Frantz Fanon’s Algerian Years on Film
In French-ruled Algeria, Frantz Fanon was a psychiatrist and an active member of the National Liberation Front. A new movie portrays his commitment to the anti-colonial struggle.
Still from Fanon. (Special Touch Studios, WebSpider Productions)
- Interview by
- Phineas Rueckert
Behind a locked door, whimpers and moans can be heard over an ominous soundtrack. Dressed in a white lab coat and tan suit, Frantz Fanon is about to encounter, for the first time, the patients of the psychiatric ward of colonial Algeria’s Blida-Joinville hospital.
The next scene is dark — both cinematographically and psychologically. The room Fanon enters looks more like a prison or torture center than a mental asylum. Some of the patients, crammed into the psych ward like livestock, are strapped into straitjackets; others have their ankles and wrists chained to the walls. After a long moment, Fanon looks to the medical intern giving him the tour. He sternly commands him to fetch the keys to unchain them all. In the next scene, the patients are released into the blinding sun of the courtyard, a neat contrast of light and darkness.
On display in these scenes is the peculiar cinematic universe of Fanon — the creation of Jean-Claude Barny, a French filmmaker of Guadeloupean and Trinidadian descent. The movie was released in France (including Fanon’s own Martinique, now a French overseas département), Belgium, Luxembourg, and eighteen French-speaking countries across Africa last Wednesday, April 2, and will be released in Canada in October.
Barny’s Fanon doesn’t subscribe to typical cinematic codes. As the director tells Jacobin, it’s a biopic that “doesn’t go from A to Z, but rather starts somewhere around C.” “Fanon,” Barny added, is an “arthouse film for the general public.”
Such an approach might be what was necessary to capture the complexities of the film’s subject: the three-year period between 1953 and January 1957 when Fanon, then a young but ambitious psychiatrist from the French colony of Martinique, served as a clinical department head at the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria. This period — which came just after the publication of his thesis on colonial alienation in Black Skin, White Masks — coincided with some of the writing of what would later become his best-known book, The Wretched of the Earth, and the apogee of his personal involvement in anti-colonial guerrilla movements as a freedom fighter connected to Algeria’s National Liberation Front (FLN).
For Fanon, Algeria was a time of political awakening and intellectual liberation. Increasingly, however, his dual role of clinician-revolutionary tortured the psychiatrist: a tension that builds throughout the film. In 1957, Fanon was forced into exile in Tunisia, where he became a spokesperson for the FLN across the African continent. While Algeria’s anti-colonial guerrilla movement would ultimately succeed with the signing of the Évian Accords of March 1962, which led to independence, Fanon did not get to see the final outcome. The physician died from leukemia in a hospital bed in Bethesda’s Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in December 1961.
In zooming in on those pivotal years leading up to Fanon’s exile — years that informed Fanon’s anti-colonial thesis and his emphasis on the need for armed struggle — Barny’s Fanon shines a necessary light on one of the world’s foremost postcolonial thinkers, one who, a hundred years after his birth in Martinique, continues to inspire.
Phineas Rueckert spoke with director Barny in a house not far from where he grew up in Paris’s northeastern suburbs.
You are of Guadeloupean and Trinidadian origin but grew up in the Paris suburbs. What did Fanon mean to you growing up? Were you particularly aware of him?
Paradoxically, no, I didn’t grow up with Fanon. That is to say, I was not born with Fanon in my hands. I wasn’t born with a Fanonesque culture in my mind. I grew up in a period called the “Thirty Glorious Years,” a time [of economic growth in post-1945 France] that marked the end of assimilation and the beginning of integration. So, I grew up in a unique historical context, in which France was [omnipresent] and everything that was linked to my heritage, my culture, was totally ostracized.
But I had a mother who was undoubtedly in tune with her time: the feminist struggles of the 1960s and ’70s, the antidiscrimination movements in the United States, which had a huge influence on the Caribbean. It was music before literature that brought this about: James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, [Bob] Marley. They took over from the literary intellectuals of the 1950s and music [radicalized] my mother, set the tone for resistance.
When did Fanon first appear in your life, then?
I was sixteen years old when I picked up Black Skin, White Masks. I was growing up in a multicultural suburb where there were real questions about who we are, where we are going and how to design society. When I discovered Black Skin, White Masks, I was a young man in the midst of emancipation, in the midst of reflection on these subjects. At the same time, there was an [American TV] series — Roots — that hit us like a ton of bricks. At school, this was a big deal, in terms of the fact that there could be black people on screen. Even if they weren’t the most radiant, they were there. When I read Fanon and I saw that we were invisible [in pop culture], I said to myself, “There’s something wrong, there’s a blatant erasure of [black people].”
Fanon is your third feature film after Nèg maron (2005) and Le Gang des Antillais (2016). Were the themes that emerge in Fanon already present in those films?
The first films you make always feels like a necessity. You have things to settle with yourself and with the social structure in which you live. I think that Nèg maron and Le Gang des Antillais were, for me, the building blocks of what I would produce in the future. I was building myself as a director, as a filmmaker, as an artist. I was polishing my skills so that when I would tackle Fanon, I wouldn’t miss the mark.
Intellectually, Fanon’s a monster. And so, I told myself that the film has to live up to this man. At the same time, I have to be able to offer something different than most biopics. For me, Nèg maron and Le Gang and my other productions — including [the series] Bitter Tropics or [telefilm] Rose and the Soldier — were projects that allowed me to establish my legitimacy. If I hadn’t made all those films in the past and I tried to make Fanon today, people would look at me with suspicion, and rightly so. But the other films I’ve made give me the standing to tackle Fanon.
Let’s talk about the film itself, which really focuses on the three years Fanon spent in Algeria. What do you want people to take away from the film and why focus on that time period in particular?
The aim was to take Fanon’s writing and make it digestible. My job, as a director, is to bring these themes into emotions through images, sound, and music. I have lots of tools to make that happen in a way that is digestible. I have actors, I have dialogues, I have sets, I have costumes, I have music, I have action, I have light, I have movement, I have a camera. So, I can put all that to work. Fanon’s turn of phrase suddenly becomes something that moves. So that’s what’s in the film: it’s really the words of the book The Wretched of the Earth. It’s a journey inside this book in two hours and seventeen minutes.
I wasn’t interested in making a biopic that went from Fanon’s birth to his death. For me, richness is when you give yourself the means to go against everything that the industry imposes on you: to spend more time than usual, [adapt] a structure that doesn’t go from A to Z but C to Z, [work with] actors who are not used to working together, sets that are not necessarily realistic, but rather symbolic. I wanted the film to get into Fanon’s psyche. A psyche is something immaterial, abstract. The idea was to allow the film, beyond its historical realism, to leave the door open for us to interpret the alienation of Fanon’s own psyche and that of the people he consults.
So, what were Fanon’s internal tensions and how do you show that in the film?
We decided to really show this through the lens of the psychiatric hospital. This really was his battlefield. Fanon was first and foremost a psychiatrist. The idea of alienation already existed in the field of psychiatry; what Fanon did was shift this from the individual to the society. How is a person’s psyche disrupted when conditions that demean, discredit, and disempower them are forcibly inflicted? Fanon decided to make the hospital the testing ground for racism and discrimination.
[He started from] the observation that colonization is the manipulation by those who want to acquire wealth of those deemed “incapable” of developing it. Fanon, like many others, explained this situation very clearly. But where he was innovative was that he also said that “the colonizer will never be able to free himself from the colonized, because the two are linked.” The two are caught in a dependent relationship and they will never be able to detach themselves from one another if only one is trying to. This will only happen when they start working together and recognize one another, understand the madness they are caught up in.
We talk a lot about Fanon as a revolutionary, as an anti-colonial thinker, as a rebel, but what is Fanon’s legacy as a practitioner of psychiatry? Is this legacy still alive?
When I look at the feedback from psychiatrists who have talked to me about the film, there is a current of psychiatrists who have always studied Fanon’s psychiatric observations. It’s not the predominant academic study of psychiatry but a school of thought for the curious. Without being an expert on the subject, I would say, yes, indeed, there are many psychiatrists today who are increasingly returning to the study of Fanon — no longer as an outlier, or a curiosity, but really as someone who had a scientific approach, someone who laid down a scientific foundation for working with the mentally ill.
I have the impression that, for lack of a better word, Fanon is really “fashionable” right now. There was a successful book published recently — Adam Shatz’s The Rebel’s Clinic — there’s your film, there are reprints of Fanon’s work coming out. Why this interest in Fanon at this particular moment in time, apart from the fact that it’s a hundred years since he was born, of course? What explains it?
It’s very hard to say. It would be naive to say it’s random. I believe that all of us who are coming together today for this centenary and who have all contributed in some way, have been preparing for some time, if subconsciously. I’ve been working on this film for seven years. It’s as if we [who study Fanon] had a maturation period of forty years, and we are finally meeting at the same time. This corresponds to the time when we all read Fanon, when all of us were shocked by Fanon and since then we had to continue to nourish ourselves, to learn, to gain humility and knowledge. There were of course a lot of people ahead of us.
There are lots of books on Fanon: these people left behind a treasure trove for us. So maybe they’re visionaries too, but they didn’t have the same timing. In the coming weeks, it may be the first time in history that the face of Fanon will adorn the walls of the Paris metro. That, for me, is the first success of the film: millions of people who take the metro will look at this man, who was totally ostracized, trivialized, treated like a pariah, and wonder who he was.
Switching gears, I wanted to speak a little bit about Algeria, where the film takes place. Relations between France and Algeria are, to say the least, a little feverish at the time this movie is coming out. Can you talk a little about what this film also says about the colonial relationship between France and Algeria? Do you think the film could be another source of tension, or, inversely, that it could in some way contribute to the calming of these tensions?
The film isn’t going to resolve anything at that level. The wound between France and Algeria is so deep on both sides that if there’s no will to close it, there’s always someone who’s going to add fuel to the fire. It’s like a bad divorce, a divorce where one of the parties doesn’t acknowledge their faults. This feeling is largely maintained by the children of the pieds noirs [French colonists in Algeria].
The average French citizen has nothing against Algeria. To them, it is a country that was once a colony. Today the tensions between Algeria and France are not a fact of citizenship; they are a political fact, and this political fact is upheld by nostalgia that has its source in the pieds noirs, who, for the most part, have not accepted the fact that they were thrown out. There was a kind of violent falling out of love, which means that today they are embittered by a place where they once felt legitimate, loved, and, above all, at ease.
You were unable to shoot this film in Algeria and therefore you shot it in Tunisia instead. Why? What happened?
I did practically three years of location scouting. I went to Algeria, I went to Blida [the hospital in Algiers where Fanon was a practitioner]. I was in Frantz Fanon’s office. I did a lot of process work so as not to be short of information when I went to work with my actors and technicians. I had to have an answer to everything. So, I worked hard for three or four years to be as informed, as well-rounded, and as legitimate as possible.
But when it came down to filming, we had a major insurance problem. We didn’t know how to validate our insurance policies to allow us to film safely in Algeria, so the brother country — Tunisia — invited us to replace some of the shots. So, it’s really, simply, because the filming conditions were more suitable for our insurance in Tunisia. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that the two countries collaborated so that we could make the best film possible.
The movie was released in France on April 2. Will it be released in other countries?
That’s a good question because that’s where you see that Fanon is a global phenomenon. It seems naive, but I’m surprised when people from Brazil send messages to me in France to ask me how and where they can see the film. This tells me that there are people around the world who want to see this film. It will be released in Belgium, Luxembourg, Canada, and more than a dozen African countries. It’s not Fanon who’s staying in France. It’s Fanon who is going on a world tour.