The centenary of the birth of Frantz Fanon (July 20, 1925) is the occasion for the release on the big screen of two films devoted to him, after this major figure of the thought inscribed in action in the middle of the XXe century was largely ignored by cinema1even if it has become a major reference both decolonial thoughts and rap musicians.
After Dewlapdirected by Jean-Claude Barny and released in France on April 2, 2025, here is that of Abdenour Zahzah, whose full title is Faithful chronicles that occurred in the last century at the Blida-Jeoinville psychiatric hospital, at the time when Dr. Frantz Fanon was head of the fifth division between the year 1953 and 1956.
The first filmmaker is West Indian (Guadeloupean), the second Algerian, two origins that make sense about a Martinican doctor, thinker and activist, of which an essential part of his brief existence took place in colonized Algeria, where the war of independence broke out, a year after the arrival of the young psychiatrist appointed manager of a service of the Blida-Joinville psychiatric hospital.
Both films are devoted to this same Algerian episode, which tends to obliterate part of the intellectual and political journey of Frantz Fanon, but highlights the gap between the two. The first is an illustrative film, which had the merit of existing while flattening this complex and daring figure in a context also simplified, except for the character of the French soldier torturer and mentally “tortured” played by Stanislas Mehrar.
Take care of “madness” in wartime
Very different is therefore the project that reaches screens – some screens – this Wednesday, July 23. Shot in Blida (north of Algeria), in the hospital where the Martinican psychiatrist worked and who today bears his name, by a director who had once devoted a documentary for television to the same character, Frantz Fanon impresses by his formal choices, as much as by the elements that he highlights and that he articulates between them.
He joined the arrival in 1953 in Blida of this 28 -year -old black man, who settled with his (white) wife to take office as a psychiatrist. He skillfully faces various forms of racism, at the same time as the rules in force in psychiatric institutions.
The image in black and white, the intensity of the physical presence, the way of making protruding, at the turn of a replica or a gesture, the multiplicity of the registers in which the action and the thought of Frantz Fanon are deployed, immediately establish a tension which will carry the entire film of Abdenour Zahzah.
If he takes care of the multiple dimensions of the presence of the militant doctor, his greatest success is due to the attention paid to patients and hospital staff. Their words, their ways of speaking, their uses of languages-French and Arabic-are part of the lively material of the feature film.
As predictable as it is authentic, the simultaneously medical and political confrontation with the chief doctors, who rely on an openly racist psychiatric doctrine, takes a singular thickness and wealth thanks to the way in which we see Frantz Fanon organizing his service.
The reactions of caregivers – Arabic or European – and those of interned men and women for multiple reasons, where colonized status is always present, activate the inner energy of Abdenour Zahzah’s film. Even grafting the disorders of French torturers, when their acts do not leave them unscathed.
Thus play the increasingly strong interference with the independence combat which takes place at the gates of the hospital and soon penetrate there, while Frantz and Josie Fanon are still committed more for the liberation of Algeria. These interferences are part of the network of reflections and practices of Frantz Fanon, the veteran of free France who was an anti -colonialist thinker and activist in the Antilles and in France, before making it the heart of his action in Algeria, or for Algeria after having been expelled in 1957.
By the creation of a day hospital as by the organization of football matches and sewing sessions, the “care techniques” – but especially the registers of attention and the ways of connecting what is institutionally and imaginatively separated – give access to the singular importance of what the author of the author Year V of the Algerian Revolution (1959).
Links between psychiatry and colonization
The film underlines the decisive role played for Frantz Fanon the teaching and practice of François Tosquelles, this French republican psychiatrist naturalized French who laid the foundations of a liberating psychotherapy, called institutional, implemented in the hospital of Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole (Lozère), where the young doctor studied. Its contribution will be to highlight the interrelation between the status of colonized – generally of oppressed – and psychic diseases.
This is already what the first book of Frantz Fanon explores, Black skin, white masks (1952), published before his arrival in Algeria, as well as the important study on the pathological internalization of their status as colonized by the Algerians, in a text whose film reports in the form of a conference, then published in February 1952 in the journal Spirit“The” North African syndrome “”.
On the scale of the themes thus mobilized responds, in the film, the attention to the silences, to the contrast of the lights and the shadows, to the brutality or the softness of a gesture, of a look.
Complex, the story of Frantz Fanon is accompanied by a legendary aura which, to be deserved as for the courage and clairvoyance of the one it concerns, easily leads to simplisms, if not to misunderstandings. The way Abdenour Zahzah designed his film works to escape it.
The harshness of images and sounds, the roughness of the assembly, far from distant the one who is now a celebrated hero, bring him closer on the contrary. The staging questions the proximity and the real deviations (cultural, to know, of body posture) with the beings and the situations that he was dealing with. And this constant questioning on distances, the ways of filling them or not, also weaves the possibility of proximity to spectators of today.
