Topographies of "Borderland Schengen": Documental Images of Undocumented Migration in European Borderlands 9783839442081

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Jan Kühnemund Topographies of “Borderland Schengen”

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Jan Kühnemund (Dr.), born in 1975, completed his PhD at Berlin University of the Arts (UdK). He also holds an MA degree in Political Science, Visual Media, and English. He works at Europa-Universität Flensburg. From 2010 to 2017, he was part of the team coordinating the African-European Erasmus Mundus Course “European Master in Migration and Intercultural Relations” at Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg. Occasionally he also works as a freelance journalist.

Jan Kühnemund

Topographies of “Borderland Schengen” Documental Images of Undocumented Migration in European Borderlands

This work is based on the author’s PhD thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of doctor of philosophy (Dr. phil.) to the College of Architecture, Media and Design at Berlin University of the Arts

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2018 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld Cover layout: Maria Arndt, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Based on screenshot from the film Bab Sebta (2008), directed by Frederico Lobo and Pedro Pinho Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-4208-7 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-4208-1

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2.1 The continuous crises of immigration  22 2.2 The Europeanisation of the crises  26 2.3 Undocumented migration  35 2.4 Terminology  40 2.5 Framing figures, icons, spaces  44 2.6 Transnational cinema  51 2.7 Cinematic documentary 
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3.1 Transnational social spaces  62 3.2 Transnational film studies  67 3.3 Borders and borderlands  69 3.4 Institutional processes of Europeanisation  75 3.5 Institutionalised improvisation in flexible geographies  84 3.6 Exterritorialisation  87 3.7 Cultures of border control and border practice  93 3.8 “Borderland Schengen” as an analytical framework – and a method  96


 

  
  





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4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8

Footage and authenticity  105 The image’s truth  108 Modes of the documentary  110 Authorship and consumption; reality and knowledge  116 Conventions  120 Evidence and rupture  125 Image spaces of migration  127 The films’ mediality  136





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5.1 5.2

Representational orders  146 Cinematic acts of creation  149

5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6

The fictional capacity of documentary film
154 Performance, authenticity and stereotype
159 Performing migration narratives
165 Performing in/visibility
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6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5

Image politics
183 Lampedusa as a placeholder
187 Narratives, figures and subjects
193 Invisible bodies
208 Discursive participation and opacity
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7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5

Establishing the border space
219 Regulated spaces: manifestations of the border
227 Places of imprisonment
231 Contact zones
242 Normality – privacy
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A picturesque, wooden vessel surrounded by the ultramarine glistening sea. The boat is nicely painted in light blue and white – and the orange life jackets some of the estimated 150 passengers are wearing make a picturesque contrast. Most of the people on board are apparently of African descent. Densely jammed together, many of them are looking directly into the camera, empty eyed, it seems. Some elements of the group of people stand out. There is this one guy right in the centre of the image wearing an Argentinian football shirt. There is a tiny rusty exhaust pipe sticking out between the people in the rearmost of the boat – much more than everything else in this image illustrating the futility of the undertaking to cross long distances. There are some people towering above the rest, obviously standing on boxes or even the boat’s railing. And then there is a caption reading “BoatPeople”. Us and them; here it’s us, there it’s them; we are individuals, they come in ‘masses’, ‘swarms’, ‘waves’ – the image makes it pretty clear who is who and who belongs where. Cut. Four young men gathered behind a head-high barbwire fence, all of them casually dressed and carrying sports bags or backpacks. One of them is slightly lifting the fence with a wooden stick in order to make way for a fifth young man to crawl underneath. The camera captures the moment as he succeeds and is about to unbend. He looks straight into the camera; apparently he is about to run right in the spectator’s direction. Most likely, others crossed the border just seconds before; those still on the other side of the fence are certainly planning to quickly follow him. The clandestine – illegal, irregular – incident is taking place in broad daylight – which makes us voyeurs rather than spectators. At the same time, it signals the threats of ‘uncontrollability’ and ‘invasion’. And that of similarity: they look just like us, like normal young men, wearing blue jeans and caps, hoodies and sneakers. Cut.



 

 
  


A three-year-old, drowned, washed up on a beach, lying face down in the surf near a Turkish resort; a “grim-faced” (Smith, 2015) police officer carries him away. The caption explains that the “dark-haired toddler, wearing a bright-red T-shirt and shorts” (ibid.) is called Aylan Kurdi, and was on his – or rather his family’s – way from Syria to the Greek island Kos when their boat capsized. A refugee, a child. A victim. Producing images that the British newspaper The Guardian characterises as “distressing, shocking, tragic” (ibid.). And yet: “Within hours it had gone viral becoming the top trending picture on Twitter under the hash tag #KiyiyaVuranInsanlik (humanity washed ashore)” (ibid.). Despite the horrors it implies – or maybe even exactly because of the horrors it implies – the image of Kurdi’s lifeless body has become an icon. But what exactly does it stand for? Cut. Just three flashlights, shreds of what in the media and the political arena is currently commonly referred to as the European refugee crisis, and presented as “a perpetual emergency” (Andersson, 2016, p.1055). What they have in common is their magnificent self-evidence. They illustrate that current migration movements on a visual level impart specific places and spaces, distinct icons, figures and narratives that are entangled with specific forms of visibility and an overall mediality of the discourse. And there are myriads of other images that illustrate the events of and responses to the crisis: military vessels combing through international waters, fulfilling the European Frontex mission, border patrols lowering the Schengen Area’s turnpikes, military staff and private security companies intending to stop migration from happening by erecting fences that primarily result in diverting migration routes, making them more dangerous; troublesome-looking European politicians at their summits selling yet another concept, directive, response or policy; professing to struggle for humanitarian solutions that eventually turn out to be primarily rhetoric and symbolic – not so much in being a drop in the ocean as in justifying the respective responses by means of a specific image politics that is part of an engineering process linking the images to acts of testimony, authentication and annotation (Holert, 2008). If what we see in those images represents a refugee crisis at all (and I will come back to this question in the following chapter), then it is a perpetuating crisis in slow motion, and primarily a humanitarian crisis – and a border crisis. It is apparent that large numbers of people are on the move; we can trust the respective images enough to state that we can see it; and the movement is even comprehensible and hardly surprising – and, above all, nothing really new. And, yet, most of the photographic and film images deployed to accompany news and reports of people trying to reach Europe, fleeing war or economic hardship in other parts of the world, are impressive if not overwhelming; many other adjectives fit and don’t fit at the same time. The majority of the images illustrate migration and flight as dramas that, however, draw on well-known figures, icons and metaphors: the victim, the threat, the refugee, the ‘waves’, ‘floods’ and ‘swarms’ of people, illegal

  




acts of border-crossing and of smuggling, the fence, the boat, Lampedusa, the sea. Seen it before. They tell the old tale of ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ – they know their ‘Other’ very well. They leave no questions, no doubt; they homogenise and victimise – and, above all, they emotionalise. But what they have on offer is rarely more than pity or fear or a complex combination of both. If, in other words, we are in fact talking about a crisis – and a crisis that is extremely visual – it is unfortunately at the least a crisis of the visual. On the contrary, the set of icons representing migration, illegality and the crisis at the same time must be considered extremely stable. The iconic dead body of a three-year-old in one of the examples above does not fundamentally put this representational regime in question; rather, it fuels the visual and the news industry. Although the three images presented above are taken at very different geographical locations, at the same time they are all set in a specific migration space, a space that is, on a more general level, primarily framed by a Europeanisation process that in return is heavily entangled with migration movements. While the Schengen Area has been established adhering to a paradigmatic interdependence of abolished internal borders and strengthened external borders, contemporary European border zones reach far beyond its actual demarcation lines and thus establish a “heterogeneous and hierarchised space of circulation within graduated zones of sovereignty” (Hess and Tsianos, 2007, p.36). At the same time, this border zone is constantly being redefined, restructured and rehierarchised by the concrete interplay of a highly flexible policy implementation and everyday migration movements. This book seeks to conceptualise this border zone as “Borderland Schengen” – a transnationalised (Faist, Fauser and Reisenauer, 2013) space emerging from the interplay of the visual, the political, the social and the spatial. It imparts the remote, hidden spaces of migration management and detention in Europe and the continent’s capitals as well as the countless places and routes of migration carving through what is perceived as the continent’s fringes and peripheries, the transit countries in Eastern and South-eastern Europe as well as on the African continent. It establishes a border zone in which various transnational networks, migration projects, border-crossing practices, spatial strategies and strategic knowledge, visualisation techniques and technologies, policy-implementation strategies and clandestine economies overlap and establish a specific geography of undocumented1 migration – time and time again temporally and spatially fragmented by means of specific political tools, for example the Dublin Regulations























































1

The definition of ‘undocumented’ applied in this work will be further outlined in the following chapter; generally speaking, it aims to, in the widest possible sense, account for migrants who according to European legislation do not have legal status (who have, in other words, been illegalised), who are threatened with the loss of legal status or who are in some sort of conflict with the European border regime although they only move through its peripheries.



   

 
  


and the concurrent Eurodac database, that apparently primarily contribute to establishing the border zone as a space of permanent – spatial, social, legal – transit,2 or of hypermobility (Fröhlich, 2015). What has been said so far emphasises the paramount necessity to approach the field of undocumented migration in general and “Borderland Schengen” in particular as fields in which the political and the visual cannot be understood independently from each other. In fact, one of the starting points of this work is the observation that there is hardly a currently socio-politically relevant field where the political and the visual merge as significantly and as rigorous as in debates around immigration to Europe. The binarism of inside and outside and the question of on what grounds a person should be permitted to enter the European Union, particularly as an immigrant, have accompanied the process of European integration since its early stages in different forms and manifestations (Triandafyllidou and Gropas, 2014) – even though it can be observed that the most dynamic areas in this regard are the already-mentioned transit zones, the areas that can be unambiguously considered neither inside nor outside. What all manifestations have in common is that they enter a complex interplay of political decision-making, social relations, legal status and visual representations. Images, in other words, play an increasingly important role in shaping political debates and laws as well as our perceptions and understandings of them – at the same time, policies do not exclusively aim at regulating immigration itself but just as well at governing and recoding its visibilities (Karakayalı and Tsianos, 2007), its meanings and interpretations. Considering the refugee crisis, political measures in this regard seem to react much more to the visuality of the crisis than to what usually is considered at the core of political discourses and decision-making, its roots, implications and consequences. The examples used above in this regard also point to the paramount significance of film and visuality concerning the institutionalisation of the rejection of immigration (Rass and Ulz, 2015). The images not only bear witness to self-evident events; at the same time, they already include the form and justification of the legislative or executive responses to it. In return, however, can those images not be understood as representations of a reality that can be located outside the image itself – but rather as specific re-articulations























































2

‘State of permanent transit’ is in this work understood as a life situation in which mobility and immobility unpredictably take turns, in which the legal status can change in the blink of an eye under the condition of potential surveillance and in which social networks constantly have to be re-established – either due to the legal and political mechanisms structuring the migration spaces or connected to strategic decisions by the person concerned.

  




of ‘migration’ as societal constructions that form constitutive elements of the European migration regime (Kuster, 2007).3 The images adhere to a specific economy: while mediated images play an important role in the establishment of a crisis in the first place, the gaps between political rhetoric and the visuality of a political issue fill more or less automatically. What has happened since mid 2015, when the refugee crisis was proclaimed in an interplay between the political sphere and media, cannot per se be considered an unsolvable crisis – but has been turned into and still is being perpetuated as a crisis by means of a complex political-visual process making particular elements and aspects visible and others invisible, by dramatising certain facts and events and by suggesting particular interpretations that in many cases are closely linked to national agenda setting and national identities – and in consequence embedded in an accelerated nationalistic discourse that complements the mediated events by an even more insistent claim for integration as a disciplining dispositive (Mecheril, 2011). The visuality of the crisis, in other words, regulates not only what we see but also what is and what can be – and it plays a crucial role in justifying political and legal measures taken in order to respond to the crisis, both on a European and a national level. Looking at migration processes in general and the refugee crisis in particular, it is hence crucial to scrutinise the production of images as visual-political processes – the visual in this regard is a constitutive element of the political, and vice versa. At the same time, proposed solutions to what has now been visual-politically constructed as a constant crisis or a continuous state of exception that primarily needs to be governed hardly imply any kind of change in political agenda setting but merely stay at the rhetorical and symbolic level (Andersson, 2014). The rhetoric does often remain in appalling contrast to political measures and the actual implementation of border protection. In the fall of 2015, for example, the European Council and the European governments’ Ministers for Home Affairs negotiated the distribution of refugees among the member states – coined ‘burden sharing’ (Traynor, 2015b) – and some states, including Germany, applied a strong humanitarian rhetoric. Parallel to those negotiations, the European Union in October 2015 launched the second phase of its Eunavfor Med mission, a military border operation in the Mediterranean Sea reaching deep into international waters, conducting “boarding, search, seizure and diversion, on the high seas, of vessels suspected of being used for human smuggling or trafficking” (EUNAVFOR, 2015).























































3

See also Brigitta Kuster’s forthcoming volume “Die Grenze filmen” (“Filming the border”), in which she investigates how and to what end filming practices contribute to the reproduction of migration and border regimes. Starting from the assumption that audiovisual environments at the same time inform and form migration movements, she analyses different films that reflect on primarily irregular passages to Europe (Kuster, 2018).



   

 
  


Interestingly enough, while Germany’s Chancellor Merkel at that time was perceived as one of the most refugee-friendly politicians in Europe, the German Bundeswehr sent the highest number of vessels in order to facilitate border protection by military means (ibid.). Although contradictory at first glance, read against the visual-political background of the two developments, both eventually make sense. The first one is connected to the sudden and certainly spectacular visibility of flight and refuge in Europe and is following rather moral or ethical arguments instead of political insights or recognition. The second one, however, builds upon the ongoing invisibility of migration at the European fringes and a clear lack of interest by media to cover the issue at all. This is also thanks to a clear allocation of roles in, for example, the Mediterranean area or the Aegean Sea – while Europe states its desire to protect those refugees who made it to their territory and whose asylum claims are considered eligible, it denies responsibility for those who are caught in the border zones; moreover, its rhetoric and political measures regarding the smugglers and so-called traffickers4 operating in the European border zones is ruthless and its responses are highly militarised – the whole political approach at the same time relies on a specific governance of visibility and invisibility. The central figure of undocumented migration discourses is the ‘illegal immigrant’ – visual processes contribute considerably to the construction of this figure and, in general, to the construction of groups as insiders or outsiders and to the definitions of memberships; at the same time, they play an important part in the production of the very categories applied to describe such groups. Illegalisation, in other words, is not merely a political or juridical process or discourse; it is, to a remarkable extent, a visual process. While “those immigrants are made illegal by political and juridical strategies” (Bischoff, Falk and Kafehsy, 2010, p.7), the production of the categories and the perception of a state of exception is entangled with visual processes, with images and with the knowledge they imply and transport. As Mitchell puts it, “law and migration engage the realm of images as the location of both the sensuous and the fantasmatic: concrete, realistic representation of actuality, on the one hand, and idealized, or demonized fantasies of migrants as heroic pioneers or invading hordes, on the other” (2010, p.13). Reichert (2011) emphasises the key role that media images play not only in reiterating the figures but also in the very construction and dissemination of border spaces and facilities – like the border fences of the Spanish exclaves in Morocco,























































4

The terms ‘smuggler’ and ‘trafficker’ are often used interchangeably in media and EU statements; while smuggling usually takes place upon the consent of the smuggled person and does not involve any kind of exploitation, victims of human trafficking are usually either moved from one place to another against their will or exploited during or after the journey. Smugglers, not traffickers, are consequently the primary targets of the EU mission (Human Rights Watch, 2015).

   




Ceuta and Melilla – as icons for Fortress Europe. In order to provide a certain border (and border policy) with legitimacy and authority, it has to be made plausible and politically justified in the context of its media representation. Visuality hence signifies “a change in consciousness, which accords visual practices a […] substantial role in thought processes and in the acquisition of ‘knowledge’” (Bischoff, Falk and Kafehsy, 2010, p.7) The representations and visualisations of processes of illegalisation and of illegality, as well as reversed processes of recognition, can hence “only be properly analyzed in relation to the actual concrete form” (ibid.). Following this argument, this book seeks to deploy documentary film images in order to analyse “the actual visual images, figures, symbols, narratives, metaphors – the material forms – in which symbolic meaning is circulated” (ibid.), and in which ‘the illegal’ as a subject is at stake. Images are, however, not immediately connected to the arrival or the emergence of the migrant; they precede him/her, even more so in the case of undocumented migration that per se lacks a certain visibility – “before the immigrant arrives, his or her image comes first, in the form of stereotypes [of e.g. ethnicity, gender, race], search templates, tables of classification, and patterns of recognition” (Mitchell, 2010, p.13). But not only are images quicker than the immigrants; they are in most cases much more successful in crossing geographical distances and borders. Hence, and this is again quite obvious from the examples referred to above, “illegalized immigration is a highly iconic topic” (Bischoff, Falk and Kafehsy, 2010, p.7) that is, due to its very character, almost exclusively visible through media. Films carry the potential to expose the relationship between images of the ‘Self’ and the ‘Other’ that facilitate the construction of a national (or supranational) entity on the one hand and the role such images play with regard to immigration policies and the production of knowledge for governmental practices (Friedrichs, 2010) on the other. As Reichert (2011) stresses, not only must the figures of border-crossing migrants be understood as being entangled with gendered processes of bordering; the border itself is a gender-sensitive issue that is ordered by means of power, sovereignty and interests. In this regard, the ‘illegal immigrant’ may, however, be considered a symbolic resource that can be strategically deployed and rewritten if necessary; by means of alternative narratives and/or a hybrid positioning, films potentially thwart hegemonic orders (Rass and Ulz, 2015). The borderland in this regard may be understood as both a conflict zone and a contact zone (Pratt, 2011). It is consequently another of this work’s central presumptions that not only is it necessary to scrutinise and re-formulate the narratives embedded in the images presented in the beginning, but that there are other images too, other narratives and figures – sometimes even the same narrative wrapped in other images, the same images wrapping alternative narratives. Icons that refuse to be consumed easily, images that are interested in and have the potential to account for motivations, aspirations and subject positions. This work seeks to identify such images in contemporary documentary films about undocumented migration; moreover,



   

 
  


even against the background of the omnipresent crisis, documentary film is considered one of the very few places where the increasingly complex and relevant issues of visibility and recognition of undocumented migrants at the European Union’s fringes are being raised at all. Looking at the examples mentioned above does in this regard also imply questions concerning the angle of observation and the image’s potential to provide a space for the establishment and recognition of a subject that is not reduced to being the ‘Other’. In the specific context of the closely controlled European border zones, this also poses questions regarding the overall structure of visibility. By referring to documentary films dedicated to the phenomenon of undocumented migration, this work grounds in an apparent contradiction. If visibility is, however, understood as a category of knowledge and the document in question as a visual technology, the contradiction turns into an obvious interdependence. Documentary film in this regard cannot be primarily concerned with trying its best to be the most adequate reproduction of reality and truth but must reflect its mediality and its being entangled with mechanisms of knowledge production and image politics – the migration apparatus, in other words. The production of the documentary image in this regard is, above all, a practice – and it may, in an analogy to Benz and Schwenken’s (2005) statement about migration practices, be considered a stubborn practice itself. To further delineate the book’s aspirations, I would like to roughly outline the choice of films for this work. The selection is based on a number of formal criteria but is mainly characterised by understanding migration as a non-linear social process and by approaching documentary filmmaking in a transnational and cinematic way5 – implying artistic autonomy and transparent authorship on the one hand and a self-conception and mission located beyond the creation of images that have a news value on the other. In order to account for recent developments and discourses, the production period has been limited to the years 2005 to 2016. The selected films resemble feature films in terms of their length (i.e. 60 minutes minimum) and audience rather than taking the form of short clips for news coverage. Eight films are central to this work; they are all set in European borderlands. BAB SEBTA (CEUTA’S DOOR, 2008), COME UN UOMO SULLA TERRA (LIKE A MAN ON EARTH, 2009) and A SUD DI LAMPEDUSA (SOUTH OF LAMPEDUSA, 2006) follow migrants on their cross-border routes and trajectories. While the first approaches European demarcation lines from a southern perspective, and in fact remains on the African continent throughout, primarily in Morocco and Mauritania, the second one, co-directed by an Ethiopian and an Italian filmmaker, revisits the transnational narratives of a handful of Ethiopian and Eritrean refugees who lived through long and unpredictable transit periods in the Libyan Desert to eventually arrive in























































5

The films’ approaches and characteristics of transnational and cinematic documentary film will be further detailed in the following chapter.

   




Italy; the third one functions as a kind of prequel to the latter as it follows actual migration routes between Nigeria and the Mediterranean. LA FORTERESSE (THE FORTRESS, 2009) and SUR LE RIVAGE DU MONDE (STANDING ON THE EDGE ON THE WORLD, 2012) are set at two specific places that are remote to actual European demarcation lines but at the same time are closely connected to the European migration regime, spanning “Borderland Schengen” as far as Mali on the one hand and Switzerland on the other. LA FORTERESSE observes the microcosm of a reception centre in a Swiss village while SUR LE RIVAGE DU MONDE captures the hopes, dreams and fears of a group of migrants who, in their attempt to make it to Europe, are being stranded in a run-down house called ‘The Ghetto’ in Bamako. Three further films dare to apply a thematically wider perspective. The Austrian-produced LITTLE ALIEN (2009) is particularly interested in the narratives of unaccompanied minor refugees; the filmmaker wanders European borderlands from the eastern borders between Slovakia and Ukraine via Greece and Austria to Morocco’s harbour city Tangier, passing various institutionalised and informal spaces and places of minors’ migrations. KURZ DAVOR IST ES PASSIERT (IT HAPPENED SHORTLY BEFORE, 2007) enquires into the issue of the invisibility of women who have been made victims of trafficking in Austria by means of hyperreal re-enactments of the women’s narratives. And, finally, HAVARIE (SHIPWRECKED, 2016) is the result of the – failed and yet completed – quest for images adequately illustrating migration movements and relations across the Mediterranean; by means of a drastically decelerated found footage clip of a refugee rubber boat, it spans a translocal narrative web across the sea. All films implicitly or explicitly address spaces and iconologies of illegal migration and document frictions between European migration policies, iconologies of migration and the dialectics of migrants’ invisibility and visibility. In common is their ability to be read as filmmakers’ attempts at discursive participation as an aesthetic political practice, and to establish their protagonists as subjects in the first place. The majority of the films have been produced by filmmakers with a personal migration narrative or experience. At the same time, the contradiction of the terms documented/undocumented is an implicit though central element in all films. Documenting and visualising human beings that, per definition, are invisible – and, in many cases, have to remain invisible as the only form of protection available – are challenges the films are meeting in quite different ways. The films show a considerable number of individuals on the move through European border zones, on “dangerous and fragmented” (Schapendonk, 2012, p.27) journeys. They aim at establishing a relationship with their protagonists that allows for perceiving them as subjects, recognising them as agents and appropriators of their own narrative. In doing so, the films often also deal with their protagonists’ recognisability (Butler, 2009), that is the “general condition where recognition can take place” (Schippers, 2016, p.26), not least by putting the iconologies underlying current migration discourses under scrutiny. Instead of applying representative modes, the films’ images and motives are characterised by visual



   

 
  


performative approaches – focusing their own mediality as well as deploying the fictional capacities of documentary film (Rancière, 2004) in a way that allows new perspectives on the phenomenon and its protagonists; in this regard, they are interested not so much in their protagonists’ mere visibility as in their recognition and opacity (Glissant, 1997). On a visual and a narrative level, they aim at irritating the self-evident in order to reveal the intolerable (Foucault, 1977a) – their protagonists’ experiences and narratives provoke affective images – overall pursuing a cinematic experience that imparts the potential non-actualisability (Deleuze, 1997a) of experience and thus endures in a space of the non-knowable and provokes thought. And although most of the protagonists are in a protracted state of transit, they inhabit those border zones none the less and constitute a social space including specific routes, places, artefacts, social practices, geographies and symbols of migration. The documentary filmmakers concerned in this work investigate those border zones of migration also as spaces of autonomy and appropriation; they wander through both strictly regulated spaces under close surveillance and the clandestine spots that allow people to have a break – their temporary homes so to speak – not least following a participative approach to filmmaking practices. Any writing concerned with undocumented migration is certainly a highly normative undertaking. I would like to underline that I am not pretending to be able to present my argument from a neutral point of view. The ethic-normative fundament of this work can be found in the claim for a set of non-negotiable human rights that goes beyond what international migration law and refugee conventions are currently able to warrant. Assuming the fundamental human right to move on the one hand and a moral obligation of the North to – instead of threatening migrants’ lives by means of dramatically militarised border protection missions – provide secure flight corridors, this ethic-normative fundament hence is one that understands human rights as authorising powers much more than disciplining ones. Against this background, the book seeks to critically investigate the interface between migration discourses and image discourses; more specifically, it takes into account how the dialectical relationship of undocumented migrants’ mobility and immobility, their visibility and invisibility, is contoured on a visual level – how the movement of people is translated into film images and how those images are entangled with specific (and conventionalised) iconologies, motives and figures, with image politics and migration policies, but also with their own mediality. As its title suggests, this book concentrates less on the refugee crisis referred to above. However, it became an extremely strong subtext over time. When preparations for this work started in 2013, there was something that, looking back today, might be referred to as a subtle crisis, a more or less perennial but comparably gently dramatised flow of (images of) refugees, asylum seekers, migrants heading towards Europe. Since mid 2015, at least, the crisis has become acute – but so far it does not in the least seem to have had a positive effect on the people subsumed under the term undocumented migrants in this work. What is currently considered

   




an acute crisis is, however, interesting as it has the function of a magnifying glass in many regards – and none of the observations made with regard to the crisis is all new. This book is consequently also about the fact that undocumented migration – which we currently see (or, rather, which is mediated to happen before our very eyes) in the form of a crisis – has a history in many regards. On a political level, it grounds in a Europeanisation process that contrasts internal freedom of movement with tight external borders and that settled on a particular culture of border control (Zaiotti, 2011) and governmentality; on a social level, it grounds in a perception of immigration as a threat to European societies and in integration discourses that emphasise discipline, integration and assimilation, and that still misinterpret migrants as representing the ‘Other’; on a spatial level, it grounds in a dialectical relationship of mobility and immobility and adheres to the logic of control and surveillance; and on a visual level, it grounds in specific iconologies, stereotypes and figures of migrants and migration that in return are a crucial element of image politics justifying policy measures, societal exclusion and spatial structures at the same time. In order to be able to account for the political, social, spatial and visual processes and their entanglements, this book eventually seeks to outline the shape of “Borderland Schengen” by means of enquiring into its topographies – in a way that Katz understands topography – as a method; i.e. by means of “a detailed examination of some part of the material world, defined at any scale from the body to the global, in order to understand its salient features and their mutual and broader relationships” (2001, p.1228). The documentary films in this regard are understood as reading a sense of sedimented process off the different layers of the border zone; translating this into a topography “situates places in their broader context and in relation to other areas or geographic scales, offering a means of understanding structure and process” (ibid.). While in contrast to Katz’s suggestion, the main point of reference in this work is the visual, not geographical space, the enquiry at the different levels envisages identifying the contour lines along which spatial, social, political and visual processes connect and interact; the emerging topographies, on the one hand, theorise the connectedness of processes and places in a multifaceted way – but, on the other hand, they also connect distant places and processes in a way that “enables the inference of connection in uncharted places in between” (ibid.); their connection is not homogenising but analytical – creating “a geographical imagination for a more associative politics” (Katz, 2011, p.58). The work, however, seeks to transgress a purely descriptive level in order to also account for the potentials provided by reading the documentary films as aiming to establish a counter-topography that connects “disparate places and social formations by virtue of their analytic relationship to a particular material social practice, social relation, and/or cultural form” (ibid.). This topography is characterised by different dimensions that also structure this work. Part 1 of the book will be concerned with outlining the theoretical and



   

 
  


methodological features of “Borderland Schengen”. While in the following chapter I will shed light on the broader coordinates and positioning of this work – the refugee crisis, undocumented migration processes, transnational cinematic documentary film – the third chapter is dedicated to explicating the theoretical and methodological framework by means of sketching my understanding of “Borderland Schengen” against a background of transnational theories. Part 2 of this book will then explicate the visuality of the borderland by means of an in-depth reading of the documentary films introduced above. The fourth chapter investigates how and to what end the documentary films measure the topography by critically reflecting their own mediality, how they conceive and capture their images and, in consequence, their relationship with the migration-control apparatus. While the fifth chapter then primarily enquires into the representational and performative qualities of the films’ images and pays attention to their strategies to fictionalise and narrativise, the subsequent chapter deals with the specific strategies applied to destabilise well-known figures and icons of illegal migration in order to establish a space in which new (discursive, recognisable) subjects emerge that appropriate their projects and narratives. The seventh chapter accounts for the filmmakers’ strategies to establish the geographical spaces of migration in general and how they approach the border in particular, the manifold places and routes of migration that include productive contact zones as well as places of absolute control. The concluding chapter then primarily addresses the question as to what end the topography outlined can also be read as a counter-topography.



 
  










  


This chapter aims at embedding the main fields touched upon in this work – undocumented migration and documentary film – in current developments and to specify the cornerstones of what this work is interested in. First of all, it is going to take a closer look at what is currently termed the refugee crisis. As said above, this work’s focus is not the crisis but a more general appraisal of the European topographies of undocumented migration, including the specific figures and narratives, spaces and places, routines and social practices, visibilities and subjects they impart. None of the developments and phenomena of this crisis is completely new – neither its medial translation into a spectacle, nor the migration policies that are fundamentally entangled with the visual appearance of migration movements and that operate specific image politics in order to justify an exclusive and repelling crisis management; neither the figures of the ‘illegal migrant’ or the ‘smuggler/trafficker’ deployed in this context nor the rhetoric of criminality and delinquency and metaphors of flooding and swarming. What is currently, however, considered an acute crisis has in this regard the function of a magnifying glass. So although the films used in this work are not immediately concerned with the acute crisis, and although this work by no means aims at making the crisis its central focus or at analysing primarily the imagery and image politics deployed in order to establish it as an acute crisis, every now and then it will be referred to as a condensed expression and result of a process that actually started more than 20 years ago. At the same time, and at specific points, it is used in order to complement the images produced by the documentary films used in this work. Secondly, this chapter will outline the scope and discourses around undocumented migration. And while, on the one hand, the scope of a phenomenon that at least partly necessarily takes place in hiding poses a methodological problem, the dominant terminologies and discursive figures are easier to grasp – if the migrant is the ‘Other’, the undocumented migrant might be considered even more determined by being attributed a fundamental difference. In addition, how far undocumented migration can be considered the contemporarily most relevant form of migration to the European Union – not least due to the lack of legal immigration pathways – will be discussed. At the same time, however, the definition of ‘un-



 

 
  


documented’ applied in this work will be presented as one that, in the widest possible sense, aims at paying attention to movements through European borderlands that by formal criteria (i.e. the clandestine crossing of a European demarcation line) would not be accounted for. Finally, by means of emphasising specific joint characteristics of the films used in this work, a justification will be provided for why they are subsumed under the label of transnational cinematic documentary films.




 
 



 
With a few exceptions,1 immigration issues dealt with in the European Union and its individual member states currently always come to the fore in the form of a crisis; already the emergence of a crisis, however, coincides with the visual representation of a certain group of immigrants. Putting it simply: without the necessary images, there cannot be a crisis; the emergence of a crisis is the result of particular visual-political processes. Until a decade ago, the various immigration crises had a predominantly national character. The 1993 German ‘asylum compromise’ can be considered a perfect example illustrating the aforementioned interplay of the visual and the political. Following xenophobic arson attacks on refugee homes, particularly, but not exclusively, in what only five years before still was the German Democratic Republic, the Conservative parties, the Liberal Democrats and the Social Democrats agreed on an amendment to the Constitutional Law’s Article 16 – the right to asylum. A central element of public perception, media representation and the political























































1

One of the few exceptions in the German context is certainly the debate about immigration and dual citizenship following the formation of a Social Democrats/Green Party government in Germany in 1998. Following a programmatic impetus, political decisions made with regard to immigration accounted for the fact, and frankly assumed, that Germany is in fact an immigration country – which stood in clear contrast to the traditional conservative position of an ethnic nationhood that had informed policy making for the two decades leading up to 1998. During a short period between 2000 and 2002, a seismic shift in the political agenda could be detected; after 2002, however, the debate again followed rather negative and critical impulses (Bauder, 2011), including a perceived lack of migrant integration and – certainly also influenced by public perception of the 9/11 attacks – a revitalised and still powerful linking of immigration, crime and security.



  




debate were the clearly negatively connoted figures of the ‘Asylant’, ‘Scheinasylant’ or ‘Wirtschaftsflüchtling’.2 While this debate was underfed by a specifically negative visual representation of asylum seekers and illustrated a general scepticism towards all forms of immigration, it also marked a paradigmatic shift: making what is perceived as public opinion the fundament of a political consensus, the constitutional right to asylum was restricted considerably. The political rhetoric around the amendment, however, referred less to political necessities or justification, and almost exclusively reflected the scapegoating of asylum seekers for all sorts of societal issues and problems (crime, unemployment and others); reversing the burden of proof, the political parties justified it by stating that they primarily “intended to prevent abuse of the right to asylum” (BAMF, 2011). In other words, the argument was that the fewer rights one has, the fewer rights one can abuse. Suggesting that the abuse of a right must be considered the norm, this rhetoric justified the perception of an asylum system in a critical state – in other words, asylum seekers were from now on obliged to prove their eligibility to claim their right in the first place. The debate took place on a national level and along nationalistic concerns – but it also reflected then current issues at the European level; while the Maastricht Treaty came into force in 1993, drafting an intensified process of Europeanisation and the Schengen Agreement, already in 1990 the EEC states had agreed on the first Dublin Convention. Under the influence of a growing number of refugees from Eastern Europe, it aimed at harmonising asylum procedures at least in so far as that people from what had been defined as ‘safe countries of origin’ were no longer considered entitled to claim asylum at all (Boswell and Geddes, 2011). Following the amendment of the German Constitutional Law, the corresponding Asylum Procedure Act was also amended in order to account for the Dublin Convention, including regulations on ‘Safe third countries’, ‘Safe countries of origin’ and ‘Airport procedures’ (BAMF, 2011). Similar political developments could be observed around that time in many European countries, for example the restriction of the so far practised jus soli in the early 1990s and the rough political rhetoric and zero-tolerance policy around the Sans-Papier movement in France over the 1990s and the early 2000s (Kahlbaum-Avcı, Kessler and Lüdemann, 2011). The debates in 2015/16 strikingly resemble those in the early 1990s. With a considerable increase in the number of asylum claims in the first half of 20153 being (politically) interpreted as signifying growing abuse of the constitutional right to asylum, the German government changed the asylum legislation in order to minimise the number of people eligible (Caspari and Middelhoff, 2015). Most























































2

In the 1990s, commonly used derogatory German terms for asylum seeker, bogus asylum seeker and economic refugees.

3

In 2014, around 202,000 people claimed asylum; and in 2015, about 475,000 claims were filed (BAMF, 2016).



   

 
  


importantly, in September 2015, the German parliament decided to add Albania, Kosovo and Montenegro to the list of ‘safe countries of origin’, radically worsening the conditions for those nationals’ asylum claims. In addition, it was agreed that social benefits can be given to asylum seekers in the form of vouchers instead of cash payment – a measure aimed at discouraging people from seeking asylum, and at the same time a highly symbolic and stigmatising measure for also increasing social control4 (ibid.). In addition, in May 2016, it was suggested to additionally rate the Maghreb states of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia as ‘safe countries of origin’ (Spiegel online, 2016). The German examples mentioned above are significant because they clearly illustrate two interconnected and paradigmatic aspects of how asylum seekers and refugees are being perceived and how their causes are being negotiated in most European Union member states. Firstly, the political debate and the creation of a crisis is characterised by an extremely flexible interplay between the legislator and what is perceived as public opinion – the necessity to become active as a legislator (be it on the national level, the European level, or both) has at the same time not been derived from an identified need of the persons at the centre of a specific law but from an implied abuse of this law, which in return has only been deduced from the growing number of people claiming their right to asylum – and, after all, their increased medial visibility. Media representations of asylum seekers in this regard form the conjunction between the political and public opinion (e.g. Pagenstecher, 2008; Friedrichs, 2010). Visibility – and this issue will be discussed in more detail later – can in this regard not per se be considered directly connected to recognition. Moreover, the example illustrates how crucial a particular iconology of asylum and asylum seekers is with regard to the justification of legal, political or executive measures. Closely linked to the current refugee crisis, and one of the most visible metaphors or icons since the early 1990s, is that of a cramped boat. While, in the past, different European right-wing extremist parties (such as Die Republikaner in Germany and Lega Nord in Italy) used the image of a boat overloaded with people, accompanied by claims such as ‘The boat is full’, in order to underpin their idea of ethnic nationhood (Falk, 2010), the terminology and metaphor were also widely referred to by politicians and in media (Pagenstecher, 2008). In this rhetoric, it is our boat that is full; it signifies our inability to accommodate more people than we already do – an image that also underlies many of the current debates around admission quotas and what is widely referred to as burden sharing. We are in the boat and it is our boat. At the same time, boats are among the most important and most visible objects of the current refugee crisis. While the boat as a placeholder for national identity























































4

The vouchers can only be used for a limited range of products.



  




and ethnic nationhood emerged during the Second World War,5 the boat as a means of transport for refugees, and hence a symbol for a completely different kind of ‘imagined community’ threatening European shores, became a strong visual element only in the early 1990s. The boat was, for example, an important element in an event that may be assumed to have contributed strongly to the extremely negative perception of refugees in Europe at that time. In 1991, international newspapers took up the arrival of refugee-carrying Albanian vessels at Italian harbours, for example in Bari; one of the most prominent images was that of the Vlora, literally overloaded with what was then estimated to be 10–20,000 people fleeing from collapsing communist Albania. They were allowed to disembark but not to leave the peer – and all refugees were deported back to Albania within only a couple of weeks (Pagenstecher, 2008). Shortly after, the label Benetton used the Associated Press photograph for a strongly criticised advert, which put the image even more into public attention. In most contexts, the image was presented as depicting the vessel’s arrival at Bari – what it actually showed, however, was the vessel leaving the Albanian harbour Durrës (ibid.). This slight but crucial re-contextualisation – the wash of the waves of refugees at European shores certainly adds a lot more crisis to an anyway dramatic event – had a massive impact on the impressive iconography of the Vlora; it certainly enforced the anchorage of the boat as a symbol for refuge and migration in the public’s perception (ibid.).6 The particular visualisation and contextualisation of the event strongly contributed to the creation of “mental and material images” (Falk, 2010, p.84) of a perceived community of refugees by, at the same time, constituting and attesting almost every general assumption attributed to refugees: they are too many; they are ready to suffer and take great risks to reach our shores. Today, “boat people clambering ashore at Europe’s borders are a frequent cliché in the European media [as] an icon of threatened borders” (ibid., p.85), depending on the context evoking pity or fear – or a complex combination of both. The ambivalence of feelings of pity and fear is also an important element in the perception of an event as being critical. The events around the Vlora led to restrictions on the right to asylum in many European countries, which again illustrates how political decision-making and the visual representation of its matter are entangled. It can hardly even be identified























































5

Interestingly enough, this image had already entered the political domain some 70 years ago when Swiss politicians during World War II deployed it in order to justify the restrictive refugee admission policy (Häsler and Dürrenmatt, 1989).

6

Pagenstecher also notes the context in which the image has been presented. Accompanied by the claim “Albanian Refugees in Italy: Asylum in Bremerhaven?”, the German weekly Der Spiegel implied the concrete danger that those 20,000 refugees could have just as well landed at a German harbour (Pagenstecher, 2008).



   

 
  


what in fact sparked a particular debate – the negative perception and representation of asylum seekers and the political measures implemented to act upon a certain matter must be considered mutually dependent. The widely circulated images of boats as placeholders or icons for refuge, asylum and migration “constitute a visual place of memory” (ibid., p.86) that different discourses revert to strategically.



 
   

 
 
Since the mid 2000s, the crises of immigration have shifted to take place at a European level. That is not to suggest that nationalistic reservations and responses have become less relevant than before – on the contrary. While nationalistic rhetoric still dominates the responses on a policy level, the causes for the ongoing crisis are sought in Europeanisation processes and in the failure of the Schengen system, and even more so in particular member states’ disobedience to Schengen principles and their disregard of what in political rhetoric is often termed ‘joint responsibilities’. Whereas conservative politicians and journalists locate failure in Europe’s inability to guarantee complete control over access to the Union, leftwing parties assume the failure of European border policies in general and the Dublin System in particular. Even more so than prior to the establishment of the Schengen Area, crises are being negotiated in an interplay of national identities and shared responsibilities. With the Schengen Area having taken its current form in the mid 2000s, all those national immigration crises seem to have mingled into one ongoing megacrisis. At the same time, the term immigration crisis or refugee crisis seems more inappropriate than ever, as what we have seen for more than a decade now must more precisely be described as a policy crisis or border crisis. On the one hand, European immigration policies are predominantly border policies – which is documented not least by the fact that the field of immigration has been allocated to the European Union’s Department of Home Affairs (instead of, e.g., considering it a task of the Department of Employment and Social Affairs or Department of Justice). On the other hand, the crises we see are strongly connected to the European Union’s members relocating their outer borders – the very borders that now must be considered the scene of the ongoing refugee crisis. In order to characterise European strategies aiming at avoiding immigration, some 20 years ago the term ‘Fortress Europe’ was coined. For a couple of years, it was commonly used, especially in academic discourses, but even in recent years it has still been popular, especially in left-wing political activism and academia aimed at finding a common denominator for the contradictions inherent in the European integration process (Etzold, 2009; Jakob and Reichstein, 2012; Milborn, 2009; Roos, 2013). The metaphor implies a distinct consistency of European migration policies – either as a supranational structure or under the hegemony of



  




certain nation states – and the control mechanisms it is implementing. At the same time, it assumes that restrictive border-control measures and immigration policies do prevent immigration, whereas they in fact define the status of border-crossing migrants, deprive them of their rights and hierarchise them according to their status. In addition, since the mid 1990s, the principle of migration management – aimed at the most efficient selection of migrants serving the needs of the European labour market for both skilled and unskilled workers – prevailed over complete border closure (Heck, 2008). Various scholars have accounted for the fact that the metaphor is misleading as European border-control mechanisms follow much more complex strategies. Currently, however, the term is experiencing a revival – on the one hand, due to the fact that the increasing rhetorical, political and visual militarisation of European borders make it appear to be the least inadequate metaphor; on the other hand, it is used in order to account for the strong contrast between the attention to European external and internal borders and to underline that movements of undocumented migrants within the Schengen Area may be considered much more mobile than before the fall of internal borders (Schapendonk, 2015). The metaphor of the fortress “does not only disname the transnational practices of migration, it at the same time fails to match the paradox ways and effects of the European border regime” (Karakayalı and Tsianos, 2007, p.12). The inadequacy of the term can be understood as underlining the challenge to adequately conceptualise the turbulences of migration and to conceive of a representational structure in which migration does not bounce off societies but is considered to change societies (ibid.). However, it has played, and still plays, an important role in scandalising the European migration regime in the first place. Also, the films used in this work have in common their persuasion that conceptualising Europe as a fortress based on the formal and informal expansion of its borders, the establishment of buffer zones for third-country nationals and the intensification and militarisation of control at the Union’s external borders, however, falls short in accounting for migration movements. One of the turning points – towards the Europeanisation and border-isation of crises – was the clandestine mass entry of immigrants to the Spanish exclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in 2005. The border played a major role in migration flows between Spain’s accession to the Schengen Agreement in 1991 and the fortification of the border in 1995, when a highly iconic six-metre double fence was erected, transforming “the border landscape in visual, functional and even ethical terms. The fortified euroafrican borderscapes of Ceuta and Melilla became paradigmatic examples of how the EU tries to seal off its outer perimeter against irregular immigration” (Ferrer-Gallardo and Planet-Contreras, 2012, p.33). While the border clearly became an icon for what then was referred to as ‘Fortress Europe’, it at the same time became a symbol for the autonomy of migration movements and the fundamental impossibility of preventing migration from happening by means of continuously fortified border facilities.



   

 
  


After the Spanish government implemented the so-called ‘Integrated External Surveillance’ in the Strait of Gibraltar (SIVE), more or less blocking this passage in 2004 (which led to a considerable decrease in the number of arrivals in that region), migration routes changed and the migratory pressure on the exclaves (in 2005) and on the Canary Islands (in 2006) increased remarkably (ibid.). In the autumn of 2005, an increased number of irregular entries to Ceuta and Melilla and further fortified border-control measures led to what was eventually perceived as the first Europeanised immigration crisis. Quickly, under the eyes of the media, the fence itself became the scene. While some images taken during that time document a peculiarly peaceful coexistence of those who challenged the border and those who were supposed to protect it, border patrol’s response to the irregular entries was extremely harsh and repressive. Hundreds of migrants may have made it to the cities – at least 11, however, were killed and many more were wounded making their attempt (ibid.). Fig. 1: Melilla, Spain: trapped between inside and outside

Source: Kassam, 2014

One of those deceptively peaceful images is that of African migrants aiming to cross the border fence around Melilla in the proximity of an elite club. While about a dozen refugees are pausing for a moment on top of the fence, two people are playing golf (Fig. 1). What is invisible in the photograph are the border guards shielding the bottom of the fence on both sides (Kassam, 2014) – explaining also



  




why the refugees are stopping, caught in a limbo, trapped between inside and outside (but, in fact, already doomed to fail). In this image, the transit area is condensed to a tiny little space, a narrow line between (at least virtually) Spain and Morocco – and at the same time the refugees’ whole human existence is being condensed to a mere physical existence. It may hence also be considered paradigmatic for the flexibility of European borderlands and the transit zones refugees are occupying for an indefinite period in time while aiming at continuing their journeys. The act of challenging a border, successful or not, might in this regard also be read as an act of political agency. Comparing images like the one of the fence-climbing refugees with those illustrating the crises some 25 years ago (such as that of the Vlora), it seems that a crucial development in the representation of refugees and migrants needs to be taken into account: much more than before, the Europeanised refugee crises have to be considered as a spectacle – not so much in terms of technology of mass dissemination or as a collection of images but rather as “a social relationship between people that is mediated by images” (Debord, 1994, p.12). While an image such as that mentioned above in a way also revels in the spectacle of the crisis, at the same time it expands this crisis beyond the common spatial and temporal transit and border zones and periods, and points to its being a crucial obstacle to social cohesion in European societies. Referring to the island of Lampedusa, and refining Agamben’s concept of bare life, Dines, Montagna and Ruggiero (2015) even go so far as to understand the transformation of the island “by the media and political establishment into a spectacle of bare life [as] not only instrumental to the functioning of migration management at Europe’s southern border but […] also constitutive of the subordinate position of migrants in Italian society and its labour market” (p.340). Although the image above implies the reduction of a human existence to less than an existential minimum – a couple of square centimetres on top of a life-threatening fence – applying Agamben’s concept to the refugee situation as a general understanding bears the danger of radically generalising the figure of the refugee (Fattal, 2013) and disallowing subject positions in general. This example clearly justifies referring to a border crisis instead of a refugee crisis. As Ferrer-Gallardo and Planet-Contreras note, on a policy level the events “led to a significant transformation of the securitization apparatus. The immediate response was the reinforcement of the fences and the border patrols on both sides of the perimeter. Spanish and Moroccan army units were sent to the border and remained there for a short time. Ceuta and Melilla would thus become the two most heavily secured border posts of the European Union. Also, surprisingly, Morocco agreed to contribute to the monitorage of two borders that [it] defines as illegitimate and colonial.” (2012, p.33)

It does at the same time illustrate how, and how quickly, the enforcement of border control in one geographical region does change migration dynamics in another region. Even after a decade of harsh and brutal border patrolling and the ongoing



   

 
  


fortification of border facilities both in terms of technical equipment and personnel, the number of entries into the Schengen Area seems not to be affected considerably. What indeed changed, and constantly increases, is the risk people have to take attempting to enter the European Union, and the number of casualties – and also the number of people involved in what Andersson refers to as “the business of bordering Europe.” (2014) As said above, the images deployed in order to illustrate the crisis already play a crucial role in establishing it as a crisis. Moreover, they seem to be the most stable elements of the crisis, rather feeding into what is known about migration and refugees than putting this knowledge to test. They not only constitute what Falk (2010) referred to as an imagined community of refugees; they perpetuate, prove and justify it at the very same time. Even a photograph like the one above – shot by the photographer José Palazón, who is working with the migrant rights group Prodein Melilla – has a potentially affirmative impact by illustrating hardly more than the narrative of “two radically different realities” (Kassam, 2014). While the photographer himself suggested a particular interpretation in his comment on Twitter – “Immigrants on the fence, expulsions and a game of golf. Only in Melilla” (ibid.) – it certainly carries the potential to evoke both pity and fear, even at the same time, and to fuel the spectacle of migration by mediating a social relationship in a particular way. Prodein Melilla, however, complemented the image, which has been shared heavily on social networks since its publication in October 2014, with a video taken at the same scene. It documents how Spanish border guards are literally pulling down refugees from the fence, beating them up with their batons and carrying one of them, unconscious, over to the Moroccan side (ASÍ DEFIENDE ‘ESPAÑA’ EL MINISTERIO DEL INTERIOR, 2014). This not least points to the crucial question of representation in general – and the systems of knowledge the producer of an image is eventually part of. While European borders have been challenged since their existence, with the events in Ceuta and Melilla media attention grew. Since then, the crisis repeats over and over again, producing new hotspots every now and then but generally adhering to the same visuality and political rhetoric. In 2006, the world’s eye turned to what was framed the Canary Islands Boat Crisis – clearly an outcome of the diversion of migration routes in the aftermath of the 2005 events. While surveillance measures in the Mediterranean were increased, more and more people tried to bypass this region by taking the much more dangerous route to the Canary Islands. Following the denial of medical support for irregular migrants by authorities on the islands, this migration route soon lost some of its significance (MaasAlbert, 2014) – though there are still people using it, the decrease in total numbers quickly made it vanish from the European political agenda. The stream of images of refugees at the European borders, however, did continue to flow. In 2010 the attention turned to Greece. In the midst of a harsh economic crisis, the number of irregular immigrants using the country as a gateway to Europe rapidly grew – which also had to do with ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Under pressure from the European Union, the Greek government



  




decided to respond to what quickly became termed the Greek Land Border Crisis by erecting a ten-kilometre long, two-and-a-half-metre high, razor-wire-topped fence at the border with Turkey in order to close one of the highly frequented routes for undocumented migration into the European Union (Kasimis, 2012). What in fact happened was that the government closed the shortest route – being at the same time the safest one. Apart from the territory now fenced, the River Evros forms the land border between Turkey and Greece (and, further north, between Turkey and Bulgaria). The politically rather symbolic act of closing the route by no means ended the movement; it simply forced migrants to use other, more dangerous routes, including the crossing of River Evros and the minefields that surround it.7 A negative side effect of measures like this is that they make smuggling increasingly attractive – the more dangerous a route, the higher the smugglers’ revenues, the more people involved in this business. The primary risk of being caught or of dying, however, remains with the smuggled person.8 As in the other examples mentioned above, the measures taken by the Greek government under the pressure of the European Union followed a particular visual-political economy. First of all, the erected fence plays a highly symbolic role in documenting the government’s willingness to cooperate, on the one hand, and in discouraging potential immigrants on the other. At the same time, it has a strong physical – potentially fatal – impact on migration routes. On a visual level, it perpetuates the myths and figures of illegal migration, even the actual images produced are similar to the crises referred to above. One may even assume that the shift of focus from the Spanish to the Greek border may have been considered politically useful as the images produced coincided with prevalent perceptions and visualisations of Greece as an extremely unreliable partner. The focus, however, shifted again quickly. Only about a year or so later, in 2011, the Arab Spring put the Mediterranean at the centre of attention; while at first the Italian island Lampedusa – at least from a European perspective – seemed to be the epicentre and the term Lampedusa became a placeholder for migration into the European Union, at least since 2013 – certainly also sparked by the exacerbated situation in Syria – the crisis perpetuated and accelerated, and constant public and political attention can be noted, once again growing since mid 2015. In























































7

Estimates indicate that about 1.5 million mines are scattered along the Greek side of the 200-kilometre long land border; the UN reports that about 300 persons have been killed or seriously wounded in this area (Borderline Europe, 2008, p.52).

8

In 2013, the debate was seen in a different light: wouldn’t it be possible that the EU – corresponding to arguments around Greece’s ejection from the joint European currency – reserves the possibility to remove the country from the Schengen Area as well? On the one hand, the EU considers border-control measures taken as insufficient and, on the other, it realises that controlling the Greek border, especially the more than 13.000kilometre-long coastline, according to Schengen standards, is unwinnable.



   

 
  


2015, the so-called Balkan Route became much noticed; in 2016, the focus turned to the Aegean Sea again, and in the summer of 2016 all eyes are on the Turkey– Greece pathway and an agreement between the European Union and Turkey, considering the detention of undocumented migrants, refugees and asylum seekers to the latter (Collett, 2016). What links the different periods of what may be considered an ongoing border crisis are the political responses adhering to a particular visual economy setting the ‘emergency frame’ around border crossings. Overall, a stronger sensitivity to the migration movements at the European borders can be detected at least since spring 2015. In June 2015, a UNHCR report sparked further public interest in the issue. According to this report, in the first half of 2015 an estimated number of 137,000 refugees crossed the Mediterranean irregularly – mainly reaching Greek and Italian shores (UNHCR, 2015d). More than 1,800 people have been reported drowned or missing at sea over that period – compared to about 3,500 between January and December 2014 (UNCHR, 2015a); the estimated number of unreported cases is assumed to be considerably higher. Consequently, the sensitivity regarding the passage’s dangers has increased, not least due to horrifying reports: over the spring and summer of 2015, almost on a daily basis news spread about human beings rescued or drowned in the Mediterranean Sea while attempting to reach European territory. On 19 April 2015, an estimated 700 to 900 migrants were reported drowned after their boats capsized near a Southern Italian port (Kingsley, Bonomolo and Kirchgaessner, 2015) in what UNHCR believes to be “the deadliest incident in the Mediterranean we have ever recorded” (Al Jazeera, 2015); similar incidents with lower numbers of fatalities have been reported regularly since then, with another peak in early August 2015 when a boat with an estimated 600 to 700 people capsized; two days after the incident, 26 bodies were found dead, and another almost 200 people were still missing and assumed dead (Kirchgaessner, 2015a). IOM published another alarming number: regardless of the overall number of migrants crossing the Mediterranean, the percentage of people dying while trying to cross it has considerably increased; over the first quarter of 2015, 46 out of 1,000 attempts result in death (Kirchgaessner, 2015b); according to UNHCR in 2015, an overall number of 4,000 people are feared drowned (UNHCR, 2015c). But the passage to Europe has always been dangerous. Since 1993, the Dutch network United for Intercultural Action documented more than 22,000 cases of “refugees, asylum seekers and undocumented migrants who have died through their attempts to enter Europe, and as a result of European immigration policies including deportation procedures, detention conditions and the inadequacies of asylum application processes” (2015b). The network points out that while media and politicians’ attention currently lies almost exclusively on the Mediterranean Sea, “refugee deaths are not limited to the Mediterranean: refugees die of suffocation and exposure hiding in freight containers and the undercarriages of planes; refugees die in the dire

  




conditions of detention centres; refugees die in police custody and at the hands of deportation officials; refugees are murdered by fascist thugs, denied both the protection of the authorities and recourse to justice.” (Ibid.)

Taking the diversity and fluidity of migration routes into account and vividly illustrating the interdependence of migration movements and border control, MaasAlbert (2014) divides European border-control measures since the establishment of the Schengen Area into five periods – based on the network’s figures. In the first period (1994 to 1998), movements across the straits of Gibraltar, Sicily and Otranto cause the highest number of deaths; as Poland is still not a European Union member state, the Oder–Neisse line is still relevant (until 2004); in the second period (from the introduction of the Information and External Surveillance System SIVE in 1998 to the EU summit in Sevilla in 2002), the overall number of deaths is increasing while the English Channel and the Canary Islands become particularly important. The third period (from the Sevilla summit in 2002 to the Rabat conference in 2006, characterised by intensified cooperation with North African states) is marked by an increased importance of the Aegean Sea and Cyprus, Libya and Lampedusa; at the same time the English Channel and the Strait of Otranto lose importance. The fourth period (starting with the intensification of Frontex border-control operations between 2006 and 2009) shows the highest number of documented fatalities around the Canary Islands (about 2,000) and in the Libya– Malta–Lampedusa triangle (about 2,300); at the same time, the importance of the Aegean Sea remains high and a considerable number of deaths in the Sahara and in the North African countries overall is recorded. Finally, over the last period (parallel to the planning of the Eurosur system from 2009 to 2012), the one hotspot is the area between Libya and Lampedusa; the Straits of Otranto and Gibraltar and the Aegean Sea remain important while more and more refugees drown in the River Evros; the Canary Islands, on the contrary, lose their significance – most likely due to the economic crisis and the denial of medical support for irregular migrants by authorities on the islands. The overall number of deaths reached a first peak between 2006 and 2009 – but the numbers have remained high since then and peaked again in 2015/16. Ironically, the immense improvement of surveillance technology has apparently so far not been to the advantage of refugees. Assuming that an increased number of fatalities corresponds with an increased number of refugees in a certain area, the changing trends described above can only to a small extent be explained by the European Union’s enlargement in 2004 and 2007. They are to a much higher degree connected to political and economic developments in EU neighbouring countries, to migration routes diverted or blocked due to Frontex border operations – and to the reflections and media images representing European borderlands particularly in the global South. The geographies of migration incorporate knowledge of migration that is to a considerable extent fed by the visuality of



   

 
  


migration. An increase in media coverage on Frontex operations in the Mediterranean region does not directly lead to diverting migration routes but rather to an increased popularity – only slowly new routes emerge and gain importance. What the above also illustrates is that the Schengen Area is structured by flexible external and internal borders and border zones; non-European migrants heading for Europe are forced to move along borders in various manifestations, to ensconce themselves in transit, move back and forth through borderlands, mainly but not exclusively in its geographically peripheral zones. These zones are highly flexible and permanently change their face and form; they include the political borders of the Schengen member states but are not limited to their proximity. Transit is a central category in European borderlands; migrants’ permanent state of transit and the gapless regulation and surveillance of movement through the borderlands are among its most characteristic features. The crisis-induced reconfiguration of the parameters of European border management and control described above can certainly not be assumed to be one of the original goals of Europeanisation – it is rather caused by the interplay of different ideological controversies that went along with processes of European integration from the outset. It hence also conveys specific power relations and hierarchies within the Union. So, while the visual gained importance and attention, certainly not only in the area of migration and migration policy but also connected to the radical digitalisation of our lives, the question of the relationship between mobility and demarcation became the focus of the political negotiations of Europe. Soon, nationalistic and exclusive impulses avoiding the transfer of competencies in the area of immigration policy prevailed, assuming a dialectical relationship between Europe’s internal and external borders. What originally may have been a supranational endeavour quickly aligned to this specific division of tasks and composed a corresponding visual configuration in Europe – including a complex dialectical relationship between the configuration and representation of the European Self and its Other on the one hand and the respective national identities and an assumed European identity on the other – itself nothing completely new but connected to long-existing discourses and images. So while from a Western European perspective the relatively new member states in Eastern Europe may still constitute the Other, and vice versa, non-Europeans moving to Europe – and particularly those without a legal status – are considered and portrayed as neither citizens nor “real others” – but “other others” (Willen, 2010). To finally put the refugee crisis into perspective: even facing the current increase in immigration numbers, undocumented migration into, within and around the European Union is relatively small in numbers compared to global movements (e.g. Abel & Sander, 2014; Andersson, 2015); disregarding the influx caused by the war in Syria, the numbers of refugees would most likely even be stable. In addition, one should not forget that the main burden of hosting Syrian refugees is not carried by the European Union but by the neighbouring countries of Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey – and Syria itself (UNHCR, 2015b).



  






   
 
The perennial appearance of migration movements in the form of a crisis can partly be located in the fact that European geographies of migration have over the past two and a half decades fundamentally changed. Contemporary European migration policies are shaped against the background of changing political landscapes and migration movements after the disintegration of the Eastern bloc in the early 1990s and Yugoslavia in the late 1990s, recent developments in Northern Africa and current armed conflicts in the Middle East, Afghanistan and in Eastern Africa. But migration movements to Europe and their perception are at least to the same extent influenced by the European integration process itself – starting way before the historical events around 1989 and culminating in a joint currency and the ratification of the Schengen Agreement and its implementation since 1995 – and its connection to the still increasing global division of labour and globalised capitalism. While migration policies and migration movements are much more decentralised than before, the traditional notion of the antipodal relationship between the rich centre and the poor periphery is less accurate than ever when it comes to the analysis of movements, routes and relationships (Koser, 2005). On a European level, the new turbulences of migration no longer appear primarily in the capitals but also at the continent’s fringes – in the border zones created through a complex interplay of migration movements on the one hand and migration policies on the other, implementing the European principles of border control far beyond the actual European demarcation lines (Hess, 2008). Irregular migration is a global issue in two regards: on the one hand, the phenomenon can no longer be observed primarily in the wealthier countries in the global North but to a much larger extent takes place between developing countries (Koser, 2005); on the other hand, nation states cooperate on a supranational level in order to control and manage immigration, primarily irregular migration (Bloch, Sigona and Zetter, 2012). On a European level, the pathways9 of asylum seeking and of undocumented migration today must be considered the most regular forms of migration (Triandafyllidou and Gropas, 2014), whereas documented or regular immigration is – notwithstanding certain forms of circular and seasonal migration, family reunification, immigration of highly skilled experts and temporary migration by means of student visa – rather exceptional. This is due not least to a common sense in the European Union that expedites a strictly regulated labour market, which in return is illustrated not least in the regulations concerning minimum requirements for the issuance of a work permit to third-country (i.e. non-European)























































9

Triandafyllidou and Gropas use the term pathway as it suggests “sets of relationships, policies and opportunities that come together to form a specific pathway, a channel through which information and people flow between sending and receiving country” (2014, p.392).



   

 
  


nationals. In 2009, the so-called EU Blue Card (or Blue European Labour Card) was introduced in order to define an overall framework regulating the work and residence status of highly skilled third-country nationals EU-wide – implicitly it defined the boundary between ‘wanted’ and ‘unwanted’ migration and clearly favoured the temporary immigration of highly skilled labour; while the prerequisites for the issuance of an EU Blue Card vary from one member state to the other, usually they include a university degree and a job offer with an annual salary of at least 1.5 times the average gross annual salary paid in the member state concerned (Blue Card Directive, 2009). In the overall perception of migration, this group of people and this pathway into the European Union play a negligible role.10 Although undocumented migration has many causes, takes various forms and depends on the respective countries’ legal regulations and their implementation, on border geographies and border control just as well as on the migrants’ and facilitators’ responses to it, roughly speaking three ways to become – or be made – an undocumented migrant can be identified: the first and most relevant way in terms of numbers, but also in terms of the perception of and political debate around undocumented migration, is connected to the clandestine crossing of borders, often facilitated by an intermediary or smuggler; the second way is by means of falsified documents or legal documents for an irregular purpose; and the third by overstaying after a legal status – for example, a student or visitor’s visa or temporary leave to remain – has expired (Heckmann, 2008). It is important to note that those categories blur; many migrants are shifting frequently between regular and irregular status (Triandafyllidou and Gropas, 2014), for example becoming illegal by failing to renew a temporary leave to remain or residence permit or after an asylum claim has been refused – or becoming legal through their recognition as a refugee, by means of marriage or a valid (temporary) work contract. Also, in many cases, a temporary situation of illegality is a phase of the migration cycle before obtaining legal residency, particularly in cases of naturalisation programmes (Tapinos, 1999). As Bloch, Sigona and Zetter (2012) stress, estimating the magnitude of the phenomenon not only poses the challenge of counting the uncountable but also points the attention towards the methodological challenges connected to it: the question of the scope is clearly connected to the question of how one defines ‘undocumented’. Consequently, estimates of the number of undocumented migrants in the European Union, based on different methods and categories, cover a wide range: they lie between 570,000 (European Commission, 2013a) and 1.9 to 2.8























































10 Between 2012 and 2014, a total of fewer than 30,000 Blue Cards have been issued by the member states, the majority by Germany (Eurostat, 2015); about half of the Blue Card holders did, however, not newly enter the Union but had another residence status beforehand (Marschall, 2014).



  




million people (Morehouse and Blomfield, 2011) and even up to 3.9 million people (Triandafyllidou, 2009).11 All studies in the field of undocumented and irregular migration point to the fundamental challenges to generate and validate reliable data.12 While the number of people living in Europe without a regular residence status apparently increased after the disintegration of the Eastern bloc (Castles, Miller and de Haas, 2013), the Clandestino Project suggests that the numbers decreased in the first half of the 2000s – mainly due to naturalisation programmes, EU enlargement and increased policing and border-protection cooperation (Triandafyllidou, 2009). As part of the current refugee crisis, it must be assumed that the numbers have increased again, although certainly not as dramatically as often stated. While according to UNHCR, in 2015, about “one million refugees and migrants have fled to Europe by sea”, mainly to Greece and Italy, and another “34,000 have crossed from Turkey into Bulgaria and Greece by land” (UNHCR, 2015d), and many of those who are the protagonists of this crisis do in fact use irregular ways to enter the European Union, most do apparently re-enter the legal cycle by claiming asylum and undergoing the respective tiresome and lengthy procedures; at least for this period they have the leave to remain in the relevant country – only the moment of rejection potentially re-illegalises them. It is hardly foreseeable if the number of undocumented migrants in Europe and at the European borders will in fact increase in the long run. The measures taken by some of the European states – including shutting down their internal borders and the reprehensible or at least paradox refugee deal with Turkey (Collett, 2016) – may aim at reducing the numbers but at the same time will most likely not cause a deceleration of illegalisation processes in general. While there are, as outlined, different ways to become irregular, processes of undocumented migration are primarily linked to the asylum-seeking pathway. It is estimated that the number of refugees coming to the European Union is roughly equal to the number of undocumented migrants (Triandafyllidou and Gropas, 2014). This again hints at the methodological challenge to define more closely who an undocumented migrant is and who is not. On the one hand – and this will























































11 To put the number in perspective: the International Organization for Migration (IOM, 2010) estimated that on a global scale up to 15% of the total migration population are in an irregular situation, i.e. between 21 and 32 million people. 12 Cf. e.g. Heckmann, who argues that although there cannot be exact figures regarding the scope of undocumented migration, “illegal migration is not completely undocumented [because] there are indicators [that] depend largely on nationally specific condition” (2008, p.286); Massey and Capoferro (2008) for remarks on the methodologicaltheoretical challenges connected to it; Europol, 2016, for an assessment from a regulative point of view; Bloch, Sigona and Zetter (2012) for a study on the extent of the phenomenon and the living conditions of young undocumented migrants in the UK.



   

 
  


be the main focus of this work – there are a considerable number of migrants moving through European border zones, some resident in the European Union, others living outside and looking for ways into the European Union and yet others who entered the Union and got deported once or more than once. On the other hand, the question is whether a person seeking refuge in a European country has to be considered an undocumented or irregular migrant only because he/she is in conflict with the Dublin Regulation13 or because he/she escapes deportation upon the denial of asylum. It is in this regard important to note that the lack of legal pathways into the European Union is complemented by specific political measures such as the 2001 EU Directive making the carriers transporting foreign nationals into the territory of the member states (such as airlines and ferry operators) responsible for all the follow-up costs and thus de facto preventing asylum seekers from entering the European Union by means of cheap and secure travel by air (Council Directive 2001/51/EC). In consequence, the majority of migration movements to the European Union are at least temporarily undocumented migrations – to put it more precisely, what has been framed as a refugee crisis is also a crisis regarding political and legal responses to undocumented migration and its rejection or prevention. Although undocumented migrants have to be considered part of the social reality everywhere around the world (Bischoff, Falk and Kafehsy, 2010), in most discourses undocumented migration is perceived as an exception to, rather than a variation from, regular migration. Prevalent public and political debates around undocumented migration focus largely on the legal title or status of migrants instead of accounting for his or her claims or motivations or social realities – the social implications it has are almost exclusively addressed in the call for ‘integration’; in public discourse and legislative and executive rhetoric it is often represented by a terminology that links irregularity to criminality and illegality (Andersson, 2014; Transit Migration Forschungsgruppe, 2007; Triandafyllidou and Gropas, 2014). The perception varies a lot depending on the respective migrant’s national background and gender; while undocumented female migrants are often perceived primarily as victims, especially young male migrants of African or Eastern European descent are usually regarded a threat to the respective nation state’s prosperity (see the commonly used terms economic migrant or poverty refugee). It has to be noted that undocumented migrants’ media representations vary between the poles of empathy and moral panic and are connected to different levels























































13 Full name: “Regulation establishing the criteria and mechanisms for determining the member state responsible for examining an application for international protection lodged in one of the member states by a third-country national or a stateless person” (2003 and 2013).



  




and constructions of otherness. While there is still a public discourse that considers all forms of migration abnormal, undocumented migration is understood as a twofold abnormality; not as a variation of regular migration but as its irregular opposite. This isolation from other (regular) migration discourses can also be observed when it comes to academic discourses regarding undocumented migration. Although there is a certain amount of publication in the field, most does not conceptualise undocumented migration as a relevant phenomenon in the field of migration studies but links it to purely legalistic discourses or – in its more populist occurrence – debates around terrorism and security. Current debates around migrant integration hardly refer to or account for undocumented migration; only a few works on issues related to migration consider irregular migration a relevant aspect at all. While, a decade ago, Sciortino noted that in “the current work on European countries’ migration regimes, the attention has focused nearly exclusively on regular migration. Irregular flows are usually either ignored or conflated in a single residual category, in an undifferentiated bottom strata” (2004, p.33), the situation has changed only slightly. What can, however, be noted is that interdisciplinary foci on the narrative figure of the ‘illegal immigrant’ have gained a certain popularity (e.g. Aas, 2011; Andersson, 2014; Bloch, Sigona and Zetter, 2012; Chimienti, 2011; Heck, 2008; Nicholls, 2013; Sigona, 2012). In more recent debates about transnational migration, this division or hierachisation of discourses can also be observed. All too often,14 the conceptualisation of a transnational life seems to primarily draw upon migrations perceived as successful, i.e. including properly determinable former and new homes or communities. Although the benchmark of transnationalism is no longer exclusively the nation state but a globalised understanding of societies and transcultural relations, the various unforeseeable diversions of an individual’s irregular migration seem to be considered as an obstacle to processes of transnationalisation and the active involvement in transnational social spaces. What several studies point out (Andersson, 2014; Bischoff, Falk and Kafehsy, 2010; Heck, 2008) is that a migrant’s legal status as expressed in terms such as ‘undocumented’ or ‘illegal’ is connected less to a person’s misbehaviour or inability to provide documents and more to the absence of an appropriate regulation defining their legal status at all in the first place. There is, in other words, a law that some people are excluded from, and the law itself does not – at least not regularly – outline a way back into the law. This also corresponds to a fragmentation of citizenship, producing different mobility standards as well as political, social and economic rights. Migration policies operate in a field in which sovereignty becomes deterritorialised and – in the case of undocumented migration – repro-























































14 For exceptions, see e.g. Espinosa and Massey, 1999, on undocumented migration and social capital; Smith and Guarnizo, 1998.



   

 
  


duced beyond citizenship. Undocumented migrants consequently have a “peculiar, paradoxical status in relation to the law – at one and the same time they are subject to the law and excluded from it” (Mitchell, 2010, p.19). In the name of the law, they are exempted from legal resources based on their status. As Balibar puts it, undocumented migrants “can easily be rendered illegal, are deprived of fundamental social rights […] and can be expelled as a function of ‘threshold of tolerance’ or ‘capacities of reception and integration’ that are arbitrarily established according to criteria of ‘cultural distance’ – that is, race in the sense the notion has taken on today” (2004, p.37).


  
This has also implications with regard to the naming of the group of concern. While the terminology in the field of migration in general is highly contested, it is even more so in the field of asylum, refuge and with regard to people lacking – from a European regulatory perspective – the necessary legal status. While undocumented migration itself is nothing new in Europe, the political construct that understands migration as a threat to European societies must be considered as a development of the past 25 years – just as is the criminalisation of undocumented migration through mechanisms introduced to protect Europe against it (Marie, 2004). With the consolidation of European integration since the 1990s, Europe’s political attention shifted from a rather pragmatic approach to undocumented migration to a clearly biased reconfiguration of an important element in international migration movements. This reconfiguration understands immigration as a threat and is underpinned by a pejorative terminology and visuality. Paspalanova notes that the terminology adopted in different contexts concerned with irregular migration “differs substantially […] and is rarely based on a substantive conceptual justification of the selection of one term over another” (2008, p.80). The institutionalised terminology in the Schengen context, used by political bodies and official sources, most media coverage and a considerable share of academic activity in the field, tends to refer to ‘illegal (im)migrants’, ‘illegals’, ‘aliens’, ‘refugees’, ‘victims of human trafficking’ or combinations of those expressions, often using the terms synonymously. The colloquial term used most often is ‘illegal migrant’. In contrast, in liberal and left-wing political contexts and in critical academic discourses the terms ‘illegalised’, ‘irregular’ or ‘undocumented’ are usually – but not necessarily consistently – preferred, mainly in order to separate migration movements from the general allegation of criminality and to stress that, unlike an act, a person can neither be illegal or criminal. Forty



  




years ago, the United Nations General Assembly published a still valid recommendation to all UN bodies, referring to the expression ‘non-documented or irregular migrants/workers’ (United Nations, 1975).15 Other terms used include ‘sans papier’/‘without papers’ – deriving from a still exemplary migrant self-organisation movement in the French context most visible in the mid 1990s (Cissé, 2002) – and ‘clandestine’. The latter is used particularly in certain political contexts in the Romanic lingual area, primarily aimed at linking undocumented migration to practices of civil disobedience and self-determination. It is also frequently deployed as a self-descriptive term by self-organised migrants. Both terms are frequently used in academic contexts as well (Clandestino, 2009).16 Marie, however, points to the fact that the terminology is “not simply a question of nice semantics, but […] a fundamental issue. The words used influence the way the situation in question is regarded and, by extension, the political philosophy governing how it is dealt with” (Marie, 2003, p.3). He also emphasises that using “the term ‘clandestine’ has the major effect of strengthening the public perception that migrants themselves generate crime and are a potential ‘threat’, thus seeming to justify their situation being dealt with policing alone, and a policy in which a rationale of security prevails over all others” (ibid.).

The terminology deployed has considerable impact on the discourses of undocumented migration. In a review of the expressions used by some of the leading US quality newspapers, Paspalanova (2008) reveals that the term ‘illegal immigrant























































15 In addition, the United Nations’ revised “Recommendations on Statistics of International Migration” (United Nations, 1998), basically defining 18 categories to compose a taxonomy of international inflows and outflows, suggests the use of the category “Citizens departing without the admission documents required by the country of destination/Foreigners whose entry or stay is not sanctioned” to refer to “foreigners who violate the rules of admission of the receiving country and are deportable, as well as foreign persons attempting to seek asylum but who are not allowed to file an application and are not permitted to stay in the receiving country on any other grounds” (ibid., p.23). Multiple times, the publication itself, however, uses the expressions ‘undocumented migrants/migration’ and ‘irregular migration/foreigners in irregular situations’ synonymously. 16 For example, by the Hellenic Foundation for European & Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP), who from 2007 to 2009 ran the European Union-funded project CLANDESTINO – Undocumented Migration: Counting the Uncountable Data and Trends Across Europe in order to set up a “database on irregular migration” (Clandestino, 2009).



   

 
  


or alien’ is adopted over the expression ‘undocumented migrant’.17 This is remarkable as those newspapers can be considered powerful instruments for popularising terminology in the English language. She observes a similar trend in academic publications. Reviewing the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies and the International Migration Review, two of the most important periodicals in the field, she states that almost half of the publications on undocumented migration in fact refer to their subject of interest as ‘illegal migrants’ or ‘illegal aliens’; about one third of the authors prefer the expression ‘undocumented’. About a fifth of the authors use ‘illegal’ and ‘undocumented’ synonymously. Overall, “very rarely does an author justify the use of one term over another. Usually the terms are used synonymously, although there is a tendency never to use the terms ‘illegal’ and ‘alien’ in the same text with ‘undocumented’ or ‘without papers’” (ibid., p.81).18 The terminology used additionally supports and even enforces a particular iconology of undocumented migration. Particularly those terms centring on the respective legal status of a migrant or refugee have strong implications and are supported by particular visual discourses and iconographies. This work prefers the term ‘undocumented’ to other terms and it uses the term in the widest possible sense. It hence also includes those who are, due to their status or ambition, likely to become illegalised in the near future, i.e. all those with a precarious legal status within the Schengen Area and all those moving through European borderlands, aiming at irregular border-crossing. This inclusive use of the term should not only shift the focus away from legal categories but in addition explicitly point towards the visual techniques and practices that becoming and making undocumented are entangled with. Moreover, it should contribute to avoiding the use of terms that carry predominantly negative political, social and visual connotations (like e.g. illegal migrant) and terms that have a specific meaning predominantly in the context of institutional migration management; in addition, the character of this work does not allow for delving deep into the complex identity constructions behind, for example, the terms ‘refugee’ and ‘asylum seeker’ – not least because in many cases there is a lack of self-description. In general, the term ‘migrant’ is preferred to the term ‘refugee’ as a denomination in this work – migrating in this regard is understood as an activity linked to a specific set of motivations and ambitions; being a refugee is considered more of a legal























































17 Between 1981 and 2007, in The New York Times articles, the term undocumented migrant was used 168 times, illegal migrant and illegal alien/aliens 6,531 times – in other words, in 39 out of 40 cases. 18 Additionally, she mentions that some academics justify the use of the term illegal on the ground that it is widely used in media coverage of immigration issues. She criticises this attitude for naively assuming media’s reliability and capacity to institutionalise unbiased terminology, and for not considering the consequences of determining linguistic usage in academia according to media preferences (Paspalanova, 2008).



  




category, a vehicle that, however, primarily narrows down the reasons for a migratory movement. In general, this work is only to a very limited extent concerned with the instantaneous legal status of persons at all – as asylum seekers, recognised refugees, refugees under temporary protection, stateless persons or persons without any kind of legal status as per European legislation – and rather more concerned with the various reflections of the highly iconic social condition of being a migrant in a state of transit. The term undocumented migrant must hence be considered an auxiliary construction to refer to migrants that are subject to a particular legal, social and economic precariousness and at the same time an inseparable element of the European migration regime. Then again, concepts of illegality and irregularity are rejected in this work because they refer almost exclusively to an assessment of the legal status of a person – a precarious legal status is, however, not a prerequisite for being of concern – neither for European border control nor for the films referred to in this work. Yet some of the films particularly follow those migrants who thus far have not crossed any border in an unauthorised manner but who are caught in the European border zones anyway, waiting for their chance to make their move. They are not part of official statistics – hence, in their case, ‘undocumented’ in the sense of ‘unrecorded’ can, for the time being, be considered the most adequate characterisation. Another aspect is that the term ‘undocumented’ clearly makes reference to visual techniques and technologies and to the fact that, despite an increasingly gapless surveillance and regulation of the Schengen border zones, a great deal of current migration movements take place unnoticed. The heterogeneous group concerned is in many ways undocumented: on the one hand, a considerable number of migrants must be assumed to not dispose of documents that are considered legal in the respective context. On the other hand, in most cases there is a tension between visibility and invisibility, an issue that is particularly relevant with regard to questions of recognition and protection. In contrast to the term ‘clandestine’, ‘undocumented’ does not imply the deliberate activity of doing something in hiding and thus shifts the focus away from the notion of illegality. Since the early 1990s, the terms ‘transmigrant/transit migration’ became popular in academic discourses on migration in and to Europe. It served mainly to account for changing patterns of migration – often labelled ‘new migration’ (Collyer, Düvell and de Haas, 2012) – in and around the European states, particularly a more significant East–West movement. While the term ‘transmigrant’ on the one hand is used to approach the subjects of transnational migration and hence appears adequate to grasp the different stages of being a migrant, it on the other hand too carries implications that may not adequately cover the subjects of this research. One has to take into account that while gaining or losing the status is by no means directly linked to the crossing (or un-crossing) of particular borders, being in transit cannot be understood as the opposite of settlement (Hess, 2008). Consequently, the reader will most likely encounter terminological contradictions at different points of this paper. As important as an adequate categorisation



 

 
  


may be considered in order to develop a research design, in certain cases, for example, the filmmakers’ conceptualisations of their protagonists or the migrants’ self-descriptions contradict the assumed clarity of the umbrella term – for example, when originally pejorative terms are strategically appropriated and referred to as a political slogans and disobedient self-descriptions or localisations;19 in other cases, it is necessary to refer to a person’s legal status in order to contextualise his or her activities and/or narrative – as well as to point out the relevant contradictions between denomination and self-description, legal and social categories and the various iconologies linked to certain categories. In addition, a migrant’s or refugee’s legal status may change with or without his or her intervention in the blink of an eye – for example, with the crossing of an official or informal demarcation line or a border that has certain implications only with regard to a person’s legal status,20 the rejection of an asylum claim, the expiration of a visa, changing legislation and so on. A migrant may be turned into a refugee and further into an asylum seeker and further into an undocumented migrant within only a couple of days.


 
 
 

In media representations and public perception, the undocumented migrant is trapped in a complex attribution of guilt and victimhood – he/she is considered a victim of smugglers or traffickers (or of brutal regimes, and his/her living conditions, or various other push–pull factors at work) and at the same time a threat to an “open and safe Europe” (European Commission, 2014), a perpetrator violating national borders, emotional boundaries and imagined national communities. While being a victim seems to be almost the only subject position that allows the negotiating and representing of migration (Karakayalı and Tsianos, 2007), concurrent notions of criminality stand in the way of empathy (and potentially blur the distinction between smuggling and being smuggled). Those perceptions fall together in the figure of the ‘desperate invader’ (Bredeloup, 2012).























































19 There are different examples for this in the US-American context; the appropriation of racist terms by Black hip-hop artists for example – or the use of the words ‘mojado’, ‘coyote’ or ‘alambrista’ in the context of undocumented Mexican migration to the US (Spener, 2009). 20 For example, based on certain movement-restriction laws as implemented, e.g., in the German context with the so-called Residenzpflicht (prohibiting refugees to cross the border of the administrative district they have been allocated to) and the Flughafenregelung (airport regulation; keeping asylum seekers in international airports’ exterritorial zones in order to perform fast-track asylum procedures).



  




While the political responses to the refugee crisis anticipate this ambiguous figure, undocumented migration as a phenomenon is mainly addressed in reference to issues of security and crime. The European Council, for example, in an emergency summit in April 2015 agreed on a ten-point plan to, among other things, “undertake systematic efforts to identify, capture and destroy vessels before they are used by traffickers” (Johnston, Cendrowicz and Dawber, 2015). The statement is interesting in that it not only alludes to a strategic reorientation of undocumented migration policies, from seeking political responses to seeking militaristic responses; it also, more strongly than before, gives the unambiguously structured figure of the trafficker the main credit for the occurrence of the refugee crisis in the first place. The traffickers – following an immoral and criminal business, and being, according to the European Union Commissioner for Migration, Dimitris Avramopoulos, “ruthless people who would do anything for money” (Zatterin, 2015) – are the central figures in the European Council’s rhetoric;21 they are the ones being blamed for the fatalities, and stopping them from doing their dirty work is considered imperative in the name of humanitarianism. Already the preference of the term ‘trafficker’ over the term ‘smuggler’ in the Council’s statement illustrates the aim to directly link any form of intermediary service to the terminology of criminal acts. Strictly speaking, the intermediaries in the Mediterranean are smugglers, mainly concerned with transporting people – in contrast to that, the trafficker’s business centres on the exploitation of people through the use of force, fraud or coercion (Pierce, 2014). Borrowing the term may be considered























































21 In the area of undocumented migration, regulations and directives as well as press releases and other official disclosures by the European Commission and Council almost exclusively refer to ‘illegal’ migration and circle around the figures of the ‘trafficker’ and the ‘illegal immigrant’. In addition, like a Pavlovian reflex, the verbalisation of political or regulatory necessities in European documents dealing with issues of undocumented migration is almost exclusively linked to issues and terminologies of trafficking, organised/cross-border crime and security. This is certainly not a new development but can be traced back some 20 years; e.g. a 2002 press release by the former Commissioner for Justice and Home Affairs, Antonio Vitorino, regarding the necessity to combat “illegal” immigration and trafficking in human beings on a European level (European Commission, 2002) clearly illustrates the rhetorical mechanisms deployed in order to continuously recreate the myth of the ‘illegal immigrant’ who is in fact, and unsaid, a ‘criminal illegal immigrant’ – and at the same time must be understood as a blueprint for official statements on undocumented migration. To stress his opinion that human trafficking and illegal immigration have to be combatted with joint legal and administrative instruments, he argues that the “criminals who commit these hateful acts are organized in transnational networks […] and exploit the differences between […] national legislation” (ibid.).



   

 
  


a distinct political manoeuvre or expedient – but it has to be noted that it also has dangerous policy implications. There are numerous further examples similar to the one mentioned above emphasising how the ‘illegal immigrant’ serves to inseparably intertwine undocumented migration and criminality/security in the European Union’s institutionalised rhetoric and terminology. Those examples clearly illustrate what can be understood as the Union’s guiding principles: firstly, the – with few exceptions – consistent use of the term ‘illegal’ to refer to undocumented migration supporting the assumption of undocumented migration being a criminal act per se; secondly, the de facto criminalisation of people without a residence status in most of the member states;22 thirdly, the tendency to indiscriminately collapse all forms of undocumented migration into one and the deduction that while regular migration has to be managed, undocumented migration needs to be combatted; and, finally, the lack of differentiation between smuggling and trafficking in human beings leading to an equation of trafficking and undocumented migration. While immigration must be considered a conscious and wilful act and smuggling a facilitator, trafficking as a matter of principle happens against a human being’s will and by force.23 The simplifying equation of smuggling and trafficking not only criminalises all undocumented migrants, but also disowns them of their free will (Paspalanova, 2008). While, as pointed out, death tolls vary from day to day and from week to week (and from source to source), the general narrative of the crossers of the Mediterranean is repeated over and over again – and so are the visual representations of those survivors who have been seized by European border patrols. The arsenal of images used to illustrate the refugee crisis in European media coverage is surprisingly limited; the common perspective is a Eurocentric one. But also humanitarian organisations deploy the rather well-known images in order to raise awareness. Amnesty International, for example, made use of a simple black-and-yellow illustration of two sinking Titanic vessels in order to exemplify the number of people having lost their lives at sea in the course of one year. The illustration was subtitled “103 years ago today the Titanic sank. 2014: 3,400 people drowned in the Mediterranean. The equivalent of more than 2 Titanics”; it was published as part of the organisation’s ‘Europe’s sinking shame: The failure to save refugees and migrants























































22 See, for example, §95 of the German Act on the Residence, Economic Activity and Integration of Foreigners in the Federal Territory Residence Act, stating that persons residing in Germany without a necessary residence title may be punished with up to one year’s imprisonment (Aufenthaltsgesetz). 23 See, for example, the definitions given in Article 3 (a) and (b) of the United Nations Protocol to prevent, suppress and punish trafficking in persons, especially women and children, supplementing the United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime (United Nations, 2000).



  




at sea’ campaign launched on the eve of the Council’s April 2015 emergency summit mentioned above (Amnesty International, 2015). Amnesty International deploys a surprisingly familiar iconology, at the same time framing its protagonists as a faceless mass. Both the terminology and the iconology of undocumented migration are highly contested – and strongly linked to discourses of criminality and illegality. 24 Constructing a strong relevance of violence and crime in migrant spaces must be assumed to serve the purpose of justifying European border-control measures. In return, the “repressive exclusion of the illegalised can successfully be legitimised as retrieving spatial control and the socio-cultural hegemony of a community of ‘legals’” (Heck, 2008, p.242). Undocumented migrants’ media representations are consequently often connected to different levels and constructions of otherness.25 Accompanying the legal, social and economic precariousness of undocumented migrants, the iconology of ‘illegal migration’, of refuge and of asylum-seeking people in general, and the figure – or symbolic resource – of the ‘illegal immigrant’ in particular must be considered omnipresent and fought-over (Heck, 2008). Using the term ‘undocumented’ and referring to the less well-known figure of the ‘undocumented migrant’ (compared to the ‘illegal migrant’) does in this regard also aim at contributing to a certain iconological ambiguity. On a visual level, the set of images and the iconology of ‘undocumented migration’ may provide a small space for recognition and agency – and for the very creation of the undocumented migrant as a subject. The figure of the ‘illegal immigrant’ may carry different names in different lingual or regional contexts – the overall character of it is, however, quite similar. Based on his research in the context of immigration policies in Italy, Quassoli, for example, describes how the figure of the clandestino became widely adopted in public discourses and in immigration management and control discourses at the same time. He illustrates how the focus on the clandestino as an ideological pillar influenced and shaped institutional everyday practices, particularly police practices, by “generating a complex web of knowledge, discourses and practices that produced the essential vocabulary and the hegemonic frameworks for public debates about immigration in Italy” (2013, p.203).























































24 See, e.g., the xenophobic Pegida movement in Dresden and other German cities since late 2014. The whole movement is based on the idea that the supposedly immense numbers of (illegitimate) immigrants with Muslim backgrounds are threatening European societies. 25 See, e.g., how the debate around the terror attacks in Paris (2015) and Brussels (2016) nimbly made reference to crime statistics among refugees and immigrants – first of all mentioning both in the same sentence in order to afterwards emphasise that the two things have nothing to do with each other (Tagesschau, 2015).



   

 
  


In the second half of the 1990s, the expression clandestine in Italy became frequently used as a synonym for immigration in general. At the same time, “the clandestine, or illegal immigrant, became representative of the difficulties of immigration and the fears associated with immigrants. As such, the clandestino became an independent symbolic resource for the political and media discourse which emphasised a linkage between immigration and criminality. What was initially a widely shared public cliché quickly took on a more pronounced ideological flavour” (ibid., p.206).

Since then, the negatively connoted figure of the clandestine/illegal migrant is used simultaneously as a category for administrative purposes and in the context of crime prevention and control. It is, however, important to note not only that the figures, icons and social conditions of undocumented migration are constantly linked to the realms of crime and illegality, but also that the exclusion is repeated in a specific geographical setting, producing spaces and places of illegality. Two examples aim at illustrating both the construction of those spaces and its inhabitants, the first one accounting for the historical transformation of spaces and discourses of migration in Germany – at the same time illustrating that the mechanisms of exclusion the process of Europeanisation imparts have historical roots; the second one taking a look at one of the many irregular spaces of migration in the French Calais region. Like on the European level, in Germany it is only since the 1990s that ‘illegal immigration’ plays a significant role in the media at all. While, before, the threat scenario of asylum seekers and refugees must be considered dominant (Thiele, 2005), after the amendment of the German Constitutional Law restricting the right to asylum in 1993 and the corresponding change of the political atmosphere, ‘illegal immigration’ became a central component in a discourse that shifted from a discourse of exclusion to one of border control (Heck, 2008). Friedrichs (2010) argues that the knowledge production regarding undocumented migration in Germany – and consequently also the political development leading up to the mentioned restriction of the right to asylum in the German Constitutional Law – roots, however, in two major events that took place well before: the 1973 recruitment ban for foreign workers on the one hand and the rising numbers of refugees in the early 1980s on the other. Those two events made way for a regime of representation (Hall, 2011) that contributed to the perception of migration as having a predominantly delinquent and/or illegal character. By means of an examination of articles published in the German weekly Der Spiegel, Friedrichs notes a considerable change in the imagery and iconology from the early 1970s to the early 1980s: “Firstly, the primary metaphorical concepts to understand migration changed from one of an ongoing (cultural) war to that of a catastrophic flood of illegal immigrants. Secondly, the trope of ‘illegality’ that successively covered all aspects of migrant life called for subjugation under strict state policies of potentially all migrants, regardless of their individual juridical status” (Friedrichs, 2010, p.32).



  




In addition, he noted that a specific “image of the ‘ghetto’ allowed transforming migration from a social into a spatial issue, urban space became one of the crucial categories in trying to contain this illegalised Other and to keep up the notion of Germany as a non-immigration society” (ibid.), in general also describing a “transformation towards a society of control and a revaluation of the concept of nationhood” (ibid.). Also, the vocabulary used to describe migration after the late 1970s changed and began to deploy metaphors of waves or floods, a vocabulary implying uncontrollability, chaos and catastrophe. At the same time, the portrayal of refugees as victims emerged, victims “not of the situation in their home countries but of the professional facilitators” (ibid., p.38) exploiting them. Apparently, victimisation went along with criminalisation; refugees were portrayed as being victims only because they are at the same time cheats in search of a better life in terms of their personal economic situation – in this victim discourse there is no subject position assigned to the refugee. Various legal measures tightening the procedures for claiming asylum went hand in hand with the increasing hostility in the depiction of and vocabulary regarding refugees. And while the social space of the ‘ghetto’ was important for the representation of immigration to the German cities up to the recruitment ban, the camp became the symbol for new migration patterns, establishing “one of the new spaces of migration” (ibid., p.39) – at the same time a space in which the state now was considered as the primary agent dealing with migration. While the ghetto’s border in the 1980s supplemented the nation’s frontiers (ibid.), the camp nowadays fulfils a similar role. With the declining efficiency of border control, the borders of the detention camps merged with the border of the nation, “separating the imagined communities of ‘Germans’ and ‘foreigners’” (ibid., p.42). Camps installed in the Schengen member states in order to facilitate the reception, transition, detention and also visual representation of asylum seekers and refugees can be understood as demarcating the inner borderlines of European border zones, as the inner periphery. Besides marking and determining the migrants’ (social and spatial) scope of movement, the camps fulfil at least one further symbolic function: images of crowded camps seem to verify the metaphor of the necessity to stop what is perceived as floods of immigrants way before the European borders. Another example illustrates that although it has been the focus of the refugee crisis for a couple of years now, the Mediterranean Sea is not the only space that is affected by undocumented migration – and at the same time points to the fact that the coverage of the crises has a direct impact on migration movements. In July 2015, a wider public became aware of undocumented migrants residing in France, challenging the internal European borderlines by trying to cross the Channel via the Eurotunnel near the French city of Calais. For years, Calais has been one of the major hotspots of undocumented migration, as it is perceived as a gateway to the UK (which is not part of the Schengen Area). Particularly since the French government closed down a Red Cross refugee centre in Sangatte near Calais in



   

 
  


2002, informal makeshift camps – subsumed under the term ‘Jungle’ or ‘New Jungle’ – were to be found in the vicinity of Calais (Kirby, 2009). Estimates of the number of people living in the ‘Jungle’ ranged from 1,300 (Guardian, 2014) to about 3,000 (Mulholland, 2015). Already before Sangatte had been closed down, migrants regularly tried the route across the Channel to the UK, mainly by hiding under lorries or in freight containers. Over the spring and summer of 2015, migrants seemed to change their strategies and approached the extensively fenced and guarded Eurotunnel terminal in groups of up to 200 people; at least 2,000 attempts have been reported within a short period of time, with between 500 and 1,000 migrants residing in the proximity of the terminal for several weeks (Elgot and Wintour, 2015). This change of strategy has – as already mentioned – been observed before around the Spanish exclaves of Ceuta and Melilla; one may assume a direct connection between the events. At the same time, the temporary visibility of the migration movement near Calais certainly attracts further undocumented migrants; a particular momentum can be observed.26 It also points to a changing approach to the self-perception of the undocumented migrants and changing structures of self-organisation. While until a few years ago it was paramount for the individual to stay hidden, recently undocumented migrants, not only in Calais but also in the proximity of the Spanish exclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, started to perceive themselves as part of a movement and to attack the border facilities in larger groups. The stronger visibility, hence, does not automatically imply an increase in the number of undocumented migrants but primarily points to changing conditions of visibility. Undocumented migrants, it seems, are claiming spaces of migration, spaces in which they gather and strategically operate. According to the French police, there have always been attempts to reach the terminal; in the course of July 2015, however, the figures went up fourfold; although obviously the security forces aren’t confronted with a completely new situation, and although the number of migrants succeeding in their aim to cross the Channel is assumed to be as marginal as before, the political response to the temporary visibility of the migrants putting their life in danger is harsh, the rhetoric derogatory – which may be interpreted primarily as the attempt to win the space back. British Prime Minister Cameron commented on the events, referring to metaphors of “swarms” (ibid.), and announced that his government would send soldiers to the French side of the tunnel in order to support French security forces’ ‘protection’ of the passage (Midgley, 2015); he also used the opportunity to announce that British immigration legislation will be made even more restrictive. There is a strong discrepancy between the fierce moral panic unleashed and the actual threat. By the time Cameron made his announcement, the migrants had still























































26 Even though ‘The Jungle’ has officially been shut down by the French government in late 2016, already in the spring of 2017, several hundred refugees started to gather again in the same area (Guillard, 2017).



  




not been able to reach the tunnel itself but had been kept in one of the surrounding security zones controlled by armed security forces and maltreated with pepper spray.


   
 

The films used in this work can be framed with regard to their approaches as being transnational, cinematic and documental; this section aims at justifying those classifications. Deploying theories from social sciences and cultural studies such as transnational theory to refer to modes of filmmaking and film analyses is not at all a new idea. With few exceptions, there has always been a reciprocal relationship between film practice and film theory.27 Especially, film movements challenging conventions and habits have always been escorted by considerable academic activity. Many different terms, including a considerable number of adjectives describing certain ideological features of a film – for example, postcolonial, hybrid, antiracist, ethnic, minority, other, marginal, mestizo, imperfect, interstitial 28 – have been deployed to describe cinematic modes and film languages transgressing the national container and dealing with questions of displacement and migration, marginalisation and difference. Each of the terms carries a more or less heavy conceptual weight; each of the terms is as useful as it needs to be subject to continuous revision.29 As I will outline in more detail in the following chapter, this work is primarily interested in the mutual stimulus of theories of transnational social spaces and transnational film theories. Concepts of what authors since the early 1990s refer to as transnational cinema (a.o. Bergfelder, 2005; Ezra and Rowden, 2006; Higbee and Lim 2010; Higson, 2000; Kinder, 1993; Lu, 1997) can be – among other influences – traced back to concepts of ‘intercultural cinema’ (Marks, 2000) or ‘multicultural cinema’ (Shohat and Stam, 2003) on the one hand and ‘third cinema’ (Guneratne and Dissanayake, 2003) or ‘accented cinema’ (Naficy, 2001) on the other. It is interested less in positioning filmmakers or audiences in a specific setting or (marginal, mestizo, ethnic) subject position, and more in the interstitials and (productive) contradictions of contemporary multicultural societies. At the same time, it shares with many of the concepts mentioned above a strong belief in























































27 See, e.g., the influence the theory of Realism had on French auteur cinema and the ‘Nouvelle Vague’ and Formalist theories’ impact on Soviet cinema. 28 For a comprehensive consideration of many of the terms mentioned here, see, e.g., Marks, 2000, and Naficy, 2001. 29 Making their claim for the term ‘multiculturalism’, Shohat and Stam (2003) even note that in some cases it makes more sense to return to a term that is supposed to be outmoded than to invent a new one.



   

 
  


politically significant art and cinema as a potential space for resistance and is “characterized by experimental styles that attempt to represent the experience of living between two or more cultural regimes of knowledge” (Marks, 2000, p.1), indicating a sort of mediated movement or mobility between cultural regimes, synthesising “new forms of expression and new kinds of knowledge” (ibid., p.7). Already in the 1960s, ‘third cinema’ or ‘tercer cine’ was sparked by the radical manifesto Towards a Third Cinema by the Latin American filmmakers Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas. Deeply impressed by revolutionary socialist movements in the Americas, they opposed the Hollywood model of cinema as an income-generating entertainment tool, driven by a neocolonial capitalist system. This model, they summarised, “only dealt with effect, never with cause; it was cinema of mystification or anti-historicism” (1969, p.108). Assuming that films are primarily a valuable tool of communication, they made a claim for the potentiality and the democratising force of guerrilla filmmaking, using inventive artistic practices in order to decolonise the Third World and its citizens as part of a utilitarian, national project. They wrote: “The camera is the inexhaustible expropriator of image-weapons; the projector, a gun that can shoot 24 frames per second” (ibid. p.127). ‘Third cinema’ in this regard is committed to realism and aims at representing people’s reality and their interpretations of it, “destruction of the image that neocolonialism has created of itself and of us, and construction of a throbbing, living reality which recaptures truth in any of its expressions” (ibid., p.123). Their claim is, however, clearly bound to a national container and an understanding of truth that almost five decades later reads a little naively. In the aftermath of the manifesto’s publication, in Latin America and beyond films emerged that directly reflected the Eurocentric elimination of the distinction between history and reality and the associated understanding that “the history of the West is also the erasure of the reality of the West’s others” (Guneratne, 2003, p.5). Films worth mentioning in this context include the Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène’s feature film XALA (CURSE, 1974) in which two competing histories clash, “the urban modernism bequeathed by the pseudo-progressive colonizing west and the atavistic pre-colonial [gender disparities inherent in the practices of polygamy] that remain embedded in a corrupting political environment” (ibid.). One of the films challenging Eurocentric modes of representation most obviously is Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s COMO ERA GOSTOSO O MEU FRANCÊS (HOW TASTY WAS MY LITTLE FRENCHMAN, 1971). Published at the peak of political repression by Brazil’s military regime and inspired by the mid 16th-century narrative of a German captive of the Brazilian Tupinambá, he in essence “cannibalizes” dominant film language and style along the lines of the Modernist ‘Manifesto Antropófago’ (de Andrade, 1928). Subtly, Pereira dos Santos undermines the selfrepresentation and narrative of Brazil’s authoritative military regime by contrasting its official history with a surprisingly disrespectful re-narration of the colonial era. Although ‘third cinema’ gained considerable influence in Latin American film production, as a theory it has widely been neglected for at least three decades.



  




While Solanas and Getino considered it as an entirely revolutionary movement, a kind of guideline for filmmakers, the idea was eventually revisited in the early 2000s in order to conceptualise and rethink it as a broader theoretical concept providing an alternative to Eurocentric theory (Guneratne and Dissanayake, 2003) and sparked many of the concepts and practical and theoretical approaches to filmmaking mentioned above. While at the same time the issue of undocumented migration has sparked filmmakers’ artistic production and creativity at least since the mid 1990s, the focus of such works has shifted considerably over the past decade. More or less parallel to a cinema labelled ‘post-migration cinema’30 – films that are often produced by migrants or their descendants and that are dealing with the demands of a multicultural or post-migrant society, the social contradictions of today’s immigration societies in Europe and diasporic or transnational social spaces in general, often in the light of a debate of a European identity that accounts for the realities of immigration societies (Betts, 2009) – particularly filmmakers based in southern European countries made the attempt to reveal the presence of undocumented migrants in what was then usually referred to as ‘Fortress Europe’. Setting their mostly fictionalised stories in the “marginal and peripheral sectors of rural and urban areas or less regulated zones of cities where irregular migrants can disappear in crowds or hide out in buildings in order to avoid being discovered” (ibid., p.61), the filmmakers began drafting alternative representations in order to visualise who they identified as the institutionally and socially unrecognised.31 Against the background of an ongoing debate about the multicultural society, they measured the “contact zones […], social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other” (ibid., p.63). Over the past decade, two major shifts in filmmakers’ approach to undocumented migration can be observed. On the one hand, more and more documentary films have been produced, which may have to do with technological developments but may also be interpreted as illustrating a general shift in the structure and relevance of visual discourses around migration, as an insistent response to the fundamental changes in the visual-political arena of migration. On the other hand, and closely connected to changes in migration movements and political measures taken in order to contain it (e.g. the establishment of Frontex, the technical upgrade of border surveillance and the introduction of new tools for the collection of data























































30 Including, e.g., the beur cinéma or cinema de banlieu movement in France since the 1980s with films focusing on the lives of people of Maghrebi origin in France, many of those produced by directors of North African descent (Tarr, 2005), e.g. Mathieu Kassovitz’s LA HAINE (1995). In Germany, the films of the filmmaker Fatih Akın are often subsumed under the label post-migration cinema. 31 Cf. e.g. Hans-Christian Schmid’s LICHTER (2003).



   

 
  


such as the European fingerprint database Eurodac), in addition to the inner European peripheries it began accounting also for the outer European peripheries, the highly regulated border zones where the main characteristic of the migrant is the dialectics of movement and standstill. It moreover shifted from the story to the narrative and complemented what Pratt referred to as contact zones – social spaces “where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today” (1991, p.34) – by the many no-contact and transit zones. At the same time, it must be stated that undocumented migration can no longer be considered as unseen or invisible per se. Migration policy and media today draw upon the understanding of an increased relevance of media discourses; consequently, migration policy no longer intends to make irregular migration invisible – but rather to govern its objects by means of a regulated visibility (including the measures taken to control, anticipate or eventually wage war against undocumented migration). Although the dominant images of undocumented migration and migrants may be considered superficial, simplistic or even racist, they are omnipresent and entangled with image politics that aim at creating the subjects to be governed in order to make them disappear at the very same moment (Holert, 2008). While many of the documentary films in the field of migration aim at contributing to counterculture discourses, they at the same time are necessarily entangled with those image politics; they join a highly unequal combat around those images. However, many of those films follow different strategies in order to desymbolise and re-imagine the discursive figures and narratives by means of alternative means of knowledge production and a critical stance towards the representative function of film images in general and documental images in particular. Those films illustrate that non-European migrants heading for Europe have to make their decisions well before approaching the actual Schengen borders; they are forced to move along border zones, to ensconce themselves in transit, move back and forth through borderlands, mainly but not exclusively in Schengen’s geographically peripheral zones. The Schengen Area is in this regard considered a political entity that has been constituted with the exclusive aim of defining and constantly redefining the course, shape and permeability of European borders/border zones, the shape and relationship of European centres and peripheries, legal and illegal routes (for people and goods), eligible and ineligible visitors/movers. It transcends national borders as political boundaries, spheres of influence and action, not only with regard to measures directly linked to migration control.


  
  

This work focuses on a particular manifestation of the documentary; films that resemble feature films in their length and audience rather than taking the form of

  




short clips for news coverage. The selection does not aim at suggesting a clear-cut separation between good, innocent or neutral and bad and harmful documentary images; nor is this work interested in developing a general typology of documentary images or documentary films. It certainly, however, makes sense to differentiate between different forms of or approaches to the documentary. There are those that may not in the first place considered commodities produced in order to be fed into the endless stream of news production and dissemination, into the global news market. They are instead created following artistic approaches and motivations – often intertwined with political or ideological motivations; they assume autonomy of artistic production and often aim at challenging pre-defined perceptions to eventually stimulate a revealing of the context and constructedness of iconologies and knowledge. They reflect their own mediality as well as the potential context in which they are presented and consumed as artistic statements. I agree with Hohenberger (2012), who noted a shift in the spatial organisation of film. Film, she states, has left the cinema and moved into heavily equipped private households, while television simultaneously has left the living rooms and now appears either in the form of public events on large screens placed in pubs or on market squares – or extremely individualised on transportable miniature screens. I would like to complete Hohenberger’s observation: a certain form of the documentary image seems to have taken the place of film in the cinema; I would like to refer to such documentaries as cinematic documentaries, and below I will explain why. A second interesting feature of the films is how they combine rather ‘realistic’ and ‘constructivist’ documental approaches (Wöhrer, 2015a) to their field of interest. Neither do they present their images as reproducing reality, nor do the images dissolve in being mere cultural codes – rather, they refer to, and at the same time render, the rhetoric, attitudes, epistemologies and demands of the documental problematic in a sort of meta-documental discourse (Holert, 2008). Reality in this regard is localised in two different sites – it is, on the one hand, created in its perception and display (Wöhrer, 2015a); on the other hand, the images’ relation to their protagonists’ life realities is a subtext that contributes to the films’ relevance as political statements. The films also apply a practice that at the same time imparts a reflection on the conditions for the construction and the constructedness of the images; in this regard they may be considered as applying a “specific mode to evoke reality” (Wöhrer, 2015b, p.7). In the context of this work, a point Bartl (2012) makes is noteworthy: she reflects in how far the artist or filmmaker has control over the significances of the image he/she produces. Enquiring into the crucial issue of the political aspirations that the documental form and alternative visualisations or representations of the marginalised ‘Other’ often impart, she renders the localisation of the political in formal and artistic considerations as problematic because, on the one hand, even enforcing the fixation of the represented as the ‘Other’ involves a danger – and because, on the other hand, eventually it has nothing to set against the anticipation of those (potentially critical) visualisations by patriarchal and colonial traditions



   

 
  


of artistic representations of difference. She suggests, instead, focusing on the ontological definition of a political form accounting for the political practice of dealing with it – in other words, understanding the political as something that has to be interrogated and investigated because it does not emanate from prefixed certainties. While this aims at redefining the representation–reception nexus, in Bartl’s understanding it also opens a political perspective in which the representation carries the potential – or stimulates a reception – to establish the ‘Other’ as an emancipated subject. The films are also aware of their theoretical localisation and their mediality; they stand in some kind of dialogue with the pressing theoretical and political questions current undocumented migration movements prompt. And while the films on a visual level admit that the documental image lost the attribution of being an approved and certified reproduction of a reality that lies outside the film, they do, however, “provide a splendid opportunity to incredulously reflect the conditions of this approval, the belief in a representability of reality and the status of the realistic image in general” (Holert, 2008, p.191); different authors in this regard emphasise the paradoxical effect that the more the documental form critically and openly reflects its ambiguous relationship to reality and the more it relativises its significance as a carrier of truth, the more it is acknowledged as a tool extrapolating reality and truth (e.g. Wöhrer, 2015a; Holert, 2008; Steyerl, 2008). Images produced for cinema audiences necessarily speak a language that differs from those produced in order to support a report on a TV news show – not only in terms of speed and density, principles of montage and narrativisation, but also in terms of the role the filmmaker assigns its audience: are we addressed as mere spectators or rather as accomplices – are we supposed to (passively) consume or to (actively) participate? Are the images suggestive and explicit and potential interpretations more or less prefixed or are we invited to make sense of them? While it does obviously not make too much sense to investigate the images’ congruency with reality, the question of openness to interpretation is a crucial one. The French filmmaker and film theorist Jean-Luc Godard’s understanding of cinema may also be understood as investigating the interplay of image production and image reception. His reflections on the potential and mission of cinema first of all insist on drawing a clear line between cinema and television. While he understands cinema as “a form that thinks”, television is a medium “where there’s no longer anything to see: neither reality nor image” (Godard and Ishaghpour, 2005, p.7) only concerned with pre-defined content and avoiding interpretation, he considers it pure affirmation; cinema, in contrast, opens the possibility to “not create a world, but the possibility of a world” (ibid.) – the world emerging in the image is necessarily haunted by the possibility of another world. What in Godard’s thinking makes the cinematic image attractive is neither its beauty or fixity nor its completeness – it is its transparency, fragility and potentiality, the infinite number of potential links between different fragments and elements (van Toorn, 2007). The cinematic experience in this regard conveys affective images maintaining the non-actualisable part of experience (Deleuze, 1997a), while the cinematic image



  




at the same time positions itself and exists independently of the creator (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p.164). Cinema in this sense should be interested less in the thing itself and more in the space emerging between and through the thing as an event. Consequently, it must be characterised by a relationship with reality that is fundamentally different from television. Or to put it with Seeßlen (2014): cinema – once created to escape reality – today seems to be the only place where we can see the misery of our time as it is. On television we rather observe how it is made to vanish. In cinema, the possibility of montage causes an ever-new form of thinking in which the camera resembles a research instrument making hidden things visible (Pantenburg, 2006) – for the filmmaker as well as for the consumer. In this regard it may be considered only consistent that complementary television footage is often used in documentary films produced for cinema – as if it expresses the filmmakers’ longing to over and over again emphasise and visualise the demarcation line between television and cinema. Certainly Godard follows a political motivation when he develops such an oversimplified binary opposition of television and cinema – aimed at underlining cinema’s mission as less an archivist or chronologist and more an agent of societal change. While he develops a model or a claim not at least as a sort of artistic guideline for his own filming practice, the practice of filmmaking is certainly more complex: on the one hand, the contexts in which film may be presented are manifold and obviously not limited to television and cinema. Taking exhibitions and installations, Internet and educational purposes into consideration may widen the scope but it is certainly still not comprehensive. On the other hand, the medium alone does not exclusively determine the content of a film. Cinema in this regard is rather an aspiration than a place or genre. What is more, most films may certainly at the same time be utilised in different media and even be conceptualised as working in different settings. Nina Kusturica’s LITTLE ALIEN (2009), for example, is clearly following a transmedial approach, i.e. being comprehensible in the context of a festival or cinema screening as well as in an educational setting, for example in secondary school. After being released for cinemas, it has also been screened on television and published on DVD. In addition, the website www.littlealien.at is used to provide complementary information and content – among other things, a glossary and school materials – that may even work independently from the film. BAB SEBTA (2008) on the other hand is a digital low-budget production that was produced without the context of its screening being predictable; after having been screened at some independent film festivals, it is now available from an online documentary film platform and has never been officially released on film material or DVD. While boundaries between different media are easy to cross, and in many contexts such a cross-media approach turns out to be extremely productive, Godard’s conceptualisation of cinema may, however, be considered adequate in implying that one has to differentiate between different approaches to filmmaking. Perpetuating his artistically motivated and oversimplified binary opposition of television



   

 
  


and cinema, today we may – ruthlessly ignoring the variety of contexts mentioned above – assume a general opposition of news and cinema. While news follows the goal of providing authentic answers, cinematic documentary is content with raising authentic questions – it is an emancipatory technique (Wöhrer, 2015a). Following Daney (2000), who stated that film is a scalpel, we should consequently move the focus away from the medium and rather consider the act and practice of filmmaking as central – and understand the common news approach to documentary film as being contrasted by a cinematic approach to the filming, montage and production of documentary images. I would like to suggest the understanding of a cinematic approach in this regard as being mainly characterised by the specific relationship between the camera and the protagonists; the act of filmmaking is connected to, and reflects, the protagonists’ actions and activities in the film and assumes autonomy of both – and of the image itself. While the camera certainly may be interested in making things visible, this is not its main feature; rather, it is interested in visualising transformations – or processes of transformation and transition. Consequently, the viewer is addressed as being more than just a viewer, and rather a “trans-active participant” (Bellenbaum, 2013, p.33) with an active role in the creation of a fragmented and yet continuous narrative, in the organisation of spatial orientation, proximity, distance and identifications – in other words, in the production and contextualisation of meaning and significance. This at the same time implies that the camera or the filmmaker does not vanish behind the images or try to camouflage his/her role as a creator nor the mediality of the film image. In avoiding consumer-oriented perspectives, the cinematic documentary sustains the possibility of another world, that is, allows and even invites a variety of perspectives to be taken without being indifferent. At the same time, its images are neither beautiful nor complete; the real and the symbolic merge in the cinematic – preserving the images’ transparency, fragility and potentiality. It puts the act of identification and continuity to test, deploys purposeful breaks, fragmentations and gaps. Where the images freeze and where it leaves blank spaces, the film mobilises the viewer. In a setting, however, where the assumption that we have seen everything is prevalent, the identification and permission of blank spaces – let alone the purposeful creation of blank spaces – is extremely challenging. The eight films primarily used in this work have shortly been outlined in the previous chapter. They all implicitly or explicitly address iconologies of illegal migration and document frictions between European migration policies, iconologies of migration and the dialectics of migrants’ invisibility and visibility. They have in common that they allow themselves to be read as filmmakers’ attempts to become involved in discursive participation as a political issue, and to establish their protagonists as subjects in the first place. The majority of the films have been produced by filmmakers with a personal migration narrative or experience. The filmmakers are certainly all committed to truth – not least because being devoted to the opposite would imply disseminating lies and propaganda. They partake in a visual discourse based on their diagnosis that the images dominating



  




the archives of memory do not adequately represent what is going on according to their assessment of the situation, their truth. In this regard, the assumption of a reality that one may aim to depict in the most adequate way, and the potential for societal change, is what may be assumed to propel the filmmakers in the first place. None of them aims at merely showing – when they try to show reality in the most adequate way they aim at confronting the viewer with the possibility of societal change in the first place. An interesting aspect regarding the analysis of the films considers the degree to which they differentiate visualisation and recognition – in other words, how far they follow the naive idea that showing the world as it is might cause a change to the things implicitly scandalised. None of the filmmakers, however, aims at creating unambiguity – their means to produce evidence is hence also open to slight misconceptions; see, for example, Berger’s reading of the film BAB SEBTA. In her otherwise interesting essay on the polyphony of filmic narration, she summarises the setting of the film as being “no longer located in Europe, but takes the audience on a journey through Northern Africa in order to investigate the reasons for migration […] BAB SEBTA depicts the hope, aspirations and desperations of Africans willing to undertake dangerous journeys as irregular migrants in order to enter Europe” (2010, p.221).

She relocates the issues raised in the film to a regime neighbouring Europe – in fact, the space measured by the directors Pinho and Lobo is unconceivable without the existence of the European migration regime. At the same time, being irregular can hardly be assumed to be the self-perception of a person seeking to enter the European Union – and certainly the filmmakers are not exclusively interested in the migrants’ individual aspirations and desperations but also in investigating the contrast between the exclusive character of the European border regime and its far-reaching repercussions on the one hand and the transnational and trans-social networking that implies a fundamental autonomy of migration on the other. But the main misunderstanding lies elsewhere. Pinho and Lobo couldn’t care less about the reasons for migration. They take the legitimacy of migration movements for granted and instead focus on the circumstances of becoming an irregular migrant and the (legal and discursive) barriers that need to be crossed in order to be recognised as a migrant at all; they don’t provide explanations, they document transformations. BAB SEBTA is, like all the other films, not a journalistic piece – this has also major implications for the role and the production of evidence.







 
  


Against the background of the ongoing crisis and the configuration and discursive framework of undocumented migration described in the previous section, this chapter serves to outline a more general appreciation of the disposition of European borders and borderlands as visual-politically constituted spaces where policy implementation and migration movements are confronted with each other and interact in a disparate transnational social space. In order to be able to conceptualise a transdisciplinary analytical framework for the visualities of undocumented migration through European borderlands, the underlying political configurations of European borderlands will be further investigated. Two important developments on a theoretical level have accompanied the change of migration landscapes that this work considers starting points for a theoretical framework to account for the visual-political character of undocumented migration processes. On the one hand, different approaches of transnational migration and transnational social spaces and networks have gained considerable relevance in migration discourses since the late 1990s, which have also been anticipated in film studies; on the other hand, a strong concern about the (de-)construction of borders and boundaries, border-crossing and deterritorialisation can be perceived at least for the last decade. Both developments cannot be considered as separate lines of thinking; they inform each other and encircle similar issues. In addition to those developments, this chapter suggests a reading of Europeanisation processes and cultures of border control as, on the one hand, following particular political considerations and principles and, on the other, in an interplay with migration movements that themselves establish a visual-political transnational space that will here be referred to as “Borderland Schengen". It defines an analytical framework but at the same time a methodological approach to the investigation of the interplay of the visual, the social and the political in a constitutively transnational topography.









   

 
  




 
  
 
The theoretical fundament of this work will mainly deploy theories of the transnational as an “epistemological and methodological tool that helps to account for political and conceptual developments and strategies of migrants that have not been conceptualised by the mainstream in social science and cultural studies” (Karakayalı and Tsianos, 2007, p.9). Those processes are to a considerable extent also visual processes – which is illustrated not least by visual studies beginning to incorporate transnational theories in order to enhance their understanding of contemporary film production (e.g. Ďurovičová and Newman, 2010; Ezra and Rowden, 2006; Higbee and Lim, 2010; Strobel and Jahn-Sudmann, 2009). I would like to undertake a short excursion into the emergence of theories of the transnational: concepts of transnationalism were first used in the 1960s to analyse political relations and supranational private, public or political structures, organisations and institutions. In political science and international relations, transnationalism was adapted to refer to institutions and interaction above the national level, like the European Union, the United Nations and other multilateral consortia of nation states. In organisation theory and management literature, the term refers to companies that are transnationally organised in terms of ownership, headquarters, personnel and facilities. In anthropological and sociological contexts, the term has been used since the 1990s to focus “mainly on the everyday life of certain groups of people, especially migrants” (Pries, 2001a, p.17), primarily in order to scrutinise classical migration research’s unilinear assimilationist paradigm (Levitt, 2001). In the 1990s, Glick Schiller, Basch and Szanton Blanc promoted the theorisation of transnational migration (1995; see also Basch, Glick Schiller and Szanton Blanc, 1997). They suggested understanding increasing numbers of immigrants in the US and Europe as transmigrants, “immigrants whose daily lives depend on multiple and constant interconnections across international borders and whose public identities are configured in relationship to more than one nation-state” (Glick Schiller, Basch and Szanton Blanc, 1995, p.48). Communities formed by migrants in their new surrounding should not be considered as a reflector or extension of their original communities or as aliens in a stable social field, but rather be considered as qualitatively new social groups in new social fields. “These new social fields build upon both the new and the former region. They connect these regions to each other, but are at the same time more than just the sum of the two” (Pries, 2001a, p.17f). Processes of transnationalisation link societies of origin, passage and residence; immigrants are not considered uprooted but rather “forge and sustain simultaneous multi-stranded social relations” (Glick Schiller, Basch and Szanton Blanc, 1995, p.48) – thus establishing “social fields that cross geographic, cultural and political borders” (Basch, Glick Schiller and Szanton Blanc, 1997, p.7) and, even more, establishing “a new modus of social reproduction under the






 
  




circumstances of global restructuring that force the community to balance its property and members between two different livelihoods” (Davis, Azzellini and Kanzleiter, 1999, p.121). With regard to undocumented migration, this poses – at least – two important questions: How is this form of social reproduction interconnected with (or obstructed by) migration policy-implementation strategies and what role do memberships and social practice play in processes of undocumented migration? A particular focus in this regard lies on the dimension of the passage rather than departure and regions or countries of departure and arrival establishing a transnational social field. Glick Schiller, Basch and Szanton Blanc (1995) account for three major forces in the global economy that lead immigrants to live transnational lives in the centres of global capitalism: first, social and economic conditions in both labour-sending and labour-receiving countries are deteriorating so that none of the locations constitutes a secure terrain of settlement; second, economic and political insecurity related to racism; and third, political loyalties among immigrants connected to nation-building projects in both home and host societies. While all three forces are still effective, from today’s perspective we may have to add at least a fourth reason for leading a transnational life: the chimaera of globalised capitalism and Internetpromoted global lifestyle; in this regard, diasporas themselves must be considered as what classical microeconomic migration theories would call a strong pull factor (Knott, 2010). Moreover, as the above outlined categorisation hardly accounts for undocumented migration processes, one would have to add at least one more reason for leading a transnational life: the European migration regime itself, meaning the complex interplay between Europeanisation and its legal framework and implementation on the one hand and transnational, flexible migration movements on the other (Transit Migration Forschungsgruppe, 2007). This, moreover, points to the fact that a transnational life cannot exclusively be lived in what Glick Schiller, Basch and Szanton Blanc call “the centres of global capitalism” – especially with regard to processes of undocumented migration, transnational networks can be considered as the main elements of the daily struggle for survival. Although he considers the overall concept of transnational migration useful especially in referring to social fields and social spaces transgressing and spanning different nation states/regions/livelihoods, Pries criticises Glick Schiller, Basch and Szanton Blanc for stopping “half way toward really abandoning the notion of the national container society as a basic concept” (Pries, 2001a, p.18). While Basch, Glick Schiller and Szanton Blanc (1997) argue that the assumption of a deterritorialised nation state can be considered a form of resistance, Pries, in contrast – and instead of referring to the alleged deterritorialisation of space and nation states – calls for a concept of transnational social spaces based on an analysis of “the very different forms of social spaces and the very different levels of geographic spaces” (2001a, p.18). In his view, “a social space cannot exist without reference to a geographic space, but the emerging transnational social spaces cannot be adequately drawn in terms of, and by reference to, nation-states” (ibid.). He



   

 
  


understands “transnational social spaces as configurations of social practices, artefacts and symbol systems that span different geographic spaces in at least two nation states without constituting a new ‘deterritorialised’ nation-state” (ibid.). Levitt (2001) in this regard points the attention to the fact that transnational ties not only link regions or countries of origin and destination but also extend to other communities in other countries based on shared religious or ethnic backgrounds, which in consequence leads to a simultaneous reproduction of a being in more than one place; the transnational migrant in this regard links the different contexts and at the same time stimulates changes in both (Vertovec, 2009); transnational social networks materialise within and structure fluid social spaces (Pries, 2005). Following this line of thinking, Vertovec (2009) stresses the necessity to account for transnational practices as fundamentally altering key societal structures as they stimulate interwoven processes of economic, political, socio-cultural and religious transformation. With regard to undocumented migration movements through European border zones, this can be considered a useful starting point as it transgresses the notion of the duality of departure and arrival and refers to social practices and social networks rather than membership – hence establishing or at least taking into account the non-linearity of the geographies of migration. Moreover, considering transnational migration as being entangled with social practices, artefacts and symbol systems and processes of transformation in general hints at the relevance of considering the formation of social fields in migration processes in general as also visual processes. Especially two conceptual delineations undertaken by Glick Schiller (2009) and Faist, Fauser and Reisenauer (2013) must against this background be considered useful to further contour the specifics of undocumented migrants’ transnational existences. On the one hand, it is Glick Schiller’s (2009) differentiation between transnational ways of being and ways of belonging. Ways of being refer to migrants’ social practices and relations, the “various quotidian acts through which people live their lives” (p.31); ways of belonging, in contrast, describe “identity practices that signal or enact a conscious connection to a particular group” (ibid). While both dimensions must in general be considered unstable and ambiguous, they are even more so when it comes to lives led in protracted and involuntary transit situations. Social practices and relations as well as notions of belonging and identity practices are put under permanent scrutiny – and especially the relationship between being and belonging is in constant disarray. On the other hand, also Faist, Fauser and Reisenauer’s conceptualisation of what they refer to as ‘the three transnationals’ (2013) – transnationalisation, transnational social spaces and transnationality – adds to a more elaborate differentiation between different migration and transit situations. While migrants’ ties and practices as well as their movement are considered subject to processes of transnationalsation, the social formations established as part of this process are referred to as transnational social spaces. Finally, transnationality describes the level of






 
  




connectivity across borders. Especially the transnational social fields, “taking various forms, including kinship groups, circuits and communities” (p.2), must be considered extremely unstable – but at the same time also a potential strategic resource for undocumented migrants. The films used in this work stimulate a widened concept of the transmigrant in so far as they not only refer to people who have more than one being or live their lives in more than one country (Levitt and Glick Schiller, 2004) but also include those whose fundaments of being/belonging is shaken and whose present lives are not clearly linked to any home because they are stuck in a transit or borderland situation. Their being is makeshift or involuntary; their belonging may relate to their place of origin or departure, an ambition or desired destination, but most of all to a, for the time being, non-realisable localisation. They do not belong to more than one society but rather to an evolving transnational network that is in many regards cut off from host societies. At the same time, the focus on the term ‘space’ does emphasise the spatial relationships that individuals in general establish with their environment (Ozkul, 2012; Voigt-Graf, 2004); and from a social geographer’s perspective, it stresses the multi-layered spaces that transnational migrations and migrants actually produce by means of their movement, their memberships and loyalties, and the other ties that they uphold. Pries, in this regard, points to the shift in the perception of the relationship between the social and the spatial, a disruption also facilitating an enhanced understanding of “new arrangements of the social and the spatial” (2001b, p.51) in migration dynamics as well as in human life in general. Glick Schiller’s above mentioned emphasis on transnational ways of being and ways of belonging and the different states of awareness of one’s being involved in transnational social fields is consequently also interesting with regard to the constitution of the transnational social networks that are being created in, and are constantly re-creating, European borderlands. While research into transnational social fields and networks has diversified at least since the early 2000s, and further evolved also in interdisciplinary contexts in order to develop new approaches to issues of membership and citizenship, ethnicity and religion, entrepreneurship, remittances and development, the transnationalisation of migration studies itself has so far hardly been realised.1 While Hess and Tsianos noted this already in 2007, contributions in this regard are still rare. On the one hand, still only few studies on transnational migration are available that consistently transgress the nation-state container by means of multi-sited or mobile research designs; on the other hand, most of the available studies do not fully conceptualise the interdependencies between migration policies and potentially deliberate and explicit transnational migration strategies. Recent academic and























































1

For an enquiry into the methodological implications of a transnational approach to migration studies, see Faist, Fauser and Reisenauer, 2013.



 

 
  


public discourses around the postulate of migrant integration have only rarely been analysed against a transnational background – indeed, the nation state as the main frame of reference seems to regain significance. Though it is sometimes argued that globalisation creates and re-creates transnational social spaces and networks and the interconnectedness of global regions through cheap mobility and the Internet,2 the study of the transnational seems to ignore scrutinising the social spaces and networks created through irregular migration processes through European borderlands. This is surprising given the fact that Europe today without a doubt is a space deeply influenced by transnational migration as well as by undocumented migration – and not only because a considerable amount of Europe’s population upholds connections to other contexts of origin. It can be observed that European immigration policies today have a transnational character themselves and that they are interacting with migrant transnationalism; hence, the analysis of the institutional political actors and the relevant practices have to be subject to a transnational perspective as well. At the same time, the analysis of undocumented migration processes cannot draw upon the dichotomy of the nation state or the supranational state on the one side and transnational space on the other: it can only be read as interplay. Consequently, one has to assume an interaction between – instead of a division of – territory and social life (Karakayalı and Tsianos, 2007). Multi-spatial migration strategies not only construct new social formations (Pries, 1999); at the same time, they increasingly constitute a reference for common lifestyles including economic and political activities and biographical conceptions. Moreover, they put the concept of the nation-state container model of sociality in question and direct attention to post- and transnational conditions of life, work and reproduction (Karakayalı and Tsianos, 2007, p.9). Appadurai (2000) goes a step further and approaches transnational practices and migrant networks as constituting a counter-hegemonic political space; in this reading, transnationalism appears to be a strategy aimed at opposing migration policies, as an “unintended product of a restrictive migration policy that it pretends to suppress – however failing in doing so” (Hess and Tsianos, 2007, p.23). A major step towards a transnational understanding of Europeanisation processes and undocumented migration has been undertaken by Transit Migration Forschungsgruppe (2007). They acknowledge the productivity of new forms of governing migration within the process of European integration and understand the transnationalisation of migration policies as a response to an increasing transnationalisation of migration practices and strategies. Europeanisation in this regard “seems to make migrants’ flexible adaption of subject positions in the context of border crossing the purpose of its control mechanisms” (Hess and Tsianos,























































2

For a theorisation of the differences between transnational social fields and transnational cultural flows, see Glick Schiller, 2009.






 
  




2007, p.24). Consequently, they suggest a transnational analysis of European migration policy centring on the movements of migration as a starting point for explorations into politics – by focusing not on the categories implemented by legislation on foreigners and migrants but, instead, on the strategies migrants develop in dealing with these categorisations/legislation and their impact (ibid.).


    

 
Meanwhile, the benchmark of transnationalism has gained growing influence also in the study of film at least since the early 1990s (a.o. Bergfelder, 2005; Ezra and Rowden, 2006; Higbee and Lim, 2010; Higson, 2000; Kinder, 1993; Lu, 1997); various attempts have been made since then to apply the framework of transnationalism to the analysis of film either as a descriptive or a conceptual tag. A considerable number of authors focus predominantly on obvious changes in film production and distribution processes; others refer to an emerging transnational notion in storytelling and setting in feature films as well as in documentaries. One of the reasons can be found in the understanding, as Higbee and Lim (2010) argue, that the paradigm of the national can no longer adequately explain the production, consumption and representation of cultural identity; instead, the authors claim a film theory, taking into account that “every narrative has a discursive history and gains currency in specific configurations of power/knowledge and at particular spatio-temporal junctures” (Higbee and Lim, 2010, p.9), and thus disposing of the artificial distinction between the descriptive and the prescriptive. Higbee and Lim (2010) identify three main approaches to the adaption of transnational theories to film studies. The first approach (a.o. Higson, 2000) consults the transnational mainly to understand cultural and economic conditions that transgress national borders and impact on all cultural production including cinema. While an analytical framework based on the national is considered too limited to adequately address questions of production, distribution and exhibition of film, a transnational model is preferred. Although there seems to be a general interest in the political, economic and ideological formations a film is embedded in, it hardly accounts for implicit power imbalances and issues of migration, diaspora and the politics of difference. A second approach (a.o. Lu, 1997; Nestingen and Elkington 2005) can be described as being mainly interested in analyses of the transnational as a regional phenomenon. While the focus is on the shared heritage of different national cinemas, the term ‘transnational’ seems to be inappropriate. The third approach Higbee and Lim (2010) identify (and favour) “relates to work on diasporic, exilic and postcolonial cinemas, which aims, through its analysis of the cinematic representation of cultural identity, to challenge the western (neocolonial) construct of nation and national culture and, by extension, national cinema as stable and Eurocentric in its ideological norms as well as its narrative and aesthetic formations.” (Higbee and Lee, 2010, p.9)



   

 
  


Diasporic and exilic filmmakers are at the centre of this approach, which is strongly influenced by postcolonial theory and cultural studies, and is consequently much more aware of power relations between the centre and the margin, insiders and outsiders, than the approaches mentioned above. Naficy (2001) and Marks (2000) exemplify this approach, which is almost exclusively interested in films dealing with issues of migration, displacement and identities in flux. Those films aim at overcoming the simplifying binary of home and host and question the notion of stable concepts of the national. While the use of the term ‘transnational’ seems to be highly appropriate in this case, a potential limitation “is that diasporic or postcolonial ‘transnational’ cinema is consistently located on the margins of dominant film cultures or the peripheries of industrial practices, making it almost impossible to evaluate the impact such films might have on mainstream or popular cinema within either a national or transnational context.” (Higbee and Lim, 2010, p.10)

This last approach certainly raises questions about authority and authenticity. Who is allowed to speak and who should be heard? Is a European filmmaker who does not have a history of migration or exile entitled to, for example, produce a film dealing with displacement and invisibility? Marks argues that most works in this field derive from “new cultural formations of Western metropolitan centres, which in turn have resulted from global flows of immigration, exile and diaspora” (2000, p.1). It must indeed be noted that the increased use of the term ‘transnational’ contributes less to render it more precisely. Although the threefold model mentioned above is rather sketchy and leaves many questions open, it does, however, illustrate how diversely and contradictorily the term is used – less because it contradicts theoretical concepts and rather more due to the various descriptive implications it is assumed to carry. One of the dangers connected to the wide use of the term and its haziness – and this also reflects a debate within the field of transnational migration studies (Pries, 2001a) – is the instable correlation between the national and the transnational. The transnational can neither replace the national nor should the national be negated. The national does not expire – in fact it “continues to exert the force of its presence even within transnational film-making practices” (Higbee and Lim, 2010, p.10). Used as a general marker for international co-production or the involvement of personnel from different parts of the world in the production of a film – in other words, a shorthand for any kind of film production that transgresses the borders of the national – it seems to be “employing a difference that, we might say, makes no difference at all”, thus turning into “a potentially empty, floating signifier” (ibid.). Instead, any conceptualisation of the transnational should acknowledge the political, economic and aesthetic implications of the term on the one hand and its production, consumption and representation on the other. At the same time, it has to reflect its complex (political and symbolic) relationship with the national and the nation-state container beyond understanding it as two sides of the same coin.






 
  




A critical transnationalism is what Higbee and Lim claim to “interpret more productively the interface between global and local, national and transnational, as well as moving away from a binary approach to national/transnational and from a Eurocentric tendency of how such films might be read” (ibid.). As the transnational model, however, doubtlessly has its own limitations and boundaries, hegemonies, ideologies and marginalisations, the authors point out the necessity “not to theorize transnational cinema only in the conceptual-abstract but also to examine its deployment in the concrete-specific so that the power dynamic in each case can be fully explored and exposed” (ibid.). In other words: concepts of transnational cinema have to take the respective background and specific contexts of its production, representation and consumption into account; for analyses of transnational cinema and films, it is imperative to consider all levels of knowledge production as equally important; the filmmaker’s biographical background is as important as the production history, the narrative on the screen as important as the audiences’ keys to understanding and interpreting. In the late 1990s, Hess and Zimmermann suggested a concept of adversarial transnational documentaries that seems most relevant with regard to the films used in this work, “tracing interactions between and around cultures; performing histories; imagining new subjectivities and alliances; mapping conflicts as multidimensional; traversing fantasies and material limits, cultures and political economies; formulating new analytics; and locating new emancipatory places” (1997, p.12). They advocate for an interception of representation, artistic practice and policy, a documentary-filming practice that transgresses different borders by rejecting the nation as given and by superseding the binary oppositions of centre/periphery and first world/third world.



 
 
   
What Hess and Zimmermann also advocate for is not only to find new ways of imagining relations but also to eventually defy and remake borders – by means of connecting across borders in order to “provisionally think through new ways of making connections across real and imaginary borders of immigration, race, class, gender, identity, diaspora and nation” (ibid., p.10). The issue of borders is deeply entangled with that of transnationalism and the disruption of the social and the spatial mentioned above. There seems to be an uncertainty about the relevance of borders in a globalising world that is often perceived as borderless and deterritorialised and a certain shiftlessness with regard to current cultures of border control and the ethical and political implications they have. Globalisation and regional integration on the one hand and the impact of the world wide web on the other seem to have made boundaries and borders more permeable for people, capital, goods and information. Consequently, notions of deterritorialisation and of a borderless world have been seized by a number of scholars (Wastl-Walter, 2011);



   

 
  


however, despite such significant territorial reconfigurations and re-territorialisation, “human activity continues to take place within well defined territories” (Newman 2003, p.87). As a matter of fact, even the seemingly free world wide web – without a doubt, one of the driving forces behind cultural globalisation and mobility – today is subject to serious combats around ownership, copyrights, censorship, capital acquisition, technical boundaries and political control; in almost all cases, the most important actors involved are national agencies of different states and – increasingly – multinational companies. The academic argument around the interplay of borders, territory and social space led to the development of a number of terms aimed at accounting for the various political and social implications of borders. While borders are often understood as lines along which two politically defined territories meet, concepts of borderlands and border zones emerged to incorporate the relationship between territories on both sides of the borderlines. Both are usually understood as areas of transition in proximity of the border and often considered as either connecting similar territorial, ethnic or cultural spaces or as hybrid spaces in which (two!) cultures and languages intermix (Newman, 2011). In most readings, such borderlands or border zones exist despite being cut by a borderline. In the understanding of this work, borderlands exist because of the actual political border; they form social spaces deeply affected by political borders and their various implications – not necessarily in the vicinity of a particular border, potentially even thousands of kilometres distant from the respective political border. Van Houtum emphasises also that the focus on migration is “not necessarily a self-evident characteristic of the border. But increasingly it has become one of the most politically sensitive and influential factors shaping the nature and consequences of borders at our time” (2012, p.405). In a world where multilateral free-trade agreements such as TTIP and CETA3 aim at flattening borders for goods and capital in order to stimulate an increase in transatlantic trade and investment, one might consider the idea that “Europe is a project of migration” (Römhild, 2010, p.50) and that migration has consequently become the only factor shaping the nature and localisation at least of European borders. Recent works in the field of border studies acknowledge that borders are socially and politically constructed and – which is clearly expressed in the term “b/ordering” (van Houtum, 2012) – power relations and a social practice of spatial differentiation (Megoran, 2012). According to Newman, a border is created and managed in a way that serves the interests of power elites – “always initially created as a means of separation” (2011, p.35). It must be considered as a reality affecting daily life patterns and determining the parameters of exclusion and inclusion; it “creates the categories through which social and spatial compartmentalization is perpetuated. As such borders are transformed into institutions which























































3

Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA).






 
  




have their own set of rules” (ibid., p.36). The border in the appearance of a line can usually only be found in a map of an area; neither it is painted on the ground nor are borders usually visible in any other form – until they are made visible. Only in being visually and physically manifest, and in there being a visual expression of it being a border, does a border exist at all. Even if the manifestation sometimes may resemble a line, as in the form of turnpikes, fences, walls, and to some extent rivers, in most cases even those facilities are rather more symbolic than adequate representations of the nicely drawn lines on a map. Border facilities follow much more functional geographies than politically negotiated lines.4 Van Houtum in this regard notes that a “line is geometry, a border is interpretation” (2011, p.50). Consequently, there is much more to a borderland than two neighbouring regions left and right of the borderline. He suggests deconstructing the border – regardless of the actual visibility or tangibility of a border – because “the borderland may be emptied of the border proper; the head of the borderlander is not emptied” (ibid.). Such deconstruction is obligatory “in order to make it possible to ontologically reinterpret this persistent phenomenon called the border” (ibid.). A border can have numerous forms and it can be drawn everywhere; it can take the form of a wall, a fence, a gate, a river, a shore, a greenfield, a line on the map or in the sand – but “a border has no original model, it is a simulation of a model […], a simulacrum, a manifestation of a copy, but with its own reality” (ibid.). At the same time, the physical appearance of the border does not necessarily equal its implications and impact – the normative relevance of the border is constructed by the symbolic meaning attributed to its appearance. It can thus not be considered or interpreted as an object alone, which makes the study of the physical appearance of the border – although especially heavily armed patrols and barbarous fences easily attract attention – less relevant than “the objectification process of the border, the socially constituted power practices attached to the border that construct a spatial effect and which give demarcation in space its meaning and influence” (ibid.). In other words: the physical appearance of the border or borderline is only one of various aspects and features of the border – a border that is constructed by various actors and their interests, actions and practices and that stretches way beyond the politically defined borderline. Van Houtum and van Naaerssen (2002) suggest using the verb bordering to account for an active and vigorous understanding of the border: because the “border makes and is made” (van Houtum 2011: 51).























































4

Particularly, the manifestation of borders at airports illustrates this: although mainland UK does not have a land border with any other country, travellers entering its territory by airplane have to cross the ‘UK border’ put up in the middle of the airport. Without it being also constructed visually – by huge dark-blue signs located above the immigration officers’ heads – nobody would even consider the existence of this border; the actual border is a placeholder for the very concept of the border.



   

 
  


In her examination of the border between Mexico and the United States, Gloria Anzaldúa laid the tracks for what we today understand as border theory. She suggested accounting for the non-physical implications of border-crossing. While a border may be considered “a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge”, set up “to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them” (1987, p.3), a borderland forms “a third country” (ibid.) implying a particular form of border culture. In her reading, the borderland is “a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of unnatural boundary. It is a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants” (ibid.). Her mestiza feminism or border feminism approach points to the interconnectedness of otherness, social inequality and identity – opening up transit zones implying the potential for radical political subjectivity. The borderland is in this regard considered a clearly gendered space; any of its structural, discursive, interactional and agentic dimensions can be sites for feminist/gendered analyses (Segura and Zavella, 2008). Drawing upon Anzaldúa’s work, Naples understands those populating the borderlands as being “able to negotiate the contradictions and tensions found in diverse settings” (Naples, 2008, p.7). Here, the border is almost exclusively a social category instead of a political one – closely linked, however, to power relations in society and political decision-making. Linda Bosniak in this regard stresses that the border not only defines and divides insiders and outsiders – including the decisions about who is entitled to become an insider – but also, at the same time, is a point of contact, “a sphere with its own normative logic, one that itself is structured neither entirely by insider nor outsider but which lies at the interface between them” (2006, p.126); Robert DeChaine points to the imperative that the fluid, everchanging border space “must be (constantly) negotiated – crossed, transgressed, played with, inhabited” (2005, p.357). All those conceptualisations underline the necessity but also the possibility to account for political subjectivities in transmigrant spaces established by bordering processes (Kron, 2011). However, one has to be aware of “the tendency to construct the border crosser or the hybrid [...] into a new privileged subject of history” (Vila, 2003, p.307). Vila criticises border theory for tending to “see the border as mere metaphor, as the epitomised possibility of crossings, hybrids, and the like” (ibid., p.312f) and that borderlands and “border crossings seem to have become ubiquitous terms to represent the experience of (some) people in a postmodern world described as fragmented and continually producing new borders that must again and again be crossed. And if current border studies and theory propose that borders are everywhere, the border-crossing experience is in some instances assumed to be similar: that is, it seems that for the ‘border crosser’ or the ‘hybrid,’ the experience of moving among different disciplines, different ethnicities, and different countries and cultures is not dissimilar in character [...] This approach not only homogenizes distinctive experiences but also homogenizes borders.” (Ibid., p.308)






 
  




His critique draws attention to the methodological implications the study of borders and borderlands encompass and the fact that the starting point of each analysis has to be the specification of the term ‘borderland’, including a definition of the type of border enquired of and the visualisation of the researcher’s aims and disciplinary background (Kron, 2011). It also underlines how borders and borderlands can only be scrutinised in a way that accounts for the entanglements of political, social and visual processes that they impart. It also draws attention to the importance of taking a closer look at the relation between geographical and social space. While geographical space is widely perceived as something purely natural, social space is swayed through politics and cultural practice, thus man-made. Geography in this reading would be the board game; social spaces write the rules. Certainly this supposedly clear-cut division is problematic; both concepts are not exclusive at all. Looking at the constitution and manifestation of the Schengen Area’s current borders might serve as a good example. While most of its land borders and demarcation lines do not take the form of a geographical boundary, they all have geographical implications. Especially in the form of insurmountable walls or life-threatening fences, they follow the intention to influence (i.e. shut down or at least control and regulate) routes – and hence largely structure the geographies of migration. And even where the borders are invisible and flexible – as most internal and some external EU borderlines are – they are physically tangible if necessary. Most borders of the European Union are, however, so-called natural borders, the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Only a minority of the 26 Schengen states’ mainlands share a land border with non-EU/EFTA5 countries. These hydrous borders are not borders per se; they do not separate continents in the first place. Oceans and seas mainly connect riparian countries and continents; they are crossed and inscribed by countless and diverse routes, inhabited by, and the reason for, different social practices and influenced by various symbol systems. They, in other words, form a geographical space that is inseparable from its social implications. But also in terms of border policies, the Mediterranean Sea and the Aegean Sea cannot be considered neutral water masses between political borders; they are sites of enforcement of a particular culture of border control aimed at refusing certain groups of people the passage across the sea – based on specific spatial strategies, “borders are moving at sea” and, what is more, the sea in this regard “constitutes one key site where borders and border enforcement are proliferating and where the policies and practices associated with proliferation can be tracked” (Mountz and Hiemstra, 2012, p.455).























































5

The European Free Trade Association EFTA is an intergovernmental trade organisation and free trade area operating in parallel with the European Union; its members are Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland.



   

 
  


The sea is governed in an extremely flexible and manipulative manner (ibid.) and can in this regard certainly be considered as a laboratory for policies of exterritorialisation and criminalisation, making the European states’ borders “less permeable while simultaneously stretching across water and into the sovereign territory of other states” (ibid. p.468). Multiplicity6 in this regard conceptualise the Mediterranean as having become “a liquid continent […], a Solid Sea. A territory plowed by predetermined routes, unsurpassable boundaries and subdivided into specialized and strictly regulated bands of water” (2003, p.70). It is surrounded by specific entry points adhering to the logic of exclusion and separation and at the same time traversed by “differences […], expert rationalities and standardization routines” (ibid. p.71). When some of the many routes intersect – like in Philip Scheffner’s film HAVARIE (2016), where the passengers of a cruise ship and a dozen refugees on a rubber boat are confronted with each other – the encounter produces “paradoxical and dramatic effects” (Multiplicity, 2003, p.70). The geography of the Mediterranean hence must be considered deeply entangled with the “transformations in [its] social landscape […] governed by clearly distinct paths, separated routes, differentiated rhythms and intensities that form a stratified landscape” (ibid. p.71). Debating geographical and social space, in other words, should not exclusively refer to the moves the pawns make on the board and the writing and re-writing of the rules that apply – but as well to the constant redrawing of the board itself. One can hardly refer to social spaces as being deterritorialised – any more than it is possible to refer to geographical space as being free from any kind of social or cultural implication. Conceptualising transnational social space, one has, however, to avoid constructing it as a plain negative of the space it aims to transgress by assigning spacetheoretical implications inherited from the nation state to a new “transnational container” (Bommes, 2002). Nor does a transnational perspective serve to prove the irrelevancy of state sovereignty. It rather helps to disclose knowledge–power complexes taking effect in the management and regulation of migration in national spatial structures (Karakayalı and Tsianos, 2007, p.11). The important – though unpleasant – underlying question that remains to be answered in this context is: What does the ‘trans’ in transnational connect – if the nation can no longer be the main frame of reference?





























































6

Multiplicity are a Milan-based “agency for territorial investigations” (Biemann, 2003, p.201), a network composed of architects, geographers, artists, sociologists, filmmakers and others.






 
  






 


 




  



The negotiation of inside and outside and the mechanisms to sustainably perpetuate this antagonism are at the core of both Europeanisation processes and debates around immigration on at least two levels that stand in a reciprocal relationship: on the level of the border between inside and outside, but just as well on the level of the structure of the inside. The Schengen Area might consequently be considered a political entity that has been constituted with the aim of defining and constantly redefining the course, shape and permeability (figuratively and literally) of European borders and border zones, the shape and relationship of European centres and peripheries, regular and irregular routes (for people and goods), eligible and ineligible visitors and movers. Given the constitutive nature of the European Union as a twofold structure with European Parliament and Commission on the one hand and the relevant national legislature and executive of each member state on the other, Schengen is, however, at the same time issue to political negotiations and power relations between the Commission and the member states, among its members states and between member states and the Schengen periphery – including potential future member states as well as states considered important players with regard to Schengen border-control measures. The focus here should, however, be less on the analysis of power relations or inequalities among the member states and their often contradictory interests, and rather more on the highly productive and flexible interplay between policy making and policy implementation with regard to the process of European integration. Research on European integration processes and the Europeanisation of migration policy indeed tends either to follow an approach centring on the nation states and their strategies to advocate particular interests on the EU level or to conceptualise supranational authorities as the matrix of a new form of governance. The changing though obviously still valid and restraining implications of territory, nation state and geography become even more obvious when taking a glance at the transnational social spaces of undocumented migration movements and processes in and around the Schengen Area. Although undocumented migration into the European Union is relatively small in numbers compared to global migration movements (OECD, 2013), the issue, however, ranks very high on the EU agenda and is embedded in an influential political and public discourse connected to a particular iconology and embedded in a strong visual discourse. It is interesting to see how differently the films in this work approach and visualise the borders and how they deal with the dialectics of inside and outside. They all pursue different strategies to follow the traces of undocumented migration and reflect the spatial dimensions of the borderland, and to “stitch together the global archipelago of exclusion: dispersed sites of enforcement and detention where people are rendered stateless by geographical design” (Mountz, 2011, p.385). Challenging concepts of belonging and aiming to illustrate multi-layered transnational



   

 
  


social spaces of undocumented migration that go beyond the binary of inside and outside, they are only occasionally set at the actual political borders; primarily they aim at detecting the various invisible and yet tangible borders that structure movement through the border zone. And while they all do away with the assumption of the linearity of migration movements with predictable or consistently linked points of departure and arrival, they do, however, perceive, visualise and establish those spaces in quite different ways. Already on a macro-level, the films differ considerably in their cameras’ scopes of movement: while HAVARIE (2016) on the visual level seems to symbolise the absolute suspension of time and space, on the audible level it forges a bridge from Algeria to Spain and from Ukraine to France, thus establishing a vivid transnational social field; LA FORTERESSE (2008) enquires into the formalised microcosm of a reception centre in Switzerland – SUR LE RIVAGE DU MONDE does the same thing in an informal and performative setting a couple of thousand kilometres south. In both cases, the camera deliberately limits its scope of movement. And while the latter and BAB SEBTA (2008) remain south of the actual demarcation lines, Andrea Segre’s films A SUD DI LAMPEDUSA and COME UN UOMO SULLA TERRA (2008) enquire into the permanent back and forth on the south–north axis of migration and LITTLE ALIEN (2009) travels some 15,000 kilometres (Kusturica, 2009) through the transnational European border corridor from East to West. The films clearly perceive the border zones as being established and structured by means of the interplay between migration policies and migration control on the one hand and migration movements on the other. They find a main reason for the existence of the borderland in the still ongoing process of Europeanisation, which is affecting undocumented migration movements in several ways, directly and by means of respective national legislation. The relevant European institutional dimensions will be outlined here shortly as they are considered a major factor for the emergence of a particular form of border-control culture that not only governs illegality and irregularity but largely contributes to its construction in the first place. Legislation with regard to the general framework of common European immigration policies, common asylum policies, policies particularly aimed at governing undocumented migration (i.e. regarding naturalisation, human rights, detention and deportation) and border-control and security policies will have to be taken into account. Common asylum policies are of concern here mainly because most undocumented migrants have either applied for asylum at an earlier stage or aim to do so as soon as they touch European ground – the categorisation as either asylum seeker or undocumented migrant is a European one, implemented in the member states’ legal frameworks; in addition, migrants who have applied for asylum and have been granted some form of temporary protection are also of concern as their status changes the moment temporary protection ends, and in many cases they then are made undocumented migrants. For the moment it is important to note that national legislation regarding all forms of immigration still differs and is only,


 
 


 
  




to a limited degree, determined by common European Union directives and treaties. The idea of Europe as an area of free movement of people and goods was first introduced in part of the Treaty of Rome (1957), which established the European Economic Community. About 30 years on, in 1985, half of the then 10 member states agreed to gradually abolish checks at their common borders under the Schengen Agreement. Fully incorporated into European Union law as part of the Treaty of Amsterdam (1997), the Schengen Area today is a core element of European Union (Boswell and Geddes, 2011). Apart from the United Kingdom and Ireland, who opted out very early in the process, and the newer member states Croatia, Romania, Bulgaria and Cyprus,7 all European Union member states are also part of the Schengen Area. The four latter states are legally bound to join the area as soon as certain (especially technical and legal) prerequisites and requirements are met; moreover, even prospective member states are legally bound to accept the Schengen acquis as part of the pre-existing body of European Union law. In addition to the 22 out of the 28 European Union Member States, the four EFTA member states formally implemented the Schengen Agreement,8 thus making the Schengen Area a consolidated formation of 26 nation states covering a population of about 420 million people and an area of 4.3 million square kilometres (European Commission, 2010a). The Schengen framework’s key elements are the complementary principles of removing all checks on persons at internal borders on the one hand and the harmonisation of conditions for crossing external borders of the area on the other. In order to implement this framework, the Schengen Area members agreed on a set of common principles to regulate internal freedom, including harmonised conditions for short-stay visas, enhanced police cooperation including cross-border surveillance, enhanced judicial cooperation including a more effective eviction and deportation system, and the establishment of the technical means to pool and exchange data on cross-border activities. The means to compensate for the loss of internal border checks include the Schengen Information System (SIS), since 2003/2004 supplemented by the European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders of the Member States of the European Union (Frontex) and since 2011 by the Visa Information System (VIS).























































7

Although Cyprus is legally obliged to implement the Schengen rules and did fulfil most of the necessary prerequisites, the country, as of spring 2016, had not joined the area due to the implications it would have for the Cyprus dispute, especially with regard to the necessity to seal off the northern part of the island in case of the south’s accession.

8

While the European microstates Vatican, San Marino and Monaco did de jure not sign the Schengen Agreement, they are de facto members, as they never performed border checks anyway.



   

 
  


Neither did Schengen imply that borders disappear completely nor that they lose their relevance in general. Compensating for a perceived security deficit connected to the elimination of internal border checks, the Union relocated controls to its external perimeter while “other, more diffuse types of control” (Zaiotti, 2011, p.2) were implemented within the Schengen Area and beyond. From the very beginning, the leading countries in the Schengen process stated very clearly that they consider internal freedom impossible without a new and common understanding of external border control. The European Security Research Advisory Board in 2006 illustrated this principle quite frankly: “The protection of Europe’s external borders will […] remain of paramount importance, especially if the Union wishes to maintain and promote freedom of movement within its borders […] The creation in 2003 of the external borders agency Frontex pointed to Europe’s commitment to this key area and an already challenging task is likely to become increasingly more difficult.” (ESRAB, 2006, p.14)

Dealing with immigration issues in the Schengen Area is also considered a common task of the European Union member states – not only since the issue was placed prominently in the Treaty of Amsterdam in 1997. In the treaty’s Article 2 the common goal “to maintain and develop the Union as an area of freedom, security and justice, in which the free movement of persons is assured in conjunction with appropriate measures with respect to external border controls, asylum, immigration and the prevention and combating of crime” is laid down. In Part III Title IV it is further explicated as to what extent the Union understands “visa, asylum, immigration and other policies related to free movement of persons” (Treaty of Amsterdam, 1997, art. 61ff) as being of mutual concern and in need of harmonisation. Interestingly enough, in order to balance national legislation and supranational instruments, the treaty limits the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice with regard to migration policies (ibid., art. 68), a constraint that has not been conceded in any other area of jurisdiction (Triandafyllidou and Gropas, 2014). Overall, with regard to policies concerning immigration and asylum, with the Treaty of Amsterdam the focus shifted from inter-governmental cooperation to protect a common interest by means of supranational governance; the treaty hence “represents a major turning point in migration policy at the European level […] it purported to offer an overall perspective in migration policy within the more general framework of an ‘area of freedom, security and justice’” (Triandafyllidou and Gropas, 2014, p.377). Migration movements are, at least from hereon, clearly defined and perceived as threatening those three principles. At the European Council Summit in Tampere, Finland, in 1999 – only two years after the Treaty of Amsterdam came into force – the member states agreed on the goal to establish a common EU policy on immigration and asylum. Eventually, this goal was reflected in the 2004 Hague Programme (European Commission, 2005). On the one hand, it suggests harmonising and increasing the effectiveness of asylum procedures through binding instruments and joint European






 
  




asylum procedures; on the other hand, it expresses the intention to find a “new, balanced approach to dealing with legal and illegal immigration” (ibid.), mainly by combatting trafficking in human beings, increased cooperation with third countries in the field of readmission and return of migrants and an integrated management of the Union’s external borders by means of Frontex. The follow-up Stockholm Programme calls for a Common European Asylum System, again stressing the necessity to further develop “integrated border management and visa policies to make legal access to Europe efficient for non-EU nationals, while ensuring the security of its own citizens. Strong border controls are necessary to counter illegal immigration and cross-border crime” (European Commission, 2010b). At the same time, access for vulnerable groups of people and people in need of protection should be “guaranteed by” (ibid.) reinforcing the role of Frontex in order to meet current and future challenges. However, more than 15 years after the Treaty of Amsterdam’s ratification, the principle of supranational governance with regard to immigration legislation or the implementation of common asylum regulations has still not been fully implemented, and what Triandafyllidou and Gropas noted almost a decade ago is still largely the case: “Defining who is an immigrant, why, how and for how long they come and stay in a member state, remains largely tied to national government decision-making and national migration policy traditions” (2007, p.13); the ongoing debate is not only reflected in the European states’ struggle about terminology and quotas in the context of the current refugee crisis. This definition, however, has not only a legal dimension but also a political, symbolic dimension – and is often in clear contrast to factual situations. As the question of how to balance national and supranational legislation is furthermore subject to extensive negotiations – on both a general level and in each specific case – and as decision-making on a European level, especially in the areas of immigration and asylum policies, is characterised by conflicts of interests between the European Commission, Parliament and Council on the one hand and among the different nation states on the other, the framework of a common European immigration and asylum policy must still be considered as fragmented rather than fully coherent. The European Union’s effort to harmonise its standards and policies resulted particularly in three dominant elements implemented on different levels: external border control as facilitated by Frontex and other mechanisms, the so-called Dublin System, and the Common European Asylum System (CEAS). The first area that has fully been implemented with all member states’ cooperation – at least in terms of European Union legislation, regulation and financing – is external border control as facilitated by Frontex and various IT and visualisation tools and mechanisms such as SIS and VIS (now subsumed under the umbrella of eu-LISA9). But while it is clear that Frontex is in charge of keeping the migration inflow via the Mediterranean and the Aegean Sea at bay, the European Union has so far proved























































9

EU Agency for large-scale IT systems, including SIS/SIS II, VIS and Eurodac.



   

 
  


unable to agree on a scheme for those migrants who succeed; faced with what is perceived as an increased refugee crisis at the European external borders, the European Council, urged particularly by the Italian government, attempted to agree on common quotas for the distribution of Syrian refugees, but as of summer 2015 failed to do so (Traynor, 2015a). Secondly, at the core of European asylum policies is the so-called Dublin System, which is today widely considered to have failed with regard to its original goals (Fratzke, 2015) and with regard to respecting asylum seekers’ fundamental rights (ECRE, 2014; Peers, 2012). Part of the European legal framework since 1990, the Dublin System gained particular significance from 2003 when the Dublin II Regulation was ratified. In 2014, a recast has was ratified with the Dublin III Regulation. While, as said above, national legislation on immigration in general and asylum in particular varies a lot, the Dublin System defines an overall framework for the different national legislations. Therefore, based on the 2003 Dublin II Regulation, the member states began coordinating asylum procedures in so far as they agreed on “criteria and mechanisms for determining the member state responsible for examining an application for asylum lodged in one of the member states by a third-country national” (Dublin II Regulation, art. 1).10 Moreover, the regulation determines that an application for asylum can be lodged only once and only with the member state of first entry (ibid., art. 10). At the core, the Dublin System grounds in the assumption of ‘safe third countries’ and ‘safe countries of origin’; while people from the latter stand almost no chance of claiming asylum in a member state, claimants entering the European Union via a ‘safe third country’ are to be deported back to the respective – in some cases the assumed – country of entry to file their claim there. A ‘safe country of origin’ according to the European Union’s definition is characterised by the application of law within a democratic system and the absence of persecutions, torture and armed conflict. In assessing a country’s safeness, account is taken of the extent to which the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), the International Covenant for Civil and Political Rights, the Convention against Torture and the non-refoulement principle according to the Geneva Convention are respected, and whether a system of effective remedies against violations of the above-mentioned























































10 One of the first countries to enshrine the intertwined principles of ‘safe third country’ and ‘safe country of origin’ in its legislation was Switzerland in 1979 (Gattiker, 2002). The concept spread rapidly into Europe. Germany, e.g., implemented it in 1993 as part of the so-called asylum compromise. Today, it is also used in Australia, New Zealand, the United States and Canada. The governments of Canada and the United States, for example, in 2004 implemented a Safe Third Country Agreement, basically declaring the other country safe for refugees and ruling that refugees have to make their claim in the first of the two countries they reach (Canadian Council for Refugees, 2009).






 
  




rights and freedoms is in place. ‘Safe countries of origin’ are thought not, or not generally, to produce refugees. It has, however, been noted that the concept of ‘safe countries of origin’ and the related procedures themselves conflict with one of the cornerstones of asylum and of international refugee law – the principle of non-refoulement. Already in 1997, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees considered whether the intensification and coordination of measures against irregular immigration aroused the “concern that the legal and administrative measures adopted, including measures to expedite asylum procedures and to shift the responsibility for considering asylum requests to other countries, may have the unintended result of placing refugees in situations that could ultimately lead to refoulement to their country of origin or other territories where their life or freedom would be threatened.” (UNHCR, 1997)

In addition, it has been stressed that especially the risk of chain deportations to the respective country of origin cannot be fully eliminated. Moreover, among the European Union Member States the concept of safety is interpreted in different manners. The overall concept of the safe country has been clarified by means of the Asylum Procedure Directive in 2013, suggesting that a country should be considered safe if a person’s “life and liberty are not threatened on account of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion [and] the prohibition of removal, in violation of the right to freedom from torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment as laid down in international law, is respected” (Article 38.1).

Additionally, the principles of the Geneva Convention have to be guaranteed, particularly the principle of non-refoulement and the possibility to request refugee status including provision of the respective protection. The tool has been developed and defined on a European level; specifically, the relevant lists of ‘safe third countries’ and ‘safe countries of origin’ are subject to national legislation. On the one hand, the European states consider each other safe. On the other, however, the member states’ perceptions of safe countries varies a great deal: Belgium, for example, considers seven non-EU states as safe (six former Yugoslavian states plus India; ECRE, 2015a); France at the same time lists 16 states (ECRE, 2015b), and Malta more than 20 (the list has not been amended since 2008; ECRE, 2015d). The German government continuously enhances its list, from two to five in 2014, then to eight in 2015 (then including six former Yugoslavian states plus Ghana and Senegal; ECRE, 2015c). In May 2016, it suggested to additionally include the Maghreb states of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia (Spiegel online, 2016) – something that the Austrian government had done already in early 2016. Luxemburg considers Benin and Ghana safe countries only for its male population; Italy, the Netherlands, Greece and some others do not have lists



   

 
  


at all and hence consider only the other European states safe countries (European Commission, 2014). In other words, although following a more or less similar legal framework, each Schengen state defines its own geography of security – and hence its own geography of eligibility and (human) rights. The foundations of the Dublin System are highly symbolic; they draw the line between legitimate and illegitimate asylum claims along the assumption of safe and unsafe countries of origin, hence considering the overall political situation in a country as much more important than the individual’s motivation to leave a country. At the same time, the decision as to which country is considered safe is less linked to an objective assessment of the political situation in a country (otherwise the lists wouldn’t differ that remarkably) and rather more to political-economic appraisals of what is supposed to be a more or less homogeneous ethnic group of migrants; this again is deeply entangled with the image a group has in society, with its visual representations. Since 2013, the Dublin III Regulation has been in force as part of the third instrument that needs to be mentioned here: the Common European Asylum System (CEAS), which has been fully applied since July 2015. What at first glance may appear to be the first occasion that the European Union has systematically coordinated and harmonised its asylum policies is in fact hardly more than a combination of older and partly recast regulations put together under the roof of the CEAS. At the core of the CEAS, the Dublin III Regulation basically emends some earlier regulations regarding legal assistance of minors and detention of pregnant women. Dublin III may adopt some important changes – essentially accounting for earlier jurisdiction – but is widely criticised by non-governmental human rights organisations because the ideology behind Dublin II was not put in question with the ratification of Dublin III and “significant elements remain at stake especially regarding access to social and economic rights, to free legal assistance, and the protection against disproportionate detention” (Statewatch, 2012). To complete the CEAS, Dublin III is complemented by directives regarding Asylum Procedures, Reception Conditions and Qualification and a revised Regulation on the Eurodac, standardising the use of a database for fingerprints of people who have crossed, unauthorised, European borders in order to control and limit the movement of the persons concerned. In addition to the regulations and directives subsumed under the CEAS umbrella, a number of directives are concerned with issues linked to asylum policy and undocumented migration, such as family reunification, the status of long-term residents, return procedures, the combat of irregular migration and demand-driven labour migration. In contrast to European Union regulations, which are binding directly and entirely, those directives leave the member states with a certain scope in terms of implementation. While the result is binding, the choice of form and methods is up to the individual member state. While undocumented migration is in most cases coupled with discourses on organised crime and hence rather indirectly concerned with a number of European regulations and directives, distinct






 
  




common European policies regarding this diverse group of people are non-existing. And apart from Frontex, the CEAS has so far not resulted in the establishment of a common European implementation body, for example supranational asylum boards – on the contrary, both border control and asylum and deportation procedures are strongly dependent on the involvement of external (non-Schengen) authorities and private companies, and rely on the existence of multilateral arrangements that provide the option of declining responsibility, if necessary. There is, in other words, a gap between the political will the European Union expresses in its directives and the implementation of the Union’s political will in the various national legislations. Presenting the CEAS as a turning point in the European Union’s asylum policy may well be considered presumptuous – not only considering the obvious contradictions in national legislation and approaches to migration and asylum policies – grounding not least in the differences of the respective countries’ migration experiences (Triandafyllidou and Gropas, 2014). Understanding the CEAS as an extrapolation of the member states’ policies on the supranational level must hence be considered a misconception. As this section illustrates, the complexity and ambiguity of the European border regime is already woven into the fabric of its foundational documents. It provides the member states and the implementing authorities – intentionally or coincidentally – with considerable room for manoeuvre and a productive and strategically utilisable (and utilised) contradiction and vagueness between the different levels of legislation and between legislation and implementation. While directives on a European level are being agreed upon, in many cases the relevant national legislation and implementation follow essentially national considerations and discourses – usually termed national interests. While it is in many cases argued by politicians that European policies should not compromise the respective national interests, it seems hardly possible to define a complementary European interest that goes beyond the principle of keeping immigration numbers as low as possible. Where a common regulatory framework exists, it must be considered highly contradictory and at the same time restrictive. Two general paradoxes characterise the implementation of joint policies: Firstly, the tension between the member states’ sovereignty and supranational governance; secondly, the tension between security and border-control issues and human rights (Lavenex, 2001). In terms of human rights of undocumented migrants and asylum seekers, the relevant EU directives do not go beyond international human rights’ minimum standards; in particular, the concept of the safe country of origin opens loopholes for shifting responsibilities with regard to accounting for human rights. While the Schengen Agreement and the Union treaties define the issue as a field for joint efforts, and while the Council and the European Parliament have adopted several directives and regulations dealing with immigration issues, there are considerable differences between the various national legislations. Legislation and the implementation of joint policies at the same time circle around the principle of absolute border control and the aim to limit the number of people eligible to claim asylum on Schengen territory by shifting responsibilities to ‘safe third countries’.



   

 
  


Consequently, a complex allocation of discourses within the area of tension between the poles of the national and supranational can be observed. While discourses of border control and border defence, for example, are assumed to be located on a distinct European level, issues of asylum seekers’ societal integration are considered national territory. How far the issues are interlinked is often disregarded. As current debates in the European Council about the distribution of refugees who entered the European Union irregularly via Greece and Italy and about quotas for asylum seekers in general show, most European states first of all evaluate their national interests, interests that understand human rights not primarily as following ethical but rather economic concerns. While the repulsion of undocumented migrants is considered a joint task of all member states and is jointly funded and implemented through Frontex, the task of taking care (both legally and socially) of undocumented migrants and potential asylum seekers is left to the individual member states (as per the Dublin Regulation). The member state of a refugee’s first entrance is responsible for the examination of an asylum claim and, with it, for running and sustaining an infrastructure accommodating the whole process from arrival to recognition/rejection – consequently, it is economically attractive, particularly for the southern European member states, to keep the number of arrivals at the lowest possible level (Maas-Albert, 2014).



    
  




  
  
The process of Europeanisation is overall characterised by an asynchronicity on different levels. And although the fundamental transformation of the modes of the political, including among other things the delegation of certain powers to supranational institutions and the harmonisation of legal requirements, is considered most relevant in public debates and recent research, the legal framework is, however, only one side of Europeanisation. The asynchronicity in European migration and border policies can likewise be observed in the European Union’s institutional and institutionalised improvisation and the adherence to pragmatic approaches that complement a strict catalogue of regulations with institutional flexibility and exterritorialisation strategies especially in terms of policy implementation. Improvisation characterises the process of Europeanisation on at least two levels. Firstly, the process itself can be understood as an intended process with unintended consequences – only rarely following clearly outlined political aims. Beck and Grande, for example, interpret Europeanisation as a regime of side effects and of transformation, a Europe that in consequence “nobody really intended and authorized” (2007, p.36); “although the process of Europeanisation […] was intended, its institutional and material consequences were unintended […] the individual stages of integration did not follow any master plan, that is, that the goal was deliberately left open. Europeanisation ‘takes place’






 
  




and ‘operates’ in the specific mode of institutionalized improvisation” (ibid., p.37; emphases in original).

The institutionalised improvisation mentioned by Beck and Grande is in many cases complemented by – and usually justified through – the need for pragmatism: Hess and Tsianos (2007) note an obvious contradiction between post-national targets of the European Union – as laid down in the Treaty on European Union in 2007: “creating an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe” – and pragmatic political regulations. This contradiction is exemplified by the 1999 EU Summit in Tampere: while the summit’s aim was, on the one hand, to develop the principles of a joint asylum system – based on a full and inclusive implementation of the 1951 Geneva Convention – it, on the other, envisaged the harmonisation of legislation on housing, education and employment of third-country nationals longterm resident in the Union. Neither of the two aims was achieved. The harmonisation of third-country nationals’ rights was specified a year after the Tampere Summit in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (2000), now referring only to those third-country nationals residing legally in the Union. Tellingly, non-refoulement according to the Geneva Convention is not stated as a fundamental right in the charter.11 Secondly, also policy implementation on different institutional levels follows the principle of improvisation. While in public opinion the European Union is usually considered as overregulated and restrictive, the set of directives and regulations in place in fact leaves the member states and the implementing authorities with considerable leeway. This becomes most evident when considering migration and asylum policies and border control, which do obey the principle of improvisation and operation in and beyond geographical and political border zones. Even less than in other areas, here Europeanisation grounds in a particular European idea or ideology – instead, migrants’ existence and behaviour in, and motion, through geographical and social space influences the authorities’ moves and operations greatly. As soon as a route or social space, for example, becomes popular (literally or figuratively), migration policy and border control react and try to close























































11 There are limits to ‘institutionalised improvisation’, respectively the process of unrestricted Europeanisation, especially concerning the contradictions between the dynamics of transnational European sovereignty and coincidental restrictions of mobility. Even the EU’s most prestigious post-national project, the Internal Market with free movement of goods, capital, services and people, is segmented – as demonstrated most explicitly in the suspension of the free movement of workers from the Eastern European member states for seven years after joining the EU in 2004 and 2007. However, even in this case, regulating mobility and immobility respectively seems to be the crucial factor behind political decision-making.



   

 
  


it – which in return does not end migration movement but simply diverts it – usually creating new, riskier routes and more precarious social spaces. Bieling and Steinhilber (2000) therefore suggest considering the European migration regime as a loosely arranged ensemble of societal practices and structures, including discourses, subjects and governmental practices. The process of Europeanisation is mainly generating answers to the questions posed by its own dynamic processes; the European migration regime hence “is a result of continuous repair work through practices” (Sciortino, 2004, p.33), triggered by the everchanging constellation of actors and rarely the result of consistent planning. There is, however, an “interdependence of observation and action. Migration regimes are rooted both in ways of observing and acting. The overall structure of the migration will determine how flows – regardless of their ‘true’ nature – will be observed and acted upon” (ibid.). An interesting example for the dynamic interplay is the debate around Frontex operations in the Mediterranean region; neither do the operations seem to adhere to a particular and distinct political strategy, nor do the marine operations seem to stand in direct connection to national or international law or normative political principles deriving from international conventions or charters. The decision about who will in fact be protected by the European Union as a refugee is hence left to chance; even those who have, according to European legal standards, the right to asylum must overcome life-threatening obstacles before they are even allowed to claim their right. Frontex operates in a state of legal exception; they have the political mandate to act, their implementation measures are, however, extremely flexible. What the example illustrates is how important the symbolic effect of policy implementation is – further: the more obvious the contradiction is between a political goal and its absolute implementation, the more important is the consistency of its symbolical manifestation. Even the fences that surround Ceuta and Melilla are potentially crossable – however high they reach and, however, lethally they are equipped. So, in order to successfully react to migration movements and keep the European border as tight as possible, improvisation has become a key feature of the Schengen regime. Moreover, must improvisation be considered an indispensable element of European border culture – on both the level of political decision-making and actual day-to-day policy implementation? Still, the – one may assume traditional – European demarcation lines are in many cases visible and in some cases manifest (see, e.g., the fence between Turkey and Greece or the Spanish exclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, both surrounded by up to five lines of fence and, in addition, heavily guarded from the inside and the outside by border guards from at least two countries). Although they have a strong iconographic function – symbolising respectively absolute border control and the conquest of insurmountable obstacles12























































12 One may even ask if demarcation lines visualised in this way have a function that goes beyond iconography. Taking the constitution of European border zones into account,






 
  




– traditional demarcation lines, however, play a minor part among the various lines of variable density and visibility; in many other cases, such borderlines are less visible and organised in a much more flexible way. Though invisible for most people, those flexible borders trenching Europe today become physically manifest if necessary – similar to an energy shield in sci-fi TV shows: visible only if touched, lethal if challenged once too often.



    
While the European Union over the past 60 years has continuously expanded its boundaries as a socio-political entity – from the six members of the European Communities in 1952 to the EU28 since 2013 – and may further expand to include further Eastern European states, Balkan countries or Turkey over the next decades, it at the same time expands its spheres of political influence far beyond its formal territory. Facilitated by individual national as well as joint strategies, exterritorialisation takes place at different levels; it can be identified as already laid down in the legal framework, as influencing European bilateral strategies, as being a driving factor in the actual border protection, and finally as aiming at eventually transgressing European geographies. In consequence, it primarily aims at an externalisation of asylum in general (Betts, 2004).13 The principle of exterritorialisation is first of all reflected in the transformation of European migration policy itself – less as an effect of Europeanisation and more as one of the constitutive principles of EU integration processes. Current initiatives to harmonise asylum policies under the roof of CEAS in fact establish “legitimacy for the denial of protection and the conclusion of readmission agreements […] by shifting responsibility away from the European territorial core” (Lindstrøm, 2005, p.588). The most important element of the CEAS remains the Dublin System and its principle of the ‘safe third country’. It denies the right to claim asylum for those refugees entering the Union via a country defined as safe, and it is complemented by readmission agreements with many non-European states. Secondly, on a bilateral level, the implementation of asylum laws and border facilities similar to those of the Schengen Area and a comprehensive adherence to the Dublin System are a prerequisite to accession negotiations; particularly with regard to immigration issues, European asylum principles and border culture have























































they seem to aim at symbolising a certain culture of border control in order to discourage – a statement, not a practicality. 13 Betts also points to the fact that EU initiatives to externalise asylum by means of thirdcountry processing centres and regional protection areas have to a considerable degree been fanned by the UNHCR’s 2003 Convention Plus (Betts, 2004).



 

 
  


to be in place long before a state might be allowed to join the Union or the Schengen Area. So even without being member states, countries such as Ukraine, Serbia and Albania have to respect and implement the guidelines and regulations as per the European Union’s definition in order to be considered eligible at all; they have to act as if they are securing a Schengen border long before they formally become a member state. In addition, most EU member states have intragovernmental repatriation agreements with sending countries outside of the Union (including, above all, states in Africa and Eastern Europe) in place. These agreements are usually linked to and a prerequisite for economic cooperation and/or development aid. By means of such bilateral agreements, the European Union has established a buffer zone around its territory in which neighbouring states’ border facilities and personnel are heavily involved in EU border control, detention and repatriation. This buffer zone is a kilometre wide and heavily guarded in terms of personnel, technical equipment and armament, be it along the 6,000 kilometres of land demarcation lines or along the 85,000 kilometres of coastlines; all states bordering the Schengen Area are bound to it through economic cooperation closely linked to border-control enforcement both within the country and towards states not bordering Schengen – in most cases backed by heavy financial support by the European Union. The self-evidence of those principles is clearly illustrated in two sequences from the film COME UN UOMO SULLA TERRA (2009), which is co-directed by the Italian Andrea Segre and the Ethiopian refugee Dagmawi Yimer. While the rest of the film is composed of a group of Ethiopian and Eritrean migrants’ narratives, by means of two short additional interviews the filmmakers elucidate how far European borderlands actually reach. In making the decision to migrate, their film’s protagonists already became part of the European migration regime, their scope of movement and action strongly determined by the implementation of Schengen border-control principles. First, Yimer and Segre approach the former European Commissioner for Justice, Freedom and Security, the Italian and right-wing Forza Italia member Franco Frattini. First, the film documents a press conference that was part of his electoral campaign in April 2008, where Frattini refers to what he finds useful about agreements with Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco and other countries of migrants’ origin and transit. Subsequently, the two filmmakers confront Frattini with inhumane conditions in Libya that Yimer has been subject to and that are, in their opinion, clearly facilitated by means of such agreements; Frattini denies the Italian government’s responsibility for what is going on in Libya; he argues that Italian funds intend “to promote more humane repatriation”. A second interview features Frontex director Ilkka Laitinen; confronted with Yimer’s experiences as a refugee in Libya, he denies any kind of accountability on behalf of Frontex. Neither Frattini nor Laitinen do, however, deny the fact that EU cooperation with Libya is an integral part of European border control – not only because it borders the Mediterranean but also because it is a buffer zone between the EU and other potential refugees’ countries of origin; the shortest line between Libya and






 
  




the Italian island Lampedusa is about 300 kilometres off the Libyan coast. Providing further facts about the cooperation between Italy and Libya at that time, Yimer and Segre inseparably link the two countries in a broader migration regime, locating responsibilities for how the border is put into practice. From 2003, they report, secret bilateral talks took place between the two countries, aimed at minimising immigration to Italy. Upon a first treaty between Silvio Berlusconi and Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan government received equipment to facilitate control of the border with the Mediterranean Sea, including “motorboats, off-road vehicles, buses, wet suits, 12 thousand blankets, 6 thousand mattresses and 1000 body bags”. In 2004, the Italian government made available a two-year budget of 43 million euros for assistance in managing migration. This bilateral cooperation went on, following the three main principles of fighting “the immigration racket” (as an Italian TV news reporter phrases it), cooperating in the oil and gas sector and opening investment opportunities for Italian companies. In his earlier film, A SUD DI LAMPEDUSA (2006), Segre sheds light on the development that led up to those agreements and the implications it had for migration routes; as one of the interlocutors states, “it all started in 95 and exploded in 98”, the first date referring to the Schengen Agreement and the second one to Gaddafi’s Libya opening its borders for nationals from all African states.14 Time and time again in Segre’s films, his protagonists underline the significance of the equipment mentioned above for their daily lives; most of their encounters with Libyan official authorities – and also with the rather half-official economy of migrant trade – include equipment sponsored by the Italian government. The sequence also illustrates that the spaces of migration are to a considerable degree also economic spheres and states’ interests intermingle in many cases. The material and non-material support by the EU in general and Italy in particular not only links Libya to the European migration regime by means of a neocolonial construction of joint interests, but also makes the country an actor in the European migration regime. Libya seems to follow its own interests in more than one regard: on the one hand, the involvement with the European migration regime is reflected in extensive economic agreements in the area of natural resources, especially energy reserves – the film emphasises that Italian politicians (here Silvio Berlusconi and Franco Frattini) do not make a secret of this connection; from such a cooperation only few people in Libya benefit at all. On the other hand, an economy of























































14 Those facts are interesting and necessary – in the film they are mainly displayed as text panels contrasting stills of the interviewees; although one may value this as an attempt to illustrate how such bilateral agreements impact on individual migrations, in this context it does not really work well. The facts superimpose the interviewees’ autonomy; they are condemned to be victims again, even visually: their images freeze and they seem deprived of their narrative and their agency.



   

 
  


smuggling and refugee trading can be observed on a lower level that helps a considerable number of people to run a business connected to the migration routes carving through the Libyan Desert. COME UN UOMO SULLA TERRA shows quite plainly how the two dimensions are interconnected, especially in the provision of the relevant infrastructure by the Italian government and in what is perceived as the very fundament of the European Union’s migration policies and legislation. The more passionate the Union tries to shield its borders, the more attractive it becomes for those involved in refugee trading and smuggling. Prices rise with the assumed risks; apart from the migrants and refugees, everybody involved benefits from this. COME UN UOMO SULLA TERRA also clearly illustrates a border space that shows a wide gap between EU human rights rhetoric regarding its migration policies on the one hand and the – formal and informal – implementation of Schengen bordercontrol measures beyond the EU’s political borders on the other. It shows how important and extensive the cooperation between the EU and its neighbouring states is in terms of border control and the principle of free movement within the Schengen Area – how broad those countries’ responsibilities are and how flexible they are expected to be when implementing those responsibilities as active, reliable players in the European migration regime. The protagonists’ accounts in the film in this regard are consistent with reports by international NGOs such as Human Rights Watch (2009). What the film example also underlines is that European border management is hardly limited to actual political borders or European territory but monitors and regulates wide border zones. The most prominent example is certainly the Frontex mission in the Mediterranean Sea. Supporting the member states in carrying out their duties concerning external border control, the agency in many cases clearly disrespects marine law and European law at the same time. For Frontex, it seems, the Mediterranean is a legal vacuum. While the agency’s task in 2004 was originally defined as “to co-ordinate operational co-operation between member-states in the field of management of external borders” (Frontex Regulation), Frontex itself seems to manifest the border; in other words: the border is where Frontex is. Or as Vaughn-Williams put it, “the border-work of Frontex produces a border that is no longer at the border” (2008, p.77); it is everywhere and yet it is nowhere. In conjunction with the above-mentioned concept of the ‘safe third country’, the border might be considered “bleeding outwards” (Andersson, 2014, p.95). Already in 2006, ESRAB stressed a concentric conception of Schengen border control, stating that “internal and external security is increasingly inseparable, with the first line of defence often being abroad” (2006, p.14). The quote is remarkable not only for its frankness and for the exemplary use of military terminology (“line of defence”) but also for the way in which it makes reference to countries outside the European Union as “abroad”. Two of the films in this work, BAB SEBTA (2008) and LITTLE ALIEN (2009), enquire into the course of the borderlines and emphasise that one can hardly speak about one line but rather several, constantly and strategically relocating lines of defence.






 
  




The bleeding of the borders must also be noted in another respect – the privatisation of border control. It is particularly remarkable and momentous with regard to the involvement of commercial airlines and boat lines in border control. Already in 2001, pursuing the goal to “combat illegal immigration”, the EU implemented a directive making the carriers transporting foreign nationals into the territory of the member states responsible for all the follow-up costs (Council Directive 2001/51/EC). While the directive clearly states that it does not apply to refugees who aim to travel to Europe under the rules of the Geneva Convention, it at the same time transfers the obligation and authority to decide upon a traveller’s motivation and performance of document checks to the commercial airlines and boat lines. As the carriers certainly always decide to take as little risk as possible, in practice no one can enter an aircraft without a valid visa – the Geneva Convention must hence be considered suspended. It is this directive “that is the reason for so many refugees drowning in the Mediterranean Sea” (Rosling, 2015). Additionally, Schengen builds upon a network of exterritorialised places on what actually is European territory. On the one hand, complementing the relocation of borders to non-Schengen states’ international airports by means of the above-mentioned EC Directive making carriers responsible for the scrutiny the travel document’s legitimacy, detention centres have been established at the international airports within the Schengen Area (Global Detention Project, 2016; Menz, 2013). Those areas are legally considered non-European territory – releasing authorities from the obligation to accept asylum claims as per international law and making the expulsion to a traveller’s country of origin a technicality. On the other hand, within the Schengen Area a considerable number of camps (often euphemistically titled reception camps), mainly detention centres or fenced quarters for persons without a clear residence status, serve to manage asylum and undocumented migration. Often, those camps can be found in remote areas; while in some cases the inhabitants of a camp are allowed to leave at least during daytime, there is usually no infrastructure in place that makes leaving worthwhile. The camp has a strong symbolic meaning – it is the place that undocumented migrants are assigned to; they are at the same time detained temporarily (de jure) and permanent (de facto). In this setting, it is usually hardly or not possible to communicate with lawyers; detention camps are spaces of illegalised migration that are structured and determined according to immigration laws – the very laws that at the same time limit the migrant’s legal scope of agency. While those places may legally be European territory, they create a social exterritorialisation by separating asylum seekers, refugees and undocumented migrants from society instead of at least spatially considering them part of a society. Of the films used in this work, particularly LA FORTERESSE (2009) deals with detention in camps and centres in Europe. Currently, an additional principle seems to be pursued enforcing the exterritorialisation and at the same time expanding the militarisation of border control. It concerns the creation of borders and (legal and social) border spaces that no longer have a direct (geographical) connection to Europe’s political borders. While ideas



   

 
  


to exterritorialise, for example, asylum procedures have accompanied the process of Europeanisation since the mid 1990s, and while readmission agreements with third countries are long in existence, the establishment of the European Border Surveillance System (Eurosur) in 2013 marked a new stage in this regard. Coordinated by Frontex, by the end of 2014 it had become effective in all EU member states and Norway. Based on a minimum budget of almost 250 million euros for the time until 2020, its goals include the detection of refugee boats in the Mediterranean by means of aircrafts, drones, offshore sensors and cameras, and satellite remote sensing. While so-called push-backs – coastguard forcing boats on the high seas to return to their origin – have been common for a couple of years now, although ruled against by the European Court of Human Rights in a landmark judgment in 2012 (Hessbruegge, 2012), Eurosur’s mission is to replace the push-backs by pull-backs. The system aims at identifying refugee vessels soon after departure from a Northern African shore in order to inform the coastguard of the respective departure country to pull back the refugees before they reach international waters. This first-of-its-kind agreement has at the moment been negotiated with Libya – a state that neither undersigned the 1951 Refugee Convention nor offers protective measures for refugees (Maas-Albert, 2014) – but instead has become one of the most prominent countries of transit for refugees from the African to the European continent. The establishment of Eurosur was also accompanied by a discussion about an even wider scope of action; in 2015, European Union leaders agreed on a ten-point plan including assigning Frontex the task to “identify, capture and destroy” (Johnston, Cendrowicz and Dawber, 2015) trafficker’s vessels on Northern African territory even before they set out to cross the Mediterranean as part of its Triton operation. Clearly, “the business of bordering Europe now thrives well beyond the confines of the continent’s geographical borders” (Andersson, 2014, p.3). At the same time – and this is also an extremely important and highly symbolic element of the European migration regime’s justification strategies – Eurosur is embedded in a rhetoric of humanity, morality and aid. Upon adaption of the relevant regulation by the European Parliament, one MEP – Dutch Jan Mulder from the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats, who also contributed to drafting the regulation – stated that “only through a pan-European border surveillance system will we be able to prevent the Mediterranean from becoming a cemetery for refugees trying to cross it in unseaworthy craft in search of a better life in Europe […] We need rapid intervention in order to keep tragedies like that of Lampedusa from repeating” (ANSAmed, 2013).

With Eurosur already operating, the Dutch network United for Intercultural Action (2015b) detected more than 2,000 deaths for the year 2014 and more than 1,100 over the first four months of 2015. In other words: despite the humanitarian rhetoric behind the implementation of Eurosur, the numbers of dead refugees are not






 
  




at all decreasing. In an attempt to scandalise European refugee policies and Frontex operations at the same time, the network started a campaign under the claim “Death by Policy” (United for Intercultural Action, 2015a). If the regulation followed a humanitarian concern, it must be considered failed; Lampedusa as a fate or narrative repeated, and repeats, over and over again. What is more, Lampedusa became the placeholder for the ongoing refugee crisis that costs hundreds and thousands of human lives. Although Frontex builds on a budget varying between 80 and 120 million euros per year (Frontex, 2015) and is heavily equipped with helicopters, aircrafts, vessels and the technical means to control borders day and night, it cannot be assumed that the numbers of undocumented migrants in Europe decreased since it was established a decade ago. As Bhagwati put it around the time Frontex came into being, “paradoxically, the ability to control migration has shrunk as the desire to do so has increased. The reality is that borders are beyond control” (2003, p.99). He makes the claim for “a seismic shift in the way migration is addressed” (ibid.). While his first statement can still be considered true, the claim remains unfulfilled; neither did the European Union find a way to balance its immigration policies – nor did it find an alternative to rigging its borders in order to meet the challenges of undocumented migration.



  

 



 
 
The principles elaborated above not only describe a policy framework; all in all, they also illustrate a particular culture of border control (Zaiotti, 2011) building on particular configurations of border spaces, on particular responses to migration movements but just as well on a particular visuality of the migration regime. The European migration regime’s “underlying assumptions and practices [have] become taken for granted among policy community members and part of their everyday routines” (ibid., p.14); they achieved a far-reaching common sense with regard to border configurations in a post-national setting. I would like to follow Zaiotti in his understanding of border culture as “a relatively stable constellation of background assumptions and corresponding practices shared by a border-control policy community in a given period and geographical location” (ibid., p.23). In addition it is, however, important to underline the necessity of accounting for migration practices and their role and autonomy in the European migration regime, or, as Benz and Schwenken (2005) put it, the stubbornness of migration practices. Stressing the interdependencies of mobility and immobility, they note a fundamental dichotomy of (prevented) autonomy and (failed) control of migration. The common sense referred to above finds its expression, for example, in the principles of the CEAS and the bilateral agreements that sustain it. In contrast to the post-war “Westphalia” understanding of borders as linear barriers defined by



   

 
  


international law (Zaiotti, 2011), Schengen policies must be considered as establishing flexible, de-naturalised geographies of border regions that are structured by different flexible border-control measures. By means of those measures, Schengen is divided into concentric circles of integration and cooperation between members of the EU, prospective members and outsiders, not only in terms of economic cooperation and power relations but also in terms of border control. Borders in this setting do not surround a particular area but they trench a territory. Frontex combs through flexible geographies, applying flexible hi-tech measures to detect and reject refugees; even airports and other intersections of public transport within the Schengen Area are subject to extensive surveillance and important places of the European migration regime. In consequence, non-Europeans can make the border experience almost everywhere and several times.15 At the core of Schengen border-control measures are the dichotomies of inside and outside, of mobility and immobility, organised in an extremely flexible way. Quite obviously, freedom of movement within the Schengen Area is considered only feasible if it is exclusive to its citizens. This also implies that with the evolution of the Schengen process the border changed its face remarkably; moreover, it has a very particular visuality: it is either invisible or impressively visible, threatening and discouraging. While some 20 years ago a borderline was assumed to be the clearest and most easily regulable facility because it clearly separates inside from outside, today’s border zones are required to be as wide and as rugged as possible. Border technologies at the same time emerged from tools that primarily aim at preventing people or certain goods from crossing the border (such as turnpikes, road barriers, detection dogs and firearms) to tools that visualise movement and information (such as infrared cameras, the SIS and the fingerprint database Eurodac). The change is not primarily an expression of technical progress but rather marks new biopolitical borders paralleled by specific practices of visualisation and visibilisation. Also the documents necessary to cross a border legally include biometric features that assume the measurability of the visual; a passport is eventually primarily a visual technology. And even if the process of Europeanisation originally followed political considerations, at least since the struggle for a unified Europe has turned into a struggle over its boundaries and borders, the political process can no longer be separated from its visual implications and entanglements with specific image politics. At the same time, the border practices referred to above are – and this also includes their visuality – to a considerable extent military practices; the Schengen























































15 Certainly also Europeans can be subject to institutionalised racism and hence experience societal borders. A considerable number of non-White people over the past few years have gone to court in order to lodge a complaint regarding so-called racial profiling techniques (Gensing, 2013). Here again it becomes evident that border techniques are for the most part visual techniques.






 
  




culture of border control builds upon a common sense of border control being performed based on military strategies and by means of military equipment. It can be observed that the rhetoric in which the militarisation is embedded is similar to that used, for example, in the context of military campaigns in Afghanistan – basically justified as a combination of humanitarian concern and moral imperative. The soldier performing military tasks has widely vanished from political rhetoric and public perception, which is interesting particularly on a visual level. The soldier still looks like a soldier, i.e. he/she is armed and wears uniform – his/her tasks, however, seem to have evolved; the soldier is using weaponry no longer to combat an enemy but basically to educate other soldiers and to protect civilians. This reverse rhetoric can also be detected in the justification of military operations in European borderlands; it illustrates that European migration policies are extremely concerned about their image in public. Consequently, Europe’s borders must be considered not only conflict zones but also a laboratory for migration policies and other political issues. As pointed out previously, the asynchronicity of European integration and migration policy implementation proves extremely productive – at the same time they cannot be separated from factual migration movements; border practices have to be considered highly interdependent. Karakayalı and Tsianos suggest reading the Europeanisation of migration policy not as a simple shift of state sovereignty to supranational institutions but as an “answer and reaction to the turbulent dynamics of migration in Europe” (2007, p.11). In their view, understanding the expansion and diffusion of the European Union’s external borders through the accession of new member states and cooperation with riparian states cannot exclusively be understood as an increase in state sovereignty and the state’s demand for control – because, in fact, the European Union’s neo-imperial character (Beck and Grande, 2007) is itself an expression of the migrations as well, which forces Europe to extend its institutional machinery as far as the Sahel zone. It becomes evident that “migration policy and eventually the movement of migration itself must be considered major impetus of the EU enlargement process” (Hess and Tsianos, 2007, p.28); moreover, can the movement of undocumented migration today consequently be considered a driving force behind current European cultures of border control and the evolution of European borders – and hence even behind the very aggregate state of the relevant borders? As a matter of course, “that does not mean that migration takes the place of the sovereign” (Karakayalı and Tsianos, 2007, p.12). The films used in this work stress the significant role of the migrants’ movements for the establishment and changing face of the border zones, emphasising not only their legitimacy and unpredictability but also their relevance as actors in the European Union migration regime. Even in recent political debates around Schengen border control, an impact of movements of migration can be detected – migration policy in this regard is not in the first place expressing a certain political will but must be read as a reaction to migration movements. The European Union spends considerable sums on various



   

 
  


border-control measures and mechanisms (EPRS, 2014); the issue of undocumented immigration, however, still ranks high on the home secretaries’ summit agenda. The French and the German governments, especially, consider it the EU’s ultima ratio to reintroduce border controls between Schengen countries if individual member states do not fulfil their ‘border-control duties’. They demand a European Union decision that allows each Schengen member state to autonomously lower its turnpikes for up to 30 days upon exigency (European Commission, 2013b). At the peak of the ‘refugee crisis’ in 2015/2016, the European leaders agreed to perform checks at the internal borders for several months, contradicting the major paradigm of Europeanisation that has always been mobility, including the creation of “imagined mobile subjects” (Jensen and Richardson, 2007, p.138) and border-crossing infrastructures.



 
  



 



  
In order to account for the complex structure and configurations of European borderlands as transnational social spaces as elaborated so far, I would like to suggest using the term “Borderland Schengen” to define an analytical framework as well as a methodological approach to the investigation of the interplay of the visual, social and political in a transnational setting. Its core does not lie in currently dominant principles of Europeanisation as reflected in both the legal framework of the European Union and particular implementation strategies as described above – but in the interplay and entanglements of political decision-making and actions, the structure of social space and migration as a social practice, and iconologies and image politics of migration and the regulation of migration processes’ visibility, invisibility and opacity. “Borderland Schengen” in this regard is considered not primarily as a geographical space or a social space but as a space in which the social, the political and the visual are not only equally important factors but also inseparably intertwined – it is at the same time assumed that it at least offers the potential to be a space where the constitution of the undocumented migrant as a subject is possible. The concept of “Borderland Schengen” grounds on a number of assumptions. First of all, migration movements are considered to be a major driving force behind the process of Europeanisation and the establishment of the Schengen Area itself (Transit Migration Forschungsgruppe, 2007) – it must be taken into account that undocumented migration is one of the constitutive elements of current Europeanisation processes; undocumented migration not only influences the shape and the implementation of European migration policies but also constitutes and structures Europe’s borderlands as disparate transnational social spaces. In other words,






 
  




there is a reciprocal relationship between the social spaces of undocumented migration and political decision-making, constantly un-mapping and remapping “Borderland Schengen”. Secondly, in its aim to control this space and to steer migration movements on and to its territory, the European Union developed a common sense implying particular border practices and building on a distinct culture of border control, which is justified and fanned by specific image politics and iconologies. The central principles include gapless surveillance of the borderlands connected to visualisation technologies and visual techniques, the exterritorialisation of immigration policies and highly flexible implementation strategies. In effect, European borderlands are not limited to the proximity of its external demarcation lines or checkpoints; rather, the borders of Europe are flexible and can literally be found anywhere in Europe and also outside its actual territory. “Borderland Schengen” consists not only of the heavily patrolled border zones in the proximity of Schengen’s political borders or its checkpoints and demarcation lines but also exterritorial grounds (e.g. in Northern Africa) and strategically exterritorialised spaces such as detention centres at European international airports; they include the wide territorial and exterritorial border zones as well as other geographical and social border areas, camps, “non-places” (Augé, 1995) and generic places inseparably linked to the European border regime. Europe’s borders are made and performed; they are constantly and strategically changing, shape-shifting depending on the respective challenge – hence also “Borderland Schengen” changes its shape, significance and manifestation permanently. Even more, it is characterised by this flexible organisation of geography and space, physically and socially manifest. Its current borders cannot be measured in kilometres but – if at all – in square kilometres; they can, however, better be captured by tracing the actors, routes, practices and discourses that continuously structure and re-structure it as a transnationalised space. Thirdly, is the visual manifestation of undocumented migration closely linked to these principles, on the one hand, and to an increased relevance of media discourses in general on the other. Dominant iconologies and narrative figures of undocumented migrants – connected to, above all, processes of criminalisation and victimisation respectively – are called on and enforced in order to justify the rationality of political decisions and implementation measures. At the same time, the implementation of immigration policies does obey visual principles: aimed at regulating visibility and invisibility, it needs to bring the social space under control by means of surveillance technology on the one hand and a hegemonic position in immigration policy discourses on the other. The IT and surveillance tools used by the European Union – like the Schengen Information System (SIS) and the European fingerprint database Eurodac – follow the aim to visualise movement and thus define new biopolitical borders; the applied border technologies are to a considerable extent visual technologies used to make politics. Therefore, “Borderland Schengen” must be considered as an arena of the visual that transgresses the political borders of the European Union and in which migration movements, migration legislation, iconologies of undocumented migration and migration control are



   

 
  


confronted with each other and must be considered highly interdependent. Both the Europeanisation of migration policies and the principles of implementation draw upon the understanding of an increased relevance of media discourses and visual culture as a combat area; consequently, migration policy and policy enforcement no longer intend to make irregular migration invisible per se – but to regulate its visibilities and representations (Karakayalı and Tsianos 2007), to intervene more strongly in the process of strategic knowledge production about (undocumented) migration. The political culture of border control hence can be said to be constituted by the vortex of images, law and immigration. “Borderland Schengen” in this regard is not to be misunderstood as a sphere where the various legal, political, jurisdictional and social aspects of undocumented migration are ordered; “Borderland Schengen” rather is a complex composition of different afterimages of legal, political, jurisdictional and social aspects of undocumented migration, a visually constituted sphere that, however, neither exists independently from undocumented migrants’ life realities and political processes nor necessarily relates to whatever is the true core of the afterimage. It is hence not exclusively a sphere of regulation and repression but, rather, at the same time a sphere of autonomy. Against the background of the noted socio-geographical inconsistencies, ambiguities and flexibilities, “Borderland Schengen” as an analytical and methodological framework consequently aims at paralleling policies/politics, practices and cultures/ideologies of migration in due consideration of the correlation of migration movements and their regulation. “Borderland Schengen” is composed of sites that are at once central to society’s periphery and peripheral to society’s centre (Mandel, 2008) and it transcends national borders as political boundaries, spheres of influence and action, not only with regard to measures directly linked to migration control. Consequently, analyses of “Borderland Schengen” have to transcend the nation as the primary frame of reference as well, i.e. not least account for transnational practices that can be detected in border control as well as in border-crossing. This chapter aimed to sketch the socio-geographic and visual-political shape of European migration policies and the principles developed in the process of Europeanisation; at the same time it laid a theoretical fundament allowing the contextualisation of the films used in this work in current discourses around borders, borderlands and transnational social fields. Assuming an indispensable mutuality of the political, the social and the visual, the following second part of the book will enhance and further specify the border zone’s topography by means of enquiries into the visuality and mediality of the films in general, the performative, fictional and representative qualities of the images produced in the borderland, the visibility, opacity and recognition of the undocumented migrants as (discursive) subjects, and eventually the visual construction of borders and border spaces.



  
  



 

  


   



We see something – and yet it takes us some time to recognise what it is we see exactly. Obviously we are at the dead of night, greyish darkness is only disturbed by a few light spots. The camera quickly zooms in and it is only after a couple of seconds that we are able to realise the setting; a lamppost shedding sparse light on a high fence, then an observation tower and moving shadows of obviously armed guards. After the whole scene brightens up a bit, we observe time-lapse footage of the space between what seem to be two fences – blurry fragments move from one side to another and cross the fences by means of ladders or giving each other a leg-up; the space is surprisingly crowded, not unlike a pedestrian area. After about 40 seconds, the scene completely changes when four border guards pick up one of the intruders and seriously beat him up. The camera – the low resolution of the footage clearly suggests that it is a mobile-phone camera – now observes the events from the opposite side of a wire-mesh fence, from a distance of about 20 metres. Twice, the persons beating up the intruder look at the camera directly – they seem to know that they are being observed; only it doesn’t seem to affect them. On the contrary, directly after the first man spots the camera, the second one jumps out of the border-patrol vehicle, runs over to the intruder already lying on the ground and kicks him with particular rigour. Gleefully, he then looks up to the camera; although the guards’ faces are anonymised, the viewer assumes he may even by smiling. It’s a demonstration of power – “look at us!”, they seem to yell. “This is what happens to you if you dare to mess with us.” The 70 seconds preceding the title sequence of Pedro Pinho and Frederico Lobo’s documentary film BAB SEBTA (CEUTA’S DOOR, 2008) present clips taken by means of mobile phones or security-cameras at the fences separating Moroccan territory from the Spanish exclave of Ceuta in Northern Africa (Fig. 2). An annoying electronic cheep and indistinct voices underlie the images; we hear a person shouting, “Go, go, go!”; another one yells, “Por favor, por favor.” The short film sequences are stuttering and shaky, blurry and vague. Throughout the sequence, it remains unclear who actually is on which side of the fence – particularly as there are a



 

 
  


considerable number of additional fences in the wide border space between Ceuta and Morocco. The beaten-up intruder is eventually forced to run away; obviously he must have been picked up somewhere in the outer regions of the border zone. Does that imply that the camera gazes from the inside? After the first 70 seconds, a text panel provides a rough contextualisation. It shortly explains the film title and locates the footage geographically. The montage of the film scenes and the text panels suggest particular interpretations – but it remains impossible to definitively evaluate the credibility both of the footage itself and the contexts provided. But it succeeds in catching the viewer’s attention and makes the context plausible. Fig. 2: “Look at us!”

Source: BAB SEBTA, Screenshot, 0'49

BAB SEBTA is a co-production by the Portuguese filmmakers Pedro Pinho and Frederico Lobo. The film premiered at the 2008 Festival Internationale de Cinéma Marseille (FID, 2008) and won the Prix Marseille Espérance; it screened at several festivals but eventually failed to find a distributor for an official release. It is currently available from an Internet platform dedicated to documentary film. The filmmakers’ enquiry into the African–European border spaces starts with the 2005 mass entries of migrants to the Spanish exclaves of Ceuta and Melilla; by means of interviews and observations in different border places in Morocco and Mauritania, it illustrates that in the Northern African countries numerous people are kept in transit. While the camera stays south of the European demarcation lines, the impact of European and African states’ cooperation in the area of migration is, however, tangible throughout. The opening sequence of BAB SEBTA is remarkable for a number of reasons. It presents the viewer with a miniature of contemporary migration spaces, of the European borderlands as outlined in the previous chapter. By observing this microcosm of border facilities for about a minute, the film already raises a number


 

  

  





of issues that I consider most relevant for the visual-political constitution of the European migration regime. The border we see is not just a line or a wall or a fence – it is a wide zone established by means of different lines of defence: barbedwire fences, walls and ditches, guards, dogs and hi-tech surveillance equipment. At the same time, being inside and being outside for undocumented migrants has an infinite number of nuances – while they can be deported easily from Spanish border zones to Moroccan territory, the Moroccan police and border guards cooperate with the Spanish border authorities in order to keep migrants as far from the fenced zone as possible – in consequence, that means already preventing sub-Saharan Africans, for example, from reaching the hubs in the Northern African countries. Neither in the proximity of nor in between the fences can an undocumented migrant be safe from being monitored, picked up, mistreated or deported. No place in Northern Africa has the character of a migration hub more obviously than the exclaves of Ceuta and Melilla – entering it means being on European territory and hence in the position to file an asylum claim.1 At the same time, no demarcation line in Northern Africa is more heavily and more discouragingly protected than the one separating Spain from Morocco. But the enclaves are only two out of numerous such hubs in the geographies of migration. Moreover, in its first few seconds BAB SEBTA contrasts two extremely important conceptions and perceptions of undocumented migrants’ subjectification and objectification.2 The first half invites the viewer to optimistically look at migration as being characterised by certain autonomy and uncontrollability – the time-lapse footage of umpteen people more or less freely moving between fences even relativises the clandestine character of climbing border facilities.3 The second half in contrast presents an image of a migrant becoming victim of police or























































1

Which is in fact the only option a migrant has after entering either of the enclaves to avoid immediate deportation. They must hence at the same time be considered as places facilitating the constant transformation of migrants’ status: as most asylum claims are rejected, most asylum seekers become deportees or ‘illegalised’ migrants in a short time.

2

As Malone (2015) pointedly stresses, “[t]he umbrella term migrant is no longer fit for purpose when it comes to describing the horror unfolding in the Mediterranean. It has evolved from its dictionary definitions into a tool that dehumanises and distances, a blunt pejorative.” Consequently, the issue of how far migrants are assigned subject positions at all can be raised; it is one of the questions that will be dealt with in chapter 7 of this work.

3

The scenes obviously document a rather exceptional situation: while usually the migrants try to conquer the border facilities individually or in small groups, in September 2005, a critical mass of migrants managed to put the borders under massive pressure.



 

 
  


border-staff brutality and despotism. The character of the footage used also echoes visuals of criminalisation and illegalisation. It remains unclear how the two parts are connected spatially and temporally; the montage, however, skilfully establishes a sense of tension that provides the film’s later investigations with undeniable relevance. The scene raises different questions regarding the visuality and mediality of documentary films that this chapter will be concerned withwith; for example, it encourages the viewer to reflect on the potential camera positions in this setting, its localisation and its role regarding authorship. Although one or more fences separate the observer and the observed, the camera takes a position that cannot be clearly identified as outside, observing a scene that cannot be clearly identified as inside. Neither is the camera purely observational nor largely interactive; it seems to localise itself in a strategically chosen and structured in-between. We cannot decide, and eventually we lose our sense of orientation with regard to categories such as inside and outside. The camera seems to aim at challenging common understandings and conceptualisations of borders by confronting the viewer with the existence of an area where neither of the two terms seems to provide an appropriate characterisation. Neither does it take a plain view; nor is it interested in keeping a distance from what it shows. It does not pretend to be a neutral observer – rather, however, it has to locate and situate itself in the in-between space it measures. On the one hand, it is also being observed, as the roles of observer and observed are distributed ambiguously in this setting. On the other hand, the camera constitutes a potential ally of the protagonists on either side of the fence/border. At the same time, the camera is apparently aware of the constructedness and selectiveness of the reality it is dealing with – it seems to point deliberately to the situatedness of what it knows and shows by exposing the production process and its mediality, as it were. In consequence, the sequence is remarkable not only for what it shows but even more for how it shows and for how it instigates the viewer to reflect on the question of how what we see relates to actual events – a fundamental question for documentary images of undocumented migration and documentary images in general. The specific hyper-authentic footage used and its narrative and visual contextualisation dissuade us from asking whether what we see is true or real – and instead encourage us to consider how the image context is made plausible and hence might be considered a relevant statement. This awareness of the images’ constructedness and their obvious detachment from reality, on the one hand, and their simultaneous claim to provide evidence and to bear witness on the other, is only at first glance contradictory. After taking a closer look at the specific quality of the CCTV footage used in BAB SEBTA and two further films, his chapter will enquire into different aspects of the truth-image nexus in documentary film. Specifically, the connection between























































In large groups, they attacked the fences; while many succeeded, today it remains unclear how many of the attackers died trying to cross the border zone (Berger, 2010).


 

  

  





images and knowledge will be of concern and the character of documentary films’ relationship with reality. Eventually the structure of the image spaces created by the films and the display of their own mediality will be explored in more detail.





   
The mobile-phone or security-camera footage used here by Pinho and Lobo has a particular quality with regard to those questions. By the standards of cinematic film production, the material is extremely poor; it is shaky, blurry and fragmented – in other words, absolutely inadequate. Even on its surface, apparently a mosaic of a limited number of inflated squares, the footage quite clearly hardly resembles the thing or reality it seems to stand for (on the visual as well as on the audible level); the sound is distorted, the images imperfect and pixelated; at the same time, the absence of colour and the time-lapsed motion leave a surreal and amateurish impression. Most of the things we think we see and hear are actually not unambiguously recognisable to our eyes and ears. At the same time, it is this particular vagueness that apparently decorates the image with a notion of authenticity (Steyerl, 2008) and evidential value. It shows a lot of things, it implies a lot of assumptions and it has an effect on the viewer – and yet it is not real. Such footage gives the viewer a strange sensation of incorruptible authenticity and credibility; it is hence in fact often part of media coverage of all sorts of events. But the footage serves its purpose only because we are used to incorporating pixelated, amateurish clips into our image of the world. And we know that it may trick us. Rather than being considered the result of a production process, this kind of footage is perceived as emerging objectively and hence rated as most immune to being staged – it even seems to deny any kind of authorship. By observing border-crossing events by means of film footage in which the contrast between the artificial surface and a strong attribution of authenticity is so obvious, Pinho and Lobo clearly point to the fact that processes of migration and the very constitution of borders are, to a considerable extent, visual processes (and entangled with visual techniques) – and at the same time they stimulate the viewers’ awareness of the constructedness of the images to follow in their film, for the character of the evidence it is interested in. The scene’s montage, however, suggests that the reading of a film greatly relies on how the viewer experiences what he/she sees – how the visual takes up common knowledge and common perceptions and how it is conventionalised. Its use in the opening sequence of BAB SEBTA precisely underlines the constructedness of images and their mediality and at the same time points to the crucial role of knowledge and the conventionalisation of the image.



 

 
  


Significantly, of the films selected for the purpose of this work, not only BAB SEBTA makes use of amateur video4 or CCTV footage; Nina Kusturica and Fernand Melgar follow similar strategies in their films LITTLE ALIEN (2009) and LA FORTERESSE (2008). They also use this kind of footage in the opening sequences in order to underline not only the mediality of their films but also the strong visuality of migration and border-protection processes and the visual construction of the spaces of migration in general. They also reflect on issues of producing images in already closely controlled, monitored and restricted spaces and of border technologies; implicitly, they are also referring to the apparent contradiction between the terms documentary and undocumented. Apparently, the context of the cinema transforms the footage’s significance. LA FORTERESSE incorporates CCTV footage twice in order to document the departure of asylum seekers who are being redistributed within Switzerland. As a routine taking place every couple of days, it frames the film’s narrative. While in the opening sequence some 50 people leave the centre and enter a bus, by the end of the film an equally large group of people can be watched leaving the centre on foot and further setting out on a bizarre procession to the train station, firmly instructed about the next steps they have to take and the authorities they have to report to. The film’s director, Fernand Melgar, apparently uses the footage to illustrate the full circle of an asylum seeker’s existence in the centre that is characterised by a peculiar state of immobilised hypermobility: on the one hand, all the interrogations taking place in the centre eventually only aim at making a decision on how to redistribute the individuals, to put them back in the transit cycle; on the other hand, immobility is what the centre is all about (not least because some of the asylum seekers live there for several months). Moreover, the footage provides some sort of ‘official’ perspective that Melgar deploys to establish a strong contrast with his own perspectives/images. While from an official perspective the moment documented by CCTV marks the end of a formal procedure, Melgar’s own material adds stories, narratives and experiences – evidence – complementing and also contrasting formal procedures; eventually illustrating that the centre, for most, is hardly more than just another institution they have passed through. Additionally, the somewhat strange and detached angle of the security-camera also stands in contrast to Melgar’s own camera work, closely following people and their narratives. By taking such a distorted angle at the very beginning of the film, it paves the way for a camera that comes quite close to its protagonists. The CCTV footage frames the film; its camera angle, which operates in an observatory























































4

As amateur video-recording equipment has become extremely affordable and film amateurs are hence able to produce videos that resemble cinematic images in terms of image resolution and quality, the term amateur here cannot signify a technical gap but rather hints at a certain style of filmmaking, an artifice.


 

  

  





mode by means of a medium shot from a bird’s eye view, contrasts the position Melgar takes throughout the film, taking a participatory position, often operating with close-up shots at eye level. The footage is also interesting in terms of its potential to provide evidence; because a particular form of evidence is what it is commonly expected to produce, it is the main reason for its existence in the first place. CCTV usually gives witness of the breach of conventions and the violation of laws; documenting boring and uneventful normality and nothingness for most part of the day, it is designed to catch the moment of exception on film in order to accurately expose factual evildoers. Even though it denies any kind of authorship it can by no means be considered a neutral or innocent technology – it establishes a particularly structured and controlled space and hence also has crucial impact on spaces of migration. The way in which the three films mentioned above make use of CCTV and its aesthetics thwarts and challenges its original functions in different ways: In LA FORTERESSE, the camera documents plain normality, a recurring event without any kind of hassle – and yet it gives account of people in a continuously exceptional situation, human beings following unpredictable trajectories. In BAB SEBTA, it enters a space that is systematically monitored – aimed at underlining the existence of authorship. Although the footage here is most likely taken by means of small mobile devices, it can well be read as aiming to intervene in the surveillance discourse by means of imitating a particular aesthetic. In a way, it critically reiterates and modifies the common CCTV narrative of crime and deviance in order to question what is perceived as clear evidence – with border authorities taking the part of the evildoers. Fig. 3: Overseeing the overseers

Source: LITTLE ALIEN, Screenshot, 1'05



 

 
  


In LITTLE ALIEN, the pixelated footage fulfils a third function; in a control room at the Ukrainian–Slovakian border, the camera films the border guards diligently checking their surveillance monitors – the camera apparently oversees the overseers (Fig. 3). While the local PR officer shows the film team around, he again and again tries to make the camera an accomplice, which it refuses; the film’s producing an image of an image underlines the control apparatus’s adherence to visual technologies. The gap between the different levels of images at times provides the viewer with the strange impression of watching dressed-up men playing video games in an amusement arcade. By means of exposing the border imagery in this way, the camera itself claims a position of authority – using the discursively established purity and objectivity of the documental, it tries to defeat the migrationcontrol regime with its own arguments (Holert, 2008). The short sequences described apparently challenge notions of truth and reality by skilfully engaging with this kind of hyper-real footage. Instead of aiming at establishing a stable link to the truth, they rather play with shifting relationships to authenticity in order to generate plausibility. Assuming that the filmmakers aim at creating work that is relevant on a socio-political level, the question is, then, how the films produce evidential value and claim objectivity in order to legitimise the knowledge their images impart and their version of the truth – how they sketch the visual topographies of “Borderland Schengen”. Secondly, the issue raised above points towards the question of if, and to what end, the documentary image positions itself in terms of relating to representational orders and image politics – how it addresses the entanglement of image, knowledge and power and scrutinises who and what is made visible by whom and in which context; in other words, how they are entangled (or even complicit) with the migration-control dispositive and visual border technologies and control mechanisms and, at the same time, aim at positioning themselves in contrast or opposition to the control apparatus. Thirdly and closely linked to the other two aspects, the question is of how the films reflect and negotiate their own mediality in a way that engages self-reference not at the cost of relevance but as a performative act, establishing the image as witness of social realities rather than giving witness.



 

 
Before addressing those questions in more detail, however, I would like for the moment to go back to immanent questions of truth, reality and authenticity, as they might be important in order to prevent the ontological pitfalls of either contrasting or even mistaking the representation of reality with the image’s relationship to reality. First of all, those concepts are immanent to the negotiation of the documentary genre – not only because of the way in which film being real is part of cinema’s


 

  

  





founding myths in general.5 The omnipresent demand that the genre of the documentary film is the part of cinema that has to be credible, authentic and non-fictitious arises from the image’s basic resemblance with reality. And to demand cinema to be realistic seems to be most obvious because, in cinema, a landscape is expressed by a landscape, a human being by a human being (Seeßlen, 2014): images are “imitations of life” (Mitchell, 2010, p.13). Consequently, more than any other genre, documentary film continues to trigger the question for its congruency with reality. Even in his standard introduction to documentary film, Bill Nichols defines the relationship between documentary film and real events as rather linear: “Documentary film speaks about situations and events involving real people (social actors) who present themselves to us as themselves in stories that convey a plausible proposal about, or perspective on, the lives, situations, and events portrayed. The distinct point of view of the filmmaker shapes this story into a way of seeing the historical world directly rather than into a fictional allegory.” (2010, p.14)

In other words: there is something we refer to as reality – people, situations, events – that the filmmaker captures in order to give account of this reality. As a description of the character of the relationship between reality and film images, Nichols’s definition falls short – but it provides an adequate description of the commonsense genre-specific expectations towards documentary film. Documentary film gains most of its evidential value – its authority – from the assumption that it is able to give a credible, plausible, legitimate and significant account of reality. That it makes a relevant statement about reality. Although terms such as reality and truth refer to – not only in the context of the documentary – fought-over concepts and although the assumption “this is true and real” may today have been replaced or at least supplemented by the rather hesitant and uncertain question “is this true and real?”, both the production and reception of documentary films are still intrinsically linked to notions of credibility and authenticity. The production and consumption of a documentary film hence necessarily swing between the poles of its resemblance with reality and the potential to deploy this resemblance in order to create relevance and plausibility – and an artificiality and mediality that necessitate self-reflexivity and a continuously created and recreated link to truth and reality. But Nichols’s definition builds on another problematic presumption: it expects the documentary’s protagonists and their narratives and stories to be real, to be themselves – he assumes, in other words, that while film cannot produce real images there is, however, always something real that it may refer to. And the definition apparently underestimates the influence the camera itself has on the space it enters and the reality it encounters – and at the same time























































5

Although certainly not in the often assumed form of the audience in the early years of cinema not being able to distinguish between images and reality, as Loiperdinger has clarified (2004).



   

 
  


thus establishes the notion of an authenticity that may indeed not be found in the image but that the camera is able to find. At the same time, we have to note a crucial difference in how images from different genres are being consumed: the binarism of fiction and non-fiction is often considered obsolete but still has a considerable impact on how we read and interpret what we see, on our genre-related expectations. While we usually claim that fiction should at least be to a certain extent plausible, a documentary image is expected to be more than that in order to be relevant: in order to maintain its authority the documentary image needs to be suggestive of being more real and truer than films in other genres; authenticity is its currency. The demand to be realistic – not by means of a logical structure of a narrative but by means of a clear link to real events – is constitutive, and this is something the film also has to reflect; as Seeßlen put it, a film has to account for the fact that it “is realistic in that it deals with its being ideology. To put it in other words: A realistic film is a contradiction – but a contradiction that it constantly aims at overcoming” (2014, p.82). The question of in what way it constructs realism in this regard is relevant and much more productive than the question of if it is realistic at all (ibid.). Consequently, it is one of the constitutive contradictions of the documentary image that, on the one hand, it cannot be real and, on the other, once it stops striving for reality it will no longer be considered as of any documental or evidential value – the question that modes filmmakers deploy in order to equilibrate this contradiction is one of the central features of documentary film.


 


 
The films used in this work have all been produced over the past decade, and although they should not be understood as constituting a new movement or school of filmmaking, they do, however, all implicitly or explicitly refer to earlier developments and movements in (documentary) film concerned with issues of their own mediality and their specific relationship to and understanding of reality. Historically, it has turned out to be an extremely productive undertaking to focus on and challenge the truth–image nexus; the French Cinéma vérité in the 1960s aimed at making the filmmaking process transparent by visualising production processes and by taking a highly self-reflexive stance, facilitated for example by direct interaction between the people behind and in front of the camera, hence by means of a rather interactive mode eventually aiming at transgressing the space between the camera and the image in order to shed light on the truth behind the image, on reality (Nichols, 1991). LITTLE ALIEN can certainly be understood as standing in this tradition, not only in terms of its thematisation of the crucial relevance of the visual in the border zone to which it enquires, but also in the way it interacts with its protagonists; the camera takes an explicitly subjective angle – every now and

 


 

 





then we observe a protagonist and the camera/filmmaker taking note of each other, even directly looking at each other.6 The North American Direct cinema in contrast followed a rather observational mode, making the camera preferably imperceptible in order to have as little impact as possible on the situation it observes and documents – nearly unnoticed like a ‘fly on the wall’. This resulted in the aim to shoot film as precisely as possible by means of little lightweight and mobile equipment. The moment when the person in front of the camera forgot about the camera’s presence was considered the privileged moment where the underlying truth is exposed (ibid.). LA FORTERESSE can in this regard certainly be interpreted as standing in the tradition of Direct cinema – not so much in trying to pretend to be unnoticed or a fly on the wall, but rather in avoiding being directly addressed as a protagonist. Melgar observes his protagonists establishing the diverse narratives in a dialogical form, but it does not intervene in the dialogue. Like LITTLE ALIEN, it is aware of being medial and it does not aim to obscure its mediality; at the same time, it observes several situations where the protagonists are emotionalised in a way that might in fact make them forget the camera for a moment. Both Direct cinema and Cinéma vérité have been strongly influenced by Dziga Vertov’s extremely reflexive 1920s Kino-Pravda and his quest for objective truthfulness by means of making the filmic conventions apparent; all those modes























































6

In 2003, LITTLE ALIEN’s director, Nina Kusturica, was the co-founder of the production company Mobilefilm, a collective of filmmakers aiming to make politically relevant films. In their manifesto, they claim that “when film is supposed to tell a story about the world, people who can relate to it in their own unique way are required. In addition to individuals who are able to provide a framework in which these stories find their own space. This entails being mobile, and sometimes choosing an alternative path, following a puff of air while at the same time remaining fully conscious of your own convictions […] We encounter stories in the same way as the individuals who want to tell them with us. We provide a framework, accompany the story-tellers, and have our own stories to tell” (Mobilefilm, 2014, Manifesto). Interestingly enough, the film collective here stresses the necessity of the filmmakers’ mobility within their own space – certainly not primarily with regard to his or her camera being lightweight and easily available. In order to capture and “tell a story about the world”, filmmaking also has to accept certain unpredictable trajectories – it less follows its protagonists around or searches for specific individuals or stories to tell and more literally stumbles upon “the world”. Filmmaking here is specifically understood as a social process; film as an artistic expression that emerges in between the filmmaker and the world – the filmmaker with his or her “convictions” is, however, not primarily a spectator but part of this “world”; the filmmaker has his/her own stories to tell.



   

 
  


avoided commonly used expository documentary film techniques such as an explanatory or contextualising voice-over – something that also links the films in this work as a fundamental principle. Only COME UN OUMO SULLA TERRA at times has one of the director’s voice-overs, but he by no means aims at providing immediate explanations but rather a radical historisation of his own migration experience and narrative; he is a narrator rather than a commentator. Also in the realms of fiction film, specific movements can be detected that understand filmmaking as being linked to social responsibility and commit their films to illustrating social realities as precisely as possible – for example, Italian Neorealismo of the 1940s, the Nouvelle Vague, the Cinema Novo, the New German Cinema and the New Hollywood movements of the 1960s and 1970s (Monaco, 2000). In 1995, the Danish directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg initiated the Dogme 95 movement, directly referring to the work of French filmmakers in the 1960s and claiming a reduced and simplified way of filmmaking in order to not alienate or distract the audience; while they did not claim the ability to better represent reality, they were certainly looking for essential or purified images, images of the real, as it were – which is exemplified not only in their manifesto’s claim that “the movie is not illusion!” (von Trier and Vinterberg, 1995). Only about a decade ago, a group of US-American filmmakers called the Remodernist movement into being, seeking a new spirituality in cinema and being “concerned with humanity and an understanding of the simple truths and moments of humanity” (Richards, 2008), also committing their film production to imperfection and films’ “ability to show the truth of existence” (ibid.). In most of those understandings, the camera is considered a tool to expose or at least anticipate social relations, and the relationship between the image and reality is perceived as more or less linear (which in some cases implies understanding the image as having some sort of indexical relationship with the world). What all those approaches have in common, regardless of the genres they are rooted in, is that they anticipate the camera’s potential to manipulate – and this way or the other thematise their images’ relationship to reality – it must be assumed, mainly in order to avert suspicions of lying and manipulation. That in some cases a certain naivety of filming approaches can be observed (and may in some cases even be intended) should not be discussed in detail here. What is interesting in this context is rather how the filmmakers concerned link their filmic subject (or story or issue) to reflections about film’s mediality, be it as part of the film, of the production process or in the form of a manifesto. Their concern about the image imparting the lie at the same time grounds less in the assumption that an image is not true enough, or not genuinely giving an account of reality, and much more in an image’s detachment from truth in a way that it is no longer rooted in social realities. So, in other words, even if an image is not expected to be real it can still be true in that it carries a particular urgency and relevance with regard to specific life realities. The modes described above have always produced hybrid forms and variations; however, they continue to inform filmmaking, particularly filmmaking that


 

  

   





intends to be of a certain social relevance. At least three fundamental aspects, however, changed over the past decades; firstly, approaches to documentary filmmaking and also its theoretical understanding moved away from the notion of an inherent reality within the image towards the question of how images are read (Jordan, 2003); secondly, digital technologies put the genre under pressure and perpetuated what is often termed an ongoing crisis of the documental;7 change has become permanent, pushed forward by the continuous “convergence and differentiation of technologies and formats” (Hohenberger, 2012, p.7); and thirdly – also an integral aspect of what is perceived as a crisis of documental forms – is the continuous contemporary attempt to collapse the difference between fiction and non-fiction, not only in reality-TV shows, in news coverage and Internet video channels but also in cinema. Consequently, an increasing similarity of documental and fictional forms can be noted, not only on a technological level but also with regard to the codes and modes deployed in different genres that in combination often lead to confusingly similar images and disturbing contextualisations. A popular example for the interchangeability of filmic codes and the fluidity of genres is the 1999 horror movie THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. The film was neither the first faux-documentary nor the first film illustrating a fictitious story by means of found footage,8 but it initiated a wave of films – six years before YouTube was launched it prefigured completely changing terms of authorship. Back in 1999, the film worked mainly because it was able to suspend all kinds of authorship that lay outside the film itself. Today, as we have the experience of living in an increasingly technologically mediated society, we are used to hybrid forms like this, to fictional images that have been authenticised by the means of design borrowed from the documentary genre. And while it is widely recognised that fiction films build their narratives in a more or less discreet way, deploying documental precepts or practices, this should not be misunderstood as a one-way process. Documentary film also makes use of practices such as scripting, staging and arranging, dramatisation, casting and performance that one would usually associate with fiction film (Nichols, 2010). In reality-TV formats, those forms merge beyond recognition, and this development also includes issues of undocumented migration; on Australian TV, for























































7

Strictly speaking, this crisis is not new but accompanied the documental from the very beginning – be it the first films by the Lumière brothers, the pioneering ethnographic work by Pöch or Vertov’s revolutionary montage techniques, film was always perceived as being involved in a complex interplay with perceptions of reality.

8

In general, since the invention of cinema it happened over and over again that lived reality was brought to the screen in unprecedented ways; Already Sergei Eisenstein’s СТАЧКА (STRIKE, 1925) was praised for its stories’ degree of realism; later, e.g., Roberto Rossellini’s ROMA CITTÀ APERTA (ROME, OPEN CITY, 1945) and John Cassavetes’ SHADOWS (1959) had some sort of documentary touch (Nichols, 2010).



   

 
  


example, there were especially two shows strongly framing the immigration debate in the country: firstly, there was a show called BORDER SECURITY: AUSTRALIA’S FRONT LINE (2004 to present), which was approved of by immigration officials, as has been revealed recently (Farrell, 2015); secondly, the show GO BACK TO WHERE YOU CAME FROM (running from 2011 to 2015) followed groups of Australians embarking on refugee journeys in reverse – from Australia, for example, to Iraq, Somalia and Christmas Island. The latter also created spin-offs, for example in Denmark with SEND DEM HJEM (SEND THEM HOME, 2013) and on German television where it was called AUF DER FLUCHT: DAS EXPERIMENT9 (ON THE RUN: THE EXPERIMENT, 2013). Shows like those mentioned go one step further than just merging different forms of images and genres – they also pretend an infinite reproducibility and interchangeability of experiences and affections. While the line between documentary and fiction on the level of the image is continuously being blurred, the boundary between the genres seems to persist (Nichols, 2010). A boundary that is, at least from a constructivist’s point of view, artificial anyway. Trinh T. Minh-ha points to a crucial antagonism that may at the same time be understood as one of the driving factors of documentary filmmaking: even though the term documentary film describes a genre or a method, and although she acknowledges the existence of a documentary tradition, she states that “there is no such thing as documentary film” (2012, p.276) as there is and always will be a shift or gap between the real and the image – and the truth does not reveal itself in the film image. Nevertheless, can the relevance of the documental not be put in question per se precisely because the very difference between fiction and non-fiction is still its existential theoretical figure (Hohenberger, 2012). Apparently, over the past two decades, with the blurring of forms and modes, the reception and consumption of images have also changed dramatically; it is as if the digital age taught us to live with the uncertainty of the image – and that acquiescing this uncertain quality of the image is much more convenient than constantly questioning what we see because it seems to be a futile undertaking anyway. Ironically, this has not led to the diminishment of the omnipresence of the documentary image – be it in TV news or newspapers, online video platforms or social networks – nor to a decrease in the impact and relevance of images. Even more, while particularly constructivist approaches stimulated a strong scepticism towards the possibility of reality being captured in an image at all, over the past decade or so a kind of positivistic backlash can be observed. Not that the doubts concerning the adequacy of images have diminished completely. Rather, we find ourselves in a paradoxical situation where on a rational level we are well aware of the fact that images cannot achieve congruency with reality and may even not be appropriate reports of an event (or even be produced with the sole purpose to trick























































9

Due to the poor market share and a controversial public debate around it, this show was, however, cancelled after few episodes (Helmes, 2013).


 

  

   





the viewers’ senses) – at the same time, images continue to be the most important elements in how the world is explained to us, in how we see and understand the world and how we compose our “ethics of seeing” (Sontag, 1977, p.3). One of the major challenges the documentary image has to meet continuously, specifically in the digital age, is connected to its authority: the true and the real resemble the lie, the unreal and the manipulative. Acknowledging that the camera does not duplicate reality and that it struggles with authenticity does not, however, automatically imply the opposite. Images are not per se unable to relate to reality – as this would consequently imply that facts could not be distinguished from lies and propaganda. If documentary film may not be able to avoid this, it can actively reflect it by means of putting its own mediality into focus. Rather than putting the documental into question in general, this dilemma highlights the urgency of the question (Steyerl, 2008). Steyerl stresses that the image can be separated neither from the (historical) context of its production, nor from the immanent doubt – because it unfolds within an “economy of uncertainty” (2008, p.12), expressed in an omnipresent awareness of manipulability on the one hand and the ongoing privatisation of public sphere and of opinions on the other. Hence, she recapitulates, the only thing we can be sure of is our uncertainty because the “permanent doubt, the nagging uncertainty of what we see is true, real and factual follows documentary images like a shadow” (ibid., p.9). Instead of understanding doubt as a deficit, we may consider it the main feature of documentary film and of the documentary image in general. At the same time, it can be observed that the documentary image is omnipresent. As Steyerl states, “instead of weakening them, doubting their claim for truth makes documentary images stronger. The documentary articulation today is much more powerful than ever […] They turn distance into intimacy, ignorance into treacherous knowledge. They mobilise the masses and turn people into enemies and friends” (ibid., p.12).

The crisis referred to above is, in other words, necessarily permanent; the moment the crisis ends is the moment of conclusive irrelevance of the documental. But Steyerl (2008) also stresses that documentary forms must be considered an important element of contemporary economies of affect, satisfying the need for intensity and identification. While we may consequently understand image production increasingly in the context of an ever-growing commercialisation of the documentary image and a decrease in journalistic standards, the films used in this work to a certain degree cast this generalising assumption into doubt. They illustrate that especially those films that do not deploy the real as their main point of reference, in terms of the production of evidence, have the potential to defy their commodification. And while it may be true for many images and news today – that they primarily have the character of commodities and that the more the stream of images accelerates, distributed for example via different Internet platforms and channels – the more their credibility is under pressure, films such as LA



   

 
  


FORTERESSE, HAVARIE, BAB SEBTA or LITTLE ALIEN thwart the logic of representation and identity politics that underlies Steyerl’s claim. Not least, those films’ continuous reflection of their being and becoming medial prevents them from being consumed by an indifferent stream of commodified images and affects. It is, however, important to note that with the commodification of the documentary image the self-evident (Foucault) shifts to the centre of its relationship with reality. While this not least underlines the fact that knowledge and the production of knowledge are only indirectly linked to reality, it also points to the crucial relevance of how seeing and knowing are being conventionalised in the economy of the documentary image – and at the same time offers a gateway to breaking conventions in order to scrutinise the self-evident. And as image and reality can be expected to be neither the same nor the opposite, for the analysis of the images’ quality it makes sense to dismiss the antagonism of truth and lie – and with it put a stronger focus on the creativity of visual and aesthetic practices. This is not to suggest relativisation or indifference: an image may always be considered full of lies – but it cannot be considered a lie in contrast to an image that is true or in contrast to a reality that it differs from – the antithesis of a real image, so to say.



 

 
  


 
At the same time, questions of truth and reality are questions that do not exclusively relate to the image itself but even more to its authors and spectators – the film images’ relationship to reality are most relevant in the moment they are being produced and composed, viewed and read/interpreted against the background of the individual (author’s or viewer’s) perceptions of the true and the real, his or her knowledge and experiences. Firstly, on the level of production, composition and authorship, it may be common sense that what we see on the screen is based on deliberate decisions by the person operating the camera and the person responsible for the montage of the film; “the documentary that you see is only one version of the film it might have been [and at the same time] the art of the thing is to improvise around the unforeseen” (Chanan, 2008, p.123). But the question of authorship goes deeper: a narrative may have been drafted before the camera shoots the first picture; the setting, the protagonists, everything may at least be the result of a well-reflected decision – by authorship. More importantly, if we assume that documentary film tells a story extracted from the real world, the question is whose story that is. Is it the filmmaker’s story or the protagonists’ stories? This question points to the fact that also a filmmaker can only know so much – just as well as the film image is framed, the filmmaker’s appreciation of a particular real event is necessarily limited and at the same time his/her knowledge about it and its context must be considered situated. The question of ownership of a story must hence at least be considered


 

  

   





ambiguous (Nichols, 2010), not least because of the already-mentioned problematic assumption that what is in front of the camera, the situation and the protagonists it finds, imparts the authentic content the image may not have and that realism can be extracted more or less automatically from this particular situation or narrative. One of the films used in this work, COME UN UOMO SULLA TERRA by the Italian Andrea Segre and the Ethiopian Dagmawi Yimer, throughout thematises the issue of authorship. Dagmawi Yimer, who came to Italy as a refugee, in this film is both a filmmaker reflecting and narrativising his own story and an interviewer in front of the camera talking to other Ethiopian and Eritrean refugees who have had similar experiences. He is behind and in front of the camera, on the one hand claiming authorship for his own story, on the other hand feeding into a larger, jointly authored narrative. Presented as a sort of incomplete mosaic, consistency is not claimed at any narrative level. The issue of authorship in the film is dealt with openly, not only on the level of the story but also on the level of the production of the film itself – the filmmakers constantly localise themselves, for example by negotiating their motivations to shoot the film. The transparency they apply with regard to the film’s mediality and their positioning as filmmakers makes the film specifically comprehensible, or in other words – how contradictory – realistic. Secondly, on the level of spectatorship or readership, the category of realism and the crucial role of knowledge need a second look. In an article on genre, Steve Neale points to the fact that genre not only consists of different films but “also, and equally, of specific systems of expectation and hypothesis which spectators bring with them to the cinema, and which interact with films themselves during the course of the viewing process” (1990, p.46). He suggests referring to the concepts of verisimilitude to describe and analyse this interaction. There is on the one hand a generic verisimilitude based on different genres’ rules, conventions and boundaries and leading to specific expectations towards a film belonging to a particular genre. While in most cases, verisimilitude relates to the question of whether specific narrative figures, elements or structures are probable or likely in the context of a specific genre, the expectations and hypotheses connected to the documentary genre already presume probability and likeliness. By, on the other hand, complementing the generic verisimilitude by a cultural verisimilitude, Neale points to the fact that the images at the same time undergo processes of translation and appropriation that are closely related to the normativity of perceptions of reality. In other words: the images’ relationship to reality is constantly being complemented and comprehended through the eyes of the spectator – by his/her knowledge; “any claim to knowledge that we take away comes thoroughly filtered through the form in which that knowledge reaches us” (Nichols, 2010, p.239). Neale deploys the concept to establish a tension between realism and verisimilitude in order to “link the industrial production of genre fiction to the conceptions of hegemony and cultural struggle” (Hall, 2011, p.361). While realism describes whether a film image accords our image of the world, verisimilitude in no directs sense related to ‘reality’ or ‘truth’; instead of referring to what may actually



   

 
  


be the case, verisimilitude accounts for what is widely assumed to be the case (Neale, 1990). Given what has been said above about the relationship between reality, image, producer and spectator, it is, however, useful to transfer verisimilitude to the documentary genre in order to point out some of its crucial aspects. Verisimilitude underlines that reality is a cultural construction regardless of the film genre; it moreover accounts for the existence of an author and stresses the need to reflect the role of the protagonists as also being subject to generic and cultural verisimilitude; and it especially points towards the fictional potential of the documentary in general. In other words: the reality a documentary film relates to is necessarily constructed on various levels – and its norms and its common sense stem from outside the film. Verisimilitude allows for approaching terms and concepts such as true and untrue, likely and plausible by means of the assessment of the cultural construction of reality that they hide: reality in a way lies in the eye of the beholder, not in the image itself; the relationship between the image and knowledge is crucial. The eye of the beholder is, however, also conventionalised by what Foucault refers to as the ‘regime of truth’, producing discourses, specific mechanisms and instances that contour what a society considers true and what it considers false and also valorises techniques and procedures obtaining truth. Truth is consequently only indirectly linked to reality; it is rather “a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and functioning of statements” (Foucault, 1977b, p.13). Consequently, the images play an important role in justifying the regime of truth and in shaping common sense and confirming knowledge – this is where Hall, referring to the concept of verisimilitude and also to Foucault’s claim for a ‘politics of truth’, assigns the image with the potential to facilitate social change. Contest over the definition of the real may force the codes of verisimilitude to change; a social movement’s claim for realism, or a new realism, in this regard challenges the conventions of verisimilitude and “realism becomes a polemic in an assault on cultural verisimilitude: it demands representation of what has not been seen before, what has been unthinkable because unrepresentable” (Hall, 2011, p.361). Trinh Minh-ha (2012) in this regard claims that the fundamental difference between a thing’s truth and its interpretation/significance is the interval without which significance would be fixed and the truth would freeze – what is considered the truth is in other words only one of several possible interpretations or significances – truths. This is what makes talking about this interval – the film – so complicated and at the same time important. The films dealt with here produce their image’s relevance primarily by means of their enquiry of European borderlands as topographies of subjects, narratives, places and objects that usually remain undetected. They build on unknown subject positions and motivations, but as well on the many unlikely and unexpected (everyday) events connected to it – the Ethiopian refugee and filmmaker Dagmawi Yimer having pasta with his girlfriend in a private space, a man from Nigeria


 

  

   





tramping through the dewy Swiss mountains wearing sun-yellow rubber boots. They evoke realism beyond self-evidence, and in consequence their images less follow representational modes or the remodelling of identities, and more organise the interval mentioned above by means of a visual performance that transgresses the dimensions of producing meaning and apprehension (Schwarte, 2011), which the following sections will outline in more detail. Summarising what has been said so far, one might conclude that film is not only incapable of duplicating reality but even defies reality – even if its means and style, purpose and material are realistic. That is not only because film has to be selective with regard to the details it takes note of and the perspective it takes, but also because of its specific claim for a consistency that reality does in fact not dispose of (Seeßlen, 2014). Documentary film does, however, bear witness – not so much of reality but of the context of the image, the factual and potential reverberations and afterimages of events. Understanding “the skin of the film not as a screen, but as a membrane that brings its audience into contact with the material forms of memory” (Marks, 2000, p.243), the form of the images’ construction may be read as above all making the conditions of its production evident. Regardless of whether an image is congruent with reality or not, its form will always tell the truth about the context of the image itself (Steyerl, 2008) – i.e. its production, its constructedness, the power relations it imparts and potentially reiterates. It is, in other words, always true and untrue at the same time. At the level of the production of the image and its constitution, contextualisation and signification is exactly where the documentary has the potential to be documental. And although we may hence not consider documentary film the place of the true and the real, it definitely has the potential to stimulate debates of life realities as it so clearly alerts us to the visual construction of the social (Mitchell, 2002) in general. Further, the films used here are deploying different documental modes – but instead of asking what the image shows and what reality it illustrates, they all suggest finding out why and in what way they show something and what the showing (and not-showing of other things) implies – apparently they are well aware of their mediality and their involvement in specific discourses and the migration apparatus. To establish the link to the issues addressed in this work more explicitly: what the films used in this work aim at is to bring events to the documentary screen in order to bring them and their subjects into existence in the first place. Even though what we see in a documentary can only assign a specific significance to what it shows and even though the film, in other words, necessarily stands between the viewer (or the analyses, theories …) and the truth and there can never be an immediate connection, we have to assume that the very phenomenon of undocumented migration does in fact exist – and that what the films show selectively refers to life realities that have to incorporate complex power relations and a precarious legal status. In being historically informed, and by operating hybrid documental modes combining observational, interactive as well as reflexive approaches, they draw the viewer’s attention “to the device as well as to the effect”, not least since “what counts as a realistic representation of the historical world is



 

 
  


[…] a matter of […] struggles for power and authority within the historical arena itself” (Nichols, 1991, p.33).



   
So, the image, its production and consumption stand in a complex relationship to reality; they are detached from the real real but at the same time closely linked to the imaginary, the constructed real – the image’s reality, so to say. Consequently, the question remains of how the films exactly contour this relationship in terms of the conventions they encompass and the resemblance they impart – in order to produce evidential value that gives account of social realities. The image’s reality in the form of the truth is conventionalised in different regards, sometimes referred to as verisimilitude, sometimes as ‘regime of truth’. Constitutively standing in a field of tension with reality and truth but also with its viewers, consumers, readers, interpreters, the documentary image’s form consequently adheres to specific conventions that also have an impact on the forms it can take. Coming back to the CCTV footage example taken from BAB SEBTA, it might make sense to take a closer look at how this particular form of the documentary image has been conventionalised in the first place, how we learned to decode its meanings and implications. A little more than a decade ago, the CNN network was the first news channel to supplement its coverage of the US intervention in Iraq by the work of so-called embedded journalists, taken out of the briefing rooms and into the field. Shot by means of light equipment and even mobile phones from army lorries, those shaky and blurry images were dripping with authenticity. Although there was nothing much to see on those images, and although they only remotely resembled the thing they were supposed to represent, they were perceived as adequate depictions of what was really going on (Steyerl, 2008), which also had a considerable impact on the viewers’ perceptions of the overall coverage of the military intervention: images like those used by CNN “fiddle with the scale of the world” (Sontag, 1977, p.4). Quickly, the products of embedded journalism changed its role in the coverage from supplementing other sources of information to being one of the main sources of information and interpretation of the conflict. Embedding journalists in the coverage of the conflict only worked based on the un-testable claim that images are able to tell the truth and nothing but the truth about the events. But how, one has to ask, to deal with a film that pretends to distinguish the true from the faked, even though the visibility of such truths is only possible in the form of the fake (Minh-ha, 2012)? The CCTV-style footage, referred to for example in the films mentioned above, works because it is part of specific “modalities of seeing” (Foucault); we have learned how to see and think what those images aimed to transport; our seeing/thinking has been trained in order to read the evidence the images impart. As Rajchman points out, “who sees what or whom and where are integral features of


 

  

   





the visual thinking of a period and not an independent fact about its context” (1988, p.92). In this line of thinking, Jonathan Engelbert (2011) draws a direct connection from the first US-American invasion of Iraq in 1991 to the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent ‘War on terror’. While the public consciousness has aesthetically been shaped by the 9/11 events, it also for the first time perceived of itself as a global consciousness10 – assuming a global relevance that is, however, unimaginable without CNN’s live coverage of the first Gulf War, including those darkgreen tinted images of curtain fire and air raids produced by means of hi-tech night-vision devices. “A diffuse optical impression provides legitimacy […], a metaphor of the approximate is enough, without the need for contextualisation of the political intentions or for an image depicting what is” (ibid., p.30). The footage used in the three film examples above must in this regard also be considered highly conventionalised; we can only read it because we learned how to read it. The context it is used in does not, however, primarily suggest an affirmative reading but rather aims at scandalising the border situation as an event. Apparently, the process of conventionalisation consequently also encompasses elements of visual literacy – the ability to separate an image and its conventions in order to re-contextualise and reconnect signification. In Engelbert’s understanding, this global consciousness is composed of technically mediated fragments of reality. A similar development can be observed connected to the 2015/16 European refugee crisis; it indeed feeds into a crisis that is increasingly being perceived as a global crisis – not so much in political terms but rather as visual events that adhere to a similar visual logic and deploy the same conventionalised narrative and rhetorical figures regardless of its geographical appearance – be it the fierce debates about Mexican and Latin American immigration to, and immigrants in, the United States, South Africa’s and Australia’s harsh immigration policies that basically obey the principles of isolation and repulsion, or the increasingly hysterical debate about refuge and asylum in the European Union and its member states: they all feed into a sort of common consciousness that understands the rich industrialised nations (us!) as being under attack. It is consequently that sort of global consciousness that is mainly being produced and conventionalised in the newsrooms and political back rooms in the industrialised immigration countries, serving specific image politics – if there is a level on which the images of the refugee crisis can be considered as establishing some sort of























































10 Admittedly, Engelbert here uses ‘global’ in an extremely generalising manner; the audience he refers to must be assumed to be primarily located in the Western industrialised countries – not because in other parts of the world people would not be empathic enough or would be unable to understand such an event, but because the event by no means universally overruled or overwrote the conventions, systems of verisimilitude and regimes of truth.



   

 
  


global consciousness then it is in the images becoming commodities, interchangeable universalised narratives and figures feeding migration and refugee discourses in countries of emigration, countries of immigration and in-transit countries. Meanwhile, the openly embedded journalist seems to be a thing of the past – certainly not least because of the high number of casualties among journalists (CPJ, 2015). Apparently, the commodification of the documentary image made the strategy of embedding journalists obsolete; constant competitiveness and lowered standards in many media newsrooms ensure that journalists often feed their material into the news stream without understanding professional distance as their main goal. On a visual level, in the coverage of dramatic incidents like wars, military or terroristic attacks, natural disasters or other catastrophic events, something usually referred to as “unverified amateur footage” became an important element in media vocabulary. In its blurriness and its excitement, such footage resembles the images the embedded journalists delivered – brim-full of apparent authenticity and uncertainty at the same time. Instead of a certain (simulated) journalistic professionalism or detachment, the dramatic narrative is being driven by obvious expressions of panic, fear and consternation, all important ingredients of credibility and authenticity. Does the viewer need to know whether the source of the footage is in fact unverified or if it is just a skilful trick, a tool to catch the audience’s attention? It’s a paradox: while unverified signals caution, amateur signals authenticity and credibility – hence using material like this must be considered as a medial artifice this way or the other.11 Also surveillance technology and CCTV footage have a remarkable function regarding images’ credibility and the production of evidence. As mentioned above, such automatically captured footage is often assigned a strong trustworthiness and incorruptibility – certainly connected to the unfounded assumption of missing subjective authorship. Like in the case of embedded journalism and amateur footage, the poor quality of the material does, however, usually contribute to the impression of credibility rather than putting it into question. Authorship is rarely scrutinised or even assumed to exist – something that the opening scene of BAB SEBTA clearly points attention to, not by answering the question but by instigating the viewer to formulate the question in the first place. But the documentary image is not only conventionalised with regard to its technical appearance and the viewers’ capacity to extract meaning or significance from























































11 Several examples exist in which unverified YouTube clips have entered the newsrooms without being properly checked for their background; see, e.g., the rage in German media caused by a doctored video of then Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis making an offensive gesture (The Guardian, 2015) or the upheaval primarily on US-American TV triggered by a faked ISIS flag (full of dildos) at London Pride in the summer of 2015 (Coombs, 2015).


 

  

  





a certain look or style of images; it is just as well conventionalised in terms of its narrative structure. Cinematic documentaries cannot be considered as functioning completely independently of, or fundamentally different from, other documentary images and narrative structures. The impact they have and the way in which those images are read, interpreted and decoded – in other words, how evidence and meaning emerge from the image – are necessarily connected to the documentary image’s common appearance, to the self-evident and visible and to the iconologies composing hegemonic visual discourses. In other words: they cannot easily create alternative evidence or new and equally relevant or authoritative versions of a symbol or icon because they first of all necessarily speak the same language. This entanglement of – roughly speaking – rather hegemonic and rather alternative visual discourses, iconologies and archives has to be taken into account in the form of the image’s resemblance or analogy with itself. In order to illustrate this analogy, I would like to transfer the Belgian surrealist René Magritte’s wellknown painting LA TRAHISON DES IMAGES (1928–29, depicting an image of a pipe and the sentence “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”) to the context of the picture of a pirogue on any shore of the Mediterranean. While it is certainly true that “Ceci n’est pas une pirogue” but instead only resembles a pirogue, it at the same time is just one of many possible images of a pirogue; in being an image it carries an endless potentiality and numerous significances – even though in language it is inseparably connected to the term pirogue. An important factor with regard to the documental quality of an image is in how far the image’s potentiality is reflected. The contextualisation of the image – from both the filmmaker’s and the viewer’s perspective – may aim at maintaining the potentiality just as well as at reducing it. Technically, however, the image remains the same – with regard to its potential content and the iconology it itself resembles. Sticking to the example of the pirogue, I would like to refer to a scene in BAB SEBTA that skilfully plays with the images’ potentiality and the viewers’ expectations and experiences. While Mauritanian fisherman set sail for a haul, we hear a male voice reflecting on the dangers of the marine journey to the Canary Islands. What the viewer in a first reflex assumes to be a boat carrying migrants – heavily loaded with luggage – and a camera that replicates an irregular migrant’s perspective on such a boat, by and by turns into a regular Mauritanian fisher pirogue; what appeared to be luggage is in fact a huge fishing net (Fig. 4). The fisherman’s voiceover at the same time explains that the 2000-kilometre or six-day trip from Mauritania to the Canary Islands is extremely tough – yet it is possible. “For us fishermen”, a man says, “it is not hard.” But for people who don’t know how to fish and who are not familiar with the smell of the sea, the trip is perilous. “But some people take their chances, leaving like that.” From the pirogue’s rocking bow, the camera observes the fishermen following their daily business – as if to visualise the narrator’s descriptions. Staying at sea for a couple of days, we learn, is nothing exceptional for the fishermen; the trip to the Canary Islands for Mauritanian fishermen could also be their daily business – and there is at least the possibility that the men or the boat depicted here have already taken the trip, either as refugees or



 

 
  


as intermediaries. The contradiction between what the man talks about and the fishermen’s actions is obvious – however, it is impossible to measure exactly and hence establishes a strong moment of potentiality. Fig. 4: Ceci n’est pas une pirogue

Source: BAB SEBTA, Screenshot, 105'29

The filmmakers here challenge the self-evident in a quite simple yet effective way; they establish some kind of heterotopic space (Foucault) in which the “traditional bonds between language and image are disturbed, made different and in tension” (Horrocks and Jevtic, 2013, p.79), in which the image and its mirror image do not correspond – and at the same time it is not clear which of the two is the image and which is the reflection; the usual filmic subordination of the sound to the image is shaken. The example illustrates how cinematic documentary films extract their credibility and suggestive power, for example, from contrasting – expository – narrative principles used in other documentary forms. The specific contextualisations of what we see challenge the self-evident nourished by our knowledge – only after we realise that what we hear does not confirm what we thought we had seen (because we have seen it many times before) are we required to take a closer look; the self-evident and the affirmative begin to crumble. BAB SEBTA does not primarily aim at establishing a linear relationship between words, sound and image but keeps it fluid, at creating visual events that need our attention in order to recreate the order of things and to align our senses to what we see (Schwarte, 2011). How the images then connect to common perceptions in terms of their production and consumption may usually lie beyond the producer’s direct sphere of influence – and not only because digital reproduction allows separating each and every image from its original (historical and medial) context. But this does not imply that the producer is not in the position to reflect the potentiality of the images created and the iconologies deployed. At the same time, it raises the question


 

  

  





of how far a critical and self-reflexive approach to evidence and the intolerable may be considered as becoming an element of an image itself. What – in terms of context and critical potential – is part of an image? The main challenge, however, concerns what has before been referred to as the image’s analogy with itself on the level of the icon. Because even if we follow Godard’s suggestion and assume a duality of forms – an affirmative model of the world on the one hand and an inspiring potentiality on the other – we have to note that they are part of the same apparatus and that on the level of the icon the different layers of meaning and significance fundamentally overlap. The images and iconologies resemble one another – where and how can we draw a line? Above, I used the example of the image of a pirogue that carries an endless potentiality; here it seems the filmmakers find a way to account for the potentiality and play with it. But while, on the one hand, this does not automatically work with each and every viewer, on the other, dealing with the discourse’s placeholders is much more complicated in most cases. Take, for example, the term ‘unseaworthy’ – clearly much harder to visualise than ‘pirogue’ but nonetheless directly connected to the visuality of undocumented migration. It carries so many implications and moral claims, it triggers conventionalised explanatory patterns and attributions of guilt and it implies intentions and victims. The example above describes the potentials of challenging conventions – here, the relationship of image and text by means of a certain narrative unreliability. The productivity of challenging or breaking conventions does, however, also follow certain conventions in return. It adheres to a specific economy in which an absolute infringement of narrative conventions would fundamentally put the images’ relevance and plausibility at jeopardy – which is, however, also sparking some of the filmmakers’ creativity; see for example Philip Scheffner’s HAVARIE (2016).



  

 
What has been said so far illustrates that, regardless of the mode or quality of an image, there is always a relationship between the image and reality. It imparts an uncertainty that can never be fully circumvented – which in return means that a central objective with regard to the image’s discursive role remains the creation of plausibility and evidence, maintenance of a credible relationship between image and social realities. The quality of the evidence stands in correlation with the modes applied to historicise events by means of documentary images; ironically, the specific generic verisimilitude of the documentary image, however, apparently plays into the hands of the filmmaker as, in a way, it overrules the inevitable incongruence of image and reality and provides the space in which relevance and justification can be produced beyond the quest for a precise representation of reality.



 

 
  


The apparent contradiction to document the undocumented underlines the urgency of the question regarding the relationship between social realities and the image’s evidential value. Following Foucault, evidence is linked to a specific interrelation of modalities of seeing, visual thinking and material existence – i.e. the space in which it is exercised and the techniques used to reproduce and circulate its images (Rajchman, 1988). Visibilities are, however, “neither the acts of a seeing subject nor the data of a visual meaning” (Deleuze, 1999, p.50) – in other words, catching a necessarily only partly visible phenomenon like undocumented migration on film by no means translates automatically into the visibility or recognition of its protagonists or their social conditions and relations. Examining the relationship of seeing, knowledge and power, Foucault understands visibility as a question of what can be seen (and shown) in the first place – what is considered self-evident is hence also largely conventionalised. This has consequences also for the significance of evidence. Evidence in Foucault’s sense is not synonymous with proof or testimony, or with something that can be taken for granted without any doubt, something that is “self-evident” (Rajchman, 1988, p.94). He suggests approaching apparently self-evident entities and continuities as being grounded in ‘events’ – and hence to ‘eventalise’ history by way of breaking with self-evidence and the knowledge, agreements and practices they rest on. ‘Eventalising’ evidence hence requires understanding how evidence emerged and took form, and by means of which of our practices of a particular way of ‘seeing what to do’ became self-evident. Self-evidence traps us in a particular way of seeing and doing things – but Foucault also points to the possibility of refusing to participate. Evidence is hence also linked to the acceptability of a given practice. As Rajchman summarises, thus, “to see the events through which things become self-evident is to be able to see in what ways they may be intolerable or unacceptable. It is to try to see how we might act on what cannot yet be seen in what we do. […] exposing the unseen evidence [makes] the things we in fact do acceptable or tolerable for us” (ibid.).

In other words, if a film aims at creating evidence in this sense, it is first of all required to break with self-evidence – with the narratives and figures that seem all too familiar. This act of seeing and showing requires rupture d’évidence, a gap between self-evidence and what is actually going on (ibid.). While Foucault refers mainly to French penal institutions, his conceptualisation of self-evidence can also be transferred to the current European migration regime, specifically the constantly refined militarised migration-policy implementation; in the gap referred to above, then, one could begin seeing something intolerable in certain practices – opening up a perspective for an analysis initiating new ways of seeing and thinking (ibid.). To Foucault, this is imperative because “[i]f thinking did not reach the intolerable, it was not worthwhile to think” (Rabinow, 1986, p.1).


 

  

  





This conceptualisation of evidence is crucial also in order to understand the dialectics of visibility and invisibility at work in documentary films; while evidence is also strongly constructed and entangled with the question of what can be seen, it can hardly be produced outside a particular system of seeing, knowing and meaning. Evidence can, however, be understood as a moment of irritation of the self-evident, the intolerable – which is particularly interesting concerning the form of evidence the documentaries in this work strive for. At the same time, it hints at one of the potential dividing lines between different forms of the documental; the documentary image in this regard hence ranges between the poles of merely indorsing the order of things by producing consistency with the self-evident on the one hand and the aim and ability to challenge the intolerable in order to open up new ways of thinking and seeing on the other. The intolerable in this regard does not primarily need to be substantiated by some sort of authentic evidence but first of all draws the line between the acceptable and the inacceptable; it consequently grounds in an ethical stance rather than in reality. The pirogue sequence from BAB SEBTA mentioned above might serve to illustrate how documentary film can challenge the self-evident – in this case by provoking a gap between the (European) viewer’s knowledge (a pirogue = refugees) and the protagonists’ practice (a pirogue = making a living); a gap in which the aim is, however, not to resolve any kind of doubt but rather to prolong the image’s potentiality. In this case, the rupture is established primarily by means of an unconventional montage of image and sound that facilitates making doubt a productive category. In order to identify potential ruptures on the level of the image, the following sections will more closely deal with the films’ awareness of their own mediality, their role in the migration-control apparatus and a specific visual performativity they apply to scrutinise representative modes.



  


 
The films deal with their mediality, specifically with their entanglements with technologies and techniques of documentation and identification, at different levels and by means of different strategies. They avoid representative and self-evident modes and rather engage in visual performativity. One important element in all the films is a deliberate display of their mediality by enquiries into their own production processes; they avoid blurring the camera’s active role in the respective setting and at the same time produce versatile intertextual and intratextual references. In many cases, even the emergence of the film material used is at the centre of attention. The films all additionally capture various migration-control mechanisms in place and expose them in different ways; their overseeing the overseers establishes “Borderland Schengen” as a space in which visibility and invisibility are not binary oppositions but in which visibility and invisibility are constantly being strategically produced and reproduced.



 

 
  


On the level of the images’ production process, it has already been mentioned how prominently, for example, Dagmawi Yimer places his camera in COME UN UOMO SULLA TERRA, not only as a means of transparency but also as an enunciation of the intention to engage with image production and as symbolising subjectivity and a position of discursive power (see Fig. 21). In many scenes, two cameras are operated in parallel: often the audience first looks at an interviewee; the next shot shows the interviewer (Yimer) pointing the camera at his interviewee. Varying the classical shot-reverse-shot principle, it seems the directors are inviting the viewer to read the film as encompassing more than one perspective – and that its perspective is not exclusively an Italian/European one but rather taking multiple angles. At the same time, the double role Dagmawi Yimer plays as being the director of the film and one of its protagonists in a way permanently underlines the aspect of mediality and the complex relationship and ongoing translation processes between life reality and film reality. Fig. 5: The camera makes an accomplice

Source: LITTLE ALIEN, Screenshot, 3'45

Also in LITTLE ALIEN, the interaction between the camera and its protagonists is characterised by a specific kind of complicity (Fig. 5). In one of the first sequences of the film, a teenager in a lorry park in the Moroccan town of Tangier tries to crawl under a Spanish trailer as a stowaway for the passage to Spain. First he seeks the lorry driver’s consent, but he only asks, “Why?” However, he then gives the teenager half a minute or so to crawl under the trailer. The teenager fails to find a safe place and while he still lies under the trailer, the lorry driver sounds the horn and lets the engine haul. Still lying in the red dirt under the trailer, the teenager and the camera are looking back at each other for a couple of seconds; the horror in his eyes seems to express both the fear of being run over and the realisation that he missed yet another chance. But at the same time it signifies a bond between the


 

  

  





camera and the protagonist, even some kind of promise to protect the teenager; in this kind of setting, the subtext here, there is no objective angle the camera can take, and it doesn’t even pretend to do so. Apparently, the camera’s presence also has an influence on the lorry driver – although, it is impossible to decide in which way. Without explicitly saying it, he allows the teenager to get under his trailer, without asking further questions or expecting any form of compensation. He tries to be as uninvolved as possible. The lorry driver takes note of the camera – rather than the teenager – and also directly looks at it. Would he have waited or even helped the young man if the camera hadn’t been there? Or would he have driven away without taking notice of the teenager at all? The short instance of complicity passes without clarification. But it stresses the camera’s subjectivity and effectively establishes it as a participant and at the same time defines a specific relationship between the camera and its protagonists’ life realities. The films refer to their mediality also in the way the sequences are arranged. None of the films mentioned so far presents its narrative in a linear or necessarily spatially and temporally consistent way. Just like the migration experiences the films’ protagonists make further on, and the processes they continue to be subject to this way or the other, the films’ single threads do not have clear-cut beginnings or ends. While in COME UN UOMO SULLA TERRA the concurrency of several similar narratives produces a specific spatial and temporal synchronicity that helps to orchestrate and hence emphasise particular experiences, the cameras in BAB SEBTA and LITTLE ALIEN seem to rummage through European borderlands randomly. Finding their stories and histories on either side of the European demarcation lines, they are apparently primarily following the aim to oppose the conventionalised and institutionalised gaze by means of investigating time and space from alternative angles. LITTLE ALIEN also underlines its mediality by means of a montage that focuses on the harsh contrasts it finds at the core of European migration policies. While the previously mentioned sequence of the teenager trying to get a lift under a trailer established the borderland as a contact zone, subsequently the film stresses the borderland’s character as at the same time also a conflict zone. Within about a minute, the camera shows the viewer around – from life vests and remnants of wooden boats washed upon a rocky shore (Fig. 6), to a coastguard boat in a Greek harbour, to migrants detained in a deportation jail crying for help, to the inhospitable waiting room of an Austrian federal-asylum office welcoming its clients by means of multi-lingual machines explaining asylum procedures and IOM’s ‘voluntary’ repatriation programme in a cynically gentle tone. The contrast is intensified within every single scene itself, the blue Mediterranean waters murmur invitingly, the coastguards are moored next to a tourist pleasure boat and the institutional lack of empathy and emotion in the asylum office is contrasted by Richard Strauss’s buoyant waltz The Blue Danube.



 

 
  


Fig. 6: Remnants washed upon a rocky Greek shore

Source: LITTLE ALIEN, Screenshot, 5'20

Emphasising the paramount significance of film and visuality for the institutionalisation of protective immigration policies (Rass and Ulz, 2015), the films are also strongly concerned with their entanglements with image politics and the migration-control apparatus in general. Consequently, they aim at exposing the principles, strategies and mechanisms deployed by migration control and management in order to enforce a particularly panoptical form of visibility and documentation. A highly symbolic scene in COME UN UOMO SULLA TERRA is that of the two film directors visiting Frontex headquarters in Warsaw, Poland. Like a modern panoptical tower, it rises over the Schengen Area, pierced with windows – a surrounding glass front – that open the view on the periphery (Foucault, 1977a). Like a supervisor, Frontex director Laitinen resides in one of the building’s top floors, and the backlight and the venetian blinds Foucault described are here replaced by a glass pane that is transparent from the inside and opaque from the outside. The relationship between the panoptical tower and the periphery is much more indirect but at the same time perfected and modernised in many regards. While control measures and the collection of information are nowadays much more decentralised and have been reshaped by digital technology contributing to the establishment of a new form of governmentality between migration and ICT (Sierra Barra, 2012), the actual structuring and evaluation of all relevant information is more than ever understood as a centralised task – in the context of Frontex using the apparently neutral terminology of ‘coordination’. And also against the background of a modernisation that actually aimed at overcoming societies of discipline and in that sense at invisibilising its subjects and decentralising power and information (Holert, 2008), the functioning of the panoptical arrangement and the exercise of power must under the current paradigm of border control be considered not too far from what Foucault described some four decades ago regarding the panoptical


 

  

   





prison: making “it possible to see constantly and to recognise immediately” (Foucault, 1977a, p.200) and inducing in those who move through the borderland “a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (ibid., p.201) makes the observed the bearers of a specific power situation. The analogy to the panoptical prison also underlines why the criminalisation of migration movements is a crucial aspect of the exercise of power. Fig. 7: Frontex’s panoptical tower in Warsaw, Poland

Source: COME UN UOMO SULLA TERRA, Screenshot, 39'00

Segre and Yimer’s image of the panoptical tower is a deliberate performative repetition of Frontex’s self-image ( Fig. 7); shots taken from similar perspectives can be found in several of their publications, including the image clip BEYOND BORDERS (2012). But in COME UN UOMO SULLA TERRA, the sequence is embedded in some of the refugees’ reports on a Frontex visit to the Libyan detention prison Al Kufrah and reveals another aspect of the panoptical situation, which is also an important element of the film’s critique of European Union’s policy of cooperation with neighbouring states with regard to migration control and management: the supervisor only sees what he wants to see; if he wants to, he can close his eyes. In the film, several of the refugees speak about a group of Italian inspectors visiting the prison in order to interview some of the inmates as part of a Frontex Technical Mission to Libya in May 2007. Particularly those speaking Italian apparently found clear words regarding the insufficient state of hygienic



 

 
  


conditions, food and water supply and the overall treatment in the prison. Although, before leaving, the inspectors informed the prisoners that they are under UN protection, nothing really changed. The film directors confront Frontex director Ilkka Laitinen with the fact that although Frontex is aware of the conditions at Al Kufrah they are not putting their cooperation with the Libyan government and police into question. Laitinen answers indirectly and evasively, explaining that Frontex is merely cooperating the member states’ activities, establishing “partnership with those countries which are either countries of origin of illegal migration or countries of transit”. Justifying the cooperation with countries like Libya, he stresses that “border control cannot be carried out only at the border but we have to act before the border where the problems arise. We have to cooperate and act across the border with our colleagues in third countries, then at the border and also behind the border.” When Yimer confronts him directly with his experiences in the Libyan Desert, in Al Kufrah and with Libyan police forces, the camera pitilessly captures a long close-up shot of Laitinen’s face, as if to switch the roles of the supervisor and the supervised. While he seems unable to react to Yimer’s report for some seconds, and even his face can be read like a book, his eyes, forehead and mouth trembling, he eventually takes his role again by summarising what he just heard as “an enormous challenge” that can unfortunately not be solved by border control. All he admits is that there has been a mission aimed at an exchange of views and possible cooperation and that the mission found “room for improvement”, but eventually emphasises that he is not aware of any details and that it is not among Frontex’s tasks to judge the partners’ actions. It is a crucial element of the exposition of the overseers; they only see what they want to see, their control only reaches as far as it is strategically useful – Frontex operations are in this regard certainly adherent to a specific economy of partnership, establishing a system of control and management that primarily aims at avoiding border crossings and that accounts for questions of human rights and dignity only as far as necessary. The reiteration of the symbol of panoptical power is in this regard an important element for the film director’s objective to re-contextualise its significance in a critical way. LITTLE ALIEN, in one of the opening sequences already referred to previously, exposes the panoptical situation at the border itself and thus also sets a critical tone for its further investigations of the border zones. Visiting the Border Control Unit Centre at the Slovakian–Ukrainian border, the supervisors’ windows are actually countless monitors screening a huge area around actual demarcation lines. A PR officer proudly walks the film team around and presents all the latest surveillance technology: thermal-imaging cameras, night-vision equipment, X-ray lorry scanners and the like. Patiently, Kusturica’s camera observes the observers meticulously, keeping a watch on their surveillance monitors. Each of the countless monitors is split into a number of screens, endlessly multiplying the number of windows to the periphery (see Fig. 3). The overall scene is bizarre. The PR officer is apparently so used to screens and cameras that he cannot resist advancing also Kusturica’s camera by means of


 

  

   





appalling jokes about the surveillance footage he observes and interprets – crossing the border facilities in the dark of night, we see some people walking backwards in order to mislead border controls; others are making grotesquely huge steps in order to avoid touching (non-existing) alarm wires. Eventually, the officer shows night-vision camera footage of a border patrol picking up a group of migrants, black dots against a greyish background to the untrained eye. The PR officer obviously aims at making the camera his accomplice, which the camera gladly documents. The way the camera resists his advances – by clearly refusing to be embedded and avoiding any notion of approval or empathy with him or his silly jokes and remarks – marks a distance within which the officer appears to be nothing but a cynic and strangely naive in a way, unsuspicious of a camera taking a purposefully subjective angle. The distance is established in the space between the two images: although the camera on several occasions takes note of the security monitors and the fancy technical equipment, it usually applies a strangely tilted perspective. Additionally, leaving the images in their original frames – such as a blue Windows Media Player frame – Kusturica also conducts a performative repetition that puts stress on the mediality and constructedness of the surveillance footage and at the same time establishes some kind of a negative version of the images she is interested in producing. Kusturica’s enquiry of the panoptical situation at the border also illustrates the virtually mythical praxis of monitoring and the corresponding performative transformation of a physical space into an image space of surveillance and control (Holert, 2008). In the following, she consequently sets out to enquire into the perimeters – not only the physical spaces of migration but also, primarily, the transformation process and the interrelation of physical and image space. By means of exposing the border imagery in this way, she establishes the camera as a participatory actor in this space; imitating the position of an overseer, her camera claims a position of authority, a form of counter-surveillance (Gegenüberwachung; Holert, 2008). The sequence underlines both the paramount significance of the filmmakers’ entanglements and potential complicity with the migration-control apparatus and the necessity and potential of a critical interaction in the image space of migration. In LA FORTERESSE as a final example, the camera enters a space that is with regard to its overall setting even more geared towards a panoptical visibility of its inhabitants. While it is not a prison in so far as the inhabitants are allowed to leave the centre at fixed points in time, the camera unmasks the immense scope of social control that structures the centre as a social space – but eventually reaches far beyond its actual fences; on the one hand by means of the knowledge preceding the refugees, and on the other hand by the multiplicity of similar spaces all over and beyond the Schengen Area. Over and over again, the camera takes notice of the centre’s physical and virtual boundaries, the walls, the doors, the fences, the spatial structure of the overall centre and the Swiss town it is located in. Specifically, the centre’s fences in this regard play an interesting role; while they are not



 

 
  


used to control or regulate movement to and from the centre (as the gates are usually open), they are important in order to define a particular image space – and its outside – and thus considerably contribute to the social conditioning of the inhabitants. Although it may not have a necessary technical function, the reiteration of the borders as an icon in the form of the centre’s fence is of paramount significance to the construction and dissemination of the border as an institution in general (Reichert, 2011). But the borders are indeed everywhere; strict rules apply to the migrants’ social behaviour – they are not allowed to drink alcohol, they are not allowed to use mobile phones, regularly they are searched by security personnel when they re-enter the compound – the respective sequences in the film, however, signal two complementary results; on the one hand, time and time again the migrants are instructed about the many things they are not allowed to. It is apparently a familiar routine for both the supervisors and the supervised. On the other hand, however, the regular misbehaviour of some of the migrants – drinking alcohol in public or being late – also illustrates how those borders are continuously under negotiation and how crossing the borders is also a practice, specifically in those cases where the migrants ironically recite those rules they have just broken. Another strategy applied by several of the filmmakers is to incorporate intertextual and intratextual elements, pointing the viewers’ attention to the relationship among the images, at the same time scrutinising the self-evident by means of estrangement or de/re-contextualisation. Those intertextual and intratextual allusions and reiterations not only disturb the temporal and spatial consistency of the image spaces of migration; they also convey the filmmakers’ intention to be actively involved in aesthetic politics instead of being mere chroniclers. Reflecting the films’ mediality in this regard helps them to strategically establish themselves as actors in the image space. In case of Andrea Segre’s films, the exchange of sequences among his films is a recurring practice. Perennial images taken in the Sahara in this regard point the viewer’s attention to the interrelatedness of the different stages of migration and the trajectories his films focus on. In most cases the images seem to evoke distant memories, abstractions and icons of the individuals’ ongoing migration journey and experience. The images primarily serve to establish contrasts – between different angles and perspectives, and to complement or indirectly comment on issues raised in the refugees’ narratives. In COME UN UOMO SULLA TERRA, for example, the audience at one point follows Dagmawi Yimer watching a news programme on the state-owned Italian channel TG1. The programme’s content is a major agreement between the Libyan and Italian governments that in 2007 linked the deportation of migrants from Italy to Libya to a cooperation of the two states’ national gas companies, ENI and NOC by means of a so-called readmission agreement. This agreement totalled up to 28 million USD over a period of 10 years and is argued by the TV channel as having put “an end to 40 years of controversy and [bringing] a colonial contention to a close”. The references here seem to suggest that migration is quite a lucrative affair – for those who are managing it – and at


 

  

  





the same time contrasts Yimer’s reflections on his migration narrative being closely interwoven with colonial history. Fig. 8: Shreds from distant parallel discourses

Source: SUR LE RIVAGE DU MONDE, Screenshot, 53'20

Most of the films in a similar manner allude to further actors in the image space; in addition to migrants, film cameras, governments and border control, they account for media coverage on migration issues that amplifies dominant discourses and image politics rather than taking a critical stance towards it. Also in SUR LE RIVAGE DU MONDE, the footage recorded in Mali is twice complemented by direct references to Europe by means of footage taken from other news reports, firstly a clip from Tunisian radio and secondly the snowy picture taken from French TV coverage on a migrant rescue operation in the proximity of Lampedusa (Fig. 8). Both appear like shreds from distant parallel discourses, hardly recognisable as standing in a direct relationship to the individuals and narratives caught by the director Sylvain L’Espérance – in consequence, those references even emphasise the filmmakers’ aim to counter a Eurocentric perspective on African migration. In this regard, a similar scene in COME UN UOMO SULLA TERRA is most remarkable: towards the end of the film, a clip from Italian TV is shown, in which Dagmawi Yimer can be identified as one of several refugees that have been rescued by the Italian coast guards. It’s a strange moment of recognition: we see the familiar image of a refugee on the boat – and we realise that we know his name, his narrative, his ambitions. In his case, the subject preceded the image.









 

 
  




 
 
 
Philip Scheffner’s film HAVARIE (2016) even goes a step further by establishing a peculiar narrative space in which the film’s mediality reverberates throughout and reflects an incident at sea in the mirror of its being watched. Blowing up a short video clip he found on the Internet to cinematic dimensions, Scheffner pushes the boundaries of the documentary genre to its limits even more. Upon premiering at the 2016 Berlinale’s Forum section and receiving several euphoric reviews, the film found a distributor and had a regular film release in spring 2017. The found video clip (REFUGEES,12 2012) was originally shot by a tourist – the Ulsterman Terry Diamond – on board the cruise ship Adventure of the Seas and captures its coincidental but not improbable encounter with a rubber boat carrying about 15 refugees in distress on the Mediterranean Sea some 38 nautical miles off the Spanish coast (Pong Film, 2016). Slightly more than three and a half minutes in length, the clip for most of its duration focuses on the rubber boat13 lying a couple of hundred metres in the distance. Halfway through, the camera shortly pans to the right alongside the ship and we see other tourists observing the scene; then the filmmaker turns his head to the left, we see more spectators, and then we are back to the rubber boat. The handheld camera is shaking throughout; in the beginning we hear a brief captain’s announcement explaining the situation, then we hear a short discussion about what is expected to happen next (“they called Spanish coastguard”), about the kind of boat they are looking at and about how many people might be on that boat (“look at all the heads”) – but for the biggest part of the clip all we hear is indistinct chatter and the hum of the ship’s engine. There is nothing much to say or explain, apparently; while it must be considered a shock to be confronted with a scene that is usually visible only through media – without the usual comment, without the usual frame – the scene has a scarily selfevident character, as if it is mere routine. Pointing at sea, the camera zooms back and forth every so often. Suddenly, two of the men on the rubber boat are waving in the direction of the cruise ship – and the camera zooms back in astonishment, as if it finds it necessary to bring some distance between the cameraman and its involuntary protagonists, as if the familiar icons have unexpectedly come to life. After this short incident, the camera zooms back in and tries to get as close as possible – but apparently the zoom is























































12 REFUGEES is actually hardly a title but rather a label the filmmaker had to define when he uploaded the clip to the online video platform YouTube. 13 The information that what we are seeing is a rubber boat has also been taken from the production company’s website; it is nothing that can actually be identified in the film (Pong Film, 2016). Also, from the original film material it is impossible to tell the number of refugees on the boat; this information is provided halfway through Scheffner’s film by means of a radio statement from the cruise ship’s captain.


 

  

  





already pushed to the limits, so the group in the rubber boat remain hardly more than an indistinct black patch. There is no further explanatory comment; the film suddenly just stops without any climax or solution. Compared to the majority of Internet video clips dealing with refugees in the Mediterranean region, REFUGEES has an almost opaque character, no close-ups, no drama, no faces to recognise. Consequently, it’s not one of the many videos that went viral – as of October 2017 it had roughly 2,400 views. By capturing the incident at sea, Diamond certainly aimed at documenting a real event – he used his mobile-phone camera as a tool to help him to handle an exceptional experience. By no means following an artistic ambition, he uploaded the video apparently unedited – reality captured in roughly 200 seconds. What Scheffner does to this footage in his film HAVARIE changes its character fundamentally; firstly, he decelerates the film drastically – instead of 25 frames per second, his film presents one frame per second, the original length of three and a half minutes is stretched to 90 minutes, reportedly exactly the period the two boats lay alongside each other before coastguards came to the rescue and the Adventure of the Sea was allowed to continue its cruise. He strips the clip from its context; all the icons and fragments of reality and authenticity are there but edited beyond recognition. Immediacy divided by 25, roughly five and a half thousand primarily blue images14 are slowly passing our eyes, one by one, every single one recognisable for exactly one second. The rubber boat shakes and bounces before our eyes, it blurs, it sidles about in the frame’s fringes, seems to move out of sight but always returns to the centre of the image. And it often has – what an adequate metaphor for migration movements through European borderlands – some kind of a digital shadow, on the one hand blurring the boat’s concrete form but at the same time anticipating and preceding the boat’s movement, but which is actually the movement of the camera – the shadows always move first (Fig. 9). Secondly, Scheffner disconnects images and sound. While on the visual level the exposition of the images’ mediality seems to make the question for the representative function of the images obsolete, different audible layers open up a parallel narrative space that contributes to giving the whole film an overall fictional texture.15 On the audio level, different narratives are taking turns and sometimes also overlap: a woman in France and her husband in Tunisia, separated by the Mediterranean Sea, talks about their challenging and involuntarily transnational relationship, the bridge of the Adventure of the Seas communicates with Cartagena























































14 The reference to Derek Jarman’s film BLUE (1993) is certainly not completely coincidental; he also disconnected image and sound and relocated the screen to the imagination of the viewer. 15 Interestingly enough, Scheffner’s co-author, Merle Kröger, translated the whole setting including many of its figures into a crime novel also titled HAVARIE. The cruise ship in the novel, however, carries the paradigmatical name Spirit of Europe (Kröger, 2016).



 

 
  


Sea Rescue, the crew of a Ukrainian cargo ship reflects about their experiences, one of the cruise ship’s managers and its first officer talk about on board losing their spatial and temporal sense of orientation – and the producer of the original film material, Terry Diamond, talks about his memories of the brutal British rule in Northern Ireland. Fig. 9: The shadow moves first

Source: HAVARIE, Screenshot, 1'45

The different narratives span a trans-social web across the Mediterranean Sea and beyond, from Algeria to Spain, from France to Algeria, from Ukraine to Spain, from Northern Ireland to Algeria – and back again; it is a web of relationships and affection but as well one of conflict, fear and anger, the Mediterranean both connecting and separating the spheres. The different narratives become knotted to the images we see, like in a ball of transnational/translocal and trans-social strings, relationships, memories and ambitions, so that eventually sound and image in a way come to coincide again. This is particularly the case when the husband in Algeria seems to stand on the beach with a friend, reflecting upon the several unsuccessful attempts they have made to cross over to Europe. And this is even more the case when, in the middle of the film, the camera slowly pans to the right and to the left (Fig. 10). Originally a sequence of hardly 15 seconds, it now takes more than six minutes – we are abducted to the “hyper-present and monstrous” (Buss, 2016) world of the cruise liner, the merciless tearjerkers and dance beats played


 

  

  





in the cruise ship’s bars, the ship’s escalators and a friendly non-smoking announcement; in parallel, we hear the radio communication between the rescue units. What we see and what we hear in a way seems to coincide at least partially – but, in fact, all we realise is the harsh contrast between the life realities that are confronted with each other, that stare at each other in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. This form of simultaneity of acuity and blurring is omnipresent in HAVARIE, and it emphasises that film and media in general can be both, and can be both at the same time. It points the attention not only to the tension between what is in the image and what is not in the image, but also to the tensions on the level of the image itself. This sort of visual disorientation is also reflected in Terry Diamond’s statement recalling the moment when he realised that the dark patch in the distance actually was in fact a rubber boat carrying refugees. He talks about having asked himself questions and picturing himself in their place – but then surrenders to the unactualisability of the experience: “you can never replicate that; you can only assume …” Fig. 10: A pan to the left

Source: HAVARIE, Screenshot, 49'05

While most of the time we hear a clock ticking to the rhythm of the frames switching – or maybe it is the other way around – what we hear has a cinematic dimension itself. Often we only hear indistinct sounds instead of talking, a running water tap, street noise, a motorbike in the distance, teacups on the kitchen table, birds



 

 
  


singing in the park; we see a film without actually seeing its images, our minds turn into a screen and are at the same time still confronted with what we actually see – a shipwrecked boat, the blue sea. And so, although sometimes image and sound seem to coincide and although we might be able to construct connections, it is eventually almost impossible to consistently synchronise the different layers of the film. This has also to do with the fact that Scheffner de-contextualised the footage almost completely. The only localisation provided at the beginning of the film apart from its title reads “37° 28.6’ N, 000° 3.8’ E”, the geographical coordinates in the Mediterranean Sea where the incident apparently took place. The awkward accuracy of the geographical localisation of the incident creates a strong contrast to the generic quality of the image itself. Those coordinates are at the same time so precise and yet so abstract and meaningless that instead of providing orientation they locate the incident in the middle of nowhere – or rather in the middle of everywhere. The coordinates, however, have a meaning, primarily in the context, for example, of Frontex-coordinated vessels navigating the Mediterranean in order to prevent boats like the one we are looking at in HAVARIE from reaching their destinations. Geographical precision is anyway not what is on Scheffner’s mind – he needs the viewer to lack orientation in order to contour the Mediterranean as an image space and a political space. He makes the viewer the screen, and “that we start creating images in our heads is not an accident, that we experience the intimacy of spaces and relations is not random, but follows admirable aesthetic political choices” (Wolf, 2016). And Scheffner not only stretches 200 seconds into 90 minutes, he also strips the moment of recognition from its temporal dimension; stretching the incident to eternity, he wrenches the images away from an assumed authenticity or reality to an, in all regards, illuminated world – and entrusts it to some kind of universality. The producer of the footage, Terry Diamond, coincidentally works as a security guard in Belfast, staring at CCTV monitors all night long; his reflections about his job sound paradigmatic in the context of the images we see while we hear him talk: “You’re always on edge, you’re waiting on the unforeseen. And it’s sometimes when you least expect it, that’s when it can happen. So you always have to be on the lookout”, he says. “And sometimes you can be distracted by certain images and they’re not an important security image and that’s when you miss something else.” At many other points, elements on the different levels seem to be duplicated or reiterated in a slightly varied way, which additionally emphasises the film’s mediality. The camera’s pan, capturing the crowd at the cruise ship’s railings, disturbingly reminds us of our own position as spectators – the Adventure of the Seas certainly encounters the real adventurers of the sea. And most prominently the film throughout reiterates the aspect of waiting – everybody is waiting for something to happen, longing even: the people on the rubber boat, the spectators on the cruise ship, the people in France, Algeria, those on the Ukrainian cargo


 

  

   





ship and we as the viewers.16 The spectating turns into waiting. In the end, nothing happens at all; none of the narratives comes to an end or a solution. And while throughout the film the radio communication between the cruise ship captain and Cartagena builds up like it is striving towards some kind of a climax – while Cartagena Sea Rescue advises the cruise ship to maintain visual contact with the rubber boat but not to take the refugees on board, a rescue operation is initiated; a helicopter and a coastguard ship are coming closer and closer, arriving in one and a half hours … in one hour … in 40 minutes … 15 minutes … 10 … – eventually the film stops without providing the relief of a successful rescue operation or its dramatic failure. Truly, the film “advances us carefully selected fragments that continuously open out and never close down” (ibid.) – eventually it becomes apparent that, actually, the viewer as a spectator is shipwrecked, and with him the representative function of the images: the images Scheffner evokes neither represent anything tangible nor feed into an economy of emotions; on the contrary, “there is absolutely no pretence of sameness but a proposal for connectedness as a political choice. The very singularity of each detail is carried as well by the acute separation of our senses, of looking and listening and bodily affect. When our senses meet again, a turbulence seems to arise, forcefully locating the crisis in our very own bodies” (ibid.).

To summarise what actually happens in the film is consequently almost impossible because it takes place on an affective level. Multiplying the screens in this way, stretching the moment of exceptionality into eternity and thus turning it into a state of normality, Scheffner also eventalises an apparently unremarkable incident. In sum, while the film certainly tells the viewer something about “the way Europe is dealing with the current refugee crisis, the portrayal of which usually oscillates between two extremes: a narrow focus on individuals and their personal dramas or, much more often, images of anonymous, helpless masses on overflowing boats and in crowded camps” (Buss, 2016), it also makes the mediality and visuality of migration itself its central concern. It confronts the viewer with the activity of viewing itself and with the knowledge, perceptions, expectations and also self-images linked to the gaze in the image space of migration. In addition, HAVARIE also raises further issues that will be dealt with in the following chapters:























































16 Indeed, the film itself also becomes very long and strenuous. In her review of the film, Cosima Lutz (2016) documents that in two regards; on the one hand, she mentions that during the Berlinale press screening about a dozen of the film critiques left the cinema during the first 40 minutes, unable to stand the waiting and the uneventfulness. On the other hand, her review carries the words “sinking raft” in its title, which clearly documents the viewer’s longing for something to happen; but in fact neither do the refugees sit on a raft, nor is their boat sinking.



 

 
  


the establishment of alternative figures of migration by means of specific narrative, performative and explicitly non-representational strategies, and the overall issue of migrants’ and migration’s visibility in European borderland. This chapter aimed to clarify the documentary films’ relationships to reality and the documental modes they apply in order to underline their relevance and create specific evidence. The films’ exposure of their own mediality should certainly be understood as the attempt to create transparency with regard to the various perspectives taken – in the questions asked, the voices speaking, the eyes looking, and the decision as to what will be screened eventually – and to visualise connecting lines, transnational ties that span the individuals represented in the film, their (hi)stories, the various routes, places and social practices connected to their departure(s), transit(s) and arrival(s), to underlying policies and policy-implementation strategies. They illustrate the numerous borders to be crossed, the different stages, forms and overlaps of transit, and the complex interplay between concepts or notions of home and transit. Particularly embedding their figures and narratives in a self-reflexive approach to their own being medial, being conventionalised and being entangled with the control apparatus, they outline a mode in which the image can avoid being consumed by dominant discourses, in which it even has a resistive core. The films perceive their mediality as a result of a process of becoming medial, i.e. as a process of medialisation by means of a sometimes stable, sometimes volatile reification of stratified, engineered and mediated dispositives (Pfeiffer and Schnell, 2008); they thematise their medialisation as passing a threshold in order to create images that – in avoiding to reiterate endless variations of the same over and over again – pursue a politics of the performative (Butler). In doing so, they also incite the viewer to a more critical assessment of the migration-control apparatus and its entanglements with visual techniques and technologies – and at the same time they aim to dissociate themselves from European border-control measures in general and the image politics that structure the border zones in particular. Several examples illustrate that what the films also show and reflect is that the border itself and border practices – the crossing as well as the protection and especially its constant relocation – are neither linear nor unidirectional but processes of becoming “that are always in the midst, without beginning or end” (Kaiser, 2012, p.522). Border practices are socio-spatial practices taking place in a visualpolitical arena (see not least the charming PR officer in LITTLE ALIEN); in being performatively enacted they are always open to change and can never finally and fully be sealed off. In other words, while they can only be established in relation to its exterior, this exterior at the same time accommodates “the unspeakable, the unviable, the nonnarrativizable that secures and, hence, fails to secure the very borders of materiality” (Butler, 1993, p.188). Border control reiterates and materialises the separation of interior and exterior by means of the naturalisation of socio-spatial categories, which “requires continual guarding and policing at the borders, to prevent the gaps and fissures


 

  

  





performatively produced from becoming ruptures that threaten to expose [their] unnatural, nonessential, contingent conditions” (Kaiser, 2012, p.523); the – de facto and potential – border-crosser perceives and performs the border in opposition to this and constantly relocates the interior and the exterior; the films specifically focus on the events through which the borders emerge, on the gaps, fissures and ruptures that provide the potential for social and spatial change (ibid.) and hence also render the social and spatial topographies of “Borderland Schengen” as performative practices. The topography is, consequently, to a considerable degree inseparably linked to (visual) performative acts – it is, in other words, far from being an authentic reproduction or map of life realities but rather a manifestation of attempts to resist, at the same time contouring options to act. The following chapter will in this regard take a closer look at the narrativisation and visual-performance strategies applied in order to translate the protagonists’ experiences into images – especially against the background of the limitations of representational aspirations of the documental image and the fictional capacity of the documentary film.





   


   
 


The questions of the image’s evidential value and its mediality raised in the previous chapters inevitably also confront us with the issue of representation. So far, I have avoided using the term as far as possible. The reason is twofold. Firstly, it documents certain unease with the assumption that the cinematic image is primarily an expression of its representational functions and qualities and thus little more than a tool to repeat social imaginaries – at the level of representation, at the same time, the film images potentially blend with the control apparatus. Secondly, while this work seeks to identify the films’ potentials and strategies to visibilise and recognise their protagonists (which – ultimately – may also include their political self-representation), the films themselves are not primarily concerned with evoking or criticising specific representations of undocumented migration. Film in this regard inhabits the overlap of the realms of art and the realms of the image, the first one inviting abstraction, the second on triggering representative readings – both conjunct in the capacity to foster affect. Apparently, the cinematic image in general and the documentary image in particular have to be considered as emerging in and, at the same time, as giving account of an interplay of images’ representational, fictional, affective and performative modes, functions and practices. Particularly, the images dealt with in this work can hardly be separated from the construction of the social – the social produces representation and at the same time produces and reproduces itself from representations; and also the development of cinematic techniques and modes is certainly less connected to technical progress than to changing social configurations and the necessity to produce itself in its representation (Comolli, 1988). But this is not exactly what the films or this work are primarily interested in; what they rather aim at is to investigate the composition and the structure of the image itself, not so much its representational quality but the representational practices it encompasses – particularly the fictional and performative practices it is entangled with; in this regard, this chapter is investigating less how meaning emerges between the image and the viewer but more the filmic strategies applied in order to limit or avoid being primarily understood



 

 
  


as representational, to challenge the self-evident – in other words, to escape a linear representation–meaning nexus. The question of representation in this work has consequently two different layers; one concerns the documentary image’s structure and composition with regard to representational, fictional and performative practices – the film image’s autonomy respectively – its role in the discourse; the other one concerns the image’s potential to open a space for aesthetic politics, its potential to facilitate the translation of visibility into recognition of the invisible by offering a space in which the formation of the undocumented migrant as a subject is thinkable – its potential to impact discourses and pre-formed representations, to counter-hegemonic image politics and challenge the control apparatus. Because while an image may not be able to represent reality as it is, to what end it contributes to establishing, for example, undocumented migrants as discursive subjects needs to be examined. Consequently, in this chapter, I will first of all further investigate the status of the documentary image as being entangled with representative, performative and affective practices; I will secondly outline how the films’ modes are also reflecting the fictional and historicising capacity of documentary film in a way that, on the one hand, allows for an account of a certain concurrency of representative and performative practices at the different levels of production and consumption of the films – that at the same time, however, clearly illustrates the limits of representation in the borderland setting. Eventually, I will more closely investigate the specific performative practices the films apply in addition to being concerned with their mediality as outlined in the previous chapter. The chapter overall aims to add the interplay of representation, performance and affect, fiction, memory and historisation to the borderland’s topography.



  

At the core of this work’s central question regarding the documentary images’ representational functions lies what seems to be an interstice between Gilles Deleuze’s persuasion that film does not represent and Stuart Hall’s conviction that an image cannot not represent. While the fundamental differences between these two approaches can certainly not be solved in this work, some of its contradictions might be used productively in order to find out how far and to what end one can expect the images negotiated in this work to represent in the first place – in what way the undocumented, including the unspeakable and the intangible their narratives encompass, can be considered to be represented at all. While the documentary image is inseparably entangled with the dialectics of showing and not-showing, the latter can further be divided into the thinkable and the unthinkable, the things we could see and the things we couldn’t even see because they lie – so far – beyond our conceptual universe.

    

  
  




The films are hardly interested in the mimetic aspects of representation and the question of “how one imagines a reality that exists ‘outside’ the means by which things are represented” (Hall, 2005, p.444) – they are, in other words, not geared towards criticising or correcting inadequate depictions of undocumented migrants’ life realities. Nor are they bringing forward a specific identity politics that expects to directly result in political participation or representation of the group at its focus. If the films show an interest in questions pertaining to representation at all it is in the assumption that “how things are represented and the ‘machineries’ and regimes of representation in a culture do play a constitutive, and not merely a reflexive, after-the-event, role. This gives questions of culture and ideology, and the scenarios of representation – subjectivity, identity, politics – a formative, not merely an expressive, place in the constitution of social and political life.” (ibid.)

The films attempt to not only refute stereotypical and simplified, negative figurations of the objects of marginality – but even more aim towards creating image spaces in which a representation of the (non-essential) subject of marginalisation is possible in a sense that is concerned with the structure of representation. They are, in Olkokwski’s words, observing the ‘ruin of representation’ (1999) and should in this regard be understood as at least implicitly bringing forward a critique towards “‘normalized’ (…) representational and discursive spaces” (Hall, 2005, p.443), which ultimately also aims at challenging, resisting and transforming the dominant regimes of representation (ibid.) – with the undocumented migrant being the subject of representation, not its object. Translating Stuart Hall’s attempt to describe paradigmatic adjustments in the conceptualisation of black cultural politics to the context of undocumented migration, it may be worthwhile to claim that the ‘undocumented migrant’ “is essentially a politically and culturally constructed category, which cannot be grounded in a set of fixed transcultural or transcendental (…) categories and which therefore has no guarantees in nature. What this brings into play is the recognition of the immense diversity and differentiation of the [subject’s] historical and cultural experience.” (ibid. p.444)

Documenting the undocumented involves an area that lies beyond most of our conceptual worlds – in other words, it may be assumed that it challenges representational practices per se. While the represented is always complemented by the un-represented and the visible always points towards the existence of the in-visible, the undocumented may be considered the double invisible. Not because the knowledge about the figure of the undocumented is non-existent but because it is incomplete in a particular form to a degree that the appraisal by means of our conceptual world is extremely complicated, to say the least. The undocumented can hardly be differentiated from the illegal and the latter’s stereotypical localisation and representation in legal and political-visual discourses. While the illegal



 

 
  


can be considered an infantilised subject, the undocumented is no subject at all. While the illegal is constructed in opposition to a specific set of laws, the undocumented as a subject is located outside legal and political norms; nor is it assigned to a specific economic or territorial sphere – its social expulsion is, in other words, absolute. The undocumented (i.e. the person lacking the necessary documents to cross a particular border) needs to become illegal (i.e. the person who unlawfully crossed a particular border) in order to become visible in a specific (legal, political, social) discourse. The undocumented migrant as a signifier does not have an equivalent in the conceptual world before he/she claims or is granted a specific regular or irregular status. The challenge hence lies in the process of representation itself. Referring to photographic images and following Stuart Hall, Hamilton points to the multi-layered process of construction of the documentary image (2011). The photographer chooses and frames the images, he/she orders, narrativises and contextualises them – processes that must be considered ordered by means of deliberate and at the same time conventionalised conduct and decision-making, but that to a certain extent also may be assumed to include elements of coincidence and unconsciousness. But, in his understanding, the construction is, however, incomplete without the meaning the viewer generates on the basis of the images, emerging as a result of complex representational constructions that are, however, instructed by the coded meanings available to the viewer and by the interpretations and significations according to the subjective horizon of knowledge and experience. The documentary image in this regard must be considered as an ambiguous mode of representation that is above all “representative of the paradigm in which it has been constructed” (Hamilton, 2011, p.87). Nowadays it sounds almost banal to repeat Stuart Hall’s assumptions that documentary images do not recite visual facts, nor do their objects have stable or true meanings, and that representation describes the relationship between things, concepts and signs – not exclusively on the level of one or more single representations but more importantly as channels through which knowledge is produced and meanings are created and circulated (Hall, 2011). In Hall’s conceptualisation of representation, the single image, consequently, has a tough job and not much of a choice. It is caught up in systems of signification from its creation to its interpretation, from its production to its consumption – it is nothing but a channel or medium – and it necessarily represents: it is deemed to be significant, to mean something that is anchored primarily in the viewer’s mind, to prefigurations and structured distinction (del Río, 2008) and not in the image. In what may be understood as an urge to underline the power of artistic statements and creativity, Deleuze (1997a, 1997b) aims at releasing the film image from this purely representational function by stating that not only does the film image not represent – it cannot represent. By no means does he simply refer to film’s necessary failure to reproduce physical reality or the simplified critique “that an image on a screen cannot encompass the complex existence of the matter before the lens of the camera” (Herzog, 2000); his take on representation is far

    

  
  




more complex. Basically, while in his understanding images are identical with movement, the image-movement does not represent characteristics of the material world as movement – just as it is not part of the spheres of consciousness or intentionality – hence “at the level of immanence, the level of the ‘image per se’, the movement-image eludes the logic of representation” (Öhner, 2004, p.158). Evading semiological film theories, Deleuze makes the claim for a fundamental autonomy of the film image by stressing the potential to create its own fluid movements and temporalities. While he considers the movements more than just a composition of specific techniques or concrete images, film’s temporality is more than just the sum of its shooting, editing, projection and reception – consequently the film’s meaning cannot primarily be found at the level of the sign. Nor can cinema be experienced intuitively or by means of pure reflection. The image is encountered directly and provokes thought; thought that can neither be located inside film nor enters a stable connection with the image because “[o]ne cannot ‘think inside’ film; film must be conceived of as a problem that arises from outside. Meaning, as such, cannot be conceptualized as signification, nor as something garnered through a direct synthesis or sympathetic penetration of the object” (Herzog, 2000). Film, in other words, is able to position itself outside representational orders and to take a potentially but not necessarily observational point of view – it can create meaning that potentially transgresses established codes and signs.



  





In any case, the film image cannot be considered “a fixed representation, a concrete image of a ‘real’ object, but as an image in its own right, with its own duration and axes of movement. What we might call the film image thus occurs in the gap between subject and object, through the collision of affective images” (Herzog, 2000). In addition, Deleuze’s conceptualisation of the film image as a mobile assemblage refuses to reduce the physical film image to a mere reproduction of a ‘real’ object it represents. And as the film image moreover comprises different dynamic and mobile optical and sonic images, Deleuze finds that it can’t even be analysed against the background of structures that have their origin outside the film. “Instead, each film-image is contingent, particular, and evolving” (Herzog, 2000), and cinema and perception are located in two different continuums. The result of this conceptualisation of cinema fundamentally destabilises “the very idea of a representation, displacing notions of signification and association in favor of acts of creation and images of thought” (ibid.). Apparently Deleuze is specifically interested in the cinematic experience – an experience of what lies beyond our conceptual universe, ‘the unbearable’, the nonknowable – exceeding ordinary experiences and thus forcing to think (Åkervall, 2008). Specifically, this being forced to think – also making an obvious reference



 

 
  


to Godard’s popular statement about cinema as a form that thinks – describes what makes Deleuze suspicious of representational approaches. Cinema is a place that provides experiences that cannot be understood as limited to representational practices – art in general transcends ordinary experience and provokes thought by means of affect. Defining affect as “the aspect of the event that its accomplishment cannot realise” (Deleuze, 1997a, p.102), he explains that “[p]ercepts are no longer perceptions; they are independent of a state of those who experience them. Affects are no longer feelings or affections; they go beyond the strength of those who undergo them. Sensations, percepts, and affects are beings whose validity lies in themselves and exceeds any lived. They could be said to exist in the absence of man because man, as he is caught in stone, on the canvas, or by words, is himself a compound of percepts and affects. The work of art is a being of sensation and nothing else: it exists in itself.” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p.164)

Hence, he considers art (such as the cinematic image) “independent of the creator through the self-positing of the created, which is preserved in itself. What is preserved – the thing or the work of art – is a bloc of sensations, that is to say, a compound of percepts and affects” (ibid.). While ordinary experiences impart affections (or feelings), the cinematic experience conveys affect, the “non-actualizable part in experience” (Åkervall, 2008); affect transcends actualisability and implies endless potentiality. As O’Sullivan (2001) points out, affects produced by art are immanent to experience and not to do with knowledge and meaning. Affects in this regard cannot be understood; they can only be experienced. This potential non-realisation of the event or non-actualisability of experience is central to Deleuze’s understanding of the cinematic experience as potentially enduring in a space of the non-knowable and provoking thought. Cinema, however, fulfils its full potential, he stresses, only in being visionary; in confronting protagonists with unbearable situations in which they are unable to react, the film provokes a parallelisation of protagonist and spectator in order to transform the unbearable into a visionary vision – reaction to the encounter is replaced by seeing in the encounter (Åkervall, 2008). Mainly referring to Italian Neorealism, this parallelisation of the protagonist and the spectator may be enhanced with regard to documentary film: the cinematic experience is here in a way widened by the spectator being in a position where he/she is condemned to observe the incapacity to react – both the spectator and the protagonist are challenged by the unbearable and forced to think and to find new ways to see, to become visionary. As del Río notes, “moving images have an unlimited capacity to move us […] to affect, and to be affected” (2008, p.2), be it the optimistic and yet desperate glance of the teenager in Tangier trying to get a clandestine lift, clinging to the underside of a freight lorry in LITTLE ALIEN (see Fig. 5), or the hope and despair that take turns in a Somali asylum seeker’s continuous state of legal, temporal, spatial, emotional transit in LA FORTERESSE (see chapter 5.4). Neither can we relate to those scenes consistently by means of our conceptual universe, nor can what we experience be

   

   
 




explained by means of representational models; it is as if the images’ potentialities are “scrambled in an impossible affective knot” (ibid., p.1). Or as Deleuze and Guattari (2004) put it, an “intensive trait starts working for itself, a hallucinatory perception, synesthesia, perverse mutation, or play of images shakes loose, challenging the hegemony of the signifier. […] a microscopic event upsets the local balance of power” (p.16). We have no choice but to think. In this regard, the way in which Deleuze conceptualises cinematic experience and affect may be understood as a fundament for an explicitly cinematic ethics. It enables us to believe in this world and thus “leads from the affect to visionary vision. In the visionary vision the possibility of another relation to the world appears” (Åkervall, 2008). Overall, he outlines an ethics of cinema foregrounding the mental instead of the real; instead of understanding cinema’s function as reflecting reality, he rather expects it to bring forth a vision of it, or as Deleuze put it: “cinema must film, not the world, but belief in this world, our only link” (Deleuze, 1997b, p.172). Summarising his concept of thought-provoking cinema he states that “[w]e have seen that the power of thought gave way, then, to an unthought in thought, to an irrational proper to thought, a point of outside beyond the outside world, but capable of restoring our belief in the world. The question is no longer: does cinema give us the illusion of the world? But: how does cinema restore our belief in the world?” (ibid., p.181f)

– because “[r]estoring our belief in the world – this is the power of modern cinema”1 (ibid., p.172). Deleuze’s concept of cinema has been criticised for being temporally and spatially unspecific, even ahistoric, and for being open to deterritorialised approaches to human thought and inattentive to the terms of its own creation as part of poststructuralist identity politics (Jones, 2010). In fact, however, it is a sound basis on which one could understand not only how “Borderland Schengen” is, in the films concerned, constructed as a transnational social space but also to what end experience and affect are inscribed in its topography. And Deleuze’s ethics of the cinema made an important contribution in that they point to the urgency to restate the question of representation in a way that accounts for its very mechanisms and at the same time provides a space in which the affective image can be considered as enjoying a certain autonomy; not only can film not be considered able to immediately reproduce reality, but also the temporal and spatial structures it visualises have to be understood as visually constructed. Doing away with the assumption of the film image as a fixed, repeatable representation or a reflected image of reality (nothing that Hall claimed, however) or its functionalisation as a sort of epistemological placeholder, Deleuze’s cinema























































1

As he adds, “when it stops being bad”, it must be assumed that he is only remotely optimistic with regard to ‘modern cinema’ fulfilling its potential.



 

 
  


imparts the forces of creativity and invention (Herzog, 2000) – pointing at the film image’s value as going far beyond being a mere link between reality and thought, carrying an ontological potential to stand for itself. Cinema in this regard – and this may be considered the most important aspect here – is much more than “a simple instrument of representation” (Öhner, 2004, p.158; emphasis added). The turn towards ‘affect’ that can be observed since the 1990s must in this regard be primarily understood “in the context of a critique of the primacy of language and representation” (Angerer, Bösel and Ott, 2014, p.7) and linked to a concern about human experiences that cannot be accounted for on the level of signification (Cronan, 2012). As proposed earlier, there is, however, a simultaneity of affect and meaning, experience and representation. Affect apparently describes the moment when something new comes into the world, or into one’s perception, that is; as Cronan (ibid.) points out, literally every single author in the ‘Affect theory reader’ (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010) stresses the newness of affect,2 assuming that affect is the unprecedented “slipping through the net of dialectical analysis” (Cronan, 2012, p.52). In this regard, representation may be understood as complementing affect by means of contributing to the known. While affect “subtends cognitively mediated representation [it] does not ever entirely replace or supersede [it]” (Gibbs, 2010, p.193). In this regard, affect and representation may be understood as having no direct connection whatsoever. Affect, however, precedes meaning, understanding, representation, and interpretation (Cronan, 2012). Also, O’Sullivan stresses that in being read, artworks indeed might have representational functions – but that art at the same time “operates as a fissure in representation”, a moment in which “the aesthetic is activated, and art does what is its chief modus operandi: it transforms, if only for a moment, our senses of our ‘selves’ and our notion of the world” (2001, p.128). Art can in this regard be considered as an “aesthetic function of transformation” (ibid., p.130), or, as Kristeva puts it, a function of real experience, an aesthetic function that is the “ultimate goal of art” (2000, p.11). More explicitly pointing towards this autonomy of affect, Massumi separates the film image into its content and its effect. While the level of content relates to its “indexing to conventional meanings in an intersubjective context, its sociolinguistic qualification” (1995, p.84), the image’s effect relates to its strength, its intensity. On the level of the content, significance and difference are conventionalised. On the level of intensity, distinctions are not fixed; it is embodied in autonomic reactions. “Intensity is beside that loop, a nonconscious, never-to-conscious autonomic remainder. It is outside expectation and adaptation, as disconnected from meaningful sequencing, from narration, as it is from vital function” (ibid., p.85). The event of image reception takes place on both levels; however, it neither























































2

He writes that “the word ‘new’ appears no fewer than one hundred and ten times in the fourteen essays” (Cronan, 2012, p.52).

    

  
  




conforms nor corresponds but rather resonates, interferes and amplifies. Massumi uses this differentiation in order to contrast ‘structure’ and ‘event’, structure being “the place where nothing ever happens, that explanatory heaven in which all eventual permutations are prefigured in a self-consistent set of invariant generative rules. Nothing is prefigured in the event. It is the collapse of structured distinction into intensity, of rules into paradox. It is the suspension of the invariance that makes happy happy, sad sad, function function, and meaning mean.” (Ibid., p.87)

Interestingly enough, the two levels also compete, as Massumi points out by referring to the dampening effect of matter-of-factness as it is produced in doubling images with a narration that in a supposedly objective way explains and classifies the movement on the screen; it interferes with the image’s effect. Massumi’s ‘matter-of-factness’ obviously refers to a similar effect as Foucault’s ‘self-evident’ image constructions and image-text compositions that deny the image its potentiality and hence prevent the viewer from establishing an at least partially non-representational relationship with the image. In this regard, the films in this work may be considered as following alternative concepts that in contrast prefer the event to the structure. Again referring to the two examples mentioned above, both the teenager in Tangier and the Somali asylum seeker in the Swiss reception centre are first encountered on the event-level; while the viewer’s gaze on the one hand aims at understanding what he/she sees and at making sense, the missing categorisation or contextualisation by an additional narration and the neglected narrative ambiguity on the other deflect the gaze from finding the structure it is looking for; the experience remains non-actualisable. This, however, does not mean that the single images or the images in a larger context do not have any representational implications. It has often been noted (e.g. del Río, 2008) that Massumi’s distinction between ‘structure’ and ‘event’ resembles the distinction between ‘representational’ and ‘performative’. And it may help to understand Hall’s and Deleuze’s conceptualisations of the image’s representational functions not as oppositional but rather as standing in a dialectical relationship. Apparently, while Deleuze is primarily interested in the production of the image as an autonomous creative process and in the author/creator–image relationship – or the mobilisation of the division between reality, representation and subjectivity, that is (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004) – Hall specifically investigates the image–meaning nexus, the perception of the image. Consequently, one may build on Deleuze in order to open up a space where the image is admitted an instance of autonomy, an instance before representation – where the image’s relationship with reality is neither productive nor regressive and where the image carries an endless potentiality, where it is fundamentally ambiguous and ambivalent and where it has the potential to evoke affect outside a direct signifier/signified relationship. In this it is inviting politics of affect that open up a kind of representational gap, inducing a moment where representational practices are at least put into question if not suspended for a short moment of affect and potentiality.



 

 
  


That, in reverse and closely linked to Hall’s assessment of the stereotype, should by no means imply that artworks such as filmic images have the potential to be altogether neutral or innocent or stand in no relationship to reality whatsoever. On the contrary. Deleuze stresses the cinematic image’s potentiality, its fundamental ambiguity and ambivalence. In its being affective it may refer to experiences that we cannot actualise, although it may consist of well-known signs and symbols. It may, however, also be composed or coded in a way that reproduces, for example, racial, social or gender stereotypes. Also, affective images emerging as the result of a creative process, in other words, have the potential to produce unintentional or problematic readings or affects – and the filmmaker can never have complete control over the affect an image triggers. There is, in other words, clearly an ethics to the production of images. The films dealt with here are well aware of the responsibility that this production process implies; they aim at framing their images by establishing the subjects and spaces of undocumented migration in a very specific way, a way that is aware of the representational implications the film images have as part of the broader migration apparatus and as actors on what has earlier been referred to as the visual battle ground of migration. If, as Bergson (1912) put it, representation primarily operates through a process of immobilisation and spatialisation in which representation turns into a sign by means of which the always-implied referent is interpreted – the films must be understood as mobilising their images, as bringing back their differences, dynamisms, movements and changes (Herzog, 2000). They, as Olkowski put it, pointing towards the practical implications of the question, link the analysis of existing conditions to a critique of the structure of representation in order to “produce the ruin of representation, the ruin of hierarchically ordered time and space […] with structures of time and space, of life and thought, disassembled” (1999, p.2).




 
 


 

The creative process, the assembly of narrative elements and the manipulation of time and space, is something one might relate to fiction film rather than documentary film – primarily as all those filmic activities seem to stand in the way of reality. Jacques Rancière, however, reverses the relationship between film and reality; his approach to documentary film might help to further integrate the perspectives referred to above and at the same time make way for a reading of documentary film as a form of art in which representational functions are clearly subordinate to a film image’s perception as being attributable to aesthetic decisions. Considering it not a mere consequence of external influences or an abstraction, Rancière (2004) insists on understanding art as being contingent on its perception in different regimes: the ethical regime (for its truthfulness), the representational regime (for its adequacy or verisimilitude) and the aesthetic regime (where art is stripped of all

   

   
 




categorisations and becomes an art of being; the place where art is art and is perceived as art). In this line of thinking, the contradiction between documentary film’s immanent claim to resemble reality and the obvious constructedness of evidential value is less relevant because it is considered two sides of the same coin. Following Rancière, one could even state that this field of tension provides documentary film with a specific privilege because its complex entanglements with the true and the real release it from being “obliged to create the feeling of the real, and this allows it to treat the real as a problem and to experiment more freely with the variable games of action and life, significance and insignificance” (2006, p.17f.). Even more, he considers documentary film not only as grounding in this aesthetic regime but also as being its culmination – because it exploits the paradox that “art and the thought of images have always been nourished by all that thwarts them” (ibid., p.19). Documentary film, in other words, is capable of greater fictional invention than what is usually understood as fictional film because the latter is necessarily devoted to producing the impression of the real and bound to particular stereotypes of action and characters (Rancière, 2004); they are liable to completely different sets of generic verisimilitude. Documentary film – and this has considerable implications for this work – hence carries the potential to thwart the hierarchies of the representational regime and make way for “aesthetic operations that calculate, withhold or construct meanings by playing with combinations of text and image, bodies and voices, fiction and fact, to offer reality and the very relation between cinema and reality, as an arena of contestation” (Baumbach, 2010, p.60). That the generic forms and styles have blurred over the past decades does not put this assumption fundamentally into question as long as one does not consider documentary film as feature film’s opposite but rather another mode of cinematographic fiction, a different way to construct a plot, to cut a story into sequences or to assemble shots into a story, to join and disjoin voices, bodies, sounds and images and to lengthen and tighten time (Rancière, 2006). What he hence understands as the main difference between documentary and fiction is “that the documentary instead of treating the real as an effect to be produced, treats it as a fact to be understood. Documentary film can isolate the artistic work of fiction simply by dissociating that work from its most common use: the imaginary production of verisimilitude, of effects of the real” (ibid., p.158).

Documentary film, however, does extract its fictional capacities not only from the fact that it is a cinematographic mode, but also from film being a historicising mode, a means of memory. The term memory in this sense may at first appear to be an ambiguous term, not only but particularly when it comes to a phenomenon, such as undocumented migration, that is hardly linked to collective memory, that hardly has memorisable subjects and whose existential myth includes a fundamental invisibility. But as Rancière outlines – very much in line with Godard’s proposition that the history of the 20th century should be read by looking at its stories,



 

 
  


because cinema is an integral part of the very idea of the century (Daney and Godard, 1992) – memory is not about preservation but about creation. Memory is the work of fiction – fiction in a sense that does not refer to the story or the lie, less considered an act of feigning and more as an act of forging. Memory in this sense hence primarily refers to “using the means of art to construct a ‘system’ of represented actions, assembled forms, and internally coherent signs” (Rancière, 2006, p.158). Fig. 11: “…when our great-grandfathers met each other”

Source: COME UN UOMO SULLA TERRA, Screenshot, 1'16

The opening sequence of Andrea Segre’s documentary COME UN UOMO SULLA this concept of memory as a work of fiction quite well. “I think I should start telling this story going back to 100 years ago,”3 the film’s director and protagonist Dagmawi Yimer says, introducing himself, localising his migration narrative as rooted deeply in the colonial past linking especially Italy, Ethiopia and Libya. The time, Yimer says, “when our great-grandfathers met each other”. The story is that of him living as a refugee in Italy after having been an undocumented migrant in a longstanding transit through European borderlands, primarily in the Libyan Desert. Expressly linking story and history here, he claims

TERRA (2009) illustrates























































3

All English translations are taken from the subtitles of the film’s 2009 ZaLab DVD version.

    

  
  




a connection between past and present that cannot be found in some kind of collective memory but only in the very act of creating memory – Yimer’s narrative in this regard is also a work of appropriation. Being very much aware of this, already at the very outset he frames the whole film as a story – additionally, speaking Italian he uses the term storia, which means history and story at the same time. The narration is complemented on the audio level by haunting guitar sounds evoking a tense atmosphere. On the visual level, long shots and close-up profile shots of Yimer sitting in what seems to be a bus terminal take turns with short black-and-white sequences of historical footage of the Italian colonial wars in Libya and Ethiopia (Fig. 11). Events that are worlds apart, spatially as well as temporally – and yet they merge in Yimer’s story; then and now, storia and storia inseparably linked. The way colonial warfare and migration as historical events are fictionalised here (in terms of their composition and their inner consistency) merges in the construction of a specific memory, a specific historisation of Yimer’s migration experience. Storia is mirroring storia also in so far as the images in both cases claim the position of witnesses of what must, from a European perspective, be considered forgotten, ignored and largely denied. While, right from the beginning, the filmmakers contextualise contemporary migration movements as being closely connected to the history of colonialism, they at the same time aim at revealing the mythical aspects of nation and history, also – though not exclusively – deeply rooted in a colonial body of thought. From the very beginning, COME UN UOMO SULLA TERRA aims at accounting for both the more general and the individual dimension of (historical and contemporary) incidents. The way Yimer’s words are at the same time intensified and contrasted by the archival footage lays the ground for a critical assessment of historicised transnational ties and the tension between story, narrative and history. Colonialism in this regard is not considered a neutral or concluded historical event – but is understood as intrinsically linking the relevant countries’ past, present and future; this relationship is not limited to abstract bilateral ties, but has to be attributed to individuals. And colonial history is more than just the background against which Yimer presents stories and narratives; by referring to “our great-grandfathers”, he points to the fact that the encounters of Italian and Ethiopian ancestors some century ago impact on his individual migration and his relationship to people in Italy considerably: his flight can be traced back to political developments and ethnic tensions in the aftermath of the colonial experience, his journey through Libya is determined by bilateral cooperation between Libya and Italy (and further European states), and the way he is perceived in Italy again is strongly influenced by the European colonial discourse and stereotypical images connected to (neo-)colonial knowledge production. As the language Yimer uses while introducing the film is Italian, the use of the term “our” seems to address the audience rather than only himself and his co-director Andrea Segre or his assumed peer group. He here creates a space in which he can strategically play with being both an insider and an



 

 
  


outsider. This transnational dimension of history and a broad understanding of ‘we’ are followed throughout the film. The, presumably, historical footage of the colonial wars has a mirroring function with regard to a second aspect. While Yimer – who will in the course of the film tell us a story that includes a lot of motion, different means of transport, different facilitators and a constant back and forth – sits and rests at the bus terminal, we see soldiers marching, trains, lorries and ships overloaded with soldiers, then flying fighter squadrons and eventually people fleeing on foot. Apparently, the black-and-white imagery foreshadows the movement that is at the centre of the film’s attention. Doubling the movement motif ties the events even more strongly together and makes the fiction of memory more specific. Which is what the directors obviously aim at; after roughly one and a half minutes the scene changes and the link between storia and storia is recreated the other way around. Yimer proclaims that instead of starting the story a hundred years ago – a skilful artifice and at the same time clearly a fictionalising choice – he will “start this story with the sound of a train”. Now he gets in motion – to the sound of a train, the camera films Italian suburbs from a train, and we see modern Italian trains on the go. We are presented with further close-up profile shots of Yimer, now also on the train. Now he talks about his memories – of train rides with his father, who used to be a train driver in Addis Ababa. Here he starts digging deeper into his own motivations to flee his country, the political situation, ethnic politics, and his father’s lack of understanding – establishing some kind of a triangle of memory, based on history, his history and his story. The main point of reference in this triangle cannot be reality – and the most interesting question, consequently cannot be what these invented new intrigues with historical documents and these explorations of the complexities of cultural hybridities tell about the past, but what they aim to tell about the present; documentary film in this regard “touches hands with the film fable that joins and disjoins – in the relationship between story and character, shot and sequence – the powers of the visible, of speech, and of movement” (Rancière, 2006, p.18); it is “offering a critique of the order of things by creating ambient atmospheres in which the boundary between artistic production and social experience is made all too visible” (Papastergiadis, 2014, p.6). This sequence from COME UN UOMO SULLA TERRA clearly illustrates that the documentary is, unlike fiction film, not limited or tied to the stereotypes of the social imaginary, but rather a place where “the fiction of memory sets its roots in the gap that separates the construction of meaning, the referential real, and the ‘heterogeneity’ of its documents” (Rancière, 2006, p.159) – and even more that the documentary cinema is “a mode of fiction at once more homogeneous and more complex: more homogeneous because the person who conceives the idea is also the person who makes it; more complex because it is much more likely to arrange or interlace a series of heterogeneous images” (ibid.). The sequence also underlines how the production and the consumption of documentary images range between the poles of rather representational and rather

    

  
  




performative modes and practices – even if most of the images primarily stand for themselves, at least the archival footage triggers a history that lies outside of the image itself. On the one hand, the images’ immanent relationship with reality invite rather representational readings and interpretations. On the other hand, specifically Rancière’s renegotiation of the fictional capacities of the documentary and Godard’s claim to give the images back to those they have been taken from propose a reconsideration of the film image from a performative angle – asking for the image’s or the montage’s aims rather than its significance. What the sequence also illustrates is that this gap has implications for the overall quality or texture of the image. Granting the documentary image a considerably fictional capacity also offers another angle from which representational practices of the documentary image can be observed. In terms of its in/completeness and in/adequacy, the narrative is structured analogously to the film image itself – neither as a single image nor in the form of its composition into a film can it account for a life story in its entirety, not even for the entirety of a specific temporally and spatially limited event; as well as in the image, most decisions with regard to the details used in order to compose a narrative are made deliberately in order to produce a certain consistency that is prerequisite to the production of meaning. At the same time, narratives as well as images differ in the degree to which they invoke self-evidence; in many cases the self-evident is produced by means of a specific interaction between image and narrative. As in the case of the image of the pirogue in BAB SEBTA referred to in the previous chapter, this common mode of interplay between image, text and knowledge can, however, be challenged by means of a specific filmic montage-type of de-conventionalising the image in which structure and event are confronted with each other – also causing a break in the representational function of the image and the narrative connected to it by putting the focus on the fictional and the performative quality of the image.



    
   

  
It has already been outlined in the previous chapter to what end the documentary films thematise and reflect their own mediality in a performative way, not only on the level of the image itself but also on the level of montage and composition. The performative practices the films apply transgress the dimension of the production of meaning and apprehension; their performative force does not lie in the statements they facilitate or the significance that emerges in reference to conventionalised signs – even without a referrer, an imitation or representation, images can perform acts that allow the emergence of something new and peculiar (Schwarte, 2011). In this regard, the image is understood as being able to accomplish performative acts and assigned the status of a witness rather than considered as giving witness; they are consequently more than reservoirs or archives but embodiments that have the potential to unleash unimagined forces (ibid.).



 

 
  


Moments of performativity can also be located in the moment of capture, before-montage. As Nichols’s earlier introduced definition of documentary film illustrated, even more than the image is expected to represent reality, its protagonists are expected to be part of a reality, to be authentic, to be themselves. It seems hence paramount to expand the analysis of representational and performative practices in a way that also accounts for that which is the cause of an image, the protagonists, events or situations the camera ‘finds’ and finds worth dealing with – the image’s reality. This would first of all highlight the question of how the protagonists themselves narrativise their stories and how they perform their narratives, and how, in a second step, this in return is made consistent by means of montage and composition. In the specific cinematic documentary mode in the focus of this work, the protagonist and the filmmaker are, in this regard, in a way mutually constructing the film narrative; they may both be considered producers, with different roles, though. In this sense, the migrants and refugees in the focus of the documentary films may be considered agents who construct and carry with them “geographical imagery to describe a people, land, culture, and nation […] mental images, spatial metaphors, and place narratives [in which they] recreated, adapted, and reinvented their sense of belonging to places they lived, travelled, settled or remembered” (Sen, 2009, p.5). This imagery is connected to the imaginary and plays a crucial role in informing and developing the individual’s narrative (also in terms of being part of a collective narrative, an imagined community); the individual must definitely be considered as concerned with his/her self-representation as a filmmaker’s informant in the context of film production. Representational practices and conventions are apparently effective, also on this level contributing to the creation of a consistent narrative. This kind of double consciousness – “the sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of other” (Du Bois, 1903; quoted from Smith, 2000, p.581) – has to be kept in mind when talking about the representational practices deployed and the representational orders potentially reiterated and reinforced by filmmakers. Especially COME UN OUMO SULLA TERRA and LA FORTERESSE investigate this double consciousness by means of interactive interview sections and observed conversations. Primarily in LA FORTERESSE, different layers of representation and narrativisation overlap in a triangular way – firstly, the camera catches statements by refugees on film and observes day-to-day life in the reception centre; secondly, the refugees are being interrogated by the federal and reception-centre authorities; and, thirdly, the camera also selectively documents some of those interrogations and contrasts the different perspectives with each other. One scene in LA FORTERESSE illustrates the various layers and conventions of narrativisation and representation quite clearly. In this sequence, Fernand Melgar takes up the case of a young Somali from different angles; first, the viewer observes him telling the story of his flight to a pastor at the reception centre, and, afterwards, the conversation between the centre’s decision makers discussing the case. In the first part of the sequence, roughly three and a half minutes long, one of the centre’s pastoral

   

   
 




counsellors talks with the Somali and emphatically follows the story of his provenance and flight. Like confessing, the man gives account of his story in a plausible, even shockingly illustrative way. He reports coming from Somalia and uncovers the scars he carries from having been shot in the legs several times. He talks about having walked through the Sudanese and Libyan deserts with badly injured legs for several weeks, accompanied by other refugees, to eventually reach the Mediterranean Sea. There, he reports, he entered a small pirogue, about eight metres in length, which he had to share with about 50 other refugees. Again and again referring to his bodily experiences and in order to supply evidence, he not only exposes his scars but also imitates his crouched posture in the small boat (Fig. 12). Fig. 12: Re-enacting the journey across the Mediterranean

Source: LA FORTERESSE, Screenshot, 61'05

The pastor’s emphatic amazement triggers the man to continue and to provide more and more detail. After seven days on the boat, he says, they ran out of fuel; shortly after that event, they also ran out of food and water. Calmly, the camera gaze rests upon the Somali’s face for most of the conversation – grasping the horrors of the trip in his countenance; the narrative and the man’s body become one; the medium close-up camera angle is interrupted only by a few close-ups of the counsellor; there is also an interpreter present but we see her rarely and always from behind.4























































4

The presence of an interpreter certainly adds an additional layer to the whole scene. Not only does she translate the Somali’s words into her own, but also there are statements that she apparently shortens or summarises or does not translate at all – thus also playing



 

 
  


The Somali’s story then culminates in an episode that took place on the group’s tenth day at sea. After a little boy had died of thirst, the other refugees cut his body in pieces and ate it. Both the pastor and the translator react with bewilderment, and also the camera stares at the man for a couple of seconds as if to express speechlessness. He looks away, nervous and ashamed. As if to release the tension, the next shot shows the pastor holding, caressing the Somali’s hand, while the pastor asks him what he thinks about Switzerland and all its riches, the cars, the food, especially in contrast to what he has been through. Laughter spells relief. What at first appears to be quite naive, or at least some kind of displacement activity, turns out to complete the Somali’s narrative. He expresses gratitude and appreciation for being treated by the Swiss in a humane way, for being given food, medication and shelter – an assessment that is clearly contradicted in the second part of the sequence. In this scene, the federal decision maker in this case explains to a colleague that the Somali’s asylum claim has been rejected because she didn’t find his story plausible. She presumes that he made up the story because it was too accurate and stereotypical with regard to the details of the journey and at the same time too imprecise and vague when it came to the man’s personal background and motivation. She claims that he was not able to convince her that it was really him who made the journey – as if he was telling another person’s story. What struck her most about his story, she states, is that she cannot imagine how he walked through the desert for 30 days with fractured legs. Her colleague is apparently extremely surprised and argues that, on first listen, he found the story remarkable but credible. In general, the tension between the two sequences points the attention to overarching problems of strict and heavily subjective asylum interrogations aimed at uncovering inconsistencies rather than showing sympathy or empathy for the claimants in general. But beyond Melgar’s giving account of an event in order to outline the intolerable and his – implicit – politically motivated fundamental critique of the Swiss and European asylum system and its underlying general suspicion of benefit fraud, the filmmaker here puts the focus on the sheer contrast between the individual’s experience and the decision-making authorities’ failure to grasp it. For the film itself, it is irrelevant if or to what extent the Somali’s narrative can be considered appropriately rendered. It is interested in the conventions and representational orders illustrated by the contrast of the two scenes – and in the fact that while there certainly is a truth behind the narrative, a reason forcing this young man to leave his home country in order to try his luck in Europe, the authorities apparently assume that in their interrogations they are able to differentiate performative and representational aspects of the asylum seekers’ narratives, that they are able to tell the truth from the lie.























































an important role in shaping the narrative. Moreover, the French parts of her and the pastor’s speech are subtitled; the man’s original statements are not.

    

  
  




This moment of fundamental failure is an immanent element of the procedures themselves and it starts with the asylum seeker being forced to actualise his experience in a way that allows him to present a consistent and comprehensible narrative in order to claim asylum in the first place. Melgar emphasises this dramatic failure by means of a sequence in which the links between the viewer, the experience and the images are suspended – he is even able to avoid inviting pity to spell out the relief of a partial actualisation of the Somali’s experience. Representation in this setting necessarily fails on all levels; neither can the affective experience be adequately represented by or “be translated into words without doing violence to the totality of awareness” (Gibbs, 2010, p.200), nor can the viewer directly incorporate it into his/her conceptual world; furthermore, the interrogator’s attempt to seek truth and authenticity that lie outside the Somali’s account necessarily fails. The affect, however, puts attention on the extent to which a refugee’s fate depends on such a procedure of interpretation that apparently adheres to representational paradigms and conventions. The Somali’s narrative is not accounted for as it is but against the background of a set of stereotypical figures, practices and narratives. The decision maker’s appreciation of the interrogation – which, and this is also important, we have not been allowed to observe – strictly speaking translates into the allegation that somebody who is subject to extensive stereotyping meets those stereotypes too perfectly, the allegation in fact made by those who have produced and are continuously reproducing those stereotypes. Apparently, verisimilitude orders adhere to the convention that a narrative is not allowed to be too conventional. This is particularly strange, as the decision makers seem to take a quite positivistic stance by judging the plausibility of a narrative by means of its reference to stereotypes. In yet another step, the image’s resemblance and its conventionality turn against the young man when the interrogator denies taking him at face value and rejects his asylum claim. She finds the story too good to be true, knowing very well that the repercussions of images of undocumented migration produced in the West are not limited to the West. She assumes – and in the logic of the European migration regime and “Borderland Schengen” this does definitely make sense – that the Somali, in other words, mingled other asylum seekers’ stories into his own, putting together bits and pieces that make up an expedient migration story. Instead of scrutinising the man’s motivation, the interrogator puts his narration into question. The fact that the Somali left a war-torn country and took an apparently highly dangerous route to Europe is, in her assessment, completely eclipsed by questions of plausibility, authenticity and credibility. All the Somali is able to present are his wounds and his narrative. In the hierarchically structured relationship between the man and the decision maker, it is the latter who generates the necessary images in order to assess the credibility of the asylum seeker – in the end it is all about her imagination, her in/ability to make sense of a narrative she was presented with. Rather than understanding the contrast between the Somali’s



 

 
  


narrative and the decision maker’s reading of the narrative, the viewer can experience the contradictions and the man’s hopelessness and incapacity to react on an affective level. While, in other words, from a European perspective those images, representations and stereotypes are legitimate elements of particular image politics, outside the European order one is apparently not allowed to strategically reorganise one’s self-representation to accord with the expectations those images encompass; while the interrogators scrutinise the authenticity of the asylum seekers’ stories, the authenticity of all those well-known representations of undocumented migration are not being put into question at all; and while the European migration regime is dominated by stable images of illegal migrants and legitimate refugees, those in the focus are not allowed to correlate with it. Even more, all the figures, places, practices and narratives of migration seem to be conventionalised to an extent that it is irrelevant to what extent and in what way the subjects of migration actually correspond to it. Although the images connected to the Somali’s story are more or less well known – the desert, the boat, the sea, thirst and death – both the pastor and the interpreter (and also the viewer) are deeply moved. The Somali gives a face to an all too familiar narrative. The narrative and the images of undocumented migration, however, are not familiar because they precisely conform to reality or have been verified, but because they have been and are being reiterated continuously. The Somali reports a story of migration that, on the one hand, is closely linked to his body and his personal experience – because he is the one giving account of it and because he carries the scars. At the same time the same narrative is being inscribed in his body by means of the viewer’s gaze. It is not only that there is nothing in the composition of the image, in the way the young man renders his narrative or in the camera gaze that implies doubt, but also that the viewer is even more willing to trust in the authenticity of the narration; one could go so far as to state that he/she wants to see it in the body. That is because, on the one hand, the narrative accords with the images the viewer knows so well – and, on the other hand, the man’s drastic narrative does in effect transgress those images; in other words, we recognise the structure of the image and at the same time we undergo it as an event, as an unactualisable experience. It is in fact as if we are staring at the ruins of representation. Moving away from the filmic level, we may assume that the decision maker in the interrogation had an experience that is similar to that of the viewer’s. The summary of her appreciation of what she heard in the interview illustrates how hard she is trying to separate structure and event, qualification and intensity. What also makes this scene so hard to grasp is how she in fact delegitimises her doubt and her emotional involvement in such an interrogation – in order to restore the representational orders that provide her daily business with legitimacy. It seems to be the only option in order to be able to continue doing the job she is doing.

    

  
  






  
 
 
While the focus above was on a rather performative interpretative mode with regard to images and narratives, performative practices are also applied on the level of the image production and narrativisation itself. They confront the audience with film material and narratives in which reality is put under scrutiny in a way that challenges the viewer to constantly renew and recreate links between image and reality because the channels of authenticity have been blocked. While all films used here to at least some degree include performative elements and images that exhibit constructedness, most of the films also encompass cuts that have definitely been arranged or staged, but also many scenes in which the viewer cannot conclusively determine whether they have been staged or not. Two of the chosen films in contrast apply a primarily performative narrative approach. In the first case, SUR LE RIVAGE DU MONDE (2012), the Canadian filmmaker Sylvain L'Espérance mirrors the narratives of a couple of undocumented migrants among other things by means of sequences from a self-written theatre play that some of those migrants are rehearsing and eventually perform; they live in a big house that they refer to as the ghetto, a place housing up to 200 migrants who are stranded in Mali, in most cases upon failing to challenge European borders. In the second case, KURZ DAVOR IST ES PASSIERT (2006), Anja Salomonowitz presents five narratives of female undocumented migrants who have been subject to trafficking and sexual or labour exploitation – the victims’ narratives are in their own words retold by lay people who due to their profession might have been among the perpetrators. Applying an extreme artistic distortion, Salomonowitz not only investigates the limits of documentary film as a genre but also focuses on the issue of visibility and invisibility of female undocumented migrants specifically and the re-creation of gender in the act of performance in general. SUR LE RIVAGE DU MONDE has been shot on location in Mali by a very small team and premiered at the 2012 Rencontres Internationales du Documentaire de Montréal; it has since been screened at different film festivals and, among others, won the competition at the 2013 Munich Dok.fest (Les films du tricycle, 2012).5 The film is primarily set in and around the ghetto, a house inhabited by stranded migrants. It follows six of the housemates, among them a boxer, a man working as a hairdresser and a woman taking care of their two little children. The film sets in by observing a group of a woman and three men sitting at a small table in some kind of garage or run-down house, discussing narratives of migration journeys and how to present those narratives. The layers of direct and indirect experience constantly overlap, and for quite some time it remains unclear whether the stories the























































5

SUR LE RIVAGE DU MONDE has not seen a major release and is available via an online film portal and on DVD.



   

 
  


four are referring to are their individual experiences or poetic abstractions blending individual experience and generic narratives. The camera at the same time entangles the protagonists with those stories by means of a participatory perspective and portrait shots, as if it is looking for signs of those experiences in their faces, in their bodies. And when one of the men addresses the woman and tells her that her role is “to speak out in defence of women”,6 his reference to a role she is playing can be understood in various ways; is he talking about the play? Is he talking about her role in the broader and clearly gendered migration discourse and the obligation the specific experiences as a female migrant imply? The narration at this point does not answer any of these questions – rather, it poses further questions by maintaining the situation as open and as potential as possible. Right in the beginning of the opening sequence, one of the men states, “I’m here in Mali, but I still feel lost.” Apparently he is giving account of personal experience as a migrant who has been deported from European borderlands. He continues by explaining a performative narrative strategy that he apparently applies in order to write and to dramatise the play – but it could just as well describe his narrative strategy in an interrogation situation: “I was in jail in Niger, I was in jail in Mauritania and Morocco, but I can’t tell those stories. So I write: ‘I was scared I’d die of thirst’, ‘I was left for dead in the desert’, ‘I was beaten up’. When you say that, people will come to see you after the play. They’ll want to hear more. That will draw the audience in. But for now, don’t give any details.”

This particular way of considering migration narratives as performative also sheds a different light on the Somali’s narrative in LA FORTERESSE referred to above. While in his case, the narrative’s conformity with common and even stereotypical elements of an undocumented migrant’s journey and experience is reinterpreted by the federal decision maker in a way that separated the man from his narrative (and she clearly has the final say in this case), the opening sequence of SUR LE RIVAGE DU MONDE embraces the simultaneity and resemblance of individual and common experiences. “My part’s clear: I’ve been deported,” says another man, describing his role in the play, also pointing to global imbalances; “I’ve seen people lose their minds. Or become extremely violent, due to the way they’re forced to live. I’ve seen kidnappings.” It’s his role, but at the same time it is very likely that it grounds in his life experience. Even though it slowly becomes clearer that the four are primarily discussing how to write a theatre play and how to bring it to the stage, the different narrative layers are hardly unravelled. Apparently they only have a couple of days to learn their lines – but as one of the men summarises, “You know most of them























































6

Original in French; all translations have been taken from the English subtitles embedded in the file provided by DocAlliance.

    

  
  




already.” Looking at his notes, he repeats the sentence he pronounced in the beginning as if lamenting his fate: “I’m here in Mali, but I still feel lost.” Now he seems to have taken a role; and again, within seconds, the layers of performance and experience are being disarrayed. At the same time, the whole sequence confronts the viewer with the set of preconceptions at work in his/her gaze. To this point, none of the four clearly expresses that he or she had the migratory experience – the man mainly speaking even several times points to some kind of manuscript. And still most viewers most likely do not even consider the four people to be actors or activists who only aim to create awareness for a phenomenon that they also only heard about. So, we see them negotiating a performance – but we realise how much we would like to read them as giving authentic account of migrants’ experiences. The presumably wellknown, familiar elements of migration stories are here arranged in a way that opens a new narrative space and projection surfaces. And this is the case throughout the film. In another sequence, one of the men from the theatre group – we later learn he seems to be a Cameroonian calling himself César and that he is overseeing the house – gives account of his journey that eventually brought him to Bamako (although this should not be misunderstood as an authentic layer contrasting the performative elements). While we see him doing boxing exercises on a deserted basketball court, we hear him talking about “the whole ordeal”, and we see him arranging red pebbles on the map of Africa, each one symbolising a leg of his long journey from eastern Cameroon to Bamako. He talks about originally having envisaged becoming a boxer in the Cameroonian city of Douala but then having been encouraged by his friends to go “to the other side”, to Spain. From Cameroon he made his way – via Kano, Zinder, Agadez, Arlit, Tamanrasset, Salah, Ghardaïa, Algiers, Oran, Oujda, Berkane, Nador – to Melilla where he has been caught and taken to Marrakesh and then to Western Sahara. From there, he says, he continued to Bamako, almost coming full circle, but at the same time still being worlds apart from where he once started. While we then see him with a sparring partner on the pitch, his voice goes on by reciting a poem: “I’m the last one on the road, but I’m still breathing, I live in the image of life, in shapes and colours, In unexpected beauty, in everyday ugliness, In misery and sorrow, but I’m still standing. I live despite the death and distress. Under the smoke and fire, but I’m still standing. You who have nothing, you’re still breathing. You answer to life, to today and tomorrow, Earth, I am on this earth, and all is with me.”

The map mirrors the poem; the poem mirrors the map – the connection between the two is open and potential. Representation ends here. Experience is transferred



 

 
  


into an aesthetic regime that transgresses both representative and ethical patterns and in which the viewer is prevented from searching for the truth – not least because it refers to events that cannot be separated into individual and common experiences, real and true experiences and “the image of life”. Again and again, we see and hear the six protagonists presenting migrationrelated stories in the form of poems, prayers, raps or songs, some form of modern dance choreography even. Each of the protagonists claims a narrative space in which the significance of his/her words and experiences cannot easily be framed in terms of a consistent meaning or interpretation, nor can they be easily inscribed into their bodies. Are these their stories? In general, in a documentary film we never know for certain if a protagonist composes his narrative from his own pool of experiences – there is always a gap – but the way Sur le rivage du monde is arranged and composed makes the viewer take notice of this gap. While following his hairdressing business, another man in a solemn way presents his prayer-like poem: “I once roamed this road like a fool, abiding by its hellish rules, a footnote, a figure, a number, deserving more than delusion and this legacy of exclusion.” And he goes on: “Hidden from the sun, my body and my shadow have become one.” Like his body and shadow became one, his life and the images and reflections of his life also become one – and the interpretation of the events composing this life here rest with the person we see speaking. The camera is close, very close – we don’t really see what the man is doing, only his face. The fact that he is not addressing the camera but rather talking loud and clear to himself embeds the exceptional into the normal, into the daily routine. While the transit situation of many undocumented migrants creates a frightening normality in a continuously exceptional situation, the artistic works presented here are apparently a result of reflection and interpretation that helped to split off the exceptional in order to allow for an at least partly normal life again. To establish this kind of space for affective images is one of the fundamental principles, L’Espérance follows in his film in order to enable the protagonists to reclaim their images and their sounds. The protagonist is not primarily utilised to contribute a life story that the viewer can easily understand and decode based on prevalent modes of seeing and knowing – the protagonists, rather, become actors in and authors of their own life stories, interpreters of their experiences. The elements composing this narrative space hence also aim at redrawing the migration discourse from a different angle; it centres on neither the legal, political and other regulatory frameworks nor the familiar figure of the illegal migrant or refugee; at the same time it clearly frames what the European migration regime implies in terms of potential experiences without giving it the opportunity to represent itself, its borders, its hi-tech, its political and executive representatives; ‘the other side’ is, on the contrary, sketched exclusively based on the migrants’ narratives/performances.

    

  
  




In the course of the rehearsals/the film, the actors in the play not only reveal further – ambiguous – aspects and elements of their journeys; they also take alternative positions, perspectives that are clearly scrutinising the migrants’ commonly assigned part in a perpetrator–victim relationship. In the play, Europe is framed the “continent of death” that “callously condemned the youth of Africa to death”. And the youth’s migration at the same time is considered a form of rebellion. The characters in the play take different extreme positions; that of the half-dead and desperate refugee in the desert, that of the cynic laughing down the refugee in need, and that of the advocate for a humane treatment of refugees. Another interesting element of the film in this regard is how it develops the display of César’s boxing – anyway a sport activity that links affective and performative elements closely to one’s body. While it first of all appears to be a biographical detail that he left his hometown in order to become a professional boxer, his boxing more and more turns into a performative element. His practising, alone and with a sparring partner, already incorporates strong elements of rhythmic performance and a vibrant and dynamic use of his body, rehearsed steps and slaps. Later, his practice is fully translated into an event where practice and performance can no longer be separated: in the dark of night he makes his moves, rhythmically counting “un, deu, trois”, in some kind of antiphony with others; his moaning and counting is repeated by others. It seems also that his moves are mirrored by at least two other persons; without actually seeing anything but moving shadows, this spectacle can be observed for a couple of minutes. Eventually, towards the end of the film, César lets his housemates know that he will have a boxing match later that year and that an Algerian boxing club is eager to sign him professionally. Narrative and performance mingle in a way that puts the verisimilitude the viewer might apply to such a situation into question. While we, on the one hand, might assume that such an offer is not the most probable thing to happen in his situation, we realise that we do not have the means to assess the actual probability; the event remains non-actualisable. The theatre cuts and poems are complemented by tableaux-like scenes, frequent cuts that each lasts for five to ten seconds and in which the film itself follows a mode that interrupts the documental by an explicit artificiality. Often those shots’ motives are symmetrical, poetical and almost motionless. Often the camera frames the ghetto from outside, sometimes its inner scribbled-over walls, then we see colourful laundry drying in the wind, or the clock at the train station. Time almost comes to a halt, and the images do not have an explanatory but purely contemplative function. They rather complete the film’s concept to avoid establishing a consistent timeline; time stands still at the edge of the world. Constructing a certain timelessness that corresponds to the spatial transit zone the migrants are finding themselves in, the lack of movement puts the focus even more on the temporal aspect of transit that prevails in their situation.



 

 
  


Fig. 13: Limiting the gaze

Source: SUR LE RIVAGE DU MONDE, Screenshot, 90'47

Two further filmic strategies are used in order to intensify the performative character of the whole film; firstly, many of its visual and textual elements are repeated throughout the film; we see several takes of the ghetto – all taken from the same angle at different times of the day. Also some parts of the poems and some verses from the play are repeated, sometimes in a different tone as if we are observing the different stages of rehearsal. The scenes evolve and change in their tone and their arrangement. Secondly, many of those tableaux result from angles in which the camera deliberately only grasps details; either because it is looking from the inside to the outside and the gaze is limited or partly blocked (Fig. 13), or because it looks at something or somebody by means of an extreme close-up or only indirectly, for example through a curtain or the reflection in a puddle (Fig. 14). The camera itself seems to constantly comment on the potentiality of its gaze and the fact that it can never catch more than just small extracts of what it is surrounded by, on the one hand, and the constructedness and performativity of its narrative, on the other. At the same time, it clearly anticipates the binarism of inside and outside that is among the main reasons for the film’s protagonists being in Bamako in the first place. Against the background of what has been said above, the film’s title also reads ambiguously. Referring to the medieval concept of ultima thule, any distant place located beyond the borders of the known world (Fitzhugh and Richard, 2014), it locates its protagonists in the remotest place possible – hence also reflecting Mali’s role as a sort of collection point for those who have come into conflict with the European migration regime, who have tried and failed Europe’s borders. Each of the film’s protagonists at the same time is portrayed as finding him/herself on the edge of their personal world. Bamako, a 5,000 kilometre route away from the Mediterranean is where they have to recover their dreams and plans, where they

   

   
 




have to make decisions – and yet most of them continue to be in a state of transit, where decisions are taken out of their hands. The house – the ghetto – where the people portrayed in the film reside, in this regard seems to be the last outpost of ultima thule – and at the same time it offers its residents a space to reflect and experiment, to deal with experiences and to translate the experience into more or less consistent narratives; it is a place where they also have the space to perform their narrative. Fig. 14: Deflecting the gaze

Source: SUR LE RIVAGE DU MONDE, Screenshot, 58'00

Besides the play, the poems and the tableaux, a fourth narrative element is that of the sequences that seem to derive from standard interview situations. But also here, the narrative space is wide open; the camera calmly rests on the protagonists in shoulder shots, in most cases complementing the performative and artistic parts by what seem to be elements of their life stories; they talk about the good lives they had before they left their home, about the dreams they had, but also about their deportations, about forced marriage, the running away. Not all of those stories’ vanishing point is Europe. Most of those sequences last several minutes and the statements are not interrupted by questions and only rarely by cuts. An important shift is caused by the fact that the protagonists are in most cases talking directly to the camera – again they claim the space in which they author and appropriate their narratives. These situations mainly concern their social relations in Bamako and the transnational relations that remain an important factor of their lives; they talk about friends and families, the mother in Cameroon, the cousin in Spain, the friend in the Sahara, and various kinds of ties linking them with different geographical spaces and locating them in different social spaces. Throughout, the narratives are presented from the migrants’ perspectives, which are not homogeneous at all and which may include projections all the same.



 

 
  


The European borders are only one of several aspects shaping their trajectories; most of them refer to having been deported from other African countries; they talk about the Malian authorities’ policies against the clandestine, the hardship to find a job as a foreigner in Mali, both the hospitality and racism they experience, knocking on people’s doors in order to get some food, or attend other people’s weddings and wakes. And they also talk about returning home, something that is at least potentially an option for all those stranded in the ghetto – and at the same time financially and culturally in a way much more complicated than the leaving part of the journey was. Only twice does the film establish a direct connection to Europe and to the all too familiar images of migration. First, we hear a sequence from an apparently Tunisian radio news programme where it is mentioned that it is at the moment most likely easier to migrate to Europe as coastal patrols have been reduced upon the downfall of dictator Ben Ali. Then we see snowy pictures from French TV showing migrants rescued in the proximity of Lampedusa, less providing any visual proof than, rather, evoking a distant memory (see Fig. 8). Europe? Who cares … Or as one of the protagonists puts it: “The El Dorado of my dreams turned its back on me. And, turned to rust at the gates to the West, my shell of a body had but one way to turn: Back.” Halfway through the film, the play is first brought to stage at a local event connected to the 2011 World Social Forum, WSF – which took place in Dakar, Senegal, but created local spin-offs in many cities. After the play has finished, the four actors introduce themselves to the audience and, still in a performative mode, sketch their experiences. Even on stage, they are playing with different levels of performance and authenticity. Ending the play, they raise their fists and claim, “Jobs for our youth – leaders of Europe and Africa, accept your responsibility – freedom of circulation for all.” There is a lot of applause; it seems the event provided the opportunity to make their voices heard. In the second part of the film we, however, observe two of the men applying, unsuccessfully, for financial aid with international organisations such as IOM, CARE and Mission d’Afrique. It becomes a struggle, tiring. Overall, in the second part of the film, the slight optimism regarding migrants’ self-empowerment fades and the connection between their art and visibility and recognition is rendered slightly differently. The narratives and stories are now beginning to push the limits of our verisimilitude even further – as already mentioned, César for example outlines his future as a professional boxer and everyone cheers and applauds. But it is even harder to tell at what level his performance takes place. Is it part of the play? Is he telling his housemates a lie? Is he talking about a dream that is as much part of a survival strategy as it astounds the viewer? Is he … true? The film leaves it open. César continues to rehearse the play with the others, even after the first presentation at the WSF. In sum, the performative mode the film follows throughout establishes a space in which the protagonists are conceded the agency to interpret and to translate

    

  
  




experience instead of being projection screens for authenticity. The film’s reference to the production of art in various forms – poems, rap songs, theatre – sheds light on a specific survival or coping strategy in a continuous state of spatial and temporal transit. The images avoid victimising the figures and bodies they are dealing with; instead they open a space of empowerment and potentiality. As one of the protagonists demands: “I need to be the author of my own story.” In their narratives, the state of transit the migrants are caught in is impressively illustrative and underlines the relevance of the geographical and social spaces their movement establishes, a topography that is less crossed than inhabited, that consist of numerous points of departure and arrival, carved by trajectories rather than routes. More than authenticised experience and precise testimony, the kind of performative authorship SUR LE RIVAGE DU MONDE confronts the viewer with points to the constructedness of European perspectives on what is perceived as a homogeneous continent, on consistent figures of migration and on clearly directed migration movements. The film – which is logical – ends on a note that underlines the overall unpredictability of the individuals’ situations. The protagonists now seem to swing between the poles of rage, anger and accusations on the one hand and the overwhelming timelessness and indecision on the other. In a sentence to his brother on the phone, one of the protagonists summarises what the film is all about, what its bottom line is: “You have to be where I am to understand the reality of my life” (Fig. 15). Fig. 15: “You have to be …”

Source: SUR LE RIVAGE DU MONDE, Screenshot, 91'50



 

 
  



  
 
While SUR LE RIVAGE DU MONDE mirrors migration experiences by means of performative elements, KURZ DAVOR IST ES PASSIERT thematises undocumented migration by putting the hierarchy of image and text fundamentally into question. Instead of an image and its reflection, we are presented with two mirror images, which first of all causes a productive relocation of issues of truth, authenticity and representation. While the images Salomonowitz generates may at first glance apparently embrace the image’s representational function, they eventually put it fundamentally into question and defy it. Shot by the Austrian Anja Salomonowitz, the film internationally premiered at the 2007 Berlinale’s Forum section; it has been screened at some 50 film festivals and won several jury and audience awards.7 The film has been perceived as belonging to a sort of new and experimental variant of the documental that combines document, enactment, play and performance – trusting neither emphatic identification nor an alleged documental evidence (Kohler, 2011). Strictly speaking, the film is hardly a documentary and rather a performance; it consists of five sequences in which excerpts of stories of women that have been subject to trafficking in Austria are being recited by a customs officer, a waiter in a brothel, the husband of a diplomat, but also a neighbour and a taxi driver. While following their usual business they, in a strangely detached way, present narratives of exploitation, desperation and violence, speaking to themselves in an incidental tone. Then again they interrupt their activities in order to directly talk to the camera. As the director reveals in an interview,8 each of the stories presented in the film has been composed from excerpts taken from a number of interviews conducted by an Austrian NGO running an intervention centre for trafficked women and by the director herself. The fictional character of the narrative is complemented by the fact that even though the protagonists had no acting experience whatsoever prior to this film, they have been cast all the same. The camera in return also takes a rather detached perspective, usually by means of medium shots or medium close-ups, and does not necessarily follow the protagonists throughout. Every once in a while, it leaves its protagonist in order to measure the space around them, the border facilities, the brothel, their private houses. It wanders the places, spaces and borders relevant in the establishment of the perpetrator–victim relationship, as if it is searching for the women who are at the same time at the centre of the film and its blank space. In the first sequence called “At the border”, we see a customs officer following his daily business at a border post. He is typing reports, waving through cars and























































7 8

In 2007 it was released and is still available on DVD. The interview can be found among the bonus material of the DVD edition of KURZ DAVOR IST ES PASSIERT.

    

  
  




lorries, or just standing around and drinking coffee; later we see him at home, feeding and caressing his turtles in the basement. The setting is characterised by sheer banality, by a meaninglessness that apparently primarily aims at providing a projection screen for the women’s narratives. While the customs officer is doing what is perfectly normal for him to do, he recites the narrative of a woman describing the process of gradual illegalisation by stringing together moments of exception turning into normality: the promises prior to trafficking, the changing cars and the men taking care of border procedures, the passport being withdrawn, being ripped off, the moment of realisation and the moment of resignation, the violence, the having been sold and now being owned, and the hopelessness. The contrast between what we see and what we hear couldn’t be stronger. The images we see in the film hence have a peculiar function: they primarily establish a projection screen for the images emerging in our heads. The gaze passes them and establishes a second layer – locating the plot in the viewer’s mind and imagination. The images we see in fact hardly have a representational function in the context of the narration itself. On the screen we see a motorway, a field, turtles in a terrarium, elderly women at a coffee table, void and insignificant; before our mind’s eye, completely different images unfold – on the one hand, structuring what we hear and trying to make sense, on the other, clearly unactualisable experiences and emotions. What Salomonowitz does here in a way reverses what Massumi stated with regard to the dampening effect of the matter-of-factness caused by doubling the images with explanatory texts. In order to avoid this doubling, Salomonowitz does not abandon or manipulate the textual layer but, on the contrary, contrasts a strong narrative with images that are as insignificant and generic as possible. The effect is remarkable; much stronger than that of being confronted with the actual images of abuse or of abused women as sobbing victims would have been. Salomonowitz manages to replace pity by affect, which in addition prevents the film from repeating the hierarchies and power relations involved in the victimisation of trafficked women. It, on the contrary, confronts the viewer with the images he/she carries along and the question of how the representations of trafficked women are structured. The emptiness and interchangeability of the images we see, however, also point to the normality and prevalence of the phenomenon and of trafficked women in the first place; they are invisible and yet omnipresent. It takes a while until the viewer realises that although the places we see may appear to be meaningless, the institutions they represent are extremely relevant in the trafficking discourse. The customs officer’s workplace, for example, turns out to be one of the crucial institutions involved in the perpetuation of the system of trafficking in the first place. As most trafficked women enter Austria legally by means of a tourist visa, they have to return to the border every three months, as they have to leave and re-enter the country in order to renew their visa. While the woman in the respective narrative hence does in fact have a sort of legal status, she must, however, be considered undocumented in the most fundamental way: her passport has been withdrawn by her ‘owner’.



 

 
  


Apparently, Salomonowitz aims at scandalising trafficking itself but also the trafficking discourse at different levels. While she confronts the viewer with the constructedness and inadequacy of representations of women who are or have been subject to trafficking, she moreover directs attention to the fact that in many cases the set of applicable immigration and residence laws contributes to making the women concerned ‘illegal’ and invisible in the first place, and thus even increases their vulnerability. It keeps them in a complex interplay of illegalisation and criminalisation, depriving the women of any kind of subjectivity and agency. Consequently, in many scenes the viewer is tempted to perceive an additional layer of synchronicity, reading the words of a protagonist as if he/she is reflecting his/her potential (and, at least in the case of the customs officer and the waiter, factual) involvement in the system of trafficking. Often it is not more than a hunch, a blink of the eye, hardly noticeable body language. Rarely it is more – for example when the customs officer recites the sentence one of the women said in order to illustrate the moment of resignation: “I build a wall inside to block off what I’m doing”. Does this statement apply on more than the level of the recitation? Is it something the customs officer himself would also state? Potentially – but on the level of the image there is nothing confirming this assumption; in this very scene we don’t even see the man’s face. The way Salomonowitz composes her film is interesting also with regard to the ethical question of how to visualise a person who may fear the consequences of having a face in public, something that every film about undocumented migration has to consider. Usually, protagonists who have to stay invisible are shown but at the same time hidden by means of pertinent techniques – blurred or masked faces, shadows behind frosted glass – that is also deployed in the context of crime in order to protect witnesses as well as perpetrators (Berg and Schwenken, 2010). It implies shame and exceptionality, conceding “the undocumented migrants’ visibility only for the price of waiving their recognisability as normal individuals” (ibid., p.112); Salomonowitz, in contrast, visualises invisibility and confronts the viewer with a film that is “no longer a medium of recognition but of cognition” (ibid. p.124). This chapter primarily dealt with the coincidence of affect and representation, on the one hand, and specified the performative modes the documentary films apply, on the other. While in the previous chapter the focus was on those films enquiring into the conditions of their own (medial) emergence and production in a specific visual-political context, the two films primarily dealt with in this chapter investigate the borderland by means of performative modes that, instead of seeking authenticity and immediacy, analyse societal structures, that de-dramatise instead of emotionalising; their modes of relocation and becoming discursive produce fractions and irritations and invite new perspectives while at the same time recognising their audience. In doing so, they challenge documental modes as well as social conditions (Kohler, 2011).

   

   
 




By understanding the documentary images of the two films not as primarily fulfilling representative functions but as witnesses of the refinement of urgent societal questions by means of a performative arrangement of figures, narratives and symbols, we may also understand their images as pointing towards the future. This also allows the viewer to understand the image production itself as structuring the conditions of its historisation by means of establishing a mutual agreement between the protagonists as agents and authors of their own stories and a camera that is willing to act as an accomplice. The films in this regard also point towards the tension between representative and performative dimensions and the necessity to consider the image’s potentially mimetic and analogical ties to reality and its performative, affective dimension at the same time. Representation can, in other words, be temporarily suspended, but it cannot be permanently eliminated. And while the modes applied by the filmmakers are diverse, they all seem to envisage the prolongation of the moment of suspension. In this regard, Rancière’s understanding of art as exploring the complexities of cultural hybridities and its “offering a critique of the order of things by creating ambient atmospheres in which the boundary between artistic production and social experience is made all too visible” (Papastergiadis, 2014, p.6) is particularly interesting as it describes the inherently political moment of artistic production. Both the distancing effect used by Salomonowitz as well as L’Espérance’s performative repetition can in this regard – coming back to Deleuze – be understood as a form of resistance, as micro-political steps. A crucial question that is implicitly raised by all the films used in this work, and that finds the most urgent expression in KURZ DAVOR IST ES PASSIERT, is that of the invisibility and visibility of undocumented migrants and migrations – primarily in obvious contrast to the various visualisation technologies, image politics and iconologies structuring the borderland; while the example of the Panopticon referred to in the previous chapter emphasises that, especially the question of the establishment and recognition of undocumented migrants as subjects needs particular attention, and will be dealt with in the following chapter.






  



KURZ DAVOR IS ES PASSIERT is an interesting film experiment also with regard to the dialectic tension between invisibility and visibility. It has been pointed out in the previous chapter that invisibility in the context of undocumented migration is in many cases also a matter of protection. In the case of women who have been subject to trafficking, Salomonowitz’s strategy consequently follows a twofold logic. Her film firstly gives the trafficked women voices and at the same time avoids capturing them in an air of consternation and a particularly stereotypical visuality of female migrants as victims. Although they certainly have been made victims, at least their speaking-out illustrates that they cannot be reduced to being victims; evading unprotected or compromising visibility, the film also underlines the right to opacity and illustrates the possibility of agency. Secondly, the film finds an innovative mode to raise the crucial question of visibility and invisibility; it discloses the women’s identity without making reference to specifically gendered display modes linked to crime and shame, but, what is more, it visibilises the mechanisms of making invisible. Berg and Schwenken in this regard stress the political dimension of the aesthetic question of how to show or not show undocumented migrants’ faces because the films cannot per se evade being linked to image politics and a specific migration-control apparatus that “forces undocumented migrants to conceal their face. But the image of a face not only helps to identify and trace a specific person, it also helps the spectator to identify with the person’s needs and feelings, to recognize a person’s condition as a human being. Therefore to protect the migrant’s identity at the same time can easily produce a de-humanizing discriminatory effect on the migrant that strengthens the hostile perception of and politics against undocumented migrants.” (2010, p.125)

A second example from the film conveys even more clearly how and to what end Salomonowitz challenges the women’s invisibility – and it at the same time points towards further crucial questions with regard to the connection between visibility and recognition and the iconologies of undocumented migration and their entanglement with image politics in general. “In the neighbourhood” is the film’s most discomforting sequence. In contrast to the other four sequences, it is not set in a



 

 
  


place that one easily associates with trafficking, such as a brothel or border facilities, but in a generic middle-class neighbourhood. An elderly woman, the neighbour, is retelling the story of a woman who came to Austria deliberately in order to marry. The initial situation as described in the woman’s words is characterised by sheer normality: she is working as a gym teacher in her home country. She meets the Austrian tourist Manfred on the beach, they fall in love and he paints a colourful picture of her opportunities in Austria. After staying together for a while in her home country, she decides to move to Austria with her two-year-old daughter and Manfred in order to marry him. The neighbour continues to retell the woman’s story: After the marriage, gradually, Manfred denies her more and more rights and freedom. In the beginning, he is only hesitant to help her finding a German-language course, then he starts locking the house during his absences and prohibits her from looking for work or leaving the house on her own at all. He establishes a system of dependence in which he is the person making all relevant decisions on her behalf. Eventually, he allows her to start a cleaning job at a neighbour’s house; there she feels treated with a strange mixture of suspicion, pity and respect. Manfred, however, keeps her under strict surveillance; she is not allowed to walk the short way home by herself. Instead, he always picks her up from work and collects her pay – like a ponce. Although due to her marriage with an Austrian her status is not that of what is commonly understood as undocumented or trafficked, she, however, leads a life on the verge of being made ‘illegal’. Every time the woman claims her freedom of movement or any other kind of self-determination – like going to a party at her child’s kindergarten or looking for a job – her husband threatens to divorce her, to illegalise her. Not only is he making her financially dependent, his threat also implies that she will be deported as soon as he casts her out, and that the child will, as a matter of course, stay with him. In their fights, one of the husband’s arguments is that she cannot act like she is at home, thus locating her in a peculiar in-between or transit space where she neither completely left her former home country nor is allowed to arrive in her new home country. The legal and social limbo she is in is very similar to that of the women in the other film sequences. Less than anybody else in KURZ DAVOR IST ES PASSIERT, the neighbour – visually and narratively – looks like one imagines the classical perpetrator in a trafficking or exploitation situation. She is just a distressingly ordinary person living in a brownish tinted, bourgeois world. Thus, in a way, she also illustrates the prevalence and the commonality of the phenomenon – not primarily at the fringes of society but right in its centre, potentially in everybody’s neighbourhood. She represents the figure of the apprehensive but eventually impassive neighbour, as a kind of accomplice of the woman and her husband at the same time. By, on the one hand, out of pity giving the woman a job, used clothes and every so often also leftover cake but, on the other, remaining a non-intervening bystander, the neighbour is, however, primarily covering up for the husband.





  




The way Salomonowitz arranges the sequence intensifies the unease underlying the narrative.1 In most of the scenes the neighbour unexpectedly interrupts a completely different activity, which then continues in the background while she, in an incidental tone, recites the woman’s words (Fig. 16). She stops singing with a choir, turns to the camera and starts telling the memorised narrative; she is having sales talks with other women and suddenly changes the subject and the addressee. Fig. 16: An unexpected interruption

Source: KURZ DAVOR IST ES PASSIERT, Screenshot, 17'08

In most other sequences in KURZ DAVOR IST ES PASSIERT, the viewer seeks to identify with the invisible person primarily through the rejection of the stand-in, sometimes even including a feeling of disgust. In the neighbourhood sequence, however, the pity one might want to feel for the locked-up woman is largely absorbed by the figure of the neighbour; when we see her selling dubious and presumably























































1

Narrativisation in the context of this work is not understood in a primarily cognitive or representative manner but as a form of shifted repetition that is entangled with fictionalisation as well as with strategies of memorisation; the individual’s experiences in this regard are not assumed to be directly accessible (either by the individual or by the addressee) or immediately actualisable elements composing consistent narratives. This understanding of the narrative does not signal an opposition of reality and artifice; it rather seeks to describe a form “connecting the presentation of facts and forms of intelligibility that blurred the border between the logic of facts and the logic of fiction” (Rancière, 2004, p.38).



 

 
  


over-prized diet products and vitamin preparations to women in the neighbourhood, her existence seems to be damaged in a quite different but extremely pitiful way. The effect is twofold. While it leaves the woman and her narrative little space to unfold and hardly encourages the viewer to identify, it causes a blatantly obvious blank space, hence even more than the other film sequences emphasising the universality of a state of invisibility. In general, Salomonowitz certainly aims at illustrating the many nuances of ‘illegality’ and at the same time a specifically gendered form of social invisibility leading to a triple exclusion of the women of concern; they are foreigners, in many cases not speaking the local language; they either have no legal status or their status depends upon another person – and they are female and hence also invisible in dominant migration discourses. By at the same time overexposing the women’s invisibility and avoiding their victimisation, the film circumvents the conventionalised reiteration of trafficked women’s invisibility and exclusion (and of female migrants in general). Emphasising the social and legal mechanisms producing invisibility, Salomonowitz does not locate invisibility in the female body but in a specific legal and social setting, establishing a space in which illegality and invisibility are two sides of the same coin. She points the viewer’s attention to the constructedness of both. At the same time, she emphasises the visibility of the many cornerstones of the trafficking regime, the legal loopholes, the perpetrators, accomplices and by-standers, a specific social setting and even acceptance or at least indifference, and, last but not least, stereotypical figures of women as victims. And while the visibility Salomonowitz feints must be considered an illusion – not least because the subjects we assume to be behind the narratives are non-existing as the director mixed up multiple similar narratives and presents them like a picture puzzle – the images gain a particular affective strength from the multiple blank spaces they illuminate. Salomonowitz’s radical way of raising the issue of invisibility also points to the necessity to differentiate: medial visibility is not the same as discursive visibility or participation; representational visibility does not necessarily imply recognition – and visibility is deeply entangled with questions of power and knowledge, with the question of what can be seen in the first place. The films dealt with here deploy different filmic and narrative techniques to visualise their protagonists in a way that challenges common figures and their medial visibility. They do this in order to create spaces for discursive participation and recognition. Their visualisations enquire the boundaries of the representable, they range between the poles of underlining blank spaces as in Salomonowitz’s case or in case of HAVARIE, and the re-writing of figures by means of overexposure, as for example in SUR LE RIVAGE DU MONDE. The films are at the same time, this way or the other, involved with image politics, politics that mainly seeks justification in the visual and mediatised appearance of a phenomenon and consequently are in need of rather unambiguous visual and narrative figures – of the ‘illegal’ migrant, the refugee, the (non-)integrating migrant, the trafficker and so on – representing difference. The films hence

 

 

 




not least follow the aim of referring to the undocumented migrant as a complex and ambiguous figure opposing the illegal migrant as an important actor and subject of “Borderland Schengen” topographies. As outlined in a previous chapter, the films must also be read, by means of their own mediality, as seeking to grapple with those image politics and perceiving an active role in the migration regime, and, at the same time, reflecting their involvement with a migration-control apparatus and surveillance technologies by means of which undocumented migrants must be considered made visible – or rather exposed – in a specific, potentially threatening but at least regulative way. Specifically with regard to the presence of the overseer, visibility cannot be considered as easily or automatically translating into recognition and political participation but first of all as “a trap” (Foucault, 1977a, p.200). Eventually sketching the films’ potential to establish and recognise the undocumented migrant as a subject, this fundamental challenge and the consequential simultaneity of documentation (as a technology of classification) and documentation (as a technique of memory and historisation), and of identification (as a category of knowledge) and identification (as a prerequisite of empathy and affect), need to be accounted for. Hence, this chapter will first of all take a closer look at image politics and its figures, dominant iconologies and narratives in European borderlands and at the films’ interventions in “Borderland Schengen” as an area of visual confrontation, its counter-iconologies and counter-narratives. Then it will enquire into the potential of those figures and narratives regarding undocumented migrants’ discursive visibility and assess filmic strategies pursuing a dialectical understanding of visibility and opacity, potentially opening a space for appropriation, recognition and agency.



 
   
It makes sense to locate the emergence and negotiation of the different manifestations of the currently prevalent images and iconologies of migration within a visual-political regime strongly influenced and sparked by processes of Europeanisation itself. On the one hand, it has already been pointed out that the Europeanisation of migration policies and the applied principles of governance in general draw upon the understanding of an increased relevance of media discourses and visual culture as a combat area. On the other hand, iconologies and representations of migration evolved tremendously over the past two decades, in particular those of ‘illegal’ migration. This is clearly illustrated by the fact that – as detailed in a previous chapter – the political construction of the figure of the illegal migrant must be considered as a development that started only in the early 1990s (Marie, 2004) and parallel to the consolidation of European integration a clearly biased reconfiguration of undocumented migration unfolded. Only since then has undocumented migration been understood as a threat to European societies and been



 

 
  


underpinned by a pejorative terminology and a particular iconology. The narratives and figures negotiated in the documentary films consequently cannot be understood without paying attention to their entanglement with image politics; they need to be questioned with regard to their ability to enunciate the relationship between image and (political) power. Some 20 years ago, it was more or less impossible to get a glimpse of how immigration authorities worked towards the implementation of immigration policies at Schengen’s demarcation lines and beyond. But, as Foucault (1977a) emphasises, full lightning captures better than darkness. That today we all are familiar with the iconic images of the hi-tech equipment used to assert control over Europe’s borders is a result of specific image politics, of politics that function on the basis of the creation of a specific knowledge about these icons and their significance – and visibility. And there are several other equally important icons: the drastic fences, not only those bordering the Spanish exclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, the militarised border patrols ashore and at sea, the homogenised figures of the refugee, the trafficker, the ‘illegal’ migrant trying to enter the Schengen Area irregularly via Turkey, Tunisia, Morocco or Libya – and currently more than ever, the encamped refugee in Greece and Turkey. Although even today most migration-policy negotiations and implementation measures do still take place behind lowered blinds, actors involved from all sides – from NGOs to GOs and private companies – began to recognise that the creation of medial visibility in the field is paramount in order to gain influence on immigration discourses and to justify their policies. Even executive powers like bordercontrol or police forces no longer try to make irregular migration invisible per se – rather, they aim at regulating and managing its visibilities and visualities (Hess and Tsianos, 2007). An important companion of all border-control measures today is the digital camcorder; and media coverage on undocumented migration is widely based on footage produced by executive powers. What is more, border authorities are also concerned with their own public image. Consequently, different agencies, including Frontex and national immigration executive forces, are flooding the Internet with short films advertising and justifying their work, largely reiterating and adjusting the iconology in place and arguing along binary categorisations of victim/fraud, legal/illegal, eligible/ineligible and so on. One of the many revealing examples of this is the seven-minute Frontex clip BEYOND BORDERS (2012). After stressing the advantages that the Schengen freedoms imply for 500 million European citizens by means of the contrast between film sequences of border checks in the 1950s and free passage today, it talks about the still existing European external borders for most of the time. Over and over again, it underlines the paramount necessity of protecting those borders. While the narrator states that “European borders have evolved beyond recognition” – which is actually true, certainly also in ways that the film does not aim at promoting – the film gives the impression that they are under constant and existential pressure. Both visually and narratively, the film justifies the necessity of external border control by establishing a strong contrast between bona fide travellers and trade on

 

 

 




the one hand and illegal passage and cross-border crime on the other. While the narrator speaks about the responsibilities that come with freedom, about the advantages of gathering intelligence by means of cutting-edge research and innovative high-end technology, particularly two kinds of images take turns: passports being examined by different means, and security-camera footage. While the first clearly aims at illustrating the normal, legal way to enter the Union, the latter signifies irregularity and crime. They both deal with the moment of documentation in a way where legitimacy is mediated by means of hi-tech equipment, by visual technologies. In the case of the passport, a smart machine resolves all doubt regarding the validity of a document; in the case of clandestine movement of migrants, it is extremely sensitive night-vision and infrared equipment. It is impressive and telling how many different images are used in order to illustrate this aspect over and over again. At the same time, it seems to point at a certain indigence on the visual level. The film also clearly illustrates how sustainable image politics urge the image to represent; every single one fulfils a strategic task in the establishment of unambiguous meaning and self-evidence in order to maintain a specific system of policy justification. In the film, Javier Quesada of the Frontex Risk Analysis Unit elucidates that “migrants will migrate, and facilitators will decide to support that migration process through organised crime”. Simple as that. The film in this regard constructs the extremely simplified binary opposition between eligible mobility and ineligible mobility – which isn’t framed as a form of mobility at all – in order to outline a more or less unambiguous situation that needs to be governed; it first confronts the viewer with consistently constructed deviant subjects in order to then develop a regulatory framework that primarily finds justification in the subjects’ misbehaviour. Image politics are in fact not at all disinterested in the subject – they need it; image politics, as Holert (2008) points out, create subjects to be governed in order to make them disappear at the very same moment. And it is impressive how self-evident the context appears to be, how persuasive and effective the image politics work, in other words. While Bourdieu’s statement that the world of images is dominated by the word and that the word creates and brings to existence in the first place (Holert, 2008) might basically be true – Trinh T. Minh-ha (2012) in this regard stresses the necessity to reflect on the fact that film analysis can exclusively operate with a terminology borrowed from other practices – the images feed into a specific economy of affect (Steyerl, 2008) in which the images are contextualised in a manner that hardly requires text or language; the text is already embedded in the images, hidden in self-evidence. The figure of the migrant being framed in this regard is also quite clear: he/she is a victim of organised crime – and at the same time can only exist within this victim/perpetrator construction. While the aspect of crime and illegality is primarily communicated by means of night-vision and security-camera footage – at the same time clearly signalling that from a regulatory point of view there exists a permanent threat that, however, is under control – the visualisation of the immigrants themselves fulfils a complementary function. Throughout, they are framed



 

 
  


as being caught in the realms of crime that create the very crisis Frontex responds to, and at the same time as being in need of the help and support of a humanitarian regime that Frontex also simulates representing. One might think that the structure of such images makes it easy to unmask the cynicism that lies beneath their surface; so obviously is it constructed, so obvious is the lie, the fraud. The male white border guard smiling at a black toddler (Fig. 17), the group portrait of some 30 men supposedly boat refugees, arranged like a school class taking a souvenir photo on an entertaining day trip, all those images raise more questions than they answer – we see such images and we are not even wondering why the police officer in the first image is wearing hygiene gloves or why none of the men in the second image is smiling. But at what point exactly can those image politics be put to test? How can an image counter the logic of image politics without being consumed by it – where and how can a counter-hegemonic line of argument be effective? Fig. 17: Frontex’s self-perception

Source: BEYOND BORDERS, Screenshot, 6'45

Several investigative documentaries illustrate how hard and ineffective it is to challenge image politics by retelling the story of ‘illegal’ migration following the impetus to complement the well-known images by the unheard truth about what ‘is really going on at Europe’s external borders’, to set things right by providing as much political and historical background as possible. Often, for example in the case of the French–German TV production LES SECRETS DE LA FORTERESSE EUROPE (THE SECRETS OF FORTRESS EUROPE, 2013), this is done by means of familiar images and motives complemented by an audio commentary aiming at scrutinising or scandalising Frontex operations against refugees in European border zones. The images themselves and the narrative figures deployed, however, can hardly be differentiated from those used in BEYOND BORDERS – in many cases

 

 

 




even the very same material has been used. But even where the filmmakers produce their own images they can hardly be separated from imagery framing migration movements to the Schengen Area as a major crisis – a crisis that has the smuggled migrant and the needy refugee as two of its central figures. Many of those films following a journalistic or educational impetus walk in the trap of image politics – they consume and reproduce power relations on the level of the image because they fail to reflect their own mediality and involvement in the control apparatus. In the case of the film mentioned above, this is already obvious in its title: it suggests that, on the one hand, the European migration regime largely operates in secret and that, on the other, the film is able to uncover inconvenient truths or even classified information. At the same time, it is so deeply entangled with the visual regime it aims to criticise that it might formulate a moral claim regarding Frontex’s means of migration control and management and the political motivation behind it – but it can hardly take a position from which it is able to criticise the visual-political discourse in general; it fails to realise that it is involved in a discourse that has – if anything – already set all the figures right. Those images fail to challenge (or even notice) the fundamental logic of image politics pointed out above: they need the subject to be governed; most of those images become effective only after the subject has already been made to disappear again – they hence cannot fundamentally put the necessity to govern migration and migration spaces into question and their scope can hardly transgress the concern, if it is governed right or wrong, in a humane or in an inhumane way – however, completely ignoring the visual-political character of the immigration discourse. It in other words, it only makes a slight – after all – difference if deportations of rejected asylum seekers are termed “return operations” (BEYOND BORDERS) or deportations – as long as the visual-political construction of migration governance, and hence the overall logic of such operations, is anticipated.



 


  
One of the currently most prominent placeholders in this discourse is that of the Italian island Lampedusa. Its iconic significance as an outpost in Europe’s struggle with irregular migration clearly illustrates how a specifically contextualised visibility serves to legitimise politics and to eventually reiterate and maintain specific power relations. Before the centre of attention shifted towards the Aegean Sea, specifically Greece and Turkey, in early 2016, Lampedusa for a couple of years was assumed to be the eye of the needle that more or less every migrant had to pass on its way to Europe. That in contrast to this perception only a small share



   

 
  


even of the refugees coming to Italy disembarks at Lampedusa2 did by no means put the crucial symbolic significance of Lampedusa into question. More than any other place, Lampedusa in the European migration discourse has become a placeholder for irregular migration across the Mediterranean (and the irregularity of migration) in general, and for the thousands of deaths at sea in particular; at the same time Lampedusa is also a symbol for the “competing yet complementary political discourses of humanitarianism and securitization” (Dines, Montagna and Ruggiero, 2015, p.431). What is more, its transformation “into a spectacle of bare life is not only instrumental to the functioning of migration management at Europe’s southern border; it is also constitutive of the subordinate position of migrants in Italian society and its labour market” (ibid., p.432)3 – its iconology and visuality in other words also play a crucial role in maintaining a particular social order. Conditions and iconologies similar to those of Lampedusa can, however, be found all over European borderlands – in Idomeni and on Lesbos, in ‘The Jungle’ and on the so-called Balkan Route. Lampedusa is hence at the same time a symbol for the necessity to govern migration, a means of justification, and a symbol for the failure of migration governance. In December 2013, a video produced by the news agency ITN was published by several news websites (e.g. The Guardian, 2013) showing the degrading procedure of boys and men having to strip in a Lampedusa holding centre in order to be examined and sprayed with disinfectant for mites and scabies (Fig. 18). Combining footage that was apparently shot by one of the migrants and interview sequences with a migrant describing the details of the procedure and claiming that migrants are being treated like animals on Lampedusa in general, the video is said to have caused “public outcry after the footage was aired on Italian television”























































2

As pointed out before, it is hardly possible to find adequate, current data on these numbers; Cuttitta (2012), however, found that between 2000 and 2006 less than one out of nine irregular migrants came to Italy via Lampedusa or any other of the country’s naval borders and that the overwhelming majority of irregular migrants were visa over-stayers.

3

Agamben’s concept of bare life is currently often applied in order to underline the perceived worthlessness of a refugee’s life in camp and reception-centre settings; and also images such as the one of the migrants sitting on top of a fence next to a golf course in Ceuta (see Fig. 1) used in a previous chapter invites interpretations of an existence reduced to less than a minimum. While the concept has often been criticised for its assumption of an eternal state of exception and its failure to provide an “appropriate distinction between nature and political artifice, between human life and the political world” (Owens, 2009, p.567), also the films in this work, in their aim to recognise undocumented migrants as subjects, oppose a generalising application of Agamben’s concept.

 

 

 




(ibid.). In the inserted interview sections, the camera captures a migrant from his shoulders downwards – he has no head, no face, no nothing. Fig. 18: The spectacle of Lampedusa

Source: The Guardian, 2013

The video is barely more than pure spectacle, and if there has been a public outcry at all, it can hardly be assumed to have had an impact on the dominant iconology (let alone holding-centre procedures in general). What we see in the video, on the contrary, by no means challenges any of the common assumptions regarding procedures in a holding or deportation facility; it reiterates even more the narrative of migrants as victims without any kind of agency – even though the secret shooting of the video and getting it to the news channels might be interpreted as illustrating the possibility of agency, as footage taking a migrant’s point of view. The oblique angle of the camera in the video – as if it has been placed two metres above the protagonists’ heads – strangely resembles that of a security-camera. Its angle specifically denies a legitimate motivation and the assumption of the existence of an author. The overall crime-scene aesthetic, the camera angle, the pixilation and the dramatic voice-over, all contribute to a filmic construction in which the questions such a video certainly raises are already answered. If the video includes any kind of oppositional or deconstructive impetus at all, it becomes flattened, standardised and eventually consumed by image politics. Apparently such visualisations of the failure of migration governance or its perversions are in a way anticipated and they rather facilitate the validity of the icon of Lampedusa instead of shaking it; and ironically they rather consolidate dominant image politics instead of scrutinising them. In this regard they fulfil several functions: firstly, they reiterate a moment of exceptionality that by standing in a strong contrast to what is perceived as normal and ethical legitimises everything that is not in the image – as if what we see is not a general perversion of the system



 

 
  


but rather an exception in a sense that procedures in the holding centres (not only on Lampedusa) are usually humane and ethical, hence also justifying more instead of less governance; secondly, they at the same time have the contradictory function to also satisfy a discourse that assumes the illegitimacy of the persons’ presence in general and hence attributes the responsibility for the exceptionality of the situations to the refugees themselves. On the basis of the images themselves – however authentic and shocking they may appear – it is hardly possible to scandalise what happened in a way that puts image politics to test. And, thirdly, they are anticipated for the deterrent impact they are assumed to have – in other words, even image politics have long since become exterritorialised. The video also illustrates the potential of image politics to include those elements of a discourse that at first glance seems to put it fundamentally into question. And it shows how limited the options are to intervene on the level of an argument that claims the prerogative at the interpretative level. It is not that the text is completely suspended, but that, in case of a strong icon like Lampedusa, a critical stance would need to deal first of all with the image itself and with the significances and self-evidence it at the same time evokes, stabilises and relies on. The stability and self-evidence of the iconology is what most of the documentary films in this paper apparently target in order to at least challenge image politics. With his medium-length documentary film A SUD DI LAMPEDUSA (2006) the Italian filmmaker Andrea Segre approaches Lampedusa in a way that aims at drafting a counter-hegemonic narration by breaking open the iconological surface in order to oppose the disposability of the icon and its universalised history as a means of image politics. Only indirectly focusing on Lampedusa, he deflects the view to various places south of Lampedusa, to the routes and narratives leading up to the existence of a place like Lampedusa, at the same time developing an alternative narrative through the eyes of those who in the example above basically provide proof of the necessity to be governed. The film starts in Niger and follows a group of migrants on their way to Libya; images of the Sahara sea of sand and overloaded lorries in a way foreshadow what may be assumed to come next: the crossing of the Mediterranean waves by means of overloaded boats (di Maio, 2013). But, deliberately, Segre does not fulfil the expectation and thus initiates blank spaces where the icon Lampedusa evoked in the film’s title is redeemed only in its absence. And while the sea, the boats and specifically Lampedusa are invisible in the film, also in the statements captured it appears only implicitly. Those images do, however, continue to exist in the viewers’ minds, and Lampedusa is constructed as a vain promise in a double sense: neither does the camera record a single frame on the island itself, nor does the group of protagonists reach it (at least not as long as the camera accompanies them). Even more, it becomes clear that Europe governs their movement although most of the protagonists do not even aim at going to Europe.





  




An important element of Segre’s films is how they oppose the assumption of temporal and spatial linearity of migration processes – something that image politics are contingent on, both on the visual and the discursive levels they need to be constructed more or less unidirectionally and unambiguously in order to maintain a consistently structured interrelation of history, politics and visuality, and to eventually suspend any effort to be persuasive on a discursive level (Holert, 2008). The structure of A SUD DI LAMPEDUSA may suggest a certain linearity – it is divided into three parts: departure, journey and deportation. On the level of the image and also the protagonists’ narratives, however, the linearity falls apart because the single elements are repeated and interlaced over and over again; every deportation implies a new departure, and even the moment perceived as arrival usually implies further arrivals and further departures, sooner or later, forced or deliberate. In addition to presenting the relationship between departure, journey and arrival/deportation as non-linear and unpredictable, the relationship between the camera, the protagonists and space constantly swings between proximity and distance. The camera follows different trajectories intersecting the geographies ‘south of Lampedusa’; several times it crosses paths with its protagonists but it does not present it in the terms of a consistent or unidirectional journey. In doing so it also puts another fundamental element of image politics to test, the permanent availability and immediacy of the icon. Fig. 19: A distorted repetition

Source: A SUD DI LAMPEDUSA, Screenshot, 14'09

The film also deploys images that have an iconic character. Even more, some of its images seem to specifically anticipate the dominant iconology in order to scrutinise its unambiguousness and to insert a slightly but significantly shifted iconology into the European immigration discourse. The overloaded lorry in the Sahara (Fig. 19) in this regard does not primarily foreshadow overloaded boats and the



 

 
  


Mediterranean Sea as suggested above; rather, it superimposes the icon by means of a shifted, even distorted repetition. It confronts the dominant iconology with the places and routes that from a wider perspective have to be considered the hotspots of migration – at the same time conveying the crucial entanglements of those places and routes and their regulation with the European migration regime. It in a way dehydrates the iconology of the refugee boats and the island of Lampedusa by pointing towards the fact that most refugees’ journeys include various seas (of sand), boats (lorries) and islands (migration hubs). The iconological persuasiveness Segre seems to establish strategically with the image of the lorry, however, also implies the risk of simply replacing one icon with the other. Segre, however, avoids this risk by moreover dissecting the icon by means of showing the moments where it falls into its pieces, the moments where the travellers, for example, rest and change carriers or where they have to take breaks due to engine failures. In those moments, the camera advances the travellers and reestablishes them as subjects by enquiring into their naratives, motivations, ambitions, self-reliance and autonomy; it enables them to take possession of their present, past and future and it approaches them as what they are in the first place: travellers, namely geographically, culturally, socially. Switching the standardised constructions of exceptionality and normality, the travellers instead of understanding themselves caught in a permanent state of emergency or exceptionality describe their journeys as something completely normal, a routine – their travel by lorry is not something clandestine but a common praxis for people lacking the money to buy air tickets; the lorries even operate based on a regular schedule; their journeys are facilitated by conversant and openly operating middlemen. Exceptionality in their narratives is located elsewhere, primarily in a system that aims at regulating their movement. The narratives presented on these occasions are additionally interesting also with regard to performative aspects that have been discussed in the previous chapter. Most of them clearly differ from the narrative one might expect. They talk about going to Libya in order to work; one man presents himself as being basically interested in travelling the continent. In addition to that, they talk about a lot of back-and-forth movement, about spatial, temporal and social transit situations. Europe as a destination in most narratives is absent; one man even states that he is too old to do the journey across the Mediterranean, impishly gazing into the distance. Maybe it’s a sort of game, or performance; I know that you know that I know that … The well-known images and stereotypes provide the background for each of those narratives. This is not to say that the protagonists are necessarily making up their ambitions; it is rather that if and to what end they are in fact doing it is not an important question.

 

 

 






  
  

 
The example above conveys how the documentary films at times also try to intervene in the circulation of symbolic meaning, in the images, figures and narratives of ‘illegal’ migration. While the icon of Lampedusa is challenged by means of shifting the centre of attention further south, different intervention strategies can also be observed with regard to commonly deployed icons and figures of ‘illegal’ and undocumented migration. The considerations above already indicated that the films apply different strategies in order to circumvent stereotypical images of illegality and instead establish undocumented migrants as subjects. An important aspect of this re-formulation regards their status, specifically the victim status that undocumented migrants are commonly assigned with regard to their relationship to the figure of the trafficker. They aim at accounting for the victim experiences that most of the undocumented migrants may in fact have had connected to displacement, exploitation and racism – but at the same time avoid understanding these experiences as the primary or exclusive determinant of their existence, and instead consider them agents of their own life, however much they may have been hurt. In consequence, this leads to the re-definition of the whole set of figures involved in the undocumented migration discourse, including the crucial figure of the trafficker (who in this kind of migration movement is in fact more a smuggler than a trafficker). One out of many significant examples has already been mentioned. In A SUD DI LAMPEDUSA, one of the protagonists stresses that although he is commonly perceived as a migrant he understands himself rather as a traveller and that he just likes to travel. He says he already left his home country Nigeria a couple of times, first for Saudi Arabia, then for South Africa, and now for Libya. In search of an improved personal economic situation, he’d so far always gone back to Nigeria, only to set out for his next journey soon after. While in the European or Western context, migration and mobility are more or less separated and hierarchised concepts – European subjects are mobile, non-European subjects have to migrate – most intra-continental border-crossing movements in the African context are subsumed under the term migration. This man opposes being attributed the characteristics of a migrant and instead insists on making use of the illegalised but also normalised routes of undocumented migration as a traveller, a spatially and socially mobile subject. He claims the space for his individual motivation and a subject position that deviates considerably from the position usually assigned to undocumented migrants, passive objects that are part of a stream or wave of migration. The camera at the same time does nothing to put his statement and narrative into question; and also, in terms of its montage, the film neither sows the seed of doubt, nor tries to contextualise the statement by means of presenting it as part of a larger, consistent master narrative. Two further film examples should be used here in order to illustrate the filmmakers’ diverse approaches to recognise their protagonists and establish them



 

 
  


as subjects: Nina Kusturica’s LITTLE ALIEN (2009) and Andreas Segre’s and Dagmawi Yimer’s COME UN UOMO SULLA TERRA (2008). While the camera in LITTLE ALIEN travels European borderlands, following undocumented minor refugees and enquiring into border situations in general, COME UN UOMO SULLA TERRA establishes its narrative primarily by means of interviews with refugees in the Italian capital Rome. Kusturica’s camera finds border situations not only in the proximity of Schengen demarcation lines but literally everywhere in Europe. In addition to footage shot along the political borders of Europe, she uses several sequences set in Austria, primarily in the small village Traiskirchen, which is located some 20 kilometres south of Vienna and hosts one of the country’s most relevant reception centres for minor refugees. Kusturica uses specifically those sequences to enquire potential subject positions by means of merely watching the contradictions emerging between minor refugees and the host society. Several times the camera observes the failure of direct contact between some of the refugees and Austrians outside the refugee centre. In one sequence, two minor refugees from Afghanistan, Jawid Najai and Alem Ghamari, are visiting an Austrian school and talk to a teacher and his teenage pupils about what it means to lose one’s family and flee a war-torn country, to travel all by oneself and live on the streets without a legal status. Alem Ghamari speaks about his journey from Afghanistan to Austria, first by means of paid facilitators to Greece, where he slept in parks for four months, then from Greece to Italy on a 16-hour trip under a lorry, and eventually to Austria. Clumsily the teacher tries to develop approaches to the boys’ experiences, to moderate a conversation that his pupils are able to relate to. By means of little drawings on the blackboard and a large map of the Asian continent, he tries to make the experiences tangible – over and over again he tries to find ways to put the implications of the boys’ narrative into words by specifically stressing the stunning facts of their journey. Unable to relate to such experiences, the Austrian teenagers eventually ask questions that instead enquire into the level of difference between the boys and themselves: How do they get along with Austrians? one girl asks; “We don’t have any contact with Austrians,” Alem responds. What do they think about the snow in Austria, something they do not have in Afghanistan? another girl enquires. This question makes the two boys laugh hard – as it so illustratively demonstrates how much the Austrian teenagers assume to know and how little they in fact do know. Despite the laughter, the atmosphere in the classroom remains tense. The teacher is not able to resolve the unpleasant overall atmosphere – he actually contributes to it by putting the Afghan teenagers on display in a quite discomforting way. While the other teenagers are staring at them with their arms folded, the two boys are placed up front. The teacher every once in a while intervenes to provide historical and geographical background information. All his interventions and questions document certain empathy but also his inability to bring the two sides into contact, and although this may not have been his intention he eventually establishes an atmosphere in class where the two boys appear to be considerably different from Austrians of their age, the ultimate Other. While the

 

 

 




teacher attempts to put their experiences into words, the pupils assume fundamental difference – which is even understandable as their main point of reference is the spectacle of the boys’ journey. Montage and camera, however, apparently invert the roles of normality and difference fundamentally. While the camera observes the setting in calm mediumclose shots, it takes a somewhat distanced take on the pupils. Catching the teacher’s and the pupils’ gazes, it does nothing to resolve the unpleasant situation but lets them appear awkward, blames them for the failure of a proper conversation. At the same time, the scene is preceded by the Afghan teenagers reflecting on their expectations in the school. They try to think of questions they are going to be asked – and they joke about speaking their mother tongue, Dari, so no one will understand them; they even link this idea to a recent film they saw in which the lead actress said “I love you” to a man in a language he didn’t understand. In the end they speak German – but still no one really understands them. This short prelude actually sets the tone for the whole sequence; it opens the space in which the boys are conceded to take possession of their narratives and claim “the right to opacity that is not enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy but subsistence within an irreducible singularity” (Glissant, 1997, p.190). Opacity weaves a fabric – and the film puts its focus “on the texture of the weave and not on the nature of its components” (ibid.) In a second scene from LITTLE ALIEN, set at Traiskirchen’s small train station, two Somali teenage girls and a Somali woman – their volunteer – are confronted with a middle-aged Austrian man erupting with racist insults. Rattling off all the xenophobic platitudes of crime and laziness, he even follows them after the Somalis decide to leave the scene in order to protect themselves. Instead of considering themselves victims of a racist infringement, particularly the woman here takes the action. While one can hear him shout in the background, the Somali volunteer in a strikingly clear manner explains to the younger ones how xenophobia works and that this poor man has a problem. They nod in disbelief and it looks as if they even feel sorry for him. The impudence of the man’s racist abuse in the presence of the camera in this scene is striking – maybe, however, the camera even triggered his aggression. While the sequence overall marks complete failure of contact, it also raises questions of recognition and agency. The camera hardly pays attention to the man and his racist eruptions (Fig. 20); most of the time he is not much more than indistinct background noise. Eyes and ears stay with the three Somali women, especially clinging to the disbelief expressed on the minors’ faces. Being shouted at by the man, the Somali volunteer puts herself in the role of some kind of a tourist guide. The roles switch, the man becomes the actual attraction here, the spectacle; the two girls – not understanding a word of what he says – stare and laugh at him like they are spectators in a circus or a zoo. Reversing the hierarchy, they make him the other – he turns into their object of study. While he wants them to react in



 

 
  


fear or panic, they just stare at him and try to understand. The sequence does attribute the women a sort of agency to deal with racism and exclusion – it does not, however, aim at relativising the racist experience as such. Fig. 20: Racist eruptions in the background

Source: LITTLE ALIEN, Screenshot, 22’05

Both of the sequences described above see the migrants taking their stand in confrontational situations. The migrants portrayed lack the two most familiar characteristics of the iconological undocumented migrant: they come across neither as an invasion of unidentifiable waves, nor as victims (Falk, 2010). Instead, they are right among us, in a school, at a train station. And even though most of the people portrayed in LITTLE ALIEN have been subject to clandestine practices of smuggling or have been illegalised by legal practices and most are caught in an unpredictable state of transit, Nina Kusturica applies different strategies in order to establish them as counterparts, as subjects in charge of their own lives. Instead of stressing the diverse exceptionalities of the migration situation, she is screening the migrants’ lives for normality: they buy clothes, they go out, they fall in love, they talk to their loved ones on the phone, they chat about everyday issues, they listen to music, they smoke. And they understand themselves as agents in their own immigration procedures; they have appointments where they have the choice to cheat in order to be successful (as one of the two Afghan boys admits to his friend). The contrast between the two scenes, however, also points to the fact that the spaces of migration are extremely gendered; the experiences of the women at the train station must be assumed to be a specifically female experience. The way the two films mentioned so far, LITTLE ALIEN and A SUD DI LAMPEDUSA, establish and address their protagonists as subjects has an interesting effect also

 

 

 




with regard to the overall quality of the images. Neither do they force their protagonists to represent nor do they force the viewer to identify. By keeping up the potentiality of the images, they establish narrative spaces and visual spaces accommodating non-actualisable experience and at the same time avoid creating moments of endless exceptionality. The camera does not explain and classify but rather creates a space in which identification is possible but not a necessary prerequisite for the image to function or the narrative to unfold. And instead of constantly contrasting difference and identification, they perceive undocumented migrants as subjects in an affective way that is stimulated not so much by difference but rather by the right to opacity. The images must hence be considered much more interested in the viewer’s affective experience than in his/her interpretation or the production of consistency. In their film COME UN OUMO SULLA TERRA (2009), Andrea Segre and Dagmawi Yimer follow a different strategy to establish their protagonists as subjects. The film is part of a series of four documentary films produced by Andrea Segre in cooperation with other filmmakers dealing with the different stages and different aspects of African migration to Italy (Di Maio, 2013). While the already-described A SUD DI LAMPEDUSA mainly refers to migrants’ crossing of the Sahara and eventual seizure and deportation from Libya, COME UN UOMO SULLA TERRA’s starting point is the gruelling but eventually successful passage to Italy and the migrants’ detention in one of the so-called Centri di Permanenza Temporanea4 (CPT) in the Italian capital, Rome. The third film, IL SANGUE VERDE (GREEN BLOOD, 2010) focuses on riots that took place in early 2010 in the Calabrian commune of Rosarno after immigrant farm workers – primarily undocumented migrants from sub-Saharan Africa – had been attacked by local youths. And together with Stefano Liberti, Segre shot MARE CHIUSO (CLOSED SEA, 2012), a documentary dealing with the Italian push-back operations and deportations to Libya after the so-called Arab Spring. This fourth film comes full circle by linking the living situation as portrayed in IL SANGUE VERDE to the undocumented migrants’ ongoing insecurity and the issue of permanent transit already broached in A SUD DI LAMPEDUSA and COME UN UOMO SULLA TERRA. Not only thematically but also aesthetically and ideologically, the four films form an entity pulling the attention away from questions of arrivals and departures by instead focusing on migration processes and trajectories. Andrea Segre is an Italian filmmaker and sociologist. Born and raised in the north-eastern part of Italy in the vicinity of the border to Slovenia – and hence next to a border that began shifting from being an EU external border to an internal border only about a decade ago – his artistic work focuses on questions around migration, human rights and dignity.5 His co-director for COME UN UOMO SULLA























































4

English translation: Centres of Temporary Residence.

5

His work since 1998 includes more than a dozen documentary films and two feature films; for his first feature, IO SONO LI (SHUN LI AND THE POET, 2011), a love story



 

 
  


TERRA is the Ethiopian refugee Dagmawi Yimer, who at the time of the production

of the film has been living in Italy for about two years. While, after two years in Italy, he has become recognised as a refugee, video footage suggests that he came via the Mediterranean Sea on a boat seized by marine border authorities. The narrative of his migration is interwoven with other migrants’ narratives in the film; the focus lies on his routes much more than his roots, on the trajectory rather than on his current situation. In the interview sequences with both other migrants and functionaries, he takes the leading part. After his cooperation with Andrea Segre, he realised a handful of further documentaries focusing on migration in the Mediterranean region, particularly on the island of Lampedusa, and on racially motivated violence against migrants in Italy (Clarke, 2014). It may be argued that in many regards COME UN UOMO SULLA TERRA forms the key film of Segre’s tetralogy. By means of 10 narratives, it accounts for departure, transit and temporary arrival(s) at the same time, and in detail follows the interlaced processes of migration and illegalisation. It is mainly set in Rome, and sheds light on the experiences Ethiopian and Eritrean refugees made on their way through Sudan and Libya to Italy. Two narrative threads are interwoven: Dagmawi Yimer reflects his own background and migration; in parallel he interviews nine Ethiopians and Eritreans6 who have had experiences similar to his own: they followed similar routes, stayed at the same places and have been subject to the same economy of undocumented migration. In addition, Segre and Yimer several times confront European Union functionaries with the obvious contradictions between humanitarian EU rhetoric and the refugees’ physical experiences especially with police forces in Libya. While the camera takes a highly sympathetic angle – for example, close-ups at eye level – during the interviews and when it follows Yimer, the directors do not directly comment on any of the statements made in the film, neither by migrants nor by officials. The film, however, implicitly makes a strong case against human rights violations by police forces and smugglers in Libya that seem to have been (at least technically) facilitated and tolerated by Italian governments since 2003. As already discussed in relation to the fictionalisation of memory in a previous chapter, the opening sequences of COME UN UOMO SULLA TERRA witness Dagmawi Yimer’s appropriation of the story and the history of his migration experience in























































between an Italian fisherman of Slavic background and a Chinese textile worker and bartender, set in the microcosm of a small island in the Venetian lagoon, he was awarded the 2012 European Parliament LUX Prize for films that “go to the heart of European public debate”. In an interview he described his motivation as “inviting the audience to look at immigrants as human beings with desires and needs. We know too little about the background of those people” (European Parliament, 2012). 6

The nationality of most of the interviewees is left unclear, but the interviewee Dawit Seyum refers to them as ‘Habesha’, people from the Horn of Africa.





  




its entanglements with the colonial past linking Ethiopia and Italy. Those scenes set the tone for the portrayal of the migrants’ narratives. By means of clips from interviews, the directors shed light on the stories of three young female and six male refugees (plus Yimer himself) – as di Maio (2013) puts it, “Italy’s postcolonial subjects, flesh and bone offspring of a historical process begun with colonialism” (p.46). The single parts mingle into a bigger – but not at all exclusive or exhaustive – narrative: leaving one’s home country, being smuggled through the Sudanese desert to Libya, being captured by the Libyan police and transported in containers to Al Kufra prison in Southern Libya close to the Sudanese border (a trip through the desert that takes one and a half days), being traded to intermediaries by the police several times, moving back and forth between Benghazi, Ajdabiya,7 Tripoli and Al Kufra for months, in some cases even years. While all 10 stories’ cornerstones are similar, the directors at the same time account for the specifics of each individual refugee’s narrative and experience. There are at least two layers to each detail mentioned in the film, instigating a permanent mutual contextualisation: what seems to be the overall narrative on the one hand and the individual’s life story and lived experience on the other.8 When it comes to life in transit, those layers overlap in many cases – the film, however, does not make the attempt to harmonise or standardise the stories presented into a consistent universal hi-/story or homogenous experience. Rather, it aims at letting the subjectivities of the 10 individuals emerge by contrasting the individual angles on similar situations and experiences, and by multiplying perspectives on those experiences. Each of the journeys is portrayed as a combination of “expected steps and unexpected turns [putting] the unidirectional and often frictionless metaphors of migration – as if migrants move like ‘flows’ and ‘waves’” (Schapendonk 2012, p.27) – into perspective; not least along the lines of gender, the narratives clearly vary. At the same time, the narratives portrayed in the film emphatically locate migration movements in an interplay of an autonomy and unpredictability of migration movements on the one hand and pre-structured and regulated routes – directed trajectories – on the other. A great many of the movements described in COME UN UOMO SULLA TERRA in fact follow migration routes as determined by European and African border surveillance, police forces and intermediaries – time and time again the directors, however, focus on the deviations























































7

Ajdabiya is a small town functioning as the junction between the two biggest Libyan cities and potential points of exit, Tripoli in the west and Benghazi in the east, and the desert and Al Kufra in the south.

8

When looking at the terms used by the interviewees, ‘we’ and ‘I’ are used almost evenly; even two of the people who died from falling off a Land Rover overloaded with 45 people get names, “Tasfae and Yared” – breaking with the convention that usually the image of a victim comes without a name.



   

 
  


and detours taken by the individual and the fact that those routes change over time due to evolving migration movements themselves. The prominent iconologies of undocumented migration are hardly visible in the film itself; the interviews, however, trigger images of flight and of African refugees that are quite familiar: Land Cruisers crossing the desert heavily overloaded with people, heat and despair, ruthless and brutal smugglers, armed drivers, corrupt policemen, considerable sums of money changing hands, disappointed confidence, people dying of thirst or being beaten to death, women being abused and raped, marks, wounds, sicknesses, all sorts of violence. All the interviewees and Yimer himself speak about having been confronted with inconceivable brutality by intermediaries and, apparently to an even larger extent, police forces in Libya. Those images are evoked in the narratives, but at the same time they are always contextualised with regard to their subjective perception and relevance. When, for example, Yimer refers to the mutual experience of violence – stating, “that was the violence of the Libyan traffickers, but we still didn’t know what it meant to fall in the hands of the Libyan police”9 – he subsequently stresses how differently each individual’s story relates to experiences of violence, and which incidents are perceived as violence at all. In other words, the protagonists apparently not only appropriate their narratives, but also take possession of their experiences of exclusion and exploitation, violence and relief. The narratives convey images of human beings that lost years of their lives in this form of transit, enduring physical and emotional experiences that are impressive enough to let them fall silent forever, and yet they are not portrayed as being caught in a state of victimhood or surrender. They all speak out; they take possession of their narratives – in a performative much more than a representative way. Some are obviously close to tears and struggling for words. It is important to note how the fact that the interviews for the film are done by a multinational film crew enables the interviewees to at the same time appropriate their narratives and emotions and link individual life stories to mutual experiences – and thus impacts on the quality of the footage considerably. Talking to Yimer as a person who shares many experiences apparently helps the other refugees to open up, to speak freely and to phrase the experiences in the first place. They sit over a cup of tea and a map of North Africa and talk – it is obvious that he is considered an insider, and that the very interviews are not the first time these issues have been brought up























































9

Most practices that European Union policies term ‘trafficking’ are in fact ‘smuggling’ practices – i.e. based on the person’s consent, ending after a specific passage has been facilitated and not connected to labour or sexual exploitation. In fact, in the Italian original, Yimer uses the term ‘contrabbandieri’, which rather means smugglers than traffickers; in the economy of migration movements between Al Kufra and the harbour cities in northern Libya, however, consent and exploitation mingle so that the translation as ‘traffickers’ may deliberately be chosen.

 

 

 




between them. Yimer himself states that at first he expected – or maybe rather hoped – to forget what he has been through, “but then together we understood that we had to tell our story”. One of the three female migrants, Fikirte Inghida, adds that she is not speaking out to seek “pity, but in the hope that a solution can be found for everyone who’s there [Libya], going through this ordeal”. A third thread followed throughout the film is that of the directors seeking confrontation with European Union officials. While the Italian film crew apparently served as a door opener, for example when they are visiting Frontex headquarters in Warsaw, most of the actual interviews are carried out by Dagmawi Yimer. On this occasion, he confronts the agency’s director Ilkka Laitinen with lived experience, something that apparently makes his respondent feel uncomfortable. He is obviously surprised and stunned by the fact that Yimer disallows him to encounter him as a victim or a petitioner to be governed – but rather as an agent of his past, present and future and a stakeholder in the European migration regime. Fig. 21: The camera as a discursive weapon

Source: COME UN UOMO SULLA TERRA, Screenshot, 14'09

Similar to KURZ DAVOR IST ES PASSIERT – although less obvious and haunting – the film establishes a transcendental screen between image and audience in which the viewer is stimulated to unfold and at the same time question his/her own imagery, thus bouncing off the knowledge and the representational practices we are familiar with. On a few occasions, however, the iconologies of undocumented migration are taken up directly, apparently following the aim to redefine or overwrite



   

 
  


their significance. At several points, footage is used that has already played a crucial role in A SUD DI LAMPEDUSA, in a way signifying both the dreamlike memories of the directors and of the protagonists. The migrants’ passage is represented by the Sahara’s vast sea of sand; on one occasion even the exact same iconic footage of the overloaded lorry crossing the desert (see Fig. 19) is used, although it geographically has almost no relation to the narratives here. This kind of intratextual repetition or relocation also fulfils a strategic role by underlining how the narratives and the images are the result of a composition process instead of representations of authenticity or actualisable experience. The figure of the undocumented migrant is also enhanced by the routines and practices it is involved in. He/she learns Italian in a school, tailoring his/her cloths, following artistic activities, drawing, painting – and, above all, shooting a film. The subject position Dagmawi Yimer takes here, as an artist, as a filmmaker, is not foreseen in the iconological figure of the ‘illegal’ migrant. Not only does he take possession of his story; he also appropriates its translation into a narrative, its contextualisation and its visualisation. The camera itself becomes an icon for the moment of enunciation and appropriation of the image, just like some kind of discursive weapon (Fig. 21). Later in the film, the question of Yimer’s positioning turns full circle when he discusses his motivation to do the film over dinner with his partner, Elena.10 They both laugh at the fact that he didn’t know his age when they first met, shortly after he eventually managed to cross the Mediterranean Sea to Italy. This sequence is not only about his motivation to do the film; it as well picks up the issue of his motivation to talk about his experiences at all. While investigating the refugees’ motivation to migrate and their ways of coping with the unexpected situation in Libya quite explicitly, the motivation to talk is dealt with rather implicitly. Yimer describes his motivation as follows: “I like talking about what happened to me in Libya [...] Now that I’m settled here in Italy, I see the faces of the people who listen [...] which is something you can’t imagine. The things you tell them ... seem unreal. [...] They don’t expect it [...] Being locked up in a prison, you can’t understand that. Or travelling in a container ... I can give you some examples, how hot it gets, what it might be like in there, but [...] how could you know ...?”























































10 It is not explicitly said but Elena seems to be Italian (judging from her proficiency of Italian and the fact that she is white); it is very interesting how Yimer’s having an Italian girlfriend changes the viewer’s attitude towards him; he seems to occupy a particular subject position, not only in that he is holding the camera, but also in that he fundamentally transgresses the centralised accommodation’s boundaries. It counters the viewer’s expectation that the refugees’ social space is more or less limited to their accommodation and contacts with people from the same home country or region (which in some cases might be true, but – and this is relevant here – not necessarily in all cases).

 

 

 




The last sentence clearly also echoes one of the central statements made in SUR LE “You have to be where I am to understand the reality of my life.” People cannot understand, they cannot know – Yimer knows that his experiences are not actualisable, which he can clearly see in the faces of those who listen. This provides him with the space to talk about his experiences without being pushed into a conventionalised narrative that primarily reiterates specific iconologies. Instead, his talking constitutes a form of politics of affect; instead of scandalising the paradigms of European migration policies, he aims at eventalising the different incidents that compose his individual experiences. In the film, Fikirte Inghida, in contrast, at various points illustrates a dilemma: she wants to speak – but she can’t. Remembering the various incidents brings her to her physical limits. She eventually mentions her hope that her participation in the film may lead to an improvement of the situation of other refugees back in Libya; for her, rather, it is a moral obligation to overcome silence.

RIVAGE DU MONDE:

The film is also concerned with “Borderland Schengen” as a gendered space. First of all, the presence of female protagonists in the film – one third of the interviewees – counters the still prevalent perception of migration being predominantly male. Moreover, the protagonists emphasise remarkable gender differences with regard to the treatment of men and women by smugglers and police. While men and women are treated more or less alike for most of the journey – packed in the same lorries and containers – and their lives are more or less regarded as vulnerable in a similar way, there is an obvious difference when it comes to the integrity of their bodies; the women in the film report having been raped by traffickers multiple times to compensate for non-existing funds; some of the men indicate having been spectators of rape. The act of sex in this regard is not a matter of negotiation, and cannot be considered a form of capital the relevant women have at their disposal; it is a value that is taken by the intermediaries against their will and violently in most cases. But the interviewees note a second important aspect with regard to gender: as long as they have been kept in a group of men and women, there was a kind of mutual protection in place. One of the women states that vulnerability of both groups increased the moment they were separated for their sex in Al Kufra prison. All in all, COME UN UOMO SULLA TERRA not only, in general, denies the viewer the fulfilment of expectations on the iconological level either by not making use of it on the level of the image or by explicitly unravelling the knowledge, practices and image politics they rely on, either in the protagonists’ narratives or their appropriation of icons. Even more, the film eventalises a particular historical setting by explicitly circumventing the self-evident in migration narratives. Things do not go without saying, they do not speak for themselves – the migrants, however, do, and they do it from individual perspectives that do not at all aim at translating experience into something actualisable. The way in which Segre and Yimer approach the stories and histories of migration and interweave them with the encoun-



 

 
  


ters between migrants and the practices implemented officially or unofficially, legally or illegally to govern migration movements in “Borderland Schengen” in addition serves to set the intolerable straight. The strategy not to standardise or harmonise migration narratives is also reflected in the framing of the interviewees; while at some points the camera comes up to the person speaking and shows him or her in a close-up, most of the times two or three persons are filmed in medium close-up. The more a narrative seems to cover rather individual aspects, the more closely the camera approaches the speaker. In many cases, an issue is approached first on an individual level by means of a number of (extreme) close-up shots – and secondly dealt with on a broader level including medium close-ups or additional footage not directly linked to the individuals portrayed. In all the interviews, the camera behaves in an extremely cautious manner, almost gentle. The gaze rests on the interlocutors and is rarely interrupted. It does not try to fill the gaps in the narratives, and it respects, even underlines, the blank spaces. Although there is no narrator or commentator providing interpretations or trying to set the facts right, the camera’s movement and angles and the montage do in fact directly relate to the narratives. Occasionally moving back with horror, it also occupies positions of strangeness and consternation; taking uncommon or even inconvenient angles, it expresses disbelief and shock – only to advance the interviewee again eventually with a sympathetic attitude. On the level of the migrants’ narratives, the filmmakers do neither directly comment on any of the explanations given by the interviewees, nor do they supplement those explanations. At times, a map of North Africa is used in order to illustrate long distances and to localise specific events. Here again, the camera follows the interviewees’ gaze, their fingers on the map; everything is close up. It does not strive to provide the broader context, the full map, or the full story. What di Maio stated with regard to Segre’s authorship of A SUD DI LAMPEDUSA is also valid for COME UN UOMO SULLA TERRA: “The director does not intend to provide an accomplished, sociologically based, finely polished picture of African migration to Europe. He does not wish to explain pedantically the political and economic situations from which these migrants are trying to escape; nor is he willing in the least to invade the depths of their private space, which, in fact, he seems to secretly share with his protagonists. […] What he does, instead, is enter the dimension of the journey with them, letting the viewers perceive empathically the weight, as it were, the physical and mental burden that they are carrying within themselves, in what by necessity becomes an ineluctably in-transit life – a life perennially ‘on hold’. Segre is not interested in explanations. He is tantalized by the crossing: first of the Sahara, then of the Mediterranean Sea, which, however, does not, cannot reach an end.” (di Maio, 2013, p.51)

A crucial figure in the whole immigration discourse, and particularly with regard to the victimisation of undocumented migrants, is the ‘trafficker’. Dominating the legal-political discourse on a European level, it is a figure with paramount significance in the symbolic process of turning a migrant into an illegal migrant.

 

 

 




He/she11 initiates and facilitates the passage not only from, for example, Africa to Europe but at the same time the passage from legal to illegal; by at the same time being a central figure in the humanitarian rhetoric of Frontex – in order to protect refugees, specifically the traffickers have to be combatted – this figure also plays a crucial role in the legitimisation of a culture of border control that increasingly makes use of military strategies and equipment. It is important to note that current European Union immigration policies and media discourses hardly differentiate between the trafficker and the smuggler but almost exclusively deploy the figure of the trafficker as a perpetrator rather than a facilitator. In fact, most border crossings must, however, be considered as facilitated by smugglers based on the smuggled person’s consent (Human Rights Watch, 2015). The documentary films paint a more complex picture. Understanding the European Union and its immigration and asylum policies as merely combatting the symptoms of global inequalities and a self-induced crisis, they also refrain from making the trafficker the central complementary figure. While most of the documentary films completely ignore ‘the trafficker’ as a perpetrator in order to provide space for migrants’ autonomy and ambitions by avoiding assigning them victim positions, particularly Andrea Segre in his films tries to reassess the figure of the intermediary and the smuggler. He is by no means interested in retrieving the intermediaries’ honour or reputation – and especially in COME UN UOMO SULLA TERRA they are presented as operating a dirty and immoral economy of undocumented migration in close cooperation with police forces (e.g. in Libya) – but much more in dissolving the oversimplified victim/perpetrator relationship between migrant and intermediary. In A SUD DI LAMPEDUSA, Segre attacks the narrative consistency of ‘the trafficker’ and evokes images that are not primarily linked to a legal discourse. In the film, some of the intermediaries in Dirkou, a rural village in north-eastern Niger and one of the nodal points of northbound migration through the Sahara, get the chance to contextualise their activities as being mainly motivated by humanitarian considerations and moral obligations. One of the intermediaries claims that the intermediaries “understand the situation best because we take on the burden of these problems. We indeed carry these problems.” He continues, “We know the desert well. So we can do it, we feel obliged to do it. We don’t want to see people suffering.” And another one adds, using almost the same words, “It’s our job, we feel obliged to do it. We help them flee to Europe or to the Arab countries. If they’ve left their homes it’s because of problems, unemployment, poverty.” They are portrayed in a neutral manner – but in contrast to the trafficker the European control apparatus has in mind, they are working in the open; they are visible to some extent.























































11 Although the figure of the trafficker is apparently exclusively male, there is no reason why a female couldn’t be involved in this kind of business as a perpetrator.



 

 
  


It is interesting how the humanitarian rhetoric of the intermediaries here refers back to and repeats the humanitarian rhetoric deployed in the migration-control discourse, for example by Frontex. And it must be assumed to be one of the aspects that Andrea Segre is primarily interested in; while the intermediaries in his film narrative also fulfil a rather strategic function and while he is hardly interested in their motivations, what he is in fact aiming at is to understand the system of movement towards Europe in a holistic way, a way in which what happens in one region of “Borderland Schengen” has an impact on and cannot be understood without accounting for what happens in another region. Later in the film, other intermediaries talk about the downside of the whole system, which becomes extremely visible in a town like Dirkou. Although it is certainly true that crossing the Sahara or the Mediterranean would be much more dangerous without the intermediaries’ support, the migrants or travellers have to pay considerable fees for the services. They not only have to pay for transportation itself but for all sorts of other things – for a place to stay or simply for being passed on to another intermediary who then facilitates the travel. Intermediaries’ services adhere to, as one of the men admits, “a well structured system”. Locating this business model ‘south of Lampedusa’, Segre stresses how the European migration regime itself is entangled with the emergence of the system and how its policies contribute to its maintenance. Even more, meanwhile the economy of smuggling in which the intermediaries are the expensive but unavoidable agents of movement has become normality. As one of the men crossing the Sahara on the loading bed of a lorry conveys, this is the only way to travel for those who cannot afford airplane tickets; “People are used to this way of travelling,” he states. Smugglers and intermediaries here appear to be a completely normal side-note of travelling. While Segre is, as said above, certainly not interested in establishing the intermediary as a valuable or honourable element of migration movements, he insists on accounting for him/her as taking a still prevalent and obviously necessary role in the business of bordering Europe. What, in a way, he succeeds in is suspending the stereotypical (in a way unrelated) figure of the trafficker European migration control tends to establish as its opponent. But not only do Segre’s figures of migrants and intermediaries deviate in a way that avoids reiterating migration as a narrative of victims and perpetrators; but also he gives the system of smuggling a number of faces and breaks down its functioning to the level of the individual. This is particularly interesting with regard to two additional considerations. In order to “disrupt the business model of human smuggling and trafficking networks” (EUNAVFOR, 2016, p.2) the European Union implemented a policy that among other things puts boat refugees in the Mediterranean and Aegean Sea under a sort of general suspicion; there is at least one trafficker – so the logic goes – on each of the boats; there is, in other words, necessarily one perpetrator among the victims. In many cases, the person navigating the boat at the moment of seizure is accused of being the smuggler or trafficker. The political aim of this measure is clear: it envisages discouraging those planning to embark a smuggler’s boat; but what it instead contributes to is an increase in the risk of the passage. Smugglers

 

 

 




reportedly began, for example, to provide migrants with a crash-course in navigation right before departure or to direct the boats by means of satellite phones and GPS coordinates from a remote, safe position instead of steering the boats themselves (Amiri, 2014; Di Nicola and Musumeci, 2015). Suspending the figure of the trafficker hence also aims at focusing attention on the entanglements of the migration-control apparatus and the operating modes of the lucrative business of smuggling, a business that already before the current crisis was said to produce annual revenue of at least 3 billion US dollars (Shelley, 2014) – a number that must also be considered as contributing considerably to shaping a specific image of the trafficker. In addition to this, scrutinising the figure of the trafficker might also help to slightly unbalance the whole arrangement of figures deployed in the migrationcontrol rhetoric. Most of those figures have an opposite figure, equally schematic in its structure, and each one complements the other in some kind of victim/perpetrator setting. The trafficker complements the refugee, the female migrant as a victim complements the male migrant as a threat (at the same time, all those figures also stand in a relationship of difference to us, the normal); denying that the trafficker plays the central role does hence also have an impact on the other figures and the assumption of their subjectivity and agency. Most of the films are not only concerned with their figures and narratives but also with the routines, symbols and artefacts of migration. Every now and then making reference to unlike events and icons also facilitates the reframing of the figures as subjects and diverts the gaze. In LA FORTERESSE, for example, the centre manager at one point notes that the inmates are “damn bored”; five of the African refugees are allowed to help the local forester to cut back trees. It is early morning; hoarfrost is glazing the terrain; the men are stomping through the woods cutting some branches – dressed up in shiny yellow rubber boots. After the job is done, one of them is unable to take off the boots; back at the centre he is joking about going to the disco on Saturday with his yellow rubber boots. It takes a considerable number of people’s expertise – including eventually the centre manager’s – to get the boots off the big African man’s feet. Eventually, the manager holds up a boot like a trophy and everybody is having a laugh. The rubber boot as an icon strongly contrasts the shoe fashion usually connected to images of migrants from the African continent, be it the sandal or bare feet. And it moreover contrasts with an image the centre manager himself drew in an earlier team meeting: discussing possible daytrips and ventures for the inmates with his colleagues, he advises against skiing and hiking because “guys who go walking in the forest with thongs won’t do it for too long” – implying that asylum seekers are not able to change their shoes, as if sandals are a disadvantageous biological feature.



 

 
  


In LITTLE ALIEN, one of the artefacts with the strongest iconology and symbolism is the so-called ‘white card’.12 It marks an individual’s shift from being an undocumented migrant without any kind of legal status to being accepted as an asylum seeker. It does not imply being recognised as a refugee or being granted asylum – it simply documents the fact that Austria acknowledges being in charge of the asylum claim and that the relevant person has the right to remain in the country at least until a decision about his or her claim has been made. It also allows refugees to look for private accommodation – which is in most cases not realistic as the financial support by the government sums up to less than 400 euros per month, and access to the labour market is not granted (Bundeskanzleramt Österreich, 2016). In most of the conversations captured by the camera, the ‘white card’ issue comes up sooner or later. “Did you get it?” is one of the most important questions. In some cases, it takes more than two months to get the document. Most of the migrants are waiting for it desperately; “Your life gets better when you have the white card,” Achmad Abdirahman explains to Asha Abdirahman. Later in the movie, Nura Bishar proudly presents her card in the coffee shop. They all look at it as a trophy; “You won, we are happy for you,” says one of the protagonists. “Kiss the card!” Symbolising the start of a new, happier life, some of the Somali migrants sing a song together. The specific iconology of the card is not exclusive to Austria or Europe – at Tangier harbour, the camera captures three youths talking about a similar system: their trophy is the ‘red card’; the alternative is a residence ban.



  
  
The framing of the figures in COME UN UOMO SULLA TERRA is not only relevant with regard to their emergence within the appropriated narratives and the imbalance they might cause among the hegemonic arrangements of the icons of undocumented migration, but also with regard to their bodies. While the visualisation of the protagonists creates a remarkable tension between their almost static bodies – in both the interview setting and their containment in the Centro di Permanenza Temporanea – and the forceful movement reflected in their narratives, this at the same time foreshadows and promises further motion. How the moments of standstill and moments of breakout take turns on their journeys, and, even more, how their social and emotional existence in transit is fundamentally entangled with the dialectics of physical motion and stasis, is one of the leitmotifs of all the narratives. In KURZ DAVOR IST ES PASSIERT, the protagonists’ bodies as significant elements of the mise-en-scène are left out and replaced by stand-ins who avoid any kind of clear movement or gesture – in a physical and emotional but also in a























































12 German: Aufenthaltsberechtigungskarte.

 

 

 




representative way. Even more, representation comes to a halt in this setting. While the victim is a central figure of the overall trafficking discourse, and being a victim is primarily a corporeal inscription, Salomonowitz covers her protagonists’ bodies, at the same time the absence of the bodies and any kind of gesture or reminiscence of the body fundamentally transforms the perception of the body itself; instead of providing a projection screen for the victims’ bodies’ transparency and self-evidence, their passivity and stasis, the performative-affective choreography (del Río, 2008) of the film confronts the viewer and points the attention explicitly towards the becoming of images. This filmic mode separates the body from its inscriptions and at the same time withdraws it from control. It is as if the moment of overexposed absence is at the same time a moment of specifically directed discursive visibility that avoids panoptical visibility, at the same time depriving dominant image politics of its reference. This must be considered as weakening also Schwenken and Berg’s abovementioned concern regarding the potentially discriminatory effect of hiding the protagonists’ faces. It is not primarily a person’s face that the spectator requires in order to identify with the needs and feelings of a person or to recognise a person as a human being; it is, on the contrary, Salomonowitz’s clever emphasis on the opacity of the persons’ bodies that limits restricting representational functions, and instead initiates the emergence of affective images allowing for a particular form of recognition. It is true that the film hardly makes an offer to identify with the victims of trafficking, neither directly nor via those strangely (e)motionless standins, and it does not follow any kind of representational impetus. But by means of evoking performative-affective afterimages that carry a crucial potentiality, she aligns the women’s – invisible – bodies with affect and thus complicates their status by “tracing the social to its corporeal site of inscription” (del Río, 2008, p.71). She locates the women’s bodies within a network of visual and linguistic, political, legal, historical and social constraints that “are indivisible from the affective” (ibid.). In this regard, not showing their bodies must not primarily be understood as a means to protect the women with regard to their legal status – that may, however, be considered a positive side effect – but as an artifice emphasising their opacity and at the same time intensifying a potentiality that lies not only on the level of the image, but also specifically on the level of the body. Medial and representative visibility, in a sense that exposes a subject as a transparent and consistent figure – a bundle of knowledge – can consequently not be considered the central category when it comes to recognition. While films like HAVARIE and KURZ DAVOR IST ES PASSIERT most obviously reorganise body and narrative, also the other films in this work establish their protagonists as subjects in a way that less challenges specific representational conditions of undocumented migration and rather more evokes affective images of the constraints acting on their protagonists’ bodies. The roles their respondents take in the interviews should in this regard not to be misunderstood as a necessarily



 

 
  


authentic expression. Though they are availed with a set of authentic and immediate experiences, the translation into image and narrative at this specific moment of standstill is at the same time a translation into a gestus, “a sensibly perceptible outward expression for his character’s emotions” (Brecht, 1940, p.96). This translation takes place in an instance that, as explained before, is not committed to fiction film’s simulation of verisimilitude and reality, but rather is sparked by the fictional capacity of the documentary film allowing a performativeaffective approach to its figures renouncing melodramatic exaggeration. Consequently, how the films evoke affect and sensation that make its images “function as the very catalysts of a thinking process that need not come to an end” (del Río, 2008, p.179) stands in clear contrast to the persuasive power of the self-evident. Structuring its narratives and figures in a non-representative manner provokes “thinking activity [that] differs from mere cognitive understanding” (ibid.) as it is not merely “a function of an interior self-reflective activity, but the process whereby a multiplicity of impersonal forces establish connections with each other” (Olkowski, 1999, p.53).



  
 

 

 

The filmmakers are, as pointed out, well aware of their entanglements with the control apparatus – they at the same time utilise the fact that every image produced in the borderland is only one of countless possible images; this goes for their own images as well as for those produced by border authorities (and news reporters and so on). The control apparatus tries to overcome this potentiality by means of producing as many and as authentic, more or less uniform images as possible in order to create a dense, gapless and consistent surface – representation cast into homogeneous icons; and it has begun to find pleasure in the disclosure of these images’ existence as part of their image politics. A specific documental form is their camouflage for visual and visualising technologies that aim at the classification of migrants and migrations primarily regarding their legal (in terms of the validity of documents and status) and moral eligibility (in terms of a perceived real need). The form of visibility resulting from this process grounds in self-evident figures; homogeneity and difference are key to the establishment of those figures. The tension between visibility and invisibility is a crucial one also with regard to another aspect. The claim for a gapless visibility of migration movements by means of enhanced surveillance technologies is part of the standard rhetoric of European ministries of the interior and Frontex in the context of capsized refugee boats. Deploying the flimsily humanitarian argument that the invisibility of undocumented migrants firstly makes them vulnerable to ruthless smugglers and traffickers, and secondly impedes their protection by border authorities, renders,





  




in this line of reasoning, visibility as a means of protection not only of borders but also of the border-crossers themselves from a regulatory point of view. The examples and considerations above also illustrate that the films’ modes primarily aim at revisiting this crucial line between visibility and invisibility. It is obvious that they all envisage finding ways to visualise a phenomenon that is rarely appreciated in a differentiated manner but rather relies on stereotypical representations and figures through which the phenomenon is in return governed. In being films, they want to show and they need to show. At the same time, however, they reflect the conditions of showing and their mediality as well as the interdependencies of visibility and knowledge. Showing a person is not the same thing as making him/her visible – and even less can visibility automatically be translated into recognition. The films are well aware of that. The visibility the films are aiming at is consequently not a purely medial or positivistic visibility that considers capturing an image of a person as equal to making the person visible. This is most obvious in KURZ DAVOR IST ES PASSIERT and HAVARIE, where we in the first case apparently observe the separation and reconfiguration of the subjects and their bodies in a way that establishes subjects that are not even shown on screen – and in the latter case are primarily pointed to the blank space where the subject should be. But this is also clearly identifiable in the performative images generated in SUR LE RIVAGE DU MONDE and the countersurveillance strategies deployed in LA FORTERESSE, LITTLE ALIEN and Andrea Segre’s films. Indeed, the films enquire into the conditions of medial visibility in the border zones, and explicitly or implicitly comment on what is perceived as a stream of images – and yet they are not interested in creating complementary or oppositional representational images and figures, because they would all eventually necessitate the reduction of complexity and the fabrication of consistency and an assumed group identity at the price of their subjectivity. The visibility they feel obliged towards is rather one of a transparency of their technological means of production and the camera’s position in the field as well as its interaction with the protagonists and their mediality in general – as seen in the examples from LITTLE ALIEN and COME UN UOMO SULLA TERRA mentioned in this chapter. Those strategies may be understood as the attempt to turn the films’ entanglements with the control apparatus and the constitutive dialect of showing and not-showing into a strength. Avoiding representational modes and despite building on images that have a rather performative or generative character, the films in fact seek a visibility that can be found in the recognition of the subject and in discursive participation. This form of visibility is only loosely – or at best strategically – linked to medial visibility. While the mechanisms of representation, as already discussed, cannot easily or comprehensively be suspended – the filmmakers’ control over the image is certainly limited – the films encompass sets of images that at least challenge image politics grounding in representations cast in iconologies. They contrast dominant, familiarised images and icons by means of performative-affective images that prefer ambiguity and inconsistency over linear binary representational structures (e.g.



   

 
  


inside/outside, real/unreal, legitimate/illegitimate, legal/illegal) – images, in other words, that potentially result in a recognition that is not suspended by representation. The films in this regard can also be considered explorations of “real emotions through false images” (Elsaesser, 1976, p.27); the images are false not in that they cheat the viewer or contain lies – but in their non-representational aims, their simultaneous making use of “generic conventions and [remaining] detached from the homogenizing organization of meaning” (del Río, 2008, p.71). So although the films are dealing with their own mediality and the conditions and structures of medial visibility in general, it cannot be understood as their primary goal to facilitate a medial visibility of their protagonists – by means of mere showing – nor are they striving towards authority on a representational level. The reflections on mediality and also the performative and generative modes applied are, on the contrary, directed towards sustaining a discursive visibility that is twofold. On the one hand, the filmmakers perceive and locate themselves as active participants in a visual-political discourse – with all the risks and chances this implies; on the other hand, in cooperation with their protagonists, they establish a visual and discursive space in which the undocumented migrants emerge as subjects that also have the potential to participate, not least by means of an appropriation of their narratives and images. This appropriation of the figures’ and narratives’ historisation may be understood as what Édouard Glissant terms a “prophetic vision of the past” (2005, p.15). Explicitly linking performativity and subjectivity in this concept, Glissant outlines the critical potential of an appropriation of one’s history and narrative. His words in the preface of his play Monsieur Toussaint are especially interesting in this regard: reflecting his lead character’s motivation, he states that “[f]or those whose history has been reduced by others to darkness and despair, the recovery of the near or distant past is imperative” (ibid.). This prophetic vision of the past is a poetic endeavour just as it is a critical one, he stresses, a renewed acquaintance with one’s history in order to relish and fully experience the present. Creating a prophetic vision of the past potentially recasts the meaning of past and present by means of a separation of historical experience from site and cite authority (Drabinski and Parham, 2015). The framing of Dagmawi Yimer’s migration narrative as being linked to the colonial past connecting Libya, Italy and Ethiopia in COME UN UOMO SULLA TERRA can be understood as a prophetic vision of the past just as can many of the narratives presented in the other films. Emphasising the necessity to constantly engage with historical events and figures, the interaction of the critical and the poetic is paramount in Glissant’s understanding of this engagement; while the “critical project retrieves the past as a productive fragmentation in order to subvert any and all pretensions of authority, rootedness and tradition […] the poetic project engages […] the imaginary. The poetic, in the wake of the critical rethinking of fragmentation, imagines the world differently: open, fractal and creolizing, always resistant to the habitual appeal of a common aesthetic, and always refusing the security of a final end or purpose.” (Ibid., p.4)

 

 

 




The prophetic vision in this regard turns against all that is authoritarian. And it does not only speak against authority but actively subverts it by “the chaotic swirl of cultural forces and meanings” (ibid.). The numerous trajectories that compose a migration as visualised and narrated in the films can in this regard be considered also trajectories of those forces and meanings. The conjunction of aesthetics, creativity, history and subjectivity that is at the core of Glissant’s thinking is apparently also what the films in this work seem to be primarily interested in – and that at the same time precisely describes the form of visibility they intend to create. Further following Glissant, both the prophetic vision of the past and the documental mode outlined above are strongly interrelated with opacity as a site where subjective resistance and universalising assumptions are confronted with each other in terms of the “articulation of an alternative subjectivity” (Murdoch, 2015, p.16), also accounting for and expressing “what has been erased from official history” (Crowley, 2006, p.108). In his concept of opacity, resistance and creativity interact in a way that de-territorialises subjectivity and identity itself (Drabinski and Parham, 2015). Just as it has the “disarticulation of rootedness” (ibid., p.2) in mind, it also necessarily opposes representative modes. While on the one hand the appropriation of narratives and images described above follows the idea of a “prophetic vision of the past” as being coincidentally critical and poetic, opacity is a prerequisite for the articulation of subjectivity. Specifically, the subjectivity of the Other is crucial in this regard, an act of recognition that “implies the inviolability of certain aspects of that subjectivity” (Murdoch, 2015, p.16) – which also imparts “the capacity to counter the objectification intrinsic to continental systems while extending it to a more broad-based vision of an interlinking of cultures that allows for, and valorizes, difference” (ibid.). We may consequently well speak of an opaque documental mode that the films in this work seem to apply – equipped with “the ontological armor of opacity” (Headley, 2012, p.92), preventing the subject from being “left vulnerable to the oppressive gaze of transparency that demands the right to assimilate the Other within the Same” (ibid.). Strategically playing the dialectic of visibility and invisibility, this documental mode consequently can be considered as redrawing and appropriating narratives, icons and figures of undocumented migration following the intention to “unleash opacity against the alienating and objectifying notion of transparency” (ibid.), an endeavour that is simultaneously critical and poetic, political and resistant. The opaque, in this sense, is that “which is the most perennial guarantee of participation and confluence” (Glissant, 1997, p.191). The films’ structuring of the visibility of their protagonists in a way that facilitates opacity as “a form of ontological self-defense” (Headley, 2012, p.92) has consequences also for their entanglements with the control apparatus. Instead of messing with the apparatus for determining visibilities, the films work towards an opaque subject, an Other that can be recognised not despite its difference but on the basis of the valorisation of difference. And while the films create transparency with regard to their mediality and their social and geographical setting, on the level of the protagonists and their narratives they dismiss transparency. They stand in



 

 
  


this regard in opposition to a control apparatus that requires the subjects’ transparency in order to govern it while operating on rather impenetrable sets of principles and implementation precepts. For example, HAVARIE in this regard reformulates the crisis at an altogether different level, that of seeing. In relocating the moment of crisis to the gaze, in reflecting it and withdrawing its temporality, the film concedes the migrants on the rubber boat a fundamental opacity. It has already been pointed out that documentation and identification concur in the control apparatus and in the documentary mode. Consequently, in order to negotiate the relevance and conditions of visibility, the films apply different strategies primarily to deal with the simultaneity of documentation – a technology of control and classification and a technique of chronicling – and of identification – at the same time a technology of producing, interpreting and applying knowledge and a prerequisite for empathy. The strategies applied by the filmmakers to distance themselves from being perceived as elements of socio-technical control dispositives (Holert, 2008) by means of opacity leads to an understanding of documentation and identification that seems to aim for a third way. Their documentation modes account not only for the fact that numerous images are possible and that every making visible is at the same time a making invisible, but also at eventalising everyday life incidents in order to make the conditions for visibility and the intolerable visible in the first place. Their making visible in this regard aims at a specific historisation and memorisation. The films’ identification mode is hence characterised by an openness and ambiguity that stimulate affective images rather than representational ones; just as the experiences accounted for remain unactualisable, identification is the result of a thought process instead of emotionalisation. Consequently, the ways in which the films recognise their protagonists as subjects only to a very limited degree account for the viewers’ longing to identify. In consequence, the visual space is not as hermetic as it may appear. Actively engaging in “Borderland Schengen” as a visual-political space, the films deploy different strategies in order to fill the visual potentiality with life, to produce and appropriate images, and to give back heterogeneity to their figures by engaging in their iconologies and histories as well as in their opacity and in valorising the Other’s subjectivity and difference. Creating a kind of counter-surveillance scrutinising the control regime and its cameras and other tools on the one hand, and its discursive figures and iconologies on the other, by means of visual-strategic operations, they eventually establish a transnational political and social space that is evidently the result of a visual construction process (Holert, 2008). This chapter enquired into different filmic strategies to establish and recognise the undocumented migrant as a (discursive) subject. While the structure of the visualpolitical arena fundamentally changed over the past two decades towards a prevalence of image politics grounding in a limited set of stereotypical figures and icons of undocumented migration – the illegal immigrant, the trafficker, Lampedusa – the films primarily aim at providing their protagonists with a space in which they are able to unfold their narratives, not least in order to avoid being perceived

 

 

 




as nothing but victims. Creating visibility in this regard is not the films’ primary goal; rather, they aim at establishing a specific opacity that facilitates a fundamental re-appropriation of their past, present and future. Imagining the world in Glissant’s “terms of opacity as a chaotically resonating whole appears as an unparalleled challenge to current notions of the global” (Loock, 2012) and at the same time challenges the notion of the national that continues to operate in the negotiation of borders; while it must hence be considered a crucial element of the transnational “Borderland Schengen” topographies, it at the same time links the performative mode of the documentary to subjective resistance in clear opposition to representative orders. Consequently, the following chapter will investigate how the spaces of migration are being established and structured in the films.


 
  
 


  
  
 


While the previous two chapters have been concerned with the question of how the films engage with image spaces of migration in order to establish and recognise the protagonists as discursive subjects by means of a specific visuality and narrativity, the work will now come back to the question how “Borderland Schengen” is established in the films in terms of its spatial and geographical structure. Geography in this regard is understood not in a cartographic sense but primarily as an epistemological structure, a site linking the “relations between subjects and places and the grounding discourses that legitimate them” (Rogoff, 2000, p.15) – which is consequently inseparably linked to its visual appearance and structure. In understanding geography as a body and an order of knowledge that needs critical assessment (ibid.), the work also rejects notions of deterritorialised subjects. The cameras in this regard on the one hand investigate and scrutinise geographical orders, and on the other also contribute to establishing specific spaces and geographies of migration; at their core lies an interest in exploring the ‘trans’ in transnational/trans-social, the state of ‘inbetweenness’ (Bhabha) of undocumented migration. The films pursue various strategies in order to follow the traces of undocumented migration and to reflect the spatial dimensions of “Borderland Schengen”, and to “stitch together the global archipelago of exclusion: dispersed sites of enforcement and detention where people are rendered stateless by geographical design” (Mountz, 2011, p.385). They are set at specific places and explicitly avoid linking those places to criminality – rather, they investigate the becoming illegalised and the tension between normality and states of exception than locate the migrants within a permanent state of illegality. They also try to maintain the boundary between the private and the public – something undocumented migrants are usually deprived of. The films are only rarely set at the actual political borders but document the invisible and yet tangible borders of “Borderland Schengen”. They challenge concepts of belonging and aim at illustrating multi-layered transnational social spaces of undocumented migration that go beyond the binary of inside and outside.



 

 
  


Moreover, the films perceive spaces, places and routes of undocumented migration as being established and structured by means of the interplay between control and autonomy as described above, and they assume a fundamental flexibility of European migration topographies in general. Those actual and historical places are never presented as neutral places – the films give the impression that migration trajectories hardly include neutral places; a specific significance is deeply inscribed in all of them at both the macro- and the micro-level. At the same time, the films investigate mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion as adhering to wellknown rules. And while they all do away with the assumption of linearity of migration movements with predictable or consistently linked points of departure and arrival, they, however, perceive, visualise and establish those spaces in quite different ways – detecting the diverse social and visual implications of geography. The films engage with “Borderland Schengen” geographies at different levels. Firstly, they visually establish diverse migration spaces and they find different ways to define the relationship between the camera and the spaces it enquires. They deploy different filmic strategies to enquire into the role and significance of specific places and to investigate the connecting lines between different places and their spatial and temporal relationship. Secondly, it is interesting how the borderland is shaped with regard to its boundaries and limitations, the diverse manifestations of physical borders and border facilities, the various kinds of border practices and moments of border-crossing or crossing of space in general. In a constitutively transnational setting, they take a critical look at the role of the nation state, primarily against the background of the European strategy of exterritorialisation. And, thirdly, the question is of how the films eventually locate their subjects in the border space and how they relate to that space – and at the same time how this space emerges through migration movement in the first place. Against the background of the images’ entanglement with the control apparatus and a panoptical visibility that migration control is aiming at, the films also illustrate how the interplay of migration control and migration movements contributes to and structures those spaces as oppositional or opaque spaces; but they also take note of the suspension of movement and mobility, and of individuals being caught in a persisting state of transit. The camera’s anticipation of the dialectics of mobility and standstill is a central facet. Already on a macro-level, the films differ considerably in their cameras’ scope of movement. While HAVARIE on the visual level seems to symbolise the absolute suspension of time and space, on the audible level it forges a bridge from Algeria to Spain and from Ukraine to France, thus establishing a vivid transnational social field; LA FORTERESSE enquires into the formalised microcosm of a reception centre in Switzerland – SUR LE RIVAGE DU MONDE does the same thing in an informal and performative setting a couple of thousand kilometres south. In both cases, the camera deliberately limits its scope of movement. And while the latter and BAB SEBTA remain south of the actual demarcation lines, Andrea Segre’s films A SUD DI LAMPEDUSA and COME UN UOMO SULLA TERRA enquire into the permanent back and forth on the south–north axis of migration while LITTLE ALIEN

  


  
 

  


  
 




travels some 15,000 kilometres (Kusturica, 2009) through the transnational European border corridor from East to West.



  

 

LITTLE ALIEN is specifically interesting because it establishes the space by means of a permanent process of transgressing and crossing the various borders it detects. It develops its filmic narrative primarily by means of two principles; on the one hand, it is spatially mobile in Europe’s geographical border regions and, on the other, it constantly works towards visually condensing the strong contrasts that structure European migration spaces in order to enquire into the texture of the border as a visual space. Vienna-based Nina Kusturica wrote and directed the film in 2009. Shot in Austria, Slovakia, Ukraine, Morocco, Greece and the Spanish exclaves in North Africa over a period of about 15 months between summer 2007 and fall 2008 (Kusturica, 2009), the film addresses the specific life situation of unaccompanied minor refugees in European borderlands. Born in Mostar in 1975, at the age of 17 Nina Kusturica fled from Herzegovina to Austria, where she later studied film directing and editing at the Vienna University of Music and Performing Arts (Mobilefilm, 2014, Team). In her director’s statement for LITTLE ALIEN, she claims that the idea for making the film is directly connected to her flight experience, and that the “alternative perspective, this clash of different worlds and expectations, the simultaneous existence of numerous realities has stayed with me to the present day” (Kusturica, 2009, p.48). Kusturica belongs to a group of filmmakers – Mobilefilm – who emphasise the necessity of mobile and self-reflexive camera work in its “own space” (Mobilefilm, 2014, Manifesto) – a mobility that, however, does not stop at being physically mobile and curious but also encompasses the filmmaker’s open-mindedness and unknowingness with regard to her convictions and the self-evidence of what she encounters. And while LITTLE ALIEN has been produced on 35mm film and for cinema audiences, Kusturica also aims at transgressing the limitations of the cinema/screen and reaches out to educational contexts; consequently, the concept of the film included, for example, a tour with its cast through secondary schools in Austria.1 In fact, Kusturica’s camera is extremely mobile. Curious and empathetic, at times stunned and disgusted, then distinctly sympathetic and affected, it seems to stroll through “Borderland Schengen” in order to collate narratives and stories in























































1

In addition to a considerable number of film-festival visitors, about 30,000 people in Austria attended film screenings, and more than 200 discussions took place in schools, cinemas and public places. The film won more than 30 international film-festival awards (NK Projects, 2016); in 2009, the film was released on DVD.



   

 
  


various border settings, from the Ukrainian–Slovakian border at the eastern fringes of the Schengen Area to harbour and border facilities in the region of Tangier, Morocco, from the notorious Greek–Bulgarian–Turkish border triangle and urban Austrian refugee centres to apparently deserted buildings in the Spanish exclave of Ceuta, pointing out “the diversity and yet interconnectedness of various spatial zones of border negotiation” (Dzierson, 2015, p.37). While the film is consequently composed of various border situations, its scope is not limited to the political borders and demarcation lines – it points out that an individual without the legally necessary document can run into a border literally everywhere and that movement through European border zones is actually a continuous movement along borderlines and across borders, be it in the middle of the Austrian capital, Vienna, at actual European border facilities or hundreds of kilometres east or south of an actual Schengen demarcation line. In contrast to LITTLE ALIEN, Pedro Pinho and Frederico Lobo’s film BAB SEBTA approaches the border spaces from a southern angle. While the camera throughout the film sojourns the African continent, it slowly recedes to the Mediterranean region, gaining a wider perspective. The camera seems to feel its way backwards in order to find out how far the European border zones reach. Starting right at the massive European border facilities surrounding Ceuta and documenting the moment of border-crossing primarily as a moment of chaos and violence, the very first sequence (see chapter 4) sets the tone for the rest of the film. This is where it all crystallises, seems to be the assumption, but where does it start, and what do the trajectories that are pointing towards this monstrous border look like? After the short opening sequence that is set at the border facilities of Ceuta and that causes a certain disorientation, the camera quickly takes a step back and, during the first half of the film, follows undocumented migrants in the proximity of the Spanish exclaves on Moroccan territory, their informal shelters, their informalised lives and the geographies their movement establishes in general. By means of conversations and observations, the film establishes a space that is largely characterised by the instability of its infrastructure and constant action and reaction of border and police forces on the one hand and undocumented migrants on the other. The most important milestones in the migrants’ narratives are Tangier – Morocco’s most important harbour city, some 40 kilometres from Ceuta – and Oujda – some 150 kilometres from Melilla and close to the Algerian border. Most of the undocumented migrants are constantly moving in the peripheries of those places, trying to eventually find a passage; some others sooner or later abandon the ambition to go to Europe and apparently try to make the best of leading an existence in this kind of permanent transit situation. Pinho and Lobo primarily use imagery that emphasises the flexibility of the border zones and the paramount significance of the principle of improvisation – on both sides. The undocumented migrants’ daily lives take place in informal shelters, in some cases tents made of plastic bags, in other cases scarce houses lacking electricity, water and furniture, or without any kind of belonging or shelter in the middle of the desert. At the same time, primarily Moroccan border guards and

 
  
 

  
  
 




police forces implement European migration policies in an unpredictable and flexible manner. In cooperation with Spanish authorities, they push people back, as one protagonist reports; in many cases they load large numbers of undocumented migrants on army lorries for their “reconduite à la frontier” (Andersson, 2014, p.126); abandoning them – one by one – in the desert regions close to the Algerian border. This making migrants walk back to inhabited areas for days, only to be picked up again a couple of days or weeks later is apparently part of a strange primacy of flexibility, this out-of-sight-out-of-mind neither has any kind of sustainable effect, nor does it put the informal geography of migration into question in general. It’s rather a matter of keeping each other busy. The social organisation of “Borderland Schengen” also points to the urgency of re-establishing one’s spatial organisation more or less constantly. The whole setting adheres to a strange economy: people are coming, others are leaving, social relations and networks have to be re-established time and time again. Police agitations are unpredictable: every so often, the film’s protagonists report, they raid their informal camps, destroy or take away all their belongings; or they detain those who approach the fences at Ceuta or Melilla too closely, and deport them to the inland desert regions. When the police bust houses, one of the men reports, they knock on the door and deport any person they find inside to Oujda and destroy his/her property. Usually, however, he says, they know beforehand that the police are coming. In that case, they enter a cemetery close to the place where they live; there, they are safe from being detained because the police do not enter . The cemetery hence seems to provide one of the very few resting spots in the borderland, like a safe base in children’s tag play. And while the actual border facilities are, apart from in the short pre-title sequence, invisible, there are other places in which the transnational daily lives crystallise, in which the networking and the exchange of experiences have a place. There is this “café-bar along the road” to Tangier, then there is this cemetery where one is safe from being detained. But there is also the name of the town, Oujda, synonymous with “the circle of fear and forced mobility” (Andersson, 2014, p.126), with being deported and the necessity to relaunch one’s ambitions; Oujda is in this regard “a mythical and terrifying place” (ibid.). And then there are the routes migrants have to walk back along after having been deported and abandoned in the desert – routes that only exist due to this strange and hostile migration circuit; most of those roads lead to Oujda. What BAB SEBTA hence primarily illustrates is an immediate geography of the present; while the camera enquires into the triangle between the outskirts of Tangier, the informal shelters close to Oujda and the generic places in the desert, the past or the road up to this place are distant memories, the future is a silver line on the horizon: Cadiz, Malaga or Tarifa – separated from the here and now by the sea and by barbwire. This future, however, is so abstract that even the camera takes note of it only once; following one of the undocumented migrants to a sand dune, it captures a peak into this future, the apparently unavoidable sea (Fig. 22).



 

 
  


Fig. 22: The unavoidable sea

Source: BAB SEBTA, Screenshot, 38’21

In the second part of the film, the camera enquires into a border space that is structured completely differently. Travelling more than 2,000 kilometres south, the filmmakers complement the informal geographies observed in the Mediterranean region by impressions from a region that used to be one of the hotspots for migration because of its relative proximity to the Canary Islands. Western Sahara and Mauritania meanwhile turned into a hotspot of another kind – firstly, because it now hosts a large population of migrants that have been deported south by the Moroccan police; and, secondly, because the European fleets emptying the fishing grounds in the international waters off the West African coast are threatening the livelihood of societies that are dependent on fishing, hence producing an all new generation of potential migrants. By means of interviews with migrants and fishermen carried out at the beaches of Nouadhibou – a harbour city located on a promontory in northern Mauritania and at the same time a junction between the coast and the inland Sahara regions – BAB SEBTA investigates the significance of a region that is rather indirectly connected to the European border regime, but in which the state of transit does not end but is rather renewed. In parallel, the camera observes a group of men apparently trying to renovate one of the rusty barges that ran aground long ago. It’s a futile undertaking – but at the same time it is an activity that reflects the men’s dreams and ambitions to overcome two aspects that are particularly limiting their scope of movement here: the lack of money to pay a smuggler and the fear of doing a six-day trip on a tiny pirogue. The beach of Nouadhibou is established as a contact zone in which diverse ambitions and hi/stories are confronted with each other; it’s a space in which fishermen and smugglers come together, migrants and locals, and in which a fisherman may turn into a smuggler and a Mauritanian into a migrant in the blink of an

 
  
 

  
  
 




eye; it is a space that is characterised by an enormous potentiality and at the same time the European migration regime is extremely visible and efficacious – on the one hand, Europe is the destination of many and on the other its policies are responsible for the fact that the legal state of transit continues for many of those who have been deported to this place, for example because they are denied re-entry to their home country, as one Senegalese migrant explains. The beach sequence is eventually contrasted by observing a group of migrants in Nouakchott setting up a satellite receiver on a roof in order to get connected to the world – “We can get Portugal, Guinea, Brazil,” they cheer, even underlining the absurdity of their precarious state. Within seconds, they zap from a Brazilian telenovela to a French football match, from a Muslim liturgy to a Moroccan news programme, as if to contrast their own being made immobile. Rather than focusing on the act of border-crossing, COME UN OUMO SULLA TERRA approaches migration processes by means of enquiring into the interplay of control and movement that is connected to certain border practices. Challenging common European perceptions of migration, it produces evidence that those practices do not simply connect departure and arrival, but that the state of transit – caused by the states’ border practices – is in fact the part of a migration that instead of connecting rather separates departure and arrival by taking the form of a permanent state of non-arrival, creating random destinations within an unclear borderland. Rest in this regard is hardly possible; even when the director and protagonist Dagmawi Yimer made it to Tripoli in May 2006 and “met some friends” after a long odyssey through the Libyan Desert, their lives were still determined by the constant fear of getting arrested. Finding a place to stay did not mean security at all – they continued to live in a state of transit in transit: leaving the house (even for a walk through the neighbourhood), they carried along everything of importance, money, clothes, phones, and they slept with their clothes on because of the imminent threat of eviction. Transit is stretched beyond imagination and stained with various forms of violence. The individual’s former ties, goals and motivations slowly vanish, and are replaced by the struggle for immediate human needs to survive, to eat and drink on the one hand, and fear on the other. In most of the films, two interconnected aspects are dealt with again and again that are also connected to establishing the border space and that clearly illustrate the migrants’ urge to leave a mark in the space, to not having suffered in vain; using recurring images, those issues are dealt with. The first regards the migrants’ ambition to find some sort of physical expression of their crossing borders and distances, primarily by means of tracing their trajectories with their fingers on a map. Almost all of the films include sequences where this is done – either a group of people bowing over a map, talking about the places and their memories often in a rather technical way, or individuals taking the camera on their spatial trajectories. While on the one hand it certainly serves to facilitate the establishment of the border zone and attempts to find comprehensible manifestations of the journeys and the various individual experiences connected to it, on the other hand it



   

 
  


primarily makes the failure to grasp those experiences manifest. The space those maps represent do not bear the slightest resemblance to the space crossed and inhabited. Fig. 23: Leaving a mark

Source: LA FORTERESSE, Screenshot, 98'43

The second aspect concerns the wish to document one’s existence in a specific place. Many of the places the cameras enquire into include walls full of scribbles, sketches, drawings and other graffiti; a deserted factory building in Ceuta, Al Kufra detention prison in the Libyan Desert, the Ghetto in Bamako. Also in the closing scenes of the LA FORTERESSE, the camera reveals that some of the inmates on their transit through Vallorbe inscribed their existence into the walls of the centre (Fig. 23). In a number of close-up shots, it shows names and dates that people carved into the concrete piers and wooden benches – in some cases a simple “I was here” tag, in other cases poems or outcries. The carvings appear to illustrate the attempt to document one’s journey beyond the impersonal file kept inside the walls of the centre – respectively on an internationally accessible server facilitating the implementation of the Dublin Regulations. In BAB SEBTA, those two forms coalesce in a sequence where two men in a small train station in the proximity of the Mauritanian city of Nouadhibou comment on some kind of accidental mural (Fig. 24). Paint from a formerly all-blue wall has chipped off in forms vaguely resembling the African and the European continents; by means of a piece of coal, one of the men adds some African states’ demarcation lines to eventually trace his travel from Ghana via Burkina Faso, Mali, Algeria and Morocco to the Western Saharan region. Those graffiti are not only stating that a specific person was at a specific place at a specific time – they also address potential future readers, men and women in a similar situation, in a way bridging time and space of the transit situation, establishing a way to communicate within a trans-social network.

 
  
 

  
  
 




Fig. 24: An accidental mural

Source: BAB SEBTA, Screenshot, 58'20

The diverse examples above illustrate that in a protracted state of transit the places of a migration have particular significance; precarious shelters and improvised homes, mobile turnpikes and shape-shifting borders form an informal geography that considerably structures and governs social relationships. The countless places turned into temporary homes are the nodal points of the transnational – they form entry points to certain social constellations and networks, and at the same time they are inseparable from other people’s past and future migrations. Many of those places have migration narratives literally inscribed: names, dates and poems carved in stone walls, or remnants of day-to-day life in transit carelessly left behind in what constituted a temporary shelter for at least some time. Roughly speaking, on a macro-level the films account for two apparently opposed kinds of spaces: on the one hand, “Borderland Schengen” is composed of various regulated and controlled places; on the other, it also accommodates diverse contact zones, which at least partly escape surveillance and in a way signify the autonomy of migration. In fact, the border zones are usually at the same time regulated and a potential contact zone. By means of strategies of improvisation and normalisation, the different places’ significances and functions are under continuous negotiation. Even the many apparently completely regulated places in “Borderland Schengen”, places that exist primarily in order to keep migrants in a state of transit, are potential points of contact and may instigate networking. These places include actual border facilities, detention centres, prisons and camps, places usually directly connected to Schengen’s governing migration or to the clandestine economy of smuggling. They also include the many ‘generic’ places or ‘nonplaces’ (Augé, 1995) that migration trajectories also almost always take, like bus stations, harbours, airports or desert zones; i.e. places that cannot even potentially be considered homes as they lack any kind of humane infrastructure.



   

 
  


The films contrast those regulated places with the many contact zones they enquire into; there are numerous improvised places that seem to escape the immediate overseers’ attention – such as deserted houses or ruined factory buildings, gatherings of informally erected shelters such as tents or huts made from plastic bags – or places that provide shelter because of its religious significance, like cemeteries or churches. They are usually found in the less observed outskirts of the cities or in remote (former) industrial zones or rural areas; some are part of an economy of secrecy and illegality (i.e. converted by the owners for an economic purpose), though most are not. Depending on the location, some provide shelter for a night, others for much longer periods. If at all, they can provide a short moment of rest and exchange, but it must be assumed that all those places are well known to the border authorities. In addition to those places, the films show the normalised places of undocumented migration, places simulating certain normality within a state of exception; this includes small desert villages along migration routes where usually the contact between migrants and intermediaries is facilitated, just as well as places connected to support structures and solidarity within the Schengen Area, the trajectories’ knots, places that enable people to slow down – a café, a kebab shop. And while most of those places have a relevance in the specific transit setting only and primarily connect arrival and departure and arrival and departure, and so on, they at the same time also potentially establish specific contact zones and must hence be considered as crucial elements of migrant networks. While the dominant representation of migration to Europe focuses “on the most spectacular moments of migrants’ journeys: The moments when they jump from fences, arrive exhausted in unseaworthy boats at European islands, or hide in fully packed cargo trucks” (Schapendonk, 2012, p.28), the routes and places that the films assume to compose the geography of migration are usually disregarded in the perception of migration. There are two main reasons: firstly, for many of the informal places, invisibility and covertness are constitutive; but, secondly, as stressed before, the common notion of migration is that of being composed of little more than a departure and an arrival – as long as there are no inbetweens, no trajectories, no detours, no geographical cornerstones, no connecting routes, there is no need, not even a cause for a place. In focusing on all those formal and informal places hosting and structuring migration movements, the films make a crucial contribution to challenging common notions of more or less deterritorialised undocumented or clandestine migration movements. The categorisation above is not suggesting a clear-cut division of the different places’ significance or character – for example, that all places are regulated this way or the other – as human beings tend to improvise and develop coping (or normalisation) strategies wherever possible and to appropriate or adapt to even the most regulated and harsh (non-)places. Most places’ significances are interlaced and shift quickly. In addition, on a micro-level, the puzzle of places is composed of and complemented by less easily identifiable pieces that carry significance on the level of each individual migration – this or that phone booth, lorry park, public

 
  
 

  
  
 




square, or memorised places connecting past and present that also clearly signify transnational ties.


 
 
 



 
Although the border facilities and demarcation lines are in most films less prominent than the spaces that span in between these political cornerstones of the borderland, in some of the films those facilities are visualised in different ways. In some cases, the camera directly enquires into them; in others, the physical tangibility of the border is rather traced by means of migrants’ accounts of their border experience. While BAB SEBTA, for example, shortly refers to the visuality of Ceuta’s border fences in the opening scene (see Fig. 2), it afterwards aims at accounting for individuals’ experiences with this border. In many narratives, however, the actual border is less relevant and physical than the unpredictable improvised and informal borders that are structuring their day-to-day lives. One Nigerian’s statement illustrates this; he talks about the barbwire on top of “ten-storeys-high” fences, although he hasn’t actually seen them. As he recalls, “I have not been there, but they say it’s very high. So it’s not so much easy for them to climb and cross over. Even before you touch it, their security will see you and will chase you out of the place. At times they say they shoot them, but I’ve never been there. They shoot the comrades outside. If they say you should not touch and you touch, they say that the Spanish shoot outside, there. But I’ve never been there.”

From many of the narratives, a geography of migration emerges in which the border facilities are not the most important elements, but rather mythical places steeped in legend. LITTLE ALIEN’s enquiry of the various manifestations of borders is in this regard much more thorough. Visually, especially in its opening scenes, the film builds on the persuasiveness of strong contrasts. Particularly the two and a half minutes leading up to the film credits catch the viewer’s attention by means of effective contrasts – on different levels. The very first scene is a long shot of an idyllic forest scene, in an almost romantic way disturbed by two wooden border posts, one painted in Slovakian colours, the other in Ukrainian colours. The posts are presented as alien objects; surreal noisy bird chirping underlines their being misplaced. This shot also refers to a concept that used to be quite relevant before the Schengen regime came into being, that of the ‘green border’. While it foreshadows the harsh contrasts tangible at the Slovakian–Ukrainian border, it may also be interpreted as a wistful reference to what borders used to be and to their arbitrariness and constructedness. Cut. The camera is now inside the Slovakian border facilities and observes the scanning of a lorry for stowaways. In a sequence that has already been referred to in earlier chapters, the camera follows one of the border officers around; he is



   

 
  


obviously extremely concerned about the impression he leaves as a busy, reliable and incorruptible person of law enforcement. He proudly presents the different technical tools in use to survey the border area and to produce images even in absolute darkness. Kusturica’s camera operates in calm long and medium shots and always maintains a distance in order to not ally with the border officer. The viewer feels increasingly uncomfortable, particularly when the officer eventually guides the gaze through an actual border-patrol operation. Switching from camera to camera, he follows a group of four border-crossers and a border-patrol unit until they finally meet and the immigrants are arrested. He continuously comments on the scene: “Those people have no idea that somebody is waiting in front of them and will catch them in a minute … it’s very easy … quite amazing … the best proof material we can get … the end of the trip for them.” Every time he pauses his speech, the background noise of clicking keyboards, alarm beeps, phones ringing, chatter and computer fans gets so loud that it is almost unbearable. And his last statement – that becomes clear very soon after – does not adequately describe what will most likely happen to the people taken into custody. Being caught in most cases does not mean that a journey comes to an end but primarily causes a diversion, a deviation on the immigrant’s way through “Borderland Schengen”, through European zones of transit. The border facilities in this sense add nothing more to the immigrants’ journeys than another nodal point on the various trajectories concerned. In almost every scene of the film, a contrast like this is evident. When a Greek border guard boat leaves the harbour of Mytilene (on an island in the proximity of the Turkish mainland), the viewer realises that it has been docked next to a fun cruise ship. This technique not only stresses the absurdity of the situation but even more the performativity and consequently the instability of borders in general. Here we are in a sphere – the Aegean Sea – that until Greece joined the Schengen Area was a hardly regulated sphere of cultural exchange and contact. The film also sets foot in one of the countless facilities of the Federal Austrian Asylum Office. The camera here observes three huge video terminals screening a sort of welcome film for asylum seekers, explaining Austrian asylum regulations and competencies in 14 different languages. The room is sparsely furnished and stands in remarkable contrast to the warm and friendly tone of the video terminal’s voice and Strauß’s Blue Danube waltz playing in the background. The human voice of the machine prompts the asylum seeker to truthfully and completely fill in the asylum claim form, to add all relevant documentation – even though “gangs of immigrant smugglers and others claim the opposite […] Don’t forget,” it stresses, “smugglers are only interested in your money, not in you as a human being.” The automated video clip ends by drawing the viewer’s attention to IOM’s voluntary repatriation programme. While the camera in the beginning is closely watching, it soon takes some steps back and observes the lunatic scene. In a number of still shots, it measures the space composed by some austere chairs, tables and posts with asylum claim forms; apart from a number of cross-fade shots of people waiting – all of whose narratives

 
  
 

  
  
 




are taken up later in the film – the place is deserted. The film presents the room as threatening and inhabitable – it is not a place; it is an institution – which is particularly evident in contrast to the video terminal’s friendly voice. Most other films stay away from the borders, not at least in order to avoid being made allies of the authorities’ control gaze or to reproduce familiar images. They put the focus on the informal and formal places and structures that are entangled with the border regime – like the reception centre in LA FORTERESSE – not least in order to unmask their paramount role in current paradigms of governing and managing migration movements. The existence of many of those places is beyond belief; they are absurd and yet part of a politics and an economy of control, strongly regulated and inhumane. Fig. 25: Al Kufra expulsion centre

Source: COME UN UOMO SULLA TERRA, Screenshot, 31’45

One of the most significant places in COME UN UOMO SULLA TERRA deals with Al Kufra, a former prison, now expulsion centre located in the Southern Libyan Desert close to the Sudanese border. The place itself is almost exclusively reconstructed from the interviewees’ memories and narratives, supported only by very few additional scenes. And although there is no comment implying this, the viewer automatically assumes that the additional short clips have been taken by means of mobile phones in the prison cells. Some of this footage is played in slow motion, giving it a dreamlike, mythical character – complemented by an agitating sound scene. It is one of few moments where Segre and Yimer use music to make an



 

 
  


anyway highly affective scene unsettling, simple guitar chords with strong reverb. While listening to the interviewees, the camera calmly rests on their faces in closeup shots; it neither forces their answers, nor interrupts them by means of questions or the request for further details. The interview sequences are composed in such a way that an impressively vivid image of the place emerges; it is an image full of potentiality and unactualisability. Seeking the physical manifestation of the prison, the viewer’s gaze can only scan the protagonists’ faces. Instead of answering the question of what Al Kufra looks like, all the viewer is offered are affective images of what the place did to those who went through it. Al Kufra appears to be the focal point of most narratives, which hints at an overarching narrative and symbolism of this very place. It is in some way inscribed in all stories – and at the same time, stories are inscribed in Al Kufra. “My homeland, please forgive me”, “If emigrating is so terrible, give me death”, “Whatever happens, it is for your good”, “If someone kills your father, do not take revenge, leave him in Kufra with no money”, are only some of the many scribbled graffiti that can be found on the walls (Fig. 25). Al Kufra is like a notebook collecting individual stories of the hundreds and thousands imprisoned once or multiple times, before starting the next attempt to reach one of the Northern Libyan hubs. According to the interviewees, upon their first arrival Al Kufra turned out to be completely different from what they expected. The expulsion centre had turned into some kind of “business centre”. While refugees detained in Al Kufra are officially being expelled to Sudan, they are in fact handed over to local intermediaries and smugglers – sold like slaves for 30 dinars. Al Kufra appears to be the nodal point of various transnational social spaces. It is a prison and an expulsion centre for those who are not able to pay for the next leg of their travel – the terminus of many journeys and at the same time the starting point for many others. At the same time, it is a market place; there is a working economy of clandestine migration in place – only it is not literally clandestine at all and includes distinct rules, borders, (financial) interdependencies and power relations, even a half-official scale of fees, a distinct infrastructure. The intermediaries select the refugees they expect to be able to pay further fees in order to be smuggled to the Libyan coast or even further. This fee is usually a couple of hundred USD; halfway between Al Kufra and the coast (usually Benghazi), the refugees are forced to wire this amount using the smugglers’ mobile phones – if they run out of cash they have to call relatives or friends and ask them to make money orders to other intermediaries in Sudan. If they are not able to pay, they are handed over – again – to the Libyan police and usually brought back to Al Kufra. If they pay, they still cannot be sure of reaching their destination: a crucial aspect of the economy at work here is that some of the refugees will be handed over to the police anyway, to be kept in the system and to generate further income. This way, some refugees go back and forth between Al Kufra and the northern Libya for months and months, years even. One of the interviewees, Johannes Eyob, reports having been “arrested seven times and sold five times [...]

  


  
 

  


  
 




always for 30 dinars”, eventually having spent “one year and six months” moving back and forth between northern Libya and Al Kufra. The geographical space between Al Kufra and the North is hardly crossable for the refugees without exposing themselves to this economic system. This system seems to be more or less arbitrary when it comes to determining which refugee has to go which way. It is, however, by no means chaotic as it shows very clear structures – even the technical infrastructure, at least partly sponsored by Italian governments, seems to be well in place. Instead of making repatriation more humane, it even contributes to making undocumented migration through Libya a massive source of private and state income (not only in cash payments, in fees and bribes but even more so in terms of economic cooperation between Europe and Libya, for example in the gas and oil sector). The smugglers seem to have effective operational economic relationships with the Libyan police – Dmallash Amtataw states, “If Mohammud2 dispatches three pick-ups [to Benghazi] he makes sure one is seized.” The refugees do usually not get in touch with the judiciary at all, neither in Sudan nor in Libya. In the interviews, the migrants provide impressive and detailed depictions of Al Kufra’s significance for their individual transit as well as its significance for migration movements from Eastern Africa to Europe on a more general level. Here, many lifelines meet and narratives interweave; some networks collapse, others re-emerge. In the overall narrative of COME UN UOMO SULLA TERRA, Al Kufra is one of the geographical cornerstones that has an iconological significance that is much stronger than those the Eurocentric discourses are focusing on, Lampedusa for example or the newly erected fences cutting the so-called Balkan Route.





   
The existence of the remote migration hub of Al Kufra directs attention to the numerous versatile and unpredictable migration routes that connect the places of migration and at the same time trench the border spaces. The control measures in this regard not only aim at regulating a given space but also at severing the traversing routes and trajectories. Especially BAB SEBTA and Andrea Segre in his films highlight the marches and different means of transport carving their traces into the sand, the detours that have to be taken, the facilitators and the obstacles connected to movement. COME UN UOMO SULLA TERRA exemplarily focuses on the route between northern Libya and Al Kufra prison, introducing the Highway Code that determines the refugees’ movements through that particular geographical space. It at the same time illustrates how such routes are fundamentally structuring transnational social spaces of undocumented migration.























































2

Derogatory label for Arab middlemen.



   

 
  


The course of those routes, and thus the refugees’ movements, is by no means direct or linear. The routes do not simply connect places; they have a life on their own. There is no such thing as a logical geography in place and the roads cannot be measured in kilometres but rather in months and years. Johannes Eyob says that he “thought the journey would only be from Sudan to Kufra, from Kufra to Libya and from Libya to Italy. But it wasn’t that way. What I did not expect is everything that came in between.” The routes little by little lose their functional meaning and become part of social practice. While there is a brutally calculating economy of mobility in place, from a migrant perspective places and routes in this regard relate to each other in some kind of black-box mode – their existence is well known, but it is unforeseeable how long the individual will be caught in this system. While the movement on the route between Kufra and the northern Libyan cities usually goes back and forth, the way from Sudan to Kufra is a one-way street. Going back is not considered an option: “Going back means crossing about 2,000 kilometres of desert. It’s the Sahara! Even if it’s not easy to go ahead it’s more reasonable to push ahead.” And even if the Libyan officials did repel the refugees, they would only be brought as far as Sudan. Usually from there it is more attractive to begin another attempt to the North than to go back to the place of departure. Al Kufra appears as a place where “human rights are not even a possibility” (di Maio, 2013, p.51); they are contrasted by the austere atmosphere of the Centro di Permanenza Temporanea in which the interviews take place. Although this atmosphere seems to provide the migrants with the opportunity to take some rest, it at the same time clearly illustrates the temporary character of the stay in the centre – and maybe even in Italy. Although this issue is not explicitly addressed in the interviews or raised by the directors, the camera amplifies this impression – while it closely approaches the interviewees, they do not seem to be part of or in any personal way connected to this surrounding. And, yet, neither should be underestimated in their functioning as crucial contact zones. The way in which Al Kufra and the routes leading to and from Al Kufra are part of the narratives not only stunningly widens the perspective on migration trajectories and transit in Libya, but is also part of an appropriation strategy, a ‘prophetic vision of the past’, accounting for the temporal-spatial dimension of the individual’s experience. This is even more impressive in the case of a second important and no less iconic cornerstone of many of the migrants’ journeys, the freight container. Those containers are commonly used to transport the migrants back and forth between Al Kufra and the North – hence they are the only connection between this surreal place in the middle of nowhere and the world in which the migrants’ desire to continue and eventually terminate their journeys may materialise. One of COME UN UOMO SULLA TERRA’s key scenes is set around, and in, such a 40-foot standard container, which is similar to those used to transport Yimer and other refugees from Benghazi to Al Kufra after the police had seized them – or, strictly speaking, the intermediaries turned them in. Interviewees depict this as a traumatising trip, 110 people in hardly 30 square metres, without water or fresh

 
  
 

  
  
 




air for one and a half days. Yimer virtually goes back to this place and occupies it; he slowly, even anxiously, approaches the container, touches it and hesitates before he finally opens the doors and enters the dark space (Fig. 26). He recalls how being caught in the container drove him mad; then he starts to seize and redefine the space with his own memories and experiences made after escaping this system of refugee trade. By developing individual strategies of coping and adapting, he dissects this part of his migration and tries to define the way to put it back together again in a performative way. The film does not suggest that his wounds will heal that way; it, however, illustrates how important it is to identify and redefine the different threads of each individual’s story connected to and at the same time contrasting with a mutual narrative. Fig. 26: Occupying the container

Source: COME UN UOMO SULLA TERRA, Screenshot, 23'42

The container is, however, a highly ambivalent symbol. It represents a space of imprisonment, lack of rights, paternalism and degradation – at the same time it symbolises free movement on a global scale. The container is a free-mover itself, being shipped around the world, being loaded onto lorries and transported, for example, all through Europe – it is a highly visible element of European integration and the Schengen principle of free movement of goods. Containers with the logos of European transport and trade companies can be spotted even on the smallest streets all over the world. The refugees for their part are transported like goods through the Libyan Desert in containers like this – perceived only as being human



 

 
  


(in contrast to free-moving goods), however, when it comes to the limitations of free movement especially across the Mediterranean. Besides being extremely iconic, the container has a transnational character per se; it is firstly a physical space that is part of most refugees’ journeys across Libya, moving through a social space with various actors following different interests – on the part of the intermediaries and the police, it must be assumed that those interests are less grounded in regulative measures than being of predominantly financial character; this space is transnational with regards to the actors and interests structuring and determining power relations, accessibility of routes and places, social constraints and borders – those, in other words, permanently redrawing the map. The container is secondly a transnational social space itself in which people, regardless of their national, religious and gender background, are squeezed in and conditioned. The state of transit itself and the highly determined geographical space between the key places linked to an individual’s refuge can, vice versa, be considered a container; it expands into Al Kufra. While Al Kufra must be considered a complex constellation of formal and informal infrastructure and economy, the films find several institutionalised places that are characterised by a similar cynicism and even perversion. The institutional geographies of migration management strongly rely on reception and deportation centres and camps, often euphemistically referred to as homes. Not least the Dublin Regulations – which assign responsibility for a person’s asylum claim to the country of first entry and hence provide a nation state with the opportunity to detain an asylum seeker without accounting for the asylum claim at all – turn those institutions into sites between states and liminal zones of exception (Agamben, 1998), territory that in fact lies between sovereign states, manipulating geography in order to undermine their legal commitments (Mountz, 2011). LA FORTERESSE confronts the viewer with one of those highly regulated spaces of exception and crucial elements in the European migration regime, the Reception and Processing Centre of the Swiss Federal Office for Migration (CEP3) in the Swiss municipality of Vallorbe in the canton of Vaud.4 Entering this specific microcosm, the Swiss filmmaker Fernand Melgar follows the daily routines of asylum seekers and centre staff for a period of 10 weeks overall. Enquiring into a specifically regulated border space, his camera “unrestrictedly penetrates into the























































3

Empfangs – und Verfahrenszentrum (EVZ) des Bundesamts für Migration, one of seven reception centres in Switzerland (including one at Zürich airport). All are located close to the Swiss borders with France, Germany, Italy or Austria.

4

Although not a member state of the European Union, Switzerland ratified a Schengen association agreement in October 2004. Technically the agreement came into force only in December 2008 – Schengen regulations have, however, been implemented and widely applied since a popular referendum in 2005.

  


  
 

  


  
 




universe” of the centre, presenting “a human gaze at an austere transition pace, where 200 men, women and children […] are awaiting the state’s decision on their behalf” (LA FORTERESSE, 2009, DVD cover). It does not follow one or several particular asylum seekers’ lives at the centre but picks up their stories randomly.5 Like most of the filmmakers referred to in this work, Melgar has his own migration history: he is the son of Spanish unionists who were exiled to Morocco to escape the Franco regime. In 1963, his parents emigrated to Switzerland as seasonal labourers and smuggled him to the country in their baggage (Mandelbaum, 2012). Since the 1980s, he has worked as a self-educated film director and producer. LA FORTERESSE has been produced in the cinematic 35mm format and premiered at Locarno Film Festival in 2008. It was screened at several national and international film festivals all over the world, winning about a dozen jury and audience awards (Climage, 2016); in 2009, it was eventually released on DVD. Vallorbe has about 3,500 inhabitants and is located in a rural basin a few kilometres from the French border and about 40 kilometres northwest of the city of Lausanne. The director, Fernand Melgar, provides neither an explanatory comment, nor any kind of relativisation or outright contextualisation. Often the viewer is left unoriented in the centre space; apparently Melgar aims at putting the audience in a situation that – at least remotely – mirrors the asylum seekers’. Only after almost five minutes does the viewer realise, by means of a sign on a glass door, that this fenced and guarded place is – technically – not a prison but a reception centre; and it takes the viewer almost half the film to find out where this centre is located. In the centre, the Swiss authorities interrogate asylum seekers at least twice. Based on the interviews, a decision on their asylum claim is made, usually within 60 days. After the second interview, the interrogator has three options at hand to evaluate a request for asylum: in case he/she decides to reject the claim, the claimant has to leave the country immediately; if he/she grants the asylum seeker temporary protection, the claimant is allowed to stay in Switzerland for a further 12 months; if he/she grants the claimant refugee status, he/she is protected for life. At Vallorbe, refugee status is granted in fewer than one out of 100 claims (Climage, 2016). In most cases, asylum is denied and refugees are prompted to leave the country within a limited number of days; in other cases, a provisional permission























































5

Against the background of how the centre and the interaction of the protagonists in the centre are portrayed, Melgar’s motivation to shoot the film must be considered as a politically motivated intervention; it seems that he felt morally obliged to comment on Swiss immigration laws and policies in a situation where on the one hand the number of asylum seekers was at a 20-year low, and on the other the popular vote for the socalled Lex Blocher in September 2006 made Swiss immigration laws much more restrictive.



 

 
  


to stay is issued.6 The centre provides 200 to 300 places and asylum seekers are regularly transferred to other Swiss reception or detention centres, particularly in cases of provisional permission to stay. For the time of their stay in Vallorbe, the migrants do not have a clear status. They are kept in limbo; in most cases this does not change with departure. Neither is Vallorbe the starting point for any of the asylum seekers’ journeys – nor is it anybody’s terminus. The ends are loose; Vallorbe is nothing more than an intersection between legality and becoming illegalised, between regularity and irregularity. Vallorbe, in this regard, is a generic place in the European geographies of migration, at the same time it is a self-sustaining space of transit itself, a borderland within the borderland. Although a four-metre fence surrounds the centre, at daytime the migrants accommodated here are allowed to leave it for a couple of strictly defined hours – at least if they do not have an interview scheduled and given that they “did their cleaning properly”, as security staff put it. In general, LA FORTERESSE illustrates the extent to which the border is in many regards a practice; the border as a physically tangible facility is here replaced by a border that is primarily a social technique, a conditioning mechanism. The actual fence around the centre – a fading memory of the border – in this regard represents discipline much more than security.7 Within the centre, the migrants encounter the borders they might have expected to cross long ago. The space is made a border space by specific techniques of interrogation, a specific social hierarchy and a set of degrading rules. Those rules also fundamentally structure the asylum seekers’ routines and movement within the centre. The crossing of one of the diverse borders that exist in the centre is sanctioned immediately. That it is almost impossible not to cross those boundaries, and that it necessarily happens unnoticed in many cases, is illustrated by one of the opening sequences of LA FORTERESSE; after filling in the relevant forms and undergoing a physical examination including a drug test – all conducted without an interpreter – a newly arrived man from Armenia, who speaks neither French nor English, is shown to his room. There he meets the first person in the centre he is able to communicate with, a Lithuanian from Vilnius; he shows him around and introduces the Armenian to the many written and especially unwritten laws and rules that























































6

Based on official numbers for the year 2007, as quoted in the film’s closing titles: out of 10,387 claims for asylum, in 2,745 cases provisional admissions and in 1,561 cases asylum have been granted (LA FORTERESSE, 2009). Between 2008 and 2015, the recognition rate in Switzerland ranged between 11.7% in 2012 and 25.6% in 2014 (Statista, 2016).

7

In Agamben’s sense, discipline must be considered the opposite of security; while discipline aims at producing order, security aims at governing a form of disorder (2001) that is almost impossible within the narrow boundaries of the centre.

  


  
 

  


  
 




structure the migrants’ daily lives in the centre and explains all the formal procedures he will have to undergo. Although the migrants have nothing to do in the centre, they are woken up at six in the morning, and breakfast is served at seven. The Lithuanian introduces the Armenian to the centre’s closing times, the daily allowance of three euros, the taking of fingerprints, the interviews, table-tennis facilities, the buildings and infrastructure in general; they talk about the Armenian lacking any kind of papers and about the public phone ringing all the time. The Lithuanian migrant talks in a laconic voice, his perfect explanation of the rules illustrating how the migrants themselves are made part of a system that has been established less to control but rather to condition them. Although he has been in the centre for two weeks, he makes it very clear that it is not a good idea to mess with the rules or with authorities. You can sleep in, for sure, but then you don’t get breakfast; the space for disobedience is marginal: if you want to smoke inside the building, go to the toilet so the guards don’t see you. Strict rules also apply to the migrants’ exit and entry; this finds an impressive expression in a sequence where two of the migrants are being denied entrance to the building because they are late – i.e. arriving after half past five in the afternoon – and apparently a bit drunk. The security staff dismiss them to a special building, some kind of sobering-up cell, where they have to spend the night. Others who also come late are put in their place, which means they have to wait in a specially designated area for no obvious reason until they are eventually allowed entry; as one security staff member clarifies: “This is the rule of the game. You come late, you wait.” In sum, there is little space for self-determined decisions between either following the rules or breaking them. Primarily those narratives captured in a less formal setting and the camera’s observations of interaction establish the physical and social space of the centre based on the daily routines and the many written and unwritten rules and regulations with regard to the migrants’ behaviour and movement inside and outside it. Migration in the microcosm of the centre is primarily a social relation. Four groups of people share the centre space, their relationship clearly hierarchised and extremely complex; in addition to the migrants, there are the federal decision makers and centre administration, private companies such as Securitas providing the security-service staff technically running the centre and also hiring asylum seekers to do the cooking and cleaning, and an institutionalised pastoral-care service. In many situations, the camera tries to be an unnoticed spectator of the interaction between those four groups. Often, it observes conversations through glass panes – either from outside of the building looking inside, or from opposite the centre’s reception desk – or its gaze is otherwise obstructed. The centre staff in most scenes uphold a similar distance to the inmates; referring to the number of new arrivals and organisational issues such as transferring asylum seekers to other centres, they seem to sit on the safe side of a glass pane. This is particularly the case in the first half of the film; in the second half, the virtual glass panes show



 

 
  


some cracks. The narratives that the camera captures necessarily remain incomplete. They have neither a beginning nor an end; the incidents reported and circumstances reflected in the interviews do not compose a full picture. Each extract is a piece of a puzzle that eventually aims at shedding light on the Swiss asylum system and its involvement with the overall Schengen framework. Several times, the camera observes official information meetings, where staff prove to be dramatically under-qualified. A man called Olivier, for example, after presenting himself as the person who will decide some of the asylum seekers’ claims, addresses the issue of “hanging around at the station” – on the one hand, denying the refugees their basic human right to move freely (even within this very small, highly regulated temporary universe of theirs), reprimanding them like misbehaving teenagers, and, on the other, implicitly, reminding them of their panoptical visibility and his position as an overseer. Moreover, he informs them that they are not entitled to solve conflicts among themselves but instead are expected to involve security staff (Securitas) to do so on their behalf. While Olivier is walking around, lecturing like a teacher, the camera mingles with the crowd of inmates and takes the angle of a person sitting – thus even intensifying the humiliating situation. At the same time, it becomes obvious that leaving the centre space by no means implies leaving the socially controlled space that transgresses the actual fences of the centre. In other scenes, the camera reveals what can be read as a parent–child relationship, for example when the inmates have to go to bed although they are hungry and not tired. Clear – if not to say racist – hierarchies are also illustrated when security staff call inmates by their nationalities instead of their names. While the interrogators in many scenes clearly doubt the accuracy of the asylum seekers’ cooperation, the camera takes a sympathetic angle and does not scrutinise the protagonists’ truthfulness. In most cases, it even takes a perspective that makes it an accomplice of the asylum seeker rather than of the centre staff – for example, entering an interrogation room side by side with an asylum seeker and sitting on his or her side of the table like a lawyer or interpreter. Just like the migrants in these situations, the audience cannot gaze behind the blinds of the authorities and has no idea about the information that may pop up on the interrogator’s screen. In one case, a man from Nigeria is questioned about his flight. The interrogator seems to be highly sceptical and continuously interrupts the man and his interpreter. After some time, the interpreter confronts the Nigerian man with the information that Austrian authorities filed two cases of cocaine smuggling connected to his name. The man denies it, but the way he is interviewed does not provide him with enough space to explain his version of the story properly. Documenting personal crises like this one, the camera’s position transmits the pressure put on the asylum seeker and triggers even stronger emotions of sympathy and affect. It at the same time hardly provides the space for pity.

  


  
 

  


  
 




In the course of the film, it becomes obvious how ambiguous the film’s title in fact is. While at first glance it seems to refer to the catchword of ‘Fortress Europe’, hence translating into the idea of keeping people out – one of the three pastors employed in order to provide pastoral care gives it an additional, even contradictory meaning when he cites a Bible verse in a service with refugees from Iraq: “‘Tu es la forteresse où je trouve refuge, tu es mon Dieu, j’ai confiance en toi.’ […] Il te protégera, tu trouveras chez lui un refuge.” A fortress not only serves the purpose of keeping people out of something; at the same time it provides refuge and keeps those inside safe. But the fortress is referred to here in a third sense. A couple of times, the impressive house hosting the centre (Fig. 27) – built in the late 19th century as a luxury hotel and turned into military barracks in the 1950s, today fenced and surrounded by a few functional buildings – is filmed from afar in long shots, almost cartoon-like portraying it sharply against the background of the dark forest and the blurring evening mist as a small fortress within Fortress Europe. Taking such a patient and distant position, the camera stresses the absurdity of a reception centre in the middle of nowhere. This impression is even intensified by an, in some cases, obviously tilted perspective. On a small scale, it resembles “Borderland Schengen”, one of the main features being its semipermeable but extremely regulated walls. Vallorbe is a borderland and at the same time lies in a borderland – and it keeps people in transit. Fig. 27: A fortress within Fortress Europe

Source: LA FORTERESSE, Screenshot, 71'05

The film starts and ends with departure situations. According to transfer lists put up only the evening before, those who have to leave are informed of their immediate departure. They are either transferred to another centre by means of a bus or by themselves taking the train. Those who are not being transferred are apparently



 

 
  


left to their own devices; Melgar documents one case where the asylum claim is terminally rejected and the claimant is prompted to sign a form and then – as Securitas staff express it – “leave the country within 24 hours. Merci, au revoir.” The scene is at the same time banal and grotesque; the man plods towards the exit without any luggage or personal belongings – with his personal data and story well documented in the Schengen Information System’s database. After the bus transferring refugees to other centres has left, the camera patiently observes another absurd incident. A Roma family – a mother with four children, the youngest one paralysed and sitting in a wheelchair – are on their way to the train station to transfer to Lausanne. Halfway to the station, security staff come running after them and confiscate the wheel chair. While they push the wheelchair back to the centre, the oldest son of the family has to carry his sister piggyback in order to continue the journey. No ties allowed – transit in “Borderland Schengen” is an absolute condition; human dignity is nothing less than a contingency. And the borders within the border zones are bespoke, the individuals’ being inside and outside, being legal and illegal, potentially alters in the blink of an eye. This is even truer for the camp as the most extreme manifestation of institutionalised border spaces, rock bottom of self-determination and freedom of movement so to speak. Usually located in remote rural areas, the camp must be considered a “diagram of a power that acts by means of general visibility” (Foucault 1977a, p.171); it condenses and magnifies at the very same time. In her short film LE HEIM (2005), Leona Goldstein investigates this specific camp space. In the pretitle sequence, the camera seems to aimlessly wander through a forest, only to eventually arrive at a barbwire fence that surrounds a camp for asylum seekers near the small village of Waldsieversdorf, some 60 kilometres from Berlin and not far from the Polish border. In a huge area, isolated in the middle of the woods and formerly used by the GDR army, at the time of filming 18 adults and three children are accommodated. The facilities are run-down, the heating does not work – the next bus stop is four kilometres from the camp, the next supermarket even further. The asylum seekers’ movement is additionally limited through the so-called residence obligation; each of their travels across the district borders (in this case a perimeter of about 35 kilometres) needs to be approved by the authorities. Welfare is paid primarily in the form of vouchers instead of cash; in addition, they are not allowed to work – understandably they feel imprisoned. LE HEIM confronts the viewer with the ultimate form of an existence in a state of transit; condemned to inaction, all the asylum seekers are allowed to do here is to “eat, sleep and die”, as one of them states. In their sparsely furnished rooms they have a bed, a table and a chair – those who are lucky have a small radio. Every once in a while, police deport one of the inmates. Goldstein establishes the camp as a space of constant uncertainty and stress. It injures its inhabitants by refusing them any kind of normality, rest and intimacy. While with one exception, Goldstein avoids showing any of the camp staff or authorities, it is pretty clear that

  


  
 

  


  
 




the space is structured along the lines of meaningless rules and procedures, the decline of basic and immediate needs – she, however, enquires of it from the asylum seekers’ perspective, capturing their narratives and accounting for their experiences. In doing so, she establishes the camp as a waiting space – but at the same time LE HEIM illustrates that the camp in general makes the recognition of asylum seekers as subjects almost impossible. In being deprived of the opportunity to act and speak at all, there is no describing, explaining, contextualising of actions; as Arendt (1998) put it very pessimistically, a “life without speech and without action […] is literally dead to the world; it has ceased to be a human life because it is no longer lived among men” (p.176). All there is to do is waiting; everybody is waiting for something without knowing for what exactly and for how long – but assumes that it will eventually be deportation. In this regard, the camp is a social technique as much as a border space. While this specific camp was relocated to another village in 2007, similar places can be found all over Europe and beyond – what is more, the European Union apparently envisages developing its immigration policies towards establishing a closer “interplay of border facilities, camps and quotas” (Angenendt, Kipp and Koch, 2016, p.1), heralding nothing less than the Union’s immigration policies’ fundamental reorientation, including exterritorial asylum facilities. Fig. 28: Double standards

Source: COME UN UOMO SULLA TERRA, Screenshot, 23'42

While Goldstein’s film can be read as the attempt to break the silence and inaction, Adrian Paci’s short non-documentary film CENTRO DI PERMANENZA TEMPORANEA (2007) in a more abstract way characterises the whole geography of reception, identification and detention centres and camps as creating dead ends deprived of temporality and spatiality. In the first third of the roughly five-minute film, he



   

 
  


observes how, one by one, a group of people climb the stairs of a gangway standing on an airport runway. After they all stop moving, the camera screens their faces, some resigned and frustrated, others full of hope. After another minute, the camera zooms out and it becomes obvious that the gangway does not lean against an aircraft (Fig. 28). While in the background aircrafts are landing and taking off, the people on the gangway stand calm and wait – even more, they seem to have settled in this position of waiting. Setting the film at an airport in full swing makes the scene even more eerie; it clearly illustrates the double standards that exist in terms of mobility and border permeability. Even after the viewer grasps the whole idea of the setting and its metaphorical function, Paci continues to present closeup shots of the prevented travellers’ faces and long shots of the gangway, more and more turning it into a sculpture.



 

Focusing particularly the breach of fundamental rights in flight situations and on minor refugees’ daily lives in different settings, LITTLE ALIEN is, in addition, remarkable for the narrative and visual principles it deploys in order to construct and present “Borderland Schengen” as a contact zone. Although it must be assumed that one of the main aims of the European Union’s policy of exterritorialisation and transit is to avoid contact, Nina Kusturica documents the various levels of transnational and trans-social networking, support and self-organisation, but also the migrants’ involvement in personal relations and exposure to the respective context. Particularly the film’s sound engineering and camera work intensify this impression time and time again. At the same time, LITTLE ALIEN understands the borderland as encompassing various contact zones, communicative intersections of migration trajectories that lie below the radar of direct surveillance. Those contact zones are not particularly clandestine or hidden places, but rather discreet appropriated spaces that are characterised by a particular normality. Kusturica is particularly interested in those areas that historically served as zones of cultural contact, of trade and exchange, i.e. harbours, bus and train stations – most of those places changed their character completely due to being connected to the Schengen border regime in one way or another. The idea of exploring the borderlands’ contact zones is deeply rooted in the genesis of the film. Kusturica’s starting point was the refugee centre in the small city of Traiskirchen, 20 kilometres south of the Austrian capital, Vienna – actually one of the many zones of no contact in the European migration regime. About 80 youths lived there when Kusturica started researching for the film but authorities did not allow her to talk to them at all. With the help of volunteers, the film team was eventually able to meet the teenagers on a daytrip to the idyllic

  


  
 

  


  
 




vineyards of the Lower Austrian spa town, Baden; here they explained their project and invited everybody interested to come to the kebab/coffee shop in Traiskirchen the next day (Kusturica, 2009). Instead of doing interviews with the youths, the camera primarily observes; it follows the youths’ day-to-day lives outside the centre, their conversations, networking and making contacts with other people. The kebab/coffee shop – where it all began – is one of the central spots throughout the film; by accompanying the migrants, the camera measures the generic space between the refugee centre, the coffee shop and the train station time and time again. At the beginning of the film, the camera follows two newly arrived Somali youth, Nura Bishar and Asha Abdirahman, both 16 years of age, being first picked up at the refugee centre’s gate by an older Somali woman who claims to have lived in Austria for 17 years and to being “the first Somali here”; the three of them walk to the coffee shop and discuss the two girls’ asylum cases. They touch many different issues such as agedetermination procedures that undocumented youths have to undergo usually, medical questions and the asylum procedures in general. The two girls quickly seem to trust the woman, openly discussing what is on their mind – but the camera also puts a lot of trust in the woman, she is in charge of the movements they make. The small group defines the camera’s scope of movement. More and more she turns into the girls’ guardian angel. She also directs them to the few other places that seem to be part of support structure; among them is a charity shop where the girls get warm coats. The coffee shop as a contact zone outside the reach of the control apparatus is of crucial importance in Kusturica’s capturing topographies of migration. Several times and in different constellations, the camera returns to the coffee shop; it seems to have a vital function in many of the refugees’ lives. In contrast to the gapless surveillance within the walls of the refugee centre and the complete absence of privacy – from group accommodation in sparse rooms to the tough interrogations by the Austrian authorities – it seems to serve as a retreat, a private sphere within the public domain. Even for something that in a less exceptional setting would be referred to as a romantic date, Asha Abdirahman and 17-yearold Achmad Abdirahman8 go to the coffee shop in search of some kind of normality. At the same time, it is presented as part of a support structure, a place to share knowledge, to network, to survive; in other words, “the best place to be”, as Asha Abdirahman states. This permutation of public and private space can be observed frequently in the films; while the private space in the centre is under surveillance, the public space offers private niches. But the coffee shop is also the place where the individual’s experience has its place, and where experiences can be put together to form some kind of narrative. For many of the refugees, it is the first occasion to speak about what they lived through – to narrativise their journeys in their own words and try to make sense of























































8

Abdirahman is a quite common name in Somalia; the two are not related.



   

 
  


their experiences and their current situation, and at the same time perform their narrative in anticipation of the official interviews to come. Hence this place also offers the camera an opportunity it cannot find elsewhere. Most remarkable in this sense is a sequence shot in a similar place, a sort of cultural centre or school, where a larger group of migrants with different national backgrounds – Kurdish, Iranian, Somali, Afghan – come together and talk about their journeys to Europe. Most of them lost their way more than once, eventually unaware in which country or even continent they had ended up. Over an atlas of the world, four of the minors reflect on their back-and-forth travelling, deportations, sinking boats and police brutality in the Mediterranean region, corrupt and sarcastic border patrols – and about their survival and coping strategies. Most of the time, however, the camera does not follow their fingers on the maps but remains on their faces, hanging on to their every word. While they talk, the group gathering around the atlas gets bigger and bigger. And, yet, places like this one and the coffee shop have a clear temporality; in most cases the migrants are relocated to Vienna or another bigger city shortly after they receive legal status. As on the level of its figures and narratives, the film does not capture space in a representative way or in the form of a geographical measurement. While the camera is extremely mobile and autonomous and apparently not committed to spatial consistency, it establishes a transnational social topography consisting of the places in which migration experiences crystallise because the movement comes to a (temporary) halt or is even more accelerated. In general, LITTLE ALIEN contrasts two fundamentally different kinds of migration spaces: on the one hand, it measures the panoptical situation in the many highly regulated spaces in search of contradictions and the subject’s autonomy; on the other hand, it seeks those places in the border zones that are apparently not under direct surveillance and enquires into how its protagonists ambitions and needs are confronted with social conditioning, pre-existing knowledge and immanent control mechanisms. The camera’s enquiry illustrates that those places complement each other in a specific economy of the border zone; neither can control be absolute, nor are there places in which control can be evaded per se. This becomes evident, for example, when the elderly Somali woman takes the two girls to her place in Vienna. In her cosy living room, they listen to Arab music, they try different perfumes and just chat about this and that. When Nura receives a mobile-phone call from her brother, who is stuck in Greece, the woman instructs her not to disclose any specific information about his whereabouts and she refuses to give him her address on the phone. “The police listen to the conversation. You have to be careful. You don’t talk about these things on the phone.” Although the three, until the very moment of the phone call, give the impression of being in a safe, private place, the pressure wielded by the specifically conditioned woman becomes so unbearable that Nura eventually asks her brother to call back later – presumably in a moment when she can talk openly, i.e. a moment when the woman

  


  
 

  


  
 




is not present; for Nura, in this situation, the woman takes the role of a protector as well as that of a supervisor. This ambiguous simultaneous absence and presence of the control regime is also clearly illustrated in another place that Nina Kusturica finds – a run-down factory in the Spanish exclave of Ceuta. The camera follows three teenagers living there in an extremely informal setting. The floors are covered with litter and dust, the walls with scribbles and drawings, the windows are barred and the teenagers share the huge place with a number of cats and clothes lines. While the establishing shot of the building from the outside may be read as part of a rather conventional construction of the sequence, it can also be understood as replicating the monitoring gaze of the control apparatus that is subsequently contrasted by one of the teenager’s nervous scrutiny of the forecourt. Inside the building, the camera captures the teenagers mostly in medium shots, standing or lying around with nothing to do. The camera’s only interest lies in them, in their interplay and in their faces. Neither does it explore the building or its surrounding or exact location; nor does it investigate the young men’s backgrounds or ask how they were able to enter the heavily fenced and guarded enclave of Ceuta from Moroccan territory in the first place. Obviously at least one of them applied for asylum or residence; he presents the other two teenagers with an official notification of his pending deportation and decides to burn it. The three of them start a discussion about whether this is a good idea – “You have to carry this with you at all times,” stresses one of them – and eventually the young man just throws it in the corner. The camera’s behaviour in the building reflects the place’s location in what seems to be the middle of nowhere. Nothing is clear here; the young men are kept in limbo. On the one hand, the place seems to be a hideout providing at least some form of shelter and rest – there are some mattresses and other signs of everyday life; on the other hand, they are constantly watching the compound – which is extremely complicated as the windows are barred and located more than two metres above the ground – as they apparently expect the police to raid the house. It is a shelter and a trap at the same time. There is nothing much for them to do but wait around and screen the spaces for their options in terms of making the next move, places and routes that will allow them mobility. They talk about the vacation season having started, which apparently provides them with a little more space and rest because “when the tourists are here, the cops don’t spend much time chasing us”. While assessing their own prospects rather negatively, they tell each other stories of those who’ve made it, for example a man who “went onto the Spanish mainland on top of a truck”. Eventually they leave the building through a hole in the wall to “check out the area”, all the time referring to the feeling of being watched. Later, they sit at a roundabout next to the ferry harbour and watch out for new lorries, assessing their chances of following the example of those who have already made it to the European mainland. The camera follows their gazes, slowly and somewhat disenchanted. The sound scene is hyper-realistic, street noises and footsteps extremely



 

 
  


loud as if to cover up all the frustration in the teenagers’ voices. In the background, every couple of minutes a ferry’s horn blows and drowns out all other noise – as if to remind the teenagers of their ambitions, pointing also to the simultaneity of mobility and immobility that is one of the founding principles of governing Schengen.



   


In addition to the spaces and places clearly linked to border and transit, some of the films also every now and again visit spaces that stand out because of their sheer normality. In the context of undocumented migration, they often appear unusual and unexpected. While such a space in LA FORTERESSE is hardly available as every gesture of normality is prevented or sanctioned, COME UN UOMO SULLA TERRA especially enfolds such normalised spaces of everyday life into its understanding of a topography of migration. When Dagmawi Yimer discusses his motivation to shoot the film with his Italian girlfriend over dinner, just such an unexpected space emerges. In this, he occupies not only his narrative but also a physical space in order to redefine the boundaries between public space and private space. While privacy is normally extremely limited, if available at all in the undocumented migrants’ state of transit – either because they are accommodated in a setting that neither allows nor intends any kind of privacy or because they have been conditioned by the potential presence of the overseer, as in the case of the three Somali mentioned above – the film specifically provokes the assumption of an existence of private migratory spaces. And while, for example, in 2014, protest movements jointly organised by local and refugee activists in a number of European capitals occupied public space by means of tent camps and improvised housing – linking the demand for a right to residence with questions regarding the ongoing privatisation and surveillance of public space – the film raises questions of the organisation of migration movements also as a question of the organisation of everyday life (Tsomou and Gaier, 2015) in the private space. In this regard, the enquiry concerns a specific, deliberate unrecognisabilty in the public sphere – and the establishment of sites that are opaque in that they are impenetrable by the exposing gaze of the overseer and allow alternative subjectivities (Drabinski and Parham, 2015) as well as creativity. Yimer claims this in a double sense, by inhabiting private space that denies a specific form of rootedness and at the same time enquires into migration spaces with a camera, capturing on film narratives and inviolable subjectivities that have been erased from official history (Crowley, 2006). His camera in this regard is both poetic and critical. Two further places in the film have a crucial significance, and it can be observed that the camera aims at capturing as much normality as possible – although

  


  
 

  


  
 




they are both certainly closely observed. The first one is the migrants’ group accommodation in a temporary residence in the Italian capital, Rome; what we mainly see are the kitchen and a sparsely furnished joint living room. It remains unclear who actually lives in that place but it seems to be a kind of home for all interviewees. While everything is quite functional and it seems impossible to make this place home, or even call it home, a mutual sense of belonging emerges in the images that is apparently strongly connected to the group of people rather than to the place itself. Secondly, most of the protagonists play active roles in the Asinitas Onlus School of Italian Language – in contrast to current integration discourses in the European context, this school is portrayed as a place of empowerment, not a place of subordination or a tool of the majority society’s exercise of power. Some of the protagonists seem to have teaching tasks here; it is a place of social life and artistic self-expression. For many of them, in addition, the language school is the place where they reassemble their networks. It is an important place in the refugees’ networks – and at the same time shows that the geographies of refuge are limited, that migration in many cases happens within a very well-defined pattern and monitored space. They do not meet again by chance – they meet again because they had to follow the same routes, regardless of the many detours that had to be taken. Even in the strictly regulated space of the centre in LA FORTERESSE, zones of contact can be detected where a certain intimacy is possible. Melgar specifically enquires into two of those spaces; one is an unfurnished room that is used as a hairdressing salon. One of the migrants cuts the others’ hair by means of a trimmer, but this is apparently only the starter to talk about their own experiences and ambitions but also politics. In one sequence, a group of Iraqi refugees even starts a fight about the question of who actually is responsible for the terrible political situation in the country they fled. The hairdresser locks the room from the inside and thus creates a space where one can speak his mind and talk off the record. It’s a tiny little space of intimacy that does not relativise the migrants’ dislocation in general – its relevance should, however, not be underestimated as a space in which a politics of placement and counter-topography is at least possible. In this regard also a second kind of intimate space is interesting; it is connected to the pastoral care offered in the centre. Several sequences show how migrants talk to the pastors, who invite them to openly talk about their journeys, their concerns and worries. Equally important are the spaces that emerge by means of the migrants’ connectedness in terms of communication technology used “to navigate the political space of possibility and transnational mobility” (Mountz, 2011, p.394). In COME UN UOMO SULLA TERRA, mobile phones are described as a crucial means to make money transfers facilitating the constant back and forth between the desert prison Al Kufra and the Mediterranean shores. In this regard, the phone is of vital significance in order to organise one’s movement along the borders. But it is also a crucial tool for facilitating the maintenance of transnational networks with families or those who have been left behind, as well as with other people on the move



 

 
  


in the borderland. Almost all the films include sequences in which people are on the phone, talking to remote others; in COME UN UOMO SULLA TERRA, Yimer and Negga Demitse are filmed trying to call a friend who stayed behind in Libya and is apparently still imprisoned there. At first, they do not manage to get through – “We better not get them into trouble. We run the risk of causing real problems,” they worry. “They never answer when police is around.” In LA FORTERESSE, one man from North Africa calls the 6-year-old daughter he obviously had to leave behind. The way he talks to her, making promises about seeing her soon and telling her little white lies, illustrates the social pressure he is under, but at the same time allows him to verbalise his ambitions. He tells her that he is in Switzerland and “met some people who understand me” and that he is going to meet her mother soon – it remains unclear where she is – obviously not with the daughter. Eventually the daughter seems to be forced to hang up. In LITTLE ALIEN, 15-year-old Juma Karimi phones up his father in Afghanistan and talks about being deported from Italy to Greece, about being on the run from the police, about working hard as soon as he is able, eventually, to buy a house with his earnings. Much more than anything else, those scenes illustrate the distances covered – physically and emotionally – by the migrants. They show families not being torn apart but being stretched across continents. Information technology is not only important with regard to communication itself and the exchange of information in a specific network; mobile phones at the same time work as navigation tools that potentially facilitate the individual’s localisation, which contrasts with a fixed state of dislocation. In addition, they are used as a means not only of communication but also of documentation; while mobile-phone footage is apparently only used in HAVARIE and BAB SEBTA, the Internet is full of short clips created by people in border situations. In sum, the films in many regards on the one hand illustrate the socio-geographical structure of “Borderland Schengen” and a politics of protracted liminality implemented by means of specific exclusion mechanisms and a particular institutional setup. On the other hand, the cameras enquire into the migrants’ dislocation not as a fixture but as encompassing the contingencies for a specific politics of placement (Mountz, 2011) and relationality. While they most obviously emphasise the migrants’ existence in the first place, they moreover visualise the various border spaces and border situations they detect as being closely connected to sovereign territory and sovereign power, and as maintaining a relationship to other spaces and places. In terms of the geographies of migration, the cameras are not interested in measuring or mapping the borderland and border spaces but in detecting an everchanging transnational social topography and its relationship to the various places and routes, trajectories and conjunctions. And they specifically illustrate the existence of everyday spaces, appropriated spaces and unstructured spaces – intimate, private or relational spaces and contact zones – illustrating how the interrelatedness of migrant networks is visible in a place in more than one way; as Gielis

  


  
 

  


  
 




points out, on the one hand “migrant places are meeting places of social networks, and on the other hand they are sites (translocalities) where transmigrants can reach out to people in other places” (2009, p.271). The films aim at un-mapping and remapping “Borderland Schengen” in a way that disrupts common knowledge about the spatial and socio-geographical organisation of the European border regime – eventually opening the space for a counter-topography, an appropriation of topographical knowledge (Katz, 2001). This is, as a matter of course, a political project building on the assumption that “space is both the bearer and reinforcer of social relations, and that if these relations are to be changed so too must their material grounds” (ibid., p.1231). In understanding the borderland geographies as expressions of knowledge orders, the films aim at bringing forward their own drawing of boundaries – clearly avoiding reiterating dichotomous geographies. Emphasising an understanding of borders as being constructed and performative, they perceive themselves as being part of a bordering discourse and practice that continuously reshape and reconfigure the borderland both as a knowledge order and a space of mobility and immobility. At the same time, the films do not aim at entirely illuminating spaces but rather enquire into the relationships between the various fragments they capture. In doing so, they are able not only to link the diverse migration narratives to the different spaces, places and routes enquired into, but also to investigate how experiences of violence and exclusion are inscribed in those places, routes and practices. The border experience in this regard may be a corporeal experience, but it is even more a non-actualisable everyday experience of exclusion.


 
  

    


In order to illustrate some of the most important features of the films used in this book, I would like to contrast the three images presented in the introductory chapter by three film sequences discussed in this work. The photographs referred to in the beginning rendered immigration in general, and the perceived acute refugee crisis in particular, primarily as a matter of illegality and irregularity, of victims and threats; they are overloaded with self-evidence and a specific and familiar iconology of undocumented migration; they imply that the space between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ is more or less unambiguous and in this regard play a paramount role in the conduct of image politics and the justification of a specific form of immigration prevention and governance. As said above, the photographs specifically represent the current crisis – but they also document the acceleration of a development that accompanies processes of Europeanisation for more than two decades now; while the current crisis has been rendered a magnifying glass for a perennial succession of refugee and immigration crises, the iconologies and image politics of the current crisis are in this regard considered to have been formed and perfected over a long period of time. The films used in this work conceive differently not only the spaces of undocumented migration but especially those who transit it or are apparently stuck in it. Three sequences that have been dealt with in the previous chapters may in this sense be understood as paradigmatic for the filmmakers’ versatile approaches to practices of undocumented migration as well as their filmmaking practices – to how they render the visuality of undocumented migration and the visibility and recognition of their protagonists, the subjects of undocumented migration. This chapter will summarise the findings of this work in order to outline how “Borderland Schengen” topographies emerge in an interplay of migration policies, implementation and control, migration and border-crossing practices and filmmaking practices. Eventually, it will assess the degree to which the cross-cultural dialogue between migration and documentary filmmaking practices has the potential to establish a counter-topography that connects “disparate places and social formations” (Katz, 2011, p.58) in a participatory and emancipatory manner.



   

 
  


Firstly, Dagmawi Yimer’s role in COME UN UOMO SULLA TERRA illuminates strategies of narrativisation that allow the establishment and recognition of subjects that contrast the familiar self-evident and alternatively victimised or illegalised iconic figure of the ‘illegal’ migrant – or the border-crosser caught in the act as in one of the photographs referred to in the introduction; the moment of narrativisation in this regard encompasses unactualisable experience and appropriation strategies at the same time. In this sense, Rancière’s (2004) statement regarding the necessity to fictionalise the real in order to make it thought in the first place has a paradigmatic character. While his narrative does not serve to mark an opposition between reality and artifice, Yimer’s narrativisation is strongly entangled with fictionalisation and performativity. In being the film’s protagonist and filmmaker at the same time, Yimer transgresses the usual subject–object relationship of filmic representations of undocumented migrants. Not only does he take possession of his story, he also appropriates its translation into a narrative, its contextualisation and its visualisation. The camera itself becomes an icon for the moment of enunciation and appropriation of the image, a discursive weapon (see Fig. 21) – Yimer is in other words telling the story in his own images, he is in a postcolonial sense filming back. It must be assumed that he is, however, only able to claim this position because he has a temporary legal status in Italy. While he appropriates his narrative, his individual experiences feed into a larger narrative – which is not to be misunderstood as more eligible or credible. However, as it does not aim at actualising the protagonists’ experiences, to make it fully comprehensible or pretending being able to make it tangible for the viewer, this larger narrative aims at contributing to the historisation of Yimer’s own and his protagonists’ narratives, not least by rendering it inseparably linked to the history of colonialism and neocolonial relationships between European and African states. And his appropriation not only spans his narrative and its memorisation but also versatile practices of border-crossing, routes and trajectories, specific places and artefacts. This is specifically illustrated in his revisiting one of the freight containers (Fig. 26) that was a crucial element of his crossing space, degrading and discouraging, and discussing the motivation to shoot the film with his girlfriend over dinner. Secondly, the pirogue leaving the shores of the Mauritanian town of Nouadhibou (see Fig. 4) in BAB SEBTA is interesting in terms of the filmmakers’ strategy of challenging the iconologies of ‘illegal’ migration by means of confronting the viewer with his/her conventionalised gaze and by deploying an imagery and montage that prefer the image’s potentiality to the self-evident. The camera is on board, peeking over the ship’s rail, and the viewer automatically assumes that he/she is on the scent of irregular migrants on their way to the Canary Islands. While we hear a male voice reflecting on the dangers of such a journey, it takes us quite some time to realise that what we are observing is apparently a group of fishermen following their usual business. What first looked like a heap of luggage is a huge fishing net; what looked like a means of clandestine transport – as, for


  
    




instance, the boat in the example used in the beginning on the work – is nothing more than a pirogue. Instead of establishing a linear relationship between words, sound and image, the film keeps the relationship between the different dimensions fluid and creates a visual event that needs our attention in order to recreate the order of things and to align our senses to what we see (Schwarte, 2011). The filmmakers are not in search of the true meaning of the image, however. They are not trying to decoy the viewer into the trap of his/her own expectations and conventions. The contradiction between what the man talks about and the fishermen’s actions is obvious – there is, however, a strong performative element to the whole sequence; what we hear and see is a reiteration of elements of both the viewer’s expectation and the fishermen’s experiences. The traditional bond between image and language is interrupted; instead it is put in a state of tension and difference (Horrocks and Jevtic, 2013), in which the image and its mirror image do not correspond – and at the same time it is not clear which of the two is the image and which is the reflection. The example illustrates how cinematic documentary films extract their credibility and suggestive power, for example, from contrasting – expository – narrative principles used in other documentary forms. The specific contextualisation of what we see challenges the self-evident nourished by our knowledge – only after we realise that what we hear does not correspond to what we thought we had seen (because we saw it many times before) are we required to take a closer look; the self-evident and the affirmative begin to crumble. And – referring to the photograph of the drowned child referred to in the introduction – in this regard the beach is not exclusively the place where the poor drowning victims’ bodies are washed ashore; it is also a space of mobilisation, departure and of potentiality. This example also illustrates the potentiality of the transnational and transsocial networks that span the border spaces. This is, thirdly, even more accentuated by the enquiry of the Mediterranean Sea as an image space and trans-social space undertaken in HAVARIE. Staring at a group of about 15 refugees on a rubber boat for more than 90 minutes (see Fig. 9), the viewer’s gaze misses its targets more and more – and instead observes the emergence of a narrative web across the Mediterranean, eventually perceiving it as an area of (suspended) contact. This trans-social web spans from Algeria to Spain, from France to Algeria, from Ukraine to Spain, from Northern Ireland to Algeria – and back again; it’s a web of relationships and affection but, as well, one of conflict, fear and anger, the Mediterranean both connecting and separating the spheres. The different narratives and the inherent social relations become knotted to the images we see, like in a ball of transnational and trans-social strings, relationships, memories and ambitions, so that eventually, sound and image in a way come to coincide again. This is particularly the case when an Algerian husband of a couple separated by the Mediterranean and immigration policies seems to stand on the beach with a friend, reflecting upon the several unsuccessful attempts they have made to cross over to Europe, made not least in order to reunite with his wife in Spain.



 

 
  


Fundamentally decelerating the speed of the original found footage he used, and disconnecting image and sound, the filmmaker at the same time makes the film’s mediality a central concern. The film confronts the viewer with the activity of viewing itself and with the knowledge, perceptions, expectations and also selfimages linked to the gaze in the image space of migration. At the same time, a fundamental re-localisation and re-conceptualisation of the border itself takes place; it is widened and its constructedness and performativity are illuminated – a border space is recreated that, far from resembling the border in the border-crossing image used in the introduction, is constantly shape-shifting and subject to negotiation and diverse border-crossing practices. While the films apply different approaches and means in order to investigate the visual-political construction of undocumented migration in the European border zones, this book has also identified a number of common characteristics on different levels. The films not only share an understanding of migration in general, and undocumented migration in particular, that assumes a categorical legitimacy of movement and border-crossing; they also assess processes of Europeanisation and the accompanying immigration and asylum policies and culture of border control sceptically. Primarily considering migration movements taking place in an interplay with immigration policies that ground in the principles of exterritorialisation, flexible implementation and a particular governmentality, they all are less in search of authentic representations of migration movements and the truth about its protagonists. Instead, on the one hand, they investigate the visual arena in which this interplay takes place, and, on the other, they seek to confront stereotypical images that adhere to a representational logic by means of an imagery that has strong performative features. In doing so, they not least also negotiate its entanglements with the control apparatus and image politics in a self-reflexive way. In addition, the films share an interest in the subjects and narratives of undocumented migration, their visibility, invisibility and opacity; following a participatory impetus, the filmmakers critically engage in migration discourses, but they also understand their protagonists as participatory subjects – in a wide space that they read as a border space in a way that continuously re-creates and reproduces border situation. The shared understanding of undocumented migration mentioned above finds its expression not only in the recognition of movement and border-crossing as both unavoidable and fundamentally legitimate but also in its conceptualisation as a practice, a practice that has social and spatial implications – consequently the films are concerned with constantly redefining and regaining the transnational social spaces they find in the border zone. Rather than focusing on questions of ethnicity, nationality or identity, they expose shared and clearly gendered experiences of delegitimisation, illegalisation and immobility. An undocumented migrant’s status is in this regard also not understood against the legal implications of the category or connected to a criminal act but as created in a specific process of illegalisation (Bischoff, Falk and Kafehsy, 2010). Occasionally thematising the various

 
  
    




exclusions and discriminations that undocumented migrants are very likely to be subject to, most of the films do not construct victimhood as a timeless, irreversible status – although all the films and specifically LA FORTERESSE admittedly also illustrate how busy the infrastructures of migration management are with maintaining this status in the form of permanent transit, i.e. a life situation in which mobility and immobility unpredictably take turns, in which the legal status can change in the blink of an eye and in which social networks constantly have to be re-established – either due to the legal and political structure of the migration space or connected to strategic decisions by the person concerned. This conceptualisation of undocumented migration not least grounds in the acknowledgement of migration movements as the primary catalyst for the emergence of transnational social spaces on the one hand and current cultures and practices of border control on the other. While many other films picking up the theme of migration focus on the – Eurocentric – antagonisms between the individual (potentially strange) migrant and a new or hostile or simply strange society, the films that for the purpose of this work have been classified as following a particularly transnational and cinematic approach seek to visualise connecting lines and to account for the complex interplay between the different actors, routes, places, artefacts, homes, social practices, routines and symbols. In doing so, the films (intentionally or not) follow specific filmic principles that can be considered as establishing particular transnational and trans-social forms of visuality. They not only aim at avoiding drawing upon stereotypes and, in the context of undocumented migration, well-established representations and iconologies of irregularity, insecurity, solitude and timelessness; they also individualise their protagonists and account for their (and the limits of their) agency, re-historising and re-contextualising the individual within a network of relationships, interdependencies, loyalties and interests. Shedding light on the social spaces concerned and the mostly invisible borders determining and structuring a life in transit, they also detect the diverse experiences written into the migrants’ lives (and bodies) and “Borderland Schengen” at the same time; and while migration is considered a process, also the observation and visualisation are understood as a process of de-symbolisation and re-imagination in which the experience itself remains incomplete, un-actualised. This is also reflected in how the films apply primarily observatory and participatory documental modes, at the same time avoiding voice-over explanations and contextualisation for the sake of consistency. Seeking to follow the tracks, traces and afterimages of undocumented migration, the films move back and forth between the centres and the peripheries in more than one way; they are constantly crossing societal boundaries. Investigating what they assume to be the geographical, social and discursive peripheries, they find their peripheries in many cases close to or even in the middle of the centres. They all show that the distance between the centre and the periphery is not to be understood as a geographical distance that can be measured in kilometres. An



 

 
  


abandoned house in the Spanish exclave of Ceuta occupied by undocumented migrants, a refugee centre for undocumented minors in the Austrian village of Traiskirchen – both places appearing in LITTLE ALIEN – those boundaries can be found nearly everywhere in Europe and around the globe. They also investigate the boundaries between visibility and invisibility and the power relations at work keeping this boundary controllable and restrictive. In order to unmask the actors and alliances in this battlefield of image politics, often the cameras themselves move back and forth between centre and periphery. The films are often set at very specific places, but they explicitly avoid linking those places to illegality – they document the tension between normality and transit rather than locating the migrants within a permanent state of illegality or exception (Agamben). They try to maintain the distinction between the private and the public and they assume a fundamental subjectivity and individuality of each migration – two things that undocumented migrants are usually deprived of. Though the films are only occasionally set at the actual political borders, the cameras move along the invisible and yet tangible and constantly crossed and reconstructed borders within “Borderland Schengen”. Challenging concepts of belonging and subverting notions of the nation and identity politics (Hess and Zimmermann, 1997), they succeed in illustrating multi-layered transnational social spaces of undocumented migration that go beyond the binary of inside and outside. While the films can in addition be considered transnational in their production and setting – and also in most of the filmmakers’ having more or less obvious biographical relationships with migration and displacement – they all provide fertile ground to eventually interrogate concepts of the transnational in general. A second crucial similarity of the films is how they apply performative modes on different levels; in being concerned with their own mediality; in how they understand the narrativisation of migration hi/stories and experiences and the memorisation and historisation of narratives as being entangled with fictionality; in at the same time providing space for self-perceptions and accounting for a double consciousness beyond identity politics; and eventually in observing staged sequences. Several examples illustrate to what end the films are concerned with their mediality. On the one hand, they strategically position the cameras in a way that makes the production of the image an element of the composition – most obviously this issue is raised in HAVARIE, in COME UN UOMO SULLA TERRA’s critical reiteration of the Panopticon and in LITTLE ALIEN’s enquiry of the complicity between protagonist and camera. On the other hand, strong intertextual and intratextual references establish a referential system that time and time again alludes to the asynchronicity and non-linearity of migration processes. Specifically, the way in which the camera distances itself from control technologies and disallows being made an ally in Nina Kusturica’s encounter with a Slovakian border guard in LITTLE ALIEN can be understood as paradigmatic for the film’s critical stance towards surveillance technology. It also illustrates an awareness of the films’ entanglement with the control apparatus and the simultaneity of documentation (as a


  
    




technology of classification) and documentation (as a technique of memory and historisation) and of identification (as a category of knowledge) and identification (as a prerequisite for empathy and affect). How the films expose their own mediality must in addition be understood as the attempt to illuminate the subjectivity of the filmmakers’ perspectives and refusal of a notion of a master narrative of undocumented migration. Particularly embedding their figures and narratives in a self-reflexive approach to their mediality – being conventionalised and being entangled with the control apparatus – the films outline a mode in which the image can avoid being consumed by dominant discourses, in which it even has a resistive core. The films in this regard perceive their mediality as a result of a process of becoming medial, i.e. as a process of medialisation by means of a sometimes stable, sometimes volatile reification of stratified, engineered and mediated dispositives (Pfeiffer and Schnell, 2008). Several examples have been used to illustrate that the films deploy performative elements and strategies also with regard to how they capture and synthesise the diverse narratives. Most prominently, the two sequences in which Fernand Melgar in LA FORTERESSE contrasts a Somali giving account of his journey to Switzerland, and the federal decision maker’s disbelief, illustrate how asylum seekers in interview procedures are caught within a representational system they can hardly escape. While the viewer at one point accepts that the Somali’s experience cannot be actualised and that the narrativisation of experience is necessarily connected to its fictionalisation rather than inherent authenticity and truth, affect is something the decision maker cannot afford; rationalising the unspeakable, she finds the narrative too good to be true, a person who is subject to extensive stereotyping meets those stereotypes too perfectly – an allegation in fact made by those who have produced and are continuously reproducing those stereotypes. Specifically, SUR LE RIVAGE DU MONDE and KURZ DAVOR IST ES PASSIERT investigate the borderland additionally by means of performative modes that instead of seeking authenticity and immediacy analyse societal structures by means of openly staged sequences; their modes of relocation and becoming discursive produce fractions and irritations and invite new perspectives and challenge documental modes as well as social conditions (Kohler, 2011). The films in this regard, however, do not seek to differentiate between documenting reality and documenting performance; they apply performative modes primarily in order to, on the one hand, scrutinise the documental claim for authenticity in general and, on the other, refuse representative modes and identity politics of difference. Time and time again challenging the self-evident, the established iconology of undocumented migration and the images’ knowledge, the films evoke realism beyond self-evidence; instead of following representational modes or remodelling identities, they organise the interval between truth and meaning along the lines of a visual performance that transgresses the dimensions of producing meaning and apprehension. The image in this regard is assigned the status of a witness rather than considered as giving witness; it is consequently more than a reservoir or archive but an embodiment that has the potential to unleash unimagined forces (Schwarte, 2011).



 

 
  


By understanding the documentary images not as primarily fulfilling representative functions but as witnesses to the refinement of urgent societal questions by means of a performative arrangement of figures, narratives and symbols, the films apparently understand their images as pointing towards the future. The image production in this regard structures the conditions of its historisation by means of establishing a mutual agreement between the protagonists as agents and authors of their own stories, and a camera that is willing to act as an accomplice – and in this regard also points towards the tension between representative and performative dimensions and the necessity to consider the image’s potentially mimetic and analogical ties to reality and its performative, affective dimension at the same time. Representation can, in other words, be temporarily suspended, but it cannot be permanently eliminated. And while the modes applied by the filmmakers are diverse, they all seem to envisage the prolongation of the moment of suspension. The camera in this regard also reflects its status as an epistemological tool – it aims less at producing images that pretend to impart the knowledge facilitating the comprehension, reading and decoding of the images’ content and more at scrutinising the conventionalised links between practice and knowledge in the narratives and experiences captured. Seeking to outline the intolerable, it produces ruptures not least by means of linking practice and experience instead in the form of affective images, not least enabling the protagonists’ reclamation of their images and their sounds. The films’ protagonists in this regard are not primarily utilised to contribute a life story that the viewer can easily understand and decode based on prevalent modes of seeing and knowing – they rather become actors in and authors of their own life stories, performative interpreters of their experiences. The films hence in general must be assumed as aiming at redrawing the migration discourse from an altogether different angle; centring neither the legal, political and other regulatory frameworks nor the familiar figure of the illegal migrant or refugee, they at the same time clearly frame what the European migration regime implies in terms of potential experiences, limiting its opportunity to represent itself, its borders, its hi-tech, its political and executive representatives; ‘the other side’ is, on the contrary, sketched almost exclusively based on the migrants’ narratives and performances. A central goal the films consequently share is the establishment and recognition of the undocumented migrant as a discursive and participatory subject. While it has been noted that the structure of the visual-political arena has fundamentally changed over the past two decades towards a prevalence of image politics grounding in a limited set of gendered and racialised stereotypical figures and icons of undocumented migration – the illegal immigrant, the trafficker, Lampedusa – the films primarily aim at providing their protagonists with a space in which they are able to unfold their narratives, not least in order to avoid being perceived as nothing but victims. And while one of the most important characteristics of all films is how they deal with the dialectics of visibility and invisibility – and particularly translate it into the negotiation of a position between the poles of protection and agency – making the protagonists visible is not their primary goal; instead they


  
    




seek to establish their recognition against the background of an opacity that facilitates a fundamental re-appropriation of their past, present and future. The films encompass sets of images that at least challenge image politics grounding in representations cast in iconologies. They seek to contrast dominant, familiarised images and icons by means of performative-affective images that prefer ambiguity and inconsistency to linear binary representational structures. In addition, the films also attempt to scrutinise the unambiguity of the dominant iconologies of undocumented migration by means of inserting a slightly but significantly shifted, alternative iconology into the European immigration discourse: an overloaded lorry in the Sahara’s sea of sand in A SUD DI LAMPEDUSA, the fishermen’ pirogue in BAB SEBTA, the unavoidable fright container in COME UN UOMO SULLA TERRA; this kind of alternative iconology facilitates what Glissant termed a prophetic vision of the past and a specific opacity in which a subjective resistance confronts universalising assumptions and makes way for an alternative subjectivity (Murdoch, 2015) that disarticulates rootedness and representation. This has consequences also for the films’ entanglements with the control apparatus. Instead of messing with the apparatus in terms of determining visibilities, the films work towards opaque subjects, an ‘Other’ that can be recognised not despite its difference but on the basis of the valorisation of difference. And while the films create transparency with regard to their mediality and their social and geographical setting, on the level of the protagonists and their narratives they dismiss the panoptical version of transparency. In this regard, they stand in opposition to a control apparatus that requires the subjects’ transparency in order to govern it while operating on rather impenetrable sets of principles and implementation precepts. As shown, HAVARIE, for example, reformulates the whole ‘refugee crisis’ on an altogether different level, that of seeing. In relocating the moment of crisis to the gaze, in reflecting it and withdrawing its temporality, the film concedes the migrants on the rubber boat a fundamental opacity. At the beginning of this work, the issue of whether what is commonly termed an acute ‘refugee crisis’ should in fact rather be considered an enduring border crisis was discussed. The films in fact show borders that are under pressure in a sense that they are not only challenged by border-crossing practices but even more are exposed as being visually, socially and politically constructed and performed. The moment of border-crossing in this regard is, on the one hand, crucial for the justification and implementation of a border as a border – but it is, on the other, also the moment where the border as a border is fundamentally put into question. The movement of the border-crosser and the practice of border-crossing are consequently the central elements the films share – be it in the form of a rubber boat coming to a halt right in the middle of the wide aqueous Mediterranean border zone in HAVARIE, the alcohol-consuming men in the Swiss reception centre in LA FORTERESSE illustrating how all sorts of borders and boundaries for the refugees in Vallorbe fall into one with the centre’s demarcation and their legal status, or the myth of the border as recounted by a young Nigerian in BAB SEBTA. Additionally, several examples illustrated that what the films also show and reflect is that the



 

 
  


border itself and border practices – the crossing as well as the protection and especially its constant relocation – are neither linear nor unidirectional but processes of becoming. Border practices are socio-spatial practices taking place in a visualpolitical arena; in being performatively enacted, they are always open to change and can never finally and fully be sealed off. But the films not only focus on the dialectic of demarcation and border-crossing; they also fundamentally relocate currently dominant cultures of border control: Europe in this regard is perceived as a project of migration, initiated and refined by the persistence of cross-border movement (Römhild, 2010); hence the films also insist on a migrationised (Bojadžijev and Römhild, 2014) perspective on both border and bordered spaces and processes of Europeanisation. In this regard, they also, as a matter of principle, aim at unmasking the mechanisms by which European migration policies continue to expand their reach in order to manage and control every kind of migration movement in its direction. The border is in this sense the place where the crisis emerges and unfolds – even more, the border is the moment of crisis. The cameras are in general hardly interested in measuring or mapping the borderland and border spaces; in their movement they are establishing visual spaces in which the social and the spatial can be rearranged; they are enquiring into the border spaces in order to detect an ever-changing transnational social topography and its relationship to the various places and routes, trajectories and conjunctions. Moreover, they illustrate the existence of everyday spaces, appropriated spaces and unstructured spaces; intimate, private or relational spaces and contact zones that illustrate how the interrelatedness of migrant networks is visible in a place in more than one way. By perceiving European border zones as highly regulated but at the same time polychromatic and polyphonic (di Maio, 2013) zones of contact, the filmmakers are able to account for migration as a social process, for its different actors, routes and places, artefacts and symbols, social practices and routines. In order to generate relevance beyond relying on self-evident and stable iconologies, the films follow distinct artistic and political strategies; taking new angles, presenting alternative narratives, they are not least opening up a space for alternative visualisations of migrants and migrations. It turned out that it makes sense to conceptualise “Borderland Schengen” as a topography in which the social, the political, the visual and the geographical can be thought of as standing in an inseparable and simultaneous relationship to each other – moreover, where they can be considered as being entangled in the same process. The border in general serves as a good example for this simultaneity; its construction, establishment, implementation and maintenance as well as its crossing and relocalisation are fundamentally connected to and have implications on the social, the political, the visual and the geographical levels. While the implementation of the border makes it a border in the first place, its crossing – legally or clandestinely – puts its existence fundamentally into question. The border, in


  
    




other words, is continuously being performed and un-performed, constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed. And while European immigration policies’ paradigms shifted towards an understanding in which the border is where Frontex is, the films paint a picture of a borderland that reaches far beyond the places Frontex manages and that is being trenched by several kinds of borders. Borderland Schengen topographies are in this regard characterised by flexible geographies and institutionalised improvisation, which has considerable implications not only for the physical manifestations of borders and for their visuality but also for their structuring social spaces and migration movements/transit. It has been stated that one of the primary goals of the Schengen Area as a political entity is in fact to define and constantly redefine the course, shape and permeability of European borders and border zones, the shape and relationship of European centres and peripheries, regular and irregular routes, eligible and ineligible movers and travellers. This culture of border control is linked to a set of specific border practices that, apart from different surveillance and visualisation mechanisms and tools, ground in the exterritorialisation of border policies, border facilities and border spaces in general and the entanglement of the border with a specific image politics. Europe’s borders are made and performed; they are constantly and strategically changing, shape-shifting depending on the respective challenge – they are characterised by this flexible organisation of geography and space, physically and socially manifest. In effect, European borderlands are not limited to the proximity of its external demarcation lines or checkpoints. The narratives dealt with previously have shown that the borders of Europe are flexible and can literally be found anywhere in Europe and also outside its actual territory. “Borderland Schengen” consequently consists of not only the heavily patrolled border zones in the proximity of Schengen’s political borders or its checkpoints and demarcation lines but also zones of exception and strategically exterritorialised thresholds; but it is also inscribed in the bodies of the undocumented migrants themselves, by means of their conditioning, their being lost in time and space and their wounds and scars. The principles of exterritorialisation and flexibility stretch the border-crossing situation and the state of liminality for those who are considered ineligible ad infinitum both temporally and spatially; the physical manifestations of borders are complemented by a specific visuality and image politics of the border as well as by social conditioning connected to panoptical visibility, social control and surveillance technologies. Moving through “Borderland Schengen” means to continuously move along the border, to continuously negotiate borders and to be permanently exposed to dislocating geopolitical powers. As Mountz (2011) points out, being detained in “Borderland Schengen” implies not only a legal and jurisdictional ambiguity, with waiting and uncertainty, but also the hardship of understanding where and by whom one has been detained – often discovering that one has lost a specific status or belonging during the journey across borders. At the same time, however, with regard to the spatial manifestation of “Borderland Schengen” one has to note that the specific interplay of migration control



   

 
  


and migration movements at work condenses not only in the actors and discourses but as well in the places, routes, practices and routines that continuously structure and re-structure it as a transnational social space. The most evident example for this is how migration routes change over time (e.g. Maas-Albert, 2014) based on an interplay of migration surveillance and migration movements; if a route becomes less favourable because control measures succeed in establishing an effective blockage, not only do the points of entry to the European Union change but also the whole preceding mobility and smuggling infrastructure has to adapt to a new situation. Such a successful blockage in return has to be understood as being constituted by means of a complex constellation of physical border facilities and the exchange of information and experiences within trans-social migration networks – inseparably linked to the visual emergence of the border itself and narratives of failure. While this kind of reconfiguration of spaces and routes on a macrolevel takes some time, on a micro-level it happens all the time. Borderland Schengen in sum must be considered a visual-political space that emerges in the cameras’ enquiries of the multifaceted interplay of migration policy and control and migration movements as negotiated throughout this work; the films establish “Borderland Schengen” as a topographical layer that is overlapped with the politically, visually and legally structured spaces of migration control and migration management – and that in modifying its iconologies, figures, spaces and routes, its stories, histories, narratives and motivations by means of performativeaffective images and specific appropriation techniques establishes a counter-topography in which commonalities and differences, visibilities and invisibilities are re-ordered strategically – not least in order re-negotiate the social, visual, political and spatial conditions of European borderlands. In this regard, “Borderland Schengen” is also characterised by a fundamental disparity – the different processes are in a permanent state of tension; the invisible necessarily points to the visible, mobility to immobility, legality to illegality and so on – and at the same time provides a stubborn practice of documentary filmmaking with the ground to investigate European borderlands as contact zones composed of sites where a complex web of articulations and demands is not only expressed but also negotiated and contested (Schorch, 2013). While the film images may be understood as counter-images – in the sense that they put the selfevident and the intolerable under scrutiny – opacity, resistance and creativity are in this regard the cornerstones of “Borderland Schengen” as a counter-topographical space. A space in which the films must also be understood as mobilising their images, at bringing back their differences, dynamisms, movements and changes (Herzog, 2000), at the same time link the analysis of existing conditions to a critique of the structure of representation; what we observed in this sense are the ruins of representation and the disassembly of hierarchically ordered time and space, life and thought (Olkowski, 1999). What the films moreover instigate is a precise revision of concepts of the transnational; they not only point at the gaps in transnational theories that have not been properly filled by the invention of the transmigrant, but even more invite a fundamental and critical re-conceptualisation


  
    




of transnational lives that in many cases have to be led as lives in a state of permanent transit. While this book originally sought to establish a kind of dialogue with documentary films, they eventually proved to be the ideal media to negotiate the conditions of the transnational lives that undocumented migrants lead. The documentary images in this regard serve as membranes bringing the audience into contact with the material forms of memory (Marks, 2000) and at the same time witnesses to the reverberations and afterimages of border events, of the emergence of unheard narratives, unseen figures and undocumented migrants as participatory subjects. In this regard, the films are not political films but rather films made political; they make “the border visible that separates film and politics: film is not politics, even though politics may sometimes seem like a bad film. However, if one understands as the ‘political’ the moment of openness and undecidability that occurs when structural principles of society are called into question, then ‘making films politically’ would not be the repetition or distribution of political slogans, but rather creating such moments of openness and undecidability: moments that also question the structural principles of cinema and the filmer-filmed-viewer contract, thus operating in the terrain where film is directly political.” (Öhner, 2014, p.164)

  


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La haine. 1995. [Film] Directed by M. Kassovitz. France: Canal+. Le heim. 2005. [DVD] Directed by L. Goldstein. Germany. Les secrets de la Forteresse Europe, 2013. [TV] France, Germany: Vincent TV. Lichter. 2003. [Film] Directed by H.-C. Schmid. Germany: Claussen + Wöbke Filmproduktion. Little alien. 2009. [DVD] Directed by N. Kusturica. Austria: Mobilefilm Produktion. Mare chiuso. 2012. [DVD] Directed by A. Segre and S. Liberti. Italy: ZaLab. Refugees. 2012. [Stream] Directed by T. Diamond. Available at: [Accessed 23 July 2016]. Roma città aperta. 1945. [Film] Directed by R. Rossellini. Italy: Excelsa Film. Shadows. 1959. [DVD] Directed by J. Cassavetes. USA: Lion International. Send dem hjem. 2013. [TV] Denmak: TV2. Стачка. 1925. [Film] Directed by S. Eistenstein. USSR: Proletkult. Sur le rivage du monde. 2012. [File] Directed by S. L’Espérance. Canada: Les films de Tricycle. Xala. 1974. [Stream] Directed by O. Sembène. Senegal: Filmi Domireve SNC. Available at: [Accessed 24 May 2015].

   


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