A Chorus for the Revolution
Essay
A Chorus for the Revolution
Essay
BY
Chrystel oloukoi
On Sarah Maldoror’s radiant call of resistance.
Sambizanga screens at Metrograph through June 16.
Sarah Maldoror envisioned cinema as a series of improvisational rehearsals for the revolution. Born and raised in Gers, France, she shot 46 films during her lifetime, crossing borders between the metropole and the colony, between empires and newly independent nations, all the while fearlessly chronicling Black continental and diasporic struggles. She entered guerilla filmmaking via an extensive engagement with Angola’s 1961–1974 war of liberation, first in the short Monangambee (1968), and then (following a run-in with authorities over her unfinished feature Guns for Banta) in her recently restored, landmark feature Sambizanga (1972).
Unmistakably kindred, her first two completed films both center on the wife of an incarcerated Angolan rebel (played by the late Cape Verdean economist Elisa Andrade), and both spring from the clandestine literature of Portuguese settler and anticolonial militant José Luandino Vieira—respectively, the 1962 short story Lucas Matesso’s Suit, and the 1961 novel The Real Life of Domingos Xavier.
In Sambizanga, Domingos (Domingos de Oliveira), tractor driver and underground member of the resistance, is arrested at dawn. The film’s three-part structure interweaves his martyrdom at the hands of the colonial police, as he is imprisoned and tortured; the unrelenting march of his wife, Maria, to find him; and the efforts of the burgeoning resistance movement to help them both. The film, named after the working-class district of Luanda where the first acts of the Angolan freedom struggle took place—on February 4th, 1961, just a few weeks after Domingos’s death in Vieira’s story—mobilizes the couple as an allegory for the suffering and rising revolutionary consciousness of the colonized.
While we briefly see Domingos engaged in activities conventionally recognized as revolutionary, such as distributing leaflets to co-workers, most of his time onscreen before his arrest is spent in no less subversive acts of care. He jests with his wife, rests idly after a hard day’s work, plays football with children, and takes care of their infant son. Similarly, other militants, while deploying vigilant, oppositional gazes, also delight in budding romances, small mundane joys, and, in the film’s mesmerizing coda, the riotous energy of nocturnal revelry and organizing. In Paulin Soumanou Vieyra’s pathbreaking 1973 book Le Cinema Africain, one of the first histories of African cinema, he contends that Sambizanga is too beautiful a film. Such a remark misrecognizes that the mandate of the culture worker is, in the words of Black American author Toni Cade Bambara, to “make the revolution irresistible.”
The ensemble of Sambizanga is not the able-bodied masculinist vanguard of the revolution, as one might expect, but women, children, the disabled, the elderly, the unattended, and the unaccounted for.
Equally moving and surprising are the images of Maria’s journey by foot from her home village to the capital, some 150 miles away, her tireless resolve combining with the film’s unhurried pace to rupture the epic of the anticolonial chanson de geste. Under a blazing sun, carrying her child on her back, Maria is accompanied by a chanted song full of longing and sorrow. When she finally arrives in Luanda, she is met with only the labyrinthine deflections of a Kafka-esque colonial administration.
Heartbroken upon learning of the death of Domingos, she collapses in the street, leaning on an old man who is mockingly referred to as “Old Half Ass.” Insignificant in the eyes of many, he is shown to be, in fact, an essential node in the transmission of information to the resistance. With a walking stick in one hand, he helps Maria walk again with the other. The ensemble of Sambizanga is not the able-bodied masculinist vanguard of the revolution, as one might easily expect, but women, children, the disabled, the elderly, the unattended, and the unaccounted for.
Part of the film’s haunting beauty lies also in the unruly environments which dominate the opening and closing sequences. The deep ecological time of turbulent waters crashing on rocks, sculpting the coast through erosion, is contrasted with the exhausting pace of the backbreaking labor undertaken in the quarry, as sweat drenches the workers’ bodies. Rather than the savanna and woodlands ecoregions of the coast where Luanda is situated, the film was shot in the People’s Republic of Congo—yet cinematographer Claude Agostini deftly captures, in impressionistic touches, the lush, verdant valleys and hills that punctuate Maria’s long march to the city; the poetic anarchy of dust; and the low, thorny landscape of the bush that offers camouflage to the rebels. Nature, unyielding and uncontained, is set off against the punitive architecture of the colonial city, with its impenetrable walls, barbed wires, and surveillance posts. Prisons are a particularly telling landmark of Maldoror’s cinema, bringing about the “moonless, nameless nights” passed in the penal colony of Cayenne in Léon G. Damas (1994) and the kinship felt in Monangambee between prisoner and lizard, both entombed inside the walls.
Sambizanga speaks to the singularity of the Portuguese, carceral colonial state. Portugal had the dubious distinction of being among the first colonial empires on the continent, with settlements, trading ports and forts as early as the 16th century—far before the mythologized chronology of a 19th-century “scramble for Africa”—as well as among the last to (pretend to) leave. The rallying cry “monangambée” (“white death”) that opens Sambizanga as a shout, then as a recurring protest song, was used to alert of the presence of Portuguese slavers, before becoming an anticolonial anthem.
Maldoror’s peripatetic movements testify to the insurgent networks and cartographies of militant filmmakers of her generation. Her radically nomadic trajectory starts in 1950s Paris, which was filled with the revolutionary energies of West African former forced conscripts, as well as exiled militants and intellectuals from Vietnam, the Black diaspora, and Latin America. There, she founded—alongside Ababacar Samb Makharam, Toto Bissainthe, Timité Bassori, and Robert Liensol—the first Black theater troupe in France, the Compagnie d’Art Dramatique des Griots, in 1956.
From there, she would move on to Moscow, where she trained on a scholarship at Vladimir Gardin’s film school (now the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography) under Mark Donskoy, alongside Ousmane Sembène. The gestural quality of Maldoror’s films, attuned to what Frantz Fanon called the muscular tension of the colonized, and Léon G. Damas the frenzy of eyes and feet, owes much to this Soviet experience, as well as to her previous experiments with theater. Later, in Algiers, Maldoror pursued practical training, working on sets such as Ahmed Lallem’s The Women (1966), Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers (1966), and William Klein’s The Pan-African Festival of Algiers (1969), before making films herself.
Sambizanga is but one example of Maldoror’s substantial collaborations with liberation movements. Indeed, Marxist-inflected organizations such as the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN), the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde’s (PAIGC), and the Liberation Front of Mozambique (FRELIMO) took seriously the task of emancipating the imaginations of the “wretched of the earth,” making culture a crucial terrain of struggle. To this end, Maldoror’s friend the Bissau-Guinean and Cape Verdean revolutionary leader Amílcar Cabral sent a cohort of students to study filmmaking in Cuba in 1967, among them Flora Gomes.
The “Third World Film-Makers’ Meeting” that took place in Algiers in 1973, and the subsequent Algiers Charter on African Cinema in 1975, made co-productions between nonaligned countries a key aspect of the fight against imperialism. A product of Third World solidarity, Monangambee was shot in Algiers, and supported by the FLN, with avant-jazz performed by the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Maldoror’s next project, Guns for Banta (1970), was commissioned by the FLN and shot in Guinea-Bissau with the support of the PAIGC. The fate of this aborted first feature—confiscated by the FLN, the six reels of footage never to be found—exemplifies the high stakes and even-higher risks of the guerilla filmmaking that marks Maldoror’s early career.
Significantly, the end credits of Sambizanga give thanks to the Marxist-Leninist People’s Republic of the Congo, the MPLA, and… the French neocolonial Agency of Cultural and Technical Cooperation. These were the material conditions in which a director like Maldoror could make radical films, at a time of decaying formal colonial empires, Third World solidarity, and a general restructuring of the terms of Western domination.
Vieira, the novelist, was then-serving a second term in prison, and many of the nonprofessional actors and crew were engaged in the ongoing liberation struggle. Mário Coelho Pinto de Andrade, Maldoror’s lifelong accomplice and the co-writer of Sambizanga’s screenplay with Frenchman Maurice Pons, was a founding member of the Angolan Communist Party and of the MPLA. The film itself was partly produced by the MPLA and shot in Congo-Brazzaville with the support of its Marxist-Leninist regime, to counteract Portuguese censorship. Sambizanga was banned by the Portuguese authorities until 1974, one year before Angolan independence was achieved.
Few filmmakers embodied so fully the ambition of a cinema without borders, inflected by socialist and Pan-African ideals.
As her first completed feature, Sambizanga casts a long shadow over Maldoror’s expansive, polymorphous oeuvre. Yet, the prolific artist did not only celebrate the everyday people engulfed in liberation wars. Her later work, often produced for television as commissions, mostly constituted short and feature-length documentaries about culture workers—poets, sculptors, painters, and designers. Many were close friends or collaborators, such as fellow Griot member and Haitian singer Toto Bissainthe, and Negritude artists Damas, Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Wilfredo Lam. These praise poems sought less to monumentalize their subjects than to disperse anew the dissonant clamor of lives that the films could never contain.
Maldoror’s trajectory, then, is that of a life and corpus in movement. Few filmmakers embodied so fully the ambition of a cinema without borders, inflected by socialist and Pan-African ideals. Her corpus remains fragmented, with a number of master copies confiscated, lost, borrowed, or left in a dire state, as is repeatedly the fate of the work of Black radical filmmakers.
This has much to do with how vulnerable Black cultural productions are, especially in relation to unscrupulous distributors. As Maldoror’s daughters, Annouchka de Andrade and Henda Ducados, recount, Sambizanga passed through the hands of a number of French distributors who neglected its formal distribution and preservation. Yet, the film’s strange journey is also inextricable from Maldoror’s own ethics of generosity, as she frequently loaned copies of her films, including master copies, to friends and comrades—and not all of them made their way back. If Maldoror relinquished her prints, it was in no small part because she espoused a cinema of liberation at the level of material conditions, too.
While some of her cinema has long led an underground existence online, Maldoror’s death in April 2020 prompted a wave of renewed interest in her work, capped by the restoration of Sambizanga, brought about through the tireless efforts of Maldoror’s daughters and support from the Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project. While appreciative of the gorgeous colors resurrected by the Cineteca di Bologna at Paris’s L’Image Retrouvée, I also can’t help but feel nostalgic for the derelict red-tinged version I first encountered, which has now been disappeared from many websites via DMCA takedowns. Embedded in the materiality of that previous version are histories of neglect and deviant circulation that one might have wanted to hold onto, despite the seductions offered by the new, pristine image.
Retrieving all 46 of Maldoror’s films is an ongoing, arduous investigative process. As her work continues to be re-energized in some ways and suspended in others, I find myself compelled to interrupt the triumphal narratives that often accompany restorations of revolutionary films to voice a concern for their afterlives, including the shifting contexts in which they get to be seen. I think of something Maldoror says in a 1977 interview:
And when I address myself to Europeans that is because it is the French distribution companies who determine whether the people in Africa will get to see a certain film or not. After 12 years of independence, it is your companies—UGC, Nef, Claude Nedjar, and Vincent Malle—which hold in their hands the fate of a possible African distribution for Sambizanga.
Today, the West conserves a colonial monopoly not only on the means of film distribution, but also over preservation and restoration, which too often function as new enclosures in a long history of dispossession.
My thanks to luminaries Yasmina Price and Amy Sall as my thoughts on Sambizanga are forever enriched by our recent exchange at BAM, in the context of the “Women’s Political Cinema 1959-1992” series.
Chrystel Oloukoi is a writer, curator, and researcher focusing on experimental cinema, queer cinema, and Black continental and diasporic cinema.
