‘I'm a Writer First’: Madeleine Hunt Ehrlich’s Literary Inspirations

This piece appears in the columns section of frieze 250, ‘ON SET’

A formative moment in my filmmaking practice came when I attended a talk in my early 20s by the writer and activist Selma James. I’m paraphrasing here, but she mentioned that her former husband, C.L.R. James, had described his book The Black Jacobins (1938) as a mass audience text. He felt that the theory, philosophy and prose we often think of as elite or scholarly can be accessible to anyone; it’s how you hand them to people. I’m of Caribbean heritage and was raised by artists in an apartment full of books. Literature, for me, is foundational. Writers like Suzanne Césaire, Édouard Glissant and Derek Walcott have been as influential to me as the romantics were to the surrealists.

I first read Césaire’s writing in Refusal of the Shadow (1996), an anthology of Caribbean surrealist writing that includes extracts from Tropiques (Tropics, 1941–45), the literary journal she founded alongside her husband, Aimé, and René Ménil. Her writing is so good that it felt like a crime I was just discovering her. But she only has seven published essays, so the mystery was: why, when she was so good, is there so little of her writing? That’s when I started to think about her as a subject for my films. Both the installation Too Bright to See (2023) and the feature-length film The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire (2024) try to address this question – and its many potential answers – with great respect and accessibility.

I’m just as interested in what we can’t see as in what we can. For instance, there is no archive of Césaire’s writing: you can only find it in the collections of white European men, such as the surrealist André Breton. Yet, for me, Césaire is one of the most important writers of the 20th century, and I feel everyone should know her work. 

I’m always writing while working on film projects. In some ways, I’m a writer first. Often, when I’m writing, I feel like I’m in a conversation with the dead. This prepares me for those high-pressure sprints of decision- making that you have to do as a filmmaker, especially when you collaborate, as I do, with people on very tight schedules. My preparation for those days of creating is a period of study comprised of writing, reading and talking to people.

Is there a way to reveal the most scandalous parts of ourselves without being punished?

It’s important to me that my projects, even if I begin them alone, are made collectively. Sometimes, I’ll tell actors that we’ll be reading or writing together, and they respond: ‘Aren’t you the writer?’ These are not tasks I do by myself. As we approach production, my collaborators become part of the process. I have several regular collaborators with whom I talk all the time. This becomes very important when, for instance, you’re asking the gaffer to light things in a particular way or the grip to manoeuvre the camera in a certain direction. Mutual understanding is hard to manufacture: it can only come from having an honest exchange.

I shoot on film because I want to be clear that filmmaking is a material process. It limits the number of takes you can do on set. That can be uncomfortable for an actor who’s used to digital, with which you can shoot endlessly. That lack of limitation is my nightmare. How would you make a film with no limitations? When you have limited takes, you need to be precise. I also shoot on film to place value on images of Black people, which I think celluloid does. Art film is different from commercial cinema in that decisions about what happens next are not necessarily motivated by character or narrative: they’re motivated similarly to how decisions get made in a painting. In my films, I often use fragmentation, which I believe is inherently cinematic. I boil down what I’m trying to show to the absolute minimum while maintaining some kind of transmission. This becomes central in the editing stages.

When I was working on the film Conspiracy (2022) with the artist Simone Leigh, I was lucky enough to meet and have a conversation with the late Lorraine O’Grady. Lorraine spoke to me about The Tale of Genji (c.1201) by Murasaki Shikibu, which is considered by some to be the first novel. She treated it like a biblical text, but what many believed to be the last chapter is now understood to have been written 100 years after Shikibu died. Not only is it written by a different author, it also ends mid-sentence. It is incomplete. I read the book while editing The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire, and that incomplete final sentence helped me decide the ending of the film. The burden of completion is not on any one person.

I approach the stories in my films by asking myself: is there a way to reveal everything, the most scandalous parts of ourselves, without being punished? I approach history, as well as my collaborators, with that in mind. There’s real power in restraint and secrets. My works originate from considering the interiority and desires of Black women, and how desire, both articulated and unarticulated, shapes our lives. I can trace that through all of my work. The specific subject matter changes, but that’s the query. In my filmmaking, we’re pulling from our guts, but it’s not all visible, and it’s not supposed to be. Something gets made from that. That’s a form I want to be in a room with and I hope you want to be in a room with it too.

As told to Vanessa Peterson

This article first appeared in frieze issue 250 with the headline ‘Secrets, Restraint’

Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire will be screened at Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis, on 2 May

^{Main images: Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich and Simone Leigh, Conspiracy (detail), 2022, film still. Courtesy: the artists}