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

Landscapes of Resistance review – an enigmatic meditation on a life marked by Auschwitz

This documentary by Serbian-born director Marta Popivoda is a mildly psychedelic drift into the horror of one woman’s deportation and determined survival

Much of this Serbian documentary uses a striking, mildly psychedelic technique: a super-slow dissolve between images that morph near-imperceptibly into the next. Cracks in rendered rural walls appear to shift and Balkan forest vegetation undergoes subtle mutations, as the film’s subject, nonagenarian Sofia Vujanovic, recalls her past in voiceover: one of Tito’s partisans, her wartime activities and subsequent deportation to Auschwitz. It’s as if an ineluctable force – history – is moving through the material world, warping and reshaping it.

These tectonics operate on human flesh too: Vujanovic’s Auschwitz tattoo has slipped down her forearm as the years have gone by. Purpose still weighting her words, she recounts her journey into activism: she was attracted to communism by progressive classmates in the countryside; cherrypicked as a cell leader during the second world war because being a woman allowed her to escape attention; and then sickened by taking her first life, an SS officer during a raid on a supply train. Vujanovic was then captured, tortured and shipped off into darkness in Poland, with Czechoslovak railwaymen taunting the prisoners en route: “Gas, gas!” She thought they were being sent to work at a gas-processing plant.

Landscapes of Resistance is available on True Story on 2 February.

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