There are unsolved questions, gaps, mysteries, and misunderstandings (willful or not) in Sarah Maldoror’s career and biography that are best summarized by the origin of her name: Maldoror is the title of one of the ‘venomous’ flowers of French culture, The Songs of Maldoror, a book-length descent into hell written by 19th-century-poet Lautréamont. By choosing this name as an alias, Maldoror posited herself within French culture’claiming some of its most sophisticated, albeit slightly elitist aspects while simultaneously embracing its iconoclastic tradition (Lautréamont is hailed as an ancestor to Rimbaud and the Surrealists). In one word, she paid homage to the dilemma of the French-speaking black intellectual: in love with and a part of French culture, yet deeply aware that he/she will never belong to the ‘mainstream.’
Another tantalizing question: where does Maldoror come from?
Even though she made some of her better-known movies in Africa, she was born in France, and is discreet about the nature of her West Indian (Guadeloupean) descent. The point is, like many children of mixed parentage, Maldoror proudly claims her black heritage, and identifies with it. The most puzzling question: why wasn’t Maldoror given the opportunity to direct more feature films after Sambizanga? As it stands now, her filmography is particularly impressive, as she has turned her camera, her incisive and generous gaze, her sense of rhythm and poetry, to a number of subjects, from the history of the Saint Denis Cathedral to African immigration in Paris, from the work of poets, fashion designers, sculptors, and singers (including the legendary Haitian Toto Bissainte, one of the four members of the theater group ‘Les Griots’ she founded in the early 1960s), to adaptation of literary works (such as L’hopital de Leningrad, from a short story by Victor Serge, or Le passager du Tassili, from a novel by Akli Tadjer).
Yet, after Monangamée, Guns for Banta, and mostly Sambizanga, our appetite was whetted, and we were expecting more African revolutionary movies from Sarah Maldoror. Not only because there are still so few women working as directors in the African continent, but because Sambizanga, combining a superb mastery of cinematic language with a unique sensibility, both Pan-African and feminine, expressed a new, powerful voice in world cinema: African women had never been shown with such compassion, understanding, and love, with such a keen attention to detail, body language, and modes of communication. When Maria’s husband is brutally kidnapped by the police, she is immediately surrounded by a group of village women of all ages who cry and mourn with her, comfort her, eventually pacify her. After a long and exhausting journey in her search for her jailed husband, she arrives at the home of friends, where she is welcomed by a community of women; one of them takes Maria’s baby in her arms and suckles him. bell hooks wrote: [inSambizanga] there are black women imaged, constructed there so differently from what i had seen before, i remember the cries of these black women in their sister bonding . . . their cries haunt me these mourning black women, their grief unmediated, different.?
Yet Maldoror’s life also articulates the essential displacement which defines women in the African diaspora; her own situation is made more complex by her involvement with Mario de Andrade, a complex, charismatic figure who was a writer, artist, and poet as well as a political leader who contributed to the Revolution in Angola. In the early 1960s, they received scholarships to go to Moscow (where she studied with Mark Donsko) and met Ousmane Sembene, the ‘father’ of African cinema), as the Soviet Union sought to play a role in the emerging African countries and train its new elites. At that time, the left-wing intelligentsias in Europe, Latin America, and Africa believed that only the ‘Third World’ could foster world revolution. This was a time of struggle and Utopia.
For some African essentialists, though, Maldoror is still considered a ‘foreigner,’ only redeemed by ‘her long service to the black and African causes and her marriage [sic] to a prominent African nationalist.’ Significantly, the same writer adds that ‘[Sambizanga’s] deliberate feminist slant . . . dilutes the impact of the films concern with armed guerrilla struggle,’ forgetting to mention that Sambizanga is one of Angela Davis’s personal favorites.
When Maldoror came back to live in France and started working for television in the late 1970s, she was faced with another aspect of this cultural dilemma (characterized by the French as métissage): as she claims at once French, West Indian, and African cultures, she is considered from neither place (not African enough for some, too black for others), and, as a woman, she has to fight across-the-border prejudices at a professional level.
Moreover, French television is not known for the cultural diversity of its programs, as it postulates an average white t’l’spectateur. It is, therefore, a testimony to Maldoror’s stamina, strength, and determination that, as funding for another feature film keeps eluding her, she has managed to work within a variety of formats (shorts, TV films, featurettes), and, among a series of more or less commissioned works, insert the object of her real desire, the telling, uncovering, and celebration of the stories, myths, traditions, memories of a multifaceted African diaspora. In Martinique, she shotAimé Césaire, Words as Masks, a multi-voiced, sensual, impressionist portrait of the French-speaking poet/playwright/politician who developed the concept of négritude. In Guyana, another documentary, L’on G. Damaswas filmed. In Réunion Maldoror made The Tribe of the ‘E’ Wood. And she is still trying to raise money for Colonel Delgr’s, a feature about a colonel from the West Indies, who loved classical music, fought in Napoleon’s armies, came to believe in the ideas of liberty, equality, fraternity, but found, upon returning to his native island of Guadeloupe, that slavery has been re-established. A man who, like Maldoror, knew the price of treading the narrow line between races and cultures.
BERENICE REYNAUD
2020
FILMOGRAPHY
Monangambééé 1969
Des fusils pour Banta (Lost copy) 1970
Louise Michel, la commune et nous (Lost Copy) 1971
Sambizanga 1972
Saint-Denis sur Avenir (Lost Copy) 1973
Velada (Copy Lost) 1974
Aimé Césaire – un homme une terre 1976
Abbaye royale de Saint-Denis 1977
Le cimetière du Père Lachaise 1977
Et les chiens se taisaient 1978
Un carnaval dans le Sahel 1979
Fogo, île de feu 1979
L’architecture étrangère à Paris 1979
Un dessert pour Constance 1979
Miro – peintre 1979
A Bissau, le carnaval 1980
Alberto Carlisky – sculpteur 1980
Louis Aragon – un masque à Paris 1980
Wifredo Lam 1980
Wielopole « mise en scène de Kantor » 1980
Ouverture du théâtre noir à Paris 1980
René Depestre – poète 1981
L’Hôpital de Leningrad 1982
Emanuel Ungaro – couturier 1982
Toto Bissainthe – chanteuse 1984
Claudel à Reims 1984
Ecrivain public 1985
Portrait d’une femme africaine 1985
Elles entreprennent : Christiane Diop 1985
Le passager du Tassili 1986
Robert Lapoujade – peintre (Lost copy) 1986
Un sénégalais en Normandie 1986
La littérature tunisienne de la Bibliothèque Nationale 1986
Première rencontre internationale des femmes noires 1986
Point virgule 1986
Aimé Césaire – le masque des mots 1987
Paris Robert Doisneau – (Lost copy) 1987
Portrait de Assia Djebar 1987
Vlady – Peintre 1989
Léon G. Damas 1994
L’enfant cinéma 1996
La tribu du bois de l’é (Collective direction) 1997
Scala Milan A.C 2003
La route de l’esclave : Regards de mémoire 2003
Les oiseaux mains 2005
Ana Mercedes Hoyos – peintre 2008
Eia Pour Césaire 2009