What The Hell America!

Behind a locked door, whimpers and moans can be heard over an ominous soundtrack. Dressed in a white lab coat and tan suit, Frantz Fanon is about to encounter, for the first time, the patients of the psychiatric ward of colonial Algeria’s Blida-Joinville hospital.

The next scene is dark — both cinematographically and psychologically. The room Fanon enters looks more like a prison or torture center than a mental asylum. Some of the patients, crammed into the psych ward like livestock, are strapped into straitjackets; others have their ankles and wrists chained to the walls. After a long moment, Fanon looks to the medical intern giving him the tour. He sternly commands him to fetch the keys to unchain them all. In the next scene, the patients are released into the blinding sun of the courtyard, a neat contrast of light and darkness.

On display in these scenes is the peculiar cinematic universe of Fanon — the creation of Jean-Claude Barny, a French filmmaker of Guadeloupean and Trinidadian descent. The movie was released in France (including Fanon’s own Martinique, now a French overseas département), Belgium, Luxembourg, and eighteen French-speaking countries across Africa last Wednesday, April 2, and will be released in Canada in October.

Barny’s Fanon doesn’t subscribe to typical cinematic codes. As the director tells Jacobin, it’s a biopic that “doesn’t go from A to Z, but rather starts somewhere around C.” “Fanon,” Barny added, is an “arthouse film for the general public.”

Such an approach might be what was necessary to capture the complexities of the film’s subject: the three-year period between 1953 and January 1957 when Fanon, then a young but ambitious psychiatrist from the French colony of Martinique, served as a clinical department head at the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria. This period — which came just after the publication of his thesis on colonial alienation in Black Skin, White Masks — coincided with some of the writing of what would later become his best-known book, The Wretched of the Earth, and the apogee of his personal involvement in anti-colonial guerrilla movements as a freedom fighter connected to Algeria’s National Liberation Front (FLN).

For Fanon, Algeria was a time of political awakening and intellectual liberation. Increasingly, however, his dual role of clinician-revolutionary tortured the psychiatrist: a tension that builds throughout the film. In 1957, Fanon was forced into exile in Tunisia, where he became a spokesperson for the FLN across the African continent. While Algeria’s anti-colonial guerrilla movement would ultimately succeed with the signing of the Évian Accords of March 1962, which led to independence, Fanon did not get to see the final outcome. The physician died from leukemia in a hospital bed in Bethesda’s Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in December 1961.

In zooming in on those pivotal years leading up to Fanon’s exile — years that informed Fanon’s anti-colonial thesis and his emphasis on the need for armed struggle — Barny’s Fanon shines a necessary light on one of the world’s foremost postcolonial thinkers, one who, a hundred years after his birth in Martinique, continues to inspire.

Phineas Rueckert spoke with director Barny in a house not far from where he grew up in Paris’s northeastern suburbs.