February 3- 9, 2005

movies

The Underneath

back in black: Colin Salmon as Frantz Fanon in Isaac Julien's "Fanon S.A. 1997-2004."

Isaac Julien's portrait of rebel theorist Frantz Fanon gets under the skin.

by Cindy Fuchs

"I do not come with timeless truths. My consciousness is not illuminated with ultimate radiances." Appropriately, the first words uttered by the subject of Isaac Julien's Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask are elusive. This self-introduction, using language that is seemingly deprecating, even negative, is typically artful, and followed by the philosopher/cultural critic's unavoidable point. "Nevertheless," he says, "in complete composure, I think it would be good if certain things were said. These things I am going to say, not shout, for it is a long time since shouting has gone out of my life, so very long."

These "certain things" are arranged as a kind of puzzle, part biography, part interrogation, part elegy. Alternately disjointed and sinuous, provocative and poetic, the film — screening as part of the Fabric Workshop and Museum's "Experiments with Truth" exhibit, which also includes a Julien installation called "Fanon S.A. 1997-2004" — presents an idiosyncratic vision of Fanon's lifelong struggle as a colonized subject seeking freedom of thought and identity. Using interviews with Fanon's associates, family and scholars, the hourlong 1996 film, co-written by Julien and EWT guest curator Mark Nash, considers Fanon from his birth in Martinique in 1925 through his training as a psychiatrist in Paris, to his work with the anti-colonial FLN in Algeria and death from leukemia in Washington in 1961. (Julien will attend the International House screening, as well as host a Scribe master class on Wednesday night, and participate in the EWT panel discussion on Saturday afternoon. See Screenpicks for details.)

Fanon (played by Colin Salmon, a favorite of director Paul W.S. Anderson, and so best-known on American screens as a fighter of zombies and aliens) began his professional life as a psychiatrist hoping to "help patients to regain that freedom they have lost in madness." To this end, the young Fanon went to France, where he came face-to-face with the colonizing force — the very ideology — that had shaped Martinique's past, and so the young doctor's. His arrival in Europe is smartly illustrated in the movie as simultaneous artifice and recontextualization: Fanon stands before an image of the Eiffel Tower and turns to face the camera to announce, "You must understand, dear boy, that color prejudice means absolutely nothing to me." The moment shows that, early on, he has fully absorbed the social and political frames of Western whiteness, colorblindness being a privilege afforded only to those in power.

This moment of liberty is brief. Cultural critic Homi Bhabha asserts that, like many theorists of his era (including Castro, Marx and Simone de Beauvoir), Fanon "stood apart," believing in the efficacy of "pure violence" and emerging as "an avenging angel" against the slave-masters — the "us" who worked so hard and over so many centuries to colonize, contain and crush a so-called "them." In his first book, Black Skin, White Masks (published in 1952 and originally titled Essay for the Disalienation of Blacks), he describes being called out on the street by a French child ("Look mother, a Negro!") and so "sees himself being seen."

Here, as cultural theorist Stuart Hall puts it, Fanon also "sees that the colonizer/colonized relationship is a struggle to the death" in which the colonizer's terrible, enduring trick is to deny any "recognition" of the colonized, to refuse to see him at all. Fanon theorized this denial, naming the structure of possession and objectification: Finding himself gazed on as an other, he resisted the process by articulating it, and finding in it the interdependence of master and slave. "His gaze," he wrote, "fixes me in my place," but the colonizer defines himself in relation to the oppressed — "A white song all around me, a whiteness that burns." Further, Fanon sees, the relationship is not only about racism, but about desire: the black man's wearing of a white mask, and the white man's desire for the black man, to possess him. Observing this sexual dynamic in power relations, Fanon challenged the colonizing gaze on multiple levels.

His own experience must change with this challenge. He can no longer understand himself as French, or even as Martinican, in the same way he once had. And so, Fanon takes up the search for an alternative identity, a community with whom he might feel affinity. In the film, he finds it in two very different ways. First, in his marriage to Josie, a white French woman, a relationship the film treats briefly, as it might embody what Françoise Verges calls the "desire for whiteness," but also as a wholly individual event: They fell in love. Second, he aligns himself with the FLN in the war for Algerian independence. Working with patients in Blida-Joinville beginning in 1954, Fanon developed his theory of the relation between racism, desire and colonialism in his book The Wretched of the Earth.

It is here that Fanon's thinking becomes acutely relevant, examining torture, imprisonment and armed resistance. While, as Verges says, "the Algerian fighter was for Fanon the real man," Black Skin, White Mask also suggests he was troubled by the incorporation of colonialist tactics in the battle against colonialism. This is, at last, Julien's own insight into a man who was both reviled and revered, a man whose complex interrogations of cultural and political affairs are forever entangled with his self-understanding as a "colonized individual" who lived his own revolt.

Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask Directed by Isaac Julien Tue., Feb. 8., 7 p.m. International House recommended