What the battle of Algiers still teaches us about revolution

From the report

In Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another (2025), Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, Bob Ferguson, a disillusioned former revolutionary, watches Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966) on television. The juxtaposition is almost comical: a man whose revolutionary aspirations have collapsed into private survival contemplates one of cinema’s most powerful representations of collective struggle. Yet the scene raises a question Anderson’s film never fully confronts: What distinguishes a revolution capable of transforming the world from a rebellion condemned to repeat itself?

The juxtaposition is especially timely. On November 7, The Battle of Algiers was screened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of Playback: The Brooklyn Watch Party, selected by actor John Turturro. Sixty years after its release, Pontecorvo’s film remains a challenge to the diminished revolutionary imagination of our time, insisting that resistance need not become perpetual repetition: even seemingly immovable structures of domination can be transformed.

The difference between the films is not simply that one depicts national liberation while the other portrays an endless confrontation with authoritarian power. Pontecorvo understands revolution as a transformation of historical possibilities, whereas Anderson risks reducing resistance to a permanent condition of political life. In One Battle After Another, there is always another enemy, another generation called upon to fight. In The Battle of Algiers, the destruction of the revolutionary underground becomes the prelude to a political transformation that military force cannot prevent.