Suzanne Césaire was a writer, teacher, feminist activist, pioneer of Afro-Surrealism and key member of the Négritude movement. Was it this trailblazer figure that interested you for your first feature film?
I grew up in New York City in the East Village in the 80s and 90s. My parents were artists, and there were books stacked pretty much floor to ceiling. There was a great reverence for Caribbean writers like Aime Césaire, Franz Fanon, CLR James, Edouard Glissant. It was in my twenties that I encountered Suzanne Césaire, just as some important translations were being made. There’s this line in her work – “poetry will be a cannibal or it will not be” – I was shocked into a rare kind of aliveness reading it. The intensity of her work is as accomplished as the greatest works of art, but there has always been a lot of mystery around her life: she died young and she only published during the second world war, and then the work stops. So I think there was a genuine desire, at first casual and then obsessive, to know why? I went looking for her, because I would want someone to do the same for me.
How did you go about researching and documenting the portrait of Suzanne Césaire?
I am a bit of a bastard in my training. I worked in the studios of some very important fine artists most of my twenties. I began taking acting classes and performance workshops and collaborating with dancers and exhibiting a lot of my work as film installations, but I went to a very traditional film school. It’s all ended up in my practice. This is to say I did read a lot of the important academic histories, but ultimately I decided to just buy a plane ticket and talk to the people who knew her – like just to ask directly. I brought great simplicity and respect to that process. There are 10 hours of interviews and those transcripts are woven through the film, read by collaborators actors Zita Hanrot and Motell Foster and Reese Antoinette.
The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire shifts between present and past, abstraction and narration, blurring the lines between the imagined and the biographical. Why did you create this mise en abyme with the shooting of the film within the film?
In the film, history is depicted as an ongoingness. For me this is the politics of the work – the form of the film. We are in the midst of a time when there is a lot of nostalgia, and a desire to see and know the past with a certain kind of completeness. I was conscious of not wanting to make a traditional film biopic in that way. I’m not trying to erase what is incomplete. A lot of this film is rooted in what this history means to the characters in the film today.
Why did you cast Zita Hanrot to play this actress and new mother and how did you adapt this literary text together for the film?
Zita is singular in her talent, and work ethic. She was, from the first conversation we had, an important voice in the work. It was very important to me that Césaire’s writing be read in French, not translated. The Caribbean is a very particular region, because you have people who are essentially and literally cousins, living sometimes 15KM away from one another separated by water, and speaking a different language. So the film tries to make space for the biligualness of the film’s origins and audience. Zita moves between French and English with an understanding that is to the very depths of a text. When we began working together she had just become a mother. I am a mother also, and so was Suzanne Césaire, who had 6 children. When Zita and I began to meet I would get off the call and rework the script for her. Together we rebuilt the character of the actress and filled her with our own experiences. This was one of the most beautiful parts of the process because production with our tiny budget was very challenging. Luckily the over-preparation Zita and I did was very helpful for this because we just understood each other – that from now on we would always be risking to make something when our young children need us too – that the same was true for Suzanne Césaire. So something about the subject matter was in our lives in a way that was authentic and this built a spiritual understanding in our collaboration.
How did you work with cinematographer Alex Ashe and why did you shoot in 16mm?
Alex and I have worked together on five films now. In the midst of production there’s not always an opportunity to say everything, and that sense of the unspoken understanding can only be earned over the course of working together over time. Alex has one of the best work ethics of any dp I have worked with, and a monastic devotion to celluloid and that has been at the heart of our collaboration, that we are devoted to a filmmaking grounded in the materiality of the medium. He also has an indexical knowledge of films, and I have a terrible memory for names, so a lot of our process is me describing a film and him correctly citing name, date, director. There’s always a thing in prep of like ‘how do we build a structural philosophy for the cinematography that starts with the equipment list and runs through production?’ Our budget was always challenging on this film, and that creates limitations that also can have creative results – in this case we had only dolly in the midst of a palm tree forest and no Steadicam – So that limitation ended up becoming the defining language of the work.
How would you describe the collaboration with Sabine McCalla’s music for the soundtrack?
I was listening to Sabine’s music during pre-production – actually, I think I included her music on a playlist I made for production and for Zita. In Sabine’s own practice she reworks songs from the archive, old pop songs from the 1920s, stuff like that. So our work became a mix of curating and also her writing and finding the right instrumentation. I wanted the music to further disrupt what was period about the film, so we didn’t limit ourself. The film opens with her cover of a kreyol folk song, a prayer to Erzulie Dantor, voudou goddess of sailors, mothers and of people in love. I want to press a vinyl of her songs for the film. They are magic.
Aimé’s success in the political sphere eclipsed Suzanne Césaire’s artistic work. Does the film aim to reassert her place as a radical voice and visionary?
A funny thing – when I began to work on this film I intentionally stopped myself from revisiting his work. His charisma is a mountain. It was hard to see her standing beside him, and then after she passed, to see her standing on her own. I made a decision to focus on her. To go against dominant narratives is difficult because of the neglect, because of the idea that a story worth telling must meet a certain bar for our attention. Suzanne Césaire’s work requires you to care about, in some cases one or two sentences. It is an exercise in worshiping the small achievements that survive.
Interview by Olivier Pierre
