(gentle music)
Welcome to this unit titled, Who Speaks, Who Narrates?
Reflecting Oppositionalities in Migration Documentaries.
And we will be looking at two documentaries
by white global northern filmmakers and at which
cinematic strategies they use to position themselves
towards the migrant stories that they tell.
And before we get to the films, however,
let's talk about a few things to consider when we approach them
and about the problems that documentaries
face and those they might create.
A key question is always that of agency.
When documentaries include migrants, who narrates their stories?
Who frames and authorizes their accounts?
The film, even the filmmaker, or they themselves?
And since we'll be looking at Europe's southern
borders, we encounter the problem that often,
complex migratory experiences are essentialized,
simplified and subsumed as migration from quote unquote Africa.
We must ask, how do documentaries engage
with these white Eurocentric preconceptions?
Finally, and very close to our topic,
what is the role of self-reflexivity in these films?
In other words, how do they Mark their own positionality?
And how do they allow us to reflect upon migration
and migration narratives as part of a European mediascape?
This is particularly critical for understanding of media literacy.
As Gao and Zhang notes, I quote, "Indeed, the central question
about documentary film ethics is as follows.
How are documentarists relate to the people whom they depict, subjects,
and to the people who view their films, the audiences?
Specifically, how should documentaries
and their creators position themselves
vis-a-vis subjects who are of nail from social
backgrounds conventionally considered peripheral
to Western Europe and its bourgeoisie?
" These questions are grounded in the
long history of exploitative imaginations
that created Europe's imagination of others.
And we know that coloniality has shaped
not only regimes of economic and political power
in this world, but that these are inextricable
from the representational and visual regimes of imagining,
and thereby enshrining notions of racialized quote unquote difference.
As Paul Landau writes, and I quote,
"The history of the European view of non-European peoples
has always reflected Europeans' history of imagining themselves,
and the Africa they fabricated derived
from Western demands and prejudices," end of quote.
And from the earliest days of photography and film,
such imaginations were part of defining who's civilized
and who is not, and also often the appended notion
of who is really human and who is not.
And as scholars like Sylvia Winter or Anibal Quijano remind us,
these demarcations were made through
racialization, through the production of race.
And it's not as if all racializations function in the exact same way.
As Philomena said, Karen Farquharson,
Catherine Pillay, and Elisa Joy White write,
this quote, "Centralization of whiteness
and notions of belonging and the construction
of the European is the universally human,
marginalizes blackness in particular," end of quote.
With this, let us turn to our first example.
David Fidelis' "The Land Between" is a 2014 documentary
filmed over more than a year in the mountains for
Northern Morocco, just outside the Spanish-owned,
euphemistically called enclaves of Melilla and Ceuta.
The film opens with surveillance footage
of migrants scaling the fences of these
enclaves, barely recognizable as individuals,
and the imagery here very consciously evokes contemporary
right-wing anti-immigration rhetoric in
Europe, and its emphasis on masses of people
who, in this incendiary and dehumanizing
language, are pouring into Europe.
"The Land Between" starts with these images
to indicate that this is Europe's dominant imagination
of migration from, quote unquote, "Africa.
" For the remainder, it foams back against this.
Fidelis' film is not organized by such hostile projections,
but is instead structured through individual testimonies of migrants.
What I mean by that is that almost the entire film
relies on narrativization by those affected.
We learn their names, like Yakuhir.
We learn where they come from,
and they share those aspects of their
histories which they choose to share.
We see them cook, chat, bond, establish their
community, take care of dogs in the camp,
and joke about the presence of the camera.
In other words, the film makes transparent
that it's not a silent, neutral observation,
but that the filmmaker intrudes,
and that he can only show what Yaku and the many others
in the makeshift camp outside of the enclaves will narrate.
While this makes up the majority of the film,
there are certain events that puncture
the harsh camp experience more than others,
among them a failed attempt to cross into a Spanish outpost
and a raid by Moroccan paramilitary security forces.
The film, however, never shows any of these,
but allows for individual accounts of them.
You can see this here on the images.
We see preparations, we see letters being made,
and afterwards, we hear people narrate what they experienced.
On a very plain level, then,
The Line Between never seeks to capture incidents
of victimization, but instead moments of reclaiming,
of narrating, and of speaking for oneself.
This emphasis on migrants' narrative agency
is also something that we find in the form
of the film, in the way that it is shot.
If we look at the sky in the majority of
shots, it looks very pale, for instance.
But if we look closer, we see that this is
because the film is slightly overexposed.
We see that light here shines across
and in a way over the tree branches in this enlarged frame.
The Line Between chooses an exposure
that emphasizes the migrants' importance,
that shows them in clear and fitting
lighting, even if this means that the accuracy
of representing their surroundings suffers.
Cinematic form, however, is not only a question of lighting,
it's also one of choosing and editing images.
In the harshest moment, the death of one of
the migrants, which I've blurred out here,
we can see cell phone footage shot by members of the camp.
In other words, the filmmaker relinquishes
authority over the production of images.
And we can read this as an acknowledgement
that there might be situations in which white Australian filmmakers
cannot ethically mediate what is happening.
As such, this film in its form, its structure,
and in its transparent limitations allows for a constant reflection
of who should be in charge of migration
stories and how film can facilitate this.
And on this note, let me come to my second example.
Gianfranco Rossi's "Fire at Sea" is a more famous example,
having won the Berlinale's Golden Bear
in 2016 and being an Oscar nominee.
It contrasts the calm island life on Lampedusa,
an island that's actually closer to Tunisia than to Sicily,
with the experiences of incoming refugees and rescue workers.
(silence)
Like "The Land Between," this film too
continually stresses its distance from the migrant experience.
Much of it is shot at sea,
and we're always reminded of the filmmaker's protected status
by the protective shields and foils that are wrapped around the camera
and which become dirty and opaque, as we see here in the enlargement.
And we see this method repeatedly
to the point where the shots are almost completely obfuscated.
This is then a film that showcases its awareness
of its distance to the migrant experience.
Visually, it tells us that there's always a distortion
between someone's experience and the film's representation of it.
And yet the film tries to convey some sense of experience
via long takes of unknown migrants' faces.
It implies here that the gaze is not
one-sided, that Europe is being watched too.
And given the film's portrayal of Lampedusa,
we are led to understand Europe as very white,
which is a highly disturbing notion, of course.
Here, migrant agency is implied,
but only through the visual tools of the filmmaker.
And these exact tools are also used in
the film's climax, which I will not show.
Again, there we see a long take,
as the camera makes its way into the hull of a boat
in which dozens of migrants lie dead.
The film's key tool by which it might bestow agency,
the long take here, that seems to simply record what happens,
ultimately becomes a device that foregrounds suffering and silence.
This, we see, stands in stark contrast to The Land Between.
Both of these films, in their own ways,
contend with the power of their white documentary gaze.
To some degree, at least, they refuse the promise
of documentary and the fetishization of knowledge
in the face of the horrors that they tackle.
They're experience that cannot be fully known from the outside,
that cannot be mediated by Western cinematic
modes and filmmakers, these films imply.
And yet, Faraday eventually does attempt to show the horror
that the fortress Europe forces upon migrants in the Mediterranean.
And here we might pause and come back to this unique central question.
Who gets to tell whose story?
What role should migrants have in the production of films about them?
Thinking of the latter example here,
can we not make visible the necropolitics of the European border regime
without imagining those affected as Europe's others,
whose death is used for the European audience's empathy,
despite the fact that Europe is the root cause of these horrors?
(microphone thuds)
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