The unspoken languages of Alain Gomis’s cinema: space, sound, and the body

Abstract

This article examines the body, space, and sound in three of Franco-Senegalese director Alain Gomis’s feature films, Andalucia (2007), Tey (2012), and Félicité (2017). These narrative and aesthetic strategies situate Gomis’s work within Hamid Naficy’s concept of accented cinema and Laura Marks’s category of intercultural cinema. The multisensoriality of Gomis’s films, notably evoking the aural and tactile senses, expand my discussion beyond the visual and align his approach with current areas of inquiry in film studies. I argue that these unspoken languages offer new possibilities for considering the decentering project of cinéma-monde as they transcend geographical borders, linguistic boundaries, and historically defined binaries.