Admission
General $12
Student $10
November 12, 2026, 6pm
Brooklyn NY 11205
USA
The African Film Institute is pleased to invite you to e-flux on Thursday, November 12 at 6pm for And the Dogs Were Silent, a program convened by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts. The program features three short films: Sarah Maldoror's Et les chiens se taisaient (And the Dogs Were Silent) (1978), Stan Lathan's Statues Hardly Ever Smile (1971), and Alain Resnais and Chris Marker's Les statues meurent aussi (Statues Also Die)(1953). The screening will be followed by a conversation between Rhodes-Pitts and Christian Nyampeta.
This program continues Two Thousand Seasons, the 2026 programming of African Film Institute, driven by methods of collective study and collaborative action, and pointing to alternative sites where memory is held and where learning is made. Moving between the film image and practices beyond the screen, the programming samples transitional ways of recording histories and practicing commemoration, foregrounding inspiration as both a lesson and a tool for loosening the grip of manipulation characteristic of the world today.
Sarah Maldoror’s film Et les chiens se taisaient dramatizes Aimé Césaire’s theatrical poem of the same name, written during World War II, in 1943, when Martinique was under the Vichy rule. The poem is a three-act drama on the Haitian Revolution and the death of Toussaint Louverture. The poem was initially included in Césaire’s early poetry, Les armes miraculeuses (The Miraculous Weapons)(1946), but it only became widely available in English in The Complete Poetry of Aimé Césaire (2017) translated by Clayton Eshleman and A. James Arnold, and more recently in ......And the Dogs Were Silent / ......Et les chiens se taisaient (2024), translated by Alex Gil.
In And the Dogs Were Silent, Alex Gil traces the genealogy of Césaire’s poem and highlights Haiti’s central role in Césaire’s intellectual project: the deep connections between Cesaire’s portrayal of Haiti and Louverture, still resonating with the struggles against today’s forms of colonialism.
Césaire’s Et les chiens se taisaient is issued from manuscripts, rough drafts, and notes, in a method of envisioning, revisiting, and revisioning. The resulting avant-textes, as Césaire describes them, offer a useful model for encountering, making sense of, and engaging with the cultural life of the goods possessed in the hold of the museums. As such, the poem connects the revolutionary action of Toussaint Louverture and the repatriation of cultural goods, while also grounding a reclamation and reconstruction of dislocated cultural lives within the locales that play host to them.
Across their different approaches, the three films presented in this program extend Césaire’s project, in ways that Ayi Kwei Armah would describe as a course of restoration which serves as a response to the exploitative conditions that led to the capture of the cultural goods rendered in these films.
The African Film Institute wishes to acknowledge the support of Annouchka de Andrade; Cineteca di Bologna; the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture; and Présence Africaine.
Films
Sarah Maldoror, Et les chiens se taisaient (1978, 13 minutes)
Director Maldoror performs along with Gabriel Glissant in this short film drawn from Aimé Césaire's theatrical poem on the Haitian revolution, enacted as an ambulatory reading staged within the bowels of the Musée de l'Homme in Paris, the colonial ethnographic museum.
Stan Lathan, Statues Hardly Ever Smile (1971, 19 minutes)
A group of schoolchildren enrolled in a summer program at the Brooklyn Museum pursue improvisational performance inspired by the museum's collection of Egyptian statuary. Produced by St. Clair Bourne's Chamba Productions, the film was edited by Kathleen Collins.
Alain Resnais and Chris Marker, Les statues meurent aussi (1953, 30 minutes)
Controversial upon its release for its critique of colonialism, the film's questions about the life and death of African objects invite renewed contemplation amidst today's energized movements for repatriation of stolen cultural property.
For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.
Accessibility
– Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
– For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator that leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Avenue (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.
– e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the Screening Room and this bathroom.
