 |
| The Wretched of the Earth (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Cinema Politica last night screened an old-fashioned sort of documentary
film, Concerning Violence made by a
Swedish filmmaker Goran Hugo Olsson who
was committed enough to his message to stay up until after 3 am Stockholm time
to engage in a question-and-answer session with the considerable audience in
Montreal.
In saying that the film has a slightly old-fashioned
air, I am more or less agreeing with an audience member who told the filmmaker
his film was “ahistorical”. Although not wholly agreeing with that, Olsson did
say that the film was designed as an illustration of a text written “fifty
years ago” by the Martinique-born philosopher Frantz Fanon --- in fact, the
text was drawn from the first chapter of the last book Fanon wrote before dying
at the age of 36, The Wretched of the
Earth --- and implying that it was not his business in this particular film
to follow up the various spokespersons he used to illustrate his text as they
proceeded through life in their various ways.
The particular point of contention arose around his
use of an early Robert Mugabe quote, taken from not long after he became the
leader of Zimbabwe. In those days Mugabe was a leader much-admired by
progressives in the Western world, an admiration that has diminished as he has
doggedly clung to power, during his later years driving most of the white
farmers from their farms, in the process plunging his nation into an economic
crisis.
The burden of the film, both written on the screen
as quotes from Fanon’s book, and carefully enunciated by Lauren Hill, handling
the commentary, was that violence lies at the root of all relationships between
colonialists and their subjects, and that only by mastering their own
responsive violence could their subjects hope to break the circle of their
oppression. When an audience member mentioned to Mr. Olsson that Mandela did not
fit that prescription, he sharply reminded the man that Mandela had been the
head of the armed wing of the African National Congress, and thus was no
exception to the rule. This is the second Cinema Politica film to deal with violence or non-violence within
two weeks. The previous film, called Everyday
Rebellion made an earnest plea for non-violence, dealing with many
inspiring resistance movements that have sprung up around he globe, from the
Egyptian spring in Tahrir Square to a movement of topless feminists in Ukraine.
As one of that film’s blurbs describes it:
“From the Occupy
movement to the Spanish ‘Indignados’ to the Arab Spring and from Iran to Syria
to the Ukraine, everyday people are expressing themselves through nudity,
performance, silence, sound, creation and community. Everyday
Rebellion is a high velocity
exploration of the power of ideas and the courage it takes to use the body as a
non-violent tool in protest, showing us the infinite possibilities of people
power in the imagination of a better world.”
Though that
film, directed by two Iranian brothers, is persuasive, one’s scepticism is
aroused by, for example, the final result of the Tahrir Square rebellion, which
has led to a military takeover that appears to be more oppressive than what
went before. (It’s not the first time that social revolutionaries have made
matters worse: the 1960s U.S. “revolution” of manners ended in the election of
the repulsive Nixon as president).
For
me, the history of the African National Congress in South Africa makes the
ultimate and virtually unanswerable case for the use of violence: the apartheid
regime shut off all political expression for the country’s black African
people, even changing every law under which the protesters won court cases,
until they were left with no option but to turn to violent struggle. The wave
of crime that has overcome South Africa
since then surely is more attributable to the many years of twisted
government by the white oppressors, and the deformations it worked in the South
African body politic, than to the fact of the use of violence by the
revolutionaries. Many prescient observers during the apartheid years warned
that if apartheid continued, the country that would be left behind would be
almost ungovernable.
Last
night’s filmmaker, Olsson, said that no white man had a right to set up a
camera in Africa, and that filming of their reality should be left to Africans
themselves. (That did raise a question in my mind as to what Olsson himself was
doing making such a film, in that case).
I sympathized with his aim, to make a film illustrating a set of complex
ideas, for I have myself tried to make films directed to the same purpose, and
I know it is not easy. Most of the questions he received from the audience last
night dealt with political realities in various parts of the world, and he
expressed himself as wishing more questions had been directed to pure
film-making subjects, on which he confessed he could have used some guidance,
or at least reasonable commentary.
His
case was certainly made strongly, beginning with an interview with a
horrendously smug, racist, Rhodesian, who appeared to believe he was
pre-ordained to lord it over the local population in perpetuity, and who did
not hesitate to speak of them in the most scurrilous tones. It reminded me of
my years in journalism, when I numbered the white Rhodesians as the worst
single population of people I had ever run across, a group of plumbers and
carpenters and store clerks from
Lancashire or Yorkshire, simple people on a lower income level at home,
suddenly transferred into a Master Race with their swimming pools, and endless
servants, and pretensions to grandeur. Although even there the peculiarity of
human beings , their irrepressible individuality, shone through: one young
woman I knew was strongly against the local political system, while the rest of
her family, including her sister, blindly accepted their destiny as Master
Race. How does one explain such a thing,
in rational terms?
I
was pleased to see an extended quote spoken by the late leader of Burkina Faso,
Thomas Sankara, especially since, in introducing last night’s film, a professor
from Ottawa appeared to suggest that the recent overthrow of Blaise Compaore in
Burkina Faso was simply yet another example of white European interference in
African governance. Unless I was
mistaken in what he said (and I confess it was difficult to follow his rambling
address), this formulation simply ignored the fact that Compaore assassinated
Thomas Sankara, who was one of the most progressive young leaders Africa has
ever thrown up, and immediately jettisoned all his progressive policies. It also ignored the fact that Compaore was
brought down after an estimated one million people thronged the streets of the
nation’s capital demanding his resignation. Not likely that the French organized
that, surely. Sankara’s assassination has stayed with me over the years as an especially
unfortunate event in the history of Africa, but a few years ago I saw a film on
Burkina Faso, of which the very last image was of a small boy, running along
with one of those wheel rims that kids everywhere have always played with, and
singing a song in praise of Thomas Sankara. That remains with me as positively
the most hopeful image I have ever seen for the future of Africa.
Sankara’s
contribution to Olsson’s film was one of the mot memorable things in the film:
a catalogue of freedom measures, including such stirring statements as that
anyone wanting to provide food aid should send seeds, shovels, tractors, hoes
and implements to help them grow their own food, which was followed by a
reasoned critique of he International Monetary Fund and its perilous measures,
designed to hand over Africa to international businessmen. Eschewing IMF aid, Sankara
nevertheless succeeded in making his country self-sufficient in food in the
four short years he was given as leader.
I
thought the decision to have a local professor introduce the film was rather
unnecessary, especially since the very first images in the film itself are of
an Indian woman professor outlining the history and message of Fanon’s book
that the film was intended to illustrate. I would have liked to question Olsson
on Sankara and his message and fate, but Olsson in answer to another question
had more or less renounced any responsibility to provide follow up to the
statements shown that were made during earlier years in independent Africa, and
whose validity might have been called into question by later events.
Much
as I admired the effort and the educational purposes that prompted Olsson’s
film, I am not sure that it can be described as an unequivocal success.
No comments:
Post a Comment