FRANTZ FANON
BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASK
Director: Isaac Julien
Producer: Mark Nash for the Arts Council of England
United Kingdom, 1996
In English and French with English sub-titles
50 minutes
video only
Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask explores for the first time on film
one of the most influential theorists of the
anti-colonial movements of our century. Fanon's two major works, Black
Skin, White Mask and The Wretched of the
Earth, were pioneering studies of the psychological impact of racism on
both colonized and colonizer. Jean-Paul Sartre hailed
Fanon as the figure "through whose voice the Third World finds and
speaks to itself." This innovative film biography restores
Fanon to his rightful place at the center of contemporary discussions
around post-colonial identity.
Isaac Julien, the black British director of such pathbreaking and
provocative films as Looking for Langston and Young Soul
Rebels, reveals not just the facts of Fanon's brief but remarkably
eventful life but his long and tortuous inner journey. Julien
elegantly weaves together interviews with family members and friends,
documentary footage, readings from Fanon's work and
moving dramatizations of crucial moments in Fanon's life. Cultural
critics Stuart Hall and Françoise Verges position FanonÕs
work in his own time and draw out its implications for our own.
Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) was born in Martinique into a lower middle
class family of mixed race ancestry and received a
conventional colonial education. When he went to France to fight in the
Resistance and receive his psychiatric training,
FanonÕs assimilationist illusions were destroyed by the gaze of
metropolitan racism. The European intellectual tradition, he
recalls, "had at first been a liberation returning me to a likeness I
thought I had lost. By taking me out of the world, it returned
me to it. But at the point I began to rise, I stumbled. The Other, with
gestures and looks, fixed me in my place."
He responded to the shattering of his neo-colonial identity, his white
mask, with his first book, Black Skin, White Mask,
written in 1952 at the age of twenty-seven and originally titled "An
Essay for the Disalienation of Blacks." Fanon defined the
colonial relationship as one of the non-recognition of the colonized's
humanity, his subjecthood, by the colonizer in order to
justify his exploitation. The film pays particular attention to Fanon's
depiction of the sexual dynamic between the races where
each ambivalently projects its desire for "whiteness" or "blackness"
onto the other. Fanon asks: what remains once we have
dropped the white mask and seen beneath the black skin?
As part of his growing interest in the colonial question, Fanon asked to
be assigned to a psychiatric hospital at Blinda-Joinville
in French-occupied Algeria. His associates there recall how,
anticipating some of the insights of Foucault and contemporary
social psychology, Fanon broke down the hierarchy between doctors, staff
and patients. He initiated a "socio-therapy" by
recreating a supportive Algerian village community inside the hospital
walls. But how could he free his patients from their
madness, only to return them to the colonial world which had contributed
to driving them mad?
Outside the hospital, the Algerian independence struggle was turning
ever more vicious. Clips from Gillo PontecorvoÕs classic
film The Battle of Algiers powerfully illustrate the French atrocities
and the Algerians' heroic resistance. In 1956 Fanon
resigned his position at Blinda and became a full-fledged militant in
the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN).
Out of this struggle came his most influential work, The Wretched of the
Earth, which Stuart Hall describes as "the bible of
the decolonization movement." Fanon calls for a radical break with
colonial culture, rejecting a hypocritical European
humanism for a pure revolutionary consciousness. He exalts violence as a
necessary pre-condition for this rupture; Fanon
supported the most extreme wing of the FLN, even opposing a negotiated
transition to power.
In the Algerian freedom fighters, Fanon thought he had finally found a
community with an authentic revolutionary identity, free
of the self-doubt and existential vertigo described in Black Skin, White
Mask. But an Algerian comrade in the liberation
struggle recalls Fanon lacked a deep understanding of Algerian society;
it could reject European ideas so resolutely only
because it retained deep, often conservative, religious and cultural
traditions of its own. Several commentators suggest that
today that culture, in the form of Islamic fundamentalism, is exacting
revenge on a revolution which never produced a deeply
inclusive post-revolutionary society.
Fanon did not live to see either the success or stagnation of the
revolution he supported. He died of leukemia in 1961 at the
age of 36 at a clinic in Washington DC. Had he lived, there can be
little doubt he would have embraced the urgent challenges
of developing post-colonial identity. He concludes Black Skin, White
Mask: "I want the world to recognize with me the open
door of every consciousness. My final prayer: O my body, make of me
always a man who questions!"
Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask offers an invaluable resource for
courses in Cross-cultural Psychology, Social
Psychology, Political Philosophy, Social Change, Cultural Anthropology,
Africana Studies, French Cultural Studies and
Minority Counseling and Development. Like such recent California
Newsreel releases as Rouch in Reverse and W.E.B. Du
Bois: A Biography in Four Voices, is an important contribution to the
development of cross-cultural perspectives in the social
sciences.
A brilliant post-Third Worldist meditation on one of the most
politically and culturally influential figures of the 20th
century.
- Robert Stam, New York University
There is artistry in abundance in Isaac JulienÕs singularly ambitious
portrait of the psychiatrist, writer and theorist of
Third World revolution...He does justice to the complexity of his
intriguing subject.
- The Guardian (U.K.)
"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."
- Angela Davis, UC-Santa Cruz
"It is a tribute to Julien's great insight into the transformative
spirit of cinema, 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."
- Homi Bhaba, University of Chicago
"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 in terms
whose clarity and subtlety articulate those of
Fanon himself."
Annette Michelson, editor, October
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