Portfolio

Reimagining the Battle of Algiers

An artist's vision of Gillo Pontecorvo’s film

Kate Liebman
Painting of a building in white with gray windows
Battle of Algiers, Scene 1 (detail). All images courtesy Kate Liebman.

Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 The Battle of Algiers is both an essential piece of political cinema and one of the most important neorealist films ever produced. Its unsparing portrayal of the resistance during the Algerian War, filmed in Algiers’s European quarter and Casbah, was so realistic that some early audiences mistook it for a documentary. In her series of paintings Battle of Algiers, Kate Liebman depicts the interior court of Serkadji Prison, where Ali la Pointe—a resistance leader Pontecorvo took as his main character—witnesses the execution by guillotine of a fellow Algerian. La Pointe is radicalized by the death.

The prison, a real place, was mediated by Pontecorvo’s film, which in turn Liebman uses as the source of these paintings, creating, as she puts it, “a fraught psychological space in which beauty and terror are held in tension.” In one of the paintings, Liebman “places the viewer on the ground, looking up,” an angle that “evokes the feeling of looking and being looked at, of being trapped, of the harsh midday Mediterranean light, of the pressures of history, of the horrors power commits, of heat, of emptiness, of being hidden, of grief.”
—eugenia bell

Painting of a building in white with gray windows
Battle of Algiers, Scene 1.
Painting of a building in white with gray windows
Battle of Algiers, Scene 3.
Painting of a building in white with gray windows
Battle of Algiers, Scene 4.
Kate Liebman is an artist who lives and works in New York City. She graduated from Yale University, contributes to The Brooklyn Rail, and has shown her work at multiple galleries.
Originally published:
September 20, 2021

Featured

The Shapes of Grief

Witnessing the unbearable
Christina Sharpe

Writing in Pictures

Richard Scarry and the art of children’s literature
Chris Ware

Garth Greenwell

The novelist on writing about the body in crisis
Meghan O’Rourke

You Might Also Like

Portfolio

Terrains of the Imaginary

Finding escape in survey maps
Geoff Manaugh

Portfolio

The Cultural Construction of Identity

The knotty interrelations between text and image
Lorraine O’Grady

Portfolio

Exile and Memory

Reimagining Iran through 200-year-old portraits
Amak Mahmoodian

Subscribe

New perspectives, enduring writing. Join a conversation 200 years in the making. Subscribe to our print journal and receive four beautiful issues per year.
Subscribe