No fim da madrugada, fazer de um só mundo, muitos : o cinema de Abderrahmane Sissako e o aparecer do comum

Abstract

This research investigates the cinema of the Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako, considering the feature films, Rostov-Luanda (1997), Life on Earth (1998), Heremakono (2002), Bamako (2006) and Timbuktu (2014), and the short films, The Game (1988), October (1993) and Dignity (2008). In view of the migratory and diasporic experiences portrayed by the films, we investigate how Sissako's cinema gives rise to new forms of appearing in common, considering authors such as Jean-Luc Nancy, Achille Mbembe and Édouard Glissant. Based on an immanent analysis of the films, which considers the composition of framing, mise-en-scène and editing, this research is interested in the way in which the formal aspects of Sissako's cinema are linked to the issues addressed by the films. Based on this, we have developed a comparative analysis through the composition of image arrangements, producing approximations between the different films that make up Sissako's oeuvre and between the films and images of other natures, such as photography and painting, based on a relationship that the investigated cinema itself invokes. Therefore, we analyze the inscription of the visible and the sayable in the films, as well as the constitution of the gaze and listening, crossed by the difficulties of communication, translation and interlocution in the communities of foreigners portrayed. In addition, we analyzed how, by putting himself on stage and developing a cinema linked to his own life, Sissako establishes a relationship between the “self” and the Other. If cinema is constituted as a space for welcoming otherness (in its forms of hospitality and hostility), we also seek to understand the relationships that are constituted in the films, based on the borders and neighborhoods, spaces and temporalities cohabited by the men, women and children who appear on the scene.