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”Colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.” So begins Concerning Violence, a most unconventional documentary. The film is structured like a book, with chapters and a preface. The non-fiction book it is based on, The Wretched of the Earth, was written by Frantz Fanon, a Martinique born psychiatrist and philosopher. The book, and so the film, argues that violent opposition to colonial power is justified as it is a means of catharsis and liberation from the yolk of imperial subjugation.

The film superimposes Fanon’s text over the film’s scenes as it is read aloud by Lauryn Hill. The movie is essentially an illustration of Fanon’s text. It is directed by Goran Olsson, whose last movie Black Power Mixtape focused on the experiences of radical African-Americans in the 1960s, also used archival footage from Swedish Television, the Swedish national broadcaster. Hill, who is best known as an R&B singer, reads the text with great passion, her words curling with indignation and anger. All of the material used in the film is from Swedish Television archives. Olsson worked with the archive to use the footage and has previously worked as a commissioning editor for Swedish Television. The archival footage varies masterfully in its tone. It can be powerful, a rebel Angolan force attack a Portuguese outpost at first light. It can be tragic, an African woman who has lost her arm sits breast feeding her child, reminiscent of a Black Venus. Most of all it can be moving, a miner and his family sit amongst what is left of their home, while the sun sets in the distance.

What unites all the scenes in the film, is that each depicts a different moment in the history of revolution against colonial power. Concerning Violence is at its best when the images most directly relate to the narration of the text. This is demonstrated in particular when a reading of Fanon’s theory of envy, which holds that all of the oppressed dream every day of living as their oppressors do, is superimposed over images of white colonialists being served by their black “subjects”. It is a historical documentary, the footage is primarily from the 70s and 80s. Yet the film has a modern resonance. Looming shots of oil rigs combined with helicopters and machine gun fire connect the viewer from the past events of the film to the current affairs of the present. The facial hair and accents on the soldiers may have changed, but the war for materials between the so-called “First” and “Third” worlds continues. Simple yet thought-provoking, it is a film worth watching both for its historical worth, and as the illustration of a theory whose relevance has lost none of its consequence.