Visualizing Theory: An Interview with Isaac Julien

VISUALIZINC THEORY AN INTERVIEW WITH ISAAC JULIEN BY COCO Fusco ilmmaker Isaac Julien whose credits include Looking For Langston, The Attendant, Young Soul Rebels and The Darker Side ofBlack, continues his investigations into identity, history and narrative structure with his latest film, Black Skin/White Masks - a meditation on the life and works of one ofthe major intellectuals ofthe 20th century, Frantz Fanon. The film has screened at film festivals worldwide including New York, Sundance, Berlin, Hong Kong, Ouagadougou, and San Francisco where it won a prize for documentary biography. In this interview, Julien discusses with Coco Fusco the trails his investigations into Fanon's life led him to and the implications his work has for us today. m:BJournal of Contemporary African Art· Summer/Fall 1997 Coco Fusco: How is Black Skin/White Masks similar to earlier films of yours? Isaac Julien: In Looking For Langston and The Attendant as well as my film about Frantz Fanon, I have been exploring the relationship between film and critical theory. Mark Nash, who is the producer of the film, and I have focused on the way in which films can visualize theory, introducing us to Frantz Fanon and to his ideas. Donna Haraway commented that what she thought was important about this film is the way that we have made an act of visualization a form of theoretical production. There are different moments in film history in which the visualization of theory has been a conscious project, such as Eisenstein's theory of montage, the British avant garde cinema of the late 70s and the early 80s, and the cinema of Trinh T. Minh-ha, the work of Chris Marker. I see these films as interventions in debates on film history. CF: So, your goal was to make a film as a theoretical intervention ? I.J.: I tried to visualize theory and Fanon's ideas. Frantz Fanon was a West Indian born, French educated intellectual . He practiced psychotherapy and engaged in a revolution in North Africa. There has been a current resurgence of interest in his work with writing by people such as Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, Diana Fuss, Lee Edelman and Stuart Hall. I began to ask myself, why Fanon? Why after so many years of relative neglect is his name once again beginning to excite such intense debate? Why is it happening at this particular moment? What is one doing when one privileges a psychoanalytically informed text such as Black SkinlWhite Masks over The Wretched of the Earth? What are Fanon's blind spots in terms of other forms of oppression especially in the areas of gender and sexuality? And how does one give at this moment a picture, when one doesn't want to make hagiographic portrayals of black revolutionaries? I was nonetheless one who was moved by Fanon. He died so young, he was so intellectually provocative and poetic. CP.: What was it about Fanon that originally sparked your interest? I.J.: I had come across Fanon's work in Homi Bhabha's "The Other Question" in Screen Magazine in 1983. I was working on my undergraduate thesis at St. Martins School of Art. I wrote an essay on the construction of the colonial fantasy in Robert Mapplethorpe's photography. The essay I subsequently published with Kobena Mercer, True Confessions, was based on that research. But it wasn't until after I completed The Darker Side ofBlack for the B.B.C in 1994 that David Bailey approached me at the ICA in London to ask me if I would be interested in making a film about Fanon. He was organizing an exhibition and a conference on Fanon for the ICA at the time. I remember being very moved by Black SkinlWhite Masks when I first read it. It was the first time I had come across writing about what it was like to be a young black man growing up in the city and about what one experiences in the city as a black subject. And I think his sort of work on looking, vision and subjectivity spoke to me in a very profound way. Here was theory that brought me closer to my actual experiences...