Close-Up: Viewing Teza, Reading Fanon: Ten Critical Questions for Haile Gerima's Cinema (A Study Guide)

This brief study guide is designed to engage audiences of Haile Gerima's film Teza in a critical analysis inspired by some of the classical critical insights put forth by Frantz Fanon. It is comprised of ten questions that encourage viewers to move beyond the entertainment value of the film and of necessity to reflect on its sociopolitical significance with regard to African people throughout the world. All of Gerima's work consistently depicts the lives of black people from a Pan-African perspective. Teza could perhaps be his magnum opus. It is committed to sharpening African people's consciousness and cultivating the desire to build a new social order, worldwide. Fanon's own work expressed revolutionary insights on the conditions of colonized and racialized African and Third World subjects at large. Gerima continues this tradition by depicting Fanon's insights cinematically. Moreover, not only does Gerima subvert the juggernaut film establishment by distributing his and other films independently, he does so as well by taking his films directly to those communities he represents for exhibition and collective discussion. Therefore, this brief study guide can be used as a critical tool that upholds Fanon's revolutionary, anticolonialist insights and fosters in-depth discussions of Gerima's cinema, particularly among those Global African communities affected by colonialism, neocolonialism, or imperialism today.