(This is SUPER late, and I’m sorry for being behind!)
I think when looking at The Battle of Algiers and discussing the response it got during its time, we have to note that it is a work of art — not a factual documentary. As I said in class, this is a huge detail in discussing what it means to a group of people.
As someone aspiring to be a journalist, I think of everything in terms of journalism and how I would relate it to my field of study. The first tenet in the journalism code of ethics is to “seek truth and report it.” Period. You ask questions, you get (or don’t get) answers, and you write that down — essentially history’s first draft.
A documentary is a filmmaker’s version of journalism. They are taking creative licenses with how they present it, film it, etc., but it is based off of true facts. Nothing is (or should be) changed. You just put it out there for the world to see.
The Battle of Algiers is a film. Not a documentary. The filmmaker, while basing the movie off a true story, still chooses what he wants to portray and how he portrays it. For example, he made the choice to start the film with the torture scene. This intentionally made the French look bad. He also made the choice to show the FLN bombing the civilian cafes and show Ali shooting his friend because he was a detriment to the FLN.
He chose to include these things. They might have been based on actual events, but I can assure you he took creative license.
While watching this film and thinking about the response it got during its time, I thought a lot about the recent events surrounding Truman Capote.
In Cold Blood was a book written by Truman Capote that describes, in gruesome detail, the murders of Herbert Clutter, his wife, and two of his children. Capote had learned of the murder and quickly went to Kansas in order to write about the crime.
He gained access to the prison in which the murderers were located — because of investigator Alvin Dewey — and was able to interview both of them extensively. Capote then wrote a four-part series that ran in The New Yorker in 1965 before he ultimately published it as a book in 1966.
It was heralded as this piece of new, literary journalism — a new way to present journalism, which Capote claimed was “immaculately factual.”
It opened the doors to crime reporting and what journalists should strive to do with their work. It was amazing, detailed, and nothing like this had been done so extensively before.
But, it turns out (as of early February), documents from the original investigation showed some details of Capote’s “research” to be fudged and skewed. Most notably, Dewey was regarded as an enormous hero in the book, but new documents show that he had investigators wait five days before interrogating the two who ultimately were convicted for the murder because Dewey believed the killer(s) to be someone else. The book says an agent was dispatched the very night of the murder.
Now, if Capote had touted his book as fiction based on a true story, the public wouldn’t feel so slighted by these new discoveries. A work of fiction, even if based on a true story, is allowed creative license to make a story more engaging. Journalism is meant to be just the facts with no opinion or sensationalism thrown in the mix.
The Battle of Algiers is a film. In Cold Bold claims to be a work of journalism. The former is art while the latter is considered to be the first draft of history. The former is allowed to be creative and selective with facts and imagery, and the latter should be completely factual and tell the human experience boldly. And the public has a right to be upset if something, like In Cold Blood, claims to be completely factually immaculate and ends up to have flaws. This isn’t to say journalists don’t make mistakes, but no mistake should be so egregious and it shouldn’t be one that could have been explained, even if it makes the story less glamorous.
Now in the end, I’m not sure what point I was trying to make, but what I think I’m trying to say is: be careful how you judge a work based on what its artistic title is. A novel is different from journalism and a documentary is different from a film.