Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask

An unusual biography of anti-colonist Frantz Fanon, who died young in 1961, and who rose to become one of the most influential representatives of black third-world freedom fighters with his psychological theory and support for the Algerian freedom movement FLN

Born in 1925, the son of a mixed couple, on Martinique, Frantz Fanon went as a young adult to Paris to join the resistance, and to study psychology. Having experienced the sobering racism of the city he analysed his colonial education and, in 1952, published his psychiatric thesis An Essay for the Disalienation of Blacks, later retitled Black Skin, White Masks. It dealt with the mutual psychological dependence between the colonised and the colonists.

Fanon was recruited by a psychiatry in Blinda-Joinville. In French-ruled Algeria he wanted to gain first-hand experience of his knowledge and treated patients of both sides with equal passion. But in 1956 he gave up his job to join the freedom movement, Front national pour Libération (FLN). Having long fallen from grace in the eyes of the French, he supported the most radical of groups. Later he held the position of Minister of Information for Sub-Saharan Africa in Algeria's government-in-exile, and wrote his influential The Wretched of the Earth, the publication in 1961 of which he did not live to see, as he was suffering from leukaemia.

Isaac Julien has now set a political milestone, making the first film about this many-faceted activist. He included interviews of relatives, professors of politics and psychoanalysts, along with archive material of Fanon, and the various stages of his life, with important moments and insights.

Back in 1989 Julien pleased his critics and a large proportion of his audience with Looking for Langston, about the black, gay writer from Harlem. Again in 1996, Julien enriched the succession of biographies of forgotten celebrities with his talent for simply breathtaking portraits. In his recreated surreal films Julien creates an ambience that does not fail to draw his audience into the subject matter.

Julien skilfully arouses a profound eroticism of mainly masculine nature. This does not make Frantz Fanon a gay film, although the mentioning of the attractiveness of the black man to white women and homosexuals is not neglected. More important than homosexuality is the ambivalence between black and white, a central theme in Fanon's life, work and theory. The decision to have men dealing with the psychological themes amongst themselves, not hiding from intensive physicality, is a good one.

It is hard to decide what contributes more to the success of Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask: the interesting choice of subject, or Julien's masterful staging of it. Historical facts, old theories with new currency and erotic inferences: in the right hands and highly appealing form of documentary.

ki, Park City – Berlin
translation: andrew
picture ©: Arts Council Films MCMXCV

Seen during the:
Sundance Film Festival 1997

Also shown during the:
47. Internationalen Filmfestspiele Berlin

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