by Zina Giannopoulou
To be black is to be contaminated by European subjectivity. – Alice Diop
Introduction
Cinema has increasingly become an important cultural site in France for debates on race and representation. The last fifteen years have seen the release of many films by Afro-French women, some of which investigate Blackness in a country historically reluctant to consider its colonial past and posit race as a salient social category.[1] In 2022, French-Senegalese writer and director Alice Diop released her first narrative feature film, Saint Omer, a courtroom drama based on the true story of a French-Senegalese woman who stood trial for infanticide in France. Among many other accolades, the film won two awards at the Venice Film Festival in 2022 and was France’s entry for best international feature at the Academy Awards, making Diop the first Black woman ever to represent France at the Oscars. A Sorbonne graduate in colonial history with postgraduate degrees in visual sociology and documentary filmmaking, Diop had already directed several acclaimed documentaries, including Nous (We, 2021), Towards Tenderness (Vers la Tendresse, 2016), and The Death of Danton (La Mort de Danton, 2011). Among her cinematic influences she cites Chantal Akerman, Claire Denis, Agnès Varda, American documentarian Frederick Wiseman, and Pedro Costa – all filmmakers who taught her that cinema could serve as a means of redressing the systematic amnesia, rigid caricatures, and demeaning exclusions with which marginalised peoples have been represented in visual forms.
Diop describes her cultural makeup as ‘very European’ (she does not speak Wolof and did not visit Senegal until later in life), a self-reference to which the intertextual Saint Omer attests, with its allusions to the Medeas of Euripides and Pasolini, Duras’ Hiroshima Mon Amour, and Wittgenstein. Her acute European sensibility informs films that are deeply concerned with issues of representation, the gaze, and the possibilities of experimental documentary for contesting marginalisation, both social and representational. In interviews, Diop often mentions her cultural hybridity as a European filmmaker of African descent, a woman born to Senegalese immigrants and raised in the banlieues, the suburbs of Paris. Her films are the products of this Afropean perspective, at once critiques of the racial discrimination in France and repositories of European cultural references.
This essay explores Diop’s poetics of refraction in Saint Omer, the ways in which her Afropeanness enables an angled articulation of audiovisual materials that calls attention to mediation, and materiality and carves spaces for critical inquiry.[2] These spaces occur in the film’s subtext – the real-life infanticide on which the film is based mirrors a real-life infanticide that inspired a newspaper article by Duras on the still unsolved death of a little boy, initially thought to have been killed by his mother – and in its textual use of breathing, (extra)diegetic sound, and the gaze. On the level of subtext, Diop models herself on Duras to probe the ethics and politics of fictionalised accounts of heinous crimes. Can fictional narration turn such crimes into emblems of larger social problems at the cost of attenuating, if not eclipsing, their singularity? Would such a narrative practice be politically analogous to centers colonising the margins, instead of the margins revolving around their own centers and envisioning new ones? How might an atrocious crime be represented without becoming merely symbolic? Textually, the film forges a relational Black subjectivity, an audiovisual community of Black subjects that contests European polarities of white subjects and Black objects in favor of relational connections and a capacious ethics of ‘difference without separability’.[3] Rather than depicting the world as composed of separate parts – content and form, self and other, European and non-European – Saint Omer offers palimpsests of interrelated but distinct parts and thereby creates a multidirectional narrative out of an array of ‘third spaces’, which are hybrid areas of ambiguity (e.g. the objectivity/performativity of the law, the courtroom/symbolic father, and the roaring sea/mother)which evoke and renounce the legacies of imperial violence connecting Europe and Africa.[4]
Marguerite Duras, Christine Villemin, and Christine V.
… innocent Christine V. who had, perhaps, killed without knowing it, as I, I write without knowing, with eyes fixed at the window trying to see clearly at the growing dark of the evening, that day in October. – Marguerite Duras, ‘Sublime, Necessarily Sublime, Christine V.’
Marguerite Duras has influenced Diop’s films since We, a documentary about people living in the suburbs of Paris, for which Diop cites Duras’ short The Negative Hands (Les Mains Négatives, 1978) as the main subtext.[5] In Saint Omer, the Durasian influence becomes textually explicit. The film opens with archival footage of women Nazi collaborators who had their heads publicly shaved after the liberation of France, set to a text from Duras’ Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) as read by Black professor Rama in a lecture hall of mostly white students. Female agency is ontologically and racially hybridised, creating fugal counterpoints between African and European perspectives, as Rama channels Duras while archival bodies of white women are shown being mutilated and objectified.
Duras also haunts the film’s subtext.[6] In 2019, Netflix released the five-part documentary mini-series Who Killed Little Gregory? about the murder of four-year-old Grégory Villemin, whose body was found tied up in the Vologne River in the east of France on 16 October 1984. His mother, Christine Villemin, was arrested for the murder. On 17 July 1985, Duras published an article in Libération titled ‘Sublime, forcément sublime Christine V.’, in which she both accused the mother (who had been indicted but not convicted and who was eventually cleared of all charges) of filicide and defended her for a crime supposedly committed against the patriarchy. In a short inset, ‘La transgression de l’écriture’, prefacing Duras’ article, Serge July, editor of Libération, wrote that Duras’ interest in the Villemin case stemmed from her fascination with Christine Villemin who was becoming the heroine of L’ Amant.
The article is full of sensational details. Duras evokes the mother’s ‘pretty face’ with ‘this absence, the slight inexpressiveness glazing her gaze’; the house with its closed shutters, the better to hide the murder perpetrated in it; a shovel stuck in a pile of gravel. She believes ‘instinctively’ that Gregory was killed inside the house and then sunk, and that his mother was at the center of the crime. Like another Sherlock, Duras scans the crime photos for clues, and comes up with three inferences – ‘Why wouldn’t a pregnancy come at a bad time?’; ‘It might be possible that Christine V. lived with a man who was difficult to put up with’; ‘No, the child didn’t have to be the most important thing in Christine V.’s life’ – and an exonerating verdict:
She doesn’t know what that word, guilty, means. Victim of unjust treatment, yes, she had been, but guilty, no, she was not guilty.[7]
Through a combination of mystical intuition and subjective interpretation, Duras turns an assumed filicide of a real-life crime into the innocent victim of a fictionalised account of that crime to pen a critique of wifedom and motherhood. The flesh-and-blood Christine Villemin becomes Christine V., a clipped and generic signifier devoid of a specific signified, a Durasian ‘Elle’ used as a symbol of oppressed femininity for whom, as the closing paragraph says, ‘justice appears insufficient, distant, even useless … superfluous from the moment it’s rendered’, because what could make Christine V. a criminal ‘is a secret that all women share’.
Alice Diop, Fabienne Kabou, and Laurence Coly
Personally, I am driven by a hybrid culture – from Baldwin to Duras to Nietzsche, and, in cinematic terms, Clouzot, Sembène, and Bresson. I am shaped by mainstream European culture, but also by minority cultures. I have a relational mindset. – Alice Diop
In 2013, Fabienne Kabou, a French-Senegalese mother, was accused of placing her mixed-race infant daughter on a beach in northern France, abandoning her at high tide. In 2016, Kabou, who claimed to have acted under the influence of witchcraft, was sentenced to twenty years in prison. Diop attended the trial and became fascinated with this mythical image of a mother (mère) offering her child to the sea (mer), ‘a mother more powerful than herself’.[8] Nature, motherhood, and power came together in her notes of the trial and were used as the framework of a screenplay that Diop co-authored with novelist Marie Ndiaye and editor Amrita David. In it, Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda) becomes Fabienne Kabou’s stand-in, the infanticide on trial who tells her story from a stern upbringing in Senegal to a gradual isolation from family and society in France to a precarious relationship with a White married man to a murder she cannot understand. Coly is seen through Rama (Kayije Kagame), Diop’s stand-in, a pregnant author and professor who attends the trial, intending to write a contemporary version of Medea. Saint Omer is thus the fictionalised account of the real-life trial of a French-Senegalese infanticide by a French-Senegalese director, starring a French-Senegalese actor as the infanticide and a French-Senegalese actor as a writer looking to transform the proceedings into a novel. The film’s mise-en-abyme structure of theme, gender, and race is enhanced by the Duras/Villemin subtext, both thematically and gender-wise.
How similar are Diop’s and Duras’ projects? Both denounce structures of female oppression, whether patriarchy or postcolonial trauma; both make art out of real cases of infanticide; both create a fictional surrogate of the perpetrator, turning a documentary into a nuanced hybrid of reality and fiction; and the female protagonists of both deny being guilty and thus challenge the prevailing system of justice. But although Christine V. takes considerable liberties with Christine Villemin, to the extent that the latter sued Duras for defamation, Laurence Coly’s incarnation of Fabienne Kabou is based on transcripts of the trial. With Christine V., Duras trades Christine Villemin’s particularity for a gendered universality, whereas Diop’s Laurence Coly both preserves Kabou’s singularity and critiques broader social ills. One of Diop’s narrative strategies for distancing or ‘decolonising’ Coly is the use of Rama as Coly’s inverted image. Both characters are Black women of a similar age and looks, their physical resemblance suggesting an identity play evocative of Bergman’s Persona (1966), and both have difficult relationships with their mothers, but Rama has earned the academic post to which Coly aspired, and she is pregnant with her first child, whereas Coly has killed hers. By refracting Black femaleness and motherhood through the prism of two women with intersecting and divergent lives, Diop writes a script that feels airier and roomier than Duras’ airtight story of doomed womanhood. A concoction of sharp realism and measured optimism, Saint Omer illuminates both Coly’s dashed dreams, caught within the fault-lines of racism and colonialism and symbolised by the infanticide, and Rama’s hope for a better future, augured by a gradually-improved relationship with her mother and the new life that she carries inside her.
Black subjectivity
I am overdetermined from without. I am the slave not of the ‘idea’ that others have of me but of my own appearance. – Franz Fanon, The Fact of Blackness
Blackness is always a disruptive surprise moving in the rich nonfullness of every term it modifies. Such mediation suspends neither the question of identity nor the question of essence. Rather, blackness, in its irreducible relation to the structuring forces of radicalism and the graphic, montagic configurations of tradition, and, perhaps most importantly, in its very manifestation as the inscriptional events of a set of performances, requires another thinking of identity and essence. – Fred Moten, In the Break
In France, during the economic growth of Les Trente Glorieuses (1945-1975), Black people from Sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean were recruited as a labor force.[9] By 1975, the country’s Black population, most of whom lived in the Paris suburbs, was the largest in Europe, and Paris continued to be a colonial metropolis, where the treatment of immigrants of color revealed the persistence of colonial ideologies and hierarchies. Alongside various forms of individual and institutional racism, the racialising gaze holds a prominent place, echoing Fanon’s experience of racialisation as a visual regime of othering. In France, Blackness is experienced as social exclusion rather than a cultural identity. Nathalie Etoké observes that Blackness here is rooted in a colonial memory that serves as a prism through which ‘psychological projections’ are screened onto persons of color and where physical attributes impose an identity that cancels the interiority of the Black subject and the complexity of their social and cultural affiliations.[10]
Racialised looking is embedded in histories of visual representation, chief among which is film. As Fatimah Tobing Rony writes, the emergence of cinema, both ethnographic and narrative, ‘has been a primary means through which race and gender are visualized as natural categories’.[11] If cinematic affordances have been historically mobilised to produce and perpetuate racist epistemologies predicated on Blackness as visual object and whiteness as visual subject, they should, logically, also be able to enact a ‘decolonization of the imaginary’.[12] Can cinema in the twenty-first century contest a Eurocentric metaphysics that conceives of ‘the black in the whiteness of being, in the being of whiteness’?[13]
To answer this question, we must first take a brief detour through Black ontology. The question of Black being or, as Calvin Warren puts it, ‘the Negro Question’, probes an ontological erasure, since being is a metaphysical category of the white subject for whom Blackness is the Black body ‘reduced to a thing, to being for the captor’.[14] Already in 1952, Frantz Fanon had called the Black body ‘a corporeal malediction’ that makes it impossible to
understand the being of the black man. For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man.[15]
For Fanon and Spillers, Blackness is relational Thingliness, Black skin for the white man. The Afro-pessimist Frank Wilderson sees Blackness as a sociological and non-relational category: ‘the Black’, he writes,
has sentient capacity but no relational capacity. As an accumulated and fungible object, rather than an exploited and alienated subject, the black is openly vulnerable to the whims of the world and so is his or her ‘cultural’ production.[16]
The Black then is a thing or an object, relational or non-relational, for or to the white subject, and Black being is parasitic on white being, the latter serving as the former’s ontological blueprint.
Saint Omer makes a case for an alternative ontology that Nahum Chandler would call paraontology and Andrew Benjamin calls ‘relational ontology’, two interpretative frames that suit Diop’s ‘relational mindset’.[17] Despite their different points of departure, both ontologies reject mutually exclusive conceptual singularities – e.g. Blackness vs. whiteness, Plato’s Forms vs. particulars – because they posit no middle ground between a refused subjectivity and nothing. To think paraontologically or from the standpoint of relational ontology would be to ask, ‘What’s the relationshipbetween blackness, thingliness, nothingness, and the (de/re)generative operations of what Deleuze calls a life in common?’[18] Rejecting the zero-sum games of Eurocentric ontology, a relationally-understood Blackness is productively situated ‘beside’ (para) it, in Benjamin’s relationality or ‘plural event’, which makes plurality primary and irreducible, and singularity secondary and derivative. According to Benjamin, in non-relational ontologies, ‘singularity is asserted as an end in itself, [and] the plural event, while it remains the condition for singularity, can always be excised’. By contrast, relational ontologies are ‘unoriginal’ in that they are predicated on a ‘doubled presence’, an ontological dyad that negates a singular origin.[19]
Relational ontologies thus make room for an excised plurality as the actualisation of a possibility that non-relational ontologies keep dormant, concealed, unacknowledged, and unthought. Saint Omer is, among other things, an audiovisual synthesis of ontological dyads, an inter-threading of subjectivities, visuals, and sounds. Its constitutive and irresoluble doubleness suggests a cinematic ontology of Blackness predicated on productive friction or discrepant engagement, a relational mode ‘at odds with taxonomies and categorizations that obscure the fact of heterogeneity and mix’.[20]
Relational subjectivity through/as breathing
Indeed, does all life that emerges and goes its separate way remain contained in an accompanying breath? – Peter Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Microspherology
In film studies, breath is connected to embodiment and corporeality.[21] Inspired by the French psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray, Davina Quinlivan’s seminal study The Place of Breath in Cinema views breathing as a form of embodied thought. The intersubjective dimension of air, its ability to blur the distinction between interior and exterior, self and other, leads to an examination of the ways in which the breathing body on screen connects with the spectators’ bodies through its mimetic and contagious qualities.[22] For Irigaray, breathing constitutes a particularly feminine form of being since our sharing of air ‘repeats the original sharing between mother and fetus and creates a community where people breathe together but are also independent from one another’.[23] Ordinarily, viewers watch characters on screen without hearing them breathing. Directors tend to make breath audible to build tension, sensuality, or to stress a basic function of the human animal. As Vivian Sobchak says, ‘we could liken the intermittent passage of images into and out of the film’s material body (through camera and projector) to human respiration or circulation, the primary bases upon which human animation and being are grounded’.[24] Saint Omer opens with the sound of breath heard over the title in the opening credits as the film transitions to a Black woman walking away from the camera toward the sea in front of her, carrying a baby in her arms. The scene lasts less than a minute and takes place at night, which makes it hard to see details – the sea, for example, is registered by the sound of crashing waves, and the baby looks more like a bundle than a human – but what stands out is the sound of breathing ranging from being very audible to being virtually inaudible.
Fig. 1
Who is breathing here? The mother, the baby, or both? Or is the sea ‘breathing’, a symbol of femininity, its crashing waves indexing the breath of a cosmic mer that now joins and now eclipses that of the human mère? In the next scene, a Black woman, later revealed as Rama, is awakened by her white lover who tells her that she was calling for her mother in her sleep. Rama calls him ‘ridiculous’ and gets out of bed.
Fig. 2
Through parallel editing the first scene visualises Rama’s dream from which she awakens in the second scene. The first scene is thus a mental image – a dream version of Rama’s childhood memory (Rama carried by her mother on a beach), or a nightmare about a baby (or Rama-as-a-baby) about to be drowned by the mother, or even a nightmare about a Black mother, possibly Rama herself since she is pregnant, about to drown her baby. Diop uses the sound of breathing to forge a relational subjectivity that complicates the subject/object dichotomy: mother, child, and sea come together in a sonic community of literal and symbolic breath and of overlapping temporalities. By drowning the baby, the breathing mother cedes her role to the roaring sea, which Diop has called ‘a mother more powerful than [the human mother]’.[25] As the dreamer of the first scene, pregnant Rama blends her breath with that of the Black mother and ‘becomes’ her, either by reliving a traumatic experience of her own that she has survived or by living out the fear of becoming a murderous mother.[26] Moreover, by blending her breathing with the breathing of the Black mother and her child, Rama both enacts her current state of breathing for herself and her unborn child and projects her desired future as a caring mother breathing alongside her child.
In the film’s final scene, the breathing body becomes a meeting point between exterior and interior that connects mother and daughter through the medium of air. Rama’s mother is shown in closeup falling asleep. As the camera zooms out, we see a still pregnant Rama sitting next to and looking at her mother until finally she turns away and looks offscreen.
Fig. 3
Here, breath is ‘a phenomenon that is fully audiovisual, and then some: breath has a density, a grain, a warmth’.[27] The mother’s breathing is somaticised and visualised first from Rama’s and then from the viewer’s POV, until both breaths become audible on the soundtrack. Other than a childhood memory of Rama, where she and her mother sit next to each other and look at their reflections in a mirror, this is the only time when mother and daughter share a calm intimacy in the same space: their breaths merge their subjectivities, jointly celebrating aged and young motherhood, their clasping hands adding tactility to their newfound bond.[28] Breath is also the only physical sign of their aliveness. If it were not for the mother’s heaving body and audible breathing, her stillness might suggest that she had died; and when Rama stares offscreen in the last few seconds of the film, her breathing is the only sonic proof that she is alive. Breathing thus serves as a shared claim to life for both women, as well as a reminder of Black power for Black people.[29] Finally, by being heard for a few seconds in the final fade-out, the two women’s breaths outlive the film’s visual narrative. The film fades out, but Black subjectivity survives as breath, animal life’s irreducible materiality.
Relational subjectivity through/as reciprocal viewing
The Negro cannot enable the representation of meaning, [since] it has no referent. – Ronald Judy, (Dis)forming the American Canon: African-Arabic Slave Narratives and the Vernacular
The mise en scène of the courtroom sets up a division between viewing subject (the jury and the public) and viewed object (the accused). At the stand, Coly’s looking grid is dictated by the necessity of having to answer the questions of the presiding judge, her defense attorney, and the prosecutor. When emotionally affected by the proceedings, she looks at the floor. The only violation of this externally-imposed looking regime is when Coly looks at Rama, a most important event that I discuss below. Besides Coly, her mother, and Rama, those with the power to decide her case, as well as the public, are white, so the visual set-up risks slipping into what Jonathan Beller terms a visual ‘metrics of domination’, an encounter in which sight becomes a ‘regime of [white] subjectification and [black] objectification’. Beller notes that ‘the processes of racist and colonial visuality have been translated into the photographic apparatus’, which captures and makes legible the visible surface of the body, transforming it into a legible surface, a signifier of racial essence.[30] The view of racialisation as a visual and epistemic process has also been advanced by Cassandra Jackson and Alessandra Raengo, and applies to all visual media, including cinema.[31]
Diop contests this view most clearly in a sequence edited in a way that suggests a reciprocal viewing that flirts with being reflexive. After Rama and Coly’s mother have had lunch at a local restaurant, Rama returns to her hotel room and throws up, a possible side-effect of her pregnancy. Having washed her face and mouth, she looks down at the sink, then up at herself in the mirror, and then down again, her breathing registered on the soundtrack.
Fig. 4
The film cuts to an extreme closeup of Coly looking intently ahead of her and at a slight angle to the viewer, her back against the courtroom wall, the sound of breathing eventually heard as doubled.
Fig. 5
In a montage reminiscent of the film’s opening sequence, the closeup of Coly is Rama’s memory or mental image of the woman on trial. The scenes of Rama in the bathroom and Coly at the stand are linked by the sound of breathing, which in the transition between the two scenes has Rama as its single source but is quickly registered as a sonic rendezvous of two breaths. In addition, the closeup of Coly almost looks like Rama’s reflection. In fact, had Rama been looking at the mirror prior to the cut to Coly, and had Coly’s shot been frontal, the closeup of Coly would appear to be Rama’s mirror-image. By placing the two women in different narrative spaces and filming them at different angles, Diop both respects their ontological separateness and joins them associatively: we are invited to see that the pregnant Rama is imagining or remembering the infanticide Coly, the sound of breathing joining the two women together like a thread. The mediating device of the mirror at once stages a community of two and prevents it from becoming (straightforwardly) reflexive.
Relational subjectivity through/as audiovisual worldbuilding
One of the reasons the music so often goes over into nonspeech – moaning, humming, shouts, nonsense lyrics, scat – is to say, among other things, that the realm of conventionally articulate speech is not sufficient for saying what needs to be said. – Nathaniel Mackey, Paracritical Hinge
The next two instances of relational subjectivity are embedded in a clash of cultures that lasts about six minutes (1:23:23-1:29:30). Asked to explain why Coly hid her pregnancy and childbirth even from her own mother, the mother blames all her daughter’s misfortunes on sorcery, an explanation that Westerners will find ridiculous, she says, but for which she has proof of ‘mystical blockages’. The jury’s incredulity prompts Coly’s mother to ask how they explain her daughter’s odd behavior, whereupon the investigating judge, who interviewed Coly prior to the trial, is called in to explain how sorcery became relevant to the case. A conversation ensues between the investigating judge and the prosecutor, the former insisting that he ‘tried to ascertain whether the cultural aspect played a part’ because, similarly to female genital mutilation, ‘we cannot judge without taking the ethnological aspect into account’, and the latter countering that unlike female genital mutilation, infanticide has no cultural value. Coly’s response to the issue of cultural relevance, mediated by the prosecutor on the basis of written transcripts, is thoroughly ‘Western’: ‘I am a Cartesian thinker, I don’t believe in all that’ – yet she starts to evoke hallucinatory phenomena and to claim that her aunts may have put a curse on her. The presiding judge reports that Coly told her mother that the investigating judge was ‘buying the sorcery explanation’, that she was not ‘the average infanticide’, and that ‘before she gets thirty years of sentence, they must know who really killed’ her daughter. Coly and Rama exchange looks, and Rama runs out of the courtroom.
Here, gender and racial subjectivities collide in an almost farcical attempt to find out the cause of the infanticide or, as Coly puts it, the real killer of her daughter. Diop stages a duel between white men and a Black mother, two parties of uneven judicial power seeking to explain an incomprehensible crime with mutually-inadmissible explanatory tools: rationality and sorcery. Between them stands Coly, a Black woman parroting the sorcery explanation fed to her by the investigating judge only to disown it to her mother, an echo of her mythical antecedent Medea in Euripides’ play who uses Creon’s love for his daughter as a ploy for gaining time to exact her revenge. Coly’s dissimulation both reflects and exposes the judge’s racial bias: in suggesting sorcery as the cause of the infanticide, the judge projects Western stereotypes and assumptions about non-Western forms of cognition and cultural values he knows nothing about, and the ‘non-average infanticide’ Coly is happy to fake them, her real motives slipping through the cracks of Western arrogance and condescension.
This absurd theater of mutual incomprehension is punctuated by two instances of sympathetic connection: a mental image anchored in Rama and a visual exchange between Rama and Coly. The mental image occurs toward the beginning of the six-minute sequence and lasts less than a minute (1:24:53-1:25:34). A medium-closeup of Rama looking straight ahead and touching her throat as if she is suffocating is followed by her looking at a large window to her right. Framed by the window and from her POV, we get a static shot of the top of the building across the courthouse against a blue sky with clouds moving, followed by another static shot of sea waves bathed in moonlight, and finally a closeup of Rama in the courtroom lost in thought. This chain of images is acoustically paired either with a mixture of diegetic sounds (Coly’s mother and the presiding judge speaking) and extradiegetic music (the Courante of Caroline Shaw’s a cappella Partita for 8 Voices, sung by the vocal group Roomful of Teeth) or with the Courante alone (for a few seconds in the shot of the sky and throughout the shot of the sea waves).[32]
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
This audiovisual narrative is both part of the plot and its formal punctuation, a Foucauldian heterotopia ‘linked to slices in time’ and opening onto ‘heterochronies’ that offers a glimpse of a heterotopic and heterochronic cosmic subjectivity conjured by Rama.[33] Visually, the blue sky/moving clouds shot is associatively linked to the moonlit sea/crashing waves shot, together drawing, so to speak, an imaginary circle around the heavens and the earth. The latter shot links the narrative past with the future, recalling the Black woman with the bundle in the opening sequence and alluding to a shot of Maria Callas’ moonlit face after she has killed her sons in Pasolini’s Medea, a scene that Rama will soon watch on her laptop. Aurally, the two shots are linked by the extra-diegetic music of the Courante, which synthesises three elements – Western baroque, folk music, and a literary allusion – and thus evokes the layered experience of exile.[34] A Courante is a late 17th century triple-meter dance of Italian and French origin, and Shaw’s Courante incorporates the tonalities of both European strands. It is, however, dominated by Inuit throat-singing or katajjak, a type of throat-singing that originated as a game between two singers (almost always women) facing each other and jointly creating rhythmic/melodic patterns of voiced and unvoiced breath sounds, growls, grunts, hums, regular modal voice, and vocables or nonsense syllables or sounds.
In Shaw’s Courante, rhythmic inhalations and exhalations, both unvoiced and semi-voiced, form the texture of much of the movement. The third element of Shaw’s Courante is the 1855 hymn ‘Shining Shore’ by George F. Root. The first stanza of the text, written by Rev. David Nelson, reads:
My days are gliding swiftly by, / And I, a pilgrim stranger, / Would not detain them as they fly, / Those hours of toil and danger. / For now we stand on Jordan’s strand; / our friends are passing over; / And just before the shining shore, / We may almost discover.
Although not sung, the text, with its description of swiftly-flying time and crossing over the river Jordan – a common metaphor in American hymns and spirituals for the representation of transitional states from slavery to freedom or from life to afterlife – is the Courante’s poetic subtext.
The sequence then conflates what is an insular environment on narrative premises (the courtroom) with a timeless environment on filmic premises – ‘filmic premises’ being those that provoke the viewer to regard onscreen events as phenomena. Although the two shots are not instances of photographic stillness and, therefore, bear a different relation to the death and eternity evoked in the works of Bazin and Barthes, their static nature and duration encode emotions.[35]This is Rama’s psychoterritory, a natural landscape whose mobility contrasts with her painterly fixed-frame in the courtroom, offering the viewer the product of a contemplative subjectivity that runs parallel to the judicial world and breaches its linearity, casting Rama in a timeless dimension and transforming the impasses of the proceedings into mutually-enhancing layers of meaning.[36] As a time-capsule, it is a burst of arrhythmia, a renegade rhythm that stops or estranges the temporal dynamics of the courtroom even as it is a layered synthesis of different breaths. The Inuit throat-singing of the Courante creates a choral ensemble of women’s breaths that materialises what Mackey terms ‘telling inarticulacy’ and ‘alternate vocality’, unlocking imagined spaces of female collectivity.[37]
The visual exchange between Rama and Coly takes place toward the end of the sequence, while the presiding judge reports the conversation between Coly and her mother in prison. The sequence starts with a closeup of Rama looking at Coly; cut to Coly looking straight ahead and with her breathing audible on the soundtrack; cut to Rama looking at Coly, her breathing also audible until it becomes the only registered sound; cut to Coly, her breathing still audible in an almost silent room until she turns her head to look at Rama; cut to Rama still breathing and looking at Coly in a complete absence of sound; cut to Coly still looking at Rama and smiling; cut to Rama looking at Coly, slowly bursting into tears, and running out of the room.
Fig. 8
Fig. 9
In this extraordinarily affective audiovisual repartee, breathing and a reciprocal gaze co-create a Black inter-subjectivity. Although Coly and Rama cannot verbally express their thoughts and feelings to each other, they bond through their animal aliveness (breath) and mutual recognition (ocular exchange). In addition, Coly smiles at Rama, a surprising smile, given her solemn expression throughout the trial. That smile may evince happiness at the sight of a Black woman close to her age or ennui at the court proceedings. I view it as a subversive act, Coly’s mocking the jury’s attempt to make sense of her putative belief in sorcery and smiling at Rama whom she sees as a co-conspirator. In a Western court, making sorcery the cause of murder is tantamount to pleading insanity, which is the line Coly’s defense attorney adopts (‘Elise died because her mother is mad. And in her madness, she believed she was protecting her’).[38] But when the Cartesian Coly insists that she does not know why she killed her infant daughter and hopes the trial will enlighten her, and when she urges the jury to find the real killer, does she blame the infanticide on sorcery or on the sociopolitical inequities, racial prejudices, and psychological burdens which made it impossible for this loving mother to raise her mixed-race daughter in France and led her to murder? Or, more radically, what if we were to understand her actions as exceeding/being in excess of the rational, or even view it as exposing the rational for what it is – a mere pretense of rationality that obfuscates a social unconscious rooted in anti-Blackness and white supremacy?
Coly’s smile, filmed in a static closeup and in a sonic vacuum, lends the facial detail of a smile ‘a surplus of plenitude’[39] that reflects the crime’s excessive causality. In closeup, the smile becomes diegetically autonomous, expanding its ability to be cognised and recognised. It leaks out and contaminates Rama, also shown in closeup, who buckles under the emotional strain and flees. The ethical ramifications of two closeups colliding are enormous. In her study of the closeup, Mary Ann Doane writes:
As simultaneously microcosm and macrocosm, the miniature and the gigantic, the closeup acts as a nodal point, linking the ideologies of intimacy and interiority to public space and to the authority of the monumental. […] The classical closeup assures us that we can, indeed, see and grasp the whole, in a moment rich with meaning and affect.[40]
The film’s intercutting between a closeup of Coly looking and smiling at Rama and a closeup of Rama looking and crying at Coly, each taken from the other’s POV and both unfolding in silence, acts as a nodal point of a shared subjectivity. The mute passage between the two women violates the spatial dynamics of the courtroom by channeling a visual exchange between the accused and the audience that turns them from spectators of the trial to witnesses of its failure to mete out real justice. It also opens up what Walter Benjamin calls ‘Jetztzeit’, ‘a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop’.[41] The moment of Rama and Coly’s mutual recognition is a charged ‘present’ that suspends the progressive temporality of the court proceedings to burst open a moment of ineffable racial and gendered connection.
No closure
What is the nothingness, which is to say the blackness, of the slave that is not reducible to what they did, though what they did is irreducible in it? – Fred Moten, The Universal Machine
In concluding, some reflections on the absence of a final verdict in the film. After the defense lawyer’s closing argument, there is a shot of an empty courtroom that signifies the end of the proceedings, but no verdict – a floating signifier. The inconclusiveness of the trial may be Diop’s way of filming Duras’ distinction between victimisation (Christine V. is victim of injustice) and guilt (Christine V. is not guilty): Coly is the victim of a host of social and racial injustices, and the court’s inability to reveal the real cause of the infanticide is a case in point, but she is not guilty of the crime. Other interpretations are also possible. The absence of a verdict may indicate Diop’s refusal to reduce Coly to what she did, even though the trial has shown that what she did was deeply enmeshed with her Blackness. It may also be a way of keeping the conversation going, the absence of closure catalysing readings of the infanticide that no one has thought of.
Finally, it may be an instance of Moten’s ‘fugitive movement’, ‘a movement of escape in and from pursuit, the stealth of the stolen that can be said, since it inheres in every closed circle, to break every enclosure’. This escape constitutes ‘a paraontological disruption of the supposed connection between explanation and resistance’, which makes Coly’s infanticide a ‘fugitive’ case that must remain unresolved because it ‘runs away’ from the jurors just as they think they can pronounce on it.[42] The absence of a verdict is thus another rupture in the narrative fabric of Saint Omer, an instance of Moten’s ‘blackness as an always disruptive surprise’, which like the film’s title at once encodes a present non-existence and summons a futural existence: the French commune of Saint-Omer is not Saint Omer – the absence of a hyphen in the latter phrase indexes a topographical vacancy that begs to be imaginatively filled. Similarly, Coly’s real motive for her crime remains unknowable in this trial but is surmisable or even knowable by viewers of the film willing to engage with its poignant Black politics.[43]
for my mother
Author
Zina Giannopoulou is Professor of Classics and European Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She has published extensively in comparative classicisms in the twentieth and the twenty-first century, Plato, aesthetics and textual poetics, film criticism and new media, translation studies, and critical theory. Her recent publications include essays on Derrida and the Homeric Hymn to Demeter; Blanchot, Kiefer, and Anne Carson; Mbembe and Antigone; Robert Bresson and animal studies; Foucault, Butler, and Athina Rachel Tsangari’s cinema of the Greek Weird Wave; and Alice Diop and Black subjectivity. Her current projects include two books: Plato’s Cave, Film, and Critical Theory and Classical Reception, Gender, and Film Genre. She has held visiting professorships at and received research fellowships from the Center for Hellenic Studies, the Warburg Institute, Uppsala University, University of Cape Town, the Sorbonne, and Oxford University.
References
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Bazin, A. ‘L’ Ontologie de l’ image photographique’ in Qu’est-ce que le cinéma. Paris: Cerf, 2002 (orig. in 1945): 9-17.
Beller, J. The message is murder: Substrates of computational capital. London: Pluto, 2017.
Benjamin, A. Towards a relational ontology: Philosophy’s other possibility. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015.
Benjamin, W. Illuminations. Boston: Mariner Books, 2019 (orig. in 1942).
Bhabha, H. The location of culture. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Brancky, A. The crimes of Marguerite Duras: Literature and the media in twentieth-century France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
Celis, A. ‘Marking Whiteness, Unmarking Blackness: Listening and Looking in Alice Diop’s Vers la Tendresse and Amandine Gay’s Ouvrir La Voix’, French Studies, 76:3, 2022: 417-435.
Chandler, N. X: The problem of the Negro as a problem for thought. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014.
Cousseau, A. ‘Le Crime et le verbe’ in Duras, femme du siècle, edited by S. Harvey and K. Ince. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001. 299-311.
Deleuze, G. Cinéma 2: L’Image-Temps. Paris: Minuit, 1985.
Doane, M. ‘The Close-Up: Scale and Detail in the Cinema’, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 14:3, 2003: 89-111.
Fanon, F. Black skin, white masks. London: Grove Press, 1967.
Ferreira da Silva, D. ‘On Difference without Separability’ in 32nd Bienal de São Paulo: Incerteza Viva, catalogue, edited by J. Volz and J. Rebouças. São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 2016: 57-65.
Foucault, M. ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics, 16.1, 1986: 22-27.
Germain, F. Decolonizing the republic: African and Carribbean migrants in postwar Paris, 1946-1974. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2016.
Glissant, E. Poetics of relation, translated by B. Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.
Irigaray, L. Between east and west: From singularity to community. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.
Jackson, C. ‘Visualizing Slavery: Photography and the Disabled Body in the Art of Care Mae Weems’ in Blackness and disability: Critical examinations and cultural interventions, edited by C. Bell. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press: 31-36.
Mackey, N. Discrepant engagement: Dissonance, cross-culturality, and experimental writing. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Marks, L. The skin of the film: Intercultural cinema, embodiment, and the senses. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999.
Moten, F. The universal machine. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.
_____. Stolen life: Consent not to be a single being. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.
Niang, M. Identités françaises – Banlieues, feminités, et universalisme. Paris: Rodopi.
Pleming, K. ‘“L’ amour se dit dans un regard”? Immigration, visibility and representation in Marguerite Duras’s Les Mains Negatives and Alice Diop’s Nous’, Modern & Contemporary France, 14 September 2023.
Quinlivan, D. The place of breath in cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012.
Raengo, A. On the sleeve of the visual: Race as face value. Lebanon: Dartmouth College Press, 2013.
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_____. Carnal thoughts: Embodiment and moving image culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
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Wilderson, F. Red, white, and black. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.
[1] For these statistics I am indebted to Celis 2022.
[2] Christian Rossipal (2021) has also used the term ‘poetics of refraction’ in his study of the ways in which documentary methods and forms capture the experience of displacement and migration in the Mediterranean.
[3] Ferreira da Silva 2016.
[4] For the notion of cultural ‘third space’ see Bhabha 1994.
[5] For a comparative study of the two films see Pleming 2023.
[6] My account of the Duras/Villemin case is indebted to Brancky 2020.
[7] See also Cousseau 2001, p. 300 and Saemmer 2005, p. 61.
[8] Medea’s mother is the Oceanid Idyia, which provides a mythological justification for the preponderance of sea-imagery in the film.
[9] See for example Germain 2016 and Vergès 2019.
[10] Etoké 2018, p. 90.
[11] Tobing Rony 1996, p. 9.
[12] Niang 2019, p. 218.
[13] Chandler 2014, p. 2.
[14] Warren 2018, p. 27 and Spillers 2003, p. 206.
[15] Fanon 1967, pp. 15, 16.
[16] Wilderson 2010, p. 56.
[17] Chandler’s word is quoted in Moten 2018, p. 204, and Benjamin 2015. Glissant’s ‘poetics of relation’ as creolisation also posits that the meeting and clashing of cultures create the circumstances for Relation ⎯ ‘evolving cultures infer Relation – the overstepping that grounds their unity diversity’ (1997, p. 1).
[18] Moten 2018, p. 197 (emphases added).
[19] Benjamin 2015, p. 4.
[20] Mackey 1993, p. 20.
[21] See especially Sobchack 1992 and 2004, and Marks 1999.
[22] Quinlivan 2012.
[23] Irigaray 2003, p. 7.
[24] Sobchack 1992, p. 207.
[25] Moten views the sea as the original mother of African slaves because it is ‘nowhere, navigable only in its constant autodislocation’ (2018, p. 199).
[26] Later in the film, Rama admits to her partner that she is afraid of becoming ‘like her [mother]’.
[27] Tremblay 2018, p. 95.
[28] The first time Rama and her mother are shown in the same room together is approximately seven minutes into the film. Rama’s mother is sitting on a sofa and straightens out the fabric, while Rama stands opposite her and looks around awkwardly. Their tense relationship is soon evidenced by the fact that Rama does not offer to take her mother to the hospital, which causes her mother to leave the room.
[29] Think of Eric Garner’s words in 2014, who was put in a chokehold by New York Police: ‘I can’t breathe.’ These words have since become a slogan for the Black Lives Matter movement, turning breath into an index of embodied power relations. Breath here also serves as a claim to life in opposition to the Afropessimist concept of Blackness as social death which precedes the body, an ontological objecthood always already carried in the mother’s womb.
[30] Beller 2017, pp. 102, 104
[31] Jackson 2011 and Raengo 2013.
[32] Diop initially considered using portions of Philip Glass’ 1975 opera Einstein on the Beach but changed her mind when she was introduced to Shaw’s music by Thomas de Pourquery, who plays Rama’s partner in Saint Omer.
[33] Foucault 1986, p. 26.
[34] For a detailed analysis of Shaw’s Courante see Saulle 2019, pp. 100-114.
[35] Bazin 2002 and Barthes 1980.
[36] The interweaving of the real and the imaginary, as well as the recurrence of temporal suspension, bears out two of Gilles Deleuze’s (1985) observations on the crystalline time-image, in which the actual and the virtual may exist as layers of subjective temporal experience, or the broader sense in which actions float in situations, rather than having resolution or a cause-and-effect relationship between one image and the next.
[37] Mackey 1993, pp. 252-253.
[38] The defense attorney’s view of women as chimeras is another way of capturing relational subjectivity: ‘And so, members of the jury, I have come to believe that we women, we are all chimeras. We carry within us, the traces of our mothers and of our daughters, who in turn, will carry ours. It is a never-ending chain. In a way, us women, we are all monsters. But we are terribly human monsters.’ A ‘chimeric’ subjectivity is relational subjectivity on a cellular level, a form of relationality that links mothers to daughters intergenerationally.
[39] Rancière 2008, p. 123.
[40] Doane 2003, p. 109.
[41] Benjamin 1942/2019, p. 35.
[42] Moten 2018, p. 142. For fugitivity as a chromatic and affective blueness that imbues the texture of Saint Omer and inflects its sociopolitical import, see Telò 2023.
[43] Warm thanks to Thomas Austin, Josh Cohen, Cris Escobar, Lena Grimm, Leo Kershaw, Dan Morgan, Mario Telò, and Jesse Weiner for comments and/or encouragement.
