Strangers Within (eBook)

I try to understand the intensity of my chagrin, and why I am missing a woman I spoke to for fifteen minutes … Now she is gone, taking away with her my good opinion of myself, which, of course, is unforgivable. Isn’t that the kind of thing that we fear strangers will do? Disturb. Betray. Prove they are not like us. That is why it is so hard to know what to do with them.

— Toni Morrison

In her text ‘Strangers’, written in 1988 and reproduced here, Toni Morrison is both enlivened and disturbed by an encounter with a fisherwoman – a stranger – whom she names Mother Something. The temporary presence of Mother Something, and their conversation – lasting merely fifteen minutes – leaves an indelible impression. The fisherwoman announces that she will return but does not, and is nowhere to be found. Her disappearance provokes conflicting responses: betrayal, fascination, obsession. She becomes an object of Morrison’s projections, a cause for either false alarm or reverence. On reflection, Morrison realises that these emotions are provoked by a fear of the stranger within herself. This echoes with the title of this anthology, borrowed from Julia Kristeva. Kristeva proposes that we discover our own disturbing otherness by our projective apparition of the other at the heart of our attempts to maintain a ‘solid’ us. Accepting the difference within ourselves, she says, is the ultimate condition of our being with others.1

Kristeva’s definition of the stranger within felt resonant when, two years ago, we first talked about putting together a screening programme focusing on the relational possibilities of the documentary encounter. The idea grew from a conversation we had about two of our own films: Slow Delay (2018), based on Therese’s chance encounter with the elderly twins Trevor and Raymond, and Next Year We Will Leave (2021), a reconciliation with Juliette’s hometown, Paris, through a dialogue with strangers. We talked about how they, although differently, shared a sense that the encounter with the person(s) – strangers – filmed spilled beyond the screen, directly affecting our own lives in the making. We wondered whether this is always the case in any type of filmmaking process.

This question led us to further reflect on the interrelations between encounters, hospitality and autobiography. Encounters, particularly with an emphasis on the unexpected and non-predetermined encounter and its relationship to filmmaking processes. Hospitality, inspired by Jacques Derrida’s two lectures on hospitality, held at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris in 1996. In ‘Foreigner Question’ and ‘Step of Hospitality / No Hospitality’, Derrida considers hospitality as a question of what arrives at the borders in the initial surprise of contact with an other, a stranger, a foreigner.2 Autobiography, with an emphasis on exploring a personal cinema where the first-person narrative echoes the stories of those filmed.

The screening programme kept being delayed, and instead what was initially conceived as an associated pamphlet gradually grew into a work of its own – this anthology. We researched the works of filmmakers, writers and artists that resonated with the idea of ‘the stranger within’. While our initial impulse concentrated on an exploration of filmmaking processes, we felt compelled to include writers and artists whose work – albeit in discrete ways – spoke to our concerns: Annie Ernaux, Toni Morrison, Adam Christensen, Jane Fawcett, Bruno De Wachter, Gareth Evans.

While encountering others in documentary processes is almost always (by its very nature) unpredictable, predeterminations of a question, an idea, a concept are often palpably felt. Projections onto those filmed are common (if not unavoidable), whether through logically arriving at certain narratives or through interpretations of people’s life experiences. If a person does or thinks ‘this’, it must mean ‘that’.

In both the physical and social sciences, suggests anthropologist and filmmaker David MacDougall, intentions are generally favoured. You need to have an idea of the direction of your research and of your main question, otherwise you merely have a muddle of undirected interests. The outcome can often be predicted from the questions asked, and the work serves to test conclusions already guessed at. Occasionally this opens up a completely new line of inquiry, but this is seen as exceptional rather than part of the original intention. MacDougall instead proposes ‘dislocation as method’. In this approach, expectations may be upset, revised or superseded, and objectives recast by particular experiences:

Here the outcome is unpredictable and open to sudden shifts of direction. To work in this way often means entrusting yourself to strangers and there is always the risk of becoming a stranger yourself … For the filmmaker it is more than a calculated risk: it is a voluntary act of dislocation.3

MacDougall reminds us how letting go of our preconceptions involves an element of risk. When filmmakers are not sure what to think and not sure of the direction an encounter may take, the process becomes guided by uncertainty and doubt. Not trying to dominate or shy away from the unknown requires trust in the discovery process.

Addressing the making of her films Estate, a Reverie (2015) and Here for Life (2019), Andrea Luka Zimmerman describes the value of an approach that embraces the unfinished and the clumsy; of going on a yet-to-be-defined journey with the people filmed. With each new film, she suggests, there is a need to see in a way that is as yet unknown. Wandering and drifting is also welcomed in Ruth Beckermann’s Those Who Go Those Who Stay (2013), in which she sets out to make a film with an intentionally unintentional gaze. This takes her on an unexpected journey across Europe and the Mediterranean; an embodiment of her suggestion that every detour changes the destination.

Caught between two worlds (or more), filmmaker and writer Trinh T. Minh-ha’s approach to autobiography values movement and journey and accommodates the exploration of our multiple selves. As a stranger to a new environment, everything safe and sound is destabilised. Trinh speaks of a voyage out of a known self back into the unknown self. The self loses its fixed boundaries – a disturbing yet potentially empowering practice of difference. There’s a strength in defencelessness, advises photographer and filmmaker Khalik Allah, and in laying down your armour. In IWOW: I Walk on Water (2020), filmed mainly on the corner of 125th Street and Lexington Avenue in Harlem, New York City, he engages in a filmmaking process guided by chance encounters and by his ongoing friendship with the homeless Haitian man Frenchie. He explains how whenever he meets another person he is also meeting a part of himself. Here, the autobiographical meets the to-be-shared biography of the subject.

Seen this way, the filmic encounter could be interpreted as a hospitable act on both sides of the camera, allowing for a shared experience: the filmed welcomes the maker into their life, and, in turn, the lens becomes a temporary shelter for the filmed. In his interview about The Filmmaker’s House (2020), filmmaker Marc Isaacs points out that ‘camera’ means ‘room’ in Latin. To film someone is also to welcome them into a tangible or intangible space: one’s gaze, one’s house or life. The porosity between ‘life space’ and ‘filmic space’ opens to a wider question: can or should the encounter with the other through film change the maker’s life? Like any encounter, it has the power to do so. In Far and Near (2003), writer and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo meets people in rural Wales whose differences from and similarities to herself allow her to reflect on her own life and journey.

Yet strict boundaries are often palpable when filming another and tend to separate the spaces behind and in front of the camera. Jean Rouch argues that the filmic encounter is like no other: the camera acts as a psychoanalytic stimulant on the filmed, who opens up in a way they would not otherwise have done.4 The power of the camera and the gaze is illustrated by Marilou Parolini’s vulnerability when confiding her feelings of loneliness and depression to sociologist Edgar Morin in Chronicle of a Summer (1961), Rouch’s seminal documentary made in collaboration with Morin. Welcoming someone into one’s gaze always implies a power relation. The gaze, as we know, holds an insistent potential as an agent of control.

Trinh memorably proposes a distinction between ‘speaking nearby’ and ‘speaking about’: to speak nearby implies an open gaze, one that does not impose itself on the other or seek to ignore the space between maker and subject. Instead, it lets them ‘come in and fill that space as they wish’. She continues:

By not trying to assume a position of authority in relation to the other, you are actually freeing yourself from the endless criteria generated with such an all-knowing claim and its hierarchies in knowledge.5

Film is necessarily a relational medium. What does it mean for filmmakers to let go of their position of authority to adopt one of openness and vulnerability, one that allows them to be affected by the other beyond the strictly defined...