This article appeared in the October 11, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire (Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, 2024)

A Martinican writer and activist, and a key figure in the Afro-Surrealist movement, Suzanne Roussi Césaire co-founded the dissident magazine Tropiques with her husband Aimé Césaire and other compatriots during World War II, when Martinique was under repressive Vichy rule. The seven essays she wrote for the journal comprise the totality of her published work, yet they represent a monumental contribution to anti-colonial thought and literary theory. Her essays refute the “pastoral tradition” of Martinican poetry, which frames Martinique in Edenic terms, instead calling for a decolonial aesthetic that took the tools offered by Surrealism to author a renewed cultural identity: “To hell with hibiscus, frangipani, bougainvillea. Martinican poetry will be cannibal or it will not be.”

Despite her groundbreaking writing, Roussi Césaire is mostly remembered in the shadow of her more famous partner. Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s new film The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire honors Roussi Césaire’s call for a “cannibalistic” aesthetic by deconstructing the fixed, flattening form of the biopic—and its tendency to reduce its subjects to single, totalizing images—with a fragmentary structure and formal experimentation. The film problematizes the fraught effort to remember an artist who destroyed her own creations: according to her children, Roussi Césaire simply tore up her writings and disposed of them after the Second World War. In the film, the discarded efforts are referred to as “aborted works,” referencing her strained relationship to writing while mothering six children. Roussi Césaire’s literary “silence” is often attributed to her status as the wife of a high-profile politician, but the poet Daniel Maximin, who edited a collection of her essays, suggests that it was due to the “cannibalistic fire of her writing that could have consumed her being . . . blazing with its capacity of refusal.”

Zita Hanrot, who plays Roussi Césaire, breaks the fourth wall to declare, “We are making a film about an artist who didn’t want to be remembered.” And The Ballad works against the idea of “rediscovery”—a colonial term fraught with the fetishism of unearthing the terra incognita—instead favoring the kind of opacity proposed by another Martinican scholar, Édouard Glissant—one that offers meaning while undermining certainty. Hanrot and Motell Gyn Foster, who plays Aimé Césaire, drift in and out of character as they meta-narratively discuss Roussi Césaire’s legacy and recite her words, while Hanrot breaks away occasionally to care for her own infant, in a nod to the multivalent labor of female artists. Brief moments of historical reenactment—featuring French Surrealist André Breton’s visits to Martinique and the Césaires delivering a public speech—are carefully disrupted by a reflexive camera, which drifts behind the scenes to the cargo vans, the set, the film workers. Severing any facile identification of the actors with the Césaires, and blurring the line between cinematic spectacle and the labor of its production, Hunt-Ehrlich foregrounds the impossibility of representing history.

The frequent close-ups of the natural surroundings are similarly disrupted by recitations of Roussi Césaire’s essay “The Great Camouflage,” which directly scrutinizes colonial and touristic representations of Martinique as a placidly beautiful place. In fact, the Montgomery Palmetum & Palm Collection in the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Miami stands in for Martinique in the film, as a means of estranging and de-exoticizing the island’s landscapes. The geographical transplantation to a garden situates the film in a constructed form of nature, rather than the “wilderness” of the Caribbean colonial imaginary, drawing our attention to the fictions at the heart of both these landscapes. Roussi Césaire herself never wanted to be fixed by her image—she was infuriated by men, including Breton, who fetishized her beauty. Her ghost returns to us most forcefully on screen through the collective recitation of her words. Throughout the film, stray pieces of manuscripts are found by different crew members, who pick up these flyaways to read them aloud. Their voices resonate in a contrapuntal exercise, a call-and-response between Roussi Césaire and those who encounter her work in the present.

Mati Diop’s speculative documentary Dahomey also probes the tension between visual and aural modes of transmitting memory. The film follows the return of 26 royal treasures that were looted from the West African kingdom of Dahomey (now the country of Benin) in 1892 and taken to France. Diop records the scrupulous transportation of the relics—from their packaging into boxes at the Musée du quai Branly in Paris to their unloading and inventorying at the presidential palace in Cotonou, Benin’s largest city. This journey is narrated to us by the imagined voice Diop gives to one of the statues, King Gezo, who becomes a personification of the spirits that were uprooted and taken to another land and now contemplate a return to a home that has changed irrevocably in the intervening centuries. His distorted voice resonates in Fon, an indigenous West African language: “In several languages, these memories whisper in my ear the full weight of the past in which I am the trance, the trace.” During his journey from France to Benin via sea, his voice emerges from a dark screen—from the shadows of history.

At the palace, where an opening-night ceremony is organized so visitors can look at these newly returned artifacts, the camera is frequently situated within the glass display cases, sharing the statues’ perspective and gazing out at curators, state officials, and construction workers. Oftentimes, the glass cage muffles our ability to hear the spectators’ words, symbolizing the linear division between the ancient and the present, and situating King Gezo in a colonial time warp. Diop implicitly questions the institution of the museum, which exploded across Europe in the late 19th century, when such looted treasures from colonies arrived on the shores of the metropole. Writer and philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah has said that “There is no old word in most of the thousand or so languages still spoken in Africa that well translates the word ‘art.’” In the name of “art,” these historical artifacts are not only separated from their lands, but also from their original functions within the rituals of communal life. Can the very system that violently displaced these objects of heritage facilitate their meaningful repatriation?

Questions such as these are taken up in an electrifying sequence in which Diop captures a debate among university students in Benin about the significance of the repatriation. The debate takes many turns, with a plurality of perspectives: some see this return as a decolonial win, while others see it as part of President Emmanuel Macron’s attempt to bolster France’s influence in Africa. The students also interrogate the dominance of the French language in West Africa as a marker of the loss of a pre-imperial heritage, and the accessibility of museums to the general public, especially the working class. Like those heard in the staged trial of Abderrahmane Sissako’s Bamako (2006), the voices of the students are not confined to one space: the camera cuts away to people listening via radios in courtyards and in cars stuck in traffic. Both The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire and Dahomey imagine decoloniality not as an attempt to “recover” a concrete history, but as a means of continually remaking history in the present moment through multivalent and speculative modes.

Cici Peng is a Chinese-Ugandan writer and film curator based in London.