Intimate recordings: mediated acts of touching in Future Lasts Forever and Giraffe

ABSTRACT

The act of recording testimonies and memories of events through audio as well as visual means can forge intimacy between people. Following a recent discursive turn toward connectivity, intimacy, and tenderness in contemporary European cinema studies, this essay examines recording’s potential in the creation of community in Özcan Alper’s Future Lasts Forever (Gelecek Uzun Sürer, Turkey, 2011) and Anna Sofie Hartmann’s (Giraffe, Denmark/Germany, 2019). Through a comparative reading of these films, I propose an approach to recording as touching, which plays out through processes of familiarity, listening without demands, care, and trust. Examined with Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of touch at a distance as the underpinning of being-with and being-in-common and Ariella Azoulay’s notion of the civil contract of photography, the act of recording in these films presents itself as an agreement between recorder, recorded, and spectator, or listener for that matter, that recognizes the recorded persons––photographed, voice recorded, or filmed––first and foremost as subjects and citizens with rights. Against distinct political and geographical backdrops of dispossession and loss, scenes of recording in these films demonstrate possibilities for communication, intimacy, and even reparative redress.

KEYWORDS:

• Recording
• touch
• Turkey
• Denmark
• memory
• Jean-Luc Nancy

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. There is a capacious archive of texts that could be named here. See, for instance, Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image (New York: Fordham University Press, Nancy 2004/2005) and Jean-Luc Nancy, L’Évidence du film: Abbas Kiarostami (Brussels: Gevaert, Nancy 2001). Contributions to the journal Film-Philosophy, in particular the 2008 special issue on Jean-Luc Nancy and Claire Denis, are also exemplary. For a very astute and recent study on Nancy’s work on touch and the films of Isabel Coixet, see Katarzyna Paszkiewicz, ‘Touch as Proximate Distance: Post-Phenomenological Ethics in the Cinema of Isabel Coixet’, Film-Philosophy 24, no. 1 (Paszkiewicz 2020): 22–45.

2. For further insight on the Berlin School and the importance of aesthetics, see for instance Olivia Landry, Movement and Performance in Berlin School (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, Landry 2019).

3. See Claudia Breger, Making Worlds: Affect and Collectivity in Contemporary European Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, Breger 2020); Maria Stehle and Beverly Weber, Precarious Intimacies: The Politics of Touch in Contemporary Western Cinema (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, Stehle and Weber 2020); Muriel Cormican and Jennifer Marston William, eds., The Tender Gaze: Compassionate Encounters on the German Screen, Page, and Stage (Rochester, NY: Camden House, Cormican and William 2021).

4. For Duygu Gül Kaya, this development was ignited by two incidents in the 2000s with regards to Armenian history in Turkey. One of these incidents was the murder of the journalist Hrant Dink.

5. Sumru most likely references the Mesopotamian Cultural Center (MKM) here.

6. Due to the multitude of languages used collectively in these films, and my own inability to understand all of them, for continuity’s sake all text from both Future Lasts Forever and Giraffe is cited from the English subtitles.

7. It is unclear if Dara has any earlier connection with the Island. In a Skype conversation with her mother, we learn that she is Norwegian. Indeed, the actress Lisa Loven Kongsli is Norwegian. I am personally unable to detect her accent in Danish.