Sarah Maldoror, an Encounter of Gazes

“All poetics in our days [en notre jour, sic] signal their landscape. All poets, their country: the modality of their participation.” Édouard Glissant

Reinterpreting the French poetic tradition from a relational otherness, and thus contesting the unified vision of the world and of literature imposed by colonialism, Édouard Glissant claims, in L’Intention poétique (1969), the intentional poetics of the diverse and the plural. In Regards de mémoire, a short film directed by Sarah Maldoror in 2003, the Martinican poet, novelist and philosopher evokes the Haitian Revolution and the figure of Toussaint Louverture in these terms: “We will have to wait for the fighting act of the Other for the Western I [...] to surpass and reconstitute itself, in a new relationship”. A similar operation is played out in the cinema of Sarah Maldoror (1929-2020). With a political and epistemic intention, that of a quest for knowledge, the filmography of the French filmmaker of Guadeloupean origin bears witness to a relational, plural, intentional poetics: a poetics of the world—and especially of the liberated world of the 1960s and 1970s—that disrupts and reinvents the colonial mechanisms, perceptive, cognitive and representative modes at work in the system, the gaze and the forms of cinema. Her mirror-films are the site of a clash of views: on the one hand, they challenge the ‘Western’ gaze and observer by making visible what hegemonic cinema has left out of the picture (the liberation struggles in Africa, as well as the power and dynamism of non-European cultures); on the other hand, they reflect on the ‘prohibitions’ of metropolitan societies (the persistence of colonial structures, racism). Based on the relational model of a meeting of different perspectives, the poetic intention of Maldoror’s cinema offers the possibility of looking (and making people look) in a different way: the balance between content and form of this cinema rooted in the world allows perspectives to emerge as a counterpoint to hegemonic history and vision. This intentional, participatory poetics signals and responds to a precise landscape (and space-time): that of the relationships of domination (and resistance) between the “Global North” and the “Global South” in the post-war period.

FROM MOSCOW TO ALGER

Born in the Gers region of France to a mother from Gers and a father from Guadeloupe, Maldoror is considered a pioneer of African and Afro-diasporic cinema. She was the first director to represent the liberation struggles of Portuguese-speaking African countries within the fictional representation system. Adopting the pseudonym “Maldoror” in reference to Lautréamont, she exemplifies the path of the internationalist necromancer. From Moscow—where she moved in 1961 to study with Marc Donskoï, and where she met Sembène Ousmane—to Bissau—where she made a series of films after Guinea-Bissau’s independence—not forgetting Algiers, her trajectory illustrates the cosmopolitanism and commitment of tricontinental cinema. Maldoror’s filmography, made up of nearly forty films of all formats and genres, from fiction to documentary, has long remained in the backwaters of a non-canonical history of cinema, a history that it is important to revisit in the light of a feminine and feminist counter-narrative of revolutionary cinema,

including in particular the figure of Esfir Choub in the Soviet Union, and those of Sara Gómez in Cuba and Josefina Crato in Guinea-Bissau. However, the work of conservation, digitisation and restoration of Maldoror’s films, initiated by her daughters Annouchka de Andrade and Henda Ducados over the last ten years, has made a decisive contribution to the rediscovery of her work: the Berlin Arsenal has undertaken the restoration of Monangambééé (1969), while the Boulogne Cinematheque has recently restored Sambizanga (1973). The Portuguese Cinematheque and the IndieLisboa festival dedicated a full retrospective to Maldoror’s filmography in September 2021.The Palais deTokyo is devoting an exhibition to the filmmaker (26 Nov. 2021-30 March 2022) and other screenings are being prepared, notably as part of the Cinéma du réel festival this year. Maldoror arrived in Paris in the early 1950s. In the circle of the Présence africaine bookstore, she became friends with Léopold Sédar Senghor, Alioune Diop, Glissant and Aimé Césaire, to whom she devoted a series of films, such as Aimé Césaire, le masque des mots (1987), a medium-length film that brings together images of the poet at the Conference on Negritude in Miami that same year, and of his life in Martinique. Maldoror’s artistic career began in the theatre, when he founded the company Les Griots with three student friends. Their performances of plays by Jean Genet and Jean-Paul Sartre are evidence of an approach that would run through her entire filmography: the quest for an African and Afro-diasporic self-representation, in parallel with the desire to reinterpret the French cultural, literary and visual tradition from a relational poetics. This desire to decolonise cultural, performative and visual forms, as well as the gaze itself, led Maldoror to learn film technique in Moscow. After her studies in Moscow, Maldoror joined her companion

Mário Pinto de Andrade, man of letters, ideologue and first president of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), in Rabat, then Algiers.The latter was then the Capital of Revolutionaries, as the title of Marie-Claude Deffarge and Gordian Troeller’s film, made in 1972, aptly sums up. The PanAfrican Festival of Algiers in 1969, in which delegations from the MPLA, the African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde (PAIGC) and the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO) took part, contributed to strengthening the internationalist connections of the liberation movements. From the Black Panthers to the Vietcong, all liberation movements passed through Algiers. The Pan-African Festival demonstrates the role of culture in the African liberation struggles, which is underlined by the final intertitle of the film Festival Panafricain d’Alger 1969 (1969) by William Klein: “African culture will be revolutionary or it will not be.”

It was in Algiers that Maldoror’s film career began. In 1966 she worked with Ahmed Lallem on the shooting of his medium-length film Elles, then assisted Gillo Pontecorvo in La Bataille d’Alger (1966). Unlike Pontecorvo, Maldoror adopted a feminine, if not feminist, perspective in depicting liberation struggles. Combining formal inventiveness and political commitment, her cinema gives substance to the emancipatory forms of a poetic and political indiscipline.

STORIES OF A WOMAN

In Algiers, Maldoror met MPLA activists, notably Elisa and Carlos Pestana, who would be the main characters of her opera prima, the short film Monangambééé (1969). The first fictional film about the liberation struggle in Angola, Monangambééé, which means “hired” and refers to the black workers forced to work on the colonial plantations, was shot in three weeks near Algiers, and produced by the Algerian National Liberation Front and National People’s

Cette double page this spread: Monangambééé. 1969. 30 min. (Court. Les Amis de S. Maldoror et M. de Andrade)

Army.The film, focusing on torture in the colonial prisons of the Portuguese fascist system, is an adaptation of Complet de Mateus (1962), a short story by the Angolan writer José Luandino Vieira. Its aesthetics of sensoriality and affects, a modality of resistance to the dominant perceptual and visual modes, announces the narrative and aesthetic procedures of Sambizanga (1972), Maldoror’s first feature film, another adaptation of a Vieira’s writings ( TheTrue Life of Domingos Xavier, 1961).

In these two films, Maldoror’s cinema asserts a plural poetics of the world that deconstructs the social, racial and gendered categories associated with hegemonic cinema, especially colonial one. Monangambééé and Sambizanga construct an anti-colonial, African and feminine gaze that not only opposed hegemonic cinema and the dominant visual paradigm, but also questions the heroic male discourses of anti-colonial cinema. Sambizanga tells the story of a woman’s search for her husband, imprisoned and tortured by the Portuguese colonial system in Angola. Shot in the People’s Republic of Congo, edited in Paris and produced with the support of the MPLA, it adds complexity to the formal procedures of Monangambééé. This time, framing without depth of field reconstitutes the sensitive conditions and perceptive and cognitive perspectives of the dominated—and resistant—bodies of colonialism.

The material history (for example, the disappearance of the reels of the film Guns for Banta, shot in 1971 and dedicated to the liberation struggle in Guinea-Bissau, under circumstances that remain to be clarified) and the lenghty period of invisibility of Maldoror’s work can be explained by the place and position of enunciation of the filmmaker—the question of gender being central—as well as by the complex history of the process of anticolonial liberation. But this invisibility also results from the singular articulation between forms of politics and politics of forms through the exercise of a narrative and aesthetic fabulation opposed to the often rigid forms of militant cinema.

From Monangambééé to Un dessert pour Constance (1981), about the living conditions of African immigrants in France, via Fogo, île de feu (1977) where sensoriality becomes a spatio-temporal figure of the experience of insularity, Maldoror’s rich filmography has never ceased to bring together various point of views, while highlighting the possibility of looking at things differently: a sensitive view of the transforming post-war world.

Translation: Chloé Baker

Raquel Schefer is a researcher, filmmaker, programmer and lecturer at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris.