Colonialism: where violence begets violence

Daniel Nelson

Rom-com, chick-flick, film noir it is not. Films don’t come more intensely polemical than this.

Concerning Violence is a documentary illustration of key themes from Frantz Fanon’s book,

Concerning Violence

Image by Concerning Violence

, banned in France immediately after publication in 1961.

The film begins with an uncompromisingly unadorned straight-to-camera analysis by Columbia University professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak of what the film is about, including an explanation of what the book missed: a gendered analysis.

It’s a mini-lecture and will empty the cinema of those who entered the cinema to shelter from the rain or who perhaps were enticed but misled by the title. 

The rest of the film is divided into nine episodes and an epilogue. The individual sections use old newsreel footage – largely gathered by Swedish director Goran Hugo Olsson during the making of his previous film, The Black Power Mixtape – with a voiceover of readings from the book by Lauryn Hill, singer, songwriter, rapper, actress, producer.

Her voice is the only concession to popular culture. The film focuses on the message that colonialism is violence, that it violently scars the colonised  and that colonial resistance has to be violent. It’s contestable, because there may be a role for non-violence and because colonialism may collapse because of its rottenness from within. But it’s a timely message to consider at a time when there are political and academic voices suggesting that “our” colonialism – whoever the voice belongs to – wasn’t as bad as others and whose benefits may outweigh the disbenefits: “We’ve nothing to be ashamed of.”

Some of the newsreel battle shots are brilliant, and occasionally brutally shocking (including one of the most moving shots of a civilian casualty you’ll ever see). It’s fascinating to see figures such as Thomas Sankara, the assassinated leader of Burkina Faso,  Amilcar Cabral, independence fighter for  Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, and Zimbabwe’s  Robert Mugabe in an earlier incarnation. But it’s the contemporaneous interviews with white settlers that are mesmerising – not just the predictable racist rants of “gooks” and “taking out 20 Afs” but the gentle probing of  a Swedish missionary couple whose naïvity and lack of awareness just leaves you gaping.

Because Olsson is working with what’s available - material unearthed from Swedish TV vaults - the film focuses on the former Portuguese colonies and southern Africa, which means that the overarching thesis of Fanon’s work is tightly compressed geographically and leaves you wondering about its application to, say, Asia and Latin America.

 

But if you want to see a vivid dramatisation of an element of Fanon’s work and get an insight into the ravages of colonialism, this is for you.

• Concerning Violence is showing at the Frontline Club on 21 Novenmber, and at the BFI, Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, SE1, from 28 November until 9 December. Info: 7928 3232