Last month, I saw an archive film collection titled The Archive Reimagined: Pan-African Histories and the Moving Image at the Barbican for their Project a Black Planet exhibition, which has also recently screened Maldoror’s films. The collection sought to answer the question of what happens to the archive when we forget that it exists. Do the filmmakers and radical figures within still find importance when their politics are no longer commercially viable? It’s clear that within our current landscape, one that decries anything progressive or Black as “woke” – a word borrowed from the same Black radical tradition Maldoror was working within – today’s actors, musicians, filmmakers, and archivists are fighting a similar battle. Despite promises to do better, uplift Black voices and talent and stories, we find fewer Black people and Black women in particular, leading TV shows and mainstream films. The cultural output of Blackness walks a tightrope of acceptance through consumption, or neglect through brutality.
Should we take advantage of the consumption? If so, how? For Annouchka, it was clear that the 2020 wave of acknowledgement was fleeting. Refusing to mince words, she states, “Everyone was so excited to discover a Black woman filmmaker. It was clear that something had changed, and so we had to jump on before it was too late.” This wave led to the restoration of Sambizanga with the aid of Martin Scorsese, the World Cinema Project, and Cineteca di Bologna. It was important for Annouchka that her mother’s work was not just tied to one film, given that her filmography includes 46 entries. “People need to understand how vast and rich her work was, and that they do not ignore the rest,” she explains. To ensure this, the titles in the season include a showcase of three of Maldoror’s short films – And the Dogs Kept Silent (1978), The Mask of Words (1987) and Slave’s Route: Glimpses of Memory (2003) – a blend of Maldoror’s passion for poetry and theatre through her reimagining of the work of the prolific poet, playwright, and essayist Aimé Césaire.
Maldoror was not only a filmmaker. Poetry and theatre, Annouchka explains, was the lifeblood of her mother. “She built her life around poetry, and I believe it was her main skill. Her identity was poetry because, for her, poetry was politics. I’m trying to refocus on that, and let people know that there is so much about her they’ve yet to discover. I want them to reconsider what they know about her.”
Both Maldoror’s daughters have continued to pass on their mother’s beliefs and brought new life into her legacy, allowing audiences to meet the woman they grew up with. Through screenings of the short documentary tribute Sarah Maldoror ou la nostalgie de l’utopie (1999), filmed Q&As, and a live reading by Annouchka of her mother’s 1959 interview The Queen of the Blacks Speaks to You about Whites, we witness a daughter’s re-examination of her relationship with memory in real time. Speaking of her mother with palpable admiration, Annouchka explains, “There were some things we didn’t know about her childhood. As she got older, I promised we would restore her work. I couldn’t answer definitively since the negatives of Sambizanga weren’t available to us at the time, but I tried my best to keep her vision alive. She gave us her blessing. We must be faithful to it.”
And faithful they have been. Their ongoing efforts to inspire younger audiences in an age of irony and division are indeed revolutionary. Sarah Maldoror is not a name I remember hearing when first entering film spaces as a teenager, but it’s one that I’ve found has stuck with me as I’ve gotten older. Her work as a poetic filmmaker asks us to pay attention to horrors but also to beauty. Our world must change but we cannot lose ourselves whilst doing so. We can draw inspiration from her work for our own creative outputs to foster her belief of a world free and fair to Black people and Black women. Though it may seem a small victory, from our conversation it’s clear that what we can learn from Sarah Maldoror as a person, is to persist against injustice, no matter its size.
A Poet with a Camera: The Cinema of Sarah Maldoror takes place at the BFI Southbank from the 2nd of September until the 3rd of October.