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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Peter Bradshaw

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

The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire.
Revolutionary thinking … The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire Photograph: Publicity image

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.

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