“The fragment is a extremely necessary construction for telling tales which have been closely impacted by colonialism,” the film-maker Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich has mentioned. “For therefore lengthy, worth has been positioned on a narrative that you may inform from starting to finish. For a lot of marginalised of us, that is unimaginable attributable to 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 Conflict, the Caribbean-born, Paris-educated mental Suzanne Césaire (1915-66) co-founded the literary journal Tropiques in Vichy-governed Martinique together with her then-husband Aimé Césaire, and revealed 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 light into comparative obscurity as Aimé ascended into the canon of postcolonial poetry and politics.
With The Ballad, Hunt-Ehrlich, who offered footage from the undertaking in set up type at this 12 months’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 outside 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 “minimize”.
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 position. 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 together 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 chunk 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 referred to 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 fairly 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, due to 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 potentialities.” The movie’s fairly humorous remaining 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 Competition
