Centre Pompidou Magazine Sarah Maldoror: Cinema as a Form of Combat

Sarah Maldoror_ Cinema as a Form of Combat – Magazine – Centre Pompidou

A committed filmmaker deeply involved in anti-colonial movements, Sarah Maldoror (1929–2020) is the subject of a retrospective that resonates with the exhibition “Paris noir”. Surrealism, Négritude, Pan-Africanism, feminism, and communism—both her life and career, under her birth name, Marguerite Sarah Ducados, reflect the breadth of 20th-century political and artistic engagement. A tireless filmmaker, Maldoror explored a wide range of themes and geographies over the course of a prolific body of work comprising more than forty films: feature and short films, television dramas, reports, and documentaries. An introduction.

“Cinema is an art of the present. It’s not about yesterday or tomorrow—it’s about today!” This unequivocal declaration, characteristic of Sarah Maldoror’s fiery spirit, shaped the course of her entire body of work. She was both a filmmaker and an activist—two dimensions that sometimes diverged and then converged again, a dynamic that is key to understanding her cinema. Maldoror worked through images; she began her career as an actress and was a co-founder, in 1956, of the theatre company Les Griots, alongside Ababacar Samb Makharam, Timité Bassori, and Toto Bissainthe—the first theatrical troupe in France composed entirely of Black actors.

“African women must be everywhere. They must be in the images, behind the camera, in the editing room, and involved in every stage of filmmaking.”
Sarah Maldoror

Her cinema responds to a sense of urgency—an urgency rooted in the very conditions of her formation: a solitary woman, orphaned, without means, arriving in Paris after years spent in the south of France, years marked by being the only Black person—and all the violence that entails. Paris, a city alive with the global effervescence of nègre arts, became the site of transformative encounters. It was there that she chose a new name, a name of her own—an act of taking her place in literature and poetry, forging unbreakable ties with poets and activists: the Brazilian Mário de Andrade, the American Langston Hughes, and the Frenchman Aimé Césaire.

Struggle and the mask

With over forty films to her name, her body of work closely accompanies the major intellectual and political movements of the 20th century—Négritude, Pan-Africanism, feminism, and communism—tirelessly questioning and documenting, through cinema, the struggles for the emancipation of peoples. Sarah Maldoror accomplished a great deal, yet there is also all that remains unrealized: forty-six projects that never came to fruition.
With over forty films to her name, her body of work closely accompanies the major intellectual and political movements of the 20th century—Négritude, Pan-Africanism, feminism, and communism—tirelessly questioning and documenting, through cinema, the struggles for the emancipation of peoples.

She settled in Algiers with her family in the mid-1960s. At that time, the city was a vibrant centre of anti-colonial struggle. It was there that she shot Monangambééé, her first short film, completed in 1969, a work that serves as a prelude to her second feature, Sambizanga, filmed in Congo-Brazzaville and released in 1972, following the loss of Des fusils pour Banta—shot in 1970 and still missing to this day.

These two films—now recognized as the filmmaker’s masterpieces—are radical indictments of the violence of colonial domination. They focus on portraying the everyday lives of Angolan revolutionaries fighting against Portuguese oppression. With meticulous attention, Maldoror depicts the strength of collective structures—couples, families, political movements—as vital foundations for resistance. In À Bissau, le carnaval (1980), a short film capturing the festivities of carnival ceremonies, this theme resurfaces, affirming community as a condition of endurance. One of the opening sequences of Sambizanga, showing Maria and Domingo waking in their hut with their baby nestled between them—moments before the father is arrested—embodies the unmatched emotional force of Maldoror’s cinema.

Forced to return to Paris in the early 1970s, she settled in Saint-Denis. From then on, she developed a multifaceted body of work interweaving poetry, music, and literature. Restlessly creative, she alternated between short, medium, and feature-length formats—many of them produced for television—based on her travels and the encounters they inspired.

Between 1979 and 1980, she dedicated a trilogy of films to the Cape Verde Islands—Fogo, île de feu; À Bissau, le carnaval; and Un carnaval dans le Sahel—made shortly after the islands gained independence. Today presented as a cohesive series, the films critically explore the symbolic and political power of the mask.

In “I’m Only Interested in Women Who Struggle”, a text on Maldoror, Jeremy Harding notes that in Le Masque des mots (The Mask of Words, 1987)—one of five films Maldoror devoted to Aimé Césaire—the Martinican poet states: “When I write a poem, I appear to myself as someone wearing a mask.” This gesture could just as well describe the cinematic practice of Sarah Maldoror.