Sarah Maldoror, Aimé Césaire—un homme une terre, 1976, Martinique/France, film still
Léon G. Damas (1994), Sarah Maldoror, France, 26 min. French with English subtitles
Aimé Césaire—un homme une terre (1976), Sarah Maldoror, Martinique/France, 52 min. French with English subtitles
July 6: With a presentation by Annouchka de Andrade and Brigitte Rollet
Sarah Maldoror dedicates this documentary titled Léon G. Damas to the eponymous poet from Guyana, known as a figurehead of black culture in the United States. Césaire and Senghor talk about their common friend, with whom they had developed and initiated the concept and movement of négritude, sharing reflections on the musicality, rhythm, and sonorities of Damas’s poetry.
In Aimé Césaire, un homme une terre, Césaire speaks about his island Haiti and his relation to its poetry. Césaire’s reception of Leopold Senghor on the island is an opportunity for them to discuss négritude; Between excerpts from the Tragedy of King Christophe, Césaire expresses the dramas of the independence of Haiti, the first black state of modern times. A visit to the site of some municipal workshops finally shows Césaire in the role of a local politician, who denounces the perenniality of the colonial status of the island.
Annouchka de Andrade is the daughter of Sarah Maldoror. She is the director of the International Film Festival of Amiens, France.
Brigitte Rollet is a French film scholar and writer with a focus on gender studies and the representation of gender and sexuality on screen.
TV Politics is a film program that revisits some of the most significant attempts to articulate a radical approach to the politics of television since the mid twentieth century. It revisits film works conceived for the purpose of rethinking what television could be, while at the same time seeking to provide a different kind of analysis of social and cultural reality.
