Saint-Louis blues: from oral storytelling to aural filmmaking

Sendra Fernandez, Estrella (2021) Saint-Louis blues: from oral storytelling to aural filmmaking. In, Lobalzo Wright, Julie and Shearer, Martha (eds.) Musicals at the Margins: Genre, Boundaries, Canons. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Record type: Book Section

Abstract

This chapter examines Dyana Gaye’s filmography, and more specifically, her multi-awarded musical film Un transport en commun (Saint-Louis Blues) (2009). This is a road trip film featuring a set of characters in circulation, where music serves as the travelling aesthetic device unifying the various spaces and times involved along the movement. In the film, music operates as the language which prompts the intimate encounter between passengers. Through songs, characters become griots, that is, storytellers, sharing personally stories that are both individually and collectively located. While each passenger has its own lived experience, they are all shaped by the postcolonial context of the roads being travelled. As the characters move from Dakar to Saint-Louis, another kind of movement is examined, from oral story-telling to aural filmmaking. This is conceived here as a way of contesting the rigidity of the musical film genre, whose conventions are largely limited to and by a Western canon. Instead, aural filmmaking is a more complex and intersectional category which embraces the context of film production.

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