Why Sarah Mal­doror remains one of cinema’s great­est revolutionaries

The films of Sarah Mal­doror, who died last spring at the age of 90, were as polit­i­cal­ly rev­o­lu­tion­ary as they were rad­i­cal­ly beau­ti­ful. She was inspired at all turns in her career by poet­ry and art, and moti­vat­ed by the fight to lib­er­ate oppressed peo­ple. In cin­e­ma she found the per­fect form of self-expres­sion, and the right medi­um for her mes­sage: a cry for free­dom that deserved a wide audi­ence. Her sad death from Coro­n­avirus com­pli­ca­tions has prompt­ed a new wave of inter­est in her work, and an in-depth ret­ro­spec­tive at this year’s year’s IndieLis­boa was sure­ly one of the rich­est seams in the festival’s programme.

Mal­doror made 42 films, includ­ing fea­tures, shorts and doc­u­men­taries, many lat­ter­ly for French TV. Though some of her work (such as her con­tri­bu­tion to Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil) went uncred­it­ed, and some of her films have been lost (includ­ing 1970’s Guns for Ban­ta, which was con­fis­cat­ed by the author­i­ties) her autho­r­i­al voice is cap­ti­vat­ing. The selec­tion of Maldoror’s films at IndieLis­boa tes­ti­fied to that, mak­ing the case for her as a major film­mak­er, as did the illu­mi­nat­ing intro­duc­tions from Maldoror’s daugh­ter Annouch­ka de Andrade, artis­tic direc­tor of the Amiens Inter­na­tion­al Film Festival.

Mal­doror was born in Con­dom in the south­west of France in 1929. Her father was from Guade­loupe and her Black iden­ti­ty was reflect­ed through­out her work which was root­ed in Africa and the Caribbean, cen­tring themes of immi­gra­tion and espe­cial­ly the evils of colo­nial­ism. She chose her own name, from the nar­ra­tive poem ​‘Les Chants de Mal­doror’ by the Uruguay-born French writer Isidore Lucien Ducasse. After dra­ma school in Paris she found­ed Les Gri­ots, a rad­i­cal Black the­atre com­pa­ny. But in the ​’60s, after encoun­ter­ing Sovi­et cin­e­ma, par­tic­u­lar­ly Bat­tle­ship Potemkin, Mal­doror trav­elled to Moscow to study film, where Ous­mane Sem­bène was one of her contemporaries.

Mal­doror moved to Alge­ria with her hus­band, the writer and activist Mário Pin­to de Andrade, where she worked as assis­tant direc­tor on films includ­ing The Bat­tle of Algiers and the kalei­do­scop­ic, urgent Fes­ti­val panafricain d’Alger. Maldoror’s first film was the short dra­ma Monangam­beee, set in Ango­la, in which a snoop­ing offi­cer igno­rant­ly mis­un­der­stands a con­ver­sa­tion between a pris­on­er and his wife, with ter­ri­ble con­se­quences. It’s a sharp jolt of a film, with an avant-garde sound­track from The Art Ensem­ble of Chica­go and a chill­ing mes­sage. There’s only one pro­fes­sion­al actor in the cast; the rest were most­ly activists in Angola’s fight for inde­pen­dence from Portugal.

Maldoror’s 1972 fea­ture Sam­bizan­ga, which screened in a stun­ning new restora­tion from The Film Foun­da­tion and Cinete­ca di Bologna, tells a relat­ed sto­ry from the Angolan fight for inde­pen­dence of a polit­i­cal pris­on­er and his wife, adapt­ed from a nov­el by José Luandi­no Vieira. The open­ing shot, as in Bat­tle­ship Potemkin, shows waves crash­ing onto shore – an image that recurs in many of Maldoror’s films – evok­ing both the trav­els of African dias­po­ra and the pulse of rev­o­lu­tion­ary struggle.

Sam­bizan­ga tells a Potemkin-like sto­ry in which the loss of one life ignites a wider insur­gency, and as with that film – and so much of Maldoror’s work – it can­not be reduced to its mil­i­tant pol­i­tics alone. It’s a gor­geous film, with a gold­en colour palette, light danc­ing over ver­dant slopes, and the hero­ine fre­quent­ly seen in long shot, enveloped in the haze of a dusty road. Maldoror’s com­po­si­tions are con­sis­tent­ly beguil­ing, and her aes­thet­ic sen­si­bil­i­ty tend­ed to the clas­si­cal: each of her films took a spe­cif­ic work of art or artist as its pho­to­graph­ic inspiration.

Many of Maldoror’s lat­er films com­bined anti-colo­nial­ist pol­i­tics with her love of music and poet­ry, as in Aimé Césaire – un homme une terre and Un Masque à Paris: Louis Aragon, or her col­lab­o­ra­tion with jazz sax­o­phon­ist Archie Shepp in the quirky teen musi­cal Scala Milan AC, in which Parisian kids enter a song con­test so they can win a pil­grim­age to the Ital­ian city. (Mal­doror wrote the lyrics to their win­ning song, Shepp the tune.) But her cam­era could find poet­ry out­side artis­tic, musi­cal and lit­er­ary sources, in short doc­u­men­taries that cap­ture scenes of a Parisian grave­yard (Le Cimi­etière du Père Lachaise) or in the glo­ri­ous­ly trans­gres­sive spec­ta­cle of car­ni­vals in Guinea-Bis­sau (A Bis­sau, le car­naval) and Cape Verde (Cap-Vert, un car­naval dans le Sahel).

There is poet­ry, too, in the life of immi­grant Paris dust­men. One Mal­doror film not to be missed is the made-for-TV com­e­dy Un dessert pour Con­stance, about street sweep­ers gripped by a pas­sion for haute cui­sine who enter a TV cook­ery com­pe­ti­tion to raise mon­ey for a sick com­rade. This decep­tive­ly light con­fec­tion lay­ers many of Maldoror’s cin­e­mat­ic strengths. It’s a wit­ty film, pok­ing fun at French culi­nary pom­pos­i­ty and expos­ing thought­less every­day racism, com­prised of quirk­i­ly beau­ti­ful com­po­si­tions and con­clud­ing with a rous­ing mes­sage of class sol­i­dar­i­ty. It’s a taste that lingers delight­ful­ly: the touch of a tru­ly great film artist, whose unde­ni­able artistry was always laced with a pro­gres­sive vision.