Narratives of the ‘Refugee Crisis’ and the Power of Visual Representations: A Study of Different Portrayals of Refugees in Documentary Film
MA Thesis in European Studies - Identity and Integration track Graduate School for Humanities Universiteit van Amsterdam
Author: Alina-Ramona Bejan Student number: 10792589 Main Supervisor: Dr. Guido Snel Second Supervisor: Prof. dr. Joep Leerssen June, 2020 Total Word count: 20,963
2 Table of Contents
Abstract 6
Chapter 1 Introduction 7
Chapter 2 Methodology 11
Chapter 3 Theoretical Framework 13 3.1 The Refugee 13 3.2 The Subaltern 16 3.3 Media Theories 18 3.3.1 Agenda Setting and Framing Theory 18 3.3.2 Mediation and Mediatisation 19 3.4 Visual Representations 20 3.5 Refugees in the Media 25 3.6 Numbness and Compassion Fatigue 26 3.7 The Spectacle of the World and the Politics of Pity 28 3.8 The Documentary 29
Chapter 4 Visual Representations of Refugees in Documentary Film 33 4.1 Introduction 33 4.2 Fire at Sea 33 4.2.1 Short Introduction 33 4.2.2 Semiotic Analysis 33 4.2.3 Narrative Structure Analysis 38 4.2.4 Contextual Analysis 40 4.2.5 Mise-en-scène Analysis 41 4.2.6 Camera Work 44 4.2.7 Editing and Sound 47 4.2.8 Production Contexts 48 4.2.9 Refugees’ Self-Representation 48 3
4.2.10 Reflection 50 4.3 Human Flow 52 4.3.1 Short Introduction 52 4.3.2 Semiotic Analysis 54 4.3.3 Narrative Structure Analysis 58 4.3.4 Contextual Analysis 61 4.3.5 Mise-en-scène Analysis 61 4.3.6 Camera Work 64 4.3.7 Editing and Sound 68 4.3.8 Production Contexts 68 4.3.9 Representation of Refugees and Refugees’ Self-Representation 68 4.3.10 Reflection 71 4.4 Refuge 75 4.4.1 Introduction 75 4.4.2 Technique 76 4.4.3 Narrative Analysis 78 4.4.4 Production Contexts 80 4.4.5 Refugees’ Self-Representation 80
Chapter 5 Discussion 81 5.1 Brief Comparison of the Three Documentaries 81 5.2 Narratives 82 5.3 Interrelation Between Text and Image 83 5.4 The Refugee – a Voiceless Subaltern and a Suffering Other 84 Chapter 6 Conclusion 86
Filmography 89
Bibliography 89
4
List of Figures1
1 ‘A Four-Dimensional Conceptualization of the Mediatisation of Politics’ 20 2 Samuele with his slingshot, training his lazy eye 34 3 The setting of the film: the island Lampedusa 35 4 The Mediterranean Sea seen from one of Lampedusa’s cliff coasts 36 5 Samuele on his father’s boat, feeling seasick 37 6 The title of the film as it appears at the end written in the symbolical colours: red (for fire) and blue (for water/sea) 38 7 Dr. Bartolo getting emotional while talking about the gravity of the situation 40 8 The room of Zia Maria, Pippo’s aunt 42 9 Migrants remembering their exodus, sharing their testimony, and giving thanks to God 43 10 Close-up on a migrant’s face 45 11 Medium shot of Samuele and his father 45 12 Long shot of ship 490, the Cigala Fulgosi and its helicopter preparing for flight 46 13 High-angle shot: view from the helicopter showing the vastness of the sea in comparison to the tiny boat of migrants 46 14 Low-angle shot: perspective on the sky 47 15 Ai’s installation of life jackets used by refugees draped around the pillars of Berlin’s Konzerthaus in 2016. Potograph: Kay Nietfeld/EPA 53 16 The film poster taken from its official Facebook page 55 17 On-screen text 55
1 Unless stated otherwise, all images are screenshots of scenes from the three films analysed: Fire at Sea (Gianfranco Rosi, 2016), Human Flow (Ai Weiwei, 2017), and Refuge (Matthew K. Firpo, 2016). 5
18 Fragment of a famous Syrian poem 56 19 Weiwei having a haircut 57 20 Weiwei giving a haircut 57 21 Girls talking about the difficulties of living in Gaza 59 22 Group of migrants clapping and singing 60 23 Mahmoud and Weiwei exchanging passports 60 24 Ismatollah Sediqi telling Weiwei about his family 61 25 A Kurd man sitting next to what is left of his house after the Turkish military’s crackdown in 2015 62 26 Interview with Diana Firas, Princess of Jordan 62 27 Two brothers crying in the agitation of a night 63 28 Discarded life jackets 63 29 Medium close-up: the subject is framed from the shoulders up 64 30 Medium shot of a woman in a tent 65 31 Full shot of mother and child 65 32 Long shot in Iraq 66 33 Extreme long shot in Iraq 66 34 Low-angle shot of the Hungarian agents 67 35 High-angle shot 67 36 On-screen text 72 37 The US/Mexico wall 72 38 Dead body lying on the outskirts of Mosul, Iraq 74 39 One of the refugees interviewed, single mother of two daughters 77 40 Drone shot of Homs in ruins and on-screen text 77 41 The migrants’ words as they appear on a beautiful shot of the sea 78 42 The image that appears while the Mayor of Lesvos speaks of hope 78
6 Abstract
This thesis discusses the meaning and the forms of representation, as well as self- representation, in relation to refugees. Representation can take the form of text, speech, photographs, TV news – all shared by the (social) media, as well as films and documentaries. When examining a representation, it is crucial to look at who is representing, who is being represented, what is the purpose of the representation, and how is the representation constructed. Using various media theories, this thesis suggests that representations are constructed or regulated in order to fit a political agenda and to create a separation between ‘us’ (Western/European audience) and ‘them’ (the ‘Others’). This consequently leads to a lack of interest in the events and tragedies that are happening ‘there’ and to a spectacle of distant suffering. Moreover, employing Spivak’s theory of the subaltern, this thesis establishes that the refugee is a silenced victim, deprived of any agency. While refugee voices are very rarely heard in the media, documentary films are more likely to allow refugees to speak for themselves in front of the camera. This thesis observes that voice and voicelessness have a big impact on representations, namely speaking or not speaking subjects create different representations and can influence a film’s narrative. Specifically, a refugee’s self- representation is more likely to arouse empathy in the public, while a representation of voiceless refugees is more prone to cause compassion fatigue.
Keywords: (refugee) representation, (refugee) self-representation, refugee crisis, documentary, compassion fatigue, distant suffering.
7
Chapter 1 Introduction
According to the data provided by UNHCR, there are 70.8 million forcibly displaced people worldwide, out of which 41.3 million are internally displaced people, 25.9 million refugees, and 3.5 million asylum-seekers.2 The same source states that over half of the 25.9 million refugees have not yet reached the age of 18 and that this is the highest number of refugees ever recorded.3 2015 has brought the worst refugee crisis in recent times with more than 3,770 migrants dying while trying to cross the Mediterranean, aiming to reach their destination: Europe.4 Media performed a crucial role in framing the events of 2015-16, which were phrased as the European ‘refugee/migration crisis,’ being the main source of information for both European citizens and policymakers. Wright argues that ‘[t]he visual representation of refugees plays an essential, yet neglected, role in forming the stereotype of “the refugee”.’5 In the news, the refugees were spoken about, but their own voices were rarely heard. This led to depicting the refugee as a silent victim. Pictures of refugees abounded in media in 2015 and in the years to follow and it is unlikely that by now, someone has not come across such a picture. This means that most, if not all of us, know what the refugee crisis looks like in pictures, but do we know how this crisis is perceived by those migrants themselves? Do we see what they see? While we have seen numerous portrayals of refugees and their tragedies from afar, as they were depicted in images, how many individual stories have we heard of? Whereas many pictures of refugees appeared in newspapers, on social media, on television, not much information was provided about who these people were. Based on the framing theory, media depictions can significantly affect public opinions and attitudes towards immigration.6 Besides that, media is constantly creating
2 United Nations, ‘Figures at a Glance,’ UNHCR, accessed June 4, 2020, https://www.unhcr.org/figures-at-a-glance.html. 3 Ibid. 4 IOM, ‘Over 3,770 Migrants Have Died Trying to Cross the Mediterranean to Europe in 2015,’ accessed June 4, 2020, https://www.iom.int/news/over-3770-migrants-have-died-trying-cross- mediterranean-europe-2015. 5 Terence Wright, ‘Moving Images: The Media Representation of Refugees,’ Visual Studies 17, no. 1 (2002): 53. 6 For more information on this, check Chauzy, Jean-Philippe and Gervais Appave, ‘Communicating effectively about migration,’ in Reporting at the Southern borders: Journalism and public debates on immigration in the US and the EU, edited by Giovanna Dell’Orto and Vicki L. Birchfield (New York: Routledge, 2014), 62-72. 8 and reproducing frames through which they are emphasising certain aspects of an event, while omitting others.7 It has been observed that media coverage of the refugee crisis tends to omit direct representation of individual immigrants.8 By the time of the publication of the Refugees Reporting project (2017), only 21% of the news on asylum and migration referenced a refugee or a migrant, and out of that 21%, only 40% of the published articles actually quoted them directly.9 In this sense, these migrants were not given a voice to represent themselves. Moreover, a report from the Council of Europe published in the same year, found that only 62% of the articles provided information about the migrants’ countries of origin, 35% referred to the refugees in terms of men or women, less than 15% attached an age to their subjects, only
16% included names, and merely 7% mentioned their professions.10 In this way, media illustrations of refugees have led to the objectification of these migrants, who were presented as an unidentified, unskilled mass of people, who inspired little sympathy because of the dehumanising way in which they were represented (faceless, nameless, no details regarding identity, no personal story), and who raised suspicion and unease, as people usually fear the unknown. When migrant groups do appear in the media, they are often depicted in a negative way. The degree to which migrants are subjected to othering depends on the type of immigration (legal or illegal) and on a scale of cultural differences (culturally close or distant). Constant exposure to negative news about refugees can lead to the creation of a negative public opinion and attitude towards this group, which consequently can motivate them to support anti- immigration parties, which are getting more and more predominant in Europe today. Thus, the acceptance and integration of migrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers may partly depend on the ways in which mass media represent them, and negative coverage of these groups of people
7 Check for example Claes H. De Vreese (2005) and Robert M. Entman (1993). 8 Jakob-Moritz Eberl, et al., ‘The European media discourse on immigration and its effects: a literature review,’ Annals of the International Communication Association 42, no. 3 (2018): 207-223. 9 Francesca Pierigh and Sara Speicher, ‘Changing the Narrative: Media Representation of Refugees and Migrants in Europe.’ (Refugees Reporting, 2017): 1-50, https://www.refugeesreporting.eu/report/. 10 Myria Georgiou and Rafal Zaborowski, ‘Media Coverage of the “Refugee Crisis”: A Cross-European Perspective,’ Council of Europe Report, (COE, 2017), 10, https://edoc.coe.int/en/refugees/7367-media-coverage-of-the-refugee-crisis-a-cross-european- perspective.html. 9
impedes their integration.11 Moreover, comparing media monitoring findings of Refugees
Reporting12 to national public opinions13 illustrates that in countries where refugee voices are present in the media citizens are less likely to be supporters of anti-migration policies. This proves that media representations and refugees’ self-representation are crucial in forming public opinions and attitudes towards migration and have the potential to construct narratives. Nonetheless, there seems to be a paradox in the representation of refugees in the media caused by the ambivalent depictions of asylum-seekers as harmless innocent victims in need of help, while at the same time, as dangerous invaders threatening Europe’s economy, security, and its culture. These are two contrasting frames used by the media, which create confusion and feelings of panic and fear. Xenophobia is thus also caused by the fact that the public cannot be certain of which of the two scenarios is real, and in order to protect themselves, they start believing the only leaders who seem to be certain of the situation: the far-right politicians who spread the message that migrants are dangerous. Greussing & Boomgaarden identify three types of framing of refugees and asylum-seekers in mass media, according to which they are either represented as ‘passive victims, as threat to the culture, security and welfare of the host country, or as dehumanised, anonymous (out-)group.’14 This classification is certainly accurate, but I would like to add that there are instances when refugees do get the chance to speak in the media and are thus given a voice. The problem is that this voice is small and not listened to, as refugees have no say in the process of asylum- and migration-related policymaking. Desiring to explore these narratives of the refugee crisis, as well as the role and impact of representation, I will analyse three documentary films about refugees, namely Gianfranco Rosi’s Fire at Sea (2016), Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow (2017), and Matthew K. Firpo’s Refuge (2016). While there are multiple documentaries covering the refugee crisis, the reasons why I have chosen these three films are the following. Firstly, these documentaries have been very successful, having reached a wide audience due to the directors’ popularity and the urgency of the subject matter in the eyes of a Western/European audience. According to IMDb, Fire at
11 As shown by Christian Schemer in ‘The Influence of News Media on Stereotypic Attitudes toward Immigrants in a Political Campaign,’ Journal of Communication 62, no. 5 (2012): 739– 757. 12 Pierigh and Speicher, ‘Changing the Narrative,’ 1-50. 13 Neli Esipova et al., ‘How the World Views Migration’ (International Organization for Migration, 2015), 1-59, https://publications.iom.int/system/files/how_the_world_gallup.pdf. 14 Esther Greussing and Hajo G. Boomgaarden, ‘Shifting the refugee narrative? An automated frame analysis of Europe’s 2015 refugee crisis,’ Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 43, no. 11 (2017): 1751. 10
Sea has been nominated for 39 categories within 23 different film festivals and awards, winning
14 of them. It received the Golden Berlin Bear at the 66th Berlin International Film Festival, the European Movie of the Year award at the 21st Capri, Hollywood International Film Festival, and it was nominated for the Oscars in 2017.15 According to the same source, Human Flow was nominated for 18 categories, and it won 6 of them.16 Out of 170 documentaries, Human
Flow was selected in top 15 contenders for Best Documentary at the Oscars.17 Refuge is a short documentary created as part of the Refuge Project and winner of Best Short Documentary at the Oxford Film Festival in Mississippi and of Santa Barbara International Film Festival in
2017.18 Secondly, the directors come from different backgrounds which influence the way they perceive the refugee crisis and can lead to different representations of it. Thirdly, for the purpose of comparison and for providing a more complex analysis, the three documentaries differ in style, focus, aim, mode, and in the level of interaction with the refugees, which allows for different degrees of refugee self-representation. Most importantly, this thesis discusses the power of representation and self-representation, aiming to illustrate that each has a different effect on an audience and each can contribute to shaping either positive or negative attitudes regarding migration. In this regard, in trying to show how refugees are portrayed in the media and primarily in documentaries, I will address the following sub-questions: 1. What cinematic techniques are used for addressing the issue of the refugee crisis? And are these techniques successful in creating and distributing an impactful message? 2. To what extent is the (limited) self-representation of refugees in these films important in breaking stereotypes and changing the existing narratives? 3. Do the documentaries succeed in giving the refugees a voice? Does their participation extend beyond the films or is it limited to the films only? 4. Who and what is represented or omitted? Who is doing the representation? 5. What is the broader political effect of these representations?
15 IMDb, ‘Fuocoammare,’ (IMDb.com), accessed June 27, 2020, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3652526/awards?ref_=tt_ql_op_1. 16 IMDb, ‘Human Flow,’ (IMDb.com), accessed June 27, 2020, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6573444/awards. 17 Paula Rösler, ‘Ai Weiwei's Film “Human Flow” Makes Oscar Shortlist,’ DW.COM, December 8, 2017, accessed June 4, 2020, https://www.dw.com/en/ai-weiweis-film-human- flow-makes-oscar-shortlist/a-41713580. 18 IMDb, ‘Refuge,’ (IMDb.com), accessed June 4, 2020, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5671954/awards?ref_=tt_awd. 11
Chapter 2 Methodology
This paper does not have within its scope a study of histories, empirical cases, or individual experiences. Specifically, this is not a social science paper as I am not conducting interviews or field surveys but do qualitative research instead in order to provide a deeper understanding of how and why certain representations are being developed and shed some light upon the implications these representations have. In trying to destroy the ‘us’ versus ‘them’ divide by means of representation, I believe individual stories told in front of a recording camera are more impactful than a text or a picture alone. For this reason, I have chosen to analyse documentaries that provide a fuller narrativization and visualisation of the refugee crisis as experienced by the refugees themselves. Some documentaries show migration in an abstract general way focusing on the masses of people, while others focus on the individuals and offer refugees the possibility to talk. This is significant because telling one’s own story is a sign of agency that refugees are usually robbed of in the media. Since visual images have the ability to create new discourses,19 I argue that audio-visual texts (films) can create new narratives or change the existing ones. While the analysis of media coverage of the refugee crisis could be interesting for several important reasons – understanding populism, analysing the policymaking process and the origins of hate speech against refugees, etc. – this thesis will mainly discuss narratives of the so-called European ‘refugee crisis’ that emerge from the ways in which these events were and continue to be illustrated. Drawing on Spivak’s theory of the subaltern, this research project also explores the concept of the voiceless subaltern in the context of the migration crisis. While news spread through the radio are efficient, newspapers and television combine text with pictures in order to make a story more powerful, effective, and catchy. Documentaries are powerful because they present a fuller story, using both text and audio-visual content. Seeing pictures illustrating the terrible situations that refugees actually face can be more impactful than simply reading about them. On the 2nd of September 2015, Nilüfer Demir’s picture of the lifeless body of a Syrian three-year-old boy started circulating around the world. The picture was selected for the Time Magazine ‘Top Photos of 2015’. On their website, the magazine describes the image as ‘the defining photograph of an ongoing war that […] had
19 Wright, ‘Moving Images’, 53. 12
killed some 220,000 people’20 by the time the picture was taken. The description adds that the photograph ‘was not taken in Syria, a country the world preferred to ignore, but on the doorstep of Europe, where its refugees were heading.’21 Moreover, they note that as a result of this image, European governments were suddenly convinced they had to open their closed frontiers, which they eventually did (but not for long). This incident proves that once the victim is given a name and a personal story, the public tends to be more emphatic, compassionate, and interested. However, while a picture is worth a thousand words and can be as impactful as to change governmental decisions, pictures without text can be misleading. Because of this I have decided to combine pictures with text and sound and analyse nonfiction films instead. The method used in this research project is content analysis of audio-visual text. More specifically, I will analyse the documentary films in terms of semiotic analysis (signs and symbols, metaphors, analogies, symbolism), narrative structure analysis (plot structure, characters, theme), contextual analysis (analysis of the film in a broader context, culture, time), mise-en-scène22 analysis (arrangement of compositional elements in film: setting, décor, depth of space, lighting and colour, props), camera work (distance, angle, movement), editing, sound (audio elements and their purpose), and production contexts (who funded the films and how this affects narratives). The analysis is meant to depict and illustrate the narratives about refugees that are created and distributed by these films. Moreover, drawing on Spivak’s theory of the subaltern, the analysis also aims to highlight some issues about the representation of refugees and refugees’ self-representation. For that purpose, this thesis will also address questions regarding the refugees’ involvement in the post-production processes and in the media events around the films, which implies that there will be a brief discussion about extra- textual aspects too, linking the subject of my thesis to a broader context.
20 Time, ‘Alan Kurdi | 100 Photographs | The Most Influential Images of All Time,’ accessed June 4, 2020, http://100photos.time.com/photos/nilufer-demir-alan-kurdi. 21 Ibid. 22 The mise-en-scène (putting things in the scene), refers to what is shot and how it is shot. 13
Chapter 3 Theoretical Framework
3.1 The Refugee
Refugee and migration flows are caused by political, economic, and social factors, and sometimes a combination of all these. Most often, people leave their homes because of war and violence, either caused by ethnic conflicts, political change, and/or decaying economic conditions. In fact, ‘it seems to be the interaction of economic and political factors which has generated most of the world’s refugees.’23 But who is a refugee? The 1951 Refugee Convention sets the definition of a refugee as follows:
As a result of events occurring before 1 January 1951 and owing to well- founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.24
As the convention acknowledges, refugees are people who are in danger in their home country, and who leave their countries because of fear of being persecuted for different reasons: race, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, affiliation with specific groups (for example IPOB - Indigenous People of Biafra, fighting for the freedom of Biafrans from under Nigerian rule). As British-Somali poet Warsan Shire powerfully highlights in her poem Home, ‘you have to understand, / no one puts their children in a boat / unless the water is safer than the land.’25 Refugees choose to flee ‘when fearing they would be exiled or imprisoned if they did not leave.’26 Many also fear they will be killed if they stay. In the context of the European ‘refugee crisis’, refugees are people coming from the south and east of Europe, who seek shelter in
23 Elizabeth G. Ferris, Beyond Borders: Refugees, Migrants and Human Rights in the Post- Cold War Era (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1993), 70. 24 United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, accessed 29 January 2020, https://web.archive.org/web/20120607013438/http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/refugees.ht m. 25 ‘“Home” by Warsan Shire,’ Facing History and Ourselves, accessed June 28, 2020, https://www.facinghistory.org/standing-up-hatred-intolerance/warsan-shire-home. 26 Darko Suvin, ‘Displaced Persons’, New Left Review 31 (January 1, 2005), 114. 14 fortress Europe and who are very much affected by the anti-immigration policies, stereotypes, and unjust representations in the media.
Edward Said defines refugees as ‘a creation of the twentieth-century state.’27 Moreover, he claims that ‘[t]he word “refugee” has become a political one, suggesting large herds of innocent and bewildered people requiring urgent international assistance.’28 Just like Said, Darko Suvin also notes that displacement is a characteristic of modernity. He defines displacement as ‘the sense of feeling alien and out of place, a widespread unease sometimes deepening into despair, that seems so intrinsic to the experience of modernity.’29 Refugees are people who desire a better life for themselves and their families, far away from threats and dangerous circumstances. They are people who risk everything anchored solely in the hope that somewhere else, life will treat them better. They are ‘damaged humans’30 who have experienced loss in all possible ways, having lost their loved ones, having been deprived of the comfort of their homes, and of the ability to speak their own language, thus being unable to express their feelings and making themselves understood in a new context, or as Hannah Arendt accurately puts it:
We lost our homes, which means the familiarity of daily life. We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in the world. We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expression of feelings.31
The refugee is alienated from everything he knows. His struggle for a better life does not end when he reaches Europe – in fact that is when ‘the alienation of [his] soul’32 begins. Many refugees arrive here all alone, confused, and not knowing what to do next. Besides this, upon arrival in Europe they become victims of human traffickers and mafia networks who recruit them for sex slavery, drug trafficking, and human smuggling, and exploit them for their own profit.33
27 Edward William Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays (London: Granta Books, 2002), 312. 28 Ibid., 312. 29 Suvin, ‘Displaced Persons’, 107. 30 Ibid., 123. 31 Quote from Hannah Arendt’s Imperialism in Suvin, ‘Displaced Persons’, 116. 32 Suvin, ‘Displaced Persons’, 119. 33 As it happens in Italy and Greece. For more information, check Helena Smith, ‘Refugees in Greek Camps Targeted by Mafia Gangs,’ (2016) and Caroline Modarressy-Tehrani and Harriet Dedman, ‘The Mafia and a Nigerian Gang Are Targeting Refugees in Sicily,’ (2017). 15
In Orientalism, Edward Said argues that the Western representations of the Orient are unfaithful – misrepresentations based on stereotypes, false ideas, and prejudices. The Enlightened West is constructed in opposition to the Orient, so that the West is everything the Orient is not. Nowadays, Europe defines itself against Islam. These representations are problematic because they make false generalisations that influence the way in which people perceive the ‘Others’ and act towards them. What Ferris pointed out in 1993 is still the reality of today: ‘European governments talk of “uncontrolled migration” as a security threat […] Racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia are increasing throughout Europe as scapegoats are sought for economic and political problems.’34 Right-wing political parties are exercising a politics of fear, creating anxiety about a possible Islamic invasion.35 Populists believe
‘immigration corrupts and culturally destroys both the host and immigrant societies.’36 According to them, immigration is a threat for national identities and cultures. But migration is a right that every human should possess and thus, it cannot be stopped. Immigrants are believed to disrupt the homogeneity of Europe and populists wish Europe could go back to its pre-immigrant state. Historically, such a Europe has never existed, because ‘Europe has been a continent of emigration’ as well.37 Nonetheless, populists forget how Europeans travelled to the colonies to make their fortunes, how between the mid-1800s and the mid-1900s, over 50 million Europeans moved to the Western hemisphere in what pre-2016 was called ‘the greatest recorded migratory flow of all time,’38 how after the First World War, millions of people were displaced in the Balkans and elsewhere,39 how the Second World War caused ‘30 million displaced people throughout Europe.’40 Colonialism, imperialism, the two world wars and all the conflicts that followed are part of Europe’s history, and the Europe we know today is the result of all these events we rather overlook. Moreover, the populist ideology is engaging with the concept of cultural fundamentalism, which ‘legitimates the exclusion of foreigners [or] strangers…[on] the assumption that relations between different cultures are by “nature” hostile
34 Ferris, Beyond Borders, 242. 35 As shown by Ruth Wodak, The Politics of Fear: What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean (London: Sage, 2015) and Anouk de Koning and Wayne Modest, ‘Anxious Politics in Postcolonial Europe,’ American Anthropologist 119 (2017): 524–526. 36 Chiara De Cesari, Ivo Bosilkov, Arianna Piacentini, and Ayhan Kaya, ‘(Why) Do Eurosceptics Believe in a Common European Heritage?,’ in European Memory in Populism: Representations of Self and Other, 1st ed. (Routledge, 2020), 35. 37 Ferris, Beyond Borders, 243. 38 Ibid., 243. 39 Ibid., 243. 40 Ibid., 243. 16
and mutually destructive.’41 According to this argument, xenophobia is an intrinsic aspect of humanity, which makes our fear of ‘the Other’ absolutely normal. In a world where populism is rising, refugees have few chances to be understood and treated as individuals in need of protection and not as enemies coming from distant lands aiming to invade Europe and impose their threatening culture onto it.
3.2 The Subaltern
Another theorist who discusses the power of representation in her most famous essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ published in 1988, is Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. It was her who, inspired by Antonio Gramsci, introduced the term ‘subaltern’ into the post-colonial discourse. The subaltern is the ‘Other’ who is being silenced and oppressed by the West. Inspired by the Marxist discourse, Spivak argues that the poorest people in the world are the most powerless, having no voice in society. When talking about humanness, Judith Butler argues that some humans have to struggle to gain it, because ‘some humans qualify as human,’42 while others do not. In this sense, the subaltern is the human who struggles to be recognised and treated as such. Although the title of this essay presents the question of whether or not the subaltern can speak, Spivak is in fact trying to show that even when the subaltern can speak and is indeed speaking, he cannot be heard because he is not listened to. Spivak combines different theories, namely Marxism, and Deconstruction which help her build her argument that oppression happens as a result of such factors as social class, gender, race, and degree of education. It was one year later, in 1989, that feminist theorist and academic Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality, the theory according to which marginalisation is the result of multiple discriminatory factors – race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, age, occupation – are all categories that to a certain extent, bring power inequalities between individuals in a society. Ideologies and systems of knowledge created by the West produce what Spivak calls ‘epistemic violence’43 – harm inflicted against the ‘Others’ through discourse. Narratives and representations are thus powerful as they can take part in a discourse used to justify real violence against other people. Riach claims that ‘[i]f the media or politicians portray a group as a threat […], this begins by damaging their reputation, and can then be used to justify the
41 Quoted in David Morley, Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity (Routledge, 2000), 248. 42 Judith Butler, Frames of war: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), 76. 43 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?,’ in Rosalind C. Morris and Gayatri C. Spivak Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 35. 17
use of force against them’44 or in the case of refugees, their rejection. Moreover, as Wright argues that the images spread by the media determine people to construct their reality,45 images can also impact viewers in many different ways, leading to feelings of pity, empathy, solidarity, or on the contrary, confusion, doubt, and fear. We tend to fear what is unknown to and different from us. European citizens mostly fear refugees because of their associations with ISIS and with different values, behaviours, and beliefs from our own. Our attitude towards these migrants reflects our deep fear, which in turn, is an emotional reaction to previous tragic events (9/11 attacks, Charlie Hebdo shooting, etc.). However, this fear can also be caused by doubt and incertitude that emerge from reading newspapers, watching the news, and seeing other pictures and texts distributed by the media controlled by specific political parties, as they mostly do not tell the public who these refugees are, where they are coming from, and the reasons why they are leaving their homes.
The subalterns ‘cannot represent themselves.’46 Therefore, their representations are done by someone else – scholars, activists, lawyers, politicians – who ‘talk about them or in their place.’47As Riach rightfully affirms, Spivak’s essay aims to show ‘how representing subalterns […] and so speaking on their behalf, effectively silences their own voices.’48 Stories about refugees are mostly told by officials, journalists, and reporters who present a Western perspective on the so-called ‘crisis’, a uniform stereotypical description of this mass of people. Refugees scarcely speak in the media because the speaking is thus done for them. In Spivak’s opinion, whenever Western people write about or try to represent people from the developing nations, they are exercising their power, whether voluntarily or not. Spivak argues that even when we, Westerners, try to help in any way, our ‘sincere and deep desire to right wrongs is integrally bound up with Social Darwinist assumptions about what it means to help and about those who are represented as forever “in need” of our help.’49
44 Graham K. Riach, An analysis of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's Can the subaltern speak? (London: Routledge, 2017), 27-8. 45 Wright, ‘Moving Images,’ 53. 46 Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?,’ 30. 47 Riach, An analysis, 28. 48 Ibid., 28. 49 Drucilla Cornell, ‘The Ethical Affirmation of Human Rights,’ in Rosalind C. Morris and Gayatri C. Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 105-6. 18
3.3 Media Theories
3.3.1 Agenda Setting and Framing Theory
First put forth by McCombs and Shaw in 1972, the Agenda Setting Function of the Mass Media suggests that the media ‘set the agenda for each political campaign, influencing the salience of attitudes toward the political issues.’50 Thus, the events portrayed in the media are seen by the public as the most important issues in a society. Subsequently, McCombs argues that ‘[b]eyond attitudes and opinions, the pictures of reality created by the mass media have implications for personal behaviors, ranging from college applications to voting on election day.’51 While the agenda-setting theory suggests that news tell an audience what to think about, framing theory proposes that they also tell the public how to think about certain issues. Framing represents the ways in which any piece of information is constructed. The framing theory was first coined by Erving Goffman in his book Frame Analysis, in which he explains that people are usually interpreting anything they come across through their primary framework, which he defines as a framework ‘that is seen as rendering what would otherwise be a meaningless aspect of the scene into something that is meaningful.’52 According to this theory, the frame is highly significant as it can influence the way in which an information will be processed by its receiver. Within the primary framework, Goffman distinguishes between natural and social frameworks. The natural frameworks are those unaffected by any ‘willful agency’ either ‘causally and intentionally’ and whose outcomes are not determined by a guiding actor.53 On the other hand, social frameworks ‘provide background understanding for events that incorporate the will, aim, and controlling effort of an intelligence, a live agency, the chief one being the human being.’54 Social frameworks employ specific drives, goals, and manipulations, and the outcome is the result of a prior ‘mental decision.’55 The conscious choice made by news writers when deciding how to organise their ideas and present their findings represents the frame they choose in order to transmit a specific message.
50 Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw, ‘The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media,’ The Public Opinion Quarterly 36, no. 2 (July 1, 1972): 177. 51 Maxwell McCombs, ‘The Agenda-Setting Role of the Mass Media in the Shaping of Public Opinion,’ 2003, 17. 52 Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (New York, NY et al.: Harper & Row, 1974), 21. 53 Ibid., 22. 54 Ibid., 22. 55 Ibid., 23. 19
3.3.2 Mediation and Mediatisation
During the last five decades, besides becoming mediated,56 politics also became mediatised.57 Mediated politics designates ‘a situation in which the media have become the most important source of information and vehicle of communication between the governors and the governed.’58 This means that people are dependent on media for information, which implies that the media depictions of reality become the reality of the people. The mediatisation of politics represents the process through which politics becomes increasingly dependent on mass media and other mediated practices (online and social media).59 The media is responsible for altering politics into ‘a process of mediated attention-seeking rather than of political representation and policy making.’60 Figure 1 shows the four dimensions of politics mediatisation, which are clearer to observe in theory than in reality. Mediation is the first phase of mediatisation. The second phase is achieved when ‘the media have become more independent of governmental or other political bodies.’61 In the third phase, there is a reversal – the media has increased its independence to the extent that political and social actors have to adapt to it.62 In this stage, the actual reality loses its significance, as the ‘mediated reality matters more than any kind of actual or objective reality.’63
56 For more information on the mediation of politics, check Lance W. Bennett and Robert M. Entman (2001) and Dan Nimmo and James E. Combs (1983). 57 For more information on mediatisation, check Hans M. Kepplinger (2002); Gianpietro Mazzoleni and Winfried Schulz (1999); Winfried Schulz (2004). 58 Jesper Strömbäck, ‘Four Phases of Mediatisation: An Analysis of the Mediatisation of Politics’, Journal of Press/Politics 13, no. 3 (2008): 230. 59 Michał Krzyżanowski, Anna Triandafyllidou and Ruth Wodak, ‘The Mediatization and the Politicization of the “Refugee Crisis” in Europe’, Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies 16, no. 1-2 (2018): 6. 60 Ibid., 6. 61 Strömbäck, ‘Four Phases of Mediatisation,’ 236. 62 Ibid., 237-38. 63 Ibid., 239. 20
Figure 1. ‘A Four-Dimensional Conceptualization of the Mediatization of Politics’64
In the fourth and last phase of mediatisation, political actors use media not only when campaigning, but also when governing and during the policy-making processes.65 In this phase, the political and media logic are intertwined, making them indistinguishable for both the public and the political actors. As the media independence from politics increases, so does the commercialism in the media sector, because the media ‘belong to both the political and the economic systems,’66 making it equally important to both politicians and the public. As a result, it can be concluded that the reality reported by the media changes according to its degree of independence. The main problem is that, as studies on media effects show, the media can have a significant influence on an audience,67 leading to the public believing whatever reality is portrayed by them, whether accurate or distorted.
3.4 Visual Representations
Nowadays, media is a significant part of our daily lives. The Agenda Setting and Framing Theory illustrate the essential role media has in influencing the public’s perception of the world and leading to the formation of opinions, be these negative or positive. The media also illustrates events, thus representing reality. But whose reality is being represented? Who and what is represented or omitted? Who is doing the representation? And what are the implications of all these actions and decisions? As Spivak argues, ‘[t]his question of
64 Figure from Strömbäck, ‘Four Phases of Mediatisation,’ 235. 65 Ibid., 239. 66 Ibid, 242. 67 Check for example Iyengar and McGrady (2007) and Preiss et al. (2007). 21
representation, self-representation, representing others, is a problem.’68 But what is meant by representation and how does representation affect an audience? Representation itself is so crucial that many philosophers, linguists, theorists, and artists have discussed it for centuries. On the one hand, a picture can come as close to reality as nothing else would. According to Terence Wright, we live in a ‘visual culture’ that ‘relies more and more upon information provided by pictures.’69 Images are extremely important because, like text, they too carry and share meaning. On the other hand, a representation will always be an imitation of reality, a fake attempt, always distinguishable from the real, as supported by Jean Baudrillard and his notions of simulacra and simulation.70 Baudrillard claims that ‘[r]epresentation stems from the principle of the equivalence of the sign and of the real.’71 In his opinion, an image goes through the following four phases:
it is the reflection of a profound reality;
it masks and denatures a profound reality;
it masks the absence of a profound reality;
it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum.72
On first glance, an image seems to be a faithful reflection of reality. Under analysis, it becomes visible that the image either masks or alters reality (phase 2), covers the lack of reality (phase 3), or is not at all connected to reality, being a replication (phase 4). Baudrillard engages with a post-modern sense of reality, one that is shattered, which implies the existence of multiple separate realities.
Susan Sontag also analyses the role of images and their relation to the real. In her book On Photography, she states that through the act of photographing, the photographer grants importance to his or her subject,73 the subject becoming visible to the photograph’s viewers. Moreover, photographing could be seen as an attempt to bring something into existence. By photographing it, its presence is being acknowledged. Thus, a picture is ‘both a pseudo-
68 Spivak Gayatri Chakravorty and Sarah Harasym, The Post-Colonial Critic Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (New York: Routledge, 1990), 63. 69 Wright, ‘Moving Images,’ 53. 70 Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Precession of Simulacra,’ in Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas Kellner Media and cultural studies keyworks (Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2006), 456. 71 Ibid., 456. 72 Ibid., 456. The italics are not mine. 73 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Rosetta Books LLC, 2005), 22. 22
presence and a token of absence’74 – the photograph proves that something exists, or at least existed at some point. The ultimate goal of photography is bringing a distant reality closer to us. Sontag emphasises that what happens ‘there’, in the distant world, could also happen ‘here’.
She wants photography to be powerful and able ‘to stop violence, to effect change, to protect.’75 But geography and culture create separate worlds, and events that happen ‘there’ do not motivate people ‘here’ to act. In this sense, media is a platform that establishes cultural, social, and other norms that work towards the creation of (cultural) dichotomies, constructing representations of ‘us’ in comparison to ‘them’. Cottle argues that:
[t]he media […] perform a crucial role in the public representation of unequal social relations and the play of cultural power. It is in and through representations […] that members of the media audience are variously invited to construct a sense of who “we” are in relation to who “we” are not, whether as “us” and “them”, “normal” and “deviant”, “friend” and “foe”, “the west” and “the rest”.76
The media is thus responsible for the construction of identities that value the label ‘Westerner’ more than ‘human’. This leads to a power imbalance between ‘us’ and ‘them’, which justifies the lack of interest in tragedies happening ‘there’. In the section ‘Screening the Other’, David Morley discusses the representation of ‘others’ in the media, especially on television. Basing his claims on Nigel Thrift’s arguments, Morley notes that ‘even if the modern media make other places and peoples seem less distant, we may still care less for others the further away they seem to be, whether in geographical or cultural terms.’77 This implies that if we cannot relate to people from different parts of the world and from different cultures, we will not feel an obligation to care about what is happening to them. Furthermore, Miller claims that television viewers are simply spectators fallen into the ‘unconscious belief that the events which happen on television are going on in some unbelievably remote theatre of human activity,’78 the screen acting as a curtain separating us from the other world. Regarding this, Judith Butler believes that we cannot relate to others unless we acknowledge precariousness as a universal human condition.79
74 Ibid., 12. 75 Sarah Sentilles, ‘Misreading Feuerbach: Susan Sontag, Photography and the Image-World,’ Literature and Theology 24, no. 1 (2010): 50. 76 Simon Cottle, Ethnic Minorities and the Media: Changing Cultural Boundaries (Maidenhead, England: Open University Press, 2000), 2. 77 Morley, Home Territories, 183. 78 Quoted in Morley, Home Territories, 184. 79 Butler, Frames of War, 28. 23
In her later book, Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag mostly focuses on war and war photography, arguing that the majority of us who have never experienced war understand it due to the images of war that are circulating in the media. Likewise, our understanding of the refugee crisis is limited to the content shared by the media, and dependent on visual representations. According to Sontag, photographs are ‘both objective record and personal testimony, both a faithful copy or transcript of an actual moment of reality and an interpretation of that reality.’80 Somehow contradictory, Sontag sees images both as faithful copies and as interpretations of reality. She argues that without words accompanying a picture, images can be misleading and can lead to multiple interpretations. This is because ‘photographs represent the view of someone’,84 which implies subjectivity. The photographer has chosen to take a picture from a specific angle for a specific reason. Thus, subjectivity plays a part in both phases: the taking of a picture and the interpreting of its meaning. She adds that ‘[t]he photographer’s intentions do not determine the meaning of the photograph, which will have its own career, blown by the whims and loyalties of the diverse communities that have use for it.’85 She seems to be an adept of relativism – meaning and interpretation are context-dependent. According to her, it all comes to the way in which a picture is used, to the frame and the context in which the picture is placed, and to the purpose and goal it has to achieve. Interpretations present social and political implications, and are always the result of an individual’s level of education, knowledge of the world, memory, experience, imagination, and cultural background. A picture unaccompanied by words is understood by the public in many different ways. Yet, an image followed by words is a tool used by someone or a group of people to share a specific message. In this regard, representation is always political. Both written and visual narratives are forms of representation that adhere to a specific (political) context and ideology. The image brings visual support for the narrative it accompanies, narrative which presents one interpretation only. According to Jennifer Todd, ‘the symbol systems to which these pictures belong are partly constituted by the social relationships between the photographer, his/her employer, and his/her audience.’87 She believes there are ‘semi-institutionalized rules and roles’88 that news
80 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, Picador Edition (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), 26. 84 Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 31. 85 Ibid., 39. 87 Jennifer Todd, ‘The Roots of Pictorial Reference’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 39, no. 1 (1980): 53. 88 Ibid., 53-4. 24 photographers must follow in order to ‘make pictures which provoke the viewers’ interests’ without offending their values.89 This relates to Sontag’s claims that the role and the power of images is merely to shock us, when she says that ‘[n]arratives can make us understand.
Photographs do something else: they haunt us.’90 Judith Butler is not convinced by this, arguing that photographs do more than just haunt us; they are absolutely necessary as evidence for the atrocities that words are trying to prove. Without a picture as evidence, the words may never suffice in proving the truth. In this regard, Butler is questioning Sontag’s way of thinking – would it not be possible for narratives to also haunt us and for photographs to help us understand the truth? In her book, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?, Butler presents an exploration of the different ways in which the U.S. wars in the Middle East have been framed and how these certain frames affect the way in which people view the wars and their victims. Unlike Sontag, Butler believes that the interpretation of a picture should not be regarded solely as a ‘subjective act’,91 because the photograph itself can provide useful information – the camera angle, the frame, and the posed subjects present a perspective and validate a point of view.92 Moreover, ‘the way that they are shown, the way they are framed, and the words used to describe what is shown, work together to produce an interpretive matrix for what is seen.’93 In ‘Photography, War, Outrage’, she defines the phenomenon of ‘embedded reporting’ as ‘the situation in which journalists agree to report only from the perspective established by military and governmental authorities.’95 In this way, by deciding what journalists are allowed to photograph, the government is in fact controlling the narrative, highlighting their own perspective. In her book Compassion Fatigue, Susan Moeller discusses similar issues. Just like Sontag and Butler, Moeller engages with the ways in which media portray the suffering others.
She notes that ‘media moguls have long known that suffering, rather than good news, sells.’96 She acknowledges the power of images, claiming that crises require pictures because a story without visual support is likely to be ignored. Especially when the crisis happens somewhere else, pictures are meant to help the public feel the gravity of the situation, provoking emotions.
89 Ibid., 54. 90 Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 89. 91 Butler, Frames of war, 67. 92 Ibid., 65. 93 Ibid., 79. 95 Judith Butler, ‘Photography, War, Outrage’, PMLA 120, no. 3 (May 1, 2005): 822. 96 Susan D. Moeller, Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death (New York: Routledge, 1999), 34. 25
Images simplify reality, making it more understandable to the wide public. While words can provide meaning, ‘in our visual era, images are essential to effective communication – especially in the telling of the news.’97 This is because, images ‘have authority over the imagination’98 – they engage with the viewer and induce a process of thought and interpretation. Moreover, photographs also freeze time, being ‘the “residue” of continuous experience,’99 or as Roland Barthes claims, photographs represent ‘the collective memory of the world.’100 We remember events more vividly due to the images accompanying them. To give just one example, the whole world seemed to understand the gravity of the refugee crisis when they saw the picture of the lifeless body of Alan Kurdi laying on a beach. Contrary to Butler, Moeller argues that while pictures ‘can drill into the minds and hearts of their audiences,’101 they hardly inform the public of the context and causes of it. Thus, while there is meaning in a picture, an image is not able to fully and accurately represent a situation that is much more complex than a single depiction. She believes the role of images is primarily to provoke emotional reactions, to catch and direct attention of an audience to a specific event, and to transmit a message instantly, unlike narratives which are ‘time and space-consuming.’103 Nonetheless, this instant message may be a distortion of reality. Both Butler and Moeller believe there is ‘an ideological construct […] behind every image. There are moral, cultural, social and political assumptions in the taking and the publishing and the viewing of images.’104 Photographs can be used to justify, initiate, or reinforce moral, cultural, social or political viewpoints. This proves that there is always intent behind a picture. The challenge is to discover it.
3.5 Refugees in the Media
All media representations of refugees contribute to ‘the elaboration of a transnational social imagination of refugeeness.’105 The portrayal of a refugee group as a confused, hectic mass of bodies, a gathering of desperate individuals, does not provide any details about these
97 Ibid., 47 98 Ibid., 47. 99 Ibid., 44. 100 Quoted in Moeller, Compassion Fatigue, 44. 101 Moeller, Compassion Fatigue, 36. 103 Ibid., 47. 104 Ibid., 51. 105 Liisa H. Malkki, ‘Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and Dehistoricization,’ Cultural Anthropology 11, no. 3 (1996): 386, https://doi.org/10.1525/can.1996.11.3.02a00050. 26
people’s culture, history, motivation to flee, identity, opinions. These ‘mute victims’106 are thus deprived of any kind of individual characteristics. Outside of the group, a refugee is anonymous – he has no identity. Such pictures only show helplessness, depriving their subjects of any agency. Additionally, Malkki believes photographs replace testimonies and silence refugees, leading to dehumanisation.107 Bleiker et al. observe that these representations of refugees always being in a medium or large group, which make the audience unable to recognise any facial features, are responsible for reinforcing a politics of fear and are unsuccessful in generating ‘a compassionate political response.’108 They also note that when the suffering is collective, the viewers are rather numbed than touched because suffering is portrayed as a wide human condition, as opposed to individual suffering, which is more likely to make the viewer feel compassion. In this way, ‘images of a lone sufferer humanise a political crisis’109 and the lack of such images dehumanises it.110 Their study also mentions that governments can influence the way in which asylum-seekers are portrayed in images through their regulatory policies. Following the Tampa incident in 2001, when Australia refused to allow the Norwegian ship MV Tampa – which rescued 433 refugees – to enter its territory, the government issued explicit directives for journalists, according to which they had to make sure that ‘no imagery that could conceivably garner sympathy or cause misgiving about the aggressive new border protection regime would find its way into the public domain.’111 This proves that governments do hold an agenda that establishes what can and cannot be seen or discussed in public, and representations play a crucial role in this, because ‘they lie at the heart of how we see and understand the world.’112
3.6 Numbness and Compassion Fatigue
When saying that ‘a war becomes “real”’ when there are photographs,113 Sontag implies that in order for us to acknowledge its reality, we have to see it with our own eyes. However, while this is true, the contrary is also valid – ‘after repeated exposure it also becomes less
106 Ibid., 378. 107 Ibid., 390. 108 Roland Bleiker et al., ‘The Visual Dehumanisation of Refugees,’ Australian Journal of Political Science 48, no. 4 (2013): 398, https://doi.org/10.1080/10361146.2013.840769. 109 Ibid., 408. 110 Ibid., 408. 111 Quoted in Bleiker et al.,‘The Visual Dehumanisation of Refugees,’ 413. 112 Ibid., 414. 113 Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 104. 27
real.’114 She seems to believe that if we are exposed to these photographs regularly, we will become accustomed to whatever they portray, and they will stop impacting us, hence losing their power. Sontag thinks the role of pictures is to affect our feelings. However, too many pictures will numb our emotions. She concludes that ‘the painful, stirring images supply only an initial spark’115 and are not enough for changing the viewers’ point of view and encourage them to take action. Similarly, Moeller claims that ‘compassion fatigue’ is that which tempts journalists to find news that sell, to adopt and reinforce simplistic, formulaic expressions, choosing pictures of starving children to appear on the front page when representing crises of war, refugees, famine, because through this method, they can capture the public’s attention. Compassion fatigue is ‘an unavoidable consequence of the way the news is now covered.’116 She claims that the media try to make us feel responsible for the tragedies that are occurring as long as we do not help. She gives the example of the Save the Children advertising campaign which appears on the first page of a newspaper. In this situation, the reader is confronted with two options: help the child or turn the page. Perhaps the first time a reader encounters such an ad, he will feel guilt and will maybe donate money. However, the second time, after lingering over the picture, he might turn the page. The third time, he will turn the page without any hesitation. The implication is that in turning the page, we become culpable and almost accomplices to the cruelty. Due to the impossibility of responding to every request for help, we might construct the belief that we are careless, that we have got compassion fatigue ‘as if we have involuntarily contracted some kind of disease that we’re stuck with no matter what we might do.’117 A few reasons that cause compassion fatigue are the plethora of catastrophes happening in the world,118 the remoteness of the crises which turns these tragedies into unrelatable events to people who are far away from the danger,119 the sensational way in which crises are reported which make us feel that some situations deserve more attention than others,120 and the formulaic coverage of crises that give us the impressions that we have seen this news before.121 To sum up, compassion fatigue establishes once news pass from page-turners to the public
114 Ibid., 105. 115 Ibid., 103. 116 Moeller, Compassion Fatigue, 2. 117 Ibid., 9. 118 Ibid., 11. 119 Ibid., 12. 120 Ibid., 14. 121 Ibid., 13. 28
turning the page.122 Compassion fatigue is the ‘result of inaction’123 and once it establishes, it will cause further inaction.
3.7 The Spectacle of the World and the Politics of Pity
Compassion, humanitarian altruism, and the question of whether or not we are able to show empathy and kindness, are related to what Hannah Arendt called the ‘politics of pity’. To tell someone that he or she has to be affected by a ‘spectacle of distant suffering’124 (as some media seem to be doing) is not ‘enough to satisfy the demand for commitment to action.’125 The politics of pity requires two specific features. Firstly, it asks for a distinction between the unfortunate – those who suffer, and the fortunate – those who do not. Secondly, there must be a focus on the process of looking and on what is seen. That is the ‘spectacle of suffering.’126 The politics of pity does not focus on action directly, nor on the power of those who are strong over those who are weak, but on observation.127 Crucial is the observation of the suffering by those who do not share their suffering, but watch it from a distance. The politics of pity is centred around luck, rather than merit, the unfortunate being considered victims – people affected by acts of terror or famine do not deserve their condition, but are rather unlucky to experience them. For the politics of pity to be effective, the spectator must be engaged, and for this to happen, he must be at a specific degree of proximity: distant enough to separate one from the other, but close enough for the fortunate spectator to be able to observe the other. According to Arendt, the spectacle of misery does not necessarily lead to a politics of pity, because the suffering of the unfortunate may be ignored by the spectator. In other words, Arendt is talking about the compassion fatigue that affects the passive spectator and makes him unable to feel pity for the suffering, consequently turning him into ‘an active accomplice of those who directly caused the sufferings of the unfortunate.’128 The media is the perfect mediator, providing the spectator with a spectacle. However, in the case of TV news for
122 Ibid., 14. 123 Ibid., 52. 124 Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), xv. 125 Ibid., xvi. 126 Ibid., 3. 127 ‘The words le peuple are the key words for every understanding of the French Revolution, and their connotations were determined by those who were exposed to the spectacle of the people’s sufferings, which they themselves did not share’ from Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 75. 128 Boltanski, Distant Suffering, 17. 29 example, the spectator hears a story told to him by a reporter who receives the information from an eye-witness. Due to the multiple layers and actors involved, the spectator chooses whether or not to believe the story and trust the information, determining the spectator’s decision to act or change the channel.
3.8 The Documentary
So far, I have talked about discourses, media, representations, and their power upon the subaltern, or in this case, the refugee. My paper is however, not about photographs, but about documentary films, topic that has not been discussed neither by Sontag, nor by Butler, nor by Moeller. Even though both are forms of representation of reality, both having a maker, a subject, a viewer, a reason, a purpose, and most probably a frame they adjust to, a film is more complex than a photograph. James Monaco argues that films are ‘agencies or channels of communication.’129 Thus, film is a way of communicating a message. In the case of documentary films, the message contained is supposedly the truth. Moreover, film is usually self-explanatory. In this regard, ‘the great thing about literature is that you can imagine; the great thing about film is that you can't.’130 One could substitute the word literature with photograph and this claim would still be correct. While a picture challenges the viewer’s imagination in the process of interpretation, a film leaves little space for imagination because the film itself provides more information. The documentary is both artistic and political. However, it is important to clarify that a documentary should be non-fictitious. As Currie puts it, documentaries are ‘filmic narratives, the images of which support the narrative in virtue
(mostly) of their being photographic representations.’131 In a documentary, the meaning is not imposed, but is conveyed by the depicted images. Thus, if we were to define the documentary film in simple terms, we could say that: 1. documentaries are films about reality – they illustrate something that actually happened; 2. documentaries are about real people, not actors playing a role;
3. documentaries tell real stories about events that happened in the real world.132
129 James Monaco, How to Read a Film: Movies, Media, Multimedia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 63. 130 Ibid., 158. 131 Gregory Currie, ‘Visible Traces: Documentary and the Contents of Photographs,’ Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57, no. 3 (July 1, 1999): 296. 132 Bill Nichols, ‘How Can We Define Documentary Film?,’ in Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 5-7. 30
It is important to note that documentaries are not a reproduction of reality, which would produce a replica or a copy of something that existed at some point, but they are rather representations of reality.133 However, even though reproductions and representations are just as different as documents and documentaries in terms of factual evidence, the filmmaker narrates a story in the ‘form and style of his or her choosing, but it will correspond to known facts and actual events.’134 While many documentary historians argue that the documentary tradition begins with the films of the Lumière brothers from the end of the nineteenth century,135 the word documentary started designating a particular type of film in the late 1920s.136 While the word documentary was already used by the French to define the newsreels, the first person to associate the word documentary with nonfiction film was John Grierson, when reviewing
Robert Flaherty’s Moana in 1926.137 He defined the documentary as ‘a creative treatment of actuality.’138 The documentary film presents ‘the sights and sounds of reality [which] enables reality to “speak” at the same time as it “speaks about” reality.’139 In this sense, the documentary film achieves the aim introduced by cinematography: ‘knowing reality through its images and sounds, that is […] allowing reality to “speak for itself”.’140 As discussed before, reality and its representation(s) are problematic issues. The purpose of a documentary is to allow the truth to present itself. Besides this, the documentary fulfils other roles as well: exposing, informing, investigating, educating. Rabinowitz states that the documentary ‘is meant to instruct through evidence’ and ‘it poses truth as a moral imperative.’141 Grierson claims that the ‘documentary film was conceived and developed as an instrument of public use.’142 According to Nichols, the documentary film ‘addresses issues of public importance
133 Ibid., 9. 134 Ibid., 8. 135 Bill Nichols, Speaking Truths with Film: Evidence, Ethics, Politics in Documentary (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2016), 9-10. 136 Ibid., 9. 137Ann S. Utterback, ‘The Voices of the Documentarist,’ Journal of the University Film Association 29, no. 3 (July 1, 1977): 31. 138 Quoted in Utterback, ‘The Voices of the Documentarist’, 31. 139 Elizabeth Cowie, Recording Reality, Desiring the Real (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 1. 140 Ibid., 1. 141 Paula Rabinowitz, They Must be Represented: The Politics of Documentary (London: Verso, 1994), 18. 142 Quoted in Brian Winston, ‘The Tradition of the Victim in Griersonian Documentary,’ in New Challenges for Documentary by Alan Rosenthal (Berkley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1988), 270. 31
and affirms or contests the role of the state in confronting these issues.’143 It can be drawn from these observations that the documentary film is a tool used in informing and educating the public, but also an instrument that can be politicised in order to serve a specific agenda. If reality ‘speaks for itself’ in a documentary, what exactly is it saying? What does this message mean, and why is this ‘speaking’ produced? And more importantly, is the speaking done for the subjects or by the subjects? While documentary provides a narrative, it must be seen ‘as not only a discursive construction, but also as a constructing discourse.’144 While the documentary presents current discourses, it is also capable of constructing its own. Regarding this speaking for itself, Jonathan Kahana claims that documentaries are ‘films with a special interest in the relation to the real, the “truths” which matter in people’s lives.’145 However, these truths ‘cannot be transparently represented.’146 Documentaries are most often criticised because they claim to be truthful representations of actuality, and thus, to represent reality as it is. However, since documentaries tell stories, they ‘demand narratives’147 which are created by the film’s production team. Since the film is the result of someone’s work, it will always be suspected of subjectivity. Nonetheless, a documentary’s purpose is ‘to speak and confer value on the objects it speaks about,’148 and I believe the three documentaries I have chosen to focus on manage to do so, each to a different extent. They illustrate the/a reality of the refugee crisis, allowing their subjects to express themselves to a certain degree, thus intending to achieve verisimilitude. In this way, these films aim to raise awareness and create new narratives that could fight xenophobia and Islamophobia. Films have a more powerful impact on their viewers than texts. Seeing the refugee camps and the deplorable conditions refugees have to live in, while, at the same time, hearing their cries, can help the audience empathise with this group of people. Moreover, documentaries about refugees allow the public to see the other side of the crisis, as they focus on the refugees themselves, rather than on the European countries affected by migration. By presenting the refugees as people like us, who are affected by the cold, hunger, and thirst just like we are, who need to be protected by the same fundamental rights as we do, the films intend to work towards diminishing the fear of
143 Bill Nichols, ‘Documentary Film and the Modernist Avant-Garde,’ Critical Inquiry 27, no. 4 (2001): 582. 144 Cowie, Recording Reality, 5. 145 Jonathan Kahana, The Documentary Film Reader: History, Theory, Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 799. 146 Ibid., 799. 147 Rabinowitz, They Must be Represented, 7. 148 Ibid., 7. 32
‘the Other’ as the Others are portrayed as helpless and in no way threatening. On this aspect, Meg McLagan claims that a ‘[d]ocumentary film is at once a form of policy analysis and a node in a larger “issue network” consisting of the filmmaker, activist organizations, social movements, decision-makers, and policy elites.’149 Moreover, Monaco argues that film can have a ‘profound effect’ on its audience because of the ‘powerful and convincing representation of reality.’150 For these reasons, nonfiction films have the potential to produce political effects by creating narratives which affect and influence people’s opinions and consequently, policies. Although there are studies which have shown that the documentary can also increase awareness and public activation,151 making people care about something that does not directly affect them is always a difficult task.
149 Meg McLagan, ‘Imagining Impact: Documentary Film and the Production of Political Effects,’ in Meg McLagan and Yates McKee, Sensible Politics: The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Activism (New York: Zone Books, 2012), 312. 150 Monaco, How to Read a Film, 261. 151 A few examples are the studies conducted by Heather LaMarre and Kristen D. Landreville (2009), David Whiteman (2009), and Beth Karlin (2011). 33
Chapter 4 Visual Representations of Refugees in Documentary Film
4.1 Introduction
Nowadays, immigration is a politicised issue perceived as a problem affecting all modern societies. It is widely known that the migration flow of recent years has been largely debated in politics and reported in the media. Wright observes that ‘[w]hile media representation may result in objectifying “the refugee” in the role of the “illegal alien”, the feature film image of the refugee as protagonist presents a role that is immediately recognizable to the audience, and one that has a high potential of gaining their sympathy.’152 Much has been said so far about the depiction of the refugee crisis in photographs, newspapers, and TV news. As documentarists claim that their duty is to report reality as it is, this section focuses on how migrants are portrayed in documentaries.
4.2 Fire at Sea
4.2.1 Short Introduction
Fire at sea (original Italian name Fuocoammare) is a film directed and produced by Gianfranco Rosi, released in 2016, with a runtime of 114 minutes. Rosi is the first documentarian to win the Golden Lion at the 70th Venice International Film Festival in 2013 with Sacro GRA. Three years later, he became the first doc director to win the Golden Bear at the 66th Berlin International Film Festival with Fire at Sea.
4.2.2 Semiotic Analysis
The Lazy Eye During the course of filming, Samuele has an appointment at the doctor and discovers he has a lazy left eye. This is a coincidence that turns to be very favourable for Rosi’s film. The lazy eye (amblyopia) is a vision disorder characterised by the brain not being able to process the images sent by one eye. Samuele has the habit of closing his left eye while throwing stones with the slingshot, because his vision in his right eye is better. To treat his amblyopia,
152 Wright, ‘Moving Images,’ 64. 34 the doctor suggests an old-fashioned method of covering his right eye instead, demanding the lazy eye to work harder. Samuele’s lazy eye could be interpreted as a metaphor symbolising Europe’s failure to see clearly what is happening in Lampedusa and how so many people lose their lives in front of Europe’s door.
Figure 2 (01:10:46): Samuele with his slingshot, training his lazy eye
The Island - Door of Europe or End of Hope?
‘In the imagination of a refugee, any place on the other side of the Wall, wherever it is, must be beautiful.’
Marcello di Cintio, Walls153
Lampedusa has a surface of 20 km2 and is situated only 113 km away from the African coast, positioning it closer to Africa than to Sicily, which is 205 km away. For this reason, Lampedusa is the first European destination that migrants coming from North Africa reach, representing the first contact of refugees with European soil – their promised land. In the beginning of the film, it is said that approximatively 400,000 migrants have reached the Sicilian island in the last twenty years, while an estimated of 15,000 have died in their attempt. The island’s representation is twofold. From the perspective of the locals, Lampedusa is their home, the place where they get born and spend their entire life. From the perspective of the migrants,
153 Marcello Di Cintio, Walls: Travels Along the Barricades (Fredericton: Goose Lane Editions, 2013), 102. 35
Lampedusa is the door to Europe. The migrants who manage to survive the journey and reach the island are being transferred somewhere else within the course of two days. For the migrants, Lampedusa is a ‘non-place’, a space of transience, where they remain anonymous, not getting the possibility to dwell there, neither to interact with the inhabitants. There are two different realities taking place on this island. One is that of the inhabitants who live their lives normally, making coffee, cooking dinner, listening to music on the radio, and doing their other daily duties. The other is that of the migrants who arrive on the island with malnutrition, hypothermia, dehydration, or who lose their life before reaching their destination. It is important to note that while so many people die so close to the residents, they are not affected by this in any way. Tragedy and normalcy coexist on this island, and the only people who are aware of this are Dr. Bartolo and the radio DJ, who sometimes mentions the unfortunate events shortly in his radio bulletin. For migrants, Europe means freedom and it is this hope that pushes them to undertake such a risky journey. For Europeans, the situation concerning these migrants does not seem important enough for them to act upon it.
Figure 3 (00:08:10): The setting of the film: the island Lampedusa
The Sea Lampedusa is surrounded all around by the Mediterranean Sea. The sea represents a means of transportation for migrants from North Africa who choose to come to Europe in search of a better life, far away from violence, persecution, war, and famine, but it is also a natural barrier. The sea is a representation of the formulaic language of the media, which normalised the use of water-related words in describing migration (‘refugee flow’, ‘waves of 36 migration’, ‘influx’, ‘stream’, ‘flood’) to create the impression that migrants are unstoppable, and they come in infinite ‘waves.’ These ‘aquatic metaphors dehumanise migrants’154 by depicting migration as a ‘force of nature in need of hydraulic control’155 rather than a human experience. The thousands of lives lost in the Mediterranean Sea also turn it into a symbol of death, a graveyard. In this way, the Mediterranean is depicted ‘as a gothic space where the perished yet ghostly migrants haunt Europe like revenants of its colonial past.’156
Figure 4 (00:42:50): The Mediterranean Sea seen from one of Lampedusa’s cliff coasts
The Child The main protagonist is Samuele, a twelve-year-old boy, who spends his time playing with his slingshot, going to school, learning how to row, and trying to get rid of his seasickness, as he is expected to follow in his father’s footsteps, becoming a fisherman. Rosi presents the island as it is experienced by the locals through the eyes of Samuele and the persons around him (father, grandmother, friends). Samuele is a child who does not seem to be aware of the tragedies happening in the vicinity of his house. Thus, he may stand for innocence and naiveté.
154 Thomas Bellinck and An Van Dienderen, ‘“That’s My Life Jacket!” Speculative Documentary as a Counter Strategy to Documentary Taxidermy,’ Critical Arts 33, no. 1 (2019): 62, https://doi.org/10.1080/02560046.2019.1627474. 155 Ibid., 63. 156 Nataša Kovačević, ‘Dissolving into the sea: cinematic migrants and the problem of agency,’ Postcolonial Studies 22, no. 4 (2019): 428, DOI: 10.1080/13688790.2019.1693110. 37
In a way, Samuele represents us all in that we do not seem to be aware of the gravity of the European refugee crisis and neither to care about the suffering migrants.
Figure 5 (00:53:24): Samuele on his father’s boat, feeling seasick
The Title Fuocoammare is the name of a very important song for the collective memory of the people of Lampedusa. In the film, Samuele’s grandmother talks about World War II and the navy ships that fired rockets, turning the sea’s colour into red, which made it look like there was fire at sea. The song is a representation of braveness, courage, and perseverance and also reminiscent of the many people who died at sea during the war. Due to the almost omnipresence of the song and to all the references that locals still make to the wartime and the particular event when there was fire at sea, which brought death, and to the fact that people are still losing their life at sea in great numbers nowadays, Fuocoammare became the film’s title. Although not mentioned in the film but lurking in its background, fire at sea could also refer to the 2013 shipwreck when a fishing boat carrying over five hundred migrants was lit on fire, causing the death of more than 360 people.157
157 Wikipedia, ‘2013 Lampedusa Migrant Shipwreck,’ (Wikimedia Foundation, May 25, 2020), accessed June 4, 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Lampedusa_migrant_shipwreck. 38
Figure 6 (01:50:32): The title of the film as it appears at the end written in the symbolical colours: red (for fire) and blue (for water/sea)
4.2.3 Narrative Structure Analysis
The film is constructed by two different stories: the story of the migrants and the story of life on the island that the migrants pass by. The theme of the documentary is the portrayal of the tragic aspect of the refugee crisis. Rosi’s aim is to show how exactly the migrants are found, rescued, and dealt with during their time in Lampedusa, while also focusing attention to the inhabitants of the island and their daily activities. The two threads complement each other in the creation of this documentary. The 6000 people on Lampedusa are represented by only seven: doctor Bartolo, DJ Pippo Fragapane, Samuele Pucillo, his father, his grandmother, Zia (‘aunt’) Maria, and the diver. The two main protagonists are Samuele and Dr. Bartolo. Samuele is the protagonist of the quiet life on the island, and he appears in mostly all scenes linked to the locals. Although not always in the foreground, Dr. Bartolo is the only character who appears in both stories, the only person who is aware of the whole situation, the only one who links the two worlds and implicitly asks the viewers to open their eyes and hearts. He is the strongest character in terms of emotions and the only one to approach the topic of the refugee crisis, giving a heart-breaking account of the things he has witnessed working as a doctor for longer than thirty years. While Rosi is not interviewing him or asking him to talk about specific things, it is through Bartolo’s speech that Rosi’s message gets across:
It is the duty of every human being, if you are human, to help these people. When we succeed we are happy, we are glad we could have helped them. At times, unfortunately, it is not possible. So, I have to witness awful things: dead bodies, children… On these occasions, I am forced to do the thing I hate 39
most: examining cadavers. I have done so many, maybe too many. Many of my colleagues say ‘You have seen so many, you are used to it.’ It is not true. How can you get used to seeing dead children, pregnant women, women who have given birth on sinking boats, umbilical cords still attached? […] All this leaves you so angry, it leaves you with emptiness in your gut, a hole. It makes you think, dream about them. These are the nightmares I relive often, often.158
In this scene we can hear Dr. Bartolo talking about a ship transporting 840 migrants. The ones on the ‘first class’ were on the deck, having paid $1,500, the ‘second-class’ were in the middle, having paid $1,000. What he did not know at first was that there was a ‘third-class’ down in the hold, where there were a lot of people who paid $800. The ‘third-class’ passengers are the ones found in the most dangerous situations, due to lack of air, food and water for a period of many days, and exposure to fuel, which – when mixed with the sea water – causes serious chemical burns that can even be fatal. Today, Bartolo is a Member of the European Parliament, having ‘exchanged medicine for politics.’159 In an interview, he states that he had to stop working as a doctor because in the thirty years that he has helped migrants nothing has changed. He claims that neither the very successful Fire at Sea docudrama, nor his two books Lampedusa: Gateway to Europe (2017) and Tears of Salt: A Doctor’s Story (2018) have brought any change. For this reason, MEP Bartolo is part of the committee appointed to reform the Dublin Regulation and hopes that from Brussels he will be able to change the situation and then move back to his beloved island, where there will be no more suffering migrants.160
158 This speech starts at 01:02:20 and finishes at 01:04:27. 159 Emma Jane Kirby, ‘Why the Doctor of Lampedusa Changed Jobs,’ BBC News (BBC, August 12, 2019), accessed June 28, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-49297950. 160 In the interview with Emma Kirby, he makes the following claims: ‘I've written books, taken part in documentary films, what more can I do? Nothing changes. So that's why I've gone to Brussels. Maybe from there I can change things.’ 40
Figure 7 (01:02:29): Dr. Bartolo getting emotional while talking about the gravity of the situation
4.2.4 Contextual Analysis
Fire at Sea is produced by the Italian director, producer, cinematographer, and screenwriter Gianfranco Rosi, who is the only documentary filmmaker to win two top prizes at the most important European film festivals (Berlin and Venice). He was born in Eritrea, where he lived until he was twelve, then he moved to Rome, later to Istanbul, and at the age of nineteen to New York to attend the NY University Film School. All the films he produced are documentaries that deal with matters of life and death. In 1993 he debuted with Boatman, followed by Below Sea Level (2008), El Sicario, Room 164 (2010), Tanti future possibili (2012), Sacro GRA (2013), Fire at Sea (2016) and is now filming Notturno. In all these documentaries he follows the same approach: not asking questions but letting his subjects talk. Moreover, he does not include texts or explanations but allows the images to speak for themselves. In Fuocoammare we see a representation of the European migrant crisis, which was at its worst between 2014 and 2016, when Rosi was working on his film. From interviews161 we learn that before Rosi actually took his camera out and started using it, he spent a year on the small island of Lampedusa among the locals in order to get to know them and feel the spirit of the place. In this time, he tried to find his characters and gain their trust,
161 For example, the interview of Roberto Minervini, ‘Fatal Journey,’ Filmmaker, Fall, 2016, 38-43, http://proxy.uba.uva.nl:2048/docview/1876806450?accountid=14615. 41 while also looking for a way to portray what is actually happening on the sea. Due to the actuality of the film’s topic, Fuocoammare reached a very wide audience. It was even offered as a present by the Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi to each EU leader present at the
European Council Migration Summit that took place in Turkey in March 2016,162 in order to direct attention to the migration issue and to show Italy’s burden and the hard work of the rescue team, and it was also screened for both the European Parliament as well as for Pope
Francis.163 The time was favourable for Rosi’s documentary as it marks the ‘year zero’ for the refugee crisis, and was therefore highly discussed and watched with much interest. However, nowadays, the documentaries of Rosi and Weiwei seem to be discussed only by academics in books about Italian Cinema164 or visual images.165 The rest of the world seems to have become numb. The refugee crisis does not make it into the news reports so often anymore and this reality seems distant to common European citizens once again.
4.2.5 Mise-en-scène Analysis
Setting and Décor The mise-en-scène is about the visual presentation of the story in a film, which helps to create meaning, an overall atmosphere, and a sense of place. The mise-en-scène can include setting, décor, depth of space, costumes, props, make-up. Since Fire at Sea presents two different stories in parallel, the settings of the corresponding scenes are also quite different. In the story of the locals, the setting is the island, the countryside where Samuele is playing, the house in which Samuele lives together with his father and grandmother, Pippo’s radio studio, Samuele’s classroom, the boat of Samuele’s father, the house of Zia Maria. The story of the migrants and their rescue takes place on the naval ship and interception station Fulgosi, the helicopter, the migrants’ own boat, the bus, and the migrant reception centre. The doctor’s office appears in both stories. The film switches continuously between stories, and for each
162 Stephanie Kirchgaessner, ‘Italian PM to Give Migration Film to Heads of State at EU Summit,’ The Guardian (Guardian News and Media, February 23, 2016), accessed June 4, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/23/matteo-renzi-italian-pm-fire-at-sea- gianfranco-rosi-migration. 163Rachel Donadio, ‘“Fire at Sea” Strikes a Nerve on the Migrant Crisis: “What Can I Do?”,’ The New York Times (The New York Times, October 7, 2016), accessed June 28, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/movies/fire-at-sea-strikes-a-nerve-on-the-migrant- crisis.html. 164 For example, Àine O’Healy’s Migrant Anxieties: Italian Cinema in a Transnational Frame (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019). 165 For example, William A. Callahan’s book Sensible Politics: Visualizing International Relations (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2020. 42 scene with locals there is a scene with migrants. Additionally, there is a strong contrast between the two achieved by the sudden change of scenes (e.g. the scene of death is followed by the bedroom shot with Maria which offers a mind-blowing contrast). Mostly, all scenes of life on Lampedusa are rather calm, peaceful, passive, while the scenes picturing migrants are loud, dynamic, tensional. This structure also sets the two predominant and contrasting sets of moods: the calm and pleasant on one side, and the sorrowful, distressed, painful on the other.
Rosi likes mystery.166 In terms of décor, he sometimes includes details into his films just because they are mysterious (e.g. the diver and his activities). There are plenty of different settings in this film, each having its own décor, but perhaps the most interesting example is Zia Maria’s room in which there are a number of Catholic elements and effigies: the figurine of Saint Francis, the small statue of Virgin Mary, and an icon on the wall. This shows that the people of Lampedusa are religious and Catholic. There is nothing happening in this scene, besides the woman arranging her marital bed, kissing the two figurines and a framed picture of her late husband, asking him to give her a nice day and a bit of health. There is no reason for including this scene other than constructing the character of the locals and emphasising Europe’s Christianity, which stands at the foundation of a European common identity.
Figure 8 (01:47:31): The room of Zia Maria, Pippo’s aunt
166 Alessandra Potenza, ‘How Italy's Gianfranco Rosi Made the Stunning Oscar-Nominated Migrant Doc Fire At Sea,’ The Verge (The Verge, January 24, 2017), accessed June 28, 2020, https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/24/14371650/fire-at-sea-gianfranco-rosi-interview- academy-awards-documentary. 43
As Maria is asking for strength and health from some divine power, the migrants are doing the same. There are two groups filmed while praying in the reception centre: a Christian group of refugees from Nigeria and a Muslim group. The Nigerians are chanting, giving thanks to God who has been their helper throughout their long journey:
We cried on our knees ‘What shall we do?’ The mountains could not hide us, the people could not hide us, and we ran to the sea. […] Today we are alive. The sea is not a place to pass by. The sea is not a road. […] We said ‘God, don’t let us die in the desert!’ […] Today we are here, God rescued us!167
Figure 9 (00:50:08): Migrants remembering their exodus, sharing their testimony, and giving thanks to God
This scene captures the migrants voicing their own story, talking and praying to God. One could argue that most of us are spiritual beings, believing in a God in whom we put our trust and hope, especially in critical situations. In this sense, the European (Zia Maria) and the ‘Other’ (the Nigerian migrants) are very much alike. However, supporters of populism might see this as a clear example of the differences between us (Europeans) and them (non- Europeans) justified by our different practices, values, beliefs, and cultural heritage. While the chanting scene humanises the migrants in a way that no other scene in this film manages to, the juxtaposition of the two scenes (Figures 8 and 9) reinforces the ‘us’ versus ‘them’ dichotomy and the fear that the ‘Other’ is simply too different to be able to integrate among us. This supports the idea that the refugee crisis is both a humanitarian and a cultural (and
167 This particular scene runs from 00:50:37 until 00:52:38. 44 implicitly religious) crisis attempting to affect Europe’s identity and it brings to the surface the question: what happens when the ‘Other’ is no longer outside but is part of Europe? These two parallels illustrate the two different realities that do not interact – even though the ‘Other’ is much closer to us now than before, our realities are still separated. The crucial question that arises is: does this turn us (Europeans) into spectators of the suffering of the ‘Other’ – as we are distant enough to be separated from them, but close enough to observe their struggle – or does this not lead to a politics of pity because we are too busy for observing the unfortunate?
Lighting, Colour, and Props Besides two occurrences when Samuele is playing outside in the dark, and when the diver is diving into the sea, most of the action happening on the island is shot during daylight. Consequently, the colours are predominantly bright, illustrating calmness and vivacity. On the contrary, most of the scenes capturing the refugees are shot either at night as the navy ship is at work searching for boats with migrants, or inside the ship, the bus, the migrant centre, which were all lacking natural light. As a consequence, most of the scenes are dominated by dark colours, provoking feelings of anxiety, insecurity, and danger. Regarding the props, throughout the film, Samuele is very often carrying his slingshot all around. Besides that, there are a few different illuminators that appear at various occasions in the film: flashlights, searchlights (the helicopter’s, the ship’s). Illuminators are used for bringing light where there is darkness, for searching the lost and the unseen in the dark.
4.2.6 Camera Work (Distance, Angle)
Filming as a one-man crew, Rosi mostly used a tripod, but also filmed handheld in difficult situations. In terms of distance, Rosi does not use extreme close-ups (part of a face), but he does use close-ups (with Samuele, with migrants while sharing a small boat), medium shots (which are predominant), and long shots (showing the landscape of the island, the town, the sea, the numerous migrants). Close-up shots rightfully show a degree of intimacy between Rosi and Samuele, who became his friend and guide on the island (which explains the intimacy), but also between him and the migrants as they share the same boat, navy ship, bus, at which times they were physically very close. While on this small boat (Figure 10), the spectators get the feeling that they are in the midst of the real experience, but Rosi is there with his camera, which adds a frame of security. Nonetheless, the fact that he is there has not changed their situation nor their journey. He simply happened to be there when these migrants 45 were intercepted at sea and thus had the opportunity to show us a glimpse of a migrant’s journey across the Mediterranean.
Figure 10 (00:17:32): Close-up on a migrant’s face
In terms of angle, most shots are filmed from a person’s eye-level, but there are also a few high-angle shots – whose purpose is to generate a sense of vertigo, making their subjects seem powerless, helpless – and low-angle shots.
Figure 11 (00:19:33): Medium shot of Samuele and his father 46
Figure 12 (00:14:01): Long shot of ship 490, the Cigala Fulgosi and its helicopter preparing for flight
Figure 13 (00:14:52): High-angle shot: view from the helicopter showing the vastness of the sea in comparison to the tiny boat of migrants 47
Figure 14 (01:50:15): Low-angle shot: perspective on the sky
4.2.7 Editing and Sound
In terms of editing, this film makes regular use of cuts, as scenes move from one to the other in a sudden way, emphasising the contrast between the two different stories. Sometimes there is a signalling of the passing of time illustrated by the waves, the sky, the passing clouds, or the sun fading before a new scene appears. Despite being a documentary, in Fire at Sea there is no narratorial voice and nobody asking questions or giving answers. Regarding the sound effects, they are environmental – sounds created by nature itself – the waves crashing the rocks, the wind blowing the leaves of trees, while the music is diegetic, coming from a visible source (the radio). There are only short fragments of the songs that the DJ plays on the radio, one of them being Fuocoammare, accompanied by other Sicilian and traditional Italian songs. Radio Delta Lampedusa addresses a very wide group, targeting people of all ages. For this reason, their programme is highly diversified – from news bulletins, to talks about culture and sports, to religious services, entertainment for children, and dance music – with programmes as
‘Fashion Music’ and ‘Dance Revolution’.168 The songs that appear in Fuocoammare are broadcasted by Radio Delta and are all part of the section called ‘Vecchi Ricordi’ (meaning ‘Old Memories’). Although these songs fit in the narrative constructed by the film, by only
168 Radio Delta, ‘Radio Delta – Benvenuti su Radio Delta Lampedusa,’ accessed June 27, 2020, http://www.radiodelta.org/.
48 including these old songs and disregarding the other types of music the radio broadcasts, Rossi creates an image of the Lampedusan society that highly relies on stereotypes and folkloristic visions, strengthening the idyllic nature of the island. Besides this, music is not very present in the film and is not used for emotional emphasis. The film is regardless, emotionally powerful, managing to leave a mark on the viewer.
4.2.8 Production Contexts
Fire at Sea’s production companies are Rai Cinema, Stemal Entertainment, 21 Unofilm, Istituto Cinecittà Luce, Les Film d’Ici and Arte France Cinéma, receiving support from the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism (MiBACT).169 Additionally, the film lists seven government agencies and the Ministry of the Interior (Department for Civil Liberties and Immigration) in the credits, emphasising the role of Italy and Italian institutions in this migration crisis and showing Lampedusa’s ascribed quality of immigration office. Furthermore, the film clearly illustrates the hard work done by the Italian Coast Guard. All these aspects turn the film into a sort of tribute paid to the Italian state.
4.2.9 Refugees’ Self-Representation
After watching the film for the first time, one might argue that the refugees are portrayed as a voiceless unidentified mass of people who are not given the chance to speak. For this, and for other reasons, Rosi’s film has attracted negative comments. Firstly, Fuocoammare is criticised for not allowing more time to the part about the refugees, othering them in this sense, as they appear less on the screen than the locals. Secondly, for not asking the migrants any questions. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, for not attributing the refugees a name and a story. They are simply a voiceless mass of people whose story is relatively unknown, which makes it difficult for the audience to connect with. To begin with the first critical point, Rosi had spent more than a year on the island to get to know the locals, befriend them, and gain their trust, but he did not have the same opportunity with the migrants. While he had free access to the reception centre and he was allowed on board of Fulgosi, where he spent more than 40 days, the migrants themselves only spent a maximum of two days in Lampedusa, being transferred quickly from one place to another. Moreover, the boats of migrants are intercepted on the sea, so they never arrive directly
169 According to IMDb, ‘Fire at Sea,’ (IMDb.com), accessed June 4, 2020, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3652526/companycredits?ref_=tt_dt_co. 49 on the island, but are quickly taken to the reception centre. Besides this, Rosi prefers not to intrude his subjects’ space. Secondly, he is not addressing questions to the locals, nor to the refugees, because he believes that interviewing people is a top-down approach which might influence reality.170 Rosi is looking for spontaneity and for truth and he does not want to manipulate reality and the course of events by asking questions and creating his story around a set of prefixed questions. On the contrary, he wants reality to take over and unfold in front of his camera. As a response to this point, in an interview he says that:
I could’ve taken a migrant on the top of the hill, looking at the world that he doesn’t know and having him interact somehow with that. But I would’ve manipulated his reality because he would, in his life, never encounter one of these situations. So my duty as a documentarian was to respect his world.171
Showing reality exactly as it is is very important to Rosi. Exactly because there are no interviews and no narratorial voice, there is less of ‘a sense of a news story being hunted, gathered and pieced together for maximum emotional impact than an impression that we’re an invisible observer of events that would be happening in exactly the same way were Rosi’s camera not there.’172 Rosi turns his audience into observers of what is expected to be reality. Regarding the third point, Rosi admits he filmed the refugees ‘like aliens […] an organic mass that moves in a place they’re not allowed to be a part of’173 because he did not have the time to get to know their stories. Because refugees are not interviewed, the public does not learn anything about them and their internal motivations. The only occurrence in which the migrants talk is the Nigerians’ testimony, called by Wilson ‘an elegy to a migrant’s journey.’174 They explain they were forced to flee Nigeria because it was dangerous and many people were killed, they have been through the Sahara Desert, lacking food and water, then fled to Libya where they were in danger because of ISIS and they were imprisoned. So, they chose to take the risk of crossing the sea with the hope that they will survive. Many, if not all refugees, share the same story of homelessness, displacement, loss, and grief. Rosi films the migrants in their most precarious conditions – half alive bodies, exhausted people grieving their lost loved ones – depicting strong emotional states. Their cries say it all, their desperate
170 Minervini, ‘Fatal Journey,’ 42. 171 Ibid., 42. 172 Trevor Johnston, ‘Fire at Sea’, Sight and Sound, (July, 2016), 60. 173 Minervini, ‘Fatal Journey’, 41. 174 Emma Wilson, ‘From Lampedusa to the California Desert: Gianfranco Rosi’s Scenes of Living and Dying,’ Film Quarterly, Vol. 71, No. 3, (Spring 2018): 17. 50 sounds tell stories of breath-taking suffering. If we listen carefully, we will notice that sometimes silence speaks louder than words.
4.2.10 Reflection
Perhaps when we hear about a documentary treating the topic of the refugee crisis, we expect it to be a certain way, due to the standard frames created by the media. Rosi’s documentary is different because besides documenting the experiences of the refugees rescued on the Mediterranean, his aim is to discover the impact this ‘crisis’ is having upon the locals, which is a story that does not appear in the mainstream media. However, his purpose is not easily detectable because, with the exception of Zia Maria’s brief comment ‘Poor souls’175 after hearing the radio’s news bulletin that a boat with 250 migrants sank near Lampedusa, the inhabitants never talk about this subject and there is further no visible impact the migrant crisis has had on the locals.176 The fact that Rosi’s film does not mention any of the issues the locals are facing (e.g. absence of a neonatal unit, fishermen’s need for proper working conditions, etc.) but creates an idyllic view of the island, is one of the reasons why Askavusa – a group of activists in Lampedusa – criticises Rosi’s film.177 As much as this documentary has been appreciated, it has also attracted criticism, as discussed above. Gemma Sou argues that Fuocoammare ‘relies on common tropes of victimhood, through scenes that attempt to depict the “raw reality” of suffering’ which ‘serves to further “other” refugees through over-used images that are dehumanizing’.178 She suggests that the way in which the refugees are portrayed constructs a spectacle of distant suffering, creating the separation between the fortunate spectator and the suffering victim. Regardless of the proximity of the suffering ‘Other’, the European does not do more than simply witness. The juxtaposition of the calm scenes on the island and the appalling scenes at sea suggests the existence of two different realities, and our reality is not relatable to theirs. Nonetheless, while
175 The daily news segment starts at 00:07:36. 176 On the contrary, Jakob Brossman’s film, Lampedusa in Winter (2015), illustrates Lampedusa’s problems and the angry fishermen striking because their ferry broke down and they cannot continue their activities. One of them angrily asks the mayor ‘Why are you not doing for us what you are doing for the migrants?’, which shows that the locals acknowledge the presence of the migrants on the island and are affected by it (the fishermen’s nests are destroyed by the remains of migrants’ shipwrecks). 177Askavusa Collettivo, ‘Fuocoammare: Considerazioni Del Collettivo Askavusa,’ February 24, 2016, accessed June 28, 2020, available at: https://askavusa.wordpress.com/2016/02/24/1428/. 178 Gemma Sou, ‘Fire at Sea (Fuocoammare), directed and produced by Gianfranco Rosi (Italy), 2016. 114 minutes. Italian with English subtitles, Nationalities Papers,’ (2017), 2. 51 engaging with painful realism, Rosi simply desires to be faithful to reality and show the entire world what it means to be a refugee. He hopes to convince people to stop looking away from this reality, because we are all participants in this horrible event which happens in front of our eyes. Perhaps it is because we see pictures of refugees everywhere that this tragedy became a sort of background noise that we have learned to ignore. In this sense, is representation a good solution or would no mediation be better? Despite all the good that the media do – informing, reporting, representing – they also install compassion fatigue among the public. As objective reality is being replaced by mediated reality (stage three of mediation) which leads to the incompetence of the media in affecting its audience, the concept of actual reality is becoming increasingly blurry. One thing is clear: Rossi’s aim was to show the migrants’ tragedy in a way that would resonate with the audience for longer than just a few seconds – as pictures might do – and I believe he accomplished this by editing the film in such a way that would lead to the death scene, the moment of maximum intensity when he enters the cargo hold where the numerous lifeless bodies were lying one on another. Rosi turns the audience into witnesses of tragedy. By shooting the scene in which refugees are mourning their lost loved ones, Rossi attempts to publicise these people’s grief. In her discussion of public grieving, Butler suggests that when grief is made public, the life and its loss are recognised; recognition which attributes validity to one’s life, rendering it grievable, and thus, valuable.179 This in turn, signifies an acknowledgment of one’s existence. In this sense, public mourning could transport the precarious life of the ‘Other’ from the ‘zone of nonbeing’180 to that of existence (visibility and meaning). This is another attempt of the documentarist to draw attention to the plight of refugees. However, although such scenes are heart-breaking, Butler would argue that due to the global power structures, we are unable to mourn the suffering or the loss of those who we perceive as distant, different, or inferior to us; in other words, less than human. This is because we, as Western/European inhabitants, cannot relate to this group of people as we do not recognise ourselves in them. Moreover, since refugees are most often represented as a threat to our culture, safety, economy, etc., we find it difficult to identify with them. Acknowledging the grief of ‘Others’ and apprehending the value of their loss is the first step towards achieving generosity and empathy. However, Butler argues that this is not possible unless we understand the precariousness of human life, which is, according to Ruti, ‘a basis for identification, and
179 Judith Butler, Frames of War, 38. 180 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 2008), 2. 52
identification, in turn, offers a basis for ethical indignation.’181 We cannot oppose the injustices the ‘Other’ is facing until we comprehend that we could also be the victim of that same injustice. All in all, Rosi’s end result is a nonfiction film that ‘occupies your consciousness like a nightmare.’182 Through all the cinematic techniques discussed above, Rosi creates the two parallel worlds that never interact, addresses issues of migration, safety, protection, and illustrates how careless Europe is even when tragedy happens at its own door. Fire at Sea is a film that ‘challenges the processes of delay, denial, and disavowal that have allowed the
Mediterranean to become a mass grave.’183
4.3 Human Flow
4.3.1 Short introduction
Human Flow is a documentary film directed and produced by Ai Weiwei with a runtime of 140 minutes. Although less known than Fuoccoammare, not having won the same number of prizes, Human Flow stands out among all films about the refugee crisis ‘for its ambitious scale’184 illustrating 23 countries and 40 refugee camps from all over the world. Moreover, the film is also widely known because of Weiwei’s public persona: dissident Chinese artist, activist, filmmaker, and political exile living at the time in Berlin. He is an important, famous, and controversial figure, who has always been fighting for justice through his art: ‘I was not born an artist, I was born a human. I care about human conditions, rather than the opinions of others.’185 He was imprisoned for it in China, but continued his activity in Western Europe through a series of installations, films, and social media. He was considered one of Foreign
Policy’s ‘100 Top Global Thinkers of 2011.’186 As a former refugee himself who now lives in exile, far from his home country, the aim of his creative activism is to raise global awareness of the refugee crisis, not only among governments or authorities, but also among citizens. Human Flow is part of a series of artistic creations through which Weiwei brings the tragedy
181 Mari Ruti, ‘The Ethics of Precarity: Judith Butler's Reluctant Universalism,’ in Maurits van Bever Donker et al., Remains of the Social: Desiring the Post-Apartheid (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2017), 96. 182 Wilson, ‘From Lampedusa to the California Desert,’ 10. 183 Ibid., 12. 184 Eszter Zimanyi, ‘Human Flow: Thinking with and through Ai Weiwei’s Defamiliarizing Gaze,’ Visual Anthropology 32, no. 3-4 (August 2019): 377. 185 Ai Weiwei, Humanity (Princeton University Press, 2018), 14. 186 William A. Callahan, Sensible Politics: Visualizing International Relations (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2020), 129. 53 of the refugees even closer to us. Some examples are the covering of Berlin’s concert hall in orange life jackets, the wrapping of sculptures with golden foil emergency blankets in Prague, the ‘F Lotus’ – a floating installation in Vienna imitating lotus flowers created from refugees’ life jackets, his #SafePassage exhibition in Amsterdam’s Foam Museum, and his replica image of Alan Kurdi. In 2019, Weiwei won a court case against Volkswagen in Denmark, because the company had used one of his installations, ‘Soleil Levant’, as the background of their ad selling the new Volkswagen Polo without asking for permission. The copyright infringement angered Weiwei most because the advertisement could damage his reputation, lifetime devotion, and advocation for human rights, while destroying the trust he has built with both refugees and his audience. This trial also highlighted the company’s hypocrisy – trying to make profit while violating human rights by partnering with authoritarian regimes, and it showed that the Western world values profit above human rights.187 This incident once again managed to draw the public’s attention on his art and implicitly, on the plight of refugees.
Figure 15: Ai’s installation of life jackets used by refugees draped around the pillars of
Berlin’s Konzerthaus in 2016. Photograph: Kay Nietfeld/EPA188
187 For more information on this, check Javier Pes, ‘Ai Weiwei Wins a Legal Battle with Volkswagen Over an Ad That Featured His Refugee-Themed Art Installation Without Permission,’ Artnet News, July 18, 2019, accessed June 28, 2020, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/ai-weiwei-vw-refugees-1603096. 188 Photograph by Nay Nietfield retrieved from Simon Hattenstone, ‘Ai Weiwei on His New Life in Britain: “People Are at Least Polite. In Germany, They Weren't”,’ The Guardian. 54
4.3.2 Semiotic Analysis (Signs, Symbols, Metaphors)
The Title As a documentary aimed at illustrating the experiences of migrants on the move, this film is not as rich in symbolism as Fuocoammare. The title is a figure of speech representing the essence of the film in its entirety. It embodies the image of humanity engaged in the process of migration pictured throughout the film as a natural process, similar to that of the wildebeest, who migrate yearly in search of green pasture, or the regular seasonal movement of flocks of birds. It implies a large-scale migration for the purpose of survival. As drone cameras record the journey from above, picturing the movement of people and the unending surface of the camps, viewers are faced with the vastness of the place and the huge number of migrants moving like ants. This continuous journey of refugees imitates the movement of ceaseless ocean waves. The migrants’ journey is only natural in the sense that migration is a right that everyone should possess. Nonetheless, there is nothing natural about the flow of forcibly displaced millions of humans. Their migration is the result of destructive human action: war, persecution, terrorism, and even famine and poverty.189 Weiwei explains the title through an analogy. He states that there are two ways of dealing with flooding: build a dam to stop the flood or create a path that would permit the flow to continue, because ‘the nature of water is to flow,’190 and humanity’s desire is to be free. The first solution does not solve the problem. On the contrary, it might intensify it. Rather than building walls, we should work towards eliminating the factors that cause the flood.191
Guardian News and Media, January 21, 2020, accessed June 28, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/jan/21/ai-weiwei-on-his-new-life-in-britain- germany-virtual-reality-film. 189 As Gabriela Vazquez explains in the film (from 02:09:44 until 02:10:00): ‘The number of poor people is increasing and a group of rich people control everything, like the economy, and while this system prevails, migration will continue, because inequality will deepen’. 190 Ai Weiwei, ‘The Refugee Crisis Isn't about Refugees. It's about Us | Ai Weiwei,’ The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, February 2, 2018, accessed June 28, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/02/refugee-crisis-human-flow-ai- weiwei-china. 191 Ibid. 55
Figure 16: The film poster taken from its official Facebook page192
The Poetry Besides the factual information either placed on beautiful shots of the sea and sky, or running in news-feed form at the bottom of the screen, there are also poetry excerpts that appear on the screen making the change from one scene to another. Weiwei thus combines historical facts with literature and art in order to create a strong coherent narrative of exodus, loss, and human precariousness.
Figure 17 (02:02:50): On-screen text
192 ‘Human Flow,’ Facebook, accessed May 7, 2020, https://www.facebook.com/HumanFlowMovie/. 56
Figure 18 (02:02:09): Fragment of a famous Syrian poem
The continuation of Nizar Qabbani’s poem is ‘We wear the cape of civilization / But our souls live in the stone age.’193 The lyrical I is disappointed in modernity and in humanity’s untruthful claims of civilisation. It is striking that in such a modern world, such tragedies still happen.
The Haircut There are two instances in which we are watching someone getting a haircut. Firstly, Weiwei himself is having his haircut done by a migrant in the camp and later, Weiwei is cutting the hair of a man who has been living for sixteen years together with his family in front of the US/Mexico border. Hair is ‘a symbol of the self and of group identity, an important mode of self-expression and communication.’194 Growing up as a refugee himself as his father was an exile, Weiwei identifies with this group of people. Multiple times in the film we can hear him saying he respects them. In subtle ways or in more obvious manners (for example when holding a paper that says ‘I, Ai Weiwei stand #withRefugees’ while taking a selfie),195 he wants to illustrate that he is involved in this ‘crisis’, which is a performance, a re-enactment of engagement.
193 ‘Verse by Nizar Qabbani,’ By Nizar Qabbani – Famous Poems, Famous Poets, All Poetry, https://allpoetry.com/poem/8526805-Verse-by-Nizar-Qabbani 194 Deborah Pergament, ‘It's Not Just Hair: Historical and Cultural Considerations for an Emerging Technology,’ Chicago-Kent Law Review, vol. 75 (1999): 44. Available at: https://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/cklawreview/vol75/iss1/4 195 This particular scene is at 01:39:00. 57
Figure 19 (01:00:52): Weiwei having a haircut
He is obviously making use of his public persona to draw attention to the migration issue, but in immersing himself in the story and interacting with the refugees in front of the camera, he turns the ‘crisis’ into a more relatable situation and proves that interaction between the Western/European inhabitant and the ‘alien’ is possible. This scene (illustrated in Figure 19) is memorable because of Ai’s piercing gaze into the camera. He is staring at the camera for fifteen seconds straight while his hair falls on the ground.
Figure 20 (02:10:27): Weiwei giving a haircut 58
A haircut can stand for character growth, change, a new beginning, as well as a way of coping with grief. Perhaps the most important aspect to mention here is the trust established between Ai and the group of migrants who surround him – he trusts them allowing someone to cut his hair, and they trust him as a man allows him to undertake this task. This also shows our dependency upon each other and the fact that we have the same needs.
4.3.3 Narrative Structure Analysis
Weiwei’s film opens with the words of the Turkish poet Nâzim Hikmet, himself a lifelong exile in the Soviet Union: ‘I want the right of life, of the leopard at the spring, of the seed splitting open – I want the right of the first man.’196 These words that settle the theme of the film depict a desperate call for liberty and the right to live written on a beautiful shot above the calm blue sea. In relation to the poem’s lines, the calmness of this scene is an allusion to the primordial silence, which is however soon disrupted by the sound of a helicopter followed by the appearance of an inflatable boat carrying migrants wearing orange life jackets. Traversing 23 countries across the period of two memorable years, the film starts narrating the migration story from the very beginning. In a non-chronological order, the odyssey starts with the migrants’ devastated home countries, then follows the refugees along their journey, depicting the severe conditions in the camps where they are trapped due to closed borders, and Weiwei also waits for them at their arrival in Europe, following them as they are brought to the reception centres. From countries like Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Iraq, Israel, Kenya, Lebanon, Turkey, to Greece, Hungary, Italy, Germany, and France, the film provides a complete narrative, rich in information and faithful in representing the whole lengthy process and complexity of migration. The theme of migration is well constructed through the combination of facts with personal testimonies. Besides the large number of migrants the film focuses on, Human Flow also includes interviews with representatives of UNHCR, UNICEF, HRW, different NGOs, the Princess of Jordan, a doctor, a lawyer, a spokesperson of Tamaja Shelter from Germany, the Greek Migration Minister, and a former Syrian astronaut. In total a number of twenty experts providing information about the refugee crisis and the impact that this process has on the migrants themselves, especially on children. They talk about the gravity of the situation, emphasise the fact that a refugee is robbed of all aspects that make human life meaningful and of all basic human needs, and argue these teenagers – traumatised by unimaginable loses – are
196 These lines appear at 00:01:15. 59 extremely vulnerable to exploitation methods, including radicalisation, as anger and suffering motivates them to fight as a way of getting revenge for all they have lost. Their message is that if the causes of migration do not cease to exist, mass migration will not stop, and this will lead to all sorts of negative global impacts. Most importantly, Human Flow is a story about migrants and their representation is situated in the limelight. Besides the short interviews with experts in the field, the migrants are always on the screen and there are twenty-nine instances in which different individuals or groups of migrants get to talk about their journey, their losses, the situation they are facing, their (lack of) plans for the future, their dreams and aspirations. There are a few instances in which the migrants are joyful: e.g. the group of young girls from Gaza who dream of travelling the world (Figure 21), the group of migrants singing after having been rescued (Figure 22), and the young Syrian man Mahmoud jokingly exchanging passports with Weiwei and willingly offering him his tent (Figure 23). Unfortunately, this joke only lasts for a few minutes and reality strikes back in – Mahmoud keeps his passport and his tent, while Weiwei, unable to change the situation, walks further.
Figure 21 (01:30:55): Girls talking about the difficulties of living in Gaza 60
Figure 22 (02:06:45): Group of migrants clapping and singing
Figure 23 (00:53:07): Mahmoud and Weiwei exchanging passports
There are also numerous sad occurrences. One example is when the viewer is allowed to eavesdrop on a conversation between two brothers crying in the dark promising that they will stay together no matter the circumstances. Another heart-breaking story is that of a man leading Weiwei and his crew to the place where his family is buried (Figure 24). Out of seventeen, only twelve members of the family are left. The rest died at sea. All he has left of them is their ID’s, and he bursts into tears when saying that they appear in his dreams regularly. He looks frightened, in pain, and confused. 61
Figure 24 (01:16:31): Ismatollah Sediqi telling Weiwei about his family
4.3.4 Contextual Analysis
Human Flow was screened for the first time at the 74th Venice International Film Festival. It is one of the multiple films covering the refugee crisis between 2014 and 2017. However, it is the only one that follows the migrants on their journey across four continents, expanding on the meaning of the word ‘refugee’, accompanied by concepts of homelessness, displacement, dehumanisation. Weiwei won five prizes with Human Flow at the Venice Film Festival, including the Human Rights Film Network Award and the Bambi award for ‘Courage’. He has produced many documentaries before coming to Europe, mostly about his life, but they were all censored in China because of his problems with the Chinese government. He says that the Chinese authorities have tried to erase his identity as his name cannot even be freely mentioned online.197 This motivated him to publish his censored films in Europe and to produce films that illuminate the injustices that some people are facing. Human Flow is the first film he has produced after moving to Berlin, followed by The Rest (2019) – another documentary about refugees, and Vivos (2020) – covering the disappearance of 43 students in Mexico. He devotes all his creativity and his work to social causes, with the hope that humanity has not yet lost its values.
197 Anny Shaw, ‘Ai Weiwei’s Censored Films to Go on Show in Berlin,’ The Art Newspaper, February 17, 2020, accessed June 28, 2020, www.theartnewspaper.com/news/to-be-deprived- of-a-voice-is-to-deny-your-humanity-ai-weiwei-speaks-out-as-52-censored-films-go-on- show-in-berlin. 62
4.3.5 Mise-en-scène Analysis
The action is mostly set in poor surroundings, in nature, and among ruins and (self- fabricated) tents. Of course, the setting is different during the interviews with experts. Some of them are interviewed outside just like the migrants, but the background is always beautiful and calm (e.g. a view of mountains or the sea), while others are in their offices. As Figure 25 and Figure 26 show, there is a striking contrast between the two kinds of settings.
Figure 25 (00:57:00): A Kurd man sitting next to what is left of his house after the Turkish military’s crackdown in 2015
Figure 26 (00:36:39): Interview with Diana Firas, Princess of Jordan 63
Lighting, Colour, Props
Most of the scenes are filmed during daytime. Implicitly there is natural light and bright colours. However, there are also scenes shot in the dark (e.g. when rescuing migrants during the night, when capturing images of camps in the dark).
Figure 27 (01:01:41): Two brothers crying in the agitation of a night
Figure 28 (02:15:22): Discarded life jackets
Perhaps the most recurring element is the bright orange life jacket that appears multiple times in the film and in different forms, as well as outside of the film – in Weiwei’s art installations. 64
Whether worn by migrants on boats, brought ashore by the waves or discarded and gathered in huge piles, the jackets signify either the presence of human life or its absence. They are witnesses to human tragedy, the embodiment of migrants’ hope, and traces of their existence.
4.3.6 Camera Work (Distance, Angle, Movement)
Weiwei worked with 25 film crews in the making of this film. The material was shot using iPhones, drones, and different types of cameras. Regarding distance, Weiwei does not use any extreme close-ups (these can be uncomfortable for the subjects). An extreme close-up on someone’s mouth could have been used in order to keep the person’s identity unknown. However, the only man who is hiding his identity is filmed from behind. Medium close-ups appear rarely when Weiwei films with his own phone and is very close to the subject. The most predominant shots are the medium, the full, the long, and the extreme long. The medium shots are used for interviews and conversations with the subjects, the full shots depict the subject’s whole body placed in the frame, the long shots used for placing the subjects into a specific location, and the extreme long shots for establishing the world in which the action takes place. As Human Flow contains many drone shots of camps, destroyed villages, or groups of people, the long and the extreme long shots are very important in the film. These illustrate the vast area affected by the ‘crisis’, accentuating its gravity.
Figure 29 (00:04:23): Medium close-up: the subject is framed from the shoulders up
65
Figure 30 (00:06:50): Medium shot of a woman in a tent
Figure 31 (00:08:31): Full shot of mother and child
66
Figure 32 (01:58:50): Long shot in Iraq
Figure 33 (01:57:14): Extreme long shot in Iraq
The only shot taken from a low angle, also known as a ‘worm’s-eye view’, is that of the Hungarian Border Patrol agents. This angle is used in order to make them appear large, powerful, and intimidating. Besides the eye-level shots, predominant are also shots taken from a high angle (‘bird’s-eye view’), to show the subjects as small figures in space, weak, and perhaps even insignificant when compared to the immensity of the world. There is chaos and disorientation. These shots are prevalent in Human Flow and show the large scale of migration.
67
Figure 34 (00:31:27): Low-angle shot of the Hungarian agents
Figure 35 (00:32:00): High-angle shot
Given the number of different devices used in filming, there are various types of camera movement: pans (camera stays fixed but moves horizontally), tracking shots (camera tracks sideways, forward, or backwards), tilts or vertical pans (camera moves vertically), crane shots
(view from above), and movement caused by a hand-held camera.198 All these movements are used to provide the audience with a sense of place.
198 Monaco, How to Read a Film, 96. 68
4.3.7 Editing and Sound
The editing consists mostly of jump cuts, meaning abrupt cuts between shots, which make a sudden switch from one shot to another. Moreover, the transition from one country or place to another is made through the insertion of either quotes or facts on a lingering image. As soon as this image fades away, there is new action. The editing also includes J cuts – a technique through which the viewers firstly hear a sound and only after they are shown the action that produced that sound, and L cuts – technique in which the sound from a scene continues to play over the beginning of a new scene, adding coherence to the narrative. There is no voiceover in this film. This implies that there is no narratorial presence to guide the viewers and tell them how to interpret the images. The sound comes from dialogues, sound effects, or music. The music is non-diegetic and is performed by the German Film Orchestra Babelsberg, consisting of instruments as violin, viola, cello/monochord, and gongs. The music creates a sense of curiosity, calmness, but it also accentuates sadness.
4.3.8 Production Contexts
The making of Human Flow was started by Weiwei and his crew with own funding,199 but eventually he partnered with the big American company Participant Media and with Andy Cohen from AC Films, who also produced Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry in 2012, which records Weiwei’s life, art, and his problems with the government. The three parties were brought together by their passion for the topic of immigration. Moreover, in multiple interviews, Weiwei declares that the purpose of the film is not making profit and that the profit, if any, will be directed to the people involved in the refugee field, namely the NGO’s.200
4.3.9 Representation of Refugees and Refugees’ Self-Representation
There is a scene in the beginning of the film in which Weiwei illustrates six migrants: two women, three men, and a child, all standing inside of a white tent (Figure 31 above). The camera is focused on each of them for fifteen seconds straight. They all resemble people just like us, people that could be our relatives, our neighbours, our friends. It is a powerful scene
199 Nick Vivarelli, ‘Chinese Artist Ai Weiwei Talks Migrant Crisis Doc “Human Flow” Ahead of Venice Premiere,’ Variety, August 25, 2017, accessed June 28, 2020, https://variety.com/2017/film/global/chinese-artist-ai-weiwei-on-his-migrant-crisis-doc- human-flow-ahead-of-venice-world-premiere-exclusive-1202538890/. 200 Geoffrey Macnab, ‘Ai Weiwei: “My 'Human Flow' Profits Will Go to Refugee NGOs,”’ Screen International, London, September 02, 2017. 69 because the migrants are looking straight into the camera, creating a sort of eye contact with the audience. We do not get to hear them talk, but we see their eyes, and eyes do tell stories. It is a self-reflexive moment in which we are faced with our ability to empathise with the other, it makes us curious about these people’s lives, and it makes us realise that the only difference between us and them is that we are lucky to have a home, while they have lost theirs. Later on, we learn from the film that Burma is pursuing ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims. When interviewed, a Rohingya Community Leader says something reminiscent of Shakespeare’s famous speech ‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’, respectively ‘We too have feelings, we too are humans’,201 justifying a claim for equal treatment. In an interview, Weiwei elaborates on the meaning of humanity: ‘We have the same body temperature. We use eyes to look basically at the same images. When we are hungry and cold, we feel the same.’202 Just like in Fuocoammare, refugees are not part of the creation team but constitute the subject of representation. Throughout the documentary they are not simply passive subjects, but are engaged in conversations and interviews, and are thus given the chance to voice their thoughts. Weiwei is listening to them at the moment of the talking, but their voices can now be heard by every single individual who is watching the documentary. This is how we hear about their tragedies, their fears, disappointments towards the Europe of their dreams, and their complaints. There is a man hiding his face who says that upon arrival in Greece nobody helped them, ‘neither the Greek police, nor the UN people. No one looked after us or even asked us anything.’203 It is admirable that on this personal journey to better understand mass migration, Weiwei not only presents the massive human flow but also pays attention to the individual. He combines the ‘faceless mass of the collective and the unique experience of the individual’204 in the representation of a global scale human flow. While he does not explicitly offer his opinion about the refugee crisis in the film, there are twenty experts who speak for the refugees from a transnational perspective, as most of them work for the United Nations. They explain the causes that create this crisis and draw attention to the fact that the big number of displaced people causes a global problem. They also point to the danger of building immunity to other people’s suffering, the inhumane conditions of the
201 Human Flow, 00:19:47 – 00:19:51. 202 Geoffrey Macnab, ‘Human Flow’s Ai Weiwei: I Turned on My IPhone Camera and Began Filming,’ The Independent, Independent Digital News and Media, November 30, 2017, accessed June 28, 2020, www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/ai-weiwei- human-flow-refugee-crisis-lesbos-tate-modern-sunflower-seeds-a8078476.html. 203 Human Flow, 00:47:11 – 00:47-21. 204 Callahan, Sensible Politics, 133. 70 camps in which migrants are forced to live for long periods of time deprived of the most basic human needs, the danger of children growing up within the walls of refugee camps, the negative power of stereotypes that can lead to hatred and conflicts, injustice and inequality, and the fact that climate change and the diminishment of resources are also reasons for migration. Nonetheless, besides the Greek minister who advises fighting against xenophobia, and the former Syrian astronaut, who jokingly suggests sending all evil people into space, nobody provides solutions to refugee’s plight. On the other hand, the migrants attempt to. One woman living in a tent next to a train station says she is curious to see if (European) leaders would be able to sleep in her tent for only one night and if they could stand the suffering of seeing their children sleep in these conditions. Perhaps when realising the problems refugees are faced with in Europe, leaders would be more motivated to change something in their benefit. Furthermore, the migrants talk of democracy and of human rights, and remind us that they too are human and in need of rights. Another migrant talks about how difficult it is for them to cross several European countries illegally in order to reach their country of preference and ask for asylum there, and says that in the process they can even lose their life. He emphasises the need for finding a solution for this issue. Perhaps if there was a better asylum system, they would no longer have to go through all the dangers of crossing borders illegally and being mishandled by smugglers. Weiwei portrays the migrants with sympathy and respect, and is eager to listen to them. Besides that, he makes it possible for their voices to be heard by a much broader audience, this of course, within the frame of his own representation. He claims:
I am interested in those whose voices have been suppressed […] because in recognising their humanity I maintain my own. I am not producing films just for the sake of producing films, but rather to bring these stories and injustices into the wider sphere so that others can know.205
And indeed, Weiwei is aiming for a wide sphere, Human Flow having been distributed in Europe, North and South America, and Asia. Moreover, in 2018, he presented Human Flow to members of the UK Parliament, hoping that MPs would be reminded of the most essential human values and that they will consider them before implementing any future policies.206
205 Shaw, ‘Ai Weiwei’s Censored Films.’ 206 Freire Barnes, ‘Ai Weiwei Tells Us About His Powerful Documentary Film “Human Flow,”’ The Culture Trip, December 6, 2017, accessed June 28, 2020, https://theculturetrip.com/europe/articles/ai-weiwei-tells-us-about-his-powerful- documentary-film-human-flow/. 71
4.3.10 Reflection
Traversing so many countries and encountering a large number of migrants from across the planet, Weiwei creates a complex representation of human movement showing that it is continuous, it affects different categories of people, and it happens everywhere in the world. Weiwei shows the story of migrants as it enfolds before their arrival in Europe, providing viewers with the reasons that cause migrants to flee, but he also illustrates their life in Europe, which is in most cases not what they had expected. Weiwei illustrates a key event in the history of the European refugee crisis, namely the incident in Calais, the gateway to the United Kingdom. As we learn from the film, 10,000 refugees were living in the ‘Jungle’ of Calais in 2016 when it was demolished. The film reflects upon the world’s response to the refugee crisis, including the construction of physical borders, border closings (Macedonia, Hungary), and the impact such decisions have on the refugees, who are then trapped and forced to survive in border camps (as it happened in Greece, Serbia, France). One migrant says: ‘when we were in our countries, we heard about Europe that there is democracy, there is freedom, human dignity, and human respect.’207 Although he does not mention the characteristics of the Europe that he found when he arrived here, his face expresses disappointment. This scene is immediately followed by the Calais incident and we can see that Weiwei is critical of how Europe is handling the situation. Ironically, the demolition of Calais involving tear gas and helicopters comes right after the Greek Migration Minister talks about the importance of tolerance and the need to combat xenophobia in order to create a united Europe that will be able to handle the crisis, and is followed by the appearance on screen of the text of the preamble to the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, creating a contrast between expectations and reality.
207Human Flow, 01:51:18 – 01:51:32. 72
Figure 36 (01:55:10): On-screen text
On another occasion, lawyer and Human Rights Activist Gabriela Vazquez is interviewed right next to the US wall. While we hear her say that migration is a human right, we are being shown the wall, separating one person from another.
Figure 37 (02:10:02): The US/Mexico wall
73
Despite Human Flow’s good reception, the documentary has also been criticised for a few reasons. Firstly, some critics argue that it is too abstract and that by talking about the crisis everywhere, it is hard ‘to relate directly to the crisis anywhere.’208 Moreover, the refugees are portrayed as large masses of nameless and voiceless people,209 whose tragedy remains collective and abstract. However, the purpose of this documentary is to show the global aspect of the crisis and the humanity that connects ‘us’ to ‘them’. Furthermore, Weiwei continuously switches from the abstract (bird’s-eye view) to the concrete. He presents the migrants both as collectives and as individuals. Secondly, the film was criticised for containing too many beautiful images, risking to aestheticize the suffering.210 However, Weiwei believes there is beauty in humanity no matter how damaged this is.211 Thirdly, Human Flow was accused of not providing enough political involvement, Weiwei simply observing the crisis. While Weiwei is mostly an observer, he did interview the Greek Migration Minister, and the on- screen texts are crucial in politicising the events illustrated. For example, the film expresses a sense of disappointment in Europe, the place where the Refugee Convention was born, and it also mentions the impact of foreign intervention in regions like Afghanistan. One on-screen text says: ‘Devastated by British, Soviet, and American invasions and domestic insurgencies,
Afghanistan is now one of the world’s most unstable and violent countries.’212 This shows that there is political involvement; it is just presented in a subtler way. Fourthly, the artist is accused of egomania, obsessed with attention, as he becomes himself part of the refugee narrative in the same way he did when he imitated the toddler Alan Kurdi lying on the beach. For that picture he has been accused of misusing the tragedy of others for the purpose of drawing attention to himself.213 However, back then, the world failed to realise that ‘Kurdi’s image does not reflect the image of “the Other” or the misery of the refugees in particular, but rather the misery of the human race and the universal loss of human dignity.’214 The picture ‘creates
208 Jessica Kiang, ‘Ai Weiwei’s Well-Intentioned But Abstract “Human Flow” [Antalya Review],’ The Playlist, October 27, 2017, accessed June 28, 2020, https://theplaylist.net/human-flow-review-20171026/ 209 Callahan, Sensible Politics, 138. 210 Ibid., 138. 211 Jochen Kürten, ‘Ai Weiwei's “Human Flow” and 11 Other Memorable Films on Refugees,’ DW.COM, November 16, 2017, accessed June 4, 2020, https://www.dw.com/en/ai-weiweis- human-flow-and-11-other-memorable-films-on-refugees/a-41392629. 212 Human Flow, 01:43:48. 213 Kürten, ‘Ai Weiwei’s “Human Flow”.’ 214 Balca Arda, ‘Contemporary art on the current refugee crisis: the problematic of aesthetics versus ethics,’ British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 46, no. 2 (2019): 316. 74
sympathy through resemblance’,215 Kurdi’s face and body not being disfigured but portraying a beautiful child dressed in normal clothes, not showing ‘any mark of his identity as Syrian,
Middle Easterner, [or] refugee.’216 On the contrary, the horrific image from Human Flow of a dead person laying on the sand, whose body has been mangled, was not as successful because a Western audience cannot relate to that.
Figure 38 (01:58:11): Dead body lying on the outskirts of Mosul, Iraq
As a reaction to this criticism, Weiwei responded that ‘[f]or me to be in the same position [as
Kurdi] is to suggest our condition can be so far from human concerns in today’s politics.’217
Weiwei’s replica of Kurdi’s picture illustrates ‘the human failure to save Kurdi’218 and by posing in the same position on the beach in Lesvos, Weiwei once again shows that he is feeling responsible for this failure. Moreover, Ai becomes closer to the migrants by interacting with them. This is why we see him cooking in the camp, offering tea, doing haircuts. He believes these small gestures bring ‘a human touch’,219 humanise them and remind them of their human
215 Ibid., 316. 216 Ibid., 316. 217 Quoted in Arda, ‘Contemporary art,’ 317. 218 Ibid., 318. 219 Deborah Vankin, ‘Why Ai Weiwei Was Compelled to Take on the Global Refugee Crisis in His New Documentary,’ Los Angeles Times, November 19, 2017, accessed June 28, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-ca-mn-ai-weiwei-human-flow-20171006- htmlstory.html 75 dignity. Fifthly, some critics argue that the world does not need even more evidence of the tragedy of refugees.220 While it is true that too much exposure to tragedy could numb the audience’s feelings of compassion (as Sontag and Moeller would argue), the aim of this documentary is not only informing people of the inhumane conditions refugees live in, but also ‘to provoke a transnational community of sense that would creatively do something to help refugees.’221 If there would be enough action, perhaps things would change, and there will be no more need for such documentaries in the future. I would argue that repeated exposure gives a sense of urgency to the crisis as much as it can lead to compassion fatigue, but it is up to the public to decide which one of the two affects them. The viewer can thus either be convinced to act or to allow numbness to install. Either way, the documentarist has done his job. Altogether, Human Flow is a self-reflexive documentary because it challenges us to think of all political and social aspects and ‘indicts not only viewers but also [Ai] himself […] as complicit in maintaining unequal hierarchies that have significant and ongoing material consequences.’222 This is why Weiwei argues that the refugee crisis is about ourselves as much as it is about the refugees, because we are part of it whether we are aware of it or not.223
4.4. Refuge
4.4.1 Introduction
Refuge225 is a short documentary film directed by the young American film director, screenwriter and photographer Matthew K. Firpo as part of ‘The Refuge Project’, a multimedia chronicle created for sharing ‘honest stories’.226 The film is created by placing together fragments from some of the 27 videos of different individuals telling their account in 20-30 minutes that Firpo and his team have published on their website.227 Everything was shot in one month in four refugee camps from Greece on the islands of Lesvos, Leros, and in Athens. On the Refuge website, Firpo explains how the project was born: ‘I wanted to look at the other side of the news. To focus on the simple, important fact that every refugee is a human being, with
220 Kiang, ‘Ai Weiwei’s Well-Intentioned But Abstract “Human Flow”.’ 221 Callahan, Sensible Politics, 130. 222 Zimanyi, ‘Human Flow,’ 378. 223 Ai Weiwei, ‘The Refugee Crisis Isn’t About Refugees. It’s About Us.’ 225 To view the film, you can access: https://becurious.ch/matthew-k-firpo-refuge-human- stories-from-the-refugee-crisis/. 226 Matthew K. Firpo et al., ‘The Refuge Project,’ https://www.refugeproject.co/. 227 These can be found at http://www.refugeproject.co/testimonies. 76
hopes and losses and families just like each of us.’228 Like Weiwei, Firpo focuses on humanity, highlighting that there is no difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’. The aim of the project is ‘to affect policy through hearts and minds’229 and to create something that would have a bigger impact on the audience than the news: ‘We wanted to bring humanity to headlines […] we tried to focus on their identities. On their eyes, their mannerisms, their loss, and their hope for a better life.’230 Firpo sees documenting these stories as a way of offering a voice to people who felt had none. He concludes this piece of writing by saying that each of us watching these videos have a responsibility to share the stories, spread the message of tolerance, and make a difference.231 Because this film is so short (18 minutes runtime), I will only focus on a few significant aspects in my analysis.
4.4.2 Technique
This documentary is different from the previous two because it only focuses on the individual. Each refugee interviewed is seated in front of a dark background and is facing the camera. They are speaking their own language so there is no language barrier restraining them from expressing themselves. The images of migrants talking are only interrupted a few times by the addition of significant images meant to provide topic-related visual support. Moreover, the music creates an atmosphere of suspense and melancholy, emphasising the loss, despair, suffering, and longing for the lost home.
228 Matthew K. Firpo, ‘Refuge | Matthew K. Firpo,’ The Refuge Project, http://www.refugeproject.co/refuge-mkf/keevm9nha095oo986nsy5s2mico25b. 229 Ibid. 230 Ibid. 231 Ibid. 77
Figure 39 (19:25): One of the refugees interviewed, single mother of two daughters
Figure 40 (06:04): Drone shot of Homs in ruins and on-screen text
78
Figure 41 (08:23): The migrants’ words as they appear on a beautiful shot of the sea
Figure 42 (11:20): The image that appears while the Mayor of Lesvos speaks of hope
4.4.3 Narrative Analysis
During the first part of the film, each refugee tells their story. They talk of death, drawing attention to the reality of war that to us seems so distant and buried in the past, while to them it is a matter of actuality. Their relatives died by bombings, raids, from army tanks and artillery fire, or from torture. They miss their home country, but the Syria they loved ‘is gone 79
now. It doesn’t exist anymore.’232 One woman explains that ‘Syria has become uninhabitable,’233 there is ‘no power, no running water, no safety and no security’234 and that they faced multiple threats from the Regime and from ISIS:
For you to be allowed to stay in a certain territory you would have to pledge your allegiance to them. If you are in ISIS territory, you have to join them. If you’re in the Regime’s territory, you would have to join them and be forced to kill your neighbours, your cousins.235
She uses the opportunity of being interviewed to spread her message regarding Islamophobia: ‘Our religion does not teach us to kill each other. Our religion does not call us to bear arms. Nor to kill women and children. Maybe with our stories people can get to know us, and realise that we are not all extremists. […] Islam is love.’236 Another young woman mentions the difference between seeing war on TV and seeing it happening right in front of your eyes. The mayor of Lesvos appears in the middle of the film, representing the role of the witness of tragedies: ‘We have seen people lose their lives a few meters from our coast. We have seen young children lose their mothers, and mothers lose their children. And this, we cannot bear.’237 He explains how for these people Lesvos symbolises hope and European civilisation, ‘and we need to be worthy of that hope.’238 After his appearance, the tone of the narrative changes. The migrants shift from stories of loss and suffering, to hopes and ambitions for the future. One man whose house and factory have been destroyed describes the condition of being a refugee: ‘We are a dignified people that like to work, that like to earn our living. We don’t like to ask anyone for help, but unfortunately our circumstances have forced us to.’239 Suffering and hope complement each other in this film. In the first part there is sadness, in the second there is hope because they arrived in Europe and their children have a chance to live. However, the presence of hope does not end suffering, as in the end a woman admits that telling her story opened wounds that make her sad again.
232 Refuge, 05:28. 233 Ibid., 03:24. 234 Ibid., 03:31. 235 Ibid., 03:55 – 04:12. 236 Ibid., 16:30 – 16:57. 237 Ibid., 11:03- 11:12. 238 Ibid., 11:27. 239 Ibid., 12:57- 13:12. 80
4.4.4 Production Contexts
This film is the result of a collaboration between a few artists who share the same passion and willingness to help. The crew volunteered to do the work required for the materialisation of Firpo’s idea because they ‘felt a moral obligation to do something,’240 in the midst of the humanitarian crisis, so everybody bought their plane tickets from New York to Greece, brought their equipment along, and started documenting.
4.4.5 Refugees’ Self-Representation
This documentary is special because the production team really took the time to sit down with each individual, learn their names, age, place of origin, and let them talk about their pain, fears, ambitions, lost homes, and expectations for the future. The film does not give a generalisation of the crisis, neither does it show the camps with hundreds of migrants. Instead, it provides a few examples of individual stories in an intimate way. Although they are asked questions about the reasons of fleeing and their expectations from Europe, as well as other spontaneous questions, which influence and frame their stories in a certain way, the refugees are the only ones doing the talking in this film and they are allowed to say everything they want. However, Refuge is very short and simplistic, only including statements from 12 out of the 27 refugees interviewed. In one of the testimonies published separately from the film, a 21- year-old Syrian man is discussing geopolitics (specifically America’s involvement in the conflicts in the Middle East) and addresses many critical questions. When asked what he hopes to do in Germany, he says he wants to study and reach a position from which his voice will be heard in the entire world, to show everyone the truth as opposed to all the lies spread by the media. He adds that he is aware this could cost him his life, but he has one goal and one life,242 and is determined to give one for the other. He wants to help other people like him and put an end to suffering and injustice. Through Firpo’s project, he can spread his ideas about humanity, equality, politics, and the untruthful media to the public, and I see this as a first small step towards the realisation of his dream.
240 ‘Syrians on the Threshold of Europe Lift the Curtain on Lost Loves and Lives,’ 99.media, accessed January 13, 2020, https://www.99.media/en/refuge-syrians-on-the-threshold-of- europe-lift-the-curtain-on-loves-and-lives-lost-forever/. 242 Ahmed Misto, ‘Testimonies. — The Refuge Project,’ http://www.refugeproject.co/testimonies, minute 25:17-25:19. 81
Chapter 5 Discussion
5.1 Brief Comparison of the Three Documentaries
The analysis above shows that the three documentaries are different in perspective, techniques, and each engages with refugees in a different way. Another differentiation is that Refuge has been produced with own funds, while Human Flow and Fuocoammare both received support from either big companies or the government. The films also differ in their aim. Rosi’s goal was to document the locals’ life on the island of Lampedusa while also including the events that happen at sea. Unlike the other two documentaries, his aim was not interviewing refugees but depicting a fragment of their life. It is because of this reason that migrants do not talk much in his film. Instead of conversating, Rosi’s form of listening is allowing the refugees to be themselves and capturing their raw emotions and feelings, while offering them space and time alone to digest all that they have experienced on their dangerous journeys so far. In this sense, the mode of Rosi’s documentary is observational. The documentary mode influences the degree of interaction between filmmaker and subject, which has a significant impact on the way the subject is depicted. Rosi observes everything that happens in front of his camera without ‘overt intervention’257 creating a film ‘with no voice- over commentary, no supplementary music or sound effects, no intertitles, no historical reenactments, no behaviour repeated for the camera, and not even any interviews.’258 As opposed to the migrants, the locals do get to talk, but they are also not asked any questions. However, Butler would say that a lot is being said even when subjects are not speaking. Indeed, the highly metaphorical and artistic content allows for multiple assumptions and makes Fuocoammare resemble a fiction film about a peaceful island visited by people from another planet. Due to the language barrier, these people do not talk. Apart from the Nigerian group who speaks English, none of them explains who they are, where they are from, and the reasons why they came to Lampedusa. Their customs are different but they are similar to us in that they too feel pain, they too mourn when losing their loved ones, and they too die. Refugees’ plight is further voiced by Dr. Bartolo who is emotionally attached to the topic. Rosi portrays silence
257 Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001), 109. 258 Ibid., 110. 82 and rawness of emotions. Nonetheless, his construction of two parallel worlds and his observational depiction of the refugees unwillingly emphasise the divide between refugees and locals. Human Flow fits in the category of participatory documentary. There is still no voice- over but that is because the director is in this case part of the film, becoming himself a social actor.259 The human flow is presented to us by someone who engages with it. The filmmaker joins the subjects on their journey and interacts with them. In this mode, the filmmaker serves as ‘mentor, critic, interrogator, collaborator, or provocateur.’260 Another form of encounter, differing from the interaction with refugees, is the interview with social actors which is used for bringing ‘different accounts together in a single story.’261 The two realms of personal and factual intertwine in this mode and provide a complex narrative. In Human Flow, there are a few instances in which migrants are taken apart and probably asked to share their story, occasions in which the camera depicts intimate moments whereby the subjects talk to each other, and instances when they interact with Weiwei and share fragments from their experiences in front of the camera. The subjects are more active than in Rosi’s film, and while they are not the only ones doing the talking, they are offered the possibility to speak. Yet, Firpo’s documentary offers insight into ‘the subjective qualities of experience and memory that depart from factual recounting.’262 The subjective and the affective are important in the telling of the story, as the subjects’ personal perspective is the most important. These aspects make this documentary performative. In this mode, the viewer is invited to experience what it is like to be a refugee. This mode allows a representation that focuses solely on the subjects and their personal experiences. Besides the mayor, refugees are the sole protagonists of this film, which offers them a higher degree of importance and agency.
5.2 Narratives
The narratives that emerge from the three documentaries are also slightly diverse. The main narrative about the migration crisis as framed by the media is that refugees create a crisis which endangers Europe. However, this crisis is visually constructed and maintained as such. These documentaries show that the crisis is global, that Europe is not the only one affected by
259 Ibid., 116 260 Ibid., 116. 261 Ibid., 122 262 Ibid., 131. 83 it, that these people have no choice but to flee or to die, and that anti-migration policies and closed borders can make the crisis even worse. Furthermore, the main narrative about the refugees themselves is paradoxical: refugees are either portrayed in the news media as dangerous potential terrorists, or as harmless people in need of help. Rosi’s film portrays refugees as outsiders, but in no way dangerous. On the contrary, they arrive in Europe very damaged, confused, and weak. Weiwei depicts them as victims of a flawed system, subjected to injustice, suffering from inequality. Firpo illustrates them as humans with harrowing stories, but hopeful for their future in Europe. All three emphasise that these people have lost everything and, in some cases, everyone. They are coping with unimaginable losses and the only thing that keeps them going is hope. In this regard, Butler proposes that we need to consider ‘the way in which suffering is presented to us, and how that presentation affects our responsiveness.’263 It is our responsibility to stop ourselves from thinking in terms of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ and to consider all factors – accompanying captions, text, images, as well as the underlying narratives – when we interpret media representations of refugees. This is primarily because representations are subjective, and like any other medium, they are not faithful to reality. The three documentaries once again show the incompatibility between various realities, thematising the gap between reality and constructed reality (representation). Additionally, refugees represent themselves as honest, hardworking, strong-willed, and determined people, who hope ‘to reach a country that will help [them] and [they] will return the favour,’ as a young man claims in Human Flow.264
5.3 Interrelation Between Text and Image
‘The language of pictures is different from the language of words.’265 However, both are crucial for representation. When discussing effectiveness and ability to make us understand, Sontag argues in favour of narratives as opposed to images. On the contrary, Butler believes that in order to understand the (political) background of an image, we do not need to read a caption or a narrative because this is ‘being explicitly formulated and renewed through and by
263 Butler, Frames of War, 63. 264 Human Flow, 00:15:23 - 00:15:28. 265 Quoted in Helen Hughes ‘The Hand as Text and Image: On Valie Export's Körpersplitter,’ in Jeffrey Morrison and Florian Krobb, Text into Image: Image into Text: Proceedings of the Interdisciplinary Bicentenary Conference Held at St. Patrick's College Maynooth (the National University of Ireland) in September 1995 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), 221. 84
the frame.’266 Therefore, in grasping the meaning of an image, it is crucial to pay attention not only to what is being shown, but also to how the picture ‘shows what it shows.’267 This ‘how’ affects our perception and turns the photograph into an interpreting device itself, rather than ‘a visual image awaiting interpretation.’268 Therefore, the meaning is formed within the interior of a frame. Moreover, Butler claims that ‘[e]ven the most transparent of documentary images is framed […] for a purpose carrying that purpose within its frame and implementing it through the frame.’269 The documentary is a construction, and even if it aims to show reality objectively, this reality is still represented within the boundaries of a selected frame. Moreover, as the analysis above also showed, in a documentary both text and images are used in order to offer the impression that the reality represented is straight forward and easily understandable, which limits the chances of imagination and interpretation.
5.4 The Refugee – a Voiceless Subaltern and a Suffering Other
While refugees’ voices are not very present in the media, documentaries tend to pay more attention to the individual stories. However, migrants’ voices are limited to the films only, which does not do more than simply create awareness and try to convince people to act. Documentaries are representations of reality, but not the embodiment of reality itself. While representation is inevitable, it is important to remember that it is never fully accurate. This is problematic because representations can determine the ways in which the represented subjects are perceived, and negative representations can strongly harm a subject’s image and attract negative attitudes towards them. In this way, representation can act as an ideological tool strengthening the imbalance between the powerful (those who represent) and the powerless (those who are represented). In the context of the refugee crisis, the images of the refugees shared by the media established the refugee as the ‘Other’ – or in Spivak’s terms, the ‘subaltern’ – of Europe. Spivak believes that ‘all forms of representation deny subalterns a fair hearing’,270 because every time somebody speaks on their behalf, refugees are robbed of the chance to speak themselves. When talking about the experiences of a refugee, is a refugee not the most qualified to do the talking? Given that there is no narratorial voice in these documentaries to narrate the story, all three
266 Butler, Frames of War, 71. 267 Ibid., 71. 268 Ibid., 71. 269 Ibid., 70. 270 Riach, An analysis, 39. 85 documentarists attempt to show reality objectively, each engaging with their subjects in a different way. For this reason, Firpo’s approach seems to be the best for the purpose of agency empowerment. Nonetheless, since all documentaries are representations, there is no direct voice of refugees possible – all is mediated. Even if they are given the chance to talk and they are listened to, this happens within someone else’s representation of them. In this regard, we cannot talk of refugee self-representation in documentaries unless they are offered the camera and become the producers of their own representation. In what concerns the refugees’ participation beyond the films, they are not involved in any conferences, interviews, or media events, neither are they involved in post-production processes. This is why, on a pessimistic note, Spivak suggests that representation denies subalterns the chance to speak, making their attempts meaningless.271 According to her, the subaltern is not heard because the voices from the West are much louder. As Spivak believes that there is no proper way of talking for/about the ‘other’ without being patronising and without helping to create an image of the powerless as the ‘others’, the only solution is to allow refugees the possibility to represent themselves and illustrate their reality. In this sense, ‘the noting of the failure of representation itself becomes a form of listening.’272 The three films discussed in this thesis attempt to represent refugees’ realities, but in doing so, they inevitably construct a different reality. Rosi simply observes the migrants, while Weiwei and Firpo interact with them. Nonetheless, since refugees are not part of the production teams, they are not in control of their own narrative.
271 Ibid., 39. 272 Drucilla Cornell, ‘The Ethical Affirmation of Human Rights,’ 101. 86
Chapter 6 Conclusion
This thesis provided a discussion about representations, self-representation, and the impact each form of representation has on changing current narratives or constructing new ones in the genre of documentary film. It established that the news media provided little and scattered information about refugees’ lives and cultures, and sometimes information about refugees’ identities were absent or marginal in much of the press coverage across European countries. This led to suspicion towards migrants and consequently, to anti-immigration policies and closing of borders. Moreover, this thesis analysed the documentary as a form of representation, looking at the author, subject, goals, and contexts of representation, the strategies adopted in the process of representation, and the implications of all these factors. Narratives and refugees’ self-representation have been discussed through analysing and comparing three documentaries, as a result of which this paper found that the representation of refugees was done by filmmakers, artists, and activists coming from three different parts of the world, aiming to bring awareness and draw attention to the plight of refugees in a time of confusion, uncertainty, and so-perceived crisis. The three artists were motivated by a moral duty to help in the way they could – by documenting these human stories, making them available to the entire world, hoping that their effort will have a good influence on the public. They take the role of activists who want to stimulate an active participation of the public and to change ideas and negative perceptions about refugees through their art. These documentaries contradict the belief that refugees are threatening, portraying them as people just like us, who are suffering terribly and need protection. If art does not have the power to change the world, it can certainly show that which cannot be seen,273 namely the stories that are not reported by the media, raising consciousness among diverse groups of people. Although highly visible, due to the plenitude of images shared by the media, the refugees are rarely heard. For this reason, being a visual medium, the documentary has the potential of being more impactful than a written report, and I believe Fire at Sea, Human Flow, and Refuge are powerful documentaries which manage to portray refugees in a more intimate way. Each of the three documentaries adopts a different approach, which also produces a different result. The techniques that are used by the filmmakers are useful in constructing
273 Jacques, Rancière, Figures of History, trans. Julie Rose (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2014), 72. 87 meaning and sharing an impactful message; each documentary being poignant in its own way. Fire at Sea is powerful because it pictures death so close to our eyes, Human Flow because it shows the precariousness of humanity, Refuge because it offers refugees a certain amount of agency, presenting pure individual stories. In the last two films, refugees take advantage of the opportunity of talking and address the common negative stereotypes (e.g. the woman talking about Islam, the man claiming they are honest hard-working people). Moreover, their depiction of refugees as weak and powerless challenges the refugees-as-enemies narrative. By providing close shots of individuals with a name and a story, migrants become humanised. Their personal accounts of pain, loss, fear, reaffirm their vulnerability and humanity. Consequently, when hearing such stories, the emotional distance between the viewer and the subject disappears and an emotional connection establishes instead. As a result of these films, more people have come to understand forced migration and the impact of immigration policies upon groups of migrants on the run, issues which have been widely discussed and debated in educational and political institutions, as well as in art discussion platforms. It is also likely that these films have led to the creation of more social media platforms (blogs, Instagram accounts, Facebook groups) which facilitate dialogue and debates on the topic. Moreover, since two of the films were presented to members of national and European parliaments, they might have stressed the need to offer more attributions to European-level refugee-led organisations (RLOs), which would allow refugees to have a say in policy-making. In this way, these organisations would gain more importance in European politics and refugee voices will be made heard on a wider scale. Although we cannot point to a specific political effect each documentary has led to, recent years have seen the building of new communities and initiatives aimed to create a better future for refugees by finding sustainable solutions. One of them is the Global Summit of Refugees that took place in Geneva in 2018 and gathered 72 refugee representatives from 26 refugee-hosting countries who discussed the issue of refugee self-representation, calling for increased involvement of refugees in local, national, and global initiatives.274 The Summit was followed by the first-ever Global Refugee Forum held in 2019. This event shows that RLOs and refugee-assisting NGOs have been more active in the past five years than ever, as they achieved the creation of a platform in which they can bring their requests, suggestions, and proposals to the table. The Forum is however organised only once in four years.
274 ‘Global Summit of Refugees,’ Network for Refugee Voices, accessed May 11, 2020, https://www.networkforrefugeevoices.org/global-summit-of-refugees.html. 88
Moreover, as a result of the ways in which these three documentaries are framed, a complex representation of refugees emerges. They are portrayed as helpless, modest, humble, brave, confused, alienated, suffering, but hopeful, willing to work hard as a way of showing gratitude to their host-countries. However, despite all attempts to illustrate reality exactly as it is, a documentary is still a composition after all, put through processes of selection and content editing, and as Spivak suggests, no one is entitled to represent the Other. Therefore, as long as refugees’ participation is limited to the films only, their voices will not materialise in more proper ways of advocating for their rights. Concerning the audience, as ‘photographing is not the same as intervening’,275 neither is watching a documentary-film the same as acting. One could argue though, that a film which illustrates the refugee crisis reinforces the need for a change. Watching such a film can make an audience become aware of this, and awareness is the first step to action. In trying to find a helpful solution that would create more balance between the representing and the represented, the main observation of this thesis is that representations of refugees as groups of faceless and nameless individuals perform a silencing function, and rather than arousing compassion, they generate numbness and compassion fatigue. On the other hand, personal and intimate representations of individuals with attributed names, stories, and voices are offering a certain amount of agency to refugees. Subsequently, these kinds of representations are successful in provoking empathy. Therefore, the only solution that would lead to the disappearance of misrepresentations and unfair negative narratives is allowing refugees to talk and having a public that would actually be willing to listen to them. More refugees speaking and more Europeans listening is what Europe needs for solving its problem regarding the representation of migration.
275 Butler, Frames of War, 84. 89 Filmography
Fire at Sea. Directed by Gianfranco Rosi. Netherlands: Cinéart, 2016. Google Play. Human Flow. Directed by Ai Weiwei. Netherlands: Independent Films, 2017. Google Play. Refuge. Directed by Matthew K. Firpo. 2016. Vimeo.
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