Black on Screen: Global Black Cinema and Anti-colonial Liberation

Join us for Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask 1997, Isaac Julien and La noire de…(Black Girl) 1966, Ousmane Sembène, as part of our October and November Black on Screen series guest-curated by writer and film programmer, Yasmina Price. She focuses on anti-colonial African cinema and the work of visual artists across the Black diaspora, with a particular interest in the experimental work of women filmmakers. This evening's screenings will be followed by Q&A with Price and Amy Sall, author of The African Gaze: Photography, Cinema and Power.

5:30 PM | Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask (1997), Isaac Julien

As diagnosed by revolutionary psychiatrist Frantz Fanon in the 1950s and 60s, the violence of colonization has been both physical and psychological—stealing land and exploiting labor while inflicting racialized hierarchies of internalized damage. Beginning in the 1980s, independent Black British filmmakers sought an audiovisual challenge to ongoing regimes of colonial and imperial domination. Isaac Julien’s experimental Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask (1997) emerged from these collective efforts, tracing the Martinican militant philosopher’s life and work through an intricate collage of archival documentation, interviews and imaginative reenactments.

Running Time: 70minutes

Language : English

6:45 PM | La noire de…(Black Girl) 1966, Ousmane Sembène

Made a few years after Fanon’s death, La noire de… (1966)—the feature debut by Pan-African Marxist Ousmane Sembène—tells the story of Diouana, a young Senegalese woman working in the home of a bourgeois white family, played by the magnetic Mbissine Thérèse Diop. Through the intimate claustrophobia of gendered domestic labor, the film examines the tolls of economic dependency and psychic confinement. Taken together, the two works are studies of blackness, alienation and subjugation leveraged towards the possibility of self-recovery and anti-colonial liberation.

Running Time: 60 minutes

Language: French

This series, Black on Screen: A Century of Radical Visual Culture, captures 100 years of local and transnational Black movement work and artistic evolution on film. Sourced from The Schomburg’s collection and others, it takes a kaleidoscopic look at Black life and expression across diasporas, rendering a range of storytelling traditions that incite and inspire Black world-building. The Moving Image and Recorded Sound Division (MIRS, pronounced “meers”) at the Schomburg Center collects and preserves audio and moving image (AMI) materials related to the experiences of people of African descent. The division has amassed nearly 400 collections, approximately 5,000 square feet, in a variety of formats, which captures the gestures and sounds of major historical, artistic and cultural moments and influencers. While the strength is the Black American holdings there is considerable Caribbean and African representation in the collection.

Accessibility requests can be made by e-mail [email protected].

Yasmina Price (Guest Curator) a New York–based writer and film programmer completing a PhD at Yale University. She is devoted to visual culture from the African continent and diaspora, anti-colonial cinema and the experimental work of women filmmakers. Her programming has been featured at Anthology Film Archives, Light Industry, Maysles Documentary Center, e-flux and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Pan African Film & Arts Festival, Los Angeles; and The National Gallery of Art, D.C. Her writing has appeared in edited volumes and museum catalogues, with essays in The Nation, The Baffler, MUBI’s Notebook, Hammer & Hope, Criterion’s Current, Film Quarterly and World Records Journal.

Amy Sall is a writer, independent researcher, and collector-archivist based in New York. She is the author of The African Gaze: Photography, Cinema and Power, which was published by Thames and Hudson in 2024. Amy is also the founding editor of SUNU: Journal of African Affairs, Critical Thought + Aesthetics, a pan-African, post-disciplinary platform exploring the artistic, cultural, and intellectual production of Africa and the diaspora across time and space. As former adjunct faculty at The New School, she conceived and taught two courses, "The African Gaze: Visual Culture of Postcolonial Africa and the Social Imagination" and "Third Cinema & the Counter Narratives." Amy's work and interests explore the theory and praxis of cultural sovereignty, cultural preservation, anti-/de-/post-coloniality, human rights, visual culture, and the archive.

This year, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is celebrating the 100th anniversary of its founding! Join us all year long for a wide array of special events, exhibitions, and more as we celebrate this milestone and continue the legacy of Arturo Schomburg.

Schomburg100 | Exhibition | Special-Edition Library Card | Become a Member

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Host or Publisher Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture