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

Abstract

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.