Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Touki Bouki
1973 · Djibril Diop Mambéty · Touki Bouki on Sightlines
4 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the horned motorcycle held still against the sky. (camera)
Mambéty repeatedly poses the zebu-skull-mounted bike in silhouette on a headland above the ocean, presenting it to be looked at rather than letting it do anything within the scene.
Payoff: The bike stops being a vehicle and becomes an image you are meant to read.
Watch for cattle slaughter cut straight into the love story. (cutting)
The film interlaces ritual cattle slaughter, throats cut, blood running, directly with scenes of the two lovers, with no narrative bridge explaining why the two belong together.
Payoff: Death and appetite get welded straight onto the story of two people trying to escape. In the reading: interstice / the 'AND'. Deleuze calls a cut that connects by association rather than continuity an irrational cut; here it welds sacrifice to desire.
Listen for the same French song returning again and again. (sound)
Josephine Baker's 'Paris, Paris, Paris' recurs throughout as the couple's musical leitmotif, its sweetness running against the Wolof speech and city noise it never quite matches.
Payoff: The song and the picture on screen are telling two different stories at the same time. In the reading: audiovisual disjunction. Deleuze calls sound and image telling different stories at once audiovisual disjunction, and the gap is where the meaning sits.
Watch a triumphant homecoming get cut against dusty reality. (structure)
Fantasy sequences show the lovers imagined returning to Dakar in triumph, showered with acclaim, spliced directly against the poorer, dustier world they actually inhabit.
Payoff: The film never marks which version is the wish and which is simply what happened.
Once you have seen it
Watch how many times departure gets planned, then delayed. (structure)
The couple repeatedly reaches the edge of leaving, money finally in hand, only for the actual departure to dissolve into repetition and further delay instead of happening.
Payoff: The journey keeps being staged without ever managing to become an actual journey. In the reading: the trip/stroll that transforms nothing. Deleuze calls a trip that transforms nothing the voyage-balade-form; the departure here never has to arrive to keep the plot moving.
Watch Mory's face once the boat is finally in reach. (performance)
At the very end the passage to France is actually available to him, and instead of boarding it the film simply holds on Mory looking at the ship.
Payoff: Looking, not boarding, turns out to be the only thing he is actually able to do.
Watch how blurred fantasy and reality get by the ending. (structure)
By the final stretch, imagined triumphant homecomings and grim present-day scenes for the couple run back to back with nothing marking which one is the wish and which the fact.
Payoff: You finish unsure which version of their story you actually just watched, and the film wants that.
Carry this in: Watch the motorcycle's horns against the sky. The film asks you to read it, not follow it.