Code Unknown

This chapter analyzes Code Unknown from a postcolonial perspective, with particular emphases on multiethnic voices, disempowered sonic presences, and cross-cultural possibilities of communication in the context of racial politics in contemporary France. The analysis considers how the sound track amplifies diverse characters’ choices to hear or not to hear, along with providing patterns and resonances that invite us to make interpretive leaps beyond the characters’ individual capabilities. Code Unknown reminds us how much our efforts to communicate matter, especially through the multiethnic, deaf-mute children who bookend the film with their extended efforts to physically “speak.” By contrast, many hearing-speaking adults of the film fail to speak or listen with patience, good will, or moral kindness, and sometimes with awful consequences. After considering many sonic moments of social discordance through the film, this chapter dwells on the tentative hope of those scenes in which the deaf-mute children create percussive music together.