ROOM 3
Masks room invites... Sarah Maldoror
Sarah Maldoror’s cinema and
the short-circuited archive of
African masks.
Sarah Maldoror’s cinema and
the short-circuited archive of
African masks.
The film À Bissau, Le Carnaval (“In Bissau,
The Carnival”, 1980) shows us images of
the festivities, including the handmade
creation of masks and playful and colourful moments of hybridity and appropriation. In Et les chiens se taisaient (“And the
dogs stopped barking”, 1978) two actors,
including the filmmaker herself, recite
various texts by Aimé Césaire, the poet of
the Negritude movement. While walking
through the Museum of Man (Paris), the
two actors stare at the wooden statues and
denounce the atrocities of colonialism.
Sarah Maldoror (1929-2020) was “invited”
to cohabit one of the museum’s most emblematic rooms to get African cinema “to
talk”, between poetic and political expression in the world. Maldoror was one of
the most important filmmakers of pan-African cinema and participated in the anti-colonial and independence struggles of
the 1960s and 1970s. Her gaze effectively
short-circuits the masks on display here.
Whereas in À Bissau, Le Carnaval we learn
about the territory’s living traditions, in Et les chiens se taisaient it is the museum
itself, with its modern and colonial genealogy, that is placed into question.
As in Maldoror’s fearless cinema, the African masks on display in this room confront us and challenge our thoughts. A
game of different gazes between different
ways of making, seeing and displaying images, which makes it possible to underline
the critical power of the cinema, in the
institutional context.
FOR ALL AGES
Sarah Maldoror
Born Sarah Ducados in 1939,
in the French city of Condon,
daughter of a French mother
and an Antillean father, Sarah
Maldoror was a pioneer of pan-African cinema. She founded
the Les Gritots theatre group in
Paris and adapted works by Jean
Paul Sartre and Jean Genet to
the stage. She studied cinema
in Moscow, was the partner of
Angolan political activist, Mário
Pinto de Andrade, and friend of
the poets Aimé Césaire, Léopold
Sédar Senghor, Frantz Fanon and
Richard Wright. Her main films
include Monangambee (1969)
and Sambizanga (1972) one
of the first African fiction films
made by a woman. Living in
Paris, she made documentaries
that portrayed Aimé Césaire, the
artist Ana Mercedes Hoyos, the
writer Leon G. Damas and the actress and singer, Toto Bissainthe,
thereby expanding the horizon of
black cultural history. She died
in April 2020, aged 91, a victim
of Covid-19.
FOR ALL AGES
Sarah Maldoror
Born Sarah Ducados in 1939,
in the French city of Condon,
daughter of a French mother
and an Antillean father, Sarah
Maldoror was a pioneer of pan-African cinema. She founded
the Les Gritots theatre group in
Paris and adapted works by Jean
Paul Sartre and Jean Genet to
the stage. She studied cinema
in Moscow, was the partner of
Angolan political activist, Mário
Pinto de Andrade, and friend of
the poets Aimé Césaire, Léopold
Sédar Senghor, Frantz Fanon and
Richard Wright. Her main films
include Monangambee (1969)
and Sambizanga (1972) one
of the first African fiction films
made by a woman. Living in
Paris, she made documentaries
that portrayed Aimé Césaire, the
artist Ana Mercedes Hoyos, the
writer Leon G. Damas and the actress and singer, Toto Bissainthe,
thereby expanding the horizon of
black cultural history. She died
in April 2020, aged 91, a victim
of Covid-19.
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