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ABSTRACT
This article examines the political aesthetics of the current ‘refugee crisis’, and the life-and-death stakes of the struggle over the meaning of foreignness that is taking place. It focuses on emergent forms of political film-making that employ mobile technologies. These include videos made on phones and distributed online or edited into documentary films, all of which are being employed in a struggle over the meaning of refugeeism. The mobile phone has acquired a crucial symbolic significance with regard to the plight of refugees, offering a means of both documenting their experience and distributing these audio-visual records. The article’s key case study is the BBC documentary Exodus: Our Journey to Europe (2016). A participatory project, Exodusassembles footage shot by refugees filming their journeys on mobile phones at huge personal risk. This article asks what role film plays in documenting, and intervening in, the refugee crisis, and to what extent documentaries such as Exodusconstitute a reconfigured or expanded transnational cinema, a new aesthetic that can offer an alternative perspective that moves beyond the conventional binary categories of foreigners as either powerless, infantilised victims or dangerous invaders.
Notes
1. Placed in an expanded media history, the history of migrant cinema extends back through Broken Blossoms (Griffith, 1919) and The Immigrant (Chaplin, 1917) to pre-cinematic narrative media such as lantern slide shows like Emigrant Ship (DETAILS).
2. See Tyler and Loyd Citation2015 for a discussion of the misleading language with which this crisis is reported:
4. And for all we know, the names they are given in Exodus may be prudently false.
5. With the ‘Interrotron’ the interviewee faces the camera, which is placed behind a two-way mirror. The mirror is angled so that it reflects a video monitor, which shows a live image of the face of the director/interviewer who sits in front of a second camera. The interviewee therefore appears to make direct eye contact with the viewer, enhancing the drama and sense of intimacy of the interview (http://www.errolmorris.com/content/eyecontact/interrotron.html).
6. See Kesting Citation2017, 65
7. Indeed, UK Government policy since 2010 has been to deter immigration by presenting the UK as a ‘hostile environment’. See https://www.libertyhumanrights.org.uk/sites/default/files/HE%20web.pdf.
9. Cameraphones were distributed to around 60 migrant but the series focuses on seven main figures (Harrison Citation2016).
11. As director James Bluemel explains, ‘I sat down with each person and said: ‘This is a very quick lesson in how to film usefully for us: Please remember to film in landscape rather than portrait, these are the shots that make up a sequence, and good luck, off you go.’’ (Harrison Citation2016).
12. As Grassilli notes, the interstitial status of the refugee film-maker typically means the film-maker cannot access funding in her/his home country or from film foundations that support world cinema since these typically require film-makers to have residency.
14. As with boats, the smugglers packed their trucks, refusing to carry sufficient water in order to reduce weight, so that Alaigie and fellow passengers collapsed from dehydration, one of them dying on the trip. The desert is harder than the sea, he suggests, since the heat means ‘you suffer before you die’.
15. Indeed, the desperate immobility of the refugee is the principal theme of Casablanca, captured memorably in the opening voiceover which relates that, ‘the fortunate ones, through influence, or money, or luck might obtain exit visas and scurry to Lisbon, and from Lisbon to the New World, but the others wait in Casablanca, and wait and wait and wait …’.