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Unresolved Subjects in the Cinema of
Statelessness |
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Noah Viernes* |
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Abstract |
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Cinematic
projections of refugees, exiles, and forced migration depart from the
conventions of documentary fact to expand the experience of statelessness.
For instance, Pierre-Yeves Vandeweerds
post-ethnographic work configures voices and bodies onscreen to communicate
political subjectivities lost to names, dates, and macropolitical
events. These films thereby return existing questions about the unresolved
sovereignties of states. |
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Key words: borders, cinema, mobility, post-ethnographic,
statelessness. |
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Stateless Fictions |
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Recent films open transitional spaces that confound
representations of statelessness in national and global space. For instance,
post-ethnographic documentary films like Pierre-Yeves
Vandeweerds Lost
Land (2011) point to the unresolved time of people and partitions across
Western Saharan territory as a call for more stories to be told. The
unfinished political state of affairs of the films backdrop appears in the
transnational spaces and times of the Sahrawi Arab
Democratic Republic, a no-mans land that lends to debates about geographies
of loss, or what Michael J. Shapiro calls violent cartographies.[1] But there are also cinematic
experiments at the frontier of documentary and fiction, such as Ruth Beckermans
The Dreamed Ones (2016), which reposition politics
beyond geography, time and cartography, and toward contemporary histories of
statelessness. This film unfolds entirely in a Berlin radio studio, where Beckermann posthumously assembles the lives of two poets,
Ingaborgh Bachmann and Jewish exile Paul Celan, by engrossing the audience in the voices of two
readers who amplify the late poets letters in a coherent, yet tragic
narrative of violence and separation. Their relationship is stateless in the
geopolitical and aesthetic sense: shifting between linear and non-linear
times, moving across territorial space in the posted journeys of love
letters, then brought to light in Beckermans film. The difference between a
vast desert landscape and the interior space of a radio studio provokes the
following inquiry into the statelessness of cinema itself. The transmission
of love letters and images across unstable boundaries becomes an auditory
optic for rethinking violence. |
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I
do not want to decontextualize the violence as
aesthetic objects of representation, but first-person memories of war and
dispossession take the form of encryptions to overcome the sort of cultural
policing that Jacques Rancire associates with,
roughly speaking, ideal orders. He locates this common political frame in
what he calls the ethical regime of art, where an arrangement of parts
adhere to a predetermined whole.[2] In Beckerman, the persistence of
voice resists the expulsions of Fascism while Vandeweerds
subjects counter the Moroccan border partition of El Hisam
with a visibility that demands a new form for its story. An emergent cinema
of statelessness thereby reconfigures space to rethink political
subjectivity. This is because statelessness materializes in stories where
narrative voice is reconstructed through fictionality. Rancire articulates this process as a meditation on the
real that pushes against the plight of exclusion. For Rancire,
the space of fictionality is a political
orientation that challenges everything silent and the proliferation of modes
of speech and levels of meaning.[3] Contemporary visual culture thinks in
and through literary and cinematic texts, between the mimetic story and some
banal realism that lays claim to the totality of the image. As a politics,
the filmmaker breaks with historic divisions of genres and ways of doing art
in order to challenge dominant modes of seeing.[4]
Fictionality is therefore an open zone of entry set
against the presupposition of borders, which does not preclude truth, but rethinks
bodies beyond the conventions of a militarized image. In treating the
connection between fiction and realism, Rancire
further underscores a literary and political convergence in the expansion
of random moments into the lives of characters that rarely find their place
in the dominant chronicles of historical movements.[5]
In its multiplication of the real, Rancire
emphasizes the random individual and events repositioned beyond the tropes
of representation. Tellingly, he borrows this aesthetic emergence from Erich Auerbach who formulated his analysis of literary realism
in the context of his own statelessness. |
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This
fictionality is therefore not specific to a strict
documentary film format, but it encourages a consideration of cinemas
engagement with the real in literary terms. Theodor Adornos
well-known critique of poetry after Auschwitz comes to mind, especially
through Hamid Dabashis
more recent reading. Critiquing the 2014 Israeli bombing of Gaza, Dabashi wrote that Adornos resistance to a post-Holocaust poetry was driven by the
re-packaging of aesthetic form in a totalizing field of nationalist ideology.
As an example, he demonstrates how poetic verse has been most effectively
harnessed by state Zionisms call for the erasure of the Palestinian—or,
further abstracted, as the final determination of the nation-state order as
it already exists. Here, statelessness and alternative histories disappear,
and absolutist state violence moves forward against the invisibility of
parts. On the other hand, statelessness is not just a lack of statehood,
but an aesthetic potential—or fiction as political genre—where
cinema re-orders what is already there. To be stateless might be addressed as
a formlessness that defies formalism and a search for a different mode of
expression. In The Art of Not Being
Governed, James C. Scott argues that statelessness is a condition of
liberation, a movement to more remote regions to elude the states
consolidation of manpower. What if we were to understand this movement in
aesthetic terms rather than Scotts topographic perception of minoritarian exclusion that propels movement toward the
higher elevations of Southeast Asia? In Vandeweerds
Lost World, the Sahrawi fight to remain,
ever conscious of territorial demarcations that bridge space and time.
Statelessness becomes exile and an ongoing resistance from within. Always
unfinished, the intensity of events deforms
representation after the manner that Giles Deleuze
locates in paintings that enact movement into the artifice of fixed
representation.[6] With works
that range from post-ethnographic to narrative films pieced together from
primary texts, the question for filmmakers like Vandeweerd
is how to address the simultaneity of location and displacement, the life
beyond the constitutional myth dreamed up to institutionalize exceptional
violence. A cinematic mode of seeing re-thinks statelessness to offer new
methodologies for thinking through the political. |
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I
consider filmmaking as a possibility for a new transdisciplinary
nexus that rethinks the global continuum of statelessness beyond its dominant
textual expressions. We have arrived at a juncture of global interconnections
and images that shift subjectivity, as Elmo Gonzaga writes, from intertextual positioning to intermedial
circulation. As Gonzaga shows, disparate modalities of film can redefine
and amplify moments and experiences without being reduced or simplified.[7]
The impromptu infrastructure of disconnections and invisibilities deform our
own movements and complicates the attempt to engage people and experiences
through existing languages. We might also shift our working vocabularies
across multiple mediums of expression. In my own experience, border regions
often exemplify the continuum of statelessness sustained within the
territorial legalities of statehood. Thailands three Southernmost provinces
along the border of Malaysia were annexed to Thailand in 1909—a
re-formation of visual cartography formalized in the legality of the
Anglo-Siamese Treaty. Since 2004, the dominant signal of disruption there is
death toll, which filters through Thailands National Statistics Office and
journalistic reports of the southern fire in the Deep South that rages on
between an active insurgency and one of the worlds largest military
occupations. In the instability of numbers, laws, and habitation, a different
kind of aesthetic occupation begins: the attempt to build a new intellectual
community in the writing workshops that led to its first multilingual print
magazine (The Melayu Review), but also the
expansion of two art galleries (De Lapae Art
Gallery Narathiwat and Patani
Artspace) to channel presence amid the instability
of local representations. Most recently, a convergence of the nations most
renown filmmakers, such as Pimpaka Towira—who made the 2015 feature length film Island
Funeral in the region, returned to partner with local youth to make a
series of collaborative films. I am suggesting spaces of political rupture
evolve toward the space of fictionality where
statelessness can be addressed. The shift recalls Laura Marks search for a
nomadic cinema in Arabic film, not as an ideal but as the only viable
option.[8]
In one example, the blocked energies of the narrative reconfigure the
impromptu partitions of Israeli roadblocks.[9]
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Bodies and Voices |
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I would like to briefly sum up my general line of inquiry in
several themes at work in the cinema of statelessness: |
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a. Statelessness
is not one thing and resists formalization; |
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b. This
formlessness can be understood in the operations of what Rancire
calls fictionality; |
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c. We might read
statelessness as a significant area of the political, precisely as a
cinematic poetics waged against the totalizing ideologies of states. |
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In these three dimensions, the geopolitical deforming of the
world is re-formed in the responsiveness of cinema. Cinema is capable of
recording, but the aesthetic form of a world adapts to the oversight of its
conventions. In interviews, Vandeweerd points out that his early ethnographic work in Africa was
confronted with expressive dead-ends.[10]
Ethnographic writing inscribed boundary markers and cultural metrics that
structured colonial power in mapping commissions and civilization discourses,
but also in the primacy of the ethnographer as framing representation through
so-called field notes. Michael Taussig, in his own
critique of ethnographic writing, claims that prolific writing undertakes the
function burying appearance—a relationship that rests at the center of
the nation-state system.[11]
Though Taussig finds refuge in the simplicity of
the sketch—to somehow reignite the workings of memory, we might also
test the possibility of camera becomes political in its undoing
representation. In other words, does a camera give voice to the
inexpressible, illuminating spaces of formlessness that are neither ideal nor
natural, but linked to trajectories of violence? |
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Drawing
attention to the fractured landscape of unresolved boundaries, Vandeweerds Lost
Land (2011) priorities and connects intensities, figures and mobility.
The film begins with a black and white disorientation of movement in space,
but also a materialization of the grainy 16mm celluloid medium. Noise becomes
both visual and, throughout the film, a dominant feature of the films sound
design. To reverberate noise is to emphasize amplification. The sequence
recalls Michel Serress Parasite, where music and noise operate as an interruption to the
signal of a communication system, where host and parasite bring death to the
organic whole. In this sense, sonic relations and geopolitical positions push
against another: historic silence and cartographic division are modulated
across a mythology of walled-states. These intensities move in a time of
their own almost as if the filmmaker struggles to remove his own imprint. In
a stunning sequence, approximately 16 minutes into the film, we enter a
deeply affective sound design in a 3-4 minute montage evacuated of words.
Each of |
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Fig. 1 (Lost Land, Pierre-Yves 2011) |
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the shots is
framed in close-up faces that comprise a political community of faces and
hands embracing. The cuts of cinematic montage build toward a collective
manifestation of voice. Here, we dont simply see citizens of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic and their postcolonial
plight for self-determination. Instead, we connect to them in close-up,
linked together by the black and white 16mm film reel. I sometimes wonder why
a slower and seemingly obsolete medium of capture imprinted upon the noisy
grain of the film strip might be effective in
cinematic projection of the political.[12]
Vandeweerd explains that the medium determined a
temporality of subjecthood, a reel for each person
to be organized according to how they themselves chose to be framed.[13]
They seek to be recognized as a people, but the filmmaker chooses to
recognize singularity in the multiplicity of reels. Noise is implicit to a
historic legacy of disconnection while the sonic layer of montage provokes
the intensity of collective resonance.
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Fig. 2
(Lost Land, Pierre-Yves 2011) |
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Lost
Land provides several intertitles
to address representational layers of silence in the regions
a post-colonial context. One intertitle explains
that after Spain withdrew in 1976, Morocco entered, thereby bombing and
occupying most of the Sahrawai territory. Morocco
then built a 2,700 km wall to create its southern provinces. This cut into
disputed territory, as read cinematically, materializes as a partitioning of
the sensible because we know the boundary can only exist through its
militarization and history of violence. The wall is a visual marker of an
exception, since those residing beyond constitutional protection are also
stateless, whether or not they are marked within the new Moroccan partition.
In order to prepare for the wall, now manned by intermittent military bases,
airfields, and surveillance systems that extend far beyond it, a campaign of
disappearances, torture, and fear ensued. This is perhaps one reason why we
never see the subject of Lost Land speak. We hear their voice-over in
mouths that dont move, projecting words that should circulate far and wide
in humanitarian discourse. The Western Sahara is disputed, but Morocco draws
its borders around it, into Mauritania and below the wall that marks its
southern provinces. On maps, there are many dotted lines. State zones are
thereby formless, illustrated in-formation—an architecture of the
impromptu. And this formation of states begins with exceptional acts of
violence, in the same way that Stephen Morton argues that states of exception
link the times of colonial regimes with the legal trajectories of
nation-states.[14] |
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Politics
must re-organize, or—as Rancire
writes—redistribute the landscape as a possible world that emerges as a
regime of visibility. Vandeweerd orchestrates this
politics in two primary ways: first, in the reorganization of the state as
text through intertitles; and secondly, in a
montage that reconnects these figures beyond the body of the state. White intertitles organize the space and time of the film. They
indicate distance from prior residences in kilometers. |
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Fig. 3 (Lost Land, Pierre-Yves 2011) |
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But they also establish an unfinished politics of resistance to
the existing representation of Moroccan space. |
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The montage sequence
is about reconnection and the recovery of a tribal community lost in the
states orchestra, which is suspiciously called a social contract.[15]
Lost Land weaves a people together and, intermittently, connects
headshots with hands embraced. Richard Skeltons post-classical sound bridge
layers resilience and traditions of mobility on top of dislocation and exile.
I will return to this point below to suggest that the musicality of
statelessness attempts to intervene in a dialogue that has been increasingly
militarized. In such cases, a human rights discourse needs an aesthetic
language to reach beyond the universality of an international community that
begins and ends with states. This point reaches across a variety of examples
of contemporary cinema, so let me first continue
with Vandeweerds work. |
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Vandeweerd reconnects voices to bodies in
a manner that dignifies the Sahrawi on their terms.
Rather than framing his interviews in the fashion of a human rights
testimony, the subject voices are recorded separately and later edited into a
three-minute reel that recalls Andy Warhols Screen Tests (1964-1966). In
Warhols case, the iconic still image snapped in close-up is refashioned
through the moving images capability for capturing affect: a tear, a subtle
gesture, and a shy aversion to the camera is tested by the duration of the
medium. But unlike the Screen Tests, Lost World dignifies the
less-visible global subject. In Vandeweerds work,
we hear the massacres and feel the resonance of words; in the wind, in the
desert, in the camp; but not in the same colors or normalized frame of
dialogue and background that links their singular story to the timeless
subject of non-citizens. They retain some semblance of community and this is
what they fight for. Ultimately, the film is not a narrative collage of
testimonies that lay claim to disputed international space, but instead a
brilliant work of audiovisual poetry that works as a
collaboration between a community, the medium of cinema, and the
audiovisual pull of voices from a desert landscape. And unlike an
ethnographer who works to translate the interplay of cultural signs for an
interpretive community, the post-ethnographic turn invites meditation on the
statelessness of time and space. |
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In
The Eternals (2017), Vandeweerd moves to color, highlighting a complex array
of details to express a different kind of documentary realism. Here the
reality is the wound, the remainder, the consequence
of violence. But any realism entails limits, since even if one sees soldiers, this vision does not guarantee any concrete
political knowledge of who is involved. The majority Armenian region
represented in the film sits along a disputed mountain range in the Republic
of Azerbaijan. Here, at the Nagorno-Karabakh highlands, a
traumatized military unit patrol the impromptu boundaries of a state
within a state. The soldiers range from the elderly to the recent young recruit who maintain the right for a community to exist in
their ancestral homelands (and, the film shows, never without consequence).
This balance is overshadowed by a history of systematic extermination during
World War I, Stalins attempt to reorganize the nationalities, and the
post-Soviet Nagorno-Karabakh War in 1994. Vandeweerd
does not pursue these details as much as the formlessness of the political
body as internalized by the soldier body. The eternals, unlike eternal
soldier of Chapter 1 of Benedict Andersons Imagined Community, is an ongoing textual center of transgenerational experience, more like a disrupted
nervous system than a meditative trope for nationhood. Hands shake with shell-shock as the appendage of gesticulating figures. The
eternal ones precariously rest their fingers near triggers that, in
montage, break the coherence of any rational system. In other words, each of
these components is oriented around a politics of statelessness in a fictionality that questions the real. Let us congeal this
meeting point between the post-ethnographic and the fictional in three
primary gestures: an attentiveness to the surfaces of the real, the kinetic
critique of the limits of fixed representation, and the sonic response to
legacies of silence. |
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First, we observe a refusal of the conventions of ethnographic filmmaking, that sometimes prey on the exotic appeal and
mystique of the visual text. The best example of this is
Jean Rouchs ethnographic portraits of Africa that
sometimes recall the colonial surf cinema of The Endless Summer
(1968). Instead, Vandeweerd works toward the
gravity of the unspoken and the limitations of what an anthropologist can
know in the claim to document a people (here, we might turn to Arjun Appadurais description
of the ethnoscape, where the disjunctures
of globalization assure the differences between tourists, immigrants,
refugees, exiles, guestworkers and other moving
groups and persons [that] constitute an essential feature of the world.[16]
These are essentially landscape films that complicate how states order
nationalities. However, the films also seem to problematize
the rational states war on so-called tribalism, a constituent and
indigenous container of our transgenerational
connections. This war seeks a systematic and rational order of the
international system, which relies on walls and a fixed sense of territory.
Dispersion is its precondition. |
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Second, we observe the limits of representation. There are limits to what one can say on behalf of others, and
the challenge of a film is to recover rather than embellish those stories.
This recovery entails several conceptual possibilities for the cinema of
statelessness addressed here. First, a cinema of statelessness might resist
subordination to the graphic of writing even as, in geopolitics, the
emergence of the modern map produces a convergence of place and text in the
image of states. But the
two-dimensionality of maps betray alternative
experiences of what Thomas Nail calls kinetic mobility. Here, a violent
tension surfaces when the kinetic mobility of marginal subjects (e.g.
barbarians, vagabonds, and proletariats) are beset by a juridical kinopower structured around the logic of stasis.[17]
In one of his more interesting cases, the vagabond circulates in the
egalitarian mode of pedesis, where connectivity and
collectivity emerge in opposition to the juridical artifice of divided space.
Nail refers to these oppositional manifestations as wave motion. Whereas
maps champion and naturalize a fixed mode of vision, Vandeweerds
cinematic world recaptures the tension between the fixed and the kinetic,
especially in the impromptu: refugee camps, tents, and the movement from one
stateless group to the next. |
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Fig. 4 (The Eternals,
Pierre-Yves 2017) |
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Finally, sound design is crucial in the recovery of intensities: in soundscapes of political
conflict, dialog does not reign over ambience, music, or other elements of
the sound design. A filmmaker will note that Vandeweerd
does not conduct interviews in his documentary, or even record location sound
at the same time as he is recording the visual image, except when dialogue is
not present. The reason is two-fold: first, he wants to allow the voice to
determine its own direction—not simply a Westphalian
a claim to self-determination, but a demand for recognition and connection
based in the zoomed-in faciality discussed above.
In dialogue, we get the sense that the people behind the voices have written
their script, rehearsed it, and then record themselves. Todays borderlands
extend into so-called states through a network of checkpoints that do not
simply turn people away, but engage them in a heavily-regulated dialogue:
where are you from, what do you do for a living, why are you here? Dialogue
itself is coupled with other forms of violence to deter mobility. Music is
often a movement into an autonomous space beyond these limitations of speech.
One of the musical sequences I like
best in the cinema of statelessness comes from Pedro Costas Ossos (2006), where remnants of a former
Portuguese colony dance at night in the Fontainhas
slum of Lisbon. When the viewer hears the first notes, they might already
sense the segmentation between homeland and metropole
that demand these moments of reconnection. The scene is a simple moment of
being together. This kind of scene is refashioned an hour into Nicolas Klotz
and Elisabeth Percevals The Wild Frontier,
a 2017 documentary film that tracks the last days of The Jungle where
12,000 stateless residents live in an impromptu city somewhere outside of
Paris. In this more contemporary staging of migration, three Ethiopian
characters have just narrated the horror of dead friends, kidnappings, stab
wounds, etc., incurred as they passed through Libyas warzone on their way to
Italy. Their memories prompt them toward suicide and the desire to close off
from others as they journey through uncertain destinations, brutal winter
winds, and the securitized soundscape of
surveillance helicopters. Below, the barren landscape maximizes visibility
for state surveillance and journalistic zoom lenses that minimize clandestine
lines of flight.[18] So when
we watch them float into a dreamy song sequence (Christophes Dangereuse was probably not their first choice), we can
better sense the projection of their pain and suffering in this moment of
reconnection in the possible formation of a new community. |
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Conclusion |
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Our submission to the internationally-accepted
vocabulary of refugee status sometimes undermines the different transnational
temporalities of being without a state. In this sense, I am intentionally
writing beyond the officially-sanctioned status of
stateless people since that status relies on the determination by official
actors. Vandeweerds work attests to this point.
But there are many other cases, such as Wang Bings
Ta`ang (2016), a documentary film about the Ta`ang minority who must move back and forth according to
the intermittent escalation of Myanmars numerous insurgencies. A state is
materiality, and also the transformation of form from one thing to another.
My friend, a poet named Zakariya Amataya, first brought me to his home along the
Thai-Malaysian border, and encouraged me to see statelessness as an
increasingly common feature within states themselves—a fragmentation
that persists within borders that are assumed to congeal in images of place.
One of his descriptions, in the defiant genre of free-verse, reads like this: |
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Zakariyas poetry interrogates of modes of seeing, there
in proximity, under martial law in southern Thailand. The regime unfolds
through airport security enforced by arming soldiers with non-conventional
firearms and DSLR cameras. These modes of capture oversee the impromptu
regulation of space in hundreds of checkpoints designed to externalize a
specific kind of dialogue. We might refer to these check-point
dialogues as soft interrogations, but they very often take the shape of a
daily line-up. On the other hand, a politics of response surfaces in
reflections off pieces of glass to reflect a shattered landscape where the
multidimensionality of everyday life must filter through the mediated
representations of a legal purgatory. This is where an independent cinema is
most significant. While official actors await a state-organized dialogue
where an opposition is characterized in the vocabulary of insurgency, a
stateless visual culture of the random moment, fills
this precarious duration with fictionality. A
cinema of statelessness captures times a
common duration to re-channel the fixed spatiality of martial law in the flow
of the everyday. These voices exist beyond constitutional protections as
their own sense of self-determination defies the shift from impromptu
security to the fixed repetitions of states. |
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This
absence of a permanent state is the condition for rethinking statelessness
as an always unresolved reconfiguration of parts.
And whereas this reconfiguration is most obvious in frontiers and
borderlands, temporary camps, and communities most often slated for
demolition (such as the cityscape of most of Pedro Costas films or the
predatory development of places that lack global cinematic projection), we
can follow this process as a guideline for how politics and aesthetics
converge. In this wave of change, facts give way to forms and dominant images
are deformed by the sonority of geopolitical uncertainty. |
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Notes |
