What is it about?
Images of the ocean in Mati Diop's 2019 Senegalese film Atlantics evoke colonial histories alongside contemporary tales of fatal migrant boat crossings. In my article, I relate this to early film theory about the relationship between cinema and the mysteries, dangers, and spiritual powers of water. The ocean unsettles our stable sense of the world and ourselves, just like cinema and its ability to show us different perspectives. Diop's film is a contemporary political reckoning with the ocean as a site of conflict and death, but also a space where fixed identities and oppressive forces can be destabilised.
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Photo by Evan Link on Unsplash
Why is it important?
With the recent political "crises" regarding migrant boat crossings, it is vital to think through how the ocean is represented aesthetically in cinema. Films such as Diop's develop an anticolonial oceanic aesthetic that can reveal new dimensions of such geopolitical issues and provide perspectives that are often ignored in Western discourses.
Perspectives
Diop's film is haunting, beautiful and brilliant. It contains within it a profound political aesthetic that I have tried to come to grips with using the lens of early film theory and contemporary understandings of race and Blackness. If you have not seen the film, I highly recommend it.
Laurence Kent
University of Bristol
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Untamed Storms: Cinema’s Oceanic Contingency and Mati Diop’s Atlantics, July 2025, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004735125_008.
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