So many critics see 'The Battle of Algiers' as propaganda," Mr. Pontecorvo told the New York Times in 1969. "But in the scenes of death, the same religious music accompanies both the French and Arab bombings. I am on the side of the Arabs, but I feel compassion for the French even if historically they were at fault. I do not say the French were bad, only that they were wrong."
"My subject," he said, "is the sadness and laceration that the birth of a nation means in our time."
Gilberto Pontecorvo was born Nov. 19, 1919, in Pisa to an affluent and secular Jewish family. His nine siblings included the atomic scientist Bruno Pontecorvo, who defected to the Soviet Union from England in 1950.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp ... R2006101500892.html
Gillo Pontecorvo was a chemistry student at the University of Pisa when he left for Paris to escape the anti-Semitic racial laws enforced under the Mussolini dictatorship.
In Paris and then in St. Tropez after the Nazi invasion of France, he worked as a newspaper correspondent and tennis instructor and befriended Pablo Picasso and Jean-Paul Sartre. He also studied piano composition and in later years created the scores for his films.
In 1941, Mr. Pontecorvo joined the Communist Party and helped the anti-Fascist Resistance movement in Italy. He distanced himself from the party after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 but remained a committed socialist.
Without any particular plan after the war, Mr. Pontecorvo settled on filmmaking after seeing Roberto Rossellini's "Paisan" (1946), an early example of neo-realist cinema that used location-shooting and nonprofessional casts to depict everyday drama.
Mr. Pontecorvo found work as an actor and then as an assistant to directors Mario Monicelli and Yves Allégret. He went on to make several documentaries, including "Giovanna" (1955), a women's-rights film shot in East Germany.
Hoping to emulate the neo-realist style for his first feature film, "The Wide Blue Road" (1957), Mr. Pontecorvo instead found himself forced into using color footage and the glamorous Italian film star Alida Valli as a fisherman's wife. He dismissed the film as overly dramatic but spoke with fondness of actor Yves Montand, cast as a rebel fisherman who refuses to join a local fishermen's co-op and also wants to bypass an exploitative fish merchant.
His next film was "Kapo" (1960), with Susan Strasberg as a young girl who tries to survive in a concentration camp. The film is notable for the grainy black-and-white photography whose stark results were perfected in "The Battle of Algiers" when he realized he could copy the film negative and re-photograph the copy.
His last film of the decade was "Burn!," whose setting was changed from a Spanish to a Portuguese colony after the Spanish authorities threatened economic sanctions against the U.S. production company, United Artists.
He also fought the studio on casting Sidney Poitier as the revolutionary "because his face wasn't wild." After months on location in Colombia, he found an illiterate, polygamist peasant named Evaristo Márquez who had never seen a film but whose face astonished the director.
Mr. Pontecorvo later said: "He'd never seen a movie but he understood money. . . . He made two films later on, and he was very bad in them. But he came home as a rich peasant and bought a lot of cows."
After a 10-year absence, Mr. Pontecorvo returned with his final feature film, "Ogro" (1980), about a Basque terrorist organization during the final years of the Franco regime in Spain.
The film was a commercial failure, and Mr. Pontecorvo spent the rest of his life making documentaries every few years. He also served as head of the Venice Film Festival in the 1990s and the state-owned film company that oversees Cinecitta studios in Rome.
At times criticized for an unprolific career, Mr. Pontecorvo once told an interviewer: "I am like an impotent man who can make love only to a woman who is completely right for him. I can only make a movie in which I am totally in love."
His marriage to Henriette Pontecorvo ended in divorce.
Survivors include his second wife, Picci Pontecorvo, and their three sons.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp ... 006101500892_2.html
R.I.P.
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發表於 2006-10-19 23:27:52
