Maldoror's 'Monangambé' plays out a similar scenario to the feature-length 'Sambizanga': the visit of a wife to her imprisoned militant husband-with a more darkly comic frame and a more avant-garde soundtrack and visual style serving to illustrate both the extreme brutality of the situation, the ironies of paranoid misunderstanding, and the psychological effects of torture (in the shadowy scenes of the imprisoned man traumatised by torture). Its title-a warning, literally meaning 'white death', of the approach of slavers, and subsequent colonial powers, and then as signal to gather during the liberation struggle of the 1960s-performs a linguistic reversal suggesting the importance of contextual knowledge, and it's this sense that the oppressed can utilise language as a weapon that remains opaque to the colonialists that leads to paranoia such as that seen by the prison authorities here. The prisoner's wife promises him a 'complet'-that is, a three-course dish, food for someone deprived of proper nutrition-misunderstood by the prison director as a three-piece suit, and thus as the reward for escape from prison, leading to renewed sessions of interrogation and torture. At once stroke, prison authorities exercise near-unlimited power within the confines of their domain, sadistically wielding torture whenever they feel like it, and are revealed to have little true understanding of what they're dealing with-a misunderstanding that can perhaps be exploited. The soundtrack by the Art Ensemble of Chicago emphasizes discontinuity over mimetic guidance, the independent parts that constitute the individuals within a freely improvising ensemble, and of the tracks of visuals, soundtrack and speech that constitute a film. This is a film about the risky ambiguities of language and of the emotional truths that go beyond language, not as existential concerns, but as the arena of real political struggle, of real consequence, for which cinema finds an experimental vocabulary. Maldoror's films of this period are films in process-films subject to an extreme precarity of material circumstance, such that an entire film might be lost mid-way through film-making, which are forced to improvise and adapt in their methods, and which suggest a kind of improvisatory viewing as well. Virtually unseen within the canonical habits of Western film consumption, they've lost none of their power.
