3rd Happy Soul Festival: Frantz Fanon Film Review, Director: Isaac Julien- Fatima Dupres Griffiths

The educational film, Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask, explores the life and politics of the black Martiniquan psychoanalyst and activist, Frantz Fanon who theorised that racism depersonalises people, by denying the person. The film highlights the importance language plays in decolonisation and overcoming the colonising master’s dominant culture. Recognising this, St Lucian director, Isaac Julien included French patois songs speaking of liberation and equality. The film’s title is taken from Frantz Fanon’s book, written in 1951, aged 27 years. We follow the complex and controversial journey both Fanon and Julien take in the exploration of Fanon’s theory that many black people of ex-slave stock, visualised themselves as white, identifying with the “massa” class, colour, and representation. Aware of cultural fetishes, Fanon was an intellectual, deeply committed to liberation of self and nations. Born in the French colony, Martinique, he studied psychiatry in France, then left for Algeria. The film shows how this internationalism influenced his work, The Wretched of The Earth, placing the Algerian War of Liberation in a Third World context.

Julien sited Stuart Hall’s work as central to decoding Fanon’s complex ideas. Practising psychiatry in war-torn Algeria, Fanon witnessed first-hand the post- traumatic syndrome resulting from war and torture. This informs the film, which highlights the evils of war and the remnants of racism that prevailed even after black soldiers fought in the violent Decolonisation wars and post slavery. Fanon pinpointed the cultural schizophrenia and mental disorders that could plague black individuals growing up with a white image of self, and the subsequent suffering and trauma brought on by the scattering of that image. This discourse clearly touches on several aspects related to the well-being of individuals and communities, central to the aims of the Happy Soul Festival.

Exploring representation, race and sexuality, this well researched documentary makes accessible to many, the personal and painful journey to self and identity that many make. Julien admirably makes the journey from documentary to the artist, presenting us with the intentional beauty of images in what is often a turgid landscape.

We feel the intentional tension around representation and “black desire” explored in the film. Guiding us through the liberation philosophy of Fanon, the director asserts that he expresses his “artistic autonomy”, even as we glimpse the melancholia and mourning that Black Skin, White Mask throws up.

Fanon theorised about the question of black desire, especially in interracial relationships, frowned on at the time. However, married to a white woman, we do not see in the documentary how he reconciled this fact with his theories, or the prevalent views deriding miscegenation, the mixing of races, outlawed in many countries. Many interviewees said to camera how important Fanon’s ideas were, and how relevant they still are, for new generations. Directing a documentary based on who many considered a genius of psychiatry, and a cultural icon for the black disenfranchised globally, Julien says that: “regarding the film’s aesthetic and politics”, he was speaking from, not for, certain communities. He touches on existentialism as propounded by Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and others. We see the political identification across culture and race. Through Fanon’s work the film asks: after self-image, what then? The historical narrative of this engaging documentary is intentional, challenging viewers’ beliefs without being didactic. If Fanon was the cultural liberation icon many believed him to be, then the film inspired by him is undoubtedly worthy of being termed ‘iconographic’. Black Skin, White Mask is a superbly shot, informative documentary, and a worthy tribute to Frantz Fanon.