Concerning Violence | Little White Lies

Con­cern­ing Violence

28 Nov 2014 / Released: 28 Nov 2014

Two young African children in military uniforms, one carrying a rifle.
Two young African children in military uniforms, one carrying a rifle.
4

Anticipation.

Word is that this is an important film.

4

Enjoyment.

As enjoyable as racial prejudice and violence.

4

In Retrospect.

Upsetting in a way that frames upset as progress.

A time­ly and pow­er­ful explo­ration into the his­to­ry of upris­ing in Africa as seen through the eyes of white liberals.

It’s not often that film review­ing is an overt polit­i­cal act. 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. Direc­tor Göran Olsson’s film is, most stark­ly, a con­trolled rage at racist oppres­sion. Are we white review­ers to gripe about sto­ry­telling com­plex­i­ties? Are we to neuter the core issue with dis­pas­sion­ate objectivity?

The lega­cy of coloni­sa­tion is still being fought amid fire and activism and vio­lence. 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.

But 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. Loop­ing over it all is a nar­ra­tive plun­dered from a text by Frantz Fanon – a seri­ous thinker and mul­ti-pro­fes­sioned African-born French­man. The psy­chi­a­trist, philoso­pher, rev­o­lu­tion­ary and writer died in the same year that The Wretched of the Earth was published.

The book’s anti-colo­nial­ist the­sis explores the idea that vio­lence is the only way for oppressed peo­ple to take back con­trol. 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.

Fanon’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. There is no way to evade the mil­i­tan­cy of the mes­sage. There is no way to absent your­self from the scope of the film’s com­ment. 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. You are rich because you are white. You are white because you are rich.”

We are all fold­ed in to the strug­gle. The footage is an inci­den­tal patch­work and the ideas about vio­lence too extreme for this review­er to adopt. 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. 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.

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. For this last rea­son it is to film to fuel pub­lic discussion.

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