2022/2 - #Materiality

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Realism as ontological unrest: Digital aesthetics and reparative dynamics in Mati Diop’s ‘Atlantics’
Pesch, Katrin (2022) , S. 175-200
Grounded in Dakar’s elemental properties as much as manifestations of immaterial and virtual presence, French-Senegalese director Mati Diop’s film Atlantics (2019) embodies what Thomas Elsaesser has described as a post-photographic realism of world cinema. In this article, I show how Atlantics collapses divisions between the evidentiary and the ghostly within the same realist impulse to create a reparative postcolonial aesthetic. Furthermore, as seen in the lucid depiction of Dakar’s clairvoyant nights, the ontological unrest of the film’s post-photographic realism also happens at the level of image aesthetics.