This brief work from New York film-maker Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich is the equivalent of a platform performance in the theatre: a look at the works of Caribbean feminist, anti-imperialist and surrealist partisan Suzanne Césaire, played by Zita Hanrot; Hanrot, rather, plays an actress musingly preparing to play her.
Césaire’s brief, intense flowering of work occurred in second world war Martinique, then a colony of France, controlled by the collaborationist Vichy government. Paradoxically liberated by this oppressive situation, Césaire co-founded a journal called Tropiques and published an influential series of essays on politics, literature and art, which showed how passionately inspired she was by her encounter with the great surrealist André Breton.
For Césaire, surrealism was a revolutionary mode of thinking and feeling: a battle cry and a challenge to the accepted order, and as she puts it here, the “tightrope of our hope”. This is an image that conveys vertiginous excitement and danger, although Césaire was a surrealist in the sense of being an evangelist for and a theoretician of surrealism, rather than a practitioner. Her essays do however have a prose-poetic quality.
If this chamber-piece film is a little opaque, perhaps that is because Césaire herself is opaque. After 1945, she stopped publishing her own work, transferring her energies to teaching in Martinique and elsewhere, and in looking after her large family. Perhaps the liberation of France, an event that certainly did not presage its colonies’ liberation, was not an inspiring moment.
And perhaps also her story is all too familiar; she found herself crowded out of the spotlight by a prominent husband, in this case Aimé Césaire, whose literary and political career made him a substantial public figure in France into the 21st century. Suzanne died in 1966, by which stage the record shows that she and Aimé were in fact divorced. A calm and interesting introduction to an important dissident author.
• The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire is in UK cinemas from 18 July.
