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Sound Moves: Displacement and Modernity in French and Senegalese Cinemas

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Sound Moves: Displacement and Modernity in French and Senegalese Cinemas Sound Moves: Displacement and Modernity in French and Senegalese Cinemas A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Vlad Dima IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Eileen Sivert, Christophe Wall-Romana July 2010 © Vlad Dima, 2010 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my co-advisers, Eileen Sivert and Christophe Wall-Romana for their patience, scholarship contribution and friendship. They were both instrumental in the development of this project, in particular Christophe‘s film expertise and knack for new technical terminology. I want to thank Charles Sugnet, the outside member of the committee, in whose African cinema course I was exposed to many themes discussed here, and in which I was inspired to start thinking about the issue of sound. I would also like to thank Mária Brewer for chairing the committee and for always being supportive and contributing to the bettering of the project with great insights. A special thank you goes to Alan Smith whose course on the New Wave was the inspiration for my future research on Jean-Luc Godard. I want to acknowledge a series of other people who have played important roles in my development as a scholar, and (in)directly in finalizing this dissertation: Judith Sarnecki (my undergraduate adviser), Robert Silberman (in the Department of Art History), Juliette Cherbuliez (current director of Graduate Studies in the French and Italian Department), and Judith Preckshot (French and Italian). Many other people have made an impact on my academic life, and I am indebted to them as well: Bruno Chaouat, Daniel Brewer, Peter Robinson, Susanna Ferlito, Eilene Hoft-March, Lifongo Vetinde, and Mark Dintenfass. Finally, I would like to thank my family for their constant love and support, and my friends and colleagues. A version of Chapter I will appear in The Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Routledge, 29.2 (March 2012). i Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter I: The Aural Fold and the Sonic Jump-cut: Godard‘s (Baroque) Sound 25 Chapter II: Mambety‘s Journey In and Out of Third and Counter-Cinemas 82 Chapter III: An Act of Love: Truffaut‘s Incursion into Marginality and the City through the Caméra-flâneur 127 Chapter IV: New Women, New City, New Modernities 176 Chapter V: Reclaiming the Body and Owning the Voice: Safi Faye and Agnès Varda 227 Conclusion 288 Filmography 297 Bibliography 301 ii Introduction The Modernity Question This project explores the relation between film, film sound, modernity, and the cultural politics of gender. Through a close analysis of specific works by French and Senegalese directors, I question the categorization of Third Cinema, and demonstrate that Senegalese cinema constitutes a discrete artistic movement unto itself, similar to a more established aesthetics such as the French New Wave. I find that both cinemas challenge the primacy of the visual by juxtaposing the various aural planes emerging from the plurality and plasticity of sound with the more rigid two-dimensional visual planes. As a result, I determine that new (aural) narrative planes surface from the displacement of sound and its clash with the image in the films analyzed in each chapter. Furthermore, I expose how sound displacement also generates gender displacement, as the French and Senegalese film subjects (diegetic characters as well as ideal audience) constantly shift their identities because of their unique position as both products and counterpoints of modernity, which, briefly and broadly defined, I see as a matrix of social relations generated by the rise of capitalism.1 I show that women filmmakers re-formulate the discourse of female identity through voice and sounds, disrupting the gendered relation that classical cinema established primarily through the scopic regime. The dislocation of 1 The cinematic subjects are shaped by modernity and everything that it entails, literally (technology) or intrinsically (alienation for example), but in the process of formation, these subjects also counter and challenge the effects of modernity. 1 masculine identity in mainstream cinema is made possible also through the wandering ability of the cinematic apparatus in the city, what I call the caméra-flâneur, which often takes on a female perspective in the two cinemas, as I will explain later. Thus, while sound as technology, and the city as an interactive and (still) growing place are construed as products of modernity, gender subversion allows for a critique of this modernity. As elements of film, sound, the city and the female cinematic subject double as both symptoms and critiques of modernity. Rather than accepting the idea of an all encompassing modernity, I propose to analyze customized modernities according to the particular interplay of sound, the city and its female subjects. This analysis takes place in two different cinematic traditions, and according to specific directors because it is from the filmmakers‘ unique perspectives on cinema that customized modernities emerge. The impossibility of giving modernity a singular meaning becomes obvious when we look at how it has been theorized. As a phenomenon in the world and in history, modernity is a constantly evolving hybrid affected and shaped by the connections between three distinctive historical and aesthetic moments: the baroque movement of the seventeenth century, Baudelaire‘s writing and description of the nineteenth century city of Paris as understood by Walter Benjamin, and the avant-garde movement in the twentieth century. These three components are at the base of Christine Buci- Glucksmann‘s representation of modernity in her book Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity. Her concern is with finding the means to represent modernity and its 2 aesthetics2 in the context of a violent and war-shattered twentieth century that polemicizes the concept of beauty. My purpose, though, takes me away from her findings, and the theories of the Frankfurt School altogether, as I am interested in the manifestation of the three ―crucial turning points‖ (Buci-Glucksmann 10) in the context of the New Wave and Senegalese cinemas. I align these three moments in aesthetic history with the works of three French and three Senegalese directors, respectively, while exploring the interplay between sound, the city and gender subversion in each case. Even though for the most part the French films studied chronologically precede those of the Senegalese counterpart, I do not wish to present the African films as being causally linked with the work and innovations created by the French; the aim here is not to understand the work of the Senegalese directors as an aftereffect of the French New Wave, but rather as an autonomous creation, an independent transposition onto a different time and culture.3 In addition, keeping the two cinemas separated allows for a more encompassing view of modernity. These two particular cinemas illustrate how modernity can be shaped by a multitude of events, people, and divergent contexts. This is obviously the case with the two cinemas in question, which come from different continents, and certainly follow extremely dissimilar cinematic traditions. The two countries, France and Senegal, share 2 The aesthetics of modernity refer to modernism. In my analysis of the films, I am interested in both the chronological aspect of modernity (the progression from the Baroque to the avant-garde), but also the qualitative category (this is Theodor Adorno‘s observation in Minima Moralia, 208), which is in fact modernism (for example, the aesthetic philosophy of Walter Benjamin as it takes shapes in the context of Charles Baudelaire‘s writings). 3 I would like to reiterate here that a substantial part of my work on West African film, as well as discussions on Fanon, Shohat, Trinh-ha, Godard and others, had their starting point in Charles Sugnet‘s course on African film that I took at the University of Minnesota, fall 2003. 3 much colonial history, but they do so from antagonistic positions. As I researched the historical events and cultural movements that have influenced and affected the phenomenon of modernity, I realized that an adequate definition of modernity has to come from multiple sources. By looking at two differing types of cinema, one representative of Second cinema4, the stylistic cinema of the auteur, and the other representing the confrontational Third Cinema, this work aims at reaching the needed breadth in order to demonstrate the hybridity mentioned above. Therefore, with Buci- Glucksmann, I place modernity at the intersection of three historical moments, the Baroque, nineteenth century Paris and the avant-garde, which I understand through three components present in every culture of modernity: sound, the city and gender displacement. Modernity is then the whole, the end result of a combination of all these elements, which further suggests hybridity; or it can be the part, each individual component. The result of the dichotomous quality of modernity brings me to the idea of multiple modernities. Charles Taylor‘s notion of multiple modernities is exposed in his book, Modern Social Imaginaries, and I analyze his theories in detail in Chapter IV. In brief, though, he defines modernity as an ―amalgam‖ of new domains: practices, ways of living, and forms of malaise. The manifestations of these domains may include science, technology, industrial production, urbanization, individualism, secularization, alienation, and meaninglessness (Taylor 1). The three subcategories I mentioned above are all found 4 I will return to fuller definitions of the Second and Third cinemas later; for now it suffices to say that the categories are born out of contrasts with, and reactions against First Cinema—the cinema of Hollywood. 4 amid Taylor‘s new domains: sound as an example of technology, the city as urbanization, and the problematic identity of female characters as an illustration of alienation. The many variations of interactions between these elements contribute to the formation of original components within the aesthetics of modernity.
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