Previous article FreeFilm SymposiumRelational filmmaking Reflections in response to comments on Unwritten Letters Reply to comments on Unwritten Letters. 2020. Max Bloching and Abd Alrahman Dukmak, directors. Distributed by The Royal Anthropological Institute.Max Bloching and Abd Alrahman DukmakMax BlochingGoldsmiths University of London Search for more articles by this author and Abd Alrahman DukmakIUAV University of Venice Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull TextSupplemental Material Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIt is an honor to be part of this inaugural film symposium. We send our sincere thanks to all the contributors. The care and attention you brought in watching, sensing, and reflecting with our film has really touched us and inspired us to revisit with fresh eyes the making of Unwritten Letters. The film in its entirety is available here.For the first few months, the process was driven not only by the desire to document Abd’s moment of transition, but by a desire “to make a film” and to be in a space of active creation. Films like Chronicle of a Summer by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin (as Christian Suhr picked up correctly), Notebooks on Cities and Clothes by Wim Wenders, or In the Last Days of the City by Tamer El Said pointed us to a direction of filmmaking as a process of testing, whereby filming a scene and together watching the material became the central gesture. This act of recording and revisiting allowed us to see, feel, and witness Abd’s experience of forced migration but also served as a mirror to our own process of filmmaking. Reconvening every two to three months to continue the ritual of filming and watching that we had started in Beirut, slowly the form of our film started to emerge. As Eda Elif Tibet beautifully describes, the camera became a mediator and holder of the space we had started to cultivate and commit to. This space we always referred to as our “workshop”: a space for process, care, and learning without the expectation that there would have to be a final result; a space for play and rehearsal like a band practice room. In this space, as Suhr aptly put it, “the contours of a shared vocabulary” would slowly form. In this space we both would learn to sit in silence with our protagonist on screen, witnessing his experience, quietly waiting, sharing presence as a form of worship—giving worth to whatever our protagonist was going through. As Yasmin Fedda points out, documentary filmmaking involves a variety of experiences and forms of time and waiting. Our “workshop” was a heterotopic zone, in and out of time and place, that served as a sounding board whose reverb would amplify and mirror “whatever is going on.” Abd’s letters to Zean would always end with the words “I am waiting for something, but I don’t know what it is.” With a bit of distance, now we can see more clearly how part of the healing capacity of this process was the “together sitting and waiting,” together sharing time and space—Abd, Max, and the material. “Maybe what film can offer us is that space of time—to make, to reflect, to wait, to hope,” as Fedda put it. We could not agree more.During the parallel process of editing and shooting, we found ourselves gathering around certain ideas or terms that would guide us for a while and encapsulate a certain direction within our research, terms like “home,” “process,” “redemption,” “catharsis,” “silence,” or “opacity.” As we were working out how to make and approach our film, Abd continued to figure out how to approach his new life in Italy as well as his past in Lebanon and Syria. The process of figuring out new ways of relating to his own experience via the making of the film spilled over into Abd’s off- screen life—that is, for instance, in relation to the question how to deal with grief and sadness. An interesting sort of Alfred Gell-like “scheme transfer” between art work and life or between Abd the character and Abd the director started to take place (see Gell 1992). As Suhr describes in reference to Walter Benjamin’s thought on film editing as surgery: “Like a surgeon who cuts into the body of a patient in order for illness to be removed and healing made possible, the filmmaker cuts into reality to understand but also to transform it.” One of the ways to transform and test Abd’s reality/ies was, for instance, through his letters and the juxtaposition of the present in the image with different imagined futures in the voice-over. “Narration through the letters becomes one way to come out of the rigor mortis of grief and apathy,” as Raminder Kaur put it. The letters indeed can be read as a response to the contingency in the life of our protagonist, as Estella Carpi remarked. Reaching out to the dead and imagining how life could be is at the same time a returning to the present and an attempt to walk towards peace.Over the course of making the film—and seeing ourselves reflected in the footage—it was clear that we nevertheless did not want to commit to one single narrative; we did not want to reduce the film to be about “the search for home” or about “the search for peace,” etc. In the space of our workshop, we eventually allowed ourselves to drift and just be close to our protagonist’s experience. Tibet’s reading strongly resonates with our approach: the being lost and found, the waiting and drifting, is part of the story of Abd’s migration and the genesis of our film. It is an experience the audience might have as well while watching—if they allow for it and the momentary discomfort this might bring. The fragmented character of our film—juxtaposing fantastical letters with interview scenes, observational scenes and reflexive making of elements—is also in parts an attempt to respond to a question Fedda points to via David MacDougall: How to resist the process of simplification and atrophy when constructing a character? During the process of making the film we learned to trust that it is fine to explore and represent our protagonist’s experience with a cinematic language that favors fragmentation and opacity over a need for transparency, logic, and clarity. In other words, we were not interested in defining “the story of Abd” to the very end and satisfying the viewer with a distilled answer, but rather in sharing the process of orienting ourselves between the fragments—images, sounds, letters, memories, etc.—of Abd’s universe.1In Carpi’s opinion “there is too much which is left untold and underexplained in the movie, easily leaving the audience with several questions.” While we appreciate the questions she is raising about Abd’s sense of hope and agency in relation to the experience of making the film, we also want to stress that we are not setting out to explain and answer questions with this film.2 As Kaur describes it “the work is a collage of audio-visual fragments that come together more like a poem rather than a composite jigsaw.” In that we felt akin with Trinh T. Minh-ha’s approach to poetic language: “For the nature of poetry is to offer meaning in such a way that it can never end with what is said or shown, destabilizing thereby the speaking subject and exposing the fiction of all rationalization” (Trinh in Chen 1992: 86). The form of our film felt like a suitable attempt to share the processual and unstable nature of Abd’s experience in this moment of transition from a life in Lebanon to a life in Italy. For us, our approach, for instance, to incorporate editing room discussions or hypothetical scenarios of Abd’s future lives via the letters resonated with Trinh’s idea of speaking nearby instead of about. “A speaking that reflects on itself and can come very close to a subject without, however, seizing or claiming it” (Trinh in Chen 1992: 86). Our goal was to produce a film that would ring true somehow with Abd’s experience without naming, reducing, or claiming it, a film that would allow the viewer to have an experience, that might not necessarily be easily summarized with words, but that feels like being close to the protagonist’s experience. “To say therefore that one prefers not to speak about but rather nearby is a great challenge. Because actually, this is not just a technique or a statement to be made verbally. It is an attitude in life, a way of positioning oneself in relation to the world” (Trinh in Chen 1992: 86). This of course is an ongoing challenge and Unwritten Letters is just one attempt to materialize it.Trinh’s words remind us of a something the US organizer and educator Mariame Kaba said in an interview (Ewing 2019):I’m so uninterested in narratives. That word that gets used often. Narrative-building. People that want to be all about narrative-shifting, narrative building. I believe we are in relationship with each other, we influence each other. What matters to me as a unit of interest, is relationships. The second thing that matters to me as a unit of impact is harm … My political commitments are to developing stronger relationships with people, and to transforming harm.Through making Unwritten Letters we ask ourselves: What kind of films emerge from processes that put relationship as the first unit of interest, over the unit of narrative? What kind of representations does such an approach facilitate? What implications does it have on the films we make if we understand ourselves as filmmakers first as producers of webs of interpersonal relationships and then as producers of narratives?3 Unwritten Letters made us realize the obvious: that filmmaking first and foremost is something we do with others. “Everything worthwhile is done with other people,” as Mariame Kaba put it.That being said, the actual work behind the film and process of Unwritten Letters has been the negotiation of difference between us as a directing team where each of us embodies such different stakes, positionalities, past and present experiences, as well as roles within the project. Abd as protagonist and writer. Max as supporting character, cameraman, soundman, and producer. Both of us as directors and editors. A driving force in our project was a shared interest in the making and eventual completion of this film and a primal appreciation for each other’s view, contribution, and artistic sensibility. With shared authored projects like this, there is the danger of falling into romanticism, while in fact in our experience it is a very delicate, complex, and energy-consuming process, which also leads to fun moments of play and learning, mutual aid and healing, as well as to a different vision of life, cinema, and ethnography. What we both take forward from this project is the appreciation of filmmaking and collaboration as an exhilarating testing ground of vision, literally and figuratively speaking, and as a testing ground for the ongoing question of what wholesome collaboration can look like.AcknowledgmentsWe want to thank Raminder Kaur for initiating this symposium and for having invited our film; and to Mike Poltorak for inviting contributors.VideosVideo 1. Teaser trailer for Unwritten Letters.Video 1Video 2.Unwritten Letters (full film).Video 2Notes1. In that regard we identify with the “heterogenous, dispersed, fragmentary and eclipsed” character of a Fifth Cinema as outlined by Kaur and Grassilli (2019: 24).2. When we were discussing the refusal to fulfill the expectation (i.e., of our editing consultant) to deliver Abd’s experience in a more defined and transparent way, we were thinking with Édouard Glissant’s argument “For opacity” (in his Poetics of relation, 2010) as well as with the idea of productive ethnographic refusal (see Simpson 2007).3. See the manifesto on relational filmmaking by media artist Julie Perini (2011).ReferencesChen, Nancy N. 1992. “Speaking nearby: A conversation with Trinh T. Minh-ha.” Visual Anthropology Review 8 (1): 82–91.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarEwing, Eve L. 2019. “Mariame Kaba: Everything worthwhile is done with other people.” https://adimagazine.com/articles/mariame-kaba-everything-worthwhile-is-done-with-other-people/.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarGell, Alfred. 1992. “The technology of enchantment and the enchantment of technology.” In Anthropology, art and aesthetics, edited by Jeremy Coote and Anthony Shelton, 40–66. Oxford: Clarendon Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarGlissant, Édouard. 2010. Poetics of relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarKaur, Raminder, and Mariagiulia Grassilli. 2019. “Towards a fifth cinema.” Third Text 33 (1): 1–25.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarPerini, Julie. 2011. “Relational filmmaking: A manifesto and its explication.” Afterimage 38 (4): 8–10.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarSimpson, Audra. 2007. “On ethnographic refusal: Indigeneity, “voice,” and colonial citizenship.” Junctures 9: 67–80.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarFilmographyEl Said, Tamer. 2016. In the Last Days of the City.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarRouch, Jean, and Edgar Morin. 1961. Chronicle of a Summer.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarWenders, Wim. 1989. Notebook on Cities and Clothes.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarMax Bloching is a filmmaker based between London and Berlin. Max’s work is animated by an interest in participatory forms of filmmaking and a love for sound and silence. Max is currently studying at the MA Artist Film and Moving Image at Goldsmiths.Max Bloching[email protected]Abd Alrahman Dukmak was raised in Damascus and moved to Beirut to study TV and film, where he has been working as a script writer and director for several short films. Abd is currently studying Multimedia Arts at IUAV University of Venice.Abd Alrahman Dukmak[email protected] Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory Volume 12, Number 3Winter 2022 Published on behalf of the Society for Ethnographic Theory Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/724111 © 2022 The Society for Ethnographic Theory. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.