Sound Moves: displacement and modernity in French and Senegalese cinemas
2010-07
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Sound Moves: displacement and modernity in French and Senegalese cinemas
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2010-07
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My dissertation, "Sound Moves: Displacement and Modernity in French and Senegalese Cinemas," explores the relation between film, film sound, modernity, and the cultural politics of gender. Analyzing specific works by French and Senegalese directors, I demonstrate how Senegalese cinema constitutes an original artistic movement unto itself, which can be compared to an established school of expression such as the French New Wave. Both cinemas 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 plurality and plasticity of sound, which displaces and complicates filmic images. These planes reshape the current paradigm of the relationship between spectator and film. In other words, the diverse sound manipulation techniques encountered in these cinemas generate a space continuum in which the audience becomes intimately involved with the projection on screen. I have identified and explored in depth two such prevalent techniques, the sonic jump-cut and the sonic rack-focus, which unfold aural planes in a way that suspends the visual-focused narration. Furthermore, I expose how sound displacement generates the displacement of the film subjects, who, in French and Senegalese films, constantly shift their identity because of their unique position as both products and counterpoints of modernity. I demonstrate that the re-appropriation of the discourse of female identity takes place through voice and sounds, disrupting the gendered relation that classical cinema established primarily through the scopic regime.
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University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. July 2010. Major: French. Advisors. Eileen Sivert, Christophe Wall-Romana. 1 computer file (PDF); ii, 310 pages.
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Dima, Vlad. (2010). Sound Moves: displacement and modernity in French and Senegalese cinemas. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/94324.
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