Programming Note: Continuing our month of re-posts from some of the best films I’ve watched over the past year. Happy viewing!
Country: Angola
Director: Sarah Maldoror
Time: 1 hour and 38 minutes
Where Can I Get It: Criterion (free w/subscription)
What It Evokes: Colonial independence movements, magisterial lighting, neo-realism in war
Aimé Césaire, the poet and former president of Martinique, once wrote, “To Sarah Maldoror...who, camera in hand, fights oppression, alienation and defies human bullshit.” It’s high praise coming from Césaire and that final flourish captures something particularly true about artists operating under difficult political conditions. Indeed, the director Sarah Maldoror’s life possessed its own cinematic quality largely because her political commitments (Marxism, feminism, anti-colonialism) manifested in a (self-willed) proximity to some of the Francophone and Lusophone world’s sharpest political conflicts during the 1960s and 1970s.
Born to a Guadeloupan father and French mother in France, Maldoror co-founded France’s first all black theater company before moving to Moscow to study cinema alongside fellow student Ousmane Sembène, the future director of Black Girl (1966) and Touki Bouki (1973). After completing her studies, she moved to Angola and then to Algeria, where she worked with Gillo Pontecorvo on The Battle of Algiers (1966), one of the greatest (political) films ever made. Soon after, she received funding from the FLN (the Algerian National Liberation Movement) to shoot her first feature length film, which centered on the independence movement then unfurling in Guinea-Bissau. Disagreements with the FLN over editing (rumored to surround what the FLN deemed Malador’s extensive focus on female revolutionaries) led to the confiscation of her physical film rolls and her expulsion from Algeria—the film has never been recovered. After leaving Algeria, she returned to Angola and set to work on Sambizanga, adapting the Angolan writer José Luandino Vieira’s novella The Real Life of Domingos Xavier for the screen with her husband, who himself had co-founded the Marxist-Leninist Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). In turn, that movement (which Sambizanga profiles) would emerge victorious through both Angola’s War of Independence against Portugal (1961-1974) and the subsequent Angolan Civil War, which ran hot and cold between 1975-2002. (Following the Soviet Union’s dissolution, the MPLA re-branded itself as a social democratic party. Angola effectively remains a one-party state today.) Needless to say, it’s an incredible biography.
Sambizanga, the resulting adaptation of Vieira’s novel, tells the story of Domingos, a member of the MPLA, who has been arrested in his town and brought to the country’s capital, Luanda. The work weaves three narratives together: Domingos’ increasingly difficult experience in confinement; his wife’s intrepid attempt to locate him within a serpentine system of colonial prisons; and the soon-to-be MPLA revolutionaries who traffic clandestine information in attempts to discover who has been taken and why. Set in 1961, the film functions as a pre-history to very real political events. Its final scene depicts MPLA members planning a 1961 prison raid that (in reality) elicited particularly vicious Portuguese reprisals and helped spark the Angolan War of Independence. Continuing conflict in Angola throughout the early 1970s forced Maldoror to shoot the film in Congo. (The war ended when the Portuguese government withdrew from the country after the 1974 overthrow of the Salazar-molded Portuguese corporatist dictatorship Estado Novo. Subsequently, Maldoror’s husband would become persona non grata in Angola after falling out with other MPLA leaders.) Throughout, the film’s breathtaking use of light (natural or otherwise) and keen sense of visual metaphor—the powerful Congo River besides which soon-to-be revolutionaries meet evokes the natural forces (and perhaps dangerously uncontainable potency) of anti-colonial movements—lend the film further emotional weight beyond its direct subject matter. Like Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, Maldoror employed actual MPLA members as actors, generating a certain verisimilitude and memorializing individuals whose contributions to history might otherwise be lost.
Explicitly political films can occasionally fall into the trap of reducing their characters to a set of political positions. Naturally, the cost of subsuming individuals within the ideas they are meant to represent (i.e. making them sloganeers) ends up being rather uninteresting characters, which leads to rather tendentious and moralizing work. Political organizing relies on lowest common denominator narratives to forge group identities and generate critical masses—opposition to something, rather than positive programs in favor of something, tending to better cohere social movements. By contrast, rounded characters are compelling because of their inherent contradictions, flaws, and inconsistencies. Political slogans provide good/bad framings, while powerful art eschews this dichotomy precisely because it forecloses interpretive avenues reliant upon ambiguity and uncertainty. (This is why depictions of pure evil remain so dull.)
By locating Sambizanga in the personal stories of MPLA members, the film avoids the trappings of its own ideological underpinnings in ways that elevate it as art. It humanizes a movement at a moment in time (regardless of that movement’s subsequent inability to achieve its own early aspirations), while capturing the complexities inherent in colonial systems, which themselves relied upon pervasive forms of complicity and acceptance (active and passive) for their persistence. (Precisely because political change seemed so improbable and the cost to subversion remained so high, working within colonial systems on their own terms often appeared the only viable route to personal stability and some level of comfort.) This is something that Domingos’ wife, Maria, understands all too well—she remains most critical of fellow Angolans who take jobs within the security state and “work for the whites”—but it’s an insight that can get lost when films hermetically seal off the “bad guys” from everyone else. Good films recognize that “they” are potentially “us” under different circumstances. Absent this understanding, it becomes impossible to satisfactorily explain the complex aftermaths of, say, post-colonial states.
By avoiding these pitfalls, Maldoror shuns a pat oppressor/oppressed rendition, surfacing harder questions about agency within systems not amenable to easy bifurcation. (This does not require a drift into the nihilism borne of unending convolution, but rather clear-eyed nuance.) Of course, Sambizanga remains highly invested and sympathetic to a particular group (the MPLA, who funded the film) but it avoids the charge of agitprop by speaking to universal human attributes and characteristics, while its sensitivity and optimism underscore future possibilities. Much like the French government with The Battle of Algiers, the Portuguese government paid Sambizanga its highest compliment by immediately banning it upon release: the ultimate testament to having done something right.
Go Down the Rabbit Hole With:
Sarah Maldoror — Dessert for Constance (1981)
Sarah Maldoror — Leningrad Hospital (1983)