June 13, 2025 / Gene Siskel Film Center / Chicago, IL
Suzanne Roussi Césaire is an enigma. Hailing from Martinique, her pursuits – including writing, mothering, editing, spousing, teaching, and evading Nazi censors – coalesced around her love for “freedom in all of its modalities.” Alongside her husband, Aimé Césaire, and additional co-conspirators like René Ménil, she co-founded the anti-imperialist literary magazine Tropiques as the Vichy regime threatened to engulf her natal island. Roussi Césaire edited all eleven issues, to which she also contributed seven incandescently brilliant essays that “focus movingly and heroically, but never sentimentally, on the challenges and responsibilities involved in the future of her land and people as well as on the imperative to find alternative weapons of survival.” Chief, for her, among those “alternative” tools of combat was surrealism.
“There's a kind of anticlimax in Suzanne Césaire’s particular story, because it really is one partially lost to time,” notes Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich. From the minor note of that “anticlimax,” Hunt-Ehrlich went on to craft her debut-feature, The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire (2024): an aching jewel of film that takes up with unmatched regard and sensitivity the conundrum folded into the frond of Roussi Césaire’s legacy like fresh rain: those of us invested in thinking with her in the contemporary moment are left with an imperative to grapple with the “partial” loss of her archive given that after 1945, she would never publish again and, although she wrote for the remainder of her life, she destroyed all of her manuscripts. Instead of striving to recover or recuperate the vanished texts, Hunt-Ehrlich hovers away from the reconstructive logics of a traditional biopic and manifests an altar at which audiences can sit alongside the silhouette of Roussi Césaire’s spirit.
To make a shrine to this great thinker without subjecting her to the vagaries of overdetermination epitomizes what Jennifer DeClue calls, in her seminal book Visitation: The Conjure Work of Black Feminist Avant-Garde Cinema, a “methodology of tenderness” wherein the filmmaker in question “mobilizes a love that goes back in time.” Such “mobilizing” occurs specifically through Hunt-Ehrlich’s refusal to “ask too much” of the archive, nor of Roussi-Césaire herself. Tenderly, the film imagines – evasively – her embodiments as writer, as wife, as mother… Tenderly, the film draws cues from the surrealist bend that breathes adamantly through each of the essays published in Tropiques. Tenderly, The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire seeks not to reach a conclusive answer as to why she destroyed her work but, rather, sculpts an hour of time to linger in the unwavering radicality and sumptuous rhythm of the surviving essays. Thus, the film grieves the amputation of the archive, cherishes what we do have left, and galvanizes audiences to – as Hunt-Ehrlich has – make a language of mark-making that continues to cite Roussi Césaire without overexposing her and, thus, also opens space to consider the foresighted agency embedded within her collusion in her own disappearance.
Featuring: Youssef Boucetta, David Jones, Jamila Brown, Cortlyn Kelly, Makala Kusi, Rasheida Witter, Jada-Amina Harvey, Ireon Roach, Sharmain Siddiqui, Camille Bacon, Denny Mwaura, Ryuan Johnson
Suzanne Roussi Césaire is an enigma. Hailing from Martinique, her pursuits – including writing, mothering, editing, spousing, teaching, and evading Nazi censors – coalesced around her love for “freedom in all of its modalities.” Alongside her husband, Aimé Césaire, and additional co-conspirators like René Ménil, she co-founded the anti-imperialist literary magazine Tropiques as the Vichy regime threatened to engulf her natal island. Roussi Césaire edited all eleven issues, to which she also contributed seven incandescently brilliant essays that “focus movingly and heroically, but never sentimentally, on the challenges and responsibilities involved in the future of her land and people as well as on the imperative to find alternative weapons of survival.” Chief, for her, among those “alternative” tools of combat was surrealism.
“There's a kind of anticlimax in Suzanne Césaire’s particular story, because it really is one partially lost to time,” notes Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich. From the minor note of that “anticlimax,” Hunt-Ehrlich went on to craft her debut-feature, The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire (2024): an aching jewel of film that takes up with unmatched regard and sensitivity the conundrum folded into the frond of Roussi Césaire’s legacy like fresh rain: those of us invested in thinking with her in the contemporary moment are left with an imperative to grapple with the “partial” loss of her archive given that after 1945, she would never publish again and, although she wrote for the remainder of her life, she destroyed all of her manuscripts. Instead of striving to recover or recuperate the vanished texts, Hunt-Ehrlich hovers away from the reconstructive logics of a traditional biopic and manifests an altar at which audiences can sit alongside the silhouette of Roussi Césaire’s spirit.
To make a shrine to this great thinker without subjecting her to the vagaries of overdetermination epitomizes what Jennifer DeClue calls, in her seminal book Visitation: The Conjure Work of Black Feminist Avant-Garde Cinema, a “methodology of tenderness” wherein the filmmaker in question “mobilizes a love that goes back in time.” Such “mobilizing” occurs specifically through Hunt-Ehrlich’s refusal to “ask too much” of the archive, nor of Roussi-Césaire herself. Tenderly, the film imagines – evasively – her embodiments as writer, as wife, as mother… Tenderly, the film draws cues from the surrealist bend that breathes adamantly through each of the essays published in Tropiques. Tenderly, The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire seeks not to reach a conclusive answer as to why she destroyed her work but, rather, sculpts an hour of time to linger in the unwavering radicality and sumptuous rhythm of the surviving essays. Thus, the film grieves the amputation of the archive, cherishes what we do have left, and galvanizes audiences to – as Hunt-Ehrlich has – make a language of mark-making that continues to cite Roussi Césaire without overexposing her and, thus, also opens space to consider the foresighted agency embedded within her collusion in her own disappearance.
Featuring: Youssef Boucetta, David Jones, Jamila Brown, Cortlyn Kelly, Makala Kusi, Rasheida Witter, Jada-Amina Harvey, Ireon Roach, Sharmain Siddiqui, Camille Bacon, Denny Mwaura, Ryuan Johnson