Sarah Maldoror at MoMA and UCLA
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How can an oppressed community band together to form an effective resistance to a government that gives itself the right to steal a man from his home—without due process but with complete impunity—and toss him into a prison where he is sure to be tortured? Any reading of Sarah Maldoror’s Sambizanga (1972) as a how-to primer would be severely reductive if it didn’t also take into account the director’s deep empathy with her characters, the sincerity of their portrayals, and the transporting richness of Claude Agostini’s cinematography. At the same time, though, as Screen Slate founding editor Jon Dieringer has put it: “Few films are so innately, integrally, and consummately revolutionary. Once seen, never forgotten: as cinema and politics, Sambizanga is unimpeachable.”
Preceded by Maldoror’s debut, the seventeen-minute Monangambééé (1969), Sambizanga will open the first full-scale retrospective of her work in North America this evening at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Both films are based on stories by José Luandino Vieira, the son of Portuguese parents who emigrated to Angola when he was three. He grew up in the African quarters of Luanda, the capital, and served time behind bars for his support of Angolans seeking independence from Portugal.
Most synopses of Sambizanga focus on Maria (Elisa Andrade), who leaves her village to head for Luanda with her baby strapped her back in search of her husband, Domingos Xavier (Domingos de Oliveira), a tractor driver who has been arrested, ostensibly for secretly passing along pamphlets calling on Angolans to reclaim their autonomy. But Sambizanga—cowritten with Maurice Pons, Maldoror, and her husband, Mário Pinto de Andrade, the founder and first president of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA)—is an ensemble piece. An adolescent and his grandfather team up for a little amateur espionage. Village matriarchs are conduits for tidbits on who might know what and where they might happen to be at the moment. A textile shop becomes a crossroads for potentially helpful information: license plate numbers, descriptions of the arresting police, the name and address of the man they’ve nabbed.
Sambizanga is “a film, partly, about pace,” writes Yasmine Seale at 4Columns, “the contrapuntal rhythms of political awakening, the basic difficulty of obtaining information and transmitting it. Characters are forever searching for the right person to talk to, then the right place to talk to them. We are shown how knowledge of brutality seeps through a population and is managed: from collaboration to obliviousness through subtle sabotage.” The film’s “slyest move is to show political abstractions entangled in material life. When revolution is being pondered there are lullabies to sing and lunch to make: details, warm and inconvenient, in the tapestry.”
Born Sarah Ducados in southwestern France to a French mother and a Guadelopean father, Maldoror took her name from a late-nineteenth-century poetic novel by the Comte de Lautréamont. In Paris, she cofounded France’s first all-Black theater company, Les Griots. In Moscow, she studied at the renowned All-Union State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) and worked alongside Ousmane Sembène as an assistant on Mark Donskoy’s Hello Children (1962). Her most famous stint as an assistant director was with Gillo Pontecorvo during the making of The Battle of Algiers (1966).
That film and others Maldoror contributed to, including Chris Marker’s Sans soleil 1983), will screen as part of MoMA’s retrospective, which runs through May 15. The focus, though, will be on Maldoror’s own work. She made more than forty films, many of them short, most of them documentaries, and several intended for television, which, as Yasmina Price writes, “was in some ways a natural choice given her prioritization of the public-facing, accessible, educational potential of the moving image.”
On May 10, the UCLA Film and Television Archive will present Sarah Maldoror: Through a Lens of Resistance and Rebellion, a free program of three films, And the Dogs Kept Silent (1978), an interpretation of a poem by Aimé Césaire; Dessert for Constance (1981), a comedy about Senegalese émigrés in Paris; and Carnival in Sahel (1979), which Arta Barzanji wrote about for Documentary Magazine when Maldoror’s daughter, Annouchka de Andrade, presented it last year at Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna.
Carnival was one of three films screening at the festival that Maldoror made in Cape Verde and Guinea Bissau. As Cape Verdeans hurry about, preparing for the annual festivities, “Maldoror isn’t as interested in showing the process in immaculate detail as in giving an accurate impression of the joy of collective cultural labor,” wrote Barzanji. “Case in point: As one local artist is carefully working on a piece, the camera zooms not on his hand or painting but on his face, as if searching for traces of the spiritual uplift brought about by the creative process.”
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