Digital technology, aesthetic imperfection and political film-making: Illegal bodies in motion

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Digital technology, aesthetic imperfection andpolitical film-making: Illegal bodies in motionVicente Rodríguez Ortegaa

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TRAC 2 (1) pp. 3–19 Intellect Limited 2011

Transnational Cinemas Volume 2 Number 1

© 2011 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/trac.2.1.3_1

VICENTE RODRÍGUEZ ORTEGAUniversidad Carlos III de Madrid

Digital technology, aesthetic

imperfection and political

film-making: Illegal bodies

in motion

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the relationship between digital technology and political film-making in the current era of uneven globalization. First, I study the role of contemporary counter-narratives of migration in giving visibility to the illegal bodies-in-motion that circulate through the western fortresses. Second, I dissect the digital and imperfect aesthetic of a set of films – Welcome to Sarajevo (Michael Winterbottom, 1997), In this World (Michael Winterbottom, 2002) and Turtles can Fly (Bahman Ghobadi, 2004) – in order to define the nuances of their politi-cal discourses. Third, I argue that the authenticating appeal of digital technology is largely based on the fact that spectators today experience the digital in their quotid-ian life experiences. Therefore, they approach digital products not only as consum-ers, but also as producers of audio-visual imagery. Finally, I study how these films operate in a liminal space between the fictional and documentary modes – the fictoreal. I contend that these films fail to hide their structuring artificiality. Paradoxically, this failure, in combination with their imperfect digital look, is the cornerstone of their capacity to successfully engage an active spectator in the inter-rogation of the specific sociocultural realities they explore. By deploying a range of representational conventions working within a variety of fictional genres, they

KEYWORDS

digitalimperfectionimmigrationpolitical film-makingWinterbottomfictoreal

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capitalize on the spectator’s familiarity with similar stylistic constructions and their capacity to decode them.

The rapid development of information and communication technologies in the last fifteen years has contributed to altering the slippery antagonism between those who hold a privileged status within the multifarious tentacles of the digital order and those who speak from the margins and have benefited from the ‘homemade’ character of the World Wide Web, and related means of cultural production and consumption – e.g. affordable video equipment, cell phones, portable music players, etc. However, there is a fundamental economic imbalance that punctuates the circulation of capital and bodies across both geopolitical borders and the World Wide Web since the access to technol-ogy and resources does not exist evenly across the world map. Furthermore, citizens from poor countries struggle to subsist and prosper on a daily basis. Their (total or partial) exclusion from global networks of communication is thus a consequence of the economic and social apartheid that persists in the contemporary milieu. Many of these disfavoured subjects risk their lives in hazardous journeys to the West. These quasi invisible bodies-in-motion, most notably immigrants from Africa, the Middle East and Latin America, constitute one of the repressed leftovers of euphoric accounts of globalization. Recently, several film-makers have mobilized digital technology in an attempt to cancel out the invisibility of these immigrants and refugees by giving them a voice and a face. In offering an autopsy of the major difficulties that immigrants face in trying to legalize their bodies within the western visa fortresses or how refugees struggle for survival in the midst of warfare, these type of films point to the multi-layered set of socio-economic structures that organizes the immi-grant and refugees’ pursuit as functioning within a business-bound dynamic. Some of these alternative narratives unravel the manner in which the limit-less tentacles of capital permeate social, ethnic and national strata and, for the right price, allow immigrants to achieve legality within or access to west-ern countries – e.g. In this World (Michael Winterbottom, 2002), La Promesse (Dardenne brothers, 1996), Dirty Pretty Things (Stephen Frears, 2002). Others zoom in on the forgotten stories of suffering that the likes of ‘CNN’, ‘MSNBC’ or ‘FOXNEWS’ fail to report and centre on those refugees who manage to avoid death temporarily – e.g. Welcome to Sarajevo (Michael Winterbottom, 1997), Turtles Can Fly (Bahman Ghobadi, 2004). In these journeys to the other side of western accounts of the global order, the physicality of the immigrants and refugees’ bodies is assaulted by the economic and military operations that frame their pilgrimage and their perpetually in-motion, harsh conditions.

Michael Winterbottom’s status as both a renowned art-house world auteur and an outsider – a British director telling the story of Afghani immi-grants (In this World) or British Pakistani Guantánamo prisoners (The Road to Guantánamo, 2006) – signals how we may pin down one of the spaces for political film-making in the current era. In the 1960s, an Italian director, Gillo Pontecorvo, enlisted himself to arguably create the definitive film about the Algerian fight to overthrow the French colonial power. Now, we may situate films by some of the most respected of world auteurs – Winterbottom, Haneke, Suleiman, the Dardenne brothers, etc. – as one of the most prominent forms of socially engaged cinema. These film-makers practice what Hamid Naficy labels accented cinema. That is, the product of the political consciousness and


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Digital technology, aesthetic imperfection and political fi lm-making

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1. In the US market, In this World was released by Sundance, an independent and foreign film powerhouse that, while typically distributing and producing the work of politically committed film-makers, has also become a multimedia conglomerate of its own, dominating along with the IFC the independent film circuit in the United States and extending its tentacles abroad.

aesthetic sensibility of film-makers who are both ‘situated’ and ‘universal’, working in the interstices of the social, cultural and cinematic (Naficy 2001). These films deal with how the émigrés relate to their homeland, situating the film-maker’s voice within a multicultural and often multi-lingual discursive field. Aesthetically, accented films are counter-hegemonic insofar as they deploy representational templates that challenge the illusionist drive of main-stream cinema – using a variety of meta-cinematic devices, creating a slippage between voice and speaker, foregrounding non-dramatic pauses and long silences, etc.

Even though Winterbottom’s body of works is a heterogeneous collec-tion of multi-generic enterprises – from the western (The Claim, 2000) to futuristic dystopias (Code 46, 2003), from film adaptations of literary works (Tristam Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, 2005) to political documentaries (The Road to Guantánamo) – he constantly deals with the most significant world conflicts that traverse his filmic career. In other terms, he regularly practices what Deborah Shaw calls ‘cinema of globalization’ – that is, ‘film texts that explicitly address questions of globalization within their narratives, central to which are the ways in which relations of power between nations and peoples are played out on screen’ (Shaw forthcoming). Winterbottom’s radical voice stands as a space of radical political thought that deploys a multi-accented set of visual, aural and narrative devices to chronicle the stories of socially and ethnically marginalized Others.1 It is thus a cinema that approaches the practice of cinematic transnationality foregrounding a ‘resistance to globaliza-tion as cultural homogenization; and a commitment to ensuring that certain economic realities associated with filmmaking do not eclipse the pursuit of aesthetic, artistic, social, and political values’ (Hjort 2009: 15).

Regrettably, most politically committed films typically operate within restricted market niches. Given that different films are subject to various degrees of mobility – since to a great degree ‘cinematic mobility, like human mobility, is determined by both geopolitical factors and financial pedigree’ (Ezra and Rowden 2006: 5) – only a few of these films manage to get global distribution. The majority of them remain confined within the transnational film festival and art-house circuits of the West and specific regional markets. In other words, although this type of cinematic production is significant from both an aesthetic and ideological point of view, in most cases their impact in the social field is somewhat limited.

Within this scenario, and returning momentarily to the primary organizing technology that punctuates our transterritorial interactions today, the first question to answer is how do film-makers such as Winterbottom utilize the practical and economic advantages that the development of digital audio-visual equipment has granted to engage with the reality of the illegal immigrants’ underworlds. Second, how do these films chronicle the living circumstances of these marginalized individuals in relation to the coverage of world conflicts and immigration practices in mainstream media? How do they negotiate the all-access connectivity of the average western citizen in relation to the lack of resources that characterizes these excluded pockets around the world?

1. DIGITAL FILM-MAKING: REINVENTING REALITY

The rise of digital imagery as the pre-eminent form of interpersonal communication and entertainment has generated unparalleled possibili-ties for those film-makers who have turned towards it in order to create


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and/or concretize worlds that were only imaginable before. A new kind of realism, devoid of any referential character, has conquered the main-stream film panorama (Manovich 1999). Digital media provides a whole new arsenal of artistic and ideological weapons to reinvent well-known genres – such as horror, sci-fi, comic book adaptations, action/adventure – the extent of which cannot be fully comprehended yet. Simultaneously, the affordability of digital equipment has sedimented a direct association between grainy footage and jerky camera movements and the spectators’ quotidian life experiences. As a consequence, two antagonistic models of reality run in parallel. The first one rules the multiplex and aims at deliv-ering pristine transparency and seamlessness, simulating ‘the look of film in all its photochemical fidelity to the profilmic’ (Renov 2004: 140–41) while pushing the boundaries of the representational through the deploy-ment of cutting-edge technology. The second one dominates the home video and computer download field. Politically committed film-makers – Kiarostami, the Dardenne brothers, Jia Zhangke, Winterbottom, etc. – turn to the latter to inscribe their radical intervention in the state of affairs of the world via the aesthetic imperfection many of us experience in our most banal audio-visual activities, thus offering a new kind of digitally medi-ated transnational cinematic realism. The long-lasting debate concerning the relationship between the photographic image – now focused on digital technology – and reality curves around a new meander that critical scholar-ship is only starting to grasp. If we accept, though, that the cinematic image, digital or photographic, cannot escape its own cultural, social and aesthetic historicity and that it is inevitably imbued with a series of conventions and stylistic imprints functioning within a narrative signifying chain, it is fair to state that a structuring artificiality constitutes the core of the cinematic. The works of the above-mentioned film-makers resort to an imperfect digital image that does not escape artifice in its attempt to remain faithful to the real. On the contrary, their films maximize the aestheticization of imper-fect imagery in combination with the mobilization of a variety of popular generic registers that are commonplace in mainstream cinema in order to engage audiences since spectators typically employ and consume them in their day-to-day living.

In parallel to this emerging tradition of ‘home-made’ digital narratives, other film-makers such as Bahman Ghobadi chronicle the exclusion/inclusion dynamic that characterizes the worldwide presence of digital technology by centering on the stories of those almost-invisible suffering bodies that west-ern newscasts rarely mention. The body of these immigrants and refugees becomes the locus where the organizing imbalance that structures the uneven distribution of resources across the world is inscribed with catastrophic consequences.

2. IN THIS WORLD AND THE RADICAL POLITICS OF THE DIGITAL IMPERFECT

In This World starts with a series of establishing shots of Shamshatoo, a refugee camp for Afghanis in Pakistan. A documentary-like voice-over reads data that situate the spectator within the socio-political time frame in which the story occurs, linking the refugees’ scarce living conditions with George W. Bush administration’s War on Terror: ‘It is estimated that 7.9 billion dollars were spent on bombing Afghanistan in 2001. Spending on refugees is far


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2. ‘Making of’ In this World, Interview with Director Michael Winterbottom and writer Tony Grisoni, DVD extras.

less generous’. From the beginning, the film thus sets in place the economy of power that organizes bodies across geographical territories. The camera then moves ‘freely’ around the camp, capturing glimpses of the lives of anonymous refugees. Most of them look directly at the camera. Their active response re-situates the film-maker’s presence within an ambiguous dynamic of intrusion/invisibility. The camera is neither recording a series of daily occurrences in a non-invasive fashion nor approaching the refugees from a detached perspective. It is among the refugees but marked as exterior through their curious gazes. It is almost there: capturing spontaneous, non-scripted reactions to its presence but triggering those through its defining out-of-placeness. The film seems to position itself within the limits of the documentary format, but nevertheless announces its first traces of artifice by juxtaposing the untarnished innocence of the children refugees’ gazes with the denunciatory numerical data. This discourse of sentimentality will prominently structure the film from this point forward in direct contact with the shaky and grainy digital image that filters it.

Immediately after, Winterbottom takes us to 16-year-old Jamal (Jamal Udin Torabi). Although the voice-over narration had informed the spectator of his name and occupation, initially it had treated him as the other refugees, without giving the spectator any visual or aural cues signalling his pivotal role in the narrative that is about to unfold. However, soon the initial documentary mode that informs our first encounter with the refugees zooms into Jamal’s story. He will stand for all of them. From now on, it is his story. The lack of transition that marks the film’s individualizing move situates its political and aesthetic agenda between the fictional and the real, operating as a continuum that resists a clear-cut distinction. In addition, Jamal is the first diegetic char-acter granted a voice. From now on a diverse spectrum of indigenous voices replaces the omniscient voice-over narration. Jamal acts as our entry pass-port in this multi-perspective universe. In other words, In This World does not simply speak about the Afghani refugees but through them.

Jamal and Enayat (Enayatullah) his older companion in the trip from Pakistan to London play themselves even though they did not person-ally embark in the journey the film dissects. The film is instead a fiction-alized recreation of the trip many Afghani immigrants take on a regular basis. The screenplay itself went through a process of collective rewriting since Winterbottom and scriptwriter Tony Grisoni modified their plan as they encountered travellers and incorporated their experiences into the final story. In This World is, consequently, a polyphonic enterprise, a project of collective archiving of real-life experiences. It instrumentalizes the unique characteristics of Jamal and Enayat’s faces and bodies as the bearers of the real incidents many people have gone through, since they represent many others who have travelled through the services of a World Wide Web of ille-gal immigrants’ smuggling. Winterbottom claims that the production team tried to create situations in which Jamal and Enayat did not have to act, just ‘be themselves’.2

The film achieves its realistic impulse through the deliberate utiliza-tion of digital video’s authenticating appeal in combination with a blend of documentary and fictional film techniques. In performing this task, In this World rewrites historical reality from a marginalized perspective, that of the Afghani immigrants; the film places their struggle centre stage with the purpose of nullifying their invisibility, exposing throughout this process the socio-economic configurations that frame their existence. In this World is


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3. DVD extras.

4. For a thorough account of the impact of cinema novo, see Johnson and Stam (1995).

thus a fictionalized historical narrative, presenting itself as a faithful recrea-tion of one of these countless journeys. Winterbottom chose to utilize digital equipment for both practical and ideological reasons. On the one hand, it allowed his small crew to manoeuvre productively within the contingent unpredictability of real locations. On the other, it granted the visual fabric of the film an immediate texture, exponentially increasing its realistic appeal sources.3

The film anchors digital video’s power to cross over from the fictional into the real through the self-consciousness of an imperfect image. This aesthetic standpoint intimately links Winterbottom’s ideological endeav-our to that of the 1960s Latin American counter-cinemas – from García Espinosa to Nelson Pereira do Santos – via the mobilization of a series of imperfect formal strategies that build an alternative filmic style in direct opposition to the dominant representational models at work in mainstream cinemas – Hollywood or otherwise.4 Scarcity thus becomes a privileged political signifier.

In the above-mentioned revolutionary Third Worldist manifestos and films, the strategic utilization of imperfection as an aesthetic flag was aimed at attacking the illusionist and spectacular modus operandi of hegemonic film practices, as well as their industrialized modes of production. They attempted to offer an alternative political and stylistic project that would thematize the lives and problems of those marginalized groups who struggle to speak their own voice. In his manifesto ‘For an Imperfect Cinema’, Cuban film-maker Julio García Espinosa declares that imperfect cinema

must above all show the process which generates the problems. It is thus the opposite of a cinema principally dedicated to celebrating results, the opposite of a self-sufficient and contemplative cinema, the opposite of a cinema which ‘beautifully illustrates ideas or concepts which we already possess’.

(García Espinosa 2000: 257)

It is a cinema that rewrites history from a plurality of points of view bound together by the fact that these have been condemned to the margins of the social, the economic and the aesthetic. This type of cinema foregrounds the processes involved in its own realization, making the spectator aware of the relationship between subject matter and aesthetic. As an instance of contem-porary counter-cinema, Winterbottom’s film functions in direct contiguity with ethically charged works in which ‘the openness and mutual receptivity between filmmaker and subject may be said to extend to the relationship between the audience and the film’ (Renov 2004: 150). For In This World is as much about the context of its production, the circumstances that framed its contingent making and the historical practices of economic and social exploitation that it exposes, as it is about the final product itself. Like Pontecorvo’s technically degraded image in The Battle of Algiers (1966), Winterbottom’s becomes the stylistic weapon through which the film extends the boundaries of representation to achieve an authenticity effect. In this way, they exemplify Shohat and Stam’s concept of ‘hijacking the apparatus of “objectivity” and formulaic techniques of mass-media reportage … to express political views that would be anathema to the dominant media’ (Shohat and Stam 1994: 121). Winterbottom’s twenty-first century refurbishing of the 1960s revolutionary filmic agendas repackages imperfection as artifice in an attempt to achieve truthfulness.


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3. UBIQUITOUS IMPERFECTION: CONSUMERS AS PRODUCERS

In this World may be understood as a continuation of Winterbottom’s previ-ous work on the horror of the 1990s Balkan wars (Welcome to Sarajevo, 1997), which he subsequently revisited in The Road to Guantánamo through the exploration of the ongoing US–Al-Qaeda war from the point of view of three former Guantánamo prisoners. To achieve this political and aesthetic endeavour, the British director’s explicitly political films do not only resort to the dramatization of real-life conflicts and experiences following a realistic drive. They also point towards highly successful TV reality shows such as Cops (1989) and media event/films like The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999). These digitally produced and advertised products blur the distinction between reality and fiction by using a stark, ‘in-your-face’ hand-held and rough camera aesthetics that engage the viewer in a series of ‘realistic’ scenarios for a variety purposes – from shock value to generic recognition. In addition, these films utilize a diverse set of sound and narra-tive conventions that characterize a wide spectrum of cinematic genres – from the suspense thriller to the realist drama.

In this World’s imperfect image banks on the ubiquitous presence of the digital in the contemporary spectator’s transmediascape – from cell phones to surveillance devices to home movies. Since, as Scott McQuire states, ‘photo-realism was always less an aesthetic function than a deeply embedded social and political relation’ (2000: 50), the film resorts to the use of a variety of widespread visual textures outside the realm of the cinematic so that they function as the evidential templates through which spectators approach its authenticity. This cues the viewer to decipher the film’s critical take on the contemporary economic and political order via the lens of its realist appeal. In this World thus positions itself in a liminal space – a concept I have termed the fictoreal – that functions as a privileged site of knowledge to address the contemporary digitally mediated socio-political milieu.

The fictoreal digital film – A Starry Sky (Tata Amaral, 1996), Ten (Abbas Kiarostami, 2002), Unknown Pleasures (Jia Zhangke, 2002) and Winterbottom’s The Road to Guantánamo and others – takes as a point of departure a well-known historical occurrence and materializes it through the use of concrete individuals that stand for thousands of Others. Shot on location, these films aesthetically and politically mobilize the flexibility and directness of the digital image to claim their lack of artifice in relation to the pre-mediated world they approach. Simultaneously, they may use a series of narrative conventions and aesthetic staples of the fictional film – e.g. title cards, computer-generated maps, suspense-building, non-diegetic music, etc. – that signal the unavail-ability of the real unless filtered through a range of artistic choices. The digital fictoreal film is, consequently, pure artifice trying to pass as unmediated real-ity. However, its artificiality is precisely what legitimates its realistic impulse since its images display ‘a nested hierarchy of cues which organize the display of light, color, texture, movement, and sound in ways that correspond with the viewer’s own understanding of these phenomena in daily life’ (Prince 1996: 32). The digital fictoreal film also utilizes a set of generic conventions that appeal to the average viewer’s training as a film consumer. Ultimately, this type of film fails to hide its structuring artificiality. Paradoxically, this fail-ure is the cornerstone of its capacity to successfully engage an active specta-tor in the interrogation of the specific sociocultural reality it explores. In this World’s digital aesthetic stands thus in direct opposition to the illusionist drive


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that characterizes the pristine seamlessness of the majority of commercial films, and may be understood as an example of what Jia Zhangke labelled the upcoming wave of amateur DV age in film-making in discussing the growing power of digital video within the cinematic arena. As Yiman Wang points out, Jia did not necessarily refer with this term to lower-quality images but to ‘a new blood and experimental spirit, which is opposed to staid filming conven-tions’ (2005: 19) and that benefits from the widespread agency that affordable DV equipment grants to countless film-makers that aim to tell stories from the margins of the mainstream.

Winterbottom draws on the perceptual realism that the all-around pres-ence of the digital medium grants to charge his political intervention with an evidential character, catalysing, consequently, the effectiveness of his politi-cal agenda. Brian Winston (1995: 252) has remarked that audiences are well aware that there is a process of mediation in any film-making endeavour and that the spectator is ultimately intellectually equipped to distinguish between a fictional narrative and a documentary. The digital fictoreal film explicitly problematizes the clear-cut distinction between these two categories in order to catalyse its realistic drive by engaging audiences through both their compe-tence in interpreting the codes of film language and their extensive expo-sure to the nuances of digital imagery in their everyday. Spectators do not simply buy the realism of digital imagery as a technological achievement that mimetically reproduces the real world. As Stephen Prince states, cinematic representation significantly functions ‘in terms of structured correspondences between the audiovisual display and a viewer’s extra-filmic visual and social experience’ (Prince 1996: 33). The fictoreal discourse operating in In this World channels our encounter with Jamal and Enayat’s journey through our social familiarity with the digital medium. Furthermore, when discussing digital video’s power to render realistic worlds, it is necessary to take into considera-tion that, in contrast with the film image, the average spectator of the world auteur film approaches the digital video image not only as a consumer but also as a producer, since a significant amount of film spectators today have authored a variety of home videos (even if shot through their cell phones) or, at least, are well-aware of the processes behind the making of such audio-visual products. Therefore, the lack of seamlessness of In this World, the fact that its imperfect digital image offers an open canvas, collapsing as a cohesive whole through the visibility of its pixels, endows it with the very immediacy that viewers believe characterizes the real as related to their own more or less successful experiences as digital video users. In other words, the digital ficto-real film renounces the illusionist character that exists at the centre of main-stream cinema. Instead, it reinstates a different kind of realistic power based on the digital image’s imperfection since the current widespread accessibil-ity of the digital medium for personal use situates this imperfection within the realm of the quotidian. Thus, both In this World and Winterbottom’s later digital effort, The Road to Guantánamo, exist within a realistic framework that ranges from jerky hand-held home videos to the experiencing of computer memory malfunctioning while watching a downloaded file.

Winterbottom’s digital video image presents itself as one that does not impose a pre-established view on what it approaches but encounters it, feeds off it and only in part manages to record its defining ambiguities and nuances. Grounding the story on an existing historical reality from the beginning, Winterbottom offers an almanac of images that refuse to be reduced to the boundaries of the frame and point to an incessantly changing world around


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them. Partnering their reliance on factuality with the ubiquitous presence of the digital in the transmediascape of the current era. Rather than being total-izing, In This World and The Road to Guantánamo need the latent universes that escape their grip to exist as such. In other words, they must foreground their insufficiency to legitimate themselves as truthful since they act as contin-gent interventions into the real that could have existed in a variety of other manners, always dependent on an overflowing reality that escapes any kind of definitive categorization.

4. TRAPPED BETWEEN BORDERS: UNEVEN GLOBALIZATION AND WARFARE

The combination of the fictional and documentary modes is also the struc-tural core of Welcome to Sarajevo. In this case, the British director mobilizes the factual social status of the TV image to plunge the spectator into a diegetic universe that problematizes the distinction between the fictional and the real. The film tells the true story of a Bosnian 13-year-old, Emira, experiencing the horror in Sarajevo during the recent war in the territories of the former Yugoslavia and a British reporter’s attempts to save her.

Following the news of an outbreak of violence, western reporters rush to a Sarajevo street. When they arrive at their destination, the image freezes as they look, horrified, off-screen. The film then cuts to the point of view of a TV camera. The spectator encounters a series of blood-covered corpses. The spec-tacular brutality of blood triggers the spectators’ horror. Furthermore, the TV camera’s visual texture grounds our emotional reaction in the very fabric of the real: this really happened. The film activates the generally accepted institutional power of certain kinds of media images – such as TV footage – as bearers of factual evidence. As Thomas Elsaesser points out, the reality effect of the cine-matic image not only depends on its indexical relation to the pre-filmic world it captures, but is also a ‘function of the institutions in charge of its verification and dissemination’ (Elsaesser 1998: 208). What Winterbottom hijacks here then is not simply the rough imperfect aesthetics of the TV image as a bearer of truthfulness, but also its privileged cartographic positioning within the current mediascape as being endowed with a factual character. A question is raised: Are these TV images real footage, inserted in a fictional narrative or are they entirely constructed recreations based on actual recordings? The alterna-tion between these two visual modes throughout the film makes a definite answer for this question rather inconsequential. For, like Emir Kusturica in Underground (1995), Winterbottom uses newsreel footage not just to trigger its evidential character, but also to expose its inability to give a full account of the Bosnians’ real suffering from the trauma of war. Both films attempt to go beyond the widely circulated images of warfare in the Balkans in order to explore selected cases of those other underlying stories that have often been buried in mass graves or, at least, in the voiceless suffering faces newscasts typically deliver as exemplifying instances of the horror of war.

Welcome to Sarajevo features Francois Mitterrand, George Bush, Bill Clinton, and Helmut Kohl among other world leaders, addressing the spectator via the visual texture of the TV image. However, this parade of cold-blooded tech-nocrats fails to offer the spectator a thoughtful insight on the conflict the film fictionally revisits. Their words are filtered through the political frame-work that organizes their respective countries’ official discourse on the war. Here it is worth mentioning that Winterbottom deploys a similar technique


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5. Turtles can Fly is an Irani-Iraqi-French co-production shot in Ghobadi’s native Kurdistan with a cast of non-professional actors.

in the opening of The Road to Guantánamo. The film starts with George W. Bush answering a question regarding the identity of the Guantánamo prison-ers. Bush bluntly states: ‘These are bad people’. Winterbottom’s film dissects such a statement, rendering visible its duping ideological stance. In Welcome to Sarajevo the words of these politicians are uttered from a distant perspec-tive, devoid of any emotional attachment to the day-after-day slaughtered civil population. The film, conversely, embraces affect, centering on a British reporter’s efforts to rescue Emira from the madness of the Sarajevo cityscape. It builds up the reporter’s increasing attachment to the Sarajevo inhabitants in order to affix our emotional investment in Emira’s necessary exile for the sake of her survival. Emira’s story, similar to Jamal and Enayat’s, stands in for the sufferings of many other Bosnian children who experienced the devastating consequences of the war.

Like In this World and Welcome to Sarajevo, Turtles Can Fly offers an insight on the tragic effects on the body that the current geopolitical order performs on individuals from underdeveloped countries. At the same time, it diagnoses the subsequent abstraction move that characterizes western media coverage of armed conflicts in these areas.5 Set in a Kurdish town turned into a refugee camp on the border between Iraq and Turkey two weeks before the eruption of the US–Iraq war, the film recounts the death-bound day to day of a group of orphan children working as minefield deactivators.

The story opens with the suicide of Agrin – a 10-year-old girl. Immediately after, the narrative goes back a few days in time. The town people are trying to change the orientation of their antennas to get news of when the war will start. Satellite, the teenage leader and caretaker of the dozens of orphans, reports to the elder men that their antennas will not work but a satellite dish would. In other words, the town is indeed excluded from the thousand discourses about the imminent US intervention that flooded news channels for those privileged enough to have access to them. Their lack of access is marked by their techno-logical underdevelopment. Soon after, Satellite goes to a neighbouring market to buy a satellite dish for the town. He pays in cash and landmines. For the town’s orphans make a living by adventuring into landmines and deactivat-ing them. Aside from money, mines have become the strongest currency in this part of the world. Moreover, US mines have the highest exchange value. In fact, many of the children bear the traces of their previous encounters with mines, missing legs and arms. In other words, it is through the destructive assets the US military has left behind that these children can make a living and, at the same time, fall prey to death any day.

Once the satellite dish has been installed in the house of the elite of the Kurdish town, the governor and religious leaders sit down watching. They do not understand English, becoming, therefore, the epitome of the passive TV watcher who consumes an array of images and sounds without crite-ria. Now they are hooked to the worldwide digital network of information; however, their linguistic lack – not speaking English – deepens their position of exclusion. In fact, the town inhabitants do not find about the war through the satellite dish. Hengov – who everyone refers to as the ‘armless boy’ since he lacks both arms – warns them of the event. He has the ability to predict the future and his reputation has extended around the Iraq/Turkey border territo-ries. All his predictions anticipate tragic events one way or another. Although Ghobadi seems to state that in this part of the world there is no way out of death or physical suffering, Hengov’s power constitutes a kind of alternative knowledge that the Kurdish people can mobilize as opposed to the lying news


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reports that digital technology brings to their town. It is thus a competing voice that, irrationally infallible, only states the truth.

Once Hengov’s prediction is fulfilled and the war erupts, Ghobadi, like Winterbottom in Welcome to Sarajevo, resorts to utilization of newsreel foot-age. We see a few high-tech US bombers taking off from an aircraft carrier, a machine gun in action and Saddam Hussein’s falling statue. However, the succession of these spectacular images, which point to the institutional discourse of western governments and media about the war, fails to encom-pass the suffering of the limbless children of the Iraqi–Turkish border. They offer to those hooked to the worldwide networks of information a skewed and partial view of the complex multi-layered course of events that the use of military power causes. Immediately after bombarding the spectator with these images, the film returns to the diegetic universe of the Kurdish town as two US Apache helicopters fly by, throwing propagandistic pamphlets to the refu-gees gathered on a hill, stating liberation is coming.

By juxtaposing these two discourses – one belonging to the average media coverage of warfare in the lands beyond the West and, the other, an instance of propaganda – Turtles Can Fly uncovers the perverted discourse that has struc-tured most western media reports of the recent Iraq war and, more exten-sively, the coverage of warfare since we plunged into the media age, dating back to the Vietnam war. Soon after, a series of devastating events unfold involving the murder of an infant child by his mother – Agrin – a teenager herself. The US army does not bring salvation but the rearticulation of the bloody conflict Kurds have long lived through by shifting the power posi-tions between the different kinds of aggressors that may strike against them. A mine hits Satellite. To ease his pain, his 6-year-old subordinate, Shirkooh, brings him a present: an arm of Saddam Hussein’s statue. He has traded it with the American soldiers. In fact, he reports to Satellite that the mine busi-ness is no longer profitable and that the soldiers have told him that now the strongest currency are objects like the arm. In other words, the very signifiers of the clean-cut version of the war that US media have endlessly promoted, screening the ruthless consequences of warfare for those living in the coun-tries or regions where gunfire cruises the air and landmines explode.

Figure 1: US helicopters throw propaganda to the gathered Kurdish crowd.


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In the closing sequence of the film, Satellite stands, helped by casts, on the side of the road. American soldiers trot by, pursuing their next military target. At first, Satellite stares at the soldiers as though he were looking for a gesture of reciprocity. They ignore him. He then turns around and mimics their patronizing absenteeism. Soon thereafter, he walks along with Shirkooh in the opposite direction. In the beginning of the story, Satellite wished for the US military’s presence, celebrating American pop culture and hoping the western superpower would save his people from Saddam Hussein’s oppres-sion. Now he has realized that the US soldiers’ presence will not change anything. As temporary occupants of the Iraq/Turkey border town, their goals point in a different direction. The Americans have arrived, and now they are cruising by, moving on to juicier and more ‘spectacular’ targets.

5. GENERIC FICTION AND REALISM: THE AUTHENTICATING POWER OF ARTIFICE

Both Ghobadi and Winterbottom reject the identification of cinematic real-ism with the attempt to capture the irreducible ambiguity of an objective world. Their fictoreal narratives privilege the artifice-wrapped recreation of actual historical events, utilizing culturally coded realistic traits to appeal to the spectator both emotionally and intellectually. Although using different audio-visual equipment and rooting their approaches in the contemporary milieu through diverse aesthetic and narrative approaches, they both attempt to bring to the fore the invisibility of the unprivileged by crystallizing their many stories in the vicissitudes of some of their kind, like Jamal, Enayat, Agrin or Satellite. Seeking to do away with artifice and narrate the story from within, Winterbottom lays out a visual digital ground zero that he paradoxi-cally contaminates with a series of generic gestures. If the imperfection of his digital imagery points to an attempt to un-mediate, his flawless soundscapes constantly remind us of the film’s fictional constructedness.

At the Iran military checkpoint episode in In this World, Winterbottom and Grisoni wanted the Iranian authorities to turn Jamal and Enayat back to Pakistan, basing their story on the real experience of an immigrant they

Figure 2: Shirkooh hands Satellite Saddam Hussein’s arm.


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6. Winterbottom and Grisoni explain this procedure in the DVD extras see above.

7. This episode is based on a real event: the death of a group of Chinese immigrants inside a container in Bristol, England.

had encountered during filming. They approached the Iranian commander in charge of the border post and explained their intentions to him. The commander agreed to grant them permit to shoot on the condition that he would play the role of the officer that turns the Afghanis back to Pakistan. Moreover, he instructed the film crew not to tell him who Jamal and Enayat were. He would simply get on the bus and identify them.6 Dario Martinelli’s score frames this sequence with the timing and syntax of a thriller. In addition, the camera intercuts between the Iranian commander’s checking on other passengers and Jamal and Enayat’s nervous behaviour, focalizing on their fear about being identified as Pakistanis. We are with them, occupying the same nerve-racking space as they do, and yet we are also drawn to experience such a psychological state via the deployment of a non-diegetic suspenseful score that Jamal and Enayat cannot hear. Similarly, when Enayat and most of Jamal’s fellow travellers run out of oxygen and perish inside the crate in which they have been shipped from Turkey to Italy, Winterbottom chooses to frame this human tragedy with a highly melodramatic score. In addition, all diegetic sounds are minimized except for the cries of a baby, making the spec-tator aware of the tremendous emotional weight of the demise of the baby’s parents. What is more, the British director uses a highly contemplative visual approach to this scene, attempting to mobilize the spectator’s affective response. Ultimately, adopting Jamal’s point of view, the camera turns shaky and hectic as it follows him escaping from the anonymous harbour warehouse where the Italian smuggling entrepreneurs had opened the crate. However, in the preceding series of shots, as the horror of human loss is unveiled, the camera aims differently: to make their tragedy stand for many others, posi-tioning the narrative in a universal space of heartfelt sympathy that the musical score anchors within a discourse of unambiguous sentimentality.7 Spectators may indeed identify this carefully woven fictoreal scenario as real or they may be thrown out of the story due to its manipulative character. One way or another, the question In this World poses is whether the fictoreal is a historically legitimate aesthetic to approach the current epoch in tune with the changing distinction between the mediated and the unmediated in the digital landscape. It also updates the long-lasting debate regarding the cinematic medium’s capacity to render reality. For a consideration of In this World’s reality effect in purely visual terms would undoubtedly reproduce the visual fetishistic bias that characterizes most scholarly writing regarding the topic of cinematic realism dating back to the works of André Bazin on post-World War II Italian cinema. As Angelo Restivo states, Italian Neorealism, from Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1945) to Bicycle Thief (Vittorio de Sica, 1948), was haunted by a melodramatic drive – especially through the use of highly senti-mental musical soundscapes – that competed with its realistic visual determi-nation (2002: 23). In other words, as much as deep focus photography may be endowed with a higher degree of realism than flatter compositions, Neorealist films – a backbone of scholarly histories of cinematic realism – are indeed generically coded, and therefore partially built upon the conscious implemen-tation of artifice in an attempt to capture the phenomenological ambiguity of the real. Therefore, the key question to answer is not whether Winterbottom attempts to filter out all artifice and construct a realistic cinematic product but to point out how he capitalizes on multiple artificial techniques to remain truthful to the reality he aims to represent.

In this World attempts to get closer to the real by focusing on a social group that occupies a marginalized status in the mainstream media in combination


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with a juxtaposition of a home-made approach to the digital image and the widespread use of well-known fiction film conventions. Winterbottom carries out this re-centering operation by resorting to the spectators’ familiarity with both digital imagery and a series of cinematic generic registers to draw the film’s subject matter closer to them.

When Jamal and Enayat cross the mountains between Iran and Turkey walk-ing through a series of trails, ‘the digital photography takes on the halting mini-malism of a struggling download’ (Winter). For a few seconds, as they hide from a border patrol, they look into the distance. Then the digital image fractures in its minimal components. It becomes a conglomerate of discrete pixels that, although still allowing the spectator to identify a series of objects – a truck, a rifle, a human body, the contours of a town in the background of the frame – in order to grasp the intensity of the life-threatening situation that the immigrants are encounter-ing, it sacrifices mimetic realism for the sake of generic verisimilitude. Attempting to simulate Jamal and Enayat’s experiencing of the situation, the jerky camera constantly moves, embracing their point of view as they try to make sense of their dangerous whereabouts in the Turkish mountains. As a consequence, the digital image explodes as a self-contained unit. Trapped within fast-moving hand-held aesthetics, its very materiality becomes exposed and, at the same time, natural-ized, reaching out to link this carefully fabricated and thrilling episode of cinematic action with the transmediascape that millions of wired users experience routinely while surfing the Web. The realistic effect of the ‘download’ look of the border-crossing scramble is intimately related to the set of camera angles and cuts that structure the sequence as a whole.

This series of choices points to the manipulation of the time-space of the episode to generate an emotional grip on the spectator. In addition, even if the digital image seems to fall apart, the diegetic soundscape of the sequence is as faultlessly minimal as it is effective. Consequently, the fictoreal’s capacity to simulate imperfection in visual terms in an attempt to offer a perceptually real universe is unavoidably tainted by the traces of artificiality with which the forces of editing and sound repeatedly colour the digital image. Paradoxically, these stains of artificiality grant this sequence its illusionist appeal in as much

Figure 3: Jamal and Enayat cross the Turkish mountains.


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as it revisits the generic codes, continuity editing parameters and soundscape architecture of dozens of mainstream films that daily conquer the multiplex (and often the art-house) promising a fun-ride of cinematic, ‘in-your-face’, spectacle.

6. REFUGEES FOR NOW, STILL ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS

In the closing sequence of In this World, Jamal, after entering the United Kingdom hidden underneath a cargo truck, makes a phone call to Pakistan. He has arrived safely. Enayat, conversely, is no longer in this world. Earlier in the narrative, we learned one of the key operating mechanisms by which the illegal immigrant smuggling business functions: half of the payment is given before the journey starts off; once the immigrant has arrived to his destination, he makes a phone call to confirm this fact. Then, the other half of the money is delivered. The juxtaposition of Jamal’s telling of Enayat’s death with the profiteering exchange that his phone call activates points to the dehumanizing nature of the smuggling practices. If Winterbottom purposely gives a face and a voice to Jamal and Enayat to transform a statistic into two human beings with whom the spectator can empathize, the monetary exchange that frames the possibility of their overland journey explicitly underscores the perverted economics of power that cuts across all social, ethnic and national strata.

After Jamal’s phone call, the image cuts to a series of shots of Shamshatoo. Refugees, mostly children, stare and smile at the camera. We are back at the beginning of the story, exploring the camp’s daily life with apparent spon-taneity. We then see Jamal entering a mosque, kneeling down and praying. Cut to black. A title card announces that Jamal has been granted asylum in the United Kingdom only until he turns 18 years. He will then have to leave London, one day before his eighteenth birthday. By inserting this piece of factual information, the film is slipping back into the documentary mode with which it opened via the use of an omniscient voice-over device. A question assaults the spectator: Is the title card referring to the fictionalized or to the real Jamal? By refusing to mark a clear-cut distinction between the real and the fictional and denying the spectator a perceivable transition between the two, In this World emphasizes how they both work within an epistemological continuum.

Winterbottom explains in the DVD extras that after shooting the film Jamal went back to Pakistan and then returned to England to ask for political asylum, a condition that was only granted temporarily. However, if we ignore Winterbottom’s extra-diegetic clarification, and we acknowledge only the information given to us by the film itself, we may be able to define the struc-tural core of the fictoreal film as a paradoxical space of historically grounded uncertainty. The information given by the title card re-frames the film’s eviden-tial value by ambiguously situating the spectator in a liminal space between the real and fictional Jamal – since we do not know to which one of the two Jamals it refers to. In addition, the title card operates as a closure mechanism – a fundamental structural principle in the majority of mainstream generic narratives – arguably undermining the fundamental authenticating drive Winterbottom’s digital aesthetics has managed to generate. In order to point to the continuum between the fictional and the real Jamal, the film resorts to the centralization of Jamal’s persona in the narrative as a way to engage spec-tators in an emotional level, banking on the widespread usage of this tech-nique in fictional narratives as a key mechanism to denounce. Ultimately, the film presents Jamal, Enayat and their kind as the unwanted, illegal, surplus


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that the unstoppable, uneven and (il)legal flows of transnational Capital cannot avoid creating and whose existence they attempt to contain through the ruthless enforcement of highly selective immigration policies. If those fail, once the illegal immigrant manages to cross over into the western fortress, legalization becomes the last step into a fully able citizenship.

REFERENCES

Elsaesser, Thomas (1998), ‘Digital Cinema: Delivery, Event, Time’, in Thomas Elsaesser and Kay Hoffman (eds), Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or Cable?, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp. 9–26.

Ezra, Elizabeth and Rowden, Terry (eds) (2006), ‘General Introduction: What is Transnational Cinema?’, in Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden (eds), Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader, London: Routledge, pp. 1–12.

García Espinosa, Julio (2000), ‘For an Imperfect Cinema’, in Toby Miller and Robert Stam (eds), Film and Theory: An Anthology, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 287–97.

Hjort, Mette (2009), ‘On the Plurality of Cinematic Transnationalism’, in Natasa Durovicova and Kathleen E. Newman (eds), World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, pp. 12–33.

Johnson, Randal and Stam, Robert (eds) (1995), Brazilian Cinema, New York: Columbia University Press.

Manovich, Lev (1999), ‘What is digital Cinema?’, in Peter Lunenfeld (ed.), The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT, pp. 172–97.

McQuire, Scott (2000), ‘Impact Aesthetics: Back to the Future in Digital Cinema? Millennial Fantasies’, Convergence, 6: 2, pp. 41–61.

Naficy, Hamid (2001), An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Prince, Stephen (1996), ‘True Lies: Perceptual Realism, Digital Images, and Film Theory’, Film Quarterly, 49: 3, pp. 27–37.

Renov, Michael (2004), The Subject of Documentary, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Restivo, Angelo (2002), The Cinema of Economic Miracles: Visuality and Modernization in the Italian Film Art, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Shaw, Deborah (forthcoming), ‘Deconstructing and Reconstructing “Transnational Cinema”’, in Stephanie Dennison (ed.), Transnational Film Financing in the Hispanic World, London: Tamesis.

Shohat, Ella and Stam, Robert (1994), Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, New York, NY: Routledge.

Winston, Brian (1995), Claiming the Real: The Giersonian Documentary and its Legitimations, London: British Film Institute.

Winter, Jessica (2007), ‘World in Motion: Following Refugees from Peshawar to London, Director Michael Winterbottom finds his Personal Velocity’, The Village Voice Online, 8 January, http://www1.villagevoice.com/news/0339,winter,47214,1.html

Yiman Wang (2005), ‘The Amateur’s Lighting Rod: DV Documentary in Postsocialist China’, Film Quarterly, 58: 4, pp. 16–26.

SUGGESTED CITATION

Rodríguez Ortega, V. (2011), ‘Digital technology, aesthetic imperfection and political film-making: Illegal bodies in motion’, Transnational Cinemas 2: 1, pp. 3–19, doi: 10.1386/trac.2.1.3_1


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CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS

Vicente Rodríguez Ortega has an MA in Communications from the University of Iowa in Communications and a PhD. in Cinema Studies from NYU. He has contributed to several book collections and journals. He is also a documen-tary filmmaker. He is the co-editor of Contemporary Spanish Cinema and Genre (Manchester University Press). He currently teaches at la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.

Contact: Calle Toledo 19, 5C, 28005 Madrid, Spain.E-mail: [email protected]


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Documents

Digital technology, aesthetic imperfection and political film-making: Illegal bodies in motion