Sonic sociabilities and stranger relations in Arnaud des Pallières’ Adieu (2004)

This article addresses the way noise has been deployed within the sonic practice of French filmmaker Arnaud des Pallières in his film Adieu (2004). According to des Pallières, the politics of his filmmaking resides in the way his films reflect on experiences of which he has no lived experience. With Adieu, des Pallières considers the experience of migration purposefully obliquely. The article examines how this indirect approach is achieved through noise that is harnessed to a political agenda, one that implicates spectators through the film’s own indirect address to listening in spectatorship. Through asynchronicity, the film tunes us to noises that continually arrive from an elsewhere, annoying our sense of place and integrating us within a world of strangers. Through a close reading of this film’s use of migratory noise, feedback and soundscaping, I show how des Pallières’ rigorous and singular approach to noise in Adieu is uniquely placed to open up questions about how we relate to sound and cinema’s address to listening in spectatorship. This consideration offers wider possibilities for understanding how cinema instigates more distant and radical forms of encounter through noise. This article considers the work of Arnaud des Pallières, a contemporary French filmmaker who, as I show through a close reading of his film Adieu (2004), demonstrates a singular and rigorous approach to the auditory to think about migration in the afterlife of colonial intervention. I am particularly interested in des Pallières’ status as a nonrefugee filmmaker reflecting on the experience of displacement, and in the ways in which he uses his filmic and sonic practice to pay attention to and capture the experience of migration beyond the visual. I argue that this turn to the auditory is also a means of acknowledging his own distance from the subject of migration and refugee experience. Des Pallières has consistently stated he wishes to make films about experiences that do not “belong” to him. Speaking of Drancy Avenir (1997), a film des Pallières made prior to Adieu that reckons with the memory of the Holocaust in the present, he claimed: I say that I am not a Jew because it is clear that the huge amount of work that remains in the face of this fundamental event in recent history—that is to say the destruction of the Jewish population in Europe—that this task is for the most part left to Jewish people themselves, and this is a disgrace because such a task ought to be shared by the entire human population. It is thus in the name of a non-Jew, although it may sound deceitful, that I allow myself to propose a cinematic vision of my era. (“À quoi”, my trans.) The politics of des Pallieres’ filmmaking, as he positions them, arise precisely from the way he provides a “cinematic vision” of subjects of which he has no direct experience. That is his responsibility as a filmmaker in Drancy Avenir: to share in the task of reckoning with the Shoah and its continual demand. This conception of des Pallières’ responsibility as filmmaker is carried forth into Adieu, where the demand of the stranger entering France, Ismaël, is continual and remains unknown. Des Pallières’ statements in interview regarding the issue of hospitality are revealing. Speaking of Adieu, des Pallières explains: “If I only had to tell Ismaël’s story, I would be doing nothing but preaching to the converted. I did not want to be