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On 13 April, the political activist, theatre maker and filmmaker Sarah Maldoror died following complications from coronavirus. She was a crucial figure in the development of pan-African, lusophone and revolutionary cinema, best known for her groundbreaking film Sambizanga (1972), likely the first feature to have been directed by a woman in Sub-Saharan Africa. While the importance of the film as a critical touchstone of anti-colonial film cannot be overstated, it was only a small part of her prolific body of work. Over the following two decades Maldoror produced over two dozen films, most of them made for television, including short documentaries about various cultural figures such as Aimé Césaire, Louis Aragon and Léon Damas. In her honour, Another Gaze will host an event on 12 May, ‘The Many Legacies of Sarah Maldoror’, which will include introductions by Maldoror’s two daughters, readings of texts Maldoror admired and conversed with, and a roundtable discussion. Three of Maldoror’s films will be available on Another Gaze’s website in the days leading up to the event. By shedding light on the many legacies that Maldoror left behind, we hope to commemorate the breadth of her work, which in all its forms was motivated by a spirit of collectivity and plurality.
Sarah Maldoror was born Sarah Ducados to an Antillean father and a French mother in rural southwestern France. A passion for theatre first brought her to Paris, where she joined the théâtre de l’école de la rue Blanche, and a number of African and Caribbean artists with whom she co-founded the first Black theatre troupe in France, Les Griots, in 1956. Of this she said: “We were sick of playing maids. We wanted to choose our own roles. As there was four of us, we put on Jean-Paul Sartre’s ‘Huis Clos’ […] We toured and played in universities for free. What we wanted most of all was to learn”. It was as part of this troupe that she adopted the surname Maldoror in homage to Les Chants de Maldoror (The Songs of Maldoror), the long prose poem by the 19th-century poet Lautréamont, much admired by the Surrealists, whose subversive artistic tactics were in turn an inspiration to the filmmaker. This name also indicates one of many points of connection with Aimé Césaire, who wrote in Discours sur le colonialisme (Discourse on Colonialism) : “The truth is that Lautréamont had only to look the iron man forged by capitalist society squarely in the eye to perceive the monster, the everyday monster, his hero.” In addition to her collaborations with Césaire, Maldoror’s work was in conversation with the Négritude movement, launched by Francophone Afro-diasporic writers and cultural producers, and was motivated by a Pan-Africanist perspective which also encompassed an engagement with a broader transnational revolutionary community. This was reflected at the start of her transition to filmmaking career in 1961, when she moved to Russia to study under Mark Donskoi at the Moscow Film Academy, and met Ousmane Sembène, the Senegalese ‘godfather’ of African Cinema. After leaving Moscow, she worked as assistant director on Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966), before making her first short ‘Monamgambée’ (1969), which can be seen as both a narrative and technical blueprint for her later feature Sambizanga (1972), a film about the Angolan liberation struggle as seen from the perspective of a wife and mother. For Maldoror, film was a tool of political education and an artistic, historiographic practice which allowed her to work towards an alternative, explicitly anticolonialist and feminist vision of the world.
—Event organised by Daniella Shreir (founder and co-editor, Another Gaze) and researcher and cultural worker Yasmina Price, with thanks to Annouchka de Andrade and Henda Ducados.
EVENT PROGRAMME
12 May, 9PM (GMT+2 – CEST)
8PM (UK) / 3PM (EDT) / 12PM (PDT)
i.
Annouchka de Andrade and Henda Ducados introduce the life and work of their mother, Sarah Maldoror.
ii.
A bilingual reading of extracts of Aimé Césaire’s Cahiers d’un retour au pays natal (Return to my Native Land), by Marie-Julie Chalu and Gazelle Mba. Reading of extracts from the work of Frantz Fanon, by Rooney Elmi.
iii.
A roundtable discussion about the legacies of Sarah Maldoror. The conversation will consider Maldoror’s work as an archival practice, an alternative form of historiography and a model for the necessity of cultural and artistic practices as part of revolutionary struggle. It will also consider Maldoror’s place as part of a broader context of anticolonial filmmaking around the time of African independence movements and the ways her work might be in dialogue with contemporary Black feminist filmmaking. With Yasmina Price, Beti Ellerson, Awa Konaté, Janaína Oliveira and Nuotama Bodomo, followed by audience discussion.
Three films by Sarah Maldoror will be made available from Friday 8 – Tuesday 12 May.
Sign up to the eventbrite for updates and Zoom link here.
BIOS
Yasmina Price is a researcher and cultural worker, currently a graduate student in the Departments of African American Studies and Film/Media Studies at Yale University. She works with anti-colonial African cinema and the subversive, politically charged production of filmmakers across the Black diaspora, with a particular interest in the experimental visual practices of women filmmakers. Her scholarship is anchored in a commitment to anti-imperialism and a liberated global south.
Daniella Shreir is a translator, programmer, graphic designer and founder and co-editor of Another Gaze. Her translation of Chantal Akerman’s My Mother Laughs came out in 2019 with Silver Press.
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Janaína Oliveira is a professor at the Federal Instituto of Rio de Janerio (IFRJ) and Fulbright scholar at the Center for African Studies at Howard University, in Washington D.C. She is the head programmer of the Zózimo Bulbul Black Cinema Encounter in Rio de Janeiro, part of the programming committee of the FINCAR, International Women Filmmakers Festival in Recife, and the advisor for African and black diaspora films for the Locarno Film Festival, in Switerzland. She is a member of the Association of Black Audiovisual Professionals (APAN) and is the founder and coordinator of the Black Cinema Itinerant Forum (FICINE). Oliveira is the programmer of the 66th edition of the Flaherty Film Seminar in New York.
Beti Ellerson is the founder and director of the Centre for the Study and Research of African Women in Cinema and has published extensively and spoken widely on African women and the moving image. She holds a PhD in African studies from Howard University, is the author of Sisters of the Screen: Women of Africa on Film, Video and Television (Africa World Press, 2000), and creator of the documentary Sisters of the Screen: African Women in the Cinema (2002). Ellerson was the keynote speaker at the 2012 colloquy on Francophone African Women Filmmakers in Paris.
Awa Konaté is a Danish-Ivorian critic, programmer and curator of contemporary art based between London and Copenhagen. She is the founder of the interdisciplinary research platform Culture Art Society (CAS), which intersects critical studies and art theory to research the cultural economy of African archives and that of its wider diaspora. Her research draws on combining literature, cinema and visual arts to form a critical curatorial practice of memory work, which pursues the ways in which the archive effects, informs and can reinform liberatory practices beyond disciplinary specificities. She has been published in Third Text, Paletten art Journal, Widewalls Magazine, The Nordic Africa Institute, and more.
Nuotama Bodomo is a Ghanaian writer and director. She grew up in Ghana, Norway, California, and Hong Kong before moving to New York to study film at Columbia University and NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Her short films Boneshaker (2013) and Afronauts (2014) both premiered at Sundance Film Festival and went on to screen at festivals including the Berlinale, Telluride, SXSW, and New Directors/New Films. Afronauts received five Grand Jury Prizes and will play at the Whitney Museum in the fall as part of “Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905–2016.” Bodomo most recently directed the short segment Everybody Dies! for the omnibus feature Collective:Unconscious (2016), which premiered at the 2016 SXSW Film Festival. It won Best Experimental Short at the 2016 BlackStar Film Festival.
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Gazelle Mba is a writer and editor from Nigeria currently living in Marseille. She is one of the editors of Nommo, a new political and cultural magazine dedicated to anti-colonial and anti-imperialist internationalisms, her writing has appeared in Another Gaze and Worms magazine. She also hosts a radio show called Loopholes of Retreat on Panicfm, including one in honour of Sarah Maldoror available here.
Marie-Julie Chalu is an actress and writer. Through her project Iconoclate, she expresses an interest in cultura, social, aesthetic and postcolonial dynamics. She is also the founder of Afropea, a curotorial and editorial project about Afro-European identities.
Rooney Elmi is a independent film creative with a hyper-focus on nonfiction cinema and utilizing the camera as a liberation tool for marginalised communities. Elmi is also the editor-in-chief of SVLLY(wood), a experimental print and digital movie magazine geared toward curating a radical cinephilia and co-runs NO EVIL EYE, a nomadic underground microcinema with Ingrid Raphael. Bylines can be found at Film Comment, The FADER, Hyperallergic, and more.
