Sonic Space in Djibril Diop Mambety's Films by Vlad Dima (review)

Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambety, who died in 1998 at the age of 53, made just a handful of films, and amongst these only two full-length features. Despite this lean output, Mambety's body of work, often stylistically subversive and experimental, places him amongst cinema's great iconoclasts. The dream-like Touki Bouki (1973), his standout feature and a cinematic landmark now digitally restored by Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Project, is illustrative of a number of Mambetian approaches and concerns: a young couple, Anta and Mory, dream of leaving Dakar for France but have no money. After various outlaw-style escapades in which they attempt to steal money for the trip, Mory finds his ties to Senegal are too strong and only Anta leaves on the ship. Spun from a simple tale, it is a layered and complex film about the difficulties and contradictions of the postcolonial condition. Stylistically, the film has a vivid, countercultural pop energy with frequent narrative fragmentations, doubling-backs, surreal touches–the film's form reflecting the disorientating, ambiguous states in which the protagonists find themselves. For Vlad Dima it is a 'lynchpin' film that connects themes and style across Mambety's films; and, as he demonstrates persuasively in Sonic Space, this is particularly true at the level of the director's use of sound.

Early on in the book, Dima retells the story of Mambety as a child going to an outdoor cinema in 1950s Dakar; he and his friends were unable to afford the price of a ticket so they simply listened from outside (pp.38–39). It is an evocative anecdote offering a possible backstory for the book's central argument, that sound is key to the innovative cinema of Mambety: by foregrounding sound as a storytelling tool (through voices and spoken language, nonsynchronous use of sound, the charting of space on the soundtrack, and music), Mambety re-orientates the conventional relationship between sound and image, and in the process creates new forms of cinema. Dima posits that the productive tension between image and sound in the telling of, at times, concurrent stories–a visual narrative and an aural (primary) narrative–leads in Mambety's hands to a decolonised fusing of Western and West African aesthetics.

In demonstrating ways in which Mambety privileges the soundtrack, Dima coins a number of new terms that are useful additions to screen music studies terminology. The 'sonic rack focus technique' is one such term Dima employs for exploring ways in which Mambety constructs or 'maps' space with sound. If a visual rack focus technique consists of visual objects coming in and going out of focus in a shot, Dima hears a similar effect operating on the soundtrack of Mambety's films: certain sounds take turns in becoming dominant. He uses a description of a scene near the beginning of Touki Bouki as an example: while the camera is relatively constrained, Anta's neighbourhood is mapped sonically by focalising the listener's attention, in sequence, on the sound of a descending aeroplane, a baby crying, an Islamic call to prayer, a dog barking and a siren–drawing attention to each in turn and emphasising the symbolic potential in the different sounds. While examples of this technique in operation in Mambety's films are relatively rare–more often he produces a dense layering of sound rather than a focalisation from one sound image to another–the idea of a sonic mapping of space is helpful in understanding Mambety's method.

Another valuable new coinage is Dima's concept of the 'acousmatic panopticon', a combination firstly of Michel Chion's concept of the acousmêtre (a disembodied voice in cinema that has mysterious and limitless powers from being heard but not seen), and secondly of Michel Foucault's invocation of the panopticon (a viewing tower that allows inmates in an institution to be constantly monitored and therefore controlled–a metaphor for the normalising and maintenance of institutional...