Concerning Violence (2014)
Thrown in at the deep end, powerful poetic narration meets subtitles at the beginning of this film which is (rightly) sinister. Enter, excerpts from Frantz Fanon’s book The Wretched of the Earth (1961) married with distressing imagery of pure unadulterated poverty.
Concerning Violence is a feature documentary compiling recently discovered archive footage of colonial Africa from the 1960’s and 1970’s. It was captured by Swedish filmmakers who set out on a mission to document the anti-imperialist liberation first hand.
Aided by extracts from Fanon’s book, director Göran Hugo Olsson artistically assembles the footage into nine chapters which factually address colonialism and capitalism. Despite writing over 50 years ago, Fanon’s book is an acute account of the still relevant, wholly prevalent struggle for independence from neo-colonialism.
The piece asks the audience to question both modern day and historical motives for violence and demands negative attention towards first world countries and their dictation of a seemingly helpless third world.
Evidence of an exploited and vulnerable group factually plays out at a conflictingly leisurely pace. The film is slow and contrarily indifferent, almost calm, yet visually provocative. Aided by the soporific sound of Ms. Lauryn Hill’s eloquent voice, music is sparse, though unbiased when apparent. It recycles the motif of music in the third world as empowering, a reality-free, spiritually driven source of escapism.
Though the film sets itself up to centre around the struggles of one man, it follows a selection of incomparable yet consistently haunting real-life narratives. Successfully the film allows one to glimpse at the sheer scale of tragedy which is seemingly washed out by Western media and hidden within the pages of history books.
The ending features nothing but text on screen, seemingly devolving the medium of film to its early stages. I would argue this is a reflection of and comment on how the third world is still yet to evolve. With this stripping back, the text and narration present an empowered future for the third world and humanity as a whole, with the concept of “inventing… a new human being.”
What a skilfully executed and dauntingly honest morsel of insight into the relationship between the first and third worlds. The film concludes on a cliffhanger, highlighting the unsettlingly real ethical conflict that lives still today.
27/01/2015, Candid Magazine