“The time it takes to march”: Pan-Africanism and beauty in Sarah Maldoror’s unapologetic cinema - Key Scholar Lecture

A position, a weapon, a dream: there are many terms Sarah Maldoror has used throughout her life to describe her cinema. As a pioneer of African cinema, her life and art are deeply intertwined with the history of filmmaking in Africa and its diasporas. Once, when discussing Sambizanga, her first feature film released in 1972, Maldoror responded to criticism that the film was not an explicit denunciation of Portuguese colonial oppression by saying: “If I wanted to film the brutality of the Portuguese, then I’d shoot my films in the bush. What I wanted to show in Sambizanga is the aloneness of a woman and the time it takes to march.” This Key Scholar Lecture, presented by Janaína Oliveira, a film researcher, independent curator, and professor at the Federal Institute of Rio de Janeiro (IFRJ), intends to explore how Maldoror forges a singular path in her films regarding the presuppositions of the continent’s cinemas, without relinquishing the combative and critical character of the 7th art shared by other filmmakers of her generation. To this end, it mobilises the notion of “beauty as a method”, as expressed by academic Christina Sharpe and also present in the thought of academic and writer Saidiya Hartman, to reflect on how the articulations between Pan-Africanism, aesthetics, and politics present in Maldoror’s films sustain the contemporary relevance of her filmmaking to this day. The Key Scholar Lecture is a programme presented in partnership with the Department of Film Studies, King’s College, London. Tickets £6.50 Programme type: Talk. Screen: NFT3.