Migrations and Mediations

Abstract

Amidst the paralyzing and polarizing effects of the Cold War, Frances Flaherty inaugurated an annual film seminar in memory of her late husband. Rather than inflame accusations and fuel paranoia, the seminar activated introspection and transformed expectations among its participants. Curated by Chi-hui Yang of the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, the fifty-fourth annual Robert Flaherty Film Seminar addressed the migrations of people, labor, and desires, alongside the transmission--often uneven and unfair--of ideas and memory across distances and decades. Juxtaposing works unlikely to be programmed together, the seminar regularly shifts focus from individualized expression to collective engagement with issues, often guiding participants toward startling results. Media migrate across platforms and into new contexts. Multimedia gallery installations, like Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan's Grossraum (2004-05), a silent 35mm film that also includes a dossier of legal documents obtained in order to film sensitive points along Europe's militarized borders, were screened alongside videos designed for Web streaming, such as Lee Wang's The Backyard Border (2005) about the 700-mile fence mandated by United States Homeland Security to divide the culturally and economically interdependent border towns of Brownsville, Texas, and Matamoros, Mexico. Debates emerge and explode, producing new insights among participants whose familiar patterns of thinking have not calcified into dead certainties. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The seminar raised questions about power imbalances between documentarians and their subjects in relation to social privilege and access to technologies and citizenship. However, works like James T. Hong's This Shall Be a Sign (2007), documenting conflicts over Israeli excavations under the al-Aqsa Mosque in East Jerusalem (as mediated by English-language televangelism), prompted reflection. Traveling as an Asian American, Hong has access that is denied to Palestinians and Arab Americans. Respecting the concerns raised by Afghani and Iraqi refugees about being represented, Laura Waddington's Border (2004) challenges the clarity of images in news media with murky images of her interactions with former teachers, professors, medical students, and bricklayers who were smuggled into Europe by traffickers, detained in Red Cross camps in France, subjected to police violence, and risked death to escape via train tunnels to the United Kingdom. The accent is shifting from acceptance of migration toward its regulation, so that transmission of different perspectives takes on renewed urgency. For most of the world's population, war is the everyday violence of unending poverty, such that strategies are needed to make visible what global capitalism renders invisible, to make audible what it renders inaudible. Participants debated whether addressing systemic forces becomes depersonalizing and distancing; whether highlighting individual voices becomes decontextualizing and depoliticizing. Ursula Biemann's Black Sea Files (2005) maps and uncovers economic and political factors that drive migrations among farmers, refugees, oil workers, and sex workers in Azerbaijan. …