Film
Library-in-Residence

Library Transmission: Sarah Maldoror’s Dialogic Cinema

Annouchka de Andrade, June Givanni and The Otolith Collective

Date and Time:: Wednesday 22 Jul, 6–8pm
Location:: Minassa

Sarah Maldoror’s Dialogic Cinema is a screening and discussion between artists that curate and film curators that archive. The screening of Aimé Césaire, Un homme une terre /A Man, A Land (1977), which is followed by a conversation between Annouchka de Andrade, June Givanni and The Otolith Collective, is one episode in the intergenerational programme Excavating Legacies developed by June Givanni that connects forty years of Pan-African cinema across five continents, expanding public access through free exhibitions, publications, screenings and workshops.

Aimé Césaire, Un homme une terre is one of three films Sarah Maldoror dedicated to the work and life of Aimé Césaire. It brings together scenes of Martinique’s black sand, mountains and gardens with dramatisations of Césaire’s La Tragédie du roi Christophe/The Tragedy of King Christophe (1963) performed by actors from the Théâtre National Daniel Sorano and poetic recitations by Bachir Touré to compose a dialogic portrait of the renowned avant-garde poet, dramatist, essayist and politician. The wide-ranging exchange between Césaire and Maldoror, filmed as they walk along the coast of Martinique, testifies to their decade-long friendship. It demonstrates Maldoror’s profound engagement with Césaire’s incandescent insurrectionary poem Cahiers d’un retour au pays natal/ Return to my Native Land (1939) and simultaneously, reveals Césaire’s appreciation of Maldoror’s approach to film as a dialectical medium of interpersonal interchange, poetic imagination and pedagogic energy.

Aimé Césaire, Un homme une terre exemplifies Maldoror’s documentary aesthetic. We see one portrait of two intellectuals thinking aloud in front of the camera: Césaire as a thinker and poet, Maldoror as a director and artist, with cameos from Leopold Sedar Senghor and the bronze statue of King Ghezo seen in Mati Diop’s Dahomey (2024). Aimé Césaire, Un homme une terre constitutes one out of Maldoror’s many documentaries that amount, in their totality, to a cine-syllabus for a Black Radical Aesthetics. The poetic trajectory of Négritude as a historical movement opens onto the political horizon of Pan-Africanism, which in turn enables us to hear, see and think about the pasts, the presents and the futures of black intellectual tradition made audible and visible through Sarah Maldoror’s dialogic cinema.

Join us for a screening of Aimé Césaire, Un homme une terre and a conversation around the work and life of Maldoror understood, in the words of Yasmina Price, as filmmaker-historian-archivist-educator.

Doors open at 5.30pm; event starts at 6pm and ends at 8pm.

The Otolith Collective are supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

Image credit: still from Aimé Césaire, Un homme une terre, 1977, Sarah Maldoror © INA

Sarah Maldoror was born Sarah Ducados in 1929 in Gers, in the southwest of France, to a Guadeloupean father and a French mother. After moving to Paris to study theatre, Maldoror co-founded Les Griots, the first Afro-Caribbean theatre troupe in France, in 1956 with Ababacar Samb Makharam, Timité Bassori and Toto Bissainthe. During these years, Maldoror adopted her surname from Comte de Lautréamont’s 1868-69 prose poem Les Chants de Maldoror/The Songs of Maldoror. In 1961, Maldoror travelled to Moscow on a two-year scholarship to train with Mark Donskoy at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography where she briefly overlapped with Ousmane Sembène. Maldoror worked as assistant director on Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966), Ahmed Lallem’s Elles (1966), and William Klein’s Festival panafricain d’Algier/First Pan-African Cultural Festival (1969).

Her first short film, Monangambée (1969), a collaboration with her husband Mario Pinto de Andrade, founder of the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola, envisioned the brutality of Portuguese colonial violence six years before the independence of Angola. Maldoror directed her second groundbreaking film, Sambizanga (1972), often cited as the first feature to have been directed by a woman in Sub-Saharan Africa, in the Peoples Republic of Congo, Central Africa’s first Marxist-Leninist state. Over the following decades Maldoror went on to produce more than forty films, many of which were short films made for television that prioritised the educational potential of the moving image.

Annouchka de Andrade has over 30 years of experience in international cultural cooperation and has specialised in audio-visuals, cultural heritage and production across France, Spain and Columbia. She has provided technical assistance to Sarah Maldoror in the last 20 years. Annouchka also served as Artistic Director of the International Film Festival of Amiens, which highlights independent cinema and African and South American films.

De Andrade and her sister Henda Ducados have developed a project to preserve and share Sarah Maldoror and Mario de Andrade’s work through the Association of Friends of Sarah Maldoror and Mario de Andrade. Crucial to their work are film restoration and the archiving of documents, correspondences, manuscripts, unknown screenplays, editions and translation.

Dr June Givanni is a BAFTA Award-winning international film curator whose pioneering experience and expertise in global African, Caribbean and Afrodiasporic cinemas for over 30 years is widely recognised. The development of the June Givanni Pan African Cinema Archive (JGPACA) is based on her decades long collection. The ambition of the JGPACA is to disseminate this invaluable heritage collection as widely as possible. Givanni’s work as a programmer began in the early 1980s when organising Third Eye, London’s first Festival of Third World Cinema. Givanni worked as a film programmer at the Greater London Council’s Ethnic Minorities Unit, to develop and elaborate Black British Independent cinema and co-organised Third Cinema: Theories and Practices at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1986. In the 1990s, Givanni ran the African Caribbean Film Unit at the British Film Unit, edited the quarterly magazine Black Film Bulletin and organised the conference Africa and the History of Cinematic Ideas at the British Film Institute. In 2000, she edited the publication Symbolic Narratives/African Cinema: Audiences, Theory and the Moving Image and programmed Planet Africa at the Toronto International Film Festival. Givanni has worked as a film curator with festivals on five continents and has been involved in the development of an infrastructural ecology for Pan-African cinema within, between and across these continents.

The Otolith Collective is an artist-led organisation that supports intergenerational and intragenerational art practices, research-led projects, writing and process based forms of development. The Otolith Collective creates environments that enable discourse and discussion, co-commission artists and curate exhibitions and programmes with a wide range of collaborators, organisations and institutions. Theirs is an international project based on transnational and translocal visions committed to maintaining and animating an experimental, worldmaking approach. Working across visual art, new music, film, video, writing and post lens-based media, The Otolith Collective draws audiences to exhibitions and platforms on the work of Black Audio Film Collective, Mark Fisher and Justin Barton, The Chimurenga Library Chris Marker, Harun Farocki, Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa and Bahar Noorizadeh, to name but a few.