Poetics of refraction, Black subjectivity, and Alice Diop’s ‘Saint Omer’

Abstract

This essay explores Diop’s poetics of refraction in Saint Omer, also the ways in which her Afropeanness enables an angled articulation of audiovisual materials that calls attention to mediation and materiali-ty and carves spaces for critical inquiry. These critical spaces occur both in the film’s subtext and in its textual use of breathing, (ex-tra)diegetic sound, and the gaze. On the level of subtext, the film probes the ethics and politics of fictionalised accounts of heinous crimes; and textually, it forges an audiovisual community of Black subjects that contests European polarities of white subjects and Black objects in favor of relational connections.