Fall 2019
Vlad Dima
3 credits
T 2:30-5pm
This seminar explores the narrative use of cinematic sound and diegetic bodies by francophone filmmakers beginning in 1966 with Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl and all the way up to Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s Naked Reality (2016). The course follows historical, theoretical, and aesthetic approaches to studying both African sound and African image. It first connects African sound(s) to African orality, European counter-cinema practices, and classical Hollywood. Second, it connects images of bodies to issues of sexuality, gender, and power. Ultimately, the seminar aims to reveal the possible bodies that emerge through cinema–aural, visual, and haptic–as a way to trace the socio-political impact of space(s) in the neocolonial context.