In 1970, Med Hondo, a Mauritanian-born French filmmaker renowned for his radical productions, released “Soleil O,” which seems to echo the sentiments of Frantz Fanon’s 1952 book “Black Skin, White Masks.” This film, shot using equipment funded by the director himself, was made by a crew of just five people and starred mostly friends who participated voluntarily on weekends. However, Hondo makes up for the film’s limited production and meager resources with an assault of groundbreaking cinematic techniques that relentlessly investigate the struggles of formerly colonized Africans in France. Engaging with a myriad of issues ranging from language to biracial romantic relations to culture in the colonial era, Hondo’s film represents a brilliant cinematic adaptation of the struggles of decolonization.
The film’s opening sequences concisely portray the physical and psychological devastation of colonization on the native population. The film opens with a stop-motion animation of an African leader surrounded by his people who is then approached and immobilized by white soldiers. The next scene features a group of Black men staring into the camera while a narrator remarks on the institutions of industry, culture, art, currency-based economy, science and education that flourished around the world prior to colonization.
Following this, a white priest baptizes the men, who apologize for speaking in their native languages before adopting new Western names, marking their conversion to Christianity. Portraying the utter dehumanization of colonized people, Hondo emphasizes how the processes of colonization stripped individuals of their identities, linguistic communities and guiding ideals. The men are then trained to become loyal subjects, taking up crosses and turning them around into swords. In an instant, the oppressors order the colonized to alternate between both humble Christian servants and unwavering imperial soldiers. The colonizers, after subduing the people’s leadership and usurping their way of life, impose their own culture and instill a sense of inferiority onto the oppressed to exploit them as a working and fighting force.
Finally, the men stand the attention of a white officer and several Black puppets. With the call “French American English,” the men attack each other until they all lay exhausted on the ground. The same goes for two Black men in soldiers’ uniforms, who fight for a single bill held over their heads by the white commander. The scene brilliantly encapsulates the colonizers’ efforts to sow discord among the oppressed, rendering them continuously powerless. Arbitrary divisions and infighting persist, achieving nothing but mutual debility. Even those colonized who find themselves in positions of power, lured by meager payment, eventually fall victim to this same imposed friction. Puppet representatives of the colonized group preside over everything at the ultimate command of colonizer officers. Interestingly, Hondo does not specify the ethnicity or nationality of any of the film’s Black characters, instead portraying them as pan-African. The colonizers’ shouts of “French American English” is another composite, this time of colonizing forces. Hondo’s lack of specificity symbolizes the struggles not just of those communities with which he is directly familiar, but also those colonized across the African continent.
What follows is a monologue from one man of the colonized group. Standing still with arms and legs apart, posed like a lifeless doll with an equally lifeless smile, he describes how he has begun to take part in the arts of the colonizer: “I am bleached by your culture, but I remain” a Black man. Sentiments like these imbue the film and allow Hondo to bring Fanon’s theories to life on screen. He writes that colonized people who harbor an inferiority complex attempt to assimilate into the colonizer’s culture. They don white masks and try to endear themselves to the colonizer by means of open imitation of their language and values. Yet, as much as one adopts what Fanon calls the mother country’s culture, the same systems of forced inferiority and otherness of the oppressed perpetuate, leaving the individual divided from both his native and non-native senses of self. While no longer as violent as the aforementioned arbitrary infighting, the goal of keeping the colonized down, even in a decolonized world, remains.
“Soleil O,” with its evocative allegories and revolutionary theater techniques, effectively tackles the manifestations of colonialism’s past. The film crafts a remarkable depiction of the realities Fanon laid out in “Black Skin, White Masks” faced by formerly colonized Africans.