Film Comment, published by Film at Lincoln Center, is pleased to announce “Film Comment Live: The Rebel’s Cinema—Frantz Fanon on Screen,” from August 29–September 1.

Taking place at four venues across the city—Film at Lincoln Center, the Maysles Documentary Center, BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music), and Anthology Film Archives—the series celebrates the publication of Adam Shatz’s new book, The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, with screenings and talkbacks exploring the legacy and influence of the Martinican writer, revolutionary, and psychiatrist.  

When Fanon published Black Skin, White Masks in 1952, he inaugurated a thrilling new era of revolutionary and anti-colonial thought. As Shatz writes in The Rebel’s Clinic, “More than any other writer, Fanon marked 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, Claude Lanzmann to Claire Denis, have drawn upon his ideas in their work. This influence was the subject of a Film Comment Podcast episode with Shatz, which inspired the series. 

“Adam’s book—which Claire Denis recently described as ‘magnificent’!—is a reminder that even though Fanon is a canonized figure across the world and in every field, from politics to medicine to the arts, there is still much to learn from and discover in his life and legacy, which is newly urgent today,” said Devika Girish, editor of Film Comment. 

“We are excited to create a forum for our audiences to do just that—learn, discover, and re-engage with Fanon—and are particularly pleased to be able to do so in Harlem, Brooklyn, and Manhattan with the collaboration of our partner venues.” 

The featured films include The Passenger (1975) by Michelangelo Antonioni, which stars Jack Nicholson as an American reporter in Chad; Quiemada (Burn!), Gillo Pontecorvo’s follow-up to his 1966 milestone The Battle of Algiers; a new restoration of Ivan Dixon’s rousing The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973); Sarah Maldoror’s directorial debut, Monangambeeee (1969); and the haunting The Zerda and the Songs of Forgetting (1982) by Algerian novelist Assia Djebar. 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. 

FILMS & DESCRIPTIONS
Please note the locations of each presentation below.

The Passenger
Michelangelo Antonioni, 1975, 35mm, Italy/France/Spain, 126m
English, Spanish, German, and French

The Passenger

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.
Thursday, August 29, 7pm
Film at Lincoln Center, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, 144 W. 65th Street

Burn!
Gillo Pontecorvo, 1969, Italy/France, 129m
Italian, Portuguese, and English

Burn!

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.
Preceded by video excerpt of Marlon Brando’s eulogy for 17-year-old Black Panther Party member, Bobby Hutton, in 1968.
Friday, August 30, 7pm
Maysles Documentary Center, 343 Malcolm X Boulevard, New York

The Spook Who Sat by the Door
Ivan Dixon, 1973, 4K DCP, U.S., 102m
English

The Spook Who Sat by the Door

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.
Saturday, August 31, 7pm
BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music), 30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn

Monangambeee
Sarah Maldoror, 1969, 16mm-to-DCP, Algeria/Angola, 17m
French
Followed by:
The Zerda and the Songs of Forgetting
Assia Djebar, 1982, 35mm-to-DCP, Algeria, 60m
French and Arabic

The Zerda and the Songs of Forgetting

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. 

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.
Sunday, September 1, 7pm
Anthology Film Archives, 32 2nd Avenue, New York