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ABSTRACT
The ocean is a constant presence in Mati Diop’s award-winning film Atlantique/Atlantics (2019), a ghostly love story about the ongoing migration crisis set in Dakar, Senegal. A critical issue Diop explores in this film is the contradiction between the geopolitical stasis of a high-rise tower and the expansive continuity of the sea, making the physical reality captured by the lens overlap with the unrestricted flow of presences carried by waves of sea and sound through the film frame. This article analyses oceanic aesthetics and the unrestricted flows of bodies of water and work in both Diop’s recent feature film and her first experimental documentary of almost the same title, Atlantiques/Atlantics (2009). These corporeal drifts disrupt narrative and temporal flows and position the cinema as a space for poetic and political change. What the ocean embodies is not only a tragic archive of colonial violence, as Rosalind Galt has recently argued, but also a space for a feminist and decolonial refusal of such loss.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. I wish to express my sincere gratitude to the editors of French Screen Studies and to the anonymous reviewers of this article for their excellent suggestions for revision. I am deeply grateful to Sara Pappas, Fran Bartkowski, Anita Mannur and Katie Johnson for their comments and encouragement during earlier stages of research and work on Mati Diop. This article is dedicated to the memory of my dear friend, James Creech.
2. Freud’s discussion of oceanic feeling in Civilisation and its Discontents is a response to correspondence with Romain Rolland who used the term to describe a limitless feeling that fuels religious energy and faith (Freud Citation[1930] 1961, 10–11). Freud acknowledges that this feeling of limitlessness and interconnection exists, but he turns away from Rolland’s theological interpretation, and instead, locates the oceanic as an undercurrent related to the formation of the ego as it includes and detaches itself from the external world (11–15).
3. In addition to Balsom’s analysis of the sea in cinema, I would refer to the growing field of the blue humanities and to Hester Blum’s excellent work in oceanic studies. Blum makes a compelling case for drawing attention to the ‘material conditions of the maritime world’ in order to galvanise ‘the erasure, elision, and fluidity at work in metaphorics of the sea’ which I think is very helpful in thinking through the enmeshed relationship between the ocean’s figurative language and the historical and political conditions it harbours (Blum Citation2010, 670).
4. Here, I refer to Isaac Julien’s multichannel film installation, Ten Thousand Waves (2010), John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea (2015) and, more recently, Josefa Ntjam’s Dislocations (2022). As Nora Alter (Citation2018), Giuliana Bruno (Citation2014) and others have shown in their analyses of these artists’ works, a common thread through these works is the representation of the ambivalent space of the ocean; its dangerous and intriguing beauty, its place in the commerce and flow of capital and bodies, an undulating surface that masks the tragic historical graves.
5. James S. Williams characterises Diop’s interweaving of fiction and documentary in Mille soleils as ‘highly elastic concepts’ that produce uncertainty (Citation2016, 91) and provide evidence of Diop’s focus on the ‘poetic fusions and reversals made possible in montage’ (93).
6. Mati Diop’s music video, Voyage à Paris, is available on YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7sx_ZVjnBw&list=PLvAt2r1pV8a6CF28CWWKwUvBT7moHwqlh, as is her clip for Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s campaign, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-mR5dWS2Dg. Diop directed a commercial film for Louis XIII cognac, Believe in Time (featuring Solange Knowles) in March 2022 and for Chanel, Tokyo Story (featuring Mama Sané), in June 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-mR5dWS2Dg and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elQNnkDG1ik.
7. It will be fascinating to see how Diop’s second feature, the documentary Dahomey (2024), fits with her other works since it deals not with those who leave or remain, but rather with the notion of return (of stolen artefacts) to Africa. The film was awarded the Golden Bear prize at the Berlinale Film Festival, Berlin, on 24 February 2024.
8. Water’s mutability, as Laurence Kent argues, expresses the contingencies in which Diop’s filmed subjects exist through the emphasis on nonhuman forms of perception (Kent Citation2023, 183). For more on the sea in the film, see also Tina Montenegro’s (Citation2021, 131–135) excellent review.
9. Montenegro cites an interview with Diop in which the film-maker explained that the plural title makes reference to Edouard Glissant’s concept of opacity and the power the ocean conveys to those who experience something as unknowable as the sea (Montenegro Citation2021, 133).
10. For more on fractals, see Mandelbrot (Citation1977).
11. Suzanne Enzerink links Netflix’s acquisition of streaming and distribution rights for Atlantique with the entangled histories of the transatlantic past that bring to the surface ‘circuits of movement’ and exchange between the US and Senegal that shape the film’s representation of the present (Enzerink Citation2021, 54).
12. For Balsom (Citation2018, 61), the connection between dreams and the sea that frame Atlantics (the short feature) breaks up linear temporality and unsettles the anchoring of the film in the real.
13. See Chris Marker, Sans soleil (1983) and also his earlier essay film La Jetée (1962) in which the image of a woman haunts the central protagonist in his time travels. See also Durant (Citation2014).
14. ‘L’invasion de cette fièvre se fait pendant la nuit tandis que le sujet est endormi. Il s’échappe de son lit et court sur le pont. Là, il croit voir, au milieu des ondes, des arbres, des forêts et des prairies émaillées de fleurs. Sa joie éclate par mille exclamations. Il témoigne le plus ardent désir de se jeter dans la mer’.
15. Diop’s citation is excerpted from a footnote entry about a tropical illness known as ‘calenture’ in Corréaud et Savigny (Citation1821, 124–125).
16. See Butterfield-Rosen (Citation2019, 188–199) for a discussion of the model, a person of colour known as Joséph, who posed for Géricault’s painting in the broader context of representations of black models in painting.
17. In an interview with her scriptwriter, Mati Diop explained that the choice of this working title had less to do with Baldwin’s stories than with its revolutionary overtones: ‘The Fire Next Time was indeed one of the working titles, for its incandescent and insurrectional sounds to which the title refers’ (La prochaine fois le feu était en effet un des titres de travail, pour les sonorités incandescentes et insurrectionnelles auxquelles le titre fait référence) (quoted in Cahen Citation2020).
18. Kent convincingly argues that the perspective offered by the ocean in the film is plural because it ‘offers no single perspective as it slips between individual, supernatural, material, and extra-diegetic perspectives’ and, as such, it becomes ‘symbolic for migrant crossings’ (Citation2023, 184).
19. According to Galt, ‘the faru rab is an ancestral spirit that is understood as circulating in the sea and air, similar to an Islamic jinn, looking for people to possess’ (Citation2023, 98). While these spirits can serve to reinforce conservative gender roles in Islamic cultures, as Galt argues, the possessions in Atlantique are not punitive, but rather enact a melancholic coupling after the deaths of the women’s partners (98).
20. Kuwaiti musician Al Qadiri was born in Senegal and lived there until she was two years old. Like Diop, she shares a powerful connection to Africa that contributed to their collaboration. In an interview with Pettengill, Al Qadiri explained: ‘That was the beautiful thing [about] working with her, also being a woman of color. Being Muslim, being exposed to Muslim culture, there were a lot of things that we didn’t need to explain to each other’ (Citation2019, para. 4).
21. In a conference presentation at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in April 2022 titled ‘The Enfoldment of Air and Ocean: The Fugue’s Contrapuntal Movements in Mati Diop’s Atlantics’, Iggy Cortez suggested reading the film’s indeterminate atmosphere through the figural trope of the fugue. Cortez’s work on Diop is part of a book project in progress on night in cinema.
22. ‘Le sel de ta peau je le goûterai toujours dans la sueur de la mienne’; ‘Que tu es belle. Je t’ai vue dans la vague immense qui nous a engloutis. Je n’ai vu que tes yeux et tes larmes. J’ai senti tes pleurs me ramener au rivage. Ton regard ne m’a jamais quitté. Il était là, en moi. Du soleil au fond de la mer’.
23. I am referring here to Resnais’ Nuit et brouillard/Night and Fog (1956) and to the recurring motif of train imagery in Godard’s Le Livre d’image/The Image Book (2018).
24. ‘Il y a des souvenirs qui sont des présages. Cette nuit m’accompagnera pour me rappeler qui je suis. Ada, à qui l’avenir appartient. Je suis Ada.’
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Elisabeth Hodges
Elisabeth Hodges is associate professor of French at Miami University where she teaches courses in film and French and francophone literatures. She is the author of Urban Poetics in the French Renaissance (Ashgate, 2008) and is completing a book manuscript on contemporary transnational film entitled Drift: On Cinema and Indirection.