Just a fable: notes on speech acts politics in Bamako

Abstract

This text seeks to describe the way in which the fabulatory speech acts configure the politics of the film Bamako, directed by Abderrahmane Sissako. In order to do so, we carried out a bibliographic study of the concept of fabulatory speech act in the works of Gilles Deleuze and a bibliographic study of the relations between film, politics and speech in the work of Jacques Rancière. We unfolded the paradigms of political cinema as described by Rancière and found, in the post-Brechtian paradigm, a possible dialogue with Sissako’s film. We analyzed some of the film’s speech acts, identified by photograms, and we found a unique way of assembling the fabulatory word and the everyday word in the production of new visibilities and new worlds.