Thursday, April 21st, 4:00 PM, Washington 315
Sound Moves: Sonic Space in French and Senegalese Cinemas
This presentation explores the ways in which sound creates a new sense of spatiality in the films of Jean-Luc Godard and Djibril-Diop Mambety. Both directors challenge the primacy of the visual by foregrounding how aural planes affect and alter the economy of visual planes. As a result, I determine that new (aural) narrative plateaus surface from the plasticity of sound, which displaces and complicates filmic images. These planes, diegetic and extra-diegetic, reshape the current paradigm of the relationship between spectator and film. In other words, the sound manipulation techniques encountered in the films of the two directors generate a space continuum in which the audience becomes intimately involved with the projection on screen. I will discuss two such prevalent techniques (that I identify as the sonic jump-cut and the sonic rack-focus) which unfold aural planes in a way that suspends the visual-focused narration.