A landmark of militant cinema, J’ai Huit Ans emerged from work undertaken by the great anti-colonial psychiatrist and philosopher Franz Fanon with Algerian child refugees, documenting their experiences of French violence during the Algerian War of Independence. Filmed portraits of these children are intercut with their drawings, originally collected by Fanon, as they narrate the stories behind the images.

The film will be introduced by visual culture theorist, Nick Mirzoeff, who was among the first people to write about this film in English. You can read his analysis here.

J’ai Huit Ans will be screened between two conversations with Nadera Shalhoub-Kervorkian. The film speaks to her notion of unchilding, which will feature in her chat with Lara Sheehi later in the evening.

Overview

In 1961, in a children’s house for refugees in Tunis, the great anti-colonial psychiatrist and philosopher Franz Fanon—experimenting with new clinical approaches—encouraged children to draw their experiences of the Algerian War of Independence. These images, the children’s narration of them and filmed portraits make up the J’ai Huit Ans. Made when the war of liberation was also eight years old, the film memorializes the war as well as the children seen in it. Banned by the French state, it continued to circulate clandestinely among communist networks.

Context

“Mournfulness makes the mourner mute” is how Walter Benjamin described the silence that often follows trauma. By folding drawing into the therapeutic relationship Fanon opens a space for unspeakable experiences to be narrated by first being sketched.

Houria Bouteldja will speak on Saturday about the end of European/white innocence. This innocence has been maintained through an ongoing denialism of the West’s colonialism; often hidden behind arguments over evidence or quantitative measure. Have enough people been killed for something to qualify as a genocide? And if not, can the crimes be downgraded, dismissed, forgotten? J’ai Huit Ans is a vital refocusing on the everyday and the power of testimony, on individual memories and emotions that are potentially truer than any statistical analysis or disputed grand narrative that erase the experiences of ordinary victims. While in France a great effort was made to deny the colonial atrocities of the war, they were well known to the young people of Algeria. The film rejects that denial. As the great Marxist historian Harry Harootunian has written, “Genocidal events are never a matter of historical judgment but rather a matter for the dead. The nameless tell us what happened and that is all the evidence we need.”

The combination of the children’s portraits, testimony and drawings in J’ai Huit Ans create a multi layered and unique depiction of state violence which can be hard to watch. But as Lara Sheehi writes in the introduction to From The Clinics To The Streets, there is an ethical need to “keep track of—be aware of, note, recognize, attune to—what it feels like to not immediately, at least, reach for the escape hatches that dislocate, dismember, and dissociate us from the pain and suffering in which we must be implicated if we are to usher in revolutionary futures.”

There is a term for the process by which children serve as political capital in the hands of the colonising state. This word is ‘unchilding’ and it was coined by Nadera Shalhoub-Kervorkian to name the political work of violence designed to create, direct, govern, transform, and construct colonized children as dangerous, racialized others, enabling their eviction from the realm of childhood itself. The children in J’ai Huit Ans speak directly to this violence, and their testimony, and even the title of the film, insist on their status as children.

While under arrest in France in the 60’s, Paul Vergès—leader of the Reunion Communist Party and Françoise Vergès’ father—saw J’ai Huit Ans, and invited Yann Le Masson to film the first of three incredible militant cinema documentaries about Reunionese resistance to French colonialism. Françoise will show these restored films, banned for decades, and in conversation with Lara Sheehi, talk through their importance on Friday evening at the Episode.

There is something to be paid attention to in the quality and context of these drawings. Made outwith an artistic situation, maybe even before drawing was established as a valid tool in psychiatry, they seem less like art and more like having emanated from the aesthetic registers of a shared sociality. A visual practice unrecuperated into an art world complicit with the European colonial project, they instead hold it to account.

Note: Authorship of the film seems contested and a little complex to understand, but involved being conceived by René Vautier; using drawings collected by Fanon; portraits filmed, additional testimony recorded and the whole film conceptualised and edited together by Yann Le Masson and Olga Poliakoff.

Collections La Cinémathèque de Toulouse

Content Notes 

Descriptions and drawn representations of colonial violence against children and their families, from the children’s own perspective.