Article:
Realism as ontological unrest: Digital aesthetics and reparative dynamics in Mati Diop’s ‘Atlantics’

Author(s): Pesch, Katrin
Abstract

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.


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Pesch, Katrin: Realism as ontological unrest: Digital aesthetics and reparative dynamics in Mati Diop’s ‘Atlantics’. In: NECSUS_European Journal of Media Studies, Jg. 11 (2022), Nr. 2, S. 175-200. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/19198.
@ARTICLE{Pesch2022,
 author = {Pesch, Katrin},
 title = {Realism as ontological unrest: Digital aesthetics and reparative dynamics in Mati Diop’s ‘Atlantics’},
 year = 2022,
 doi = "\url{http://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/19198}",
 volume = 11,
 journal = {NECSUS_European Journal of Media Studies},
 number = 2,
 pages = {175--200},
}
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