‘The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire’ Interview With Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich

New York artist Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich makes films that, as she describes it, are “concerned with the inner worlds of Black women.”

Her documentary short A Gentleman’s War explored a Caribbean team playing in a summer cricket league in Brooklyn and “the utopian world this predominantly immigrant community has constructed on their weekends,” as her website highlights. A Quality of Light examined “the under-told story of the haunted artist who also inhabits the unique political position of being Black and a woman” while applying principles of music theory and West African performance structure in its construction. And Spit on the Broom was a surrealist doc that put the history of the African American women’s group the United Order of Tents, a clandestine organization organized in the 1840s during the height of the Underground Railroad, center stage.

This year, Hunt-Ehrlich’s first feature, starring Zita Hanrot, Motell Foster and Josué Gutierrez, debuted and has traveled the world. The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire puts a spotlight on Martinique-born writer Suzanne Césaire and her legacy as a pioneer of Afro-Caribbean surrealism and a key member of the Négritude movement, which focused on reclaiming African culture and the value of Blackness and promoting Black culture while protesting French colonial rule.

The movie is no classic biopic though. Far from it. It is presented as an attempt by a group of filmmakers to better understand the trailblazer and her impact, and how she has often been in the shadow of her better-known husband: poet, author and politician Aimé Césaire. The crew tries to make a film about Césaire and her life but often has a hard time making sense of them. The project mixes fragments of Césaire’s life as a school teacher, writer, political organizer and mother of six children, both from her own writing and audio testimony that the filmmaker collected from her family.

The movie’s film festival circuit stops have included the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival. This week, it is screening at the BFI London Film Festival.

Hunt-Ehrlich talked to THR about her experimental approach to filmmaking, the importance of music, why Césaire speaks to her and other Black women, and what is next for her.

When did you first find out about Suzanne Césaire? Why did she and her work speak to you so much that you wanted to make a movie about her, and how long did it take to make the film?

It’s been such an amazing journey with this film. I call it a small but mighty film, because we really didn’t have a whole lot of resources. We had to be very focused and disciplined in our approach because we had very little time. But I worked on this film a long time – seven years.

I just was taken with Suzanne Césaire’s work. Like a lot of people, I knew her husband’s work. In France, he is a very important political, as well as literary figure. And in the Caribbean, he’s also very important. My background is part Jamaican, and so I knew about Aimé Césaire. But when I discovered Suzanne Césaire, I just sort of fell in love. I think that’s what is true for many people when they discover her work.

So I just really started with a very simple question: How could someone be so talented and publish so little? It was a big mystery to me, so I sought to figure out an answer. And what I discovered was that there were a lot of answers, and I felt that the right film would present that.

Your film incorporates various elements that you wouldn’t necessarily expect in a biographical movie. How key was finding the right style and form for you?

I’m a filmmaker who’s really invested in form. I think that one of the challenges of U.S. filmmaking today is that we’ve kind of entered this space where the idea is that the place of courage in film is in content. But I believe that courageous films are created through form, and I think that that’s something, at least in the American context, that is missing. And so I’m very interested in the kinds of risks and innovation that we can find in a formally disciplined cinema. So even though I set out to make something like a biopic, my commitment was also to how to formally represent the story.

I felt like I interacted quite a bit with the film, thanks to how you use music and dance and other scenes. It sounds like you like the idea of viewers not just leaning back?

That’s at the heart of everything. I think in America we’re saturated with biopics. Doing everything safe actually makes it so that you don’t hold on to anything — it slips right through. And I was interested in asking what’s a different way of doing biography where you’re actually going to keep someone on the edge of their seat.

Even though I’m always trying to innovate in the way I make films, I also care about the audience’s pleasure. So, I consider myself a pleasure-forward filmmaker in that the film is also playful. We have this big, beautiful soundtrack by [singer] Sabine McCalla. We’re using a lot of electric guitar and organ and and music that’s playing with the themes of the film.

And we have these beautiful performances by Zita Hanrot, who is a French-Jamaican actress, and Motell Foster, who’s an African American actor, and Josué Gutierrez, who’s a Puerto Rican actor. They’re really these charismatic, romantic performances. And so even though we’re working with pretty serious, dense literary and political history, it’s still supposed to be concerned with the pleasure and accessibility of a bigger audience.

I also [like to] keep constantly destabilizing your expectations. I think of it like in music. If a song was all chorus, you wouldn’t like it. The way that you experience pleasure in music, or the way that you enjoy a chorus, is because of the dissonance, because of the bridge or the in-between phrases of music. You actually need this contrast of a kind of boredom to experience pleasure. So that’s what the film seeks to do.

I’m gIad you mention music, because the film begins with longer music and dance scenes. And throughout the movie, I was reminded of performance art. How much did you want to weave other art forms into the film to give it that feeling and how did you approach moving the characters on screen?

We had committed ourselves to using a dolly, and we were shooting on 16-millimeter film. And we were shooting at a palm tree sanctuary. So it was really physical shooting because we had 100 feet of dolly and we were in the swamp in the tropics.

Did you shoot in Martinique?

We were in Miami in this palm tree sanctuary.

We essentially had 100 feet of dolly, and we were just reconfiguring it. Camera choreography has always been really important to me in my filmmaking. And so a lot of it was about the repetition of the camera movement and revealing different things, working with these different circles.

You also reveal history in the film but don’t give the kind of final, definitive answers others may claim they can provide…

One of the ways I was thinking about this was: one of the most successful biopics ever made is Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There [about Bob Dylan]. And I think that a poetic approach to history is something desperately needed because of the ways that history can be really weaponized. I think it requires a sense of openness to interpretation to really use history in ways that are more political and useful for us in our present moment. Suzanne Césaire published only a little bit of writing, but it was all very politically urgent writing for her time, and it’s been very timeless writing. There’s this sadness underneath the surface of it that is very potent and really speaks to a very relatable experience for women, for Black women, for mothers who are balancing the same things that everyone desires: to be your authentic self, to feel liberated, to be able to express oneself with the duties that women have to the family and to their communities. I was really interested in putting value and attention on a Caribbean history, which I think is often overlooked.

When the film credits started rolling, I felt I had to read up more on the people in the movie and Caribbean history. I assume you want to motivate people to spend more time on the themes and topics presented in the film?

The ending is very important to the film. The ending is very important to what I believe cinema should do. Film is one of my big loves. Like all of us who work in film, I have strong feelings about what film should do for the audience. And if it doesn’t give you that feeling, then for me, it’s not worth your time.

I make films in New York. We’re kind of equidistant between L.A. and Europe. I don’t really know any filmmakers I would consider my peers who aren’t equally looking to fashion or the art world or Europe as they are looking to L.A. at this point. And so it’s a really exciting time to be a New York-based filmmaker. We have so many more modes of cinema to work with than someone who’s really steeped in the system. There’s really liberated potential.

I read that you interviewed friends or family of Suzanne Césaire. And how much research did you do overall?

Too much research. I don’t think every film requires the level I went to, but I really wanted to be sure, and I did everything you possibly could. I spoke to all her living children, her first cousin, every single biographer. I read every single letter and every single archive that exists. You don’t have to do that to make a film. I did that for this film.

Ultimately, when you have stories like Suzanne Césaire’s story, part of the story is that some of it is lost to time, even for the people closest to it. That was part of the way the film turned out. Rather than trying to sort of blanket over the holes of this history, I let those holes inform what we experience. And I think for Black women in particular, and for Black women’s histories, a lot of our stories have been mis-cared for or forgotten, and so we have to invent new approaches to tell our stories that don’t rely on pure continuity, because we don’t really have it.

I also picked up that she didn’t necessarily care about being remembered so much…

The big narrative sequence of the film hinges on this big myth, this kind of true story that’s been very mythologized, which is that the famous surrealist André Breton and a group of surrealists stop in Martinique during World War II, while they’re escaping the Vichy Nazi occupation of France. And when they are there, they discover Suzanne and Aimé Césaire’s writing. There’s this famous trip to the forest that everyone says changed their life, in published text or in writing. Of course, we don’t really know what happened, but there are all these traces of this experience they shared.

Breton wrote this very romantic poem to Suzanne Césaire. Suzanne and Aimé Césaire have this long correspondence with him. [Cuban artist] Wifredo Lam, who is a painter who is also there, ends up making his most famous painting inspired by things Suzanne Césaire says. So, it’s this magical moment that has this ripple effect through some of the biggest, most important works of literature and art in the 20th century, and it’s just a real mythology. So the film, in a very minimalist way, references this story and tries to imagine the kind of the connection between these historical figures. She was inspiring all these works that were so important, but then she was left out of the memory.

What’s your take on surrealism and how it fits today’s world?

I tried to come up with my own way of understanding surrealism. I think surrealism is really relevant right now because in some ways, there are similar echoes to the political context of surrealism which was, in part, a way to be political and to be liberated in a censorship environment or a fascist environment. It was also key in a colonialist context, a context where you were really punished for thinking outside of the lines or thinking outside of the political mainstream.

I think that we, in some ways, are again in times like that — in a political moment where we’re on the cusp of fascism all over the world, where there are not a lot of resources for people who are doing work that goes against the political grain. And so I think that surrealism is a kind of teacher that we’re revisiting in a lot of different ways. In my definition of how to use it in film, it’s what I was speaking about earlier. It’s this idea that surrealism is the crack in expectation. How do you create that jolt or that spark where the outcome is not that you are lulled into an expected outcome, but something else takes place?

For me, this is in form and constantly disrupting what you think should happen next, and that experience will spark something, make something alive for you. That’s all I care about. The worst thing in the world to me would be that you left [the film] and you just went and ate dinner and that was it for you. I’d rather make you furious with me than have you just go and eat a sandwich.

Is there anything else you would like to share?

I would like to speak about Zita Hanrot and her performance. Zita is one of the great actors of her generation and my generation, and she works primarily in the French market. She was a really important collaborator on the film, and so a part of the film became a product of our process and the discussions we were having together in our rehearsals about being a new mom and about being an artist, about being of Caribbean heritage, and about feminine desire. She became a very crucial collaborator. And so I started to rewrite the script in rehearsal to be about her. Zita had actually just had a child, and she had just done her first film project [after that]. She was in a big film [called Lee] with Kate Winslet.

So we took that experience and embedded it into this film that was originally maybe more biography. As I worked with her, it became as much about this modern-day character inspired by my work with Zita. It’s just magnificent because she’s always finding great meaning and conveying great meaning with a masterful subtlety. I’m just very excited for what is coming next for her.

And what’s next for you?

I actually just completed a short film starring Ruth Negga that was commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It’s called The Death of Cleopatra.

Is that what it is about?

You’ll have to wait and see. I’m also working on two feature-length scripts.

With the first feature, I’ve always told myself it’s something you just have to get through. Nobody believes in you before you’ve done it, and so you’re just up against that obstacle. Also, I think your first feature should be the purest form of what you believe about cinema. There’s no reason to make many compromises in my mind because you’re kind of like laying your marker down in the sand.