Based on Frantz Fanon’s book The Wretched of the Earth, Concerning Violence is a truly startling and shocking documentary following African countries’ break from colonisation and push for independence in the fifties and sixties.
Concerning Violence opens with a scene that prepares you in no way for what is to happen. In an ordinary office surrounded by towers of books, Columbia University professor Gayatri Chakravatory Spivak tells us that Jean Paul Sartre read The Wretched of the Earth as an avocation of violence, refusing, Spivak says, to read between the lines: the poor and colonised are reduced to violence only because it is the only outlet. This tame static shot clashes immediately with one of the most striking images you’ll see this year: in a grim reminder of a scene from Full Metal Jacket, an unsmiling soldier casually shoots peasant’s cows as they flee his advancing helicopter. In a film of striking images, this isn’t even the strongest one.
Director Olsson (The Black Power Mixtape, 1967-1975) takes this style of calm and chaos with the wonderful footage he has unearthed. There’s bowling in Rhodesia and stories from the front line with the MPLA in Cambinda; caddies scurrying after puny white men on a makeshift golf course as a Frelimo teen talks about how long the war will last; a German missionary bumbles through his answer when questioned if a school and a hospital will soon follow the building of the church, and there’s a strike in a Librarian Swedish mining camp that’s broken by government forces. An interview with a landowner on his peaceful grounds is broken by his violent hate for the ‘Affies’. The refrain of the colonial powers throughout is, 'If you wish for independence, take it and starve.'
But the strongest image belongs to a naked black woman, her right arm severed when a bomb fell into her hut, breastfeeding her baby whose right leg torn away from the same attack.If these images don’t take any prisoners, the narration (former Fugee Lauryn Hill reciting from Fanon’s book) is equally as hard-hitting. Capitalists are war criminals, Europe created the Third World, and charitable aid is Africa’s right – reparations for centuries of rape, murder, slavery and robbery.
Concerning Violence is only seventy-eight minutes long but Olsson makes every one of them count. This isn’t a film you’re unlikely to forget very quickly.