Cinematic hometactics: negotiating belonging in first-person documentary

ABSTRACT

This article approaches first-person filmmaking as a potential home-making practice – a hometactic – that can actively negotiate reality to set forth new modes of belonging. With a focus on negotiating belonging in the context of migration, I turn to Four Journeys (Louis Hothothot, 2022) as a case study, a first-person documentary that explores the relationship between suppressed memories of violence and lived experience of in-betweenness by tracing four separate journeys between China, Hothothot’s country of origin, and the Netherlands, his country of residence. My analysis of Four Journeys’s home-making efforts as permeated by a praxis of care needed to enact a sustainable mode of belonging in the aftermath of migration is combined with insights from an interview between the filmmaker and the author. On the basis of the case study, the article proposes and elaborates on three forms of home-making practices in relation to cinema: hometactics in film (the documentation of home-making in the film), camera as a hometactic (the act of filmmaking as a home-making process), and cinematic hometactics (the cinematic enactments of home). While this three-part analytic differentiation serves to unpack the diverse forms of cinema and/as hometactics, the article also addresses their overlap.

KEYWORDS:

• First-person documentary
• hometactics
• care
• migration
• belonging

First-person documentary and/as home-making practice

The notion of home has been central to the study of the relationship between migration and cinema (Lebow 2003; Naficy 2001; Olivieri 2016; Rodovalho 2014). In this article, I propose to consider cinema as an everyday home-making practice – a hometactic – that has the capacity to enact new modes of belonging rather than merely represent reality as it is. While home-making efforts can be mobilized in a variety of contexts, my focus will be on first-person negotiations of belonging in the context of migration, with the article thereby primarily contributing to the scholarship concerned with first-person documentary in relation to migration (Cati and Grassilli 2019; Denić 2023; 2024; Lebow 2012a). First-person films about diverse migration experiences – such as motivations to migrate, migration journeys, border-crossings, life in Europe, exclusion, and deportation, among others – are not a new phenomenon. Their proliferation in recent years has, however, been noticeable.¹ To advance an understanding of cinematic hometactics, I focus on Louis Hothothot’s Four Journeys (2022), which joins this rich filmmaking practice by exploring the lived experience of transnational belonging in the aftermath of migration.² In Four Journeys, Hothothot documents four separate journeys between China, his country of origin, and the Netherlands, his country of residence, across a span of several years. While the journeys appear prompted by his wish to uncover the memories of a childhood marked by the experience of being a second child during the strict implementation of the one-child policy in China (1980–2016), the film develops as an examination of the relationship between these memories and the director’s experience of belonging. At the core of the film is the process of navigating the state of in-betweenness as a form of destabilized belonging in relation to the two countries, which makes the film a particularly fruitful case study to expound an understanding of cinematic practice in terms of hometactics.³ As I will argue, Hothothot’s first-person filmmaking consists of diverse home-making practices that allow the filmmaker to negotiate in-betweenness into a sustaining mode of belonging.

I approach first-person filmmaking as a practice in which the director’s first-person mode of address is readily acknowledged, and where the director is simultaneously a subject in and of the film (Lebow 2012b; Renov 2004). In The Cinema of Me (2012b), the now classic study of first-person documentary, Alisa Lebow observed how the back and forth movement between countries of origin and countries of residence has become central not only to migration experience but also to the first-person filmmaking in the aftermath of migration. ‘Self-documentation accompanies the movement of bodies across borders,’ Lebow (2012a, 258) writes, with the camera ‘propelling some of these seismic geographical shifts as it appears to simply record them’. At the crux of Lebow’s approach to first-person films about migration is the conceptualization of the camera as a peripatetic migration machine: a symptom of displacement acting as a catalyst and not just a record of migration. ‘The process of documenting a displaced subjectivity via the cinematic apparatus,’ she contends, ‘reveals within it the seeds of its own destabilization’ (Lebow 2012a, 270). Lebow’s understanding of first-person filmmaking as a symptom of displacement that propels migratory movements remains a critical perspective on the relationship between cinema and migration that transgresses the representational paradigm. However, the notion of the peripatetic migration machine does not move beyond the camera’s capacity to set things in motion and reveal the seeds of one’s own destabilized identity. I argue that what lacks in Lebow’s account of the relationship between cinema and migration is an acknowledgement of cinema’s capacity to navigate the state of displacement towards more sustainable modes of existence. While the camera does function as a peripatetic migration machine in Four Journeys – leading Hothothot on four journeys that tackle the family’s wish to forget their relation to the one-child policy – I am interested if Hothothot’s first-person filmmaking can also transcend the status of a symptom of displacement. Rather than iterating displacement through the back-and-forth movement between the filmmaker’s country of origin and the country of residence, how can first-person filmmaking become a cinematic practice that negotiates a sense of belonging?

A theorization of the relationship between cinema and migration that does consider cinema’s potential in negotiating one’s context has been offered by Lars Gustaf Andersson and John Sundholm in The Cultural Practice of Immigrant Filmmaking (2019). Gustaf Andersson and Sundholm (2019, 3–5) propose an understanding of filmmaking in relation to migration as taking the form of a cultural practice: upon migration, filmmakers turn to film workshops and associations for support in realizing their cinematic projects, with the films becoming ‘a way of acting in the world’ that allow their makers ‘to find a context for themselves’. This expanded approach to film as not only an aesthetic object but a cultural practice by which one navigates the opportunities to establish themselves as filmmakers after migration allows the authors to conceptualize the act of filmmaking as a negotiation of a new context. While moving beyond the representational paradigm, Gustaf Andersson’s and Sundholm’s approach does not consider the potential of first-person filmmaking in specific, nor does it articulate what the negotiation of one’s context after migration amounts to. In this article, I attend to first-person filmmaking in relation to migration not only as a cultural practice – which it certainly is – but in terms of its capacity to negotiate the everydayness of migration and in doing so form ‘a cinematic response to unsustainable conditions’ (Hongisto 2017, 191).

Mariana Ortega’s (2016, 205) conceptualization of hometactics as practices ‘deployed at a personal and relational level’ to ‘grant new possibilities of belonging’ is key to my understanding of the different forms of Four Journeys’s home-making efforts. The notion of home mobilized in my conceptual framework does not refer to imaginary spaces in which one feels as fully belonging. Rather, I agree with Ortega’s (2016, 200) claim that ‘given the complexity of the selves as well as the complexity of spaces of belonging (in terms of their members as well as criteria for membership)’, ‘there are only different senses of belonging depending on which markers of identity are chosen’. The understanding of belonging as decentred and accompanied by tactics of home-making is vital to Ortega’s (2016, 63) theory of multiplicitous selfhood, which conceives of selfhood in terms of ‘multiple positionalities or social identities’ that are inhabited in ‘specific material circumstances that include particular histories’.⁴ In the understanding of selfhood as multiplicitous, hometactics comprise diverse practices that can provide a sense of belonging in the process of navigating multiple identities. If hometactics allow oneself to navigate the ambiguities that emerge from the lived experience of multiplicitous selfhood, how should we conceive of cinematic hometactics?

I approach Four Journeys as an exercise in self-mapping, a process in which ‘one locates oneself in life and space and recognizes locations imbued with histories, power relations, cultural and economic forces, and personal dreams and imagination’ (Ortega 2016, 193). When approached from this angle, Hothothot’s first-person filmmaking can be understood as a process of navigating multiple identities, with his particular context involving a decentred experience of belonging in-between China and The Netherlands. By laying open the injustices suffered by Hothothot’s family due to the one-child policy and their enduring impact on the family’s everyday life, Four Journeys can be understood as part of an ongoing first-person documentary practice in contemporary China that is centred on the ‘tensions between individual desire and collective family obligations’ (Yu 2019, 25). As my analysis of the film will show, each family member needs a different form of care during this process, with their needs often appearing as mutually exclusive, which in turn leads to the interpretation of each other’s behaviour in terms of failures to care. I will argue that a crucial part of Four Journeys as a hometactic concerns Hothothot’s negotiation of these ambivalences of care to set forth new forms of belonging and familial relationality. Overall, the article’s main contribution to the study of first-person filmmaking in relation to migration is an elaboration of first-person documentary in terms of everyday cinematic practices rooted in a praxis of care that have the capacity to enact in-betweenness as a sustaining – rather than destabilizing – mode of belonging. By considering the many layers of first-person filmmaking in Four Journeys in combination with insights from an original interview with Hothothot (2023),⁵ I propose to consider three possible relationships between cinema and/as hometactics: hometactics in film (the documentation of home-making in the film); camera as a hometactic (the act of filmmaking as a home-making process); and cinematic hometactics (the cinematic enactments of home).

The three proposed forms of hometactics in relation to filmmaking should not be conceived of as being mutually exclusive or positioned in a hierarchical fashion. Rather, based on Four Journeys as a case study, the cinematic practices of home-making more often than not straddle all of the three proposed forms. Therefore, while I hope that this threefold analytic distinction can be useful in unpacking the diverse relationships between cinema and/as hometactics, the challenge is to think them together. Ortega (2016, 203) has moreover argued that ‘no specific, set formulation of what these practices [hometactics] look like is possible, since one of the main features of tactics are precisely their unmappability and their working ‘blow by blow’, taking advantages of opportunities as they present themselves’. Accordingly, the specific characteristics of Hothothot’s first-person filmmaking as a home-making practice are by no means meant to provide an exhaustive description of the possibilities of cinema in relation to home-making.

There is one more noteworthy comment before turning to Four Journeys. Due to my focus here on first-person filmmaking as a potential home-making practice, the notion of home movie might come to mind as a case in point. Home movies are commonly understood as a form of amateur filmmaking aimed at representing everyday life (Moran 2002; Zimmermann 2007). This definition doesn’t neatly fit Four Journeys’s cinematic status and aim, which is neither a piece of amateur filmmaking (Hothothot is a trained filmmaker, and the film was produced by a leading Dutch documentary producer Pieter van Huystee, as well as funded by various Dutch public organizations), nor does it necessarily represent everyday life (as I will argue, the film disrupts the course of everyday life to actively shape reality). Despite these key differences, I propose not to dismiss the relevance of the notion of home movie for this study, but rather to rethink its original meaning in light of cinematic hometactics.

Hometactics in film: memory work

Four Journeys is a microhistorical documentary to which memory work – as a practice that starts with one’s own archive to make public the stories rarely acknowledged by the hegemonic cultural memory – is central (Cuevas 2022; Kuhn 2002). By uncovering the family’s personal archive and presenting it from a new perspective, the film intervenes in the complex dynamic of remembering and forgetting that shapes the family’s memory of the one-child policy with the aim of preserving the past as present. From the film’s onset, all family members – Hothothot, his parents and sister – appear as on-screen characters in the unfolding of memory work. In this section, I consider how memory work, including its negotiation of care in the familial setting, can be considered as one of Four Journeys’ hometactics, which allows Hothothot to navigate the affective complexity of his journeys between China and the Netherlands.

When Hothothot visits his family in China after years of living in the Netherlands and expresses his wish to unearth the memories surrounding the illegality of his birth during the country’s strict implementation of the one-child policy, his parents disagree. The family albums have been locked away, his father claims to have forgotten the past, and his mother insists they should not think about it. In a scene revealing of Hothothot’s own affective relationship to the past, he presents his parents with a family album acting as a memory prompt. As they browse through the album, one memory stands out: Hothothot as a young boy, riding a doll horse in an amusement park, attacked by a swarm of bees. While the parents think their son was too young to remember this unfortunate episode, what follows is an abrupt break in continuity of the scene. The photograph at stake appears on the screen with a yellow superimposed sign ‘I do remember!’ (Figures 1 and 2).

Figure 1 and 2. Memory work in Four Journeys.

The unearthing of this memory is a turning moment in the film’s memory work, as Hothothot remembers not only how scared he was by the bees, but by the unwanted gazes of the other park visitors. ‘Was it because they realized I was a ‘black kid’? I believe so. They realized I was an illegal child. For three decades, the pain of being a ‘black kid’ was well hidden in my heart. Why can’t it be controlled any longer?’, Hothothot whispers through the voice-over narration.⁶ The scene not only reveals his and his family’s disparate relationships to the past, but also highlights the affective intensity of memory work for Hothothot as he uncovers the enduring feeling of being unwanted and unwelcomed as a second child. The audio-visual historiography of the film, as this scene exemplifies, does not take the form of filmed testimonies concerned with documentary veracity and the film’s ability to provide an index of the events unfolding in front of the camera, but rather attends to the affective complexity of memory. Such audio-visual historiography, as Malin Wahlberg (2020, 217) has argued, reveals the ‘reverberation of a conflicted past’ that requires an attentive mode of viewing as well as listening.

Hothothot’s family members appear to experience the making of Four Journeys as inconvenient, often ignoring his questions or deliberately asking him to stop filming. This is most apparent with his mother. When Hothothot presents her with the family portrait in which she is expecting her second child (himself), she is visibly upset. Before asking for a break in the conversation, she adds: ‘It makes me sad to see this. In hindsight, it was the wrong decision. Why did I give birth to a second child? Stupid idea.’ Her reluctant and hasty comment, and the wish to avoid the conversation altogether, taps further into the affective complexity of her own relation to the past. But Hothothot doesn’t stop there.

As his memory work progresses, it becomes apparent that the parents’ complex relationship to the one child policy stems from before the birth of their second child, with their first-born child dying in a tragic accident as a young boy. When Hothothot poses a morally charged question to his mother inquiring why she never visits his brother’s grave, the inconvenience of the memory work aggravates. Visibly in distress, she offers a brief answer: ‘He let me live in pain. He damaged my life for a long time,’ before leaving the room. With this question, memory work uncovers a difficult past: after the director’s sister was born, the parents continued longing for a male child, which led to the decision to have a second child despite the one-child policy and the lack of support from their families due to the fear of repercussions. Hothothot’s memory work can therefore be understood as inconvenient because it touches on a traumatic set of existential circumstances through which his parents lived, and which they would prefer to forget. As these scenes reveal, the uncovering of memories brings about feelings of anger, hurt, grief and shame, among others. On the one hand, there is Hothothot’s anger towards the censorship of the injustices brought by the one-child policy and feelings of hurt because of his family’s neglect of this important dimension of their lived experiences. On the other hand, there is his parents’ grief for a lost son and feelings of shame for breaking the policy.

A ‘thick sense of not being-at-ease’ permeates the scenes at stake, as Ortega (2016, 198) has described the situations from which hometactics emerge. Hothothot (2023) explained in our conversation how these scenes reveal a gap in understanding between him and his parents: ‘In 2015, I moved to the Netherlands, which created a big gap within my family. Through this project, I try to understand my family and the culture we live in.’ Hothothot’s committed memory work is reflected in, as he shared, the desire to ‘fix the family gap.’ As a result, while the memory of his parents fails to acknowledge the enduring affective experiences associated with the memory of one-child policy, the film refuses to accept their failure to care as normative. In contrast, the film’s memory work intervenes as an act of care that acknowledges the affective complexity of familial memory. Memory work as a hometactic, I propose, aids Hothothot in establishing a sense of familiarity in the context of a return to a familial setting in China to which he struggles to connect after years of living abroad.

How can acts of care be reconciled with the inconvenience brought by them? As Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2017, 1) asked in her work on speculative ethics,

But what is care? Is it an affection? A moral obligation? Work? A burden? A joy? Something we can learn or practice? Something we just do? Care means all these things and different things to different people, in different situations.

This seeming paradox between care and inconvenience thus reveals the ambivalence of care that is at the heart of Four Journeys. I suggest that the memory work unfolding in the film is not only inconvenient because it forces the director’s family members to work through their relationship to the country’s violent past, but it is also inconvenient because it explicitly demands care as much as it provides it, with the described scenes thereby revealing the relational inconvenience of care.

Perhaps some would see Hothothot’s demand for care as conflicting with the conceptualization of Four Journeys’s memory work as an act of providing care. While the two are indeed in tension, what the film’s memory work as an act of providing and demanding care does, I argue, is engage with the inconvenience of being in relation, rather than ignore it. This ambivalence does not diminish or augment its conceptualization as an act of care, but rather helps to understand why its committed memory work is experienced as inconvenient by others: while Hothothot intentionally exposes his vulnerability in the process of memory work, his family members wish, in the words of Lauren Berlant (2022, 7), to protect their vulnerability ‘from exposure, expression, and even self-acknowledgment’. Berlant (2022) recently proposed to understand the feeling of inconvenience as intrinsic to living in relation with others, which they conceptualized as ‘the affective sense of familiar friction of being in relation’ that ‘disturbs the vision of yourself you carry around that supports your sovereign fantasy, your fantasy of being in control’ (Berlant 2022, 2–3).

As my analysis shows, while the camera indeed operates as a peripatetic migration machine that takes Hothothot on journeys in-between China and The Netherlands to reveal the seeds of his destabilized belonging, it also negotiates the expression and reception of care towards new possibilities of belonging. To understand the discussed scenes as mere records of memory work as a hometactic would therefore miss the role of the camera in negotiating the ambivalence of the film’s praxis of care: the camera’s role in the film’s memory work transcends the task of a recording device in the process of recovering memories, and becomes a key tool in the staging of a scene ‘through which memory as affect is apprehended’ (Cowie 2011, 164). In other words, the camera is not only a catalyst for memory work, but an integral part of it. During our conversation, Hothothot (2023) reflected on the role of the camera in his filmmaking process in a similar fashion, explaining how the presence of the camera aided the family in understanding each other: ‘We started to argue with this camera right in between of us. Without the camera, we’d argue, and we wouldn’t speak, and I’d go back. The camera helped me to realize that my motivation was to understand them and how they think about the world. They are the main protagonists and I needed to let them speak.’ Positioned in between the family members during the process of unearthing neglected memories, ‘the camera creates a tolerance,’ Hothothot (2023) proposed.

Camera as a hometactic: documentary enactment

Four Journeys’s memory work consists not only of memories that Hothothot directly lived through, but also of knowledge and experience transmitted at a generational divide. These inherited memories are remembered by means other than lived experience, such as different forms of mediation: for examples through images, language, or behaviour. Marianne Hirsch (2008, 109) has conceptualized such a manner of remembering in terms of postmemory, which ‘is not identical to memory’, yet ‘it approximates memory in its affective force’. Approached from this perspective, the event that comes to constitute the core of Hothothot’s memory work – the death of his parents’ first child – can be understood as a postmemory, since it occurred prior to Hothothot’s birth. This postmemory is reactivated in Four Journeys through a staging of the present as a commemorative practice that allows the family to come together in a sustainable rather than destructive manner. Hirsch (2019, 175) has argued that commemorative artistic practices in general involve orientation not only towards the past but a potential future, ‘enjoining us to imagine what might have been, in addition to what was’, with the attempt ‘to circumvent linear trajectories leading, inevitably, to disaster’. If, echoing Judith Butler (2021), violence creates situations of destructive relationality, I understand Four Journeys as operating in the aftermath of violence with the aim to develop non-violent approaches that would lead to a more sustaining form of familial relationality. What the earlier described scenes of relational inconvenience point to is that the process of transitioning from a destructive scene of violence towards a sustaining scene of care among family members (and beyond) requires attention, acknowledgement, and engagement with relational inconvenience. As Berlant (2022, 7) maintained, ‘to know and be known requires experiencing and exerting pressure to be acknowledged and taken in’, which is a process reflected in Four Journeys’s memory work. In this section, I consider how Four Journeys’s staging of a commemorative practice can be understood as a hometactic that allows Hothothot not only to imagine – but also live through – a familial scene of a sustaining relationality.

Hothothot decides to investigate the circumstances surrounding the death of his brother with the help of an uncle, who shares with Hothothot his memories of the boy’s accident, as well as brings him to the site of the burial. Due to the family’s respect of a Chinese tradition that prohibits burying young children at cemetery, the burial was performed in a public field, with the grave itself having no visible trace. During Hothothot’s last of the four journeys to China, he invites his family to come together at the site of the burial to commemorate the boy’s death. More than forty years after the burial, the family engages in an act of commemoration by symbolically planting a pot of flowers at the assumed place of the grave. For the first time in the film, a sense of acknowledgement and understanding – rather than inconvenience – emerges from the family’s shared memory work. ‘My son, mom is here to plant a flower for you. Wherever you are, when you see these flowers, please be aware that we didn’t forget you,’ the mother gently expresses while carefully planting the flowers. In the form of an apology, she adds: ‘Mom never had the courage to come. I’m so sorry.’ The commemoration is an opportunity for the parents to openly grieve, but it also creates a space for Hothothot to come to terms with the complexity of his own situation. ‘I’m sorry, my brother. I replaced you, but I can’t take care of our family instead of you,’ Hothothot reflects on an imposed familial responsibility in the voice-over. During the commemoration, the screen’s aspect ratio changes from a wide screen to a vertical format. The change of aspect ratio marks the transition from the depiction of a collective gathering to the capturing of portraits of Hothothot’s mother and father, with the camera acknowledging the affective reverberations of the commemoration for both of them. Finally, Hothothot whispers through the voice-over: ‘This flower tree will grow bigger and bigger branches. They will be my brother’s embrace. All these flowers will be his kisses.’ Here, the camera lingers on the brightly coloured flowers as a sense of care permeates the scene (Figures 3 and 4).

Figure 3 and 4. Commemoration in Four Journeys.

The commemoration is Four Journeys’s last act of memory work. While the gesture of coming together, initiated by Hothothot in response to the weight of inherited memories, uncovers the presentness of an event from the past, the act of commemoration appears to be more than ‘a re-opening, a re-visiting or a re-interrogation of an event’, which is how Stella Bruzzi (2019, 50) describes documentary reenactments. The scene at stake, I propose, should rather be understood in terms of an enactment in the form an unscripted staging of a performance in the present (Winston, Vanstone, and Chi 2017). In other words, Four Journeys enacts a scene of mourning that builds on the past as it has occurred by initiating a new manner of approaching it. In the process, the camera is not only recording the event taking place, but participating in the reactivation of the past: it is a tool that intervenes in the existing dynamic of remembering and forgetting to ‘provoke a certain reality’ (Rouch 2003, 141). For Ilona Hongisto (2015, 12), the act of filmmaking indeed has the capacity to initiate new formations of reality by partaking ‘in the material processes that co-compose the real’. The filmmaker and the filmed subjects together participate in the actualization of reality, Hongisto (2017, 191) argues, thereby transforming the filmmaking process into a space of fabulation ‘where the factual begins to impinge on the fictional’. Expanding on Hongisto’s ideas, I understand Four Journeys’s first-person filmmaking as intentionally activating the fabulating function of cinema to set forth alternative manners of being in the world that involve both the filmmaker and the filmed subjects. While Hothothot’s unscripted staging of a scene of commemoration could not have anticipated the direction of this reality in the making, I propose to understand its enactment as forming a rupture in the destructive relationality that characterized the familial relationships at stake.

My understanding of the camera as participatory agent in the making of reality moreover aligns with Beatriz Rodovalho’s (2014, 95) conceptualization of the camera in first-person filmmaking as ‘a familiar device that creates a shared space between the operator and its subjects’. In turn, during the enactment process, both Hothothot and his parents transform into characters on a stage. Approaching his family members as characters was a crucial part of Hothothot’s (2023) process, as he shared during our conversation:

I see myself and my family as subjects. In this way, I can make a personal problem part of the character, and I can then open up the character and analyse them. When you want to understand the character, you have to know their childhood trauma, what formed their ideas, and how their mind works.

Not only did the camera then create a tolerance, as Hothothot (2023) had previously reflected, but it also initiated the family members’ participation – as characters in the process of becoming – in a scene of mourning. As result, the ‘camera’s power to provoke reality to reveal itself’ (Rothman 2019, 129) exposed additional layers of the ambivalence of care in Four Journeys. ‘The traditional Chinese culture asks me to go back. There is the responsibility to take care of the family. For me, this is a very difficult situation,’ Hothothot (2023) explained. While Hothothot’s parents might have expected an appropriate gesture of care to be his return to China, the enactment is a gesture of caring otherwise: one that prompts both Hothothot and his parents to come to terms with a different reality in the making. As the parents unlock an alternative way of approaching the past, Hothothot takes a firmer step towards a transnational mode of belonging. Such a negotiation of a praxis of care might not be everyone’s intended outcome, but it sets of an opportunity for the family to enact a more sustaining bond among themselves. The enactment process is Hothothot’s hometactic, which allows him to further a sense of belonging in a space that formerly symbolized the seed of his destabilization.

Cinematic hometactics: aesthetics of in-betweenness

Four Journeys narrates the spatial dimension of Hothothot’s transnational belonging through the theme of distance, both actual and felt. For example, the film opens with a magnified family portrait from the Tiananmen square, which is followed by a visualization of the numbers that signify the distance between The Netherlands and China as Hothothot introduces his first journey in the voice-over: ‘It’s 7800 km from Amsterdam to Beijing. The time difference is 6 h. The flight takes 13 h. It’s 5 years since I last crossed that border’. The film thereby not only visually foreshadows memory work by including personal archival material in the opening scene, but it also makes clear that the bridging of the temporal distance between the present and the past at the same time involves the bridging of the spatial distance created by migration from China to the Netherlands. Hothothot’s need to understand his family’s past appears simultaneously intertwined with the need to understand his migration journey. ‘Why do I refuse to go back? It was something I was expected to do but didn’t. I wanted to understand why I wanted to live in this country [the Netherlands] and not in China,’ Hothothot (2023) reflected during our conversation. The process of navigating multiplicitous identity propelled by migration, as Ortega (2016) has argued, is a process of navigating in-betweenness: Hothothot at the same time embodies the multiple positions associated with belonging to his country of residence and country of origin, and the in-between space of those positions. In this section, I consider how the cinematic manner by which Four Journeys advances an aesthetics of in-betweenness to traverse the temporal and spatial distances of living in-between China and the Netherlands towards a place of home, can be understood as a cinematic hometactic.

Following Gloria Anzaldúa’s (1987) reflection on life in the territories in-between US and Mexico, Ortega (2016, 68) describes the experiential space of in-betweenness in the aftermath of spatial ruptures – ‘movements to other lands because of economic, cultural, or political conditions, movements that might turn multiplicitous, in-between selves into fugitive selves, exilic selves, wounded selves’ – as one of borderland. Rather than only referring to the life of those living at the frontiers, ‘a borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary’, a place that ‘is in a constant state of transition’ (Anzaldúa 1987, 3). Therefore, while being indeed marked by spatial ruptures, what borderland appears to signify is the state of in-betweenness in the form of not-being-at-ease that is perpetually reinforced by borders acting as boundaries between multiple selves.

I would like to complement Anzaldúa’s and Ortega’s understanding of borderland as an affective experiential place with Étienne Balibar’s (2009) conceptualization of borderland Europe as a model denoting the overlap of political spaces in Europe. In referring to the state of borderland, Balibar’s (2009, 210) main concern are namely the models used to represent European borders,⁷ with his model of ‘borderland Europe’ arguing that Europe as ‘a political space could (and perhaps should) be imagined in terms of overlapping open regions’: a cross-over of political spaces that remain open towards further hybridity and cultural invention. Balibar presents the conceptualization of borderland Europe as a factual description of the tensions created by the porosity of Europe’s internal (national) and external borders, and their subsequent crossover of political spaces. Like Anzaldúa and Ortega, Balibar’s reflection stems from attending to multiplicity. Namely, to conceive of Europe as a borderland is to understand Europe itself as multiplicitous, with the difficulty of ‘Europeans (as it is expressed by their official politics) to accept what they (confusedly) see as ‘non-European’ (or ‘anti-European’)’ being ‘a symptom of their incapacity to understand, acknowledge, and transform their own ‘domestic’ multiplicity’ (Balibar 2009, 210). While Balibar wrote this reflection approximately 15 years ago, the tensions created by the porosity of Europe’s borders have only magnified. Rather than embracing the formation of Europe in terms of overlapping open regions, recent European politics has strived to make its borders less porous.

If Ortega and Anzaldúa conceptualize borderland as an affectively charged place of in-betweenness shaped by spatial ruptures and upkeep of boundaries that separate the multiplicitous selves emerging from those ruptures, I see Balibar as uncovering the political dynamic that maintains such an affective experience in Europe. In both conceptualizations, the manner of reducing the affective and political tensions is not to regulate the multiplicity of selfhood and of Europe itself, which would be there even if Europe’s borders were removed and external ones democratized, but to negotiate the lived experience of in-betweenness, of living in a borderland, towards a sense of belonging.

In one of Four Journeys’s last scenes, Hothothot takes part in a family dinner in the presence of his close and extended family members. During the dinner, he calls Artémise, his partner with whom he shares a home in the Netherlands: ‘I’m at a big party, more than twenty people. A big family.’ The phone, with Artémise seen through a video call, is passed between family members at the dining table. ‘Nice to meet you. Welcome in China!’ and ‘Welcome to my big family!’ are heard as the scene visually unfolds with family members taking turns to warmly greet Artémise. The sound of their encounters is gradually toned down to make space for Hothothot’s voice-over narration and expression of appreciation for the gathering, which breaks the continuity of the scene: ‘I feel the warmth I missed for a long time.’ A moment later, he adds: ‘Who is doing this? These endless separations. Swallowing our wishes. Mocking us with what we love,’ with the scene thereby turning into a reflection on the experience of in-betweenness on the relation between China and The Netherlands (Figures 5 and 6).

Figure 5 and 6. Aesthetics of in-betweenness in Four Journeys.

On the level of activity taking place within the scene, the act of including Artémise in the family dinner via a mobile device can be conceptualized as a hometactic in cinema, one that allows Hothothot to temporarily connect the people important to him beyond temporal and spatial divides, which would also be in line with the current scholarship on the importance of mobile devices for migrants’ home-making practices (Alinejad 2019). Next to that, on the level of the act of filmmaking initiated to create the scene at stake, the camera can yet again be understood as a tool that provokes the unfolding scene of connectedness, with the cinematic process thereby acting as a hometactic in itself. While the scene can in these ways be approached as a documentation of a hometactic in cinema and an instance of using the camera as a hometactic, I am interested in how it can also be understood as an aesthetic enactment of belonging in terms of in-betweenness that in turn forms a trace of a reality in the making.

The scene at stake transgresses the spatial distance between Hothothot’s loved ones, which it weaves with an intimate reflection on the affective tensions of living in a borderland in the voice-over. As a culmination of the film’s persistent grappling with the ambivalence of care, a sense of being-at-ease with the reality that has been set in motion – even if only brief – permeates the scene. While endless separations due to migration cannot be wished away, this scene, I propose, is an emblematic aesthetic trace of Four Journeys’s final act of care, one that does not iterate belonging as bounded to either China or The Netherlands. Rather, the film’s enactment of belonging in-between these political spaces transgresses their national frontiers, and in turn also the home-regulating power of bordering mechanisms. Borderland, Four Journeys shows us, does not necessary imply a state of displacement. At this scene exemplifies, Four Journeys is a cinematic hometactic: its aesthetic traversal of distances between people, memories, and places, as I hope to have shown, comprises an enactment of in-betweenness as a mode of belonging.

The film’s overall home-making efforts align with Ortega’s (2016, 201) conceptualization of hometactics in terms of ‘a decentred praxis of home-making and belonging, one that gives up the possibility of full belonging and allows for the possibility of not longing to be on one side or site of belonging’. What hometactics allow is a sense of connection with the places one inhabits ‘without necessarily having a particular location designated as our home’ (Ortega 2016, 204). Four Journeys’s cinematic practice of home – traverse the complex intersubjective, temporal and spatial terrain of borderland towards a co-presence of multiplicitous selves. In this interstitial space enacted by the film, to echo Engin Isin (2012), the binary between a migrant and a citizen subject position ceases to operate. This blurring, in turn, reveals the film’s praxis of care spanning well beyond its familial space: Four Journeys exerts the pressure for the dwellers of the borderland to be acknowledged and taken in as citizens, in homes that traverse frontiers.

Conclusion

My aim in this article has been to advance understanding of first-person filmmaking – especially in relation to migration – as a cinematic practice of home-making that can set forth new formations of reality characterized by a sense of belonging rather than displacement. Four Journeys, as an instance of first-person filmmaking focused on the lived experience of decentred belonging in the aftermath of migration, has served as a fruitful case study to articulate a threefold relationship between hometactics and/as cinema: hometactics in film (memory work), camera as a hometactic (enactment), and cinematic hometactics (aesthetics of in-betweenness). While the article makes an analytic distinction between these three forms of hometactics, I hope to have shown how they always already overlap with each other in practice. Overall, I have argued that Four Journeys’s hometactics, rooted in a praxis of care, set forth a sense of being-at-ease in previously unsustainable circumstances by enacting in-betweenness as a mode of belonging.

Where does this leave the notion of home movie as an amateur genre aimed at representing everyday life? James M. Moran (2002, 61) offered an insightful understanding of its cinematic dimension when he wrote the following: ‘While usually thought of as geographic, home may be photographic as well, unconfined to a specific place, but transportable within the space of imagination’. My articulation of a threefold relationship between cinema and hometactics aligns with Moran’s proposal that homes are transportable in images. Yet, it also expands on it by considering how home is not only a matter of representation, but a matter of everyday practices aimed at granting new possibilities of belonging. Can the notion of home movie, in turn, whether reflecting an amateur filmmaking practice or not, also come to signify cinema’s potential to enact a home? I hope that this article is a step in that direction.

While I have elaborated on the respective possibilities of cinematic home-making, it is worth articulating what these hometactics are not. I agree with Ortega (2016, 205) in this regard, that hometactics do not ‘appeal to a fixed home location, an intentional self-integrating life-project, or a set of so-called authentic identity markers’. This is an important remark, that hometactics are not strategic tools that offer a linear trajectory from a destabilized state of displacement to a stable state of home. Cinematic hometactics, as this article contends, are cinematic practices mobilized in one’s everyday life to negotiate a thick sense of not-being-at-ease in the aftermath of migration, which have the capacity to set forth interstitial spaces of belonging that traverse frontiers.

Acknowledgment

I am grateful to Louis Hothothot for our conversation and permission to include the stills from Four Journeys, as well as to Malin Wahlberg, John Sundholm, and Abe Geil for their valuable feedback in the process of writing this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek: [grant number PGW.20.010].

Notes on contributors

Nadica Denić

Nadica Denić is a film researcher and curator based in Amsterdam whose main interests include documentary theory and practice, the relationship between cinema and ethics, and cultural memory of migration. As a PhD researcher at University of Amsterdam, she explores the cinematic ethics of first-person documentaries about migration in Europe. She has curated and moderated various film events, and has been a recurring member of IDFA’s (International Documentary Festival Amsterdam) selection committee.

Notes

1 For Sama (Waad al-Kateab and Edward Watts, 2019), Midnight Traveler (Hassan Fazili, 2019), Europa, "Based on a True Story" (Kivu Ruhorahoza, 2019), Purple Sea (Amel Alzakout and Khaled Abdulwahed, 2020) and We (Alice Diop, 2021) are some of the notable examples.

2 Hothothot is an interdisciplinary artist whose artistic practice includes filmmaking, video art, and graphic design. Four Journeys is his first feature film, which is intended as a first film in a first-person trilogy. The film had its World Premiere in 2022 as IDFA’s (International Documentary Festival Amsterdam) opening film.

3 My elaboration on cinema as a hometactic via Four Journeys as a case study aims to provide the groundwork that could later be used as a basis from which to approach the particularities of a growing number of first-person films in which belonging is also a key theme, such as, In a Whisper (Heidi Hassan and Patricia Pérez Fernández, 2019), Republic of Silence (Diana El Jeiroudi, 2021), The Eclipse (Nataša Urban, 2022), All You See (Niki Padidar, 2022), Chasing the Dazzling Light (Yaser Kasseb, 2023), and Background (Khaled Abdulwahed, 2023), among others.

4 One of Ortega’s (2016) own examples concerns the struggle to reconciliate her Latina and lesbian identity.

5 As expressed in a conversation between Hothothot and the author in July 2023.

6 The term ‘black kid’, or ‘heihaizi’ in Chinese, denotes children who were born outside the one-child policy and whose birth couldn’t be officially registered.

7 See: the clash-of-civilizations pattern; the global network pattern; the center-periphery pattern; and, finally, the crossover pattern (Balibar 2009).