Co-Presented with Adam Shatz
August 29–September 1
When writer, radical, and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon published Black Skin, White Masks in 1952, he inaugurated a thrilling new era of revolutionary and anti-colonial thought. As Adam Shatz writes in his book The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon: “More than any other writer, Fanon marks the moment when colonized peoples make their presence felt as men and women, rather than as ‘natives,’ subjects,’ or ‘minorities,’ seizing the Word for themselves, asserting their desire for recognition, and their claim to power, authority, and independence.”
Since his untimely death in 1961, Fanon’s life and work—which included practicing as a psychiatrist in Algeria; serving as a spokesman for the National Liberation Front in its struggle against French imperial rule; and publishing The Wretched of the Earth, another classic of anti-colonial literature—have invigorated generations of thinkers, writers, artists, and revolutionaries. His influence on cinema is particularly vast: filmmakers from Ousmane Sembène to Sarah Maldoror, and Claude Lanzmann to Claire Denis, have drawn upon his ideas in their work.
Inspired by a Podcast conversation with Shatz and marking the publication of The Rebel’s Clinic, Film Comment will present a four-day series of screenings and talks exploring Fanon’s echoes in cinema, and the renewed relevance of his legacy in today’s world. Running from August 29 to September 1, the series will take place at Film at Lincoln Center, the Maysles Documentary Center, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Anthology Film Archives, in a unique collaboration among the institutions. Each screening will be followed by a talkback with Shatz and other special guests, and the discussions will subsequently be published on the Film Comment Podcast.
Each screening will involve intro and Q&A.
Thursday, August 29, 7pm
Film at Lincoln Center, Francesca Beale Theater
The Passenger (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1975, Italy/France/Spain, 126 mins)
Antonioni’s epic of existential malaise and identity slippage stars Jack Nicholson at the top of his game, as an American journalist who, on a whim, assumes the identity of a deceased, look-alike gunrunner caught up in a revolutionary conflict in Chad. Whether intentionally or not, Antonioni’s portrayal of the African rebels, whose leader is interviewed by Nicholson’s reporter in a key scene, casts a decidedly Fanonian light on a film that, at its core, is about a man’s political paralysis in the face of a revolutionary uprising and his blindness to the limits of his knowing. Throughout the film, Antonioni emphasizes the influence off-screen reality exerts on his globe-trotting work of fiction, even inserting a few moments of shockingly real violence that rupture the Western protagonist’s self-created, and alienated, dreamworld. Tickets on sale now.
Q&A with Blair McClendon (writer, film editor) and Adam Shatz, moderated by Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute.
Friday, August 30, 7pm
Maysles Documentary Center, 343 Malcolm X Boulevard, New York
Burn! (Queimada) (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1969, Italy/France, 112 mins.) Preceded by video excerpt of Marlon Brando’s eulogy for 17-year-old Black Panther Party member Bobby Hutton in 1968.
Dubbed by Pauline Kael a “luxuriant, ecstatic epic told from a neo-Marxist, Frantz Fanonian point of view,” Pontecorvo’s follow up to his 1966 milestone The Battle of Algiers is a sweeping, 19th-century anti-colonial drama. Marlon Brando stars as William Walker, an agent provocateur sent by the British government to foment a regime change on the fictional Caribbean island of Queimada. Played with acerbic gusto by Brando in one of his most underappreciated performances (“the best acting I’ve ever done,” he wrote in his memoir), Walker is a hired henchman of European imperialism who ends up locked in a tête-à-tête with a Black revolutionary named José Dolores (nonprofessional actor Evaristo Márquez). With its lurid, color-saturated images and rousing score by Ennio Morricone, Burn! offers a searing vision of a slave rebellion posing an existential threat to the colonial-capitalist system. Tickets on sale now.
Q&A with Kazembe Balagun (executive director, Maysles Documentary Center), Brent Hayes Edwards (professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University), and Adam Shatz, moderated by Film Comment editor Devika Girish.
Saturday, August 31, 7pm
Brooklyn Academy of Music, 30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn
The Spook Who Sat by the Door (Ivan Dixon, 1973, U.S., 102m)
One of the most radical, revolutionary statements in film history, Ivan Dixon’s explosive adaptation of the novel by Sam Greenlee follows the fictional first black CIA agent (Lawrence Cook) who uses his specialized training to build a guerrilla army intent on government overthrow. Dixon rousingly depicts “the American ghetto as a Fanonian war zone,” per Adam Shatz, with a call to revolution so potent that the film was pulled from theaters within days of opening. A treasured classic and 2012 National Film Registry selection, BAM is thrilled to present this long unavailable masterwork of American cinema in a new 4K restoration by the Library of Congress and The Film Foundation. Tickets on sale now.
Sunday, September 1, 7pm
Anthology Film Archives, 32 2nd Avenue, New York
Monangambeee (Sarah Maldoror, 1969, Algeria/Angola, 17m)
The masterful directorial debut of Sarah Maldoror, Monangambeee was filmed in 1969 in Algeria, which had won its liberation from France just seven years before, though it takes place in Angola, which was still six years away from independence. An Angolan woman visits her husband in prison, and wants to give him a “completo”—which means “three-course meal” in Angola, and “three-piece suit” in Portugal. In jagged black and white, with a clattering free-jazz score by the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Monangambeee depicts the misunderstandings and violence that ensue when the guards assume that the prisoner is planning an escape and proceed to torture him.
Followed by:
The Zerda and the Songs of Forgetting (Assia Djebar, 1982, Algeria, 60m)
In the elegiac The Zerda and the Songs of Forgetting, Algerian novelist Assia Djebar pairs French colonial newsreels shot in Algeria with a haunting, counterposed soundtrack, excavating and recovering a vivid, resilient history of indigenous Algerian ceremonies from the oppressor’s gaze. Made by women who were equal parts revolutionaries and artists, Monangambeee and The Zerda and the Songs of Forgetting dramatize, in astutely Fanonian fashion, language as a terrain of radical struggle—as rife with possibility for self-negation as for solidarity. Tickets on sale now.
Q&A with Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich (filmmaker, The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire) and Adam Shatz, moderated by Film Comment editor Devika Girish.
