Authors
Anna-Tina JedeleJohannes Riquet
Topics
German Colonialism and Identity StudiesEcology, Conservation, and Geographical StudiesEuropean Cultural and National IdentityCaught in the Loophole: Film Aesthetics and the (Im)mobilisation of Migrant Dreams in Xavier Koller's Journey of Hope (1990) Anna-Tina Jedele and Johannes Riquet Introduction: Steamrolled by Modernity 1 At the beginning of Xavier Koller's film Journey of Hope (Reise der Hoffnung, Switzerland/ Turkey, 1990), we see the young protagonist, a Turkish boy named Mehmet Ali, running onto a railway line with his friends to play a game of chicken. 1 The scene begins as a shot/reverse shot exchange between the children and the train, whose approach is aesthetically slowed down by the use of a telephoto lens. The gliding movement of the train therefore appears as if it were filmed in slow motion, and its muted sounds further accentuate this impression. After this initial exchange, mostly shown in the angled views characteristic of shot/reverse shot constellations, we also see several frontal shots of both the train and the boys. This creates a visual effect of collision as the train approaches Mehmet Ali, who remains on the track even when the other children run away. Just before we see the train rolling over the boy, the film cuts back and forth between point-of-view shots of Mehmet Ali and the train, which is thereby personified and turned into an antagonistic force. In what follows, we see mostly lateral shots of the train from both sides, interrupted by one brief point-of-view shot of the boy from underneath the train. In the last of several close-ups of the wheels, we see Mehmet Ali's father through the gaps, filmed from the other side of the train, before he runs to the boy, who is unscathed.The scene encapsulates the links between mobility, technological modernity, migration, and film aesthetics that interest us in this article. The intrusion of technology into rural Turkey is signalled by the train, an icon of Western modernity and the regimes of mobility connected to it. 2 The classic diagonal, familiar from countless films from the Lumière brothers' L'arrivée d'un train (France, 1895) to train shots in action films such as From Russia with Love (UK/USA, 1963), foregrounds the speed of the train after its deceptively slow first appearance. 3 The young protagonist is here literally steamrolled by the train, and the frontal perspective emphasises the violence of the assault. It also places the viewer in the same position, but only briefly: the association between the viewer, the camera, and the protagonist is broken as the camera returns the viewer (along with the father) to the position of a bystander. Mehmet Ali becomes part of what Wolfgang Schivelbusch calls the "machine ensemble" of the railroad, the fusion of train, rails, landscape, and people into a machine-like order: "the railroad was merely an expression of the rail's technological requirements, and the rail itself was a constituent part of the machine ensemble that was the system. It was, in other words, that machine ensemble that interjected itself between the traveler and the landscape." 4 While Schivelbusch is mainly interested in the machine ensemble as the central manifestation of how technological modernity reconfigured historical experiences of space and time in the nineteenth century, railway cinema commonly attaches ideological and figurative meanings to the machine ensemble. These meanings are frequently based on the cultural and political associations between the train and the nation state as discussed, among others, by George Revill. 5 scene at the beginning of Journey of Hope thus draws on the function of the train as an icon of mobility that is figuratively connected to both the modern state and the cinema -a modern machine of movement, like the train. 6 From its opening minutes, then, the film draws attention to cinema's potential to reflect on questions of (im)mobility and migration. Indeed, the scene follows right after an exchange between Mehmet Ali's father and his brother, who successfully emigrated to Switzerland with the help of a middleman. The boy's close encounter with the train thus announces his role as the film's most mobile subject who can insert himself into the loopholes of various systems of mobility without being detected. At the same time, his position in the gaps of larger systems -literally the machine ensemble of the train, figuratively the modern state apparatus -also immobilises him. The scene thus already foreshadows his death during the attempt to reach Switzerland illegally with his parents at the end of the film, where he is radically immoblised as he freezes to death in the Swiss Alps. Indeed, the white steam of the train that obfuscates the image after the passing of the train points forward to the fog and snow that dominate the frame when Mehmet Ali and his father get lost in the Alps. The train scene thus encapsulates the boy's complex relation to the modern routes and networks of mobility. William Walters, Charler Heller, and Lorenzo Pezzani's concept of viapolitics serves as a useful frame for understanding the entanglement of migrants, infrastructure, state power, and physical geography that the film dramatises as it engages with "the lively and at times violent interaction between people on the move and the vehicles, networked infrastructures, and geophysical environments across which they travel." 7 However, Koller's film invites reflection not only on the socio-political discussions surrounding different forms of mobility but also on what we might term a form of viapoetics, an exploration of the possibilities of film to think about these mobilities through its own moving images. As we will demonstrate, Journey of Hope draws on the aesthetic possibilities of the medium to juxtapose two opposing forms of mobility. The first is that of the straight line, epitomised by the train; this is the regulated mobility that serves the modern nation state. The film juxtaposes this mobility associated with the straight line with diverging, stray mobilities, the mobilities of clandestine immigration that are sacrificed in the interest of the former.
About
PublishedJan 1, 2022
TypeArticle
Citations0
References13