The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire review – the legacy of a dissident and inspirational surrealist author

Brief film looks at the intense flowering of essays by the Caribbean feminist and anti-imperialist who saw surrealism as a revolutionary mode This brief work from New York film-maker Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich is the equivalent of a platform performance in the theatre: a look at the works of Caribbean feminist, anti-imperialist and surrealist partisan Suzanne Césaire, played by Zita Hanrot; Hanrot, rather, plays an actress musingly preparing to play her. Césaire’s brief, intense flowering of work occurred in second world war Martinique, then a colony of France, controlled by the collaborationist Vichy government. Paradoxically liberated by this oppressive situation, Césaire co-founded a journal called Tropiques and published an influential series of essays on politics, literature and art, which showed how passionately inspired she was by her encounter with the great surrealist André Breton. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/rx4iLoM via IFTTT

‘Viscerally terrifying’: writers on their scariest movie moments ever

For Halloween, Guardian writers look back at their biggest movie nightmares, from The Omen to It Follows

  • There are major spoilers ahead

Dario Argento’s equally gorgeous and grotesque Suspiria is here to cure anybody of their scary-movie snobbery. In this masterpiece, Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper) is a graceful and wide-eyed American who shows up at the Tanz Academy, an elite ballet school in the shadows of the Black Forest. Whoever dreamed up this august institution, with its sumptuous art nouveau decor and gaudily vivid hues, may as well have written the Wes Anderson playbook. Young women float by in gauzy get-ups and then, one by one, they disappear. The creepy-crawly atmosphere has Suzy on edge from the jump – and interludes with a Dr Feelgood and a case of maggots falling from the ceiling do little to calm her nerves. In the film’s thrilling climax, a terrified Suzy works her way down a secret corridor and finds the building’s inner sanctum, where she faces off with a coven of witches, floating furniture and bloodthirsty rotting bodies that make most Hollywood slasher villains look like slapped-together Halloween costumes. Come for the vibes, stay for the violence. Lauren Mechling

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