Truth is a “bird of prey”: interpreting the postcolonial dialectic in Agustí Villaronga’s El ventre del mar (2021) with Frantz Fanon

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this article, I argue that Agustí Villaronga’s 2021 film El ventre del mar (The Belly of the Sea) explores a post-Fanonian version of the Hegelian master-slave dialectic as a historical struggle between colonizer and colonized, and between the elite and the dispossessed in a limit situation. Villaronga’s cinematic vision of this historical struggle is neither progressive-linear nor simply non-linear, but iterative, as it casts light on uncanny analogies between necropolitical strategies (Mbembe 2019) marking different periods and political regimes: from the absolutist and colonial nineteenth-century France to the democratic European Union of the twenty-first century. To this end, Villaronga interweaves three hermeneutic layers into his filmic fable: the memory of a nineteenth-century historical event as mediated through pictorial and literary representations, a critique of the present marked by refugee crises and postcolonialism and an exploration of the human condition in its agonistic-tragic dimension. In Villaronga’s cinematic vision, the agon between master and slave ends neither in reciprocal recognition (as theorized by Hegel) nor in the emergence of the “new humanity” overcoming the Manichaean, “compartmentalized world” of colonialism (Fanon [1961] 2005. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Books), but in an open dialectic of resistance and radical uncertainty.