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Frantz Fanon: Black
Skin, White Mask
Isaac Julien, the celebrated black British director of such provocative films as Looking for Langston and Young Soul Rebels, integrates the facts of Fanon's brief but remarkably eventful life with his long and tortuous inner journey. Julien elegantly weaves together interviews with family members and friends, documentary footage, readings from Fanon's work and dramatizations of crucial moments in Fanon's life. Cultural critics Stuart Hall and Françoise Verges position Fanon's work in his own time and draw out its implications for our own. Born in Martinique in 1925, Fanon received a conventional colonial education. When he went to France to fight in the Resistance and train as a psychiatrist, his assimilationist illusions were shattered by the gaze of metropolitan racism. Out of this experience came his first book Black Skin, White Masks (1952) originally titled "An Essay for the Disalienation of Blacks." Fanon here defined the colonial relationship as the psychological non-recognition of the subjectivity of the colonized. Soon after taking a position at a psychiatric hospital in Algeria, Fanon became involved in the bitter Algerian civil war, eventually leaving his post to become a full-time militant in the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN). Out of this struggle, Fanon wrote his most influential book, The Wretched of the Earth, which Stuart Hall describes as the "bible of the decolonization movement." Fanon died of leukemia
in 1961, just as Algeria was winning its independence. But his seminal
texts continue to challenge us to liberate ourselves from all forms
of psychological domination. |
"It is a tribute
to Julien...that we are now confronted with a Fanon that articulates
both the great mid-century moment of anti-colonial struggle and the
insurgencies and intimacies of our own post-colonial condition." "Visually stunning
and intellectually provocative, Isaac Julien's film is an eloquent and
complex exploration of the life and legacy of this century's most compelling
theorist of racism and colonialism." "Immediately
riveting and intensely thought-provoking...makes available to a wide
audience the central role and legacy of this pre-eminent theorist of
colonial domination." "There is artistry
in abundance in Isaac Julien's singularly ambitious portrait... He does
justice to the complexity of his intriguing subject."
Video
Purchase: $195
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Frantz
Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask
explores for the first time on film the pre-eminent theorist of the
anti-colonial movements of this century. Fanon's two major works, Black
Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth, were pioneering studies
of the psychological impact of racism on both colonized and colonizer.
Jean-Paul Sartre recognized Fanon as the figure "through whose voice
the Third World finds and speaks for itself." This innovative film biography
restores Fanon to his rightful place at the center of contemporary discussions
around post-colonial identity.
