The Rebel's Cinema - Frantz Fanon on Screen

Burn! (Queimada) (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1969, Italy/France, 112 mins.) Preceded by video excerpt of Marlon Brando’s eulogy for 17-year-old Black Panther Party member Bobby Hutton in 1968.

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. Tickets on sale now.