(Im)possible movements. Migratory flows and digital flows in contemporary documentary cinema

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses some fundamental aesthetic (and thus political) questions which arise when faced with the problem of the representation of migratory flows in documentary cinema: how to represent in an unprecedented way a ‘crisis’ that has long been preponderant, omnipresent in the European mediascape? Subsequently, more generally speaking, by what means should a crisis be represented in cinema? That is to say, what form should be given to an image of crisis, if such a thing exists, at a time when what is in crisis is representation itself? By what means can we regain the efficiency of images when they have lost all their power through multiplication? How can meaning be restored to the gaze? This text aims to shed some light on these interrogations based on the analysis of two examples of contemporary documentaries which deal, directly or indirectly, with the interrelation between digital flows and migratory flows: Havarie (2016) by Philipp Scheffner and The Migrating Image (2018) by Stefan Kruse Jorgensen.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration
• digital flows
• migratory flows
• documentary cinema
• refugees
• crisis

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank filmmakers Stefan Kruse and Philipp Scheffner for the rich discussions about their work.

Disclosure statement

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

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 In this paper, I use the term ‘flow’ to address migration because it is useful for the purpose of comparing the facility and speed of the digital flows of data and images with the difficulties and obstacles of human migration. Nonetheless, it is important to acknowledge the critical discussion existing around the use of fluid, liquid and aquatic metaphors in migration media and political discourse: migration has been often described as a flood, a force of nature taking over territories or a natural disaster, as in the expression ‘wave of migrants’. This dehumanising metaphor influence the general perception of migrants as dangers from which nations need to protect themselves through militarisation of borders, funding and action plans. Cf. among others: Vitez et al. (2022); Montagut and Moragas-Fernández (2020) or Taylor (2021).

2 Other documentary artworks dealing with this same interrelation could be included in this corpus, such as Shipwreck at the Threshold of Europe, an investigation by Forensic Architecture; 24 hours at Aegean and The sea stayed calm for 180 miles by Tamara Kametani or AZ: Move and get shot and The Virtual Watchers by Joana Moll.

3 Interview conducted and published by the collective After Social Networks: www.after-social-networks.com.

4 Same interview as above.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gala Hernández López

Gala Hernández López is a filmmaker and researcher, member of the Aesthetics, Sciences and Technologies of Cinema and Audiovisual (ESTCA) laboratory at the University of Paris 8, teaching (ATER) at the Université Gustave Eiffel. She is currently finishing her PhD on screen capture as a medium in the post-internet era. During the academic year 2021–2022, she is a visiting scholar at the Filmuniversität Babelsberg Konrad Wolf (Potsdam, Germany). She is co-founder and co-director of the artist-research collective After Social Networks (www.after-social-networks.com). She has published in several academic journals (Digital War, Interfaces, Augenblick …) and collective works (L'art tout contre la machine, Captures d'écran, L'essai médiatique … ) and has edited issues of the journals Contratexto, Images Secondes and currently Multitudes. She has presented her work in numerous universities and institutions, such as Goldsmiths (University of London), University of Copenhagen, University of British Columbia (Vancouver), Université Paris 1 – Sorbonne, École Normale Supérieure (Paris) and Harvard University (USA). She has translated Marie-José Mondzain's Images (to be continued) into Spanish, which will be published by Metales Pesados (Chile) in 2022. She has collaborated with Débordements, AOC.media and Art Critique.