One of the most important references for Isaac Julien is Frantz Fanon.[1] Fanon's work allowed issues of black identity to be taken beyond geographical boundaries. This dimension is primordial in the method of the artist, who is nourished by ideas of the voyage and changing frontiers, conceived according to a critical, geopolitical analysis.

In treating with precision the notion of visual identity, the works of Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall and Françoise Vergès, the principal commentators of Fanon, have allowed the artist to complement his personal field of research. All three appear in the film Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, made by Julien in 1996. Alternating historical archive material, interviews and dramatizes scenes, it underlines the importance of the gaze that marks difference. Analysed at length by Fanon. It is this gaze that allowed Bhabha to reuse the phrase that concludes Fanon's Black Skin, White Mask – “The Negro is not. Any more than the white man.”[2]- at the start of his essay, “Interrogating Identity, Frantz Fanon and the Postcolonial Prerogative”. He underlines “The awkward division that breaks his line of thought keeps alive the dramatic and enigmatic sense of change. That familiar alignment of colonial subjects – Black/White, Self/Other – is disturbed with one brief pause and the traditional grounds of racial identity are dispersed, whenever they are found to rest in the narcissistic myths of negritude or white cultural supremacy.”[3] These elements of reflection are integrated into Julien's work using a very precise process, in which the film editing creates a rupture between shots, in the same way as the full stop serves to interrupt the syntax in Fanon's sentence. This visual interruption, specific to a cinematic (dis)continuity, is often reinforced by projection on a double or triple screen.

“When I was doing Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Mask (1996) I asked myself: how to reconcile the different, and often conflictual, interpretations of Fanon. He lives so many lives in such a short time! I had to innovate and to seek to translate visually the poetic dimension of Fanon. Fanon was both a brilliant analyst and a man with strange ideas. He spoke so clearly about the lived experience of being Black and explained so well how that came to play such a role in the imaginary of both Whites and Blacks. I wanted to represent what it is to think in a sophisticated manner about the perverse and irrational phantom of race, which Fanon so brilliantly exposed. I wanted to make beauty terrifying, to make it haunting…”[4]

Elvan Zabunyan

Translated by Natasha Edwards