Sonic Space in Djibril Diop Mambety's Films

Vlad Dima

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780253024336
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Film e video

An analysis of the Senegalese film director's work from the perspective of sound. 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. "Vlad Dima's close readings of Mambèty's films sing. His are smart, critically sound interpretations of aesthetically rich and thematically resonant works. This book will surely be of interest to anyone studying movie soundtracks, but it will also interest those who care about the affective dimensions of sound and audition, particularly in the global South." —Noah Tsika, author of Nollywood Stars "This sophisticated and in-depth analysis aptly demonstrates Vlad Dima's grasp of the contentious issues surrounding Mambèty's film legacy as well as the overall perspectives on the degree to which Third Cinema and revolutionary filmmaking fit within an analysis of the Senegalese director's oeuvre." —James E. Genova, author of Cinema and Development in West Africa

1Aural Space and the Sonic Rack Focus in Touki Bouki

SINCE DJIBRIL DIOP MAMBETY’S most influential film, Touki Bouki, acts as an aesthetic and thematic lynchpin that connects his entire oeuvre, it seems appropriate to begin this study with it. Touki Bouki is a movie about the particular but also about the universal and the community; it is a political satire, a lyrical work about love, a drama about exile. This drama accentuates the contradictions between outside and inside, even though “it is difficult to remember a shot filmed inside in a film by Djibril. Mambety likes transparency. He works in broad daylight and in front of everyone” (Sene 2001, 79).¹ A stark contrast arises nonetheless because the constant outdoor shooting is juxtaposed with the interior drama, the internal struggle of each character. Although Touki Bouki is poignant in its incisive sociopolitical commentary, it is slow and indirect when dealing with marginality, which informs the personal tragedy of the two main characters. However, the present analysis will focus on the internal conflict between image and sound. Reading the film at both visual and aural levels, quite as Michel Chion proposes to audio-view films (1994, 185–213), facilitates a better contextualization of current sound theories.

It has already been suggested that Mambety challenges the primacy of visual space by juxtaposing the various aural planes emerging from the plurality and plasticity of sound with the existing, more rigid two-dimensional visual planes. New, aural narrative planes are created by this juxtaposition. These narrative planes are revealed throughout the film, but most clearly in four separate sequences, which can be reduced to the following spatial and aural markers: the slaughterhouse, the neighborhood, the cliff, and the harbor. These markers, woven into the narrative fabric of the film, will reveal exactly what the aural narrative plane means.

The main characters of Touki Bouki, Anta and Mory, are a young couple dreaming of emigrating to France, but they have no money to travel. They become a Senegalese version of Godard’s Patricia and Michel in Breathless (1960). The narrative arc of Breathless revolves around Michel, a small-time crook fascinated by the persona of Humphrey Bogart. Michel is on the run because he shot a policeman; he is also in love with an American girl, Patricia, who is a student at the Sorbonne and sells the New York Herald Tribune on the streets of Paris. The film moves slowly around Paris following the two characters as they attempt to figure out their relationship, each other, and the next step—all elements used by Mambety in the context of Dakar. In the end, Patricia decides to turn Michel in; he is subsequently shot by the police in the middle of the street. In the case of Mory and Anta, the woman, Anta, is fully an accomplice to her male counterpart.² Anta and Mory face the harsh economic and social realities of their country, while they also undergo constant changes. The two main characters of Touki Bouki thus oscillate between modernity and tradition. I disagree with Sada Niang’s assessment that Mambety does not use that opposition to define his characters: “Touki Bouki makes us vibrate through this ambivalence: a fascination for elsewhere and an integration of the origin. Some have wanted to see an opposition between tradition and modernity. Mambety has always escaped this dichotomy. To him, modernity was in marginality, in challenging the power and indiscipline, in rebellion, in the force to say ‘I’ while integrating ‘us,’ not the ‘us’ of social constraints but the one of essential values brought on by the origin, transmitted by the story and the myth” (2002, 7).³ On the contrary, the character of Mory encompasses both traditionalist elements (his very strong connection to the land) and modern ones (like his passion for the motorcycle). These elements help us define Mory as a postcolonial, hybrid subject; he has a split identity, with which he attempts to come to terms throughout the film—and really even beyond, because incarnations of Mory resurface in later films.

As a matter of fact, both characters are hybrids, and so is the film itself. It mixes conventional Western cinema practices, which cannot possibly be fully avoided, and the oral tradition of West African storytelling. Already from the title (frequently translated as “The Journey of the Hyena”) it is possible to make a connection to the stories of Birago Diop, Contes d’Amadou Koumba, which locate the hyena as a central figure in West African animal tales. David Murphy notes another connection: he associates the film with the trickster narratives of Leukle-lièvre (2000, 244), although this link makes more sense when aligned with La petite vendeuse. However, there is an ongoing debate over the validity of the translation of Touki Bouki as “The Journey of the Hyena,” which equates Mory with the hyena, “an animal accused of greed and mischievousness” who “symbolizes trickery and social marginality” (Pfaff 1988, 220). Furthermore, the hyena is always portrayed as dirty and lacking intelligence. Obviously few of these attributes apply to the protagonist of the film; even so, critics such as Dennis Essar have fully accepted the parallelism: “It is the main character who is the hyena: on the margins of a society convulsing with rapid, profound, and irreversible cultural change, he strives to achieve his fanciful goal at any cost” (Essar 1996, 78). Niang offers another translation. In his opinion the title remains enigmatic. He separates the two words, suggesting that they are in fact entire sentences and that the full, correct phrase should read “Touki bu nu buki, which should be translated as a voyage that has been ‘hyenazied’” (Niang 2002, 129),⁴ in which “hyenazied” refers to achieving one’s goals and ambitions. Regardless of the outcome of this debate, Mambety’s film exudes ambivalence starting with its very title. Mambety’s dualism further separates him from other African directors. His films, and in particular Touki Bouki, are not mere attempts to appropriate an existing style (such as the French New Wave or Russian formalism) and to adjust it to an African context. Instead, they attempt to push further, to create new forms of cinema. Murphy also notes that Mambety creates something radically different from adaptation models of Western experimental films to Senegalese culture; the end result is that the film “can be read as an exploration of the cultural encounter between the West and Africa” (Murphy 2000, 243). There is definitely an auteurist aesthetic influence present at the level of film technique, most evident in the lack of narrative linearity, but in the end the main plotline is very simple, harking back to the stories told by griots.

This last term is radically important, because it will provide us with the necessary transition from storyteller to filmmaker. In fact, Murphy and Patrick Williams go as far as to propose the “hybrid griauteur, who is an appropriate figure for contemporary African filmic practices” (2007, 9). A griot is essentially a storyteller, and the name has various forms: Paulla Ebron’s Mandinka “jali,” “gewel” in Wolof, “gawlo” in Fulani, “djeli” in Bambara, and so on. Griots can be musicians or poets, and they range from money-chasing local griots who crash marriages and naming ceremonies in the hope of getting small sums from the celebrants, to griots who legitimize rulers by singing their deeds and advise heads of state on policies. Olivier Barlet describes the griot primarily as a storyteller but also as court jester, wandering minstrel, counselor, news bearer, and even therapist (2000, 162–165). Referring to Barlet’s list, Murphy and Williams remark that it is the multiplicity of roles that unites griots and African filmmakers (2007, 9). Griots are a caste one must be born into, and there are both griots and griottes, though there usually are some gender rules about what functions women can perform. In general, griots do not tell stories like animal fables but sing the praises of their patrons and recite genealogies that preserve historical memory. And of course they sing and recite epics like the Sundiata.⁵ Stories involving Bouki (Hyena), Golo (Monkey), and Leuk (Hare) are not at all confined to members of the griot caste and could well be told by mothers to their children. It may be inferred that Mambety’s film is quintessentially African in its form and more specifically Senegalese; but given that more than a hint of European cinema runs through it, Touki Bouki is an example of successful blending of African and European storytelling techniques. Mambety does not simply “Africanize” the European (auteur) cinema of the 1960s. Rather, he balances it with a revamped way of looking at West African oral tradition and storytelling. This modern-day griot has had to develop a new personal style to deliver the stories, to seize and maintain the attention of the audience, and he has taken the best of two often conflicting worlds.

Mambety’s personal style is apparent from the composition of the film’s first scene. The film begins with two shots of a herd of cows led by a young boy on an ox. These shots precede a series of images of cows being slain in a slaughterhouse, which represents our first spatial marker. From the beginning there is a movement from outside to inside, and this back-and-forth becomes a motif throughout the development of the movie. The outside-inside movement is cinematically doubled and therefore reinforced; the little boy and the herd are shown in long shots, while for the gory images in the slaughterhouse the camera moves in much closer, into medium shots and even close-ups. The length of the first two shots, which are essentially long takes, further emphasizes the sharp contrast between the two episodes. However, once the camera moves inside the editing drastically changes, offering eleven shots in rapid succession. Interestingly, the camera work and rapid editing suggest the killing of the animals; it is the montage technique that cuts, not just the actual knife. This is quite like Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960); as Kaja Silverman observes, in the famous scene in the shower, the camera becomes an instrument of dissection because of the multiple cuts in the narration: “The cinematic machine is lethal; it too murders and dissects” (Silverman 1983, 202). One particularly graphic shot shows a man slitting a cow’s throat open; the camera lingers as blood pours out. It is, however, the only shot in the sequence that is out of focus, as if the director could not show the full-blown violence and tried somehow to mask it. Here also, at the level of a single shot, one witnesses the director’s and the film’s ambivalence. Images of cattle being herded as a metaphor for the human condition are nothing new to cinema,⁶ but in this case the counterpoint shots of people are missing. This sequence clearly echoes Eisenstein’s Strike (1925) right down to specific details, such as shots of knives gouging open the throats of the cows. Alongside the French New Wave, Eisenstein and formalism are the other cinematic influences that will be compared to Mambety.⁷ Touki Bouki is in fact an appropriate example of intellectual montage, as Eisenstein called his aesthetic approach to filmmaking. In short, the visual association of shots that normally have nothing in common should elicit a third, new meaning in the minds of the spectators. In Strike the shots of slaughtered animals are counterpointed with shots of people fleeing through the woods and being shot at by the military. The juxtaposition between running people and slaughtered cows creates a new meaning and suggests that people are subjugated and treated like animals.

Interestingly, Mambety adds a wrinkle to the intellectual editing: he waits to juxtapose the shots in the slaughterhouse. Thus, there is another subtext lurking at the beginning of the film, but it only comes to life when fellow students attack Mory. Senegalese men are slaughtering the cattle; the aggressors and the victims are both products of the same place. On an obvious interpretive level, this sequence is a negative commentary on halal beliefs and practices. On a more speculative level, it reminds us of Frantz Fanon’s warnings about the colonized middle class taking the place of the colonizer and acting in the same abusive way (1968, 153–163). It remains to be determined if the juxtaposition of separated events can still be considered intellectual editing. I maintain that the temporal separation does not take away from generating meaning at the third level envisioned by Eisenstein. As a matter of fact, atemporality plays a large role in Mambety’s film, as will become evident throughout this analysis. So Mambety utilizes an atemporal intellectual montage—a variation of the original theory that better suits a culture and society less keen on time, as Teshome Gabriel instructs us.

Time seems curiously absent from the very first scenes, a fact made even more obvious through the aesthetic use of noises and anachronous sound, which also provides the audience with another tension between inside and outside (in that anachronous sound remains on the outside of the diegesis, a literal add-on). It is appropriate, then, to return to the construction of the first sequence, which establishes the narrative rhythm of the entire film, particularly at the level of sound. In the first shot, the boy on the ox is framed in a very long shot. On the aural level, Mambety introduces cows’ moos that are barely distinguishable, and most prominently, a flute playing. The music is very peaceful and understated, and the choice of the flute leads us to expect a bucolic story. The flute is also associated with shepherds in many oral traditions—it is a pastoral instrument. In the next shot, the boy is still far away. It is as if he could not quite approach the camera; there is a sense of distancing play in this opening sequence. The boy finally moves ahead of the herd a little, but importantly it is the sound that becomes louder; it is the sound that comes “closer” to the camera and thus to our point of “view” (hearing). The oxen and cows are heard more distinctly in the second shot, and as the boy disappears to the right of the frame the moos increase dramatically. At this juncture, Mambety cuts away to an ox being pulled by the horns into the slaughterhouse. Aurally, the moos have now intensified, and they are intercut with the yelling of the men working at the slaughterhouse. The action moves from the outside in the third shot to the inside. Thus far it seems that the audience can only relate to the story spatially, and not at all temporally. A similar shift occurs with the visual and aural dynamic. If the audience usually requires both spatial and temporal components to situate the story and image and sound to work together to create a fuller sense of reality, as André Bazin and Christian Metz would have it, then in the case of Touki Bouki the audience mostly relies on two components: space and sound. From here, it is only a small step to investigate the creation of space through sound.

Before the ox is hung up from a hook in the slaughterhouse, some focalization issues are noticeable. In a previous article (and above), I have claimed that this points to the director’s reluctance to show us the full-blown violence (Dima 2012a, 44). To this I should add that the most important detail of the shot is that the sound stays clear throughout; it is never distorted. Throughout the film this will be established as a dominant trend: sound appears to be more coherent, more distinct than image. The visual fails us narratively in the sequence above. It fails to tell the appropriate story, but sound maintains the narrative course that reveals the entire story.

As the animals are being slaughtered, the sound works mostly with the image instead of against it. However, the horrible cries of animals dying are slowly muffled, to the point that they become inaudible; one gets the sense of having been thrust into a very chaotic world that is paralleled by a very chaotic noise mixture. As sound comes in and out of focus, a certain “sonic rack focus effect” is created.⁸ Visually, when a shot comes in and out of focus, the effect is called “rack focus.” On many occasions, Mambety applies the concept to sound. The horrible sounds of the oxen in the slaughterhouse appear to “assault” the image, not unlike the knife in Psycho in Silverman’s view. Michel Chion tracks a similar process in his analysis of “a nearly invisible attack of birds that we hear but cannot see all around the house” in Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963): “It is as though the sound were attacking the image. The sharp beaks that are picking through the door, associated with the terrible sound of the attackers, suggest the idea of sound seeking to leave its trace on the image, of piercing a hole in the canvas of the screen” (2009, 166). Of course, in the case of Touki Bouki, the animals do not pose the same kind of deadly threat. Nonetheless, even though the threat is directed toward the animals, the effect of the sound on the image remains. In fact, the blurriness of the shots from above could be construed now as a direct result of the aural attack.

The inside/outside dichotomy continues in this first sequence through one shot of several oxen waiting outside for their fate. The animals are filmed from inside the slaughterhouse. The visual narrative explores the outside first, and then in the next shot it moves completely outside, back to the young boy. This time he is riding alone and no cows follow him. It is a stark contrast that suggests that the entire herd has just been dropped off at the slaughterhouse. On the soundtrack the music of the flute returns triumphantly, but soon the sound of a motorcycle is heard, amplifying gradually. Visually, the film switches perspective from the little boy to Mory’s back shoulder on the motorbike. Mory has attached the horns of an ox to the bike, and in the first shot over his shoulder only one of the two horns is visible. The transition from the boy to Mory occurs aurally through a sound bridge created by the flute music. This bridge aligns the little boy with Mory, which will prove problematic for the latter’s persona: is he the leader of future Africa, or will take his people to the slaughter? Murphy contends that “time and location are fragmented” (2000, 243) during the transition from the rural scenes to the shots taken from the motorcycle; in other words, atemporal intellectual montage. In his study with Williams, Murphy returns to this fragmentation and lack of logical narration to propose that Mambety may be targeting Sembène’s linearity (2007, 26). The fragmentation and the choice of shots push the audience into “a tale of modern Africa, complete with motorbikes, motorways, and machinery” (Murphy 2000, 243). This may be a modern Africa, but it is one deeply rooted in tradition, and the sound transition emphasizes the connection that still exists between times and locations. The camera returns to Mory, who is still driving through the neighborhood, with children following him on either side. When he finally clears the village and ends up on the highway, he is filmed from above, off a bridge. The engine of the motorbike is heard loudly on the soundtrack as Mory heads down the highway. As he moves away, the flute music begins to slowly die out, too. A shot from Mory’s point of view while on the motorbike is interjected here. The spectators do not see the vehicle, but they hear it. In fact, other than the shot from the bridge, the motorbike is only present as sound—an aural signifier meant to bring past and present together.

The aural sensation generated by this opening and the meshing of animal sounds, flute music, human yelling, and the sound of the motorbike complicates the audience’s comprehension of the events, which are no longer linear but rather convoluted like a helix. Everything seemingly spirals out of control; our senses are so overwhelmed that they are not to be trusted anymore. It is a very close approximation of a feeling of acute pain that suffuses the body to the point that the original source of pain is no longer clear. Hence the violence of the slaughter is transposed onto us, the audience, who experience it secondhand. It is a very powerful beginning that announces the complexity of this film and the difficulties one may have in understanding it; it is also an opening that will be echoed by a similar meshing of the senses at the very end. The gap between the noises at the beginning and the noises at the end does not prevent us from making a very similar connection to the one just made between the slaughters and Mory. We now make a temporal jump ourselves to the end of the film in order to illustrate this point.

On a visual level, Niang makes an astute connection between the shot of the oxen awaiting their fate and the shots showing the line...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Aural Contexts
• 1 Aural Space and the Sonic Rack Focus in Touki Bouki
• 2 Flaneur, Geography, and Caméra-Flâneur in Badou Boy and Contras’ City
• 3 Trauma and Zombie Narratives in Hyènes
• 4 Voice(s) in Le franc and La petite vendeuse de soleil
• Gallery of Film Stills
• Conclusion: Current Contexts and Legacies
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index