The Rebel's Cinema—Frantz Fanon on Screen #2, with Kazembe Balagun and Brent Hayes Edwards

The Film Comment Podcast

Last April, Film Comment invited writer Adam Shatz on the Podcast to talk about The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, his new biography of the Martinican writer, psychiatrist, and anti-colonial revolutionary. The Podcast explored Fanon’s lasting impression on the world of cinema since his untimely death in 1961—and it became the basis for a four-day series of screenings and talks we presented last weekend, called The Rebel’s Cinema—Frantz Fanon on Screen. The series took place at four cinemas across New York City, beginning at Film at Lincoln Center with Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975), moving to Maysles Documentary Center in Harlem for Gillo Pontecorvo’s Burn!, (1969), winding down to the Brooklyn Academy of Music for Ivan Dixon’s The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973), and finishing up at Anthology Film Archives with Sarah Maldoror’s Monangambeee (1969) and Assia Djebar’s The Zerda and the Songs of Forgetting (1982). Each screening was followed by a Q&A with special guests, which we’re excited to share this week on the Podcast. On today’s episode, Film Comment editor Devika Girish welcomes Adam as well as Maysles executive director Kazembe Balagun and scholar and writer Brent Hayes Edwards to talk about the entanglements of race and class, and history and Hollywood in Pontecorvo’s period epic Burn!, which stars Marlon Brando as a British agent provocateur who overthrows a Portuguese colony in the Caribbean by fomenting a slave revolt.