Frantz Fanon: Black Skin | White Mask (1995, Isaac Julien) (Patreon)

50/100

Don't mind me, just wrapping up the 1996 New York Film Festival almost 27 years after I attended. (Still a few more selections left, actually, including Yang's Mahjong; this one popped up on the Criterion Channel and is due to expire soon, so I decided to get 'er done.) On the one hand, if you come to this documentary knowing precious little about Fanon, as I did, you're likely to be frustrated by how haphazardly it conveys who he was and why his work was important—there's no structure to speak of, nor does anyone onscreen give more than lip service to such crucial ideas as the difference between passive decolonization and active liberation. Again and again, one of the talking heads would mention something fascinating, e.g. Fanon coming to think of himself as Algerian (to the point of rejecting his Martinican heritage and becoming angry when others noted it), and then the film would simply move on. Not an uncommon problem when trying to tackle intellectuals onscreen. On the other hand, I tend to dislike conventional biographical docs, and Julien does attempt to make his subject a cinematic object, casting an actor as Fanon but using him primarily in a sculptural way. Lots of striking shots featuring one face in profile dominating the foreground, another perpendicular and out of focus in the background (and then swapping them to keep us off balance). Ambitious form, slightly soporific content; ultimately, there was just too much verbiage along the lines of "Violence is the awareness of freedom's proximity to the fragility of survival" to keep me from wishing that I were reading any of Fanon's books instead. 

ANAL-RETENTIVE TITLE CORNER: Most sources place a comma between Black Skin and White Mask, but onscreen they're on the same horizontal plane, separated by a lot of space: Black Skin            White Mask. I feel like the pipe best gets that across without creating a formatting headache.