Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich is an American artist and filmmaker whose work has been presented at the Berlinale, la Biennale di Venezia, the Guggenheim, the Tate Modern, and the Whitney. The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire (2024), her feature debut, meditates on and refracts notions of history, memory, desire, representation, collaboration, and the creative process (including filmmaking), all intersecting in what Hunt-Ehrlich identifies as her central concern: the inner worlds of Black women. Suzanne Césaire is a Martinican writer, thinker, publisher, anti-colonialist activist, teacher, and mother, whose writing – seven pieces exist – had an important role in the history of Surrealism, as well as Negritude, a philosophy developed in the pages of the Martinique cultural journal she co-founded with her husband Aimé Césaire, Tropiques. The film follows a group of actors performing the roles of Suzanne, Aimé, and André Breton, while also further embodying, interrogating, and complicating Suzanne’s writing — and thereby her legacy — and its marginalised history. The film received its Canadian premiere in the Wavelengths program at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, during which this interview was conducted by Christopher Heron.
The Seventh Art: I’m curious how you first came to Suzanne Césaire’s work: what is the origin of the idea for the project?
Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich: Suzanne Césaire is, I feel, a cult figure and when you trace who she’s inspired, it’s like a who’s who of the 20th century: André Breton, Wifredo Lam’s very famous painting, “The Jungle” (1942-43), is based on Suzanne Césaire’s writing about humans being intrinsically linked to plant life. The fate of plants, the fate of nature is also the fate of humans.
[Césaire’s concept of] “Plant Man.”
“Plant Man,” exactly.
That [represents] Ethiopia, too, right?
Totally. The scene in the film where the drummers are kind of embedded in the tree is supposed to be a recreation of that painting [“The Jungle”] and that idea. She’s basically… it’s even deeper than that, if you get really deep into French intellectual culture. France has such a rich sort of space of public intellectuals, I would say more so than the States. There’s a lot of folks that maybe in the States might not translate [as well known], but are quite well known in France and they have really involved correspondence with her. She was inspiring people across many disciplines and public spaces, but she was this kind of shadow figure of the 20th century and my question was, “How could someone be so talented and just stop?” That was what I was really curious about, trying to imagine being really, really good at something and then deciding not to do it anymore. So, I went to Martinique to talk to her family and ask them why she stopped. What was surprising is that I got the answer that she didn’t stop, she just stopped sharing it with the world. And that becomes a really big moment in the film and a point of departure for me in the film.
It’s funny that you say shadow figure because the book that I read [her work translated in] was Refusal of the Shadow, which is kind of exactly what you’re describing.
Yeah, that was the first time I read her work, too. That’s an older book. It’s interesting because translation plays such an important part in how we can access her work and you should read the newer translation that Daniel Maximin put together [The Great Camouflage: Writings of Dissent (1941-1945)] because it’s actually really different.
One of the things in the film and why I worked with Zita Hanrot, who is a French and Jamaican movie star and I was so honoured that she would do the film; she’s amazing. One of the reasons I wanted to work with her is that I didn’t want to translate Suzanne’s work. I mean, there are subtitles, you can access it as an English-speaking audience, but she relays the writing in French, so the original voice of the work as it came from her is preserved in the film in French.
It must have been tough then with subtitling it, because now you’re going back into the problem.
It’s true. Language was such a central question about the work and I think it’s a central question about the Caribbean. It’s a really tricky place to tell stories about because it’s a place where there’s a lot of shared political urgency by people who, because of the residue of colonisation, speak different languages: mainly Spanish, French, and English. But it’s people who are literally, you know, 20 miles away from each other, technically related. There’s shared political needs because the Caribbean is the frontline of global warming. The Caribbean is politically — in the global geopolitical — very disempowered. So for me, when I think of a Caribbean cinema, it has to be multilingual in order to really have the politics that I’m interested in.
I guess it’s what she says in her writing, to not just go with the flow, right? I feel that with the multimedia that you use, the different types of images, inherently adds a political dimension, which is that this isn’t just verisimilitude. There’s a feeling like this has been put together, which I think in her writing is a suggestion of how you can be productive and move forward because she seemed to be dispirited by the assimilation that was just happening with the French colonisers, rather than standing up and creating a unique art form.
Yeah, and I think that’s even how I envision her surrealism, which is a big question: is she a surrealist? André Breton and her both wrote about each other and also had a correspondence — a flirtatious one. People like to call her a surrealist. I see her surrealism as exactly what you just described. We have these ways that society is organised, these expectations of how we’re supposed to live, and I think all of us to some extent are concerned with how to actually live authentically and in a way that feels morally and spiritually authentic to our values. For her, the idea was that there might be some way to crack this kind of social expectation or restriction or oppression with… you could call it surrealism, but it was also an embrace of this access to a kind of spiritual way of thinking. You could call it madness, you could call it surrealism. She saw ways to reach that through art, she also saw it through nature. I think the concern was that we know that we want something better and more liberated for ourselves, but how do we actually envision that if everything about the way we’ve been acculturated is of this system we kind of want to reconstruct. That’s why she’s so inspiring to me.
She’s not afraid to mix and match ideas, which I think is a kind of surrealism, right? Something you don’t expect. Even her admiration for the German anthropologist [Leo Frobenius], I think what she says specifically is that this combination of a kind of mythology within a sociology is what was so appealing. And I think that that also resonates in your work, that it’s not just one style filmmaking, it’s a bricolage maybe? Is that something that you were conscious of, having read what she had written about poetry? She talks about poets and it doesn’t feel like she’s including herself, which is fair, because I think that she’s not just one thing. There are passages in these essays that are very poetic, but she probably doesn’t want to be pigeonholed into one term.
Being devoted to her is like a devotion of the small, because I think a lot of the ways you fall into her works, sometimes it’s two lines, but they’re so incredible: “Martinican poetry will be cannibal or it will not be,” or “Surrealism, tightrope of our hope.” It’ll be this one line or two lines. A lot of the work, for me, was about thinking that small things we do can still be important and can still be enduring across time. I love that you said bricolage. I really do make work that way. I’m, for better or worse, a big risk-taker in the ways I make films. It’s very scary, but I believe, very much, in a liberated cinema. Part of how I approach that is that I’m very agnostic about genre. For better or worse, I think of genre as texture: narrative filmmaking is a texture, documentary is a texture, music is a texture. I want to approach it more like painting where, like you said, are using different techniques together, but something new comes out of it. I really respond to what you just described, that’s absolutely how the work is put together in many ways.
Like [the film’s] dancing scene, which has a chiaroscuro, if you were to compare it to a painting. It even made me think of West Indies (1979) by Med Hondo.
I’m obsessed, Med Hondo is my… I could go really deep on that. I think often when people talk about the political work of Godard, they really just mean Med Hondo in terms of a kind of actualising of the politic, while also doing formal auteur cinema. Absolutely, he’s an inspiration. I think the thing that gets challenging is where the marketplace meets the work. The marketplace is so incentivised to have filmmakers really take something off the shelf and then just pour a story into that format, but I think that’s how film will die [laughs]. The only way we’re going to find the thrill of the new is by continuing to take risks and put things together that haven’t been put together before — or have, but there’s something slightly different about what is being put together. I’m a believer in the cinephile, but sometimes it feels like a dying breed or a little isolating, especially in the States. I don’t know how Canada feels. but it’s the same. Okay.
It’s the same. It’s [like] a language that through not being used is just going away. I think you’re right, it’s because of the — well, not constraints because constraints can be creative and liberating, but more just that the access to money, even if it’s a small amount, is hard to get. I read you talking about the production of this film and how you had to have some creative solutions to problems that came from the resources that were available. Was that something that happened recurring throughout the film’s production or is it just one or two things?
Yeah, sometimes I think limitations can be productive. We didn’t have a steady cam and a dolly, we just had dolly. I was like, “I think it should be dolly. I think we should really go back to sort of a meat and potatoes, beginning craft of filmmaking,” which is the real precision movement of dolly track and a real, full dolly cart. But we couldn’t afford both that and steady cam, so that meant that we were in this 100 acre tropical field for all of our production with 100 feet of dolly track and this huge dolly cart. We were very limited by that. Sometimes it was totally perfect for what we wanted to do, but sometimes it was really challenging and really hot and really slow. But as a result, there’s a kind of unity to the work, because everything, except for one part of the film, has that real precision… the dolly just moves and angles, you know? I think that’s something that I love about the film and it came from a limitation, because if I just had money, we would have also just had a steady cam because it solves so many problems sometimes when it’s really hot, people are tired, and you need something fast.
I found the rhythm of how the camera moves from scene to scene to be really interesting. I was trying to guess whether that was something that you had planned in advance or is it something that you determined in the edit because, as you say, it seems to be so precise, but I have to imagine that sometimes you move scenes around. Was it completely planned out in advance?
Alex Ashe, the cinematographer, and producer Sophie Luo, we continue to work together across many projects. What’s really nice about that is you really start to have that kind of rhythm and trust in the collaboration and a process really develops in good ways. So Alex and I, before we shoot, pick a couple filmmakers or film ideas and then we just watch a ton of stuff. For this film, interestingly enough, we watched a lot of Miklós Jancsó. We really got deep into how he would set up his dolly track, which would be a single diagonal and then the pivot of the camera on the tripod head on the dolly. So we were already sort of thinking about Miklós Jancsó circles and I think that that really informed them; we just kept setting up these circles in the film that you see repeated in that choreography. My work, for a long time, has functioned around a principle of choreography. One of the things I find the most exciting about film is that choreography. Do you think that that’s like a dividing line between the kind of filmmaker or films that you like? Because there’s such a strong school these days, especially an art house film, of just locked-off shooting, right? The long take, but it’s a locked-off frame.
The contemplative contemporary cinema or the “slow cinema.”
Yeah, or even in American indie, because it’s a very affordable way to shoot and you can just do a lot of narrative, where the blocking comes from the performance and then story. But I’ve always been a person where one of the most thrilling things, where your stomach turns over and you’re just at the edge of your seat, is how the camera moves and what it reveals. What would you say your big love is?
I studied the so-called “slow cinema” and so I loved those films at that time. It felt punk to be doing that. But then, of course, everyone starts doing it and then it just becomes codified as a thing where you go to a film festival and all the films are like this and then you don’t feel the same way that you felt when you first saw that. Likewise, now when I see a camera move, I’m so excited because we don’t have it in so many films. I guess the simple answer is whether it makes sense why it’s happening in the film. Like it does in your film. It seems like such an integral part of the rhythm of everything: the speaking, the movement, the blocking of the characters, their actual choreography. It makes sense. But then again, you have what Jacques Rivette wrote about the immorality of the tracking shot in Kapo (1960).
I feel like the hegemony that I feel oppressed by, maybe it’s starting to sort of self-correct. But for a while, I felt like every American film, thoughtful film, indie film is a gentle handheld, a stable handheld, you know? You follow the character in a tracking handheld with just a little energy, everything’s sort of evocative, a slightly moving handheld, but as soon as I saw it, I would just shut down completely — power off. I couldn’t even see it because it was just so inescapable. I think that was part of the draw in the last couple of years that I’ve had to dolly, a reaction to that. There’s a really early tripod head, like the first tripod head, was all gears. I would have to look up if they still make them, they’re quite expensive to get them now. You would crank it and basically your angles couldn’t be any more precise. And so the last couple of years, I had just been craving precise angles. I think that we have to keep shocking our system into feeling things and that’s part of the challenge of trying to exist outside of the commercials, because the commercial is so fast and it cannibalises anything interesting. You’re constantly having to really think about what’s important to you in relation to the ways that all of our strategies get neutered so fast.
A professor of mine that taught avant-garde cinema was talking about how in the past he could tell that certain kids in the class had parents in advertising. That’s how a Michael Snow thing ends up in a commercial. Something that is on one end of the spectrum gets cannibalised, as you say, by the other because they see [the technique] without meaning, a flat aesthetic thing that can be used in any situation. It is the hegemony, as you say.
I don’t actually have problems with the fact of a commercial. I think the problem is when the commercial doesn’t allow the device to still be political. It only works to make this feel things because of its political contrast to something else, right? A lot of times, many commercials, they want to steal the aesthetics without having to commit anything to the political urgency and that’s when it becomes this violation, right? Especially in America now — I don’t know what Canada’s like — because we have no national funding, I don’t know how any filmmaker could avoid institutions or commercial entities completely. You just couldn’t make work with big crews. But when it works, for me, is when the political urgency is protected somehow, walled off from the fear and complacency of mass market, which sometimes happens.
I was just talking to Muhammed Hamdy and he was talking about this and he mentioned Godard. When the films have less budget, they become more creative, they become more political because they’re less on the hook for money.
And yet his last film was paid for by Yves St. Laurent. So, even Godard had to do “branded,” but it’s still a very political work. I’m agnostic in a lot of ways that I think other filmmakers like me maybe aren’t, but to me it’s all about what shocks your system and what facilitates that is really less important than the experience.
I was shocked by the horse and the storm in your film. Then I read [Suzanne Césaire’s] “The Great Camouflage.” You really captured that, but it’s still shocking when you see it. Is that mixed media? Archival footage?
We really had a horse. My producers hated me. The horse was actually— I have never said this publicly, but I have a friend who’s a very incredible fine artist, Simone Leigh, and she was on set with us and she actually decorated that horse with all those ribbons. I had these reference images of carnival horses from around the time in the Caribbean and then she did all of those wonderful pink bows. But yeah, the first lines of “Grand Camouflage” talked about this horse being struck dead.
For me, it all comes down to a very central philosophy I have to my work and the best way to explain it is how I think about music: usually in a song, the biggest pleasure centre is the chorus, but the chorus would not be pleasurable if the song was all chorus. You actually require the dissonance of the song in order to feel the pleasure of the harmony or the melody. It’s the relief or the contrast of lack of pleasure and pleasure that even creates the experience of pleasure to begin with. That has always guided how I think about film structure. Boredom is actually a really rewarding experience. This is where I am different than many of the slow cinema ways of thinking: I do think you need those shocks of just pleasure or candy or colour or irreverence or romance in order to have the full emotional response to either of the things. It’s like when you watch a film and it’s giving you non-stop pleasure, you turn off. I have the same thing when I watch films that are only slow. It’s the most productive to me when you’re just given something so sweet and then you’re asked to really work. So the horse is candy.
Speaking of the music, it’s…
Sabine McCalla. She’s a rock star.
I wanted to know how the pieces were selected for her work.
That’s another candy in the film. Sabine is a rock star, she’s so cool. One of the things I do with my collaborators is make them all mixtapes in pre-pro — everyone, actors, crew… She was on a bunch of mixtapes and what I love about her music is that she’ll take old songs, pop songs from the ’30s and then she’ll cover them in her style. I really wanted to work with her because when I talked to the Césaire kids, I asked what they were listening to? In Martinique around that time, there was this music called biguine, which I think a lot of times the assumption of what was happening then. It’s a very clarinet-driven jazz that grew out of Martinique. I asked, “Were they listening to biguine?” And they’re like, “No, Aimé Césaire went to the Sorbonne. They were listening to Duke Ellington.” They were very much a part of the international jazz-listening space. So, it felt really fitting to choose this ’30s pop environment to try to play around in for me and Sabine, but we didn’t limit ourselves. It was very much a Marie Antoinette (2006) approach of prioritising how it feels over a complete fidelity to the time period.
Sabine lives in New Orleans and it was a hot, hot summer. It was like 115 degrees and her studio kept getting shut down. She couldn’t record because it was too hot. There was a monsoon. But we picked a bunch of songs and she and her collaborator recorded a bunch of songs using organs and different guitars. I was like, “I want it to be electric, electric guitars.” Then we pared those songs down and it ended up being: a Creole song, “Erzulie Dantor,” a Voodoo God of love and sailors; one original song of hers [“Dream Weaver”]; and then also this song “Ain’t No Weight,” which is kind of a soul song that she does this version of with organ. It’s just lovely.
And there’s Experience 7 [“Lanmou sé on danjé”], the zouk track at the end. I’ve been listening to that non-stop. I love it so much.
Thank you for saying that. I am so appreciative that you appreciate that song. Basically, that song is called “Love and Danger” and we had to track them down because whoever the record label is, they’re like, “We don’t even talk.” That’s a deep cut. But luckily I have some friends in Guadeloupe. We couldn’t find them through their publisher or the record label, but my friends in Guadeloupe found them because they’re there, it’s not a big place. There’s two versions of the song, we use both versions. There’s a slower zouk version and then there’s one that is like… sometimes there’s songs and you’re like, “Is this one of the top 100 songs ever made? It’s kind of that realm with me, it’s so good.
The ’85 version?
Yeah, the ’85 version.
That’s the one I’ve been really rinsing at home.
Exactly. All of us in the edit, once it was moving through the edit, it was the kind of thing where we wouldn’t be editing any more, but it would still be on. I dropped it in the credits. It was kind of like a gift for my audience. I want to be the experimental filmmaker who’s super generous.
It’s like Beau Travail (1999), when you get to the end.
Yeah, it’s totally a Claire Denis move. It’s so true. I love when she uses, in 35 Shots of Rum (2008), the Commodores song “Nightshift.”
I’ve always loved the cover of Hot Chocolate’s “Put Your Love in Me” in Bastards (2013).
Barry Jenkins has nice moments like that, too, using Caetano Veloso in Moonlight (2016). When he did that, that’s when I really believed in him. I believed in him because that film is so formally rigorous and then when he did that, I fully believed in him because it’s actually a really easy thing to mess up: a needle drop. It’s a delicate thing.
You don’t want to make it feel like it’s doing heavy lifting for the emotion or the narrative.
It’s a big power, so you have to be careful how you use it.
I skirted over some of the heavier stuff [in the film], but the idea that gets mentioned early on is what does it mean to decide that you’re not remembered or canonised? But also who does the remembering? I think it’s — in a positive way— obviously not resolved by the end of the film; you can’t really resolve that. How did you approach such a heavy topic?
I made this discovery that is very important to the film. It happened after I had already made the film, so this wasn’t a part of how I thought about it in writing it, it happened in maybe the late edit. I finally read this book called The Tale of Genji, which is a Japanese book, possibly the first novel. It’s written by a woman in feudal Japan and what’s interesting about this book is it’s a very long epic where the last hundred pages are actually written 100 years after the author died and they’re written by another woman. What’s also really interesting about this book is this last chapter of the book, written 100 years after the book was first written by another author, doesn’t end in any kind of final way. It actually ends mid-sentence, so it’s incomplete and that incompleteness is kind of an invitation in some ways. I realised when I read the book and then I read about the book that this was actually a really interesting proposal about this idea of remembrance or immortality. How do you transcend death? That’s one of these existential things that drives us when we even think about accomplishment or erecting any kind of monuments, right? How will I be remembered? How will I live on even though we can’t live forever? Something of me must live. That’s just a human desire, but this was a really interesting idea. Well, maybe the idea is not that you have to complete things, maybe there’s a kind of way that completion is — across time, across people — an act of faith that someone will pick up where the work left off. It’s what informs the ending of the film. It was where that decision came from, because there’s more to that scene, but when I read this book and I understood this very interesting fact about the book, I said, “I see, it has to end here.” Because that’s what this film is to her work and it should end on an invitation that shows my actual faith and trust that what she did was enough. Even though it seems like this small amount of work, maybe even this unfinished work, for me, it’s about the enough-ness of that.
In her own work, it seems like she’s challenging other people often. And it’s not about her work as a self-contained theory that has been proven, but more like throwing down the gauntlet to the people reading. I guess with Tropiques at that time, that would have been an important aspect of the publication, because they were trying to create something new. So, it makes sense that maybe she didn’t want the completeness either, right?
Right, absolutely. I think that’s a really important way of challenging the ways we construct history or value — in the West, at least — which is very concerned with the prolific, singular artist. It’s an interesting sort of proposal or challenge to that way of thinking, what you just described.
Even someone like [Herman] Melville, right? There are so many artists that we take for granted that they were popular, but objectively they were not. We backwards project that because this person is seen as important. But most art that is cutting edge or marginalised for reasons of oppression, we want to bring it out and draw attention to it, which is great, but then it also runs the risk of overdetermining what that was at the moment of its creation, which was probably very hard to access.
That’s the thing about her as well, which in some ways she’s one of the most enduring voices. Do people really read [Breton’s] Manifesto of Surrealism anymore? I mean, I guess some people, but her work is really having a kind of renaissance. And there was a way that she was really prescient, especially with the “Grand Camouflage” essay about the urgency of a politic about the environment. She kind of forecasted global warming in many ways in the work, which was not something that people were talking about at that time. Something about the work stayed just completely timely and yeah, you can’t predict that.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but that essay is written about Haiti?
Yeah, they were in Haiti. They were teaching there.
That’s another aspect, we ascribe that she did not get to do more artistic work and her daughter kind of suggests this, but also does that devalue the work she did as a mother and an instructor — all these other things — which perhaps to her seemed more real or vital than publishing?
I agree with that and I hope that that’s present in the film, those kind of ephemeral, but very valid uses of a life. I wonder if she decided or chose that that was more important. I mean, at the end of the day, I hope that the film doesn’t try to limit the answer to this question of why do we only have the seven essays, but rather leaves a lot of space for that to be an answer, as well as the intense sexism of the time she was working in, as well as all the other reasons we’ve discussed. So I hope that it leaves a kind of open-ended approach, that’s what’s most interesting to me. I say this all the time and when I talk about the film, but I really don’t even like biopics. I think they often, in an attempt to have some kind of narrative resolution that just doesn’t actually exist in life and living, really sort of flatten people and events and stories in this way that’s kind of unwatchable. So, I was really trying to do kind of an anti-novel or an anti-biopic that just left a lot of possibility, even as it tried to talk about something that already happened.
How does it function in a gallery setting [as “Too Bright to See”]? Does it open it up more, do you think, or less?
It’s a very different film. It’s a 20-minute film. There’s a little bit of overlap in the world, but there’s also a lot of different footage and elements. It’s also a physical use of space. It exists on this screen, which is a scrim and the way that the scrim works, you might take for granted this scrim, but it actually took a lot of prototyping. It was really hard to pull off because essentially we had to find a combination of materials; it was important to me that there was still a fidelity of image, a real projected image that felt like a cinema, but I was interested that when the light flashed on the screen, it would become completely transparent and the device of the projector onto the screen would be very much revealed — like the actual mechanism of the cinema would be revealed. You would experience the image in the dark and then in the light, it would become very clear that the image was an illusion and that there’s a whole mechanism creating this experience. But to create that, figure out a material that holds light, but then when flashed with light becomes transparent, it’s actually almost impossible. So we had to prototype all these combinations of silks and meshes to finally get this combination that does that beautifully. There’s also this use of light and space in “Too Bright to See” that is echoed in the short film, as well as in the mechanism of the projection, which flashes light and then also plays cinema. They are very different ways of working, but one thing I really appreciate about this way of working is that I think the cinematic experience is so important to me. We started this conversation talking about theatres disappearing and you really have to imagine in ten years, how will cinema exist? How will we see movies? I think that it’s really exciting to also be thinking about the space that we’ll see movies in and maybe the space isn’t just a black box. Maybe, in the case of my installation, it’s orange. Some installations that I love, it’s a colour, it’s on a piece of glass on the ceiling, but that we could completely rethink the encounter.
Encountering Suzanne’s work, what are you carrying with you from this experience to new work that you’re doing? Is there something that resonated from this that’s in your own practice?
I think it’s really interesting when you make work about someone who’s dead, because you definitely end up spending all this time with this person or this idea of a person and it’s almost like living with a ghost; you feel like you get to know something about someone. You’ll never really be able to totally verify if you do know them at all and yet there’s this incredible experience of intimacy. And again, I think this is in the film, you think you’re chasing the person, but ultimately you’re often chasing yourself as you pursue something in that person. I worked on this a long time — probably too long, it’s embarrassing to say how long — and when it was done, it really felt a moment of almost being able to say goodbye to someone you’ve loved very much, but to say, “I can leave you here and I can go up the road.” The film that I just shot something for this summer, commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is about a missing sculpture and a woman who finds it. I keep finding stories that hit these notes. ❏
Our interview with Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich was conducted in September of 2024 and is part of our TIFF 2024 coverage, which also includes interviews with Roberto Minervini, Guy Maddin/Evan Johnson/Galen Johnson, Jessica Sarah Rinland, Nicolás Pereda, and Muhammed Hamdy.
