From visual place to aural space: the films of Mahamat-Saleh Haroun

Abstract

Mahamat-Saleh Haroun has become an increasingly relevant directorial voice in African and international cinema. His films deal with various themes, such as family (especially the loss of a parent), civil war, and social inequality, mostly set up against the socio-political backdrop of Chad. Haroun's camera records and observes the country as a visual place, at the intersecting narrative point of fiction and documentary. As such, the director visually builds a place of tragedy and conflict. However, as one transition from place to space through the movement of the characters and the movement of the camera, a subsequent space emerges: an aural space. This essay investigates the narrative transition from visual place to aural space that occurs in Haroun's films and proposes that the materialization of this aural space represents an innovative way to claim the spatial freedom of the neocolonial subject.

Notes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 In using the term “neocolonial” I follow Ella Shohat's perspective: “The 'neocolonial,' like the 'postcolonial,' also suggests continuities and discontinuities, but its emphasis is on the new modes and forms of the old colonialist practices, not on a 'beyond'” (2006: 241).

2 Olivier Barlet (1996: 157–99) and Frank Ukadike (1994: 201–22) make a similar argument.

3 Two quick illustrations: Mambety’s use of Josephine Baker’s songs in Touki Bouki (1973) may be construed as anempathetic; and, in Mossane (1996), Safi Faye uses non-diegetic choirs that complete the visual narrative through additional (sung) stories.

4 The return is a recurring motif in African cinema and literature. For example, Abderrahmane Sissako also returns home in La Vie sur Terre (Life on Earth, 1998). Famously, Aimé Césaire's seminal Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, 1939) turns the motif of the return into lyrical and melancholic musings on black consciousness.

5 According to Roy Armes, Haroun and Coelo are the only two directors from Chad who have worked towards creating a “national” cinema (2006: 47). Armes does not use the quotation marks ironically, but rather to emphasize the scarcity of film-making in the area.

6 The gesture is reminiscent of the ending of Ousmane Sembène's La noire de… (Black Girl, 1966), in which the main character's young brother, framed in a close-up, reveals himself from behind a wooden mask as the credits specify “Ecrit et réalisé par Sembene Ousmane” (Written and directed by Sembene Ousmane). The superimposition of the director's name over the face of the young boy is quite powerful and suggests that perhaps Sembène sees himself as the emerging young voice of African cinema.

7 In one of the several inter-titles in Les Saignantes (2006), Jean-Pierre Bekolo poses a similar question “How to make a film that anticipates, in a country with no future?”

8 See especially his latest book, Trash: African Cinema from Below (2013), and the essay "Manthia Diawara's Waves and the Problem of the 'Authentic'" (2015, African Studies Review 58, 3: 13–30).

9 Space is very limited in Dry Season, as the main characters, Atim and Nassar, forge a relationship in the dark, small room of the bakery.

10 For more on this, internal/external place, and extension as the essence of the body, see Descartes' Principles of Philosophy, Part II, 10–18.

11 This usual translation of the German "Anschauung" is problematic; Kant may mean something closer to "apprehension."

12 It should be noted that Brown's study is on sound in theatre, and that I am extrapolating his comments to the cinematic world.

13 This is, perhaps, the physiological reason because of which film scholarship “tends to [erroneously] consider the visual track and/or narrative form of film at the exclusion of the sonic components” (Fisher 2016:7).

14 This expression, “contrapuntal use” of sound, comes from Sergei Eisenstein's manifesto Statement on Sound (written with two other Russian directors). To the Russian formalists, the advent of sound allowed for new ways of perfecting montage techniques: “The first experimental work with sound must be directed along the line of its distinct nonsynchronization with the visual images” (1985: 84), and “only a contrapuntal use of sound in relation to the visual montage piece will afford a new potentiality of montage development and perfection” (ibid). While Bazin was not in agreement with Eisenstein's overall ideas on montage, he does use the word “counterpoint” himself when discussing sound: “(…) silent film was an art on its own. Sound could only play at best a subordinate and supplementary role: a counterpoint to the image” (1967: 26).

15 The original Kuleshov effect is an experimentation based on visual counterpoints: the same image of a man juxtaposed with various objects or people, food, a coffin, a beautiful woman elicited different “reads” from the audience, meaning “hunger,” “sadness,” “sexual interest,” respectively.

16 This is the actual name of the real person that Haroun witnessed dancing in a show and decided to make into the hero of a story. The nickname, Grigris, may be a reference to the homonym gris-gris—the name for the voodoo amulet that brings luck and shields the wearer from evil. Therefore, Souleymane becomes a talisman for the community.

17 This connection speaks directly to one of Chion's observations about the physical nature of sound: “There is always something about sound that overwhelms and surprises us no matter what (…) and thus sound interferes with our perception, affects it (…) sound more than image has the ability to saturate and short-circuit our perception. The consequence for film is that sound, much more than the image, can become an insidious means of affective and semantic manipulation. On the one hand, sound works on us directly, physiologically (breathing noises in a film can directly affect our own respiration)” (1994: 33–4).

18 This aural tone is quite possibly augmented by Grigris’ musical environment, which is missing from the other films. If we consider the beginning of A Screaming Man, for example, Adam works at a pool and the glistening of the water while he plays with his son, Abdel, certainly underlines the visual quality of the shot. However, when the two characters go under water only bird noises make themselves heard. At that exact moment of tranquillity, the title appears on the screen and produces a stark contrast between silence and the promise of a screaming man.

19 The motif of the missing father continues in this film, too. Ayoub plays the father figure even though Souleymane also has a stepfather who is in the hospital.

20 This is an important detail for the plot as young Atim must avenge his father's death. In the climactic scene, he brings the culprit to his grandfather, but only pretends to kill him by shooting off his gun in the air twice. Blind characters also appear in films by Mambety (Badou Boy, 1970, and The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun, 1998), and they underline, through their lack, the importance of sound.

21 The radio is a crucial prop, a fetish-object really, in several West African films: Mambety's Le Franc (1994) and The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun, Sissako's Life on Earth (1998) and Bamako (2006), and Sembene's Mooladé (2004), are but a few examples. Similarly, the radio also plays an important part in Godard’s work, particularly in Pierrot le fou (1965) and 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle (1967). In these films, news from the war in Vietnam reach the characters but they are not always aware of the acousmatic presence. This unawareness points to the Marxist alienation of the European subject and to the gap between the French subjects' ignorance and the troubling political reality that surrounds them. Godard portrays the individual as cut off from the national consciousness. This is clearly not the case in Haroun's films, which generate a sense of aural unity instead.

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Vlad Dima

Vlad Dima is an Associate Professor of African Cultural Studies and French at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has published numerous articles, mainly on French and francophone cinemas, but also on Francophone literature, comics, American cinema, and television. He is the author of Sonic Space in Djibril Diop Mambety's Films (Indiana University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a second book project titled, The Beautiful Skin: Clothing, Football and Fantasy in West African cinema, 1964-2014.