Voice-over and sharing bodies in Alice Diop’s Vers la tendresse (2016)

Abstract

Films in French have long been global in scope, and debates around the nomenclature used to describe these cinematic works have emerged as a means to acknowledge the power imbalance invoked by categorizations such as French and francophone. Cinéma-monde serves as an organizing principle to articulate the relationships between films and the French-speaking world without reinforcing spatial and linguistic boundaries by way of a center/periphery paradigm. This article addresses the implications of the cinéma-monde framework within the Hexagon to illustrate the representational modes of diffusing marginality in cinema made in France. This article offers a close reading of a scene from Alice Diop’s documentary Vers la tendresse (2016) that mobilizes what Mary Ann Doane calls a disembodied voice-over in combination with camera movement to create an open cinematic space which disjoins the internal experiences expressed by the voice-over from the outward appearances of the characters. Diop assembles a fictional mise-en-scène and recordings of male interviewees speaking at a workshop held in Seine-Saint-Denis on the subject of intimacy. As the camera pans slowly across a group of men, it is unclear which body is the visual representation of the narration. Calling upon Michel Chion’s audiovisual contract and its rupture in Vers la tendresse, this article addresses how a dissonance between image and sound permits one voice to accompany several different bodies, an effect that reveals and dismantles the building blocks of the narrator’s isolation. Viewed through the framework of cinémamonde and its decentering approaches, Vers la tendresse underscores the flexibility of the film space and, consequently, social boundaries, to shed light on how we intentionally or unintentionally constitute others in society.