Sentries of the Earth: Thinking Space and Revolution with Gillo Pontecorvo

Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers and Burn! are most widely known as revolutionary films. At the same time, both films take physical space as their subject and a character. Pontecorvo uses space as a narrative and visual device to orient the revolution, a way of understanding the role of the partisan, a cause and victim of violence, and a series of boundaries, whose placement and transgression are key to revolutionary action. These uses of space rearticulate the philosophy of revolutionary space found in the works of Carl Schmitt and Frantz Fanon.