Sarah Maldoror’s cinema and the short-circuited archive of African masks. The film À Bissau, Le Carnaval (“In Bissau, The Carnival”, 1980) shows us images of the festivities, including the handmade creation of masks and playful and colourful moments of hybridity and appropriation. In Et les chiens se taisaient (“And the dogs stopped barking”, 1978) two actors, including the filmmaker herself, recite various texts by Aimé Césaire, the poet of the Negritude movement. While walking through the Museum of Man (Paris), the two actors stare at the wooden statues and denounce the atrocities of colonialism.

Sarah Maldoror (1929-2020) was “invited” to cohabit one of the museum’s most emblematic rooms to get African cinema “to talk”, between poetic and political expression in the world. Maldoror was one of the most important filmmakers of pan-African cinema and participated in the anti-colonial and independence struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. Her gaze effectively short-circuits the masks on display here. Whereas in À Bissau, Le Carnaval we learn about the territory’s living traditions, in Et les chiens se taisaient it is the museum itself, with its modern and colonial genealogy, that is placed into question.

As in Maldoror’s fearless cinema, the African masks on display in this room confront us and challenge our thoughts. A game of different gazes between different ways of making, seeing and displaying images, which makes it possible to underline the critical power of the cinema, in the institutional context.