Nabua and Other Nocturnal Peripheries

By Iggy Cortez

Excerpt pp. 216–217

The cinematic night’s capacity to connect territorial and legal boundaries to the limits of normative perception extends well beyond the narrative hydraulics of classical cinema or the genre film. If both Black Coal, Thin Ice and Touch of Evil turn to the night as an allegorical register linked to the delirium of new visibilities that artificial light enables, Laura Waddington’s Border (2004) mines the critical affordances of vision’s de-constitution and precarity in low-light conditions. Filmed around the Sangatte Red Cross camp in France where she spent several months, Waddington’s experimental documentary follows Iraqi and Afghan refugees attempting to access England by jumping on to trains due to pass through the Channel Tunnel. To safeguard the migrants she was accompanying from detection, Waddington used a Sony TRV-900, a portable DV camera, keeping its shutter wide open due to the lack of reliable light sources other than distant headlights and lamps. Negotiating the constraints imposed by the nocturnal environment in conjunction with the volatile conditions she was recording, Waddington reveals how she “produced images, which were stuttered and blurred, and sensitive to the slightest movement of my hand. If I breathed too heavily, shivered or trembled, the blur in an image would become too great and the refugees would dissolve, like ghosts, into the reeds and bushes.”⁶

Border appears visually grainy and ambiguous, unfolding at a hauntingly decelerated and piecemeal pace as its images leave a kind of retinal residue even as they dissolve into new scenarios. This stuttering, hazy effect prevents a kind of cognitive distancing, as the film’s visuals are palpably entangled with the straining cadences of Waddington’s physicality, which serves as the spectator’s perceptual surrogate while simultaneously registering the artist’s distressed yet steadfast testimony. Through these sensory coordinates, the camera’s limits in low-light conditions expose the ethical shortcomings of normative vision which Rosalyn Deutsche describes as “the sense that, instead of welcoming others, tends to meet them in relations of conquest, to make them disappear as other.”⁷ The film’s fraught yet poetic opacity instead negotiates complex epistemological tensions. On the one hand, its stutter and blur provide a degree of anonymity and inscrutability akin to the night’s cover of darkness, acknowledging how visibility can expose the migrants to surveillance, violence, detention and deportation. At the same time, the film’s indefinite visibility at night critiques, precisely by deforming, the field of normative representation that renders the humanity of migrants invisible while simultaneously framing them as an excessive over-presence compromising the imagined integrity and harmonious order of European nation-states. Simultaneously opaque yet also exorbitant, the visual warping enacted by the stutter and blur in Border enacts a decomposition of the representational field corresponding to the symbolic threat racialized migration poses not so much to an extant social order, but to the successful repression of that social order’s constructed and thus provisional character—the intrinsic precarity of national sovereignty that is “nothing more than a re/de/composition, a contaminated assemblage of citations and de/formations,” to borrow Rizvana Bradley and Denise Ferreira da Silva’s potent description.⁸

If the photochemical index has been routinely romanticized as an indissoluble material link to reality and a vehicle of evidentiary singularity, the electronic stutter in Waddington’s work provides a more capacious inscription. The gaps and fissures of the stutter’s kinetic flow, the manner in which its blur hesitates between presence and residue, encompass a gamut of incommensurable yet related phenomena—the physical reality of the migrant trajectories, the filmmaker’s corporeal implication in their journey, as well as the discursive threat migration poses to the triumphalist and illusory imaginaries encoded in fortified borders. In this capacity, the stutter enables us to recognize the interrelations between heterogeneous forces and agents without, however, devolving into a generically universal account of interconnectedness that veils the differential distribution of violence across racialized logics and privileges. The pressure the night places on visual technology and perception in Border thus functions along the lines of what Meta Mazaj theorizes as “a kind of borderscape form that both orders and de-orders meaning, forcing our attention from the discourse of what is said to the form that shapes this discourse.” ⁹

Reproduced with kind permission of Iggy Cortez.

Footnotes

• Waddington, “Scattered Truth, part 2b (CARGO, Border, the blur, new technology …)”, https://www.laurawaddington.com/articles/67/scattered-truth-part-2b-cargo-border-the-blur-new-technology#making-of-border

• Deutsche, Hiroshima After Iraq: Three Studies in Art and War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 64.

• Bradley & da Silva, “Four Theses on Aesthetics”, e-flux journal (September 2021),
https://www.e-flux.com/journal/120/416146/four-theses-on-aesthetics/

• Mazaj, “Border aesthetics and catachresis in Ali Abbasi’s Grans/Border”,, Transnational Screens, 11:1 (2020), 36.

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