Mapping the Sonic City in African Cinema

More than colors and forms, it is sounds and their arrangements that fashion societies. With noise is born disorder and its opposite: the world. With music is born power and its opposite: subversion.
[…]
Among birds a tool for marking territorial boundaries, noise is inscribed from the start with the panoply of power. Equivalent to the articulation of a space, it indicates the limits of a territory and the way to make oneself heard within it.

Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music^[1]

Jacques Attali’s treatise on the ‘political economy’ of music discusses sound as something which can not only be ordered, but also has the power to order. As with all manifestations of power and order, both these qualities are essentially political. In approaching an ‘exploration’ as open-ended as this, I’ve tried to limit the critical tools at my disposal; in the case of this essay, it will be through a kind of ‘sensory deprivation’. Attali’s ideas on the relation between sound, order and politics should go some way to introducing my decision to focus this exploration of the politics of the African city in cinema within an ‘aural field’.

Sound and Order in the Cinematic City

I want to start by outlining some of the ways in which sound is implicated politically in notions of order, both as a tool of the filmmaker and within the diegesis of the film (and its representation of the (African) city). The ordering of images by a filmmaker can be understood as a political act: as the director Wim Wenders says, ‘the most political decision you make is where you direct people’s eyes’.^[2] Sound is implicated in this process too. This is primarily through what theorist Michel Chion, in his extensive work on film sound, calls added value – ‘a sensory, informational, semantic, narrative, structural, or expressive value that a sound heard in a scene leads us to project onto the image, so as to create the impression that we see in the image what in reality we are audio-viewing’.^[3] Maintain Chion’s vocabulary, the use of added value can be integral in temporal phrasing (or the ordering of narrative time) and audiovisual scenography (or the ordering of imaginary filmic space).^[4]