On 13 April 2020, 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.
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.
Les Griots
The following is a transcription of a Zoom event hosted by Yasmina Price and Daniella Shreir on the 12th of May 2020, which lasted for three hours. It was introduced by Maldoror’s daughters, Annouchka de Andrade and Henda Ducados. This was followed by a bilingual reading of extracts from Aimé Césaire’s Cahiers d’un retour au pays natal (Return to my Native Land), by Marie-Julie Chalu and Gazelle Mba, and a reading of extracts from the work of Frantz Fanon, by Ruun Nuur (these are not included in the transcript). The final part of the event was a discussion, featuring Yasmina Price, Beti Ellerson, Awa Konaté, Janaína Oliveira and Nuotama Bodomo.
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In my early teens, Sarah’s eccentricity bothered me: the fact that she wore jeans and boots and her hair in a big afro, and that, until the mid-seventies, she answered the phone with, “Ready for the Revolution?” I asked her many times why she couldn’t be more normal, work at the neighbourhood bakery or something like that, waiting for us after school with a glass of milk and some cake.
One day she helped me write a short essay to read out in front of my class at school. It got me an A. It became clear that not only was she a true poet but also that her eccentric nature was envied by all my friends. Sarah was modern, ahead of her time, and she always treated my sister and me as individuals. This was heavy to deal with as a child. Now, as an adult, I appreciate her even more. One day she was supposed to go to Nigeria for three days but only returned three months later. How could she have imagined that she was about to land right in the middle of a coup? Things were never easy with her, but they were always fun and unpredictable – un vrai bordel. People came in and out of the house all the time and good-hearted strangers babysat us while Sarah travelled the world. Later on I was astonished to learn that so many major figures of the 1960s had stayed with us and sat at our kitchen table. There were very few rules I can remember her setting but one of them was that guns should be left by the door.
Thank you Sarah for being so courageous and for passing this courage on to me. You gave me the strength to face up to my fears and to venture out and have an impact in this world.
—Henda Ducados
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Sarah Maldoror is well-known as a filmmaker and a militant but this is a reductive view of who she actually was. Before being a filmmaker, woman and mother, Sarah was a fundamentally poetic person. She did not compartmentalise her life into different sections. Everything she decided on, acted upon, was linked to multiple dimensions. She was original, generous and always surprising. In one of our last conversations at the hospital, she spoke only of her admiration for the nurses and wondered whether we – her daughters – needed anything.
Sarah chose cinema as a way to spread African culture to African people and to others. She always said: “We are responsible; no one else is to blame. We are the only ones who should communicate our history”. Her very first feature film – Guns for Banta – was produced and financed in Algeria. After a difficult shoot in the war zone in Guinea-Bissau, and after a conflict with the producers, she had to abandon the copy of the film and leave Algeria within 48 hours. Our whole family was kicked out of the country. Our father, Mário Pinto de Andrade, had a meeting with Fidel Castro and, as a result, Henda and I were sent to live with a host family in the south of France. We all met later in Paris.
Over the course of her life, Sarah directed 40 films and worked on more than 15 projects that were never completed. My sister and I are currently working on completing our existing archives, getting back rights and copies of several works and restoring a few others. There are also many films that were never broadcast , and even one that was seized! During an interview with the RFI radio station in November 2019, Sarah said: “I was kicked out from Algiers, but I wasn’t the only one. So what?” This was my mother. This was her way of thinking, her attitude, whatever the situation. No time for regrets. It was sometimes difficult for Henda and me to keep up with her. She brought us with her everywhere: political meetings, professional meetings, film festivals. Sometimes, for example, we would spend hours with Louis Aragon reading Victor Hugo. For her everything was something new for us to experience; a way of bringing art into our daily lives. We made floral bouquets by mixing fruit and vegetables (radish and lily of the valley). Once she asked the mayor of the city of St Denis to destroy the wall of the cemetery and replace it with hedges of roses.
This poetry vibrates in her first short film ‘Monangambée’. The incarnation of torture through the body of Mateus as he falls down – no drop of blood, the interiorisation of suffering. She always looked for a different way of telling stories, a way to transcend everyday life.
Monangambée
Once, when filming the poet and former president of Senegal, Léopold Sédar Senghor, in Normandy, she had Senghor change the decor and move decorative masks into the corridor, because it was nicer on the level of photography – a good angle for the camera. Head of State or not, the quality of the image was important to Sarah.
Sarah’s concept of freedom was scary for some. There were producers who never signed a contract with her or, if they did once, never did again. When she returned from Guyana with her eponymous film on the poet Léon Damas, the RFO Channel refused to broadcast it because of her last minute decision to shoot in black and white. But this is, of course, one of her best films. She wanted to share and show her pride in Black culture and, despite thousands of negative responses, she never gave up. Nor did she ever change her attitude. I told her several times that the one word she didn’t understand was “compromise”.
To conclude I will share the title of her last project based on Franz Fanon, ‘Fanon, a whisper in the wind.’ What I would like to insist on is the complexity of her thought and action. She always remained true to herself. She was open-minded, aware of others, absolutely curious about everything. But she was undeniably sensitive to others and to her surroundings surrounding and always ready for the unpredictable.
Thank you,
—Annouchka de Andrade
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Questions from the audience to Henda and Annouchka, relayed by Daniella Shreir:
Daniella Shreir: When did you discover your mother’s films, and is her practice part of your own life?
Annouchka de Andrade: We were born and raised on cinema. We had to go to the cinema to see her movies, and loads of other movies too. We grew up at the Cinémathèque d’Alger which was run by Jean-Michel Arnold at the time. Sometimes, when our mother had meetings, she would leave us in the cinema for hours. Watching movies was normal for us, it was always part of our life.
DS: Can you expand on the final project about Franz Fanon?
ADA: It was towards the end of her career, when it was already becoming difficult for her to shoot films, and there was no script. In the past, her films had been better set up , ready to be shot. But she at least had notes on how she wanted to shed light on Franz Fanon’s work. She wanted to start the movie in Paris in front of La Sorbonne and she wanted to talk about prisoners. The notion of liberty was very important in all of her movies – how being in jail impacts your body and mind. It’s present in her first movie ‘Monangambée’ [1968] where she talks about lack of freedom and it’s present in all her subsequent work . She wanted to make this movie specifically about the importance of Fanon’s work on the body.
DS: Are there any plans to distribute Maldoror’s films on Amílcar Cabral or on Mario and Joaquim de Andrade? Relatedly, can either of you speak on why Guns for Banta [1970] was confiscated by the Algerian government?
ADA: She didn’t write anything about Amílcar Cabral, it was just an idea she had. But of course, he was very close to our family, and a great friend of our father’s, so we knew him well. She had a project that involved a movie on Mário, which I have here at home.
With regard to the disagreement with the producer in Algeria, it was over the point of view from which this film was shot, which was predominantly from that of women in Guinea-Bissau. The Algerian government didn’t like the idea very much because women were too present. There was another disagreement over Maldoror’s use of jazz music in the film. When she eventually presented the first cut, they wanted her to make changes, and she said no. She was too direct and maybe even ended up insulting her interlocutor. He wanted to kill her! He said, “I’m not going to kill you, but you have to leave within 48 hours.” After that, there were no more problems with Algeria. We hope we’ll be able to rescue the movie, finish it, and present it, because we have no idea where the copy is. We have been looking for it. Hopefully we can get a hold of it.
Henda Ducados: I could add a few words about the making of Guns for Banta. Maldoror once said that when it came to making films about the formation of Guinea-Bissau, she was struck by the fact that women were active participants in the struggle and carried guns and heavy loads of artillery and machinery for the men. A lot of the disagreements they had towards the end of the project were due to her focus on this aspect of the struggle. She highlighted gender imbalance, but she did it with a lot of beauty. Women were active soldiers even though they received no recognition for their service. It’s important to say as well that during this period Maldoror said she discovered what human beings really are, men in particular. During the course of shooting the film, part of the team had to return to Algeria because of the bombings, but Maldoror stayed on with a few members of the crew. When she came back she was furious because she had been abandoned. I think the General at that time wanted to make a point, not only because Maldoror had brought back a project that wasn’t aligned with what had been agreed, but also because she’d made a point of telling him what a coward he was! We’re talking the 1970s, the Algerian army, and the fact that we were guests of the Algerian government at the time – these things all contributed to Maldoror being expelled and to the movie disappearing.
DS: How did Maldoror envision the relationship between cinema and contemporary art? How did she see her relationship to museums, institutions and the art market?
HD: The relationship between cinema and contemporary art started very early on for her, when she went to study in Moscow. She learned that art was very important and looking at a painting could help her capture the essence of a person or an emotion. When we were children, she would make a point of taking us to museums every Sunday. She not only wanted to enrich our souls, and for us to get ideas, but she also wanted to expose us to the art world.
ADA: She was curious and aware of everything around her. Whenever she decided to make a movie, she would start with a painting. This was important to her. Each movie is related to a particular painter or a painting. She would get her whole team to see this particular painting before the shoot. This connection was very important. She didn’t separate art into different categories. For her, cinema involved music, art, painting, sculpture, etc. She wanted to mix everything together. That was very important. Whenever she was in the process of discovering a new country, the first thing she would do was to go to a museum to discover national artists, to feel the art in order to feed it into her movies.
DS: What was Maldoror’s relationship to jazz?
ADA: Jazz was very important to her. She especially loved the saxophone. In jazz, she recognised something very deep, I think, which was related to freedom. She decided to use music from the Art Ensemble of Chicago in her first movie, ‘Monangambée’. She also used jazz in a movie about the Russian writer, Victor Serge. Of course, there is no link between jazz and Soviet culture, but for her, the lack of freedom, and the fight for liberty that was represented by Serge, was best translated by the saxophone. Jazz was a political attitude.
Panel Discussion
DS: What was your first encounter with Maldoror’s work? How does her work fit in with your wider practices?
Yasmina Price: I first encountered Maldoror through her most well-known feature, Sambizanga. I think the reason her cinema marked me so deeply, even before I had the opportunity to see more of her films, was because of this sense of openness, which is marked politically, aesthetically, formally, methodologically – in every sense. I’m so glad to have heard Annouchka and Henda explain how this came from the generosity of her orientations towards the world, because this is so remarkably clear in the films. I also appreciate that the films hold very clear ideological positions but are also so open to a variety of readings. For example, the film ‘Monangambée’ is so evidently an indictment of torture, but also of carcerality and the prison. In this way it is a blueprint for Sambizanga, which is about motherhood, militancy, revolution and the importance of political action, but also could be read as a text in favour of prison abolition, which is unfortunately an issue that stays on the surface of what it means to exist as Black in the world today.
Sambizanga
Awa Konaté: I absolutely agree that Maldoror’s ‘Monangambée’ advocates for prison abolition. But I think in reflecting on Maldoror and the difficulties of our contemporary imagining, and thinking about prison abolition on the continent, I see Maldoror’s reading not as a reformation of penal systems in Africa – which would follow an analysis of penal policy – but rather abolition in the sense that one is allowed to imagine possibilities outside of these colonial residues. Tying that back to your question, Daniella, I found out about Maldoror in 2012 through Beti Ellerson’s blog. Maldoror was one of a few African women working in film during that period that we know about. So I think it’s about drawing on her significance in one’s own liberatory practices, and using her work as a way of thinking about what it means to enact freedom on a daily basis, about the many things that African cinema has predicted, about the current social malaise that still exists within the African continent today, and about ways of undoing things.
Janaína Oliveira: For me, the first thing that connected me to the work of Maldoror was the deep connection between life and work: her Pan-African life and Pan-African cinema. I was struck not only by her fight against colonialism, but also the fact she was able to make connections between the Caribbean, the Americas, Europe and Africa, to somehow put all of this together, and to explain this to an audience like me, for instance, born and raised in Rio. Particularly after listening to Henda and Annouchka, I’m impressed by the Pan-African life she led.
This is an important theme of my own work as a researcher at Howard University: how Africa and Black diaspora film projects are related. It’s not about creating parallels, but understanding the process. Her relationship with music also made a big impression on me. What Annouchka was saying about Maldoror’s understanding of jazz as freedom is something I can see in other films of that time, for instance in Haile Gerima’s ‘Child of Resistance’ [1973], or even in our first Black film here in Brazil, Zózimo Bulbul’s ‘Soul in the Eye’ [1973], which includes a soundtrack by John Coltrane. We can go back to the continent, too, because on the podcast that Annouchka was on last week with Rachel Schefer and Cheick Oumar Sissoko, she made a great point about ‘Monangambée’ and the expressiveness we can find in the music by Ruy Mingas, which occurs at the beginning of Sambizanga and is also part one of the first films made in Mozambique, 25 [1977], by the Brazilian filmmakers Celso Luccas and José Celso Martinez Corrêa. So we see these Pan-African connections happening through music, which was very important for me when I connected to her work.
Also, I was thinking about the connection with other African filmmakers. zeinabu irene davis made a comment too on the Vimeo page of one of the films, about how she sees ‘Monangambée’ as connected to Sembène’s works, and she also mentioned Jean-Pierre Dikongué Pipa’s Muna Moto [1975].
The very first African film I saw was in the first edition of the Rio Film Festival, it was Abderrahmane Sissako’s La vie sur Terre [1998], the one with the Aimé Césaire quote from Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (… “car la vie n’est pas un spectacle,… car un homme qui crie n’est pas un ours qui danse”), when I was nineteen. It was an introduction to African film, but also to Césaire works. So that was also a point of connection with Maldoror, through her work on Césaire.
Nuotama Bodomo: I was also introduced to Maldoror’s work through Sambizanga. For context, I was working in the American film industry, and trying to make an African film in that industry, and having the overpowering narrative that what I was doing was incredibly new, or risky. Walking out of Sambizanga I had the feeling that literally everything I wanted to do had already been done – the precedent had been set. I think that was my first interaction with her work.
I’m currently researching my first feature entitled Afronauts. It’s set within the Zambian freedom struggle. That was an incredibly border-melting, border-crossing, Pan-Africanist movement. So Maldoror’s work is a very powerful reference for the work I’m doing right now.
DS: I want to ask a question about the historical resistance to acknowledging that Black women filmmakers may have formal and aesthetic positions. Critics have reproached Maldoror for the beauty of Sambizanga, both formally, and also for the fact that the actress, Elisa Andrade, is beautiful. How do the aesthetics of the film coincide with the politics?
JO: This is related to this very traditional cinematic trope: the opposition between aesthetics and politics. For me, this places Maldoror in a very avant-garde place. I watched the films in chronological order yesterday, first ‘Monangambée’ and then Sambizanga. This is when I noticed the continuity of the music in both films. Sambizanga is very beautiful. There is only a bad copy of it online, which drew me into imagining it in the intended colours, but also the angles, the choices she made. There’s a beautiful moment where Maria is walking, leaving her village to go to Sambizanga.
Maldoror fights against the traditional way of positing aesthetics, politics, and cinema as antithetical to each other.
AK: Absolutely, I think some of the critiques of Maldoror are without a doubt very sexist, but at the same time I also think that’s because film critics and whoever has been reviewing her work, are so determined to adhere to the binaries they impose between the beautiful and the ugly. Therefore, they do not allow for what aesthetics can be, because the aesthetic is political, without any doubt. The aesthetic is politics. I wonder whether this general critique of African cinema as something very beautiful, is also something that we’ve extended to many others, such as Sembène and Sissoko and many other names. Of course there are sceneries and physical spaces and conditions that allow for a certain palatable aesthetic that of course marks the movie. But I also wonder whether filmmakers have employed a beautiful visuality to move away from what is undoubtedly a colonial residue of a gaze; of how Africa has generally been depicted culturally and has been seen for many years. In order to move away from something that has been reproduced as ugly, one must try to undo and redo the aesthetic of how things are represented and seen, without necessarily believing that they can only be beautiful or ugly. There’s an in-between space. I think Maldoror does that very well, because she employs a rearticulation of the aesthetic.
NB: I completely agree with what’s been said. I think it’s incredibly reductive to pretend that there is a clear line between the beautiful (and even the term beauty as it’s being used here is also incredibly reduced) and the political. I don’t think we could render the politics of Sambizanga without the community-focus that the “beauty” brings with it. I think Maldoror uses what we’re calling “beauty” to highlight the community surrounding the imprisonment and violence in the film. I think the community ultimately is what is victorious at the end of the film. I don’t understand how we could render Sambizanga without that beauty.
In ‘Monangambée’, another tool she used to maybe give a bit of levity to her films is the tool of the complet. She gives a definition at the top [“a dish made of beans, fish, palm oil and bananas. Daily meal popular in the shanty towns of Luanda (Angola)”], but then a colonial officer doesn’t understand what it is, and there’s a tense misunderstanding that is quite funny. I think that is wonderfully done and shows the political power of language and how it’s used in colonial struggle. And yet, even with the use of this tool that lends us a lot of lightness and humour, the story is still that of a political prisoner who dies of hunger. So that signifier is one that lends us humour, but is also the symbol of deep hunger and ultimate death. I agree with Awa that these things are fluid, there’s no binary. Maldoror is using these things that someone might dismiss as beautiful or humourous to do so many different things. So I don’t understand how the political and the aesthetic could be divorced.
Beti Ellseron: I have to admit I feel a little old school here. I started African Women in Cinema because the study didn’t exist. Just to show you how far back – I was still in graduate school when I first saw Sambizanga in 1990. And in fact, I found myself interested in African women in cinema just because I was interested in African studies and I was interested in women! This was when I started doing research – we’re talking about 1995, when I was doing a post-doc – and I was looking for information I could use for my proposal that looked at African women in cinema, and I came across this interview Sarah Maldoror had given. In the interview she said African women should be everywhere in cinema. They should be in front of the camera, behind the camera, in the editing room, and everywhere. And I thought, “this is true”, and that was how I framed the proposal . It became a leitmotif for me in terms of finding African women everywhere, and that also means scholars, researchers, critics and so on. So that was my point of departure. The fact that she was from the diaspora at the same time, was focusing on Africa, made me feel like an Afro-American interested in Africa. In a lot of ways she guided me. And then I got a chance to meet her and interview her, which was another highlight. I followed her work from then on. And I was able to meet Annouchka in 2013 at the Paris Colloquium.
I’m not a specialist on Sarah Maldoror, but more a person who has used her as a guide through my own research on African women and cinema as a study.
YP: Thank you, Beti. In so many ways, you, Janaína, Annouchka, Henda are all doing the same sort of work, which is a work of history and counter-history. I think what is quite heart-breaking with regards to Maldoror and Safi Faye and the few African women filmmakers that there are, is that their contributions are elided from the frequently masculinist framings of African Cinema historiography. They were both disadvantaged at the time they were producing and are still not given the same amount of recognition as their male counterparts.
I think Maldoror herself was engaging in a process of counter-history. To return to the earlier point that all my wonderfully brilliant interlocutors were making, her cinema is uncontainable, in terms of its Pan-Africanist reach, the multidisciplinarity of her method and sources, and also in what she was able to put inside her cinema narratively and thematically
On top of that, she was intensely attentive to the quotidian and the everyday. Her stories of uprisings are not focused on the heroes. For all that she was someone who was friends with people of Césaire’s stature, she wasn’t only making films about the Césaires of the world. She was making films about people who, under normal circumstances, would not make it into the official records of history at all. For instance, the protagonist of Sambizanga is not a hero within the narrative itself. She loses her husband and takes it upon herself to galvanise support and enact this intimate scale of rebellion and revolution. I think that is indicative of Maldoror’s cinema as one that operated in quite a minor key. Especially in a moment of particularly acute global crisis, all of us are being confronted with the fact that the power of collective action is the most effective: that which comes from the ground up, and operates on a small scale, and doesn’t necessarily get recorded in big history books. It takes filmmakers like Maldoror to authorise these forms of counter history so that they do get narrated and documented.
BE: If we look at one of her most recent films, ‘Scala Milan’ [2005], I think people would be surprised – “is this Sarah Maldoror? What does this have to do with this revolutionary ideal? This humourous story, set in the outskirts of Paris?” I see Maldoror in a broader sense. Not to say that your work, or what you’re talking about, is narrow. But she also focuses on art and people of non-African descent. I think that’s how people see her, at least in France. Perhaps this is an area that needs to be looked at to get a larger picture of her and her eclectic way of experiencing cinema and art. Remember she also came from theatre. I’m not hearing that part of who she was. And I think that’s because it’s more specific to the Francophone world, or it relates more to the particular experiences and circumstances that happen in France. But that’s another thought that I had when I was listening to you all focus on Sambizanga and her experiences in the 1970s, as opposed to the more recent engagement she had with her neighbourhood, Saint Denis, an immigrant area outside Paris, where she lived until she passed. That may be something that we want to consider when we’re thinking of her more broadly.
NB: I completely agree. This is reminding me of when Annouchka said that Sarah cared about the clouds and the movements of the trees. What we’re calling the quotidian or the everyday is such a deep part of her work. I even think that in the older work – which is maybe more revolutionary – these everyday, real-time moments, are the stuff of the revolution, maybe even what we’d call “the reason” why we’re fighting the revolution. I’m reminded of the really long shot of the baby crying in Sambizanga: it’s a real baby crying, and we’re just there, watching it and watching it and watching it. To me it’s almost like this is what we’re fighting for ultimately.
In ‘Monangambée’ there’s this really long shot of the sweat on the prisoner’s chest. And we’re just watching it. Or in the Damas documentaries, these extended shots going down a river, going back to these places where Damas had lived his life.
I hear you Beti in terms of the evolution of her work, and calling out the political aspect of her work might reduce it if we only talked about that. But I almost think that even in the political work, these long, extended, real-time moments, are the stuff of the revolution. This is why her treatment of these revolutionary themes (like violence) is so unparalleled to me. It goes beyond what we aesthetically attach to it. It is quotidian and everyday.
ADA: May I say something? I think that for Sarah, at least at the end of her life, the most important thing was education. She saw that education was the key to better understanding each other. She jokingly said that little children should have to go to the cinema to learn the images before learning how to read. They should go to the cinema to be educated and open-minded about the world. And to make a connection with what Beti said earlier: ‘Scala Milan,’ the short movie Sarah made in the early 2000s, was quite different from the other films – it seems less militant. But there is a real link between ‘Scala Milan’ and ‘Monangambée’, which is the misunderstanding in ‘Monangambée’ over the term le complet – the meal – and the misunderstanding in Portuguese with the militant. ‘Scala Milan’ is the story of young people who try to win a competition because they want to go to Milan, and for them Milan, Italy, is about football. They want to win this competition to go to Milan and see the football team. But of course, with Sarah, they go to Milan and discover the Scala, the opera. For young people from the Paris suburbs the opera was something untouchable or just not part of their world. So Sarah wanted to tear down the walls and say that yes, opera should be accessible for everyone, even for young people from bad suburbs. I just wanted to add this thought. For Sarah it was really important to spread all culture and to be open.
‘Léon Damas’ (1994)
JO: To add something on the topic of education: when I was first saying that I was impressed by how she engaged with and living this Pan-African dimension, I always understood her work as explaining African traditions to the Western world. I learned a lot from her films. For example with ‘Léon Damas’ [1994] I knew a little bit about him, but watching her film I learned more about his poetics and the context. An amazing thing about ‘Aimé Césaire au bout du petit matin’ [1977] is that it’s about friendship, about people talking, and this is another thing about her work that is very impressive. I haven’t seen some of the later works but this idea of education is a way of presenting, of presenting literature to people, and bringing the Caribbean to the other parts of the Pan-African existence. This aspect of everyday life and friendship in her films is very moving. I love the beginning of ‘Au bout du petit matin’, and how Césaire is talking so easily, and laughing with Maldoror. It’s really a nice piece.
Aimé Césaire au bout du petit matin (1977)
AK: As we’re talking about education through Maldoror’s work, I think a really good way that Maldoror tries to do this is by means of memorialisation. Memory is integral to her work. We were leading up to this when we were talking about Maldoror’s archival practice. When I think about Maldoror’s archival practice, I think about how, although the archive itself is not necessarily like a collective memory, Maldoror instead draws on an archival practice to create a collective memory in the sense that one is able to remember a shared commonality or shared goals or beliefs or ideals.
When I think about education, I don’t think about Maldoror trying to educate in an institutional sense. I instead think that she’s attempting to educate one to remember what has been and what continues to be. This, I think, is quite important. Her educational/archival practice isn’t necessarily tangible in that sense, but education via a space, a memory, or a person. This is what Maldoror represents for me in terms of education: to memorise, and memorise, and memorise.
YP: Maldoror has astounding shorthands with which she makes much broader, critically astute statements. For instance, in the Damas films, when she’s interviewing the school kids and asking them what poets they know, it turns out to be Baudelaire, Victor Hugo, a whole host of French poets, even though few of them say they have a specific interest in poetry. Here she is making this film about a poet, making the argument for the crucial importance of Damas as a poet, but one is confronted with the fact that these kids in French Guiana aren’t even being taught about their own poets because their education is dictated by the French system. This points to the importance of political education. To go specifically to Awa’s point about the archive, Maldoror herself ended up staging a host of conversations and encounters simply through her cinema. Her later catalogue of films are portraits of all these different artists and thinkers, such as Damas, Césaire, as well as Toto Bissainthe, one of the friends with whom she started ‘Les Griots,’ the theatre troupe she co-founded. These films are a crucial catalogue of Black and Afro-diasporic culture. And that means that one could almost get a crash course in Black culture and thought just by watching her documentaries. For one person that’s an extraordinary contribution.
DS: There was a question for Annouchka and Henda about the importance of language. While the films we watched were primarily in French, we know that Sarah and Mario wrote and shot scenes in Kimbundu, Wolof and Portuguese. I wanted to know about the linguistic choices of her films.
HD: The use of language is an interesting aspect in the films. If we were to take the example of Sambizanga, Maldoror didn’t use professional actors, she used militants as well as local people from the Congo, and everyone speaks a different language. There is a mix of Portuguese, Lingala, Kimbundu. But this did not stop her from communicating the story. This is why Sambizanga is always subtitled. She herself was never able to master the English language. She spoke a bit of Russian and tried for many years to learn English, but she didn’t get it. It didn’t stop her. She went to America by herself many times. She was so fearless, language for her came from the heart. Everything about her was really embodied in her soul and she was extremely sensitive. She had uncommon sensitivity when it came to matters of the heart, and to transcribing thoughts to images, and images into action.
DS: Can panellists explore the role of the revolutionary filmmaker as an archivist? The idea of the fight not being erased from the discourse, and how this role impacted Maldoror.
ADA: I’m not sure I understood the question, but at first she said that it was like she had to make movies on African revolutions because, she said: “Everybody knows the war in Vietnam, but there is no cinema about African liberation movements! If I don’t do that, nobody will talk about our reality, our revolutions, our history.” She felt that she had to do it. So, she made those movies to talk about this history. And then, she went more and more into poetry, which we could also say is a kind of weapon. There was a necessity for her to make Sambizanga and ‘Monangambée’ and Guns for Banta because there was no other way. Not waiting for someone to take the camera, she did it.
JO: I think it’s interesting how in ‘Monangambée’ and Sambizanga there are moments where the film is very connected to José Luandino Vieira’s work, almost quoting it, cinematographically. It’s an interesting way of using memory, specifically literary memory, in a way that is very connected to the reality of Angola in that moment, and the previous revolutionary moments. I went back to the books this week.
AK: In terms of Maldoror having an archival practice, I think she is doing something that has always been integral to blackness and what Black people have been doing, which is holding onto memory and trying to rearticulate that memory. The archive has always been embodied as a form of practice of survival, to methodise memory or to methodise one’s own existence. When Maldoror employs the archive, she is drawing on these various disciplines that constitute what it means to be Black, whether on a geographical locality or on a global scale. She tried to form a unified reflection on that. What Maldoror is doing with the archive is holding onto a memory and rearticulating it again and again and again, so that it never loses relevance.
DS: Someone asked a follow up question that would be interesting to discuss in terms of Chris Marker’s work. Chris Marker feels similarly like an archivist who was given much more opportunity to share such archives on militancy. As we know, Sans Soleil [1983] cited, though didn’t credit, some of Maldoror’s work.
ADA: She was very close to Chris Marker. They met in the early sixties through François Maspero who had a publishing house. There was a lot of respect between the two of them. We met Chris Marker a lot. When she organised screenings of her movies she would talk to Chris Marker and get his advice, always. And Chris invited her to watch his movies. When Chris Marker decided to make Sans Soleil he had already been to Guinea-Bissau. After independence in 1975, my father was minister for culture in Guinea Bissau and he oversaw the Centre for Cinematography. And, of course, Sarah told him to invite Chris Marker, that he would work with the two filmmakers from Guinea Bissau, that it was important to learn from the best. So Chris came to Guinea Bissau for a few weeks or a few months and then decided to shoot Sans Soleil. But he needed images from the war of independence, so Sarah gave him her own images. In Sans Soleil there are images that come from Sarah that are not credited, but they came like that. It was just a gift. It was important for her, and she was really happy to share those images with Chris.
JO: You mentioned something on the podcast about sharing images like this being a common occurrence. Are there other examples of this in Maldoror’s work?
ADA: Yes, she also shared images with William Klein when he shot the movie for the Festival Panafricain D’Alger in 1969, when Sarah met Archie Shepp. She had shot images for William Klein and not been credited, but she was there in Algiers and she participated in the movie.
DS: In terms of Sarah’s position in French film history and in French institutions, programming, festivals etc, how is she received in metropolitan France?
ADA: She didn’t have any regrets. Her only goal was to make movies, and if the movie was not selected in a film festival she didn’t care because she had another project to go to. She had been invited to a lot of film festivals to present Sambizanga, which was very well known. With the others it was rarer and some of them have been screened only twice, or a few times. But it was not important. Her goal was to make movies. I do remember that at the end, in the last few years, some film festivals wanted to make tributes to her. And she said, “No way, I don’t want tributes, that smells like death!” She preferred making movies, than receiving tributes.
DS: The last question we’ll take is about ‘Et les chiens se taisaient’, one of the films that we shared. Did your mother ever describe the experience of playing the role of the mother in this film? Did she empathise more with the roles of the rebels or the mother? And further to that, did she ever reflect on the experience of filming in the Musée de L’Homme, and her collaboration with Michel Leiris?
‘Et les chiens se taisaient’ (1976)
HD: Can I go back to the last question? And then I can pass over to Annouchka on the recognition of the French institutions? It’s important to say that she received the Order of Merit from the French Minister of Culture, Frédéric Mitterrand. In his tribute to her he emphasised the fact that she was a pioneer in terms of women in film. I think that she could come across as a bit scary when she went on television or was invited somewhere. I remember as a child, whenever the school was organising a parent-teacher meeting, I would hide the notes, because I was afraid that she would cause havoc because of the racism at the time. We were the only Africans in school, and I didn’t want her to know about the racist comments we got, because I was afraid that she would raise her concerns too vociferously. In general, I think people admired her, but also feared her because she didn’t mince her words.
There is a question that we have missed – someone asked about the Leftist movement and her relationship with politics. Politics was extremely important in everything she did. Once, she was invited to a film festival to be a member of the jury and she was never invited afterwards because she was too strong willed and opinionated. I remember we went to the airport to pick her up, and no one would talk to her! I turned around and said, how come they are not speaking to you? And she said that during the deliberation for the first prize, she had insisted that the film that should win should be a film from Palestine. She knew that the film was not good, but for her it was a question of principle, because Palestine was Palestine. Everything was like that. Through the contemporary lens, today everyone sees her as a big hero. But if you go back 30 years her unwillingness to compromise was scary. She was extremely strong. For many years she was a member of the French Communist Party. For many years we had to go with her on Sundays, knocking on people’s doors to distribute L’Humanité Dimanche. Over the years she slowly voiced her disagreement with the failures of the Leftist party, of the Soviet Union. But she never really said it out loud. She just said, “We had a dream, we thought the revolution was going to come to a happy ending, and it did not. So the struggle must continue.”
JO: I would like Beti to talk about this and about her article in African Feminist about this episode. This was the first time that African and diasporic women in cinema sat to talk about film and politics in relation to African and Black women. They decided to separate the diasporic filmmakers, and if I understood correctly, Sarah along with other diasporic filmmakers were asked not to be present in the first round of conversations? I would like Beti to talk more about this moment and how it happened, and what happened next.
BE: As a disclaimer, I wasn’t there. I heard about the scandal right after everyone came back. It was never resolved. When I did the documentary, Sisters of the Screen: African Women in Cinema [2002], I thought I would try to get some kind of discussion going with some of the people who were involved. That’s how I ended up asking Sarah Maldoror her point of view, and also Aminata Ouédraogo, who was one of the organisers, as well as the late Chantal Bagilishya. The documentary tells the back and forth. What I thought was interesting with Sarah was, here she is, viewed as the pioneer of women in African cinema, and yet because she was not ‘African’ from the continent, she was not invited . That’s how that went. Of course, not being there, I can only go by what happened. You can get more of the dynamics of the people involved, and how it went from reading the book or watching the film. But I think this would not happen today. All the discussions around positionalities and identities have certainly broadened. Those kinds of separations and dichotomies just don’t exist today. We see it now with second generation people, or first generation diasporans, who are African by parentage, but who in fact are born in another country. So those were some of the issues I wanted to bring up. And it still hasn’t been resolved. But that was what happened in 1991, so now, what, 30 years ago? Oh my!
‘Fogo L’île de feu’ (1979)
DS: Someone in the comments is saying that they were a guest there, so you can read that if you want. I think maybe we should wrap up, but I don’t want to. I’ll ask a final question that anyone can answer, about what Maldoror’s legacy should be, how should we now work in terms of distributing her films, whether you think the posthumous recognition has come too late? I mean, I know it’s very early days, and she was just getting retrospectives around the world at the end of her life. I guess this is mostly a question for Annouchka and Henda, but it’s also about legacies, and Awa you might have something to say about memorialisation?
AK: Certainly. I don’t think this honouring has come too late, but unfortunately I do think that as this honouring is happening – and as we’re putting forward what I’m predicting is going to be a shift in institutional interests that moves from contemporary African art to African cinema within the next three to five years, and as many more African films are being preserved and restored – that of course leads to a question of material exchange and transfers. And with that follows a question about who owns the work and access to the work? Especially if they’re subjected to institutional borderings that allow these films, with their necessary, pivotal critiques, to remain in archives that collect dust. And one must ask, as these works are increasingly shown within institutions – to whom, for whom are they being shown if they’re continuously bordered by institutional boundaries? So, whether we’re talking about ‘Monangambée’ which, as Yasmina was saying, draws on prison abolition, or whether we’re talking about ‘Et les chiens se taisaient’, which talks about the relationship between humanism and the museum as a haunted site, or we’re talking about Léon-Gontran Damas and our failure to honour and remember these people who contributed to our liberatory work of freedom and our practices, I think our question should always be, what spaces and what frameworks are these works going to exist in? And which audiences are they going to exist for?
BE: Can I make a point? I wonder if this is a question for the Anglophone world because, as Annouchka just said, there was a tribute to Maldoror, she was recognised by the Minister for Culture, and in 2013 there was a retrospective of Francophone African women where her work was shown. So maybe it’s in the Anglophone world that her work is finally beginning to be recognised and distributed. Because I never felt that she was not recognised, that she was not seen as a pioneer, that her work was not being seen or viewed or talked about as such. I don’t know, that’s how my experience has been following her work for so long.
AK: The word recognition has such porous value. It can mean so much and it can mean so little. Sarah Maldoror has been shown in various large institutional centres and she has been recognised by high-profile members. But ultimately, it’s a question about where do these works reside and who are they presented to? Of course, it’s great that Sarah Maldoror’s work is presented at Museo Reina Sofia in Spain for instance, which is one of the largest institutions in the world maybe, but what does that representation itself do for working class people, migrants, African migrants in France that are living at the margins of society? My question is really just that I think, that as her work becomes better recognised – as I predict it will – we will still need to think about its value, and who it belongs to. But I completely agree with you, Beti.
DS: There’s an interesting discussion going on about this in the chat. When she was invited to Créteil Women’s Film Festival she was marginalised there.
NB: I wanted to add to this question about recognition. Especially now that there’s this focus on having to create a legacy. For me, when I think about the work that remains to be done, I’m thinking, let’s not read a certain lament into her biography just because of a blindspot that certain categorisations and structures of programming, and maybe even archiving, is guilty of. Let’s not allow those blind spots to read a certain lamentation into her biography. In watching the Damas documentary, there was this weird refraction happening because I was watching it in relation to this event. Watching her do this memorialising work, it felt like it was her teaching us how to remember her. One thing I would point to is that, when she went out to do those interviews, she interviewed teenagers, schoolgirls. They were the people she went to to ask about Damas. It’s almost like, those were the people that it mattered to her to remember him. I think that means a lot in terms of, as Awa is pointing out, where her work is going to play, in terms of these retrospectives and remembrances. Who is going to be invited to watch her work? Who will have access to it? Looking at her work and especially at this documentary and the choice to interview teenagers and to showcase the loss of them not knowing who their ancestors are, that should be a focus in thinking about the legacy of her work and who should be given access to remembering her. I also thought in that documentary, that when Césaire calls Damas “a living negro” – he said that he was an academic and Damas was a “a living negro” – I feel that was also Sarah Maldoror.
AK: That was the best part because she was basically saying that this is not just something that you study, you have to live it, right?
NB: Yeah, yeah.
DS: Ok, we’re going to wrap up there. We could continue this conversation forever! Yasmina did you want to wrap up?
YP: One last point on looking towards the future, which sometimes is a question of looking back at the past. Something that I only found out more recently (but I think that many of you are familiar with) is that Maldoror took her artist name from Les Chants de Maldoror by Lautréamont. I think there’s something significant about the fact that her first action was to name herself, and to remake herself. For me, it’s indissociable from the end of Les Damnés de la Terre where Fanon calls for a new humanism, a new man, a new way of being. A through-line in everything we’ve been talking about in terms of the scope, the plurality, the complexity, the richness of Maldoror’s work is one that both honours history, and to draw on Awa’s really important point, it’s a history that is lived by certain people even if it was being ignored by others, but in her Fanonian echo, is a sort of cry, or call, towards the future, directed at all of us to remake the world differently. And to remake it with a knowledge and a lucid confrontation of what it has been and the ways that it’s been less than ideal. With that, I want to thank Annouchka and Henda so deeply for being part of this event. When Daniella first reached out to me about putting this together, it was very important for both of us that it be an occasion that also honoured the legacy of the person who was your mother. Thank you so much for being with us, and for all your time. Thank you to these fantastic panellists as well, for lending us their expertise in archiving, filmmaking and their scholarship. I know that Dani and I are very grateful. And maybe if Annouchka or Henda have any final words, we will listen and then wrap up.
ADA: Of course, we would like to thank you all for organising this meeting, and we hope that the next one will involve watching her movies! It’s important to watch and share her movies, and that’s what we’re working on. The idea is to share all the documents we have – correspondence, projects – and to understand the amazing complexity of this person. The first step will be to restore Sambizanga. We hope we can eventually present all her movies: how they evolved and became different, building upon each other. We want to show how important Black culture was in her movies, but also how she made things about Aragon and one about the painter, Miró. It’s also important to see that she was not focused on one subject, from one angle. She was really open minded. What she would’ve wanted us to share is her belief in education as a life-changing force. Faith in education is one of the most important parts of her legacy.
HD: Very quickly. Next time when we meet again, I think that it would be good to talk about Sarah as a woman and to talk about the great love story she had with our father, that led not only to the two projects, ‘Monangambée’ and Sambizanga, but to two wonderful daughters! The gendered aspect – of being in a relationship with a militant, of not being married – and her view about feminism and being a single mother, female head of household, taking care of two daughters, and making sure that collectivity ruled. “Never look at the individual but at the collective,” was how we live.
Yasmina Price is a writer and PhD student in the Departments of African American Studies and Film & Media Studies at Yale University. She focuses on anti-colonial cinema from the Global South and the work of visual artists across the African continent and diaspora, with a particular interest in the experimental work of women filmmakers.
Janaína Oliveira is a professor at the Federal Instituto of Rio de Janerio (IFRJ). 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. 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). She was the 66th Flaherty Film Seminar (NY) programmer.
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.
Awa Konaté is a London and Copenhagen-based Danish-Ivorian researcher, curator and writer. Her curatorial practice foregrounds archives, decolonial thought, and interdisciplinary frameworks of artistic productions from the African continent and diaspora with a focus on lens-based practices. She is the founder of the curatorial research platform Culture Art Society (CAS). Konaté has worked with the Serpentine Galleries, The Showroom, Kunsthal Trondheim, The Danish Film Institute, CIRCA, to mention a few.
Nuotama Frances Bodomo is a Ghanaian filmmaker of Dagaaba origin. Her short films ‘Boneshaker’ (2013) and ‘Afronauts’ (2014) both premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. ‘Everybody Dies!’ (2016) won Best Experimental Short at the 2016 BlackStar Film Festival. Nuotama also co-founded the New Negress Film Society. She was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film in 2014 and is a 2019 United States Artists Fellow in Film. Her work is currently streaming on Netflix and the Criterion Channel.
Daniella Shreir is the founder of Another Screen and Another Gaze, which she co-edits.