After years of silence, Gillo Pontecorvo has died (at age 86, in Rome), taking with him the last remnant of left—wing artistic humanism. Born in Pisa, Pontecorvo spent a large part of his life in Paris after fleeing the Mussolini regime in 1938. He was a diehard communist (his brother Bruno was one of the turncoat physicists who gave the A—bomb secret to the Soviets) who never repudiated a single element of the doctrine. He made a number of films, most of them documentaries, almost all of them dealing with politics. But he was best known for a single film: The Battle of Algiers, a 1965 release depicting the lengthy urban guerilla conflict between French colonists and the Algerian independence movement. Algiers is a nearly unique combination of pseudo—documentary footage and fictional narrative, a gritty, utterly realistic portrayal of a city under siege. It is also one of the most effective propaganda films ever made. Like Dr. Strangelove, the greatness of...(Read Full Post)