FILM: FANON’S ARC FROM THERAPIST TO REVOLUTIONARY

By Dimitri Keramitas 

Fanon, Chroniques Fideles survenue du siècle dernier à l’hôpital de Blida-Joinville au temps ou le Docteur Franz Fanon était Chef de la cinquième division, entre l’an 1953 et 1956 (Fanon, Faithful Chronicles from the Last Century at the Blida-Joinville Hospital when Dr. Franz Fanon was Chief of the Fifth Division, between 1953 and 1956) - a film by Abdenour Zahzah

Sixty-four years after his death - and during the centenary of his birth - the great psychiatrist, polemicist and revolutionary Frantz Fanon seems to have fully returned to the public consciousness, with his ideas being used to address current societal divisions.

Fanon has been the subject of bios, studies, graphic novels, and several films (documentaries and features). Now, a new biopic, directed by Abdenour Zahzah, focuses on his professional experiences at the Blida-Joinville hospital in French Algeria in the 1950s, when l’Algérie Française was giving way to decolonization. (Algeria was divided into fifteen French departments until it won independence following a brutal war.)

As a historical document, the film is fascinating, and even important. Fanon’s hugely influential thought and writings about the effects of colonialism on the psyche of the colonized germinated in the Blida hospital. He would later apply his ideas in political action.

Originally from Martinique, Fanon was educated in elite schools and joined the French Resistance when WWII broke out. (He was awarded the Croix de Guerre, by Colonel Raoul Salan, who as a general would lead a right-wing terrorist group that tried to keep Algeria French.) After completing his medical studies in Lyon, he was sent to the colonial hinterlands of the Maghreb to work with mentally ill patients. At the Blida-Joinville hospital he found wretched conditions and patronizing doctors (one ascribed the mental dysfunctions of Arab patients to racial differences in the brain).

Fanon immediately began trying to reform and humanize the hospital environment with early versions of group encounter sessions. He realized that racism and colonial oppression played a strong part in mental illness. Eventually he became an opponent not only of the imperialism victimizing his patients but of that found in Algerian society in general. He joined the revolutionary FLN (National Liberation Front) and after independence served in the Algerian government.

Fanon would later become associated with the Third World and Black Power movements with his ideas of the “false consciousness” imposed on the oppressed, an idea taken up by others, such as the late writers Ngugi wa Thiong’o and V.S. Naipaul. He attracted controversy by stating that violence could be a legitimate way for victims of racism and imperialism to break out of their psychic straitjackets. In some "Western" countries, he was accused of championing terrorism. It’s difficult to ascertain how literal this was, how much the overheated product of the times (as with the theories of Wilhelm Reich and J.D. Laing). So perhaps it was a good idea to take a look back at Fanon’s clinical work with mentally ill people.

Zahzah himself is from Blida, and he gives us an assured sense of place, mostly of the hospital grounds (which included staff housing), also of a bucolic mountain where orderlies take patients on an outing. He has chosen to film in low-contrast black-and-white, which is pleasant but feels too sedate for the setting, and the context. The hospital is, after all, a “madhouse” as the patients themselves say, with some very extreme cases. This becomes even more the case when the independence war begins. The Algerian War was a violent, often gruesome conflict, and the soft grayish tones somehow seem evasive. We feel that a more extreme style, on the order of Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor, would be more appropriate.

Alexandre Desane as Fanon is brilliant, and he has Fanon’s physical presence (at least as expressed in photos). 

He possesses just the right balance of humane empathy, outrage at the conditions patients are subject to, and assertiveness. Unfortunately, we don’t get a convincing character arc – of his transformation from hospital psychiatrist to revolutionary. The transition seems too smooth, as if Fanon had simply gravitated to a social movement, as opposed to political revolt. This may not be completely inaccurate: To Fanon, joining the Algerian independence struggle wasn’t all that different from joining the French Resistance. (The Resistance too was a proscribed, violent movement opposing what had been termed Free France until it became known as Vichy.)

The supporting actors do serviceable work, but not much more than that, and some secondary characters seem to be played by non-actors. Fanon’s own son plays a small part (as an old friend of Fanon). This adds to the distancing effect of Zahzah’s mode of filming. Perhaps Fanon himself would have wanted his story to be told in an “objective” fashion, except that there’s a contradiction between his portrayal (as well as that of the French characters), and that of the Arab-Algerian patients and staff. This is ironic given that one of the themes is French Algeria’s segregation of French and Arab citizens.

The director trenchantly shows how mental illness was induced by cultural and social forces. This was exacerbated by the war, as we observe both victims of the French army and traumatized perpetrators of torture. The policies applied by the hospital itself become oppressive. In a way reminiscent of the theories of Michel Foucault, Fanon’s notions about colonialism’s damaging impact on the psyche could be extended to other institutions: school, workplace, government bureaucracy, culture.

Regrettably, in delineating this theme, the narrative structure breaks down. While multiplying case studies, the film is desultory and diffuse. Zahzah doesn’t develop and dramatize his cases sufficiently, and then overcompensates with set-pieces in which characters present overwrought monologues about past trauma.

There’s something telling about the film’s long, rather curious, official title. It sounds like self-parody, or something Brechtian, or like Peter Weiss’s play (adapted to film by Peter Brook), The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade - it implies taking literal fact into surreal territory.

Before making this film, Zahzah had made a documentary about Fanon (Frantz Fanon, Mémoire d’Asile, 2002, also about his experiences at the hospital). The director obviously felt a need to get beyond a discursive approach, but he doesn’t quite manage the leap from documentary to dramatic fiction.

In addition, the director misses opportunities to explore his subject’s contradictions. Fanon’s own personality had an authoritarian streak, reinforced by the discipline of serving in a military capacity and by the French education system. His marriage with a Frenchwoman is portrayed as conventional and dominated by his vocation. Fanon tries to “liberate” the patients by imposing Beethoven (shades of Clockwork Orange) and having them put out a newspaper. Another of his methods is to establish that most French of institutions, a café, in the hospital. A couple of times he takes patients into his own household in what might seem a patronizing manner. If all this was for the benefit of the patients, it perhaps indicates that his views on imperialist influence were sometimes tempered with pragmatism.

The film ends with Fanon, now an FLN member, leaving his post to “await instructions” elsewhere. He doesn’t seem much concerned about his wife, young son, or the patient who’d become a member of the household. It’s a sort of grim foreshadowing: The FLN had the structure, and the ruthless methods, of a clandestine liberation movement fighting a more powerful enemy; the structure and methods were later used to remain in power undemocratically. Likewise, the film depicts the importance of the Muslim religion for the Algerian fellah, and this foreshadows the civil war in the 1980s pitting the authoritarian FLN government against Islamists.

At the Paris screening of the film, among the attendees was a woman who had worked with Fanon at the Blida hospital, and who has also written about him. Now nearing 90, she was then a young intern. Whatever her sympathies at the time, like many other Algerian Jews she left the country for France. She declined to speak of that period except to say that while the film was “good” it contained “historical inaccuracies”. She refused to say what they were.

One possible example: Fanon’s tenure at the hospital apparently ended when he was deported, not because of a James Bond-like escape. A life lived semi-underground would seem to guarantee murky historiography, and it’s clear that the life and legacy of Frantz Fanon will continue to provoke debate and controversy. But continuing the discussion is necessary. For that reason alone, Fanon is worth seeing.

Dimitri Keramitas is a Paris-based writer and legal expert.

Photos are courtesy of the film distributors. Fanon will be in cinemas in July.