Toward a cinema of multiplicity: Alice Diop’s La Permanence (2016)

This article focuses on the documentaries of Alice Diop, foregrounding La Permanence/On Call (2016), which was filmed in a medical center for refugees and migrants in the banlieues of Paris. Positioning the film in relation to Diop’s wider oeuvre, the article considers her approach to those she films, which she speaks of in interview in terms of an ethics attached to a duty of care, respect, and full awareness of the power of the camera, and which is based on an exchange, “not just the filmer filming the filmed” (Choudhury 2022). Concerning itself with Diop’s documentary ethics, the article revisits my earlier study of ethics, French documentary, and the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. Drawing now upon interconnected discussions of multiplicity and care across the work of different thinkers – Édouard Glissant, Fred Moten, William Kentridge, and Maggie Nelson – I explore how the selfless cinema that I interrogated in that earlier work relates to the cinema of multiplicity that I conceptualize here.