‘Songs’ of Maldoror: Political cinema through poetic image

This article analyses the particularities of Sarah Maldoror’s gaze, founded upon a singular notion of political cinema that used the poetic image of a surrealist matrix. In the Portuguese-speaking world, Maldoror stood out from other engagé filmmakers for being the first to use fiction to portray the fight for African independence. Later films shot in Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau portray the involvement of people in the decolonization, without failing to unabashedly point out the cultural hybridity. Her work (dis)orders itself as a ‘filmography of survival’ – which includes both personal projects and commissions accepted to make a living in cinema, in her insubordinate and politicized way. Making use of poetry, jazz and painting, she relied upon a surrealist aesthetic and never conceded to the pressures exerted on her filmmaking, all the while putting together a body of work portraying decolonization and survival. I propose that the invisibility of Maldoror’s filmography resulted from the difficult balance between her creative choices and the coercion she was subjected to.