Burn!
Gillo Pontecorvo was an Italian film maker who died at 86 in Rome in 2006. He was born in Pisa, one of ten children in the family of a wealthy Jewish industrialist. Pontecorvo was a lifelong Communist. His brother Bruno Pontecorvo was a leading Italian nuclear physicist who defected to Russia and died in Moscow.
Pontecorvo was a journalist, anti-Fascist resistence fighter, professional tennis teacher, and deep-sea diver among other things before becoming involved in cinema. His first movie about class conflict in a fishing village was released in 1957 as The Wide Blue Sea. He made a concentration camp picture in 1960 called Kapo. In 1966, he garnered international fame for The Battle of Algiers. This was followed by Burn! in 1969 and, then, in 1979 Ogro, about a political assassination in Spain. After that, he made shorts, documentaries, and television commercials.
Pontecorvo’s tracking shot at the climax of Kapo inspired one of the most notorious controversies in the history of cinema criticism. The writer (and, later, great director) Jacques Rivette denounced Pontecorvo’s “reframing” of an image of a corpse danging on an concentration camp electrical fence as inspiring in him “the most profound contempt” for the Italian director. Rivette thought that Pontecorvo was guilty of “aesthetizing” the horrors of the concentration camp. (Probably, much of the problem was related to miscasting the American actress Susan Strasberg as the protagonist in the film.) By contrast, Bernard Henri Levy wrote that Pontecorvo had been “criminalized” on the basis of a single shot when directors like Quentin Tarantino (in Inglourious Basterds) and Scorsese with his film Shutter Island have exploited the Holocaust for melodrama. (There is a fine essay on the “tracking shot in Kapo written by Serge Daney reprinted from Cahiers du Cinema in Senses of Cinema on February 12, 2004.)
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Gillo Pontecorvo’s most famous film is The Battle of Algiers (1966). The movie is about the insurgency in Algeria between Fronte de Liberation Nationale (FLN) and the pied-noirs (or French). Algeria was not a French colony but, in fact, organized as a part of France itself, that is, a territory annexed to France with participation in the French government. The movie was commissioned by Saadi Yacef, a member of the ruling military junta who had been a leading FLN commander during the conflict. Yacef had written a memoir and wanted this to be filmed. (The original plan was that Paul Newman would be cast in a starring role.) The resulting movie written by Franco Solinas was shot on the original locations where the actual events depicted in the movie had occurred. Pontecorvo cast non-actors in all roles and used prostitutes and beggars in key parts. All of these measures were supervised by Yacef, who was the film’s producer and who stars in the picture. Although the movie has been praised as being even-handed in its depiction of war atrocities and terrorism, recent commentaries argue that Yacef white-washed his role as a leader in the FLN and that Pontecorvo, in fact, slants the movie against the French colonialists – something that was pretty apparent to most viewers of the film in the sixties who were unabashed in their praise of the picture’s Leftist politics. (Yacef turned out to be a murderous dictator himself and his regime slaughtered thousands of Algerian collaborators, tortured people with impunity, and enforced violent repressive measures against the people.)
Pontecorvo said that the picture was subservient to the “dictatorship of truth”. By this, he meant that he rejected the overtly propagandistic script endorsed by Yacef and opted for a more nuanced portrayal of the conflict that showed both sides engaged in war crimes. (The most famous sequence in the film is a sequence in which FLN terrorists plant a bomb in a movie theater and kill scores of civilians.) Pontecorvo imagined the film as being in the lineage of the Italian neo-realists and similar to pictures like Rosselini’s Open City and Paisan. Lastly, he strove for authenticity, using grainy newsreel-style camera work, nonprofessional actors, and footage imitating TV reporting from actual locations. (This was part of a trend at the time; in the U.K., Peter Watkins made several similar films employing newsreel style filmmaking – including Culloden and The War Game.) The Battle of Algiers was closely studied by the Black Panthers in the late sixties. In 2003, the picture was screened repeatedly as a training film by the Pentagon. Pontecorvo is reputed to have said: “Studying the film will train you to make cinema, not war.”
By virtue of Pontecorvo’s international success with The Battle of Algiers, the director was able to amass Hollywood financing (and the involvement of Marlon Brando) for his film, Burn! Upon Pontecorvo’s death, the government of Algeria sent a crown to be set on his bier to honor his depiction of the armed struggle against the French in that country.
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United Artists working with the French company, Les Productions Artistes Associes, agreed to finance Burn! like The Battle of Algiers, based on a script by Pontecorvo’s reliable screenwriter, Franco Solinas. (Solinas had written all of the Pontecorvo’s previous films.) This film was supposed to combine a swashbuckling action movie with political ideology – that is, “(a) romantic adventure and (a) film of ideas.” United Artists suggested that Pontecorvo hire Charles Bronson or Steve McQueen to play the film’s protagonist William Walker. Substantial money was budgeted for battle scenes, period costumes, and sets – whereas The Battle of Algiers cost only $800,000 (and earned many times that amount), Burn! ended-up significantly over its allocated budget of three million dollars.
Brando admired Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers and seems to have watched that movie at the behest of his associates in the Black Panthers. He was politically engaged with the film’s ideology and agreed to reduce his ordinary fees to work with Pontecorvo. However, ultimately, the association was catastrophic and Brando, true to form, set about subverting the film and wrecking its production. The initial problem was that the movie was shot on locations near Cartagena, Columbia – these places were scalding, infested with bugs, and relatively inaccessible. Brando was associated with disastrous problems that vexed Mutiny on the Bounty, another film shot in an exotic locale, and, for all his posturing about authenticity, was, in fact, a product of the Hollywood studio system and didn’t like working on location. After several months in Cartagena, Brando simply walked off the set, demanding that the movie’s production be transferred to places that he found more congenial. Brando’s intransigence, probably, saved Pontecorvo by forcing him to leave Columbia – he was close to collapse due to the harsh conditions on the set and both his wife and small son were extremely ill. Apparently, Brando’s refusal to cooperate was based in part on the fact that he had some kind of tropical rash and was suffering from amoebic dysentery. In any event, after a pause, shooting was commenced again in Morocco. It’s for this reason that the film’s landscapes don’t always match, inexplicably shifting between lush Caribbean forests and lagoons and mountainous high desert. When Brando eloped from the production, United Artists threatened to cease financing and pull the plug on the movie. In the alternative, United Artists considered re-casting the lead role with Burt Lancaster or Richard Burton or some other bankable star. Pontecorvo, however, mended his relationship with Brando sufficiently to persuade the American actor to demand that the picture be completed with his involvement. The scenes involving the guerilla war between Walker’s army and Jose Dolores’ insurgents comprising the second half of the movie were shot in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, hardly plausible as a Caribbean island such as one of the Antilles, Haiti, or Guadalupe. The big sequences showing the carnival street-fighting and the rebel march along the beach were shot in Columbia at the outset of the production. Sequences on the seashore were filmed either at Cinecitta studios near Rome or in St. Trinidad in the Virgin Islands. Some interiors were shot in Paris. (These locations seem to have been chosen by Brando for his convenience.)
Brando and Pontecorvo clashed at the outset of the film’s production. Pontecorvo, who was extremely superstitious, was afraid of the color lavender. For some reason, this hue signified failure for him. But in the opening scenes, Brando insisted upon wearing a silk lavender scarf. (Brando was in a phase of interpreting roles with overtones of homosexuality – he had done this with his characterization of Fletcher Christian in Mutiny on the Bounty and in the film Reflections in a Golden Eye). Pontecorvo protested because he felt the color would jinx the movie (which did, in fact, turn out to be jinxed) – but Brando was intransigent about this detail and, in the end, Pontecorvo succumbed to his demands.
Accommodating Brando’s whims wasn’t a successful strategy in the end. By the final weeks in the nine month production, Pontecorvo wasn’t speaking with his star. The two men communicated through intermediaries. Furthermore, Brando petulantly worked to undercut Pontecorvo’s credentials as a Marxist - Leftist director. He accused Pontecorvo of underpaying the Black actors involved in the movie and, even, discriminating against them by reducing their food rations and providing them with nutrition inferior to the White European cast and crew. Production was complicated by the fact that Brando spoke with his fellow actors and Pontecorvo in French; the crew and director communicated in Italian; the extras and second-unit production personnel all spoke Spanish exclusively.
Brando successfully destroyed Pontecorvo’s reputation for efficient and low-budget film-making. After shooting Burn!, Pontecorvo didn’t work on a feature for another ten years and his last picture, 1979's Ogro was seen by next to no one. Adding insult to injury, Brando claimed that his acting in Burn! was his best movie performance and his favorite work.
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While Burn! was under production, Franco’s Spain pressured the French production firm and United Artists to change the movie’s title from Quemada (“burn” in Spanish) to Queimada (the spelling of “burn” in Portuguese.) Franco’s government said that Spain would boycott the movie if it purported to depict Spanish tyranny in a Spanish colony. In 1969 and 1970, Spain was a country with big audiences and large ticket receipts. For this reason, United Artists acceded to Spanish pressure and set the movie in a fictional Antilles island mysteriously controlled by Portugal.
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Another complication in Burn!’s production was Pontecorvo’s penchant for casting non-professionals in important roles. The part of Jose Dolores was played by Evaristo Marquez. Marquez was an illiterate Columbian cane-cutter (or, in some references, described as a shepherd), living in the hills with two wives. Marquez, reportedly, had never seen a movie before he was cast as a co-star with Marlon Brando. (This is mythology – in fact, Marquez had appeared in three short documentaries before he was cast as Jose Dolores in Burn!)
Marquez couldn’t read the script and had to be taught his lines by dialogue consultants. To his credit, Brando liked Marquez and did everything he could to support and assist him on the set. Scenes with Marquez are shot from angles to disguise the fact that Brando had to nudge Marquez off-camera to cue him to speak or, even, move. From his experience making this movie, Marquez concluded that he was a movie-star. He appeared in three other films, but was hopelessly inept. It is reported that after debacle of these latter films, Marquez returned to cutting sugar cane (or herding goats depending upon the account.) He lived in San Basilio de Palenque in northern Columbia, now a UNESCO protected heritage site, a village established by runaway slaves (“maroons”) in the first half of the 17th century. (Linguistic problems with Marquez’ work were exacerbated by the fact that he didn’t speak conventional Spanish, but a highly distinct and unusual Creole dialect.) Marquez died in Cartagena in 2010.
Marquez said that “(Brando) never made me feel inferior to him; he regarded me as a brother...” Marquez continued: “Indeed, there was no one like Brando, that way of changing his expression, his eyes, even more he was a brave man.” Roger Ebert interviewed Pontecorvo in Cartagena in 1969. Brando was missing in action – he had gone to Los Angeles and was expected back any day. (In fact, as it happened, Brando had left Columbia for good and did not return, necessitating shooting the picture in other locations.) Pontecorvo said that working with Marquez was a extremely difficult. The first scene required 44 takes and was never completed in a form that Pontecorvo found satisfactory or, even, adequate – the sequence had to be rewritten entirely. Pontecorvo said that Marquez had to be “taught how to walk”; he couldn’t do anything right. In one shot, Jose Dolores is supposed to show “irony” on his face. It was impossible to explain to Marquez what this meant and Pontecorvo despaired of getting the shot. Brando kicked Marquez hard while the camera was running and Pontecorvo reported that his resulting expression could be construed as irony, although it was really a mixture of surprise and anger.
Marquez’ bad acting accounted, in part, for the film running far behind its original 17 week shooting schedule for Cartagena. This protracted shoot under difficult conditions in Columbia led to Brando walking off the project with further cost overruns involving completing the film in Paris, Rome, the Virgin Islands, and Morocco.
Ennio Morricone
Burn! is sometimes said to boast the one of the greatest movie scores of all time. In the year that Ennio Morricone wrote music for the film, he completed no fewer than 29 other film soundtracks. Morricone composed music for the cinema beginning when he was 35 in 1961 (he was born in 1928). Prior to that time, he studied classical music, wrote some pop tunes, and scored music for radio dramas. Morricone led a jazz band and was accomplished in all genres of music. (In fact, he collaborated with the Pet Shop Boys and wrote a number of pop songs including one recorded by Paul Anka). He was always a bit skittish about publicity arising from his famous film scores; Morricone had hoped to become famous for his “serious” music. When he died in July 2020 at 91, he was generally regarded as the best and most influential composer in film history.
Morricone’s music for Burn! is an unusual and singular combination of Caribbean influenced rhythms and syncopation matched to hymn-like music with Gregorian chant tonality. The processional music, “Abolisson”, is often performed in concert, generally with astonishing effect. (“Abolisson” means “abolition” and the music signifies the freeing of enslaved people in Burn!)
Morricone composed the famous music for Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns, most notably A Fistful of Dollars, The Good, Bad,and the Ugly and the lyrical (and operatic) soundtrack for Once upon a Time in the West. One of his last scores was a return to the Western genre with the score for Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight. (Morricone, who won an Oscar for this music, said that the score was “(his) revenge on the Western.”) But, as shown by the indelible music written for Burn!, Morricone wrote soundtracks for all sorts of movies, including Cinema Paradiso, various gangster films including Leone’s picture Once upon a Time in America, Bertolucci’s epic 1900 (in which he pays tribute to Verdi) and the famous melody for pan-flute in The Mission.
After Burn! was shot, Pontecorvo was working in a Roman studio editing the picture. The soundtrack for Liliani Cavani’s film The Cannibals was being recorded in the studio and Pontecorvo heard the theme that would be developed into “Abolisson” in Morricone’s score for her picture. (Cavani’s picture is a counterculture retelling of Antigone involving lots of nudity and student riots.) Pontecorvo asked Morricone to “give him” the theme written for Cavani’s film. Pontecorvo, who like Handel and Bach, was not averse to borrowing from himself, rewrote the music slightly, converting it to the form in which appears as a highlight in Burn! Morricone was trained as a trumpeter. Indeed, his first important spaghetti Western scores featured variations on the Mexican trumpet melody Deguello, called the “cutthroat song” in the John Wayne movie Rio Bravo. The last time that Morricone played trumpet in public was for Pontecorvo’s wedding in 1964 at which he played the famous trumpet fanfares from Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” from the incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
In Burn!, Morricone borrows from Bach’s sacred song, Komm Suesser Tod, Komm heilige Ruhe (“Come Sweet Death, Come sacred peace”) for the music in the final scene associated with Jose Dolores’ death.
On Insurgencies
An “insurgency” is a form of asymmetrical warfare. According to the Rand Corporation, the world has seen 181 insurgencies since the end of World War Two. Insurgencies are characterized by the use of guerilla tactics with fighters that are lightly armed and that seek refuge in the local population. Most insurgencies emanate from rural areas, although there are notable examples of urban insurgencies, including aspects of the Algerian uprising and the fighting in Baghdad after the American invasion. Insurgencies, sometimes called “the other war,” last on average ten years. Fighting is low-intensity without pitched battles or military (army v. army) confrontation. Insurgents often control local populations by terrorist measures undertaken to demonstrate that the ruling authority (or target of attacks) has no ability to protect civilians against fighting and depredations. Insurgency is possibly the oldest and most pervasive form of conflict. Studies of prehistoric populations show that over 10 % of males died violently, but there is no evidence of battles or military campaigns. This suggests that low-levels of persistent raiding, hostage-taking, and ambush have characterized almost all of human history. Paradoxically, conflict between equally armed states is a development that results in massive amounts of killing in specific, limited circumstances (on battlefields) but a lower level of casualties over time.
About half of modern insurgencies are successful. Democracies don’t do well in counterinsurgency (COIN) warfare since public support wanes in the course of these persistent conflicts and because concern for human rights hampers COIN efforts. Anocracies – that is regimes that pretend to be democracies but are actually autocratic – fare worst in this kind of fighting. According to the Rand Corporation studies, insurgencies that involve closely knit ethnic or religious groups are more successful than more diffuse insurrections. The Rand Corporation observes that insurgencies in which fighters have relatively safe, remote, and readily defended havens from which to operate are also likely to be successful.
Examples of recent insurgencies are
– The French defeat in Indochina (Vietnam);
– Castro’s guerilla war in Cuba;
– The U.S. defeat in Vietnam;
– The U.S. incursion into Somalia which engendered an insurrection and U. S. withdrawal;
– The Russian defeat in Afghanistan;
– The U.S. defeat in Afghanistan;
– The U.S. defeats in Iraq;
Unsuccessful insurgencies, or, at least, insurgencies brought under some level of sustained control are
– The Syrian government’s repression of an insurgency in that country;
– Russian repression of Islamic insurgents in Chechnyea and the South Caucasus;
Some insurgencies are not defeated but simply weaken over time, ending with a whimper and not a bang. Examples of this phenomena are the Shining Path rebellion in Peru and the upper Amazon basin (this is the fighting in which the CIA with local forces “bagged” Che Guevera) and the Tamil uprising in Sri Lanka as well as the Maoist Naxalite uprising in rural India, in which there are still over a 100 local police killed per year, but without any other significant or decisive outcomes. The United States was successful in suppressing an insurgency in the Philippines between 1898 and 1902; tactics used against the Filipino guerillas, including widespread collective punishment, and torture, would likely not be condoned today.
On Franz Fanon
Franz Fanon (1925-1961) was an important writer on subjects involving anti-colonialism, revolution, and anti-racism. He is most notorious for his advocacy of violence as a tool for liberation. His ideas are integral to Gillo Pontecorvo’s cinema, most notably The Battle of Algiers and Burn! In the United States, Fanon’s book Wretched of the Earth (1961 in French Les Damnes de la Terre; published in English in 1963) was regarded as a primer for revolutionary consciousness among the Black Panthers and other sixties radical groups. Brando was associated with the Black Panther movement and, in fact, became interested in working with Pontecorvo after becoming familiar with Stokely Carmichael and others who were heavily influenced by Fanon’s theory.
Roger Ebert interviewed Pontecorvo on location in Cartagena. Ebert told the director that The Battle of Algiers had played for 13 weeks in Harlem to mostly African-American audiences. (The movie played for several months in a theater in a Black neighborhood in Chicago as well.) Pontecorvo expressed surprise but said that he had made the film under the influence of Franz Fanon’s writings and that this response was consistent with his intentions. Pontecorvo said that he borrowed motifs from Fanon and said that the writer was “so important (because) he clarifies the Third World.” In Pontecorvo’s view, Fanon was wrong when he ascribed evil to the colonialists; “they were not bad but only that they were wrong.”
Fanon was born in the Caribbean on the francophone island of Martinique. He was raised speaking creole or pidgin French, the language in Martinique, and, of course, conventional French. When he was 18, he left Martinique to fight with Free French in World War II. After the War, Fanon studied psychiatry in France (Lyon) and was a a licensed psycho-therapist. In his practice, he treated victims of the war in Algeria – both the victims of torture and those who had been torturers. In 1956, Fanon left his practice and went to sub-Saharan Africa, gradually working his way to Algeria where he become a member of National Liberation Front (FLN) and fought as an insurgent against the French. By that time, Fanon identified as African and carried a passport stating that his country of origin was Tunisia. During the Algerian War, Fanon became ill with leukemia. He was a Communist and sought treatment in Russia. His Russian doctors recommended that he seek more advanced treatment available in the United States. Somehow, he became entangled with the CIA, who covertly transported him to the National Institute of Health hospital at Bethesda, Maryland. It’s unclear to me whether the CIA was trying to treat him for his leukemia or engaged in an effort to delay and impair his therapy so that he would die. But, in any event, he died at Bethseda.
Fanon published three books in his lifetime. Two of them are highly influential: Black Skin, White Mask (1952) and Wretched of the Earth. A third book contains essays about Africa and political theory. After his death, a number of other essays as well as psychological case studies authored by Fanon have been published as well. Fanon wrote in French. Wretched of the Earth was made famous, in part, because of its foreword by Jean-Paul Sartre.
Here is a sketch of Fanon’s principal ideas:
1. Fanon is a phenomenological existentialist. He derives his ideas from his own embodied consciousness and experiences as a Black man in White dominant society. He also bases his ideas on experiences of patients that he saw when he was psychiatrist;
2. Fanon identifies colonialization as a totalizing project. It affects all aspects of human existence and controls every kind of human relationship – work, language, psychology, ideology, etc.
3. Racism and colonialism throw their victims into a limbo, a “zone of non-being” – this induces an experience of depression, desolation and helplessness, but, paradoxically, also liberates its victims from constraints so that they can forge new identities;
4. Language is an instrument of oppression. Fanon denounces pidgen or creole tongues as internalizing abject responses to the Master language – in his case, French. But there’s no escape from oppression. A Black person who masters French diction remains, nonetheless, a colonial subject or subaltern.
5. All Black people suffer from “epidermal” racism – that is, racism that is systemic and inescapable due to the color of one’s skin. (“What do you call a Black man who speaks seven languages, has a doctorate, and is an accomplished surgeon?” This is an old joke that expresses the nature of racism.) In reality, there is no such thing as a Black Man or a White Man; these are constructed identities;
6 Interracial desire is always pathological and embodies necessarily a master-slave dynamic;
7. Fanon began as an exponent of Negritude, a Black arts movement that expressed the notion that Black writers and artists should embrace their Blackness and African roots. (Richard Wright is sometimes considered a practitioner of this idea.) Negritude is essentialist – that is, asserting that a Black writer must be true to his or her essential nature. As an existentialist, Fanon opposed all forms of Essentialism (although see 18, “strategic essentialism” below). Therefore, he rejected Negritude as a valid ideology;
8. The end of race prejudice comes with a “sudden incomprehension” –at some point, a person grasps that racism makes no sense and turns away from it as “incomprehensible.”
9. A human being must never succumb to any fixed identity but must remain an interrogating/questioning being: O mon corps, faid de mois toujours un homme quid interroge! (O my body, always make me a man who questions!) You should not seek the truth, but perpetually question the truths presented to you;
10. We must de-colonize being-in-the-world, desire, language, and subjectivity – that is, every aspect of what it means to be human since the colonial project is always totalizing;
11. Revolution is impossible without anti-colonialism. This is because a revolution not based on an anti-colonialist ideology merely replaces one form of colonialist oppression with another.
12. Violence is a pre-condition for revolution and the anti-colonialist endeavor;
13. Colonialism is based upon the logic that the colonialized are weak and feckless and, therefore, deserve to be abject subjects – this is an assumption that creates a psychological reality of weakness and ineffectuality in colonial subjects. It is only violence that can disrupt and break this logic;
14. Revolutionary violence creates a new consciousness in the oppressed. It is the Revolution that makes the future, not some sort of vanguard of thinkers or ideas that precede the Revolution. Revolution is a practice that is fundamentally thoughtless. Violence is an end in itself in the practice of revolution and, therefore, self-actualization of the oppressed;
15. Revolutionary violence counters the violence of colonialization that relies upon coerced subordination of colonial subjects and extraction of resources;
16. A colonialized society consists of three classes: (a) workers whose relationship to the colonial power is that they work for it, primarily to extract value (mining gold or harvesting sugar cane for example); (b) colonialized intellectuals who have adopted the language and theories of the European oppressors; ( c ) the so-called Lumpenproletariat – these are the surplus people, the disposable population that provide nothing to the colonialist project; they don’t produce value and are ignored by the masters and their colonialized intellectual servants. The Lumpenproletariat consist of vagrants, refugees and displaced people, petty criminals, slum dwellers, sex workers, subsistence farmers;
17. The workers are too embedded in systems of extraction to be revolutionary. The colonialized intellectuals are counter-revolutionary. The revolutionary class par excellence is the Lumpenproletariat.
18. Essentialism may be deployed as revolutionary tactic – that is, the Lumpenproletariat should be persuaded that they express fundamental aspects of being African that are in opposition to the colonialist ideology. This is called “strategic essentialism” – that is, creating a class consciousness based on identity that is essentialist and, therefore, fundamentally a false consciousness (but, nevertheless, one that is strategic in fomenting revolution);
19. Violence committed by the Lumpenproletariat shows the workers that it is possible for them to resist oppression;
20. Revolution makes everything revolutionary – so revolution is also totalizing;
21. Armed violence is a form of psychotherapy. Violence is an affirmation of human dignity;
22. Don’t look to emulate European models of enlightenment or politics. Don’t look to revive archaic pre-colonialist forms of government or consciousness. Make it new.
23. Europe will be cast into crisis by anti-colonialism. This is because all aspects of the European state, relations, and psychology are based on colonialism. If colonialism is stripped away, nothing remains of the “static” and “strange foundation” of the West. European economies and thought are all based on subordination and extraction. If these aspects of colonialism are destroyed, Europe will cease to exist as an ideological construct;
24. Violence makes a new start and creates a new way of thinking. From this, the “new man” will develop. We can’t define or describe the “new man” because he doesn’t yet exist.
25. We don’t know what the future holds except that with anti-colonialism it will be completely new and, therefore, indefinable at the present moment.
These ideas have interesting consequences. I think it is possible to be inspired by these ideas and, yet, reject them mostly out-of-hand. On a relatively trivial level, Fanon embraced bebop in jazz as embodying the revolutionary consciousness of energy and dynamism. By contrast, he rejected the Blues and traditional Jazz as the product of the “old Negro with five drinks under his belt whining for the delectation of his masters.” Fanon was a relatively young man (36) when he died. His ideas are the thoughts of a young man. We have no idea how his thinking would have evolved if he had lived to see many of his ideas in actual application and commerce – for instance, as adopted by the Black Panthers or various National Liberation Movements (for instance, the Viet Cong, the Taliban, and the violence in Gaza – the Palestinian raid in Gaza was a Fanon-style gesture of violence for violence’s sake; hence, difficulties that college elites expressed in denouncing the attack.)
Burn! dramatizes some of these propositions. The workers are unable to foment a revolution because they are too entangled with the politics and industrial activity of sugar cane production. Walker begins the revolution that he will later destroy by encouraging the commission of a crime – that is, a bank robbery. (It should be recalled that the Symbionese Liberation Army in Oakland, California engaged in a number of bank robberies with shoot-outs – the SLA, of course, were violent radicals acting on Fanon’s theories.) Crime of this sort is the province of the Lumpenproletariat. The villagers encouraged to commit the bank robbery live in a remote place and are really not closely associated with the cane industry. This gives them a perspective as, in effect, displaced persons or surplus people from which they can mount revolutionary acts. The raison d’etre for the bank robbery is greed, the commission of a crime, but Walker regards this crime as the fuse that ignites the revolution. The pan-African celebration with the masks and totemic figures represents the deployment of “strategic essentialism” in the service of the revolution. Revolution can not succeed unless it makes everything new. In the film, we see Jose Dolores agreeing to replace the old form of sugar cane slavery with a new form of capitalist wage slavery – that is, the fundamental economic relations in society are not altered in any meaningful way. One form of oppression simply replaces another, leading to a new revolutionary movement. A revolution that does not change the economic order of capitalism or capitalist production of value will inevitably fail in that the new regime will merely supplant one form of oppression with another. Since revolutions almost invariably simply replace one set of corrupt and avaricious masters with another, the revolutionary project is doomed to fail. And, yet, there will always be revolutions and revolutionaries. There is a certain “Principle of Hope” that animates human existence – in the face of a certain knowledge that our revolutionary efforts are doomed, human beings remain fundamentally revolutionary. We seek a New that is unknown to us. You can kill revolutionaries but you can’t kill the principle of Hope from which revolution inevitably springs.
Most people have never read Fanon and can’t discuss his ideas. But, as with Freud and Marx, it is possible for thinker to influence society by creating a whole diffuse climate of opinion based on that thinker’s ideas.
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