- character, face, representation -

In '20-ies Lev Kuleshov shot a single long closeup of an actor named Mozhukhin, sitting still without expression. He then intercut it with various shots, which comprised a bowl of soup, a woman in a coffin, and a child with a toy bear. The audience "marveled at the sensitivity of the actor's range."

In 1961, by looking at his face during the trial in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt points out that Eichmann was a mild mannered civil servant with a wife and kids who epitomized the virtues of the German middle class. It was in his dispassionate face that Arendt saw “the banality of evil”.  

In Shoah (1985), Lanzmann’s nine-and-a-half-hour filmic meditation on memory, testimony and annihilation, there are only images of faces and places: interviews with survivors, perpetrators and bystanders intercut with present-day footage of the killing sites. 

What is particularly disconcerting about a number of the survivors’ expressions, is their habitually impregnable impassivity. The camera repeatedly lingers on these faces, inviting us to scan them for insights into the past and the present, yet even when the witnesses are remembering the most excruciating suffering, their faces often remain inexpressive, deadpan, at once unreadable and available to a multiplicity of readings.

Shoah strips the face of spectacular qualities and re-maps it instead as a trauma site. In the absence of direct images of the past, the survivor’s face becomes the place not only where trauma is visually registered but also where the interdiction on representation is affirmed. In this way, the visible face incessantly points to or signifies something beyond the visible, something that perpetually eludes our vision and escapes our knowledge and understanding. 

For Levinas, the human is not represented by the face. Rather, the human is indirectly affirmed in that very disjunction that makes representation impossible, and this disjunction is conveyed in the impossible representation. 

"There is first the very uprightness of the face, its upright exposure, without defense. The skin of the face is that which stays most naked, most destitute. It is the most naked, though with a decent nudity.... The face is meaning all by itself...it leads you beyond." 

"To my mind the Infinite comes in the signifyingness of the face. The face signifies the Infinite.... When in the presence of the Other, I say, “Here I am!”, this “Here I am!” is the place through which the Infinite enters into language.... The subject who says “Here I am!” testifies to the Infinite." (Emanuel Levinas)

In "The Open" (2002) Agamben analyses images from 13th century Hebrew bible in which the righteous are presented not with human heads, but with those of animals. 

For Agamben, “the righteous with animal heads…do not represent a new declension of the man-animal relation,” but instead indicates a zone of non-knowledge that allows them to be outside of being, “saved precisely in their being unstable”  

against representation

If humanity allows itself to venture into the pure realm of things beyond representation, then it may be capable of embracing its true vocation beyond vocation. The moment we fully embrace this realm beyond all representation, the moment we dissolve transcendence and therefore immanence as well, is the moment we embrace a materialism beyond the animal-human or human-divine dichotomies, a materialism that can only as such be - divine.

- immigrant as a film character -



1. First films that show life of immigrants coming to America are Traffic in Souls (1913) and The Italian (1915). Released near the end of a long period of unrestricted emigration from Europe to the United States, these two films depict hazards that await them in new world, a Darwinian jungle rather than a promised land paved with gold.Despite unfortunate ethnical and other stereotypes, The Italian develops considerable sympathy for the main character, presenting us an unusually complex view of tenement life and multiethnic immigration in America.

2. However, if we try to discover visual and narrative responses to subject of immigration, the theme of "movement" and, much more specific "movement in container" comes to mind. migration implies a movement of specific kind, in specific context: using cheap and/or illegal ways of transport. In Charlie Chaplin's The Immigrant (1917), it is the boat that arrives to New York.

Chaplin gets a lot of laughs, but he also gives us a very accurate picture of the terrible living conditions on the immigrant ships. Most immigrants could afford only steerage class, where they were jammed in like sardines. They suffered from no privacy, bad food, poor ventilation, sickness, and filth on their two-week journey from Europe. There is one thing about these scenes that is not realistic. Real immigrants almost always traveled below deck, at the bottom of the ship. Chaplin put his immigrants on deck because it was a more interesting environment for his story. He needed the ship’s railing and the open sea for his comedy routines. He needed the view from the deck for the scene in which the immigrants see the Statue of Liberty.

Even now, more than before, illegal immigrants have been known to suffocate in shipping containers, boxcars, and trucks, sink in shipwrecks caused by unseaworthy vessels, die of dehydration or exposure during long walks without water. An official estimate puts the number of people who died in illegal crossings across the U.S.-Mexican border between 1998 and 2004 at 1,954.

3. In opposition to this image of the immigrant as a victim, or, sometimes as a danger to the society, in short film Mobile men, Apichatpong Weerasethakul offers us different image of immigrant worker:

"In my recent short film, the main character is played by a migrant worker from Shan state in Burma named Jaai. He is one of the lucky ones who have decent jobs and are contented with the new living condition. But there exist many others who are still living in the opposite circumstances. Mobile Men is a portrait of Jaai. By the act of making the film, I would like to instill and capture his confidence and dignity. It is not about storytelling, but about a man who is full of life. (…) The film honors simple gestures that mark individuality through visual exchanges. I hope the viewers realize that, when the actors and a director are holding a camera and shoot, we are destroying a discriminating barrier. The pickup truck simulates a small moving island without frontiers where there is freedom to communicate, to see, and to share."

4. In documentary films, authors developed different strategies to avoid legal consequences for their characters, illegal immigrants. Their appearance on screen could mean revealing their identities and they could risk expulsion from the country. Most advanced strategy even created a new genre - documentary animation. (Hanna Heilborn and David Aronowitsch).