Sarah Maldoror’s friendships with poets and political thinkers like Aimé Césaire, Louis Aragon, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Léon-Gontran Damas profoundly shaped her life in theater, cinema, and activism. Program 86 min.
Louis Aragon: Un masque à Paris (Louis Aragon: A Mask in Paris). 1980. France. Directed by Sarah Maldoror. With Louis Aragon. DCP. In French; English subtitles. 13 min.
Donning a red mask, the poet Louis Aragon reads a piece by his companion, the writer and literary critic Jean Ristat, and conspiratorially converses with Sarah Maldoror about Surrealism, its relationship to the French Communist Party, and its shortcomings with respect to race.
Aimé Césaire: Le masque des mots (Aimé Césaire: The Mask of Words). 1987. France/Martinique. Directed by Sarah Maldoror. DCP. In French; English subtitles. 47 min.
Invited by Aimé Césaire and Leopold Sédar Senghor to a conference on Négritude in Miami, Sarah Maldoror decides instead to film the city, invite Maya Angelou to recite a poem by Césaire in French, and later meet up with Césaire in Martinique. There, at the foot of Mount Pelée, he invokes the volcanic island that inspired him so profoundly, observing that “I appear to myself, when I’m writing a poem, as a person wearing a mask.”
Léon G. Damas. 1994. France/Guyana. Directed by Sarah Maldoror. DCP. In French; English subtitles. 26 min.
In this portrait of Léon-Gontran Damas, one of the founders of Négritude and a member of parliament for French Guiana from 1948 to 1951, Sarah Maldoror observes the poet as he voyages among landscapes and rivers from Cayenne to Paris. Although Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor testify to Damas’s poetic force and reach, Maldoror is struck by the enduring legacy of colonialism when young Guyanese girls confess their ignorance of his work.