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Weapons of Resistance
Film director, Euzhan Palcy at the
National Maritime Museum, 25 March, 2007,
part of the Abolition Bi-Centenary,
| It's a field day for Slave-Trade Abolition celebrations across the country with cultural and media institutions desperate not to miss their say. The bigger the institution, the bigger the splash. During one such profile event at the National Maritime Museum on the 25 March, Euzhan Palcy, the only woman of African descent to become a Hollywood director described how the French did it last year when all the schools in Africa and France celebrated Abolition together as part of an established annual event. At one event, Jacques Chirac invited artists to come to the Senate Garden and read the work of Aimé Cesaire, Euzhan Palcy's Spritual father, an intellectual and writer as well as founder of the Negritude movement. Euzhan Palcy's talk also included an account of her films and the support she has received from leading figures in the film world such as Francois Truffaut and Marlon Brando. But greatest of all, Palcy told us, was the blessing and patronage she received from Aimé Cesaire. |
| Indeed, the most fascinating subject of all her films is Euzhan Palcy's three part television documentary, Aimé Cesaire: a Voice for History. In Palcy's words, Cesaire is the still living‚ worldwide intellectual and poet and playwright. Cesaire, also an historian and philosopher was author of the masterpiece, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land that contains a foreword by his enthusiast, Andre Breton. Cesaire created the Negritude movement, along with Leon Damas and the African, Leopold |  |
| Senghor, a thinker who changed his life. Cesaire said that when he came to Paris, Senghor gave him the key. Until then, though he was of African descent he was a colonised man who knew nothing about the mother-land. (Above right: Aimé Cesaire born in Mortinique in 1913) |
 |
Aimé
Cesaire was to become a political man but not a politician‚
Palcy tells us. At one time he was the youngest mayor ever in the
capital of Martinique. He was also a famous
playwright, too, of works such as the Tragedy of
King Kristof, Season of the Congo
and Toussaint L‚Ouverture. Along with
Frantz Fannon, another Martinique
born intellectual who was one of Cesaire's
student's and became a thinker who dealt with the matter of decolonisation
and the psychopathology of colonisation, Aimé
Cesaire also gave the key of creative expression to Martinique
novelist Joseph Sobel. |
| Palcy's first film was an adap- tation of Sobel‚'s Sugar Cane Alley, a novel of plantation life in the 1930's in Martinique. "In Martinique where I grew up", Palcy tells us," people saw a lot of movies but rarely saw black characters. When I was young I decided to be a film-maker. Ofcourse it was difficult in Martinique but I knew that we weren't what some of these Hollywood movies preten- ded that we were.' Once Palcy had read Sugar Cane Alley by Joseph Sobel, it moved her so much she decided to make a film to bring it to other people. |  |
Still from Sugar Cane Alley film by Euzhan Palcy
| She claims that Sobel made it all possible for her to become a film-maker because he gave her the rights to the work for free, though he had received many offers. At 17 she completed her first draft of a screenplay adaptation. When she went to the Sorbonne her fellow class-mate was Laura Truffaut who not only joined in with developmental readings of the screen play but also passed it to her father. Its possible Francois Truffaut immediately identified with the focus on the child's growing awareness of the wider world and became an advocate for the project. Palcy claims too, in turn, to have admired particular films of Truffaut such as L'Enfant Sauvage and 400 Blows. |
| Sugar Cane Alley (or Rue Cases Negres) was released in 1983. Receiving rave reviews, it won over 14 interna- tional prizes, including the Silver Lion for Best First Feature at the Venice Film Festival, and in America, the First Prize Critics Award at the Houston Film Festival. The film centres on a young boy, Jose and Martine, |
 Euzhan Palcy on location |
| his grandmother who works on the plantation so that Jose will not follow her path but instead go to school. Jose befriends Medouze, an elderly African whose father was a slave. Medouze will eventually tell Jose what his father taught him about slavery when he thinks he's old enough to take it. Medouze tells the young boy that once slavery was abolished he ran and ran and ran but ended up in the same place, since Martinique is a small island. |
 |
The oppression of colonialism is clearly present in a previewed scene that takes place on one particular pay-day. The plantation workers are freed but on a small island and with no money they are shown spending all their wages at the local shop to get their food for the week and yet still ending up in credit to the plantation. Against bitter recrimination, singing and dancing is heard coming from a group of men, the only thing left for those deprived of freedom and wealth. |
| Palcy's good fortune continued when she found support for her next film project from the retir- ed Brando who offered to star in her adaptation of Andre Brink's A Dry White Season‚ completed in 1989 and starring Janet Suz- man, Michael Gambon, Zakes Zulu Mokae and Donald Suth- erland. Palcy wanted to make a movie about apartheid South Africa to show people what was going on. She loved Brink's story of a white man who isn't a racist and even though he has many black employees he treats them well. However he is totally blind to the wider situ- ation in his country. The death of his gardener's son triggers a sequence of incidents.He finally |  |
| discovers the truth and in the name of his human dignity he decides to fight the apartheid system. To research the film Palcy went underground in South Africa, guided by a famous Doctor who was also Nelson Mandela's family doctor. She met him in Paris and went to Soweto where she met mothers who had lost kids. While there she recorded everything and later depictions of torture in the film are based on authentic accounts. |
 Paul Newman Palcy andRobert Redford at the Sundance Flm Festivall |
|
In addition to her socio-political films and documentaries,
Palcy explored her first love of music in Simeon,
a magical-realist film made in 1993 that explores
the Zoot music originating from
Martinique and Gaudeloupe. This film
provided a cure for the utter distress she felt after her contact with
the brutality of South Africa, while researching
A Dry White Season‚ She is currently
completing her latest film, a historical costume drama in which she portrays
a love affair across a racial divide, before the advent of the system
of slavery that introduced racism for the first time in relations between
Africans and Europeans.
David Somerset, fiba Editor 27 March, 2007 |
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