Goran Olsson’s chilling documentary explores Frantz Fanon’s powerful landmark text with some limitations
 
‘Concerning Violence’ is the opening chapter of Martinique-born psychiatrist Franz Fanon’s book, The Wretched of the Earth. It is also the title of Swedish director Goran Olsson’s documentary, which explores Fanon’s landmark text. Fanon dictated his posthumously published book while ill with leukaemia at the age of 36. It reads as a final call to arms to those living under the tyranny of colonialism during the 1950s and ‘60s. Olsson continues with the theme of human injustice and oppression, which he explored in his previous documentary about the civil rights movement, Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975.
Olsson stamps his signature love of music to this documentary as he did in Black Power Mixtape, in which he used 1960s and ‘70s R&B and Motown songs as the backdrop to archival footage of the civil rights movement. However, in Concerning Violence, a simple composition of a searing trumpet slices through the scenes and emotion evoked by Fanon’s blistering critique. Passages from The Wretched of the Earth are read by none other than Fugees singer Lauryn Hill. Hill’s voice is resolute, as if a sergeant were commanding her troops about the enemy, yet she soulfully pounds Fanon’s words.
The documentary contains rare archival footage of Africa under colonial rule during the 1960s and ‘70s. Anti-colonial fighters are shown in Mozambique, Angola, Congo and Burkina Faso, travelling through the rich and dense forests of the continent. The images in the documentary are at times harrowing, such as the footage of the amputee baby suckling on his mother’s breast, with both arms of the mother also decapitated by a bomb. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s in-depth preface at the start of the documentary compares this image to that of the Black Madonna, emphasising the importance of the inclusion of female resistance in the anti-colonial narrative.
These disturbing scenes are interspersed with miscellaneous interviews showing the absurd yet commonplace racial attitudes of the time. Olsson searched through hundreds of hours of archives and meticulously selected material which succeeds in capturing the varying themes and experiences of life under colonialism. On second viewing, the footage of a man speaking about his experience of torture in a South African jail, the Lamco workers dispossessed for striking over unfair wages in Liberia, and the young FRELIMO women of Mozambique talking about education and social liberation, are not random, but carefully chosen sequences which create a mosaic of the psychological, social and economic effects of colonialism.
There is, however, a glaring absence in Olsson’s documentary, and that is of the country that inspired Fanon’s revolutionary ideas: Algeria. In the Q&A that followed the Frontline Club screening of the documentary last November, Olsson admitted that he had excluded Algeria for both artistic and a practical reasons. Artistically, there was already an unparalleled film about Algerian resistance, The Battle of Algiers, and practically, there is little footage left. The absence of Algeria and non-African colonial struggles points to the main flaw in this documentary: a solely surface exploration of Fanon’s ideas in The Wretched of the Earth. The documentary is, in Olsson’s words, intended as an “advert for Fanon’s book”, and to introduce Fanon to new audiences. Therefore, the documentary manages only to excavate the sexiest quotes of this complex book.
Olsson’s painstaking search for rare footage reveals to audiences a not too distant past, and reminds us of the world in which this ‘radical’ book was written. Olsson’s reanimation of Fanon’s evangelical rhetoric through Hill’s melodic and resolute voice, alongside the striking footage of Africa at war, ensures that audiences are unyieldingly engrossed throughout this documentary.
Concerning Violence will be screened at Somerset House on Monday 2nd March 2015 as part of the Unorthodocs film series, curated in partnership with Dartmouth Films. The film is also available to purchase on DVD.

Image from: http://bit.ly/1vHep7u