Intimate recordings: mediated acts of touching in Future Lasts Forever and Giraffe

Abstract

ABSTRACT The act of recording testimonies and memories of events through audio as well as visual means can forge intimacy between people. Following a recent discursive turn toward connectivity, intimacy, and tenderness in contemporary European cinema studies, this essay examines recording’s potential in the creation of community in Özcan Alper’s Future Lasts Forever (Gelecek Uzun Sürer, Turkey, 2011) and Anna Sofie Hartmann’s (Giraffe, Denmark/Germany, 2019). Through a comparative reading of these films, I propose an approach to recording as touching, which plays out through processes of familiarity, listening without demands, care, and trust. Examined with Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of touch at a distance as the underpinning of being-with and being-in-common and Ariella Azoulay’s notion of the civil contract of photography, the act of recording in these films presents itself as an agreement between recorder, recorded, and spectator, or listener for that matter, that recognizes the recorded persons––photographed, voice recorded, or filmed––first and foremost as subjects and citizens with rights. Against distinct political and geographical backdrops of dispossession and loss, scenes of recording in these films demonstrate possibilities for communication, intimacy, and even reparative redress.