Fanon on film - Culture - Al-Ahram Weekly

Al-Ahram Weekly

08-08-2025

Perhaps rather in the way of passengers on London buses, which have a reputation for keeping people waiting beyond scheduled arrival times and then showing up in groups of two, French audiences now have the opportunity to see not one but two films about the life and times of the Martinican psychiatrist and Algerian independence activist Frantz Fanon.
Both films are biopics, and both focus on the years that Fanon spent at Blida, a town some 45 km southwest of Algiers, after his appointment to the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in 1953. He resigned in 1956 to devote himself to the struggle for Algerian independence from France.
The first film, called Fanon and directed by French director Jean-Claude Barny, takes in Fanon's arrival in Blida in 1953, his attempted reorganisation of the medical services provided at the Hospital, and his eventual resignation in 1956 before joining the Front de Libération nationale (FLN), the Algerian independence movement.
It ends with Fanon working for the FLN in neighbouring Tunisia as a writer on the movement's French-language newspaper El Moudjahid and with the diagnosis of the leukemia that led to his early death at the age of only 36 in 1961.
The second film, released in cinemas just weeks after the first and called Frantz Fanon, is directed by Algerian director Abdenour Zahzah. It also focuses on the years that Fanon spent in Blida before leaving to devote himself to the struggle for Algerian independence. However, whereas Barny's film, working with what seems to have been a larger budget, invites audiences to place Fanon's growing political radicalisation at the centre of their sense of him, Zahzah focuses instead on Fanon's work as a psychiatrist.
His film, made in black and white and without the overblown soundtrack that is such a feature of Barny's film, presents Fanon as a medical professional, though one working in and rebelling against the colonial context. His Fanon rarely if ever leaves his place of work – quite a contrast to Barny's who is shown driving around the countryside, attending FLN meetings, confronting the French army, and finally moving to Tunis.
Both films plunge audiences back into the political debates in France in the 1950s, when the future of its then remaining colonies, at first up in the air, was effectively decided by the decision to withdraw from what was then French Indochina, now Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, following defeat at the hands of the Vietnamese independence movement the Viet Minh in 1954.
Morocco and Tunisia, then French protectorates, became independent in 1956 without notable violence, but the case was different in Algeria, a French colony rather than a protectorate, a history of colonialism going back to 1830, and a European population of some 1.6 million. Algeria only became independent in 1962 following a long and bloody independence war that witnessed atrocities on both sides.
Lasting scars were inflicted at enormous cost in terms of material losses and human lives. French intellectual life also became focused on the country's relationship with its soon to be former colonies. Writers such as Albert Camus, himself Algerian born, Pierre Bourdieu, Raymond Aron, Andre Malraux, Albert Memmi, of Tunisian origin, Jean-Paul Sartre, and many others all took up positions on the Algerian war.
This heady set of circumstances was added to by writings on colonialism and the search for independence by writers such as Aimé Césaire in the Caribbean – his book Cahier d'un retour au pays natal is about the colonised condition of his native land, which, like Fanon's, was Martinique – and the Sub-Saharan African and African diaspora figures gathered around the review Présence africaine, including first president of independent Senegal Leopold Sedar Senghor.
Fanon intervened in these political and intellectual debates with his own philosophically and psychologically inflected writings on colonialism, post-colonialism, and cultural and racial difference. He began to publish these in 1952 even before his posting in Algeria, with the best-known being Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks), a meditation on racism owing much to the existentialist philosophy of Sartre that was then fashionable in France.
This book is presented in Zahzah's film as having first drawn the attention of the FLN to this unorthodox, but still obscure, young psychiatrist who had joined the Blida Hospital at the beginning of what was supposed to be a medical career. There is also a moment in Barny's film when a copy of the book is discovered on Fanon's shelves. He points to the others and says that they are the works of Sartre.
Peau noire, masques blancs began a vein of examining race-based subjugation and the search for freedom that was later carried forward in different form in books such as Les Damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth) and L'An V de la Révolution algérienne (A Dying Colonialism) on the impact of colonialism in Algeria and prospects for post-colonial government.
Fanon saw the promise of independence in Algeria as part and parcel of the freedom from the fatal dialectics of black and white identified in the earlier book and played out in another form in the poisonous relation of coloniser and colonised in France's North African colonies.
Fanon and Frantz Fanon: Barny's film is the longer and more wide-ranging of the two and presents a Fanon who, at first at sea in Algeria, gradually comes to understand that it is impossible to practice psychiatry, at least his kind of psychiatry, under colonial conditions.
Arriving at the Blida Hospital, Fanon is shown entering a house of horrors where patients are chained up in cellars and treated less as human beings and more as the bearers of conditions not amenable to effective therapy. Fresh from his psychiatric studies in France and convinced of the value of new techniques that seem closer to modern standards of psychotherapeutic treatment, Fanon releases the patients, introduces what might now be called occupational therapy, chiefly football matches and art classes, and encourages the patients to express themselves and become more involved in their care.
All this is presented as revolutionary in the film, and perhaps it was in the context of colonial Algeria, except that while Fanon had spent some time at the St Alban Psychiatric Hospital in the south of France where he had been introduced to the psychotherapeutic methods associated with one of its leading figures, the iconoclastic psychiatrist Francois Tosquelles, it is known that he could also be quite orthodox in his medical views.
Trained as a medical doctor rather than as a clinical psychologist, psychotherapist, or psychoanalyst, he is known to have relied upon the usual panoply of medical treatments for long-term patients recommended at the time, including various drug therapies, electroconvulsive therapy, and insulin comas, which are frowned upon today.
However, Barny's interest is less in the details of Fanon's psychiatric methods at Blida and more on his growing political awareness and sense that practicing psychiatry under colonial conditions was likely to lead to intolerable conflicts. Patients are shown being arrested at the Hospital during police raids on suspicion of membership of the FLN, and Fanon himself is shown attending FLN recruitment sessions in the surrounding countryside. His position as a senior member of the medical profession becomes untenable, leading him to abandon his career.
Zahzah's film, this time called Frantz Fanon, also focuses on Fanon's Blida years and begins with the arrival of this young doctor – he was just 28 years old – in a hospital that, looking to France for its senior staff, drew on the so-called Algiers School of Psychiatry for its medical bearings. This had pioneered a diagnosis handed down to the Hospital's native Algerian, as opposed to European, patients, who could be identified as suffering from a mixture of lassitude and outbreaks of violence thought at the time to be related to less developed impulse and motor control.
Arriving in the Blida Hospital following a period spent trying to introduce more humane methods of psychiatric treatment during his medical training in France, Fanon began to look for ways to break traditionally hierarchical doctor-patient relationships. Zahzah's film does not present the Blida Hospital as being the house of horrors imagined by Barny, and it is probably more accurate about what went on there. Fanon is at first assigned to treat the Hospital's European patients, where his methods achieve some degree of success, and only later is he assigned to treat the Algerians.
Zahzah's film, more modest than Barny's, is the more thought-provoking of the two. Both films draw upon cases reported by Fanon in Les Damnés de la Terre, where in the chapter on 'Colonial War and Mental Disorders' he suggests that the psychological disorders of his Algerian and European patients were related to the colonial context in which they lived. He questioned the diagnoses of the Algiers School, suggesting that the symptoms exhibited by his Algerian patients were best understood as a response to the colonial situation in Algeria rather than, as the School had suggested, a form of 'reactive paleophrenia' associated with the influence of the 'reptilian brain' or so-called 'North African Syndrome.'
In the films, two cases, one of a French police officer who beats his wife and children and one of two Algerian boys, 13 and 14 years old, who kill a French playmate, are woven into the narrative. These are described as 'reactive disorders' in Les Damnés de la Terre, and in Zahzah's film they are used illuminatingly to suggest the ways in which Fanon's work at Blida, and his growing sense of psychiatry in a colonial context, were related to his earlier work, inspired by Sartre, on the psychopathologies of racism in metropolitan France.
One thing that neither film can do is answer all the questions audiences might have about what went on in Blida and its relationship to the essays on Fanon's psychiatric practice and analysis of colonialism. This is true of the essay on 'Medicine and Colonialism,' for example, mostly about the relationship between Algerian patients and French medical professionals, as well as those 'On Violence' and 'Colonial War and Mental Disorders.'
Many readers over the years will have read these essays and wished that Fanon had had more time to develop his ideas and that the essays themselves, sometimes just hypotheses thrown out in the hurry to the press, had contained pointers to the way he carried out his medical consultations and the relation of the cases to his clinical notes, presumably long since destroyed.
Ecrits sur l'aliénation et la liberté, published in 2018, a collection of previously uncollected pieces by Fanon that includes his psychiatric writings, is an essential resource, especially the introductory material by editor Jean Khalfa. French audiences might also be advised to see Zahzah's film, which sends one back to Fanon with a new appetite.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 7 August, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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