4 - Feedback, Asynchronicity and Sonic Sociabilities: Arnaud des Pallières’s Adieu

Summary

STRANGER

This chapter addresses the potential for cinema to orient us through sound towards a world of strangers. Whereas Chapter 3 showed how migratory noise in Tony Gatlif 's Exiles opened up sites of in-betweenness for exilic dwelling between identity positions, here I show how instances of migratory noise might instigate more distant and radical forms of encounter that open us to alterity. It examines Adieu (Arnaud des Pallières, 2004), a film that recounts at least two parallel stories: Ismaël (Mohamed Rouabhi) flees persecution in Algeria and journeys to France illegally, only to be arrested and forcibly sent back to Algeria; a patriarchal, well-off French family of pig farmers bury their youngest son and brother, Simon, who has died in a tragic road accident. However, Adieu is also composed of other mysterious segments, such as the building of a lorry which we see in the film's lyrical opening sequence that returns throughout the film in short passages, a contemporary Frankenstein inspired by John Carpenter's Christine (1983) and Marguerite Duras's The Lorry (1977), seemingly driverless with its metallic muzzle appearing to guzzle up the road ahead. These different narrative threads give the film the feel of a rhizomatic, open structure, where multiple parts enter into multiple relations with each other, ceaselessly producing connections and de-couplings.

Like Gatlif, des Pallières allows noise to migrate within his filmic spaces and disturb the security and positionality of bodies on screen. Yet Adieu is far less concerned with exploring exilic identity positions than it is with using the auditory to register the presence of strangers beyond the visual, and to think through the politics of visibility and audibility that Ismaël, a clandestine migrant, is permitted. Through the auditory, the film provides a delicate attention to the relations between ‘host’ nation and ‘intruder’, community and stranger. It does this by not resolving these relations into the workings of narrative. The pig farmers are totally ignorant of Ismaël. And Ismaël, we are told in the film's opening, has no desire to know France or who the French are. The idea that these two stories even unfold in a proximate geography to one another is only loosely intimated in one shot where we hear the sound of an off-screen aeroplane (possibly Ismaël’s) traversing the sky above, as the funeral congregation files out of the church.