FILM COMMENT – I Write Your Name By Devika Girish May 9, 2025

Film at Lincoln Center

I Write Your Name By Devika Girish

Sarah Maldoror refused to settle. In 1970, when the Guadeloupean-French filmmaker was living in Algeria with her partner, Angolan poet and revolutionary Mário Pinto de Andrade, she went to Guinea-Bissau to make a movie about the freedom struggle against Portuguese colonial rule. The project, titled Guns for Banta, was funded by the newly independent Algerian government, but when Maldoror returned and presented her first cut, the authorities were appalled at her choice of a female protagonist and her use of jazz, which was viewed as an American (and therefore imperialist) export. Maldoror was enraged, and cursed out the officer who delivered the news, calling him “capitaine de merde” (literally, “captain of shit”). She was given 48 hours to leave the country with her family, abandoning the footage she had shot, or she would face death.

Across stories from Maldoror’s life, this ironclad sense of integrity emerges as a motif. Commissioned by French television to make a report on Léon G. Damas, poet and founder of the Négritude movement, she shot the film in black and white—the appropriate choice, she felt, for the subject—against the channel’s wishes, and they refused to air it. She was as steadfast in her political position as a Marxist, anti-colonial feminist as she was about her aesthetic vision. During a virtual tribute organized by the journal Another Gaze after Maldoror’s death in 2020, her daughter Henda Ducados recalled that Maldoror once pissed off her fellow festival jurors by insisting that the top prize go to a Palestinian film; she was never invited to the festival again. At the same memorial event, Maldoror’s other daughter, Annouchka de Andrade, remarked that if there was one word her mother didn’t know, it was “compromise.”

In today’s times, it’s hard to imagine an artist—a Black woman, no less—being so principled yet so prolific, particularly in a medium as capital-intensive as cinema. A comprehensive new retrospective of her work at the Museum of Modern Art, organized in part by Annouchka de Andrade, features, in addition to Maldoror’s acclaimed first feature Sambizanga (1972), nearly 40 short films, as well as works she assisted on (in some cases, without credit) by Chris Marker, Gillo Pontecorvo, Ahmed Lallem, and William Klein. Maldoror was certainly not as prolific, or as recognized, as she should have been—she never managed to procure the resources to make a theatrical feature again after Sambizanga; much of her later output was for French television. Yet she managed to produce relentlessly for four decades, making short narrative films; odes to sculpture, poetry, and theater; documentaries about significant Pan-African figures; reports about working-class immigrants in Paris; and more. As the variety of the MoMA selections makes clear, no matter the constraints, the length, or the format of the film, she never compromised—be it on her ideological or artistic commitments.

How did she manage it? Possibly because her work, whether as an activist or an artist, was always within and for her community; she was an auteur but never a rogue agent. Maldoror was born in 1929 in Gers, in southwestern France, and moved to Paris in the 1950s to study acting. When she realized that Black students were rarely given lead roles, she started her own theater troupe, Les Griots, with other Black artists, and began staging plays by Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Genet, and Aimé Césaire. Around this time, encounters with the leading figures of the Négritude and Pan-African movements—including Césaire and Senegalese poet and politician Léopold Senghor—ignited her anti-colonial fervor. By the time Les Griots was mounting its famous (and scandalous) production of Jean Genet’s Les Nègres in 1959, she had met de Andrade and left for Africa with him, drawn to the call of revolution. In the decade that followed, she went to Guinea-Conakry, then Moscow to study film with Mark Donskoy and work alongside Ousmane Sembène, then Morocco, then Algeria, and finally Saint-Denis, outside Paris, where she settled with her daughters after the kerfuffle over Guns for Banta. Until her death, she would answer the phone with “Ready for the Revolution?”

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Her two best-known films—Monangambééé (1969), a short, and Sambizanga—were adapted from stories by the Angolan writer José Luandino Vieira. Both share the same narrative spine: a man is imprisoned and violently interrogated by Portuguese colonial authorities, while his wife fights for him outside. The films offer a kind of blueprint for her approach, which was erudite and literary, yet firmly grounded in the granularities of the everyday. Shot in Algeria but set in Angola, Monangambééé hinges on a fatal miscommunication. The wife of the prisoner tells him she’ll bring him a complet, which is a local dish in Angola but denotes a three-piece suit in Portugal. The Portuguese officers think the man is planning to dress for an escape and torture him. A simple gesture of nourishment is seen, due to willful ignorance, as a defiance that must be brutally punished.

In Sambizanga, which is set in 1961—on the precipice of the Angolan War of Independence—such gestures abound. Before the main plot kicks off, we spend a few wondrously intimate moments with the protagonists, Domingos (Domingos de Oliveira), a quarry worker, and his wife Maria (Elisa Andrade), as they eat dinner together—casually, with their hands, their faces exuding love and repose—and then calm their crying infant by nestling him between their bodies. When Domingos is arrested and taken to a prison in Luanda, Maria makes an arduous trip from the suburbs to the city with the baby on her back, looking for him. The film has almost no extra-diegetic music, and unfolds in a hushed quiet that underlines its verité quality, as does Maldoror’s choice of actors: most of them were actual Angolan militants living in exile in Congo-Brazzaville, where Sambizanga was shot.

Maldoror alternates between Domingos’s ordeal and Maria’s journey, but her restless gaze is drawn to the many micro-narratives taking place around the protagonists. As Maria walks or takes buses through fields and streets, Maldoror’s roving camera often strays, observing children playing outdoors, tailors chatting in a workshop about class inequality, a young revolutionary flirting with his girlfriend. These are not digressions, but the very substance of revolution for Maldoror—the everyday communal life that colonial violence threatens to erase, and which endures against all odds. “No war can take place without the participation of the people and their daily routine,” she once said. “Heroes do not interest me . . . what interests me is daily life.” Maldoror was reproached by certain leftist audiences and critics for not showing oppression directly, and for the visual beauty and technical felicity of Sambizanga; the actors were “too pretty” for some.

But for Maldoror, showing the ugliness of colonialism and exploitation did not mandate ugly images; all her films are exquisitely composed and exactingly paced. When Domingos is interrogated by the authorities, she frames his face in abstract, silhouetted fragments: a side profile of his forehead and nose against a dark, soft-focused background; his brow, furrowed in both pain and resolve; his back, glistening with sweat in the bright, painful light. Even in A Dessert for Constance (1979), a charming, hour-long fictional comedy (such was Maldoror’s range!) about two African sanitation workers in Paris who take part in a culinary game show to pay for a friend’s medical expenses, the images are indelible in their stylish modernism. As the two men work in a park, the camera zooms out from a close-up of their upside-down reflections in a lake to a wide view where they become specks in a large, grand landscape; in the next scene, an intimate shot of multicolored garbage being lifted from a landfill by a mechanical claw resembles a Cubist painting. Maldoror’s commitment to beauty was political. Beauty confers dignity, and for her, the people engaged in quotidian struggles were the most dignified. “For me there are only exploiters and the exploited, that’s all,” she once said of her worldview.

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Though Maldoror’s political convictions and artistic affiliations were clear from the start, it’s impossible to contain her work with any one label or movement. She made a series of shorts about carnival traditions in Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and the Sahel, exploring the undercurrents of resistance in these celebrations. Her portraits of fellow Pan-African and Surrealist artists—from Césaire, Wifredo Lam, and Assia Djebar to Louis Aragon and Vlady Rusakov—are rooted in a spirit of both collegiality and education, striving to preserve and propagate what she so admired about these figures; a few shorts record theater productions with a dynamic camera that makes the viewer feel like a fellow performer on the stage. The program within the MoMA retrospective that I found most revelatory is titled “Reportage,” and features a series of bite-sized films, mostly running seven minutes or less, that she made in the 1970s and ’80s for a French TV magazine called Mosaïque, dedicated to immigrant life and culture.

In A Senegalese Man in Normandy (1986), she interviews the residents of the region about what it’s like to live in the same town as a luminary such as Senghor, and accumulates something of a reverse ethnography, questioning them about their attitudes toward African history and art. Point Virgule, Youth Journal (1986) is a wonderful short about a newspaper produced by North African–French high schoolers, who speak about their resolve to dispel stereotypes of Arab youth as “predators” and challenge the brutality of the police. In Public Writer (1985), we get a glimpse of the work of the translators who assist non-French-speaking immigrants at public institutions. In most of these films, Maldoror begins with a shot of the environment—a storefront on a street, the stone arch of a building—and then zeroes in with loving close-ups of faces, hands, and gestures. In another director’s oeuvre, these commissioned bits and pieces might constitute miscellanea; here, they crystallize the questing impulse at the heart of Maldoror’s work—her drive to locate political struggle in the prosaic negotiations of social life.

Of this selection, the seven-minute-long Père Lachaise Cemetery (1979), has stuck with me most profoundly. Maldoror’s handheld camera roams the famous Paris burial ground, zooming in and out of flowers and autumnal leaves, and caressing the curves of sculptures and tombstones—of Proust, those who died in the Paris Commune of 1871, and Surrealist Paul Éluard, among others—while a narrator recites poetry, including the last few stanzas of “Liberté” (1942) by Éluard:

On the absence without desire

on the bare solitude

on the death marches

I write your name.

On health recovered

on risk disappeared

on hope without remembering

I write your name.

And by the power of a word

I started my life anew.

I was born to know you.

To name you.

Liberty. 

The poem distills the aspect of the Surrealist project that so powerfully drew Pan-African thinkers like Césaire and Senghor: the possibility of rearticulating, through language, a world of oppression into one of freedom. Père Lachaise Cemetery, with its curious, itinerant gaze, perfectly distills Maldoror’s own approach to filmmaking. She was curious and attentive to the world around her, and with her camera, she inscribed in each of her subjects a kind of liberatory recognition—a name, forged through the image.