22.25 Dani Gal Dark Continent
More
“The Saint-Yile tapes,” the librarian mumbles in astonishment, rummaging to procure the note about the request from his file. He disappears into the back—not without remarking that these materials are usually kept under lock and key—only to return with a tape recorder and several tapes in hand.
The story that unfolds in the 2023 film Dark Continent—after Fanon threads the tape, puts on the headphones, and presses play—is a slightly dramatized adaptation by Dani Gal, drawn directly from Black Skin, White Masks, the book that brought the Martinique-born psychiatrist, writer, and activist to prominence in 1952 and established him as a sharp, articulate thinker and early theorist of decolonization. The case study it presents centers on a young white French woman who suffers from strange physical tics—twitching eyes and rocking-chair-like movements with her feet. She also experiences abstract hallucinations of circles and reports hearing “African” tom-tom music. The attending physician eventually prescribes a form of lucid dream therapy—with success: the circles are broken up, crossed out, and disappear; polyrhythmic drumming gives way to the clear, three-beat rhythm of a waltz.
On several intricately interwoven diegetic levels, Dani Gal tells the story of a haunting and its healing—one that (re)establishes a European sense of order through the questionable means of erasure and overwriting. These levels are both held together and fractured by sound, its (technical) transmission and visual symbolism. The film adopts the structure of concentric circles expanding outward, reflecting both the central narrative force and the graphic visualization of the young woman’s hallucinations at the heart of the story. In dramatizing the material, the boundary between cinematic fiction and real events becomes porous: We see an actual and authentic case, albeit stylized through cinematic techniques, framed within a fictional narrative in which the real Frantz Fanon conducts imaginary research on the very story being told. Similarly, the sharply defined boundaries between roles are blurred through the figure of the young, white, European woman—who is passive and inevitably objectified. At one point, the treating doctor quotes Sigmund Freud’s assertion that women remain a “dark continent,” complicating the clear-cut categories of perpetrator and victim.
This back and forth, this ping-ponging between levels and positions, is framed by a prologue and an epilogue that give the film—structured like a resonating chamber—a fourth, outermost layer and enclose it parenthetically in terms of technology and media theory. Before the fictional Fanon enters the library, the camera shows us the librarian’s stamps through the (likewise circular) lens of a magnifying glass. Depicted there are radios, tape recorders, loudspeakers, and transmission masts with concentric circles radiating outward from the top, symbolizing radio waves and transmissions—images of sound presented in the form of stamps, which in turn represent another form of communication.
Fittingly, the portable radio in the prologue is heard playing the very same waltz (The Snow Star) that Fanon mentions in Black Skin, White Masks, identical to what the patient later learns to use to drown out the sound of the drums. In addition, Gal introduces the voice of the narrator, who recounts an article published in 1928 by Nana Amoah III, King of the Gold Coast (as the area now known as Ghana was known under British colonial rule). In the article, he discusses how long before the advent of radio, Africa had developed a highly advanced and sophisticated communication system: the drum, which allowed the transmission of complex, rhythmically coded messages over long distances. It’s not surprising, then, that colonial powers and enslavers were quick to ban them, fearing that they could be used to spread revolutionary and seditious messages. In the epilogue, the portable radio plays a central role in unraveling the story behind the patient’s mental illness. Her father, played by the same actor as the racist librarian, had served in the French colonial armies in Africa. Night after night he listened to “African” drum music on his radio, the rhythms of which carried through the darkness to his daughter’s ears. In Gal’s film, the radio plays not the waltz, but the distinctly percussive, echoing music of contemporary composer and musician Tyshawn Sorey.
In Dark Continent, the collective history of colonial violence and oppression emerges as a historical condition underlying individual psychological trauma and is conveyed above all through sound. In this film, sound has the power to cut through the image, its fluid, unfixed nature opening up new spaces. It unsettles the rigid, carries the past into the present as something “present-absent,” and creates feedback loops between now and then—so that the repressed returns within the repressor and one medium within another, the drum within the radio, sound within the image. From an empty center, echoes ripple through Dani Gal’s film, spanning generations, eras, and continents. Waves overlap, first canceling each other out through interference, then amplifying one another. History emerges as a contested, structured field of resonance shaped by power, violence, and oppression—the reverberating spaces of which are haunted by ghosts that drift back and forth, sometimes even passing through the very walls that divide not only these spaces, but also those of us who inhabit them.
Dani Gal studied at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, and the Cooper Union in New York. His films and works have been featured in numerous exhibitions, including documenta 14 in Kassel and Athens (2017), the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2018 and 2023), steirischer herbst in Graz (2023), and The Polygon Gallery in Vancouver (2024). In 2019, Gal was Artist-in-Residence at Blood Mountain Projects and a research fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies. In 2024, he was a fellow at inherit, Centre for Advanced Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin. Dani Gal lives and works in Berlin.
Close
The story that unfolds in the 2023 film Dark Continent—after Fanon threads the tape, puts on the headphones, and presses play—is a slightly dramatized adaptation by Dani Gal, drawn directly from Black Skin, White Masks, the book that brought the Martinique-born psychiatrist, writer, and activist to prominence in 1952 and established him as a sharp, articulate thinker and early theorist of decolonization. The case study it presents centers on a young white French woman who suffers from strange physical tics—twitching eyes and rocking-chair-like movements with her feet. She also experiences abstract hallucinations of circles and reports hearing “African” tom-tom music. The attending physician eventually prescribes a form of lucid dream therapy—with success: the circles are broken up, crossed out, and disappear; polyrhythmic drumming gives way to the clear, three-beat rhythm of a waltz.
On several intricately interwoven diegetic levels, Dani Gal tells the story of a haunting and its healing—one that (re)establishes a European sense of order through the questionable means of erasure and overwriting. These levels are both held together and fractured by sound, its (technical) transmission and visual symbolism. The film adopts the structure of concentric circles expanding outward, reflecting both the central narrative force and the graphic visualization of the young woman’s hallucinations at the heart of the story. In dramatizing the material, the boundary between cinematic fiction and real events becomes porous: We see an actual and authentic case, albeit stylized through cinematic techniques, framed within a fictional narrative in which the real Frantz Fanon conducts imaginary research on the very story being told. Similarly, the sharply defined boundaries between roles are blurred through the figure of the young, white, European woman—who is passive and inevitably objectified. At one point, the treating doctor quotes Sigmund Freud’s assertion that women remain a “dark continent,” complicating the clear-cut categories of perpetrator and victim.
This back and forth, this ping-ponging between levels and positions, is framed by a prologue and an epilogue that give the film—structured like a resonating chamber—a fourth, outermost layer and enclose it parenthetically in terms of technology and media theory. Before the fictional Fanon enters the library, the camera shows us the librarian’s stamps through the (likewise circular) lens of a magnifying glass. Depicted there are radios, tape recorders, loudspeakers, and transmission masts with concentric circles radiating outward from the top, symbolizing radio waves and transmissions—images of sound presented in the form of stamps, which in turn represent another form of communication.
Fittingly, the portable radio in the prologue is heard playing the very same waltz (The Snow Star) that Fanon mentions in Black Skin, White Masks, identical to what the patient later learns to use to drown out the sound of the drums. In addition, Gal introduces the voice of the narrator, who recounts an article published in 1928 by Nana Amoah III, King of the Gold Coast (as the area now known as Ghana was known under British colonial rule). In the article, he discusses how long before the advent of radio, Africa had developed a highly advanced and sophisticated communication system: the drum, which allowed the transmission of complex, rhythmically coded messages over long distances. It’s not surprising, then, that colonial powers and enslavers were quick to ban them, fearing that they could be used to spread revolutionary and seditious messages. In the epilogue, the portable radio plays a central role in unraveling the story behind the patient’s mental illness. Her father, played by the same actor as the racist librarian, had served in the French colonial armies in Africa. Night after night he listened to “African” drum music on his radio, the rhythms of which carried through the darkness to his daughter’s ears. In Gal’s film, the radio plays not the waltz, but the distinctly percussive, echoing music of contemporary composer and musician Tyshawn Sorey.
In Dark Continent, the collective history of colonial violence and oppression emerges as a historical condition underlying individual psychological trauma and is conveyed above all through sound. In this film, sound has the power to cut through the image, its fluid, unfixed nature opening up new spaces. It unsettles the rigid, carries the past into the present as something “present-absent,” and creates feedback loops between now and then—so that the repressed returns within the repressor and one medium within another, the drum within the radio, sound within the image. From an empty center, echoes ripple through Dani Gal’s film, spanning generations, eras, and continents. Waves overlap, first canceling each other out through interference, then amplifying one another. History emerges as a contested, structured field of resonance shaped by power, violence, and oppression—the reverberating spaces of which are haunted by ghosts that drift back and forth, sometimes even passing through the very walls that divide not only these spaces, but also those of us who inhabit them.
Dani Gal studied at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, and the Cooper Union in New York. His films and works have been featured in numerous exhibitions, including documenta 14 in Kassel and Athens (2017), the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2018 and 2023), steirischer herbst in Graz (2023), and The Polygon Gallery in Vancouver (2024). In 2019, Gal was Artist-in-Residence at Blood Mountain Projects and a research fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies. In 2024, he was a fellow at inherit, Centre for Advanced Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin. Dani Gal lives and works in Berlin.
Text Dominikus Müller
Dark Continent, 2023
Video, 4K, 25 min.
Written and directed by Dani Gal
Starring Yoli Fuller, Maj-Britt Klenke, J. David Hinze, and Patrick Joswig
Cinematography Itay Marom
Produced by Kirberg Motors and Dani Gal
Courtesy of the artists and Kadel Willborn, Düsseldorf