Oceanic feeling in Mati Diop’s Atlantique

Abstract

ABSTRACT The ocean is a constant presence in Mati Diop’s award-winning film Atlantique/Atlantics (2019), a ghostly love story about the ongoing migration crisis set in Dakar, Senegal. A critical issue Diop explores in this film is the contradiction between the geopolitical stasis of a high-rise tower and the expansive continuity of the sea, making the physical reality captured by the lens overlap with the unrestricted flow of presences carried by waves of sea and sound through the film frame. This article analyses oceanic aesthetics and the unrestricted flows of bodies of water and work in both Diop’s recent feature film and her first experimental documentary of almost the same title, Atlantiques/Atlantics (2009). These corporeal drifts disrupt narrative and temporal flows and position the cinema as a space for poetic and political change. What the ocean embodies is not only a tragic archive of colonial violence, as Rosalind Galt has recently argued, but also a space for a feminist and decolonial refusal of such loss.