A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Tuesday, July 22, 2025

True Chronicles of the Blida Joinville Psychiatric Hospital ... (Abdenour Zahzah, 2024)

Alexandre Desane in True Chronicles of the Blida Joinville Psychiatric Hospital ...

Cast: Alexandre Desane, Gérard Debouche, Nicolas Dromard, Omar Boulakirba, Amal Kateb, Catherine Boskowitz, Chahrazad Kracheni, Kader Affak. Screenplay: Abdenour Zahzah. Cinematography: Aurélien Py. Film editing: Youcef Abba, Abdenour Zahzah. 

The full title is True Chronicles of the Blida Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in the Last Century, When Dr Frantz Fanon Was Head of the Fifth Ward Between 1953 and 1956. Which pretty much tells you that the film is a docudrama about the work of the revolutionary intellectual during a crucial period of his life. Fanon, played by Alexandre Desane, came to work at the Algerian mental institution when the conflict between the colonizing French and the Algerian people was nearing a flashpoint. He found a hospital in the grip of antique psychotherapeutic practices and racist assumptions by the French doctors in charge. His work transformed the hospital and drew attention to his ideas about the mental damage done by racism and colonialism not only to the native Algerians but also to the French who were occupying their country. It's a sober film, a series of incidents with no leavening humor or narrative suspense, but a provocative one even today, as racial stereotyping and inflexible ideology continue to afflict even those of us who oppose them. 

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