Digital Dilapidation

This article engages the formal qualities of Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s Sci-Fi feature Les Saignantes (2005) to consider “what it feels like” to live in the 21st century. The first part argues that the film’s imperfect digital video aesthetics can be read as a critical mimicry of entertainment media in the age of neoliberal politics, state withdrawal, and informal economies: the “discorrelation” of digital video, which evokes the literal disintegration and corruption of a file through illegal reproduction, offers Bekolo a way to grapple with what it means to be a citizen of a state engineered to malfunction by its colonial past and its capitalist present. Considering Les Saignantes’ circulation at European and North American film festivals, the second part of the essay offers a caveat to this argument: how does the disintegrity of low-quality video awaken a desire for an image of Africa as an illicit object of desire, meant to be consumed?