Exil and the Cinematic Mood of Racism

Abstract

Exil and the Cinematic Mood of Racism Olivia Landry (bio) Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. —Edward W. Said, "Reflections of Exile" How can cinema recreate the experience of everyday racism? This is the question that motivates this essay, and one that goes beyond mere narrative content. Racism and racist acts have long been portrayed in many different films. This is rather a question about how racism is experienced by those it targets and how this experience translates into the language of cinema, from genre and aesthetics to expression and affective attunement. What is the cinematic mood of racism? Jordan Peele's American horror film Get Out (US, 2017) has received much praise for its allegorical recreation of the experience of racism in liberal white society, specifically the experience of being Black in America. In many ways the first of its kind, Get Out is a film about racism that mobilizes the cinematic genre of horror with its conventions of suspense, jump scares, the fantastical, and slasher violence to portray racism in contemporary America. But the culminating racialized violence of the film and its crest, one that eventually becomes inverted by the main character's successful escape from a rich white family's plot to use his young body to achieve eternal youth, consists chiefly of the true-to-life microaggressions this character, Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), faces vis-à-vis the police and the family. As Isabel Pinedo asserts, "In contrast to most American popular culture, Get Out centers black suffering in a way that neither [End Page 223] renders black people as abject nor mediates this suffering through a white character. The centrality of a black protagonist makes visible the otherwise invisible whiteness of characters (Dyer 1997) in horror film."1 As a point of departure, Get Out provides a notable example of a film's generic assertion of the experience of racism and therefore the possibilities of the cinematic medium to bring visibility to the otherwise invisible whiteness of characters. In this essay I turn to a more recent and lesser-known film, Visar Morina's 2020 Kosovan German film Exil/Exile. It is fair to surmise that what Peele does for the horror film, Morina does for the psychological thriller.2 Distinct in many ways from Get Out, Exil nonetheless similarly captures a cinematic mood of racism. The racism portrayed in Exil is not anti-Black racism and does not directly compare to the murderous threat and detriment evoked in Peele's film. The comparison nonetheless serves as a means of opening up broader reflection on how the experience of racialized discrimination is taken up in different ways in film. Exil presents a nuanced portrayal of a man originally from Kosovo, living and working in a nondescript city of Germany with his German-born wife (played by Sandra Hüller) and their three young children, and whose experience with everyday racism gradually draws out his rage. On numerous occasions, the main character, Xhafer, an Albanian Kosovar (played by Mišel Matičević), futilely attempts to explain to his wife the experience of living with racism in Germany. In an accusatory tone, he offers the following explanation: "You have no idea what it means to be a foreigner in this wannabe sophisticated and deeply dishonest country. Either they treat you with open racism, or they treat you like you are disabled in a manner that makes them feel oh-so-compassionate: 'Oh, you can walk. That's great! And wow, you can also count. Bravo! [he claps] And even better, you don't beat your wife. You are fully integrated!'"3 The directness and anger of Xhafer's words unapologetically lay bare the otherwise mostly implicit racism of contemporary liberal German society portrayed in the film through narrative and form. This essay will explore how Exil generates a mood of racism that underpins Xhafer's words with the power of experience that congeals into a suspenseful thriller. The film opens with an escalation, when implicit racism and bias appear to become more direct and their physical threat heightens. I begin by exploring how the daily experience of racism creates a daunting atmosphere of suffocation...