Doudou Joop: The pirogue of cinema
by Jade de Cock de Rameyen and Mamadou Khouma Gueye
In July 2023, the confident smile of a young man showing us his film camera reached our Instagram feed. The man is posing on a beach, he is calmly looking at us. He holds a digital camera on a tripod. Behind him, the ocean. The image was posted by the Spanish Commission for Refugees (CEAR), a non-profit organisation defending the rights of asylum seekers. CEAR did not post a photograph: it is a screenshot of an article written by Jose Naranjo for the newspaper El Pais, titled ‘Doudou Diop’s last movie. The filmmaker that died in a fishing boat while filming his journey to the Canaries’ (‘La última película de Doudou Diop, el cineasta que murió en un cayuco cuando rodaba su viaje hacia Canarias’).
Doudou Joop (as he used to write his name according to Wolof phonetics[1]) was a young filmmaker from Saint-Louis (Senegal), who made shorts tackling issues of environmental justice. His dedication to cinema and his community led him on the deadliest migration route, to make a film on his friend Tapha’s third crossing attempt, together with his cameraman and long-time accomplice Babakar Diop. At first, they tried shooting the sequence on the shores of Saint-Louis with twelve actors, but it did not feel real enough. Doudou believed that telling that story required making the journey.[2] He decided to get into the pirogue as yet another migrant to better capture Tapha’s unwavering determination to leave, to reach Spain after three failed and terrifying journeys.
Doudou had made money editing a friend’s film in Dakar, and this paid for his crossing (amounting to 400.000 CFA, around 600 EUR). On the night of 18 July, the three companions got into the pirogue. Doudou started shooting at dawn, against the captain’s will – smugglers typically dislike any visual evidence of their operations. When the pirogue was intercepted by a Moroccan marine ship ten days later, Doudou was not among the survivors. The rest of this story is told in newspapers from all over the world, in more or less faithful copies of an article published in El País.[3] Upon his disappearance, it was José Naranjo, a journalist who dedicated his life to documenting the violence of migration policies, who first wrote a feature article on Doudou – which was swiftly followed by over ten national and international newspapers.
Doudou’s story quickly attracted world-wide attention. Filmmakers, journalists, and writers approached his family. Following the visibility of their article, El Pais intended to make a mini-documentary. Fara Konaté, Doudou’s uncle and mentor, disagreed. He has been developing a film on Doudou and wants to make sure that his family receives proper compensation. These are troubled waters, and the threat of cultural appropriation looms. From an article in El Pais to its copies in the Senegalese press, from an aborted Spanish mini-documentary to a Senegalese film d’auteur, from an Instagram screenshot to an academic journal: Doudou’s story has taken many routes to pollinate our minds. This article asks: how did Doudou’s made and unmade film mobilise our voices and work, in the film industry and beyond? According to Marshall McLuhan,[4] low resolution fosters higher degrees of sensorial participation. Building on recent analyses by Hito Steyerl,[5] Antonio Somaini, and Francesco Casetti,[6] who interrogate how they are produced, appropriated, and circulate, we trace the journeys of Doudou’s images in Africa and Europe, from the lens of the digital economy of images.
In the second section, we analyse Joop’s previous works: Dépotoir (2022) was selected in various African festivals; Voisin des Eaux Usées (2023) was commissioned by NIYEL, a NGO specialising in advocacy and public affairs in Africa, which led an initiative regarding sanitation in Senegal. Both delve into garbage, a prolific cinematic and postcolonial motif[7]and a site of resistance against high culture: the poor image made flesh. In Dépotoir, two mothers struggle to make a living by doing laundry or recycling plastic waste littering the beach. Using cheap digital technology and a hand-held camera, Joop swamps the horizon line in waste, while spectral silhouettes cross the screen in motion blur. Dépotoirembraces an aesthetics of low definition against sharpness, controlled shots, and diegetic transparency.
Finally, this article asks: how low must media go to move us? Given the impossibility of representing the ongoing catastrophe taking place on the shores of Fortress Europe, Erika Balsom[8] argues for obliquity, opacity, and abstraction as more fruitful strategies. That is – to keep mass death and suffering off-screen. Films like Mati Diop’s Atlantique(2019), Peggy Ahwesh’s The Blackest Sea (2016), and John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea (2015) invent ways not to represent the unrepresentable, to give those ‘waters of bodies’ indirect forms of visibility.[9] This was not Doudou’s ambition.[10]He meant to be as close as possible to his subject, becoming one in the process. If it is impossible to capture mass death at the Schengen borders, it is this very impossibility that Doudou’s unmade film Daaj Gaal demands us to face. His is nothing but the ghost of a story. It haunts us, yet its unfinished business is a social force, connecting us to a multitude of other stories that reinvent the meaning of circulation. Bridging garbage and low-resolution aesthetics in Dépotoir and the haunting absence of Daaj Gaal, the politics of underrepresentation and non-representation, this article re-traces the ways Doudou Joop activates us.
The adventures of a poor image
The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution.[11] So begins one of the most influential texts of recent media studies, ‘In Defence of the Poor Image’, by artist and philosopher Hito Steyerl. Steyerl untangles the political stakes of the distinction between low and high resolution. Cinema increasingly fetishises high definition, but most images are not rich enough to enter its ‘flagship store’.[12] Our epoch is dominated by poor images, she argues, moving in accelerated motions along the global flows of audiovisual capitalism. Poor images are the lowest class in the hierarchy of images, which is primarily based on resolution.
In the digital economy of images, degrees of definition may be measured according to the total number of pixels or their density.[13] Steyerl’s ‘poor image’ updates McLuhan’s infamous distinction between ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ media.[14]McLuhan identified hot media as those that were at his time rich in sensory data (or high definition): print, photographs, radio, cinema; cool media (low definition) included cartoons, telephone, television. According to MacLuhan, low resolution encourages participation. Because cool media give a ‘meagre amount of information’, they ‘leave so much to be filled in or completed by the audience’.[15] Signal poverty demands more from the audiences’ senses. However, resolution encompasses more than just signal.[16] Resolution must be understood through its experience and the environments through which images navigate and which they contribute to shape. Low- and high-definition images tend to operate in specific medial environments – what Francesco Casetti refers to as mediascapes.[17] High-definition experiences tend to be immersive and rare events, their conditions of visibility and exhibition strictly controlled. A video installation in a museum, for example, carefully orchestrates screen scenography and choreographs audience movements. On the contrary, low-definition images may travel anywhere, from a laptop to a smartphone, regardless of viewers’ quality of attention. By doing so they reconnect audiences from every corner of what MacLuhan called ‘the global village’.[18]
Fig. 1. Screenshot of an Instagram post by cearefugio on 19 September 2023.
Scrolling through Instagram, a fragmentary screenshot of Naranjo’s article (Fig. 1) moved a newly-graduated white doctor in professional limbo deep into Fortress Europe. It moved her – that is, it put her in movement, it activated her to tell a story. She looked for the gatherer of stories she needed and found Mamadou Khouma Gueye, a filmmaker skilled at fabricating collective intelligence from the polyphony, both in and with film.[19] From both of our non-expert positions – an established filmmaker who did not know Doudou and a scholar whose relationship with African cinema had been anecdotal[20] – we decided not to tell Doudou’s story. Instead, we trace the adventures of Doudou’s stories.
Doudou’s last footage rests with him at the bottom of the ocean. His story, however, lives on – or rather, it is reappropriated by a myriad of storytellers (us included), friends, peers, foreigners, with or without his family’s consent, based on first-hand information or rumours, partial copies or AI translations. As Hito Steyerl suggests, the opportunism of poor images also makes them more vulnerable to all kinds of commodification.[21] Doudou’s Daaj Gaal has become the poorest of images, a film that is nothing but its circuits of circulation. For its story is full of holes, and there are questions we chose to leave open. At the time of his crossing, Doudou had four projects in development: a series, a fiction film, an ethnographic film, and a documentary.[22] The printed script of Daaj Gaal (in English, ‘to board a pirogue’) was found at his home by Naranjo. The note of intent is as follows:
My intention is to tell the story of Tapha, a young migrant on his third attempt to reach the Spanish coast by pirogue. I couldn’t help but think that it would be interesting to retrace his journey, which after living through hell, still hasn’t given up on braving the sea once more. If, despite the setbacks that have taken their toll on his life, and in view of the numerous losses of human life at sea distilled in the press, Tapha continues to pursue his dream, it’s either because he’s already lost his mind, or that he no longer has any hope in his country.[23]
Stories differ – some say that Daaj Gaal was indeed the film he was shooting, others talk of yet another project, also dedicated to Tapha’s migration attempts, the script of which is on Konaté’s computer. Solving this mystery would involve asking first-hand witnesses: those that precisely do not need noisy researchers to stir up traumatic memories. If poor images are no longer about ‘the real thing’ but about ‘their own conditions of existence’,[24] the digital afterlives of Daaj Gaal pose serious ethical problems. Finding the originary original, the film that he wanted to shoot, is an untrodden path, and one we chose not to take. Yet, his other shorts are available, and they tell us another migration story.
To retrace the adventures of Doudou’s films we followed a series of leads, forged digital alliances, gathered narrative scraps, and took many detours. A Facebook picture got us in touch with producer and distributor Oumou Diegane (WawKumba Film), and Amadou Massaer Ndiaye, the sound engineer for all of Doudou’s films. Massaer was our initial contact and has been helping us in our efforts to organise a screening of Doudou’s films. It took months for Massaer to send us a rough edit of Dépotoir, however. The film was travelling around on a hard drive with Doudou’s brother, who was on a trip – just one of many instances of the complex, and far from dematerialised, circuits of digital distribution. Several more months passed before we got in touch with Fara Konaté, Doudou’s uncle and mentor of many other young filmmakers from Saint-Louis. Konaté produced Doudou’s films and Doudou edited his short Après l’Errance (2020). He sent us the subtitled file, together with yet another re-edited version of the film.
Low-definition images are characterised by their plasticity, their susceptibility to undergo multiple transformations: reformatting, compression, re-editing. A version of Dépotoir is available to stream for free on FilmFreeway, a submission platform that acts as a middleman between filmmakers and film festivals from all over the world (fake ones too). Yet, throughout our research, we received three different versions of the film. It is unclear which is the final cut of Dépotoir. Doudou’s film is a collective work in process, a film that keeps on being reworked and re-edited by his friends and family. This is also what allows Doudou’s films to circulate more freely. They are reappropriated, improved, adaptive. Voisin des Eaux Usées aimed to get citizens involved in sanitation and raise awareness on waste treatment practices. To meet its objective, the film was first shown at a festival, then in a classroom to an audience of local political actors and neighbours, and is now posted on Youtube (with 150,000 views). And this capacity to ‘land in many physical spaces, from workspaces to the living room, from a classroom to an open space where I isolate myself with a laptop’,[25] is key to the efficacy of low definition.
Doudou’s films are nomads. They traversed disparate contexts. Dépotoir and Voisin des Eaux Usées moved freely and reached a wide array of audiences, but they never crossed the ocean. They were made from and for his community. Up until his disappearance, they remained in Africa. Dépotoir was selected at Festival Vision Documentaire 2022 (Kinshasa, RC) and STLouisDocs 2023 (Saint-Louis, Senegal), but it was with Daaj Gaal, a film that will never be seen, that the Schengen area discovered his name. As I write these lines, Doudou’s films have only been screened once in Europe.
In January 2024, La Muestra de Cine Social y Derechos Humanos (MUSOC), a human rights film festival based in Asturias, dedicated a tribute section to Joop’s work. Funded by three NGOs (El Pájaro Azul, Asociación Pro Inmigrantes en Asturias [APIA], Afayaivos), the screening included Dépotoir and Après l’Errance. On this occasion, three speakers were invited. Each one offered a different perspective on migration (the intimate experience of it, a journalist’s overview of the phenomenon, and a film critic’s take on its representations). Senegalese carpenter Abdou Khadre told the audience about his journey to Morocco and his seven attempts to cross the Mediterranean, until arriving in Spain in 2016. Jose Naranjo y Laura Feal, a key figure of decolonial film criticism based in Saint-Louis, discussed Doudou’s story and the criminalisation of migration. Doudou’s uncle Oumar Sarr, mediator for the Red Cross in Spain, was present. An animated discussion took place between NGO actors, Spanish and Senegalese citizens, journalists, and film professionals. The post-screening discussions lasted an hour and were recorded. The video was then uploaded on Youtube and is still available to watch to this date. Additionally, two texts were commissioned: a summary of the event for the webpage of MUSOC, and ‘Doudou Diop, el espíritu de una generación’,[26] a short article written by Laura Feal for the festival’s magazine.
An hour-long post-screening colloquium, an uploaded recording, written and photographic accounts of the event for wider visibility, a curated programme, and three guest speakers: such a deployment of resources for an early-career filmmaker is rarely seen in film festivals. However, it is not uncommon in human rights film festivals. Human rights film festivals have proliferated globally since the 1980’s,[27] and they distinguish themselves from other film festivals in several ways. First, their audience tends to be more local.[28] Few are the viewers who travel from abroad to attend a human rights film festival, in comparison to other world-renowned film festivals. Second, documentary is the most represented genre in human rights film festivals. Third, although human rights film festival programming involves a whole array of issues (such as avoiding manipulation and propaganda, or challenging the ‘humanitarian gaze’[29]), the purpose of film screenings remains to ‘raise awareness of human rights and promote social change’.[30] Finally, the interpretive contexts of presentation takes crucial significance: thematic discussions, off-screen events, etc. The focus in human rights film festivals lies less on the films that are screened than on what programmers do with a film.[31]
The tribute provided Doudou’s film with a certain aura and enabled the audience’s immersion in the theatre, while maintaining the film’s testimonial value through live discussions. As Francesco Casetti shows, there are ‘climatic changes’[32] that make cool media warm up.[33] An environment favourable to high definition clashes with a low-definition image, and this tension produces a change in the poor image’s regime of visibility, an increase in media temperature. This happens when, as with MUSOC, the conditions of exhibition of Doudou’s film enhance viewers’ focus or emphasise its cult value. Thus, if an image never comes alone, if it must always be considered in relation to the broader filmic world[34] it co-produces with its viewers, dispositive, contexts, and environments of exhibition, then we must revisit our initial diagnostic. An article published in the top-ranking Spanish newspaper, a fully-documented tribute in a dark screening room, and the academic paper you are reading – Doudou’s image may be poor, but the worlds it conjures up in Europe are rich indeed. Only that the routes Doudou’s images have taken to reach Western audiences involved the filmmaker’s death – a very costly gain in aura.
A cinema of garbage
Doudou Joop directed two shorts: Dépotoir (2022) and Voisin des Eaux Usées (2023). Both are films about trash, a motive that, according to African cinema scholar Kenneth Harrow, ‘has haunted African cinema from the start’.[35] In Doudou’s films, waste precedes the human figure. Voisin des Eaux Usées is a traditional low-budget documentary set in Pikine, a suburb of Saint-Louis where sewage is discharged onto the street and mixed with sceptic refluxes. It portrays children playing in the dump and includes the topical talking head shots of sanitation experts explaining to children how to wash their hands. Yet, it does so from the sewer level. The camera tilts upward to reveal the speaking experts’ feet, with children unclogging a drain or returning the gaze.
Camera movements betray a fascination with decomposition, such as the sewage water running below our feet. We do not experience the rot from a safe distance. The hand-held camera work is claustrophobically close, but the nauseating smell may only be imagined. The audience is sheltered from seeing too many details – for instance the rotting animal corpses that the voiceover comments on. In a series of low-angle shots, the camera hovers ever closer to stagnating wastewaters, piles of plastic, faecal sludges. Motion blur, hand camera movements, or highly abstracted close-ups make the matter in decomposition indistinguishable (Fig. 2). What are we looking at? Are those polyethylene pellets, organic leftovers, or insect eggs?
Fig. 2: Doudou Diop, Voisin des Eaux Usées, 2023.
Although a more traditional and expository documentary than Doudou’s previous short, Voisin des Eaux Usées reflects a scopic pulsion for the dump that was already key to Dépotoir. The dump is where everything ends, but also where everyone meets – the ultimate democratic space, the place for all things possible. In his discussion of a ‘cinema of garbage’, Robert Stam[36] shows how alternative postcolonial aesthetics have revalorised by inversion the abject, the despised, and the trashy. This cinema – that includes films such as Glauber Rocha’s Terra em Transe (1967) and Eduardo Coutinho’s Boca de Lixo (1992) – opposes hybridity and contamination to aesthetics of purity. Trash becomes a site of resistance against high culture, the poor image made flesh.
Like Agnes Varda with Les Glaneurs et La Glaneuse (2002), Doudou gathers the stories of what is ignored by society – both people and matter. Trash is not ‘beautiful’[37] as Varda’s heart-shaped potatoes, but it certainly is intriguing, full of potential, and brimming with invisible labour. The cast-off, property-less, and domestic workforce inhabit the landfill together with chickens, dogs, stray cats, and draught horses. Through the dump and through his protagonists’ friendship, Doudou weaves two female stories. While Mbayangue Seck sorts through the rubbish, Aicha Beye does the laundry. The former is married, the latter was divorced by her second husband for refusing to abandon her children. Both live in single room houses that do not belong to them. Both have invented a job for themselves and their families to survive. At lightning speed, Aicha hand-washes piles of clients’ clothes until late at night. Mbayangue follows the garbage cart, spots whatever has value, and patiently gathers it all in what was meant to be a room of her house.
In his exegesis of garbage Stam writes, ‘garbage […] is a great social leveller’.[38] Waste from all social classes is gathered here in common decay. Recycled or broken down, through fermentation or putrefaction, over days or centuries, it will become other. Different speeds of decay and various trajectories of global trade are mixed in common indistinction, pointing to what Stam identifies as the ‘chronotopic multiplicity’[39] of garbage. Over his short career, Doudou saw the cinematic potential of trash, his multi-temporal and multi-spatial heterogeneity. An aggregate of disparate journeys of production, disposal, and transformation, Doudou’s dump concentrates trajectories of death and rebirth. In a telling sequence, the film zooms in on burning tires and transitions to the flames of a gas cooker (Figs 3-4). This match dissolve embodies the narrative arc: from obsolescence to subsistence, garbage is where everything ends and begins anew.
Figs 3-4: Doudou Diop, Dépotoir, 2022.
While constructing the dump as a space of virtual connectivity, Dépotoir simultaneously reveals the dissymmetry of power in the recycling market. Only women and children are seen sorting through the rubbish. Men come in later: first the garbage collector’s husband, then the sales intermediaries, and the owners of the plastic recycling plant. They weigh large bags full of plastic, value it, and make lightning-fast calculations. In a striking scene, Doudou intercuts sequences of Mbayangue’s husband explaining the family’s difficulties with various stages of his wife’s cooking process (collecting the food, simmering the fish, feeding the children). Later, as he recounts his struggle to make a living, the camera drops and starts framing Mbayangue sorting plastics in the background. Our attention is deflected from the father’s words and temporarily hijacked by the woman’s affairs. The camera seems unable to make up its mind, until finally focusing back on the speaker. Doudou’s distracted gaze playfully comments on the gender politics of documentary and the invisibility of female labour.
Garbage is power-laden.[40] The dump concentrates society’s contradictions and reveals brutal socio-economic contrasts. Dépotoir was shot in Saint-Louis, but the stern masculine voiceover (by Latifa Gueye) says otherwise:
Almadie, a neighbourhood that has developed over the years in a non aedificandi zone, a dry lake that receives household waste every day. Its inhabitants live under the risk of being evicted by municipal authorities as they bought plots of land from third parties, who were not their legal owners.
In fact, Almadie is the most prestigious and upscale neighbourhood in Dakar. The commentary is misleading for Western audiences, all the more so as it is the only moment French is spoken (the dialogue is in Wolof). Doudou both exploits and undermines the authority of the colonial language to comment on the violence of capitalist modernity. It is a private joke: the irony is for locals to appreciate.
The filmmaker’s extraordinary commitment to document his peers’ plight, his cinematic exploration of society’s margins, and his genuine solidarity with Aicha and Mbayangue are palpable. He interacts with them, and his presence is felt throughout. However low Aicha and Mbayangue crouch or lean, the camera is always lower. Doudou shoots subsistence from the ground up – even if it means losing focus (Fig. 5). Herein lies the ‘testimonial value’ of low definition:[41] when cinema adopts poor images it gives up on accurately reflecting the world, to make us feel instead its fabric and dynamics.
Fig. 5: Doudou Diop, Dépotoir, 2022.
Dépotoir has been both praised for the promising future it heralded for Doudou’s career and dismissed as a student’s film – it is merely a sketch of what Doudou’s cinema could have become. There are indeed multiple imprecisions: motion blurs are omnipresent, focus is indecisive, and the score is overly dramatic. At times, the music is mixed so high that it drowns out the protagonists’ speech, and later it abruptly stops, producing quasi-parodic effects. Whether intentional or not, Dépotoir unabashedly embraces an aesthetics of low definition, against sharpness, controlled shots, and diegetic transparency. An aesthetics that, as Antonio Somaini argues, has a political dimension: it represents a new materialism of digital images, which reveals their conditions of production and circulation.[42] African cinema always existed against accusations of technological inferiority,[43] and this impacts where films travel and where they do not. The Western world exports its waste, its obsolete and end-of-life products to the Global South,[44] yet prevents people and low-definition cinema from following the same routes northward. The neoliberal order is grounded on a very narrow conception of free circulation.
The ghost of a story
There is violence in visibility. The image can trivialise, and can turn suffering into cheap sensationalism. As various studies have shown,[45] Western media representation of migrants is highly polarised – and all the more so on Instagram, an image-based channel that dramatises emotional responses.[46] While positive representations depict migrants as vulnerable individuals, negative ones associate migration with dangerous invasions, illegality, terrorism. The latter exploits citizens’ fears through dynamic images of swarms of migrants in movement, and ignores the geo-political factors of migration by considering immigrants as those who freely chose to leave. The former foregrounds a tendency to approach the phenomenon as ‘humanitarian emergency’ through static images of migrants living in inhumane conditions, suffering in passivity, or dead. They are depicted as those who were forced to leave.[47] Both representations tend to dehumanise migrants and deflect attention from Fortress Europe’s murderous policies and its long history of colonialism. Both rely on a fetishising logic, transforming the migrant into a universalised, dehistoricised figure – the ‘charitable subject’, the stranger that needs our help.[48]
Doudou Diop died in the ocean while attempting to reach Europe. The over-repetition of these words, along with images of boats cramped with faceless bodies, have come to normalise what is characterised as ‘the greatest humanitarian disaster’ in Europe since the Second World War.[49] Yet, Doudou’s story resists trivialisation. The mundane portrait of a young filmmaker, along with a film that was never made and a story full of holes, has made its way into the cracks of hegemonic discourses.
Social media is no place for storytelling, however. We scroll through our feeds in moments of boredom and procrastination, and in return they send us into recursive loops between distraction and more boredom.[50] But this boredom is not Walter Benjamin’s ‘dream bird that hatches the egg of experience’, who is driven away by a mere ‘rustling in the leaves’.[51] Digital boredom – what researchers call ‘superficial boredom’[52] – is nothing but rustled leaves. If, for Benjamin, storytelling requires boredom and ‘mental relaxation’,[53] the digital noise of social media prohibits narrative practices. We gather around the hearth of social media to recount our experiences, but only sequences of poor images come to ephemeral light.
Doudou’s screenshot portrait is poor in experience, content, and context. It is nothing but the ghost of his story – but that story haunts us. ‘Haunting is passive, not in the sense of a lack of activity, but rather in the sense of opening oneself up to inhabitation by the other, and it is thus attentive to alterity.’[54] Through their unfinished business, through the way they activate our responsibility in the present, ghosts are social forces, according to Carla Freccero.[55] They invoke collectivity, they demand response, not mourning.[56] Film critic Laura Feal, who is based in Saint Louis, admits in her tribute to Doudou:
I did not know Doudou. But I know Massow, Amina, Mamadou Khouma, Elhadj, Fatou Kine. They are Doudou’s contemporaries, Senegalese filmmakers of the same generation. As courageous as him, as passionate as him, as committed to their mission as him.[57]
Jade did not know Doudou, but neither did she know Mamadou, Amadou Massaer Ndiaye, nor Fara Konaté, Laura Feal, and Jose Naranjo. An errant JPEG has put our worlds in touch, across oceans of images and data.
Seeing Doudou on Instagram was perhaps the last straw – but it was not the straw that broke the camel’s back. Instead, it was the straw that connected a Western film scholar to a whole generation of young Senegalese filmmakers actively deconstructing dominant narratives of migration. From studying indigenous heritage at Université Gaston Berger, to learning the craft of film at Centre Yennenga, a film hub fostering inter-African productions,[58] Doudou’s trajectory speaks to a generational shift that has taken place since the 2010s in the Senegalese film world, closely associated to a series of decolonial and associative initiatives. Through our exchanges with Laura Feal, it became evident that Doudou’s generation emerged from this intellectual effervescence. He and his peers are determined to tell their own stories, especially regarding migration. They seek to go beyond the official discourse on migration dissuasion[59] and the neo-colonial narratives of development, what Felwine Sarr denounces as ‘the Global North’s game of catch-up’.[60]
Migrants often characterise their journey as an ‘adventure’. And as Sylvie Bredeloup suggests,[61] an adventure arises with the telling of it. Migration then is nothing but its stories. Bredeloup makes this clear: migration should not be studied solely through the lens of political economy (focusing on labour management and flow regulation), nor can it be understood merely in terms of the adjustment of geopolitical imbalances.[62] How are those adventures told? The discursive heterogeneity of migration stories is well-documented,[63] yet dominant discourses of migratory dissuasion continually silence the stories we need to hear. A minority determines the meaning of circulation, which is in turn contested and transformed by a proliferation of attempts to subjectivise these narratives. Those are often local, little known, and rarely relayed by the media.[64] To ensure these stories are told, Doudou and his peers invest as much personal and economic resources as necessary. With them, a good dose of necessary ambiguity is reinjected in the imaginary of migration.
But who are we to tell Doudou Joop’s story? As his missing film triggers multiple cycles of appropriation, it also interrogates our fraught positions. Daaj Gaal speaks to the broader issues posed by unwatchable films. As Rebecca Schneider[65] eloquently puts it, the unwatchable catches us off watch. The unwatchable has always already assimilated us as we then try – and mostly fail – to assimilate it. Interfering unannounced with business as usual, ‘unwatchables find us, rather than vice versa’.[66] If Doudou’s story found us and connected us, it connected us through different modes of capture. For there is a cannibalistic violence in telling and watching Doudou’s story on the northern side of the Mediterranean, from the comforts of our barricaded cities. The discomfort of telling Doudou’s story is inescapable – nor should we try to avoid it. Yet, Daaj Gaal does not provide us with a perspective to swallow up, only a gesture to inherit. It begs for relays, not displays. It demands witnesses, not spectators.
Contrary to other unwatchables, Doudou’s literally inaccessible film immediately displaces the question from what and how to watch, to what to do and how. In many ways, the experimental documentary Purple Sea (Amel Alzakout and Khaled Abdulwahed, 2020) echoes Doudou’s gesture. Purple Sea provides visual evidence of Alzakout’s deathly crossing of the Mediterranean, while upsetting our perverse craving for transparency. It is shot with an underwater camera attached to the filmmaker’s wrist, aimlessly moving among desperate bodies after the shipwreck. This is a politically necessary film to watch, though – as diffracted as its perspective may be[67] – should we avert our gaze to a girl’s death and her mother’s scream? Purple Sea asks: when is it enough to look away? When is it too much to show and share? Doudou’s film was too much to make, to show and to watch, but it has been shared repeatedly. When an image is nothing but its circuits of circulation, it puts in sharp focus the proximities film creates, its legitimate or illegitimate uses, and the heterogeneous, fraught, communities cinema produces. Today, as official bodies fail and our administrations kill, to bear witness is perhaps to turn those uneasy circuits of appropriation into more or less clandestine networks, which may serve many functions: smuggling stories, support, housing, safe passage. As Olivier Marboeuf[68] suggests, to decolonise is not merely to ask where does one think from, but also where does one think towards.
Doudou’s adventure was a bet against all odds for the emergence of another future. ‘But you have to choose: live or tell.’[69] Sartre has never been more right. However, the story does not end with the storyteller’s life. Doudou’s story has become a tale passed from mouth to mouth, or rather from screen to screen. If commercial cinema is a flagship, Doudou’s was a pirogue. It travelled fast and far. As it moves through the global flows and aberrant distortions of information capitalism; as it transforms from blackout to glitches, from rumours to copies and mistranslation, it possesses us, and we possess it in return. There is little information in that story. Fact checking is a losing venture. It will never be fully understood why Doudou decided to embark on the pirogue; nor is it clear what the film he wanted to shoot was meant to be. But, as Jose Naranjo recounts, ‘when I heard about Doudou, I immediately knew that there was a story to be told.’ The adventure of this story has only begun.
Authors
Mamadou Khouma Gueye is a filmmaker and visual education teacher, living between Guinaw Rails and Nantes. After studying History at the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, he started working in the film industry by campaigning for cinema access for the residents of Dakar suburbs. He then moved on to directing, using his own resources and harnessing the collective energy of his generation to produce and distribute their films. Mamadou always defends the idea that art must make room for ordinary people, and participate in the representation and awareness of social and political realities that are sometimes difficult.
Jade de Cock de Rameyen is Lecturer in Literature and Invited Expert in Film Studies at Université Libre de Bruxelles. Her current research focuses on forest aesthetics and decolonial ecology. By putting narrative theory to the test of contemporary artists’ cinema, her thesis, ‘Narrative Ecology in Contemporary Artists’ Cinema’, addressed the call for other stories to face climate change. Her articles are published in Film Philosophy, New Review of Film and Television Studies, and Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire. In 2018-2019 she was a visiting assistant in research at Yale University.
References
Ahmed, S. Strange encounters: Embodied others in post-coloniality. Oxon: Routledge, 2000.
Bakhtin, M. ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics’ in The dialogic imagination: Four essays, edited by M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981: 84-258.
Balsom, E. After uniqueness: A history of film and video art in circulation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.
_____. An oceanic feeling: Cinema and the sea. New Plymouth: Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, 2018.
Benjamin, W. ‘The Storyteller’ in The novel: An anthology of criticism and theory 1900-2000, edited by D. Hale. Malden: Blackwell, 2006: 361-378.
Bonner, V. ‘Beautiful Trash: Agnès Varda’s Les Glaneurs et La Glaneuse’, Senses of Cinema, no. 45, 2007: https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2007/feature-articles/glaneurs-et-glaneuse/.
Bredeloup, S. ‘L’aventurier, une figure de la migration africaine’, Cahiers internationaux de sociologie, 125, no. 2, 2008: 281-306; https://doi.org/10.3917/cis.125.0281.
_____. Migrations d’aventures: terrains africains. CTHS, 2014.
Canut, C. and Sow, A. ‘Les voix de la migration. Discours, récits et productions artistiques’, Cahiers d’études africaines, no. 213-214, 30 June 2014: 9-25; https://doi.org/10.4000/etudesafricaines.17578.
Casetti, F. ‘Les Environnements Médiaux entre haute et basse définition’ in La haute et la basse définition des images: photographie, cinéma, art contemporain, culture visuelle, edited by A. Somaini and F. Casetti. Paris: Éditions Mimésis, 2021: 243-263.
_____. ‘Mediascapes: A Decalogue’, Perspecta, no. 51, 2018: 21-44.
Casetti, F. and Somaini, A. La haute et la basse définition des images: photographie, cinéma, art contemporain, culture visuelle. Paris: Éditions Mimésis, 2021.
Cassarini, C., Mbodj-Pouye, A., and Poulet, K. ‘Décourager les départs? Acteurs, ambivalences et réceptions de la dissuasion migratoire en Afrique’, Cahiers d’études africaines, 254, no. 2, 2024: 257-279.
Chakrabarty, D. ‘Of Garbage, Modernity and the Citizen’s Gaze’, Economic and Political Weekly, 27, no. 10/11, 1992: 541-547.
Colta, A. ‘Creative and Emotional Labour: Programming Human Rights Film Festivals as Practice-Led Ethnography’, edited by C. Chambers, Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, no. 17, 1 July 2019: 128-145; https://doi.org/10.33178/alpha.17.08.
Danewid, I. ‘White Innocence in the Black Mediterranean: Hospitality and the Erasure of History’, Third World Quarterly, 38, no. 7, 3 July 2017: 1674-1689; https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2017.1331123.
De Cock de Rameyen, J. ‘Diegetic Existence. Transmedia Instauration in Artists’ Cinema’, New Review of Film and Television Studies, 21, no. 4, 2023.
De Rosa, A., Bocci, E., and Carpignano, N. ‘Polemical Social Representations about “Immigration” in Journal Articles of Different Political Positioning via Facebook’ in Political and economic self-constitution: Media, political culture and democracy, edited by I. Bondarevskaya and B. Todosijevic. Kyiv: Institute of Social Sciences, 2020: 58-64; https://iris.uniroma1.it/handle/11573/1544870.
Diop, D. ‘Dump’, FilmFreeway, 2023: https://filmfreeway.com/Dump683.
Feal, L. ‘Doudou Diop, El Espiritu de Una Generación’, Perroflauta News (MUSOC), January 2024: 5.
Freccero, C. ‘Queer Spectrality: Haunting the Past’ in The spectralities reader: Ghosts and haunting in contemporary cultural theory, edited by M. del Pilar Blanco and E. Peeren. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2013: 335-359.
Guterres, A. ‘U.N. Refugee Chief: Europe’s Response to Mediterranean Crisis Is “Lagging Far Behind”’, TIME, 23 April 2015: https://time.com/3833463/unhcr-antonio-guterres-migration-refugees-europe/.
Harrow, K. Trash: African cinema from below. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013.
Hassan, C. ‘The Social Representation of Migrants in the Press’, Trauma and Memory, 6, no. 2, 14 September 2018: 25-30; https://doi.org/10.12869/TM2018-2-02.
Hven, S. ‘The Diegesis as Environment’ in Enacting the worlds of cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.
Issa, M. and Traoré, A. ‘Greenpeace Africa Reacts to Attempts to Turn Senegal into a Plastic Waste Dump’, Greenpeace Africa, 2021: https://www.greenpeace.org/africa/en/press/13646/greenpeace-africa-reacts-to-attempts-to-turn-senegal-into-a-plastic-waste-dump/.
Larkin, B. ‘The Grounds of Circulation: Rethinking African Film and Media’, Politique africaine, 153, no. 1, 2019: 105-126; https://doi.org/10.3917/polaf.153.0105.
Marboeuf, O. and Ferdinand, M. ‘Penser au-delà de la plantation’, Interview by Librairie Utopia, 2022: https://audioblog.arteradio.com/blog/179893/podcast/196420/penser-au-dela-de-la-plantation-avec-malcom-ferdinand-et-olivier-marboeuf.
McCormick, E., Murray, B., Fonbuena, C., Kijewski, L., Saraçoğlu, G., Fullerton, J., Gee, A., and Simmonds, C. ‘Where Does Your Plastic Go? Global Investigation Reveals America’s Dirty Secret’, The Guardian, 17 June 2019, sec. US news: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/17/recycled-plastic-america-global-crisis.
McLuhan, M. Understanding media: The extensions of man. London: MIT Press, 1994.
Murphy, S., Hill, T., McDonagh, P., and Flaherty, A. ‘Mundane Emotions: Losing Yourself in Boredom, Time and Technology’, Marketing Theory, 23, no. 2, 1 June 2023: 275-293; https://doi.org/10.1177/14705931221138617.
Naranjo, J. ‘La última película de Doudou Diop, el cineasta que murió en un cayuco cuando rodaba su viaje hacia Canarias’, El País, 17 September 2023: https://elpais.com/planeta-futuro/2023-09-17/la-ultima-pelicula-de-doudou-diop-el-cineasta-que-murio-en-un-cayuco-cuando-rodaba-su-viaje-hacia-canarias.html.
Rosa, A., Bocci, E., Bonito, M., and Salvati, M. ‘Twitter as Social Media Arena for Polarised Social Representations about the (Im)Migration: The Controversial Discourse in the Italian and International Political Frame’, 2021: https://doi.org/10.1093/migration/mnab001.
Rosa, A., Bocci, E., Nubola, A., and Salvati, M. ‘The Polarized Social Representations of Immigration through the Photographic Lens of INSTAGRAM’, Psychology Hub, 37, no. 3, 11 December 2020: 5-22; https://doi.org/10.13133/2724-2943/17227.
Rossipal, C. ‘Poetics of Refraction: Mediterranean Migration and New Documentary Forms’, Film Quarterly, 74, no. 3, 2021: 35-45; https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2021.74.3.35.
Sarr, F. Afrotopia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019.
_____. ‘Reopening Futures’ in The politics of time: Imagining African becomings, edited by A. Mbembe and F. Sarr. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2023: 117-128.
Sartre, J. Nausea. New Directions Publishing, 2007.
Schneider, R. ‘Off Watch’ in Unwatchable, edited by N. Baer, M. Hennefeld, L. Horak, and G. Iversen. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2019: 341-346.
Somaini, A. ‘Le Flou, le net, et l’histoire des images matricielles’ in La haute et la basse définition des images: photographie, cinéma, art contemporain, culture visuelle, edited by A. Somaini and F. Casetti. Paris: Éditions Mimésis, 2021: 45-98.
Stam, R. ‘From Hybridity to the Aesthetics of Garbage’, Social Identities, 3, no. 2, June 1997: 275-290; https://doi.org/10.1080/13504639752104.
Steyerl, H. ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’, e-flux, no. 10, November 2009: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/.
Tascon, S. ‘Considering Human Rights Films, Representation, and Ethics: Whose Face?’, 2012.
_____. Human rights film festivals: Activism in context. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
[1] Feal 2024.
[2] Naranjo 2023.
[3] Ibid.
[4] McLuhan 1994.
[5] Steyerl 2009.
[6] Casetti & Somaini 2021;
[7] Stam 1997; Harrow 2013; Chakrabarty 1992.
[8] Balsom 2018, p. 60.
[9] Balsom 2018, pp. 60-65.
[10] Migration cinema includes plenty of other films that have visualised the crossing, only they are generally fictional. La Pirogue (Moussa Touré, 2012), Io Capitano (Matteo Garrone, 2023), and Harragas (Merzak Allouache, 2009) are some of the most famous instances.
[11] Steyerl 2009.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Since digitalisation, it is also possible to quantify the difference between sharpness and blur: by calculating the number of pixels of a given image. This shift from qualifiable to quantifiable is key to the history of visual technologies. Casetti & Somaini 2021, p. 9.
[14] McLuhan 1994.
[15] Ibid, p. 23.
[16] The many embodiments of the high and low are amply discussed in the edited volume La Haute et Basse Définition des Images. Casetti &Somaini 2021.
[17] Casetti 2018.
[18] McLuhan 1994, p. 93.
[19] Mamadou co-founded the festival Tééméri Bop Koñ in Dakar (‘A Thousand and One Street Corners’), an initiative that brings cinema to take part in local struggles. The festival connects filmmakers with activist and citizen communities, enabling the creation of documentary shorts that capture the complexity of socio-environmental issues, while fostering spaces of participatory democracy. Through screenings, citizen assemblies, and workshops, filmmakers immerse themselves in a specific disputed territory (such as Bargny, Dakar’s industrial suburbs), and address its environmental and social challenges (in Bargny’s case, industrial contamination and land-grabbing by tourism). This political commitment is evident in Mamadou’s films, which focus on, among others, a traditional women’s assembly (Pencoo, 2018), an environmental activist’s fight against a coal-fired plant (Le Temps de Dire Non!, 2021), and the rising sea levels threatening the low-income neighbourhoods of Saint-Louis (Xaar Yallà, 2021).
[20] Jade’s doctoral research focused on a doubly ‘rich’ image: artists’ cinema, filmmakers that are both established in the cinema industry and in the art world. In the art world resolution is fetishised, as is rarity, for both are strongly associated with authenticity and authorship (Balsom 2017). Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Albert Serra, Helena Wittmann, and Saodat Ismailova are part of a generation of filmmakers that skilfully weave two distinct kinds of rich image economies together: their fiction feature films were distributed in theatres, while their video installations were shown in prestigious art venues around the world. These are artist-filmmakers who have reached the ‘flagship store’ of cinema, as Steyerl (2009) puts it, while maintaining a continuous engagement with the art market and its luxury economies. Strikingly, up until last year (when Baloji’s fiction feature film Omen [2023] was released), Jade has failed to find any African filmmaker that fit into that highly-restrictive corpus.
[21] Steyerl 2009.
[22] Diop 2023.
[23] ‘Mon intention est de raconter l’histoire de Tapha, jeune migrant qui est à sa troisième tentative de rejoindre les côtes espagnoles en pirogue. Je n’ai pu m’empêcher de me dire qu’il serait intéressant de retracer son parcours, qui après avoir vécu l’enfer, ne renonce toujours pas à braver une fois de plus la mer. Si malgré les échecs accumulés, et qui ont des lourdes conséquences sur sa vie, et au regard de nombreuses pertes en vie humaine en mer distillées dans la presse, Tapha continue de porter son rêve, c’est à mon sens qu’il a déjà perdu la tête ou qu’il n’a plus d’espoir dans son pays.’
[24] Steyerl 2009.
[25] Casetti 2021, p. 251.
[26] Feal 2024.
[27] Tascon 2012.
[28] Tascón 2015, pp. 9-10.
[29] Tascón 2015.
[30] Tascon 2012, p. 140.
[31] Colta 2019, p. 134.
[32] Casetti 2021, p. 252.
[33] McLuhan did not explore the relation between media and the environments in which they circulate. As Casetti shows, low and high definition reflect the sensorial intensity that characterises the interaction between media and their viewers, as well as their environments. Casetti 2021.
[34] On the expanded and experiential concept of the filmic world, which is an updated version of Etienne Souriau’s initial conceptualisation, see Hven 2022; de Cock de Rameyen 2023.
[35] Harrow 2013, p. 1.
[36] Stam 1997.
[37] Bonner 2007.
[38] Stam 1997, p. 283.
[39] Ibid. From chronos, time, and topos, space, the chronotope was coined by Bakhtin (1981, p. 84) to suggest that time and space are inextricably connected in the novel. As Stam suggests, this is particularly true for cinema, which quite literally shows time becoming flesh, and space responding to the movements of time.
[40] Stam 1997, pp. 283-284.
[41] Casetti 2021, p. 254.
[42] Somaini 2021, p. 75.
[43] Larkin 2019.
[44] In 2019, an investigation (McCormick et al. 2019) showed that every year 1 million tons of North American waste was exported to countries with waste management problems, with Senegal being one of the main destinations for this plastic waste export. Fortunately, the Senegalese government has banned plastic waste importation in 2021 and, when discovered, fraudulent attempts to bring waste into the country have been heavily fined. Issa & Traoré 2021.
[45] Hassan 2018; De Rosa & Bocci & Carpignano 2020; de Rosa et al. 2021.
[46] Rosa et al. 2020.
[47] Ibid., p. 15.
[48] Danewid 2017; Ahmed 2000.
[49] Guterres 2015.
[50] Murphy et al. 2023.
[51] Benjamin 2006, p. 367.
[52] Murphy et al. 2023.
[53] Benjamin 2006, p. 367.
[54] Freccero 2013, p. 344.
[55] Freccero 2013.
[56] Mourning may also allow the European left to redeem its own humanity and innocence. In her essay, Danewid (2017) critically interrogates white liberals’ rhetoric of mourning, which is used to expand the spectrum of empathy and challenge the dehumanisation of xenophobic and white nationalist discourses. However, she remarks that this is often done at the expenses of very concrete questions of responsibility, restitution, and structural reforms. What is more, white empathy often addresses dead migrants – ‘that is bodies that cannot speak back’ (Danewid 2017, p. 1683). The fetish of the dead stranger in need of Europe’s salvation remains thus unchallenged.
[57] Feal 2024.
[58] Doudou first studied Heritage at Université Gaston Berger, a hotbed for the broader movement of Africanisation of universities. His curriculum was part of the UFR of Civilizations, Religions, Arts and Communication (CRAC), which was established in 2010 by Felwine Sarr, Professor of Economics at Gaston Berger and the author of the seminal essay ‘Afrotopia’ (Sarr, ‘Afrotopia’). CRAC was designed to place indigenous knowledge at the heart of its pedagogy. In 2017, Doudou continued his training at Ecole des Métiers du Son et de l’Image (Saint-Louis) and later at Centre Yennenga (Dakar). Founded by acclaimed director Alain Gomis, Yennenga has become a key player in promoting horizontal inter-African film productions. It is a post-production school and filmmaking hub that hosts a festival, screenings, exhibitions, and offers equipment and studio rental. Furthermore, Doudou belonged to Rencontres Cinématographiques du Nord, a community of young filmmakers in Saint-Louis, known for its collaborative, grassroots, and socially-oriented approach to cinema.
[59] For an in-depth overview of how discourses of ‘sensibilisation’ on the risks of migration are upset and subverted by African political and cultural actors, or even used to extract information on migration routes, see the recent issue of Les Cahiers d’études africaines: Les équivoques de la dissuasion à la migration. Cassarini & Mbodj-Pouye & Poulet 2024.
[60] Sarr 2023, p. 124.
[61] Bredeloup 2008.
[62] Bredeloup 2014, p. 42.
[63] Canut & Sow 2014.
[64] Ibid, p. 21.
[65] Schneider 2019.
[66] Ibid., p. 345.
[67] Rossipal 2021.
[68] Marboeuf & Ferdinand 2022.
[69] Sartre 2007, p. 39.