Rent Black Skin, White Mask (1996)

Black Skin, White Mask (aka Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask) review by Adrijan Arsovski - Cinema Paradiso

Black Skin, White Mask celebrates the literary, historical, and the life legacy of Frantz Fanon, whose essays and other written works had a major impact on the anti-colonial movements globally. The film uses a combination of archive footage, dramatic re-shots, and real interviews to capture the essence of what Frantz Fanon was all about. To this extent, director Isaac Julien had managed to bring some of the long forgotten ideas into the forefront of the modern thought – and I don’t say that lightly. These ideas include the pondering and contemplation of an urban diaspora caught between a rock and a hard place, the potential misdeeds of some minorities, and the strong racist undertones in a society that is seemingly free.

Frantz Fanon was born 1925, in the (at the time) French colony of Martinique and then traveled to France in order to enroll into medicinal and psychiatric studies. Sometime later (in 1952 to be precise), he published his first book named “Black Skin White Mask”, in which he spoke about his anti-colonialist view wherein the relationship between the “oppressors” and the “oppressed” polarized the public masses and made a great divide between the majority of the differing social classes worldwide. Therefore, argues Fanon, the latent racism is just confirming the fact that this master-slave relationship does indeed exists.

Interesting thing to note here is that Frantz Fanon was inspired by none other than Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, two literary and philosophical giants who single-handedly carried the burden of the 20-th century thought on their own shoulders. Of course, Fanon thought that he was nowhere near these two scholars, but his dire need and inclination to search for the right answers had led him to become one of the most revered thinkers of that same age.

Furthermore, it seemed as if Fanon was always divided between the notions that his persona had a major appeal mostly among white intellectuals, with whom he shared little both in character and culturally-wise. Even Sartre went on to say that “through Fanon’s voice that the Third World finds and speaks for itself.”

Black Skin, White Mask draws a neat parallel between the life of Frantz Fanon, his illusions of belonging everywhere and nowhere, and the course of action as set by his ideas on the anti-colonial viewpoint. This was a complex man whose identity got lost somewhere between his native France, and his ever-evolving, but often misunderstood state of mind.

If you like to be entertained by an hour and a half of contemplation about what’s it like to live on the exile whilst belonging nowhere in particular – then a film such as Black Skin, White Mask would be right up your alley.