For today Tuesday Sept 22nd* our friend Heathcote Ruthven** wanted to screen "Concerning Violence" by Göran Olsson.
"Concerning Violence" offers little historical context about the anti-colonialist movements it presents. The audience don't hear about the development of the struggles being filmed, or the people doing the filming. Thomas Sankara, Robert Mugabe, and female guerrillas in Mozambique are placed side by side with Algerian cocktail parties, interviews with deluded 'Rhodesian' nationalists, and Swedish missionaries lecturing on polyamory. These fragments are shown raw, explained only by extracts of Fanon's philosophy coldly and huskily read out by Lauren Hill. The film is a theoretical tract on the meaning of decolonisation - both in the sense of liberating a territory from the control of a coloniser, but also of freeing the native consciousness from the alienation caused by being colonised. Fanon, a psychologist, forcefully but delicately explores the moral and practical role of violence, and how it should be conceptualised. He brings in dreams, dancing, class, reformism, and - centrally - violence into a conversation that can help us understand domination in general. The Swedish director Göran Olsson has repeatedly claimed that this film is 'for Europeans', that he has neither the ability or inclinations to lecture Africans about their own oppression. Fanon's text demands that Europeans “stop playing the stupid game of the Sleeping Beauty” and wake up to the emptiness of their Enlightenment values. Olsson stated in one interview "I wanted to put out the recipe for change. Sort of like propaganda. The tools of change are in this book, and I wanted to put it out clear and loud, karaoke style" With the rise of colonial rhetoric emerging in Greece - Varoufakis fancying himself as a new Sankara - and anti-authoritarians discussing "what to do after the riot?", we can talk afterwards about the critical tools Fanon could possibly offer us.
*Screening starts at 10pm. Conversation will follow. BYOB
**Heathcote Ruthven is an anthropologist, researcher and associate of International Times Archive.