AND THE DOGS KEPT SILENT

Sarah Maldoror, France, 16mm > digital, 13 min, 1978

And the Dogs Kept Silent is based on recorded excerpts from the play Et les chiens se taisaient (1958) by the Martinican poet and politician Aimé Césaire (1913–2008).

The life of a man, a revolutionary, relived by him at the moment of death in the middle of a great collective disaster. His existential dialogue with his mother reverberates around the African sculptures stored at the Musée de l’Homme, the Parisian museum full of colonial plunder whose director was the Surrealist anthropologist Michel Leiris. Sarah Maldoror had been planning to stage this tragic poem since the 1950s, finally interpreted here by Gabriel Glissant and the filmmaker herself, and also integrating three spectators in their game who take the role of silent witnesses.—Sabzian

Sarah Maldoror (1929–2020). Co-founder (1956) of Les Griots, the first Black theatre company in France; relocated to Algeria and worked as assistant on Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers (1966); made 40+ films of her own from 1968–1997, including Sambizanga (1972), one of the first African films directed by a woman; screenings at venues including Cannes Film Festival and Berlinale. L’ordre national du mérite (2011). Complete retrospective of films and archival exhibition at Palais de Tokyo and Musée de l’Homme (2021).