Arts Publications and Cultural Projects by Sondra Hale

Sondra Hale studied Aesthetic Anthropology (mainly visual) with Jacques Maquet and Daniel Biebuyck, both renowned anthropology of art specialists (Africa) who taught for a period at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where Hale received her Ph.D. in Anthropology. Hale's history of art background comes from studies at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, and at UCLA. Her specific feminist art training was informal, mainly through workshops at the Los Angeles Woman's Building in the 1970s and 1980s and critical studies workshops at California Institute of the Arts, 1978-80. Hale studied Sudanese modernist art through carrying out aesthetic anthropological fieldwork over decades in Sudan and among the Sudanese diasporans.

When Hale taught for two years at California Institute of the Arts, she was involved in consulting and curriculum development (funded by a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant for Summers 1978 and 1979) in the Critical Studies Division and co-teaching an NEH-funded course on the Arts of Africa and Japan. Among Hale's research and teaching specializations are aesthetics and cultural studies. She taught African art at California Institute of the Arts, aesthetic anthropology at California State University, Northridge, and women and art in twentieth-century United States at UCLA.

The Dislocation of Amber: Sondra Hale as Apprentice Filmmaker

In 1974 Sondra Hale was invited on a filmmaking odyssey. The Artist Books annotated below came out of the experience—The Cries of Coral, written in Suakin in 1974, during the filming of The Dislocation of Amber, and the other, written the next year, Seasons of Discontent, a series of political poems and art. Both are collaborations with Sudanese.

Hale was invited by the late Hussein Shariffe, Sudan's greatest expressionist painter, to join an ensemble of thirteen people—artists, writers, actors, photographers—to undertake the making of Sudan's first art/feature film on location on the partially deserted sea port of Suakin on Sudan's east coast. It is a film about colonialism and death by suicide (as one and the same).

One could have predicted the kind of film that Hussein would create. For him, color is everything: subject, theme, technique, and mood. The Dislocation of Amber, shown at a number of international film festivals, can only be described as an "art film"; it is highly abstract and painterly, with no dialogue (although it has sound: music, wind, water, birds, chants, the creaking of wood, etc.). The title refers to the violent extraction of amber from the earth. What Shariffe created sometimes looks like a still-life painting, with only the camera moving. He seemed to have little regard for movement. All of the images are framed, each an individual painting.

Shariffe wanted to use the semi-destroyed and deserted seaport and the glorious but crumbling buildings as a metaphor for a society decimated by colonialism. The "plot" concerns a woman's suicide by drowning (a scene for which Hale is the double) and a series of other suicides and violence: rape, human degradation, and humiliation—all metaphors for colonialism, with an eye to the then current political events in Sudan. Hussein attempted mood invention through color and the slow pace. The eerie buildings of old Suakin are characters themselves. Shariffe had his camera move from one symbolic motif to another, with only mysterious links between them. In the background the audience can hear the gentle lapping of the Red Sea waves.

Everyone in the stock company (the ensemble) became filmmakers in that everyone carried out at least one filmmaking function. Hale was assigned as the still photographer who photographed the settings from the air, but also took shots of each angle of a scene and compiled the "dupe sheets," a detailed record of all the takes. Hale also helped with costumes, make-up, and set selection and appeared in several group scenes (although disguised).

Artist Books

The Cries of Coral is a collection of poems and artwork completed by Hale in collaboration with Mohamed Omer Bushara and Yousef Aydabe. Hale wrote the English poems and Yousef Aydabe the Arabic, with line drawings, waterwash, and scraperboard by...