Opening The Fortress. The Work of Public Gaze on the Swiss Asylum Reality

Abstract

The Fortress (La Forteresse) is a 2008 documentary film by Fernand Melgar that reports the Swiss asylum reality from a distant but committed point of view. The documentary describes the life of asylum seekers awaiting in a federal centre the decision to grant them—or not—refugee status. It subtly raises the issue of the role that “textual realities”, grasped from the spectator's point of view, play in the production of public discourses. Most of all, it subtly poses the question of the (Swiss) spectator as an actor of the asylum policy, in the context of a semi-direct democracy. After evoking the notion of sensible experience for linking spectatorship to politics, we look at how the documentary invites its model spectator to accept the film's moral premises. Furthermore, focusing on the Swiss public sphere, we deliver an account of the reception by empirical spectators, notably by a group of leftist activists that tend to subvert Melgar's intentions. This two-fold analysis leads us to exhibit that, in a context of discursive struggles, The Fortress generates an original space of deliberation and experience, which appeals to the public to exercise their political agency on asylum policy without being constricted by an antagonist framework.

KEYWORDS:

• asylum
• documentary
• public sphere
• spectator
• “sensible experience”

Introduction

It is dark. The security guard unlocks the gate, a metallic lattice fence. He maneuvers his key, guided by the light of his electric torch. On the back of his jacket, he wears the name of the private company he works for: “Securitas.” The key turning in the lock resonates against the concrete walls. As the guard passes the gate and secures it again, the camera and the spectator follow him into the precincts of the facility. Through the lattice gate, we get a glimpse of the frost-covered grass on the verges of the road leading to the outside world. The guard walks along a huge concrete wall, inspecting the ground with his torch. He passes by the main entrance of the building, checks that the door is locked, and carries on with his patrol, throwing light on the windows of the facility.

Another metallic gate, smaller, and we—the guard, the camera and the spectator—are inside the building. The guard makes a phone call. “Can you switch on the lights in the rooms? Thanks, bye.” Then, entering the rooms, he says quietly but firmly: “Good morning. Get up. It's time to transfer to Chiasso.” From the doorway, we get a quick look at the bunk beds, six or eight by room. Someone moves under the woollen blankets. The lights are on.

As the opening credits of the film mention the co-producers, the first of them being Swiss National Television, the building is shown from the outside, enclosed in darkness. Through the windows, in the lit-up rooms, people are getting ready for the day: a man kneels to pray, a young black girl washes her face, staff members prepare breakfast.

Soon, we are inside again, in the midst of a crowd abandoning their rooms and dropping their bedsheets on the floor as they prepare for the transfer. A woman member of staff calls the names of the people on the transfer list. Her colleague gives instructions to one of the residents: “Your luggage, Madam. Go pick up your luggage. In ten minutes, you are gone.”

The screens of the surveillance camera show people climbing on to buses in the courtyard. The guards open the gates. In a few hours, the buses will reach another centre located in the Italian-speaking part of the country, 400 kilometers from their point of departure.

A huge building flanking the mountain is shown from behind the pines that border the road, as the movie title appears: La Forteresse.¹

The sequence described above is the opening scene of The Fortress (La Forteresse), a documentary by the Swiss film director Fernand Melgar, released in 2008. The film tackles the issue of asylum seekers in Switzerland.² It reports “from within” the living conditions of asylum seekers in a centre of accommodation and provisioning (CAP) located in Vallorbe, a small town situated 85 kilometres from Geneva. This CAP is an imposing building covered with cameras and surrounded with high barbed-wire fences. Only people with a direct or professional connection to the centre are entitled to enter: the asylum seekers, the director of the CAP, the security and cleaning staff, the federal examiners, the chaplain and the physician. There are four other secure semi-detention centres in Switzerland, operating as the nodal points of the asylum system.³ Every asylum seeker arriving in the country goes through one of them in order to enter a procedure lasting up to 60 days, an inquiry consisting of two interviews to decide who will be granted refugee status. The first interview inquires into the asylum seeker's identity and the reasons for her/his request; the second, more detailed interview, is meant to clarify her/his motives. The asylum seeker's narrative plays a critical role in the final decision, the federal examiners carefully investigating the credibility of her/his story.

As a documentary, The Fortress depicts to the spectators a factual account of the reality under review: the everyday life of patients⁴ of the Swiss asylum policy (the inmates) and the professionals who implement it (the staff members), showing how the people living in the CAP are embedded in the institutional relations constituting the asylum policy and practices. The documentary is thus a description made up with audiovisual methods. Its reference to society and its claims of realistic portrayal are similar to ethnographic descriptions. Both these modes of description intend to give a faithful representation of the outside world; their objective “is the making visible of society, not as an allegory […] but as a fact” (Peters 1997, 7). Nevertheless, this particular documentary is produced from a standpoint that is not only distant, but committed as well. Melgar's point of view is distant in the sense that the director of The Fortress provides an ethnographic gaze of asylum reality.⁵ It is also committed, because the director's objective for making the film on the asylum policy is moral: as he explained in the press, he wants to “confront the public with moral cases, to which only they themselves can find an answer. […] What I find important is to return a humanity to, to give faces to those who had become nothing but numbers and statistics”.⁶ These political concerns remain in the background of the documentary; the filmic text is neither a denunciation nor a partisan statement. But the website of the film makes these reasons explicit.⁷ The Fortress develops a perspective that is undoubtedly critical, without giving up the task of describing a reality that would remain invisible, without the mediation of the film, to important actors of the Swiss asylum policy: in the context of a semi-direct democracy, which combines elements of representative and direct democracy, and in particular with regard to the referendums that took place in the previous years, the Swiss citizens indeed have their share of responsibility on asylum policies.

There is a striking parallel between Melgar's documentary gaze and sociologist Dorothy E. Smith's (2005) approach, Institutional Ethnography. Melgar approaches his films as discourses capable of exerting an effect on reality, as interventions that at least behold the potential for change. In that regard, Smith (1990a, 1990b) would say that texts belong to the “public textual discourse”, defined as the “discrete order of social relations” organised by communication, mediated communication especially, in which social meaning is shaped and diffused. Smith's insightful reflections on “textual realities” suggest that texts (films, newspaper articles, administrative notes, etc.) are not inert documents separated from social relations: they are made operative through the reader's interpretative practices, and they regulate, organise and structure other practices. Texts are active in the sense that they have “to be seen as organizing a course of concerted social action” (Smith 1990b, 121). They are also continuously effective, although not always in the ways they are intended: they rule most of the social relations we are embedded in; for example, those we enter as professionals, as citizens, users of state services, media viewers and so forth. Moreover, “textual realities” are the main vehicles of “ruling relations”, those “objectified forms of consciousness and organization, constituted externally to particular people and places, creating and relying on textually based realities” (Smith 2005, 227).

According to Smith, texts impose mostly constraints; they tend to squash people's “actualities”, the bodily experience that people have in local and concrete settings. The sociologist gives “birth” as an example. In demographic textual reality, “birth” is a generic category produced from the standpoint of a peculiar institution, the state, and “appears as ‘mere’ birth”, “as a birth simply to be counted” (Smith 1990a, 86). But producing “birth” as “mere birth” requires to “discard” the “lived actualities”, the painful or joyful labour and delivery experienced by the mother, the supportive or anxious attitude of the father, and so on. Thus, Smith's sociology grants a normative precedence to the phenomenological embodied point of view in contrast to mediated textual relations, which have a dislocating effect on experience. As long as discourse is not grounded in local experience, for Smith (2004) it is ideological and produces alienation. In order to restore ordinary people's agency, the sociologist maps actual social territories coordinated by textual devices. These maps are meant to help those people locate their local actions and situations within “ruling relations” and institutional settings: in the process, social agents become aware of how their actions are shaped and constricted by external constraints. This awareness opens the way to a new praxis, more in phase with people's actual experiences and capable of transforming social relations.

Although Smith's and Melgar's projects seek to expand people's agency, they are built on a different understanding of agency. Smith's model is dyadic, and thinks social change from the perspective of a Foucauldian subject:⁸ first, the subject finds himself/herself in the state of a patient, being affected by oppressive social relations; becoming aware of her/his oppression, she/he then becomes an actor, a genuine performer of her/his embodied and local activities. In the case of the asylum policy, Smith would probably focus on the asylum seekers, mapping their location in the system to help them in their struggle against official discourses, practices and procedures. Showing asylum seekers tactics against the strategies of an oppressive social order—to use de Certeau's ([1980] 2011) concepts—is important and perfectly relevant. But it tends to neglect the figure of the spectator,⁹ which is absent from Smith's analysis of textual realities, probably because her sociology is suspicious towards mediations, whose possible alienating dimension is more emphasised than its emancipatory one (Gonzalez and Malbois 2013a, 2013b; Kaufmann 2013). In contrast, Melgar, who believes in the liberating potential of mediation, uses a triadic model of agency where the main subject to convince is the spectator.

In her work on the spectacle of suffering in media, Chouliaraki (2006) stresses the importance of focusing on the spectator when investigating textual realities. Although there is a long tradition of focusing on media recipients (for instance, in Cultural Studies), a number of recent publications remind us of the need to pay attention to the spectator as a discursive position of the communication process. In his book The Emancipated Spectator, Jacques Rancière ([2008] 2009), for instance, insisted on reconsidering the distinctive spectator agency, and argued that the figure of the spectator has to be reconciled with the idea of politics. This raises the issue of the role that “textual realities”, grasped from the spectator's point of view, play in the production of public discourses within democracies.

This issue lies at the heart of Melgar's documentary, as we will see below. Our discussion of this documentary is divided into three parts. In the first part, we further develop the ideas of spectator agency and the link of spectatorship and politics, through the evocation of the notion of the sensible experience. We then look at how the documentary contains an invitation for the spectator, and in particular the Swiss citizen as a model spectator, to accept the film's moral premises, and its intervention in the discursive struggle on Swiss asylum policies. In this part, a detailed socio-semiotic analysis of some of the key sequences is performed. But not all recipients accept this invitation: in the third part we can find a brief analysis of the reception of the documentary, and the interpretation of a particular group of empirical spectators that runs contrary to Melgar's intentions.

Rethinking Textual Realities from the (Swiss) Spectator's point of view

We stated that figure of the spectator is central to the analysis of textual realities. This claim has to be elaborated before we discuss the case of The Fortress. Under what terms or conditions is the spectator's agency central?

Let us start with a fundamental finding of the sociology of media: communication technologies deeply transformed the common experience of our everyday world (Park 1940; Thompson 1995; Peters 1999). Before modernity, things, events and individuals were visible because people shared a common physical and temporal space. Direct co-presence is no longer a requisite with the emergence of communication technologies. Media have become one of our ordinary and privileged means for experiencing events that are too distant from the observation point to be perceivable (Scannell 1995).

As a film, The Fortress is a textual reality related to the “regime of meanings” (Chouliaraki 2006, 70) of cinema. But as a documentary, a specific kind of filmic text, The Fortress implies a mediated experience that belongs to a particular “discursive mode” (Odin 2000): the viewer is asked to be aware that the film conveys information about what is actually happening in the world. Conversely, a filmic text pragmatically works as a documentary when its addressees recognise the viewing contract involved by such a “discursive mode”. This being said, in what sense is it possible to talk about agency in relation to this type of viewing? And how to qualify the spectator's experience as she/he watches a documentary such as The Fortress?

The spectator is not directly acting on the actualities depicted by the movie. Her/his actions are mental, not immediately practical, even though they are genuine acts: interpreting, thinking, imagining and judging (Arendt [1971] 1981, [1982] 1989). To introduce the spectator into the actualities, we need to favour a triadic model of agency. We suggest that agency in the everyday world passes through three main “involvements” (Goffman 1963): the actor's and the patient's, whose activities imply a direct action, respectively acting and being affected; and the spectator's, acting indirectly—viewing, for instance. Two types of experience have to be distinguished: one is immediate (“from within”) and refers to what Smith describes as a “lived experience”; the other is indirect (“from a distance”), and can be said to be “sensible” (Boltanski [1993] 1999; Rancière [2011] 2013).

We ascribe a double meaning to this “sensible experience”. First, it refers to the senses (especially seeing and hearing), mediated or unmediated by “techniques of representation” (Peters 1997) and textual practices depicting reality whereby things, events and people exhibit a visuality for the spectator perceiving them. Secondly, “sensible” is to be understood as concerning emotions and feelings, the domain of affects that we apprehend in relation to the ways (audiovisual and scriptural methods) things, events and people appear, in visible and definite forms through a course of action.

Close to Rancière's aesthesis,¹⁰ our definition of “sensible experience” draws both from Boltanski's ([1993] 1999) work on the spectator confronted with the spectacle of suffering in the media and from Rancière's concept of sharing of the sensible. ¹¹ This kind of sharing refers to the ways we see and make sense of the world that we have in common. It constitutes a link between aesthetic and political practices:

I call [sharing] of the sensible the system of self-evident facts [impacting our perception] that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective [shares] and positions within it. […] The [sharing] of the sensible reveals who can have a share in what is common to the community based on what they do and on the time and space in which the activity is performed. Having a particular “occupation” thereby determines the ability or inability to take charge of what is common to the community; it defines [the fact of being] visible or not in a common space, granted to a common [conversation], etc. There is thus an “aesthetics” at the core of politics […] It is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience. Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the [status] to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time. (Rancière [2000] 2004, 12–13)¹².

The link between sensible experience and the opening of a “common space” of discourse is fruitful for exploring Melgar's documentary: it describes the phenomenological experience of the spectator, including its potential political dimension. Indeed, The Fortress is a rather “closed” (Eco [1979] 1984) filmic text. As such, it invites a sensible experience made of various emotions and moral evaluations: the spectator is located as a witness of the reported actualities about asylum, and is confronted with a—mediated—reality meant to provoke a “moral experience” (Boltanski [1993] 1999).

That moral experience may be lived by any category of spectator, in as much as the reality of asylum seekers concerns everyone who tends to consider it a humanitarian issue (Boltanski [1993] 1999). However, The Fortress encourages a peculiar moral experience for a Swiss audience. The specificity of this experience is not to be related with the reception context of the film—that context could be relevant for any other category of viewer. This relevance is logically inscribed in the textuality of the film, for the Swiss spectator is a category presupposed by the documentary itself, as the director has chosen a semiotic code that relies on cultural inferences indexed on the Swiss socio-political context. This presupposition is noticeable in the way it compelled us, in the introduction, to make explicit elements, present in the opening scene, which are easily understood, if not taken for granted, by a Swiss spectator, but probably not well known for a foreign audience: in the process of linguistic and cultural translation,¹³ “Securitas” is understood as “the name of the private company the guard works for”, “Chiasso” is recognised as “another centre located in the Italian-speaking part of the country” and so on.

Using one of Eco's ([1979] 1984) concepts, we can say that The Fortress defines the Swiss spectator as its “Model Reader”. This model spectator is summoned to take a stance on the reality depicted by the documentary. This summons follows from the rule that “if information concerns a collective category, and if I consider myself a member of that category, then this information concerns me and I must/should take an interest in it” (Widmer 1999, 201). That rule pragmatically connects a national collective category of spectators (“Swiss”) to a unique type of moral experience. Swiss asylum policy is a consequence of the actions of the Swiss people as citizens, since, under the system of semi-direct democracy, they (co-)determine the federal policy on the issue. Consequently, the moral experience of the spectator who considers herself/himself a member of the category “Swiss” has potentially a political extension, in as much as it is duly correlated with the actions she/he is entitled to carry out in the future as an agent of Swiss policy. Thus, the proposed experience of The Fortress is different in its implications for a Swiss spectator as opposed to a non-Swiss one.

The Fortress from the Model Spectator Standpoint

Let us turn to The Fortress, keeping in mind that the “Swiss spectator” is presupposed as the model spectator. We selected key sequences to reconstruct the viewing trajectory generated by the documentary. A detailed analysis of the “sense assembly methods” (Lee 1984) inscribed in the filmic text will help us investigate how the documentary manages to provoke a critical evaluation of the asylum actualities. This “socio-semiotic perspective” (Widmer 2010) relies on the idea that filmic intelligibility can be said natural, ordinary and common, for the world displayed in a filmic text has strong connections with everyday life:

We understand the film image in part because it reproduces on screen whatever scene or object the camera was turned onto in the first place—because it is an image of something in the real world. However, our understanding of it is a conventional one, not because we understand the image itself is coded in a way unique to it, but because we understand the perceptual world of everyday life through our concepts, our language, and our cultural knowledge in the first place. We see through this cultural knowledge. We understand the filmic image and sequence, therefore, in much the same way, and by reliance on the selfsame resources that we use to understand the perceptual world around us, a perceptual world of activity and interaction. In other words, the understanding of the methods of filmic discourse, the “how” of filmic communication, must be addressed first through an understanding of the intelligibility of the scenic life-world. (Jayyusi 1988, 272, original emphasis).

The description of the textual strategies used to produce an intelligible discourse will exhibit how the documentary, as an active text, invites the spectator to make sense of the actualities that are displayed (Livingston 1995). Two dimensions are considered here: the narrative level of the filmic text, which refers to the interactions between the characters on screen; and the discursive level of the filmic text, which refers to the relationship between the enunciator and the addressee of the documentary.¹⁴ Our analysis then describes the textual organisation of the documentary and exhibits how The Fortress, as an ensemble of signs interrelated with the everyday life, contributes to the constituting of the Swiss citizen's sensible experience. However, by considering The Fortress as one of the “public discourses” (Smith 1990a, 1990b) about asylum that are available in, and competing with other discourses within, the Swiss public sphere, our approach relocates this sensible experience within a social and historical setting.¹⁵

Managing The Fortress: from experience to ruling relations

Melgar's film has a total duration of 100 minutes. It begins with the sequence described on the first page of this article, where the observer—camera and spectator—enters the centre by following a member of the security staff. This excerpt proposes a significant viewing trajectory. The observer goes from the actualities of securing the CAP to the ruling relations of managing the number of asylum seekers kept within the facilities; the inmates are symbolised as cohorts by means of statistical representations. Thus, the spectator is invited to enter the “Fortress” from the point of view of the security force, but without being encouraged to endorse this perspective: many elements create a discrepancy between the staff's actualities and what an external viewer can perceive.

The first seconds of the film capture a night patrol. The observer follows the guard as he passes the gates separating the centre from the outside world. The guard is not a federal officer, but an employee of Securitas. To the Swiss spectator, this can be quite disturbing, since the security guard is a member of a private business enforcing a public policy, and not a public officer.

A transfer is in process. Several asylum seekers will be moved to another centre located in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland. The transfer sequence ends with the fuzzy images of the surveillance cameras exhibiting the lines of asylum seekers stepping onto the bus. This framing puts the viewers in the subjective position of observing the transfer from the point of view of the security staff. She/he sees how the institutional work of managing the inmates is carried out. At that point, it becomes apparent that the technological surveillance devices mediate and, at the same time, constitute the viewpoint of the institution. This way of filming does not necessarily suggest a merging between the guard's point of view and the spectator's. On the contrary, these images invite more of a distancing from, instead of an identifying with, the security perspective. Guard and spectator see the same images, but they observe a different reality because they are not involved in similar activities. This distance between both gazes is correlated with the fact that they do not share the same actualities.

The whole sequence ends with an image displaying the title of the film: The Fortress. As the letters appear, the transfer process seems to encapsulate what the title stands for. However, the ethnographic documenting of ruling relations is not yet complete. The next sequence will exhibit the logics of this ruling apparatus.

This second sequence comes right after the transfer process. The camera captures a conversation occurring in the director's office. The director and an assistant discuss the housing capacities of the CAP and an overpopulation problem that the staff might face. The statistics brought up during the discussion are compared with the housing capacities of two other national centres. Transforming the asylum seekers’ lived actualities into countable statistical data makes that sort of comparison possible. In turn, it enables translocal coordination between centres. But it has the effect of erasing the asylum seekers’ subjectivities. They become countable, and thus exchangeable things.

The analysis of these first two sequences¹⁶ highlights the singular mediation work accomplished by the film. The core business of an asylum institution appears as two-fold: producing the visibility of asylum seekers through statistics; and monitoring the actualities of people living there by watching them, notably through surveillance cameras. Melgar's camera provides visibility to the institutional viewing apparatus and enables the spectator to submit the reality of the asylum policy to her/his judgement.

Administrating the asylum seeker's experience

Examining asylum seekers on their motives and evaluating the credibility of their narratives is a key procedure in the decision to grant them refugee status. The Fortress reports several moments of this kind, but the following excerpt provides a singular sensible experience, one that evidences a discursive–textual struggle between different versions of a testimony. It shows a Somali asylum seeker telling his story to a chaplain. His statement is followed by a sequence where a member of the Swiss Federal Administration explains to her colleague how she assessed the Somali's narrative.¹⁷ These related sequences display a rather unexpected juxtaposition between the asylum seeker's lived experience and its objectification by the institution.

The first scene is a dialogue between the chaplain, a slim man in his sixties with a soft voice and penetrating blue eyes. He sits in front of a much younger black man, thinner than his interlocutor. A young black woman mediates between them, translating back and forth from Somali into French. Most of the time, the camera stands behind her.

— So, here, I'm a man of the church to listen to people and help them in whatever way I can. Where do you come from?

— For the first part of my journey, I came from Somalia. And I was hit by bullets in the legs.

— In Somalia.

The young man pushes his chair back. He lifts his right leg, rolls up his trouser-leg. As he speaks, he shows a deep scar. The chaplain sighs. The Somali shows a second and a third scar on the other leg.

— So they fired bullets from behind, which hit me in my feet. And the two men who were with me were killed. And I was saved.

— OK.

The chaplain nods. He looks at the woman translating, and both turn their eyes to the young man.

— We walked in the desert for one and a half months.

— A month in the desert!

— Yes. We crossed the desert and my legs were torn apart.

The chaplain is taken aback.

— We got to the sea and we could get in a small dugout: eight meters, eight meters!

— The, the boat?

— Yes, eight meters in length.

— And how many people were in it?

— Fifty people.

— How many?

— Fifty.

— Fifty people!

— Yes.

The young man climbs on the back of his chair and squats down, showing how the passengers packed into the boat.

— One after the other, sitting down.

— No, no, ah!

The chaplain is in shock.

— On the seventh day of the week, the petrol was used up, then the water and then the food.

Suddenly, the young man talks much faster. The translator shrieks, before returning to her translating.

— On the tenth day…there was a little boy amongst us. He died. So we saw that they cut up his body…and ate him.

— Oh no! Oh no! Oh no, it isn't possible!

The chaplain reaches for the hand of the young man and holds it. Talking to the translator, he asks:

— But what does what does he think of rich Switzerland? With all the cars, with shops full of…food and…he who has gone through all that, who didn't eat for days? How…What does he think of Switzerland?

— For me it is something incredible.

— Incredible.

— For me it is something unbelievable. A country for which I don't have any papers, where I enter without any papers, without any authorization and they give me food, a place to sleep and medication. All that is humanity and I'm very proud. I thank Switzerland a lot.

The following scene takes place in the office of a Swiss federal examiner. During the procedure, a male examiner collected the first account of the young Somali and registered the administrative request for asylum. His colleague, whose office we are in, is a female examiner; her duty was to check the account. She explains her assessment of the Somali's case.

— So, listen, of course the practical decision about his case is negative. Honestly, I have problems with the plausibility.

— Really?

— Yes. What bothers me about his story is that, actually, it's just a bit stereotyped. What I mean is that when I ask him for specific details about himself [like] what happened to him, what exactly happened to him, he's very brief and vague. But well he can give me plenty of details of what happened around him.

The male examiner murmurs a feeble “Yes,” as his female colleague proceeds:

— That's what he can't manage to do. It's like with the story about the journey, he can't manage to make it really plausible that it was him who made the journey…To be honest, for me, it is as if it was another person…who made the journey and then he tells the story of somebody else…And then, well, he said that he was hurt, that he was, well, wounded by bullets.

— Yeah.

— Plus fractured legs.

— Hmm.

— But he told me he walked 30 to 40 days! So, how can a person with a fractured leg…

— Seven days before, yes it's a bit…

— Let's say ten days, fifteen days after that, can that person walk forty days to fifty—no, thirty to forty days?

— How long did he stay in Sudan?

— Well, in Sudan, he actually stayed. He left immediately for Libya.

The male examiner tries then to explain his motives for believing the testimony when he first heard it.

— Well, you see, when you have the first draft of a story, you tell yourself, “well, it's amazing, it could be credible.” And when you examine it in depth, you see that…

— Exactly. Well, it's the goal of the federal interview, so…

— Yes, hmm. Well, OK, I said to myself, “This is someone who's telling things the way they actually happened.” His physical aspect and his skinniness are still under consideration.

— Yes, well, in any case, I've decided to reject it and also in the application that, should his provisional admission be lifted, his health condition will need to be re-examined.

— Oh, I see…

The male examiner looks disheartened.

Melgar's camera exhibits how the asylum institution needs accounts of lived experiences in order to operate. Staff members are required to produce them through interviews. These accounts must conform to a criterion of plausibility or “verisimilitude” (Bruner 1991). This narrative constraint conditions institutional common-sense; it guides federal examiners, giving a general shape to what an actual experience of being a refugee must correspond to in order to be convincing. An objectification takes then place: through his narrative, the asylum seeker has to produce himself as “a recognizable case of the real thing” (Garfinkel 1967, 181). Common-sense procedures are also applied for assessing the narrative. If the asylum seeker does not give adequate details about his journey through the desert, or if he presents seemingly contradictory pieces of information (walking for 40 days with a fractured tibia, for example), the account is ruled as not being authentic. From the point of view of the institution, the testimony is not plausible, because it does not look like the narrative of someone having experienced in the first person the events recounted.

Such evaluative criteria place strong constraints upon the kind of subjectivity the asylum seeker can adopt. The asylum institution does not seem to take into account the way cultural backgrounds or traumatisms could impact the recounting of the lived experience. Nonetheless, the generic treatment of categories by the asylum institution is more complex than the squashing of lived experience described by the Smithian model. Let us detail what is at stake: in the institutional reception of the narrative, Somali is treated as an administrative or geographic category. It is neither related to culture, political or social conditions, nor to personal capacities for escaping a common situation of despair. The asylum institution locates the Somali category outside the narrative: it stands only for the asylum seeker's official identity, his country of origin; it is not taken as a thematic resource for producing the internal accountability of the asylum seeker's own story—and its assessment.¹⁸

The female examiner abstracts other elements from the asylum seeker's lived experience as a refugee (his medical condition). The male examiner struggles to re-include those elements in the evaluation of the case, but fails eventually. By so doing, he shows that the decision to grant refugee status is constituted through interaction—and here, mild opposition—with his colleague.

But let us apprehend these scenes from the spectator's point of view. The first part of the sequence displays a chaplain listening to the Somali's narrative. The priest appears as a powerless witness. The second part shows two examiners from the Federal Administration accounting for the reasons leading them to deny refugee status. The spectator is located in a two-fold position, being able to hear the asylum seeker narrative and to appraise how the examiners treat that account. This specific way of addressing the audience produces a discrepancy, which calls for a judgement (Arendt [1982] 1989). The spectator is invited to occupy the position of the third party within the asylum institution. From that position, she/he is summoned to assess the institutional treatment of the narrative, and the whole process of decision-making. Such an evaluation is a complex process. It involves emotions (sadness, pity, disgust, fear, etc.), practical and moral reasons (human dignity, equality, justice, etc.) possibly leading to a political stance. The spectator is drawn to transform her/his sensible experience of the film into a moral experience of actualities that she/he is not experiencing in the first person. Thus, the documentary allows the spectator to judge the procedure of granting refugee status as human or inhuman, unbiased or arbitrary, just or unjust.

Inviting a concerned spectator: the work of public gaze

The last scene provides clues about how the film must be understood. Before the last sequence, another transfer takes place. The spectator witnesses a cycle whose end, marked by the disappearance of the previous inmates and the appearance of new ones, is already familiar. Only a handful of these asylum seekers are granted asylum.

After the second transfer took place, an Arabic inscription is shown, written with a pen on the wooden pole of a playground, inside the courtyard of the CAP. “If time becomes too long and I don't see you again, I swear to you on the God of the people, that I will never forget you.”

The screen goes blank as a message written in white letters appears: “In 2007, 10,387 people filed a request for asylum in Switzerland. Asylum was offered to 1,561 people and 2,749 provisional admissions were granted.”

End.

The beginning and the end of the documentary frame the filmic text. During the opening sequence, the image of the title appeared like an initial disjuncture. There was a contrast between the bucolic scenery of the house framed between the trees and the title of the film, The Fortress. It invited the spectator to ask: “how can the label ‘fortress’ stand for the building on the screen?” The house appeared as a setting to explore: a part of the Swiss asylum policy that, through the filmic text, is articulated as representative of the whole system.

The initial sequence therefore constitutes the house as a link in the chain, a peculiar embodiment, but also an emblem of the Swiss asylum system. The exploration of that institutional reality will reach its apex at the end of the documentary. The last scenes convey a subtle statement. This vantage point takes the form of objectified data summing up the asylum phenomenon by way of a statistical capture. Again, those figures inform the spectator that what was shown during the film is part of a vast policy. But here, the statistical point of view that the film presents to its viewers is not allowed to crush the asylum seekers’ lived experiences. The image preceding the figures displays a message engraved in the wood, the sign that someone was there, leaving a trace of her/his presence for a friend. She/he could not stay longer, but was carried along by the administrative management of the cohorts of asylum seekers.

As the final sequence ends, it has been shown that the inmates, who are the principal actors of the film, cannot be the key actors to implement the transformation of the asylum system. Conversely, both director and spectator adopt a unique position, which is the observer viewpoint: their own actualities are remote from those happening in the CAP, but, they are unfailingly the witnesses of others’ actualities. They become concerned spectators as they are invited to accept the task of judging the asylum system on the basis of a factual and moral inquiry. And if those witnesses are Swiss citizens, this evaluation can lead to the mobilisation of a public, so that they can try to modify the asylum policy. Thus, the principal addressees of the textual mapping are not the people living the asylum actualities: the documentary is about mediating their presence and powerlessness to a third party. It is through the agency of a third party—the Swiss spectators as citizens—that The Fortress might give rise to a political action that could potentially influence the asylum seekers’ experience.

The Gap with the Empirical Spectator

The Fortress was widely acclaimed

The first official screening took place in August 2008, at the Locarno Film Festival. Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, the Federal Minister of the Justice and Police Department, was present and praised the documentary as a tribute to the people in charge of applying the asylum policy. The press noticed the long conversation between Melgar and the member of the government (coming from a right-wing party), one of the headlines stating “The Film Director Charms the Minister”.¹⁹ The acclaim came from the left as well, notably from Federal Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey, who belongs to the Social Democratic Party of Switzerland. The documentary eventually won the prize of the Locarno Festival.

But this wide celebration took place in a context of intense discursive struggle about the asylum issue, as becomes apparent in this interview of anthropologist Séverine Graff, who worked with Melgar on the movie:

Everyday, the Swiss spectator is confronted with extreme debates, he is fed up with political discourses about foreigners. He does not want to go to the cinema to see what he sees everyday on television. In order to justify the release of a documentary and the price of the ticket, the film business tries to distinguish itself from the political sphere, and place itself within the artistic domain.²⁰

Melgar's narrative and discursive strategies in the documentary reflect the problem of stating something publicly audible in a polarised context. The film director wanted to contribute to the debate and formulate a political statement without being identified with one of the camps. In every interview, Melgar would keep the same motto: “my film is committed but not militant”.²¹ In order to adopt such public stance, the film director had to rely on the critical activity of the public. This positioning is well explained in this interview published by Pages de Gauche, a socialist monthly. Melgar answers the question “Can your film be considered a militant act?”:

No, I deny this. Above all, my job is to produce documents. I always start by trying not to take sides. In concrete terms, in The Fortress, I wanted to restore the shades of grey, between the black sheep and the white sheep [that is between the left and the right]. But I am no sermonizer, I do not tell what to think, or what to vote. I ask questions that highlight contradictions, but I leave everyone the opportunity to form their own opinion. People from the far-left criticized me for that. My films are committed, in the sense that I ask the public to see a kind of commitment in them, hoping to confront the public with moral cases, to which only they themselves can find responses.²²

As a “committed” documentary, The Fortress aims at producing a “concerned spectator”. Ideally, this “model spectator” meets the “empirical spectator”. In reality, they seldom fuse but often exist in tension. The above-mentioned responses from federal ministers bear witness of this possibility. They can also clash: the moral experience expected by the filmic text is then completely bypassed. An example of the rejection of the film's invitation for a particular positionality happened in September 2008, during a screening that took place at the Oblò, an independent cinema in Lausanne, run by an association whose goal is to promote alternative films. The following ethnographic description, made by one of us, demonstrates how The Fortress was received that night in a specific context.

Fernand Melgar was in the room. He was invited by voluntary workers working in Oblò and in activist associations linked to the left or the far-left. The audience was homogenous, sharing the same political profile. I was there, among the 40 to 50 spectators I would usually meet in similar circumstances. Melgar seemed at ease: he was familiar with this small circle of spectators. He had just shared a friendly and casual dinner with some of them. He probably thought that this specific audience, well informed about asylum issues, was already convinced by the relevance of his project.

After the screening, Melgar got on the stage for the debate with the spectators. The images of The Fortress were still in my mind. I remember being overwhelmed by emotions, incapable of asking a question. I needed silence. Speaking—deliberating on the reality depicted in the film, and on how it is shown—seemed difficult for me, at least not this early after such disturbing experience. I was still trying to recover my mind when some people started to question Melgar. Their criticism was very strong: The Fortress was a bad depiction, they stated, for it did not clearly identify the victims and the evil-doers of the Swiss asylum policy. The complainants expected from Melgar a denunciation of the policy. For them, this movie weakened the charges against asylum, as well as the dissident and leftist voices it should have incarnated, in the context of a violent antagonism within the public sphere. (Malbois, Lausanne, September 2008).

This criticism reveals one particular empirical reception, among many others, of The Fortress. It is important to notice here that this interpretation refuses the basic codes of the filmic text, using the documentary in a way that was not intended by the director (Eco [1979] 1984). Criticising The Fortress on the grounds that it does not take a partisan stance rejects the “discursive mode” of the documentary, still a factual account of the Swiss asylum actualities. Instead, it demands a pamphlet, a story that is told by reverting to a—mostly Bourdieusian—narrative about domination, where the respective binary positions are given in advance (dominants against dominated).²³ The empirical spectators that reacted negatively in the Oblò cinema refused to identify themselves with the position of the concerned spectator that was promoted by the film, but also believed that spectators would not be enough affected by the “sensible experience” articulated by the film. This leads to a paradox where these activists seem to believe that spectator agency cannot be triggered by the Deweyan narrative, which invites public inquiry on a factual and emotional basis, of The Fortress.

The Public as a Critical Standpoint

The critique embedded in The Fortress can be decisive, for the documentary, as a textual reality, directs spectators towards a moral experience of the reported asylum actualities. For Swiss spectators, the film constitutes a subtle appeal to act on a political level as a public of citizens. Being made witness, as third party, to these asylum actualities provides them with a position from where The Fortress can be opened. From this standpoint, everyone who recognises herself/himself as a member of the Swiss political community is invited to be concerned with the (running and the regulation of the) asylum system (Widmer 1999). Becoming part of this public is negotiated by the sensible experience offered by Melgar. His proposed position—that of the concerned spectator—motivates non-antagonistic responses within the context of the Swiss semi-direct democracy.

Because it consists out of a political but not partisan statement, The Fortress opens up new possibilities for the public debate, and subverts the sclerosed line dividing the main two antagonist camps that were heard in the discursive struggle on asylum policies.²⁴ By inviting the spectators into the position of producing a moral evaluation, on the basis of a factual depiction of the Swiss asylum reality, the documentary generates an original discursive space of deliberation and experience, which appeals to the public to exercise their political agencies on asylum policy without applying antagonist frameworks.

In this article, we have argued that in particular Swiss spectators are addressed on a political level by the film. Even if this means that non-Swiss spectators are articulated as bystanders of “the” Swiss way of managing asylum, The Fortress is still capable of echoing debates that are going on in other national public spheres. The possibility of such impact needs to be carefully studied, although some concluding remarks can still be made. Non-Swiss spectators of this documentary can reconnect their sensible experience to the “political community” (Dewey [1927] 1954) they are attached to. However, this reconnection can be demanding at the level of imagination (Arendt [1971] 1981, [1982] 1989), because judging asylum policies presupposes a prior comparison between Switzerland's situation and other national realities, as well as a translocal mapping of asylum policies. But the international acclaim of Melgar's documentaries on asylum, with the 2011 Vol Spécial (Special Flight), after The Fortress, indicates that this analogical work has already taken place, at least to some degree. This opens a very promising field of investigation, focusing on the transcultural variations of the model/empirical spectator, and his/her agency in playing active roles in the public spheres and in engaging in discursive struggles.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors wish to thank Dorothy E. Smith, Joy Charnley, Laurence Kaufmann, Fernand Melgar and the editors of this special issue for their helpful comments.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

FUNDING

This work was supported by the FNS [grant 100016_144027].

Additional information

Philippe Gonzalez is lecturer in sociology and communication in the Laboratory of Sociology, Social Sciences Institute, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland.

Fabienne Malbois is senior researcher in sociology and communication in the Laboratory of Sociology, Social Sciences Institute, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1. The film's descriptions are those of the authors. Dialogues are rendered ad verbatim, and the translations of press articles are by the authors.

2. For a historical or sociological perspective on Swiss asylum policies, see Mahnig and Cattacin (2005).

3. Vallorbe is located in the French-speaking part of the country. Three other centres are established in the German-speaking part (Allstäten, Basel, Kreuzlingen) and one in the Italian-speaking part (Chiasso). See https://www.bfm.admin.ch/content/bfm/en/home/themen/asyl/asylverfahren/empfang/uebersicht_empfangs-.html. Last accessed February 14, 2014.

4. The notion of patient—and its contrast with the notion of actor—will be explained further.

5. Melgar worked with anthropologists on the project (Graff 2009).

6. Melgar's interview in R. Ruiz. 2008. “La Forteresse n'est pas une leçon de morale.” Pages de Gauche, October. Melgar applies the idea of “humanity” not only to the asylum seekers, but also to the federal examiners and the staff running the CAP; see interview in R. Bouchet. 2008. “Fernand Melgar: ‘Je ne suis pas un donneur de leçons’.” Le Courrier, September 20.

7. The reasons behind the making of the movie are political, and had to do with a “Sunday evening”. This refers to 24 September 2006, when a large majority of Swiss citizens accepted the “Blocher lex”; that is, the very restrictive bills drafted by far-right politician Christoph Blocher, then Member of the Swiss Federal Council (the executive branch of the government), concerning foreigners and asylum seekers. On the website of the film, Melgar writes: “The outcome of this vote was not surprising. However, the number of voters that said yes (68%) and the territorial unanimity deeply shocked me. Especially in a country where one out of five people is a foreigner and where requests for asylum had not been as low in 20 years. The right savoured its victory after having led a xenophobic campaign where incidences were blown out of proportion, fuelling fear of foreigners from outside the European Union which Switzerland still has not joined and which a portion of the Swiss population still views with skepticism”. See http://www.laforteresse.ch/en/why-this-movie/it-was-a-sunday-night. Last accessed February 14, 2014.

8. “[I]n institutional ethnography, the term agent is used analogously with how the term subject has come to be used in poststructuralist thinking, where it is treated as a property of discourse” (Smith 2005, 223).

9. Obviously, Smith's writings imply her acknowledgement of the existence of a reader.

10. For Rancière ([2011] 2013), aisthesis corresponds to “ways of perceiving and being affected” by artistic creation.

11. The English translation has chosen “distribution of the sensible” to render the French “partage du sensible”. Such rendering downplays the central idea of “sharing” or “partaking”.

12. The brackets in the quote indicate slight modifications that we introduce into G. Rockhill's translation to emphasise the phenomenological dimension of Rancière's analysis.

13. What we usually call “culture” depends on that a taken-for-granted background knowledge differing between communities and is indexed on the history and practices of a given community (Winch [1958] 2008).

14. On this distinction, see Blanco (1987).

15. However fascinating on the interactional level, the analysis by Puumala et al. (2011) of some sequences drawn from The Fortress bypasses the film as a mediation inscribed within, representing a socio-historical reality.

16. Taken together they last approximately 210 seconds.

17. The excerpt starts at 01:05:22 and ends at 01:11:06. The transcription follows the translation provided by the subtitles of the DVD.

18. Country of origin information is widely in use throughout the asylum procedures, although it seems less used than expected, as observed in the British and French cases by Gibb and Good (2013). Interestingly however, the two anthropologists underline that country of origin information is used for determining to what extent the asylum story is “externally consistent” (2013, 292; original emphasis) with the known situation in his/her home country. Then, the country category is not taken as a “narrative category” belonging to the applicant's story and to which the story must be reflexively reported for being intelligible, but as a “category of information” produced from the point of view of the asylum institution for evaluating the credibility of the story.

19. Unknown. 2008. “Le réalisateur séduit la ministre.” 20 Minutes, August 11.

20. M. Loewer. 2009. “Ciné-météques suisses.” Le Courrier, September 5.

21. This “committed but not militant”—or “neither populist neither militant” (see Graff 2009)—stance was documented in the following press articles: P. Blanchard. 2007. “Le quotidien des requérants filmé au centre d'enregistrement.” 24 Heures, December; A. Walther. 2008. “Le cœur gros comme ça, Fernand Melgard garde l’œil ouvert.” 24 Heures, January 30; C. Krafft. 2008. “Un Mexicain et un Vaudois décrochent le Léopard d'or.” Le Matin Dimanche, August 17; A. Robert. 2008. “‘La Forteresse’ de Vallorbe, à voir sur les écrans romands.” September 15. www.domainepublic.ch; and R. Wolf. 2008. “Mon film n'est pas militant.” Le Matin, September 16.

22. R. Ruiz. 2008. “La Forteresse n'est pas une leçon de morale.” Pages de Gauche 71, October.

23. If the expected narrative was Foucauldian, the criticism would have been more complex and in phase with the documentary, trying to detect and trace the microphysics of power.

24. In an interview, Melgar stated: “For me, what happened with this vote [on the asylum policy] is a crystallization between two antagonisms. On one side, the far-right describes the asylum seekers as profiteers, drug dealers, or rapists, and, on the other side, circles from the left and the Church affirm, in reaction, with a naïve optimism, that all [the asylum seekers] should be accepted.” In S. Gobbo. 2008. “La caméra sublime les gens.” La Liberté, September 19.