This article examines contemporary essay films that concern refugee im/mobilities across the Mediterranean Sea. In the last few decades, the Mediterranean has been transformed into a fatal space for those attempting to cross the sea without documents. The dominant Eurocentric perspective reductively views these refugee and migrant crossings as violations of European borders. Such limited frameworks feed into the category of ‘crisis’, which demands immediate intervention and top-down governmental solutions, such as the militarization of borders. In this article, I explore essay films that counter and disrupt the ‘crisis’ framework and the sense of urgency and tragedy it evokes: Havarie (2016), a slow-form documentary by Philip Scheffner, and The Leopard (2007), a dance film by Isaac Julien. Drawing on recent theories of multi-directional memory, I investigate the ways in which these films establish mnemonic connections across diverse experiences of displacement, including those produced by European colonialism, transatlantic slavery and postcolonial conflict.
BhabhaH (1997) The world and the home. In: McClintockAMuftiAShohatE (eds) Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
8.
BiemannU (2008) Writing video – writing the world: videogeographies as cognitive medium. Transit4(1). Available at: www.escholarship.org/uc/item/5542b0rw.
9.
BranniganE (2011) Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image. New York: Oxford University Press.
10.
BryantR (2016) On critical times: return, repetition, and the uncanny present. History and Anthropology27(1): 19–31.
11.
Casas-CortesMCobarrubiasSDe GenovaNGarelliGet al. (2015) New keywords: migration and borders. Cultural Studies29(1): 55–87.
12.
CelestinRDalMolinE (2007) France from 1851 to the Present: Universalism in Crisis. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
13.
ChambersI (2008) Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
14.
ChambersI (2009) Adrift and exposed. In: RedakcjaKI (ed.) Isaac Julien – Western Union: Small Boats. Warsaw: Centrum Sztuki Współczesnej Zamek, pp. 8–13.
15.
CruzA (2000) Introduction. In: FrankelD (ed.) The Film Art of Isaac Julien. Annandale-on-Hudson, NY: Center for Curatorial Studies, pp. vi–ix.
16.
De GenovaN (2002) Migrant ‘illegality’ and deportability in everyday life. Annual Review of Anthropology31: 419–47.
17.
De GenovaN (2013) Spectacles of migrant ‘illegality’: the scene of exclusion, the obscene of inclusion. Ethnic and Racial Studies36(7): 1180–98.
GonzálezJA (2011) Sea dreams: Isaac Julien’s Western Union: Small Boats. In: MathurS (ed.) The Migrant’s Time: Rethinking Art History and Diaspora. Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, pp. 115–29.
20.
GreeneS (2012) Envisioning postcolonial Italy: Haile Gerima’s Adwa: An African Victory and Isaac Julien’s Western Union: Small Boats. In: Lombardi-DiopCRomeoC (eds) Postcolonial Italy: Challenging National Homogeneity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 253–62.
JeffreyC (2010) Timepass: Youth, Class, and the Politics of Waiting in India. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
23.
KoepnickL (2014) On Slowness: Toward an Aesthetic of the Contemporary. New York: Colombia University Press.
24.
Lombardi-DiopC (2008) Ghosts of memories, spirits of ancestors: slavery, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic. In: ScacchiAOboeA (eds) Recharting the Black Atlantic: Modern Cultures, Local Communities, Global Connections. New York: Routledge, pp. 162–80.
25.
MalkkiLH (1996) Speechless emissaries: refugees, humanitarianism, and dehistoricization. Cultural Anthropology11(3): 377–404.
26.
MartinC (2011) Turbulent stillness: the politics of uncertainty and the undocumented migrant. In: BissellDGillianF (eds) Stillness in a Mobile World. London: Routledge, pp. 192–208.
27.
MountzA (2011) Where asylum-seekers wait: feminist counter-topographies of sites between states. Gender, Place and Culture18(3): 381–99.
28.
New Keywords Collective (2016) Europe/crisis: New keywords of ‘the Crisis’ in and of ‘Europe’. Near Futures Online1(1): 1–45.
29.
PandolfoS (2007) ‘The burning’: finitude and the politico-theological imagination of illegal migration. Anthropological Theory7(3): 329–63.
30.
PapazianEAEadesC (2016) Introduction: Dialogue, politics, utopia. In: PapazianEAEadesC (eds) The Essay Film: Dialogue/Politics/Utopia. London: Wallflower, pp. 1–12.
31.
PeerenE (2014) The Spectral Metaphor: Living Ghosts and the Agency of Invisibility. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
32.
PuglieseJ (2009) Crisis heterotopias and border zones of the dead. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies23(5): 663–79.
33.
RamsayG (2017) Incommensurable futures and displaced lives: sovereignty as control over time. Public Culture29(3): 515–38.
34.
RascaroliL (2017) How the Essay Film Thinks. New York: Oxford University Press.
35.
RigneyA (2014) Ongoing: changing memory and the European project. In: De CesariCRigneyA (eds) Transnational Memory: Circulation, Articulation, Scales. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 339–60.
36.
RoitmanJ (2013) Anti-Crisis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
37.
RomneyJ (2010) In search of lost time. Sight and Sound20(2): 43–4.
38.
RothbergM (2009) Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
39.
RothbergM (2011) From Gaza to Warsaw: Mapping multidirectional memory. Criticism53(4): 523–48.
40.
RothbergM (2013) Multidirectional memory and the implicated subject: on Sebald and Kentridge. In: PlateLSmelikA (eds) Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, pp. 39–58.
