Aural Narrative Planes in Djibril Diop Mambety’s Films

Although Djibril Diop Mambety’s films deal with various issues such as politics, social class, locomotion, and comings and goings, they are especially concerned with sounds and voices. Mambety’s¹ sharp sense of satire, combined with an inventive editing style, at the level of both image and sound, creates films that undermine the categorization of Third Cinema,² or any categorization for that matter. He crafted his own style, his own language and sound, and his own delivery. As Sada Niang notes, “Mambety built a personal project of cinematic language since Contras’ City. . . . First, there was the exploration of cinematic space, of the possibilities of combination, juxtaposition, narration and description of image and sound” (197).³ I find the disconnect between sound and image to be Mambety’s creative niche, the mark of a personal style that establishes his body of work as a bridging point between Third Cinema and auteur cinema.⁴ There are moments when his cinema is pastoral or contemplative; at other times it is political and satirical. His editing is often disruptive and discontinuous. Most importantly, though, there is a constant alternation between synchronous and asynchronous sound, which, along with the often-used extra-diegetic sound, leads to the creation of another narrative level as spectators are transposed from a visual plane onto an aural narrative one.⁵ Thus I find that Djibril Diop 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 then created. This article unveils these particular aural planes, explores the shift from visual to aural in Mambety’s films, and especially focuses on the seminal Touki-Bouki (1973).

In the films of Mambety, sound takes on a life of its own, which really separates his work from sound’s more conventional use as soundtrack in the context of West African cinema.⁶ His sound goes beyond Robert Stam’s definition of cinematic sound that “amplifies the mimetic power of the medium . . . reinforces the impression of depth because it penetrates the space of the audience . . . [and] fills out an imaginary third dimension lacking in silent cinema” (260). Not only does the Mambety sound fill another dimension, but it adds multiple layers to that dimension through a technical innovation, a sonic rack-focus effect, to which I return later in this article. This dimension is what Mary-Ann Doane refers to as “acoustical space” (166), the third space in her breakdown of a cinematic situation (the first two being the space of the diegesis and the visible space in front of the spectator). Mambety strives to enhance the legitimacy of this acoustical space, sometimes to the detriment of diegetical space. According to Teshome Gabriel, the diegetical space of African film is not linear; it actually follows multiple paths, and it does not tell only one story. On the contrary, “stories tend to bend back upon themselves, to circle as they circulate, so that their fabric contains many interlocking stories and permutations of stories” (60). Mambety complicates that trend by extending his interest outside the limitations of the image. When he starts exploring and experimenting with the realm of sound, the narration splits onto different planes as “sound becomes disembodied and takes on a force and presence of its own” (Mintz 289).⁷ The force of sound and noise affects the narrative structure of the films, in some cases in their entirety, in others sporadically.

Photo 1.

Director Djibril Diop Mambety.

Perhaps one of the most important documents concerning sound in cinema is Sergei Eisenstein’s Statement on Sound (1928), written with two other Russian directors, which actually speaks negatively about sound in film (Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Alexandrov). According to Eisenstein, the ability to add sound to film has affected the continuing developing of cinema by undermining its basic “hook” on an audience—the image onscreen.⁸ To remedy this, the trio of Russian directors thought about using sound mainly as a montage technique, especially as...