The Brooklyn Rail

Whenever I consider the legacy of Surrealism, my thoughts turn to its under-acknowledged Black feminist lineage. That lineage appears featured in Too Bright to See (Part I) (2022) by Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, a 24-minute film included at the 2024 Whitney Biennial which focuses on the life of Suzanne Césaire: an intellectual whose contributions to both Surrealism and anti-colonial thought have often been eclipsed by the fame of her male contemporaries. As Hunt-Ehrlich’s work shows, feminist Afro-Surrealism can be distinguished by its transgressive use of what was once considered the “woman’s sphere”—specifically here, epistolary correspondence from the home front —to lead revolutionary advances in aesthetics and politics abroad.

As a museum installation, Too Bright to See (Part I) engages with the Surrealist tradition, but not in the Eurocentric way the movement is often remembered. Instead, it highlights how Césaire and other Afro-surrealists invented new Surrealist tools for political and aesthetic revolution. As a writer and intellectual during World War II, Césaire positioned the colonies as a site of radical possibility in correspondence with her husband Aimé Césaire. As critics have noted, the film’s fragmented structure, and its refusal to offer a conventional biographical narrative, reflects how Césaire’s life was equally shaped by the tensions between her intellectual output and her role as a wife, mother, and teacher.¹

This film emerges at a crucial moment in the ongoing reassessment of Surrealism’s global impact. As contemporary artists and scholars excavate the movement’s colonial entanglements and decolonial futures, Too Bright to See (Part I) offers a vital intervention. It not only recovers Césaire’s overlooked contributions but also proposes a novel methodology for engaging with historically marginalized figures within the avant-garde.

Hunt-Ehrlich’s refusal to simplify Césaire’s legacy through traditional narrative structures is an homage to an Afro-feminist surrealist ethos. In her film, the camera resists biographical reduction, focusing instead on the gaps in the historical record. One reviewer termed it an “anti-biopic” that critiques not only historical exclusion, but the normative documentary conventions through which excluded stories are brought back from the margins.

This approach resonates with recent developments in Black studies, where feminist scholars of the visual such as Tina Campt have proposed “refusal” as a critical methodology. By declining to fill in the blanks of Césaire’s life, Hunt-Ehrlich honors the complexity and opacity of her subject while challenging the viewer’s desire for comprehensive knowledge. This strategy aligns with what Saidiya Hartman has termed “critical fabulation,” a method of engaging with archival absences that respects the unknowability of certain historical experiences. By refusing to neatly reconstruct Césaire’s life, Hunt-Ehrlich reveals how her intellectual work is inextricably tied to the raced and gendered roles and constraints placed upon her within the colonial modern sphere—an environment Césaire inventively deploys as a space for revolutionary thought.

The use of 16 mm film amplifies this intersection of the personal and political by evoking the tropical landscape of Martinique, a space that both nurtured and constrained Césaire’s intellectual output. As critics have noted, this setting—while lush and beautiful—is complicated by its association with labor and colonial exploitation.²

Watching it reminds me of Sylvia Wynter’s famous dialectic of “plot” and “plantation” in the Caribbean: with a double entendre here on the word “plot” to encompass the fugitive scheming Césaire engages in, with her small “plot” adjacent to the colonial plantation economy.

The film continually returns to the image of written texts—letters, manuscripts, even burning pages—that symbolize the precariousness of Césaire’s historical memory and her deliberate choice to erase parts of her archive. The film’s aesthetic choices evoke the materiality of mid-twentieth century cinema, creating a temporal dialogue between Césaire’s era and our own. This technique situates Too Bright to See (Part I) within a broader tradition of Third Cinema which engages with colonial archives and forgotten histories; films like John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses or Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Reassemblage, which similarly use formal innovation to interrogate colonialism and the limits of representation.

Hunt-Ehrlich’s film, with its fragmented narrative and refusal to complete the story of Césaire’s life, mirrors this act of linguistic and aesthetic rebellion. This symbolic connection between letter-writing and revolutionary thought ties back to Césaire’s use of language itself as a tool of decolonization. Césaire believed in transforming the French language—a tool of colonial oppression—into an instrument of liberation, using Surrealist techniques to open new possibilities for reality rather than reinforcing its limitations.

Suzanne Césaire’s work as glimpsed here prefigures later developments in postcolonial literature, such as the Créolité movement in the Francophone Caribbean. Her fusion of surrealist aesthetics with anti-colonial politics anticipates the work of writers like Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau, who similarly sought to fabulate colonial language and imagination. But the case this film makes is for something other than influence, itself a somewhat patrilineal concept that critical theory has begun to shift away from. By positioning Césaire as an only partly knowable figure—both due to the gaps in historical documentation and the deliberate destruction of her personal writings—Hunt-Ehrlich detonates the unexplored ordnance of the historical imagination.

In this way, Too Bright to See (Part I) proposes a new vision for Surrealism’s future. By centering Black feminist thought and embracing formal experimentation, Hunt-Ehrlich suggests that Surrealism’s most radical potential may yet be unrealized. Ultimately, the film renews and unsettles the legacy of Surrealism by demonstrating how women artists and revolutionaries like Césaire used the tools available to them—both physical and intellectual—to decolonize their futures. As contemporary artists continue to grapple with the movement’s complex legacies, films like this remind us that Surrealism’s power lies not in its past, but in its capacity to imagine and create new realities. Today, as the revolutionary potential of Surrealism lives on in the fragments, the movement still subsists in the gaps between what we know and what we can imagine.