It took long to boil up, though the irrevocable spark was two days before VE Day, in Sétif, Guelma and Kherrata, where celebrating French troops massacred thousands protesting  Paris' reneging on independence in return for colonial loyalty against Nazism. Nine years later, shortly after Dien Bien Phu and the humiliation of withdrawal from Indochina, the Cairo (later Tunis)-based FLN launched initial military and terrorist attacks. Spurred by the OAS and pieds-noirs (European Algerians), Mendès-France insisted on unconditional gunbarrel negotiation, while Africa's second-largest nation (a combined Alaska, Texas and Utah) entered an eight-year struggle for independence, where one-point-five million died and General de Gaulle was brought back into power.

A disillusioning haven for America's social and political revolutionaries in the sixties, the nation has been governed by various permutations of that FLN (currently RND) for forty years, and, despite later fundamentalist unrest, has yielded in Western consciousness to other, noisier saber rattlers.  Forgotten are the notorious interrogation techniques of French troops, the reprisals, "collective responsibility" and regroupement (read "pacification"), along with street clashes, infighting among rival nationalist factions like FLN and workers' MNA, and terrorist bombings of military and civilian targets which averaged 120 per day late in the war.

Appropriately for today's volatile and fragile world, "the most stirring revolutionary epic since Potemkin" is to be re-released in a new 35 mm print. Award winning, praised and damned, long banned in France and unavailable in the United States, recently privately screened for Pentagon personnel -- "how to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas"-- Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers is a monster.

Senator Saadi Yacef's plotline -- written in a French jail and scripted by Pontecorvo and Franco Solinas -- derives from his own experiences as an FLN military leader. As cool Jaffer (called Ali Kader in printouts), Yacef plays himself. Pride of place, however, belongs to his deputy Omar Ali (Brahim Haggiag), a street-tough ex-con who, nom de guerre Ali-la-Pointe, cornered by forces of Vietnam veteran Colonel Mathieu (Jean Martin), more or less opens and closes the 123 minutes and surrounds the flashback body leading back to October 7, 1957.

Unfortunately, the screening print does not yet incorporate advertised, theoretically more accurately translated subtitles, and white shirts and buildings eat a sizable portion of the writing.  Nevertheless, this picture remains as searingly timely, maybe even more so, as four decades ago.

Made on location in the Cité Europeenne and, mostly, Casbah of Algiers, in handheld telephoto, grainy newsreelly black-and-white, the film has an amateurish, documentary quality.  Without cartoonish Technicolor gore, the blood and dedication of a nation are revealed: only a single nation, not two, for in spite of blather about impartiality, it seems  obvious that everyone's (the director's, film's and audience's) heart is with the freedom fighters/terrorists whose guns are carried, and bombs placed, by Arab women.

Beyond Eisenstein-influenced technique as in the stone staircase scenes, the result surpasses what, in lesser hands, would have been only propaganda or adventure. Like Frantz Fanon's coolly disturbing analyses of that same struggle, Pontecorvo's apogee work here -- the more complex Burn/Quemada is muddled -- is fascinating, with a core equally chilling as the ululations from thousands of rooftop veiled mouths.

In what is the story of the radicalization of Ali, and of his people, emotion is heightened by shifts between openly cried anguish and the silence of gestures, hands, faces and eyes -- a bound prisoner's, observing torture over a paratrooper's shoulder. Events are an amalgam of the imagined and the real, as for example, Larbi ben M'Hidi's legendary facetious offer to trade bomb-baskets for Mirage fighters.

The director has learned from Rossellini and Francesco Rosi, and it is a tribute to him as well as to cameraman Silvano Mancini, that the recreated immediacy of the Casbah be indistinguishable from the closing 1960 footage (which an Algerian friend insists is real), three years after Ali's martyrdom. Textbook in its easy, economical simplicity of highlight, action and emotion, it gains rawness from the amateur local cast -- only Martin was a cinema professional --including 80,000 Algerian figurants.

This famous, infrequently seen film is (one fears) not the stuff of theatrical success in videogame-conditioned America. It is, nonetheless, one of those that, once seen, is remembered.  Particularly in this country, in these days, The Battle of Algiers serves potent warning to those who envision warfare, or any Western-dictated settlement, in areas so hungry and so foreign.

(Re-released by Rialto Pictures LLC; not rated by MPAA.)