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.”
For Fanon, Algeria was a time of political awakening and intellectual liberation.
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…
Auteur: Jean-Claude Barny
