In November 2004, Gillo Pontecorvo’s classic The Battle of Algiers was shown on French public TV for the first time. Despite the film’s global fame and growing popularity since its release in 1966, for four decades it was hardly known in France outside of certain intellectual circles.

Yet unlike other films about the Algerian War, The Battle of Algiers was not banned, beyond the first year following its release. Nor was this the kind of censorship typical of illiberal regimes. Rather, the film didn’t fit into French public institutions’ way of dealing with their past — and so it was censored through various unofficial forms.

Historian Benjamin Stora argues that the film’s absence from French theaters partly owes to cinema owners bending to threats from war veterans’ organizations and pied-noir groups. Yet it was also subject to a more insidious kind of censorship: spectators’ unwillingness to be confronted with one of the most violent episodes in France’s colonization of Algeria, including the now-well-known torture inflicted on Algerians by the French army. Hence through a mix of sociocultural norms, press uproar, and rioters smashing the windows of independent cinemas who did dare screen it, Pontecorvo’s stunning representation of the anti-colonial war was de facto banished from public space.