Andrew Worsdale spoke to independent British film-maker Isaac Julien, who is visiting South Africa Celebrated independent British film-maker Isaac Julien was recently at the Johannesburg Biennale to attend the screenings of Frantz Fanon: Black Skin White Mask, about the black theorist on anti-colonialism. He made the film with Mark Nash, his boyfriend and producer.
It’s Julien’s second visit here. He was last here for a screening of his work at the Gay and Lesbian Festival. “I think the place has changed a lot since 1994,” he says. “I sense a greater feeling of space in the city for black people. Last time we had a lot of problems with busing in audiences. In some respects the biennale has had the same problems in that one doesn’t just want to show films to informed middle-class audiences.”
Nash, one-time editor of Screen magazine, and co-owner of Normal Films with Julien, says: “This is my first visit and I can see that it’s a place going through enormous flux, but in some ways it seems like it could be any African city.”
Julien is soft-spoken and contemplative, interspersing polemics with “you know” in a distinctive East London accent. Trained at St Martins School of Art, he has been making ground-breaking films about race and gender issues since 1983. Some of these titles include the short This is Not an Aids Advertisement – an impressionistic antidote to the British 1987 Aids awareness campaign with rap by Bronski Beat’s Larry Steinhabeck. And The Darker Side of Black, a penetrating documentary that looked at homophobia in black music, where he challenged Buju Banton’s concept of “the batty boy”.
Julien’s solo feature, Young Soul Rebels, was a semi-autobiographical tale of two black kids growing up in Thatcher’s Britain circa 1977, the year of the Silver Jubilee. But he’s probably best known for the erotic black and white meditation on the Harlem renaissance of the 1930s, Looking for Langston, where he combined archive footage with quotes from Langston Hughes, Essex Hemphill and James Baldwin and some stunningly poetic recreations.
The Fanon film also employs the same techniques – he contrasts interviews with intellectuals and rare archive material with delicate dramatic reconstructions by actor Colin Salmon. Julien says, “I wanted to make the film like Fanon’s writing. Black Skin White Mask is poetic, philosophical and montaged. If I’d made the film otherwise, I don’t think it would have been in the spirit of the subject matter.”
Fanon’s book, which he wrote in 1952 as a dissertation for his psychiatry degree, forms the basis of an astutely contemporary vision of the man and his ideas, an intellectual exploration of the notions of desire, violence and racism that not only educates but through its complete command of cinematic aesthetics, entertains.
Julien says the connection between Looking for Langston and his latest is that he’s always been fascinated by history. “I’m haunted by the past. It’s something that people always want to forget about. I think I’m actually guilty because I didn’t experience such terrible things growing up as a third generation Black European, but I have this feeling of trauma, you know, the burden of black representation.”
He believes he was asking for trouble making a film about Fanon. “We’re dealing with a dead icon, which can be dangerous (Hughes’s estate objected to the homo- erotic portrait of the author in his previous film), but at the same time it gives you space to ruminate on who they might have been and extrapolate on their ideas.”
Julien has always been actively involved both as a film-maker and a cultural critic, consistently forging a new language around black representation, and de-essentialising black and gay subjectivities. At a recent symposium he was asked what it’s like to work as a black gay film-maker and replied: “I speak from that position, not for it.”
Last week at the Johannesburg Biennale offices he confessed to becoming rather wary of all this academic debate. “I’m feeling a lot more ambivalent about intellectualising the cinema. Film studies always has this socio-political programmatic take on film analysis; academics always feel they have to make a grand narrative.
“Nowadays I’m not interested in discourse alone. I really don’t think everything must be explained away. One should be more open. One doesn’t always have to put the lid on what a film-maker is trying to say.”
As for African cinema, he thinks it’s all a bit of a myth. “Most African film-makers live in Paris. There films are financed in France; they’re basically hybrid art-house films.”
At the Newtown Film School workshop he advised emerging South African film talent to tell indigenous stories. “There’s great potential here for film to be a tool for reconciliation, of memory building, but I think you should keep your individual voices and tell small stories that are genuinely affecting. If you’ve got a good story it’ll always translate. I mean if all you want to do is make commercial blockbusters, please get on a plane and go to Los Angeles.”
But if all goes according to plan Julien’s next film will be a feature set in South Africa. Written by Matthew Krouse, The Bartering of Souls has been described by Julien as “a My Beautiful Laundrette or Beautiful Thing gone wrong, set in South Africa, about hustlers”.
An adaptation of one of Krouse’s short stories, it follows the friendship and romance between a middle-aged academic and a Zimbabwean immigrant. Set against the backdrop of drag queens and toilet sex, the story is devastatingly emotional, funny and deeply touching.
Julien says perhaps South African film- makers would have the right to balk at a foreigner coming in to make the movie, but he was approached by the producers on the strength of his track record, something sadly lacking in local film-makers. “And anyway, I get lots of scripts set in many different places other than Britain. With this one I think I’m going to really enjoy the challenge. That’s what I like.”
Author Krouse is very pleased that Julien is set to make the picture, which earlier this year was awarded a grant of R50 000 for development by the Department of Arts and Culture. “I think it’s fascinating for a white Third World person to collaborate with a black First World person. I’m not a traveller; I’m a bit of a hermit. And Isaac will bring the outsider’s perspective, which I think is very important. I have a lot of faith in him,” says Krouse.
At present the script is going through the usual series of rewrites while producers Philip Brooks and Jeremy Nathan try to raise the finance. Julien and Nash are both upbeat about the prospects of making a film here. “It’ll be great to do something away from Britain. We think British cinema can be too restrictive.”
Until The Bartering of Souls is made, local audiences can expect to see Frantz Fanon: Black Skin White Mask later this year on SABC, and the film will also be available through the Film Resource Unit.
BLURB: Julien believes he was asking for trouble making a film about Fanon. ‘We’re dealing with a dead icon, which can be dangerous’