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| Director Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich |
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| Suzanne Césaire |
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| Aimé and Suzanne Césaire |
THE BALLAD OF SUZANNE CÉSAIRE B USA (75 mi) 2024 d: Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich
We are making a film about an artist who didn’t want to be remembered. —Suzanne Césaire (Zita Hanrot), speaking directly to the camera
Cinema has a way of introducing new subjects to viewers, and this is a prime example, as most have probably never heard of this artist, and that is not by accident, but by design. How does a woman at the center of history simply disappear from it? Women, and black women in particular, have routinely been erased by history, which has largely been written by white males, so she’s not alone, but emblematic of many who were often overlooked and forgotten. Look no further than Pamela B. Green’s eye-opening Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché (2018) for a masterclass on how men intentionally took credit for the works of one of the earliest female pioneers in cinema, as French filmmaker Alice Guy-Blaché was nearly forgotten, where her contributions were suppressed from history for over 100 years, but were finally brought to light. This film similarly opens a crack in a door that has been shut for nearly 80 years, but it raises more questions than answers. Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich is an assistant Queens College professor, filmmaker, and visual artist who makes films concerned with the inner worlds of black women as she explores a forgotten legacy of a remarkable writer. Accompanying the release of this film, footage was shown as a video installation in art museums entitled Too Bright to See, Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich: Too Bright to See, sharing the same ideas and images from the film, which is an extensively researched experimental essay on the legacy of Suzanne Roussi-Césaire, a writer and anticolonial feminist activist from French-speaking Martinique who, along with her husband, Aimé Césaire, was at the forefront of the Négritude, Afro-Surrealist, and Pan-African movements during the first half of the 20th century. While it’s illuminating, as Césaire was a visionary throughout her entire life, articulating an awareness of the complexity of Caribbean identity that was far ahead of her time, her character, however, is never fully established, as only fragments of her work survive, weaving together archival material with an unconventional cinematic narrative and a modern cast, informed by the director’s interviews with the living children and family of the artist, where the film is daring in its ambiguity, yet it’s really an attempt to communicate with the “spirit” of the artist, like a séance, a choice that can feel obtuse and overly academic. Drawing inspiration from Caribbean aesthetics and Surrealist artwork, with a soundtrack by New Orleans singer Sabine McCalla, Sabine McCalla - Full Set | The OnBeat Sessions YouTube (11:23), the film breaks boundaries by constructing re-enactments, staging multiple scenes with the film crew in plain sight, combining surrealist imagery with voice-over excerpts read in French and English, literally immersing viewers in an imaginary “feel” of Suzanne Césaire. Sensuously shot on 16mm by Alex Ashe, feeling minimalist, disjointed, and often hard to follow, the Montgomery Palmetum & Palm Collection in the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Miami is a stand-in for Martinique in the film, beautifully surrounded by the luxurious wildness of nature, like being thrust amidst the exotic flora and fauna of an Henri Rousseau painting, where the languid tempo, almost as if time has stopped, and lush green beauty of the tropical island is visually seductive, camouflaging a long history of colonial exploitation. Martinique historically imported over 200,000 slaves who were immediately forced to assimilate to the tropics, facing malnourishment and high mortality rates before slavery was abolished in 1848, but not before enduring three centuries of captivity. The abolition of slavery did not result in the opening up of economic avenues, continuously mired in dire poverty while suffering from ingrained stereotypes of intellectual and cultural inferiority, French colonialism formed the roots of the repressive society that Césaire lived with and wrote about.
As if to emphasize the lost or forgotten nature of her legacy, there is no linear progression, instead the film is a dreamlike, free association essay built on fragments and abstract expressions of an artist who has only recently begun to receive the attention her evocative ideas and her distinct style merit. Starting from the supposition that next to nothing is known about Césaire, as the title suggests, there is a lyrical, songlike, storytelling aspect that deconstructs her life, bypassing any conventional structure, turning this into an avant-garde biopic that is daringly ruminative, based in part on the essay Surrealist Refugees in the Tropics by Terese Svoboda, first published by Guernica in 2017, Surrealist Refugees in the Tropics - Guernica Magazine, as it breaks new ground by finding inventive ways to tell her story, moving between narrative filmmaking and abstraction, utilizing a lyrical richness that is both obscure and eye-opening at the same time, reconstructing the memory of the artist, where the emphasis is on keeping her legacy alive. Characterized by an uneasy combination of homage and erasure, Césaire’s work in the pantheon of Caribbean literature identifies her as a key figure, yet it is undeniable that the paucity of her works, where only seven theoretically innovative essays on subjects related to feminism, Marxism, and Surrealism were published between 1941 and 1945 and then published nothing for the remaining twenty years of her life, which means that her memory has been overshadowed by that of her illustrious and prolific husband, Aimé. Together with the help of other Martinique intellectuals such as René Ménil, Lucie Thésée, and Aristide Maugée, they founded the dissident literary review Tropiques in 1941, which established a dialogue with surrealism both as a means of cultural liberation and as a means to obscure political messages for the censors, where her scathing attacks on fascism and racism were camouflaged as reviews of literary and ethnological studies, as those essays were published during a period of unusual censorship, racism, and oppression from an authoritative Vichy government of Nazi-occupied France and were not widely read until the 1980’s, and not readily translated until the late 1990’s. The most ardent surrealist of the Tropiques collective, embracing blackness as a unifying force and as a means to move beyond colonial oppression, it’s worth mentioning that she was a black woman in an intellectual world dominated by men, working from the mindset of the periphery, as women poets and novelists have historically been excluded by male-dominated movements like Négritude, yet they were among the first public and literary figures to embrace a black identity. For decades, historical overviews of the era made little mention of her contributions to the cultural renaissance of Martinique, a time when Caribbean students mingled with European intellectuals while studying in Paris, returning home to challenge the cultural status quo and alienation that characterized the French colonial Martinique identity at the time, eloquently described in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, with Césaire writing, “The Martinican has failed because, misrecognizing his true nature, he tries to lead a life that is not his own,” emphasizing the physical and historical space of the Caribbean, appropriating and redefining the legacy of the slave trade.
Told in a sleepy, tropical manner, where a woman silently sits alone smoking a cigarette in a darkened room of a 1940’s café, with an oscillating fan buzzing overhead as a jazz record can be heard in the background, which sets the stage for frequent close-ups in natural surroundings, while she and her husband Aimé (Motell Gyn Foster) drift in and out of the screen, friends with French Surrealist André Breton (Josué Gutierrez), who visits them in Martinique, blurring the distinctions between past and present. Blending personal reflection with broader cultural themes, interlinking an imaginary dialogue between the director, French-Jamaican actress Zita Hanrot who plays Césaire, and the artist herself, between Césaire’s words and the screenplay written by Hunt-Ehrlich, the provocative style seems to invite viewers to question what they see and engage in a deeper, more introspective dialogue with history and memory, challenging any idea of an authoritative history or biography, providing stream-of-conscious projections of various strands of thought that touch on history, collective identity, memory, and women’s artistry, where she incisively acknowledges, “Proust wrote in his parents’ luxurious house. Very sincerely, make Proust a farm worker from Martinique, I doubt he would have written In Search of Lost Time.” A writer who supposedly destroyed her own creations, simply tearing up her drafts and disposing of them after the war, referred to as “aborted works,” while also referencing her strained relationship to writing while mothering six children (and teaching full-time), her work was constantly interrupted caring for their everyday needs, which may explain the fragmented structure utilized by the director, “In our film, the fragment becomes a central structure and an idea about how cinema can tell stories. Rather than using it to smooth the asperities of history, cinema precipitates us where the known person stops. This ballad presents itself as a post-modern romance, a biopic that recognizes that the reasons why we think about history are always influenced by the most pressing needs of the present.” Lack of information about her life and work persists, despite acknowledgements by colleagues of her indispensable role at Tropiques, describing her lyrical poetic prose as the “soul of the movement.” Césaire subverted gendered, exoticized representations of the Caribbean islands, as they were used to promote colonial travel narratives from a white tourist industry to help justify continued environmental exploitation, expansionist development, and neocolonial control. Even today, travel brochures to Martinique present the island as an exotic, truly enchanting, picture perfect postcard with its white sandy beaches. Her portrait of the region moves back and forth between an outside and an inside perspective to show both the extreme beauty and the troubled turbulence of the Caribbean, believing that the fragmentation of the Caribbean identity permitted its subordination, where her primary relation to place rather than origin distinguishes her from her peers, where her search for empowerment is never utopian, but grounded in reality, refusing to echo the culture in France, while affirming the reality and originality of Martinique culture. Surrealism was not solely a literary aesthetic, it was also a politically engaged movement that condemned imperialism worldwide. Railing against the patriarchal-colonialist domination that supports the exploitation of both women and the environment, her work is primarily concerned with assimilation, dependence, and racialized forms of colonial domination. From The Malaise of a Civilization, Tropiques 5, April 1942:
Understand me well: It is not a question of a return to the past and resurrecting an African past that we have learned to appreciate and respect. On the contrary, it is a question of mobilizing every living force mingled together on this land where race is the result of the most continuous brazing; it is a question of becoming conscious of the tremendous leap of various energies we have until now locked up within ourselves. We must now put them to use in their fullness, without deviation and without falsification. Too bad for those who thought we were idle dreamers. The most troubling reality is ours. We shall act. This land, our land, can only be what we want it to be.
"The Great Camouflage" Negritude Women, by T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, 2002, which includes Suzanne Césaire’s The Malaise of a Civilization (page 130), Tropiques 5, April 1942, and also her final published essay, The Great Camouflage (page 135) from Tropiques 13-14, September 1945
