Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art and Media 9789048554584

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Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art and Media

Media, Culture and Communication in Migrant Societies International migration for work, study, humanitarian and lifestyle reasons is increasingly commonplace, representing an unprecedented movement of people, globally. With these transnational mobilities comes the emergence and establishment of migrant societies with their own distinctive cultures and socialities. These migrant societies however are not necessarily oriented to particular fixed ethnic nor national identities. Instead, they may be formed through other identity signifiers such as feelings of commonality of specific experiences. Migrant societies, moreover, may not be confined to geographical boundaries but due to the digital turn where media and communication technologies and products are ubiquitous parts of everyday life, may exist transnationally in the digital environment. This book series is dedicated to engaging and understanding the role, impact, breadth and depth of culture, media and communication practices in and across migrant societies. The series showcases high quality and innovative research from established and emerging scholars to engage readers in exciting and informed conversations on migrant societies. Series editor Catherine Gomes, School of Media and Communication, Melbourne, Australia

Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art and Media

Edited by Deniz Bayrakdar and Robert Burgoyne

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Frame from the opening scene of Seaburners (2014), directed by Melisa Önel. Courtesy of Melisa Önel. Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 416 6 e-isbn 978 90 4855 458 4 doi 10.5117/9789463724166 nur 670 © The authors / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2022 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

In memory of Eileen Rositzka (1988–2021), friend, scholar, and poet of the unbounded world.



Table of Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction: Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art, and Media Robert Burgoyne and Deniz Bayrakdar

9 11

Part I 1. Moving Peoples and Motion Pictures: Migration in Film and Other Media

27

2. Modes of Self-Representation in the ImagesCollectively Produced by Migrants in Lésbos Island: Natives of the New World

51

3. Abstraction, Bare Life, and Counternarratives of Mobilityin the Refugee Films of Richard Mosse and Ai Weiwei, Incoming and Human Flow

73

Dudley Andrew

Nagehan Uskan

Robert Burgoyne

4. Across the Sonorous Desert: Sounding Migration in El Mar la Mar 89 Selmin Kara

5. Dislodged from History, Confronted by Walls: Picturing Migration as a Global Emergency

107

6. Virtual Reality and Immersive Representation in Recent Refugee Narratives

129

Dora Apel

Erik Marshall

Part II 7. The Secret Life of Waste: Recycling Dreams of Migration

151

8. Waiting in Line, Moving in Circles: Spaces of Instability in Christian Petzold’s Transit

177

9. Migrant Bodies in the Land/City/Seascapes of 2000s Turkish Cinema

193

Deniz Göktürk

Eileen Rositzka

Deniz Bayrakdar

10. Third World On the Move: Cinematic Destination Belgrade/Serbia 219 Nevena Daković

11. On the Borderlines of South-Eastern Europe: Migration in the Films of Aida Begić and Želimir Žilnik

237

Conclusion (Speculative)

259

References

271

Index

295

Iva Leković

Robert Burgoyne and Deniz Bayrakdar

Acknowledgements Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art, and Media originated as the product of the conference Cinema and Migration; XX. New Directions in Turkish Film Studies Conference, May 7–11, 2019, coordinated by Deniz Bayrakdar and hosted by Kadir Has University in Istanbul. The conference was supported by the General Directorate of Cinema of the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism and the Turkish National Commission for UNESCO. We would like to thank Dr. Gökçe Ok, Deputy Director General of the Ministry of Interior, Directorate General of Migration Management; Selçuk Yavuzkanat, Deputy Director General of the General Directorate of Cinema; and Prof. Dr. Öcal Oğuz, President of the Turkish National Commission for UNESCO for their support. We are also grateful to Kadir Has University for hosting the conference. We would also like to thank the Department of Radio, Television and Cinema, in particular Dr. Melis Behlil and Dr. Levent Soysal. A selection of papers by keynote speakers and panel participants from the conference, along with several additional solicited chapters, form the contents of the volume. Our thanks to everyone who participated in an exceptionally stimulating exchange of ideas and images. For help with the funding for the illustrations, we thank the Emeritus Academy of Wayne State University, Detroit, and, in particular, its director, Emeritus Professor Arthur Marotti. Thanks also to Kadir Has University for funding the illustrations. For the beautiful cover illustration, we are grateful to the filmmaker Melisa Önel, who directed the film Seaburners, from which the cover image is taken. Our most important acknowledgement, however, is to Dr. Ahmet Emin Bülbül, Istanbul Bilgi University, who served first as the conference assistant and then as editorial assistant and correspondent. He has proofed and formatted the text, through its many revisions, with grace and expertise. Mr. Bülbül has provided an exceptionally high level of thoughtful editorial oversight and has managed his many tasks with exemplary thoroughness. We thank him deeply for his fine work throughout this lengthy process. Finally, we acknowledge the tragic passing of one of our contributors, Eileen Rositzka, who left this world for a different shore on May 26, 2021. Eileen was a great friend and superb young scholar, whose work on cinema as a form of mapping and unmapping was influential and inspiring. We have dedicated this volume to her.

Introduction: Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art, and Media Robert Burgoyne and Deniz Bayrakdar The unending drama of forced migration, with millions of people displaced from their homes and compelled to take on a life of nomadic transience or enforced stasis in permanent waiting zones, ranks as the defining story of our times, the most sweeping transformation of collective historical experience since WWII. The United Nations estimates that the overall population of migrating people, including economic migrants and those swept from their homes by war, persecution, and climate catastrophe, now numbers over a billion people—one in seven humans now alive. This vast exodus has been called the “largest diaspora in the history of the species” (Salopek, 2019). Already in 1951, Hannah Arendt saw the swelling numbers of refugees and stateless people as an insoluble threat to the existence of the nation state. The 21st century, with its ecological crises, civil wars, and intractable hardships, has seen a massive, unprecedented increase in the number of people wandering the Earth or locked in conditions of suspended mobility. The phenomenon of mass displacement, however, also brings into view a striking new mode of human existence: as one writer says, the journey is now shaping a different class of human being, “people whose ideas of ‘home’ now incorporates an open road” or, at the other extreme, people whose mobility is blocked, who have become, as the title of a recent exhibition puts it, “permanently temporary” (Salopek, 2019). Viewed through a guardedly positive lens, the refugee and the migrant, as Giorgio Agamben (1998) further suggests, may represent “the paradigm of a new historical consciousness,” pointing towards a future beyond the binary order of the nation state, defined as it is by the concepts of citizenship and exclusion. Thomas Elsaesser makes a similar observation. Describing contemporary Europe as a “thought experiment,” he characterizes modern Europe as a continent of immigrants… both East to West and South to North, with migrants, refugees and mobile labour turning the nineteenth century

Bayrakdar, D. and R. Burgoyne (eds.), Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art and Media. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463724166_intro

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European nation states into multicultural, multi-denominational and multi-ethnic communities which have not yet found a modus of how to live together. (Elsaesser, 2018, p. 85)

Although the intensive media attention that the refugee crisis and forced migration has intermittently received has illuminated incidents of a particularly tragic nature—the mass drownings in the Mediterranean, the bulldozing of refugee camps, the separation of children from their parents at the US–Mexico border—the larger and more urgent task of framing this new historical narrative, a narrative of vast collective and individual consequence, has not yet been met. The phenomenon of migration in its current forms poses a major challenge to narrative and imaginative representation, and it is this challenge that provides the impetus for this study.1 The essays gathered here mark a new critical mapping of the visual culture emerging from mass migration in the 21st century. Drawing on documentary and fiction films, gallery installations, site-specific artworks, virtual reality (VR) projects, photography, and experimental film, the volume brings into relief the potent creative culture that has developed around the subject of forced migration and enforced stasis, both within and alongside populations driven to extreme hardship and precarity. Departing from the customary rhetoric of Western news reporting, which uses images and narratives, now familiar, to reproduce migrants as media objects, the book considers the myriad ways works of art create a distinctive and nuanced aesthetic approach to the existential experiences of migration. We expand critical discussion to a wide range of expressive forms, exploring the worldwide artistic response to the most consequential story of our time—an artistic engagement that suggests the possible emergence of new 1 On the terminology of migration, please see IOM UN Migration, International Migration Law No 34. – Glossary on Migration, www.iom.int. According to the glossary, a migrant is a person “who moves away from his or her place of usual residence, whether within a country or across an international border, temporarily or permanently, and for a variety of reasons”; an emigrant is a person who moves from their country of origin to another country, which becomes their new residence (2006, p. 18); a refugee is a person who is outside of their country due to “fear of persecution of race, religion, nationality . . . membership of political opinion . . . and unwilling to return” to the habitual residence (2006, p. 171); and an asylum seeker is an individual who is seeking international protection. “Not every asylum seeker will ultimately be recognized as a refugee, but every recognized refugee is initially an asylum seeker” (2006, p.14). Irregular migration def ines “movement of persons that takes place outside the laws, regulations, or international agreements governing the entry into or exit from the State of origin, transit or destination” (2006, p. 116); a trafficker (human) is a person who commits the crime of organizing the trafficking of persons (2006, p. 216).

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forms of global citizenship, as well as exposing the escalation of social loss and exploitation. The authors contributing to this collection work in the general areas of film studies and art history, and write from a wide range of geographic settings. Each essay brings into view a different aspect of refugee and migrant experiences. As the authors make clear in their analyses, the pervasive rootlessness, or its opposite, the enforced stasis of much of the contemporary world, manifests itself in different ways. From the drifting sense of invisibility that characterizes the lives of migrants moving between the “non-places” of motel rooms, urban streets, back alleys, and bureaucratic offices in Istanbul and Paris to the filmic self-portraits of refugees housed for years in the vast camp at Lésbos; from the existential isolation, the “inner exile,” of immigrants in Eastern Europe to the stunned, crowded caravans crossing the Sahara or the countless communities abandoned on small boats crossing the Mediterranean, the films and artworks that are the subject of this study depict the transient lives of stateless persons in nuanced and specific ways (Augé, 1995). What emerges is a striking portrait of the spaces that have come to define the refugee and migrant experience, distinct spaces that are nonetheless linked as places of transit and of the transitory, what Marc Augé calls “non-places.” Moreover, the distinctive temporality of the refugee and the migrant also comes into view, a temporality defined by waiting, of a life in suspension, a life without ordinary forms of agency. With its focus on aesthetic responses to this unfolding human drama, Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art, and Media captures key aspects of contemporary historical life. The volume explores the different ways the experiences of refugees and migrants has been represented in the expansive media forms of 21st-century visual culture. Focusing primarily on films, the work considers a wide range of modes and genres. Many of the films discussed in the volume are experimental, independent projects that unfold in a non-narrative style, such as El Mar la Mar by Joshua Bonnetta and J. P. Sniadecki. Some, such as Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow, are relatively straightforward documentaries. Others are narrative fiction films, such as Christian Petzold’s Transit and Melisa Önel’s Seaburners. In Natives of the New World, the refugees themselves are the authors and directors of the work. And in the virtual reality films considered here, the explicit attempt to immerse the viewer in the world of refugees opens a form of interactive engagement, in which the gaze of the spectator/participant actualizes certain narrative events. The work also explores the conditions of contemporary migration in a wide range of geographic settings, including Europe, the Balkans, Turkey,

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the US–Mexico border, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean. Previous scholarship on the subject of film, refugees, and migrants—such as Transient Mobility and Middle Class Identity: Media and Migration in Australia and Singapore (2017) by Catherine Gomes and Migration, Arts, and Postcoloniality in the Mediterranean (2018) by Celeste Ianniccielo—has provided important insights but has been limited in terms of geographic range. In addition to its broad spatial compass, Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art, and Media takes a unique approach to the phenomenon of migration and forced displacement, emphasizing the subjective, interior dimensions of the migrant experience and the power of works of art to illuminate the uncharted emotional and psychological drama of lives defined by precarity and transience. Mass migration, the book suggests, has begun to shape a new mode of human existence, where ideas of home are now superimposed over the reality of nomadic life, or conversely, where home has become a vast encampment where all mobility is blocked. The history of cinema is, of course, replete with stories of migration, a subject that forms a kind of leitmotif in world f ilm history, dating from the earliest years of f ilmmaking and shared by many national cinemas. As Giorgio Bertellini writes, “The emergence of motion pictures and the phenomenon of world migrations are profoundly interrelated: their threads span from social and economic history to racial politics and film aesthetics” (2013, p. 1). Migrant stories, moreover, have been rendered in a wide range of genres, including epic, comic, crime f ilms, road movies, slapstick, musicals, art cinema, documentary, and melodrama. The role of migration in the developing history of cinema extends, however, well beyond the realms of story content and subject matter, because immigrant directors, producers, actors, and audiences have provided the foundational elements of the art form. Scholarship devoted to the importance of migrants and migration in film history is extensive, ranging from studies of migrant directors in Hollywood (Morrison, 1998) to the inf luence of Italian immigrants on American f ilm (Bertellini, 2005). It includes the role of the “Great Migration” of Black Americans to the north during the Jim Crow era, which forged both a new Black American cinema and a new urban audience (Stewart, 2005); the potential created by the European Union for cross-cultural expressions (Loshitzky, 2010); the prospect of migrant and diasporic cinemas as a creative force and agent of social transformation (Berghahn & Sternberg, 2010); and the representation of migration and mobility as a European ideal that is contradicted by forced migration and xenophobia in films and art works from the 1990s (Bayraktar, 2015).

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Several recent books dealing with contemporary cinema and art may be usefully compared to our study. One such work is Mobility and Migration in Film and Moving Image Art: Cinema Beyond Europe, by Nilgün Bayraktar, published in 2016. This book contains chapters on Turkish German cinema and includes discussion of the French film Hidden as well as considering experimental videos and site installations. Another text that considers the interpenetration of film and migration is The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis, by T. J. Demos, published in 2013. A theoretically sophisticated work oriented to challenging new forms of documentary practice, it focuses on activist art explicitly concerned with social change, arguing that the subject of refugees and migrants in moving images serves as a call for an experimental rethinking of documentary convention. A third text that considers the dynamic potential of film as an artistic response to migration is Yosefa Loshitzky’s 2010 study, Screening Strangers: Migration and Diaspora in Contemporary European Cinema. Loshitzky considers the representation of migrants and refugees in European films as engaging the discourse around a “new Europe.” Analysing works by prominent directors such as Bernardo Bertolucci and Stephen Frears, she argues that diasporic films may influence European society, categorizing them in terms of different themes, such as the “journey to hope” or “the enemy within.” The subject of immigrants and the cinema of the “New Europe” forms an important area of recent scholarly concentration. İpek A. Çelik’s book In Permanent Crisis: Ethnicity in Contemporary Media and Cinema (2015) details the powerful anti-racist deconstructions of ethnic stereotype in the work of Michael Haneke, Alfonso Cuaron, Fatih Akın, and Constantinos Giannaris. The European media economy that thrives on images of the ethnic other as either perpetrators of spectacular violence or victims of it receives deep contextualization in her work, as she charts the ways these four auteurs provide historically informed analyses of ethnic and racial tension. Another highly influential work, Daniele Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg’s European Cinema in Motion (2010), discusses the increasingly important role of migrant and diasporic filmmakers in the self-representation of migrant culture and experience, arguing that European filmmaking has been significantly transformed by the prominence of diasporic filmmakers. In addition, the book delineates the challenge to national narratives, ethnocentric myths, and traditional understandings of the historical past that these filmmakers convey, arguing that diasporic filmmaking may serve as a significant medium of redefinition of European identity. And Isolina Ballesteros (2015), in Immigration Cinema in The New Europe, provides a

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theoretically rich account of a wide range of films that give voice to the immigrant experience, focusing on films that are “in between,” that dismantle stable film categories. Works that mirror the situation of immigrants in the New Europe, she argues, are characterized by hybridity, featuring an uncategorizable mix of styles, the deliberate blurring of categories of genre, national cinema, and authorship—reflecting, in formal terms, a concrete sense of “double occupancy,” to use a term set forth by Thomas Elsaesser. Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art, and Media contributes to and extends these important scholarly endeavours. It can be distinguished from the works described above by its panoramic focus on the representation of refugee and migrant experiences, extending analysis to multiple regions of the world. The volume also expands critical discussion to a range of media forms, moving beyond documentary and dramatic film to include virtual reality, experimental films, refugee self-representations, photography, and gallery installations. We consider the way distinct media forms shape representation and the different ways that migrants and refugees are portrayed through multiple channels of expression. The book is also shaped by a sense of historical urgency, because the subject of mass displacement and enforced stasis has today pressed itself on the consciousness—and the conscience—of the world. The exponential increase in refugee populations across the globe has become a signature characteristic of the contemporary period. And where migration has been written into the history of a region for decades or longer, as in Turkey, the Balkans, or the US–Mexico border, the subjective, emotional drama of homelessness, of permanent temporariness and liminality, has now become a focus of artistic imagination. The work is organized in two parts: The first section of the volume consists of chapters that address experimental films and artworks, projects that attempt to find a new visual and sonic language for representing the migrant and refugee experience. The second section comprises essays that explore the existential dramas of forced mobility and enforced stasis in narrative form, dramatic and documentary films that convey the personal, subjective experiences of migrant lives in ways that challenge the traditional syntax of film. In many of the works treated in this section, standard narrative conventions such as agency, event, and temporal progression have essentially dissolved as cardinal figures of plot. Each type of media we consider, whether experimental film or VR, gives a different accent to the portrayal of the lives of migrants and refugees. The authors contributing to this volume, moreover, employ a varied set of theoretical perspectives. Details of social context, historical patterns of

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migration and emigration, and the aesthetic lineage of the artworks we discuss are incorporated into the separate chapters, situating the migrant stories treated in these works in a larger aesthetic, historical, and theoretical framework. The first chapter of Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art, and Media sets a challenge to the rest of the volume. Dudley Andrew’s essay, “Moving Peoples and Motion Pictures: Migration in Film and Other Media,” centres on the urgency of representing the enormity of 21st-century world migrations, the great drama of our historical period, in a medium that achieves its impact from stories of a more modest, recognizably human scale. He argues that Western cinema has not yet found the visual or narrative language to convey the collective experience of mass migration with any real insight or dramatic power and that such a visual language may, in fact, not be possible. The limitations of film, as well as its possible resources for representing this immense subject, have not yet been clearly understood. Other art forms, he suggests, may offer examples and ideas. Ranging widely over a number of artworks in different media, including literature, video, opera, and theatre, Andrew provides a valuable survey of artistic work that has succeeded in illuminating one facet or another of the phenomenon of forced displacement or enforced stasis. Finally, Andrew’s essay turns to a small number of recent films by directors such as Gianfranco Rosi, Philippe Lioret, Aki Kaurismäki, and Fatih Akın, who have created powerful and imaginative portrayals of the migrant and the refugee and the worlds they inhabit. In the second chapter, Nagehan Uskan describes the visual art of selfrepresentation conducted by the refugees sequestered on Lésbos Island. Her analysis, entitled “Modes of Self-Representation in the Images Collectively Produced by Migrants in Lésbos Island: Natives of the New World,” focuses on the work of a group called Kino Mosaik, consisting of refugees from several different countries and continents. The several forms of self-representation the group devises are conceived as a counternarrative to the stereotypes of refugees as passive, consigned to endless periods of waiting. The film the refugees produced, entitled Natives of the New World, can be understood as a form of video activism, a project that breaks away from the representation of refugees as “silent actors and victims.” Robert Burgoyne, in “Abstraction, Bare Life, and Counternarratives of Mobility in the Refugee Films of Richard Mosse and Ai Weiwei, Incoming (2014–2017) and Human Flow (2017),” considers two very different attempts to convey the extraordinary changes in human life and history that forced migration has wrought. Mosse’s gallery installation, Incoming, represents

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refugees in both an intimate and abstract way, recording their faces and figures with a thermographic camera, a military-grade device that can register the heat signature of figures from a distance of up to 30 kilometres. Capturing the movements of refugees at sea, on transport trucks, and in refugee camps, the artist records the presence of figures from afar, in long shot and in close-up, with no significant loss of visual clarity or detail. In contrast to the distanced yet intimate observations of Mosse, Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow, in which the artist visits some 40 refugee camps in 23 countries, attempts to comprehend in visual form both the enormous global scale of human displacement in the contemporary period and to extend a bridge of generosity and hospitality. The individual exchanges he initiates with refugees unfold as an attempt to change the discourse about refugees, who are often depicted in the media as a mass form of threat, and to extend to the refugee the ancient gestures of hospitality. The film asserts an ideal of the traveller having the right to be at home anywhere in the world. Selmin Kara moves away from a concentration on the visual signs and meanings produced by film to consider the sound design of the abstract work, El Mar la Mar (2018), by Joshua Bonnetta and J. P. Sniadecki. Her essay, “Across the Sonorous Desert: Sounding Migration El Mar la Mar,” considers the film soundtrack as a distinct medium, one capable of expressing in a new way the plaintive and tragic effects of forced displacement. Whereas films of refugee experience typically privilege the image, creating a familiar visual lexicon of suffering, abandonment, and death, sound design can reawaken our sense of strangeness and loss. Set in the Sonora Desert, a vast, desolate space—so harsh and hostile that it functions as a natural extension of US Border Control—El Mar la Mar uses a complex assemblage of imagery and sounds that Kara calls a “cartophony,” a merging of cartography and sonic activity that may function as a counter-mapping of geosocial relations. The film conjures an experiential map of the Mexico–U.S. migrant trail. Dora Apel, in “Dislodged from History, Confronted by Walls: Picturing Migration as a Global Emergency,” explores several exhibitions and sitespecific artworks that expand the visual, sonic, and gestural vocabularies of displacement, bordering, and trauma. The videos, photographs, and sculptures she considers make the global catastrophe of refugees and forced migration visible in a striking and haunting way, but they also suggest the limits of the global capital order as well, which fails to support and sustain its own populations. The critical, political thrust of much of the work she surveys confronts nation states’ failure to meet the global crisis, while using materials and media that underscore how global capital creates the very economic, ecological, social, and political conditions that produce forced

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migration. The growing visibility of creative work on this subject, with exhibitions, site-specific installations, videos, and sculptures appearing with increasing frequency in all parts of the world, has the potential, Apel writes, to galvanize resistance to inhumane treatment of refugees and to underscore the catastrophic dimensions of forced migration—a phenomenon that will ultimately affect everyone. In “Virtual Reality and Immersive Representation in Recent Refugee Narratives,” Erik Marshall details two important VR projects on refugees and assesses their potential for creating an immersive—and potentially empathetic—experience for the spectator. The two works, Carne y Arena (Virtually Present, Physically Invisible, 2017), by Alejandro González Iñárritu, and We Wait (2016), Darren Dubicki, and produced by Aardman Studios and the BBC, employ very different approaches to use VR technology, but share the goal of encouraging spectator involvement. The Iñárritu film follows the trail of a group of Mexican migrants trying to cross the US–Mexico border, while the work by Aardman Studios follows a Syrian group trying to make their way to Europe through Turkey. Marshall provides a detailed technical and theoretical analysis of VR and its relation to narrative film, its status as a form of language using images rather than a reproduction of pre-existent reality, and the impression of bodily presence, of engagement with the simulated world, that VR induces. The impression of immersion in the virtual world breaks with the documentary tradition of distanced witnessing or impartial observation. In both the VR projects Marshall discusses, the new medium’s potential for engaged, politically sensitive presentations is manifest, because both projects succeed in suggesting the size of the problem—the vast numbers of people attempting to cross the seas or the deserts—while being specific enough to allow spectators to identify with the speaking characters. In Part II of this study, Deniz Göktürk takes on the surprising but fundamental connections between migrants, refugees, and consumer waste. In “The Secret Life of Waste: Recycling Dreams of Migration,” she f irst considers the stereotypical appearance on-screen of “surplus populations” and proposes a set of alternative theoretical and filmmaking practices. When situated in particular concrete environments, she writes, film may be able to provide mediated access to aspects of the everyday lives of migrants that are ordinarily invisible, including the tales, dreams, and aspirations of those who live and work with waste. Refuse, she points out, plays an important role in the lives of migrants. A product of the contemporary consumerist world, waste is shunted out of view, to be tended to, transported, and recycled by a nearly invisible population, the dispossessed people who populate the

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underbellies of cities. Discussing the short documentary Afganistanbul (Ulaş Tosun, 2018), she details the minute attention the film gives to a local group of Afghan migrants working as waste pickers in Istanbul’s Fatih district. Her analysis links the seemingly disparate topics of garbage and refuse, with its intrinsic relation to capitalism and consumption, to the lives of people who are also deemed to be “surplus” to the capitalist order. Her essay foregrounds a critical migration studies framework that looks at the naturalized centre from the point of view of its margins. The film Afganistanbul succeeds in conveying a sense of life through migrant eyes, seeing the secret life of waste “through the lens of migration and migration through the lens of waste.” Eileen Rositzka, in “Waiting in Line, Moving in Circles: Spaces of Instability in Christian Petzold’s Transit” (2018), explores a film that represents the migrant experience of liminality in nearly all of its possible articulations, depicting a character displaced in space, time, history, and from his identity. The sense of being unmoored, detached from a singular, meaningful past, without a sense of future, and suspended from ordinary forms of agency, def ines the main character’s meandering passage through what Marc Augé calls the non-places of modernity. The character, Georg, lives his life in various waiting rooms, train stations, and anonymous coffee bars. The obsolescence and historical displacement that is so often seen in Petzold’s work is reinforced by a series of formal correlatives—the sudden shift to video security footage, the severing of sound and image, the irruptions of the Nazi past into the contemporary present, as Nazi soldiers flood the streets of modern Paris. The film creates a vivid sketch of blurred identity: Georg, who lives in a fictive contemporary world, in which France is occupied by Nazis, takes on the persona of a famous author, a recent suicide. Georg’s appropriated identity, of a figure he knows nothing about, is that of a ghost, a holdover from an earlier time, a spectre. Here, the plight of the migrant and the refugee is represented as a figure adrift in space and time, persecuted by history and by the present, anonymous, precarious, and transitory, in a fragmented filmic form without any form of narrative overview. Deniz Bayrakdar, in “Migrant Bodies in the Land/City/Seascapes of 2000s Turkish Cinema,” explores six films (five Turkish and one Turkish German film) that centre on migration and refugees, analysing the shifts that have occurred in the key locations that frame the migrant experience in films from 1998 to the present. Once situated mainly in the outskirts of cities and in rural settings, films depicting the lives of migrants and refugees in Turkey have increasingly shifted to the seascape, with its tragic and

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poetic associations. In considering a broad range of films, including Bliss (Abdullah Oğuz, 2007), The Wound (Yılmaz Arslan, 1998), Rıza (Tayfun Pirselimoğlu, 2007), Broken Mussels (Seyfettin Tokmak, 2011), The Guest (Andaç Haznedaroğlu, 2017), and Seaburners (Melisa Önel, 2014), Bayrakdar provides a short history of migration in 21st-century Turkish cinema. Different settings, she f inds, produce different types of plots and distinct forms of affect in the spectator. Employing Michel Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia and of the non-place, Bayrakdar charts a subtle and important shift in the representation of refugees and migrants. Films set in cityscapes, such as The Guest and Rıza, portray the transitional spaces of call offices, motels, internet cafes, shopping malls, and basement flats as “waiting rooms,” environments that are filled with predatory characters. In contrast, seascape films, such as Seaburners, suggest a sense of placelessness, of transitory experience in spaces deprived of human marks of history, bringing seemingly random characters and events into contact. In Seaburners, the sublime associations of the sea and the coastline, familiar from earlier Turkish art f ilms, is evoked by the beauty of the setting—and harshly contradicted by the recurring figure of a washed-up body on the beach. The unidentified figure on the shore is an image that both opens and closes the film, underlining with one stroke the contemporary tragedy of refugees lost at sea. Nevena Daković explores the long history of migration as it has been rendered in Balkan cinema in “Third World on the Move: Cinematic Destinations, Belgrade/Serbia.” Characterizing the Balkans as a place that multiple waves of migrants have passed through or left behind on their hopeful and desperate transits to Europe, Daković shifts the ordinary perspective, explaining that the Balkans have recently become a desired destination for migrants from other parts of the world. This reverse migrant narrative, where the historical crossroads of the Balkans has now become a destination of choice, is the topic of the film Practical Guide to Belgrade with Singing and Crying (Praktičan vodič kroz Beograd sa pevanjem i plakanjem, 2011) by Bojan Vuletić. The film maps the return of an older, romantic vision of Belgrade as a place of vibrant escape, the “limina of the civilized world,” where forbidden desires can come true. Daković describes the deep ambivalence that pervades the film and its protagonists, however, torn between a desire for Europe and a longing for the Balkans, an ambivalence sharpened by the different senses of cultural identity attached to each. The essay introduces the concept of “inner exile” as a mode of displacement characteristic of Balkan filmmakers, a displacement that is not spatial or geographic, but rather psychological

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and existential, a state of liminal rootlessness that is expressed in the films she discusses. In her essay, “On the Borderlines of South-Eastern Europe: Migration in the Films of Aida Begić and Želimir Žilnik,” Iva Leković analyses two recent Balkan films, Never Leave Me (2017) by Aida Begić, and The Most Beautiful Country in the World (2018) by Želimir Žilnik. Never Leave Me narrates the story of three Syrian refugee children living in an orphanage at the southern border of Turkey, the traditional site for the beginning of the migrant journey to Europe. In contrast, The Most Beautiful Country in the World concerns a different aspect of the migration story, focusing on the fate of an Afghan migrant who has begun settling in Vienna, the end of the journey, whose assimilation is complicated by the arrival of his traditionally minded grandfather from Afghanistan. Both films feature non-professional actors, playing roles that are close to their actual selves. Analysing the two works as examples of what Hamid Naficy calls “accented cinema,” Leković describes each work as an interior journey, reflected in narrative fragmentation and the juxtaposition and merging of present-day experience, memory, and fantasy. Each filmmaker focuses not on the external causes or consequences of the migrant story, but on issues that each finds most important—the possibility of the reconstruction of damaged childhoods, in the case of Begić, or the ways identity is reformed in different settings and ideological systems in the work of Žilnik. The essays written for this volume illuminate the power of the aesthetic imagination, its capacity to reframe a world reality of almost incomprehensible scale into the vocabulary of local, situated experiences. Together these contributions emphasize the particularities of refugee and migrant lives as well as their commonalities. But, perhaps more to the point, we hope to convey in this volume the power of film, art, and media to invest acts of readership and spectatorship with empathy and a glimmer of understanding, to open a critical dialogue with the way the lives of so many have been represented in the media forms of the 21st century.

References Agamben, G. (1998). Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (D. Heller-Roazen, Trans.). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Arendt, H. (1979 [1951]). The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company. Arslan, Y. (Director). (1998). The Wound [Film]. Germany: Gün İzi.

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Augé, M. (1995). Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (J. Howe, Trans.). London: Verso. Ballesteros, I. (2015). Immigration Cinema in The New Europe. Bristol: Intellect. Bayraktar, N. (2016). Mobility and Migration in Film and Moving Image Art: Cinema Beyond Europe. London: Routledge. Begić, A. (2017). Never Leave Me [Ne ostavljaj me] [Film]. Bosnia and Herzegovina: Filmhouse Sarajevo. Berghahn, D., & Sternberg, C. (Eds.). (2010). European Cinema in Motion: Migrant and Diasporic Film in Contemporary Europe. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Bertellini, G. (2013). Film, National Cinema, and Migration. In I. Ness (Ed.), The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration (pp. 1–6). Oxford: Blackwell. Bertellini, G. (2005). Migration/Immigration: United States. In R. Abel (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Early Cinema (pp. 432–435). New York: Routledge. Bonnetta, J., & Sniadecki, J. P. (Directors). (2017). El Mar la Mar [Film]. United States: The Cinema Guild. Coordination Team Mozaik. (2018, October 31). Natives of the New World [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzDnSqPjSlU&t=685s Çelik, İ. A. (2015). In Permanent Crisis: Ethnicity in Contemporary European Media and Cinema. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan. Demos, T.J. (2013). The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis. Durham: Duke University Press. Dubicki, D. (Director). (2016). We Wait [Virtual reality project]. United Kingdom: Aardman. Elsaesser, T. (2018). European Cinema and Continental Philosophy: Film as Thought Experiment. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Gomes, C. (2017). Transient Mobility and Middle Class Identity: Media and Migration in Australia and Singapore. London: Palgrave MacMillan. Haznedaroğlu, A. (Director). (2016). Misafir [The Guest] [Film]. Turkey: Andaç Film Productions. Ianniccielo, C. (2018). Migration, Arts, and Postcoloniality in the Mediterranean. London: Routledge. Iñárritu, A. G. (2017). Carne y Arena [Virtually Present, Physically Invisible] [Virtual reality project]. United States: Fondazione Prada. Loshitzky, Y. (2010). Screening Strangers: Migration and Diaspora in Contemporary European Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mosse, R. (2014–2017). Incoming [Video installation]. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, United States. https://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2019/richardmosse-incoming.html Oğuz, A. (Director). (2007). Mutluluk [Bliss] [Film]. Turkey: ANS Production. Önel, M. (Director). (2014). Kumun Tadı [Seaburners] [Film]. Turkey: Bulut Film.

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Petzold, C. (Director). (2018). Transit [Film]. Germany: Schramm Film. Pirselimoğlu, T. (Director). (2007). Rıza [Film]. Turkey: Zuzi Film. S a l o p e k , P. (2 0 1 9 , A u g u s t) . Wa l k i n g w i t h M i g r a n t s . Na t i o n a l Geographic. https://w w w.nationalgeographic.com/culture/2019/07/ paul-salopek-chronicles-the-mass-migrations-that-define-our-age-feature/ Stewart, J. N. (2005). Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tokmak, S. (Director). (2011). Kırık Midyeler [Broken Mussels] [Film]. Turkey: 90 Film Production. Tosun, U. (Director). (2018). Afganistanbul [Film]. Turkey: Xanaduart. https://vimeo. com/348987107, Password: afgan2020 Vuletić, B. (Director). (2011). Practical Guide through Belgrade with Singing and Crying [Film]. Serbia: Art & Popcorn. Weiwei, A. (Director). (2017). Human Flow [Film]. Germany: 24 Media Production Company. Žilnik, Ž. (Director). (2018). Najlepša zemlja na svetu [The Most Beautiful Country in the World] [Film]. Slovenia: Factum.

About the Authors Robert Burgoyne is a writer and lecturer whose work centres on the representation of history in film. The author of five books and numerous essays, his work has been translated into nine languages. He was formerly Chair in Film Studies at The University of St Andrews and Professor of English at Wayne State University. Deniz Bayrakdar is a professor of film studies at Kadir Has University. She is the Chair of the Communication Committee at Turkish National Commission for UNESCO. She initiated and organized New Directions in Turkish Film Studies www.tfayy.org (1999–2019). “Migrant Women in Turkish German and New Turkish Cinema” in The International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media, and Communication (2020) is her latest publication.

1.

Moving Peoples and Motion Pictures: Migration in Film and Other Media Dudley Andrew

Abstract Nearly from the start, cinema has registered, dramatized, and produced images of migration and its attendant anxieties. Indeed, movies have been fuelled by the movements of peoples thanks to the striking stories and images these always engender. After glancing at two distinct efforts in the 1960s in which cinema aimed to capture a mass phenomenon for a mass audience (one from Classic Hollywood, the other from the periphery of India), I will interrogate 21st-century strategies to come to terms with what the art form’s limitations may be. Can cinema get its arms around something so complex, multidimensional, and contested as migration? Jia Zhangke’s success in bringing internal Chinese migration to light may not be easily replicated by filmmakers in other nations faced with migration issues that cluster at their borders. Perhaps other art forms are naturally more capable in this regard. To isolate what cinema has done best, however, I will draw attention to films set on the edges of Europe. Keywords: migration, periphery, China, media specificity

I dropped out of the sky into Turkey in May 2019, surprised to be landing on the longest runway at what would become the largest airport in the world, and surely the most spacious and ornate. The New Airport was just three weeks old. I cannot help but compare my descent into luxury to the most stunning shot in Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow (2017), when his camera descends from the cloud on its drone into the midst of refugees who spread out to make room for it to settle among them. The construction of Turkey’s outsized airport began in 2013—when the country also developed its 25 immigration centres now holding over two million refugees, by far the largest number of

Bayrakdar, D. and R. Burgoyne (eds.), Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art and Media. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463724166_ch01

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any country in the world. Debates rage about the conditions in those camps; unlike at the airport, those who arrive seldom find a connecting flight to another country. Since its March 2016 deal with Turkey, Europe pays for what was meant to be the Turkish buffer. After more than five years, however, many Turks are concerned that the human flow may be stagnating within their borders, unable to do more than slowly seep north into the Balkans or Eastern Europe, still unable to return home (mainly to Syria) and being absorbed far too slowly, or not at all, into a reluctant Turkish culture. Ai Weiwei takes on migration at the global scale, Turkey providing one of his most striking instances because of the sheer magnitude of the situation. Like a holy spirit, his camera and microphone float among migrants to let them speak in many tongues, all subtitled so they can be understood abroad. Frequently visible on the edge of the frame, he personally stands with his beleaguered subjects. Once, he comforts a woman who is sick to her stomach. But Human Flow is not about Ai Weiwei and his empathy; he even mocks his own freedom to move across the globe in a jocular exchange of passports with a Syrian, a stateless refugee whose papers are worthless. On the other hand, Ai Weiwei’s passport (which was once revoked by Chinese authorities) has been countersigned by Amazon, his producer. And so he goes everywhere that Amazon goes, not delivering goods, but collecting images: images of people fenced in, or confined on floating jails, or locked within prison cells, or inside the swiftly erected compartments of camps where strict surveillance prevails. Ai Weiwei must have asked himself: For whom, to whom, am I displaying this gazetteer of statistics, personal stories, and stunning images? How does one convey a situation that is so large and shapeless, no matter how palpable wherever encountered? The largest tent city built in Turkey holds 30,000 Syrians; altogether, Turkish camps hold about 300,000, which is only 10 percent of the three million refugees in Turkey. The refugees outside of these camps are scarcely visible: They slip into the cracks of Turkish society, or are swept to the outskirts of villages and towns, or into the ghettoes of Istanbul, Ankara, Trabzon, and Izmir. There is no way to visualize such a problem even with drone cameras. Film scholars are faced with a parallel problem: Can a meta inquiry even comprehend this immense and immensely troubling phenomenon termed “migration” as it appears in moving images? This essay can’t hide its ambition to scan cinema’s place amid various types of representation that have attempted to grasp something so slippery and amorphous. Not even a multimedia master such as Ai Weiwei, furnished with limitless funding and mobility, can frame migration in its many dimensions or do so from enough perspectives. Risking the same

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hubris that I find in his bold work, I want to use this essay to compare a range of approaches that have, for better or worse, provided what we sense migration to be and to portend. One needn’t be a media essentialist to recognize that, for instance, photographs, paintings, newsreels, and poems, while all bearing witness to the turmoil in refugee camps, provide distinctly different types of images of a single distressing situation. Moreover, within any given medium, there comes into play not just the “vision” of the artist but the mandate of the approach, be it doggedly embedded in the migratory movement (following a person, a family, an entire people’s adventure) or dialectically straddling a border (switching views between those arriving and those who receive or resist migrants). The variants are innumerable; selecting the ones to attend to immediately limits, or biases, any putative survey. In the face of this, I focus on what I know best: feature films. After acknowledging the place migration has played in the largest nations, the societies and cinemas of India and China, I turn to the recent situations in the Middle East and on both sides of the Mediterranean. And here I turn to glance at other media and art forms to calculate the degree of achievement (or folly) of filmic representations in this sphere. Cinema in turn may help those who work in these other media to better appreciate or criticize what they, for their part, have been able to articulate or convey of situations that are often genuinely unspeakable. While drowning migrants cannot speak, their plight has been heard and felt through works of art made in the hope that the survival of their story and their image may bring about changes, so others need not suffer such a fate. Meanwhile, living voices have also been muffled, including those in receiving cultures whose fabric may be in danger of tearing under the weight and strain of immigration. Can cinema render in images and sounds the many forces pulling this way and that? Can it imagine migration? ** Along with climate change, to which it is connected, migration is the most controversial international issue of the 21st century, and therefore an opportunity as well as an inevitability for cinema everywhere.1 The medium continues to develop as it finds strategies to represent something that is both impossibly complicated to fully understand and heart-rending in its innumerable consequences. The pressing of beleaguered peoples into the 1 It is rivalled by another disaster, AIDS, a topic that took over the arts and media beginning in the 80s but has begun to diminish in visibility. Compared to today’s 68 million refugees, nearly 40 million people are currently HIV positive, a million still dying each year.

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contact zones of Europe, the United States, and East Asia produces anxieties on all sides: anxieties aplenty for the migrants, who have been uprooted and driven to “invade” places they suspect will not welcome them, and anxieties within static (as opposed to migrant) peoples, who feel they should be exempt from threats to their stable way of life, with stability measured by an economic “standard of living” as well as by cultural standards of conduct. Mass migration, resulting from major social or climatic disturbances in the Global South, is not just in the news; it is the news. It is also not new. The first decade after the partition of the South Asian subcontinent into India and East and West Pakistan saw the greatest mass dislocation in modern human history. Simultaneously, the most dynamic of all national cinemas came alive when, in 1951, the melodrama Awaara (Raj Kapoor) was seen by more people on the globe than any other film last century. Its superstar, Raj Kapoor, replaced Chaplin (on whom he modelled himself) as the most recognizable actor/director anywhere. In hits such as Shree 420 (Raj Kapoor, 1955), his character, an itinerant, impoverished dreamer, bumbles his way to Bombay, playing to the anxieties of displacement that come up in film after film. Even India’s parallel cinema, working in explicit opposition to Bombay entertainment, followed suit. Beginning in 1955 with Pather Panchali, Sajyajit Ray’s The Apu Trilogy (1955–1959) chronicled the painful uprooting of the rural poor as they make their way to the slums of cities that were becoming so populous that no census figures could measure them.2 The far more radical Ritwik Ghatak plotted a critical cinema open to larger social movements of the time. In a trilogy of acerbic melodramas (explicitly inflected by Brechtian principles), he replayed the trauma of migration that he himself experienced when the Hindis of East Pakistan were driven into Calcutta. No other filmmaker of the period, indeed anywhere in the world, registered with such a mixture of keen critique and empathy the forces and consequences of mass migration on individuals. In Subarnarekha (1965), Ghatak follows a family whose fortunes since Partition have been dissipated by dislocation and prejudice; the patriarch aims to recover the family’s values and self-respect by moving from Calcutta to a provincial village, but these noble aims founder in the face of overwhelming circumstances, and 2 The role of women is also essential here. Apu, fatherless for much of Pather Panchali, grows up between his self-sacrificing, tradition-bound mother and an elder sister who is rambunctious, craving the freedom of her poetic imagination. In line with the melodrama that undergirds even the art cinema in India, the sister must die, while Apu makes his way in the world, i.e. the big city.

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he is drawn back into the slums of Calcutta where catastrophe finds him. And in Reason, Debate and a Story (Jukti, Takko Aar Gappo 1974), Ghatak, playing the main character who dies when the film ends (as he himself did), preaches migrancy as if it were a moral precept, not a condition. The characters struggle to reach a site of freedom but encounter successive social horrors within Indian society, including, in the climax, the army. They become collateral damage. I have begun with India because the scale of its mid-century migration is matched by the size of the cinema that grew alongside it. It stands as an unmistakable prelude to what we think is primarily a 21st-century issue. When considering the relation of cinema to history, I side with Alain Bergala, who claims that cinema became the art of the 20th century because it obsessively wrestled with two overriding concerns: the rapidly changing status and roles of women and the even more rapid urbanization of the populace. Both were felt f irst in the industrialized West and in Japan. These were the issues that stoked Hollywood and Weimar cinema and helped France produce the most mature national cinema of the 1930s. Bergala extrapolates that the current malaise of Hollywood and of first-world cinema everywhere, including Japan, is due to the normalization of urban culture and to the gains (still in process) that women have made.3 Today, cultural entropy has brought the f irst world “cooler movies,” as its social disparities have lessened. By cool, I mean both hip (knowledgeable, unworried) and far less energetic. Compared to decades past, are we not disappointed with the persistently innocuous offerings of Western mainstream f ilms and even art cinema? Movie culture in the so-called advanced world has become a stream of recycled genres and remakes. Cinephiles are lucky to have mind-game f ilms to grapple with. 4 Any urgency that still remains in Hollywood is felt in the efflorescence of films by and about Black Americans, whose forced migration centuries ago was repeated in a new key in between the World Wars, as hundreds of thousands of impoverished and ruined southern agriculture workers moved north, especially to Chicago. Novels such as Native Son (1940), paintings by Jacob Lawrence, and particularly the Chicago blues of Muddy Waters gave artistic body to this wrenching experience of looking backwards and finding nothing but grief. As for American cinema, it was only decades later that the effects of these migrations, long unrecognized or 3 4

Alain Bergala, lecture at MICEC conference, Barcelona, June 2008. The genre has been studied intensely by Thomas Elsaesser, 2018.

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repressed by Hollywood, worked its way into national distribution. The urgency felt in Spike Lee’s work, in art f ilms such as Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016) as well as in genre pictures such as Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017), has been building up over the past decade, as appalling moving images taken from cell phones and body cams show Black people beaten and murdered by White policemen and vigilantes. Such images accumulate to the negative and positive poles of the cultural battery (Black–White, poor–privileged) until they find sudden release and shock us in electrifying f ilms. Still, such f ilms represent a literal minority. Overall, American cinema feels anodyne in comparison to the role it served from 1912 to 1950 or even to 1975. But, in other regions of the world, the exacerbating anxieties associated with the situation of women and with urban influx—which is, after all, internal migration—have not abated and continue to stoke dynamic cinemas. Look at Iran, at Africa, at the Philippines, perhaps at Turkey. The films that make us believe in cinema come from such places, cinema being an arena where struggles are visible, sometimes boosted by state promotion or repression. But first look at China. The new century belongs, we are told, to China, whose national cinema is said to be reaching a scale equivalent to Hollywood’s in its heyday. While China’s industry aims to copy Hollywood in infrastructure, genres, and marketing (thus becoming, in my view, progressively less urgent and important), outside the Chinese studios exist the “urban generation” filmmakers who, already in the late 90s, were registering China’s unprecedented urbanization. These films felt urgent, and they quickly pointed not just to a thriving marginal movement, but to one of the most significant cineastes working today, Jia Zhangke. This poet of post-Mao China has been chronicling the experience of a billion people moving swiftly from a static, state-protected socialist and largely rural culture into a hyper-dynamic urban one, fuelled by controlled but ruthless competition and the licensed displacements of people… incalculable numbers of people. His art has brought into view the millions who live in limbo between hometown and city centre: construction workers, entertainers, migrants of every stripe. His masterpieces The World (2004) and Still Life (2006) showed us at once the implacable structure of a system as well as the “structure of experience”—the class feeling—that this produced within the workers caught up in it. Jia’s genius stems from his having intuited the appropriate scale at which to view, sketch, and record Chinese life in transition. His fictions and characters can be absorbing, as we follow their private concerns and

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dreams, but they are also always involved in a world beyond their personal, fabricated drama, a world populated with others facing them down, a world of institutions, regulations, and technology. Background and foreground interact so intricately that we give up trying to distinguish pertinent gestures, actions, words, and scenes. We cannot tell what relates directly to the characters named in the credits as opposed to what belongs to the setting or environment. Everything is germane; everything is in some sense “documentary.” In following the fates of the featured players to the end, we simultaneously follow a mass movement and the conditions that have brought it about and that it in turn affects. Jia’s formula, if that is what it is, for representing internal migration has seldom been adopted by those representing international migrations. Ying Liang’s 2018 A Family Tour, for example, shown at the 2018 New York Film Festival, explicitly addresses the plight of a dissident People’s Republic of China intellectual trying to get himself and his family out of the mainland through Hong Kong to Taiwan. While we suspect there are innumerable such stories, with many other people following this risky itinerary, A Family Tour remains focused on a single all-consuming case. Its moral may be broadly applicable, and its cautionary lessons certainly point to the political stranglehold China exercises on the larger region, but the drama of A Family Tour is easy to recognize; it feels familiar because essentially it is about a family. By contrast, Jia Zhangke has succeeded in something rare, something for which neorealism provided the inspiration: He has brought out (i.e. articulated) a previously unremarked, even unseen, reality, that of an entire non-class of human beings. They have now been given a face and something of a voice in the social geography. And that geography is now visibly more complicated, hence more tragic, than had been thought. This effort to “f igure” the invisible and the ignored is what art, at its most consequential, has always aimed for. Political art, when it is at the cutting edge of its historical moment—Goya in painting, Malraux in f iction—exposes the system that consumes its subjects. Jia Zhangke intuited a form that cinema needed to adopt to reach this political edge. For over two decades now, he has photographed the bodies of migrant labourers, and the particular dramas of several of these labourers, in an economy that uses them and that they transcend or disrupt as best they can. Representing migration internal to a country—even the largest of countries—is easier to conceive than imaging, or even imagining, immigrants struggling to find their place, or any place, around the world. How can any

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film artist possibly gain a view of international refugees that is as controlled and complex as that which Jia mastered for the Chinese situation? His achievement in this is remarkable. First of all, the affected people find themselves in more dire circumstances, because relocation is often forced upon them and runs them into barricades and police. Then, wherever they temporarily settle, they confront other sorts of barriers—of language, customs, and often religion—that magnify the ordeal experienced by those who move within a nation. Second, the forces pressuring migration are far more difficult to identify on the planetary scale than they are on the national level. And they differ across a depressingly long list of locations and circumstances. Why not admit it: in the case of the greatest social drama of our world today, there may be limits to what can be represented on-screen. I say this despite the existence of ubiquitous news releases and hours of moving-image reportage online and on television. Cinema, which I align with the arts, needs not just to present what is discoverable, as all image documentation does; it should coordinate images into perspectives and points of view. This distinction is akin to the tradition that sets newsreels apart from documentaries, not to mention from fiction films based on genuine situations, including those that sometimes incorporate actual footage. So, while video journalism has inundated the world with raw images of migration, documentaries and realist fiction films have had trouble shaping migration experiences the way cinema should, by providing or creating situated points of view. Each work of cinema should aim to be remarkable, distinct, even unique. Spectators are meant to “remark” on films, to dwell on, argue about, and interpret them. Cinema is thought to be more reflective than journalism, which serves its own crucial function for the culture—it is inquisitive, investigative, informative. A film can adopt these roles too, but it is expected to strive for calculated impact and a coherent vision, which it attains through the art and artifice of its form as this form engages in a subject. *** In March 2019, in the online journal Senses of Cinema, Joy Castro brought attention to the most remarkable “New Refugee Documentaries” made since 2017. Each of the five films discussed inserted a centre of human feeling into the mass of impersonal journalism that is desensitizing the topic of migration. Because of the fame of its maker and the marketing advantage Amazon gives it, Human Flow is the first film discussed. However,

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its scale threatens to make it less a documentary than a supersized work of journalism, a glut of information and images: Shot over a period of a year, the film was produced on a staggering scale appropriate to the magnitude of the global refugee crisis itself, with 25 camera crews (about 200 people) shooting over a thousand hours of film at 40 refugee camps and other sites in 23 countries. (Castro, 2019)

Where is the heart in Human Flow, Castro asks? Ai Weiwei’s “wry comic gentleness” disarms many of the migrants who surround him and with whom he sometimes interacts, but then quickly he flits away: “While the f ilm’s explicit agenda is to educate, encourage empathy, and model vulnerable and embodied action, its visual rhetoric suggests that the most comfortable thing to do is pull away” (Castro, 2019). In fact, Human Flow is “surprisingly easy on the eyes” (Castro, 2019). The thrilling drone shots let us move with the transcendence of a camera that flies smoothly within and around the spaces that entrap its thousands of subjects. Thanks to its “sheer visual beauty and exquisite camerawork,” we are “put at ease” to gape for 140 minutes at this “wrenching human drama” (Castro, 2019). Each of the other four documentaries held up by Castro gambles more by investing its resources in a single human subject, whether crossing the sea or recently sequestered. In every case, the filmmaker is rewarded when patience pays off with unforeseen developments or striking images that crystallize the subject, filling it with feeling. Jakob Preuss’s gamble took him to Africa, where, abandoning his plan to focus on border guards, he bet on a Cameroonian he happened to meet who was determined to reach Europe, Germany if possible. When Paul Came Over the Sea (Jakob Preuss, 2017) follows Paul René Nkamani on an open-boat crossing that results in his rescue at sea. Later, Preuss happens upon Nkamani in a Spanish detention camp and accompanies him northwards by bus. His garrulous, resourceful, and charismatic subject lured the filmmaker out of standard journalistic ethics, tempting him to let the personal… defy the usual rules of documentary… Nkamani ends up living in Preuss’s childhood bedroom, being coached, mentored, and fed by Preuss’s parents while… moving through the immigration process… [thus] In a postcolonial about-face—displacing Preuss and occupying his former home. (Castro, 2019)

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Castro intimates that, just as Paul Nkamani succeeded in coming over the sea, Jakob Preuss did so in overcoming the barrier between filmmaker and subject. Breaking the codes of journalism, he fashioned a powerful film. Taking a strategy opposite to that of Preuss, in 2018 Karim Aïnouz filmed the stasis of refugees rather than their movement. The pair he focuses on, a Syrian and an Iraqi, open up his real subject: the massive former Berlin airport, Zentralflughafen THF. In this former airport, now outfitted to hold 3,000 people, the pair are waiting, for a connecting flight that might not take off for months or years. This bizarre space is a contact zone where bored refugees share complaints and dreams with each other and, surprisingly, with service workers who appear only slightly better off and freer than the “inmates of the surreal world” they all inhabit. By far the most well-known and respected documentary about a contact zone between Europeans and refugees is Gianfranco Rosi’s Fuocoammare (2016). In choosing to remain for months on the island of Lampedusa, the director not only could capture a constant stream of refugees reaching the southernmost outpost of Europe, but could, without trickery, film both sides of an intercontinental face-off. The 6,000 residents of the island have yet to abandon their way of life even in the midst of a crisis that has stretched on for more than a decade. Without judgement, Rosi watches the amblings of an adolescent from an Italian family that has been part of the island’s north side for generations; we are left to imagine the effect on this boy of the pain and panic just over the hill where, each week, hundreds of people tumble out of rafts or off small crafts or even swim ashore. Everyone is aware that many others flounder and have died. How long can a situation like this be called a “crisis,” the film implicitly asks? Is it worse to recognize it as routine? It is routine for the navy rescue teams that ply the sea 365 days a year and for the local doctor who tends to the wounds and pregnancies of the desperate with calm consistency. The refugees, of course, are not calm at all. Yet Rosi manages to settle in with them, getting close to their faces in the communion of prayer and song that forms the film’s emotional core. If we take this island to be an allegory of the world, like that of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (whose island might well have been based on Lampedusa), then Rosi has put his cinematic arms around it. The soundtrack widens the environment to include radio traffic of those searching for lost boats. Radar antennae whirl day and night, a sign that an entire apparatus (military, medical, logistical) has attached itself like coral to the island. Engineers and military personnel enlarge the social economy of this fishing and tourist site. The people inhabiting the island are shown to live at different speeds. Each receives the camera’s full respect, whether they are

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permanent residents rooted in the land and its tradition, technicians recently assigned to a burgeoning rescue economy that has them tied to a clock, or the wretched ones in process, literally being processed, as they await a fate that will take them elsewhere. Shots of Lampedusa’s ancient coastline and of the Mediterranean remind us of a deeper time, of a past that stretches to the Odyssey and of fabled beaches still pictured in tourist magazines. Fuocoammare shows that cinema, perhaps uniquely, can frame a situation by framing a space that fills up with coexisting temporalities. In this case, we can both empathize with the immediacy of pain while watching the resources of the social body that are mobilized to staunch the wound, so that the entire social organism can go on with the business of life that, elsewhere on the island, seems to prevail almost timelessly. In its sangfroid, the film asks if human migration, even when forced upon some groups and individuals, has become normal on this crowded island we call Earth. This is a deep question and it is posed in an experiential way that other media, often deluging us with information, fail to touch. Fuocoammare gained respect because its self-restraint touched the situation without manipulating it or the audience. Rosi wants us to trust him the way both the refugees and the Lampedusans did. His touch is deft, going against the medium’s natural tendency for expansive melodrama when facing such a topic. Because immigration produces excruciating confrontations, often with Manichaean forces lined up on two sides of a borderline. Good, evil, and indifferent people are encountered by victims who experience danger, betrayal, reunions, separations, incarceration, deportations… Cinema has shown that it knows how to deliver melodramas of migration—and it can do so with visceral effect. At its strongest, cinema carries experiences of waiting, anxiety, despair, benevolence, and liberation that are relished in melodrama and that must often be the felt reality of those who are pulled by forces far beyond their control. Fuocoammare stands out for having asked cinema to do more by expressing less. To recognize its limits as well as cinema’s special resources to cope with this immense topic, why not look at other forms—the novel, first of all? The modernist novel grew up by representing, without a hint of melodrama, the inner life of Europe around WWI. James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, John Dos Passos, and Ernest Hemingway invented techniques that permitted the kind of multiplicity of perspectives, voices, types of information, and shifting sympathy that migration, taken in the round, requires. Readers of modernist novels are ready for shifts in discursive mode, changes in tense, even the inclusion of photographs or specialized fonts, all in the service of representing inner experience and its

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environing and historical conditions. These make up some of the panoply of techniques that Valeria Luiselli mobilized for her much discussed novel published to acclaim in 2019, Lost Children Archive. Its title alone hints at a literary solution to representing migration. A jumble of short sections mimic the diary and field notes taken by the two main characters, trying to save their marriage with a road trip from New York to the border zone of New Mexico. The pair are professional sound recordists: she calls herself a documentarist, he a documentarian. Does this distinction, crucial to the novel, ever occur to filmmakers (Luiselli, 2019, p. 99)? The documentarist uses whatever she gathers (recordings, texts, photos, clippings) to fashion a story with immediate relevance; the heroine becomes involved in her current story when helping translate judicial hearings in New York for an illegal immigrant she met at her daughter’s school. The woman’s daughters are being detained just over the Mexican border, where they had been abandoned by their coyote. Like hundreds of other children sent up from the south, they were caught between predatory middlemen and unflinching border patrols backed by judicial officials. As a documentarian, the husband aims for something else. He captures sounds that are unclassifiable and without apparent use, except to amplify the archive of what is “out there.” Still, he has started to collect all he can find about the last Native Americans to stand up to the White man. His goal in New Mexico is to make “[a]n inventory of echoes,” that rise from the ghosts of Cochise and Geronimo. Buried in the desert with these fabled men are stories and artefacts that emit social radioactivity whose half-life he registers and archives. Who knows when these stories may become useful? As they head south-west, husband and wife, documentarian and documentarist, spark the imaginations of their son and daughter in the back seat, with stories about lost children and heroic Native Americans, both resisting American law and order. In the car’s trunk are stowed six private boxes, holding materials important to each family member. Dipping into these boxes, Valeria Luiselli interrupts the literal “drive” of this novel. Sometimes, we are taken back in American history; other times, we find ourselves with lost children from earlier times and places. Multiple stories, including a series taken from “Elegies for Lost Children,” which Luiselli leads us to believe comes from a minor Italian author, are part of the travelling archive of this automobile. The novel’s 350 pages make room for CDs of old songs, bibliographies that both parents compile (including items on theories of the archive and of migration), diaries they keep, books they read aloud or imitate, polaroids

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taken by the 10-year-old son, historical vignettes told by locals at cafes, and motels where they stay. The novel as a form is capacious, and this one especially so; it has the capacity to make us feel a child’s terrified yet exhilarated scramble atop and between boxcars, before breaking free into the forbidding desert, hunted like an animal. It expresses a privileged boy’s empathy for such children that is so complete, he arranges to be lost himself in the same forbidding terrain. Whereas the adolescent boy featured in Fuocoammare remains opaque to us—an ordinary boy dreaming of adventure but little else—Luiselli’s precocious 10-year-old narrates an adventure he not only dreams but sets in action. Cutting back and forth between embedded texts set on both sides of the border, Luiselli brings into view avaricious brigands and steely border guards. She arranges things so that three sets of lost children, hiding in boxcars, come into momentary contact in New Mexico. The clever parallels that she lines up reinforce the ubiquity of migration while pointing self-consciously to the effort needed to grasp something as large and confusing as human dislocation. That effort involves making sense of the lists Luiselli inserts between sections of the book, lists of pertinent objects, epigraphs, CDs. Yet many episodes unroll in continuity to provide glimpses of the operations of the legal system or of border control. A particularly dramatic moment delivers the wrenching experience of deportation: at a repurposed airbase in the desert, children are marched from a hangar to a plane for an enforced return to Mexico. Gaping in horror through binoculars and screaming, Anne the documentarist is held back by a chain-link fence. By assuming the mantel and authority of the librarian and the historian, as well as the novelist, Luiselli challenges the reader to concoct other lines of inquiry with what she has collected and enumerated. And her elaborately extended metaphors, plus the criss-crossing lines of action, try boldly to coordinate the disparate elements of her teeming archive. In this, she follows the lead of John Berger, whose pioneering photo-text A Seventh Man (1975) combined historical vignettes with various forms of writing and with photographs chosen from archives or taken by his regular collaborator, John Mohr, producing a montage of migrant labourers explicitly based on Marxist film aesthetics. A Seventh Man was conceived to be at once epic and intimate, a montage of perspectives. The finished book combined aerial photography with portraits, macroeconomy with minute rendering of everyday experience. Alongside its theoretical assertions the text narrates an archetypal journey

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from south to north undertaken by an unnamed male hero, “He.” The jargon of economics thus shares the page and is often cross-cut with the sights, sounds and feelings of the migrant as he travels. Through a series of interruptive shocks (and Brecht was certainly a model), Berger and Mohr try to wake the reader from the dream. The text… is a stream of shocks. Freestanding paragraphs appear in boldface, a textual mix of the personal and anonymous, poetry beside statistics. (Sperling, 2018, pp. 129–131)

In Berger’s lean disjunctive work, just as in Luiselli’s quite elaborate one, the reader-viewer is charged first with putting together the significance of clear juxtapositions, while, at the same time, ranging beyond these to come up with larger ideas that synthesize what is given in fragments or in discrete and separate sections. The causes, consequences, and experiences of migration are meant to arise through the very process of reading. Through this, the reader’s own uncomfortable position in relation to this situation is brought to light. The ambitions of such literary experiments, their exertions, speak to the complexity of their subject matter and make us question whether cinema can cope with it. True, Berger wrote his book while scripting such radical films for Alain Tanner as Jonas qui aura 25 ans dans l’an 2000 (1976) and declaring montage to be cinema’s gift to political aesthetics. But cinema, as he knew well, tends to simplify; when approaching dialectical oppositions (slavery, for example, worker exploitation, or migration), cinema almost always turns to melodrama. Recognizing this, some political filmmakers have moved to video art, abandoning the movie theatre and its promise of immersion for the gallery, where artworks ask to be reckoned with from several angles at once or in succession. Multiscreen installations demand the kind of comparison and contrast that Brecht aimed for in the theatre and Berger wanted for his hybrid photo-books. For Auto-Da-Fé (2016), his epic on migrations of persecuted religious groups through history, John Akomfrah chose a format that naturally distances the viewer: video on dual screen. Akomfrah further keeps spectators at bay by shifting eight times from one historical religious persecution to another and by staging each tableau in a formally stilted manner (Mathwin, 2017). Still, even though never synchronized, the side by side shots are so choreographed that their cumulative 40-minute duration gives the whole the inevitability of history: time and again, people are forced from home, often out to sea, surviving, if they do, in strange relocations. The beauty and hieratic pace of the images run counter to the implied goal of critique, producing what Akomfrah himself calls a “non-fiction tone-poem,” a word he confesses is

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derived from German late romantic music, something Brecht explicitly wanted to bury.5 Regardless of its enticing images, Brecht would certainly have approved the exhibition space. In the Lisson gallery in New York, for instance, the two screens held images on both sides, while ranged around the walls were Akomfrah’s photographs obliquely related to his video. The space between photographs and video, and the narrow space dividing the two screens that are out of place, impede any comfortably unified experience. Akomfrah has found the concentrated yet unsettled form that his subject requires: His representation of attractive, dignified people driven to strange inhospitable locales demands more than our applause, curiosity, or sympathy. It initiates our critical engagement. Akomfrah’s gorgeous HD images make us ask how far we should go when making suffering and hardship beautiful. That question, taken from a review of Sabastiao Salgado’s now classic volume about migration, Exodus, was explicitly posed to a 2007 video installation by Akomfrah’s British compatriot, Isaac Julien (Atwell, 2016). In reaction to Julien’s Western UnionSmall Boats, an 18-minute three-screen piece in which a dance troupe glides through scenes of migration from Africa across the Mediterranean to Sicily, Emma Chubb (2016) remarked in Art in America, “Western Union leaves viewers stranded in the artificial and lab-like space of the temperature- and humidity-controlled gallery, caught in the loop between screens, geographies, and times, staring at the beauty of implied catastrophe” (p. 43). And then she asked, “How does one combine the artist’s pleasure in the act of creation with the horrific subject matter which is the source of the creation” (Chubb, 2016, p. 43)? Opera is a form that has never apologized for the melodramas of its libretti, nor for the beauty wrung from the sufferings it represents and then expresses. However, operas, more so even than gallery installations, may take up the plight of the downtrodden, but normally expect to be seen only by privileged, moneyed spectators. This problem is confronted frontally by Manthia Diawara in his An Opera of the World (2017), a film about a performance in Bamako of Bintou Were, A Sahel Opera, concerned with a pregnant rape victim’s attempt to cross to Europe so her baby at least can find asylum. Diawara intersperses arias and balletic set pieces with footage of actual migration on Lésbos and with his exchanges with prominent European and African cultural figures. The most well known of these, Alexander Kluge, discusses his famous idea of opera as “the power plant of 5

John Akomfrah, “video interview,” Artes Mundi 7 (Cardiff, October 2016).

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the emotions,” while observing the director edit the video of Bintou Were. How does an African artwork function for local audiences? How might it best be presented in fancy European theatres? An Opera of the World was not meant to be an opera, but it gives us ideas and a taste of how this form might become instrumental in recruiting the emotions to play a role in our otherwise often arid legal or sociological discussions of the problem of migration. Opera is also a cathartic ritual for a society in pain, perhaps the closest form we have to Greek tragedy. What would a tragedy of migration staged by Euripides be like? This was the starting point for a film opera, Iphigenia Point Blank: Story of the First Refugee, staged in Iowa City (2018) and then New York (2019). Music, dance, and song play out in front of a huge projection of images taken by filmmaker Irina Patkanian on the Greek coast. Her extreme long takes—five minutes of a beautiful urchin with a necklace around her neck that gradually begins to look like a noose—run counter to the barrage of photos and videos of migrants that standard journalism rains down daily on our screens. In the theatre, all devices are silenced, and the audience is subject to the temporality of sustained background sounds, a threnody above which live actors chant their plaintive speeches and arias; the visual tone and tension of shots taken in the recent past on a Greek island affects, without commenting on, the scripted human drama that erupts anew each performance. Under such moving images, “you sing because you cannot talk anymore.” A total work of mourning, Iphigenia Point Blank aspires to be a ritual, so much so that, at its conclusion, instead of applause, the troupe has the audience turn from the screen and follow them outside the theatre to exhale in a lament, a prayer sent out into the night. *** This survey of how migration can be represented in literature, photographic albums, gallery installations, opera, and theatre takes us finally to the movies. How has standard cinema, rather than documentary or experimental film, represented the largest issue of our century? The movies have always framed massive human conflicts in terms of individual quests and dramas, where characters with motivations—often involving their backstories and psychologies—must overcome some stubborn obstacle, usually embodied by an individual antagonist, or occasionally by a more general resistant force like state bureaucracy (Pudovkin’s Mother, 1926) or the weather (Sjöström’s The Wind, 1928). Invariably backed by the predictable support of music, fictions about migration align the spectator with certain characters, often to the point of empathy. In the few films that stick close to the risks and

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tragedies of migration journeys, the task is to win the audience over to the perspective of someone, often indigent, trying to claw their way north into Europe or the United States. To make his audience feel the disorientation and anxiety of refugees, Moussa Touré, director of La Pirogue (2012), made sure to keep his camera close to a virtuous Senagalese fisherman, tempted by an irresponsible brother and by debt to take on the challenge of crossing over to a Spanish island with 30 petrified Peuls, many of whom have not seen the ocean before and all of whom have paid a tough, unsympathetic, but efficient handler for the dangerous voyage. Opening with scenes on land that expose elements of an organized system of human trafficking, the bulk of the film then takes place like a play within a large pirogue that we immediately sense has not been adequately provisioned. Inevitably, during a journey that will take at least a week, some of those aboard lose faith or reason, pitting the noble captain against the pragmatic enforcer. When a terrifying storm weakens not just the resolve of the strongest but the vessel’s outdated motor, naked feelings pour out. Rendered helpless, drifting in the sea, the pirogue is spotted by a Spanish helicopter, and those still alive are brought to the Canary Islands by the Cruz Roja. A brief sequence in a set designed to serve as a processing centre precedes the humiliating deportation of the good captain who winds up back in his poor home, safe with wife and son, but with his moral outlook darkened forever. In adapting the work of a respected local writer who seems to have written this novel to caution his countrymen, Moussa Touré glances at those who initiate or deal with migration on both ends of the journey, but his central focus remains with the terrified refugees and particularly their sensitive, scrupulous captain.6 We understand his need to take this risk and then, alongside him, we live the risk and take the consequences of failure. That “we” includes African spectators of course, but, because the production and marketing was supported by Arte, the film was destined for Cannes’s “Un Certain Regard,” where the favour it found gained it invitations to numerous other festivals and finally brief theatrical runs in France and elsewhere, including the United States. In short, this circumscribed film, featuring 30 Africans, delivers an apparently “universal experience” of the dangers and moral decisions involved in migration. A final title card—a shocking exclamation point—informs us that, from 2000 to 2012, 30,000 6 La Pirogue is adapted from a short novel by Abasse Ndione, titled Mbëkë mi: à l’assaut des vagues de l’Atlantique (2008). This quiet literary work tones down the drama aboard and concludes just as those still on the disabled pirogue are saved by the Spanish.

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Africans drowned in circumstances like those we’ve just been shown. The producers clearly understand that other films are needed to bring to light the process by which so many people take such a reckless course of action. Their movie could at best send a flare into the sky from the sea. La Pirogue is one of the few fiction features recounting tales of migration set entirely on the southern side of the first-world barrier, because firstworld producers naturally gravitate towards characters and stories that they can imagine portraying authentically for first-world audiences. Most such stories follow the fate of illegal refugees dropped out of the blue into a first world that doesn’t anticipate them and fears being destabilized. The sudden appearance of migrants quickly leads to a range of dramatic conflicts and a greater range of consequences. This overall premise belongs to a ready-made genre that Thomas Elsaesser (2009) named the plot of “Double Occupancy,” wherein characters slip unbidden into the private residences of people from a different social group.7 This is the case of many ghost films (The Innocents, Jack Clayton, 1961; The Others, Alejandro Amenábar, 2001), in which those banished to another realm return to premises that now belong to their successors. Because it always involves the violation of space and provokes conflicts of shared domiciles, double occupancy is fundamentally political. Refugees have invigorated this genre, wringing from it not just new variations, but new styles with which to represent the conflicts scriptwriters elaborate. The real test of both cinema and of the capacity (the capaciousness) of the double-occupancy genre may be whether it could seriously accommodate, and make digestible, a homelander’s perspective. Because there are certainly tales to be told of poor people, poor in two senses of the term, whose prospects have darkened under the shadow of migrants relocated to their backyards. Rosi provides a glimpse of this in giving us some images and words of the locals of Lampedusa, whose lives and traditions will not be the same as they were before the migrants started to arrive. But has any fiction film been scripted to portray with sympathy the plight of villages and their workers, already marginal in the global economy, who are made to accommodate people who share none of their customs and perhaps few of their values? It is easy for film spectators, particularly ones attending festivals in cosmopolitan cities, to demean such a small-minded perspective. This is precisely why we need films to deliver the experience of being overwhelmed by what are, in fact, aliens. Can cinema, or the critical discourse that tends 7 Elsaesser’s first published article using this term is titled “Real Location, Fantasy Space, Performative Place: Double Occupancy and Mutual Interference in European Cinema” (2009).

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it, make us comfortable with the perspective of those who see themselves as single (and original) occupants of the land they have always lived on? More than the politics of mere cinema is at stake. The native’s perspective can be felt, if only provisionally, in some of the best recent fictions that contrive to bring a refugee into the home of ordinary solid citizens whose lives are thereafter disrupted. The older characters are led by these encounters to reconsider their values. I know no film where such a character works in good faith to preserve the status quo; instead, they work on behalf of the homeless and, in the process, the hosts become reconciled not just with the homeless, but with close family members and the larger society that subplots have introduced us to. Perhaps the most consequential film yet made on this template is Philippe Lioret’s 2009 Welcome: Bilal, a 17-year-old Kurdish refugee, has struggled his way through Europe for the last three months, trying reunite with his girlfriend, who recently emigrated to England. But his journey comes to an abrupt halt when he is stopped by authorities in Calais, on the French side of the Channel. Left with no other alternatives, he decides to swim across. Bilal goes to the local swimming pool to train, where he meets Simon, a middle-aged swimming instructor in turmoil over his imminent divorce. Simon agrees to help Bilal, hoping to win back the affection of his wife, who does volunteer work helping immigrants. But what begins as a relationship based on self interest, develops into something much bigger than Simon could ever have imagined.

Star actor Vincent Lindon is the marquee draw, but the film’s real attraction is its minute dissection of thwarted channel crossings at Calais and of the legal and social measures that keep hundreds detained in a hastily constructed tent city. This turns out to be the very bidonville that Ai Weiwei shows incinerated by the French authorities in Human Flow. In fact, Lioret’s film had something to do with the dismantling of “le jungle,” as this notorious ghetto was known, because Welcome’s box office success led to five Cesar awards and a prize from the European Parliament (voted on by Members of the European Parliament). Its portrayal of the tangled Calais refugee problem was discussed on French television by the director and then debated in the legislature when an amendment to existing laws was introduced. “Le jungle” entered everyday conversation; it was destined for destruction. Welcome’s impact was greater in the political domain than the cinematic, at least in comparison to Aki Kaurismäki’s Le Havre (2011), which followed

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it two years later.8 Both relate stories of young runaways trying to cross the English Channel while being harboured by unlikely but kind French protectors. In a dowdy part of the port city Le Havre, the winsome Idrissa is taken in by a good-hearted, older “bohemian,” whose long-time pals at the little greengrocers and at the bar can be counted on. Kaurismäki relishes the classic rock ’n’ roll of the ageing musicians at the throwback bar; indeed, he reaches for a similarly warm and solid cinematic style. When the relentless detective, nemesis of refugees, softens in the final scene, turning a blind eye so that Idrissa can head to England in the hold of a small boat, we know we’ve seen a fairy tale or at least a comedy, because only in the movies do things turn out so well. But Kaurismäki demonstrates that the problems of migration are no less potent, even when presented in a comic register. Indeed, he proved it again in his next film, The Other Side of Hope (Aki Kaurismäki, 2017), the second in his proposed refugee trilogy. From the bowels of a ship’s hold and out of its cargo of coal emerges Khaled, a completely blackened Syrian man. Off the ship and skulking in the middle of a Helsinki night, he is nearly run down by Wilktsröm, a local man driving away from his alcoholic wife who has come to disgust him. Within hours, he takes the Syrian in, because they meet again by the dumpster of the restaurant Wilktsröm has recently bought and where Khaled has been hiding. Taken on as an illegal restaurant worker, the Syrian’s status is the same as the lost dog that the restaurant’s tough but sentimental staff shelters, except that Khaled has skinheads to fear as well as the authorities. With his signature stoic wit, Kaurismäki brings two sets of separated couples together (Khaled and his lost daughter, and Wilktsröm and his reformed wife). A third couple forms a bond in the tragicomic final shot: the restaurant dog comes to comfort Khaled who is quietly bleeding to death after a skinhead attack. Alone at the harbour, these two refugees, man and dog, snuggle. Khaled has reached “The Other Side of Hope.” Elsewhere, I have written that the theme of double occupancy reached a plateau in Fatih Akın’s Auf der Anderen Seite (The Edge of Heaven, 2007), and it is on this work that I conclude (Andrew, 2016). Akın’s elegant script (a prize-winner at Cannes) is patched into a patterned carpet through flashbacks, repeated musical motifs, and a subtle camera that frames more than one perspective (Mennel, 2009). In the film’s emblematic scene, Susanne (played by Hanna Schygulla), the liberal German mother who had at first been so unwelcoming to Ayten, the Turkish political refugee, is face to face 8 Welcome received short reviews in Sight and Sound, Screen International, and Positif; only Transnational Cinemas (Ceuterick, 2014) devoted substantial scholarly discussion to it in an article that also took up Le Havre. The latter has grabbed sustained attention in several film periodicals.

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Figure 1.1: Concluding shot on the coast of Turkey: The Edge of Heaven (Auf der Anderen Seite, Fatih Akin, 2007). Photo: Anka Film.

with her in an Istanbul prison. Their mutual understanding and sympathy comes to us doubly mediated: visually, through a thick glass partition, and audibly, through the telephone they must employ although they are just inches away from each other. But, across the tinny sound and in the reflections caused by the window that keep both faces together on-screen, we are certain of an accord, of an understanding, and of the reality of two people, two cultures able to project a harmonious future, each with the other’s interests in mind. The elaborate script and cinematography of Auf der Anderen Seite paved the way for the refreshing clarity (visual and moral) of Kaurismäki’s film, whose German title, Die andere Seite der Hoffnung hints at further connections, “The Other Side of Hope” echoing “On the Other Side.” Both films project across their painful subjects a calming look that encompasses and surpasses the cruelties and hopes of migration, a look that envelops dramas of space co-inhabited by different temporalities and projects. On the big screen of the movie theatre and in the rhythm laid out in blocks of space and time passing at 24 frames per second, this kind of cinema is able to comprehend, in the full sense of that term, experiences of migration.

References Aïnouz, K. (Director). (2018). Zentralflughafen THF [Film]. Germany: Lupa Film. Akın, F. (Director). (2007). Auf der anderen Seite [Edge of Heaven] [Film]. Germany: Anka Film.

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Akomfrah, J. (2016). Auto-Da-Fé [Video installation]. Lisson Gallery, New York, United States. Amenábar, A. (Director). (2001). The Others [Film]. Spain: Cruise/Wagner Productions. Andrew, D. (2016). Fatih Akin’s Moral Geometry. In S. Jeong & J. Szaniawski, (Eds.), The Global Auteur: The Politics of Autership in 21st Century Cinema (pp. 179-198). New York: Bloomsbury. Atwell, O. (2016, December 27). Book Review: Kuwait—A Desert on Fire By Sebastiao. Amateur Photographer. https://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk/book_reviews/ book-review-kuwait-a-desert-on-fire-by-sebastiao-salgado-98597 Berger, J., & Mohr, J. (1975). A Seventh Man. London: Penguin. Castro, J. (2019). “The People are Missing”: New Refugee Documentaries and Carceral Humanitarianism. Senses of Cinema, 90, https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2019/ feature-articles/the-people-are-missing-new-refugee-documentaries-andcarceral-humanitarianism/ Ceuterick, M. (2014). Welcome, Le Havre and Un Cuento Chino: Visceral Cosmopolitanism and the Domestic Sphere. Transnational Cinemas, 5(1), 78–85. Chubb, E. (2016). Small Boats, Slave Ship; or, Isaac Julien and the Beauty of Implied Catastrophe. Art Journal, 75(1), 24–43. Clayton, J. (Director). (1961). The Innocents [Film]. United Kingdom: Twentieth Century Fox. Diawara, M. (Director). (2017). An Opera of the World [Film]. Portugal: Maumaus. Elsaesser, T. (2009). Real Location, Fantasy Space, Performative Place: Double Occupancy and Mutual Interference in European Cinema. In T. Trifonova (Ed.), European Film Theory (pp. 47–61). New York: Routledge. Elsaesser, T. (2018). Contingency, Causality, Complexity: Distributed Agency in the Mind-game Film. New Review of Film and Television Studies, 16(1), 1–39. Ghatak, R. (Director). (1965). Subarnarekha [Film]. India: J. J. Films. Ghatak, R. (Director). (1974). Reason, Debate and a Story [Jukti, Takko Aar Gappo] [Film]. India: Angel Digital Private Limited. Jenkins, B. (Director). (2016). Moonlight [Film]. United States: A24. Jia, Z. (Director). (2004). The World [Film]. China: Office Kitano. Jia, Z. (Director). (2006). Still Life [Film]. China: Xstream Pictures. Julien, I. (2007). Western Union: Small Boats [Multiscreen installation]. The ICA, Boston, United States. Kapoor, R. (Director). (1951). Awaara [The Vagabond] [Film]. India: All India Film Corporation. Kapoor, R. (Director). (1955). Shree 420 [Mr. 420] [Film]. India: R. K. Films Ltd. Kaurismäki, A. (Director). (2011). Le Havre [Film]. Finland: Sputnik. Kaurismäki, A. (Director). (2017). The Other Side of Hope [Film]. Finland: Sputnik.

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Lioret, P. (Director). (2009). Welcome [Film]. France: Nord-Ouest Films. Luiselli, V. (2019). Lost Children Archive. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Mathwin, G. (2017). Review: Auto Da Fé and Vertigo Sea. Sensible Perth, 8, https:// sensibleperth.blogspot.com/p/172.html Mennel, B. (2009). Criss-Crossing in Global Space and Time: Fatih Akın’s The Edge of Heaven (2007). Transit 5(1). http://dx.doi.org/10.5070/T751009745 Ndione, A. (2008). Mbëkë Mi: À l’assaut des vagues de l’Atlantique. Paris: Gallimard. Patkanian, I., & Schoevaert, M. (Directors). (2018). Iphigenia Point Blank: The Story of the First Refugee [Film opera]. David Thayer Theatre, Iowa, United States. Peele, J. (Director). (2017). Get Out [Film]. United States: Universal Pictures. Preuss, J. (Director). (2017). When Paul Came Over the Sea [Film]. Germany: Weydemann Bros. Ray, S. (Director). (1955). Pather Panchali [Film]. India: Government of West Bengal. Rosi, G. (Director). (2016). Fuocoammare [Fire at Sea] [Film]. Italy: Stemal Entertainment. Shakespeare, W. (1894). The Tempest. New York: Harper & Brothers. Sjöström, V. (Director). (1928). The Wind [Film]. United States: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Sperling, J. (2018). A Writer of Our Time: The Life and Work of John Berger. London: Verso. Tanner, A. (Director). (1976). Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l’an 2000 [Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000] [Film]. Switzerland: Action Films. Touré, M. (Director). (2012). La Pirogue [Film]. France: Les Chauves-Souris. Weiwei, A. (Director). (2017). Human Flow [Film]. Germany: 24 Media Production Company. Wright, R. (2000). Native Son. London: Vintage Books. Ying, L. (Director). (2018). A Family Tour [Film]. Taiwan: 90 Minutes Film Studio.

About the Author Dudley Andrew, at Yale University, is biographer and translator of André Bazin, whose ideas he extends in What Cinema Is! and Opening Bazin. After several books on French cinema, he is preparing Encountering World Cinema. Andrew was named Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

2.

Modes of Self-Representation in the ImagesCollectively Produced by Migrants in Lésbos Island: Natives of the New World Nagehan Uskan Abstract Natives of the New World is a short documentary film shot on cell phones by the Kino Mosaik collective, which was founded in Lesbos Island, Greece, in 2018. The migrants who were members of the collective tried to transform the period when they were stuck in Lesbos waiting for the decision on their asylum applications into a constitutive process. Kino Mosaik’s main goal was to oppose the passive, apolitical, and victimized migrant image created by mainstream media and many artistic representations. The collective thought that this was possible only from their perspective, and they made this film as an action against stereotypical representational systems. In the short documentary, not only are the difficult conditions that migrants have to deal with made visible but also the forms of collective resistance they have developed against them. This article will analyse Natives of The New World by comparing it with the representational tools it opposes. Keywords: autonomy of migration, self-representation, counter-image, collective image, accented cinema

This chapter will analyse a short documentary film called Natives of the New World, a collective work produced in 2018 by migrants who are or were stuck on Lésbos Island in Greece. The anonymous writers, directors, and producers of this documentary are united under the collective Kino Mosaik. They are originally from countries such as Afghanistan, Iran, Guinea, Congo, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, and Ethiopia.

Bayrakdar, D. and R. Burgoyne (eds.), Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art and Media. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463724166_ch02

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This analysis will first be based on the ways in which migrants choose to represent themselves, as well as the forms and the potential elements of resistance present in their works.1 Its aim is to understand how migrants can act in society through video counter-strategies opposed to the representation techniques of the mainstream media. As insider testimonies of the migrant life, how can they create their own counternarrative and express it through artistic tools? I would like to examine what distinguishes these works from the representations of outsider journalists or artists. The documentary film Natives of the New World is a good example to explore how the individual identities are collectively united in a common narrative and how this common narrative can express itself as a transformative power. Taking into consideration also the production process of this movie, is it possible to define this common narrative as a “collective accent” by interpreting Hamid Naf icy’s famous def inition, according to which “accented directors” use collective forms of production and an accented version of the hegemonic film industry and language (Naficy, 2006)? I want to discover the ways in which this collective experience provides ideas about migrant identity, and how we can define this sort of “collective accent.” I will analyse the visual media responses provided by different social realities, experiences, feelings, backgrounds, and pasts during their f irst step in Europe, and how all these are reflected in a common narrative. After the European Union–Turkey refugee deal was signed on March 20, 2016, the Greek islands of Lésbos, Chios, Kos, and Samos became the new hotspots where asylum seekers needed to wait while undergoing their procedures, for an undefined amount of time. This waiting period puts migrants in different types of difficult conditions. The main refugee camp, Moria, which is extremely over capacity and has abysmal living conditions, can be seen as a reflection of the institutional agenda of deterrence, which is apparently not working given the continued process of migration to Europe.2 1 After a great deal of thought and discussion, I decided to change the term refugee to migrant throughout the chapter. There is often a hierarchical relation imposed on the part of the authorities: refugees who escaped war zones have a well-recognized right to ask for asylum; migrants, however, are often considered “economic migrants” and do not have the same rights. They are more easily deported. Afghan people, for example, have a diff icult path to asylum, because Afghanistan is not considered a war zone. They are often considered economic migrants. To avoid this differentiation between people on the move, I prefer to use the term migrant in this chapter. 2 The database of the UNHCR indicates the total number of arrivals to Greece in 2019 as 50,720. Lésbos Island has received the most of this number, with 17,806 people.

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The main research of this chapter is based on Lésbos Island and an independent film collective, Kino Mosaik, founded in 2018 as a result of a visual storytelling workshop, in which I actively participated. The collective met three times a week over six months to discuss the visual representations of the migrant experience in Lésbos. It aimed to show the transformative power of the image and self-representation from the point of view of people who live this experience first-hand. The production process of the short documentary called Natives of The New World gave us a space to work and reflect collectively about the concepts of migration, repression, home, new home, representation, resistance, and hope.3 Before I speak about our methodology, I would like to refer to Shahram Khosravi’s article “Waiting” (2014), in which he talks about the dynamics of waiting, making people wait, the manipulation of other people’s time, and the regulation of social interactions, power, and subordination.4 Sharing the reflections of Bourdieu, according to whom “making wait without destroying the hope is a way of domination,” Khosravi analyses in a remarkable way how waiting affects the less powerful groups in society, how it generates “powerlessness and vulnerability” (2014), and how it produces “subjective effects of dependency and subordination” (Auyero, 2012, p. 28). Another important point is that being forced to wait is also a demonstration that “one’s own time (and therefore, one’s social worth) is less valuable than the time and worth of the one who imposes the wait” (Schwarts, 1974, p. 856). In accordance with the importance of using time efficiently in Western societies as a form of capital, “waiting symbolizes waste, emptiness and uselessness” (Khosravi, 2014). Being stuck in an “in-between” island for asylum procedures brings with it all the different aspects of what we highlighted above. During this waiting period, which is lived as a state of limbo, there are numerous institutions, NGOs, and independent volunteers active on the island for different purposes of “charity,” “philanthropy,” or “solidarity.” The medical support and food and clothing distribution all fulfil essential needs. At the same time, courses of Greek and English language, computer and informatics, literacy, yoga, and handicraft are developed by different 3 The film is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzDnSqPjSlU&t=685s 4 The co-research project developed with the movie Natives of the New World inspired the Commons and Learning to Live Together project hosted by Humboldt University in Berlin, Institute for Asian and African Studies, conducted by Nagehan Uskan and Salim Nabi, through Off-University in the spring and summer 2021 period. During the 14-week online seminar, participants from Lésbos Island and the Off-University platform experienced a new possible approach to migration studies through co-research works: https://off-university.com/en-US/ Lesson/Detail/commons-and-learning-to-live-together?i=1114

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organizations for the better integration and “social inclusion” of the asylum seekers in their present and future new life. Different cultural and artistic activities are also present, such as video-making, photography, storytelling, stop-motion animation workshops, choir, and poetry meetings. During this ambiguous waiting period, many activities offered to the migrants by different organizations have the simple motivation of “spending time.” This motivation is also sometimes expressed as “solidarity and empowerment” by the Mosaik Support Centre,5 “marketable skills and career building” by Refocus Media Labs,6 “co-creating together” and “CV and portfolio development” by the Office of Displaced Designers,7 and “giving the dignity back to the refugees” by the Hope Project.8 Returning to Khosravi’s notion(s) on waiting, waiting is not always passivity and brings also the potential for positive change, as made clear by the words used to finish his reflection: “Waiting does not have to mean passivity, and can be an element in a strategy by migrants to improve their situation” (2014). Kino Mosaik has been founded during this waiting period, by migrants who were willing, in addition to spending their time in a fruitful way, to look at different ways to raise their voices to show their situation and demand a change, in keeping with the concept of the “autonomy of migration” (De Genova, Garelli, & Tazzioli, 2018). This concept refers to some aspects of migrant subjects, which are constitutive and potentially transformative within the system, while avoiding damaging accounts of migrants as totally autonomous subjects. Importantly, as these writers have it, this concept is not reducible to any liberal notion of the pure autonomy of migrants as free and sovereign individuals, nor is it a romanticization of the migrant exercise of freedom of movement as purely subversive or emancipatory act. Largely inspired by more general autonomous Marxist positions, the autonomy of migration has been conceived in terms of historically specific social formations of human mobility that manifest themselves as a constitutive (subjective, creative, and productive) power

5 The statement has been taken from the web page of Mosaik Support Centre: https:// lesvosmosaik.org/ 6 The statement has been taken from the web page of ReFocus Media Labs: https://refocusmedialabs.org/about-us 7 The statement has been taken from the web page of Office of Displaced Designers,: http:// www.displaceddesigners.org/ 8 The statement has been taken from the off icial Facebook page of Hope Project: https:// www.facebook.com/pg/HopeProjectKempsons/about/?ref=page_internal

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within the more general capital-labour relation. (De Genova, Garelli, & Tazzioli 2018, p. 241)

Considering all the different types of migrant representation and its problematic history in mainstream media, in humanitarian advocacy appeals, and in different artistic forms such as paintings, photography, and video, I argue that the self-representation proposed by migrants can bring an element of autonomy in the system of representation.

Methodology The production of the documentary Natives of the New World can be interpreted as a form of research—the production itself corresponds to its methodology. Our main point of reference here is the co-research (conricerca) methodology developed by the Italian Marxist thinker Romano Alquati in the 1960s. This method is based on a collaborative research between the researchers and their subjects, reducing the unequal relationships between them (Ross, 2013, p. 8). Cultivated in Italy by the Autonomia Operaia group (Workers Autonomy), it formed an important political and cultural movement in the 1970s. For co-research, the groups taking part in the analysis actively participate in the construction of the tools of study. At the same time, because of their co-involvement, for both the activist and the researcher the production of knowledge is immediately a mode of subjectivation and development of political organization. (Renzi, 2011, p. 24)

This reminds us also of the specific Deleuze-influenced approach called schizoanalysis, as defined by Ali Akay (1995), which problematizes the micropolitical relations of power always present during the survey process. According to the schizoanalysis approach, the way of interviewing the concerned subjects must not be “cold and distant,” based on the hierarchical attitude of the sociologist, but based, rather, on mutuality and “friendship politics,” reducing as much as possible the separation between the interviewer and interviewed. It refuses the objectification of the interviewed also because, frequently, the interviewed people are friends or a close contacts. The interviewer and the interviewed share similar emotions and lifestyles, because they are part of the same “feelings’ community.” Therefore, we can speak of a condition of intersubjectivity, which is a further process of

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Figure 2.1: Freedom of Movement, Natives of the New World (Kino Mosaik, 2018).

dis-identification and elimination of the borders between the interviewer and the interviewed, empowering both sides. Ideally, it should not be possible to define who is asking and who is responding: This is the final result of the schizoanalytic dis-identification (Akay, 1995). Natives of the New World is a product of people from the same “feelings’ community,” with migrants and people in solidarity with them. Another possible similar approach can be seen in the methodology of militant research. Militant research has been mostly discussed by visual artists, activists, and academics with the optimistic idea that “things can actually change” (Saab, 2012, p. 5). Militant researchers have not only a participative approach with the group with whom they’re working, but they are also in solidarity with them and see themselves as participants in their struggle. More often than not, it entails the researchers’ active and committed participation in the political movement of their subjects. As opposed, say, to participant-observation, which is a favored method among ethnographers, militant research involves participation by conviction, where researchers play a role in actions and share the goals, strategies, and experience of

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their comrades because of their own committed beliefs and not simply because this conduct is an expedient
way to get their data. The outcomes of the research are shaped in a way that can serve as a useful tool for the activist group, either to reflect on structure and process, or to assess the success of particular tactics. (Ross, 2013, p. 8)

After these clarifications, we can reflect on the choice of video as a tool of our research. This brings us to the methodology of video activism. The “digital era” caused a reduction in communication through verbal language, leaving its place to the visual image (Wright, 2002). Similar to the approach of militant research, video activism also takes an approach aimed to change the conditions of the communities for better, this time through the power of the image. The members of the Kino Mosaik collective chose to use the moving image to reflect on their own lives. Because all the members of the collective had a mobile phone, they recorded their daily lives in its different aspects. The difficulty of representing the more complex issues and of finding a balance between the investigation of reality and the non-victimization of its subjects was one of the group’s main concerns.

Representing the Disaster As the largest refugee camp in Europe, Lésbos Island attracts photographers, filmmakers, journalists, poets, and writers as a place of inspiration, where all the contradictions of Europe and the troubles of the so-called Third World meet. This attraction often creates a distorted gaze towards migration, charged with an excessively emotional approach. Iman Ali Doosti, an Iranian refugee living on Lésbos Island for two years, following his experiences of direct collaboration, qualified the interest of visual artists towards the island as mainly based on economical reasons: Migration means business for most of the people. There is a lack of sincerity in many people coming to the island to help or work. Some of them want to add all these to their CV’s. Some of them want to take pictures and make money with them. Few people are there to support the difficult situation.9 9 The interview with Iman Ali Doosti has been published in Bir Artı Bir online magazine: https://www.birartibir.org/goc-ve-multecilik/204-fasistlik-nedir-anti-fasist-kimdir

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To reflect on our video-activist approach, I would like to make a distinction between four different types of images, which are also sometimes interconnected and not separated by clear lines: media image, humanitarian image, artistic image, and activist image. We put our video-activist approach on the opposite side of the media image. How do the mainstream media misinterpret or misrepresent migration? What are the tools chosen by the mainstream media? And how is the approach of the video activist different? The mainstream media image belongs to the communication Ideological State Apparatuses (press, radio, and television, etc.) (Althusser, 2001). “All Ideological State Apparatuses, whatever they are, contribute to the same result: the reproduction of the relations of production, i.e. of capitalist relations of exploitation” (Althusser, 2001, p. 104). Each has its own way to implement this: The political apparatus by subjecting individuals to the political State ideology, the “indirect” (parliamentary) or “direct” (plebiscitary or fascist) “democratic” ideology. The communications apparatus by cramming every “citizen” with daily doses of nationalism, chauvinism, liberalism, moralism, etc, by means of the press, the radio and television. (Althusser, 2001, p. 104)

The European media’s attitude towards new arrivals had a big impact on the perception of migration because of its major role in shaping discourse (Nerghes & Lee, 2019). Existing studies show that mainstream media news about migration is highly negative. According to the European media coverage report of the “refugee crisis” by Georgiou and Zaborowski (2017), based on extensive analyses in eight European countries, despite some regional differences, newly arriving migrants were seen as either vulnerable or dangerous outsiders. The initial “sympathetic” and “empathetic” response of 2015 “was gradually replaced by suspicion and, in some cases hostility towards refugees and migrants” (Georgiou & Zaborowski, 2017, p. 3). Also Ebern et al. (2018) remark the coverage of migration issues in European media is often negative and conflict-centred, and “migrants and refugees generally underpresented and portrayed as delinquents or criminals” (as cited in Nerghes & Lee, 2019, p. 276). Gemi et al. (2013) remark that the two most dominant mainstream media representations of migrants are as “innocent victims” or as “invaders and threats to the physical, economic, and cultural well-being of the respective host country” (pp. 266–281). According to Esses et al. (2013), migrants are seen as “uncertain” threats, and they’re portrayed as “enemies at the gate” (p. 519). All these analyses remind us of

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Simon Cottle’s (2000) words: “the media occupy a key site and perform a crucial role in the public representation of unequal social relations and the play of cultural power” (p. 2). Another crucial result of the media coverage of the “refugee crisis” report regards the limited opportunities of the migrants to speak for themselves and to tell their opinions. They’re represented “in images as silent actors and victims.” In addition to the fact that the migrants’ narratives were replete with negative consequences (66%), the migrants depicted in these stories were also mostly an “anonymous” and “unskilled” group of people (Georgiou & Zaborowski, 2017, p. 3–10). The humanitarian image is “the mobilization of photography in the service of humanitarian initiatives across state borders” (Fehrenbach & Rodogno, 2015b, p. 1124). The history of humanitarian imagery can be traced to the invention of photography in the second half of the nineteenth century, when photographers in different roles (missionaries, reformers, and journalists) tried to draw attention to troubled situations from different parts of the world and started campaigns to create awareness, targeting European and American audiences. Many non-governmental organizations and humanitarian institutions can continue their activities thanks to support gathered because of photography-based campaigns. Humanitarian photos mobilize human emotions through portraits of suffering, to call to action, exploiting the affective power of the images. These emotions may be considered as a sort of moral rhetoric, because they aim to create feelings of sympathy, empathy, and a sense of responsibility or guilt in its viewers (Fehrenbach & Rodogno, 2015b, p. 1126). The artistic image brings with it the expression and the aesthetic regime of its creator. It also brings with it two main issues. The first is the use of stereotype, clichés, and the call to a “comfortable” empathy and mimesis. And the second is aestheticization. Similar to humanitarian images, artistic images accentuate certain universal values as humanism, sympathy, empathy, and solidarity (Yalouri, 2019). Usually, artists pretend to “be the voice” of migrants or “give voice” or “give visibility” to them. This approach ends up giving way to a symbolic domination of the represented subject and the consolidation of the difference between a voiceless and invisible “them” and a verbose and visible “us.” The activist image is the image that aims to create counter-information and have a positive transformative effect through the power of the image. The roots of using the image for social change can be traced to the Russian director Dziga Vertov and his agit trains and agit boats, which aimed to create a network between the workers through images in a revolutionary context (Harding,

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2001, p. 2). During the 1968 student demonstrations, video was used as a tool for change by collectives such as Atelier de recherche cinematographique, Cinelutte, Les Groupes Medvedkine, Cinethique, and Cinema Libre in France (Grant, 2016). The Cine Liberación collective, founded by Fernando Solanas, Octavio Getino, Gerardo Vallejo, and Nemesio Juares in Argentina, was active between 1968 and 1971 and called their film productions Third Cinema. They wanted to transform their film screenings into film actions—film events that are the meeting points of discussions and decisions (Eshun & Gray, 2011). In the 1990s, growing social justice movements focused on human rights abuses and the lack of their visibility in mainstream media, and they brought the ideas of advocacy and change through video (Harding, 2001). Video as a tool of social justice activism has been used by different organizations and NGOs. As we see here, sometimes the boundaries between all these types of images are ambiguous. Video activism is used frequently by humanitarian organizations for the same reasons of campaign and advocacy, as in the case of the WITNESS project, which is a remarkable example of video activism that also had a humanitarian character.10 In addition to this, many videoactivist images or moving images are also exhibited in art fairs, biennials, and exhibitions. I would like to clarify the main distinctions between these forms with an example: the image of the dead body of the three-year-old Syrian Kurdish Aylan Kurdi. The photograph of Aylan Kurdi was extremely widely circulated in early September 2015, because it described in a very strong and brutal way the contemporary situation for migrants. The image was instantly circulated all over the world. Although a Turkish journalist, Nilüfer Demir from Dogan News Agency, took the photograph, it gained widespread visibility when a human rights activist, Peter Bouckaert, director of emergencies at Human Rights Watch, tweeted it to his target audience, giving a new humanitarian value to the image (Fehrenbach & Rodogno, 2015a). Given the popularity of the photograph in social media, the mainstream media began to use the image to describe the tragic results of the situation for migrants as it was in 2015. This picture was also interpreted as an index of the supposed risks of mass migration for Europe. The question I would like to foreground, however, is whether this image really represents a call to action or directs the spectator’s response to a 10 WITNESS is a wide video-activism project that works in collaboration with local organizations from different parts of the world. By documenting and spreading images of human rights violations, WITNESS aims to call for justice and change (Gregory, 2005). The website www.witness. org shows that the project has now reached 570 organizations from 135 different countries.

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comfortable zone of emotions such as compassion and mercy. Fehrenbach and Rodogno remind us that [t]he decision by humanitarian actors to show a dead or dying child is not new. Neither is the idea that displaying shocking images of human suffering in circumstances that humanitarian organizations deem to be exceptionally dramatic, might induce behavioral and political change. (2015b, p. 1123)

Since the end of the 19th century, the humanitarian image continues to be active via different tools such as newspapers, newsletters, and other media. Reviewing the history of humanitarian photography will show us that some specific visual topics are consistently in the foreground. “Mother and child” and “the child alone” are repeated many times and, as Fehrenbach and Rodongo state, [t] hese tropes are informed by closely held cultural notions of children’s innocence and pre-political status. Nonetheless, one common theme has been a recognition, via visual representation, of the absence or inadequacies of the patriarchal protection of one’s State, one’s husband and one’s father, particularly in wartime. (2015b, pp. 1143–1144)

Only two days after his death, some members of the Justice and Development Party’s (Ak Parti) Trabzon Youth Section staged a re-enactment of the photograph, lying face down in a position similar to Kurdi on a beach of the Black Sea coast.11 After 10 minutes in this position, the young Ak Parti members made a press statement calling for attention to the difficult situation of Syrian migrants, defined as “their Muslim brothers.” After approximately six months, the famous Chinese artist Ai Weiwei enacted the same pose on a stony beach of Lésbos Island, this time in black and white and with a more “artistic” style, to be exhibited at the India Art Fair. The daily newspaper The Guardian, in an article dedicated to the performance, mentioned the words of the co-owner of India Art Fair Sandra Angus: It is an iconic image because it is very political, human and involves an incredibly important artist like Ai Weiwei. The image is haunting and

11 https://www.hurriyet.com.tr/gundem/ak-partili-genclerden-ilginc-protesto-29983240

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represents the whole immigration crisis and the hopelessness of the people who have tried to escape their pasts for a better future.

In the same interview, Ai Weiwei explains his motivation: “It is a personal act, very simple; an artist trying not just to watch events but to act, and I made this decision spontaneously.” The image transforms from mainstream media into humanitarian image and finally into artistic image, reconstructed on the basis of “artistic” rules. Going back to the words of Weiwei, who considers his own performance as a political act, we are confronted with a larger issue. What is a political act? Can we really be politically effective by imitating the lifeless passive body of a child? Isn’t it risky to reduce the migrant experience to the dead body of a child? Or, going one step further, does this metaphor not risk seeing refugees only as innocent, passive victims symbolized in the body of a dead child? These questions can also make us reflect on the sad reason for the fame of this picture, because it is always easy to perceive refugees as motionless children. The photograph also lends itself to appropriation because of the association of “observer-as-father,” of the audience to “distant suffering,” or, more troubling, because of Aylan Kurdi’s physical resemblance to a “White European” image, with which is easier to have empathy (Fehrenbach & Rodogno, 2015b, p. 1154). Here, we can recall the words of Bouckaert who first tweeted Kurdi’s picture: What struck me the most were his little sneakers, certainly lovingly put on by his parents that morning as they dressed him for their dangerous journey. One of my favorite moments of the morning is dressing my kids and helping them put on their shoes. Staring at the image, I couldn’t help imagine that it was one of my own sons lying there drowned on the beach. (as cited in Fehrenbach & Rodogno, 2015b, p. 1128)12

According to Bouckaert, the reason why this picture has an extreme emotional power is the fact that this child looks a lot like a European child and could be “theirs,” in contrast to ongoing indifference towards the huge number of children from African countries, whose deaths do not attract so much attention (as cited in Fehrenbach & Rodogno, 2015b).13 Returning to 12 The online text by Peter Bouckaert called “Why I Shared the Horrific Photo of a Drowned Syrian Child” was published on Human Rights Watch website on September 2, 2015. 13 Bouckaert’s argument was mentioned in the online text “What the Image of Aylan Kurdi Says About the Power of Photography,” written by Olivier Laurent and published on Time website on September 4, 2015.

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the history of humanitarian photographs, the colour of Armenian children’s skin was lightened in the pictures for the campaigns made in the United States to collect money during the massacres taking place in the First World War (Fehrenbach & Rodogno, 2015a). Refugees are not at all a passive, desperate, and hopeless group of people. Besides all the horrible conditions imposed by the system, refugees and migrants are looking for change: They have their hopes, dreams, and the will to transform the conditions they face. They’re not lifeless, they’re not passive, and they’re not children. The image of Aylan Kurdi brings with it all the stereotypes of representation of the experience of migration. The photograph speaks to the feelings and doesn’t really induce us to reflect on the solution to the problem we face. The image loses its first impact after it has been reproduced in different forms and after it has been disseminated on different platforms. The photo poses a question about the fine line between video-activist images and videos. Ulus Baker, in his article “How Can We Resist the Media?” (2017), makes a distinction between the media image and the action image. Baker explains the effect of the media on us with these words: “The media makes us forget our events. Because every thought, apart from being an ‘event,’ must also be ‘about’ the events. But the media offers us ‘individualized,’ disassembled events, events which are not making us think” (Baker, 2017, p. 14). Baker describes the techniques of the media first as repetition and insistence, which means repeating an actual media incident to the point that it loses its effect. The second technique is to mobilize all its channels and offer the same news with different informational or emotional shapes. As a result of this, the media events lose the value of being thinkable. This recalls the concept of image fatigue, which causes “compassion fatigue”: In the words of Lodge, “the idea that we get so much suffering thrust in our faces every day from the media, that we become sort of numbed, we’ve used up all our reserves of pity, anger, outrage” (as cited in Wright, 2002, p. 53). According to Baker, the media event shines and fades, like a flash in the pan. But the most important thing is that these events cannot be linked to each other except by what I call ‘repetition’ and ‘insistence.’ The result is a state of intense atrophy, paralysis and boredom, whose psychological effects can be felt at any time (2017, p. 14).

Thus, anti-mediatic thinking should reconsider the meaning of event and should rebuild the event. Bringing the event to a thinkable level and creating

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anti-mediatic or counter-mediatic information is not so easy. There should be the expression of a point of view, which has freed itself from the homogeneity of points of view created by media. When an event is thinkable, it’s possible to have a cause and effect relationship (Baker, 2017). Video activism can have a similar meaning, which means that the images give us the possibility to think and act.

From the Stereotypes Created to the Activist Images Self-Created by Migrants I gave the example of the image of Aylan Kurdi, which became an internationally famous media event. Besides this example, in different representations of migrants and the so-called refugee crisis, the most repeatedly used stereotypes are the images of the orange life jacket, tent, blanket, and dinghy. Elena Yalouri, in her article “Difficult Representation: Visual Art Engaging with the Refugee Crisis,” provides further examples of the stereotypes regarding the representation of migration in the artistic world. Yalouri underlines the fact that many artists attempt to imitate, similar to Ai Weiwei, and that “these imitations may point to the imbalance between those who have the power to represent and those who are represented” (Yalouri, 2019, p. 5). Yalouri suggests other problematic issues concerning the use of “mimetic representation,” including “image fatigue,” depoliticization, emphasizing feelings such as “compassion, pity, or sympathy” while leaving in the background “the recognition of social and political rights” (2019, p. 5). Representation may also legitimate and reinforce the system that has created the “refugee crisis.” Thus, it “raise(s) the issue of the boundaries between the desire to showcase the marginalized and/or silenced narratives, and the consumption, capitalization, and aestheticization of their suffering, which runs the risk of resulting in the latter’s normalization, simplification and eventually legitimization” (Yalouri, 2019, pp. 4–7). In the media and artistic representations of migration, suffering becomes a “commodity.” Symbols and representations with symbolic objects—such as life jackets and rescue blankets—make the migrant subjects essentially disappear. In these examples, we observe the representation of migrants without migrants or with dead migrants. There is another possible way of representation. It is important to bring our attention to alternative approaches, different films and documentaries made by directors in a participative way. Vittorio Iervese (2016) calls participative

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Figure 2.2: Moria, Natives of the New World (Kino Mosaik, 2018).

migration documentaries “brave and uncomfortable documentaries” that have challenged what mass (and social) media do not show about migrants in the case of Italy—above all, the agency and the active participation of migrants in their representations (2016, p. 133). Natives of the New World aimed to appropriate the tools of representation and have its own autonomy of representation. After collecting different moving images recorded with mobile phones, we watched them together, thinking through them and telling our lives through them in a collective way. While watching the collected images together and reflecting on them, a participant sang a song from his home country; another participant told about his own feelings of leaving home and the condition of being a refugee. Some of the participants expressed their hopes and dreams for the feature, another participant talked about the place where she feels good on the island, and one participant read a poem that he wrote about the perception of being a migrant. The documentary starts with the images of Lésbos Island, the temporary home of most of the migrants. It’s the European land where they make their first steps. They’re in transition between homes, the old and the new. The words of the narrator describe his situation: There is a country with beautiful places and the country where we are born in and that’s our home town. Why a person decides to leave his own town, own country? Because of life. Maybe there are a lot of definitions of the refugee. But for me the migration means surviving, it means I

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wish, I love to live, to be alive. Because life is more valuable than we can imagine. Everyone has different reasons to be alive.

The last words of the narrator are heard over images from Moria camp, which is the main refugee camp on the island. In the following scenes, different images from the camp show all the main difficulties of being a migrant in Moria camp, especially the food line, the unhygienic conditions, and the big crowd of tents. These difficult images are accompanied by a song from Sierra Lione’s Refugee All Stars band called Living Like a Refugee: You left your country to seek refuge In another man’s land You left your country to seek refuge In another man’s land You will be confronted by strange dialects And you will be fed with unusual diets You’ve got to sleep in a tarpauline house Which is so hot You’ve got to sleep on a tarpauline mat Which is so cold O’ we own time Living like a refugee is not easy It’s really not easy 14

This band’s members are all migrants who lived for many years in Guinea in a tent camp, so they have a similar experience and emotional attitude towards being migrants. The song is a form of reggae, with a humorous way of singing, which helps to de-escalate the dramatic tone of the many elements shown in the documentary. Afterwards, we’re back in the daily life of Lésbos Island. The narrator continues: We suffered a lot of problems, to arrive at a safe place. We walked through huge mountains, hot deserts, big and dangerous seas, to escape from our problems, to rescue our lives. But it’s not too much different. We’re experiencing the things that we have experienced before, and believe me, sometimes it’s harder than before. 14 The song is from the album of the same name from Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars band, released in Europe on September 25, 2006.

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After these images of everyday life on Lésbos Island, there are images from different demonstrations that took place on the island. These demonstrations were realized with the participation of migrants and the people in solidarity, and their images help to show the needs and the problems of the refugees and the way the migrants have expressed them. The narrator continues: We don’t want too many things. Our equality. We just want a safe place. We’re tired from fighting racism, waiting for a long time. And here, in Moria, we’re suffering all these problems. It has different names, like Moria the prison, the hell inside the heaven. And like one of my friend is always telling, Life is too hard my friend, especially when you’re waiting for food in Moria.

The Moria residents demonstrate with the slogans “We’re human beings!” and “Moria no good.” We see them marching to Sappho Square, which is the centre of Mytiline, the main town of the island. Here we listen to a public statement laying out all the demands of the migrants for a better life: We’re calling to stop the EU-Turkey deal. Turkey is not a safe country for us and for all nationalities. Equal rights to the refugees. Open the borders. Asylum for all. Stop deportation. Close all concentration camps. All refugee kids should enter schools with equal rights. Free transportation for the camps.

After this, two narrators lay out their hopes and plans for the future. The first one talks about the importance of not looking back to the dark past but towards the brighter future; the second one talks about his plan for when he will get asylum, which is to help people like him. In the final scene, we see images from a concert of a choir composed of migrants and people in solidarity, where the audience is also involved in their performance. Natives of the New World, after expressing the diff iculties of being a migrant in Lésbos Island and living in Moria camp, shows different ways to deal with this. The images and sounds are communications among themselves, in an internal dialogue: An image that is difficult to represent is answered and contrasted by a sound or image of resistance. Resistance can also be accomplished with humour. All of the images are filmed with mobile phones or found on the internet through archive research. As the main languages of the workshop were English and French, the narration is also not in the original languages of the participants. Thus, there are different accents of narration. Considering the

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Figure 2.3: EU, Natives of the New World (Kino Mosaik, 2018).

characteristics of what Naficy (2001) calls accented cinema, cinema made by migrant directors living in exile or in diaspora, we can find common ground regarding the language and the modes of production: the English and French spoken, collectively, and a low-budget (no-budget) production. In Naficy’s Accented Cinema, there is the pattern of a journey, a movement from an old home to a new home (Naficy, 2001). In this documentary, a journey is also suggested, a movement between an old and a new home. The new home, however, is still not reached, and that is why the new home is the locus of all the positive meanings, almost imaginary. The new home is seen in contrast to the old home. One of the main characteristics of Accented Cinema is homesickness. Natives of the New World’s participants, in a transitional moment, have not settled their lives in a new place. This in-between situation does not allow them to think of the past or to be nostalgic about it. The future and its imaginary is stronger than the memory of the past.

Conclusion Natives of the New World is an experiment, a documentary in transition, like its actors. It gets its force by standing against all the different stereotypes mentioned above and suggesting its own point of view, a migrant point of view. It shows its position against discrimination and proposes a new

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image of the migrant—depicted not simply as a passive victim, but in the middle of different and complex relations and feelings: pain, suffering, and difficulty but also struggle, hope, reflection, resistance, and action. It suggests alternatives for the possibility of solution or ways to reduce the problem. Its collective voice transforms the image of the migrant. Opposite the media images described by Baker, which offer distinct, shiny, and quickly fading events, Natives of the New World brings together different images and provides a more complex engagement with the situation. Here, images are interconnected and communicate among themselves. They are a form of action.

References Akay, A. (1995). İstanbul’da Rock Hayatı. Istanbul: Bağlam Yayıncılık. Althusser, L. (2001). Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (B. Brewster, Trans.). New York: Monthly Review Press. Auyero, J. (2012). Patients of the State: The Politics of Waiting in Argentina, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Baker, U. (2017). Medyaya Nasıl Direnilir? In E. Berensel (Ed.), Videonun Eylemi, Tarih, Deneyim, Taktik: Türkiye’de Video Eylem (pp. 13-23). Istanbul: Alef Yayınevi. Coordination Team Mozaik. (2018, October 31). Natives of the New World [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzDnSqPjSlU&t=685s Cottle, S. (2002). Ethnic Minorities and the Media: Changing Cultural Boundaries. London: SAGE. De Genova, N., Garelli, G., & Tazzioli, M. (2018). Autonomy of Asylum?: The Autonomy of Migration Undoing the Refugee Crisis Script. The South Atlantic Quarterly, 117(2), 239–265. Eshun, K., & Gray, R. (2011). The Militant Image: A Cine-Geography Editors’ Introduction. Third Text, 25(1), 1–12. Esses, V. M., Medianu, S., & Lawson, A. S. (2013). Uncertanity, Threat, and the Role of the Media in Promoting the Dehumanization of Immigrants and Refugees. Journal of Social Issues, 6(3), 518–536. Fehrenbach, H., & Rodogno, D. (Eds.). (2015a). Humanitarian Photography: A History. New York: Cambridge University Press. Fehrenbach, H., & Rodogno, D. (2015b). “A Horrific Photo of a Drowned Syrian Child”: Humanitarian Photo and NGO Media Strategies in Historical Perspective. International Review of the Red Cross, 97(900), 1121–1155. Gemi, E., Ulasiuk, I., & Triandafyllidou, A. (2013). Migrants and Media Newsmaking Practices. Journalism Practice, 7(3), 266–281.

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Georgiou, M., & Zaborowski, R. (2017). Media Coverage of the “Refugee Crisis”: A Cross-European Perspective. Strasbourg: Council of Europe. Retrieved October 21, 2019, from https://rm.coe.int/1680706b00 Grant, P. D. (2016). Cinema Militant: Political Filmmaking and May 1968. London: Wallflower Press. Gregory, S. (2005). Introduction. In S. Gregory, G. Caldwell, R. Avni, & T. Harding (Eds.), Video for Change: A Guide for Advocacy and Activism (pp. xii–xvii). London: Pluto Press. Harding, T. (2001). The Video Activist Handbook. London: Pluto Press. Hürriyet Online News. (2015, September 4). Ak Partili Gençlerden İlginç Protesto. Hürriyet. Retrieved October 21, 2019, from http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/gundem/ ak-partili-genclerden-ilginc-protesto-29983240 Iervese, V. (2016). Altro Che Invisibili: Il Paradosso Delle Immagini Degli Immigrati. Zapruder, 40, 132–139. Khosravi, S. (2014). Waiting. In B. Anderson & M. Keith (Eds.), Migration: A COMPAS Anthology (pp. 74–75). Oxford: COMPAS. Mosaik Support Centre. The Situation in Lesvos. Retrieved October 21, 2019, from https://lesvosmosaik.org/about/situation-on-lesvos/ Naficy, H. (2001). An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Naf icy, H. (2006). Situating Accented Cinema. In E. Ezra & T. Rowden (Eds.), Transnational Cinema, The Film Reader (pp. 111–130). New York: Routledge. Nerghes, A., & Lee, J-S. (2019). Narratives of the Refugee Crisis: A Comparative Study of Mainstream-Media and Twitter. Media and Communication 7(2), 275–288. Off ice of Displaced Designers. Retrieved October 21, 2019 from http://www. displaceddesigners.org/ Refocus Media Labs. Building Community. Retrieved October 21, 2019, from https:// refocusmedialabs.org/about-us Renzi, A. (2011). From Collectives to Connectives: Italian Media Activism and the Repurposing of the Social [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. University of Toronto. Ross, A. (2013). Research for Whom? In Militant Research Handbook (pp. 8–10). New York: New York University. Saab, A. J. (2013). Scholarly Acts of Everyday Militancy. In Militant Research Handbook (p. 5). New York: New York University. Schwarts, B. (1974). Waiting, Exchange, and Power: The Distribution of Time in Social Systems. American Journal of Sociology, 79(4), 841–870. Sierra Lione’s Refugee All Stars. (2006). Living Like a Refugee [Album]. ANTI-. The Hope Project. Retrieved October 21, 2019, from https://www.facebook.com/ pg/HopeProjectKempsons/about/?ref=page_internal

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UNHCR. Retrieved October 21, 2019, from https://data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/ mediterranean/location/5179 Uskan, N. (2018, December, 15). İran’dan Midilli’ye Uzanan Üç Göçmen Hikâyesi: Faşistlik Nedir, Anti-faşist Kimdir? 1+1 Forum. Retrieved October 21, 2019, from https://www.birartibir.org/goc-ve-multecilik/204-fasistlik-nedir-anti-fasist-kimdir WITNESS Project. Retrieved January 6, 2020, from https://www.witness.org/ Wright, T. (2002). Moving Images: The Media Representation of Refugees. Visual Studies 17(1), 53–66. Yalouri, E. (2019). “Difficult” Representations: Visual Art Engaging with the Refugee Crisis. Visual Studies, 34(3), 223–238.

About the Author Nagehan Uskan lives in Lésbos Island, Greece. After studying cinema at Bologna and Lyon II Universities, she finished her PhD at the Sociology Department of Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Istanbul, on the topic of Kurdish documentary cinema in Turkey. She conducted a postdoctoral research on the topic of the visual self-representation of migration at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. She is the co-founder and the artistic director of Istanbul Silent Cinema Days and also works as a film programmer for different institutions. She has been part of different grassroots visual media collectives with migrants in Lésbos Island.

3. Abstraction, Bare Life, and Counternarratives of Mobility in the Refugee Films of Richard Mosse and Ai Weiwei, Incoming and Human Flow Robert Burgoyne

Abstract This chapter explores the unprecedented formal experiments of Richard Mosse and Ai Weiwei in their attempts to capture the signature global event of our time, the mass movements of refugees and immigrants across geopolitical boundaries. In Mosse’s Incoming, a thermal camera registers the heat emanating from human bodies from some 30 miles away, providing images of refugees in lifeboats, transport trucks, and refugee camps that are both other-worldly, almost mutant in their strangeness, and deeply moving—images that rivet the gaze. In Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow, drone cameras render the vast scale of human displacement around the world—a view from above is interspersed with the close witnessing of cell phone video, using the visual language of spontaneous documentation in counterpoint with a technology associated with military surveillance. In both films, Giorgio Agamben’s concept of “bare life” is articulated within an advanced optical and technological framework that brings new critical questions into view. Keywords: refugee films, thermal images, migrants, Hannah Arendt, Ai Weiwei, Richard Mosse

In this chapter, I explore the unprecedented formal experiments of Richard Mosse and Ai Weiwei in their attempts to capture the signature

Bayrakdar, D. and R. Burgoyne (eds.), Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art and Media. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463724166_ch03

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global event of our time, the mass movements of refugees and immigrants across geopolitical boundaries. In Mosse’s Incoming, a thermal camera registers the heat emanating from human bodies from some 30 miles away, providing images of refugees in lifeboats, transport trucks, and refugee camps that are both other-worldly, almost mutant in their strangeness, and deeply moving. In Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow, drone cameras render the vast scale of human displacement around the world—a view from above that is interspersed with the close witnessing of cell phone video, using the visual language of spontaneous documentation in counterpoint with a technology associated with military surveillance. Both f ilms articulate, in different ways, the challenge the refugee poses to the model of the nation state, the grand narrative that has dominated political and cultural life for the past two hundred years, as well as to the doctrine of human rights, a challenge Hannah Arendt f irst exposed in an essay published in 1951.

Incoming I begin with the work of Richard Mosse. The extraordinary black, white, and grey images of refugees that comprise his multipart work, Incoming (2017), provoke an immediate set of conflicting emotions, arousing curiosity, fear, critical alarm, and fascination in equal and troubling degrees. The compelling subject and form of the work—the documentary representation of refugees in transit or held in camps, recorded with a thermal camera that reads the heat emanating from their bodies—creates a visual record that is at once the trace of intimate biological processes, an index of organic life, and an eerie abstraction, a disorienting representation of a human tragedy that is both important to and distant from our daily lives. The provocation implicit in the work begins with the technology the artist uses to create these images—a military-grade thermal camera that can record the heat signature of bodies some 30 kilometres away. Capturing the movements of refugees at sea, on transport trucks, and in refugee camps, the artist can record the presence of figures from afar, in long shot and in close-up, with no significant loss of visual clarity or detail. Classified as a weapon, the thermographic camera can be taken across borders only with special papers and government permission. Because of its provenance and its typical instrumental use—the camera is most often used to control

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borders and provide surveillance in battle zones—the technology itself arouses a number of ethical concerns. The critical unease the technology instils, moreover, is compounded by its use as a tool of artistic design. Shifting the images of the most vulnerable and exposed of the world’s populations from the conventional, journalistic coverage of unfolding tragedy—a discourse, by now familiar, often characterized as a “pulling on the heart strings”—to an art-centric documentary frame, Mosse’s photographic images of refugees raise troubling questions of reception, historical precedence, and, above all, the intersection of exhibition practice and its politics with what one group has called the “right to a dignified image” (Fox, 2019). To begin at the most intuitive level of critique, Mosse’s Incoming participates, unambiguously, in a historical discourse of power and visuality. What the theorist Roger Stahl (2013) calls the history of “imperial looking,” which “divides the world into those who are rightful subjects and objects of the gaze,” is immediately and explicitly evoked (p. 663). Moreover, the historical antecedents of the film in colonial and ethnographic photographic practices, among others, align closely with the contemporary cultural moment and its increasing interest in the production of visibility, manifest in the mapping of ordinary geographic movements, the use of facial recognition technology, and the overall scopic penetration of everyday life. In many ways, Mosse’s use of the thermographic camera is an emblematic expression of this trend—the camera is detached from its subjects, invisible to the objects of its gaze, and maintains both a visual and conceptual distance from the bodies of the people it records. The images of refugees created by the artist also resonate, however, with a much earlier pictorial tradition. One writer has compared the imagery of Incoming to the medieval pictorial tradition of grotesques—with the eyes of the figures reduced to dark pools and the mouths to black cavities—clearly investing the refugee population with the signifiers of threat. Describing Mosse’s figures as a form of Gothic demonization, akin to Hieronymus Bosch or Dante, the author argues that the film plays into a long tradition in which dark skin is associated with evil, projecting a “phantasmagoria of race” (Ramirez, 2018). Filmed in slightly slowed motion, Incoming visually emphasizes the blurred, smudged features of the people in the boats and on the trucks, moving soundlessly—a visual design that registers as a densely unfamiliar and frightening mode of existence. Viewed from this angle, Mosse’s project might be said to rehearse, in a new, technologically advanced visual medium, a recurrent European fantasy of barbarian invasion, a trope

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Figure 3.1: Incoming (Richard Mosse, 2017).

that depends on a perception of the multitude as a wild collective without law or history (Michaud, 2017). Mosse describes his own work in related terms: Quite by accident, the device produces a beautiful monochrome tonality, subtle and dazzling. Human skin is rendered as a mottled patina disclosing an intimate system of blood circulation, sweat, saliva, and body heat. Yet the camera carries a certain aesthetic violence, dehumanizing the subject, portraying people in zombie form as monstrous, stripping the individual from the body and portraying a human as mere biological trace. (Mosse, 2017)

Seen from a different perspective, however, the film Incoming and the photographs that accompany it compel a strange sense of recognition. In representing the most basic, shared human properties—thermal radiation, respiration, the traces of touch that leave a heat imprint on the surface of cold bodies—the project may be understood, in the most positive reading, as an attempt to convey a sense of shared interdependence with those who are most vulnerable, who most “seem to test our sense of belonging, or to defy available forms of likeness” (Butler, 2010, p. 36). Mosse depicts refugees in states of obvious precarity, in groups and individually, in which the faces look stunned, at the limits of endurance, images that trigger a powerful sense of empathy. He also, however, offers images of refugees who have attained a more settled status, portraying men, women, and children engaged in everyday activities, playing, preparing for sleep, checking cell phones, and, in

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one memorable sequence, kneeling and bowing in prayer. The conjoining of familiarity and frightening strangeness in the affect generated by the work might be compared to Freud’s description of the uncanny, the unsettling combination of heimlich and unheimlich that Freud found in certain faces, images, and spaces. In a recent essay, the media theorists Lille Chouliaraki and Tijana Stolic (2017, 2019) consider the complex visual discourse that has developed around the representation of refugees in Europe, a pictorial language that is more varied and expressive than has been previously discussed. Motivated by the limitations they see in the vast amount of critical work surrounding images of the refugee crisis, in which the tropes of “victim” and “threat” dominate the analysis, the authors have devised a theoretical taxonomy of refugee “visibilities,” which they distil into five key visual configurations. These consist of “biological life,” “empathy,” “threat,” “hospitality,” and “self reflexivity.” In the course of this essay, I will refer to this model in reading the f ilm installation by Mosse and the very different f ilm by Ai Weiwei. In each of these works are several examples of the visual conf igurations that Chouliaraki and Stolic set forth. Both f ilmmakers, however, also make an effort to move beyond the existing rhetoric of refugee images that the authors discern, to introduce a different visual language for representing the stateless population. For their part, Chouliaraki and Stolic appear to hold little hope that the great crowds of refugees in the present period can be represented visually in any form that speaks to dignity and agency: Despite their internal variation, all regimes of visibility are ultimately informed by symbolic strategies of dehumanization. Whether these are strategies of massification, vilification, infantilization, marginalization or aestheticization, the refugee appears in Western spaces of publicity as a deeply ambivalent figure: a body-in-need, a powerless child, a racial ‘other,’ a linguistic token or a sentimental drawing. (2017, p. 1173)

The images of refugees presented in the work of Mosse and Ai Weiwei can be mapped onto a different, more hopeful symbolic field, one informed by a deeper sense of historical possibility. Mosse has addressed directly the difficulty of representing refugees with a technology and in a medium designed for surveillance, asserting that he did not intend to ignore the camera’s “sinister uses,” but to treat them as a challenge:

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I am European. I am complicit. I wanted to foreground this perspective in a way, to try to see refugees and illegal immigrants as our governments see them. I wanted to enter into that logic in order to create an image that reveals it. So I chose to represent these stories, really a journey or series of journeys, using an ambivalent and perhaps sinister new European weapons camera technology. (2017)

Mosse’s project, at first glance, seems to adhere closely to the mode of pictorial representation described by Chouliaraki and Stolic as “biological life” (2017, pp. 1167–1168). Producing images that depict the migrants as “a mass of unfortunates… that reduces their life to corporeal existence and the needs of the body,” the project maintains a strict visual distance that deprives the refugee subjects of voice and, by extension, agency or will. The project inscribes the disenfranchised populations it records in a “biopolitical field of symbolic power,” reducing them to bodies in need (Chouliaraki & Stolic, 2017, p. 1167). At the same time, however, Mosse’s film and photographs also appear to evoke the primitive emotion of threat, especially in the groups of mutant-looking figures crowded together on rescue rafts or in transport vehicles moving across the Sahara. The visuality of threat, as Chouliaraki and Stolic describe it, centres on depictions of masses of refugees walking through motorways on the Balkan route or squeezed in rescue boats; and of aggressive young men wearing balaklavas… the regime of threat [thematizes] not empathy [as in the depictions of biological life] but fear—the anxiety that ‘our’ social order is disturbed by racial and cultural “others.” (2017, p. 1169).]

In my view, however, the categories of refugee visualities that our two media theorists have devised fall short. The taxonomy they have created cannot account for the disconcerting emotional power of these images or the fascination they evoke. Despite Mosse’s avowal that the work’s purpose and intent is to reveal the way our governments see the refugee and the illegal, I would like to propose a counter-thesis, arguing that Incoming may be read not simply as a look through the lens of power, coloured by fear, but rather as a deep emotional and intellectual engagement with the politics and poetics of the refugee condition. In particular, it serves as a bracing and effective critique of the limitations of notions such as the “imagined community” and the “Rights of Man,” employing what Mosse calls the camera’s “aesthetic violence” to bring into relief the deeper, emotional dimensions of forced migration (Anderson, 1991). Through its formal exaggerations—the blurred outlines, the massification, the unfathomable experiences communicated by

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Figure 3.2: Incoming (Richard Mosse, 2017).

the faces of the people—the film evokes, at one and the same time, a deeply ingrained iconography of threat as well as a sense of sameness and identity, of interdependency, of our shared biological traces of human life. Far from indexing our common humanity in some familiar, anodyne manner, the film challenges us to see likeness in these images of the dispossessed, “test[ing] our sense of belonging… of likeness” (Butler, 2010, p. 36). Above all, with its disturbing, difficult imagery, its depictions of both extreme similarity and radical otherness, the project sets forth an imaginative challenge to the ideal of the imagined community and its principle political form, the nation state. The film implicitly asks us to consider if the ideal of the imagined community can be extended to a stateless population that is both manifestly “the same” and, in the imagery of the film, dramatically other. As Giorgio Agamben writes, “the refugee must be considered for what he is: nothing less than a limit concept that radically calls into question the fundamental categories of the nation state, from the birth-nation to the man-citizen” (Agamben, 1998, p. 134).

Hannah Arendt As early as 1951, Hannah Arendt saw the swelling numbers of stateless people as perilous to the existence of the nation state. In an essay remarkable both for its prescience and its ambivalence, “The Decline of the Nation State and the End of the Rights of Man,” Arendt first provides a deeply sympathetic

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analysis of the condition of the stateless person—a “rightless” being who has lost the ability to act, to work, to travel, or to voice an opinion that matters. The stateless person, she observes, has also lost all security. The protections ostensibly guaranteed by the doctrine of the Rights of Man had proven to be a convenient myth: The conception of human rights… broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships—except that they were still human. The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human. (Arendt, 1979, p. 299)

With a tone of measured sarcasm, she argues that the loss of human rights can be traced to the moment when a person relinquishes national citizenship, when they have become simply human. The paradox involved in the loss of human rights is that such loss coincides with the instant when a person becomes a human being in general, without a profession, without a citizenship, without an opinion, without a deed by which to identify and specify himself. (Arendt, 1979, p. 302)

At the end of the essay, however, she swivels from the point of view of the refugee to the perspective of the nation state, which, in 1951, was already under threat by a surge in statelessness, by increasing crowds of wandering people who could neither be repatriated nor naturalized, and who existed in the liminal condition that Agamben calls bare, creaturely life. The danger in the existence of such people is twofold: first… their everincreasing numbers threaten our political life… the world which is the result of our common and coordinated effort in much the same, perhaps even more terrifying, way as the wild elements of nature once threatened the existence of man-made cities and countrysides. Deadly danger to any civilization is no longer likely to come from without. The danger is that a global, universally interrelated civilization may produce barbarians from its own midst by forcing millions of people into conditions which, despite all appearances, are the conditions of savages. (Arendt, 1979, p. 302)

Arendt’s analysis is both acute and chillingly stark, with none of the emotional coating that makes so many descriptions of the refugee condition

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palatable to both the mind and the eye. Her argument, moreover, that the narrative of the nation state—a grand narrative that has dominated political life and culture for the past two hundred years—is structurally threatened by the inevitable rise of populations who can neither be assimilated nor repatriated, moves the question of the refugee away from the periphery and into the centre of national life. The essay casts a clear light on the basic, structural contradiction between the nation state form—in which only citizens truly have rights—and the inexorable rise in the numbers of migrants and dispossessed—forced into mobility by hardship, war, and, increasingly, by ecological disaster. Arendt’s essay speaks to a deep instability in the wider social and political world—the world created by “our common and coordinated effort”—that is only now becoming self-evident. And although the refugee and migrant displacements of today come from very different disruptions than those of Arendt’s time, the present-day upheavals of civil war, privation, persecution, and environmental disaster provide a paramount exemplif ication of her thesis. In the films that form the topic of this chapter, the challenges set forth in Arendt’s essay are given a distinct visual and symbolic form. Richard Mosse’s Incoming, for example, illustrates the disturbing condition of the stateless person today, without security or rights, bereft of citizenship and without protection, retaining only the basic humanity that we all share. The portraits he offers, however, are still a long way from Arendt’s “conditions of savages.” In many shots, the images are tender and familiar—a man praying, a young girl peering into her cell phone, a woman making a bed, a child with a balloon. As one writer says, “seeing them in Mosse’s shadowy renderings erases the lines that have been drawn between refugees, immigrants, natives, citizens, and the rest. His camera makes little distinction between the heat that each body emits” (Campbell, 2017). Nevertheless, in his portrayal of the “abstract nakedness of being human” (Arendt, 1979, p. 297), Mosse sets forth images that present refugees in a disquieting new photographic language, a defamiliarizing imagery that foregrounds their status as, in Agamben’s words, “homo sacer,” usually translated as “accursed man,” “the first and only real appearance of rights outside the f iction of the citizen that always covers them over” (1998, pp. 79–131). His film and photographs expose the presence of bare life in the world we inhabit: as one writer says, “deprived from their human rights by lack of citizenship, they can only claim to stay alive, most of the time confined in camps settled in countries near the one from which they have fled” (Fassin, 2005, p. 367).

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Human Flow In many ways, Ai Weiwei’s film Human Flow can be seen as a response to, and to some degree a repudiation of, Arendt’s dark closing paragraph. Her surprising use of the words “savages” and “barbarians,” and her comparison of the danger posed by the stateless multitudes to the “wild elements of nature,” are implicitly challenged in Ai’s film, which sets forth contrasting themes of empathy and hospitality—understood as the right to be “at home” anywhere in the world. In the ancient world, of course, hospitality was considered a “right” of the traveller, a right that included food, drink, shelter, and, in some cultures, entertainment. Human Flow suggests a sense of this older concept of hospitality in its representation of the refugee crisis, serving as a symbolic antidote to the idea of the stateless person as threat. Ai’s personal empathy comes into relief throughout the film, as he repeatedly enacts the gestures of hospitality with the migrants he encounters, offering water and tea, cooking kebabs, soothing a distraught woman, and even giving a man a haircut. His own explicit identification with those forced into migration underlies these exchanges—Ai is well known as a persecuted artist whose passport was seized by China and returned only in 2015. In the film, Ai engages people in relaxed, intimate conversation, in interviews that feature the refugees speaking in their own voices. The migrants are informed, articulate, and self-aware. Carrying with them memories of belonging, they share stories of their former lives with photographs—photos of a pet cat, of a big brother astride a scooter, of family members lost on the journey. The representation of stateless persons through the lens of empathy and hospitality, however, can convey its own forms of disempowerment and complicity. In the analysis offered by Chouliaraki and Stolic, the visual conventions of empathy also imply the helplessness of the refugee population, emphasizing vulnerability, victimization, and neediness. The authors note that the emblematic focalizing figure for empathy is the refugee child—an innocent victim, without history or politics, and importantly, a passive figure who is incapable of speech and self-representation. The filter of empathy, for our two media theorists, is thus profoundly infantilizing, excluding the refugee from any kind of agency. The power to help, to aid and assist, resides wholly with the one who is doing the empathizing. Similarly, the gestures of hospitality may be fraught with difficulty in the context of the refugee population. A politics of openness to the legions of wandering peoples, a willingness to share resources and extend a basic sense of human welcome to those without rights, often involves an explicit or implicit denunciation of an uncaring, inhumane nation state. In the

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taxonomy of refugee visualities set forth by Chouliaraki and Stolic, the various protest groups that insist on hospitality for the refugee population often cast the nation state in the role of threatening other. Rather than the migrants, it is the state that has become the source of threat. The refugee population is thus entangled in a political discourse not of their own making, but turned into the mute objects of a contest between political groups that may have little to do with their interests, and that, once more, disempowers them from meaningful political agency on their own behalf. Ai Weiwei’s insistent performance of empathy and hospitality produces a somewhat different, if related, set of contradictions. Although the film conveys a powerful appreciation of the individuality of the travellers within the human flood now inundating the nation states of the world, the discrepancy between the status of the migrants he interviews and the privilege Ai enjoys as an international artist nonetheless comes through. On the one hand, the visual representation of empathy and hospitality in Human Flow comes from a seemingly authentic position of identification and mutuality, as Ai facilitates what Arendt calls the “public performance of voice,” opening a space of belonging through the sharing of stories. On the other hand, the discordance between the unfettered mobility of an artist who can locate himself anywhere in the world and the forced movements and enforced stasis that defines the life of the refugees is pronounced, instantiated in one difficult scene in which the artist, in an ostensibly playful exchange, offers to trade passports with a Syrian refugee. If we shift the focus from Ai’s own performance, however, to the refugees themselves, the actions elicited in the photographic encounter can be seen as forms of what Judith Butler (2016) calls “conditional agency”—the agency involved in maintaining the gestures of ordinary life under conditions of great hardship. In Human Flow, the act of eating dinner by the roadside, walking, protesting, smiling, playing, and making music, convey a world where daily life, in its most quotidian form, can be understood as a form of agency, and, perhaps, of minimal resistance. In the context of the photographic encounter—as Ai’s work at certain points illustrates—the meaning of what it is to be vulnerable can change. Rather than signifying a passive need for humanitarian help, vulnerability can sometimes manifest as a type of speech act, projecting resilience or simply adaptation, a theme that comes through strongly in several on-camera interviews (Chouliaraki & Stolic, 2019). In its overall structure, Human Flow delineates the stunning size of the stateless world, which numbered some 68.5 million in 2018, driven from their homes across the world due to war, violence, and persecution. The

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film documents Ai’s visits, over the course of a year, to some 23 countries and 40 refugee camps—official camps as well as illegal tent cities set up along railroad tracks, settlements cobbled together in muddy fields and deserts, and permanent camps that have housed generations of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. The f ilm follows the passage of vast trains of migrants along highways, rural roads, desert tracks, and in the crossings of the Mediterranean. It surveys the earth’s congregations of denationalized peoples, the great crowds of migrants temporarily ensconced in or moving through Africa, the Middle East, southern Europe, northern Europe, and the Mexico–U.S. border. At the core of the film, however, the interviews with individuals come to the fore. The people Ai records express a complete range of human emotions, from optimism to fatalism, despair, abjection, and grief. The film language of Human Flow is similarly varied. Sequences typically begin with panorama shots, in saturated colours of blue, green, and desert brown, that provide a momentary drift into visual beauty, a kind of visual poetry that is often accompanied by a line or two of actual poetry quietly appearing in the upper half of the frame. Sometimes filmed with a drone camera, these introductory vistas sketch a natural world that seems unblemished and complete, unmarked by the dividing lines of race and nation. The grandeur and beauty of these scenic shots sets a tone of gentle observation for the intimate encounters conveyed in the film, which, for the most part, unfold in conversational tones, absent the drama of physical or psychic extremes of suffering. Richard Mosse’s avowed goal in Incoming, as I have discussed, is to enter into the logic of the thermal camera and to see the refugees as the eyes of power see them, in order to reveal the political image culture of the state. In these images, refugees, at times, appear almost like a mass contagion, a biomorphic threat. Ai’s approach in Human Flow is the opposite. Without overt sentiment, the work attempts to de-anonymize the vast crowd of stateless persons, to provide particularity, and to record the individuality of voices, names, and faces. In the interviews conducted by Ai, the refugees often address the camera directly; at other times, he pictures them in individual portraits, full-length, as they silently regard the camera for 30 seconds or more. The overall effect is not so much to “rehumanize” the migrant population—one of the words used to describe the project of Mosse’s Incoming—but rather to create a surprising reversal. The wandering peoples depicted in full-length, medium shot, and close-up, appear utterly familiar, open, and gregarious. The representatives of the nation state, however, are portrayed mainly in the form of helmeted police and armoured military

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vehicles or symbolized by the brute fencing that is thrown up suddenly to prevent the passage of migrants from one national state to another. The nation state, in the visual logic of the film, becomes an anonymous agent of threat, a faceless and frightening force. Where the film underlines the uncertain fate of those forced into mobility is in the focused attention it gives to the material culture of the refugee world. Abandoned orange and red life jackets, the ubiquitous gold and silver foil rescue blankets, the white jumpsuits of rescue workers and of some refugees, the black rafts and rescue dinghies, the endless rows of tents—the material culture of the refugees has become the signs of an era of forced mobility and statelessness. The colours, in particular—especially the red and orange lifejackets and the gold and silver foil blankets—have become associated with forced migration in an indelible way. Throughout the film, the camera lingers on these emblems of the displaced, life jackets floating on the water, abandoned on the shore, worn on the bodies of refugees, summarized in one stunning shot at the end of the film: a lengthy reverse zoom of a mountain of abandoned life jackets, numbering at least 100,000, on the shores of the island of Lésbos, a major camp and transit point. The concentrated colour of the artefacts identified with the multitudes of stateless people mark, in yet another way, the film’s aesthetic contrast with the black and grey images of Mosse’s Incoming. Where Incoming dematerializes the objects of the camera’s gaze, blurring the signs and cultural associations that colour communicates in favour of a greyscale that tends towards abstraction, Human Flow lingers on the vivid pallet of the life vests and the rescue blankets and details the colours and the materials of the refugees’ clothing and shelters. Indeed, the material culture of migrant populations forms a visual leitmotif in the film, from the salvage materials used for shelters to the large backpacks and rolling suitcases used by migrants, to the various materials that “encase and support the body” in its endless transit through space (Barry, 2019). In concentrating on these artefacts, the film touches on the overwhelming number of people now experiencing forced migration and suggests as well the permanence of this new mode of life on Earth, as well as its certain expansion—itemizing what we might call the indexical signs of forced migration in the contemporary world. Moreover, the enormous collections of material artefacts, the film implies, will outlast the lives of the refugees themselves; indeed, they may well outlast the human species and its time left on Earth. To some extent, Ai’s visual and thematic interest coincides with the recent turn towards the artistic repurposing of the detritus of the refugee camps, the abandoned clothing, life vests, and other artefacts, which have been

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collected and reconfigured by visual artists into sculptures and assemblages for exhibition. Examples include works by Ai Weiwei himself, for example, his Law of the Journey, which consists of an enormous life raft suspended from the ceiling of the galleries in which it is hung; Paul Handley’s Smuggling Pod, which details the huge collection of life jackets left on the shores of Lésbos; and a work by Arabella Dorman, who has gathered clothing left by refugees at various camps and hung them from the ceiling of a church.

Conclusion The oppositions that come into relief in these two works can be seen as a matrix that clarifies the wider culture of images surrounding mass migration and refugees. Mosse’s Incoming both underlines and exaggerates the emotional signals associated with images of the stateless population. The project both dehumanizes and rehumanizes; it abstracts and embodies; it subtracts race in terms of colour and amplifies it in the emphasis on the subjects’ facial features; it “massifies” and conveys the intimate behavioural details of life on the road and in the refugee camps. And it portrays the fate of the stateless humans, who often destroy their own passports in order not to be returned to their country of origin, from the perspective of a camera that essentially carries its own form of passport—the authorizing papers that allow the thermal camera to be transported across borders—a transport accomplished with far greater ease than for the human populations it surveys. Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow moves in a different direction, insisting on hearing the stories of the refugees, individualizing their experiences, opening what Arendt calls the “space of appearance” to the migrant population. Ai’s mode of identifying his own condition with that of the refugee enacts what Adriana Cavarero calls the “human capacity to establish communities of belonging through the sharing of stories” (as cited in Chouliaraki & Stolic, 2017, p. 1174). At the same time, however, Ai’s exceptional status as an artist with extraordinary resources and freedom of movement makes his avowed affinity with the refugee population somewhat ambiguous, perhaps a performance of sameness rather than a realized identity. In closing, I would like to return to the subject of Hannah Arendt’s essay, “The Decline of the Nation State and the End of the Rights of Man.” From the long perspective afforded by her essay, the vast canvas of displaced populations depicted in Human Flow and Incoming suggests that a historical endgame may be playing out and that forced migration—because of war, poverty, and environmental disaster—will not only increase but will

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certainly multiply. A massive population that no longer belongs “to any community whatsoever” now confronts the imagined community of the nation state—the dominant paradigm of belonging for the past two hundred years (Arendt, 1979, p. 295). One of the major questions her essay brings to the fore is whether the nation state form can be reconceived and refashioned to accommodate this new historical reality of mass, forced migration. Or is the narrative of the nation state moving towards its concluding chapters? Seen from a different, more optimistic angle, however, what these films portray might be construed as the beginning moves of a new social narrative, in which migration and mobility become the defining features of historical life. In the work I have done over the course of my career, I have sought to show how film and media contribute to the shaping of a national imaginary, what I call the “field of national imaginings.” What I would like to suggest now is the role that film and photography may play in highlighting the historical shift currently underway, a moment of profound tension between the ideal of the imagined community, founded on the model of nation, and the unwritten narrative of a world on the move. The migrant journeys of the contemporary world have, I believe, begun to shape a new type of protagonist, “a different class of human being,” as one writer has it, “people whose ideas of home now incorporate an open road” (Salopek, 2019). The refugee and migrant flows of the present moment are, in my view, the great story of our time. The films and photographs I discuss here might be seen as the opening pages of a narrative that will soon attain epic proportions.

References: Agamben, G. (1998). Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (D. Heller-Roazen, Trans.). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso. Arendt, H. (1979 [1951]). The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company. Barry, K. (2019). Art and Materiality in the Global Refugee Crisis: Ai Weiwei’s Artworks and the Emerging Aesthetics of Mobilities. Mobilities, 14(2), 204-217. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2018.1533683 Butler, J. (2010). Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? New York: Verso. Butler, J. (2016). Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance. In J. Butler, Z. Gambetti & L. Sabsay (Eds.), Vulnerability in Resistance (pp. 12-27). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Campbell, M. (2017, February 5). Richard Mosse’s “Heat Maps:” A Military Grade Camera Repurposed on the Migrant Trail. The New Yorker. https://www. newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/richard-mosses-heat-maps-a-militarygrade-camera-repurposed-on-the-migrant-trail Chouliaraki, L., & Stolic, T. (2017). Rethinking Media Responsibility in the Refugee “Crisis”: A Visual Typology of European News. Media, Culture and Society, 39(8), 1162–1177. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443717726163 Chouliaraki, L., & Stolic, T. (2019). Photojournalism as Political Encounter: Western News Photography in the 2015 Migration “Crisis”. Visual Communication, 18(3), 311–331. Fassin, D. (2005). Compassion and Repression: The Moral Economy of Immigration Policies in France. Cultural Anthropology, 20(3), 362–387. Fox, J. (2019, March 26). The Right to the Image. Presentation to the Humanities Research Group, University of Windsor. Michaud, E. (2017). The Modern Invention of Barbarians: Ethnicity and the Transmission of Form. October, 161, 11–22. Mosse, R. (2014–2017). Incoming [Video installation]. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, United States. https://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2019/richardmosse-incoming.html Mosse, R. (2017). Incoming. London: MACK. Ramirez, D. (2018). Racial Phantasmagoria: The Demonization of the “Other” in Richard Mosse’s Incoming. NECSUS, https://necsus-ejms.org/racial-phantasmagoriathe-demonisation-of-the-other-in-richard-mosses-incoming/ Salopek, P. (2019, August). Walking with Migrants. National Geographic. https:// www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/2019/07/paul-salopek-chronicles-themass-migrations-that-define-our-age-feature/ Stahl, R. (2013). What the Drone Saw: The Cultural Optics of the Unmanned War. Australian Journal of International Affairs, 67(5), 659–674. Weiwei, A. (Director). (2017). Human Flow [Film]. Germany: 24 Media Production Company.

About the Author Robert Burgoyne is a writer and lecturer whose work centres on the representation of history in film. The author of five books and numerous essays, his work has been translated into nine languages. He was formerly Chair in Film Studies at The University of St Andrews and Professor of English at Wayne State University.

4. Across the Sonorous Desert: Sounding Migration in El Mar la Mar Selmin Kara

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 concrète 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).1 The “mar” in the phrase is recognizable to Spanish speakers as the word for sea. It is addressed 1 The image has been memorialized most notably through Aylan Kurdi’s widely circulated photo of a three-year-old Kurdish Syrian boy, whose tiny body was found washed up on a beach in my home country Turkey in 2015.

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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). The Guardian’s Wendy Ide has pointed to an additional, auditory connection between El Mar la Mar and Rosi’s award-winning film, paying attention to the way that the experiences of being lost at sea (at times a sea of airwaves) is “given impact through vivid sound design” in the two works: “Snippets of voices lost in the wilderness of the airwaves crackle on the soundtrack—a device that recalls the use of distress calls from refugee boats in Gianfranco Rosi’s Fire at Sea” (2018). Her recognition of the power of sound in giving impact to the migrant experience in these films is noteworthy in that scholarship and criticism on the cinematic engagements with migration, such as T. J. Demos’s influential study The Migrant Image (2013), often prioritize analysis of the image tracks. But what if we think of sound design, in films such as El Mar la Mar, as not just a supplement that amplifies the image track in depicting migration? Can we imagine and hear sound as a distinct medium that, by means of its own attributes and historical traditions, has the potential to find forms that express the experiential effects of displacement in powerful ways? In pursuing these questions, this chapter turns Ide’s commentary into a broader investigation into what foregrounding sound design might offer to cinema in terms of addressing migration. More specifically, it shifts the attention from El Mar la Mar’s individual sound effects and sonic devices to its overall acoustic ecology, locating in it a “migrant soundtrack” (in conversation and contrast with T. J. Demos’s formulation of the “migrant image,” perhaps), which disrupts the material-discursive practices that weaponize “migrant ecologies,” such as seascapes and desertscapes, to secure borders (Oppermann, 2017). Described by its directors as an avant-garde film (more so than a documentary in the traditional sense), El Mar la Mar is edited like an episodic work, originally intended for a multichannel installation. It is composed of three acts that do not have a unified narrative or aesthetic, at least on

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the surface. Rather, what the viewer encounters is a complex assemblage of imagery and sounds that draw from Bonnetta’s expertise in sound recording and design across experimental film, installation, and performance art as well as from Sniadecki’s expertise in experiential anthropology and documentary. However, beyond the surface appearance of an eclectic aesthetic that appears to have come out of a creative collision between experimental, anthropological, and documentary filmmaking techniques and practices, the three-act structure is productive of what one might call a kind of cartophony. In an article on the affordances of sound maps for critical mapping, Samuel Thulin (2018) defines cartophony as an umbrella term that encompasses “blends of cartographic and sonic activities, examining how we create, experience, and share relationships with places through combinations of sound and cartography” (p. 193). In other words, it is a form of mapping, and at times counter-mapping, geosocial relations through sound. My delineation of a cartophonic approach in El Mar La Mar is related to the way its three-act structure and foregrounding of sound conjures up a map of the Mexico–U.S. migrant trail that is simultaneously spatial, social, experiential, and multisensory. The following discussion breaks down the film’s structure to intimate how each of these modalities manifest themselves. In the film, the three acts are separated from one another with clear chapter breaks preceding each section. Act I, titled “Rio,” references the Rio Grande, whose natural boundary comprises much of the border between Mexico and the United States. Instead of the river, however, a single travelling shot takes the viewer on a disorienting ride past the metal posts of the Mexico–U.S. border fence. From the vantage point of a moving vehicle, the vertical slits between the posts rapidly flash strips of landscape, densely textured with verdant vegetation. A droning sound, seemingly that of a quiet hum of wind heard from behind closed car windows, is paired with the image, itself a composite of two recordings: one from a bowed piece of barbed wire fence and another from a contact microphone recording of the vehicle.2 Two things are established by this abstraction. First, in the absence of any voice-over or text contextualizing the image, the viewer’s first encounter with the Sonora Desert gets filtered through an assaultive aesthetic—in the sense that scholars such as Matthias Stork (2013) describe the effect of perpetual motion in contemporary action films. In Stork’s “chaos cinema” framework, assaultive aesthetics describes a style of contemporary filmmaking, in which the openings of films immediately cut to 2 Joshua Bonnetta and I had a video chat on May 18, 2020 about El Mar La Mar’s production process, when he gave me details about the sounds heard in the film.

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action in medias res, with movement accelerated to dizzying degrees and the image track stripped of clarity to viscerally overwhelm and disorient the viewer. Sound in this framework is what gives disjunctive or abstracted imagery a sense of continuity, clarity, and cohesion. The effect of the first act’s propulsive energy, despite the lack of frenetic cuts characteristic of chaos cinema, is a similar visual brutality and sensory overload, establishing the border fence as an assault on the body and the senses. Instead of clarity, however, the soundtrack intensifies the abstraction and establishes an anomalous atmosphere signalling that something is amiss. What enables that sensation is the employment of contact microphones to shape the location sound. Contact mics, which Bonnetta employs extensively in his works (including his 2020 film The Two Sights, which won the Best Sound Award from the Cinéma du Réel festival in Paris, France, for its creative documentation of the acoustic ecology of the Outer Hebrides islands off the Scottish coast) operate differently from microphones that capture waves from the air (Fifteen Questions Interview with Joshua Bonnetta: Index of Possibilities). Similar to the way that a stethoscope makes the low-volume sounds of organs audible, they record or transduce vibrations from solid objects through contact with or physical attachment to them. In doing so, they make the vibrations inside materials sonorous and create deep, grainy sounds that feel other-worldly—sounds that we cannot access through our unmediated senses. The first act’s other-worldly drone allows the viewer to listen to the part natural, part man-made border from within an unusual yet sited auditory perspective, cocooning them in its seemingly impenetrable yet visceral materiality. The overall effect of such visual and sonic abstraction is the invocation of an environment that calls for its own modes of bodily perception. J. P Sniadecki himself describes the first act like an overture in the classical sense, priming the viewer for the main body of the film: So these abstractions are perhaps a way to inaugurate the film and the viewer into a particular kind of relationship. To defamiliarize and disorient you, so that you can reorient yourself through your perceptual apparatus, and through your sensorium. You’re thrown into a space that you’re not able to decipher right away, but that makes you even more sensitive, and even more actively engaged in the film. (as cited in Mulligan, 2017)

According to his formulation, the abstraction’s main purpose is to recalibrate the perceptual apparatus and the sensorium so that the disorientation felt in the process becomes a cue for approaching film viewership as a form

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of wayfinding, produced by means of a felt vulnerability and uncertainty about the cinematic space that one is asked to navigate. Second, the zoetrope-like imagery produced through the travelling shot and the drone sound laid underneath deprive vision of a kind of direct or elucidated access to reality, often conceived as the desired outcome of observational documentary footage. Both the fence and the image track prohibit exploring what lies beyond, urging the viewer to search for nonvisual cues to give them context, whereas the soundtrack creates a perspective “from the outside looking in” (rather than from the inside looking out, as expected from a shot framed by a vehicle window) (Mulligan, 2017). It is at this point that the title of the act, Rio, offers some grounding, while demanding the viewer do the interpretive work. The title works initially by metonymy; as I mentioned, it references the Rio Grande, the natural border (or nature as border) between the United States and Mexico. On the broader migrant trail, the Rio Grande constitutes an even more deterring border wall than the fence itself, due to its vast, deadly terrain. According to Border Patrol data, the Rio Grande Valley sector, which includes 320 miles of border and dangerous river crossing points, is the most common site of migrant deaths. In the crossing points, the water levels have reportedly been high due to unprecedented snowmelt run-off in recent years and, in the desert, heat exposure and arid conditions act as natural killers. With unforgiving conditions such as these, the sector serves as a natural weapon against undocumented migration, a fact that has been instrumentalized—and given formal recognition—in the infamous “Prevention through Deterrence” (PTD) policy that came into effect in the 90s (Alonso & Nienass, 2016). In his book The Land of Open Graves (2015), anthropologist Jason De León discusses the history and impact of the policy at length, describing it as “a killing machine that simultaneously uses and hides behind the viciousness of the Sonoran Desert” (pp. 3–4). According to De León, PTD is a security paradigm that emerged specifically in 1993, after the human flood, induced by the North American Free Trade Agreement, forced the U.S. government to come up with the strategy to deter migration through a particular (and lethal) combination of human, non-human, geological, and technological agents. What the combination entails, more specifically, is the deployment of Border Patrol agents, military and surveillance technology, and fences in strategic urban locations, so that the majority of the migrants are left with no other choice than to move towards remote areas where they evade border patrol yet get handed out capital or harsh corporeal punishment by difficult climate and terrain. The outcome of such strategies, however, which approach the border as an engineering problem, has been “a crisis of

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disappearance,” rather than a disruption in the migration cycle (Boyce, 2019, p. 194). Through these policies, the Sonora Desert, and more specifically the Rio Grande, has been made complicit in harrowing migrant disappearances and death, acting as “a wall of deterrence that is equal parts human, animal, plant, object, geography, temperature, and [the] unknown” (De León, 2015, p. 39). Taking such a configuration into consideration, the title Rio in the first act works not only by metonymy (the border fence alluding to the policy by mental association) but also by synecdoche (making us aware of the geospatial features and material constituents of the physical border’s cartography). The propulsive camera movement funnels the viewer, just like the way the fence funnels the migrants towards taking the much more forbidding path across the Mexico–U.S. border, mimicking the way that border-crossers on foot are forced to stake out the territory to figure out where mobile passages lie. This is how the camera movement and the image track take on the impression of devices that are extensions of the PTD’s border enforcement apparatus, while the soundtrack points to how their effects are distributed across human and non-human bodies.3 Denied a safer pass through the border fence, our eyes travel restlessly to find the more remote terrain of the desert, stretching out into the unknown as the embodiment of the policy. Just like the migrants, we are left with no choice but to foray into the unknown, to reach the first site of bodily mobility. Titled “Costas,” the second act leads the viewer into the desert as well as the lengthy ethnographic segment of the film. Here, rumbles of a distant thunderstorm and the rhythmic chirping of crickets precede the image, alongside the chapter title, which is superimposed on a grainy black screen, and we enter the desert in the night, guided by the suspenseful crackling of sand scrunched underfoot. The night-time entry into a dangerous sector is mimetic here, because most migrants prefer to cross the border in the dark to avoid being detected. The close-up shot of a bobbing hand carrying a torch emerges from within the darkness as if in a tenebrist painting, giving the viewer the impression of a mobile body, finally able 3 Image-capture technologies such as surveillance cameras, satellite remote sensing, and actual drones are already actively used as extensions of this apparatus (Eurosur is the European equivalent), so perhaps the impression is accurate. The travelling shot’s funnelling of the eye towards the desert resonates with Camilla Fojas’s description of how drones shepherd migrants, for example: “Along with the entire security apparatus at the border, drones shepherd migrants to dangerous and inhospitable terrain and expose them to death. Migrants are not simply rerouted, demobilized, and denatured, they are captured as image and information that is fed into an integrated tactical infrastructure” (2019, p. 310).

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to move forwards on the migrant trail. Immediately, a different aesthetic, which several critics have found evocative of sensory ethnography, kicks in. The predominantly dim image track withdraws the field of vision from prominence and allows other senses like audition and proprioception to step in to complicate perception. While it is a stretch, the critics’ association of this aesthetic with sensory ethnography is understandable, because the ethnographic films produced by Harvard University’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, which J. P. Sniadecki was aff iliated with at some point during his graduate school years, have received a lot of attention over the past few years, becoming a reference point for ethnographic films with innovative approaches to image-sound relations. Critically acclaimed works such as Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s Leviathan (2012) have especially been influential in this regard, with Ernst Karel’s powerful sound design featured in the film rekindling interest in the ethnographic potential of acoustic ecologies and process-oriented sound. An avant-garde film that features mostly night-time footage shot aboard a groundfish trawler off the coast of New Bedford, Leviathan shares a few features with En Mar La Mar, including an investment in “documenting sonic ecologies that retain a monstrous edge” and an approach to audiovisuality that “begins from the middle; from within the various forces that make up the relations the film seeks to explore” (Kara & Thain, 2014, pp. 186–187). While, in the former f ilm, the monstrosity is an overall metaphor that speaks to the turbulent relations between the human, animal, and machinic agents in the oceanic landscape of commercial fishing, its presence in El Mar La Mar is implied in much more subtle ways. The foray into the realm of the unknown through the siren-like call of a night-time thunderstorm is a subtle detail that suggests a horror film aesthetic, for example, because it is responded to by the cautious movements of the aforementioned shot of a hand carrying a torch in the pitch dark, bringing to mind the conventional set-up for jump scares in the genre. However, monstrosity and horror are embedded in the second act not in the sustained fashion of stable genre conventions, but as the affective contours of a broader climate, which goes in and out of legibility through the film’s eclectic aesthetic. As Amahl Bishara and Naomi Schiller (2017) note: While one reviewer suggested that El mar la mar resembles a horror movie (Cronk 2017), for us, the film suggests the slow and morally ambivalent ways that we live in the midst of systems of violence, when the scenery can be striking and the evidence of violence appears only occasionally on our doorstep. (p. 199)

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While one reviewer suggested that El mar la mar resembles a horror movie (Cronk 2017), for us, the film suggests the slow and morally ambivalent ways that we live in the midst of systems of violence, when the scenery can be striking and the evidence of violence appears only occasionally on our doorstep.

Such an undercurrent of horror and violence that runs through everyday experiences is made sensible most vividly through the audio testimonials, recorded by shotgun microphones. In fact, the film’s distinct approach to sound design (in good company with Sensory Ethnography Lab films in terms of a heightened attention to documentary sound and affective climates, yet unique in its use of microphones, recording and abstraction techniques, and found sound from various sources such as short-wave radio and YouTube) become most conspicuous in the careful co-articulation of the location sounds from the border, the Sonoran biome, and testimonials. We hear a series of audio testimonials, for the first and only time in this act, excerpted from interviews with subjects that the filmmakers met during their fieldwork. Set against black frames, the testimonials hail from invisible sound sources and impart commentary on the incongruous realities that meet and clash on the migrant trail. The disembodied voices immediately signal to the viewer that the film asks them to be guided by audition, rather than sight, in navigating the desert landscape’s human dimension as well as geospatial features. Sniadecki states: When we first started doing the interviews, and setting them against black frames, we were interested in… what would it be like to have a film where you sit in the darkness and listen to someone? You’re in the dark, attending to voice and ambient sound—what would that be like? What kind of image track is generated within the mind of the viewer as these things are going on? We were interested in creating a chorus of… the kinds of violence that ripples into the everyday, that ripples into the lives of people in this space (as cited in Mulligan, 2017).

What the statement suggests is that the avoidance of the talking-heads aesthetic and the decoupling of the voices from their bodies are intentional choices. They allow the viewer to project and focus on what Tom Artiss would call “mediated structures of sonic feeling: imprints of hearing experiences that articulate subjective constellations of sound, time, and space,” vis-à-vis the recollections shared by the interviewees (2018, pp. 321–328). The description of the effect of the disembodied testimonials as a kind of

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chorus of violence, rippling into the everyday, is evocative here, because it alludes to the director’s recognition of both the transcorporeality of the migrant experience on the Sonora Desert—as a kind of shared and uncontainable violence that traverses across personal, corporeal, and spatial boundaries—and of the migrant aspects of soundtracks itself, with the capacity to reverberate and carry affects from out of cinematic space into the everyday perceptual field of the viewer. Whether sound is a migrant phenomenon or not is often discussed by sound scholars, who frequently formulate it “as a visceral and vibrational force” that can travel through waves (Baker & Anderson-Kunert, 2019, p. 2), send the body moving, and move the hearer towards considerations of “how life is composed in the midst of affects” (Lorimer, 2008, p. 2). Artist-composers such as Yolanda Harris also make a connection between soundtracks and displacement, drawing attention to the fact that the presentness we feel when we are listening to field recordings of a location (which are always displaced soundscapes) is related to an “acute awareness of embodied location” channelled through them (Harris, 2013, p. 13). Neither Sniadecki nor Bonnetta make a direct reference to such scholarship; however, Bonnetta acknowledges the influence of musique concrète, the history of artists using field recording (such as Michel Redolfi in Desert Tracks), and, to a greater extent, anecdotal sound after Pierre Schaeffer (especially in the work of Luc Ferrari), which suggest that the logic behind their uncoupling of voices and bodies has to do with a similar care for embodied location and ethics of displaced soundscapes. On a relevant note, Bonnetta’s privileging of Ferrari’s anecdotal model over Schaffer’s (despite acknowledging the influence of both) is striking, in that the former figure marks a turn from craft-based formulations of sound (established by Schaffer and the proponents of musique concrète in the late 40s and early 50s) towards referentiality (an appreciation of the original souce and its meanings in recordings) and social sound. As Geoffrey Cox (2017) notes, Ferrari’s approach, beautifully demonstrated in works such as the Presque Rien series, can be viewed as occupying a middle ground between musique concrète and the experimental practices of documentary sound established by the early British and Soviet documentary movements. These movements cherished the manipulation of location recordings, technological mediation, and sonic abstraction, yet did not disavow the social. Through its careful sound design, El Mar la Mar can be taken as a film that reflects on the sonic philosophies of these traditions and brings them into the context of migration. The selection of the first testimonial is an interesting example of anecdotal sound in this regard, because its content is not particularly relevant to the

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experience of migration or migrants. Yet it is incorporated as integral to the social geography of the desert. A young man (a picker that the filmmakers came across in the dark during their f ield research) tells the story of a confrontation with the mythical, 15-foot Arivaca monster that inhabits the desert. Instead of framing the Sonora Desert as a migrant ecology, the monster story gives it an instantly mysterious and monstrous edge, which helps establish an “affective tone” of dread and estrangement that sustains the voices of migrant experiences that will join the chorus later (Goodman, 2012). It can be imagined as serving like a bass line, if we continue the chorus metaphor, reverberating from a lower register that sets the tone. In doing so, the monster story creates an itinerant mental image that makes the desert resonate, first and foremost, as a relational geography, one that is home to the realities of the migrant trail yet cannot be subsumed by them. In Acoustic Territories (2010), Brandon Labelle argues that sound creates relational geographies, which are often “emotional, contentious, fluid,” and stimulate “a form of knowledge that moves in and out of the body” (p. xxv). It is also, he writes, promiscuous. “It exists as a network that teaches us how to belong, to find place, to attune to others, as well as how not to belong, to drift, to figure acts of dislocation, and to dwell within experiences of rupture” (LaBelle, 2010, p. xvii). In a sense, what the viewer is invited to do, when listening to the emotional audio testimonials in the dark, is to attune to the voices’ spatial network and imagine them as located in (as well as dislocated from) an acoustic territory that reverberates with echoes of everyday horrors. In his book The Horror Film (2004), Peter Hutchings states that sound in the horror genre “denotes the unseen presence of something that should not be there,” and therefore helps make monsters sensible (pp. 128–129). Monsters are often situated off-screen, aurally, in a blind space “where the violent screeches, bumps, strikes, and moans are separated from their sources” (Luko, 2013, p. 7). This essentially renders them acousmêtres or “acoustical beings” à la Michel Chion (1999): entities that are heard but usually shrouded from view. There is a subtle monstrosity suggested by the audio testimonials in the second act in this sonic sense too. Undocumented migrants are often overexposed though mechanisms of immigration surveillance yet remain socially invisible, threatening, and abject, because their bids at crossing the border are seen as a breach of rich states’ sacred gates of stability. What the film’s disembodied voices bring to mind is this “biopolitics of otherness” or presumed alterity (Fassin, 2001). Yet the speaking voices that the viewer hears appear to be trespassers, witnesses, victims, and monsters all at once. They not only belong to migrants but also to those that volunteer, live in,

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and surveil the desert—with the latter raising ethical concerns about the film’s inclusion of the point of view of border patrol. Because voices are not synced with on-screen faces, we wait for a reveal, for the voices to find their bodies. But as more audio testimonials roll in, set against black frames, an overarching veil of spectrality is cast upon all. The film’s resistance to clearly identify the interviewees is no doubt partly motivated by a desire to protect some of the at-risk subjects, to frustrate both border policies’ and documentary style reportage’s demands for exposure, yet it also renders the desert sonorous, teeming with acousmêtres that invite the viewer to pay attention to relationality. 4 The audio testimonials are not the only striking element of sound design in the second act; in between each act, the film presents the viewer with rich compositions, featuring location sounds that are constitutive of the broader acoustic ecology of the desert and the Sonoran biome. These also appear unsynced or difficult to identify at times. A rumbling sky suggests the possibility of a sudden burst of rain. The desert has scorching temperatures, yet also brief seasons of monsoon, so rain is not unlikely. However, what the rumbling sky transitions to are the sounds and sights of a forest fire in the dark. Animals such as bats, which the camera locates in a cave, are not synced, because their frequencies require speedy shifting to make them perceptible. Later on, in a sequence that Sniadecki reportedly referred to as the “psycho-desert scene” in one of his question-and-answer sessions, close-up shots of desert flora, such as cacti, are synced with their sounds. The contact microphones placed inside cacti generate a sonic eeriness and intensity that point to the ultimate strangeness of non-human scales. They bring the viewer into a hypnotic visceral proximity with the desert’s non-human ecology as well as the various technologies that are called in to mediate it. Here, while the sound sources are not hidden from sight, both the sounds and the images (also grainy and fleshy, owing to the choice of 16 mm film) retain their otherness. In moments such as these, the desert itself materializes as an acousmêtre: diabolical, omnipresent, and impenetrable in its acoustic ambiguity. The fact that the close-up shots of cacti and night-time dwellers of the desert are followed by tracking shots, presumably, from the vehicles of patrol agents, strengthens this association, pointing to the use of the desert as a deterrent against migration. 4 In my conversation with Bonnetta, he indicated that the two filmmakers had decided to avoid making a talking-heads documentary early on; therefore, quite a few of the interviews were not filmed at all, but they also took into account the need to protect the interviewees, who were vulnerable, and abstracted the image tracks when needed.

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Conversely, the footage does not remain consistently dark or dim throughout the second act.5 Overall, this ethnographic segment almost presents a showcase of diverse filmmaking methodologies and aesthetics, drawing upon the traditions of fields such as experimental film, fiction film, various subfields of anthropology, and field recordings.6 In addition to black frames, some testimonials are laid under shots of the material remains of migrants and there is also observational footage of desert dwellers, humans, animals, surveillance towers, infrastructure, and landscape. Among the material remains, Tess Takahashi states, “we see footprints in soft brown dirt, abandoned shoes, a tangle of red, white, and blue clothing, faded backpacks, ID cards, pink rosaries, and once-green water bottles bleached by the sun” (2019). These are juxtaposed seamlessly with shots showing the living conditions and the occasionally adrift bodies of locals, suggesting a connection between “the despair of the Hispanic migrants” and “the loneliness of the American inhabitants of the region” (Salvatore, 2018). The archaeological so-called inventory-style cataloguing of physical traces likely references Jason De León’s “four-field anthropology.” As mentioned earlier, De León is the author of a book about the migrant trail, but he is also thanked in the credits and acknowledged by the filmmakers in interviews as someone that was essential to both the background research (through his book) and the fieldwork for the film (2010). Sniadecki elaborates: We went down to Arivaca [AZ], where he had done a lot of his field work, and we met people there. We hiked with Tucson samaritans, brought water and supplies into Sonora, talked at migrant shelters, interviewed people in Chicago and Arizona and Colorado… and we did a lot of walking around the desert together. So our research was both digging from afar and connecting with people, but also walking the same trails that other people have walked. And not only spending time on those trails, but also just in the desert, finding regions and areas that were fascinating to us 5 The interplay between daytime and twilight sequences is a point of curiosity in Bonnetta’s more recent film The Two Sights too. Bonnetta indicates that he likes filming during twilight, partly because of the magical qualities of light at that time and partly because of his interest in the historical twilight of space, explored extensively in Peter Davidson’s book The Last of the Light: About Twilight (2015). 6 Cinematic history is also invoked: There are references and nods to Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1954), which was f ilmed in the Sonora Desert; Westerns; Bruce Baillie; Valentin de las Sierras (1971); Chick Strand; Deborah Stratman; Sharon Lockhart; James Benning (the shot of a train in the film is an homage to Benning’s work); and Peter Hutton, who the filmmakers found out passed away on the last day of filming.

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for whatever reason—geographically, or botanically, or politically. (as cited in Mulligan, 2017)

Here, the interest in the geographical, botanical, and political mapping of the desert, in addition to the acoustic, once again highlights the film’s cartophonic sensibility. Relevantly, Sniadecki’s individual collaboration with De León goes beyond the context of this film alone. The director’s 2020 f ilm (with Lisa Malloy), A Shape of Things to Come, is also shot in the Sonora Desert and follows one of the subjects seen in El Mar la Mar, Sundog: a reclusive man, who rehearses shooting down two of Border Patrol’s surveillance towers as part of his fantasies of bringing down civilization. This second film directly features thermal drone cinematography from De León’s Undocumented Migration Project, as stated in the credits.7 In his description of “four-field anthropology,” De León explicitly explains that he came up with the four-tiered model, because he was not convinced that participant observation, the methodological cornerstone of ethnographic research, is an appropriate tool for understanding clandestine migration. He argues that the methods he uses, such as the archaeological method, which focuses on objects left behind by migrants, are safer than participant observation, because the latter often puts migrants at risk. Whether De León’s approach is itself exempt from ethical concerns, the representational strategies of a few of his four fields can be located in the image track and soundtrack of El Mar la Mar, contributing to the film’s eclectic (and perhaps meta) articulation of film methodologies and aesthetics. Through such eclecticism, the viewer is ultimately presented with a cartophonic mapping of the Sonora Desert, which makes it appear as both viscerally present and distant as a chimera, reflected from cinema’s myriad mirrors placed and pitted against each other. The f inal act of the f ilm, “Tormenta” (Storm), presents yet another divergent aesthetic, in the form of a mini f ilm poem, featuring grainy black-and-white imagery of a region of the desert preceding and during a downpour. A recited passage from the 17th-century Mexican poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s iconic poem “Primero Sueño” (“First Dream”) is heard as voice-over, accompanying the stationary long shots that invoke the contemplative temporality and existential angst of slow cinema. The poem, 7 The film’s sound design and mix are done by Ernst Karel, who I am grateful to for allowing me to watch an early cut (with the generous permission of the directors). Karel’s soundtrack itself stands out to me as evocative of a “migrant soundtrack,” with its attention to the sonic complexity of the Sonora Desert, including but not limited to that of the migrant trail.

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which, in its longer version, is often interpreted as divided into three parts (two of which revolve around the themes of corporeal journey and spiritual awakening) mentions ghosts, yet another form of acousmêtres. That serves as a subtle connector between the three acts by alluding to forces that are heard but not seen. At the level of content, the recital of “Primero Sueño” allows the film to conclude its cartophonic trek through a sombre search for answers—or for one’s self-understanding after an experiential and spiritual journey—in the epilogue. The patient arrival of the rainstorm and the sensual vocabulary of Sor Juana, which appeals to the senses through mentions of sonic and haptic elements such as a calm smoke, misty vapours, transformed wind, and intoning tones, remind us that the Rio Grande is a topography in constant transition, just like the visual surfaces and the sonic depths of the film, with modulating climates, biomes, sounds, and affects.8 In terms of the rationale behind its inclusion, however, the poem presents the viewer with another layer of intertextuality. Shot on the last day of filming and on expired stock given to Sniadecki and Bonnetta by Mexican Canadian filmmaker Nicolás Pereda, the storm sequence recalls Pereda’s 2009 experimental film All Things Were Now Overtaken by Silence, which follows a staging of the same poem to pose questions about the process of filmmaking—its engagements with light, silence, music, landscape, and nature. While such intertextuality provides little closure, in terms of what the film wants the viewer to take away from the connection among migration, bodies, voices and sounds, and landscapes, it highlights El Mar la Mar as a film that honours both the realities encountered on the migrant trail, as disjunctive as they appear at times, and the realities of the film’s own processual journey. What is the potential of El Mar la Mar’s cartophonic approach, or the (counter)mapping of the geosocial relations across the Sonora Desert, then? In his chapter on Ursula Biemann’s Sahara Chronicle (2009), poignantly titled “Video’s Migrant Geography,” Demos argues that the Swiss artist’s depiction of “the struggle between mobility and the politics of containment” on the Algeria–Morocco border helps chart “a vague terrain that is the space of the migrant” (2013, p. 201). More specifically, “Biemann deploys a diversity of representational strategies and presents a variety of perspectives,” to 8 Notably, the Sonora Desert is home to the greatest species diversity in any desert in North America as well as to several ecotones. In environmental science, an ecotone describes a transitional ecology where different species meet and blend. In El Mar La Mar, the rich soundtrack, attentive to the blending of ambient sounds from distinct coordinates in the desert, charts out Rio Grande as a broader transitional ecology or sonic ecotone perhaps, in which complex human and non-human realities meet.

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create a mode of address that challenges “the representational conditions of clandestine migration,” including “sensationalist images corresponding to an easily consumable repertoire of human-interest stories” (Demos, 2013, pp. 203–206). These strategies and perspectives find their culmination in a sandstorm sequence, in which the opacity of the desert and its barely discernable inhabitants visualize clandestine migration’s resistance to reductive capture. One might imagine a storm-chasing connection between the migrant geography that is rendered visible in Biemann’s aesthetically opaque sandstorm sequence and the one that surfaces in El Mar la Mar’s epilogue. Opacity in the latter film, however, is not the ultimate goal or representational strategy. Rather, sensorially rich sequences, such as the one showing the approaching rainstorm or the one that depicts the desert during the low light conditions of twilight, support the filmmakers’ investment in foregrounding embodied location, so that the effects of displacement and clandestine mobility find sharp relief. Sniadecki and Bonnetta give equal weight to sights and sounds, allowing the viewer to contemplate the history of representation pertaining not only to the cinema of and on migration but also to the various audiovisual traditions that engage with field recordings. From its contact mic-enabled fleshy drone sounds (which point to sitedness and materiality rather than rehashing experimental cinema’s cliché practices of putting eerie reverb sound as drones underneath visual footage) to the disembodied audio testimonials (which defy talking-heads convention in documentary filmmaking) and the broader acoustic ecology that the film construes through field recordings as well as anecdotal sound objects, El Mar la Mar challenges our expectations of what a migrant geography sounds and looks like. What it presents might be imagined as a “migrant soundtrack,” the sounding of a simultaneously violent and vibrant terrain that compels us to attune to the struggles of survival and the search for better lives in the expanse of seascapes and desertscapes.

References: Alonso, A. D., & Nienass, B. (2016). Deaths, Visibility, and Responsibility: The Politics of Mourning at the U.S.-Mexico Border. Social Research, 83(2), 421–451. Artiss, T. (2018). Structures of Sonic Feeling. In M. Bull (Ed.), The Routledge Companion to Sound Studies (pp. 321-328). New York: Routledge. Baillie, B. (Director). (1971). Valentin de las Sierras [Film]. United States: Canyon Cinema Foundation.

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Baker, A., & Anderson-Kunert, T. (2019). Guest Editorial: Journeys in and through Sound. Qualitative Research Journal, 19(1), 2-8. Biemann, U. (Director). (2009). Sahara Chronicle [Film]. Switzerland: Zurich Institute of Art and Design. Bishara, A., & Schiller, N. (2017). Making Violence Visible at the U.S./Mexico Border: Review of the Exhibitions Fencing In Democracy and State of Exception/Estado de Excepción, and the Film El Mar La Mar. Visual Anthropology Review, 33, 195-200. Bonnetta, J., & Sniadecki, J. P. (Directors). (2017). El Mar La Mar [Film]. United States: The Cinema Guild. Bonnetta, J. (Director). (2020). The Two Sights [Film]. Canada: Canada Council for the Arts. Boyce, G. A. (2019). The Neoliberal Underpinnings of Prevention Through Deterrence and the United States Government’s Case Against Geographer Scott Warren. Journal of Latin American Geography, 18(3), 192-201. Castaing-Taylor, L., & Paravel, V. (Directors). (2012). Leviathan [Film]. United Kingdom: Arrete Ton Cinema. Chion, M. (1999). The Voice in Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press. Cox, G. (2017). “There Must Be a Poetry of Sound That None of Us Knows…”: Early British Documentary Film and the Prefiguring of Musique Concrète. Organised Sound, 22(2), 172–186. Davidson, P. (2015). The Last of the Light: About Twilight. London: Reaktion Books. De León, J. (2010). Background. Retrieved from The Undocumented Migration Project: https://www.undocumentedmigrationproject.org/background1 De León, J. (2015). The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail. Oakland: University of California Press. Demos, T. J. (2013). The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fassin, D. (2001). The Biopolitics of Otherness: Undocumented Foreigners and Racial Discrimination in French Public Debate. Anthropology Today, 17(1), 3–7. Fifteen Questions Interview with Joshua Bonnetta: Index of Possibilities. (n.d.). Retrieved from Fifteen Questions: https://15questions.net/interview/ fifteen-questions-interview-joshua-bonnetta/page-1/ Fojas, C. (2019). Drone Futures. Cultural Dynamics, 31(4), 308–322. Goodman, S. (2012). Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. Cambridge: MIT Press. Harris, Y. (2013). Presentness in Displaced Sound. Leonardo Music Journal, 23, 13–14. Hutchings, P. (2004). The Horror Film. London: Pearson. Ide, W. (2018, August 5). El Mar La Mar review – Engrossing experimental documentary set on the Mexico-US border. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian. com/film/2018/aug/05/el-mar-la-mar-reviews-sonoran-desert-us-mexico-border

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Kara, S., & Thain, A. (2014). Sonic Ethnographies: Leviathan and New Materialisms in Documentary. In H. Rogers (Ed.), Music and Sound in Documentary Film (pp. 180–192). New York: Routledge. LaBelle, B. (2010). Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life. New York: Continuum. Lorimer, H. (2008). Cultural Geography: Non-Representational Conditions and Concerns. Progress in Human Geography, 32(4), 551–559. Luko, A. (2013). Listening to Ingmar Bergman’s Monsters: Horror Music, Mutes, and Acoustical Beings in Persona and Hour of the Wolf. Journal of Film Music, 6(1), 5–30. Mulligan, J. (2017, September  22). CIFF Inter view: Director J.P. Sniadecki of “El Mar La Mar.” Boston News Today. https://digboston.com/ ciff-interview-director-j-p-sniadecki-of-el-mar-la-mar/ Noble, F. (2018). Beyond the Sea: Seascapes and Migration in Contemporary Spanish Cinema. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 95(6), 637–656. Oppermann, S. (2017). Introducing Migrant Ecologies in an (Un)Bordered World. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 24(2), 243–256. Pereda, N. (Director). (2009). All Things Were Now Overtaken by Silence [Film]. Mexico. Ray, N. (Director). (1954). Johnny Guitar [Film]. United States: Republic Pictures. Redolfi, M. (2016). Desert Tracks [Album]. Sub Rosa. Rosi, G. (Director). (2016). Fuocoammare [Fire at Sea] [Film]. Italy: Stemal Entertainment. Salvatore, G. D. (2018, February 20). El Mar La Mar. Retrieved from Film Explorer. https://www.filmexplorer.ch/detail/el-mar-la-mar/ Stork, M. (2013). Chaos Cinema Assaultive Action Aesthetics. Media Fields Journal, 6, 6–16. Takahashi, T. (2019, March 15). PROGRAM NOTES: Joshua Bonnetta and J.P. Sniadecki’s El Mar La Mar. Retrieved from Vertical Features. https://www.verticalfeaturesto. com/el-mar-la-mar Thulin, S. (2018). Sound Maps Matter: Expanding Cartophony. Social & Cultural Geography, 19(2), 192–210.

About the Author Selmin Kara is an associate professor of Film and New Media Studies at OCAD University in Toronto. Her primary research interests are digital aesthetics and ecological sensibilities in cinema as well as the use of sound and new technologies in contemporary documentary.

5.

Dislodged from History, Confronted by Walls: Picturing Migration as a Global Emergency Dora Apel

Abstract This essay examines select visual representations of refugees and migrants as embodied subjects in photography, art, and video. It focuses on American asylum politics and explores the questions of free movement, the right to have rights, and the ethics and efficacy of border walls. It argues that the catastrophe of global forced displacement makes the elimination of national borders and the nation state itself a revolutionary necessity. Keywords: asylum, free movement, border walls, art exhibitions, national sovereignty, migrants and refugees

André Aciman (2016) writes of the Holocaust survivors who became homeless refugees, “You are eternally dislodged, eternally transitional, and eternally out of sync with the world.” This describes the condition of enduring trauma that persists for contemporary refugees, too, including survivors of gang violence, war, persecution, famine, and other life-threatening conditions. This does not mean, however, that refugees cannot return to living productive lives, if they are lucky enough to have the opportunity to do so, even if they may have a continuing sense of themselves as displaced or in mourning. How much worse is the condition of refugees and migrants made by their status as stateless subjects without rights, reviled by the countries where they seek refuge? In this essay, I focus on a selection of photographs, videos, and artworks shown in the United States and international art exhibitions that demonstrate in powerful ways the traumatic effects of anti-immigration policy on

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migrants and refugees. Such works and exhibitions create a public sphere that makes visible the dire plight of refugees and the unstoppable flow of migratory movement. I also examine American asylum politics, explore the question of borders and free movement, and consider the ethics and efficacy of border walls to help explain the origins and impact of immigration policy and to show how the global capitalist system of militarized borders has become increasingly untenable. Among the exhibitions on forced migration that have opened in art museums in the United States in the past several years is The Warmth of Other Suns – Stories of Global Displacement at the Phillips Collection in Philadelphia (2019). The exhibition featured about 75 paintings, photographs, videos, and installations that explored the global refugee crisis with works chosen by curators from the New Museum in New York City. Many of the artists are immigrants themselves. French Algerian artist Kader Attia strew the floor with faded blue jeans, blue shirts, sweatshirts, and shoes to create the installation La Mer Morte (The Dead Sea), reminding us of the thousands who have been lost at sea, whose clothes may also wash up on shore. Belgian-born, Mexico-based artist Francis Alÿs’s video, Don’t Cross the Bridge Before You Get to the River, pictures a long line of children holding toy sailboats, walking into a large body of water, and disappearing, made at the Strait of Gibraltar between Morocco and Spain (2008). The Warmth of Other Suns also reminds us of earlier migrations in the last century. A painting by Armenian Arshile Gorky, The Artist and His Mother (ca. 1926–1942), painted long after Gorky emigrated to the United States, pictures the artist as an 8-year-old boy with his mother, who the artist, as a 14-year-old, watched starve to death during the Armenian genocide. A Farm Security Administration photograph by Jack Delano of a Black family moving north evokes the mass migration of six million Black people attempting to escape Jim Crow racism in the South. Group of Florida Migrants on Their Way to Cranberry, New Jersey, to Pick Potatoes near Shawboro, North Carolina (1940) shows them tying all their worldly belongings onto the top and back of a car while a young girl poses in front of it. In a remarkable representation of embodied trauma, Turkish artist Erkan Özgen’s 2016 video Wonderland presents a 13-year-old deaf and mute Syrian boy named Muhammed, who escaped the bombing of his hometown of Kobane by the Islamic State and eventually made it to the artist’s hometown in Turkey. The boy is anxious to convey his experience and describes what he saw through a variety of mimetic actions, hand gestures, and wordless sounds. The sometimes frantic acting out of all he observed is mesmerizing,

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Figure 5.1: Erkan Özgen, Wonderland, 2016, single-channel digital video, colour, sound, 3’54.” Photo: Courtesy the artist.

haunting, and traumatic in its own right. Through his body language and facial expressions, Muhammed conveys planes dropping bombs, going without food and water, the blindfolding and tying of hands before hangings and shootings, beheadings, and more, with an urgency and intensity that is chilling. New Museum curator Natalie Bell observes, “[s]omehow, taking the words out of this story made it all the more powerful. It’s hard to watch and it’s hard not to watch. It’s hard to turn away” (as cited in Stamberg, 2019). Muhammed is desperate to be understood and we want to understand as he performs the horror he has experienced, presenting it in precise and disturbing corporeal language. The video thus gives “voice” to a doubly voiceless refugee, without resources and without the ability to speak, who is still able to tell his story with uncommon power. “The power of his body language,” says Özgen, “made any other language form insufficient and insignificant” (as cited in Smee, 2019).1 Indeed, Muhammed’s sharp observations and visual eloquence belie verbal necessity as he becomes the voice for those in Kobane who forever cannot speak. His skilled re-enactment calls into place in the public sphere traumatic events that otherwise might remain historically invisible. Such works challenge the viewer to confront the political meaning and continuing effects of traumatic events. 1 See also Erkan Özgen Interview: When Language is Not Enough (2019), which includes clips of the video and 15. İstanbul Bienali, 15th Istanbul Biennial ÖZEL KARAKÖY RUM ANA VE İLKÖĞRETİM OKULU (2017), for a 3’3” clip of the video.

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The travelling exhibition Baggage Claims, on the uncertainties of migration, originated at the Orlando Art Museum in 2017 and included the video Road Movie by Iranian-born, Berlin-based artist Shahram Entekhabi in collaboration with Dutch cultural theorist and video artist Mieke Bal. In a single long take, a man dressed in a shabby suit with two old cardboard suitcases walks away from the viewer along the median of a long straight four-lane highway as traffic sometimes sails past. He disappears momentarily into the horizon and then reappears and walks back towards the viewer. If we identify with the man as he walks away, substituting ourselves for the receding figure, we realize we have a long journey ahead with only our feet as a vehicle of mobility and not much in the way of worldly goods. We may feel anxious about the unknown, hopeful about the future, sorrowful about what is being left behind. As citizens and viewers, we may be anxious about the migration of friends, neighbours, family members. Alternatively, as the figure comes towards us once more, we are in an imminent face-to-face confrontation. This can be read as evoking the fear of those who experience not the exodus of friends and neighbours but the influx of needy refugees and strangers who arrive with almost nothing. Shahram Entekhabi identifies the man as a minimalist version of the “migrant figure” or “guest worker” as he believes Western Europeans imagine him. He suggests that the dual coming and going raises questions of visibility and invisibility, as well as the split nature of the individual who is forced to migrate, perpetually travelling elsewhere and seeking a place in the world while always longing for home.2 Mieke Bal suggests the possibility that the man has been turned away at a border, denied entry and forced back, but that his return “reliev[es] the tension created by his absence,” thereby proposing that we identify with those who have been left behind to wait.3 Whether we identify with the man or the invisible watcher, the enactment of departure and return speaks to longing and need, recognition and non-recognition, and the perpetual conflict between home and away, departure and return. The experience of anonymity, displacement, and invisibility also describes the refugees in Albanian artist Adrian Paci’s video Centro di permanenza temporanea (Temporary Detention Centre), another work in The Warmth of Other Suns exhibition. A group of men shuffle towards isolated airplane boarding stairs, climb up them, and wait endlessly on this stairway to 2 See “Visibility_Invisibility, An Artist’s Statement,” http://www.entekhabi.org/Texts/Visibility_Invisibility.html. 3 See http://www.miekebal.org/artworks/films/road-movie/.

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Figure 5.2: Adrian Paci, Centro di Permanenza temporanea (Temporary Detention Center), 2007, video, colour, sound, 4’32.” (still from video). Courtesy of the artist and kaufmann repetto Milano / New York, and Peter Kilchmann, Zürich.

nowhere. Planes take off in the distance, but none approach the occupied boarding stairs, loaded to capacity with men who clearly want to go somewhere yet are left in a limbo of helplessness. The imagery suggests a metaphor for the modern refugee as perpetually displaced and forgotten, consigned to no place or existing in an unplace, stranded outside time and place, waiting for an unknown fate, yet perhaps suspecting it has already arrived. Existing outside the recognized structures of citizenship, the refugee is indeed “eternally dislodged, eternally transitional, and eternally out of sync with the world.” Anything can be done to the rightless, from their abandonment in detention to hunger, thirst, and drowning, in a state of perpetual unbelonging. In different ways, these videos construct an image of the stateless refugee deprived of rights, even the right to have rights, whose life conditions embody the minimal biological existence of “bare life” in a “zone of exception” outside the protection of the state that Giorgio Agamben first theorized in relation to the concentration camps of World War II. This description applies equally well to the migrant detention centres and camps across the United States and Europe. The countries that have taken in the most refugees include Turkey, Pakistan, Sudan, Germany, Iran, Lebanon, Bangladesh, and Ethiopia. Uganda, one of the poorest nations on Earth, has taken in more than one million refugees, many who fled the civil war in South Sudan; it has taken in the third highest number of refugees in the world (Harrington, 2019).

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Figure 5.3: Orna Ben-Ami, Entire Life in a Package, 2016, Welded iron sculpture on photo. The original photo: Reuters/ Marko Djurica. Courtesy of the artist]

Israeli artist Orna Ben-Ami approaches the subject of migrant precarity by combining metal sculpture with Reuters photographs taken within the last 20 years to convey a sense of perpetual displacement altogether unique in its tactile resonance and affective dimensions. In her exhibition An Entire Life in a Package, shown at the United Nations in Geneva and New York City as well as various museums around the world and across the United States, the photos are reinforced to hold the sculpted and welded iron, giving the images an eerie presence. By putting together two materials that normally don’t go together, Ben-Ami transforms them into a kind of uncanny metaphor for the condition of the migrant, who has stepped outside of ordinary time and space. In a work consisting of a hunched iron figure sitting on a suitcase in the middle of railroad tracks, its three-dimensional quality is oddly reversed, rendering the two-dimensional photo that recedes to a vanishing point on the horizon more “real” than the attached sculpted figure, which flattens out like an abstract map of a human. Only the “package,” that is, the suitcase into which “an entire life” has been packed, has a three-dimensional quality, as if holding all the memories and desires to which a refugee may cling—even as they appear to feel their own body disappearing in the endless search for a place of belonging. The receding railroad tracks signal the infinite journey and recall the black-and-white photos of the train tracks leading to Birkenau,

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where millions of Jews vanished, while the abstraction of the figure suggests a gradual succumbing to a hollowed-out life or a living death. The hybrid image conveys the incongruousness of the migrant’s status: ungrounded, unmoored, unprotected. In the exhibition Unpacked: Refugee Baggage at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Syrian architect and sculptor Mohamed Hafez joined with Iraqi writer Ahmed Badr to look inside the “package.” They listened to the stories of refugee families from Iraq, Afghanistan, Congo, Syria, and Iran now living in America and created a multimedia installation in which the voices of each family tell their stories while viewers engage with scale models of ruined homes and rooms left behind as represented by Hafez in 10 suitcases, nine wall pieces, and one big installation. The works give voice to the experiences of 10 families whose lives were upended by war or civil unrest (as cited in Stewart, 2020). 4 The valise is a common trope in art on migration, but Hafez goes beyond the question of what it means to pack a life in a box to ask what it means to pack a people, or a nation, in a box. In his work A Refugee Nation, in the Baggage Claims exhibition, Hafez opens the box to create a whole apartment building from what look like miniature cement blocks, broken and in ruins, inside a typewriter case, as if producing a palimpsest of a city that now exists only in memory and imagination. These memories of place are carried personally as well as collectively, private recollections and public representations constructing and reinforcing each other. As a whole, these places in suitcases are monuments to lost cities and ways of life that simultaneously demonstrate how they were lost and the effect of that loss on those who survived to become migrants and refugees. They evoke a sense of trauma and violence as much as a nostalgic longing for home, a burden always carried. In these and other travelling exhibitions, the images of people enduring ongoing vulnerability and precarity, following the sudden loss of home, national identity, and the rights of citizenship, provide urgently needed forms of representation that not only make the global catastrophe visible but also frame it in terms that ultimately suggest the inability of global capitalism to support and sustain its own populations. Capitalism not only fails to meet the global crisis of refugees, but helps create the economic, ecological, social, and political conditions that produce it, while confronting the resulting human flood with a wall of hostility and rejection. By producing a public sphere that makes visible the plight of refugees through photography, video, 4

Also see Mohamed Hafez’s website at www.mohamadhafez.com.

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Figure 5.4: Mohamed Hafez, A Refugee Nation, 2017, Mixed media, plaster, paint, antique typewriter case, found objects, MP3 media player, 14 x 30 x 12 in (35 x 76 x 30 cm). Courtesy of the artist.

art, and film, it is possible to create a civic arena of political opposition to anti-immigrant policy, to expose the conditions that lead to the loss of rights, and, through political struggle, to enact those rights once again.

The Failure of Walls When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, there were 15 border walls around the world. Today, there are at least 77 global walls or fences, many erected

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after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York City and at the Pentagon. Morocco built a 1,700-mile sand wall fortified and surrounded by millions of land mines in 1975 along disputed, ungoverned territory on its border with Western Sahara. More than two decades ago, Spain built 20-foot-tall concrete barriers to wall off Melilla and Ceuta, Spanishadministered enclaves in Morocco, to increase border security against African migrants. In 2014, Saudi Arabia built a 550-mile-long wall with Iraq, a response to the rise of the Islamic State militants sweeping across parts of that country. In 2016, France built a mile-long wall, funded by the United Kingdom, at Calais to prevent migrants from accessing the Channel Tunnel that connects Britain to continental Europe. India is building a 1,700-mile-long barbed wire fence to block migrants from Bangladesh, with whom it shares a 2,500-mile border. In 2015, Austria, Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Slovenia, and Tunisia made plans or built walls on their borders, and in 2016, even Norway built a border wall. Countries are also investing in more border guards, more sophisticated surveillance technologies, and more detention facilities to hold unwanted migrants. This forces migrants to seek increasingly dangerous routes to asylum. According to the International Organization for Migration, an estimated 40 thousand people died attempting to cross a border between 2006 and 2015, with more than eight thousand dead or missing at borders in 2016 (Jones, 2019, pp. 2–3). Following 9/11, and the sudden sense of national vulnerability in the United States that it produced, states of emergency were declared, the National Guard was deployed to the U.S. border with Mexico, the number of agents on the border was doubled, smart border technology was installed, and new barrier fencing was built along 670 miles of the 2,000-mile border with Mexico—even though the relatively open border had nothing to do with those attacks. The rhetoric of the Bush administration shifted American policy to a defensive posture and constructed a new world order between “civilization”—meaning economically advanced Western countries—and the forces of “hate and evil”—code for Islam and people of colour—leading to the “global war on terror” and reinforcing the world view of White supremacist nationalism that became mainstream in the administration of Donald Trump. The war on terror led to a defensive “circling of the wagons” domestically, with Mexico increasingly represented as a dangerous and lawless place and undocumented immigrants dehumanized and def ined as “illegal aliens” (Jones, 2012, pp. 40–41).

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The new security measures, including the new border barrier, like the dozens of border walls around the world, must be understood not as demonstrating the strength of nation state sovereignty but instead as demonstrating its erosion. As political theorist Wendy Brown asserts, while walls may appear as hyperbolic tokens of such sovereignty, like all hyperbole, they reveal a tremulousness, vulnerability, dubiousness, or instability at the core of what they aim to express—qualities that are themselves antithetical to sovereignty and thus elements of its undoing. (2010, p. 24)

Put another way, the higher and longer the walls, the more precarious a grip on sovereignty the nation state betrays. The border south of San Diego, which was identified as an area of active human smuggling and drug trafficking, was the first borderland to be fenced under the Clinton administration in the 1990s. An installation by French artist JR, consisting of a huge image of a young Mexican boy peering over the border wall, seems to embody the precariousness of nation state sovereignty: the child metaphorically threatens to topple the wall with his fingertips while two Border Patrol agents look on, as if helpless. The image suggests that walls are ultimately flimsy, ineffective, and surmountable. More than this, it suggests they are made to be surmounted, the site of exclusion becoming the site of resistance.5 Historian Greg Grandin (2019) explains the proposed U.S. wall on the border with Mexico as representing the end of the myth of the Western frontier, which lasted for two centuries as an idea of endless growth and expansion, rugged individualism, and national wealth and power that, once the actual frontier closed, could be “applied to other arenas of expansion, to markets, war, culture, technology, science, the psyche, and politics.” The metaphor of the “frontier,” Grandin argues, conveyed a vision of a world order premised on U.S. global power and limitless growth. It kept at bay the domestic problems of racism, toxic masculinity, poverty, and violence, problems that only got worse following the 2007–2008 financial collapse after decades of deindustrialization, financial deregulation, and tax cuts for the wealthy, along with the rise of low-paying service jobs, stagnant wages, and personal debt, in addition to the problem of the unwinnable wars in Afghanisand Iraq (Grandin, 2019). 5 See Vallet, 2019. For images of the installation, see https://weandthecolor.com/ installation-artist-jr-border-mexico-usa/90649.

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Since the presidential race in 2016, Trump has held out his dream of “a beautiful wall,” insisting that walls work and invoking as a model the separation barrier built by Israel to contain Palestinians in the West Bank. Grandin observes, The wall might or might not be built. But even if it remains only in its phantasmagorical, budgetary stage, a perpetual negotiating chip between Congress and the White House, the promise of a two-thousand mile-long, thirty-foot-high ribbon of concrete and steel running along the United States’ southern border serves it purpose. It’s America’s new myth, a monument to the final closing of the frontier. (Grandin, 2019)

This is another way of saying the wall represents the final closing down of American optimism and the end of the “American dream.” The idea that you can “strike it rich” is no longer convincing when an increasing number of people struggle just to survive, many having lost their homes to foreclosure, their jobs to foreign cheap labour, their savings to a medical emergency, their lives to opioid addiction. Now, resources must be hoarded in an America that is “already full” in Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric. We have travelled from limitless horizons to “already full,” and from liberal universalism to good vs evil, Judeo-Christian vs Islam, White vs dark, civilized vs dangerous. It’s no accident that the insecurity that has focused on borders and the shoring up of nation state sovereignty has been launched into panic mode at a time when globalization has transformed the world. If we understand globalization as the free movement of people, goods, and services, borders are necessarily soft and porous. Urbanization, moreover, can no longer be defined as bounded cities; instead, corporate technological exploitation engulfs the Earth to its furthest reaches on land, under water, and in the air.6 Climate change wreaks global effects with huge consequences for people’s ability to survive as they have for centuries in the past. Understood in corporate, ecological, and human terms, as globalization makes borders increasingly irrelevant, more and more nation states are driven to build border walls in an attempt to hold on to a former world order. But the instability and crumbling of that former order is conveyed by the walls themselves. In the United States, the loss of a sense of unlimited potential has been transformed into an unending war between “us” and “them”—enemies that must be dangerous and violent or we would not need walls to keep them out. The construction of external enemies has the 6 See Brenner, 2017, and my “Thirsty Cities Who Owns the Right to Water?” 2018, pp. 25–40

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important goal of attempting to overcome internal social divisions while seeking to prevent the “browning” of America. Yet border walls do not work. They fail for the simple reason that people always find a way under, over, or around them, or through the bribery of border police. Despite the billions of dollars the U.S. government has spent on curbing migration and enhancing border security, it has done little to deter those determined to cross the border, whether they cross on foot, using wooden ladders and ramps, through tunnels, or hidden in vehicles. As former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano observed in 2005 when she was the governor of Arizona: “You show me a 50-foot wall and I’ll show you a 51-foot ladder at the border. That’s the way the border works” (as cited in Jones, 2012, p. 51). While border walls and fences are an attempt to consolidate absolute authority over a bounded territory against “invaders” who are construed as inferior or uncivilized, they also signal the acute sense of vulnerability experienced by the wealthier nation state as the political contradictions of economic inequality grow more extreme.

Defining Asylum Political scientist Rebecca Hamlin (2015) notes that American asylum policy has developed gradually over many decades, and the relationships between the categories of refugee, asylum seeker, and undocumented immigrant have shifted many times. Shifts in asylum policy from the Cold War to the present largely depended on the rise of legal institutions committed to international human rights and the conservative backlash to those institutions (Hamlin, 2015, p. 321).7 In the Cold War period, defectors from the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba were welcomed and even encouraged as part of an anti-communist policy that saw them as trophies and political fodder. When geographically excluded groups, including Haitians, Ethiopians, Ugandans, and Iranians, began to arrive and seek asylum, tensions arose. A new Refugee Act in 1980 broadened the definition of a refugee and lifted geographic restrictions, but tensions still emerged between a conservative political movement under Ronald Reagan’s presidency and an international human rights coalition. The denial of due process and the deportation of Haitians especially stood out as part of a highly politicized process. As late as 1986, Attorney General Edwin Meese said that he “found it difficult to accept the view that the 7

Also see Libal et al., 2019.

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refugee law and the asylum rules permitted no distinction between aliens fleeing Communist and non-Communist countries” (as cited in Hamlin, 2015, p. 328). Even as more people applied for asylum, fewer were accepted, although 100,000 anti-communist Cubans sent by Fidel Castro to Florida were admitted by President Jimmy Carter in the Mariel Boatlift in 1980. In the 1980s, more than 70 per cent of Soviet applicants were accepted, but only 2 per cent of applicants from Haiti, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador (Hamlin, 2015, p. 329). At the same time, several organizations of human rights lawyers, including the American Civil Liberties Union, founded projects committed to helping asylum seekers. In 2014, the Obama administration responded to the flow of refugees at the southern border by setting up new detention facilities, increasing surveillance, increasing Border Patrol agents, and seeking other ways to discourage and turn back asylum seekers (Nevins, 2019, p. 129). While further militarizing the border, Obama aligned U.S. policy with international law, which defines a refugee as someone who has a “well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion” and cannot rely on “their national governments for protection” (as cited in Nevins, 2019, p. 129).8 Migrants, on the other hand, are defined as those who are likely fleeing deprivation and poverty conditions within their home country. As the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) explains on its website, “Migrants, especially economic migrants, choose to move in order to improve the future prospects of themselves and their families. Refugees have to move if they are to save their lives or preserve their freedom” (as cited in Nevins, 2019, p. 129). This distinction between refugees and migrants became the justification for increasingly rejecting and deporting Central Americans seeking asylum in the United States. Droughts and ecological destruction wrought by climate change, conditions that often make farming impossible, along with economic conditions often facilitated by the actions of the United States—such as its support for military dictators, the War on Drugs waged for many decades, as well as destabilizing trade agreements and long externally supported civil wars—are not considered forms of “persecution.” This gives countries such as the United States the right to exclude the global poor and disadvantaged, to decide whether dangerous situations are life-threatening. 8 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, http://www.ohchr.org/EN /ProfessionalInterest/Pages/StatusOfRefugees.aspx

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Should these countries have such a right? Or is there a human right to mobility? According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a historic document that was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own.” What good is such a right, however, if it cannot be enforced? Scholar and activist Joseph Nevins (2019) asserts, Even if one refuses to accept such a right, a basic concept of justice demands recognition that migration involving the movement of people from exploited and relatively impoverished parts of the world to countries of relative wealth and privilege is, or at least should be, a right born of debt—an imperial debt. The right to migration, in other words, is a form of reparations. (p. 130)

Following his election in 2016, Trump asserted that he only wanted to let in people from countries such as Norway, taking as the foundation for his immigration policy not anti-communist status, and certainly not humanitarian concerns, but first and foremost, the condition of Whiteness. Trump has proven himself to be rabidly racist and anti-democratic, using the promise of a wall as a way to unite the White working class with the White ruling class by launching an immigration war against Muslims—proposing to ban immigrants from seven Muslim majority countries—as well as Central Americans and Black people from former colonial countries such as Haiti, Cuba, and countries in Africa. Indeed, the Trump administration has called for a return to the immigration law of 1924, which barred immigrants by country of origin. Heavily influenced by the eugenics movement, this law was particularly aimed at Italians, Greeks, and Eastern Europeans, and it prevented hundreds of thousands of Jews from escaping the Nazis to asylum in the United States. Trump’s architect of immigration policy, Steven Miller, is a known White nationalist who oversaw a near 75 per cent drop in refugee admissions, the lowest level since the modern programme began in 1980 (Rogers & DeParle, 2019). If the expanding construction of border walls signif ies the growing arbitrariness of borders and the insecurity of nation state sovereignty, it is no doubt time to reconsider ways to address the global crisis of refugees and the untenable path represented by exclusionary practices and border walls. Various photos and videos by photojournalists show Central American migrants climbing the border fence between Mexico and the United States, demonstrating that it is often not difficult to scale walls. The answer is not to add a moat with snakes and alligators, a Trump proposal both farcical

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and revealing in its backwards-looking nature, as if Trump were defending his castle from invading enemy hordes—though for White nationalists, non-Whites are enemy hordes, coming to undermine their wealth and privilege. Instead, we must consider how to support and sustain the tens of millions of displaced peoples around the world who, in their effort to survive, already refuse to abide by borders and walls, no matter how heavily fortified. Unlike immigrants who apply for entry to the United States as refugees and are accepted for resettlement, those who simply appear at the nation’s borders are regarded as undocumented migrants (who, in theory, may apply for asylum); those who enter the country without permission are all seen as people in violation of that country’s immigration laws, as “illegal aliens.” Yet philosopher Michael Huemer (2019) cogently argues that the concept of “illegal immigration” is a tautological absurdity and has no basis in any law that an undocumented immigrant is bound to respect: Undocumented immigrants also have no duty to obey the immigration laws, according to any of the leading theories of why individuals are obligated to obey the law in general. For instance, undocumented immigrants cannot be accused of violating the social contract because no reasonable social contract could contain a clause requiring one to completely exclude oneself from the society to which that contract applies. Nor can undocumented immigrants be said to be treating others unfairly by violating the immigration laws; on the contrary, the immigration laws unfairly demand that some individuals be excluded from our society and all its benefits, while others face no such exclusion, solely based on the accident of one’s initial birth location. Nor, finally, can the democratic process legitimize the immigration laws since the authority of democracy rests on the idea that democracy treats all individuals as equals and gives an equal voice to all who are affected by the laws. Those who wish to immigrate are the people most affected by the immigration laws, yet they are entirely excluded from the democratic process, and they are explicitly and severely discriminated against by those laws; hence, whatever legitimacy there might be for democratically made laws in general cannot be extended to the immigration laws in particular. (pp. 47–48)

Democracy is not democracy, argues Huemer, if it presumes to speak for those whom it excludes, and those whom it excludes are therefore not required to obey its illegitimate laws, because “no reasonable social contract could contain a clause requiring one to completely exclude oneself from the society to which that contract applies” (2019, p. 48). Bourgeois democracy,

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however, has always been exclusionary—consider, for example, the fact that the United States was founded on the notion that “all men are created equal” but excluded Black people, women, and Native Americans; indeed, it was founded on and coexisted with a system of enslavement. Migration restrictions, which, in practice, are increasingly based on country of origin, are meant to protect wealth and privilege using the shield of law and are often enforced through violent and inhumane practices such as family separation and the incarceration of children in detention centres. These must be understood as prisons or concentration camps, because the criminalization of migrants and their imprisonment go hand in hand.9 Under Trump, asylum was nearly out of reach for most migrants arriving at the southern border. Under a series of agreements with Central American countries, the Trump administration as of 2019 sent back 57,000 migrants to Mexico under the “Remain in Mexico” agreement, which prevents migrants from being granted asylum if they pass through any country other than their own before arriving in the United States. The administration also sent migrants back to Guatemala, one of the countries from which people are fleeing. Protection for those who came to the United States as children through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) programme—affecting 700,000 to 800,000 young people, who receive renewable two-year deferred action from deportation and become eligible for a work permit—was lifted, inciting public outrage. Trump was not alone in his anti-immigrant policies; many governments have revised their migration policies to restrict eligibility for immigration, and these policies are increasingly shaped by national political decisions rather than international norms of human rights. Yet the right of free movement for all people would save thousands of lives by allowing people to seek better lives when conditions become unsustainable and by not forcing them to seek dangerous routes around obstructionist border walls that lead to the deaths of thousands of migrants. It would save migrants thousands of dollars paid to smugglers, which would help them establish a new life elsewhere. It would allow people who migrate for labour to freely return to their homes and families, and it would save millions of dollars on border infrastructure that could be better used for social programmes.10 The estimated cost of Trump’s border wall was between $15 and $25 billion dollars, which doesn’t include the cost of yearly maintenance estimated at $750 million (Drew, 2017). 9 See Loyd et al., 2012, pp. 13–24. 10 See Jones, 2019, pp. 264–272.

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Figure 5.5: Reena Saini Kallat, Woven Chronicle, 2011/2016, Circuit boards, speakers, electric wires and fittings; single-channel audio (10 min.), 127 x 570 x 12 in. (322 x 1447 x 30 cm.). Installation view, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo: Reena Kallat Studio.

Instead of demonizing and criminalizing the “other,” leading to desperate and tragic consequences, and militarizing the southern border, which alienates border communities, produces practical difficulties on Native American reservations, and causes serious environmental effects by threatening animal species on land, rivers, and streams, free movement and open borders would construct people not as enemy invaders but as neighbours with human rights, including the right to migrate. The exhibitions on migration and refugees continue to multiply. Among the many works in shows such as When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Art and Migration at the Minneapolis Institute of Art and Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, both exhibitions include the large installation Woven Chronicle by Indianborn artist Reena Saini Kallat, in which she creates a map of the world and its histories of migratory movements. The fragile borders and sovereignties are overlaid with the paths of migration represented by wires that simulate barbed wire, suggesting the dangers and difficulties of migratory movement even as they represent channels of transmission and cultural exchange. Woven into the map are small speakers that indicate the movement of people, animals, and goods. Kallat writes, “The audio component resonates with high-voltage electric current sounds drowned within deep-sea ambient sounds, slow electric pulses, the hum of engaged tones from telecommunications, mechanical-sounding drone, factory sirens, and ship horns intermingled with migratory bird sounds” (Kallat, 2016). Her world map produces an encompassing sense of historical

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migration as an ever-present force while simultaneously conveying the risks and dangers of migration as a contemporary global emergency.

Conclusion The current crisis over borders and immigrants is that it has been brought on not only by wars, persecution, and climate change but also by the contradictions of capitalist globalization itself, which seeks to militarize borders even as the flow of people, goods, and services it has set in motion works to erode their significance. At the same time, asylum policies are being shaped by political considerations such as rising nationalism, xenophobia, and anti-immigrant sentiment, making global immigration policy increasingly restrictive for refugees and migrants. The insecurity of nation state sovereignty and the panic of White nationalists who fear their “replacement” by people of colour, coupled with the rise of immigrant defence organizations and sanctuary cities in support of free movement, occurs at a political moment in which the vast majority of people experience continuing economic decline while a tiny wealthy elite keeps enriching itself at the majority’s expense, racializing and criminalizing those whom it wishes to exclude. The elimination of borders would necessarily mean the elimination of nation state sovereignty, a revolutionary change that ultimately would require the overthrow of the capitalist profit system itself. The struggle for a restoration of the right to mobility would be part of a larger political struggle for an economically reorganized collectivized society that would counter the effects of decolonization, the historical legacy of racial violence, the exploitation of labour, and provide freedom, equality, and autonomy to everyone. In the meantime, spaces of protest and refuge have appeared in many places across Europe and the United States in support of the daily struggles for freedom of movement and the right of refugees and migrants to have rights. The images of the refugee crisis in photographs, artworks, and videos by artists and photojournalists alike make visible the increasingly untenable nature of the global immigration system and have the potential to help galvanize political struggle in favour of the victims of forced migration, who remain subject to persecution, imprisonment, terror, and death. At a minimum, such images rupture a sense of complacency and signal that, if nothing is done, the growing catastrophe of forced displacement that will affect everyone.

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References: Aciman, A. (2016, March 24). After Auschwitz. Tablet. www.tabletmag.com Alÿs, F. (2008). Don’t Cross the Bridge Before You Get to the River [Video installation]. The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, United States. https://www.phillipscollection.org/event/2019–06–22–warmth-other-suns-stories-global-displacement Apel, D. (2018). Thirsty Cities Who Owns the Right to Water? In C. Lindner & M. Meissner (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Urban Imaginaries (pp. 25-40). New York: Routledge. Attia, K. (2015). La Mer Morte [The Dead Sea] [Installation]. The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, United States. https://www.phillipscollection.org/ event/2019–06–22–warmth-other-suns-stories-global-displacement Bal, M., & Entekhabi, S. (2004). Road Movie [Video]. The Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, United States. https://omart.org/exhibitions/baggage_claims/ Ben-Ami, O. (2017). Entire Life in a Package [Installation]. Waterfall Mansion & Gallery, New York, United States. https://www.waterfall-gallery.com/ornaben-ami Brenner, N. (2017). Critique of Urbanization: Selected Essays. Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag. Brown, W. (2010). Walled States, Waning Sovereignty. New York: Zone Books. Delano, J. (1940). Group of Florida Migrants on Their Way to Cranberry, New Jersey, to Pick Potatoes near Shawboro, North Carolina [Photograph]. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/resource/fsa.8c35333/ Drew, K. (2017, January 26). This is What Trump’s Border Wall Could Cost. CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2015/10/09/this-is-what-trumps-border-wall-couldcost-us.html Gorky, A. (ca. 1926–1942). The Artist and His Mother [Painting]. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, United States. https://www.nga.gov/collection/highlights/ gorky-the-artist-and-his-mother.html Grandin, G. (2019). The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. New York: Metropolitan Books. https://www.kobo.com/us/ en/ebook/the-end-of-the-myth Hafez, M. (2017). A Refugee Nation [Mixed media]. The Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, United States. https://omart.org/exhibitions/baggage_claims/ Hamlin, R. (2015). Ideology, International Law, and the INS: The Development of American Asylum Politics 1948–Present. Polity, 47(3), 320–336. Harrington, J. (2019, July 9). Countries Accepting the Most Refugees (and Where They’re Coming From). 24/7 Wall St. https://247wallst.com/special-report/2019/07/09/ countries-accepting-the-most-refugees-and-where-theyre-coming-from/ Huemer, M. (2019). In Defense of Illegal Immigration. In R. Jones (Ed.), Open Borders: In Defense of Free Movement (pp. 34–50). Atlanta: University of Georgia Press.

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Jones, R. (2012). Border Walls: Security and the War on Terror in the United States, India, and Israel. London: Zed Books. Jones, R. (2019). Introduction. In R. Jones (Ed.), Open Borders: In Defense of Free Movement (pp. 1–20). Atlanta: University of Georgia Press. Jones, R. (2019). Conclusion: In Defense of Free Movement. In R. Jones (Ed.), Open Borders: In Defense of Free Movement (pp. 264–272). Atlanta: University of Georgia Press. Kallat, R. S. (2011–2016). Woven Chronicle [Installation]. MOMA, New York, United States. https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/33 Kallat, R. S. (2016, November 16). Woven Chronicle. Medium. https://medium.com/ insecurities/woven-chronicle-e494ea66e782 Libal K. R., Felten, G., & Harding, S. (2019). Refugee Resettlement in the United States: The Central Role of Voluntarism in a Time of Backlash. In S. M. Berthold & K. R. Libal (Eds.), Refugees and Asylum Seekers: Interdisciplinary and Comparative Perspectives (pp. 74–99). Westport, CT: Praeger. Loyd, J. M., Mitchelson, M., & Burridge, A. (Eds.). (2012). Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis. Atlanta: University of Georgia Press. Louisiana Channel. (2019, August 20). Erkan Özgen Interview: When Language is Not Enough [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDYhYdgNsSs Nevins, J. (2019). Migrations as Reparations. In R. Jones (Ed.), Open Borders: In Defense of Free Movement (pp. 129–140). Atlanta: University of Georgia Press. Özgen, E. (2016). Wonderland [Video]. The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, United States. https://www.phillipscollection.org/event/2019-06-22-warmthother-suns-stories-global-displacement Paci, A. (2007). Centro di permanenza temporanea [Temporary Detention Center] [Video]. The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, United States. https://www.phillipscollection.org/event/2019-06-22-warmth-other-suns-stories-global-displacement Rogers, K., & DeParle, J. (2019, November 18). The White Nationalist Websites Cited by Stephen Miller. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/18/us/ politics/stephen-miller-white-nationalism.html Smee, S. (2019, July 13). This D.C. Exhibition Should Be Seen by Everyone Concerned about the Migrant Crisis. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost. com/entertainment/museums/this-dc-exhibition-should-be-seen-byeveryone-concerned-about-the-migrant-crisis/2019/07/13/319b26b6-a403-1 1e9-b8c8-75dae2607e60_story.html Stamberg, S. (2019, August 20). Artists Take On Global Migration: “It’s Hard To Watch And It’s Hard Not To Watch.” NPR. https://www.npr.org/2019/08/20/752490769/ artists-take-on-global-migration-its-hard-to-watch-and-its-hard-not-to-watch Stewart, J. (2020, January 24). Interview: Artists Rebuild Refugees’ Emotional Memories of “Home” Inside Suitcases. My Modern Met. https://mymodernmet. com/mohamad-hafez-unpacked-interview/

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Vallet, E. (2019). Border Walls and the Illusion of Deterrence. In R. Jones (Ed.), Open Borders: In Defense of Free Movement (pp. 156–168). Atlanta: University of Georgia Press. wildrosetr. (2017, November 14). 15. İstanbul Bienali, 15th Istanbul Biennial ÖZEL KARAKÖY RUM ANA VE İLKÖĞRETİM OKULU [Video]. YouTube. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=FuUz3giIbSg

About the Author The daughter of Holocaust survivors, Dora Apel’s work is inspired by art and politics. She has authored six books on subjects including imagery of the Holocaust, contemporary war, lynching and racial violence, Detroit ruins, and, most recently, Calling Memory into Place, on the dynamic nature of memory, memorials, and inherited trauma.

6. Virtual Reality and Immersive Representation in Recent Refugee Narratives Erik Marshall

Abstract Virtual reality (VR) offers an exciting new way to represent crises of forced migration. Like many new technologies, though, VR risks exacerbating the challenges that exist in more traditional modes of representation, particularly that of documentary f ilm. This essay examines two VR projects that depict migrants attempting to cross borders: Carne y Arena (Virtually Present, Physically Invisible) by Alejandro González Iñárritu and We Wait, co-produced by Aardman Studios and the BBC. The two projects differ in technique but share many characteristics as they attempt to encourage empathy in the viewer through the use of immersive technology. Keywords: virtual reality, documentary, interactivity, immersive technology

Introduction The plight of migrants has long been a subject of documentary f ilm, as f ilmmakers try to capture the seemingly endless environmental and political crises that displace large groups of people. The liminal state of forced migration presents many challenges to f ilmmakers and journalists alike, including the balancing act of representing the losses of the displaced with the danger of objectifying and commodifying that loss. Visual representations of refugees, for example, often depict women and children in vulnerable states, playing on a long established discourse of

Bayrakdar, D. and R. Burgoyne (eds.), Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art and Media. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463724166_ch06

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helplessness and infantilization and eliciting pity or guilt in Western audiences (Chouliaraki, 2006, pp. 89–90). While the goal of representing the displaced is usually to prompt identif ication and empathy, the result is often to further dehumanize sufferers for the spectator, who is usually presumed to be not only Western but also homogenous in terms of race, class, and gender (Ong, 2014, pp. 189–190). In addition, many documentary projects simplify refugee narratives to the point of suppressing the complex economic and sociopolitical causes of forced migration (Sou, 2018, p. 512). As immersive, stereoscopic 3D technologies become more accessible to f ilmmakers and consumers alike, more artists and journalists have attempted to provide an all-encompassing experience, breaking the established codes of visual representation by expanding the sensorium of the viewer. By eliciting a more profound sense of verisimilitude, they hope to sharpen a sense of empathy. The promise of virtual reality (VR) documentary lies in its ability to erase the cinematic frame, hiding the representational interface and providing a sense of bodily presence. If traditional two-dimensional videographic depictions of vulnerable people pose ethical problems, however, the use of more immersive technologies could amplify and complicate these concerns rather than diminish them. This essay will examine several tensions or breaks revealed by the increasing use of virtual reality in representing refugees. Some of the issues accompanying the use of immersive technologies include the move from a representational cinematic and televisual register to computer-generated simulation, the seeming contradiction between narrative structure and interactivity, and, finally, the foregrounding of the idea of presence in virtual reality. Two VR projects in particular illustrate these issues well. Each represents a refugee crisis, located on two different continents, and each employs quite different, perhaps competing, approaches to the use of this novel technology. Carne y Arena (Virtually Present, Physically Invisible) (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2017), a VR installation experience created by Alejandro González Iñárritu, details the travails of a group of Mexican migrants attempting to cross the U.S. border. We Wait (Darren Dubicki, 2016), a VR movie produced by Aardman Studios and the BBC, tells the story of Syrian migrants attempting to make their way to Europe by way of Turkey. A close examination of these two works will illustrate rather diverse approaches to virtual reality documentary and probe the possibility of encouraging increased empathy in VR representations of refugees—without reinforcing some of the dangers inherent in such representations.

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On Virtual Reality The term “virtual reality” (or VR, for short) signif ies a rather broad set of technologies. One of the earliest definitions comes from Klaus-Peter Beier: “In immersive VR, the user becomes fully immersed in an artificial, three-dimensional world that is completely generated by a computer” (1999–2000). He distinguishes immersive VR from technologies that simply replicate 3D worlds on a computer screen, such as Apple’s Quicktime VR. Some characteristics of immersive VR include head-referenced viewing for navigation of 3D spaces, stereoscopic viewing for enhanced perception of depth and the sense of space, a virtual world presented in full scale, and the illusion of full immersion (Beier, 1999–2000). The use of gloves and other haptic devices to manipulate the simulated world can enhance the sense of both immersion and interactivity but are not strictly necessary. Beier’s definition emphasizes the fact that VR is computer-generated, which sets it apart from traditional photographic or videographic media. The worlds created in VR are simulations, as opposed to the representational mode of photography. Thomas Elsaesser argues that this feature of VR places it in the realm of language and opens it up to a different type of analysis than that of cinema: Visualization in VR refers, in the first instance, to the use of images as a symbolic language, in order to render visible a set of abstract data or processes: what we see is a language of vision, not something that is in any sense actually “out there.” (2014, p. 299)

If VR is simulation as opposed to representation, the implications for documentary work are profound, because the image risks losing its evidentiary power.

Interactivity and Navigation vs Narrative in VR As a simulation, the immersive 3D space lends itself more to a mode of navigation and interactivity than to narrative (Elsaesser, 2014, p. 304). Elsaesser also interrogates the term “interactive narrative,” claiming that there is an inherent paradox in the idea. The problem can also be more succinctly phrased as one between “narration” and “navigation”: there is a category shift between random

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access in media that offers some resistance in the form of an irreversible temporal flow, like the novel or a narrative film, and those that do not. (2014, p. 305)

Virtual reality is one of those that do not. Virtual reality is often used to simulate environments for training purposes, to provide visual aids for learning, and even to help soldiers cope with PTSD; in other words, VR creates environments that need no narrative to organize them. The tension between the temporal imperative of narrative and the navigable worlds of VR threatens to undermine the ability to control the ways in which refugee narratives are understood. Elsaesser further claims that “the term confuses narratives with games, and interactivity with non-linearity” (2014, p. 302). Indeed, perhaps the most popular use of VR is in the realm of video games. Virtual reality offers the three-dimensional space many video games have attempted to replicate since the advent of the first-person shooter, realizing the dream of placing the player directly in the action, with all the perceptual cues of actual 3D space. The goal is to eliminate the interface, providing a complete world for the player to explore without limiting the action to a narrow visual frame or the unsatisfying illusion of three dimensions on a two-dimensional monitor or television. Even when video games incorporate a narrative layer, the element of interactivity changes the mode of consumption and engagement, because players must perform some action for the experience to continue. Ian Bogost (2010) argues that video games foreground a “procedural rhetoric,” a mode of argumentation that privileges procedure over the visual or linguistic rhetoric characteristic of f ilm and written media, respectively. Drawing on this work in her study of video games about refugee experiences, Gemma Sou (2018) argues that, in contrast to the passive cinematic mode, video games offer the player an opportunity for deeper contextual understanding of complex issues, because they require the player to work through a scenario or problem rather than to observe it passively (pp. 514–515). VR presents a challenge to traditional filmmakers, because the usual technique of using the cinematic frame to include and exclude material does not work in VR, due to the ability of the user to explore and manipulate the environment. The interactive mode of engagement contradicts the notion of passive and distant witnessing achieved in the cinematic and televisual modes described by Chouliaraki, allowing for the possibility of deeper understanding of complicated matters (2006, pp. 2–3).

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Presence in VR Whether in video games or other simulated environments, the goal of VR is a sense of presence: “the virtual is defined not in terms of illusion, but rather as a mediated form of presence of something elsewhere in either time or space or both” (Elsaesser, 2014, p. 298, emphasis in original). This presence manifests in the immersive visual landscape that takes over and replaces whatever space the user currently occupies. The ability to interact with the environment reinforces the feeling of bodily presence, of engagement with the simulated world. The computer-generated, simulated world of VR, with its predisposition for interactivity, navigation, and telepresence seems to stand “in opposition to the experience of cinema (which is still thought of as involving distance, disembodiment, and ocular verification)” (Elsaesser, 2014, p. 302). When it comes to documentary work, then, VR breaks the assumption of impartial observation or representation and works against the tendency to narrativize its subjects.

360-Degree Video and Representation Most documentary work labelled and marketed as VR doesn’t strictly fit Beier’s definition, occupying instead a seeming middle ground between the traditional cinematic mode and true immersive, interactive VR: In 360-degree film the audience can look around, but they can’t navigate it or control anything beyond the direction of looking in what Beier describes as “head-referenced viewing” (1999)—the experience here is one of the virtual flaneur. In VR however, the user has a degree of control over the experience and has the ability to move around the environments and interact with them. Much of the navigation and interaction is enabled via concentrated looking, responding to either visual or aural cues. The same goggles that enable VR also facilitate the viewing of these 360-degree videos and images, hence the ontological confusion between them. (Atkinson & Kennedy, 2018, p. 3)

While often referred to as VR, a 360-degree video is closer to the experience of cinema than that of a video game. In fact, these videos could represent another step in the project of Total Cinema, as developed by André Bazin (Leotta & Ross, 2018, pp. 152–154). Beginning with early stereoscopic photography, and including widescreen cinema, IMAX, and 3D cinema,

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each iteration of cinematic technology that enlarges the viewing space or introduces an illusion of depth might be seen to take one step closer to an all-encompassing, faithful reproduction of reality (Bazin, 2005 [1967]). In this sense, 360-degree videos might not represent a break from traditional cinema at all. Writing about VR travel documentaries, Alfio Leotta and Miriam Ross conclude: The reconfiguration of the gaze and the possibility to elicit a more immersive cognitive and emotional engagement with place and space point to VR’s latent ability to rearticulate conventional ways to conceive of travel, mobility and tourist practices. (2018, p. 159)

The same could certainly be said of many 360-degree documentaries about refugees, such as The Displaced (2015) or On the Brink of Famine (2016). In videos such as these, the viewer is virtually transported to another place in a more profound and total fashion than with traditional film, but, as in travel documentaries, conventional regimes of spectatorship are not overthrown but reinforced. Although 360-degree video doesn’t incorporate the ability to manipulate the projected world, the viewer still has some agency in choosing where to look. This small amount of interactivity might cause problems for the narrative filmmaker, because a “viewer may miss important elements in the story and thus obtain only a partial picture” (Aitamurto, 2019, p. 9). The expanded field of view plays against the narrative impulse, which must be controlled and presented sequentially, in a way that most viewers will understand in a similar way. Some filmmakers have devised ways to direct the spectator’s gaze, a phenomenon Bimbisar Irom calls “induced movement,” but the absence of the frame in an omnidirectional view works against a more controlled narrative agenda (2018, p. 4279). Put simply, the viewer may just choose to look elsewhere than where the director wants them to look, thus missing the point of the work (Nielsen et al., 2016).

Refugees in VR Many documentary filmmakers and journalists use immersive technology to engulf the viewer in the world of refugees, in the hopes that a more immersive experience will translate into a greater sense of presence and emotional engagement (Aitamurto, 2019, p. 4). For example, the United Nations has produced several humanitarian VR documentaries, including,

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most notably, Clouds over Sidra (Gabo Arora, Barry Pousman, & Chris Milk, 2015), which details the life of a 12-year-old Syrian girl in a refugee camp in Jordan. Clouds over Sidra, and other works like it, use 360-degree photography to present their subjects. The viewer can use a proprietary apparatus such as an Oculus headset, or even the eminently inexpensive Google Cardboard, which consists basically of a cardboard box with lenses aff ixed to the front, which a viewer wears over their eyes. The conceit of immersive documentaries—the assumption that they minimize or do away with mediation—is, however, double-edged: On the one hand, it may promote affective involvement (Irom, 2018, p. 4287); on the other, it can prevent the viewer from obtaining the requisite distance from the sufferers to allow detached analysis of the larger political systems in which the refugees and the viewer are embedded (Leotta & Ross, 2018; Rose, 2018). Unlike Clouds over Sidra and others like it, Carne y Arena and We Wait are not strictly 360-degree representations, nor are they fully fledged interactive environments. They both inhabit a space between the passive viewing of 360-degree video and the active engagement of video games and other simulations. They also do not consist strictly of documentary footage, but instead are recreations built on the experiences of actual refugees. The truth claims of each work come from the research performed by their respective creators, even as the emotional impact derives from the immersive technologies employed. In the case of Carne y Arena, actual refugees are featured in the work, and in We Wait, the experience depicted is constructed from interviews with refugees.

Carne y Arena Carne y Arena (Virtually Present, Physically Invisible), a six-and-a-half-minute VR installation created by director Alejandro González Iñárritu and his long-time collaborator, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, allows a visitor to inhabit the perspective of migrants crossing the Mexico–U.S. border. At the beginning of the experience, viewers enter a cold room and remove their shoes. Then, after a period of waiting, they are ushered into another large, dimly lit room with a sand-covered floor. An assistant helps them don a backpack and headset with headphones. The sand is coarse under foot and the moonlight barely illuminates the way through the rocky desert terrain as you edge along the Mexican and

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American border. Suddenly there are shouts. Vans hurtle forward in the distance, helicopters whirl overhead, as border guards leap out of the shadows, rifles at the ready, ordering you and your fellow immigrants to your knees. (Lang, 2017)

Before constructing this exhibition, Alejandro González Iñárritu showed a keen interest in cinematic immersion. The seemingly continuous take of Birdman and the visceral bear attack in Revenant are but two examples of a filmmaker attempting to provide an experience as close to perceptual reality as possible. His attitude towards VR is complex, however. He does not subscribe to the idea that VR continues the trajectory of Bazinian Total Cinema, but asserts that it constitutes a genre unto itself. In an interview about Carne y Arena, he says, “Cinema is frame, cinema is length of the lens, cinema is editing, the position of images that create time and space. Virtual reality, even when it’s visual, is exactly all what cinema is not” (Roxborough, 2017). In another interview, he says, “The big mistake of VR is that it has been considered an extension of cinema. It has been considered a promotional tool. It has been devalued. This is an art in itself” (Lang, 2017). In fact, Iñárritu maintains that the intention of Carne y Arena is “to explore the human condition in an attempt to break the dictatorship of the frame, within which things are just observed” (Cronk, 2018, p. 20). These quotes indicate that he embraces the force of presence that VR can bring and that he believes that VR forces a spectator to become an active participant. Perhaps the greatest deviation from traditional cinema lies in Iñárritu’s use of the kinesthetic senses as well as the visual and auditory. The use of sand, heat, and wind add to the sensorial experience, inducing a more forceful sense of realism. These factors alone, though, do not constitute the complete break from cinema that Iñárritu claims. This description of a scene in the installation is illuminating: As guns are pointed and orders barked, the immigrants drop to their knees. So too can the viewer; the virtue of VR is the ability to walk up to and around a film’s subjects, almost like one holds an invisibility force field. (Zeitchik 2017, emphasis added)

The invisibility of the participant belies the fact that Iñárritu positions the spectator as passive, similar to a traditional cinematic spectator, and therefore unable to change the course of events. Despite his protestations to the contrary, Iñárritu has brought a primarily cinematic sensibility into

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a medium that lends itself better to simulation and interactivity. In fact, although both Iñárritu and Lubezki take great pains to distinguish VR from cinema, in a telling moment, the cinematographer can’t help comparing Carne y Arena to their previous works: Lubezki believes virtual reality is a natural extension of recent works such as “The Revenant” and “Birdman” that used long takes to create a feeling of verisimilitude and plunge people into a frontier landscape or backstage on Broadway. (Lang, 2017)

The supposed interactivity inferred from the agency of movement is superseded by the narrative impulse. As with cinema and other televisual media, no matter how many times one enters the experience, it always lasts the same amount of time. The same things happen no matter what the user does. The only agency the user has is the choice of physical viewpoint, the locus of the gaze. In this sense, each person might experience the installation differently, perhaps even uniquely, but then one assumes the video would continue to play more or less the same way even if the visitor removed the headset. Another account of the same experience illustrates the lack of interactivity well. When a border guard points a gun in his face and orders him to get on his knees, the reporter says: I did nothing of the sort, and lo and behold a bright light flashed, the sun rose, and after a few minutes of video testimonials and a glance at the guest book, I stumbled out to the courtyard where patrons sipped $15 cocktails and tourists posed with the museum’s famed Urban Light exhibit. (Cronk, 2018, p. 21)

For all its claims of interactivity and immersion, the installation situates the participant as a more or less passive viewer, able to refuse the commands of the officer without repercussion. By contrast, in a video game, a player might have to make a choice at this point, and the soldier would be able to interact with the player, possibly pushing them to their knees, or worse. Or the gameplay would simply cease until the player performed an action. Sou makes a pointed contrast between the truly interactive mode of video games and more passive modes of spectatorship: serious refugee games are not solely dependent on visceral imagery and the invocation of emotional discourses of guilt, pity and sentimentality in order to establish emotional connectivity and proximity between

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spectator and sufferer—tactics that are often used in other popular culture representations of refugees (2018, p. 520).

The lack of true interactivity matters, because, without it, Iñárritu risks creating a representation that “can patronize audiences and maintain the reproduction of simplistic and emotive images, texts and narratives about distant others” (Sou, 2018, p. 520). By contrast, “serious games can challenge players to use their agency to critically reflect on the intricacies and challenges of refugee issues” (Sou, 2018, p. 520). While they don’t use virtual reality technology, the video games Sou discusses (Frontiers: Welcome to Fortress Europe, Cloud Chasers: Journey of Hope, and Against All Odds) employ procedural rhetoric not just to evoke an emotional response, such as empathy, for its own sake, but do so “through discourses of social injustice” (2018, p. 521). As powerful and immediate as the experience of Carne y Arena seems to be, the linear, passive presentation of the installation risks decontextualizing the actions of the refugees, isolating them as suffering figures and offering no explanation of how they got into the Arizona desert, what sociopolitical situations caused them to flee Latin America, or what, beyond the rough treatment by the Border Patrol officers, will happen to them next, let alone what might have happened had they successfully escaped. While the short virtual experience might indeed have much more powerful emotional effects than a more traditional cinematic project might, it still ensures nothing more than an “affordable empathy,” one without risk, rather than a “riskier empathy,” one that questions imbalances of power and leads to action on the part of the participant (Irom, 2018, p. 4278). Although Iñárritu didn’t set out to make a video game, he did choose to work in a medium that encourages interactivity. Forcing visitors to make meaningful choices might have provided more context to the causes of the forced migration he reproduces, perhaps even leading the participants to reflect on the structures in place that allow such displacement. And there is ample evidence that Iñárritu hopes to influence others with his work. At the Washington, DC installation, he extended an invitation to politicians, who have the power to alter the circumstances that create such harrowing experiences. That’s why I want to invite publicly Donald Trump and all the senators and all the people who will decide about these people’s lives (the DACA guys or kids that were brought back) to have the chance and privilege and blessing to spend six minutes and a half to see in the eyes of a kid

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that was brought here, the conditions he was in, and that will make them much more stronger to make the right decision, whatever that may be. That’s needed, based upon the complexity of this issue. (Iñárritu as cited in Raessens, 2019, p. 642)

In my view, the assumption that being exposed to suffering will lead to humanitarian action is misguided at best, especially without an analysis of the context for that suffering (cf. Nash, 2018, p. 129; Rose, 2018; Leotta and Ross, 2018). All of this is not to say that Iñárritu has approached VR naively. He does seem to acknowledge the impossibility of presenting a realistic scenario in the use of two dreamlike examples. At one point, the participant can see the internal organs of various characters, including migrants and Border Patrol off icers as the character walks through the participant (Dictatorship of the Frame, 2018). In another instance towards the end of the installation, a banquet table appears in the middle of the scene (Cronk, 2018). These rather surreal additions to an otherwise realistic experience play to one strength of VR: that of simulation. When visitors walks into the heart of a refugee or border guard, they take on the perceptual point of view of that person and are reminded of the universality of humanity. One of the last images is a ship capsizing in the Mediterranean, which is certainly out of place in the middle of a desert. This might be read as an acknowledgement that the plight of these North American refugees is a global problem, shared by many others around the world, which brings us to We Wait.

We Wait We Wait also depicts refugees attempting to escape danger but takes a markedly different approach. To produce We Wait, the BBC partnered with Aardman Studios, the creators of the popular stop-motion masterpiece Wallace and Gromit. Predictably, their aesthetics couldn’t be further from those of Iñárritu. Depicting Syrian refugees in Turkey waiting for a boat that will bring them to Europe, We Wait is a seven-minute VR experience that plays much like a 360-degree video, but with simple computer animation instead of recorded video. While Carne y Arena attempts to immerse the participant by using real people in a simulated experience, the environment of We Wait could not be mistaken for anything resembling lived reality. Low-polygon figures recall video game characters instead of lifelike actors;

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yet We Wait succeeds in producing the effect of presence in ways that Carne y Arena could not. The experience begins in darkness. White text appears, hovering over a black background: “More than a million migrants and refugees crossed into Europe in 2015, mostly by sea.” The text then explains that we are about to join a Syrian family in Turkey as they try to get a boat to Greece. The scene fades into a dark night on a beach, with a dozen or so people huddled around various fires. Those nearest look like a family—mom, dad, maybe an adult daughter. When viewers focus on one, she starts talking. “Waiting for boat,” she says, in heavily accented English. She explains that they had paid 4,000 euros to a smuggler, but the boat started to sink and they had to stop at the island they’re currently on. The sound of waves hitting a boat signal that we’re now in flashback. Bright torch beams indicate that something is happening behind the boat, guiding viewers where to look. Turning around reveals another boat sinking in the distance. The woman explains in voice-over that they had to leave people behind. It’s clear that many people died. The sound of waves recedes, indicating a shift back to the present. The young woman complains that she doesn’t want to get on a boat, that they’ll drown if something happens, because none of them can swim. A blindingly bright searchlight pierces the dark, as someone starts yelling. The Turkish Coast Guard has found them and will take them back to where they started. The man says, “And now, we wait for the smugglers again,” and white text appears in the sky: “‘We Wait’ is based on BBC News interviews with migrants.” After this, credits roll in the sky while the characters wait. Like Carne y Arena, this project’s claim to authenticity lies in having consulted actual refugees. Although We Wait doesn’t include the actual refugees as participants, as Carne y Arena does, their presence is still felt in the epilogue, in the fact that their stories formed the basis of the narrative. The informative text at the beginning of the experience provides some context for the enormity of the problem. As of 2018, Turkey is housing nearly four million refugees, most of them from war-torn areas such as Syria (United Nations). Despite Turkey’s best efforts to accommodate them, there are simply too many, so a great number use the country as a sort of waiting room and attempt to flee to other European countries.1 The short 1 Kirişci and Erdoğan (2020) point out that “[in] 2014, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Turkey became the country hosting the largest number of refugees in the world . . . the Syrian refugee population alone is close to 3.6 million.” Less than 2 per cent are in camps, and “[t]hey were granted ‘temporary protection’ upon their arrival and enjoy access to a range of free public services, including education and health care.”

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experience of We Wait cannot provide all of the context surrounding this crisis, but it does attempt to frame the situation in its opening moments. We Wait takes place entirely in the Oculus Rift headset, with the viewer seated comfortably at home. Despite the lack of a special trip to a specific location or the visual and tactile overwhelm of Carne y Arena, it provides a powerful experience. Instead of the adrenaline-producing frenzy of the Arizona desert, the scene on the Mediterranean portrays a slower experience—that of waiting. Elements such as the dark night and the huddled figures around fires induce a sense of foreboding hopelessness. The reminder that they can’t swim underlines the deadly stakes. The narrative structure suggests a loop: more migrants will arrive, more boats will take them on, more people will die. Even as some make the journey successfully, others will have to wait, again, to risk their lives once more crossing the sea at night. As in Carne y Arena, the viewer gets no sense of what will happen if they make it to their destination, but it feels as though it can’t be worse than what they are experiencing now. Although, like Carne y Arena and 360-degree videos, the scene plays out more or less the same way each time, taking the same amount of time, with the same dialogue by the main characters, there are subtle points of interactivity that enhance the user’s sense of presence. When the participant makes eye contact with someone, they often look back, sometimes raising their eyebrows or making small gestures. In at least one case, looking at a character elicits dialogue. At one point, if the user looks at a small child, he runs to his mother. It’s not much, and it doesn’t affect the narrative, but the awareness of the direction of the viewer’s gaze and the reciprocity of the look draw the viewer in subtly, enhancing the sense of presence. Contrary to the experience of Carne y Arena, the participant is not invisible. Indeed, a recent study shows that this feature could increase the chances that a viewer seeks more information about the crisis after experiencing We Wait (Steed et al., 2018, p. 2). The authors of the study outline four related illusions in virtual reality environments that go beyond simple 3D perception: place illusion, plausibility illusion, body ownership, and agency. They found that adding responsiveness of other characters contributed to a greater sense of the first two illusions: place and plausibility. Participants who experienced characters looking back at them, talking to them, or otherwise responding to their gaze were more likely to report that they felt they were really in the place and the events were actually taking place. Furthermore, they were more likely to click on a link requesting more information.

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One remarkable aspect of this study is that the responsiveness of other characters evinced a feeling of bodily presence and reciprocity despite the fact that the characters are depicted in a decidedly low-polygon, and therefore unrealistic, way. Perhaps, though, this is where Aardman Studio’s experience with animation came in handy: Photorealism was an objective that was unattainable, so the creators chose a low polygon style of animation, with strong art direction to evoke the scenes depicted. The characters in the story were designed to have expressive eyes to strongly convey human emotion in response to gaze interaction. Motion capture was used to ensure that character movement was as close to realistic as possible. (Steed et al., 2018, p. 3)

Foregrounding the act of simulation, rather than attempting to hide it, allows the animators to make the characters more empathetic. The relative sameness of this group doesn’t necessarily project them as faceless others, but as individual parts of a broader, intractable problem. In this way, We Wait can suggest the size of the problem, the vast numbers of people attempting to cross the sea, but still create empathy without falling into the trap of showing, say, aerial views of indistinguishable migrants massing at a border (Sou, 2018, pp. 510–511). This experience is broad enough to convey the problem, but specific enough to allow the viewer to identify with the speaking characters. This VR project illustrates the potential of VR to forcefully induce a sense of presence and empathy while maintaining a measure of narrative control. Unfortunately, it falls short of providing the context necessary to elicit the “riskier empathy” that Irom suggests is necessary to move the spectator out of the comfortable mode of pity. Beyond a brief mention at one point that the Turks don’t have room for the refugees, there is no other reflection on the larger structural causes of the dilemma in which these migrants find themselves.

Conclusion The reach of VR as a mass medium is currently limited by several obstacles, such as the cost of equipment, the wide range of often incompatible platforms, and, in the case of Carne y Arena, the built-in scarcity, because it is a temporary installation in a large indoor space. Despite this, the medium

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has great potential to transform the field of documentary, if creators are willing to lean into the native strengths of the medium. Although Carne y Arena and We Wait take decidedly different approaches to representing their subjects, both of these projects attempt to reproduce an experience and tell a story in an immersive environment, yet neither allows the type of interactivity that would interfere with the narrative flow. Although they unfold in a purportedly navigable space, the force of linear narrative reigns supreme. Both of these works depict the journey of refugees in a specific time and place, but neither contextualizes the origins of their displacement, nor what happens if and when they arrive at their destinations. These refugees are forever liminal, constantly crossing empty spaces, forever fleeing—or always approaching and arriving, depending on the point of view. This perpetual liminality endures in part because the practitioners of this new immersive technology remain rooted in the representational practices of their predecessors, striving to represent the trauma of refugees but neglecting to provide context for the situations they depict. They fall into the trap of believing that, because they are using a new technology, they can ignore the pitfalls of the media from which it emerged. They forget that the “representational strategies of VR are subject to the constraints of ideology and power hierarchies that permeate other representational tools” (Irom, 2018, p. 4287). Creating immersive documentary projects using the same techniques used for decades in traditional televisual media may produce the ironic result of amplifying the very problems filmmakers were hoping to solve by using immersive technologies in the first place. Whether virtual reality automatically increases empathy is contested, but it’s clear that simply reproducing the same sorts of documentaries in 360-degree stereoscopic view doesn’t magically absolve documentarians of the responsibility of providing greater context. In other words, VR still carries the risk of positioning the subject as someone to be pitied by a privileged (Western) other, reproducing the same dynamics that allow the tragedies depicted to continue. Instead of striving for an “affordable empathy” with no real risk or discomfort for the viewer, I join Irom in wondering how far can VR push the spectator from this affordable empathy to a risky empathy wherein the spectator is willing to revisit the self–other relationship and perhaps even entertain the thought of addressing the unequal power dynamics embedded in that liaison. (2018, p. 4274)

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By way of solution, Irom suggests that [t]he developers of immersive technology need to engage with critical communication theories that posit that the technology, like any other representational tool, utilizes structures of meaning-making codes in its simulations of distant peoples and spaces. (2018, p. 4288)

I would further suggest that, in addition to familiarizing themselves with communication theories, VR producers might consult video game developers and theorists to exploit the inherent characteristics of the medium to go beyond mere empathy or voyerurism. Video game designers have long had to grapple with the contradiction between exploration and play on the one hand and narrative on the other, but the problem is now presenting itself to those who want to use VR to engage in more traditional means of communication. Perhaps introducing procedural rhetoric to the VR medium could lead to the riskier empathy Irom describes. The strength of virtual reality is twofold. The introduction of immersive presence provides incredible potential for a more immediate experience, which can enhance a sense of empathy, but that’s not enough. As we’ve seen, the drive to induce empathy, no matter how well intentioned, can backf ire if the viewer is placed in a position of distance or superiority. This evocation of pity might lead to acts of charitable giving, but will not encourage the viewer to imagine systemic change to solve the problem. The second strength of VR, interactivity, may provide the necessary complexity to tackle the underlying issues. While We Wait moves in this direction with a simulation of presence, it stops short of the procedural rhetoric that Bogost and Sou argue could more dramatically enhance understanding. The conundrum facing VR artists who don’t want to become video game developers rests in navigating the medium in ways that foreground, or at least simulate, procedural rhetorics without giving up authorial agency. Just as video game producers have learned to preserve narrative in a primarily interactive medium, f ilmmakers might f ind a way to introduce a small amount of interactivity into their narrative practices to shift the spectatorial mode of subjectivity from that of passive observer to one of active participant. Doing so may allow the director to provide the necessary context to let the viewer grapple with the complex, multifaceted causes of refugee situations and begin to work towards lasting solutions.

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References Aitamurto, T. (2019). Normative Paradoxes in 360° Journalism: Contested Accuracy and Objectivity. New Media & Society, 21(1), 3–19. Arora, G., Pousman, B., & Milk, C. (Directors). (2015). Clouds over Sidra [Virtual reality project]. https://with.in/watch/clouds-over-sidra/ Atkinson, S. A., & Kennedy, H. W. (2018). Virtual Humanity: Empathy, Embodiment and Disorientation in Humanitarian VR Experience Design. Refractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media, 30(2), 1-19. Bazin, A. (2005 [1967]). What Is Cinema: Volume 1 (H. Gray, Trans.). Berkeley: University of California Press. Beier, K-P. (1999-2000). Virtual Reality: A Short Introduction. The Archives of the University of Michigan Virtual Reality Laboratory at the College of Engineering. http://www.umich.edu/~vrl/intro/ Bogost, I. (2010). Persuasive Games: The Persuasive Power of Video Games. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Chouliaraki, L. (2006). The Spectatorship of Suffering. London: SAGE Publications. Cronk, J. (2018). Ready to Wear. Film Comment, 54(1), 20–21. Dubicki, D. (Director). (2016). We Wait [Virtual Reality Project]. United Kingdom: Aardman. Elsaesser, T. (2014). Pushing the Contradictions of the Digital: “Virtual Reality” and “Interactive Narrative” as Oxymorons between Narrative and Gaming. New Review of Film and Television Studies, 12(3), 295–311. FRONTLINE PBS | Official. (2017, July 24). On the Brink of Famine 360° | FRONTLINE [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIF5DYNLIPs Iñárritu, A. G. (2017). Carne y Arena [Virtually Present, Physically Invisible] [Virtual reality project]. United States: Fondazione Prada. Irom, B. (2018). Virtual Reality and the Syrian Refugee Camps: Humanitarian Communication and the Politics of Empathy. International Journal of Communication, 12, 4269–4288. Kirişci, K., & Erdoğan, M. M. (2020, April 20). Turkey and COVID-19: Don’t Forget Refugees. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2020/04/20/ turkey-and-covid-19-dont-forget-refugees/. Lang, B. (2017, May 17). How Alejandro G. Iñárritu Used Virtual Reality to Tackle Illegal Immigration. Variety. https://variety.com/2017/film/markets-festivals/ alejandro-g-inarritu-virtual-reality-1202430264/ Leotta, A., & Ross, M. (2018). Touring the “World Picture”: Virtual Reality and the Tourist Gaze. Studies in Documentary Film, 12(2), 150–162.

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Nash, K. (2018). Virtual Reality Witness: Exploring the Ethics of Mediated Presence. Studies in Documentary Film, 12(2), 119–131. Nielsen, L. T., et al. (2016). Missing the Point: An Exploration of How to Guide Users’ Attention during Cinematic Virtual Reality. In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Conference on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (pp. 229–232). New York: Association for Computing Machinery. Ong, J. C. (2014). “Witnessing” or “Mediating” Distant Suffering? Ethical Questions across Moments of Text, Production, and Reception. Television & New Media, 15(3), 179–196. Raessens, J. (2019). Virtually Present, Physically Invisible: Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Mixed Reality Installation Carne y Arena. Television & New Media, 20(6), 634–648. Rose, M. (2018). The Immersive Turn: Hype and Hope in the Emergence of Virtual Reality as a Nonfiction Platform. Studies in Documentary Film, 12(2), 132–149. Roxborough, S. (2017, May 24). Alejandro G. Inarritu Embraces Virtual Reality (But Don’t Call It Cinema). The Hollywood Reporter. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ news/alejandro-g-inarritu-embraces-virtual-reality-but-dont-call-cinema-1006881 Sou, G. (2018). Trivial Pursuits? Serious (Video) Games and the Media Representation of Refugees. Third World Quarterly, 39(3), 510–526. Steed, A., et al. (2018). “We Wait”-The Impact of Character Responsiveness and Self Embodiment on Presence and Interest in an Immersive News Experience. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 5, 1–14. The New York Times. (2015, November 6). The Displaced | 360 VR Video | The New York Times [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecavbpCuvkI United Nations. Figures at a Glance. UNHCR. Retrieved June 12, 2020, from www. unhcr.org/en-us/figures-at-a-glance.html VR Vegan. (2018, March 5). Dictatorship of the Frame: Carne y Arena [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYjx5mNE74o Zeitchik, S. (2017, May 21). Cannes 2017: Alejandro Iñárritu’s Virtual Reality Project Takes Film to New Frontiers – and Questions. Los Angeles Times. https://www. latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-cannes-vr-inarritu-20170521-htmlstory.html

Video Games Frontiers. 2015. https://www.frontiers-game.com/ Cloud Chasers: Journey of Hope. 2015. http://cloudchasersgame.com Against All Odds. 2007. New York. http://www.playagainstallodds.ca

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About the Author Erik Marshall teaches Screen Studies at the University of MichiganDearborn. In addition to film studies, his interests include video games, virtual reality, and data studies.

7.

The Secret Life of Waste: Recycling Dreams of Migration Deniz Göktürk

Abstract This essay opens up a new perspective on migration through the lens of waste, tracing the effects of war, border securitization, and global capitalism on a local scale. The analysis of Afganistanbul (2018), a short documentary produced by a team at Kadir Has University in Istanbul where the book in hand originated, captures the predicament of undocumented waste workers in the city who lack the means to continue their journey to Europe or return to their homeland, while resources and revenue in the global recycling business circulate freely. Following the film in its close-up on a specific site of life and labour, this essay teases out competing aspirations among local and migrant city dwellers, arguing that representations of migrant experiences are prone to the temptation of poverty porn and calling on spectators to consider their own implication in interlocking systems of inequity. Keywords: undocumented migrants, waste, recycling, documentary, Istanbul “Here we have a man whose job it is to gather the day’s refuse in the capital. Everything that the big city has thrown away, everything it has lost, everything it has scorned, everything it has crushed underfoot he catalogues and collects. He collects the annals of intemperance, the capharnaum of waste. He sorts things out and selects judiciously; he collects, like a miser guarding a treasure, refuse which will assume the shape of useful or gratifying objects between the jaws of the goddess of Industry.” This description is one extended metaphor for the poetic method, as Baudelaire practiced it. Ragpicker and poet: both are concerned with refuse, and both go about their solitary business while other citizens are sleeping; they even move in the same way. ‒ Walter Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” (2006, p. 108)

Bayrakdar, D. and R. Burgoyne (eds.), Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art and Media. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463724166_ch07

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The ragpicker (Lumpensammler), an emblematic f igure whom Walter Benjamin resurrects from Charles Baudelaire’s 19th-century Paris, is an embodiment of poetic engagement with history from below through discarded material (Abfall). Growing up in Istanbul in the 1960s and 1970s, the call of the eskici (junk dealer) passing through the streets with a handcart, buying discarded newspapers and household items, was a familiar sound. Famous novels such as Orhan Kemal’s Eskici ve Oğulları (The Junkman and His Sons, 1962) feature the trader of old goods as a key figure. The city’s flea markets offered rich repositories for reuse and recycling. Household trash, rummaged by street cats and dogs, often piled up at corners due to delayed collection. Social hierarchies were clearly visible. Middle-class families occupied the upper floors with balconies and water views in apartment buildings, while the doormen (kapıcı) and their families, mostly migrants from the country, lived in the basement, in crowded one-room apartments. These janitors would service the heating, clean hallways and stairs, do the shopping, and take out the trash. For people moving from rural areas to the city, finding work as a kapıcı in a building, as a municipal trash collector (çöpçü), or as a factory worker was a move up in society. Turkish cinema pays tribute to the plight of such f igures in countless melodramas and comedies. Kapıcılar Kralı (King of the Doormen, Zeki Ökten, 1976) and Çöpçüler Kralı (The King of the Street Cleaners, Zeki Ökten, 1978), both shot on location in my childhood neighbourhood of Cihangir, featuring the popular comedian Kemal Sunal, now streaming on YouTube, staged social stratif ication in a humorous light. In his later f ilm Polizei (Şerif Gören, 1988), Kemal Sunal took his streetwise humour to Berlin, Germany and assumed the role of a street cleaner and aspiring stage actor in the neighbourhood of Kreuzberg, where many migrants from Turkey had settled in search of better prospects. Comedies targeted not just lower-class country bumpkins as butts of the joke but also inflated pretentiousness in figures who projected more civilized and cultured personalities. Much in line with Sigmund Freud’s analysis of Jewish jokes, humour arises from exposing a propensity towards pompousness in all members of the community. Social stratif ication notwithstanding, everyday interactions entailed a sense of bonding and solidarity. Migrants from the country brought village life to the city. Initially, many settled in shantytowns of informal housing, gecekondu, literally “built overnight” (Karpat, 1976). These settlements were sometimes nested between modern apartment buildings, but were often located on the outskirts of the city in close proximity to landfills, where people

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foraged through waste for usable materials. The writer Latife Tekin brilliantly condensed the hope, resilience, and poetic imagination among this population in her novels, especially Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills, published in English translation with a preface by John Berger (2015 [1984]). Municipalities disposed of trash collected from affluent neighbourhoods on large landfills on the outskirts of the city—Halkalı on the European side, Ümraniye on the Asian side—a place that entered public consciousness through the front pages of newspapers on April 28, 1993, when a fatal methane explosion left 27 people dead and 12 lost in mounds of trash. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, now president of Turkey, began his political rise when he was elected mayor of Istanbul in 1994 and made a name for himself by instituting regular trash collection to clean up the city. Gecekondu settlements were frequently torn down, but many eventually legalized and integrated into urban infrastructures. In the place of landf ills, self-contained cities of several millions shot up, with high-rises, shopping malls, gated communities, and housing complexes built by private companies or the Housing Development Administration of Turkey. Waste had to be moved out further and further to disappear from sight. Within one generation, the face of the city transformed radically; migrants made their homes, were joined by families, and transitioned from temporary presence into more permanent settlement. In his novel Kafamda bir Tuhaflık (A Strangeness in my Mind, 2014), Orhan Pamuk vividly captures the transformation of Istanbul since the 1960s by giving centre stage to a migrant character who hails from rural Central Anatolia and sustains his family as a street vendor. The waning hope of settlement, justice, and solidarity is perhaps most characteristic for more recent migrant experiences. The short documentary Afganistanbul (Ulaş Tosun, 2018), discussed in detail below, reveals everyday peril and poetry among today’s “ragpickers” stranded in a big city far from home. New routes of informal migration fling people from distant war-torn and poor countries to Istanbul, where they end up at manual trash-processing sites and other low-paid jobs without civic rights and protection. The poetically deviant f igure of the rag-and-bone man seems to have lost some of its romantic lustre as it moves and multiplies around the globe. Transient waste collectors and street dwellers are a common sight in Manila, Mumbai, Moscow, and many other 21st-century cities. Documentaries such as Mai Iskander’s Garbage Dreams (2009), on the Zabbaleen in Cairo, Egypt, or Parasher Baruah’s Waste (2009), on adolescent plastic collectors in Dharavi, India, open up insights into urban economies of waste, suggesting that municipal efforts to regularize

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waste management often deprive informal workers of their livelihoods. Meanwhile, the convergence of waste material and human outcasts is close to home. Anyone driving through Los Angeles or the San Francisco Bay Area cannot help but notice homeless people on a daily basis; tent camps and informal shelters built with refuse have been growing along highways, train tracks, and under bridges. Unlike old-time vagrant f igures—eskici, kapıcı, çöpçü, and gecekondu dwellers—who were at home in the streets of Istanbul, the homeless and migrants of today appear more adrift, discarded by society, severed from social ties and support networks. Why start a contribution to a volume on migration and media with waste? My aim with this essay is threefold. First, I propose to shift discussions on migration to a systemic level, taking into consideration intersecting economies of circulation, dispossession, and dispensability within a framework of global environmental humanities. Undeniably, the current world order is shaped by closure and obstacles as much as movement. As entire regions around the globe become uninhabitable due to climate change and wars, migration is bound to increase despite all pervasive and insidious border protection efforts in wealthier regions. Only a combination of macro and micro perspectives, considering effects of global interdependency in local settings, can achieve a grasp of the complex social dynamics in our pandemic times out of joint. Second, I suggest that moving images enable a closer look at specif ic sites and domains of life and labour, which is key for understanding disjuncture with regard to mobility and confinement, opportunity and deprivation, want and waste. Third, I argue that cultural production drawing on practices and metaphors of recycling can present a corrective to the invisibility of lives in waste. However, any such production needs to cautiously navigate the temptation of showcasing “the pain of others” (Sontag, 2003) as slum tourism or poverty porn, which merely induces spectators to wallow in pity without making them reflect on their own complicity in circuits of waste and value generation. Agency and participation in processes of mediatization are key aspects to consider in this regard. Approaching waste through the lens of migration and migration through the lens of waste, I argue, enables a broader systemic understanding of mobility (in)justice, embedded in environmental causes and effects, than a mere focus on the representation of migrants in moving images could yield (Sheller, 2018).

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Recology Over Migrantology Following industrialization, economic practices gradually shifted from repair and reuse to consumption and disposal of mass-produced merchandise, radically transforming social relations and environments (Strasser, 1999). As the world has been sprawling into an “endless city” (Burdett and Sudjic, 2010), human production of waste has grown exponentially, and the question of where to put it is becoming more acute by the day. According to a study conducted for the World Bank Group, waste generation will outpace global population growth at a rate of more than double by 2050 (Kaza et al., 2018). Especially in low- and middle-income regions, where lifestyles have been changing in recent decades, the amount of waste generated is increasing at a fast pace. In these regions, most of the refuse still lands in open dumps, posing serious environmental and public health hazards. With his documentary Polluting Paradise (Müll im Garten Eden, 2012), Hamburg-based director Fatih Akın amplified local protests against one such ill-conceived and badly executed open landfill that was installed in a former copper mine right above his ancestral village Çamburnu to receive waste from the city of Trabzon and the entire eastern Black Sea region, an area known for its lush green hills with tea plantations, where migration to cities has been depopulating the land. Environmental transformation results in “displacement without moving” (Nixon, 2011, p. 19). The collection, disposal, and recycling of waste not only presents massive challenges for governance, it has also become a global industry with considerable revenue. As residents of high-income regions, we have learned to sort our household trash into bins designated for compostable kitchen and garden waste, residuals for the landfill, or recyclables such as paper, plastic, and glass. We tend to rely on regular, mostly automated, pickup, supported by a well-maintained infrastructural network of transfer, disposal, and recycling, along with breathable air, drinkable water flowing out of our faucets, and a power grid that we can plug into at our convenience. While we expect our cities and neighbourhoods to be clean, most of us well-showered desk and screen workers rarely wonder where our trash goes and who processes it along the way. What we discard as trash actually constitutes a source of livelihood for others. Large amounts of refuse from high-income countries are exported to be dumped or processed elsewhere, in countries that do not have comprehensive waste-management infrastructures. China’s shift to incineration and subsequent decision to cease recycling paper and plastic from the United States and Europe, announced at a meeting of the World

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Trade Organization in 2017, has called attention to the global interdependence in waste management. If trash is conveniently moved out of sight, it does not simply disappear but is bound to produce lasting effects at other sites on the planet. Only a situated approach that pays close attention to labour on the ground as well as translocal circulation and correspondence can begin to unpack the complex “economies of recycling” where “remaking remakes us all” (Alexander and Reno, 2012, p.1). Taking a holistic view beyond the circulation of waste as commodity, environmental historian John Scanlan (2005) aptly reads “the history of disposal, of garbaging” as “a shadow history” of culture at large, because “the core of all we value results from (and creates ever more) garbage (both the material and the metaphorical)” (p. 9). Cultural geographers see waste as a key site to study global entanglements and interactions: “waste has impacts across multiple scales, linking such diverse actors and processes as informal waste workers, local environmental governance, and an increasingly globalized trade in waste and recycled goods” (Millington & Lawhon, 2018, p. 1). Unskilled jobs in the field of waste collection and processing have long been staffed with low-paid, often informally employed, migrant labourers, both needed and ostracized, and frequently framed as dirty to showcase a need for social reform. Zygmunt Bauman (2003) addresses the production of waste as “an inseparable accompaniment” of modern “order-building” and “economic progress,” focusing particularly on “‘human waste,’ or more correctly wasted humans (the ‘excessive’ and ‘redundant,’ that is the population of those who either could not or were not wished to be recognized or allowed to stay)” (p. 5). The editor of the journal The New Inquiry provocatively posits in the introduction to a special issue on “trash”: The capitalist world is built on a giant mound of garbage, but bourgeois nostrils insist on not inhaling the stink. Such standards of cleanliness and order have always required someone else’s hands getting extremely dirty. As automation and waste increases, so too do “surplus populations,” those outside or on the margins of production circuits who so often populate and pick through the sites of literal and figurative waste disposal. (2015)

This essay will focus on-screen appearances of such “surplus populations,” asking questions about the economy of (in)visibility at play when trash dwellers become actors. We can only begin to grasp our complex enmeshment in matters of waste and value, work and consumption, rights and deprivation if we look attentively at correlated movements of people and images—in close-up as well as from a bird’s-eye view. While the materiality

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of trash matters, waste per se will not take centre stage in the following. I am primarily concerned with possibilities of mediated access to the tales, dreams, and aspirations of those who live and work with waste: migrants and dispossessed people who populate the dirty underbellies or fringes of cities that fashion themselves as clean and attractive. Cultural initiatives that turn trash into artistic energy to raise public consciousness for sustainability have been gaining ground. Recology, a portmanteau of the words “recycle” and “ecology,” is the name adopted by the integrated resource recovery company headquartered in San Francisco, California in 2009. The San Francisco Recycling and Transfer Station has been running an artist-in-residence programme, which has hosted 145 professional artists and 40 student artists since 1990, making art using discarded materials.1 Waste Land (Lucy Walker, 2010), a film set on the world’s largest landfill in Rio de Janeiro, showcases impressive remakes of famous paintings produced by artist Vik Muniz in collaboration with waste workers. Chinese dissident artist and human rights activist Ai Weiwei has made films focusing on the global migration crisis Human Flow (2017) and The Rest (2019), which are embedded in his practice of producing art through recycling. In his installation Safe Passage (2016), he draped 14,000 discarded life jackets from the shore of the Greek island Lésbos around the pillars of the Berlin Konzerthaus, and in the exhibition Laundromat (2016) at the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in New York, he put on display clothing left by refugees in the camp of Idomeni near the Macedonian border, washed, neatly ironed, sorted, and hung on racks. In Istanbul, Artıkişler Kolektifi (Refuse Works Collective) has been producing video works, approaching urban waste and work from various angles.2 Their mission is spelled out on the collective’s website: Artıkişler is a video collective that aspires to create spaces for non-mainstream collective production in the field of everyday visual culture and art. It pursues the principles of sharing with groups that have similar interests and public exhibition of topical and thematic works that address and question ruptures in social life with regard to urban transformation, gentrification, forced migration, refuge, labour, archiving and collective memory. 1 https://www.recology.com/recology-san-francisco/artist-in-residence-program/ 2 My translation from the Turkish: “artıkişler kolektifi güncel görsel kültür ve sanat alanında anaakım olmayan, kolektif üretim ve alanları yaratmaya çalışan bir video kolektifidir. Kentsel dönüşüm, soylulaştırma, zorunlu göç, mültecilik, kentiçi emek, arşivleme ve kolektif toplumsal hafıza gibi Türkiye’de toplumsal yaşamın farklı kırılma alanlarını sorgulayan güncel ve tematik çalışmaları benzer çizgideki gruplarla paylaşma, kolektif alanlarda sergileme ve gösterim prensiplerini izler.” See: http://artikisler.net/

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The group received funding from the Friedrich Ebert Foundation and the European Union’s Sivil Düşün (Think Civil) programme to publish the bilingual collection İstanbul’un Artığı / The Surplus of Istanbul, which, in its introduction, includes informal waste collectors’ ironic comments about tourists who want to take their pictures as well as self-reflexive questions by researchers and documentarists: “So, what are we doing here with cameras in our hands?” (Şen et al., 2014, p. 10) The question about the role of the camera and the purpose of documenting waste workers already came up in the first video documentary showcased on the collective’s website, Hakkari’den Ankara’ya Kağıtçılar (Scavengers from Hakkari to Ankara, 2007), which is about people from the Kurdish village Ördekli (Kotranis) near the Iraqi border. Their village was burnt down in 1994, following battles between the Turkish army and the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK), and, like many Kurdish citizens in the region, they were forced to migrate. Ten years later, hundreds of them, among them many children, were making a living as ragpickers, collecting paper and cardboard on the streets of Ankara and carting it to a processing factory. They were anticipating that the government would soon put an end to this livelihood by officially regulating waste management in an effort to clean up the streets of the capital and refashion it as a “European” city. A protest by Ankara’s Kurdish scavengers, whose paper stocks had been burnt by the police, also appears as a side show in Swiss video artist Ursula Biemann’s two-channel video Black Sea Files (2005), which captured life on the ground during the construction of the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan oil pipeline connecting the Caspian Sea through Turkey to the Mediterranean. Exhibited at Kunstwerke Berlin and at the 10th Istanbul Biennial (2007), Biemann’s video installation documents the everyday struggles of people on the ground throughout this extended extraction zone shaped by transnational flows of resources, staging situationist “files” for the biennial art circuit. The Artıkişler collective’s video Scavengers from Hakkari to Ankara begins with a question asked by a youth wheeling a cart and looking into the camera: “Will that appear on TV?” The cameraman answers: “I don’t know. We are just shooting.” Appearing on television equals a claim to fame and recognition. Is it a dream of stardom that drives a poor kid to participate in this documentary production? How does he aim to present himself? Who is looking? Who stages and frames whom and what for whom? Who gets to tell their experiences, and what difference do particular stories make? What can films, videos, or research publications focusing on poor migrants do for and with their subjects? The insight to take from this conversation between the cameraman and his subject is that self-reflection on the purpose and

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efficacy of image production within an overall ecology of circulation and affective engagement should be key to any artistic or academic discovery of dispensable matter and people. In our era of high-speed digital connectivity, people acquire knowledge about the world primarily as long-distance spectators through moving images flickering on portable screens. The common framing of migrants moving in a caravan, huddled on an overcrowded boat or in a tent camp, is occasionally punctuated by a photograph gone viral, for example, of the drowned Syrian boy on a Turkish shore or the crying little girl from Honduras at the U.S.–Mexican border, looking up her mother’s legs as a guard is patting her mother down. Saddening images of dead or distraught toddlers in red T-shirts have been more effective in mobilizing affective engagement with the human cost of violent borders than any research publication on migration. However, the direct appeal of framed helpless children offers, first and foremost, a safe outlet for shock and pity that affords no political intervention or systemic change. Are there alternatives to passively watching the pain of others, the suffering of refugees detained at borders, rescued at sea, or trapped in camps? What might the world look like through the lens of migration? How can we begin to conceptualize an open city based on participation and interaction? Empathetic spectatorship rarely translates into effective critique and action. The victimizing gaze on migrants without agency falls short of imagining possibilities of coexistence, collaboration, and a shared future. It also does not capture the day-to-day struggles of migrants labouring for survival in inhospitable environments, contributing significantly to various micro and macro economies. Berlin-based cultural anthropologist Regina Römhild has critiqued the tendency of migration research to “(re)produce… subject categories and concepts of the nation state which it… aims to criticize” (2017, p. 69). By producing a “plethora of accounts of migrants’ lives and migrants’ worlds,” Römhild argues, social research as well as public debate have tended to pit those who cross borders against the petrified notion of a native population, construed as bounded and rooted in nation state territory (2017, p. 69). Such accounts reinstate native permanence irrespective of previous histories of mobility across regions. Resisting “migrantology,” Römhild and others have promoted critical migration studies that reverse the viewing direction: looking at the “naturalized centre” from the point of view of its “ethnicized and racialized margins” (2017, pp. 69–70). Such a shift in perspective reveals the allegedly stable core of the nation “as being part of a postmigrant, postcolonial space of cultural dynamics and social struggles,” thus cosmopolitanizing migration research and turning it into “a general

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study of cultural and social realities crossing ethnic and national bounds” (Römhild, 2017, p. 69). This critique of a narrow focus in research is pertinent to understanding the power dynamics of visibility and invisibility, which determine the framing of migration in visual media. Despite the widespread rhetoric about access, interactivity, and participation in the digital age, key questions concerning the transnational traffic in (re)presentation are far from conclusively resolved today. Reframing knowledge and image production on migration within the circular economy of recology, mindful of resources that shape human livelihood and mobility from local to planetary scales, enables a more comprehensive understanding of the hidden life of capitalism and its waste.

Lives in Waste Turkey’s most populous city, Istanbul, with officially 15.5 million residents, likely more, has in recent years become a “waiting zone” for people who cannot travel, as Sami Mermer and Hind Benchekroun show in their documentary Callshop Istanbul (2015) (Türeli, 2018, p. 163). The city has long been a magnet for people from poor rural areas in Turkey and, increasingly, refugees from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and other countries who continue to live in uncertainty (Biehl, 2012, 2015). The ongoing civil war in Syria, in particular, has led to an unprecedented increase in migrants. According to the UNHCR, Turkey is now home to the world’s largest refugee population of some four million. In 2019, less than 2 per cent of these refugees lived in camps near the Syrian border, designated Temporary Accommodation Centres, which have absorbed most of the international aid, while the rest lived mostly in urban and peri-urban areas (UNHCR, 2019). In Istanbul alone, half a million Syrian refugees were registered, while many more migrants live in the city without registration in precarious conditions of extreme poverty, many of them hoping to travel on to better prospects in another country. Following the migration control deal that the European Union struck with Turkey in March 2016, the borders have been sealed for these migrants (Aydın-Düzgit et al., 2019). Even if they attempted the perilous sea crossing to the Greek islands to enter the European Union, they would likely be returned to Turkey, where resentment among the local population has been surging. According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), border closures, travel restrictions, and the economic downturn in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 have exacerbated the vulnerabilities of these migrant populations, many of whom lack access to basic healthcare

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Figure 7.1: Afganistanbul (Ulaş Tosun, 2018).

and other social services (IOM, 2019). Older models of migration, as a move from home to host country, ideally resulting in settlement and integration, can no longer adequately capture such cycles of detention. Afganistanbul (2018), a short documentary focusing on a group of men and youths from Afghanistan living in Istanbul, pointedly captures the entrapment of migrants in the city. Pointing to the predicament of making these hidden lives visible, the preamble to the film states in Turkish and English: “Bu belgeselde, Türkiye’de ‘yasadışı’ bulunan umut yolcularının [literally: travellers of hope] kimliklerine yer verilmemiştir. / In this documentary, the identities of asylum seekers who entered Turkey illegally have not been revealed as per their wishes.”3 The film begins with the sound of heavy rain. The establishing shot shows a man wearing a black coat and black hat, standing on a flat roof, braving the downpour under a transparent plastic umbrella. Two blurred figures wrapped in soaked blankets, looking beyond the roof into the fog, blend into the background (Figure 7.1). The man is centred in the frame, turned towards the camera, but looking down at the screen of his smartphone, smiling, immersed in conversation with someone whose video image he presumably sees but who remains invisible to the viewer of the film. The phone communication in Pashto is subtitled in Turkish and English: “How are you? Are you well? Is everything 3

https://vimeo.com/348987107, Password: afgan2020.

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OK?” The answers to the man’s questions remain inaudible. He must have been asked similar questions in return, because he follows up with reassuring sentences: “Things are on track here. We are fine. Don’t worry about me.” Finally, he says: “It’s always raining here.” With that, the man turns to the side, presumably to show the rain to the person he is speaking with. The pre-title sequence establishes the simultaneous dual presence on a wet rooftop in Istanbul and in a distant place. The man will explain later that he was speaking with his mother in Afghanistan. The one-word composite title of the film Afganistanbul, which appears at this point in white letters on black, highlights this translocal fusion. In the next shot, a high-angle street view presents burnt-out, bare-bone houses with no windows. The rain has stopped. As the camera moves into one of the ruins, two men become visible, loading bundles of paper and cardboard onto a truck on the street. One says: “Look, these might be worth something!” The other jokes about the relative value of waste: “Oh, I thought they were garbage.” The men work at a rudimentary transfer station where municipal waste is collected and sorted by manual labour. The blue container that the men are loading is designated property of the municipality, Fatih Belediyesi, as signalled by a passing glimpse of the writing on the side of the vehicle. Although the men live in fear of deportation due to their lack of papers, this vehicle suggests that the municipality must be aware of their presence and actually benefits from the cheap labour that they provide. Meanwhile, electrical wiring and other utilities in the building are shown to be precarious when a youth gets up to relieve himself, stepping behind a makeshift curtain. In another shot, one of the men is seen wheeling a large plastic-filled bulk bag, which carries the name Clariant, a Swiss specialty chemicals company headquartered near Basel that maintains over 110 operating companies in 53 countries and lists annual total sales of around U.S. $6.6 billion. As the revenue in the recycling business circulates internationally, the Afghans who provide the manual labour at this sorting site in Istanbul are stuck in place. The cues of localization that the film provides are subtle, which might render its appeal more universal. Two minutes into the film, a high-angle shot from above the roofs, which are patched up with plastic sheets, through the branches of a leafless tree, and captured with a fisheye lens, presents a slightly convex image of the yard where the men are loading a truck with a heap of white sticks that could be the remains of plastic window frames. Rendered in time lapse, their movements appear rushed and mechanical. The optical manipulation of this long shot, held for ten seconds, reminds spectators that they are watching a cinematic mediation of reality and invites

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them to pause and ponder their own position as distanced observers. The hemispherical shot evokes a feeling of confinement, as if the globe were condensed into this junkyard. In the upper-right corner of the image, the Golden Horn can be seen in the hazy background. Water views, which are the prime attraction of Istanbul, only enter the field of vision from this elevated vantage point, not from the junkyard where the men are toiling below. To provide a little context for non-Istanbulites, the Afghans occupy a decrepit building in the Küçükpazar neighbourhood of Istanbul’s Fatih district, located in the triangle between Eminönü, Süleymaniye, and the Golden Horn, on the city’s historic peninsula, which features some of the prime tourist attractions in the city, included those in the UNESCO World Heritage List. The old buildings in this area have housed many migrants and workshops over the years. A beautiful night shot of a small minaret next to the dome of a mosque, which might once have been a Byzantine church, and leafless trees against the sky with the Moon shining through clouds, provides another contemplative moment in the film. The camera captures sections of old brick walls in the buildings at points, revealing layers in the urban fabric in this old part of town. The film’s director, Ulaş Tosun, currently works as a photographer at the private Kadir Has University in Balat on the Golden Horn, located not far from the site where the Afghans reside, where colleagues from the Faculty of Communication staged the conference Migration and Cinema that fed into this volume. 4 Afganistanbul grew out of Tosun’s collaborations with students at this university. A graduate of the Anthropology Department at Istanbul University, Tosun had previously worked as a news reporter and photojournalist in the Küçükpazar neigborhood. In 2007, he published a photo essay titled “Taşı Toprağı Altın Kentin Son Gurbetçileri” (“The Last Guest Workers in the Golden City”) in the weekly magazine Nokta. At that time, the people collecting old paper on the city streets included internal migrants, poor villagers who hailed from Anatolia. Following the pattern of seasonal workers, they came to the city intermittently to earn a living, while staying in shared accommodations, so-called bachelor’s rooms (bekar 4 I was not able to attend this conference. I would like to thank colleagues at Kadir Has University, in particular Ulaş Tosun, Deniz Bayrakdar, and Ahmet Emin Bülbül, for their inspiration and input in this essay. I presented the film Afganistanbul and early thoughts on this topic at a workshop on Intersecting Peripheries: Migration, Poverty, and Performance, organized by Burcu Tung and Nermin Soyalp at the California Institute for Integral Studies in San Francisco on February 24, 2020 on the occasion of the U.S. premiere of Sedef Ecer’s play On the Periphery, jointly produced by Golden Thread Productions and Crowded Fire Theatre. I would also like to thank the participants of this workshop for an inspiring discussion.

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odaları) (Şen et al., 2016). The television documentary Küçükpazar (Zafer Akturan, 2007) shows the conditions of seasonal migrant workers from Anatolia living in these crowded rooms. Around 2013, refugees from war-torn Syria, who were becoming noticeable on the streets of Istanbul, settled in this area. Tosun reports that, when the municipal government moved the Syrian families to refugee camps near the border, the vacated buildings were gradually populated by the current residents, single men and boys, 13–40 years of age, mostly from Afghanistan. He explains that making contact and communicating with these Afghans proved difficult due to language barriers as well as their bosses, who largely kept them shielded from the public. Subcontractors in the waste business lure these young “travellers of hope” (umut yolcuları), as Tosun calls them, with promises of a better life to make the long journey from Afghanistan, take their money or make them work off their fare, and use these migrant workers as “modern slaves” (Tosun) who have no labour protection rights. Tosun assumes that the bosses instigate fear of deportation in the workers, although Turkey did not execute rigid deportation practices when the film was shot. Because the Afghan men were fearful due to their undocumented status, only one group among many agreed to speak with the small film crew, mostly on Sunday afternoons, after the owners had left the depot. On one evening of ramadan, the month of fasting during daylight, the crew was able to take the men out for dinner (iftar yemeği). They had to obtain permission from the owner of the depot for this outing, which he granted based on religious sentiment. The subcontractors remain outside the frame in Afganistanbul as an invisible force. To grasp the transnational interdependencies in the workers’ situation, viewers need to look beyond the images, invest further research, and draw on context. Taking the men to a festival or arranging for a screening in the building has not been possible, so the subjects of this documentary have not been able to watch themselves on-screen. Some of them were able to see a few scenes on camera while the film was being shot, but they never saw the finished product. According to Tosun, the men told him during his last visits that the crew’s presence was creating problems for them; they asked him not to come back. The film crew respected their wishes and stayed away. This story from the production process suggests the predicament of exposure. On the one hand, making visible the invisible does not necessarily benefit those who are put on display. On the other hand, Afganistanbul enables insight into an integral part of city life. If it were not for films like this, university students and festival audiences would be oblivious to labour beneath the surface. The film was shown at numerous short film and documentary festivals and won

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awards as best documentary at BUZZ CEE International Film Festival in Romania and best short documentary at Marmaris International Short Film Festival. It was also screened at Documentarist Festival, Mimarlar Odası (Chamber of Architects) in Istanbul; International İzmir Artemis Film Festival, XII International Architecture and Urban Films Festival; and We the Peoples Festival at Rio Cinema, Dalston, London. The scope of its circulation and recognition is clearly smaller than that of global art world sensations such as Ai Weiwei’s film Human Flow (2017) streaming on Amazon Prime, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s immersive virtual reality show Carne y arena (2017), or Richard Mosse’s video installation Incoming (2017). With its close engagement with life at a particular site, however, Afganistanbul offers an important complementary perspective to those epic-scale renderings of the plight of migrants. The man seen on the rooftop at the beginning of the f ilm appears repeatedly. He is seen walking across a yard filled with discarded cables, electronics, scrap metal, and large bags of cardboard. He crouches on the lower cot of a bunk bed while two young men are huddling on the floor in the background. His voice in Pashto, subtitled in English, along with his melancholic smile as he addresses the camera, lends the film a personal tone and serves as narrative commentary, both diegetic and non-diegetic. His voice is heard even when he is not himself seen in the frame, and it becomes the soundtrack throughout the film, loosely attached to the fugitive glimpses of everyday life: two men trying to keep warm, dimly lit as they squat by an open fire burning in an old can and eat a piece of bread; others sorting waste, filling and carrying heavy bags, mostly shot from behind or through openings in the bare, unplastered walls that partly obstruct the gaze, indicating that the crew encountered obstacles to filming the men at work. The filmmakers avoided voice-over narration from outside but rather let the images and one man’s words speak for themselves. The poetic genius of this short documentary lies in the evocative quality of its images in combination with the migrant waste worker’s voice.

Solidarity in Transit On the rooftop, this time in the glow of afternoon sunlight, the man accounts for communal leisure time, explaining how Sundays are now their day off rather than Fridays as in other Muslim countries. As he talks, the film cuts to two men seen from behind, praying on rugs on the floor. The day off is devoted to cleaning up, doing laundry, visiting friends, and long phone calls

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to family. Two men are smoking and watching a soccer game on an iPhone; others are lounging; the narrator himself is squatting in the yard with his cell phone pressed against his ear, smiling and blinking at another man, then back on the rooftop addressing the camera, as if stepping out of his own real-life situation to reflect on his experiences: Because I’m illegal here it’s difficult to enjoy life. I try to entertain and calm myself down by doing things. I miss real happiness. I console myself, reminding myself that hard times are a part of life. We the Pashtuns all live together and share our difficult times. Additionally, I try to follow the state of my home country. If we can do something for each other, we do; if not, we still vent by talking to each other.

To these words, the camera pans around the room, showing the assembled men on mattresses on the floor, visually underscoring the claim to community and solidarity. The narrator is back among them in this scene, cooking stew in a big pot on a propane cylinder on the floor, chopping tomatoes, receiving a phone call, and instructing a younger member of the group to stir the pot, while a little boy sits by, chewing on a cucumber. Over a dozen men and teenage youths assemble for the joint meal served on a blue plastic sheet on the floor, pita bread is handed around, salad and stew are shared in the middle, neatly taken by hand with pieces of bread. The shared domesticity among the men appears as a substitute for family life. Their conversation is not subtitled, but the narration from the rooftop is taken up again: “They come and they go. Like today, there are many of us at lunch. We are all Afghans, we are happier eating together than we are eating alone.” The emphasis on sharing is conveyed both visually and by narration. After the meal, music is selected on a cell phone, and two youths get up and gracefully dance to the tune. “It is difficult to lead a happy life in transit,” says the man on the roof. “Sometimes I lose hope completely.” The camera punctuates this depiction of close quarters visually by panning over a sign on the wall: “Attention… Open and close only with authorization… Exit.”5 The speaker talks about his journey from Afghanistan, once again crouching on his bunk bed: When I was leaving home just put a few pieces of clothing in a plastic bag and packed them. I heard they would get wet on the way… but this was nothing compared to what I had to go through afterwards. I hit the road. 5

My translation from Turkish: “Dikkat… Yetkili olan Açar ve Kapar… Exit.”

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Once again, the camera punctuates his narrative by visually suggesting points of resonance. Painted on the rear window of a car, the following words enter the field of vision: “When I am gone / my wind will blow / that will be enough for you / for 12 months / He’s a soldier now.”6 The travel account continues: First, I came to Kabul in a car and then went to Kandahar by bus. I rode in a truck to Balochistan in the Afghan–Pakistani border and I met the f ixer. The other passengers had already arrived, we were six people, walked for 8 hours and slept in the forest. There was no food or water. There was only Allah. The truck came back in the morning and we rode to a predetermined spot on the Pakistan–Iran border. We walked for 9 hours in the mountains. Someone came and picked us up and we walked for another 3–4 hours. We came down on a plateau. We then got on the truck and went to an old house to spend the night. We went to Tehran from there. We got on a vehicle in Tehran to get to our f irst destination in Turkey. We arrived at the Turkish border, next to a creek. We walked across the creek and crossed the Turkish border. Then we took a car to Van. And we took the bus from Van to here. When we arrived in Istanbul, the f ixer said “Now you can go, you’re not my responsibility anymore.”

While the man recounts the stages of his long and perilous journey from the south of Afghanistan to Istanbul, another figure in the back of the room, wrapped in a blanket, is seen getting up, leaving the house, and walking down the alley. When he returns from his walk, he shakes the speaker’s hand before he retires back to his place in the back of the room on the floor. The figures cloaked in blankets in the background resemble a silent chorus in ancient Greek theatre. The film does not present footage from the journey itself but the editing choice to combine the travel account with the shots of the circular movement of this walking figure renders this sequence visually effective with simple means. Following the travel account, the speaker reflects on the local population’s perception: They know we are illegal, that we don’t have passports. Being without papers causes many difficulties. We are asked for our passports wherever 6 My translation from Turkish: “Ben olmasam da / rüzgarım eser / bu da size / 12 ay yeter / O şimdi asker.”

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we go, even the doctors. Nobody sells us medicine. We are not allowed to go to the hospital, and these places are not safe. We have no place to go if something were to happen to us. I would recommend to my Afghan brothers to not believe what they hear, that life in Istanbul is not how they tell you it is, and not go on this journey. Nobody shares their home, they will not let you rent a place without a passport. In Istanbul, you are nothing without your passport. Turks don’t show us their hatred, they don’t make it obvious. Everyone I met this far has been good, but there are lots of issues with payments because of the Syrians, Afghans, Uzbeks, and Pakistanis. Because there are so many illegal people… folks can easily find cheap labour.

The lack of legitimizing identification locks these migrants in precarious conditions with no civic rights. The film thus conveys a sense of life in the city through migrant eyes. In line with critical migration studies, it invites the viewer to adopt the point of view of migration. In the second half of the film, the film presents some native voices in Turkish, visually signalling this reversal by a shot focusing on a piece of dropping cardboard from the bottom of a refuse bag. A Turkish waste collector on the street with his cart comments with passion: Currently, they get two thirds and we get one third… I mean, they surpassed us, brother, these men have become millions of people and spread all across Turkey… they don’t even know how to walk on the street. Say, I would know where I can park this cart. I have to know my limits. Can I stop on the sidewalk where the people are passing by? I shouldn’t. They didn’t even do any good to their own country, to their own people. How can these men bring us benefit? These are uneducated men, they are backwards, maybe living in a situation that was the reality in Turkey 60 years ago. He finds something in the trash, say half a can of coke, drinks it bottoms up, then that reflects badly on us. He has not seen this level of wealth, he is hungry.

Another recycling worker, loading a truck, echoes this voice of indignation: If Pakistanis, Afghans were good people, would they have abandoned their homeland to come here? If they were good men, would they leave their motherland? Why don’t I leave? Okay, they are in a pitiful situation, but the saying goes: if you take pity on the orphan. If Tayyip Erdoğan said, get out of this country, where would I go? I have no other homeland,

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no other country but Turkey. These are traitors, why are we harbouring traitors? I am angry for this reason [too] at our prime minister and our president. They came, and theft rates increased, there are more bombs, more of all this shit, more PKK.

Based on his accent, this man is most likely not a native Istanbulite himself. He might be of Kurdish origin, himself a migrant to the city from the southeast of the country, who unloads his frustration with the regime onto the new migrants from abroad. By including these voices, Afganistanbul stages paradigmatic nativist resentment against migrants. Solidarity between these groups is non-existent. Turkish waste workers interviewed on the street see the newcomers as competitors for resources who work at low wages. The disparaging remarks about being unfit for life in the city are not without irony, because these waste collectors who claim native territorial rights are likely migrants who themselves or whose ancestors have previously relocated to the city from rural locations. Nationalist sentiment, which thrives by eliding past histories of migration, tends to boil up when immigrants are perceived as a threat to settled populations’ sources of livelihood and sense of order. Meanwhile, not all locals harbour hostile sentiments towards the migrants. In the next scene, a youth walks to a small corner store, which sells tomatoes, döner kebap sandwiches, and ayran (yoghurt drink), to get a refill for the propane cooker. The store owner’s voice is heard before he appears in the frame: Europeans are bothered by my fellow citizens, Turkish citizens, that’s why I am not bothered, brother. They are our Muslim brothers, they have been our brothers since history! Why, because we are economically slightly more advanced than them. We went by the “Kefere” [most likely means “kafir” in the sense of non-believer, non-Muslim] in 1969, we washed the shit of the Germans and earned our living. What happened now? They say, “Fuck off now.” Nazism has resurrected and says “Go on, fuck off.”

Clearly, this man has himself experienced being a stranger in a foreign country, not feeling welcome, ostracized as a Turk in Germany. He bears a grudge, because he did dirty work there, returned to Turkey, and now racism is rearing its head again in Germany, calling for foreigners to go home. His inclusive attitude towards his fellow Muslims is not entirely selfless, of course, because, unlike the domestic recycling workers, he profits economically from the Afghans who buy at his store. Vested interest aside,

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Figure 7.2: Afganistanbul (Ulaş Tosun, 2018).

his is a strong and important voice in the film that reminds the audience of the relativity of the migrant experience: Turks themselves went to Germany as so-called guest workers in the past to pick up German trash. On the roof, the Afghan man speaks about the dream of travelling to Europe, while another man in the background is sleeping under a blanket on a dirty mattress: “We hit the road to make it to Europe. Without a doubt Istanbul is the gateway to Europe.” Corresponding with this assessment, this scene features more panoramic vistas of the city: high-rises on the horizon across the Golden Horn and the complex (külliye) of the Mosque of Suleyman (Figure 7.2), completed by architect Mimar Sinan in 1557 under the reign of Süleyman the Magnificent. We came this far and we plan to go further. Our plan is to go further, but the roads are closed. The path is tough. There is death, there is the ocean, and boats sink on the route. There is hunger and thirst on this path; there are forests, wild animals, accidents, getting shot, going to jail. We want to go to Europe, because we are living in poverty. We cannot live in Afghanistan. I swear to Allah, I make 700, 800, 1,000 lira a month. Money here is good. I made money alright, but it’s neither enough to reach Europe, nor to get back. If I can’t find a way, I’ll stay in Istanbul to make money, and then go back home. What could I have done? The situation in our country is worse.

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The predicament of not being able to stay or leave is voiced clearly here. The migrant waste workers do not have enough money or the necessary papers to go back home or to travel on to any country in the European Union; they are trapped in transit. Quoting the title of Ulaş Tosun’s earlier photo exhibition, which featured the everyday life of Syrian refugees in Istanbul, the suspended mobility and status of non-arrival of these present-day migrants can be described as “permanently temporary.”7 The solidarity among them that Afganistanbul highlights is all the more remarkable.

Soiled in Synchronicity Another short documentary presenting three Afghan waste workers in the city of Uşak in Turkey, Başka Sınırlar (Other Borders, Turap Başel & Ahtam İbragimov, 2018), echoes the invisibility and entrapment of these new refugees. As the film’s title suggests, having escaped from a country that has been in a state of war since 1978, they find themselves fighting new battles within other borders. One of these young men speaks in fluent Turkish about the difficulties of making a living and supporting families back in war-torn Afghanistan. He then proceeds to tell how he went to a store with his cousin before his departure. As he entered, a bomb exploded right in front of the store, killing his cousin. The film captures the disjuncture and non-synchronicity articulated in this memory of tragic loss in a powerful image, also featured on its poster: a discarded twin stroller, turned upside down on a dump, which has caught fire but only one of the two seats is burning. Two related lives—one cut short by violence, the other carrying this memory of tragic loss—are thus inseparably joined within the metal frame of the stroller and the frame of the cinematic image. In a sequence towards the end of Afganistanbul, the film changes pace and moves into a fast-motion city montage in the style of a music video set to the song “Memleketsiz” (“Without Country”) by the rapper Gazapism (alias Anıl Acar) from his album Bir Gün Herşey (One Day Everything) (2016). Gazapism, whose chosen name converts “wrath” (gazap) into a movement, is based in İzmir on the Aegean Coast, where he founded his own label Argo İzmir. His family relocated from the city of Elazığ in Eastern Anatolia. In an interview, he speaks about growing up with a Kurdish father and a Turkish mother, both teachers, with posters of the Kurdish singer Ahmet Kaya 7 The exhibition, depicting scenes from the daily life of refugees from the Syrian war in Turkey, was shown at the European Forum (Club Alpbach Turkey) at the Austrian embassy in Yeniköy, Istanbul, in April 2016.

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and the rapper Tupac on his bedroom wall and a feeling of not belonging anywhere (Cinmen, 2019). While he reached broader fame as an actor in the television series Çukur (The Pit, 2017–), he still claims social conscience by sharing revenue that he earns from advertising with street kids. The musical interlude in Afganistanbul illustrates this song with several young men pushing their carts through the streets, then broadens the scope to capture a variety of locations across the city, and ends with a shot of the Afghan narrator with some of his mates, cleaned up and smart-looking, walking across busy Taksim Square on a rare recreational venture into a part of town that ranges outside the radius of the decrepit junkyard they inhabit within the scope of this film. The lyrics of “Memleketsiz” are well chosen to amplify the plea for solidarity that Afganistanbul advances. This street has no windows, its kettle is empty My brow frozen in a frown, I don’t have anything, I don’t have any place My face fallen, it’s hard to smile when you look under my eyes No need for sadness, pour a hot tea Let me rub my hands It’s like this cold will get us somewhere, run! Solace is mockery Flung in a void, time has stopped I did not have a park, a street, a country, nor any money For a street kid wine became the revolt Suddenly they called for the morning to come Why didn’t anyone hear, surely this will pass, hold on, my son I did not choose this path, the end of this path is darkness Soiled in synchronicity, we kept looking for a place to hide…8

Along with images of the Afghans blending into the crowd walking the streets of Istanbul, the line “soiled in synchronicity” strongly resonates with 8 My translation from the Turkish: “Bu sokağın penceresi yok, tenceresi boş /Öyle çatık kalmış kaşım, hiçbir şeyim yok, hiçbir yerim yok / Düşmüş yüzüm, gözlerimin altlarına bakıp sonra gülümsemek zor / Hüzünlenmek yok, bi’ sıcak çay koy / Ellerimi ovuştursam / Bu soğuklar sanki bizi bir şeylere kavuşturacak, koş! / Avuntular yoz / Savruldukça boşlukta, zaman durdu / Parkım, sokağım, memleketim bir de param yoktu / Bir sokak çocuğuna isyan oldu şarap / Birden sabah olsun diye bağırdılar onlar / Neden duyan yoktu, elbet geçer dayan oğlum / Ben bu yolu seçmedim ki bu yolun sonu karanlık / Eş zamanlı kirlendikçe gizlenecek yer arandık…” For the complete lyrics of the song, see: https://genius.com/Gazapizm-memleketsiz-lyrics. The official music video has over 21.5 million views on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=A5QI77d6OUg&ab_channel=Gazapizm35.

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reflections on the current world order, suggesting that these young men’s lives in waste are out of sync with the fervour of consumption in cleaner and wealthier parts of the city. The philosopher Ernst Bloch wrote in 1932: “Not all people exist in the same Now. They do so only externally, by virtue of the fact that they may all be seen today. But that does not mean that they are living at the same time with others” (p. 22). Along with obvious non-synchronicities in terms of physical situation and social status, Bloch highlighted the simultaneity of different temporalities based on disparate memories and aspirations. With regard to our times, migrants are driven by their memories of families back home and aspirations to move on to a better life in Europe, while locals are in turn harbouring feelings of being declassed by a system that keeps eliminating the value of labour. In fact, many waste-processing jobs might be taken over by machines before long, increasingly rendering ragpickers superfluous and pushing them into ever more perilous situations. The seemingly disjointed spheres of those who touch and sort the waste of the city and those who produce it are interdependent. Realizing this interdependence could be a first step towards reconsidering polarizations of native vs migrant in their spatial and temporal relativity. In an environmentalist perspective, the non-synchronous synchronicities between those who are recognized as belonging in a place and those who are not appear interwoven with the social fabric of the city. From a broader perspective, the ragpickers’ non-synchronicity is emblematic of life on a planet engulfed by waste. In a world where whole regions are becoming uninhabitable, people, unable to sustain themselves, will continue to migrate—no matter how many walls and borders are fortified. Growing numbers of people already live in precarious conditions, in exploitative labour relations, or without work and support networks. Hostility by settled populations who claim territorial rights—be it in their gated community or their nation—is bound to increase. Humanity’s only hope is to instil some planetary consciousness that conceives life beyond the parochial bounds of ethnic or national belonging. Poetic documentaries that lend a stage to waste dwellers as actors rather than victims without agency remind viewers of their own implication in a system of thoughtless consumption and uneven access to resources. Touching what has been trodden upon can thus be a worthwhile task for the arts and humanities. The secret life of waste is populated by rag-picking poets who are recycling dreams of migration as a means to survival and settlement. Engaging their voices could lend new meanings to recology beyond a capitalist logic of increasingly automated waste management focused merely on resource recovery from refuse.

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References Akın, F. (Director). (2012). Polluting Paradise [Müll im Garten Eden] [Film]. Germany: Corazón International. Akturan, Z. (Director). (2007). Küçükpazar [Television documentary]. Turkey: TRT. Alexander, C., & Reno, J. (Eds.). (2012). Economies of Recycling: The Global Transformation of Materials, Values and Social Relations. London: Zed Books. Artıkişler Kolektifi. Hakkında. http://artikisler.net/#hakkimizda Artıkişler Kolektifi. (Director). (2007). Hakkari’den Ankara’ya Kağıtçılar [Scavengers from Hakkari to Ankara] [Video]. Turkey: Artıkişler Kolektifi. https://vimeo. com/72444171 Aydın-Düzgit, S., Keyman, F., & Biehl, K. (2019). Changing Parameters of Migration Cooperation: Beyond the EU-Turkey Deal? Istanbul Policy Centre Sabancı University Stiftung Mercator Initiative. https://ipc.sabanciuniv.edu/en/ search-content?type=Publication&id=a87d3578–b9ff-4129–b021–73983392a340 Başel, T., & İbragimov, A. (Directors). (2018). Başka Sınırlar [Other Borders] [Film]. Turkey: Alfeka. http://w w w.alfeka.com/portfolio-item/ baska-sinirlar-belgesel/#toggle-id-1 Bauman, Z. (2003). Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts. London: Polity. Benchekroun, H., & Mermer, S. (Directors). (2015). Callshop Istanbul [Film]. Canada: Turtle Films. Benjamin, W. (2006 [1938]). The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire (H. Zohn, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Biehl, K. (2012). New Diversities in Istanbul: Setting a Research Agenda for Studying Migration and the City. SSIIM Paper Series, 10, http://www.unescochair-iuav.it/ en/ssiimps10/ Biehl, K. (2015). Governing Through Uncertainty: Experiences of Being a Refugee in Turkey as a Country for Temporary Asylum. Social Analysis, 59(1), 57–75. doi:10.3167/sa.2015.590104 Biemann, U. (2005). Black Sea Files [Video installation]. KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany. https://www.kw-berlin.de/en/, https://www. geobodies.org/art-and-videos/black-sea-files Bloch, E. (1977 [1935]). Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics. Excerpt from Erbschaft dieser Zeit (M. Ritter, Trans.). New German Critique, 11, 22-38. doi:10.2307/487802 Burdett, R., & Sudjic, D. (Eds.). (2010). Living in the Endless City: The Urban Age Project by the London School of Economics and Deutsche Bank’s Alfred Herrhausen Society. London: Phaidon. Cinmen, I. (2019, January 12). Gazapizm: Mutlu İnsanlarla Frekansım Tutmuyor. Posta. https://www.posta.com.tr/gazapizm-mutlu-insanlarla-frekansim-tutmuyor-2081219

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Çatay, K., & Okur, Y. (Executive Producers). (2017–present). Çukur [The Pit] [TV series]. Turkey: Ay Yapım. Editor’s Note. (2015). The New Inquiry: Special Issue on Trash. 40. Gazapizm. (2016). Memleketsiz [Without Country] [Song]. On Bir Gün Her Şey [Album]. Argo Yapım. Gören, Ş. (Director). (1988). Polizei [Film]. Turkey: Penta Films. Iñárritu, A. G. (2017). Carne y Arena [Virtually Present, Physically Invisible] [Virtual reality project]. United States: Fondazione Prada. IOM UN Migration (2019) Factsheet No. 6. Covid 19 and the Risk of Exacerbating Existing Vulnerabilities. https://www.iom.int/sites/default/files/our_work/ICP/ MPR/migration_factsheet_6_covid-19_and_migrants.pdf Iskander, M. (Director). (2009). Garbage Dreams [Film]. United States: Iskander Films. Karpat, K. H. (1976). The Gecekondu: Rural Migration and Urbanization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kaza, S., Yao, L., Bhada-Tata, P., & Van Woerden, F. (2018). What a Waste 2.0: A Global Snapshot of Solid Waste Management to 2050. Washington, DC: World Bank. Kemal, O. (2016 [1962]). Eskici ve Oğulları. Istanbul: Everest Yayınları. Millington, N., & Lawhon, M. (2018). Geographies of Waste: Conceptual Vectors from the Global South. Progress in Human Geography, 43(6): 1–20. Mosse, R. (2014–2017). Incoming [Video installation]. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, United States. https://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2019/richardmosse-incoming.html Nixon, R. (2011). Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ökten, Z. (Director). (1976). Kapıcılar Kralı [King of Doormen] [Film]. Turkey: Çiçek Film. Ökten, Z. (Director). (1978). Çöpçüler Kralı [The King of the Street Cleaners] [Film]. Turkey: Arzu Film. Pamuk, O. (2015 [2014]). A Strangeness in My Mind [Kafamda bir Tuhaflık] (E. Oklap, Trans.). New York: Knopf. Parasher, B. (Director). (2009). Waste [Film]. India: Center for Communication and Development Studies. Römhild, R. (2017). Beyond the Bounds of the Ethnic: For Postmigrant Cultural and Social Research. Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, 9(2), 69–75. doi:10.1080/2 0004214.2017.1379850 Scanlan, J. (2005) On Garbage. London: Reaktion Books. Sheller, M. (2018). Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes. London: Verso. Sontag, S. (2003). Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador. Strasser, S. (1999). Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash. New York: Metropolitan Books.

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Şen, A., Çelikaslan, Ö., & Tan, P. (Eds). (2014). İstanbul’un Artığı / Surplus of Istanbul. Istanbul: Artık İşler Kolektifi. https://monoskop.org/images/5/55/Artikisler_Kolektif_eds_Istanbulun_Art%C4%B1g%C4%B1_Surplus_of_Istanbul.pdf Şen, B., Arlı, A., & Şen, A. A. (2016). Yoksulluğu Bölüşmek: Süleymaniye Bekâr Odası Göçmenleri. Istanbul: Küre Yayınları. Tekin, L. (2015 [1984]). Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills (R. Christie & S. Paker, Trans.). London: Marion Boyars. Tosun, U. (2007). Taşı Toprağı Altın Kentin Son Gurbetçileri. Nokta, 56–59. Tosun, U. (Director). (2018). Afganistanbul [Film]. Turkey: Xanaduart. https://vimeo. com/348987107, Password: afgan2020 Tosun, U. “Re: Afganistanbul.” E-mail to Deniz Göktürk. January 28, 2020. Türeli, I. (2018). Istanbul, Open City: Exhibiting Anxieties of Urban Modernity. London: Routledge. UNHCR. (2019) Turkey Fact Sheet. Reliefweb. https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb. int/files/resources/UNHCR-Turkey-One-Pager-Fact-Sheet-Oct2019.pdf Walker, L. (Director). (2010). Waste Land [Film]. Brazil: Almega Projects. Weiwei, A. (2016). Safe Passage [Installation]. Konzerthaus Berlin, Berlin, Germany. Weiwei, A. (2016). Laundromat [Installation]. Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, New York, United States. Weiwei, A. (Director). (2017). Human Flow [Film]. Germany: 24 Media Production Company. Weiwei, A. (Director). (2019). The Rest [Film]. Germany: AWW Germany.

About the Author Deniz Göktürk is a professor of German Studies, Film and Media at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on theories and practices of migration and media transformation in a global horizon. She is co-editor of The German Cinema Book (2002, 2020); Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration (2007); and Orienting Istanbul: Cultural Capital of Europe? (2010).

8.

Waiting in Line, Moving in Circles: Spaces of Instability in Christian Petzold’s Transit Eileen Rositzka

Abstract Loosely based on a 1944 novel by German writer Anna Seghers and set in present-day France, Christian Petzold’s Transit is a story of fateful migration, in which conflicting agencies and shifting identities are translated into an aesthetic principle. Its fluctuating interrelations between images, texts, and temporalities transform the film into an ultimate “non-place,” which, except for a few hints at fascism and a refugee crisis, provides no explanation or overview of its political implications. Alongside the characters, spectators are thrown into a world defined by fragile image spaces and zones of exclusion, always haunted by fragments of the past and glimpses of an uncertain future. Keywords: cinematic space, non-place, historicity, aesthetic experience

A scene like any other: A man sits in a cafe sipping his espresso, eventually distracted by the insistent sirens of police cars rushing by. Suddenly, he is approached by another man who seems to know him from somewhere. “Georg? Why are you still here? Paris is being sealed off. You won’t get out.” “And you?” “I’m leaving tomorrow.”

The man tells him that he has a danger visa for the United States, “a visa for people in great jeopardy.” “You’re in great jeopardy?” Georg smiles, not quite taking him seriously, but still agreeing to doing him the favour of delivering two letters before he

Bayrakdar, D. and R. Burgoyne (eds.), Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art and Media. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463724166_ch08

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will join him on his escape from the city. Suddenly, Georg leaves the cafe, and the film’s title appears: Transit. Against certain expectations one might have, based on the canonical dramaturgy of Hollywood thrillers, the prologue hardly conveys a sense of palpable danger. This impression surely cannot only be attributed to the fact that Transit (2018), German director Christian Petzold’s eighth feature film, is not a Hollywood production. While Petzold, a representative of the so-called Berlin School, is known for his matter-of-fact style, and for calculated yet emotionally complex references to classical genre cinema, there is something odd and “off” about the opening scene, precisely because it drifts apart on the level of sound, dialogue, and acting: Its overall slow pacing, the calm behaviour of the people in the cafe while the street outside—always visible through the large windows—is crowded with police cars, accompanied, from time to time, by the piercing sound of their sirens. Clearly, an emergency is unfolding, or a raid is about to start, but it does not seem to affect the man whom we get to know as Georg (played by Franz Rogowski). This ominous threat, it appears, is only passing, while the real danger might lie in the prospect of losing time under the pressure of everyday events—a fundamental problem of modernity; in the end, this is what the notion of “transit” entails. Along these lines, the plot follows Georg to Marseille—a supposedly vivid seaport depicted as a hopeless cargo area, where he is torn between the urge to leave for a better yet uncertain future and his desire to stay with people he does not know very well, but who become dear to him. For a filmmaker such as Petzold, a theme like this may seem consequential in relation to his previous portrayals of German neoliberal wastelands. Examples include Wolfsburg (2003), Yella (2007), and Jerichow (2008). With Transit, however, something else comes into play: Unlike other works by Petzold, the film is not about current life in post-reunification Germany but instead reaches out to different places and a different historical past. It thus completes a trilogy of “period pieces” (in the broadest sense), following Petzold’s German Democratic Republic drama Barbara (2012) and his subsequent film Phoenix (2014), a story of a female Holocaust survivor in post-war Berlin. Yet, in its radically conceptual movement between past, present, and future, Transit sets itself apart from its immediate predecessors. In her The New York Times review of the film, Manohla Dargis (2019) puts it as follows: There are no valorous choices in “Transit,” where leaving is a high-stakes necessity for Georg and the desperate, panicked refugees around him. To stay is to die. To remain is also to exist in a time-space puzzle—perhaps

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another dimension, or a Philip K. Dick-style dystopia—in which German forces are flooding into present-day Paris.

Indeed, what Dargis calls a “time-space puzzle” with regard to the spatiotemporal dynamics of Petzold’s film is rooted in the nature of transit itself: On a pragmatic level, the word “transit” describes “the process of moving goods or people from one place to another”—a process that supposedly leaves said people or goods in the passive state of being moved around or being placed in transitory environments whose purpose is just as well defined by the rules of passage.1 Describing such surroundings as zones lacking identity, and specifically referring to monofunctional architectural structures like train stations, airports, or shopping malls, French anthropologist Marc Augé (1995) famously coined the term “non-places.” In Petzold’s Transit, a story of fateful migration, this movement of conflicting agencies and shifting identities is translated into an aesthetic principle that works in both literal and metaphorical ways. Ultimately, as the film unfolds, the fluctuating interrelations between images, texts, and temporalities transform Transit into a “non-place” that is more than the sum of its parts. Petzold based his film on a novel by German writer Anna Seghers (2013), which she wrote in exile during the Nazi occupation in France. Seghers’s original text, also published under the title Transit in 1944, not only serves as a historical reference for the film, which is set in present-day France, its language also finds its way into the conversations and interactions of the protagonists; they often use the same words and perform the same actions depicted in the book. The film’s actual subject—the contemporary political circumstances presupposed in the plot—remains utterly vague: a few hints at fascism and a refugee crisis, some information about various consulates and transit documents, but no explanation, no overview at all. These narrative gaps prove to be constitutive for the film’s overall sense of instability and essential insecurity. Alongside the characters, we as spectators are thrown into a world that is more or less anonymous, precarious, and transitory. This shared world, then, is one of fragile image spaces, undefined urban landscapes, and zones of exclusion, always haunted by fragments of the past and by glimpses of an uncertain future. Always concerned with somewhat spectral notions of modernity, Petzold has defined Transit as a “ghost story” about people who not only get lost in space, but in time as 1 Cambridge Dictionary, accessed February 26, 2020. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/ dictionary/english/transit.

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well: “For these emigrants, time stands still. The past that they have is of no interest for anybody else. They don’t have a future, they live in the now. But the now does not accommodate them” (Treml, 2017). Instead, as ghosts of bureaucracy, they depend on self-sufficient documents that only take them from one intermediate stage to the next, or, in the words of Anna Seghers: “A transit visa—that gives you permission to travel through a country with the stipulation that you don’t plan to stay” (2013, p. 32). It is this placelessness, a simultaneous everywhere and nowhere so distinctive to migrant experience, that characterizes Transit’s fragile image spaces; as a result, the characters’ hesitant motion and paralysis in their search for identity and stability translates into audiovisual modes of staging, into images and sounds that come together only to drift apart again. Ultimately, the transitional places mapped out in this film become spaces of and for cinematic thinking and reflection: With its both epistolary and topographical features, the film presents itself as a “hypercard” of migrant narratives and time-images, an advanced postcard in that it moves beyond limited texts and identifiable places, and instead “contains dense texts that not only point to referents and other texts but also are themselves pointers to other pointers” (Naficy, 2001, p. 150). From the beginning, in its prosaic yet thoroughly deliberate mise en scène, Transit poses many unanswered questions, leaving the spectator wondering and wandering through an ambiguous storyworld—a world full of stories about people whose absence outdoes their visible traces.2 When Georg, keeping his promise to deliver the letters before heading to southern France, enters a Parisian hotel room to find their addressee, he notices a typewriter and a manuscript on the desk: Die Entronnenen (Those Who Got Away) by an author named Franz Weidel, next to a passport issued by the German Reich. Why, the viewer might ask, would there be a now ancient item like this, when we just saw Georg walking through a city full of modern cars and LCD screens? And what about the typewriter, which also seems to be out of place and out of time? A film philosopher might reply that what is presented here could be described as a crystal image in the sense of Gilles Deleuze: a figuration of coexisting temporal layers in which the “real” is paralleled with aspects of an imaginary past or with virtual possibilities. Frank Ankersmit (2005), on the other hand, would argue that, through such scenographic compositions, 2 According to Thomas Helbig (2019), these traces help to create a presence opposing the profound absence that death usually entails (p. 35). In my view, however, it is precisely this absence that becomes a dominant presence, one that stands in for Weidel’s visible body.

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the film facilitates what he calls a “sublime historical experience,” in that the viewer (or the figure of the historian in Ankersmit) engages with the feeling of a past breaking away from the present. However, while Ankersmit qualifies this experience as traumatic for the historian who realizes that this past is being lost forever, one core argument of his definition could be applied to the film viewer’s encounter with Transit’s supposedly historical objects: [S]ublime historical experience is no longer an experience of the distance between past and present-where the distance between past and present is presupposed. The situation here is rather the reverse, in the sense that in sublime historical experience the past comes into being only thanks to and by historical experience. (2005, p. 265)

In this vein, Ankersmit also adds that—in the wake of this sublime experience—the historian’s mind becomes “the scene on which the drama of world history is enacted” (2005, p. 265). While Transit does not qualify as a historical object in the strict sense (in fact, the cinematic medium itself could hardly be grasped as an “object” or artefact), it nevertheless initiates a confrontation of certain historical resonances (signs of the Third Reich) with others (references to the viewer’s present within the film’s mise en scène)—a confrontation, that is, a dramatic conflict that is only realized in the act of film-viewing. This conflict, then, exceeds the simple juxtaposition of arbitrary objects; it is not simply to be decoded as a postmodernist trick employed by the filmmaker. Rather, by blurring the lines between history and fiction, it questions the status of narrative—and of reality itself, as the film reveals. Only seconds after Georg has briefly scanned Weidel’s work and belongings, he finds the hotel bathroom covered in his blood. We learn from the hotel owner that the author has committed suicide and his body was already taken away: “Unknown corpse, crematorium, unmarked grave.” For both Georg and the spectator, Weidel has already disappeared before he even came into view, and soon he is forever lost in Transit’s “time-space puzzle.” How do we process the unsettling news of his death off-screen? How are we to think of and about his identity when not even the film can really testify to the existence of one of its own characters? It is at this point that Petzold begins to suspend any sense of trust an audience could possibly put in the f ilm and the traceability of its plot, especially with respect to an allegedly historical dimension. This profound unreliability is later intensified by a male voice-over that cannot instantly be ascribed to any of Transit’s protagonists. From a supposedly omniscient

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point of view, and in an ostentatious literary manner, the narrator begins to tell Georg’s story, as if reading from the very manuscript Weidel left on his desk. A restless fugitive and illegal alien, Georg, who promptly takes on Weidel’s identity, becomes a figure that is caught between an audible text recited in past tense and its accompanying images unfolding in the present of the film. Yet these images, in turn, tend to divert from the descriptions read out by the narrator: Often, the voice announces a movement or an action that is not performed on-screen, as if the scene would spontaneously refrain from showing what is actually being told. The film, so it seems, is always undecided whether to stay “true to its word,” or whether it should transform into its own allegory, another version of itself. One could even say that Transit’s almost dialectical historicity, which constitutes an unsettling movement between non-places and identities, is itself always in transit, as it alternates in shaping the narrative structure and the experience of its viewers and characters. Indeed, the extent to which Petzold’s protagonists are existentially compromised by historical circumstances testifies to the director’s affinity for flashpoints of crisis and rupture—mainly in connection to tangible shifts in (Germany’s) social and economic conditions. As Jaimey Fisher (2013) notices about Petzold’s films and their ghostlike characters: [H]istory regularly intrudes upon individuals’ dreams, fantasies, and desires as well as the spaces they inhabit… Petzold’s ghosts… are invariably remnants from an earlier moment generated by socioeconomic change; in fact… this spectrality compels the viewer to confront history’s transformations, dissonances, and losses. Individuals, families, even whole communities are knocked out of time and rendered undead before they realize it. (p. 5)

Fisher goes on to say that this sensibility would recall Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project (one of Petzold’s stated references), in which the philosopher “sought to create an archaeological history of modernity by immersing himself in the past, tearing out quotes and images to ‘mortify’ them, and then recontextualizing them in work that would illuminate the present” (2013, p. 5). Consequently, for Fisher, this approach to historicity as a mode of reworking remnants and remains becomes manifest in how Petzold quotes older genre films to conjure “a non-nostalgic, critical history of the present” (2013, p. 5) Examples of this technique range from certain scenes in Yella, in which Petzold’s modes of staging visibly allude to Herk Harvey’s 1962 B-picture

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Carnival of Souls, to a more complex interplay of genre modalities (of the German “Heimatfilm,” the fairy tale, or the espionage thriller) in his madefor-TV crime movie Wölfe (Wolves). This interplay, however, as Matthias Grotkopp (2019) elucidates, not only reflects the structural principles of the genres themselves; the modalities of the crime genre pave the way for what Wölfe “actually wants to be”: a love story. The same goes for the notion of historical experience in Transit. Here, too, we find references to what Fisher calls “older genre films”: The Moroccan name of the first hotel Georg visits (“Le Ryad”), and the name “Rick” printed on the soccer T-shirt of the little boy who befriends him, gesture to Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942). But this is more than a simple nod to the past in critical reflection of the present. It is not the film Casablanca that seeps into the fabric of Petzold’s Transit; rather, it is our memory and experience of the film—of Rick’s cafe as a junction for its dramatic threads and conflicts, the melodrama unfolding between Rick (Humphrey Bogart) and Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman)—that interferes with Transit’s central love relationship between Georg and Marie (Paula Beer) as well as its other cinematic influences: the typical tension of an escape drama mixed with the sober narration of a hard-boiled detective thriller, perhaps carried away by the poetic flow of an essay film. Casablanca thus becomes part of an intertextual web through which the world of one film becomes graspable as the reflexive modulation of another film’s world.3 The subtle yet persevering presence of Casablanca makes us realize how Transit’s plot could have developed along the lines of Classic Hollywood cinema and how it eventually diverges from Curtiz’s f ilm as a now romanticized version of the past. That is, like Transit’s characters, Casablanca is a ghost prompting the contemporary viewer to search the fragile spaces of the present for possible reasons of their fragility. In the words of Jaimey Fisher: Remnants, remains, and ghosts are things that, above all, recall the past—that underscore the so-called presence of the past. But beyond the simultaneity of the past in the present, they indicate the very processes by which the present becomes past. Especially ghosts compel us to ask in an uncanny, non-nostalgic mode: Why does this remain? What happened that it survives in this liminal form? [T]heir very presence queries why we have ended up here and now. [G]hosts suggest the noncontemporaneity, the nonidentity, of the present with itself. (2013, p. 16) 3

Something Michael Wedel also notices about Drei, a film by Tom Tykwer (2019, p. 22).

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If, according to Ankersmit’s concept of sublime historical experience, the separation of past and present is meant to be overcome in terms of historical knowledge, then these remnants, remains, and ghosts (especially those haunting Petzold’s Transit) could be perceived as manifestations of historical questions, as interrogations demanding our engagement with the past to provide the present with an identity, or at least with a possible trajectory. This would not be a quest for truth, nor would it be an endeavour to understand the essence of reality in the most objective sense; instead of employing a mimetic conceptualization of realism, an aesthetic examination of the past through the present, and vice versa, also allows for the perception of a commonly shared reality in abstract and metaphorical ways. Accordingly, the late Harun Farocki, who closely collaborated with Petzold on the screenplay of Transit, and who had already noted down first ideas on Seghers’s original novel decades ago, wrote in 1966: “Robed in the guise of ‘reality’ this subject matter contains a parable” (Helbig, 2020, p. 34).4 As we can see in Farocki’s original handwritten document, he eventually crossed out the word “reality” and replaced it with “historical event.” Indeed, the film that eventually came into being could be described as a cinematic experiment in which the “historical event” sets the stage for thinking through the present; reality then becomes a prospect, not a pregiven condition. As Hermann Kappelhoff argues: The visual spaces of the cinema open up external reality as a field of the possible experience of social reality. A reality of society, represented in the stances and gestures of the body, in the spatial configurations of surfaces as well as in the emotional atmospheres, in the modes of perception and modulations of the gaze carried out by the camera’s position. It is presented as the experience of reality in the mode of possibility. (2015, pp. 65–66)

For a contemporary audience, this reality is of course always mediated, full of fleeting images they encounter at home or on mobile screens. Watching and interpreting Petzold’s film now thus obviously recalls the extensive media coverage of the ongoing European refugee crisis (which began in 2015); above all, it brings to mind various news images of Syrian or African people holding out in camps and on boats, of both welcoming and exclusive communities in European countries, of border controls and overcrowded 4 The original German note reads: “Der Stoff birgt im Gewand der ‘Realität’ . . .‚ Historischen Begebenheit’ eine Parabel.”

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train stations. None of this is visually reproduced in Transit. Instead, and because the film is replete with anachronisms, the temporal and narrative layers that make up its plot are configured in a way that one historical or cultural context is remediated through another: Remediation, in the sense of Bolter and Grusin (2000), occurs when one medium is repurposed by another, or whenever “old” and “new” media reshape each other by way of mutual reference. Furthermore, what Bolter and Grusin call the “double logic of remediation” is—in their view—a consequence of Western culture’s aspiration to “both to multiply its media and to erase all traces of mediation” (2000, p. 5). Ideally, they write, “it wants to erase its media in the very act of multiplying them” (Bolter & Grusin, 2000, p. 5). At first glance, this logic also seems to be at work in Petzold’s Transit: Seghers’s original story is filtered and altered through a more contemporary plot’s aesthetics; old media technology (typewriters and transistor radios) is complemented by modern screens and cameras. But these media do not necessarily eliminate each other’s traces; instead, their unquestioned coexistence and display openly calls for the attention of the audience, prompting every spectator to keep them in sight and mind—not as enhanced versions or incorporations of one another, but as signs of their own time demonstrating that past and present are in fact closely intertwined. As a result, the anachronistic assemblage of texts and technological devices in the film renders every component, each medium, “a metonymic and a metaphoric displacement of desire” (Kauffman, 1986, p. 38), which, as Hamid Naficy paraphrases Linda Kauffman’s account of epistolarity in modern fiction, can be defined as “the desire to be with another and to reimagine an elsewhere and other times” (2001, p. 101). In her study on movement and performance in Berlin School cinema, Olivia Landry makes an interesting claim in this regard: Petzold works in the “cemetery of media.” Without being overtly selfreflexive, there is a haunting quality, a play between absence and presence, between life and death, between past and present, that subtends the mediatic entanglements of the films of Petzold and a number of his fellow Berlin School filmmakers. Accompanying this is an awareness of the precarious status of cinema as a dying (perhaps already dead) medium and an urgency to not necessarily resuscitate it but to rethink its place among media, (re)presentation, and imaging. (2018, pp. 17–18)

This problem of situating both Transit’s characters within the film’s thoroughly transitory urban landscape and thereby questioning the status of

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the cinematic image itself is further complicated by how Petzold, in doing so, fundamentally challenges the notion of spectatorship and witnessing—invoking a double sense of immediacy and hypermediacy, as Bolter and Grusin would call it (2000, p. 5).5 In fact, creating an irritating effect of “liveness” through the insertion of surveillance camera footage has become one of Petzold’s signature traits. On the one hand, it undergirds the impression of the films’ “own real-time modality”; on the other, it again plays into the motif of haunting that runs through the director’s work (Landry, 2018, p. 20). In Transit, however, this notion takes shape as a structure of feeling essential to the migrant experience: the feeling of being watched and objectified at all times, of being subject to an unfeeling state apparatus. Thus, the ostensible liveness and immediacy of surveillance takes on a distinctly diasporic quality—something that Naficy attributes to what he calls an “accented cinema”: “While mediated simultaneity is generally regarded positively for its communitarianism, it has the adverse effect of intensifying the rupture of exile” (2001, p. 133). In this sense, the specif ic surveillance aesthetic, the sudden switch to low-resolution digital imagery, not only marks a notable change in the f ilm’s formal style but also unsettles its constitution of subjectivity as the disembodied camera gaze seems to revoke Georg’s point of view, calling attention to the refugee’s loss of agency. At the same time, the viewers are being forced to share a non-human—and indifferent—sense of vision. It is one single surveillance shot that catches them off guard, so much so that they might feel alienated from the world of the f ilm and reminded of their own voyeurism: When Georg arrives in Marseille (after having travelled by train as a stowaway and leaving behind a friend who died on the journey), he heads for the city centre and looks at a map—not only to know his position but also, quite literally, to know his place as an insignif icant stranger in a strange city. He is a passenger not worth noticing, yet he is possibly suspicious. Without any diegetic motivation, a surveillance camera frames him from behind, people left and right enter a subway station minding their own business, and the narrator remarks: “He was tired, no one looked at him. That’s the terrible thing. Not that they stare at you, your dirty, tired face, your torn clothing. The terrible thing is: they don’t see you. You don’t exist in their world” (see Figure 8.1). 5 This is what has been pointed out in a discussion of the film within the context of a workshop at the Berlin-based Centre for Advanced Film Studies, Cinepoetics. The event, titled Beyond Spectatorship? took place on November 1, 2019.

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Figure 8.1: “You don’t exist in their world.” Transit (Christian Petzold, 2018).

While this last sentence could well be interpreted as a cynical comment on the fact that the world of any f ilm is of course technically separate from the everyday world of the spectator, it is another division that is addressed here: a clear separation between “you” and “them” that refers to the exclusion of the refugee from the community of unperturbed residents. In this moment, when Georg is “caught on camera,” his actual immobility against the other pedestrians’ unheeding hastiness accentuates his state of being cut off from the world: out of time, out of place, and out of touch. According to this logic, only a touch can change this situation; only physical contact can disable the surveilling gaze. As it happens, a woman suddenly runs up to Georg, disabling the surveilling gaze. Grabbing him by the shoulder, she soon realizes that he is not the man she thought she had recognized. The voice of the narrator supplements the action: “That’s when he saw her. She looked at him, lightly shook her head, turned away and left. That instant, a police siren sounded, then a second. It was a raid. He ran for it.” We learn later on that the unknown woman Georg frequently meets by coincidence is Marie Weidel, the writer’s wife in search of her husband. Her restlessness is of a different, circular kind: Every person she attaches herself to is also her point of departure. Georg, in turn, is always kept from arriving somewhere, from settling down with someone. His precarious affection for Marie is but one element of the film’s atmospheric instability, of the gentle but insistent tension created by the vagueness of its setting and the precision of Petzold’s filmmaking, as Justin Chang (2009) notes in his review of Transit. Oscillating between “the evanescence of a dream and the urgent clarity of a newspaper headline,” the film weaves a net of ambiguous spaces and places, until it gradually transforms into what Chang aptly calls “a sunlit purgatory,” an absolute non-place and transit zone living up to its allegorical

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potential. Each of the film’s spatial configurations is therefore centred on the sheer torment of waiting, on the cautious exchange of words, looks, and gestures in the face of uncertainty. For the protagonists, however, this exchange ultimately fails to establish a sense of belonging, the foundation and reassurance of a common destiny. In the end, what is missing in Transit’s cinematic world is not only a reliable topographical habitation but also what Vincent Descombes (1987) once defined as a “rhetorical territory,” a space defined by rhetorical acts such as plea, accusation, eulogy, censure, recommendation, and warning: The character is at home when he is at ease in the rhetoric of the people with whom he shares life. The sign of being at home is the ability to make oneself understood without too much difficulty, and to follow the reasoning of others without any need for long explanations. A disturbance of rhetorical communication marks the crossing of a frontier, which should of course be envisaged as a border zone, a marchland, rather than a clearly drawn line. (p. 179)

In his conception of non-places, Marc Augé follows Descombes’s approach, arguing that “the link between individuals and their surroundings in the space of non-place is established through the mediation of words, or even texts” (1995, p. 94). The “real non-places of supermodernity,” as he names them, are partly defined by their “instructions for use” (signs, orders, information) to establish “the traffic conditions of spaces—spaces in which individuals are supposed to interact only with texts, whose proponents are not individuals but ‘moral entities’ or institutions” (Augé, 1995, p. 96). Yet this leads to the paradox that non-places make us feel “always, and never, at home,” because they require a functional relationship between texts and individuals, but they do not necessarily take root in these individuals’ daily lives and environments (Augé, 1995, p. 109). This is where modernity turns into supermodernity, where, according to Augé, history is made into a specific spectacle, rather than being woven into an intricate mesh of old and new—a condition Petzold highlights by frequently loosening the threads in Transit’s fabric of historical referentiality (1995, p. 110). This becomes most evident in scenes that take place in bureaucratic establishments, where people’s personal stories turn into anecdotes and images become phantasmatic landscapes—and where the behaviour of certain characters takes on an almost comical quality, underscoring the absurdity of institutionalized habits, the farce of waiting in line and moving in circles.

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At the Mexican consulate in Marseille, for instance, Georg, who waits in the entrance hall, is joined by a short man wearing a straw hat. The stranger sits down next to him. Initially, as he does so, the camera takes no interest in him. Because he is too small to be captured in full frame, his head occasionally emerges from the bottom left corner of the image while he is trying to face Georg and tell him all about his newly obtained documents and work contract: Caracas. I’m a conductor. You know Caracas? You see? I’m supposed to start on September 1. This is my ship passage. Maybe you’re thinking: “That lucky chap is bound to get his stupid transits.” But no. They’re afraid. Afraid we’ll disembark and stay.

At that point, Georg stands up to find another spot next to a woman with two dogs. The narrator’s voice-over sets in: He looked at the conductor. And all the others who wanted to tell their stories. How they’d narrowly escaped death. About the children, the men, the women that they had lost on the run. The horrific things they had seen. He couldn’t stand to hear it anymore.

So he crouches down. Without being asked, the woman, too, begins to talk. She tells him that the dogs belong to a Jewish couple, and that she, who is Jewish herself, will most likely get a visa if she brings them with her to the United States. Georg does not say a word, and it seems as if he would speak his mind through the voice of the narrator—as if he was just taken over by yet another identity—which also expresses the general “difficulty of coming to speech in exilic situations” (Naficy, 2001, p. 115): “Then he thought: ‘This is Marseille. It’s a port. And ports are places where stories are told, that’s what they’re there for.”6 A consulate does not seem to offer the appropriate “rhetorical territory” for stories about personal thoughts and feelings. As is emphasized in the image composition of the scene, the setting does not allow for an individual to fully occupy the shot; all bodies are fragmented, their voices silenced. Somewhat unexpectedly, the scene cuts to a group of people waiting in line to draw a number. A monitor behind them displays a slideshow of scenic landscapes—probably Scandinavian, but definitely not Mexican—and 6 Naficy goes on to say that “the ambiguity about the identity of the speaking subject creates within the text and the spectator a profound sense of dislocation” (2001, pp. 148–149).

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Figure 8.2: Waiting in distress. Transit (Christian Petzold, 2018).

for a few seconds, the editing becomes more dynamic: a parallel montage of incoherent words uttered by the conductor and by the Jewish woman, with accompanying medium shots of their tired bodies. The monitor now switches to random images (a sketch and a painting) of ships in distress (see Figure 8.2), while the persistent sound of a bell finally makes its way to the acoustic foreground of the scene. Eventually, the final call is noticed by the woman with the dogs, who then breaks into Georg’s thoughts: “813. That’s you.” More than reducing human beings to numbers, these laws of bureaucracy turn their living bodies into double placeholders: always saving their spot for the next person in line and, in doing so, securing the institution’s right to exist. Above all, what this scene gauges in its compositional dissonances is an experiential register of transit and migration that does not aim to visualize physical struggle in extreme natural conditions; instead, it emphasizes different levels of psychological and emotional exhaustion, of a life deprived of individuality, of having no fidelity to anyone or anything. The film as a whole thus evokes several layers of fictionalization (written texts, spoken words, even a lullaby sung by Georg) to test their mutual reliability, to play them off against one another, but also to put the individual spectator in a position of transit—to feel and think through the “in-between” of times and spaces. With all its loops and detours, Petzold’s Transit resorts to a road to nowhere (which is also the title of the Talking Heads song played over the closing credits) that takes us to the non-places of cinema. At the end of the film, we find Georg where we have met him for the first time: in a cafe—in Marseille and not in Paris, but possibly anywhere and nowhere. And it is here where—almost en passant—the identity of the narrator is revealed to be that of the cafe’s bartender. Ultimately, to provide a barely visible side character with the enunciative authority over this film

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seems consequential considering Petzold’s cinematic conception of transit: a fleeting movement from one point to the next that creates temporal and temporary connections. Nothing more and nothing less is epitomized by the barman catching and passing down stories in his cafe—a place where time passes through and thoughts are left to linger.

References Ankersmit, F. (2005). Sublime Historical Experience. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Augé, M. (1995). Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (J. Howe, Trans.). London: Verso. Bolter, J. D., & Grusin, R. (2000). Remediation: Understanding New Media. Boston: MIT Press. Chang, J. (2019, March 6). Review: Christian Petzold’s thriller “Transit” is hauntingly suspended between past and present. Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-transit-review20190306-story.html Curtiz, M. (Director). (1942). Casablanca [Film]. United States: Warner Bros. Dargis, M. (2019, February 28). “Transit” Review: An Existential Puzzler with Jackboots and Terror. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/movies/transit-review.html Descombes, V. (1987). Proust: Philosophie du Roman. Paris: Minuit. Fisher, J. (2013). Christian Petzold. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Grotkopp, M. (2019). Genre, Modus, Modalität. Petzolds WÖLFE und die Pluralität der Perspektiven. mediaesthetics, 3, http://dx.doi.org/10.17169/mae.0.80 Harvey, H. (Director). (1962). Carnival of Souls [Film]. United States: Harcourt Productions. Helbig, T. (2019). Die Gegenwart des Historischen in Christian Petzolds Transit. all-over, 15, 33–44. Retrieved February 26, 2020, from http://allover-magazin.com/?p=3392 Kappelhoff, H. (2015). The Politics and Poetics of Cinematic Realism (D. Hendrickson, Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press. Kauffman, L. (1986). Discourse of Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fiction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Landry, O. (2018). Movement and Performance in Berlin School Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Naficy, H. (2001). An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Petzold, C. (Director). (2003). Wolfsburg [Film]. Germany: ARTE. Petzold, C. (Director). (2007). Yella [Film]. Germany: Schramm Film. Petzold, C. (Director). (2008). Jerichow [Film]. Germany: ARTE. Petzold, C. (Director). (2012). Barbara [Film]. Germany: Schramm Film. Petzold, C. (Director). (2014). Phoenix [Film]. Germany: Schramm Film. Petzold, C. (Director). (2018). Transit [Film]. Germany: Schramm Film. Seghers, A. (2013) Transit (M. Bettauer Dembo, Trans.). New York: New York Review Books. Treml, C. (2017, July). “Transit”: Verloren in der Gegenwart. Goethe Institut Kultur: Magazin. Retrieved February 26, 2020, from https://www.goethe.de/ins/fr/de/ kul/mag/21019389.html?forceDesktop=1 Wedel, M. (2019). Das Wunder von Wuppertal: Tom Tykwer, Miracolo a Milano und das Märchenhafte. In R. Brückner, B. Groß, M. Grotkopp, & E. Rositzka (Eds.), Im Verwandeln der Zeit: Reflexionen über filmische Bilder (pp. 13–24). Berlin: Vorwerk 8.

About the Author Eileen Rositzka (1988-2021) holds a PhD in Film Studies from the University of St Andrews. Her dissertation has been published under the title Cinematic Corpographies: Re-Mapping the War Film Through the Body (2018). She was a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at Freie Universität Berlin.

9. Migrant Bodies in the Land/City/ Seascapes of 2000s Turkish Cinema1 Deniz Bayrakdar

Abstract In this essay, I explore the land-, sea-, and cityscapes in six films (five Turkish and one Turkish German)—Bliss, The Wound, Rıza, Broken Mussels, The Guest, and Seaburners—and their use of place and non-place. Hamid Naficy’s concept of transitional space and Marc Augé’s notion of non-place, based on Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, will be the basis of the theoretical discussion. I focus on what I see as a major shift in the representation of the migrant experience in the Turkish cinema of the early and late 2000s, a shift from the land- and cityscapes to films whose setting is the seascape. This shift, I argue, corresponds to changes in the phases of migration that flow within and through Turkey, and both government policies and the public perception. Keywords: Turkish cinema, migrant bodies, landscape, cityscape, seascape, transnational spaces, non-places, heterotopia

Introduction The migrants’ stories in 2000s Turkish cinema are told in land-, city-, and seascapes as heterotopian, transitional spaces and non-places. In 2007, two striking films on migrants’ stories end with the protagonists gazing 1 This essay has its basis in my research as an academic visitor at Royal Holloway University in London, Media Arts Department (2015). I would like to thank Prof. Daniela Berghahn, Prof. John Hill, and Prof. James Bennett for providing me with the time to think and write and for their scholarly support. I am grateful to Robert Burgoyne for his revisions and valuable contributions to my essay. I would also like to thank Melisa Önel for providing me with the Seaburners images and Ahmet Emin Bülbül and Rob Lewis for their careful reading and formatting of my text.

Bayrakdar, D. and R. Burgoyne (eds.), Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art and Media. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463724166_ch09

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out on seascapes: Mutluluk (Bliss, Abdullah Oğuz, 2007) and the Turkish German film Auf der Anderen Seite (The Edge of Heaven, Fatih Akın, 2007). The closing scenes of both films emphasize the seascape2 as heterotopian space, which mainly does not refer to a specific place with a geographical, social, and historical connotation, but to the inverse of real sites and utopias, a characteristic that is shared with the Turkish German film Yara (The Wound, Yılmaz Arslan, 1998). Bliss tells the story of a couple forcibly migrating from Eastern Anatolia to Istanbul due to an honour killing. A young man, who has come back from his military service, is tasked with killing a young girl, a relative who is a rape victim. He falls in love with her, and they find shelter in a professor’s sailing boat on the Aegean. The boat gliding through the seascapes serves as an ultimate heterotopia, signifying both freedom and a passage to maturity for the migrant couple. The Wound tells the story of a Turkish guest worker’s daughter, sent back from Germany to Turkey as a punishment. The film reverses migrants’ usual direction of mobility from East to West. In the young woman’s dream sequences, water serves as a mirroring space, what Foucault calls a heterotopia of deviation (1984, p. 5). In contrast to her nightmare experience in the Eastern Anatolian landscape, the young woman experiences the waterscapes in her dreams both as liberating and as a space of capture. She is shown in a cage with her guest worker father guarding the cage, which is encircled by a fluid heterotopian space. The Wound and Bliss use waterscapes and seascapes as fluid spaces, without a specific location, as ultimate heterotopias. The cityscapes portrayed in films such as Rıza (Tayfun Pirselimoğlu, 2007) and Kırık Midyeler (Broken Mussels, Seyfettin Tokmak, 2011), on the other hand, are portrayed as transitional spaces. Hamid Naficy exemplifies transitional and transnational places and spaces as “borders, tunnels, seaports, airports, and hotels and vehicles of mobility such as trains, buses, and suitcases, that are frequently inscribed in the accented films” (2001, p. 5). He points out that these places, spaces, and vehicles are “privileged sites” within journeys and struggles in search of identity (Naficy, 2001, p. 5). According to Naficy, third-country or transitional hotels and motels—as seen in Rıza—both build a shelter for immigrants and refugees, and are environments where all kinds of swindlers and corrupt officials abuse these people on the move. Misafir (The Guest, Andaç Haznedaroğlu, 2016) depicts where those migrants in Istanbul live in cheap basement flats, as transitional spaces, and shopping malls, as non-places of supermodernity. 2 The closing scene of The Edge of Heaven is discussed in the essay in “Turkish Cinema and the New Europe: At the Edge of Heaven” (Bayrakdar, 2009).

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These stories, taking place in bachelor rooms, hotel receptions, call offices, and internet cafes—different types of “waiting rooms”—portray Istanbul as a dark city. Rıza, Broken Mussels, and The Guest do not allow for a contemplation of the landscape: Cityscapes dominate the background. In rare scenes, we have access to the Sea of Marmara and to the Bosphorus. Melisa Önel’s Kumun Tadı (Seaburners, 2014) presents a third way of conceptualizing the tragic space of irregular migration, building its sense of space as a non-place, in Marc Augé’s (1995) formulation. The feeling of an abyss, a “black hole,” where one loses oneself without a trace, exists throughout the film. As Augé explains, a non-place is not an organic social space, in contrast to Durkheim’s concept of place, which has an organic relation to space and time (Ponzanesi, 2012, p. 676). It has no relation to identity or history. Spaces that do not absorb the traces of human passage or use, the waiting rooms of society—these are non-places, in Augé’s concept. In contrast to the films of migrants set in the cityscapes mentioned above, Seaburners makes use of the sea, the swamp, and other fragmented spaces as non-places. The sea builds a natural line and border of migration, where the migrants lose and “burn” their identities. The land- and seascape in Seaburners is, moreover, not subservient to the narrative. The image of the seascape, rendered in a loop that both opens and ends the film, becomes the non-place of the migrants’ tragedy. In Seaburners, the water-, sea-, and landscapes become “autonomous” and are not in the service of the story. The transition from setting to landscape is realized both through the cinematographic medium and the spectators’ gaze, which has a doubly temporalized space, that of the directors and the spectators, which allows an interplay between the narrative mode—the story of the migrants—and a spectacular mode—the pictorial qualities of the seascapes as non-places (Lefebvre, 2006, p. 28).3 The seascape plays a particularly important role in Turkish cinema, dating at least to the 1960s, seen as a place of contemplation that induced a kind of “oceanic feeling.”4 The symbolism of the sea5 from this era is carried into the 3 This is a characteristic shared by films such as Yeşim Ustaoğlu’s Bulutları Beklerken (Waiting for the Clouds, 2004), Reha Erdem’s Kosmos (Cosmos, 2009), and Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Kış Uykusu (Winter Sleep, 2014). 4 The seascapes in the 2000s do not resemble the temps mort of Turkish f ilms of the 60s, such as Sevmek Zamanı (Time to Love, Metin Erksan 1965), which moved in the direction of contemplation, conveying a sense of the oceanic feeling—a feeling that Freud describes as a sensation of eternity (1973, p. 91). 5 At the X. New Directions in Turkish Film Studies Conference in 2016, I presented a paper entitled “The Sea-Time,” which centres on the notion of seascape in young women directors’ films in the 2000s.

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first Turkish migrant films of the 2000s, which depict seascapes and boats as heterotopian spaces, and the migrants as individuals with an identity (Foucault, 1984, p. 3). However, towards the mid-2000s, I argue, seascapes become non-places in films that focus on the migrants’ plight—where dead migrant bodies become an indelible part of the image of the seascape. The recurrent images of death in the seascapes have become indexical signs of the harsh reality of the migrants’ dangerous journeys. According to the UN Migration report (IOM), between 2014 and 2019, over 19,000 migrants, men, women, and children, lost their lives in the western and eastern Mediterranean.6 Images of migrants’ deaths in the setting of the seascape regularly illustrate the news. The film Seaburners references both the documentary quality of these images as well as poetic associations with the sea and the shore in order to remind us of what is happening between these images and to make us aware of the rupture between the harsh reality and our consciousness. The film uses seascapes and waterscapes to recall the images of migration and death that dominate the media. The essay will first reflect on Christopher Connery’s discussion of the physical features of the natural world that complicate the mobility of people and the mythological and religious connotations of the sea among civilizations. The basis of how films on migration narrate their stories ranges from Auden’s thoughts of “voyage” as a romantic attitude to leave home without knowing the final destination to the situation of refugees and migrants leaving their lands due to wars, conflicts, famine, and drought in the hope of finally reaching their wished-for destinations. This essay focuses on the 2000s Turkish films that show refugees, migrants, and asylum seekers in land-, sea-, and cityscapes, following the tragedies of forcibly displaced people due to the Syrian crisis and the migration flow to Turkey from Afghanistan and other countries, plus irregular migration and Turkey’s position, which was once as a transit country and is now, for most refugees, a “waiting room” and, for some, a new home. The first film analysed in the essay is Bliss, which centres on internal migration due to a blood feud, before the migration flow during the Syrian war and other conflicts in the neighbouring countries. Bliss is one of the most significant 2000s films that uses the landscape as a subject, along with the protagonists. Similar to Bliss, the Turkish German film The Wound also relies on patriarchy as the cause of women migrants’ tragedies. The film parallels the immigration policies of Germany and the oppression of 6 https://www.iom.int/news/mediterranean-migrant-arrivals-reach-72263-2019-deathsreach-1041

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the family in the sad story of a young woman that takes place in Anatolian landscapes. In the mid-2000s, Rıza, Broken Mussels, and The Guest are other striking films that centre both on cityscapes and landscapes as transitional places, heterotopias, and non-places of migration. These films show migrants stuck in their immobility. The core film analysis is on Seaburners, which foregrounds an essayist approach that makes the landscape its main subject and an obstacle in the mobility of the refugees and migrants. In Seaburners, the dead bodies on the shore underline the tragedy of the people burnt out at sea. The main argument of the essay is built on the fact that, today, 82.6 million people are displaced worldwide. Turkey hosts the largest number of refugees and migrants, with nearly 3.7 million people. The films discussed in the essay show these people in the cities, on the Aegean waiting for human traffickers to take them aboard and at the borders, or in Turkish cities trying to begin a new life. The films in the essay are chosen according to their landscape choices. The choice of the landscapes as obstacles to the mobility of the refugees and migrants can be seen as a reflection of the increasing restrictions to migrants of legislations and regulations. Bliss, The Wound, Rıza, Broken Mussels, The Guest, and Seaburners centre their stories in landscapes as transitional spaces, non-places, and heterotopias, as the geopolitics of emotion, between humiliation, hope, and fear (Moïsi, 2010).

Fluid Images of Migration Images of migrant bodies in the news, artworks, and films show people in transit, on seashores, struggling against rivers, icy mountains, and swamps, just like the chemical journey of water into solid, liquid, gas. Water and migration have long been connected, both in history and mythology. As Christopher Connery describes it, the physical features of the natural world—deserts, valleys, mountains, rivers, and oceans—are often portrayed as obstacles to the mobility of people (2006, p. 498). In 17th-century Western literary history, for example, “mountain gloom” belonged to the romantic period’s description of horror; later, “mountain glory” replaced the feeling of fear (Nicolson, 1997). In mythological and religious texts, waterscapes were primarily obstacles for people on the move. The sea as the space of disorder and chaos, “the realm of the dead, transformation and darkness,” was fought by Yahweh, the god of the Jews and the Christians (Connery, 2006, p. 499). The anti-sea is featured in Genesis, in the Noah legend, in Exodus,

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and in the books of the prophets (Connery, 2006, p. 499). More recently, the turn to the sea, as in W. H. Auden’s The Enchafèd Flood, Or, the Romantic Iconography of the Sea (1985), is understood as a romantic attitude—but not without dangerous consequences (Connery, 2006, p. 499). Auden’s list of characteristics in the romantic attitude assure us that, to leave the land and the city, belongs to the sensibility and honour of every man. Voyage is the essential situation for a man; it is the place where final events happen and the destination is not known. From the first migration legend of Noah to literary texts—in which leaving the land was seen as a romantic attitude—to the present waterscapes and seascapes in films, these fluid images stand for the transitional spaces of people fleeing from disastrous “floods” and reaching their destinations, which are unknown spaces. According to a Turkish saying, “water finds its way.” Likewise, migrants follow their paths in the hope of arriving in the lands of their desires. But, with few exceptions, it is rare that they reach their final destinations. Striking film examples of migration in 2000s world cinema frequently show the mobility of migrants over the water and in seascapes. Artists’ portrayals of migrants, moreover, rely on water and seascapes more than on uplands or the back country. Our collective memory of migration in the last decade leans heavily upon the photographs in the press, as well as amateur videos and images shot by the migrants themselves and their rescuers. Some of the most striking images of migration show the migrants’ death on seashores and in swamps. The Syrian migrants’ flow 7 to Turkey began in April 2011. Erdoğan et al. (2017) divide this period into four different chapters: Human Tragedy—“Time of Support” (2011–2012), “The Future of the Assad Régime” (2013–2014),8 “Big Escape to Europe” (2014–2015), and “Aylan Baby” 2015, which is a breaking point in the perception of migrants in Europe and Turkey (p. 18). As Erdoğan et al. further note, the death of Aylan Kurdi on the seashore in Bodrum (an upmarket seaside resort city on the Aegean) was the event that created worldwide awareness of the migrants’ tragedy. As a consequence of this photograph, EU negotiations with Turkey began in 2015 and the “readmission agreement” came onto the 7 A research project was forwarded to the Turkish National Scientific Commission on “Syrian Migrants’ Life Spaces and Their Relations with Their Settlement” in 2018 (D. Bayrakdar, M. Erdoğan, H. Bengi, Ö. Avcı-Aksoy, B. Öztürkkal, A. Atalay, & L. Yılmaz). 8 Turkey was considered as a third country for migrants, which allowed them a secure transition point. Because of the increase in the number of migrants and refugees in Turkey, the Law on Foreigners and International Protection was endorsed in the parliament in 2013 and Temporary Protection Regulation on October 22, 2014. See https://www.unhcr.org/tr/en/ refugees-and-asylum-seekers-in-turkey

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agenda on March 18, 2016, categorized as the “Citizenship” period (Erdoğan et al., 2017, p. 18). The news images featuring children’s bodies on the shore evoked a more conscious approach: Local news became the focus of the world media (Erdoğan et al., 2017, p. 18). The photo of the dead body of the little child exceeded the threshold of the news images on migration as an indexical sign and critically transformed European politics and the journalistic approach. From this point, migrants at the border became a subject that must be handled with care. In 2000s Turkish cinema, the image of the sea, in keeping with journalistic accounts, frequently signifies the dangerous transition from Turkey to Europe. In these films, the migrant bodies in the seascape, a space portrayed as a non-place, reflect the core of the news and shocking photos mentioned above. In the migration films of mid-2000s Turkish cinema, the seascape appears to suggest a death drive, leaving no space for an “oceanic feeling” symbolizing hope or eternity. Seaburners, which I analyse in depth in the last part of this essay, underlines the death drive from the opening to the end of the film. In Seaburners, water and the seascape both terrorize—the enchantment of the glitter of the waves and sand magnify the suggestion of pain—and the deaths by water index all migrant bodies drowned at sea. The death drive is embedded throughout the film. A comparison with the earlier film Bliss brings this difference into relief.

Bliss in the Seascapes, Yara’s Landscapes Bliss tells the story of internal migrants from Eastern Anatolia to the west of Turkey. Meryem, a young girl, has been raped and must be killed, according to the honour code of the family, shared by her cousin, Cemal, who has come back from his military service and is tasked with killing her. They migrate from Eastern Anatolia to Istanbul. Cemal attempts to throw her out of the train, but he cannot do it. Their journey brings them to Istanbul to the Bosphorus Bridge, where Cemal asks Meryem to kill herself by jumping from the bridge—a space that connotes the link between East and West and that is also a common place for committing suicide.9 The killing of Meryem cannot be accomplished, however, and Cemal fights with himself over his growing love for her. Meryem is obedient to the patriarchal rule and accepts that her fate is to be killed. She is aware of Cemal’s inner struggle with his 9 Bridges are commonly associated with suicide in cities, and the Bosphorus Bridge certainly has that reputation.

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conscience. Cemal knows from the beginning that she is not the one who should be blamed for the rape. Meryem’s silent resistance teaches him to reconsider the violent task he has been given. Moving to the seascape setting, they find jobs on the sailing boat of a professor, Irfan, whose name means wisdom. The seascape opens up to a vista of sailing and floating on the Aegean, until the moment Meryem and Cemal make a break for it on land. Their relatives follow Meryem through a swamp to the seaside, reminiscent of the river where she was raped. Cemal saves her, and the last scene shows them looking out to the horizon from the seashore. The film implies that they find bliss there at the seaside. The sea and water represent hope for them, overcoming the order of the honour killing. Landscape in this film teaches and helps Cemal and Meryem, shaping their rite of passage on the way to love, from the wastelands to the seascapes, a fluid, transparent horizon without boundaries. During long, mute scenes, the landscape is emphasized—the sea, the horizon, the clouds, and the sky ease the harsh reality of their lives in their painterly qualities. The film begins by recycling the former migration films’ Eastern Anatolian landscape cinematography and then opens up the vista to the seascapes in the Aegean. Bliss can be seen as a prototype for films using the image of the sea in a revolutionary way.10 It can be taken as the epitome of all the stories of migration from East to West. This time, however, the backlands and wastelands are replaced by the sea as the space that breaks the bounds of patriarchy and helps the flow of the narrative.11 Here, the boat parallels and visualizes Foucault’s definition of a boat as a “floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea” (1984, p. 9). In the film, the seascape metaphorically stands for the freeing spirit of the mid-1990s in Turkey, a shift from wastelands to seascapes, from the patriarchal order of honour killing to the enlightenment and liberation of 10 “Looking away from the port to the sea, our gaze is captured by the waves, the colours and the reflections that merge into the sky if ever we can see the horizon” (İncirlioğlu & Topal, 2011, p. 21). 11 Lúcia Nagib analyses, in Brazil on Screen. Cinema Novo, New Cinema, Utopia (2007), the images of the sea drawing a dialectic matrix of utopia and anti-utopia. She focuses on GlauberRocha’s films before and after the 1964 military coup: Black God, White Devil (1964) and Land in Anguish (1967). Black God, White Devil is Brazilian cinema’s utopian prophecy: “The backlands will turn to sea, and the sea into backlands” and the latter is the “anti-utopian inversion.” The Film Revival in the mid-1990s, according to Nagib, recalled utopian thought as a “reference to past” that centred the nation. The re-emergence of the utopian sea is shaped with references to the past fulfilling “a desire for historic continuity” (Nagib, 2007, pp. 3–4). Thanks to her for the inspiration for this article.

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migrant lovers. Following Bliss, several films of Turkish and Turkish German directors used seascapes to end their films.12 The seascape signified, for some, freedom and the homeland. Several films from this period, however, such as Rıza and Broken Mussels take place in cityscapes, where access to seascapes is restricted. Another film, Yara, tells the story of a reverse migration from West to East, revolving around a young woman—a guest worker’s daughter—sent back to Turkey from Germany. The film is landbound, centred in the countryside, but the sea- and waterscape nonetheless makes an appearance in the young woman’s nightmares. Released two years before Bliss, Yara bases its story on a similar patriarchal order, shifting the migration from West to East, from Germany to Eastern Anatolia. Hülya, whose name means “dream,” is a young woman, the daughter of a guest worker, who is having adaptation problems in Germany. She is sent back to her village in Eastern Anatolia, where she is unable to fit in. On her long road back to Germany, she spends time in a mental asylum. In the asylum, she forgets both languages, German and Turkish, and tries to continue to exist by drawing pictures in her blood on the wall. The film is like a road movie through wastelands and mountains, with stops at bus and gas stations, weaving together realist and surrealist scenes of dreams or nightmares, the uncanny home and the waterscapes in Hülya’s dream states. Arslan recycles the landscapes of Yılmaz Güney’s films on migrants from Eastern Anatolia, reminiscent of the cinematography of The Herd (Zeki Ökten, 1979). Yara makes significant use of what Naficy calls “transnational spaces,” and is a perfect example of an accented film that depicts the isolation of women.13 Hülya’s portrayal in claustrophobic non-places—airports, borders, dark asylums—recalls the work of the accented Turkish German filmmakers Tevfik Başer and Yılmaz Arslan in the 1980s (Naficy, 2012, p. 452). In their films, women are imprisoned or sent to asylums as a consequence of their noisy or silent protests against the patriarchy. Their existential questioning of the rules and customs is punished through imprisonment in the heterotopian spaces of deviation, asylums or homes that are similar to prisons. Arslan emphasizes the interstitial identity of Hülya between Germany and Turkey, staging the border scene as the liminal threshold of 12 The Edge of Heaven (Fatih Akın, 2007) also follows this path of reversing the direction of migration from Europe to Turkey as opposed to his documentary title, Denk ich an Deutschland—Wir haben vergessen zurückzukehren (2003), which means Thinking of Germany—We Forgot to Go Back! 13 Yara depicts the problem of homelessness and heimatlos (statelessness). Being homeless means having no family, and having no family means being unable to make it in a country and just “pretending to be there” (Bayrakdar, 2004).

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her dilemma and social isolation. Hülya’s representation, according to Deniz Göktürk (2000), can be considered “the new mode of depicting immigrants”: Young women on the German streets are seen as “metropolitan figures,” compared to the guest workers’ wives trapped at home. But they are still subjects of “double othering” (pp. 64–66), lacking a concrete basis for their existence. In several scenes, Arslan depicts Hülya’s dreams, showing Hülya imprisoned and encircled by water to provide her with an imaginary space to exist. The setting of the dream states in fluid waterscapes suspends the narrative and uses water to build a kind of non-diegetic microcosmos. On the one hand, transnational spaces such as the airport and the border are frequent settings in Yara, spaces where passport control becomes a way to dramatize her liminal identity. In her passport photograph, issued before migrating to Germany, she is pictured veiled and wearing dark glasses. After she has been sent back to Turkey by her father and cannot bear the pain of not belonging in her country of origin, she tries to re-enter Germany. The police officer looks at Hülya’s photograph in the passport and then back at her, now unveiled. He does not allow her to cross the border into Germany without the veil,14 in contrast to Ayten in The Edge of Heaven (Fatih Akin, 2007), who brazenly and easily enters Germany with a fake passport but is then deported after being denounced by her girlfriend Lotte’s mother Susanne.15 She then puts on a scarf and sunglasses and she is allowed to pass through the border, mocking her “wound,” not belonging and not being accepted entirely in any place. This scene not only serves as the “materiality of the place” but also jogs the memory of the history of migration from Turkey to Germany (Vassilieva, 2018, p. 38). Daniela Berghahn goes into detail on the “farflung families” (2013) and young Turkish women that experience a Head-On (2015) collision. On the other hand, the asylum where Hülya is kept under treatment corresponds to Foucault’s description of heterotopian spaces, which replace “crisis heterotopias,” characterized by Foucault as associated with adolescence or military service, such as boarding schools and military barracks. In everyday life, these are replaced by heterotopias of deviation, such as psychiatric 14 Hülya’s father is a guest worker in Germany, so she has legal rights as a second-generation migrant to live in Germany. Ayten, on the other hand, cannot rely on her mother’s existence in Germany, because she is working there as a prostitute, who sends money to her daughter and hides her identity. 15 The border crossing in Yara is a critique of the norms and regulations at borders and the stereotypes that define the “other” in the earlier examples of Turkish German cinema. Berna Gueneli discusses European spaces, borders, landscapes, and cityspaces in later Turkish German films in Fatih Akın’s Cinema and the New Sound of Europe (2019).

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hospitals, prisons, nursing homes, or retirement homes (Foucault, 1984, p. 5). Gunnar Sandin (2003) refers to heterotopias as “a veritable modelling of a dichotomic place, namely the reflecting place that contrasts the utopias of society, and in that aspect society itself” (p. 69). The heterotopian spaces Hülya experiences can be understood as negative reflections of both societies, Turkey and Germany. Towards the end of the film, Hülya returns to Germany. But her problems with her multiple identities lead to a tragic end, signified by an Ottoman puppet figure lying on the streets of a German city, suggesting the death of Hülya: She was given this puppet by a ventriloquist as a present during her long migration journey from the East to the border. Berna Gueneli refers to the characters’ multiple border crossings in the 2000s Turkish German film Im Juli (In July) (Fatih Akın, 2000) (Gueneli, 2019, p. 56), and she further points out that the road movie genre supports a narrative favouring the characters (travellers) compared to the uniformed guards at the border and shows a “border crossing without political obstacles” (2019, p. 58). The spaces of Im Juli represent the Eastern European region in the post-1989 era before some of these countries entered the European Union. This was the route Turkish guest workers followed back to Turkey to spend their summer holidays in their newly purchased German cars, such as in the film Mercedes mon Amour (Tunç Okan, 1993), based on the prominent Turkish author Adalet Ağaoğlu’s novel. The landscapes in Mercedes Mon Amour and Yara, belonging to the 1990s, are different from those in the more recent examples of Turkish German cinema, especially compared to Fatih Akın’s films. The spaces in Hülya’s dreams are transparent and fixed, reminiscent of Foucault’s discussion of the space in our dreams and our passions. In her dreams, she is walking in a seascape when a cage is added to the white, bright atmosphere of the waterscape. The dreams turn to nightmares; as Hülya is shown in the cage, the perspective becomes increasingly shallow, and Hülya’s father is portrayed sitting in front of the cage. In all the dream scenes, the ground is a transparent seascape with flashes of light, reminiscent of crystal clear seascapes, as Foucault describes our dreams (1984, p. 3). The backlands in the film are dusty and yellowish, the borders are dark, and the asylum is claustrophobic, but her dreams configure a space that is light, fluid, and floating.

Conscience and Death in the Cityscapes Rıza, Broken Mussels, and The Guest are other striking films that centre on migrants’ stories in the 2000s. These f ilms use both cityscapes and

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landscapes as transitional places, heterotopias, and non-places of migration. The migrants in these films live in cheap hotels or bachelor rooms. These are places of transitions, of waiting, and therefore their atmosphere is eerie, reflecting anxiety and crime. Typically, they are on the outskirts of cities or in the backstreets of old centres of towns where migrants, refugees and illegal workers live for a certain time until they get their papers to leave for their destination countries. They are depressed, waiting without knowing the hour of their departure; they are in the hands of the smugglers and their dark business. Going back is not a possibility, reaching the destination is a vague hope, and staying in these places is risky. Naficy describe these hotels and motels as transitional places of residence and underlines the anxiety of waiting to obtain passage (2001, p. 248). Rıza is the first film of the “conscience and death” trilogy by Tayfun Pirselimoğlu.16 The director presented his film during the Migration Film Festival (2019) and spoke about the production phase of his film: “I observed the migrants and their lives in bachelor rooms and other cityscapes, especially behind Eminönü, for a long period before shooting this film.”17 The film takes place in a motel in the backstreets of Eminönü, Istanbul. The motel is a “transitional place of residence,” as Naficy has it. In the film, an Afghan family and African migrants wait for their papers and money to leave this uncertain stage. Rıza, a truck driver whose truck has broken down, has no money for the repairs. The Afghan migrant family, an old man, his wife, and their daughter-in-law, live in total silence in their motel rooms waiting for their time to migrate to Europe along with the African migrants. Istanbul is shown as a city of lurkers at night and crime. Rıza kills the Afghan father and steals his money to have his truck repaired, but his conscience does not leave him alone. He decides to help the daughter-in-law of his victim to contact her husband in Europe. The film confines the characters in their rooms and the dark lobby with an aquarium—which constitutes the only fluid space throughout the film—in the middle. The atmosphere of the cityscape reflects the corruption and crime in the microcosmos of the motel. Rıza, produced in the same year as Bliss, freezes the motion and mobility in the story of Afghan and African migrants living in the rogue migrant places of Istanbul. Migrants are portrayed as anonymous beings, waiting silently in dark, claustrophobic hotel rooms, in places such as boarding 16 The “Conscience and Death” trilogy by Tayfun Pirselimoğlu consists of Rıza (2007), Pus (2010), and Saç (2010). 17 XX. New Directions in Turkish Film Studies: Cinema and Migration, Conference and Migration Film Festival, May 7–11, 2019, Kadir Has University, Istanbul.

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houses, hotels, restaurants, and bus terminals. These places are shown under neon signs and fluorescent lighting; dominated by the night, they are transitional spaces for postcolonial and Third World exiles. The cityscape does not allow an opening to the country or the seascape.

Broken Mussels in Cityscapes Broken Mussels is also set in the cityscape of Istanbul. The mussels of the title refer to the story of young men migrating from the south-eastern Anatolian city of Mardin to Istanbul to sell midye dolma (stuffed mussels). (Almost all midye dolma18 sellers in Istanbul are originally from Mardin.) The film shows Istanbul as the locus of all migrants—the bachelor rooms of the film, similar to the hotel rooms of Rıza, function as transitional spaces. Broken Mussels is set in the microcosmos where migrants from Africa, East Anatolia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Russia meet in Istanbul’s bachelor quarters. The drug dealer Cevat owns the house, and each room opens onto another plot. Medina, a mother from Bosnia, lives in a room with her daughter Elma, who is sick and needs a heart operation. Two cousins from Mardin, Hakim and Faysal, have come to Istanbul hoping to migrate to Germany to join their other cousin, Salim. Babatunde, an African, and his friends are waiting for the boat that will take them to Europe. Oksana is a Russian woman kept by the drug dealer like a hostage and is a victim of his violence. Hakim, a delinquent boy—similar to Antoine Doinel in Les Quatre Cents Coups (François Truffaut, 1959)—is the leading character in the film. His actions bind the stories of the migrants in separate rooms under the same roof somewhere in Kumkapı—a region between the historical centre of Istanbul and the Sea of Marmara. The film depicts the Sea of Marmara as a closed border, with no possibility of escape. The boys steal the mussels from the neighbouring mussel sellers and try to cook mussel dolma. Faysal, the younger boy from Mardin, has worked in a restaurant as a dishwasher, but the boys fail, and neighbouring mussel sellers destroy their stand and beat them up, breaking all the mussels. The mother, Medina, is sent to Bosnia by the drug dealer Cevat to organize the Mafia’s collection of the money needed for her daughter’s operation, but she does not survive. The Africans take a boat from near the ruins of the historical centre of Istanbul, but the background is a dark sea without 18 Midye dolma is stuffed mussels, a popular street food in Istanbul and in the coastal cities in the Aegean.

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a horizon. The drug dealer Cevat is imprisoned. At the end of the film, the Kurdish cousins Hakim and Faysal from Mardin and the Bosnian girl Elma use the money left by Cevat to go to the seaside and find shelter in a wreck—a boat that cannot set out to sea any more. The dream of migration is frozen, with the image of the Sea of Marmara in the background. Throughout the film, the seascape of Istanbul is shown in the background without any narrative addition as a setting in its own right. It is similar to the ending of Les Quatres Cents Coups, because, as spectators, we do no longer fear for the fates of the children. They are frozen in the idea of migration as escaping from the space where they are by using the wreck, as in a fairy tale, a dreamy but dry heterotopia (Foucault, 1984, p. 9). Another film that centres on migrant children in cityscapes is The Guest. Lena, an 8-year-old Syrian girl, loses her family in a bombing. With the help of their neighbour, Meryem, she carries her little sister to the Turkish border. A group of Syrian migrants first arrive at the refugee camps and then head for Istanbul. They rent a place in the basement of a building and try to survive. A young girl is sold to a Turkish family as a child bride to fund the trip to Europe. Meryem tries to take care of Lena and her sister like a mother, but Lena cannot cope with the trauma of the loss of her mother and father. She is waiting for a call from her uncle in Germany to be taken to Europe. As they stroll in the city, Lena befriends other migrant children and begins begging in the street. During a traffic jam, a Turkish woman sees her and takes her to her home, where they are having a birthday party for her son. Lena as the guest spends the night in this cosy home. At the end, they collect enough money, and Meryem brings Lena and her baby sister to the seashore. They get aboard hoping to reach the other shore, Europe. The film depicts a true story, which the director has experienced herself. The docudrama style of the film is distinctive. The encounter of the migrants with the Turkish people in the city, and the problems of integration, are shown with empathy compared to the attitude towards migrants in Rıza and Broken Mussels. The house in the basement and the textile atelier where Meryem works are transnational places of cheap labour. Among these places, a big shopping mall provides the setting for the encounter of Lena and some tourists who speak Arabic. She is simply trying to survive in Istanbul, in contrast to the rich women from neighbouring countries, who indulge themselves in the shopping mall, a non-place of supermodernity. The shopping malls, filled with anonymous customers and tourists, are spaces where the circulation of people and goods is accelerated, similar to high-speed roads and airports, non-places, as Augé describes them (1995, p. 78). Tourists speaking Arabic pass by the poor migrant girl Lena; these

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encounters symbolize the global flow of capital, while migrant children suffer in gigantic shopping malls. The Guest, which is based on the attempted integration of Syrian migrants in Istanbul, overlaps with the change of migration policies in Turkey. The film reflects the attempt of the municipalities and the state to integrate the overwhelming numbers of migrants in the border towns and metropolises.19 The Guest uses seascapes throughout the film, however, as a symbol of hope. At the end of the film, Lena, with her baby sister, takes a boat to Greece to migrate to Germany, to her uncle. Meryem, her protector, is left alone on the shore and looks out to sea. The final seascape in The Guest is a wide vista, filled with daylight, like the ending of Bliss.

Seaburners20 Seaburners brings a new approach to films on migration in 2000s Turkish cinema. The film shifts between photography and cinema as a work of art. The director draws with light (photography), mainly relying on chiaroscuro technique, based on the dark narrative of illegal migration. The land and the sea, the Earth and water become the main subjects of the film—the characters inhabit these non-places only for a certain time, which is not measurable: The director erases any reference to chronological time in general, as well as to defined historical and social places except for a few scenes in Istanbul and the town in the Black Sea region. Melisa Önel points out in an interview that the term “seaburners” does not exist in English but is used in African literature: “[I]t is a name given to Africans who burn their identities migrating through the sea. First time I heard this term I liked it and choose it as the title of my film.”21 The Turkish title of the film is Kumun Tadı, which means the taste of the sand. Both titles refer to the sea and the seashore and to the “death journey” of migrants. The 19 Out of 3.6 million Syrian refugees in Turkey, 496,635 live in Istanbul, according to data in April 2020. https://multeciler.org.tr/turkiyedeki-suriyeli-sayisi/ 20 This part on Seaburners is based on my conference papers, “Bodies in the Sensitive Landscapes of Migration” (2017), presented at the NECS Paris Conference, and “Migrant Women in New Turkish Cinema” (2019), presented at The Migration Conference in Bari 2019. “Spaces and Places of Irregular Migration in Rıza (2007) and Seaburners (2014),” presented at the XX. New Directions in Turkish Film Studies: Cinema and Migration Conference and Migration Film Festival in 2019, reflects the core of my article entitled “Places and People of Irregular Migration” (2017), published by the Turkish National Commission for UNESCO. 21 http://film.iksv.org/tr/festivalgunlugu/918

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main characters of Seaburners are three Africans, a mother and a daughter who speak Chaldean, the human traffickers Ali and Hamit, a young boy, and the European botanist Denise. The plot revolves around the tragedy of the dangerous journey by some migrants over the sea to Europe. Human traffickers have forgotten to put a group of illegal migrants aboard a boat going out to sea and instead place them in a shed in a remote area to wait. The refugees include two African men, an African woman, a mother (Sanem Öge), and her little daughter, who must wait to be taken onto a boat again. Three smuggler characters are introduced: the ruthless boss, Ali (Mustafa Uzunyılmaz); the middle-aged Hamit (Timuçin Esen); and a young village boy, Mehmet (Ahmet Rıfat Şungar), who runs their errands. The most out-of-place character, however, is the only one with a more or less permanent habitation: a Western botanist named Denise (Mira Furlan), who lives in a small cottage near the shore. The mother and daughter and the African migrants spend days locked in the shed until a new boat arrives, and they are not allowed out except for basic needs. They try to survive in the cold with little food. The film jumps between the fragmented world of the migrants’ shed; the cottage of Denise and her temporary lover, Hamit; the small town; the street of mobile phone shops in the city; a swamp where the botanist collects plant samples; the wasteland where the human traffickers meet; and the seashore. At the end, the migrants are taken at night to a boat along dark country roads. The film opens with a terrifying high-angle view of the sea. The camera scans the shore and shows, but does not linger on, a dead body on the beach. The camera avoids any kind of identifying or explanatory close-up: The shot seems to suggest the world’s attitude towards the tragedy of the migrants and the need to dig deeper into the significance of this dead body. The dead body on the dark beach first appears as a dot, and then the camera comes closer, moving without pausing to pay the body any special attention. With half the frame occupied by the sea and the other half by the coast, the dead body is a mere spot in this space formed by the seashore and the waves. Bookending the film, the last scene returns to the opening, depicting the seashore from an overhead angle and approaching the dead body on the sand, making a loop and finally ending at the non-place where it began. The representation of the dead body in the landscape thus haunts the story from the beginning. The image is familiar from those we have seen of dead migrant bodies on seashores, but its representation in a shot that also invites us to contemplate the beauty of the landscape blurs both reality and illusion. Although the collective traumatic images of migration and dead bodies in the landscape or seascape tend to lose their impact over

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Figure 9.1: Seaburners (Melisa Önel, 2014).

time, the image in the film is nevertheless shocking. With the enchanting colour palette of the hills and the sea, as well as the chiaroscuro lighting, a mesmerizing view around the bay frames the setting, as the camera moves towards a dark spot, revealing the contours of a body. As Vivian Sobchack points out, we perceive “the remains of dying” as an “indexical sign,” and this death exceeds the threshold of visibility and representation (Sobchack, 2004, p. 233). The director’s decision to centre the overture and the ending of her film with the shocking photo in the seascape seems to work against Roland Barthes’s statement that traumatic photographs “like fires, shipwrecks, and violent death” that are portrayed as real leave nothing to the imagination (2010, p. 30).22 It remains an image without value or explanation in the diegesis and leaves everything to the imagination.23 After the overture, with its shots of the sea and beach, the film jumps between the spaces of the village, the shed where the migrants wait for their journey, Denise’s laboratory, the cottage where the human trafficker and the botanist Denise meet, and the swamp where she collects plant samples.

22 D. Bayrakdar, “Why do Films End at the Sea? At the Edge of Heaven?” IX. New Directions in Turkish Film Studies: Cinema and Fantasy, May 7–9, 2009, Kadir Has University, Istanbul. 23 Thanks to Robert Burgoyne for his valuable suggestion, which allows a counter-reading of Barthes’s statement concerning the shocking photo of the dead body that “leaves everything to the imagination.”

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Figure 9.2: Seaburners (Melisa Önel, 2014).

Love or compassion, which could breathe life into language, is absent from the relationship between the botanist and smuggler. Their life together is far from a happy one, taking the form of disjointed moments when they hastily meet one another’s physical needs. The possibility of filling their language with love and mercy is not even seen in the passionate relationship between Ali and Denise. A weird merging of two bodies, a human trafficker and a Western botanist. They make love and then go back into their “black holes.” It seems that Denise does not accept her lover’s dark side—being a human trafficker—but passion brings them together. The director decides not to place further emphasis on their wild love, which swings between Eros and Thanatos. Denise is seen in three spaces in the town: in her house, in the cottage of her lover, and the laboratory. She leads an isolated life with no relation to anyone except her lover and the Turkish assistant in her workplace. We see her studying the plants, collecting them in the swamp, putting them into jars, and testing their survival capacities. Denise’s laboratory might be defined as a colonial heterotopia. The weeds are processed and examined to determine if they can be assimilated and prepared for a new life in a cultivated environment. These plants, waiting in the water in a jar, might be compared to the migrants passing through fluid spaces. The weeds or the wild human bodies of the refugees are kept under control in the laboratory on their way to the West in the spaces of obscure and invisible non-places in the transit countries. The migrant mother and daughter in the shed have been ripped out of their past and crammed into a “black hole” of time and space similar to the

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weeds put in the jar. Their questions are not answered; their bodily needs are not satisfied. The means of communication is through order and obedience. Melisa Önel’s Seaburners builds its space against the “real place,” namely as a non-place that has no relation to identity or history (Ponzanesi, 2012, p. 676). Seaburners makes the link to organic society, however, in two cityscapes. The first is Istanbul, where Hamit the smuggler buys mobile phones, and the second is when Denise goes to town. Mobile phones are the most important medium in the migrants’ flow through the landscapes, for the purpose of communication with relatives and with human traffickers, as a pathfinder, and for survival reasons. The film underlines the role of mobile phones as the primary medium in the network of the human traffickers and migrants. It is the non-places in the film, however—the sea, the waste heaps, and the swamp—that restrict communication and the establishment of a social order among the people. Even the idealized place, Europe, becomes a nonplace in the view of Hamit. He tells the village boy, “I couldn’t live there, I had to come back.” So Europe cannot be a target for him. His relation to the West is similar to his relation with Denise, a feeling where sadness and pleasure cohabitate. The film equates the condition of the people—be it the human trafficker, the migrants, or the botanist—with suffering the same angst and ambiguity. But the fate of the others is worse, moving from the beginning to the last resort, death, and the taste of the sand and the sea, death. Migrant people beyond the border share the same fate of ambiguity and not knowing where and how to go. Either it is the border or the sea, both serving as non-places. The f ilm features little talking, chatting, mutual understanding, or expressing of ideas. In this universe, human voices are hushed and barely audible. Transitions to other scenes are made through sound bridges, and conversations are left hanging with no place to go. The mother and daughter speak Chaldean, a fact that can only be inferred from the plot. We do not know where they have come from or where they are heading. Similarly, no information is provided about the country of origin for the African group or for Denise. The only thing we know about the botanist is that she collects plant samples from swamps, placing them in glass containers, one by one, using tweezers, and that her experiment involves the survival chances of these wild plants in specimen jars and their comparison with species in scientific books. The only thing revealed about the past of the mother and daughter living in the shed is a photo album. We are not allowed to see the photos in detail; family information and memories are kept from the viewers. Their identity documents are taken away and destroyed during preparations for

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departure, as stated by the director’s comments concerning the title of the film Seaburners. The documents have to be destroyed. The botanist conducts an experiment concerning the future, while the mother and daughter are on the run. They are severed from their past and conf ined in a cycle of emptiness. Without an identity, the mother and daughter cannot find answers to their questions. Many questions in the film are answered by the Turkish word şey (meaning a “thing” or serving as a filler word similar to “well…”). The word şey is one of the first signs of the migrants’ identity turning from “something” into “nothing.” Most of the conversation in the film is in the form of commands: The mother and daughter are silenced with commands such as “get in” and “don’t wander about outside,” preventing them from meeting their needs or talking about their problems (Bayrakdar, 2020). Önel’s film uses landscape, mainly seascapes, as a source of constant anxiety for both the irregular migrants and the human traff ickers, as well as for us. Seaburners fragments each character’s story into a plot that unfolds in non-places, and assigns to each of them a particular landscape. The most exhausting place is the sea, the waves and the dimly lit boat, and the swamp with its wild plants. The dark sea is related to death, the boat to migrants, and the swamp to the Western botanist. The feeling of being in a demarcated space is shattered. The photographic quality of the imagery is fascinating, using shades of blue and grey, and giving the landscape and seascape a value equal to the story of the migrants and human traffickers.

Conclusion As Turkey became a transit country in the 2000s, first photojournalists, then film directors focused their observations on migrants and their move towards Europe. Bliss refers to internal migration as a consequence of a blood feud. Rıza depicts people killing time, in the “waiting rooms” of Turkey as a transit country, to reach Europe. The Guest looks at the migration problem from an ethical perspective and questions how migrants and refugees are perceived in Turkey, living in the cities as “guest inhabitants.” The stories in Rıza and Broken Mussels are set in Istanbul and stick to dark cityscapes. Broken Mussels shows the Kurdish children on the seashore in Istanbul, but the seascape is used mainly as a setting to portray how the children find shelter in this heterotopian space of the boat wreck. The Guest presents the voyage of migrants from Syria to the border, to refugee camps, and then to

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Istanbul and finally to the Aegean. Each encounter with the seascape in The Guest shows that the sea is subservient to the story of the Syrian girl Lena and her survival. Bliss uses three regions of Turkey—Eastern Anatolia, the Marmara region, and the Aegean—and goes through landscapes to cityscapes and then back to the sea. Bliss has doubly temporalized qualities in its usage of the land- and seascapes. Seaburners, with its distancing cinematography, tackles the problem of human traffickers and migrants relying on the land- and seascapes of the Black Sea. The film is a harsh critique: Without naming and indexing the sources of xenophobia as such, the film leaves us in a black hole. Önel engages with the theme of migration to Europe from a new perspective: The film evolves from a photographic base to a cinematographic scenario and places still life images in between the shifting scenes. The storyline does not allow viewers to get lost in the narrative flow, and the uncanny atmosphere maintained throughout the f ilm provides an ever-present sense of foreboding. The viewers’ minds are kept alert during the entire film: As they watch the lives of people fleeing, while some are smuggled and others perish, they recall tragic images of migration that are imprinted in our memories through audiovisual media. The tragedies of migration that are presented by the media, almost on a daily basis, have a repetitive mechanism that make viewers forget that these lives have substance. From this perspective, Melisa Önel’s film questions our social consciousness and conscience at a deeper level than do realistic news photos. This is because the film selects a punctum from among the phenomenon of migration and the dramatic stories behind it: the background story of people smugglers and migrants that the news cannot reveal.24 In Seaburners, the boat that is supposed to help the migrants reach Europe is never shown floating on the sea. The boat is seen as a dark cave, and the migrant bodies inside it only as silhouettes. That the boat has made it to the sea can only be understood through the tragic connotation of the corpse on the seashore at the beginning and ending of the film. The boat in Broken Mussels, on the other hand, is a heterotopian space in which the migrant Kurdish children find shelter in a wreck and where they cannot unfurl the sails. 24 Roland Barthes explains the concepts of studium and punctum in his Camera Lucida (2010). A punctum is a point that captures the viewer or reader as they look at a picture; it is a connection formed between the image and the viewer. It could be a small detail in the picture, a detail that could strike the viewer independent of, and maybe more potently than, the social, historical, and political context.

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Seaburners shows the city as a “place” only twice during the entire film, and in those scenes, the centre is invisible except for small shops where mobile phones are sold and in a short small-town sequence. The settings in Seaburners, which are reminiscent of Augé’s “non-places,” include gloomy sheds, huts, derelict cottages, and botanical laboratories. Women are alone as mothers or wives, and they are almost completely silent, reminiscent of the silence of death in the seascapes. In Rıza, dim hotel rooms with lime green walls contain mute women accompanied by their husbands or fathers. Filmmakers and artists use water, the sea, ice, and other forms of water in their films dealing with migration. Alongside mountains and forests, water and seascapes give the feeling of the sublime in these artworks. They share these liquid, translucent, transparent qualities of water and sea, reflecting what appears on their surfaces, such as trees, clouds, animals, and people who are passing by, like migrants. It is the flow, it is the flood, the overwhelming status of the fluid over the stability of land. Migrants need seascapes as a liminal space to cover up the trauma of the lands they are leaving behind. The dead body in Seaburners stands for thousands of migrants who have drowned in the Aegean and the Mediterranean Sea. Their corpses, which we see every day in newspapers and on TV deteriorate into “thing-ness” and then into absolute “no-thing-ness”—“both experientially unknown and unknowable” states of “being” (Sobchack, 2004, p. 236). Furthermore, the corpse has a “paradoxical semiotic force” and reminds us of a subject that once lived and does not exist any more (Sobchack, 2004, p. 233).25 Seaburners violates a visual taboo. To show a dead body explicitly is a violent attack directed on our gaze: In Seaburners, we experience the dead body with a guilty feeling of being indifferent towards this tragedy of dead migrant bodies. But migrants’ lives are not a fiction: It is the violation of a human taboo, ending the lives of those who are trying to escape the traumatic circumstances at the borders. The f ilm manages to hit our conscience and to shake us out of our complacency. In sum, 2000s Turkish cinema takes a close-up of migrant bodies in the land-, sea-, and cityscapes in the heterotopian, transitional spaces, and non-places in and through which these no-name “displaced” people, called migrants, refugees, or exiles, move. 25 “It is a significant bodily sign of the body that no longer has the iconic power to intentionally signify itself as lived. Instead, the corpse engages our sympathy as an indexical object existentially connected to a subject who was once an intentional and responsive ‘being,’ and it generates our horror as a symbolic object bereft of subjectivity and responsiveness that stands for a condition we cannot existentially know and yet to which we must succumb” (Sobchack, 2004, p. 236).

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References: Akın, F. (Director). (2000). Im Juli [In July] [Film].Germany: Senator Film. Akın, F. (Director). (2001). Denk ich an Deutschland – Wir haben vergessen zurückzukehren [Film]. Germany: Megaherz TV Fernsehproduktion GmbH. Akın, F. (Director). (2007). The Edge of Heaven [Film]. Germany: Anka Film. Arslan, Y. (Director). (1998). Yara [The Wound] [Film]. Germany: Gün İzi. Auden, W. H. (1985). The Enchafèd Flood, Or, the romantic Iconography of the Sea. London: Faber & Faber. Augé, M. (1995). Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (J. Howe, Trans.). London: Verso. Barthes, R. (2010). Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (R. Howard, Trans.). New York: Hill and Wang. Bayrakdar, D. (2004). Anavatan/Babaevi: Yara Filminde Doğudan Batıya/İmgeselden Simgesele Yolculuk. Seyir, 1, 18-19. Bayrakdar, D. (2009). Turkish Cinema and the New Europe: At the Edge of Heaven. In D. Bayrakdar, A. Kotaman & S. Uğursoy (Eds.), Cinema and Politics: Turkish Cinema and the New Europe (pp. 118-132). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Bayrakdar, D. (2017). Places and People of Irregular Migration in Turkish Cinema. In D. Bayrakdar & Ö. Aksoy (Eds.), Communication for All/Herkes İçin İletişim (pp. 99-120). Ankara: UNESCO Turkish National Commission. Bayrakdar, D. (2020). Migrant Women in Turkish German and New Turkish Cinema. In K. Ross, I. Bachmann, V. Cardo, S. Moorti, & C. Scarcelli (Eds.), The International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media and Communication. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell. Berghahn, D. (2013). Far-Flung Families in Film: The Diasporic Family in Contemporary European Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Berghahn, D. (2015). Head-On (Gegen die Wand). London: BFI. Burke, E. (1990). A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ceylan, N. B. (Director). (2014). Kış Uykusu [Winter Sleep] [Film]. Turkey: NBC Film. Connery, C. (2006). There Was No More Sea: The Supersession of the Ocean, From the Bible to Cyberspace. Journal of Historical Geography, 32(3), 494–511. Erdem, R. (Director). (2009). Kosmos [Film]. Turkey: Atlantik Film. Erdoğan, M., Kavukçuer, Y., & Çetinkaya, T. (2017). “Türkiye’de Yaşayan Suriyeli Mültecilere Yönelik Medya Algısı” [Media Perception Towards the Syrian Refugees Living in Turkey]. Liberal Perspektif: Analiz, 5, https://mmuraterdogan. files.wordpress.com/2016/06/oad_c2lgwsk.pdf Erksan, M. (Director). (1965). Sevmek Zamanı [Time to Love] [Film]. Turkey: Troya Film.

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Foucault, M., & Miskowiec, J. (1984 [1967]). Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias. http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/foucault1.pdf Freud, S. (1973). Abriß der Psychoanalyse: Das Unbehagen in der Kultur. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag. Göktürk, D. (2000). Turkish Women on German Streets: Closure and Exposure in Transnational Cinema. In M. Konstantarakos (Ed.), Spaces in European Cinema (pp. 64–77). Exeter: Intellect. Gueneli, B. (2019). Fatih Akın’s Cinema and the New Sound of Europe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Haznedaroğlu, A. (Director). (2016). Misafir [The Guest] [Film]. Turkey: Andaç Film Productions. İncirlioğlu, G., & Topal, H. (2011). The Sea-Image: Visual Manifestations of Port Cities and Global Waters. New York: New Gray. Lefebvre, M. (Ed.). (2006). Landscape and Film. New York: Routledge. Moïsi, D. (2009). The Geopolitics of Emotion: How Cultures of Fear, Humiliation, and Hope Are Reshaping the World. New York: Anchor Books. Naficy, H. (2001). An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Naficy, H. (2012). A Social History of Iranian Cinema, Volume 4. The Globalizing Era, 1984–2010. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Nagib, L. (2007). Brazil on Screen, Cinema Novo, New Cinema, Utopia. London: I. B. Tauris. Nicolson, M. H. (1997). Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Oğuz, A. (Director). (2007). Mutluluk [Bliss] [Film]. Turkey: ANS Production. Okan, T. (Director). (1992). Sarı Mercedes [Mercedes Mon Amour] [Film]. France, Germany, Switzerland, and Turkey: Bay Okan; Farid Tourab. Ökten, Z. (Director). (1978). Sürü [The Herd] [Film]. Turkey: Güney Film. Önel, M. (Director). (2014). Kumun Tadı [Seaburners] [Film]. Turkey: Bulut Film. Pirselimoğlu, T. (Director). (2007). Rıza [Film]. Turkey: Zuzi Film. Pirselimoğlu, T. (Director). (2010). Pus [Film]. Turkey: Graal. Pirselimoğlu, T. (Director). (2010). Saç [Film]. Turkey: Graal. Ponzanesi, S. (2012). The Non-Places of Migrant Cinema in Europe. Third Text, 26(6), 675–690. Rocha, G. (Director). (1964). Black God White Devil [Film]. Brazil: Banco Nacional de Minas Gerais. Rocha, G. (Director). (1967). Land in Anguish [Film]. Brazil: Difilm. Sandin, G. (2003). Dealing With Non-place in Exploitation, Belonging and Drifting. Nordisk Arkitekturforskning/Nordic Journal of Architectural Research, 12(2), 67–85.

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Sobchack, V. (2004). Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tokmak, S. (Director). (2011). Kırık Midyeler [Broken Mussels] [Film]. Turkey: 90 Film Production. Truffaut, F. (Director). (1959). Les Quattre Cents Coups [The 400 Blows] [Film]. France: Les Films du Carrosse. Türkiye’de 10 Yılda 35 Bin Göçmen Kaçakçısı Yakalandı. (2019, Dec e m b e r   2 0). Hü r ri ye t . ht t p s :// w w w. hu r r i y e t . c om .t r/g u n de m/ turkiyede-10-yilda-35-bin-gocmen-kacakcisi-yakalandi-41402145 Ustaoğlu, Y. (Director). (2004). Bulutları Beklerken [Waiting for the Clouds] [Film]. Turkey: Silkroad Production. Vassilieva, J. (2018). Russian Leviathan: Power, Landscape, Memory. Film Criticism, 42(1). https://doi.org/10.3998/fc.13761232.0042.101 http://film.iksv.org/tr/festivalgunlugu/918 https://www.unhcr.org/tr/en/refugees-and-asylum-seekers-in-turkey

About the Author Deniz Bayrakdar is a professor of film studies at Kadir Has University. She is the Chair of the Communication Committee at Turkish National Commission for UNESCO. She initiated and organized New Directions in Turkish Film Studies www.tfayy.org (1999–2019). “Migrant Women in Turkish German and New Turkish Cinema”+- in The International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media, and Communication (2020) is her latest publication.

10. Third World On the Move: Cinematic Destination Belgrade/Serbia Nevena Daković

Abstract The aim of this paper is to map manifold notions of migrant cinema and its history, in other words, film narratives about migrations from, across, and to the Balkans. The analysis looks at broader Balkan cinema that features as the context for focusing the changes of the migration pattern from and to Belgrade. The paper takes Practical Guide to Belgrade with Singing and Crying (Praktičan vodič kroz Beograd sa pevanjem i plakanjem, Bojan Vuletić, 2011) as its case study to show the recent reversal of migrant narratives in which the Balkans are the desired destination, in itself an exception to the rule. The analyses are based on the appropriated definition of migrant cinema and complemented with notions of inner exile and accented cinema. Keywords: migrations, Serbian cinema, exile, Belgrade

Migrations and Exiles in Cinematic Narratives Migrations, travels, and journeys have always been among the most popular and interesting cinematic topics. Journeys are a driving force propelling most road movies and narratives of people on the move—migrants, travellers, refugees, exiles, fugitives, etc. On their journey, the travellers—whether due to voluntary or forced migration—cross many borders “not only physical and geographical, but also psychological, metaphorical, social, and cultural… [while] journeys may take the form of exploration, pilgrimage, escape, emigration, or return” (Naficy, 2001, p. 222). The diversity of borders and travellers sustains not only literary but, more importantly, metaphorical potentials of the journey (journey as growing up, identity transformation,

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class mobility). Most often, the two strands are hard to separate. Migrants’ journeys are made in search of daily bread, the myth of a promised land, or a new beginning. Once the destination is reached, instead of the desired, almost idyllic life and land of utopia, the travellers often only find dystopia and desperation, while the experience of the journey itself remains central. Film narratives about journeys and people “on the move”—as a common thematic denominator—cover a wide range of genres and formats: road movie and migrant, diasporic, or accented cinema, among others. Before undertaking a brief overview of the films about journeys and the Balkans, it is necessary to make a distinction between overlapping notions of migrant, diasporic, exilic, or accented cinema as well as to define the added term of inner exile. A manifold and multilayered phenomenon, the topic of “the Third World on the move” encompasses journeys and migrations from, across, and (rarely) to the Balkans and Serbia, considered the Third World corner of the First World, Europe, or Third Europe tout court.1 First, the topic designates the long history of migrations from the Balkans spanning the 1970s to 1990s—from economic migrants to the wave of refugees and migrants escaping the spreading political chaos and wars following the break-up of the former Yugoslavia and the poverty that ensued. Second, the phrase, “Third World on the move” has come to signify the 2015 refugee crises, when the Balkans became the principal transit route for many refugees from the so-called Third World. Many political and economic migrants and refugees from the war-torn and economically ravaged countries of Africa and Asia passed across what has been characterized as a Third Worldized Balkans (Todorova, 1997). Third, the topic of “Third World on the move” suggests a phenomenon that is rarely explored—migrations to the Balkans as the final destination in the search for a better life. In this essay, I explore the film Practical Guide through Belgrade with Singing and Crying (Praktični vodič kroz Beograd sa pevanjem i plakanjem, Bojan Vuletić, 2011) as an example of this new variation of the migrant narrative, within a broader thematic field of films about journeys, road movies, and the appropriated notions of creolized cinema and inner exile. The comparative framework further systematizes the films into distinctive thematic subgroups: road movies transgressing spatial (The Melone Route [Put lubenica], Branko Schmidt, 2006; In July, Fatih Akın, 2000), temporal 1 Serbia and the Balkans are interchangeable terms to a degree, because Serbia as a country is in (permanent) crisis, eternally marginalized, on the border of the “civilized world,” and, at the moment, as a non-EU member, it is taken as a paradigm of the (Western) Balkans.

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(Underground [Podzemlje], Emir Kusturica, 1995); or new migrant topics (films by Želimir Žilnik). However, as the closest comparative case, the paper analyses Srđan Karanović’s film Something in Between (Nešto između, 1982), which, together with the main case study, Practical Guide through Belgrade with Singing and Crying, placed in diachronic perspective, maps out the return of imagining Belgrade as place of romantic and vibrant escape. Particular definitions of the closely related terms of migrant, diasporic, or exilic cinema are based upon the seminal writing of Daniela Berghahn (2008). In her research project Migrant and Diasporic Cinema in Contemporary Europe (www.migrantcinema.net), she defines diasporic cinema narrowly, as filmmaking of any dispersed community that lives away from its country of origin. The complementary term migrant cinema is defined as “first generation immigrants who relocated to what has been referred to as ‘old Europe’ (and, in a colonial context, the ‘mother country’ or ‘metropolitan centre’) in their search of education or training, better economic or professional conditions, or a safer and more stable sociopolitical environment.” Diasporic filmmakers, she writes, “are the offspring of migrants” (Berghahn, 2008). Furthermore, the two terms coalesce with the notions of transnational cinema and the cinema of “double occupancy” (Elsaesser, 2005, p. 108–133). In this essay, I define migrant cinema (comprising a large group of films2 about migrations) as all films dealing with the phenomenon of migrations—people, individuals, or groups on the move. The key analytical term for this diverse body of films is Naficy’s notion of accented cinema—how the experiences of journeys and displacements are translated into films. In his seminal book An Accented Cinema, the author discerns the “ʻexilic’, ʻdiasporic’ and ʻpostcolonial ethnic’ identity of filmmakers based on their relationship to homeplaces” (Naficy 2001, p. 21). “The accent,” the handwriting and style of these filmmakers, stems from the sense of exile or displacement of the filmmakers and their emerging alternative production modes and narratives. It is an aesthetic response to lived or real-life experiences. Although the experiences vary greatly, the films themselves exhibit shared stylistic features, including genre hybridization, placing an emphasis on a covert political agenda and a concern with transgressions of and transformations of identity.3 2 There is no explicit time span when the films were made, but the implicit presumption is that the films were made predominantly—with one or two exceptions—after the fall of the Berlin Wall, because the event that set off rapid geopolitical changes, crises, and stratifications in the whole of Europe. 3 As complementary to the notion of accented cinema I would suggest the term creolized cinema. Migration, then, refers also to the migration across genre borders leading to creolized

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To the list of possible feelings of filmmakers—themselves on the move—I add the notion of inner exile as a sense of isolation endured by an individual, a group, or a generation vis-à-vis time, space, country, or culture, for example. In Serbian cinema, the term refers to the generational experience of filmmakers born in the late 1970s and 1980s. Their adolescence, education, employment, and lives took place in a country economically devastated by hyperinflation and subject to sanctions. Eventually, under Milošević’s rule, the nation was bombed by countries in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Their films can be seen as a way of coming to terms with inner exile, of finding new life and space that may meet their needs and dreams. Their migration is invisible, because they do not leave the country but stay in Serbia while feeling hopelessly out of place. The reach for new cinema formats and genres is a symbolic and metaphorical realization of their inner journeys, migrations, or exile through the creation of new life space. Metaphorical inner exile leads to concrete internal exile—as physical banishment to a remote part of one’s own country—now redef ined as conscious and voluntary exclusion from the realm of mainstream cinema and classical production by introducing an eclectic mix of Western genres with strong local colour. 4 These novel films entail expressions of political criticism and resistance to and subversion of the constraints of the system. Usage of media clichés and popular cultural stereotypes shape and create a sense of yearning for and fascination with the West but also yearning for and fascination with the Balkans. The films articulate the Balkans’ twofold longing for and enchantment with the West as well as a Western fascination with Serbia and the Balkans as the limina of the civilized world, a romantic place in a sort of ironic manner where secret dreams and forbidden desires can come true—at least for a moment. Serbia becomes, for these filmmakers, the promised land as well as the land they all long to get away from. cinema, i.e. cinema of creolized genres and formats. Originally promoted by Robert Stam and Ella Shohat (1994), denoting mixed racial, cultural, and only sporadically cinematic trends, the term creolization is also taken as the result of border crossing and of an inevitable mixture of influences from both sides of the border. Creolized thus slightly departs from its original meaning within postcolonial theories or critical race studies and points towards various creolizations, appropriations, or acculturations of American and European film genres and formats in the local context. 4 The feeling of inner exile belongs to all those who feel that they do not belong to their surroundings and long for different lives. Like characters from the novels of Ivo Andrić, they always want to be someone else, somewhere else. The recognition of otherness and the longing for something different could also be termed the internalized other.

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Short History of Narratives “On the Move” One of the first films dealing with migrations is atypical, a late and never finished masterpiece by Aleksandar Petrović.5 Migrations (Seobe, 1989, Aleksandar Petrović) is an adaptation of the great eponymous work of Slavic literature by Miloš Crnjanski. Its subject is Serbian migration from the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the 18th century. The story follows the lives of mercenaries in the War of Austrian Succession (1740-1748) when the Austro-Hungarian Empire ruled Serbia. Pavle Isaković (Dragan Nikolić) longs for the great Slavic motherland, the Russian Empire; his great wish is epitomized in his dream about an endless blue circle with a star in its centre. The tagline of the film—“Death does not exist, there are only migrations”—adds another meaning to the term migration. It suggests not only the move from this world to the world of death but also a bizarre fulfilment of dreams and wishes. The (hi)stories of the journeys from, across, and to the Balkans and Serbia develop as narratives of crossing real, concrete but also metaphorical borders. Eventually, the actual journey has metaphorical value, because the road in space and time is also the path across political, ideological, class, generational, and various other identity borders. The motif of the journey is a solid signifier that is “paired” with a range of elusive, free, and symbolic signifieds. In road movies, heroes cross spatial borders, such as in The Melone Route, Escape (Darko Lungulov, 2004), In July, and Valkanisateur (Sotiris Goritsas, 1997); temporal borders, as in Underground [Dust (Milcho Manchevski, 2001); or both, as in Ulysses’ Gaze (Vlemma tou Odyssea, Theo Angelopoulos, 1995). On the other hand, “metaphorical travellers” cross the border between classes, as in the urban–rural divide in Premeditated Murder (Ubistvo s predumišljajem, Gorčin Stojanović, 1995) and social groups, such as refugees and émigrés of different ethnic origin, as in Loving Glances (Sjaj u očima, Srđan Karanović, 2003) and Head-On (Fatih Akın, 2004). The faith of refugees and migrants on the move due to the 1990s Balkan Wars dominates films such as Someone Else’s America (Tuđa Amerika, Goran Paskaljević, 1995), Broken English (Gregor Nicholas, 1996), a crime story of ethnic outsiders 3 a. m. (Lee Davis, 2001), and the romantic French story 5 In his films, Aleksandar Petrović frequently explores the motive of the journey, while the narratives are recognized as variations of road movies (Three [Tri], 1965; I Even Met Happy Gypsies [Skupljači perja], 1967; The Master and Margaret [Majstor i Margarita], 1972) along diverse roads. In his seminal exotic Gypsy film, I Even Met Happy Gypsies (the first Yugoslav film granted an award at Cannes, in 1967), a doomed couple is constantly on the road, in search of a better life and happiness, which constantly escape them.

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Lovers (Jean-Marc Barr, 1999). They all argue that the long shadows of war fall over us regardless of where we are, that people from the former Yugoslavia carry “the heavy cross” of war as the destiny they cannot escape.6 The man who opened a new perspective is Želimir Žilnik,7 who relies on docu-fiction in his films and holds a mirror to multifaceted stories of diverse migrations and their ensuing anxieties.8 His examination of the theme, in the new millennium, critically confronts Europe’s repressive politics towards migrants (Europe Next Door [Evropa preko plota], 2005; Fortress Europe [Tvrđava Evropa], 2000), eventually focusing on the 2015 routes and moves across the Balkans. Logbook Serbistan (Destinacija_Serbistan, 2015) offers a powerful testimony about recent migrant crises through exploration of the entangled affects and emotions of the Third World population (migrants and people from the Balkans) in general. It tells a story of the daily lives of refugees from Middle East, who are seeking a new home in Western Europe, but are stuck in Serbian asylum facilities. This is also the time of apocalyptic floods and social turbulences, the time when Serbian people are as traumatized as are the migrants from devastated countries in Asia and Africa. Similar migrant experiences and lives in permanent crises shape close, almost brotherly relations between populations of the Third World. They also explain Serbia’s official politics towards migrants, one of mercy and gain; the support provided to the migrants is buttressed by financial support from the West. Most stories about diverse travellers develop along the lines of their escape from the Balkans or their travel across the Balkans. Few narratives explore either the crises of the return to the homeland after guest worker experiences or the shock caused by the regular short visits to family and friends who 6 Another example is British black comedy Beautiful People (Jasmin Dizdar, 1999), about a Bosnian trauma that rules the lives of refugees, war veterans, and journalists. Journalist Jerry (Martin Gilbert), after his experience in Srebrnica, develops the “Bosnian symptom.” In an attempt to totally identify with the victims, he drives around London pretending to have an amputated leg and listening to blasting Bosnian music. To the same group also belong films such as Vladan Nikolić’s Love (Ljubav, 2005), Breaking and Entering (Anthony Minghella, 2006), Yugodivas (Andrea Štaka, 2000), and Das Fräulein (Andrea Štaka, 2006). The films about diasporic, migrant, or exilic communities and their war-determined destinies are made by exilic filmmakers (Darko Lungulov) or by directors and scriptwriters with migrant backgrounds (Steve Tesich). 7 The motive of the journey is already present in his famous film Early Works (Rani radovi, 1969), which brought Žilnik the Golden Bear, and the reputation of l’enfant terrible of Yugoslav cinema, causing him to seek exile in Germany where he continued his career for some time. 8 His films chornicling the changing lives and problems of migrants include such titles as Unter Denkmalschutz (1975), Second Generation (Druga generacija, 1983), Kenedi Comes Back Home (Kenedi se vraća kući, 2004), and Kenedi is Getting Married (Kenedi se ženi, 2007).

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stayed in the Balkans.9 Even fewer reveal the appeal of the Balkans to the foreigners who revel in the charms of downtown Belgrade, reviving the vibrant and feel-good cosmopolitan Belgrade of the 1980s. The iconic image of charming Belgrade is offered in Srđan Karanović’s film Something in Between—a Jules et Jim “à la balkanique”—one of the rare pure melodramas in former Yugoslav cinema. The carefully written script is signed also by the American screenwriter Andrew Horton, who provided a formative foreign gaze. The film is “a portrayal of a young American woman journalist who, in a brief six-week stay in Belgrade” on her way to Istanbul, “finds herself caught ‘in between’ her sexual and sentimental attachments to two Yugoslav men who are best friends” (Goulding, 2002, p. 175). An unexpected stay in Belgrade provides the opportunity to examine stereotypes and prejudices on both sides and to arrive at new self-recognition. Belgrade is presented as a place of initiation and coming to maturity, providing a nostalgically viewed return to the lost paradise of the pre-consumerist or early consumerist era. Under the American visitor’s scrutinizing gaze, the city undergoes a miraculous change from an old-fashioned, prejudice-ridden socialist capital to the “New York of the Balkans,” a city rewritten in cosmopolitan terms. The recurring structuring motif is the bridge: the Brooklyn Bridge in New York, the Brankov bridge in Belgrade, and the Galata Bridge in Istanbul. They are emblems for the narrative itself, which bridges a series of opposites: love and friendship; insider and outsider; the distance between two others; ideological, historical, and cultural contrasts in Belgrade, a city that is itself a bridge between east and west, north and south—suspended between two worlds. The film constructs Belgrade as a multicultural space, a space of ubiquitous transcendence of cultural and identity borders, a space where everything “is like somewhere else,” with a “bit of Vienna, Budapest, Italy” (Daković, 2008, 2011; Daković & Ćirić, 2013) Something in Between, shot at the beginning of the Yugoslav crisis—in the immediate aftermath of Tito’s death—was followed by the grim stories of the decline of the city amid the break-up of the former Yugoslavia. Almost 30 years later, we find again the revitalized image of Belgrade, as a city that people travel to with the intention to stay. Although the turbulent years have left their mark on the cityscape, foreigners manage to discover and fall in love with Belgrade, guided by the motto “home is where the heart is,” as represented in Here and There (Tamo i ovde, Darko Lungulov, 2009). In the American Serbian co-production directed by a member of 9 Hadersfild (Ivan Živković, 2007), Sorry for Kung Fu (Oprosti za kung fu, Ognjen Sviličić, 2004), Tomorrow Morning (Sutra ujtru, Oleg Novković, 2006), Ajvar (Ana Marija Rossi, 2019).

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the Yugoslav diaspora in the United States, the narrative revolves around Robert (David Thornton), a depressed and broke middle-aged New Yorker who travels to Belgrade with the intention to make money by providing a Belgrade woman, Ivana (Jelena Mrđan), with U.S. immigration papers by means of a sham marriage. During his stay in the city, he falls in love with another Belgrade woman, Olga (Mirjana Karanović), and with the irresistible charm of the Balkans. They have to part, however: Olga stays in Belgrade while Robert takes Ivana to New York. Back home, he pines for Belgrade, in an ending that leads to a good, old-fashioned melodramatic ending in the hope that he would come back. Exchanging emotional and cultural values in cross-cultural and transcultural fashion results in an erasure of differences between cities: They begin to resemble each other, as spaces conform to the character’s emotions. Belgrade is re-codified as a place of love and romance, and the more intimately acquainted Robert becomes with the city, the more it resembles his native New York. Both cities are carefully reduced to their indistinct suburban districts, made up of ordinary houses and streets, corner shops and second-hand car dealers’ lots. Images of drabness prevail, with the only exception being the skyline of downtown Manhattan and Belgrade as seen from the bridges. The final transcultural adaptation is anticipated in the opening credits, in the form of an outline of a metro map. Two lines, red and blue, drawn symmetrically, symbolically represent the interchangeable spaces. The red could stand for here; Belgrade and the blue for there, New York, or the other way round, depending on individual characters’ perspectives. The graphic representation is a metaphor of the relativity of emotional perspectives and of separate existences that turn out to be so close (Daković, 2008, 2011). The fascination with the Balkans as a romantic, timeless place where dreams can come true and love conquers everything, if even for a short time, is ironically revived in the works of a new generation of filmmakers.

The Balkans as a Dream Destination The omnibus film Practical Guide to Belgrade with Singing and Crying is directed by Bojan Vuletić. The script is co-written by Vuletić and Stefan Arsenijević. The two filmmakers occupy a place apart from mainstream production and share a long history of searching for novel formats and experiences in Balkan co-productions and joint ventures. Arsenijević’s short film, (A)torsion ((A)torzija, 2003), made when he was 25, was shortlisted for an Oscar. The film, about an unusual episode from besieged Sarajevo, is

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written by Abdulah Sidran, who also wrote the scripts for Kusturica’s early films Do You Remember Dolly Bell (Sjećaš li se, Dolly Bell, 1981) and When Father Was Away on a Business Trip (Otac na službenom putu, 1985). The plot revolves around a multi-ethnic singing group that tries to get away from Sarajevo to sing at the European competition in Paris (to sing for Bosnia, to sing for Sarajevo, as they say). But, before leaving the city, they sing Agnus Dei in a shabby stable to save a cow and her unborn calf—the cow would feed seven hungry people. Obvious metaphorical values—initiation of the journey with the act of atonement and repentance, the biblical resonance of the stable, straw and waiting for the birth—give the film a broad appeal. Arsenijević’s next film, Fabulous Vera, in the European omnibus Lost and Found (2005), offers a lucid and symbolic comment about a devastated country everyone is leaving. The girl, the daughter of the Vera mentioned in the title, wants to immigrate to Australia. She debates and negotiates the possibility with her mother during a tram ride.10 Arsenijević’s first feature fiction film—Love and Other Crimes (Ljubav i drugi zločini, 2008), co-written with Bojan Vuletić—introduces the motive of falling in love in and with Belgrade. However, it lacks the quality of his short films.11 Bojan Vuletić achieved European success only with his second feature film Requiem for Mrs. J (Rekvijem za gospođu J, 2017). Mrs. J—whose initials are an obvious allusion to Kafka and his topics of alienation, poverty, and desperation—depressed by the death of her husband and unable to deal with the problems of her family and the country, plans to commit suicide. In other words, as already phrased in the tagline of the film Migrations, “There is not death, there are only migrations,” she wants to migrate or move to another world. However, she does not succeed and, with newly found serenity—as the suicide attempt fails seemingly due to the miraculous and magical intervention of her late husband—continues living in Belgrade; the journey to another world has turned into the return to Belgrade, Serbia, and the Balkans. 10 The name of the mother, a former stewardess (Milena Dravić) who has to work as a tram ticket conductor, is Vera. This is both a personal name and a noun that, in Serbian, means faith. Vera thus might be the one providing faith in a better future of her daughter, family, herself, or even her country. Vera sends her daughter (Milica Mihailović) to a new life with family silver in the bag, while the end of the film hints that the mother might also find happiness. The ride of a runaway tram—and the rescue operation by Vera—is likewise a metaphor for a long, uncertain (and probably desperate) journey from Serbia to Europe through the wastelands of transitional and turbulent present. 11 His last film, Strahinja (2021), focuses on migrant crises from the original perspective of the palimpsest, like an evocation of a famous folk song with a similar name.

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The continuation of the theme of falling in love and succumbing to the charms of the Balkans—from Arsenijević’s feature debut—is also found in The Practical Guide. It is a story about foreigners who come to Belgrade (a French woman, an American, a German Turk, and a Croatian man) searching for various things—work, adventure, love, sex—only to find more than they ever bargained for. They became entranced and seduced by the hospitality of this cosmopolitan yet devastated Balkan city and its inhabitants, who try to meet the wishes and demands of the visitors. The locals are warm-hearted, depressed, and open-minded characters from the social margins—sympathetic and kind losers living in everlasting economic crises and political transitions. The motive of the journey as crossing borders is underlined by Belgrade’s position in the centre of the Balkans; on the eternal crossroads between East and West, Orient and Occident, and their respective cultures. Belgrade is the meeting point of civilizations, the city where something is always in motion and in transit. In Belgrade, one spontaneously embarks on a journey, meanders along its streets and across borders. Moreover, since the violent conflicts of the 1990s and the October 5 revolution, Serbia itself has been both on the road of transition towards the European Union and entangled in a social transition for which we know the beginning but have no clue of the ending. For 30 years, Serbia has been living life on the move and in migration. The Practical Guide to Belgrade begins with a promo clip about Belgrade as the city of the future and ends with a typical Balkan wedding between eternal (fr)enemies, a Serbian woman and a Croatian man—a neighbour who is already part of the European Union. Belgrade becomes a city of love on the move, which triumphs over all obstacles, metaphorically connecting Serbia and the European Union. The omnibus is divided into four stories, entitled Love, Crisis, Adultery, and Wedding, each one focusing on different and deep emotional and passionate love between foreign guests and Belgrade’s citizens. A newly employed young driver Stefan (Marko Janketić) is assigned to drive Sylvie (Julie Gayet), a French singer, from the airport to the concert hall. In the concert hall, a middle-aged Melita (Anita Mančić), who works as a production assistant, plays a professional dominatrix with Bryan (Jean-Marc Barr), an American diplomat. In return, she hopes to obtain an emigration visa and green card. In the hotel where they regularly meet, Jagoda (Nada Sargin) works as a maid. She falls in love with Orhan (Baki Davrak), a German businessman of Turkish origin who has come to Belgrade to buy a bankrupted Serbian company. However, during an accidental encounter and elaborate play of seduction by Jagoda in an authentic Belgrade kafana, Orhan

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discovers his roots and falls in love with the Balkans and the woman who symbolizes both the Balkans and Belgrade as its soul. In the same kafana, Jagoda’s friend, a police officer named Đurđa (Hristina Popović), is having her hen night, because she is about to marry her Croatian colleague Mato (Leon Lučev). On their way to the ceremony, the wedding party stops and the two of them make confessions that put the wedding into question—but, in the end, love conquers all. The intricate map of the journeys, moves, and migrations around Belgrade and off the screen around the Balkans and in Europe confirm a rich polysemy and ironic resonance of travels and migrations. The style and structure of narration reveal European and American genre influences, making the film a sort of hybrid of the two. At the same time, the pattern of the film exposes the filmmaker’s inner exile. The link between the stories is provided by the character from one segment leading to the protagonist of the next segment, and by the same setting—the rich and amazing cityscape of Belgrade. The episodic and fragmentary structure follows the pattern set by Cabaret Balkan (Bure baruta, Goran Paskaljević, 1998)—except depicting not the city under threat, during an endless night of hyperinflation and authoritarianism, but rather recovering after the wars and crises, healing the scars. In an international context, it is comparable with the films of one of the most popular American indie directors—Jim Jarmusch and his episodic tale Mystery Train (1989) as well as road movies such as Stranger than Paradise (1984), Down by Law (1986), and Night on Earth (1991). The music numbers—variations of sad classic folk songs, which, like fil rouge, link the stories—are a pale echo of the Hollywood tradition of musicals but also bear a strong similarity to Fatih Akın’s Head-On. Humorous and ironic music numbers not only deal, as might be expected, with love and romance but also with Belgrade on the move towards the European Union. Stewardesses, police officers, maids, road workers, and prisoners sing five sad classical love songs, remembering old Belgrade that, once upon a time, was a thriving metropolis on the border of fallen empires, open to the world and embraced by the victorious states of the Great War. However, they also speak for Belgrade as the city of the future, which will be recognized again as a propulsive European—if not EU—metropolis, as the New York City of the Balkans. Different choirs—like in ancient Greek theatre—present characters, explain the plot, and make comments. The irony is introduced through comments—about how Belgrade’s reality differs dramatically from the propaganda proclamations of the government and media—which overlap with the lyrics of the songs. The lyrics about love, emotions, and affects

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mix with a voice-over that speaks in facts, percentages, and f igures about prosperous Belgrade—a city of the new era attracting tourists and investors.12 After long years of wars, dictatorship and international isolation, Belgrade has opened its big heart again, ready to welcome warmly tourists, businessmen and curious people, who are coming from all over the world to this metropolis. Belgrade is a fast-growing city; city of development and business opportunities; it is a city of smiling hosts, exceptional music and exquisite tennis players. Belgrade is the city of the future. (Practical Guide to Belgrade with Singing and Crying)

In the meantime, the words and lyrics are accompanied by shots done in mockumentary style—yet another point of mixed influences and acculturations. The camera—almost freely and happily wandering around the streets of Belgrade and its oxymoronic cityscape—“accidentally” shoots couples passionately exchanging kisses.13 The camera wanders along the streets of Belgrade, showing the flower beds in front of the town hall and revealing the debris and ruins of the bombed buildings in the centre. The ironic contrast of love/life and war/death conf irms the Third Belgrade as a city of unfulfilled love and failed migrations to the Balkans. This is strengthened further by the soundtrack of the film, composed of traditional Serbian and Balkan music and rarely of European melodies. The music score becomes the f ilm’s “accent,” an element of accented cinema. The story of Jagoda and Orhan is set in a traditional Belgrade kafana, where the two slowly fall in love against the sounds of sad melodies of unrequited and unfulfilled love that brings brief happiness, lasting pain, and eternal memories. Such songs accompanied by gestures of visceral jouissance brought by music—drinking, smashing glasses, dancing as if in a trance, passionate kissing—is recognized both as one of sevdah and dert. Singing love songs in or out of dert—meaning grievance or malady—the characters experience and express pain, misery, and fleeting moments of happiness. 12 The comments anticipate the speeches of the actual mayor and vice mayor of Belgrade. Nowadays, speaking in the same flamboyant style, they talk about huge construction projects they initiated but that, in reality, brought nothing but further devastation and destruction of the city. 13 The hidden reference is to famous photos such as Robert Doisneau’s Kiss by the Hotel de Ville (1950) or Alfred Eisenstaedt’s V-J Day in Times Square (1945). In the same mood, the film shots mimic the spirit of Belgrade as of a free, victorious city, a survivor of NATO bombing and Milošević’s authoritarian regime.

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They shed tears of sorrow and happiness at the same time. Dert is active like jouissance, while sevdah—eternal pain, sorrow or painful, nostalgic longing—is more like passive surrender to the pain and masochistic pleasure taken in feeling it. Sevdah is more female and controlled, while dert is male and uncontrolled. However, both Balkan dert and sevdah, when juxtaposed with Western Weltschmerz (world weariness) bring Orhan back to where he belongs. Returning to one’s origin and true identity is a paradigm of the Balkans and Belgrade as a destiny and destination for Europeans in search of identity. Thus, the genre identity of the film emerges from a search for identity. Together with its romantic plot and the role of music, it can be characterized as a Serbian melodrama. Torn between belonging to the Balkans and longing for the Balkans and Europe, the film and its protagonists portray a growing and ambivalent sense of Europe(aness) that emerges from behind the ruins and the depleted facades of nation states and that, nevertheless, encourages transnational identification, deconstruction, and fading of national identities.14 At the end of the The Practical Guide to Belgrade with Singing and Crying, our expectations that all characters would meet in one place do not materialize. Instead, the film’s end brings together the denouement of separate stories. With the first tones of the song “A što ćemo ljubav kriti” (“Why Should We Hide Our Love”), Đurđa and Mate make vows about eternal love and fall down in a cornfield passionately embracing each other.15 Stefan drives foreigners from the airport; Sylvie sits alone on a plane hiding her red and swollen eyes behind sunglasses. Melita visits Bryan in prison. Jagoda lies alone in a king-sized bed. Orhan, with the guilty conscience of an adulterous husband, returns to his faithful wife. The dialogical lamination of the lyrics and the comments of the choir leader provide a powerfully ironic line about Serbia and Belgrade ready for a new metaphorical romance with the European Union and literal love stories with EU citizens. Ch: Why should we hide our love, when you have to be mine… Le: Belgrade is fully ready to become again a member of the community of European and world nations. 14 “The strengthening of feelings of regional and local belonging; disappearance of (some) customs and borders . . . the intensification of an ethic component in politics; conflicts such as those in the Balkans, which have made refugees of many and have reconf igured whole geographical areas” (Mazierska & Rascaroli, 2006, p. 2). 15 The subtitles and the language the characters speak are purposefully in pidgin and broken English, which is shared by various migrants from the Balkans; English as lingua franca is a relic of colonialism and a fact of present-day cultural imperialism.

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Ch: My heart is no longer mine, it belongs to you, my darling. Le: Although many conditions are still not fulfilled on our road to full membership, by making love to our dear guests from abroad, we come at least one step closer to Europe and the world. Ch: Either you take me or kill me, don’t let another woman kiss me. Le: As love brings us together, love sets us free, love makes us better. Ch: My heart is no longer mine, it belongs to you, my darling.

The prisoners singing in the choir walk out of the yard one by one while the camera stays within the walls of the prison Balkan. In the end, we have both Prison Balkan and Fortress Europe within the crumbling walls. The f ilm charts multiple migrations and instances of people on the move—from the European Union to Belgrade and the Balkans; from Belgrade and Serbia on the move to EU membership; from the brief escapades of Europeans and the metaphorical inner exile of Belgrade f ilmmakers visible in the crossing of the genre borders. The sense of internal exile, however, remains an emptiness in the centre of identities, the void to be filled through media and art that ironically redesigns the Balkans as a desired destination of the European Union and, to a lesser degree, vice versa. The Balkan crossroads is portrayed in both the genres and emotional mixture of road movie, melodrama, the comedy of sevdah and dert, joy and sorrow expressed through singing and crying at the same time.

References Akın, F. (Director). (2000). In July [Film]. Germany: Wüste Film. Akın, F. (2004). Head-On [Film]. Germany: ARTE. Angelopoulos, T. (Director). (1995). Ulysses’ Gaze [Vlemma tou Odyssea] [Film]. Greece: Greek Film Centre. Arsenijević, S. (Director). (2003). (A)torsion [(A)torzija] [Film]. Slovenia: Studio Arkadena. Arsenijević, S. (Director). (2005). Fabulous Vera [Film]. Bosnia and Herzegovina: Art & Popcorn. Arsenijević, S. (Director). (2008). Love and Other Crimes [Ljubav i drugi zločini] [Film]. Serbia: Icon Film. Arsenijević, S. (Director). (2021). Strahinja [Film]. Serbia: Surprise Alley. Barr, J. M. (Director). (1999). Lovers [Film]. France: Toloda.

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Berghahn, D. (2008, January 29). Migrant and Diasporic Filmmakers. Migrant Cinema. Retrived September 20, 2019, from http://www.migrantcinema.net/ glossary/term/migrant_and_diasporic_filmmakers/ Daković, N. (2001). Images from the Fringes: Balkanism in World Cinema. Spaces of Identity, 1(1). Retrieved September 20, 2019, from http://www.arts.ualberta. ca/CCAuCES/spacesofidentity/start.html Daković, N. (2008). Balkan kao filmski zanr: slika, tekst, nacija. Belgrade: Fakultet dramskih umetnosti. Daković, N. (2011). Imagining Belgrade: The Cultural/Cinematic Identity of a City at the Fringes of Europe. In K. Pizzi & G. Wiess-Sussex (Eds.), The Cultural Identities of European Cities (pp. 61–76). Oxford: Peter Lang. Daković, N., & Ćirić, M. (2013). The Balkan Wreath: Multicultural Balkan Identity in Film Music. In R. Pekka-Pennanen, P. C. Poulos, & A. Theodosiou (Eds.), Ottoman Intimacies, Balkan Musical Realities (pp. 87–103). Helsinki: SAIS. Davis, L. (Director). (2001). 3 a. m. [Film]. United States: 40 Acres & A Mule Filmworks. Dizdar, J. (Director). (1999). Beautiful People [Film]. United Kingdom: Arts Council of England. Doisneau, R. (1950). Kiss by the Hotel de Ville [Photograph]. Artsy. https://www. artsy.net/artwork/robert-doisneau-le-baiser-de-lhotel-de-ville Eisenstaedt, A. (1945). V-J Day in Times Square [Photograph]. Wikipedia. https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-J_Day_in_Times_Square Elsaesser, T. (2005). European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Goritsas, S. (Director). (1997). Valkanisateur [Film]. France: 16/9 Action Plan of the European Union. Goulding, D. J. (2002). Liberated Cinema: The Yugoslav Experience, 1945–2001. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jarmusch, J. (Director). (1984). Stranger than Paradise [Film]. United States: Cinesthesia Productions. Jarmusch, J. (Director). (1986). Down by Law [Film]. United States: Island Pictures. Jarmusch, J. (Director). (1989). Mystery Train [Film]. Japan: JVC Entertainment Networks. Jarmusch, J. (Director). (1991). Night on Earth [Film]. France: Victor Company of Japan (JVC). Karanović, S. (Director). (1982). Something in Between [Nešto između]. Yugoslavia: Centar Film. Karanović, S. (Director). (2003). Loving Glances [Sjaj u očima] [Film]. Serbia: Film and Music Entertainment.

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Kusturica, E. (Director). (1981). Do You Remember Dolly Bell [Sjećaš li se, Dolly Bell] [Film]. Yugoslavia: Kinema Sarajevo. Kusturica, E. (Director). (1985). When Father Was Away on a Business Trip [Otac na službenom putu] [Film]. Yugoslavia: Centar Film. Kusturica, E. (Director). (1995). Underground [Podzemlje] [Film]. Yugoslavia: CiBy 2000. Lungulov, D. (Director). (2004). Escape [Film]. United States: Here and There Productions. Lungulov, D. (Director). (2009). Here and There [Tamo i ovde] [Film]. Serbia: KinoKamera. Manchevski, M. (Director). (2001). Dust [Film]. United Kingdom: Alta Films. Mazierska, E., & Rascaroli, L. (2006). Crossing New Europe: Postmodern Travel and the European Road Movie. London: Wallflower Press. Minghella, A. (Director). (2006) Breaking and Entering [Film]. United Kingdom: Miramax. Naficy, H. (2001). An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Nicholas, G. (Director). (1996). Broken English [Film]. New Zealand: Village Roadshow Pictures. Nikolić, V. (Director). (2005). Love [Ljubav]. Serbia: Thoke Moebius Film Company. Novković, O. (Director). (2006). Tomorrow Morning [Sutra ujtru] [Film]. Serbia: Zillion Film. Paskaljević, G. (Director). (1995). Someone Else’s America [Tuđa Amerika] [Film]. Yugoslavia: Canal +. Paskaljević, G. (Director). (1998). Cabaret Balkan [Bure baruta] [Film]. Yugoslavia: MACT Productions. Petrović, A. (Director). (1965). Tri [Three] [Film]. Yugoslavia: Avala Film. Petrović, A. (Director). (1967). Skupljači perja [I Even Met Happy Gypsies] [Film]. Yugoslavia: Avala Film. Petrović, A. (Director). (1972). Majstor i Margarita [The Master and Margaret] [Film]. Yugoslavia: Dunav Film. Petrović, A. (Director). (1989). Soebe [Migrations] [Film]. Yugoslavia: Radiotelevizija Beograd. Rossi, A. M. (Director). (2019). Ajvar [Film]. Serbia: Biberche. Schmidt, B. (Director). (2006). Put lubenica [The Melone Route] [Film]. Croatia: Hrvatska Radiotelevizija. Shohat, E., & Stam, R. (1994). Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. London: Routledge. Stojanović, G. (Director). (1995). Premeditated Murder [Ubistvo s predumišljajem] [Film]. Yugoslavia: Cinema Design.

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Sviličić, O. (Director). (2004). Oprosti za kung fu [Sorry for Kung Fu] [Film]. Croatia: Hrvatska Radiotelevizija. Štaka, A. (Director). (2000). Yugodivas [Film]. Switzerland: Dschoint Ventschr Filmproduktion AG. Štaka, A. (Director). (2006). Das Fräulein [The Mistress] [Film]. Switzerland: Dschoint Ventschr Filmproduktion AG. Todorova, M. (1997). Imagining the Balkans. New York: Oxford University Press. Vuletić, B. (Director). (2011). Practical Guide through Belgrade with Singing and Crying [Film]. Serbia: Art & Popcorn. Vuletić, B. (Director). (2015). Requiem for Mrs J [Rekvijem za gospođu J] [Film]. Serbia: Geopoly Film. Žilnik, Ž. (Director). (1969). Rani radovi [Early Works] [Film]. Yugoslavia: Avala Film. Žilnik, Ž. (Director). (1975). Unter Denkmalschutz [Under the Protection of the State] [Film]. Yugoslavia: Alligator Film. Žilnik, Ž. (Director). (1983). Druga generacija [Second Generation] [Film]. Yugoslavia: Art Film. Žilnik, Ž. (Director). (2000). Tvrđava Evropa [Fortress Europe] [Film]. Slovenia: Low Budget Production. Žilnik, Ž. (Director). (2004). Kenedi se vraća kući [Kenedi Comes Back Home] [Film]. Serbia: Terra Film. Žilnik, Ž. (Director). (2005). Evropa preko plota [Europe Next Door] [Film]. Serbia: Terra Film. Žilnik, Ž. (Director). (2007). Kenedi se ženi [Kenedi is Getting Married] [Film]. Serbia: Terra Film. Žilnik, Ž. (Director). (2015). Destinacija_Serbistan [Logbook Serbistan ] [Film]. Serbia: Playground Produkcija. Živković, I. (Director). (2007). Hadersfild [Film]. Serbia: Eye To Eye.

About the Author Nevena Daković, PhD is professor of Film Theory/Film Studies (FDA, Belgrade) and Director of the Institute for Theater, Film, radio and Television (FDA). She is the author (Film Studies: Essays in Film Texts of Memory, 2014; Balkan kao filmski žanr: slika, tekst, nacija, 2008…..) and editor of many books (Film and Screen Media Studies: Serbia 3.0, 2019; Media Archaeology, 2016; Representation of the Holocaust in the Balkans in Arts and Media, 2015) etc. Nevena Dakovic publishes widely in the national and international framework (UK, Turkey, Slovakia, Italy, Austria, France, USA), participates at the conferences and is committee

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member of international project groups (COST and TEMPUS projects). She is visiting professor at European and American Universities and is member of Academia Europaea. As of January 2021 she is to be associate editor of ER (European review, Core Cambridge Journal). Main research themes: cinema, media, nation, representation, the Balkans, Holocaust, cultural memory.

11. On the Borderlines of South-Eastern Europe: Migration in the Films of Aida Begić and Želimir Žilnik Iva Leković

Abstract This paper analyses recent works by Aida Begić and Želimir Žilnik— Never Leave Me (2017) and The Most Beautiful Country in the World (2018), respectively. These works narrate the evolving lives of migrants on the borderlines of the Balkan Anatolian region. Migrants’ aspiration to reach their “dream land” is interpreted as a journey towards unfolding “the virtual realities of consciousness” of both actors and directors. The reflections of both Begić and Žilnik on the issue of migration, filmed in an accented style, highlight their own post-Yugoslav perspectives, which allows us to analyse the two films in context of “return to homeland”—a concept present both in Naficy’s theories of an accented cinema and in Boym’s notion of “reflective nostalgia.” Keywords: migrants’ representation, post-Yugoslav cinema, return to homeland, reflective nostalgia

Introduction The migration processes evolving since 2014 have reflected the ancient European fear of invaders from the East who come to change the face of Europe, confirming that “globalization encouraged stronger local attachments” (Boym, 2001, p. 12). Neglecting the real origin of the migration crisis and also neglecting the individual destinies of those affected by war and poverty, right-wing rhetoric (Kurecic & Kuhar, 2019) reawakened the concept of “fortresses of little Europe,” leaving people from Syria, Iraq,

Bayrakdar, D. and R. Burgoyne (eds.), Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art and Media. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463724166_ch11

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Afghanistan, Nigeria, Somalia, Pakistan, and more to live in a limbo of endless attempts at crossing the borders (Josipovič, 2017, p.21).1 As Damir Josipovič writes: The European controversy once again won by defending the Schengen from the outside (from Macedonia towards Greece) alluding to the great schism along the former East-West (Iron Curtain) divide… a huge majority of refugees ended up in Germany who socially overdid this experiment outplayed with the help of Turkey and the Balkan suzerains. The countries from Greece to Slovenia found themselves in a position of gatekeepers tailored to suit the wishes of the mighty. Even Austria found itself in an uninformed position not exactly knowing what to expect and how to intermingle. (2017, p. 22)

For many of those forced migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, Turkey is the first transit country, with many of those forcibly displaced from Syria, whose number rose from one million in 2014 to around 3.5 million today.2 Even with the Turkish border recently reopened, figures from the Balkan migration route show that most of those who try to go further west and who manage to smuggle themselves through Greece and North Macedonia usually remain stuck for years in Serbia or in Bosnia and Herzegovina, trying to cross the Hungarian or Croatian borders over and over again (Çavuşoğlu, 2020). This contemporary political situation transformed the Balkan–Anatolian region into an isolated island that, once again, is obliged to defend the gates of Europe. The geopolitical disposition of the present-day migration context recalls the studies of Russian scholars Vadim Tsymbursky (2009) and Stanislav Khatuntsev (1994), who created the concept of Grand Limitroph, hence the name limbic territories. According to Tsymbursky, the regions that flank “the great Russian Island”—the northern borders of the Balkans and Asia Minor, Caucasus, Pannonia, and the territories of Central Asia—have always been the main migration route for many populations travelling from the East to the West or vice versa. According to them, the Balkan–Anatolian region is a “small island,” the one that reflects Eurasia in small. 1 While Kurecic and Kuhar, in their research, find certain differences in populist rhetoric of “Old” and “New” Europe regarding the migration issue, it seems that origins of this might be found in “risk discourse” and “externalization of the EU borders” (Korac-Sanderson, 2017). 2 Operational Portal Refugee Situations. Syria Regional Refugee Response. https://data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/syria/location/113

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The narratives of Aida Begić’s and Želimir Žilnik’s films evolve on the edges of this small island of meta civilization.3 In Begić’s Never Leave Me (Ne ostavljaj me, 2017), the plot takes place at the starting point of the migration route—in south-eastern Turkey, while, in Žilnik’s The Most Beautiful Country in the World (Najlepša zemlja na svetu, 2018), we witness the end of the migration journey upon their arrival in Austria’s capital (an epitome of the “Promised Land”). The site-specific denominators position these two films firmly on the borderlines of the current regional migratory flow, so the analysis of their narratives, in a way, represents the narration of a presumed (factual) migratory journey. Departing from Hamid Naficy’s theory of exilic and diasporic filmmaking, the primary aim of the discussion is addressed to the issues of deterritorialized or dislocated identity, which consequently reflects the identity of the authors themselves. This chapter, starting with Never Leave Me and continuing with The Most Beautiful Country in the World, observes each of the two films, focusing on the motives closely related to the changes of identity, such as memory and nostalgia, trauma, gender, generation, and the inversion of “otherness.” The concluding remark will be devoted to the synthesization of the two films within the concept of “return to homeland,” found both in Naficy’s theories of an accented cinema and in Svetlana Boym’s notion of “reflective nostalgia.”

Displaced People: Accented Filmmakers Migration represents a familiar theme for authors from the Balkans, because the idea of the journey and constant migration are closely linked to Balkan identity. Nevena Daković points out, in her study of the Balkan (film) genre, that “film journeys are treasuries of symbolical inscriptions of quest for identity; inscribing of the nation; metaphorical articulation of the Balkanness is structured by transgression of the state and genre borders” (Daković, 2008, p. 47). The Balkan genre is understood as a system of hybridized genres that comprises the works of regional production and thematic of the region, and, among other denominators, it is adequately determinable by the notion of “accentuated cinema” (p. 42). 3 Meta civilization is understood here in Tsymburskiy’s terms, as a notion that refers to the position of both periphery and centrality. The Russian geopolitician uses the term in this sense to denote the “Great Island” that is Russia, according to him. In context of theory of Great Limitroph, the Balkan–Anatolian region is a certain counterpart of this meta civilization and could be understood as a meta civilization in itself.

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Although they belong to different generations of filmmakers, both Želimir Žilnik and Aida Begić rely on the traditions of the author’s film. According to Naficy’s theory, accented filmmakers come from the decolonialized territories of the Global South and can be divided into two groups of postcolonial displacement: The first comprises the displaced during the 70s, while the other is displaced during the 1980s and 1990s due to the ruptures of, for example, socialism and nationalism. In the cases analysed here, these generations overlap. While Begić belongs to the generation of filmmakers who have developed their style during the war in Yugoslavia, Žilnik had a diasporic experience during the 1970s. However, his unofficial exile belongs to the peak of the socialist era, when his first films, compared to the dominant model of Yugoslav production, were marginalized due to, what, in the context of our theme, might be called accented style and displaced narrative, characteristic of the period of the new wave of Yugoslav cinema. Their films discussed in this text share the theme of journey (a central subject of accented cinema), represented through the narrative of the current migration crisis. The notion of diasporic filmmaking is recognized in terms of production, owing to the fact that both films are made on the outskirts of the directors’ homelands.4 Besides the theme of migration and context of production, the two films also share some of the elements of accented style. This includes the method of creating the script through casting, setting the stage for a re-enacted and filmed psychodrama, which implies performativity as the core constituent of identity’s (re)construction. This method is formally visible in the use of persuasive documentary elements, which sets both of these films at the margins of fiction and documentary. In Žilnik’s case, we are presented with a method that is typical of his approach—the assumption of a “bottom up point of view” (Gocić, 2009, pp. 117–128). Reducing the formal distinction between fiction and faction5 is a stylistic trademark of the new wave of the Yugoslav cinema. Using the linguistic trademarks of guerrilla filmmaking (low-budget production, work with non-professional cast, a blurred distinction between the acted and 4 Never Leave Me was produced in Turkey (with support by an NGO), and The Most Beautiful Country in the World is a majority Austrian co-production. Also, both films are multilingual: In Never Leave Me, Turkish and Arabic are spoken; in The Most Beautiful Country in the World, the characters speak in Arabic, German, and Afghan languages. 5 The notion of faction is a term derived in an analogy with the notion of fiction, and it defines texts or elements of texts as a representation of facts (verbal, visual, cinematic), which are usually textually of intertextually related to the work of fiction. The term is used in literature and film studies by theoreticians from Serbo-Croat speaking area, among whom some also publish in English (Udier, 2011; Daković, 2017).

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the spontaneous, the use of a handheld camera), Žilnik casts real people to act their own life stories. His films are filled with humorous elements, likeable to a wide audience, but they are also introspective, diving into the ethnography of the present moment. Even before the escalation of the global migration crisis in 2014, the topic of immigration had already been present in Žilnik’s work, exemplified by Inventory (Inventur—Metzstrasse 11, 1975), The First Trimester of Pavle Hromiš (1983), Fortress Europe (2000), and the Kenedi Trilogy (2003, 2005, 2007), for example. In line with the engaged nature of his cinematography, he continued to deal with the topic of migration along the Balkan route in Logbook Serbistan (Destinacija Srbistan, 2015), which narrates the lives of migrants who came from the Middle East and Africa. These migrants are residents of centres for asylum seekers in Serbia while trying to cross the northern borders. The Most Beautiful Country in the World could be seen as a continuation of the Balkan migration route saga. The initial idea was to film it as a documentary, but the new right-wing atmosphere in Austria in 2016 caused difficulties for shooting the documentary, necessitating a change in the film’s genre to fiction. The agreed sketch of the scenario was based on conversations and stories of migrants who interpreted their own administrative troubles. This resulted in a film in which nobody plays themselves (as is typical of his films), but rather interpret situations from a friend’s experiences (Gvozdenović, 2019). On the other side, Aida Begić is a filmmaker whose work is strongly related to the experience of the war in Bosnia. Both of her previous films, Snow and Children of Sarajevo, are set in the context of post-war Bosnia, and they thematize the representation of body’s traumatic memory (Jelača, 2016, p. 210). In Children of Sarajevo (Djeca, 2012), she also used the docufiction form, marked by the characteristic use of a handheld camera, long takes, tracking shots, and photography set in dark and blurry tones, which structurally and stylistically comes close to the film discussed here. The method of creating the script through casting, however, is a novelty in her filmmaking. Choosing to work with non-professional actors who performed what is almost their real story continues to articulate the concept of the body as an instrument of remembering. The process of creating situations in which the characters were brought closer to their real personalities was described by the author as the point when “the line between life and cinema came so close together” (as cited in Tizard, 2017). This line between life and cinema, marked by the method of similar filmmaking in both discussed films, represents a formal distinction that allowed us to observe these two films in the same context.

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Both from the Balkans, the authors of these films, each from their own perspective, reflect on migration from the position of in-betweenness, and, as such, “they are presumed to be more prone to the tensions of marginality and difference” (Naficy, 2001, p. 10). According to the concept of “the accented style in filmmaking,” their films “may be thought of as a performance of its author’s identity” (2001, p. 6). In further analysis, reflection of “the author’s identity” is seen in relation to “homeland,” conceived both literally and metaphorically. In that sense, the two authors, representatives of postYugoslav cinema, while narrating about contemporary migration, return to their own homeland(s), addressing post-Yugoslav narratives or, specifically, post-war narrative and critical discourse directed towards the interpellation of the marginalized and the oppressed.

The Beginning of the Journey Never Leave Me deals with the lives of refugee children from Syria who are located in the ancient city of Şanlıurfa, in south-east Turkey. Isa, a child who we meet in the opening road scene, ends up in a car accident in which his father is killed. At the beginning of the film, we are faced with the scenes of cruelty of the life of a child who, after losing both parents, has to take care of the father’s funeral, after which he is told to pick up his things from the apartment where he had been living with his mother. Due to the circumstances of war, he decides to cross the border with the help of a local Turkish gangster, who later blackmails him. In Şanlıurfa, he finds residence alongside other Syrian refugee children. As the oldest, he becomes the head of a trio—Isa, Ahmed, and Motaz—around whom most of the plot evolves. While Isa’s character is shaded with the dark colours of his difficult fate, the other two boys are rather childishly innocent. Ahmad is a child who sees apparitions of his father, who went missing in Syria, whereas Motaz, the youngest one, dreams of winning the first prize in a local talent contest, hoping that, in that way, he can reunite with his mother, who abandoned him (Goodfellow, 2017).6 Another rather peculiar child character is Tuka, 6 Speaking about the differences between the real-life stories of the actors and the roles they perform in film, Begić said: “For example, Isa’s father really was killed by the same bomb that hurt him and his sister. But it was in Aleppo and in front of his father’s store. So I changed the situation to a bomb that fell on a car. That was the hardest scene for him to do. Because his father was missing since 2011—he never heard anything about him. Another child had this feeling, thinking that he saw his father, hugging him. It’s something that these kids really want to see and want to experience. Fragile moments” (as cited in Tizard, 2017).

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Figure 11.1: Never Leave Me (Aida Begić, 2017). Courtesy of Author.

a girl whose endeavours are directed towards negotiations and saving money to buy a pigeon. Isa’s problems with the loan shark who helped him cross the border motivate him to convince the orphanage crew to start a business selling paper tissues in a cafe near the beautiful Balıklıgöl Lake. The children’s efforts are met with complete indifference by the inhabitants, and at the end of their working day, a violent, tenacious girl tries to steal their money. Şanlıurfa’s cityscape plays an important role in Begić’s film. Presenting remarkable, dreamlike images (characterized by the colourful camerawork of Erol Zubčević) of an ancient city helps create a fairy-tale atmosphere in a film with a depressing topic. The location of the shooting, which is near the actors’ homeland, accentuates “the gap between identity and resemblance” (Boym, 2001, p. 62). Ahmed’s phantasmagorical apparitions of his father’s figure underline the dreamy tone of the film, as does the ending, in which young Motaz finally arrives in Istanbul, where he wins a prize, with his friends from the orphanage joyfully watching him on television. Throughout the narrative, we follow the pieces of everyday lives, goals, and sorrows of Syrian refugee children. Present-day struggle and painful memories are intermingled, which results in a fragmentary narrative structure and due to which the chronological order of the events is not easy to follow. The film resembles a collage in which pieces of a lifetime are cut and mixed together in a surreal image, in which the horror of the Syrian Civil War and the children’s experiences fade into the background, with their imaginations taking precedence. The narrative structure of the film is

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comparable to dreams7 and traumatic memories. Pumla Godobo-Madikizela notices that, “when the rupture of one’s sense is a daily occurrence, old memories fuse with new ones” (as cited in Kaplan, 2005, p. 42). Dissociation caused by trauma makes such narratives “paradoxical” to facts and veridical when it comes to the “gist” of the memory (Walker, 2004, p. 125). In Cathy Caruth’s terms—trauma, as a special kind of encapsulated memory, takes the form of repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, and flashbacks, producing only affects (as cited in Kaplan, 2005, p. 34). Analogous to that, the handheld camera in the film, creating shots of hasty movements and rough cuts, serves as a (de)construction and an affectionate articulation of an interrupted or cut childhood. With regard to exile, E. Ann Kaplan (2005) highlights Freud’s late book Moses and Monotheism, written during his expatriation to England, which marked a turn in his theory of trauma. Revealing “exile as a situation par excellence of loss of identity” (p. 44), it seems that Freud immerses himself in what Boym defines as a reflective nostalgia that “has a capacity to awaken multiple planes of consciousness” (2001, p. 62). The cinematic image of exile, according to Boym, is “a double exposure, or a superimposition of two images—of home and abroad, past and present, dream and everyday life” (2001, p. 11). As in her previous films, such as Snow (2008) and Children of Sarajevo, Begić deals also with the profiles of children and women coming from wartorn countries. She focuses on their psychological condition, which reflects war trauma but also the desires and dreams that have been neglected by their circumstances. Her intentions are directed towards a more personal (children’s) perspective of the war. She deliberately avoids the “objectivity” of “the male perspective,” directed towards the need to explain the facts about history and politics, in favour of “the female perspective,” which tends to be “more intimate, personal and human” (Goodfellow, 2017). Narrating the tale about Syrian orphanages, the filmmaker is narrating a war story from her own perspective—the perspective of a (Sarajevo) siege child and a (Muslim) woman in ever-changing circumstances.8 Both of the perspectives ignore the big historical and political narratives central 7 Analogous to the name of the workshop My Dream, during which Begić worked with these children. 8 In Never Leave Me is also a strong woman that takes care of and protects the children, similar to the character of Rahima from Begić’s previous film Children of Sarajevo. In a scene in which Ahmed has gone missing, a woman from the orphanage takes action to find him. In her attempts to find out what happened to him, she determinedly faces a gangster who has been stalking Ahmed.

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to migration issues, emphasizing the intimate and hidden side of human nature, including feelings, desires, and longings.9 Begić seems to follow the feminist paradigm “the personal is political,” in the sense that it “asserts the political nature” of personal aspects that migration processes produce (Mulvey, 1989, p. 89). Never Leave Me thus bridges the dominant topic of Begić’s work—a (demasculinized) post-war narrative from the perspective of a woman and children—and reflections of a wartime trauma that ends up revealing children’s broken childhoods and stolen futures as well as women forced to be strong enough to sew broken childhoods together. The elements of re-enactment are an essential aspect of her directorial work in this film.10 Real-life stories are transferred to the script, to an extent that does not violate the children’s emotions and memories. The film becomes a tool to bring together the dimensions of life and cinema. The actors (real children affected by a real catastrophe) contribute to the intertextuality of the film. Acting was a way to re-experience their past, understanding their war-related emotions, a self-discovery. 9 Although her perspective tends to reveal the intimate side of war atrocities, the political background has a transparent connection with Bosnia and Herzegovina. Arab regions of the Middle East are, just like the former Yugoslavia, the territories that once belonged to the Ottoman Empire and that were targeted by colonizers (Syria by the British and the French, and Bosnia and Herzegovina by the Austrian Empire). The multi-ethnicity of Syria’s population has some similarities with Yugoslavia’s multi-ethnic context. “According to one US conducted survey from 2011, it heavily relied on the 1987 data of the Collelo’s group: the Sunnis and Shia Muslims shared a 27 per cent of population, while Maronites represented 21 per cent. Another 8 per cent were attributed to Greek Orthodox Christians, 4 per cent to Greek Catholics, and 7 per cent to other Christian denomination (Syriac Catholics, Assyric (Nestorian and Chaldean) Christians, Armenian Apostolic Christians, Armenian Catholics, Melkites etc.), while 5 per cent were represented by Druze communities” (Josipovič 2017, p. 15). Additionally, some aspects of political organization in Syria also have similarities with Bosnia and Herzegovina’s present-day administrative division: “[T]he president should always be a Maronite, while the Prime minister should be a Sunni Muslim, and the speaker of the Chamber of Deputies a Shia Muslim” (Josipovič 2017, p. 16). This is similar to Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the presidency consists of three members from the three constituent nations. 10 Begić here applies a similar principle as her Bosnian colleague Alen Drljević in Men Don’t Cry (Muškarci ne plaču, 2017), who used real material from psychodrama workshops to create a script that deals explicitly with Yugoslavia’s war past. Although he first intended to make a documentary, his reason for genre modif ication could be applied to Begić as well—coming to the conclusion that fiction film might come closer to the truth than the documentary one. Begić’s film is largely a Turkish co-production, within the scope of a broader Yetim project run by Beşir Derneği, which helps orphaned children around the globe and works to raise public awareness of their needs and place in society.

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Stylistic aspects of the film Never Leave Me show a mixture of elements of Begić’s previous, formally distinct films. Snow’s magic realism relies partially on a melancholic depiction of a Bosnian village (Jelača, 2016, p. 91), analogous to the role of Şanlıurfa landscape in Never Leave Me. And the docu-fiction approach finds analogy in The Children of Sarajevo—a story about war orphans fighting with poverty, transition injustice, and criminal behaviour (Jelača, 2016, p. 214). Referring to the development of her film Snow, Begić once said that, during the work on the film, they were thinking about something that could be called a “Bosnian dream,” a restructuring of society.11 In this film is the same basis for that restructuring—which reveals the stylistic trademarks of poetic realism—supported by intentional references to Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups (1959).12 Such allusiveness accentuates tactile vision, propelled by nostalgic longing, which creates specific “structures of feeling” (Naficy, 2001, pp. 28–29) that “lingers on ruins, the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place and another time” (Boym, 2001, p. 54). In both Begić’s and Žilnik’s films are nostalgic structures of feeling. Depicting temporal and spatial displacement by means of “multifocality, multilinguality, asynchronicity, critical distance, fragmented or multiple subjectivity, and transborder amphibolic characters” (Naficy, 2001, p. 32), they accentuate nostalgic longing, which “drives them to tell their story, to narrate the relationship between past, present and future” (Boym, 2001, p. 62).

Arrival to the “Dream Land” Destination The Most Beautiful Country in the World narrates the process of Europeanization13 that happens among migrants upon their arrival at the desired 11 “While making my first film, Snow, we talked a lot about something called ‘the Bosnian dream.’ Back then we had a dream and we believed in the reconstruction of our society. But then sometimes when we were talking about the war, my friends and I would get really lively. It seemed like people had been more human during the war” (as cited in De Castro, 2012). 12 “I was trying to follow this cinema where not everything is explained, and events and emotions are cut before they fully play out” (Goodfellow, 2017). 13 Europeanization denotes a process of identity construction or identity shifting. It is synonymous to the process of EU integration or becoming an EU citizen, while, in cultural studies, it is related to the individual and collective transformation that assumes adoption of certain values (appropriated as “European”) and modes of behavior. In Balkan cultural studies and studies on Balkan cinema, Europeanization is often mentioned as opposite to Balkanization (Iordanova 2001; Daković 2009). By analogy, the word is used here in relation to the presumed prefix of Orient, which locates the origin of migrants.

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destination—Vienna. The film begins with a scene of two young men, both immigrants, in an open space in Vienna, on a festive day. They are discussing the war in their home countries. A young person talks about the beauty of the monuments that have been destroyed in his native Syria and about the absurdity of the political situation in which millions are forced to suffer due to a few hundred who decided to quarrel. The conversation, in a dark evening setting, with close shots of both men, with depressed faces and cigarettes in their hands, at first glance evokes a certain empathy and makes the viewer wonder about the implications of the war’s destruction. The conversation triggers a dialogue with the audience, many of whom are transnational, reflecting the thoughts and wounds of both the protagonists and their homeland and compatriots (Naficy, 2001, p. 6). In the context of post-Yugoslav nostalgia,14 we might relate the scene to the everyday political discourse in the Balkans and interpret it as an allusion to the war in Yugoslavia.15 The political and historical background and the outcomes of the Yugoslav war are comparable to the situation in Syria, replicating the mourning for lost monuments and the beauty of the former country. The melancholic tone of the initial scene in Žilnik’s film soon shifts to a story about a group of young people, mostly Afghans, who are adapting to the new surrounding and its bureaucractic labyrinths. The main character is Bagher, a young Afghan who just managed to get legal residence in Vienna, learned German well, and hopes to start the new life he longed for as a 17-year-old when he started his journey. Throughout the film, we follow his administrative troubles, bargaining with the landlord for prices and his quest for a job. Despite the obstacles, he seems satisfied with the direction his life has taken in a new environment. Having found a girlfriend in Vienna, he is willing to adapt to the European way of life and break from a lifestyle compatible with traditions he knew in Afghanistan. A twist in the film occurs with the arrival of Bagher’s grandfather, Haydar Ali. He comes to Vienna to find his grandson, whom he has never met. Bagher 14 Referring to nostalgia in the post-Yugoslav context is used to mark the distinction from nostalgia as a notion that was, during the 90s, associated with either nationalist restoration or Yugo-nostalgia (Boym 2002, p. 64). The intention of this contextualization implies that there are multiple semantic and phenomenological manifestations of the notion, some of which are present indirectly and hardly related to its (stereo)typical connotations. 15 Želimir Žilnik is a resident of present-day Serbia, but we refer in this text to Yugoslavia as his homeland, because it seems that he shows more affiliation to the former country than to the current one, given the generation he belongs to and his strong critique of all forms of ethnonationalism. But in his case as well, when it comes to his homeland, it is also possible to refer to it as Yugoslavia or Serbia.

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is the only heir he has left, and Haydar’s sole desire is to see him married to an Afghan girl, in accordance with their customs, so that he can be sure Bagher will continue the family tradition. The appearance of his grandfather evokes the past and memories a world that is long gone for Bagher. In the scene featuring a conversation between Haydar Ali and his grandchild on the tram, he explains the war and labour troubles he faced back in Afghanistan. Foreigners (Chinese, Russians, and Americans) had profited by occupying the land, setting up their industries and underpaying the local population, people like him. Talking about his country in a nostalgic manner, he states that it is the most beautiful country in the world, after all. Leaving his savings from the sold house to Bagher, Haydar Ali decides to return to his homeland after the wedding ceremony he plans for his grandchild. Haydar Ali’s arrival introduces a generational question into the plot, which appears quite frequently in recent Balkan and post-Yugoslav cinema.16 In the post-Yugoslav context, it can be related to the renewal of a discussion that started in the Yugoslav dissident culture of the 1970s, and which concerns the definition of personal responsibility in the constitution of concepts of civic responsibility. In all treatments of this topic, “the (grand)father figure… is shown as the figure of the memory that should establish continuity of projects of both personal and social rehabilitation, in transition from one order of masculinity into another” (Rosić, 2012, p. 57). Torn between the family tradition and his own hopes and desires, Bagher decides to organize a feigned wedding ceremony before his grandfather’s departure to his homeland. A gap between the old, traditional generation and the new one eager to find a new modern life in a “promised land” places Bagher in a moral dilemma that will be solved in a humorous manner. Though Bagher became a “European man” fond of so-called modern European customs, the colonial discourse directed towards migrant populations is woven throughout the film. The traces of orientalization of the migrant subject takes the form of a reversal of gender roles, which imply that the object of the gaze is male and originates in the Orient.17 A male subject is designed as a mere object of desire, reflecting the “will for power” of the Western female, which depicts, on a certain symbolic level, the disposition of powers between the migrating Orient (male) and stable Europe (female). 16 Aferim (Radu Jude, 2015), Dnevnik jednog mašinovođe (Miloš Radović, 2016), Ustav republike Hrvatske (Rajko Grlić, 2017), Ahlat Ağacı (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2018), Teret (Ognjen Glavonić, 2018), Otac (Srdan Golubović, 2019). 17 In one of the scenes, a woman explains that Austrian girls have a tendency to get into relationships or affairs with young men from the Middle East, but they do that “just for fun,” without any intention of developing real emotions for them.

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Introducing the issue of traditional customs due to the organization of the wedding ceremony, Žilnik pulls to the surface the paradigm of “hidden” feminism.18 Before the wedding ceremony, women from the Middle East discuss the position of women in their societies with a couple of local women. The conversation attributes an ironic tone to Sharia law, irrelevant in the host society. Arriving in European society, where women choose and change their partners, migrant women make jokes about how they are now the ones who can have more men, instead of the other way around. “As a migrant woman encounters the changing roles and expectations in the host society—in intimate relationships, with immediate family members, ethnic group, and with the larger community—the conception of womanhood changes as well” (Singh, 2012, p. 123). Gender aspects in the film seem to assert Sumita Chakravarty’s (2017) argument that, in migration film, “neither masculinity nor femininity follow predictable paths” (p. 58). In public lectures and interviews on the occasion of the screening of his latest f ilm, Žilnik often highlights changes in the European working environment. Despite the fact that Europe’s immigration discourse has shifted towards security issues, migrants are necessary for Europe. Countries such as Germany and Austria lack the workforce to perform service jobs on a daily basis. The immigrants’ lives and individual destinies thus become determined by the market needs and capital accumulation of the Western world. Representing these young immigrants as smart, well-educated people, who learn foreign languages well, Žilnik presents the viewers with a dilemma, asking whether the expressed solidarity and good asylum conditions for immigrants in Europe is sincere or simply another colonizing practice of capitalist societies that lack a sufficient workforce for industries that rely on material goods imported precisely from African and Arab countries. People from the margins of society are constantly present in Žilnik’s films, and the idea of “ethics as an aesthetics of future” is applicable to his oeuvre. It has already been suggested that Žilnik uses the camera as scalpel to excise and examine (De Cuir, 2018, p. 124) reality, to provide visibility for those who are forgotten. This sort of praxis, as Pavle Levi (2009) points out, represents a permanent legacy of his Marxist intellectual heritage, due to which he acts 18 Shweta Singh (2012) def ines hidden feminism as drawn from the realm of postcolonial, Islamic, cultural, and global feminisms, as it deconstructs modernity and the ethics of modern structures. She argues that it transcends social identity and group associations, and that it overcomes the limitations of complex and multiple social group identities and its influence on the formation of women’s identity and agency (Singh, 2012, pp. 123–148).

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Figure 11.2: The Most Beautiful Country in the World (Želimir Žilnik, 2018). Courtesy of Sixpackfilm.

as a demystifier of the supposedly spontaneous and ideologically unpainted rapid spread of liberal politics and market economy (p. 17). From his first films in the mid-1960s to those from the late 1980s, he dealt with the position and rights of the working class, homeless people, guest workers—questioning the reality of the proletariat. During the 1990s and afterwards, he has continued to deal with transvestites, the position of the working class in transition, and the world economic crisis. As Jurij Meden (2009) astutely observes, “his films fulfil Chris Marker’s legendary utopia that true films about the workers should be made by the workers themselves” (p. 184). The closest description of his style, in the context of Naficy’s theory, evokes Third Cinema: “If Third Cinema films generally advocated class struggle and armed struggle, accented films favor discursive and semiotic struggles. Although not necessarily Marxist or even socialist like the Third Cinema, the accented cinema is an engagé cinema” (2001, pp. 30–31). Žilnik’s cinematography, without a doubt, is “about people whose lives embody the ideological diversity of sociopolitical opposites and paradoxes related to the construction of identity. In short, it is cinematography about Europe’s internally displaced people” (Levi, 2009, p. 17). In The Most Beautifull Country in the World, by juxtaposing the old modes and the new paradigms of European society, Žilnik juxtaposes the dominant axes of world power, places of privileged life (EU countries), and societies in transition.

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Return to Homeland In The Most Beautiful Country in the World, on the road to Austria, the camera passes through Serbia’s region of Vojvodina. In one of the asylum centres, we meet migrants who speak openly about how they do not intend to stay in Serbia, owing to the low standard of living and underpaid jobs. However, during her stay in Subotica, a woman who runs a choir established during the socialist period is preparing a choral performance in which migrants will have a singing act. While discussing which song they should sing, the choir leader and one of the migrants arrive at the conclusion that the song should be a popular song from Syria, which is also frequently performed in Palestine, Iraq, and other Arab countries.19 Trying to recall the origin of the song, the migrant consults a woman from Iraq to verify the name of the original performer, only to find out that the song is Iraq’s anthem. A woman from Subotica makes an inquisitive comment: “What’s that? Some sort of Arab Internationale?” This scene bears a striking resemblance to the plot of Adela Peeva’s Whose Is This Song? (2003) Besides the reference to Peeva’s famous film, the scene also makes a reference to the former Yugoslav anthem “Hej Sloveni!” Written by a Czech, Samuel Tomašik, during the period of panslavism in the 19th century, “Hej Sloveni!” is considered the second national anthem of Slovakia and is still the national anthem of Poland under the title “Jeszcze Polska nie zginęła, kiedy my żyjemy” (“Poland Is Not Yet Lost While We Are Alive”). Just like the scene at the beginning of the film, Žilnik continues a line in a series of references alluding to the former Yugoslavia.20 The title of Žilnik’s film contains a riddle that can be read from multiple perspectives. One of them is imposing the grandson’s point of view (alluding to Austria); the other imposes grandfather’s point of view (referring to Afghanistan as the most beautiful country in the world). Another interpretation might reflect Žilnik’s own perspective—reference to his own country while narrating the migrant’s longings. As the author whose films are directed to the “displaced people of Europe” (which includes post-Yugoslav exiles), he indicates that to each person, their country is the most beautiful one. 19 The song written by Ibrahim Tukan and composed by Muhamed Flajfel. 20 Yugo-nostalgic references could be seen also as national references: “Listening how they sang the anthem ‘My homeland’ I asked for the translation. In the stanzas of the song you can find words of pride, praise and enthusiasm, about the same meaning as in Serbian anthem God’s Justice (Bože pravde) or Croatian Our Beautiful (Lijepa naša)” (Gvozdenović, 2019).

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Žilnik acts as a reflective type of nostalgic who “does not pretend to rebuild the mythical place called home,” but tries to “suggest new flexibility” (Boym, 2001, p. 62). His nostalgic narrative shows the elements of benevolent irony that might be interpreted as nostalgia towards the “critical political edge” of his own stance (Boym, 2001, p. 357). The homeland he refers to might be actual, utopic, or acquired, but, most of all, it is the desire for a truly equitable distribution of goods and new forms of human communion. A similar principle underpins Begić’s allegorical reminiscences to her “Bosnian dream” that never saw the light of the day. In view of Svetlana Boym’s study on nostalgia, both directors whose works are discussed here are “longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed” (2001, p. 11). Nostalgia appears in their films personified by actual and symbolic representations of childhood (Never Leave Me) and old age (The Most Beautiful Country in the World). These characters represent a reflection of the directors’ own personal, but also collective, longings. The concept of return to the homeland emerges in their films, not as factual representation, but as traces of their mental habitus. In that context, it might be useful to turn back to Odysseus—whose story is about endless wandering, a descent into Hades, and homecoming. Boym reminds us that it is not a story about some sentimental longing and subsequent return to family, but rather a tale about human fate and the return to life (2001, p. 24). The Odyssey is a quest for identity and regaining memory. Its later literal transfiguration into Ulysses becomes a parabola about the modern condition, just like Boym’s nostalgia or contemporary migrations, which ultimately internalizes the division between “local” and “universal.” Boym claims that nostalgia remains an intermediary between collective and individual memory. Unreflected, “it breeds monsters,” but reflected, it functions as a playground. Performativity or self-performativity of characters in these two films articulates this reflective playfulness, through which it points to the future. As Boym explains, reflective nostalgia has a utopian dimension that consists in the exploration of other potentialities and unfulf illed promises of modern happiness. It resists both the total reconstruction of the local culture and the triumphant indifference of technocratic globalism. Instead of the economic globalism from above, the reflective nostalgics can create a global diasporic solidarity based on the experience of immigration and internal multiculturalism. (2001, p. 347)

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In the context of post-Yugoslav spaces, Dijana Jelača sees it as a state of melancholia “often enacted in the form of dislocated screen memories evoked by Yugo-nostalgia, a complicated structure of feelings that has deep political implications and that ultimately desires the impossible” (2016, p. 179).

Conclusion At the beginning of the century, Naf icy wrote that “in recent years no region in the world has borne deadlier sustained clashes over physical (and discursive) borders than the Middle East and the former Yugoslavia” (2001, p. 31). The words remain topical for the present day. The actual disaster that caused migrants’ exile, however, does not find much place in the films of Žilnik and Begić; it is rather articulated through the film language—imitating the form of trauma (as in Begić’s film) or representing spatial and personal dispersion (as in Žilnik’s film). The authors rather focus on aspects they find important in the migration narrative—the possibility of reconstruction of damaged childhoods or the interpellation of identity in different ideological systems. Their reflections acknowledge the individualism and vulnerability of each human, while recognizing that the cultural memory of others draws a relation to their own (inner) reality and collective memory (Boym, 2001, p. 342). Refering to Boym’s notion of reflective nostalgia, Jelača observes that “its gaze is projected into a futurity in which nostalgia becomes a way of performing non-ideologically manipulated collective belonging” (2016, p. 140). In Naficy’s terms, the authors perform a self-inscription through the story of actual migrations, in which they quote their own (work) biographies, their homeland(s), real and imaginary, actual or destroyed. Observing the migration process from within, they articulate their own points of view. For Begić, it is the absurdity of war, which leaves the weakest devastated and without protection; for Žilnik, it is the subversive power of a system that is always using the global context as an excuse to repress those who are other. The collective sense of belonging in the experiences of war and trauma, exile and the perception of one’s own “otherness”—which is used to colonize war-torn countries, take advantage of their national goods, and use the local population as a cheap workforce—allows Žilnik and Begić to tell their own stories through the migration problem. The immigrants stuck on their Balkan route, on the road to their promised land, highlight the Balkans’ own destiny—the destiny of eternal migration

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and the situation of the local population. When narrating the story about Syrian orphans, Aida Begić actually narrates the destinies of Bosnian children; when Želimir Žilnik narrates the story about Afghans, that story recounts outcomes of transitions in post-Yugoslav societies—stuck between the old and new, faced with a choice to Europeanize or to hold onto the nostalgic emotion of an époque that probably won’t return. As interstitial artists, they depict the liminal home-seeking experience of others, who they resemble or at least sympathize with, and by doing so, they return to their own homelands. Displacement entails placement, just like the journey always entails the return (Naficy, 2001, p. 229). Emerging into cinematic border crossings, the authors become companions of the internal and external exiles of their characters. As their identities are shifted and shaped, so their homeland proves to be somewhere else, or at least somewhere in between. Highlighting the journey of migrants in the multiple perspectives of their conflicted present, they shift the margins to the centre, confirming their Balkanness as a central rather than ambivalent component of their identities.

References Begić, A. (2008). Snow [Snijeg] [Film]. Bosnia and Herzegovina: Les Films de l’Après-Midi. Begić, A. (2012). Childrenof Sarajevo [Djeca] [Film]. Bosnia and Herzegovina: Filmhouse Sarajevo. Begić, A. (2017). Never Leave Me [Ne ostavljaj me] [Film]. Bosnia and Herzegovina: Filmhouse Sarajevo. Boym, S. (2001). The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Ceylan, N. B. (Director). (2018). Ahlat Ağacı [Film]. Turkey: Zeynofilm. Chakravarty, S. S. (2017). Gender in Transit: Framing the Cinema of Migration. In K. L. Hole, D. Jelača, E. A. Kaplan, &P. Petro (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Gender (pp. 57–67). New York: Routledge. Çavuşoğlu, M. (2020, March 22). EU Inaction on Syrian Refugees Is a Stain on Human Conscience. Financial Times. Retrieved March 28, 2020, from https:// www.ft.com/content/43bcdc3c-694b-11ea-a6ac-9122541af204 Daković, N. (2008). Balkan kao filmski zanr: slika, tekst, nacija. Belgrade: Fakultet dramskih umetnosti. Daković, N. (2009). Creolised Cinema: Serbian Cinema and EU Integration Process. In D. Bayrakdar (Ed.), Cinema and Politics: Turkish Cinema and The New Europe (pp. 94–108). Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

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Daković, N. (2017). The Other Side of Socialism: History and Cinematic Memory of Socialism. Contemporary Southeastern Europe, 4(2), 67–88. De Castro, C. (2012). Aida Begić on Children of Sarajevo. East European Film Bulletin, 18, https://eefb.org/interviews/aida-begic-on-children-of-sarajevo/ De Cuir, G. (2018). Black Soil. In I. Ćurlin, A. Dević, N. Ilić, & S. Sabolović (Eds.), Shadow Citizens – Želimir Žilnik (pp. 117-127). Oldenburg: Edith Russ Haus for Media Art and Sternberg Press. Drljević, A. (2017). Men Don’t Cry [Muškarci ne plaču] [Film]. Bosnia and Herzegovina: Deblokada Produkcija. Glavonić, O. (Director). (2018). Teret [Film]. Serbia: Cinémadefacto. Gocić, G. (2009). Pogled Odozdo-Nagore: 1968, Doku-drama i Srpski Excentrici. Novi Filmograf, 5/6, 117–128. Golubović, S. (Director). (2019). Otac [Film]. Serbia: Film House Bas Celik. Goodfellow, M. (2017, October 24). Bosnian Film-maker Aida Begic Talks Syrian Orphan Drama “Never Leave Me.” Screendaily. Retrieved March 28, 2020, from https://www.screendaily.com/features/bosnian-film-maker-aida-begic-talkssyrian-orphan-drama-never-leave-me/5123561.article Grlić, R. (Director). (2017). Ustav republike Hrvatske [Film]. Croatia: In Film Praha. Gvozdenović, N. (2019, June 25). Žilnik: Snimio sam prvi f ilm sa kompletnim migrantskim kastingom u Evropi. Aljazeera Balkans. Retrieved October 3, 2019, from https://balkans.aljazeera.net/news/culture/2019/6/25/zilnik-snimio-samprvi-film-sa-kompletnim-migrantskim-kastingom-u-evropi Iordanova, D. (2001). Cinema of Flames: Balkan Film, Culture, and the Media. London: British Film Institute. Jelača, D. (2016). Dislocated Screen Memory: Narrating Trauma in Post-Yugoslav Cinema. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Josipovič, D. (2017). Geopolitics and Migration: Migration Industry as an Important Factor of (De)stabilization of Europe and the Middle East. In M. Bobić & S. Janković (Eds.), Towards Understanding of Contemporary Migration: Causes, Consequences, Policies, Reflections (pp. 3–24). Belgrade: Faculty of Philosophy. Jude, R. (Director). (2015) Aferim [Film]. Romania: HI Film Productions. Kaplan, E. A. (2005). Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Khatuntsev, S. V. (1994). Novyy vzglyad na razvitiye tsivilizatsiy i taksonomiyu kul’turno-istoricheskikh obshchnostey. In Tsivilizatsionnyy podkhod k istorii: problemy i perspektivyrazvitiya. Voronezh: Nauka. Korac-Sanderson, M. (2017). Bordering and Rebordering Security: Causes and Consequences of Framing Refugees as a “Threat” to Europe. In M. Bobić & S. Janković (Eds.), Towards Understanding of Contemporary Migration: Causes, Consequences, Policies, Reflections (pp. 25–40). Belgrade: Faculty of Philosophy.

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Kurecic, P., & Kuhar, P. (2019). The Rhetoric on Illegal Migration of Centre-right Parties and Right-wing Populist Parties in “Old” and “New” EU Member States: A Content Analysis of Leaders’ Speeches. In Data Value Chains in Science & Territories 2019 International Conference Proceedings (pp. 79–86). Paris: CODATA. Levi, P. (2009). Cine-Commune, or Filmmaking as Direct Socio-Political Intervention. In For an Idea – Against the Status Quo: Analysis and Systematization of Želimir Žilnik’s Artistic Work (pp. 16–39). Novi Sad: New Media Center and Playground Produkcija. Meden, J. (2009). Želimir Žilnik’s “Kenedi” Trilogy: Solidarity Outside the Walls of Fortress Europe. In For an Idea – Against the Status Quo: Analysis and Systematization of Želimir Žilnik’s Artistic Work (pp. 180–185). Novi Sad: New Media Center and Playground Produkcija. Mulvey, L. (1989). Visual and Other Pleasures. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Naficy, H. (2001). An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Operational Portal Refugee Situations. Syria Regional Refugee Response. Retrieved March 17, 2020, from https://data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/syria/location/113 Peeva, A. (Director). (2003). Whose Is This Song? [Chia e tazi pesen?] [Documentary]. Belgium & Bulgaria: Adela Media Film and TV Productions. Radović, M. (Director). (2016). Dnevnik jednog mašinovođe [Film]. Serbia: Zillion Film. Rosić, T. (2012). Panika u redovima, tj Balkan zemlja s one strane ogledala. Sarajevske Sveske, 39–40, 49–71. Singh, S. (2012). Transgression into “Hidden” Feminism: Immigrant Muslim Woman from India. In G. T. Bonifacio (Ed.), Feminism and Migration: Cross-Cultural Engagements (pp. 123–148).New York: Springer. Tizard, W. (2017, October 21). Antalya Festival: Aida Begic on “Never leave me,” Shooting with the Kids. Variety. Retrieved October 4, 2019, from https://variety.com/2017/film/ festivals/antalya-festival-aida-begic-never-leave-me-shooting-with-kids-1202595977/ Truffaut, F. (Director). (1959). Les Quattre Cents Coups [The 400 Blows] [Film]. France: Les Films du Carrosse. Tsymburskiyy, V. L. (2009). Zemlya za Velikim Limitrofom: ot RossiiYevrazii k Rossii v Yevrazii. In V.L. Tsymburskiyy, Rossiya – Zemlya za Velikim Limitrofom: tsivilizatsiya i yeyegeopolitika. Moscow: Akademicheskij Proekt. Udier, S. L. (2011). Fikcija i fakcija: Rasprava o jeziku književnosti na predlošcima tekstova Miljenka Jergovića. Zagreb: Disput. Walker, J. (2004). The Vicissitudes of Traumatic Memory and the Postmodern History Film. In E. A. Kaplan & B. Wang (Eds.), Trauma and Cinema: Cross-Cultural Explorations (pp. 123–145). Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Žilnik, Ž. (Director). (1975). Inventour [Inventory] [Film]. Germany: Alligator Film.

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Žilnik, Ž. (Director). (1983). The First Trimester of Pavle Hromiš [Film]. Yugoslavia: TV Novi Sad. Žilnik, Ž. (Director). (2000). Tvrđava Evropa [Fortress Europe] [Film]. Slovenia: Low Budget Production. Žilnik, Ž. (Director). (2003–2007). Kenedi Trilogy [Film]. Serbia: Terra Film. Žilnik, Ž. (Director). (2015). Destinacija_Serbistan [Logbook Serbistan] [Film]. Serbia: Playground Produkcija. Žilnik, Ž. (Director). (2018). Najlepša zemlja na svetu [The Most Beautiful Country in the World] [Film]. Slovenia: Factum.

About the Author Iva Leković is a PhD student in the Department of Theory and History at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade. She holds a BA degree in Art History and an MA in Cultural Policy and Management. She has participated at several international conferences and has published articles as well as exhibition and film reviews.



Conclusion (Speculative) Robert Burgoyne and Deniz Bayrakdar

The essays in this volume explore a range of creative responses to the many faces of refugee and migrant experiences in the 21st century, focusing on the power of art to bring into view both the quotidian experiences and the interior lives of people forced to migrate or blocked from moving to a future homeland. In the course of these chapters, we have attempted to draw a rough outline of the ways the personal lives and historical destinies of people swept up in the great migrations of the 21st century have been represented in film, art, and media. The book serves, we hope, as a cognitive bridge to a deeper awareness of the experiences of refugees and migrants. We have focused on a small temporal slice of this vast human drama—now extending to over a billion people—looking mainly at works created in the 21st century, with a few from the late 20th century. The analytic perceptions that have emerged in this study constitute an important contribution, but they are only a small sample of the intellectual work that might be done. It is our hope that this volume will stimulate further research on this urgent topic. As varied as they are, the separate chapters of the book cohere along certain lines, forming rough constellations of themes and emphases. In Part One, for example, the analyses foreground the challenge to representation posed by mass refugee and migrant experiences, a challenge that is explicitly set forth in Dudley Andrew’s opening essay. The chapters included in Part One engage with the work of a number of artists who employ innovative modes of audiovisual media to capture the experiences of nomadism, displacement, and enforced stasis that characterize migrant lives. Analysing films made by refugee collectives, works that employ sonic elements as a form of cartophony, films that are made with a thermographic camera that records the body heat generated by refugees at sea, in camps, and in transit across distant landscapes, and media composed as virtual reality immersions in the space-time of the refugee experience, the writers contributing to Part One focus, for the most part, on new technologies and novel approaches to sound and image. In this section of the book, as well, site-specific artworks

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that throw a new light on zones of political contestation and conflict are reconsidered through the lens of a political critique that links capitalism with the homelessness and displacement of the contemporary period. In Part Two, the focus shifts to narrative and documentary films that engage the tools of more familiar audiovisual forms to explore the experiences and the subjective worlds of migrants and refugees. In this part of the work, aspects of migrant lives that had previously been almost invisible or simply not noticed are illuminated. For example, Deniz Göktürk’s opening chapter of Part Two describes Afghan migrant trash workers in Istanbul with an optic that looks to the long history of cinematic and novelistic representations of ragpickers and ragmen, representations that have now all but disappeared from film and literature. The chapter focuses on the ways film can render the concrete experience of a capitalist economy that links migrant “surplus populations” with the surpluses of consumerist commerce. In this section, different chapters are connected by their focused consideration of the subjective aspects of migration, detailing the anxiety of the stateless refugee, out of place and out of time, wandering the cities of Paris and Marseille, or the emotional lives of displaced children and young women in Turkey and Eastern Europe, waiting to continue their journeys at borders and seascapes. The authors bring into view the way the non-places of wandering and enforced stasis are depicted in narrative film—the rural backcountry, the urban bachelor flats, the train depots, call stations, abandoned dwellings, shelters, and warehouses. Also, in this part of the book, the cinemas of the Balkans and Turkey receive heightened attention. The long history of migration into and out of the Balkans and Turkey is embedded in these chapters, which deal with f ilms that provide a new take on the reconf iguration of that history, bringing to light both the ambivalence and the sense of possibility that characterizes these works. Given our subject, we felt that the writing of even a provisional conclusion to these stories, or to this book, was premature, and perhaps contradictory. To provide a sense of overture rather than finality to the end of the book, we have decided, at the suggestion of our series editor Catherine Gomes, to expand the focus of our work and consider our subject from a different vantage point: How do we envision the representation of refugees and migrants in the visual arts of the future? We invited our authors to engage in a thought experiment, and we include their responses here. Enfolded in this question are a number of difficult considerations. To begin, the inquiry requires that we imagine how the present-day reality of pandemics, ecological crises, civil wars, social unrest, and mass displacement will proceed,

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or perhaps metastasize, in the decades to come. The question also forces us to ponder whether the defining social and geographical systems of the present—nation states, hard borders, territorial definitions of belonging and exclusion—will survive or be replaced. Finally, the question demands that we think about the art forms of the future and how those forms may allow for different modes of access and emotional response. Each of the nine short essays included here offers an original take on some of the possible worlds embedded in our present moment.

Nagehan Uskan When the Covid-19 lockdown started in March 2020 on Lésbos Island in Greece, Moria camp residents produced different demonstrations and actions to protest the inhuman conditions of the worst refugee camp of Europe, also known as “Hell,” where they were confined. A group of Afghan women made a collective short documentary while supporting the women residents of the camp in different ways. One member of the collective, Zahra, answered some of my questions about their actions and their film. The interview speaks to some of the ways refugees may represent themselves in projects of the future. These are her words.1 Uskan: You participated in many demonstrations to make your voice heard against these terrible conditions. Can you tell us a little bit about them? Zahra: I joined them all while shooting with my camera. African communities led these actions, and then other communities have also joined. During the Covid-19 outbreak, we demanded the camp be evacuated, so that we may be transferred to safer places. African communities are very creative with actions. They had written a song about the Moria camp. They marched together dancing in rhythm with their hands and bodies, while singing that song. They turned their actions into a spectacle. One time, they prepared an amazing performance. A person was lying on the ground, playing someone whose body was taken over by the virus. On one hand, I was excited to be filming, but on the other, I was breaking into tears. We women also wanted to shoot a short film and tell about our experiences. We are in the final stage of the movie. 1 The Turkish version of the whole interview can be found: https://birartibir.org/ goc-ve-multecilik/732-cehennemde-ozsavunma

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Uskan: What is this film about? Zahra: Westerners frequently visit the camp and try to film and report what we are going through. Most of them are men, and all of them repeat the same things like robots. They have no idea about what it means to live in the camp. “This is the garbage, these are the toilets, and these are the food lines.” Then they return to their comfortable homes and comfortable lives in Europe. Yet we don’t need someone to cry for us. If the situation worries you, take concrete steps. Photos of Moria are posted everywhere; everyone has known for a long time how dire the situation is. So why have our conditions not changed? In the documentary, we say: “It’s our turn to speak.” As refugee women living in Moria, we want to express our feelings and experiences. We need solidarity and change, not journalists who cannot go beyond reproducing the current situation with their photographs and news. Our documentary is about migrant women. We, as women, did not give up solidarity even in the most difficult days; we continued our actions with different methods. We made our film, cooperated with women’s organizations, and distributed aid in the camp. We did not leave those who were in a difficult situation alone. Where were you?

Deniz Bayrakdar Images of refugees and migrants in contemporary visual arts bridge a mnemonic correlation with European colonialism and with transatlantic slavery, a strike back, a mirroring of the past. The paintings of the “Guineamen,” for example, showing the transportation of slaves, such as in Philip James’s drawing The Slave Ship “Brookes” (1789), or the deck plan of the slave ship, Vigilante (1822) (Clifton and Rigby, 2004, p. 201) adjoin images of plastic boats carrying fleeing people squeezed together in the Mediterranean, as in Kumun Tadı (Seaburners, Melisa Önel, 2014). The travelling memory of these people and others in the East and South build a kind of “palimpsestic memory,” which is now juxtaposed to VR images of migration in museums, galleries, and on the web (Silverman, 2015). The migrants’ memory, expressed in recent artworks, recalls images of forced displacement of the past—the basis of most of the nation states—as captured in the National Maritime Museum’s illustrations of slave transports. Visual artworks representing the flow of migrants are, in effect, superimposed on earlier memories and representations, forming a loop that is running in present time.

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Juxtaposed to the dominant symbolic memory of passage and forced transit, however, is the enforced stasis of the border zones and refugee camps. Here, the recent pandemic functions as an unexpected, abrupt “insert” and a “fade-out” in the time-image of the migrants. The priority of the pandemic de-emphasized the urgency of the refugees’ and migrants’ lives, at the same time functioning as a valid justification for not opening the borders. For the refugees and migrants, the pandemic reinforced the experience of immobility, of being frozen in place. Their mobility is stuck. The artworks of the future, I believe, will centre on encounters of the natives with migrants at the border spaces. The images and voices of those forced to migrate due to wars, famine, and the droughts of today will build the accumulated memory of the future as a form of “outsourced and borrowed memory” (Parfit, 1984). Artworks on migration will enable the continuity of memory, especially in virtual reality films such as those of Chris Milk and other new technologies that transform storytelling into a form of story living (Buckmaster, 2019). The memory of the refugees and migrants in these artworks will overlap with the spectators’ own past—allowing a way to reconstruct their identities through these virtual encounters, as realized by such artists as Gabo Arora, Chris Milk, Nonny de La Peña, and Alejandro González Iñárritu. New ways of representing refugees and migrants in artworks and cinema will go beyond images of migrant bodies at the seashores and borders and give back their voices and memories as well as transfer these multichannelled memories to the spectator. The time of being stuck at borders will, in time, erase the imagination of their country of destination, which once was seen as a place of desire and utopia, and turn it into a heterotopia (Foucault, 1984). The artworks of the future may also deal with the images and voices representing the way refugees and migrants may “other” the insiders who once “othered” them. Or, according to sponsors and supporters, the memories of the refugees and migrants may be meshed with the tailored stories of the nation’s insiders’ immersive experiences, meeting the political agenda’s requirements, in a volumetric space and time (Nonny de La Peña, 2020). These new concepts and aesthetic forms, based on AI technology, will enable migrant characters to speak to us while we all move and travel freely. This near future of self-designed stories may ignite an overlapping form of memory, joining the experience of the insiders with that of the refugees and migrants, and hopefully bringing with it a more insightful and positive understanding.

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Erik Marshall Any new technology comes with a surplus of fanfare and revolutionary rhetoric. According to some, the internet was supposed to make the world more democratic and open, social media was supposed to connect us, and cheaper phones would lift people out of poverty as pocket computing liberated us from the requirements of labour and physical presence. Many of these technologies have, of course, delivered incredible benef its to many around the world. At the same time, oppressive governments use the same technology to monitor and control people, and the algorithms of for-prof it social media companies have divided societies. Regarding representations of people forced into migration, the use of new technologies risks replicating and amplifying the problems inherent in more traditional filmmaking. That said, there is room for optimism. The ubiquity of high-quality mobile cameras, 360-degree photography, and virtual and augmented reality technologies has already changed our sense of (tele)presence in myriad ways. If put in the hands of the migrants themselves, immersive mobile technologies can circumvent the exoticism and othering inherent to much documentary work on migrants. For example, a loose network of self-shot videos, narrative or not, could replicate the disjointed, diasporic sense of the migrant experience. Rather than relying on the authorial voice or gaze of a dominant (often White, Western) frame, migrants themselves can document their experiences and then curate the resultant representations. This curation might work in a more affective register, without a dominant guiding narrative. Alternately, narratives can be constructed through the juxtaposition of disparate representations, linked together after the fact by the participants themselves. Perhaps augmented reality can contextualize these experiences in ways currently unforeseen. For this to work, the trick for Western producers is to get out of the way. Supply the technology, perhaps, then step back.

Nevena Daković International opinion about changes in migration in the pandemic and post-pandemic world range from radical, such as “the pandemic has ended a decade’s growth in the flow of migrants around the world,” to cautious optimism that the outcome of the pandemic might bring “more inclusivity and more diversity, in the global workplace, and an improvement in some

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of the factors that drive people to leave their homes and countries in search of better livelihoods” (Strauss, 2020). However, leaving aside, for the moment, the predictions focused on economic migration, it becomes clear that pandemic measures such as the closing of borders, disrupted travel, and stalled transport has left many migrants “imprisoned” at some unwanted point and place on their migrant routes. They live in camps or migrant centres, unable to continue to travel and even less able to stay in some transitory spot, unless they are ready to face a difficult fight for survival on a daily basis. Covid-19 has not yet been turned into cinema, or into another form of media art or fiction. But I maintain that the motive of the pandemic would not radically change migrant narratives in cinema. It would just make them gloomier and more dramatic, adding another obstacle in the narrative of their journey to a better life. Judging by previous speculative films, it might add a touch of medical or disease thriller, sometimes linked with the motive of travel in general, such as in the films Contagion (Steven Soderbergh, 2011) or Variola Vera (Goran Marković, 1982), in which the disease is brought by people travelling to distant countries, or like Outbreak (Wolfgang Petersen, 1995), in which the characters travel to exotic parts of the world to explore the source of the epidemics.

Iva Leković The breaking news regarding the migration crisis in February 2021 left the image of thousands of migrants stuck at borders between Turkey and Greece, just before another, much faster traveller stepped its foot up on the global scene. The global pandemic crisis started writing its own apocalyptic scenarios, reinforced by media footage of empty shelves in supermarkets, health workers in sanitary suits, and emptied urban spaces, announcing that the face of the Earth will not be the same again. The prevailing atmosphere was accurately depicted in the initial sequences of Semih Kaplanoğlu’s Grain (Buğday, 2017), which show a dystopic future of genetic engineering, contaminated lands, and refugees kept behind electric security fences. This future seems to be happening now, and some scientists argue that this atmosphere might be related to the end of the Anthropocene, a category that remains more a cultural one than a geological one. In this new reality of dominant technology and an endangered environment, migrants once again are pushed off the map. With almost every corner of the world quarantined, medical authorities proclaimed physical distancing and staying at home as a necessary and responsible life principle, without mentioning what

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this would mean for those who are, by definition, homeless and forced to be distant from their place of birth, although usually not from each other. The meaning of the word “home” has changed, revealing several paradoxes. While, for those who migrate and who are marginalized, home is a place of longing and aspiration, in the current mainstream discourse, it can easily become the framework for trauma. Constantly faced with ourselves and our own consciousness, we start projecting its content in multiple parallel screens that eventually generate new media, that have the capacity to immerse us into its own spaces. Virtual reality is taking precedence, not only awakening multiple planes of consciousness, but absorbing physical reality itself. Images of migration so far remain on the borders of global solidarity, staying on the periphery of vision, but they still form part of the global environment. Perhaps its future representation should be sought on the boundaries of control systems. Until they’re open, we might all remain locked in.

Eileen Rositzka Considering their presence in current discursive frameworks, borders (as territorial, aesthetic, and experiential categories) will feature even more prominently in future sociopolitical debates and media figurations. The reconfiguration of traditional genre codes and limitations that we see on the level of filmmaking and artistic practice may be linked to depictions of visible boundaries under stress, such as the US–Mexico border and the Israel–Gaza barrier, or by debates on Brexit and the European nation state. And in times of increasing polarization and political radicalization, it is perhaps no surprise that the lines between horror, melodrama, fantasy, and realism are less and less easy to draw: A world in crisis must result in a crisis of images and narratives. But beyond documenting and observing our conflicts and catastrophes as something irreversible, which has already happened, it will be all the more important to intervene before it is too late. What we should learn through the experience of migrants and refugees is that borders connect as much as they separate, and it will require a stronger focus on the former to fortify what could be called a democratization of perception. It is on audiovisual media to account for multiple points of view and points in time that help us see the bigger picture—to not only direct our attention to post-migrant conditions either as a result of successful integration efforts or as testifying

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to ongoing exclusion but also to migration as a tightrope walk between and among emotional, physical, and political states that affects both refugees and consolidated “resident” communities. The hardships of migration, of this most challenging manifestation of the in-between, not only remind us to stand up against warmongering and ostracism but also test our adherence to human rights and democratic constitutions. Mediating and acknowledging this experience will help to further question distinctions between “us” and “them,” between “self” and “other.” Ultimately, migrants and refugees call on us to act as a global community, to affirm our societies’ principles of plurality, which in turn serve to guarantee every individual’s pursuit of happiness. Their voices are nothing less than a call to humanity itself.

Dora Apel Representations of refugees and migrants make starkly visible the global refugee crisis and the untenable nature of the global immigration system. The increasingly desperate struggle to police national borders points to the growing arbitrariness and ineffectiveness of such borders—even as the victims of forced migration remain subject to persecution, imprisonment, family separation, pandemic disease, and cruel deaths. Images of migrants and refugees not only signal the growing catastrophe of forced displacement but also help galvanize political struggle for liberty, equality, and the right to have rights. In an ideal world, there would be free movement for all and images of rightless migrants would be replaced by images of emigrant global citizens. But because no capitalist ruling class will relinquish control of its borders, there can be no progressive immigration policy under capitalism. The fight for full citizenship rights for everyone means sweeping away capitalism through a series of socialist revolutions around the globe.

Selmin Kara In the pandemic winter of 2021, I taught a master’s course on eco-media at an art and design university in Toronto, far away from my home in an agricultural town on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey. Delivered synchronously online, the felt feels like a United Nations assembly, a mini Rio Earth Summit of sorts, with students connecting to class from their homes, some a few blocks and others continents away. A student in Iran complains that the air is so polluted in her hometown that the residents

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cannot breathe. Another from Indonesia shares her concerns about sea-level rise in Jakarta, reportedly among the top 20 cities at risk in the world. I comment about alarming reports of drought in Turkey, while two other students, one Indigenous and the other from the Bahamas, discuss the importance of sovereignty (“the right to be cold,” in Sheila Watt-Cloutier’s words), reform, and unlearning. Looking at all of us on my laptop’s screen, I ponder what futures we’ll find ourselves in over the next two or three decades, which will see an acceleration in climate change, biodiversity loss, economic and political instabilities, forced migrations, and struggles to hold onto ancestral lands. Who among us will be able to stay in their homelands and stand their ground against impending tides, and who will have to leave or keep moving? My feeling is that the stories we tell today about 21st-century migrations only hold light to the tip of the iceberg, rapidly melting. There is need for more radical and speculative post-cinematic visions to prepare us for our collective geosocial and transcorporeal futures, attentive both to the rights to move—seek refuge, livelihood, and safety elsewhere—and rights to stay: defend the sovereignty of land, waters, and biota.

Robert Burgoyne Images of mass migration, after a brief period in which they seem to have disappeared from the lens of the media, have returned as subjects of journalistic attention, a return marked, for me, by two photos in the January 18, 2021 edition of The New York Times. In the first, a high-angle shot of a swelling crowd of refugees depicts hundreds of people, mostly from Honduras, pushing hard against a many-tiered wall of soldiers guarding the border into Guatemala. In the second photo, a group of migrants are shown lying and sitting around on a highway, a non-place with no visible signs of habitation, shelter, or relief. These photos, ricocheting between scenes of desperate, mass confrontation and images that depict the stasis of a suspended journey, draw from a now familiar visual rhetoric, a pictorial vocabulary that has descended into a tired set of conventions and visual codes that translate, too easily, into well-rehearsed narrative genres—the disaster film and the post-apocalyptic road movie—that usually signify both chaos and the threat of contagion. A very different genre, however, might be superimposed on these tropes, giving rise to a different way of reading images that fall too readily into established affective scripts. Several of the writers in this conclusion have discussed potential modes of future representation that mark a major formal

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departure: refugee and migrant images that are interactive and dialogical, migrants taking charge of their own images, reversing the point of view, turning the camera lens around on the landed residents of nation states. These are interesting and worthwhile thought experiments. I would like to propose a more traditional, but nevertheless guardedly optimistic way of seeing present-day images of mass migration—as the basic visual vocabulary of a future epic cinema. From this perspective, the massed crowds on the roadway and the vast makeshift camps in desperate places might be seen as foreshadowing the emergence of a new people, the intimation of freedom after a long history of extreme hardship, the incipient resolution of wandering and confinement in a story of progress that can only be glimpsed from a long historical vantage point. What I am imagining, of course, is what Fredric Jameson, following Ernst Bloch, called the utopian underpinnings of mass culture, and by extension, mass media, and what Bloch himself wrote concerning the genres of mainstream film, that they can create a “hope landscape,” a “mirror of hope,” the mime of the “days which change the world.” Such a future might be almost impossible to foresee in the present moment. But perhaps we can imagine a script in which the images of desperation that now dominate journalistic media can be rethought as heralding an almost unthinkable future of global citizenship.

References Bloch, E. (1986). The Principle of Hope (Vol. 1) (N. Plaice, S. Plaice & P. Knight, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Buckmaster, L. (2019, May 8). What Will Films Be Like in 20 years? BBC Culture. https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20190508–what-will-films-be-like-in-20–years Clifton, G., & Rigby, N. (Eds.). (2004). Treasures of the National Maritime Museum. London: National Maritime Museum. Foucault, M., & Miskowiec, J. (1984 [1967]). Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias. http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/foucault1.pdf Games for Change. (2020, August 13). KEYNOTE – Building the Volumetric Future with Nonny de la Peña [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=YSCHwSB-8yE Kaplanoğlu, S. (Director). (2017). Buğday [Grain] [Film]. Turkey: Kaplan Film. Marković, G. (Director). (1982). Variola Vera [Film]. Yugoslavia: Art Film 80. Önel, M. (Director). (2014). Kumun Tadı [Seaburners] [Film]. Turkey: Bulut Film. Parfit, D. (1984). Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Petersen, W. (Director). (1995). Outbreak [Film]. United States: Warner Bros.

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Silverman, M. (2015). Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film. New York: Berghahn. Soderbergh, S. (Director). (2011). Contagion [Film]. United States: Warner Bros. Strauss, D. (2020, October 19). Pandemic Ends a Decade of Growth in Global Migration. Financial Times, https://www.ft.com/content/1cae3b39-f8f6-4efc-99a02efe1c9aad8c Uskan, N. (2020, May, 29). Moria Kampında Korona Günlerinde Kadın Dayanışması: Cehennemde Özsavunma. 1+1 Forum. Retrieved January 15, 2021, from https:// birartibir.org/goc-ve-multecilik/732-cehennemde-ozsavunma

About the Authors Robert Burgoyne is a writer and lecturer whose work centres on the representation of history in film. The author of five books and numerous essays, his work has been translated into nine languages. He was formerly Chair in Film Studies at The University of St Andrews and Professor of English at Wayne State University. Deniz Bayrakdar is a professor of film studies at Kadir Has University. She is the Chair of the Communication Committee at Turkish National Commission for UNESCO. She initiated and organized New Directions in Turkish Film Studies www.tfayy.org (1999–2019). “Migrant Women in Turkish German and New Turkish Cinema” in The International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media, and Communication (2020) is her latest publication.

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Thulin, S. (2018). Sound Maps Matter: Expanding Cartophony. Social & Cultural Geography, 19(2), 192–210. Tizard, W. (2017, October 21). Antalya Festival: Aida Begic on “Never leave me,” Shooting with the Kids. Variety. Retrieved October  4, 2019, from https://variety.com/2017/film/festivals/antalya-festival-aida-begic-never-leaveme-shooting-with-kids-1202595977/ Todorova, M. (1997). Imagining the Balkans. New York: Oxford University Press. Tokmak, S. (Director). (2011). Kırık Midyeler [Broken Mussels] [Film]. Turkey: 90 Film Production. Tosun, U. (2007). Taşı Toprağı Altın Kentin Son Gurbetçileri. Nokta, 56–59. Tosun, U. (Director). (2018). Afganistanbul [Film]. Turkey: Xanaduart. https://vimeo. com/348987107, Password: afgan2020 Tosun, U. “Re: Afganistanbul.” E-mail to Deniz Göktürk. January 28, 2020. Touré, M. (Director). (2012). La Pirogue [Film]. France: Les Chauves-Souris. Treml, C. (2017, July). “Transit”: Verloren in der Gegenwart. Goethe Institut Kultur: Magazin. Retrieved February 26, 2020, from https://www.goethe.de/ins/fr/de/ kul/mag/21019389.html?forceDesktop=1 Truffaut, F. (Director). (1959). Les Quattre Cents Coups [The 400 Blows] [Film]. France: Les Films du Carrosse. Tsymburskiyy, V. L. (2009). Zemlya za Velikim Limitrofom: ot RossiiYevrazii k Rossii v Yevrazii. In V.L. Tsymburskiyy, Rossiya – Zemlya za Velikim Limitrofom: tsivilizatsiya i yeyegeopolitika. Moscow: Akademicheskij Proekt. Türeli, I. (2018). Istanbul, Open City: Exhibiting Anxieties of Urban Modernity. London: Routledge. Türkiye’de 10 Yılda 35 Bin Göçmen Kaçakçısı Yakalandı. (2019, December 20). Hürriyet. https://www.hurriyet.com.tr/gundem/turkiyede-10-yilda-35-bingocmen-kacakcisi-yakalandi-41402145 Udier, S. L. (2011). Fikcija i fakcija: Rasprava o jeziku književnosti na predlošcima tekstova Miljenka Jergovića. Zagreb: Disput. UNHCR. Retrieved October 21, 2019, from https://data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/ mediterranean/location/5179 UNHCR. (2019) Turkey Fact Sheet. Reliefweb. https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb. int/files/resources/UNHCR-Turkey-One-Pager-Fact-Sheet-Oct2019.pdf United Nations. Figures at a Glance. UNHCR. Retrieved June 12, 2020, from www. unhcr.org/en-us/figures-at-a-glance.html Uskan, N. (2018, December, 15). İran’dan Midilli’ye Uzanan Üç Göçmen Hikâyesi: Faşistlik Nedir, Anti-faşist Kimdir? 1+1 Forum. Retrieved October 21, 2019, from https://www.birartibir.org/goc-ve-multecilik/204-fasistlik-nedir-anti-fasistkimdir

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Uskan, N. (2020, May, 29). Moria Kampında Korona Günlerinde Kadın Dayanışması: Cehennemde Özsavunma. 1+1 Forum. Retrieved January 15, 2021, from https:// birartibir.org/goc-ve-multecilik/732-cehennemde-ozsavunma Ustaoğlu, Y. (Director). (2004). Bulutları Beklerken [Waiting for the Clouds] [Film]. Turkey: Silkroad Production. Vallet, E. (2019). Border Walls and the Illusion of Deterrence. In R. Jones (Ed.), Open Borders: In Defense of Free Movement (pp. 156–168). Atlanta: University of Georgia Press. Vassilieva, J. (2018). Russian Leviathan: Power, Landscape, Memory. Film Criticism, 42(1). https://doi.org/10.3998/fc.13761232.0042.101 VR Vegan. (2018, March 5). Dictatorship of the Frame: Carne y Arena [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYjx5mNE74o Vuletić, B. (Director). (2011). Practical Guide through Belgrade with Singing and Crying [Film]. Serbia: Art & Popcorn. Vuletić, B. (Director). (2015). Requiem for Mrs J [Rekvijem za gospođu J] [Film]. Serbia: Geopoly Film. Walker, J. (2004). The Vicissitudes of Traumatic Memory and the Postmodern History Film. In E. A. Kaplan & B. Wang (Eds.), Trauma and Cinema: Cross-Cultural Explorations (pp. 123–145). Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Walker, L. (Director). (2010). Waste Land [Film]. Brazil: Almega Projects. Wedel, M. (2019). Das Wunder von Wuppertal: Tom Tykwer, Miracolo a Milano und das Märchenhafte. In R. Brückner, B. Groß, M. Grotkopp, & E. Rositzka (Eds.), Im Verwandeln der Zeit: Reflexionen über filmische Bilder (pp. 13–24). Berlin: Vorwerk 8. Weiwei, A. (2016). Safe Passage [Installation]. Konzerthaus Berlin, Berlin, Germany. Weiwei, A. (2016). Laundromat [Installation]. Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, New York, United States. Weiwei, A. (Director). (2017). Human Flow [Film]. Germany: 24 Media Production Company. Weiwei, A. (Director). (2019). The Rest [Film]. Germany: AWW Germany. wildrosetr. (2017, November 14). 15. İstanbul Bienali, 15th Istanbul Biennial ÖZEL KARAKÖY RUM ANA VE İLKÖĞRETİM OKULU [Video]. YouTube. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=FuUz3giIbSg WITNESS Project. Retrieved January 6, 2020, from https://www.witness.org/ Wright, R. (2000). Native Son. London: Vintage Books. Wright, T. (2002). Moving Images: The Media Representation of Refugees. Visual Studies 17(1), 53–66. Yalouri, E. (2019). “Difficult” Representations: Visual Art Engaging with the Refugee Crisis. Visual Studies, 34(3), 223–238. Ying, L. (Director). (2018). A Family Tour [Film]. Taiwan: 90 Minutes Film Studio.

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Websites http://film.iksv.org/tr/festivalgunlugu/918 https://www.unhcr.org/tr/en/refugees-and-asylum-seekers-in-turkey

Index (A)torsion 226 3 a. m. 223 360-degree 133-135, 139, 141, 143, 264 A Family Tour 33 A Refugee Nation 113-114 A Seventh Man 39 A Shape of Things to Come 101 Accented cinema 22, 51, 68, 186, 219-221, 230, 237, 239-240, 250 Aciman, André 107 Acousmêtres 98-99, 102 Acoustic ecology 89-90, 92, 99, 103 Activist image 58-60, 63-64 Aegean 171, 194, 197-198, 200, 205, 213-214 Aferim 248 Afganistanbul 20, 151, 153, 161-165, 169-172 Afghanistan 22, 51-52, 113, 160-162, 164, 166-167, 170-171, 196, 238, 247-248, 251 Africa 32, 35, 41, 84, 120, 205, 220, 224, 241 Against All Odds 138 Agamben, Giorgio 11, 73, 79-81, 111 Ağaoğlu, Adalet 203 Ahlat Ağacı 248 Aïnouz, Karim 36 Aitamurto, Tanja 134 Ajvar 225 Akay, Ali 55-56 Akın, Fatih 15, 17, 46-47, 155, 194, 201-203, 220, 223, 229 Akomfrah, John 40-41 Akturan, Zafer 164 Alberti, Rafael 90 Alexander, Catherine 156 Algeria, 102 All Things Were Now Overtaken by Silence 102 Alonso, Alexandra Délano 93 Alquati, Romano 55 Althusser, Louis 58 Alÿs, Francis 108 Amenábar, Alejandro 44 America 102, 113, 117-118 An Entire Life in a Package 112 An Opera of the World 41-42 Anatolia 153, 163-164, 171, 194, 199, 201, 205, 213 Anderson, Benedict 78 Anderson-Kunert, Todd 97 Andrew, Dudley 17, 27, 46, 259 Andrić, Ivo 222 Angelopoulos, Theo 223 Angus, Sandra 61 Ankara 28, 158 Ankersmit, Frank 180-181, 184

Anthropocene 265 Apel, Dora 18-19, 107 Apparatus 36, 58, 92, 94, 135, 186 Arendt, Hannah 11, 73-74, 79-83, 86-87 Argentina 60 Arizona 100, 118, 138, 141 Arora, Gabo 135, 263 Arsenijević, Stefan 226-228 Arslan, Yılmaz 21, 194, 201-202 Artıkişler Kolektifi 157-158 Artiss, Tom 96 Artistic image 58-59, 62 Asia 30, 220, 224, 238 Asylum seeker 12, 52, 54, 118-119, 161, 196, 198, 238, 241 Atkinson, Sarah 133 Attia, Kader 108 Auden, Wystan Hugh 196, 198 Auf der Anderen Seite 46-47, 194 Augé, Marc 13, 20, 179, 188, 190, 193, 195, 206, 214 Augmented reality 264 Australia 14, 227 Austria 115, 238-239, 241, 249, 251 Auto-Da-Fé 40 Auyero, Javier 53 Awaara 30 Aydın-Düzgit, Senem 160 Bachelor room 163, 195, 204-205 Badr, Ahmed 113 Baggage Claims 110, 113 Bahamas 268 Baillie, Bruce 100 Baker, Alison 97 Baker, Ulus 63-64, 69 Baku 158 Bal, Mieke 110 Balat 163 Balıklıgöl 243 Ballesteros, Isolina 15 Balochistan 167 Bangladesh 111, 115 Barbara 178 Bare life 17, 73, 81, 111 Bari 207 Barr, Jean-Marc 224, 228 Barry, Kaya 85 Barthes, Roland 209, 213 Baruah, Parasher 153 Basel 162 Başel, Turap 171 Başer, Tevfik 201 Başka Sınırlar 171

296 

Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art and Media

Baudelaire, Charles 151 Bauman, Zygmunt 156 Bayrakdar, Deniz 20-21, 163, 194, 198, 201, 209, 212, 262 Bayraktar, Nilgün 14-15 Bazin, André 49, 133-134, 136 Beautiful People 224 Beer, Paula 183 Begić, Aida 22, 237, 239-246, 252-254 Beier, Klaus-Peter 131, 133 Belgrade 21, 219, 221, 225-232, Bell, Natalie 109 Ben-Ami, Oma 112 Benchekroun, Hind 160 Benjamin, Walter 151-152, 182 Bennett, James 193 Benning, James 100 Bergala, Alain 31 Berger, John 39-40, 153 Berghahn, Daniela 14-15, 193, 202, 221, Bergman, Ingrid 183 Berji Kristin 153 Berlin 36, 53, 110, 152, 157-159, 178, 186 School 178, 185 Wall 114, 221 Bertellini, Giorgio 14 Bertolucci, Bernardo 15 Biehl, Kristen 160 Biemann, Ursula 102-103, 158 Biodiversity 268 Birdman 136-137 Birkenau 112 Bishara, Amahl 95 Black God, White Devil 200 Black Sea 61, 155, 207, 213 Black Sea Files 158 Bliss 21, 193-194, 196-197, 199-201, 204, 207, 212-213 Bloch, Ernst 173, 269 Bodrum 198 Bogart, Humphrey 183 Bogost, Ian 132, 144 Bolter, Jay David 185-186 Bombay 30 Bonnetta, Joshua 13, 18, 89, 91-92, 97, 99-100, 102-103 Bosch, Hieronymus 75 Bosnia 205-206, 227, 238, 241, 245 Bosphorus 195, 199 Bouckaert, Peter 60, 62 Bourdieu, Pierre 53 Boyce, Geoffrey A. 94 Boym, Svetlana 237, 239, 243-244, 246-247, 252-253 Breaking and Entering 224 Brecht, Bertolt 30, 40-41 Brenner, Neil 117 Britain 115 Broken English 223

Broken Mussels 21, 193-195, 197, 201, 203, 205-206, 212-213 Brown, Wendy 116 Buckmaster, Luke 263 Budapest 225 Bulgaria 115 Burdett, Ricky 155 Burgoyne, Robert 17, 73, 193, 209, 268 Burkina Faso 51 Butler, Judith 76, 79, 83 Byzantine 163 Cabaret Balkan 229 Cairo 153 Calais 45, 115 Calcutta 30-31 California 157, 163 Callshop Istanbul 160 Campbell, Max 81 Canary Islands 43 Cannes 43, 46, 223 Carne y Arena 19, 129-130, 135-142, 165 Carnival of Souls 183, 211 Carter, Jimmy 119 Cartophony 18, 91, 259 Casablanca 183 Caspian Sea 158 Castaing-Taylor, Lucien 95 Castro, Fidel 119 Castro, Joy 34-36 Caucasus 238 Centro di permanenza temporanea 110-111 Ceuterick, Maud Eurydice 46 Ceyhan 158 Ceylan, Nuri Bilge 195, 248 Chakravarty, Sumita 249 Chaldean 208, 211, 245 Chang, Justin 187 Chaplin, Charles 30 Chicago 31, 100 Children of Sarajevo 241, 244, 246 China 27, 29, 32-33, 82, 118, 155 Chion, Michel 98 Chios 52 Chouliaraki, Lille 77-78, 82-83, 86, 130, 132 Chubb, Emma 41, 46 Cihangir 152 Cinmen, Işıl 172 Ćirić, Marija 225 Citizenship 11, 13, 80-81, 111, 113, 199, 267, 269 Cityscape 21, 193-197, 201, 203-206, 211-214, 225, 229-230, 243 Clayton, Jack 44 Clifton, Gloria 262 Climate change 29, 117, 119, 124, 154, 268 Clinton, Bill 116 Cloud Chasers 138 Clouds over Sidra 135 Collaborative research 55

Index

Collective accent 52 Collective memory 157, 198, 253 Conditional agency 83 Congo 51, 113 Connery, Christopher 196-198 Contact zone 30, 36 Contagion 265 Cosmos 195 Cottle, Simon 59 Counternarrative 17, 52, 73 Cox, Geoffrey 97 Creolized cinema 220-221 Crnjanski, Miloš 223 Cronk, Jordan 95-96, 136-137, 139 Crow, Jim 14, 108 Cuaron, Alfonso 15 Cuba 118, 120 Curtiz, Michael 183 Çamburnu 155 Çavuşoğlu, Mevlüt 238 Çelik, İpek A. 15 Çöpçüler Kralı 152 Çukur 172 Daković, Nevena 21, 219, 225-226, 239-240, 246, 264 Dalston 165 Dante 75 Dargis, Manohla 178-179 Das Fräulein 224, 268 Davidson, Peter 100 Davrak, Baki 228 De Castro, Colette 246 De Cuir, Greg 249 De Genova, Nicholas 54-55 De La Peña, Nonny 263 De León, Jason 93-94, 100-101 Delano, Jack 108 Deleuze, Gilles 55, 180 Demir, Nilüfer 60 Demos, T. J. 15, 90, 102-103 Denk ich an Deutschland—Wir haben vergessen zurückzukehren 201 DeParle, Jason 120 Descombes, Vincent 188 Desert Tracks 97 Dharavi 153 Diaspora 11, 68, 226 Diawara, Manthia 41 Dick, Philip K. 179 Dizdar, Jasmin 224 Dnevnik jednog mašinovođe 248 Do You Remember Dolly Bell 227 Doinel, Antoine 205 Doisneau, Robert 230 Don’t Cross the Bridge Before You Get to the River 108 Dorman, Arabella 86

297 Double occupancy 16, 44, 46, 221 Double othering 202 Down by Law 229 Dravić, Milena 227 Drei 183 Drew, Kate 122 Drljević, Alen 245 Drone 27-28, 35, 73-74, 84, 89, 92-94, 101, 103, 123 Dubicki, Darren 19, 130 Durkheim, Émile 195 Dust 223 Dystopia 179, 220 Early Works 224 Ecer, Sedef 163 Egypt 153 Eisenstaedt, Alfred 230 El Mar la Mar 13, 18, 89-91, 95-97, 101-103 El Salvador 119 Elazığ, 171 Elsaesser, Thomas 11-12, 16, 31, 44, 131-133, 221 Eminönü 163, 204 England 45-46, 244 Entekhabi, Shahram 110 Erdem, Reha 195 Erdoğan, Murat M. 140, 198-199 Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip 153, 168 Erksan, Metin 195 Eros 210 Escape 223 Esen, Timuçin 208 Eshun, Kodwo 60 Eskici ve Oğulları 152 Esses, Victoria M. 58 Estonia 115 Ethiopia 51, 111 Euripides 42 Europe Next Door 224 European Union (EU) 14, 52, 67-68, 158, 160, 171, 198, 203, 220, 228-229, 231-232, 238, 246, 250 Europeanization 246 Exodus 41 Fabulous Vera 227 Facial recognition technology 75 Farocki, Harun 184 Fassin, Didier 81, 98 Fatih 20, 162-163, 176 Fehrenbach, Heide 59-63 Ferrari, Luc 89, 97 Fisher, Jaimey 182-183 Flajfel, Muhamed 251 Florida 119 Fojas, Camilla 94 Forced migration 11-12, 14, 17-19, 31, 78, 85-87, 89, 108, 124, 129-130, 138, 157, 219, 267-268 Ford, Madox Ford 37 Fortress Europe 138, 224, 241

298 

Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art and Media

Foucault, Michel 21, 193-194, 196, 200, 202-203, 206, 263 Fox, Jason 75 France 20, 31, 43, 60, 92, 115, 177, 179-180, Frears, Stephen 15 Freud, Sigmund 77, 152, 195, 244, Frontiers 138 Fuocoammare 36-37, 39 Furlan, Mira 208 Garbage Dreams 153 Garelli, Glenda 54-55 Gayet, Julie 228 Gaza 266 Gazapism 172 Gecekondu 152-154 Gemi, Eda 58 Geneva 112 Georgiou, Myria 58-59 Germany 35, 111, 152, 169-170, 178, 182, 194, 196, 201-203, 205-207, 224, 238, 249 Get Out 32 Getino, Octavio 60 Ghatak, Ritwik 30-31 Giannaris, Constantinos 15 Gibraltar 108 Gilbert, Martin 224 Glavonić, Ognjen 248 Gocić, Goran 240 Golden Horn 163, 170 Golubović, Srdan 248 Gomes, Catherine 14, 260 Goodfellow, Melanie 242, 244, 246 Goodman, Steve 98 Goritsas, Sotiris 223 Gorky, Arshile 108 Goulding, Daniel J. 225 Goya, Francisco 33 Göktürk, Deniz 19, 151, 202, 260 Gören, Şerif 152 Grain 265 Grandin, Greg 116-117 Gray, Ros 60 Greece 51-52, 140, 207, 238, 261, 265 Gregory, Sam 60 Grlić, Rajko 248 Grotkopp, Matthias 183 Group of Florida Migrants on Their Way to Cranberry, New Jersey, to Pick Potatoes near Shawboro, North Carolina 108 Grusin, Richard 185-186 Guatemala 119, 122, 268 Gueneli, Berna 202-203 Guinea 51, 66 Güney, Yılmaz 201 Gvozdenović, Nataša 241, 251 Hadersfild 225 Hafez, Mohamed 113-114

Haiti 119-120 Halkalı 153 Hamburg 155 Hamlin, Rebecca 118-119 Handley, Paul 86 Haneke, Michael 15 Harding, Thomas 59-60 Harrington, John 111 Harris, Yolanda 97 Harvey, Herk 182 Haznedaroğlu, Andaç 21, 194 Head-On 202, 223, 229 Heimatfilm 183 Helbig, Thomas 180, 184 Helsinki 46 Hemingway, Ernest 37 Here and There 225 Heterotopia 21, 193-194, 196-197, 201-204, 206, 210, 212-214, 263 Hill, John 193 Hollywood 14, 27, 31-32, 178, 183, 229 Holocaust 107, 178 Homo sacer 81 Honduras 119, 159, 268 Hong Kong 33 Honour killing 194, 200 Horton, Andrew 225 Huemer, Michael 121 Human Flow 13, 17-18, 27-28, 34-35, 45, 73-74, 82-86, 157, 165 Human trafficking 43 trafficker 12, 197, 208-212 Humanitarian image 58-59, 61-62 Hungary 115 Hutchings, Peter 98 Hutton, Peter 100 I Even Met Happy Gypsies 223 Ianniccielo, Celeste 14 Ibragimov, Ahtam 171 Ide, Wendy 90 Iervese, Vittorio 64 Im Juli 203, 220, 223 Imagined community 78-79, 87 Immersion 19, 40, 131, 136-137, 259 immersive 19, 129-131, 133-135, 143-144, 165, 263-264 Imperial looking 75 Iñárritu, Alejandro González 19, 129-130, 135-139, 263 Incirlioğlu, Güven 200 Incoming 17, 73-76, 78-79, 81, 84-86, 165 India 27, 29-31, 61, 115, 153 Indonesia 268 Inner exile 13, 21, 219-220, 222, 229, 232 Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter 123 Integration 54, 161, 206-207, 246, 266 Interactivity 129-134, 137-138, 141, 143-144, 160

299

Index

International Organization for Migration (IOM) 12, 115, 160-161, 196 Inventory 241 Iordanova, Dina 246 Iowa City 42 Iphigenia Point Blank 42 Iran 32, 51, 111, 113, 160, 167, 267 Iraq 113, 115-116, 160, 237, 251 Irom, Bimbisar 134-135, 138, 142-144 Iskander, Mai 153, 191 Israel 117, 266 Istanbul 13, 28, 47, 109, 151-154, 157-158, 160165, 167-168, 170-172, 194-195, 199, 204-207, 209, 211-213, 225, 243, 260 Italy 55, 65, 225 Izmir 28, 165, 171

Khatuntsev, Stanislav 238 Khosravi, Shahram 53 Kino Mosaik 17, 51, 53-54, 56-57, 65, 68 Kirişci, Kemal 140 Kiss by the Hotel de Ville 230 Kluge, Alexander 41 Kobane 108-109 Korac-Sanderson, Maja 238 Kos 52 Kreuzberg 152 Kuhar, Petra 237-238 Kumkapı 205 Kurdi, Aylan 60, 62-64, 89, 198 Kurecic, Petar 237-238 Kusturica, Emir 221 Küçükpazar 163-164

James, Philip 262 Jameson, Fredric 269 Janketić, Marko 228 Japan 31 Jarmusch, Jim 229 Jelača, Dijana 241, 246, 253 Jenkins, Barry 32 Jerichow 178 Jia, Zhangke 27, 32-34 Johnny Guitar 100 Jonas qui aura 25 ans dans l’an 2000 40 Jones, Reece 115, 118, 122 Jordan 135 Josipovič, Damir 238 245 Joyce, James 37 Juares, Nemesio 60 Jude, Radu 248 Jules et Jim 225 Julien, Isaac 41

La Mer Morte 108 La Pirogue 43-44 Labelle, Brandon 98 Lampedusa 36-37, 44 Land in Anguish 200 Landry, Olivia 185-186 Landscape 91, 95-96, 100, 102, 133, 137, 179, 185, 188-189, 193-197, 199-204, 207-208, 211-213, 246, 259, 269 Lang, Brent 136-137 Latin America 138 Laundromat 157 Laurent, Olivier 62 Law of the Journey 86 Lawhon, Marry 156 Lawrence, Jacob 31 Le Havre 45-46 Lebanon 84, 111 Lee, Ju-Sung 58 Lee, Spike 32 Lefebvre, Martin 195 Leković, Iva 22, 237, 265 Leotta, Alfio 133-135, 139 Les Quatre Cents Coups 205-206, 246 Lésbos 13, 17, 41, 51-53, 57, 61, 65-67, 85-86, 157, 261 Levi, Pavle 249-250 Leviathan 95 Lewis, Wyndham 37 Libal, Kathryn 118 Liminality 16, 20, 143 Lindon, Vincent 45 Lioret, Philippe 17, 45 Lockhart, Sharon 100 Logbook Serbistan 224, 241 London 165, 193, 224 Longing 21, 110, 113, 222, 231, 245-246, 251-252, 266 Lorimer, Hayden 97 Los Angeles 154 Loshitzky, Yosefa 14-15 Lost and Found 227

Kabul 167 Kafamda bir Tuhaflık 153 Kafka, Franz 227 Kallat, Reena Saini 123 Kandahar 167 Kapıcılar Kralı 152 Kaplan, E. Ann 244 Kaplanoğlu, Semih 265 Kapoor, Raj 30 Kappelhoff, Hermann 184 Kara, Selmin 18, 89, 95, 267 Karanović, Mirjana 226 Karanović, Srđan 221, 223, 225 Karel, Ernst 95, 101 Kauffman, Linda 185 Kaurismäki, Aki 17, 45-47, Kaya, Ahmet 171 Kaza, Silpa 155 Kemal, Orhan 152 Kenedi Comes Back Home 224 Kenedi is Getting Married 224 Kennedy, Helen 133

300 

Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art and Media

Lost Children Archive 38 Love 224 Love and Other Crimes 227 Lovers 224 Loving Glances 223 Loyd, Jenna M. 122 Lubezki, Emmanuel 135, 137 Lučev, Leon 229 Luiselli, Valeria 38-40 Luko, Alexis 98 Lungulov, Darko 223-225 Macedonia 238 Malloy, Lisa 101 Malraux, André 33 Manchevski, Milcho 223 Mančić, Anita 228 Manila 153 Mardin 205-206 Mariel Boatlift 119 Marković, Goran 265 Marmara 195, 205-206, 213 Marmaris 165 Marseille 178, 186, 189-190, 260 Marshall, Erik 19, 129, 264 Mathwin, Graham 40 Mazierska, Ewa 231 Mbëkë mi: à l’assaut des vagues de l’Atlantique 43 Meden, Jurij 250 Media image 58, 63, 69 Mediterranean 12-14, 29, 37, 41, 84, 90, 139, 141, 158, 196, 214, 262, 267 Meese, Edwin 118 Men Don’t Cry 245 Mennel, Barbara 46 Mercedes mon Amour 203 Mermer, Sami 160 Mexico 12, 14, 16, 18-19, 39, 84, 89-91, 93-94, 108, 115-116, 120, 122, 135, 266 Michaud, Eric 76 Middle East 14, 29, 84, 224, 241, 245, 248-249, 253 Migrant soundtrack 90, 101, 103 Migrantology 155, 159 Migrations 223 Mihailović, Milica 227 Militant research 56-57 Milk, Chris 135, 263 Miller, Steven 120 Millington, Nate 156 Milošević, Slobodan 222, 230 Mimar Sinan 170 Minghella, Anthony 224 Minneapolis 123 Mobility 11, 14-16, 28, 54, 81, 83, 85, 87, 94, 102-103, 110, 120, 124, 134, 154, 159-160, 171, 194, 196-198, 204, 220, 263, Mohr, John 39-40

Moïsi, Dominique 197 Moonlight 32 Moria 52, 65-67, 261-262, Morocco 102, 108, 115 Moscow 153 Mosse, Richard 17-18, 73-79, 81, 84-86, 165 Mother 42 Mrđan, Jelena 226 Mulligan, Jake 92-93, 96, 101 Mulvey, Laura 245 Mumbai 153 Muniz, Vik 157 Mystery Train 229 Mytiline 67 Naficy, Hamid 22, 52, 68, 180, 185-186, 189, 194, 201, 204, 219, 221, 242, 246-247, 253-254 Nagib, Lúcia 200 Napolitano, Janet 118 Nash, Kate 139 Native Son 31 Natives of the New World 13, 17, 51-53, 55-56, 65, 67-69 Nazism 169 Ndione, Abasse 43 Neorealism 33 Nerghes, Adina 58 Never Leave Me 22, 237, 239-240, 242-246, 252 Nevins, Joseph 119-120 New Bedford 95 New Mexico 38-39 New York 33, 38, 41-42 108, 111-112, 115, 123, 157, 225-226, 229 Nicholas, Gregor 223 Nicolson, Marjorie Hope 197 Nielsen, Lasse T. 134 Nienass, Benjamin 93 Nigeria 51, 238 Night on Earth 229 Nikolić, Vladan 223 Nixon, Rob 155 Nkamani, Paul René 35-36 Noah 197-198 Noble, Fiona 89 Non-place 13, 20-21, 177, 179, 182, 187-188, 190, 193-197, 199, 201, 204, 206-208, 210-212, 214, 260, 268 Norway 115, 120 Novković, Oleg 225 Obama, Barack 119 Odyssey 37, 252 Oğuz, Abdullah 21, 194 Okan, Tunç 203 On the Brink of Famine 134 Ong, Jonathan Corpus 130 Oppermann, Serpil 90 Orlando 110 Otac 248

301

Index

Ottoman Empire 245 Outer Hebrides 92 Öge, Sanem 208 Ökten, Zeki 152, 201 Önel, Melisa 13, 21, 193, 195, 207, 209-213, 262 Ördekli 158 Özgen, Erkan 108-109 Paci, Adrian 110-111 Pakistan 30, 111, 167, 238 Palestine 251 Palimpsest 113, 227, 262 Pamuk, Orhan 153 Pannonia 238 Paravel, Véréna 95 Parfit, Derek 263 Paris 13, 20, 92, 151-152, 177, 179, 190, 207, 227, 260 Pashto 161, 165 Paskaljević, Goran 223, 229 Passos, John Dos 37 Pather Panchali 30 Patkanian, Irina 42 Peele, Jordan 32 Peeva, Adela 251 Pentagon 115 Pereda, Nicolás 102 Petersen, Wolfgang 265 Petrović, Aleksandar 223 Petzold, Christian 13, 20, 177-179, 181-188, 190-191 Philadelphia 108 Philippines 32 Phoenix 178 Pirselimoğlu, Tayfun 21, 194, 204, Poland 251 Polizei 152 Polluting Paradise 155 Ponzanesi, Sandra 195, 211 Popović, Hristina 229 Postcolonial 35, 159, 205, 221-222, 240, 249 Pousman, Barry 135 Poverty porn 151, 154 Practical Guide through Belgrade with Singing and Crying 21, 219-221, 226, 228, 230-231 Precarity 12, 14, 76, 112-113 Premeditated Murder 223 Presence 18-19, 74, 81, 95, 98, 112, 130, 133-134, 136, 140-142, 144, 153, 162, 164, 180, 183, 185, 264, 266 Presque Rien 97 Preuss, Jakob 35-36 Primero Sueño 101-102 Pudovkin, Vsevolod 42 Punctum 213 Pus 204 Radović, Miloš 248 Raessens, Joost 139

Ragpicker 151, 153, 158, 173, 260 Ramirez, Diego 75 Rascaroli, Laura 231 Ray, Nicholas 100 Ray, Sajyajit 30 Reagan, Ronald 118 Reason, Debate and a Story 31 Recology 155, 157, 160, 173 Redolfi, Michel, 103, 114 Reflective nostalgia 237, 239, 244, 252-253 Refugee camps 12, 18, 29, 35, 52, 57, 66, 73-74, 84-86, 135, 164, 206, 212, 261, 263 crisis 12, 35, 58-59, 64, 77, 82, 108, 124, 130, 177, 179, 184, 220, 267 Remediation 185 Reno, Joshua 156 Renzi, Alessandra 55 Requiem for Mrs. J 227 Revenant 136-137 Rıza 21, 193-195, 197, 201, 203-207, 212, 214 Rigby, Nigel 262 Rio de Janeiro 157 Rio Grande 91, 93-94, 102 Road Movie 110 Rocha, Glauber 200 Rodogno, Davide 59-63 Rogers, Katie, 120 Rogowski, Franz 178 Romania 165 Rose, Mandy 135, 139 Rosi, Gianfranco 17, 36-37, 44, 90 Rosić, Tatjana 248 Rositzka, Eileen 20, 177, 266 Ross, Andrew 55, 57 Ross, Miriam 133-135, 139 Rossi, Ana Marija 225 Roxborough, Scott 136 Römhild, Regina 159-160 Russia 205, 239 Saab, A. Joan 56 Saç 204 Safe Passage 157 Sahara 13, 78, 115 Sahara Chronicle 102 Salgado, Sabastiao 41 Salopek, Paul 11, 87 Salvatore, Giuseppe Di 100 Samos 52 San Diego 116 San Francisco 157, 163 Bay Area 154 Sandin, Gunnar 203 Sappho Square 67 Sarajevo 226-227, 244 Sargin, Nada 228 Saudi Arabia 115 Scanlan, John 156 Scarcity 142

302 

Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art and Media

Scavengers from Hakkari to Ankara 158 Schaeffer, Pierre 89-97 Schiller, Naomi 95 Schizoanalysis 55 Schmidt, Branko 220 Schwarts, Barry 53 Schygulla, Hanna 46 Seaburners 13, 21, 193, 195-197, 199, 207-214, 262 Seascape 20-21, 89-90, 103, 193-196, 198-201, 203, 205-209, 212-214, 260 Second Generation 224 Seghers, Anna 177, 179-180, 184-185 Sensory ethnography 95 Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) 95-96 Serbia 21, 219-220, 222-224, 227-228, 231-232, 238, 241, 247, 251 Shakespeare, William 36 Sheller, Mimi 154 Shohat, Ella 222 Shree 420 30 Sicily 41 Sidran, Abdulah 227 Sierra Lione’s Refugee All Stars 66 Silverman, Max 262 Simulation 130-131, 135, 137, 139, 142, 144 Singh, Shweta 249 Site-specific 12, 19, 239, 259 Sjöström, Victor 42 Slovakia 251 Slovenia 115, 238 Slum tourism 154 Smee, Sebastian 109 Smuggling Pod 86 Sniadecki, J. P. 13, 18, 92, 95-97, 99-100, 102-103 Snow 241, 244, 246 Sobchack, Vivian 209, 214 Social inclusion 54 Soderbergh, Steven 265 Solanas, Fernando 60 Somalia 160, 238 Someone Else’s America 223 Something in Between 221, 225 Sonic abstraction 92, 97 Sonora Desert 18, 90-91, 93-94, 96-102 Sontag, Susan 154 Sorry for Kung Fu 225 Sou, Gemma 130, 132, 137-138, 142, 144 Soviet Union 118 Soyalp, Nermin 163 Spain 108, 115 Srebrnica 224 Stahl, Roger 75 Štaka, Andrea 224 Stam, Robert 222 Stamberg, Susan 109 Stateless 11, 13, 28, 77, 79-86, 107, 111, 260 Steed, Anthony 141-142 Sternberg, Claudia 14-15 Stewart, Jacqueline Najuma 14, 113

Still Life 32 Stojanović, Gorčin 223 Stolic, Tijana 77-78, 82-83, 86 Stork, Matthias 91 Strahinja 227 Strand, Chick 100 Stranger than Paradise 229 Strasser, Susan 155 Stratman, Deborah 100 Strauss, Delphine 265 Structures of feeling 246 Studium 213 Subarnarekha 30 Sublime historical experience 181, 184 Sudan 111 Sudjic, Deyan 155 Sunal, Kemal 152 Supermodernity 188, 194, 206 Surplus 19-20, 156, 260, 264 Surveillance 28, 73-75, 77, 93-94, 98, 100-101, 115, 119, 186-187 Süleymaniye 163 Sviličić, Ognjen 225 Synchronicity 171-173 Syria 28, 113, 140, 160, 164, 212, 237-238, 242, 245, 247, 251 Şanlıurfa 242-243, 246 Şen, Alper 158 Şen, Bülent 164 Şungar, Ahmet Rıfat 208 Taiwan 33 Takahashi, Tess 100 Taksim Square 172 Talking Heads 190 Tanner, Alain 40 Tazzioli, Martina 54-55 Tbilisi 158 Tehran 167 Tekin, Latife 153 Telepresence 133, 264 Teret 248 Tesich, Steve 224 Thanatos 210 The Apu Trilogy 30 The Artist and His Mother 108 The Children of Sarajevo 246 The Displaced 134 The First Trimester of Pavle Hromiš 241 The Guest 21, 193-195, 197, 203, 206-207, 212-213 The Herd 201 The Innocents 44 The Master and Margaret 223 The Melone Route 220, 223 The Most Beautiful Country in the World 22, 237, 239-241, 246, 250-252 The Other Side of Hope 46-47 The Others 44

303

Index

The pain of others 154 The Rest 157 The Slave Ship “Brookes” 262 The Tempest 36 The Two Sights 92, 100 The Warmth of Other Suns 108, 110 The Wind 42 The World 32 The Wound 21, 193-194, 196-197 Thermographic camera 18, 74-75, 259 Third Cinema 60, 250 Thornton, David 226 Three 223 Thulin, Samuel 91 Time to Love 195 Tito, Josip Broz 225 Tizard, Will 241-242 Todorova, Maria 220 Tokmak, Seyfettin 21, 194 Tomašik, Samuel 251 Tomorrow Morning 225 Topal, Hakan 200 Tosun, Ulaş 20, 153, 161, 163-164, 170-171 Touré, Moussa 43 Trabzon 28, 61, 155 Transcorporeality 97 Transience 11, 14 Transit 13, 20, 177-188, 190 Transitional space 21, 193-194, 197-198, 205, 214 Travellers of hope 161, 164 Treml, Cordula 180 Truffaut, François 205, 246 Trump, Donald 115, 117, 120-122, 138 Tsymbursky, Vadim 238-239 Tukan, Ibrahim 251 Tung, Burcu 163 Tunisia 115 Tupac 172 Turkey 13, 16, 19-20, 22, 27-28, 32, 47, 52, 67, 71, 89, 108, 111, 130, 139-140, 152-153, 158, 160-161, 164, 167-169, 171, 193-194, 196-203, 207, 212-213, 238-240, 242, 260, 265, 267-268 Turkish German cinema 15, 202-203 Türeli, İpek 160 Tykwer, Tom 183 Udier, Sanda Lucija 240 Uganda 111 Ulysses 252 Ulysses’ Gaze 223 Underground 221, 223 United Kingdom 115 United Nations 11, 112, 120, 134, 140, 267 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) 163, 207 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) 119, 140 United States 30, 43, 63, 91, 93, 107-108, 111-112, 115, 117, 119-122, 124, 155, 177, 189, 226

Unpacked: Refugee Baggage 113 Unter Denkmalschutz 224 Uskan, Negahan 17, 51, 53, 261-262 Ustaoğlu, Yeşim 195 Ustav republike Hrvatske 248 Uşak 171 Uzunyılmaz, Mustafa 208 Ümraniye 153 Valentin de las Sierras 100 Valkanisateur 223 Vallejo, Gerardo 60 Vallet, Élisabeth 116 Van 167 Vassilieva, Julia 202 Vertov, Dziga 59 Video activism 17, 57, 60, 64 Vienna 22, 225, 247 Vigilante 262 Virtual reality (VR) 12-13, 16, 19, 129-132 136-138, 141, 143, 144, 165, 259, 263, 266 V-J Day in Times Square 230 Vojvodina 251 Voyage 43, 196, 198, 212 Vuletić, Bojan 21, 219-220, 226-227 Waiting for the Clouds 195 Walker, Janet 244 Walker, Lucy 157 Washington 138 Waste 19-20, 53, 151, 153-158, 160, 162, 164-165, 168-169, 171, 173, 211 Waste 153 Waste Land 157 We Wait 19, 129-130, 135, 139, 140-141, 142-144 Wedel, Michael 183 Weimar 31 Weiwei, Ai 13, 17-18, 27-28, 35, 45, 61-62, 64, 73-74, 77, 82-83, 86, 157, 165 Welcome 45-46 Western Union-Small Boats 41 When Father Was Away on a Business Trip 227 When Home Won’t Let You Stay 123 When Paul Came Over the Sea 35 White supremacist nationalism 115 Whose Is This Song? 251 Winter Sleep 195 Wolfsburg 178 Wonderland 108-109 Woolf, Virginia 37 Woven Chronicle 123 Wölfe 183 Wright, Terence 57, 63 Xenophobia 14, 124, 213 Yalouri, Eleana 59, 64 Yella 178, 182

304 

Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art and Media

Yeniköy 171 Ying, Liang 33 Yugodivas 252, 268 Yugoslavia 224 Zabbaleen 153 Zaborowski, Rafal 58-59

Zeitchik, Steven 136 Žilnik, Želimir 22, 221, 224, 237, 239-241, 246-247, 249-254 Živković, Ivan 225 Zone of exception 111 Zubčević, Erol 243