Music as Ethnography: Cultural Identity and Resistance in the Soundtracks of Third Cinema

Abstract

This essay will use the soundtracks of African and Asian independent films as a form of musical ethnography to document and explore the music life of these communities. Building on Solanas and Getino's manifesto for a third cinema, Teshome Gabriel's aesthetics of liberation, Stuart Hall's account of cultural identity, and Michel Chion's theory of audiovision are used to treat indigenous music in these films as both evidence and a weapon, rather than as a local colour. Close Readings of Ousmane Sembène's Xala, Djibril Diop Mambéty's Touki Bouki, and Dani Kouyaté's Keïta!. L'Heritage du griot and Souleymane Cissé's Yeelen show West African filmmakers contesting who is counted as the nation through song and language. Readings of Ritwik Ghatak, Satyajit Ray and K. Hariharan's Ghashiram Kotwal employs raga, Tagore songs and Marathi folk forms to explore the themes of identity, memory, patronage and conflict in South Asian cinema. This music does not conform to the colonial habit of listening or the sonic demands of the postcolonial state, and it also does not spread culture universally; rather, it is a type of legible social behaviour.