For this last reason it is to film to fuel public discussion. This is a film to make you evaluate your place in society, a film to discomfort you into sensitivity, a film devoid of the relief of humour, a film that – like the history of injustice – seems too big to process in a single brain. Answers may be thin on the ground for a metropolitan liberal (hi) but that is because this film is an SOS at a point in world history that is not as advanced as many of us would like to think. And yet there is something primal and powerful that transcends the sum of its parts and speaks clearly of a wrong burrowed deep in our social DNA. The footage is an incidental patchwork and the ideas about violence too extreme for this reviewer to adopt. Although the film focuses on specific struggles, especially the Algerian war for independence, its philosophical approach is broad, aggressive and personal: “The cause is the consequence. There is no way to absent yourself from the scope of the film’s comment. There is no way to evade the militancy of the message. Fanon’s text and Olsson’s archival footage focus on black struggles but an introduction by Columbia professor, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, encourages women to make an imaginative leap and apply the philosophy to sexual equality.įanon’s precise academic language is read by the richly cadenced voice of former-Fugee Lauryn Hill and also flows intuitively in large print across screen for extra oomph. The book’s anti-colonialist thesis explores the idea that violence is the only way for oppressed people to take back control. The psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary and writer died in the same year that The Wretched of the Earth was published. Looping over it all is a narrative plundered from a text by Frantz Fanon – a serious thinker and multi-professioned African-born Frenchman. The black Goncourts and the yellow Nobels are finished the days of colonized laureates are over. The most crucial, most timely thing that Concerning Violence does is force you to stare at racism in a way that is shocking if you are used to enjoying the privilege of an intellectual buffer zone between global issues and one’s own small orbit.īut what is it in practical terms? Concerning Violence is an essay film composed of nine examples of uprisings in Africa shot by guerilla Swedish filmmakers in the ’60s and ’70s. Fanon has nothing in for you at all his work-red-hot for some-in what concerns you is as cold as ice he speaks of you often, never to you. The legacy of colonisation is still being fought amid fire and activism and violence. Are we white reviewers to gripe about storytelling complexities? Are we to neuter the core issue with dispassionate objectivity? Director Göran Olsson’s film is, most starkly, a controlled rage at racist oppression. Concerning Violence has been released in the UK during the week that a white policeman was acquitted for shooting dead an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri. ![]() It’s not often that film reviewing is an overt political act. ![]() A timely and powerful exploration into the history of uprising in Africa as seen through the eyes of white liberals.
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