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The art of Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambety's cinema lies
in the tension created between the visual narrative and the aural
narrative. His work has been considered hugely influential, and his
films bridge Western practices of filmmaking and oral traditions
from West Africa. Mambety's film Touki Bouki is considered one of
the foundational works of African cinema. Vlad Dima proposes a new
reading of Mambety's entire filmography from the perspective of
sound. Following recent analytical patterns in film studies that
challenge the primacy of the visual, Dima claims that Mambety uses
voices, noise, and silence as narrative tools that generate their
own stories and sonic spaces. By turning an ear to cinema, Dima
pushes African aesthetics to the foreground of artistic creativity
and focuses on the critical importance of sound in world cinema.
The art of Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambety's cinema lies
in the tension created between the visual narrative and the aural
narrative. His work has been considered hugely influential, and his
films bridge Western practices of filmmaking and oral traditions
from West Africa. Mambety's film Touki Bouki is considered one of
the foundational works of African cinema. Vlad Dima proposes a new
reading of Mambety's entire filmography from the perspective of
sound. Following recent analytical patterns in film studies that
challenge the primacy of the visual, Dima claims that Mambety uses
voices, noise, and silence as narrative tools that generate their
own stories and sonic spaces. By turning an ear to cinema, Dima
pushes African aesthetics to the foreground of artistic creativity
and focuses on the critical importance of sound in world cinema.
For too long, the approach to seemingly universal experiences like
love, death, and even time in film has been dominated by the Global
North. But what if such explorations developed horizontally
instead? Drawing from both European and African cultural theorists,
including Gilles Deleuze and Wole Soyinka, Vlad Dima invites us to
consider what happens to postcolonial African film if we no longer
privilege the idea of time. How else might we understand the
cinematic image, and how would its meanings change?
Meaninglessness: Time, Rhythm, and the Undead in Postcolonial
Cinema is a study of meaning and meaninglessness through the figure
of the undead, beginning with francophone Africa and extending to
postcolonial France. Through the analysis of films like Mati Diop's
Atlantics and Jean-Pierre Bekolo's Miraculous Weapons, Dima shows
how the African cinematic image may produce meaning without any
attachment to European time, and how that meaning is connected
instead to the philosophy of negritude and to the notion of rhythm.
Meaninglessness introduces the concept of the rhythm-sequence as a
new way to understand the African moving image.
In this original and provocative study of contemporary African film
and literature, Vlad Dima investigates the way that football and
cinema express individual and collective fantasies, and highlights
where football and cinema converge and diverge with regard to
neocolonial fantasies. Shedding new light on both well-known and
less familiar films by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, Abderrahmane Sissako,
Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Moussa Toure, Safi Faye, Cheick Doukoure, and
Joseph Gai Ramaka, among others, the study asks just whose fantasy
is articulated in football and African cinema. Answering this
question requires the exploration of body and identity issues, here
through the metaphor of skin: fantasy as a skin; the football
jersey as a skin; and ultimately film itself as a skin that has
visual, aural, and haptic qualities. The neocolonial body is often
depicted as suffering and in the process of being flattened or
emptied. So frequently do African cinema and literature replicate
this hollowed body, all skin as it were, that it becomes the very
type of body that defines neocolonialism. Could the body of film -
the depth of both characters and story within the cinematic skin -
hold the key to moving into a post-neocolonial era, an era defined
by "full" bodies and personal affirmation? This is the question
Dima seeks to answer.
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