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Abstract
This essay examines Michael Winterbottom's 2002 film In This World, which follows the journey of two Afghan migrants from Peshawar to London. Winterbottom's preparation involved travelling from London to Peshawar and then in reverse overland as far as Istanbul; he then returned to Peshawar and filmed the same journey using two non-professional actors, one of whom replicated the journey once filming was completed, to claim asylum in London. I read the way in which the contexts of the film's production repeat and reverse the journey of its subject as a form of chiasmus, a rhetorical strategy identified by Henry Louis Gates and others as a means of reclaiming a subject status from an experience of displacement. In In This World, however, chiasmus signifies not the potential for the displaced to redefine themselves but a condition of perpetual displacement. I explore the way in which the filmmaker's notion of a production that continually crosses between genres has different implications for the film and its subject, and how the depiction of space and movement is determined by very different experiences of the exclusionary powers of Nation and State on the part of filmmaker and migrant.
Notes
1. Harris refers to the West African fables of the trickster, who often took the form of a spider, which were carried to the Caribbean with the slaves.
2. Prime also identifies Stephen Frears's Dirty Pretty Things (2002) as an example of the refugee film. Other examples might include the Dardenne Brothers's La Promesse (1995), Michael Haneke's Code Unknown (2000), Pawel Pawlokowski's Last Resort (2000), and Nick Broomfield's Ghosts (2007).