4 - Across the Sonorous Desert: Sounding Migration in El Mar la Mar

Summary

Abstract

Joshua Bonnetta and J. P. Sniadecki's El Mar La Mar (2017), an experimental documentary on the migrant trail across the Mexico–US border, features a striking audiovisual assemblage that gives equal weight to sights and sounds, allowing the viewer to contemplate the history of not only the cinema of migration but also the various traditions that engage with field recordings. This chapter investigates the ways in which the film challenges our expectations of what a migrant geography feels like, with special attention to the film's soundtrack, from its contact mic-enabled drone sounds to disembodied audio testimonials, and the broader acoustic ecology that the film construes (influenced by musique concrete and post-Pierre Schaeffer anecdotal sound, in the work of Luc Ferrari).

Keywords: sound, migration, documentary, Luc Ferrari

Among the commonplace icons that speak to the brutal realities of economic and forced migrations in recent years has been, as Fiona Noble puts it, “the image of a dead migrant prone on a beach… symbolizing the catastrophic synergy amongst seascapes, migration and death in the contemporary cultural imaginary” (Noble, 2018, p. 637). It is the haunting quality of this image that explains the symbolism behind the title of Joshua Bonnetta and J. P. Sniadecki's experimental film El Mar la Mar (2017). The “mar” in the phrase is recognizable to Spanish speakers as the word for sea. It is addressed in both the masculine and feminine to invoke the title of a Rafael Alberti poem, which the film on the migrant trail across the Mexico–U.S. border is named after. While it is shot in the Sonora Desert, El Mar la Mar attaches a pelagic description to this arid topography, as a reminder that bodies are scattered in the expanses of not only seascapes but also desertscapes, in the broader ecology of 21st-century clandestine migrations. The bodies that are recoverable (sometimes only partially) in these formidable geological graveyards constitute grim indexes of human lives that perished during crossings across treacherous terrain.

Several critics have noted the affinity between the film's engagement with the “lost at sea” trope and that of recent documentaries on Mediterranean deaths, including Gianfranco Rosi's Fire at Sea (2016).