Reliving migrations, resolving dislocation Bani Khoshnoudi

“Home for the exile in a secular and contingent world is always provisional.” - Trinh T. Minh-ha, When the Moon Waxes Red

She had not drawn something out of nothing (a meaningless act), but given to nothing, in its form of nothing, the form of something. The act of not seeing had now its integral eye. The silence, the real silence, the one which is not composed of silenced words, of possible thoughts, had a voice. - Maurice Blanchot (as quoted in When the Moon Waxes Red)

For me, as an ethnographer and filmmaker, there is almost no boundary between documentary film and films of fiction. The cinema, the art of the double, is already the transition from the real world to the imaginary world. - Jean Rouch, Ciné-Ethnography

As a filmmaker concerned with ideas of subjectivity, collective memory, and representation, I am inspired by the films of Jean Rouch and his theories on the relationship between the viewer and the viewed, the ethnographer and the “ethnographee”. In this essay, I consider how my approach to making Transit, a short film that lies at the border of documentary and fiction, is an example of Rouch’s notion of a “shared anthropology,” while also pushing his concepts further to think about representation, subjectivity, and marginalized people in ways that he may not have explicitly developed. I describe my filmmaking methods in dialogue with Rouch’s methods within a framework that is informed in part by psychoanalysis and draws from the work of filmmaker and theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha. I begin with the specific context out of which Transit was born in order to articulate (however partially) the particular situation of the film’s subjects, but also because it reflected and impacted the conditions of the film’s making and its greater meaning to my own process as a filmmaker. Testimonials and repetition Transit is embedded in the political and social context of the struggles in France in the early 2000s, focused on migrants, or exiles, as our group preferred to call them, who were arriving to France and ending up in the Northern coastal city of Calais. Our work focused on “Sangatte”, a sort of makeshift “refugee” camp run by the Red Cross, monitored by the French police, and shunned by all. I put the word refugee in quotations because the people who were staying at the camp were anything but “refugees”, a term that would imply the accordance of an official status by the French government. In the case of Sangatte, the men, women and children who were in the camp had virtually fallen off the institutional radar, living a completely marginal and invisible existence.

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I first traveled to Sangatte in 2001, curious to see what this place was where apparently thousands of Iranians, Kurds, Afghanis, and people from other parts of the world had been arriving at a regular tempo. My first visit to the camp left me awestruck; people were living in deplorable conditions in France, within an official framework, to the indifference of most of the French population. I continued to visit Sangatte for the next two years, and increasingly became invested in the stories of the exiles. I found their sustained survival within such a tragic context a powerful testimony to life. The stories I heard are far too many to recount here. A young Iranian man, crying in a corner with me, described how smugglers in a forest in Yugoslavia had taken the women away from the group only to bring them back hours later at their leisure; what those women went through would remain a secret. A woman from Isfahan, who had given birth while staying at the camp, was nursing her 3 week old baby as she spoke loudly and confidently of the reasons why her family had left Iran. Her presence seemed to overshadow her husband’s, as he had lost touch with reality and was overcome by severe depression. Lastly, I cannot get out of my mind the young couple from Tehran, in their mid thirties, middleclass, and unable or unwilling to relate to any of the other exiles, maybe out of fear of admitting to the gravity of their situation. While they tried to maintain a psychological notion of “home” within this context, their six-year-old and two-year-old daughters were learning how to share with the other “lost” children. In the play center, the older girl drew a colorful picture with crayons and handed it to me: a mother, a father, and two sisters, behind them a big house with a tree in front. The stories that I heard and the conditions that I witnessed virtually became an obsession for me. I could not stop listening and imagining the wretched events that each person described, filling in with my own images the blank spots where their memory did not go.

Autobiography and subjectivity As I discovered and thought more about the psychological impacts of displacement and exile on subjectivity, I came to realize how my interest in Sangatte, specifically my desire to connect to those displaced people and their stories, came from a need to enact a repetition of traumatic events from my own past. In 1979, as the Revolution came to a close and Khomeini took absolute power in Iran, my family immigrated to the United States. I was two years old, and my sister was seven. The trip we made, though not as long and perilous as the exiles at Sangatte, was also enveloped in shock, uncertainty, separation, and ultimately dislocation. I believe that through communication, the impact on one’s subjective relation to the world and to oneself can become a shared experience. The collective repetition of trauma- what happens when groups gather to exhume pain, or in most cases, when whole populations repeat historical events through unconscious processes and repeated mistakes- is part of everyone’s existence. In psychoanalytic theory, the drive towards repetition is one seen as a means to undo trauma. Filmmaker and theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha describes how repetition, consciously constructed through image creation, can work to undo stereotypes or fixed ideas of marginalized peoples’ subjectivities. Repetition as a practice and a strategy differs from the incognizant repetition in that it bears with it the seeds of transformation. When repetition calls attention to itself as repetition, it can no longer be reduced to connote sameness and stagnancy as it usually does in the context of Western progress and accumulation, and its globally imposed emancipatory projects… Repetition outplays itself as repetition, and each repetition is never the same as the former. In it, there is circulation, there is intensity, and there is innovation (Trinh, 190).

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In the fall of 2002, the newly named French Minister of the Interior, Nicolas Sarkozy shut down Sangatte as his first action within a new no-tolerance campaign that would develop into the racist political agenda that France is embedded in today. With the complicity of the media, Sarkozy argued that closing Sangatte would get rid of the bait, and thus deter exiles from arriving to France. He insisted that once the camp was destroyed, men and women would no longer leave everything behind and risk their lives to make it to what he claimed had become a famous French attraction. He was sorely wrong- the situation in the streets of Calais persists even today. What followed this political decision was a re-gathering of exiles in the squares of Paris. Shortly thereafter, I helped found a collective in Paris that focused on the 10th arrondissement where the largest number of exiles was gathering to sleep in a public square close to the Gare de l’Est; a sort of make-shift Sangatte. As I continued to work with the exiles and listen to their stories, in 2004 I decided to make a film with a group of them. Mostly Afghanis, Kurds, and Iranians, I had been helping to write their asylum cases, and became engaged in the difficult process of their adaptation to a new environment. Transit, was born out of our close collaboration and a collective process that I believe mirrored our individual and shared needs for repetition. I consider Jean Rouch’s cinema, and specifically his engagement in the former French colonies and in the Niger delta as embodied in Moi, un Noir (1958), Jaguar (1967), and Cocorico! Monsieur Poulet (1974), as phenomenal examples of a cinema of repetition. Through reenactment, re-inscription of story, and re-figuration of roles, Rouch and the people in his films unraveled collective trauma that reflected a shared colonial history. While revolutionizing methods of ethnography, Rouch and his collaborators questioned the work of representation and its subjective roots; finally scrutinizing the privileged foreigner’s vision of the Other. The methods Rouch advocated for and practiced were not only part of a broader vision of changing relationships within the field of ethnography; I believe they also came out of his own need as the privileged (white, male, French) subject to transform the power-dynamics of the ethnographic paradigm. Working with improvisational techniques and blurring the documentary and fictional forms can allow for a freeing up of the site of language and image making. This does not mean that the relationship of filmmaker and filmed does not continue to be a conflicted one, but rather, that an opening within subject relations is created that can lead to more nuanced and complex representational practices. Theorizing around the autobiographical, Trinh continues her exploration of representation, production methods and the transformation of power relationships embedded within constructs of knowledge and subjectivity. Although Trinh is writing in a different context, her ideas can shed light on this notion of “shared anthropology”. Even if the process of making the film is not always visible or self-reflexive in Rouch’s films, or in Transit, I see resonance with Trinh’s thoughts on the “autobiographical”. Autobiographical strategies offer another example of ways of breaking with the chain of invisibility. Diaries, memoirs, and recollections are widely used by marginalized people to gain a voice and to enter the arena of visibility… As strategies, again, they retain all their subverting potential… Memories within come out of the material that precedes and defines a person… Thus, autobiography both as singularity and as collectivity is a way of making history and of rewriting culture (Trinh, 191). During many months, I was closely involved with the exiles and their stories. Many of us would spend long hours helping them to write their asylum cases. During the winter of 2003,

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our Collective began a squatting campaign, occupying a different location with a group of exiles every night. These moments spent together united us around the shared experience of occupying space, and provided us an opening to share our testimonies and emotions. While recognizing our different experiences and my privileged position as the filmmaker, I would like to make the claim that the “autobiographical”- our personal pasts and our individual traumaswas inherent to the shared work of representation. Our collaboration was reflective of those moments together as well as of each of our personal stories. The representational form (of the film we were making together) was built through a sharing of past experiences through communication and a sharing of physical space in the present moment, so that personal memories and experiences became collective. In this way, Transit opened the way for what Trinh calls “…the emergence of new forms of subjectivity”: …the subjectivity of a non-I/plural I, which is different from the subjectivity of the sovereign I (subjectivism) or the non-subjectivity of the all-knowing I (objectivism). Such a subjectivity defies the normality of all binary oppositions including those between sameness and otherness, individual and societal, elite and mass, high culture and popular culture (Trinh, 191-92). That which was theirs, became mine, and that which was mine, became theirs. Instead of defining the Other’s subjectivity through an imposed, pre-determined frame dominated by a Western paradigm, the methods used to make Transit allowed for a transformative space to be created where a dynamic interchange between personal and collective identification guided the making of the images in the film.

Process: visible, invisible While taking inspiration from Rouch’s work in Africa, I adapted the methods to our situation, bringing about a distinctive set of instances of collaboration. Unlike Rouch’s use of shared storytelling structures, like in the narration for Jaguar or Moi, un Noir, I decided to write the basic narrative and the scenes for Transit on my own. Using the many testimonies I had heard during my time at Sangatte and thereafter, I wrote a script in order to establish the important events and actions that I thought would best reflect the experiences of the exiles that I had met with. I wanted to melt together the hundreds of stories that I had documented over those few years in order to lay down a foundation that would allow for a fragmented experience; one that would reflect the collective trauma more than any one individualized story. I still decided to have two main characters, but formed them by blending multiple stories, bringing forward this complex dynamic of singularity within shared experience. Once the foundation was established, we began our collaboration. The script was translated into Farsi, and I organized a meeting with a group of about twenty exiles with whom I had established close relationships. As a group, we communicated about our needs and desires in working towards a collectively made document. Those who wanted to act in the film came forward, and a few of them were interested in playing the role of the main character, Arya, a young man from Afghanistan. I set up a more traditional casting process, using acting exercises with them in order to choose the best match. With the group of actors formed, we began open discussions about the story and the scenes. These discussions always had multiple voices, an important aspect of our collaboration. The exiles actively reflected on and determined their singular voices within the group, and I listened to their concerns and ideas on how they wanted certain things to be translated to the screen. We continued with this dynamic again during the film shoot. Instead of rehearsing the scenes, we would discuss openly as a group, and then the

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exiles/actors would discuss amongst themselves, before beginning their improvisations for the camera. The dialogues I wrote were also open to interpretation and transformation. In terms of mise-en-scène and camera placement, I decided on very defined and determined shots. This fixed aesthetic accentuated the fictional qualities of the film, while allowing space for the exiles’ interpretation as “documentary” subjects. The process of “fictionalizing” their story created some distance and an alternate framework from which to analyze and communicate their situation. In addition to my presence as the director, the processes of improvisation encouraged the exiles to appropriate the space of the film for themselves and to direct each other. In this way, they helped determine and guide the action of the film, based on their own personal, first-hand experiences. They approached their roles through a collective understanding amongst themselves of what had happened to them, and what they needed to show the viewer. Other important interactions took place off screen: between the crew and the actors, and between the actors and the locations- those places that mirrored the foreign environments that had been so hostile to them. The story begins in Yugoslavia, where a group of exiles are moving across borders, intentionally invisible and physically ambiguous in the film to reflect the blurred sense of place inherent to many experiences of clandestine migration. I scouted locations in France that could convey the environments that were described to me. (Clips) The second half of the film takes place in a small, holding room where the main character joins a new group of exiles. This is where they must wait for the smuggler to put them en route to the next phase of their voyage towards England. The dynamics of this group, off camera and in the film, took on a similar collaborative element. There were also two additions to the story at this point: the presence of a migrant woman, which I will elaborate on later, and the character of the smuggler, who, in the context of Sangatte, was often a migrant himself. At one point in the film, the smuggler startles the group as they are briefly trying to break the bleakness of their situation. The following scene came out of improvisation and a desire on the part of the exiles for a brief moment of relief in the film, and most definitely during their perilous journeys. (Clips) The last idea that I would like to address is the notion of the visible and the invisible within representation and memory, but also within the dominant structures of subjectivity and subject positions. Rather than a simple dichotomy, complex situations and dynamics are at play in the different processes of reproducing structures of visibility. As a filmmaker I am interested in developing transformative representational practices that can underline and blur these notions of visibility and invisibility. As such, I was constantly negotiating the multiple dynamics of privilege involved in the making of Transit. As the director and someone with access to Western institutions, I held a privileged position in relation to all of the exiles I was collaborating with. My experience as a woman further complicated my position in relation to the men participating in the film. This was most clear in relation to my concern with making visible the differences between the experiences of the male and female exiles. During the time I spent at Sangatte, I met very few women, and despite their presence, their story was ignored within the master narrative of migration. Those who were not accompanied by their husbands or other family members were few, and communicating with them was very difficult. As women en route, their situation was subject to violence and tragedy that was specifically because they were women. The shame surrounding events past was so strong that their stories could barely be spoken and were rarely heard. The burden and shame carried by the women meant their struggles were compounded - ostracized

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and ignored within the larger mainstream as well as among their own communities of exiles. They had been made invisible. Khorshid, the female character in the film, enters the story as Arya arrives to the holding room. She has been there for an unspecified amount of time, and we discover that the smuggler has been sexually abusing her, making her situation an indefinite and precarious one. I decided to cast a young, non-professional Iranian actress, who despite being outside the migration story, had emigrated from Iran with her parents in the early 1980s. Her story was also one of displacement, but of a different kind, which allowed her to keep an important emotional distance to play the part. While I was consulting the exiles about the script, the young Afghani who would play Arya was unhappy with the way Khorshid’s story was supposed to unfold: his character would not stand up to the smuggler to defend her openly. He insisted that we should change the script for his character to fight the smuggler in front of the camera. After an open discussion about what people had witnessed during their passage, we decided not to change the story because the desired revision did not reflect the reality and gravity of the situation. Because of their dependency on the smugglers, the men were not able to fight back or speak up, however much they had wanted to, if they had wanted to do so. As a woman, it was important for this film to make visible the impossible situation female exiles are placed in, and as such, I remained firm on this part of the story. This uneasy disconnect between representing the reality of the situation as the exiles had collectively recounted it, and the individual of the young actor to disrupt the reality within the fictional space of the film, symbolized the trauma and guilt for all involved and made the re-enactment of these scenes all the more meaningful. The result of keeping these scenes in the film is a strong sense of unconscious shame and their isolation of her through acting out a quasi-total disregard in the film. The way the group of men interpreted their roles through improvisation precisely emphasized the invisibility of her character and allowed for an uncomfortable repetition to unfold. (Clips) The notion of a collaborative experience, based on shared or collective memory-work, attests to the possibilities of a “shared anthropology” and the political transformations that it can facilitate. In my own case, the process of making this film was an urgent and necessary event in my own life; one that allowed me to begin representing to myself the past traumas born of immigration and displacement.

Works cited Rouch, Jean. “The Staging of Reality and the Documentary Point of View of the Imaginary” from “Ciné-Anthropology, Jean Rouch with Enrico Fuchignoni”. Ciné-Ethnography. Ed. Steven Feld. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Trinh, T. Minh-ha. “World as a foreign land.” When the Moon Waxes Red. New York: Routledge, 1991.

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