“The fragment is a extremely necessary construction for telling tales which have been closely impacted by colonialism,” the film-maker Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich has stated. “For thus lengthy, worth has been positioned on a narrative that you could inform from starting to finish. For a lot of marginalised people, that is unimaginable as a result of trauma or misplaced historical past.”
Her The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire (2024) is one such “fragment”, a stunning, elusive movie about an intriguing, elusive determine. Throughout the Second World Battle, the Caribbean-born, Paris-educated mental Suzanne Césaire (1915-66) co-founded the literary journal Tropiques in Vichy-governed Martinique along with her then-husband Aimé Césaire, and printed a number of essays that had been influential within the growth of the Négritude and Surrealist actions. However she ceased writing after 1945, maybe as a result of burdens of elevating six youngsters, and pale into comparative obscurity as Aimé ascended into the canon of postcolonial poetry and politics.
With The Ballad, Hunt-Ehrlich, who introduced footage from the mission in set up kind at this yr’s Whitney Biennial, makes an attempt to rediscover and restore Suzanne Césaire’s legacy—up to some extent. A mixture of historic fiction, meta-movie and essay movie, her first characteristic movie skips calmly between layers of actuality and illustration from an early sequence wherein the digital camera wanders by way of a damp out of doors cafe, following the our bodies of the dancers and onlookers till alighting on the face of the actress Zita Hanrot, returning her silent, considerate gaze till somebody’s offscreen voice calls “reduce”.
Motell Foster and Zita Hanrot in The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire (2024) Courtesy of Madame Negritude
What follows is, loosely, the story of the performer on the centre of that shot, as she research her function. Although it’s clear from context that inside the film-within-the-film Hanrot is Suzanne Césaire, Motell Foster is Aimé and Josué Gutierrez is André Breton—who stopped off in Martinique on the way in which to the US throughout his wartime exile, and was impressed by the Césaires’ revolutionary imaginations—the tip credit record solely the identify of the actors, not of any characters. Hanrot spends a lot of the film merely being, whether or not spending time along with her new child and the infant’s nanny (Hanrot herself grew to become a mom shortly earlier than the shoot), or strolling between palm bushes studying. In a recurring visible motif, a bit of paper—a fraction—is blown by the wind by way of the jungle, coming to relaxation who is aware of the place, a logo of what the director known as “misplaced historical past” and her topic’s continued marginalisation.
Drawing from Terese Svoboda’s essay “Surrealist Refugees within the Tropics” and interviews with Suzanne Césaire’s youngsters, Hunt-Ehrlich alternates between impressionistic glimpses of inventive creation and the competing obligations of motherhood on the one hand, and the firmer stuff of literature and historical past on the opposite. Snippets of essays and recollections are learn aloud by the actors and in voiceover, woven by way of the soundtrack alongside the peaceable ambient buzz of the tropical biome (or quite subtropical: the movie was largely shot in Miami). The cinematography, in 16mm, is lush and languid, and the fictional scenes are sometimes near-wordless—moments that might, in one other movie, be interstitial and ephemeral.
If Surrealists like Breton discovered within the tropics the potential for rejuvenation for Europe—war-torn, exhausted, in any respect method of ideological and aesthetic dead-ends—then that promise, tantalising however unfulfilled, has an onscreen analogue right here: Hunt-Ehrlich conjures a buzzing, low-key Eden extra dreamt-of than returned to. And equally, whereas Hunt-Ehrlich could have present in Suzanne Césaire a uncared for intersectional icon who speaks to the contradictions, private and political, of the present second, the filmmaker equally is aware of that, because of the linearity of historical past, her protagonist stays incomplete, a portrait in fragments. Nonetheless, there’s freedom there—as Suzanne Césaire wrote, “Surrealism gave us again a few of our prospects.” The movie’s fairly humorous closing scene toys with our hope that this determine from the previous might be an oracle within the current, and sends us out on a observe of puckish open-endedness.
The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire performs at 4pm on 6 October on the Brooklyn Academy of Music as a part of the New York Movie Pageant
