It was one day after a grand jury decided not to indict officers in the death of Staten Island resident Eric Garner, who was videotaped being choked and thrown to the ground by policemen on July 17, 2014, and I was sitting across a table from the Swedish documentarian Göran Hugo Olsson, talking about his new film, the remarkably prescient “Concerning Violence.” Based on Frantz Fanon’s revolutionary text “The Wretched of the Earth,” published and just as quickly banned in France in 1961 (the first English translation arrived via Grove Press in 1963), the film brings the writer’s anti-colonialist plea to the masses through a rich collage of archival footage and a bold, provocative clash of text and disciplined voiceover.
When I asked if he sees his film having a place in the debates currently happening around structural violence in the wake of Ferguson and Eric Garner, Olsson lit up. “Of course there is resonance today,” he said. “I wouldn’t do the film if I didn’t think so.” He said he was at the protests the night before and reached for his cell phone, showing me images he took of crowds swarming through midtown Manhattan streets and cramming into the main concourse of Grand Central Terminal. “Police brutality in America is absolutely total Fanon dynamics,” he said.
Aside from its contemporary relevance, “Concerning Violence” can also be seen as a continuation of the work Olsson began with “Black Power Mixtape” (2011), which traced the story of the black liberation movements happening in the United States in the late ’60s and early ’70s through the lens of Swedish journalists, whose footage of prevalent figures such as Stokely Carmichael and Angela Davis was collecting dust in the vaults of the Swedish Broadcast Corporation before being discovered by the filmmaker and reconstructed into a stirring narrative.
Olsson’s interest in revolutionary histories stems from his childhood memories of the Soweto uprising in South Africa in 1976, when a protest led by black high school students against the mandatory teaching of Afrikaans, the language of South African whites, in schools was met with violence by the local police. According to some reports, hundreds of school children were killed. “As kids we were totally terrified by this fact,” he said, and remembers collecting money for the African National Congress, which won the country’s first democratic election in 1994 led by Nelson Mandela, with his classmates.
This early social consciousness was filtered through the punk era, which fused a connection between culture and politics. In the ’80s Olsson was influenced by a wave of politically engaged films that embraced documentary and essay forms, produced by groups such as the Black Audio Film Collective, and filmmakers such as Isaac Julian and Derek Jarman. But that influence only extends so far. “What happened in the last 20 years of documentary filmmaking is that a lot of people — artists, photographers, writers — moved into the field of documentary and really enriched our work,” he said. “But it’s really hard to be a documentary filmmaker and become an artist. I’m not an artist; I’m a documentary filmmaker. It doesn’t even matter if I make films or not. Documentary films are not a genre but a method, a process.”
After the relative success of “Black Power Mixtape,” Olsson was receiving offers from producers in Los Angeles and was hesitant to make another film constructed around archival footage. But then an editor at a publishing house in Stockholm gave him a copy of “The Wretched of the Earth.” Sitting down at a coffee shop, he read the first chapter and was blown away, deciding quickly that this would be in some way his next project. He went through various methods of translating the text on screen —Maybe it needs contemporary images to make the connection between Fanon’s words and what’s happening now more concrete? — before discovering a treasure trove of archival footage in the archives of the Swedish Broadcast Corporation capturing anti-imperialist struggles, once again collecting dust, that was too remarkable not to use.
“I didn’t want [the film] to feel old so I only used the youngest material, which was color, good resolution, sound, and so on,” he said. We visit the liberation movements in Mozambique and Angola, watch an inspiring interview with the former president of Burkina Faso, Thomas Sankara, who was assassinated not long after the footage was shot, and bear witness to startling images of violence, especially against women, that verge on the grotesque. While feeling that the images of extreme violence were important to include in the film, Olsson was worried about their effect on the viewer.
A solution came via a problem with the book itself. The introduction to “The Wretched of the Earth,” written by the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, a supporter of Fanon and anti-colonialism in general, has long been criticized for misreading the original argument of the book. (Fanon’s wife reportedly later attempted to have the introduction removed because of Sartre’s support of Zionism, but publishers still include it today because it apparently helps the book sell more copies.) In translating Fanon’s work to the screen, Olsson arrived at a formal structure not unlike that of a book, with individual chapters and bold text that unfolds across the frame. Within this formula, he arrived at the idea of having a preface to the film, and reached out to Gayatri Spivak, a professor at Columbia University and one of the best-known postcolonial thinkers.
The film opens with Spivak, sitting in her office surrounded by stacks of books that tower over her, reading a prepared statement that highlights contradictions not just in Fanon’s writing but in the film itself. It’s a bold and provocative move for a film to announce its faults up front and center, but one that Olsson felt was necessary. “I think she’s the magic key that opens the door for the film,” he said. “She connects the ideas not only to today, but also to gender and the future.”
Spivak’s response to the overwhelming maleness of the book led Olsson to seek out more female voices for the film. When searching for somebody to do the voiceover narration of specific chunks of Fanon’s texts, he landed on the singer Lauryn Hill. “She has magic around words,” he said, and was happy to find out that she was currently reading Fanon, and was eager to collaborate on the project. The only problem was that she was in prison, serving three months from July to October 2013 for tax evasion. When she was released, it was too late to do the music, but she went into a recording studio three days after leaving jail to record the audio you hear in the film, which bristles with authority and anger.
Since “Concerning Violence” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2014, Olsson said some of the most enthusiastic responses have been from teachers, who commonly ask him about how they can show his film to students. He hopes that the film will have a life as a useful tool for people attempting to understand Fanon’s writings on the mechanics of structural violence. “I think it’s time for us to really think this through,” Olsson said, pausing to take a deep breath. “If we had listened to this guy 50 years ago, we wouldn’t have all these eruptions.”
