THE BALLAD OF SUZANNE CESAIRE

A defining image of Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire emerges from the windswept palms of Martinique, their emerald hues lingered on by a camera skeptical of, if not outright hostile to, their natural beauty. Within the hypersaturated layer of film grain and the verdant flora its images commit to memory, the popular imagination of the Caribbean and its “Edenic” island life finds its aesthetic texture. Resisting such clichés of third-world exoticism throughout the film are incantatory readings from Césaire’s seven extant Tropiques essays, each a tool with a different use for rooting out the colonial disease propagating the soil of Martinique’s political and cultural identities.

Co-founding the Tropiques literary magazine in 1941 with her husband, anti-colonial theorist and poet, Aimé Césaire, and philosopher Réné Ménil, Suzanne has often had her integral role in the anti-colonial activism of Vichy-occupied Martinique cheapened by the gendered discrepancies of historical accounts. Rectifying this to position her at the forefront of the opposition, Hunt-Ehrlich channels Césaire’s kinship with contemporaneous surrealist thinkers of the time, especially in the resistance to assimilation found in André Breton’s salvos against habituated thought. 

Spurred by the foundation of their dissident journal, a serendipitous encounter between the Césaires and Breton is restaged throughout Ballad’s fiction. The occasion became a watershed moment in connecting the political struggle of the surrealist nucleus in the Antilles with the Eurocentric waves of the movement, a discursive means to, as Césaire put it, "dare to point out the Caribbean stain on France's face, since so many of the French seem determined to tolerate no shadow of it." Césaire discovered in surrealism not an impotent formalism, but a force for liberation, levying her righteous fury on the myths of Nau and doudouisme’s poetic ideals of the island as a matronly representation of fertility, romanticized to the extent of naturalism’s palliative impulses. 

Hunt-Ehrlich transposes Césaire’s polemics to the cinematographic image and apparatus, finding the veneer of its images peculiarly similar to Martinique’s vegetation, a camouflage for colonial reality. In restaging the historical rendezvous between Breton and the Césaires, Hunt-Ehrlich uses theatrical recitation and Vodou percussion along with Brechtian fourth wall borderlessness to dispatch readymade notions of the biopic, generating tension between romanticized images and the industrial process they belie.

Further complicating this are the patriarchal shadows cast over Suzanne’s femininity and identity as a mother and writer by her husband’s comparatively extraordinary political and literary success. Later going on to become the mayor of Fort-de-France and the author of Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, which Breton later called “nothing less than the greatest lyrical monument of our times,” Aimé takes a supporting role to this reappraisal of an artist in the creative spring of her life, one which revolves around the question of surrealism’s anti-authoritarian capacities.

Winner - Best Experimental Film - National Society of Film Critics Award