Organised to coincide with Tate’s exhibition Surrealism Beyond Borders, Tate and SOAS University of London present three evenings dedicated to the late artist's films.
Concluding the series, this screening features two short films and a medium-length documentary. Here, Maldoror highlights three figures of Caribbean literature: Léon-Gontran Damas, René Depestre and Aimé Césaire. The screening will be followed by a conversation with Annouchka de Andrade, the artist’s daughter, and Dr. Estrella Sendra Fernandez (SOAS).
Meanwhile, about the SOAS screening:
The film screening will be hosted at Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre at SOAS from 11 to 12.45 pm and will be followed by a Q&A with her daughter, Annouchka de Andrade, until 2 pm. This is a free event accessible to all, but registration is highly recommended. Please wear a mask during the screening.
Programme
- Sarah Maldoror, Léon G. Damas, 1994, (16 mm film), sound, 25 minutes, French with English subtitles.
- Sarah Maldoror, René Depestre, 1981, (Video), sound, 4 minutes, French with English subtitles
- Sarah Maldoror, Aimé Césaire. Le Masque des Mots, 1987, (16 mm film), sound, 47 minutes, French with English subtitles
- Conversation with Annouchka de Andrade and Dr. Estrella Sendra Fernandez
Léon G. Damas
French Guianese poet and politician Léon-Gontran Damas (1912–1978) was one of the founders of the Négritude movement. His writings regularly denounced colonialism while celebrating African cultural heritages. In her documentary about Damas, shown in the UK for the first time, Maldoror highlights the poet’s unique use of language and rhythms. She also gives voice to two other founders of the movement: Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor. Damas’ poetry was, according to Senghor based on ‘an image leading to a series of similar melodious and rhythmic images’. The same could be said of Maldoror’s editing. The film embraces the jazzy rhythms dear to the Négritude poets. Snaking in an out of the frame, the Maroni River undulates through Guianese trees, black-and-white sequences following its curves.
René Depestre
Maldoror filmed this short documentary about René Depestre (b.1926), a Haitian poet and communist activist, for the series Aujourd’hui en France (Today in France), produced by the French Foreign Affairs in 1981. She had met many of the Négritude thinkers during the Paris 1956 First Congress of Black Writers and Artists at the Sorbonne University, some of whom became the subject of her works. Important figures such as Frantz Fanon, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and René Depestre were amongst them. The film, structured around key cutaway shots, unfolds with a jolting pace reminiscent of the Surrealists’ unexpected juxtapositions.
Aimé Césaire. Le Masque des Mots
Between 1976 and 2008, Maldoror directed five films featuring Martinican poet Aimé Césaire (1913–2008). Ten years after her first (Un homme une terre,) Maldoror returns to this founding figure of the Négritude. Le Masque des Mots captures a symposium organised in Miami in Césaire’s honour. Including footage of Léopold Senghor, but also of Carlos Moore, a Cuban writer, civil rights activist Alex Haley or poet Maya Angelou, the film highlights the pan-African perspective of the Négritude. The movement bridged Surrealist ideals with decolonial, tricontinental concerns. The 1987 symposium filmed by Maldoror, demonstrated this ethos; that of ‘a probing spirit’ to quote Césaire, and a shared goal of resisting alienation.
Today, Maldoror’s work evokes what Nigerian author Wole Soyinka coined as ‘tigritude’, a term used to define an African cinema that, like a tiger, does not proclaim its identity. A cinematic genre not defined in opposition, or in reference, to western artistic cannons. Following the principles laid out by Senghor and Soyinka, Maldoror made playful use of 'analogies, melody and rhythm', and, over the years, became an example for filmmakers and artists alike.