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Editorial

Cinematic Im/mobilities in the Planetary Now

Heike Härting et Johannes Riquet

Texte intégral

Dis/enclosures and Im/mobilities

  • 1 Cary Joji Fukunaga (dir.), Sim Nomre, Scion Films, Canana Films, and Creanda Films, 2009.

1At the beginning of Cary Joji Fukunaga’s 2009 film Sin Nombre, which tells the story of a group of Hondurans attempting to cross into the United States via Mexico by riding aboard a fictional version of the freight train known as ‘La Bestia’ or ‘El tren de la muerte,’ we encounter a scene of im/mobility.1 In the film’s first shot, we see a path in an autumn-coloured forest leading away from the camera until it disappears on the brightly lit horizon, with the camera slowly tracking forward as if following the path. In the second shot, we see a young man sitting motionless on a chair in a small and dark room, staring towards the camera, which slowly moves towards him. In the third shot, we see the path again, establishing it as the object of the young man’s gaze, before the spatial relations are clarified in the fourth shot, which shows him from behind, staring at what reveals itself to be a poster in the adjoining room, now framed by the thick stone walls that separate the two rooms.

Figure 1. Aesthetics of im/mobility in the opening scene of Cary Joji Fukunaga (dir.), Sin Nombre, 2009.

2The scene already foreshadows the young man’s story: as we learn later, he is a Mexican gang member who will unsuccessfully try to escape his gang on the same freight train but ultimately fail to cross the border as he is shot down by a fellow gang member.

  • 2 Achille Mbembe, Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization, Columbia University Press, 2021, p (...)
  • 3 Achille Mbembe, Bodies as Borders, From the European South, vol. 4, 2019, p. 13.
  • 4 Mbembe, Out of the Dark Night, p. 13.
  • 5 Axelle Karera, “Writing Africa into the World and Writing the World from Africa: Mbembe’s Politics (...)

3 The scene encapsulates the theoretical and aesthetic interests of this special issue by provoking reflection on im/mobility in the planetary now on thematic, political, and aesthetic levels. On the one hand, it contrasts the protagonist’s literal and figurative immobilisation with a desire for mobility, the possibility of a path that leads somewhere. In the context of the countless migrants who are immobilised by death or severe physical injuries on ‘La Bestia’ every year, the film can be seen as gesturing towards, to cite Achille Mbembe’s essay on “Planetary Entanglement”, our “deeply heterogenous world of flows, fractures and frictions, accidents and collisions” in which “[n]ew boundaries are emerging, while old ones are being redrawn, extended, or simply abandoned.”2 Marked by the profound inequalities and power relations of “late, deregulated capitalism” and the “[w]ars on mobility” that target “certain undesirables” such as refugees and migrants in the twenty-first century,3 the world is witnessing planetary transformations of colonial violence and forced displacements, resulting in “paradoxes of mobility and closure, of entanglement and separation… of temporariness and permanence.”4 Indeed, as Axelle Karera notes, for Mbembe decolonisation requires “a politics of dis-enclosure, of circulations of worlds.”5

  • 6 Richard Barsam and Dave Monahan, Looking at Movies: An Introduction to Film, fifth edition, New Yor (...)
  • 7 Tim Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World, New York, Routledge, 2006.
  • 8 Mimi Sheller and John Urry, “The New Mobilities Paradigm”, Environment and Planning A, vol. 38, no. (...)
  • 9 Mimi Sheller, Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes, New York, Verso, 20 (...)

4 At the same time, the opening scene of Sin Nombre also performs its engagement with contemporary im/mobilisations and dis/enclosures through an aesthetic intervention that foregrounds im/mobility as a cinematic phenomenon. A common distinction in film analysis is that between open and closed frames, both of which are present in the scene. As Richard Barsam and Dave Monahan note, “[t]he open frame is designed to depict a world where characters move freely within an open, recognizable environment, and the closed frame is designed to imply that other forces (such as fate; social, educational, or economic background; or a repressive government) have robbed characters of their ability to move and act freely.”6 As the open frame of the forest meets the closed frame of the protagonist’s room, the latter literally puts the illusion of the former into perspective. As such, the scene also points to cinema’s inherent situatedness between stillness and movement, the one enabling and conditioning the other – just as the mobilities of certain actors are enabled by the immobilisation of others, one of the key insights of mobility studies, from Tim Cresswell’s seminal On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World7 to more recent work within the “new mobilities paradigm”8 and debates around “mobility justice.”9

Filmic Mobilities in an Immobilised World

  • 10 Ousmane Sembène (dir.), La noire de…, Filmi Domirev and Les Actualités Françaises, 1966.
  • 11 Xavier Koller (dir.), Journey of Hope (Reise der Hoffnung), Catpics AG and Condor Films AG, 1990.
  • 12 Cherien Dabis (dir.), Amreeka, National Geographic Entertainment, Imagenation, and Levantine Entert (...)
  • 13 Becs Arahanga, Amberley Jo Aumua, Matasila Freshwater, Dianna Fuemana, Miria George, Ofa Guttenbeil (...)

5This special issue has its own history of im/mobility. It had its starting point in an online series of film screenings and discussions entitled “(Im)mobilities and Migration” that the editors jointly organised in the summer of 2020 in the midst of a global pandemic. In the context of the series, we streamed and discussed four films from the last fifty years. The earliest of these films was Ousmane Sembène’s La noire de… (Senegal/France, 1966)10, one of the first internationally recognised films from sub-Saharan Africa, which recounts the disillusionment and eventual suicide of a young Senegalese woman who moves to France to work for a rich family. The second film was Xavier Koller’s Journey of Hope (Reise der Hoffnung, Switzerland/Turkey, 1990)11, a trilingual film that won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1991 for its story of a Turkish family’s fatal attempt to cross the Alps into Switzerland (see Jedele and Riquet’s article in this special issue). The third film was Cherien Dabis’s Amreeka (US/Canada/Kuwait, 2009)12, an Arab American comedy with tragic undertones that focuses on a Palestinian immigrant family’s confusions and conflicts in small-town Indiana. The final and most recent film was Vai (Becs Arahanga, Amberley Jo Aumua, Matasila Freshwater, Dianna Fuemana, Miria George, Ofa Guttenbeil, Marina Alofagia McCartney, Nicole Whippy, and Sharon Whippy, New Zealand, 2019)13, a portmanteau film directed by nine female Pacific filmmakers and filmed on seven islands that follows the movements of its central character(s) named Vai (water) through different stages of her/their life.

6 All these films dramatise a tension between mobility and immobility. They do so in a very literal sense as each is concerned with different forms of transportation, journeys, and movement announced early on in each film. La noire de… opens with a shot of a large ship’s slow movements as it arrives on the coast of France, filmed from the land with an almost static camera before a car ride accompanied by jaunty music seems to transport the character into a promised land, only to end in a cul-de-sac named Chemin de l’hermitage (‘Hermitage Lane’); Reise der Hoffnung begins with a train thundering over its youthful protagonist lying immobilised between the rails; Amreeka starts with the protagonist’s car bouncing back and forth between two other cars parked on the side of a busy street before we see a graffiti with the titular Amreeka on the wall, linking street art to mobile desires; and Vai begins with a child dancing in the rain before her sorrowful departure to literally new shores is announced. As in Sin Nombre, these films’ concern with (im)mobility also manifests itself in the form of a larger aesthetic strategy. In Amreeka, for instance, the emphasis on everyday mobilities and their frustrations is conveyed through the film’s extensive use of a hesitant and searching handheld camera; each segment of Vai consists of a single long take that accompanies Vai’s movements between land and water, expressing the film’s concern with cycles of departure and return; La noire de… counters the claustrophobic domestic spaces in which he film’s black protagonist moves with the imagined mobility of her voice-over, and ironically, it is only her ultimate immobilisation through suicide in her employers’ bathtub that makes any form of escape possible.

Cinematic Histories of Im/mobility

7The historical span of the films we selected for the summer series ranges from the global wave of decolonisation in the 1960s to the supposedly postnational present, allowing us to think about the continued effects of colonial violence, the transformations in mobility regimes at different scales, and gender-specific forms of mobility, from the relationship between imperial centre and former colony (La noire de…) to migrations in the context of European ‘integration’ and its perceived outside (Reise der Hoffnung), geopolitical tensions in the Middle East and their relationship to global power relations (Amreeka), and the coexistence of Indigenous networks with colonial trajectories in the Pacific (Vai). Yet watching these films and discussing them across continents and oceans – with participants based in Canada, Finland, Switzerland, and New Zealand – at a time of a global pandemic, national confinement, and closed borders also provoked reflection on what it means to be mobile or, rather, immobilised in the neoliberal present, and how aesthetic practice mediates the politically fraught dialectic between mobility and immobility. The videos of simulated travel that appeared on social media across the world during the pandemic accentuated the role of the imagination as a force of mobility, notably the imagination afforded by moving images in a time of profound immobilisation. Indeed, film production and distribution itself was profoundly impacted by the pandemic, being implicated in a network of institutional structures and changing power relations (such as the shift towards online streaming). The Covid-19 pandemic also urged us to move from a national imagination towards questions of planetary entanglement and our collective habitation of the earth.

  • 14 Tim Cresswell and Deborah Dixon, “Introduction: Engaging Film”, in Tim Cresswell and Deborah Dixon (...)
  • 15 See Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant Garde”, in Tho (...)
  • 16 Giorgio Bertellini, “Film, National Cinema, and Migration”, in Immanuel Ness (ed.), The Encyclopedi (...)

8This special issue is therefore dedicated to the “mobilities” that “play a number of important roles in the production of the cinematic experience”14 and have indeed been constitutive of cinema, but revisits them from the perspective of the planetary now. It is a critical commonplace that the celebration of movement itself was a key aspect of the early “cinema of attractions.”15 Indeed, early cinema repeatedly stages the advent of movement itself, from the diagonally approaching train in the Lumière brothers’ L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (France, 1885) to the (literal) freezing and reanimation of the space travellers in a moving ice box whose rectangular shape doubles the shape of the screen in George Méliès’s Voyage à travers l’impossible (The Impossible Voyage, France, 1904). From cinema’s inception, the mobile possibilities of film were implicated in larger frameworks of mobility and its regulation by power structures. As Giorgio Bertellini notes, “[t]he emergence of motion pictures and the phenomenon of world migrations are profoundly interrelated: their threads span from social and economic history to racial politics and film aesthetics.”16 Beyond the key role of migrants in early American film production and consumption as well as silent film’s capacity to traverse linguistic and cultural boundaries, for instance, film was also deeply implicated in the privileged mobilities of colonial centres (think, for instance, of the actualities of ‘exotic’ locations around the world or early documentary’s connection to ethnography).

  • 17 Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking, Princeton, Princeton University (...)

9In the course of the twentieth century, cinema increasingly became a vehicle for telling stories about various forms of (in)voluntary displacement and global migrations. Written at the turn of the twenty-first century, Hamid Naficy’s An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (2001) remains the most important account of these trends. For Naficy, the “accented” films’ concern with displacement and movement between cultural spaces takes place on various levels, from content and narrative form to film style, the use of multiple languages and locations, and transnational modes of production; he is attentive to various forms of mobility and to the importance of both “closed and open spatiotemporal topoi and forms.”17 In many ways, Naficy’s influential account is an important background for the perspective advanced in this special issue, and indeed several of the films discussed in it could be qualified as “accented” as they also move between languages, cultures, and spaces while dramatising various forms of exchange across multiple boundaries.

From Genre to the Planetary Now

  • 18 Lucy Tulugarjuk (dir.), Tia and Piujuq, Arnait Video Productions, 2018.

10In other ways, however, Naficy’s concern with exile and diaspora emphasises the opposition between ‘homeland’ and ‘host country’ in ways that cannot fully account for the multiple co-existing spatialities and temporalities that interest the authors of this special issue. Rather than being oriented by generic concepts such as ‘accented films’ or ‘migrant cinema,’ they trace an aesthetics of im/mobility that gestures towards what we would like to think of as the ‘planetary now’ in a variety of ways. One further example will serve to illustrate this interest. In Inuk filmmaker Lucy Tulugarjuk’s multilingual film Tia and Piujuq (2018), a 10-year-old Syrian refugee girl living in Montreal discovers an old garage door in her uncle’s backyard garden.18 The door turns out to be an imaginary portal between multiple temporalities and different places, the Arctic and urban Montreal as well as Syria. At once a site of migration and translation, enchantment and wonderment, the door signals different forms of movement, transgression, and storytelling through which to mediate individual and communal transformation. It facilitates the movement of humans and nonhuman intermediaries across vast distances of space and time at different speeds and modes of expression, symbolising the existence of a profoundly relational, porous, and fluctuating world. Signalling displacements, connections, unexpected encounters, and alterities, the imaginary portal and the stories that unfold through it operate on various scales from the local to the planetary. The door also interweaves different film genres including magical realism, fantasy, and the migrant film without strictly adhering to any of these categories. Similarly, this special issue examines how cinematic representations of mobility and immobility intersect with, shape, and are subtly shaped by the elusive and malleable concept of the planetary, whether explicitly theorised as such by the contributors or not.

  • 19 Sean Cubitt, The Cinema Effect, Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 2004, p. 277.
  • 20 For more on relationality and planetarity, see Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, Ann Arbor, Un (...)

11While the individual films discussed in this special issue could certainly be categorised by such film genres and production modes as European migrant cinema (Reise der Hoffnung), transnational cinema (Incendies), “ecoapocalyptic cinema”19 and science fiction (The Wandering Earth, Children of Men), New Chinese cinema (Still Life), virtual reality cinema (Clouds over Sidra), documentary film (Dakar – Djibouti, 1931. Le butin du musée de l’Homme), and Indigenous or Fourth Cinema (Restless River), we collectively opted not to foreground generic constraints of interpretation. Instead, the essays explore the various unstable temporal and spatial trajectories of our planetary present. The latter, as many have argued, coincides with but is not reducible to the advent of the Anthropocene and the massive migrations, ecological devastations, and socio-political transformations brought about by anthropogenic climate change, global geopolitics, and neoliberal capitalism. Since the planetary is often taken as a synonym for the Anthropocene, i.e., for the transformation of the planet’s life-support systems through human activity, we will first take a moment to address and challenge this terminological confusion. Drawing out some of the political and aesthetic trajectories will help us distinguish these terms – at least strategically and provisionally – from each other. Second, by looking at the planetary from a perspective that exceeds an anthropogenic imaginary of planetary collapse, we will briefly discuss the heterotemporality that characterises different modalities of im/mobility in the planetary now. Together, these concepts provide the critical framework through which the essays collected in this special issue discuss their particular films’ aesthetics and politics of mobility, immobility, and relationality, of planetary metamorphosis and ontological perplexity.20

  • 21 Crutzen, Paul J. and Eurene F. Stoermer, “The ‘Anthropocene’”, in Libby Robin, Sverker Sörlin, Paul (...)
  • 22 For instance, James W. Moore suggests the “capitolocene” to emphasise the rise of capitalism and co (...)

12The Anthropocene and the planetary must be distinguished on a historical, political, and aesthetic level without, however, losing sight of their critical and productive entanglements. In 2000, the climate scientist Paul Crutzen and bio-chemist Eugene Stoermer announced that humanity is now living in the age of the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch defined by humanity’s bio-physical impact on the planet whose beginning the authors date to “James Watt’s invention of the steam engine in 1784.”21 Although this date is highly controversial and reflects the authors’ own scientistic perspective, it is useful for our purposes.22 On the one hand, it indirectly relates anthropogenic climate change to the progress narratives of the European Enlightenment as well as the onset of industrialisation and extractive capitalism. On the other hand, the date is of specific interest to the thematic orientation of this special issue, as it creates a direct link between planetary transformations and the development of modern forms of mobility, transportation, speed, and acceleration. Simon Harel, for instance, argues in his article that this link is paramount not only for understanding France’s colonial project in Africa but also for tracing the deeply racialised epistemophilia – even epistemophagy – of ethnography and its rise to the rank of an academic discipline at the beginning of the twentieth century. This suggests that the Anthropocene can be seen as a geological epoch that registers planetary transformations rather than stability (as was the case with the Holocene), an epistemological category of critique, and an act of naming, which is always a violent and necessarily exclusionary act. As such, the Anthropocene constitutes a contested macro-paradigm, which, as Heike Härting observes in her article, is subject to specific visual regimes of perception and narrative. The naming of the Anthropocene certainly emphasises that planetary life is – and has been – dramatically changing under the pressures of climate change, petro-capitalism, and a looming sixth extinction, subsequently leading to global conflict, massive refugee movements, displacements, and humanitarian crises.

  • 23 Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, Chicago, University of Chicago Press (...)
  • 24 Chakrabarty, Climate of History, p. 134.
  • 25 Gayatri Spivak, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, Cambridge, Harvard University P (...)
  • 26 Chakrabarty, Climate of History, p. 83 and p. 137.
  • 27 Chakrabarty, Climate of History, p. 18.

13Yet the planetary is both more specific and broader than the Anthropocene. This special issue examines how a number of films produced over the last thirty years have engaged with the ways in which humans and nonhumans traverse and inhabit the planet and, vice versa, are traversed or literally moved by the planet. A planetary imaginary as we understand it implies that the planet is not a given entity. Rather, as Chakrabarty argues, the “planet emerged from the project of globalization.” The latter refers to centuries of extractive global capitalism, growth and progress ideologies, the militarisation and technologisation of the Earth.23 As a self-regulating field of multiple forces, the planet operates on multiple and often incomprehensibly large or minute scales of time and space and, in its unruliness, remains oblivious to national boundaries. Thus, a planetary imaginary is not necessarily premised on identitarian or (trans)national imaginaries. Rather, for the purpose of this special issue, we argue that it is organised around three axes. First, it proceeds by jointly examining the previously separate genealogies of “human moral life” and “natural life on the planet” and thereby “decenters” the human, paying close attention to encounters between the living and nonliving, the human and nonhuman.24 These aspects are central concerns of the films Restless River (see Jenni Niska’s contribution), Clouds Over Sidra (see Safa Kouki’s essay), and Children of Men (see Heike Härting’s article). Second, the planetary, as Gayatri Spivak argues, “is in the species of alterity” and thus evades processes of naming and claiming.25 Instead, a planetary imaginary actively counters a technopositivist faith in fixing or geo-engineering anthropogenic climate change. It strives to historicise the latter and mobilise creative reason and the imagination to address increasing experiences of uncertainty, of uncanny and unexpected encounters. In their different articulations, these planetary affects structure the uncertain migratory paths and psycho-traumatic journeys of the characters in films such as Journey of Hope (see Anna-Tina Jedele and Johannes Riquet’s article) and Incendies (see Daniel Graziadei’s essay). Third, although a generative, planetary imaginary owes much to relational concepts of the world and mediates the planet’s “habitability”26 for all forms of life, it also searches for a language that can account for the planet’s asymmetric movements and that exceeds systemic harmony. Within these three axes, the planetary must be seen as a profoundly ethical concept and, as Chakrabarty insists, a “humanist category” that comes into view by “zooming in and out” so that the planetary becomes manifest through the global.27

Aesthetics of Im/mobility

  • 28 More hegemonic representations of the Anthropocene might include climate fiction films such as Bong (...)
  • 29 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, New York, Schocken Books, 1968, p. 261.
  • 30 Giorgio Agamben, What Is an Apparatus?, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2009, p. 41.
  • 31 Agamben, What Is an Apparatus?, pp. 51-53.
  • 32 Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, Kindle Edition, Durhame, Duke UP, 2019.

14On the one hand, the process of zooming in and zooming out of the planetary inadvertently addresses the movement of the camera itself, the importance of visualising the planetary in ways that destabilise and fragment hegemonic views of the Anthropocene.28 On the other hand, it draws attention to the various temporalities of the planetary now. The latter is akin to Walter Benjamin’s notion of the “time of the now,” a moment – or “monad” – blasted out of “the continuum of history,” a moment when time is momentarily arrested and becomes disjunctive.29 Whether this monad be a moment of unexpected recognition in a public pool (Incendies), a historically displaced art object or sacred artifact (Dakar – Djibouti, 1931), a “ruinscape” in China’s post-global architecture (Still Life in Chan Du’s contribution), or the sublimity and terror of the Swiss Alps in Journey of Hope, these arrested images – as they are discussed in the following essays – unravel the compressed and progressive past and present of global and colonial modernity, witness future destructions, and at times allow us to wonder at the planet’s geological deep time. If this articulates the heterotemporality of the planetary now, then it is the films’ cinematography that often visualises the synchronous presence of multiple temporalities through, for example, a slowing down of the filmed images or the self-conscious im/mobility of the camera. As a result, the planetary now signals a new relationship with time, one, as Giorgio Agamben observes, that is marked by “a disjunction and an anachronism.30 To Agamben, this ruptured relationship to time constitutes a new sort of “contemporariness,” one in which the present is not self-identical but reaches backwards and forwards. In fact, the contemporary, or the now, in Agamben’s sense, attends to the “present” as the “unlived element in everything that is lived” and, thus, “is capable of transforming [the present] and putting it in relation with other times.”31 Thus, the heterotemporalities of the planetary are relational and generative of multiple futures. In this sense, the planetary now makes visible the historical sedimentations of violence, of forced displacements, crossings, and enclosures that Achille Mbembe sees as a permanent “war of attrition” waged against mobility and life itself.32 Yet the films discussed in this special issue do not easily succumb to an anthropocenic imaginary or to end-of-time prophesies.

  • 33 Ian Baucom, History 4° Celsius: Search for a Method in the Age of the Anthropocene, Durham, Duke UP (...)
  • 34 Baucom, History 4° Celsius, p. 67.
  • 35 Baucom, History 4° Celsius, p. 92.

15Taken together, the essays in this special issue imagine the possibility of planetary commons rather than a priori existing spaces and belongings. In many of the films discussed in the essays, the planetary commons are generated or imagined through the ways in which space and time are visualised, inhabited, and traversed. Furthermore, the films discussed here demonstrate a deep vulnerability of their characters and their various environments. Although they reveal, in Ian Baucom’s succinct words, the Anthropocene as a gathering of “forces of profound violence and unfreedom,”33 the films also register the metamorphic possibilities that emerge from a joint visualisation of the planet’s “forces and forcings – of human and extra-human history.”34 Living with the unexpected forcings of the planetary, however, the subject – especially those hailing from the global South, the migrant, the refugee, the orphan, the poor, the nonhuman, the old and disabled – is always at risk, as Baucom explains, of “being undone […] of being decomposed and recomposed through an entangling set of relationships to the biological, and the zoëlogical, and the geological, cosmological, and theological orders and times of planetary life.”35 It is precisely at this nexus of multiple temporalities, of being undone, decomposed, and recomposed, of mobility and immobility, that the films begin to situate a nascent planetary imaginary that abandons human mastery and gestures towards a multiplicity of possible futures based on what remained unlived and spectral in the present.

Overview of Articles

16The articles included in this special issue address various intersections between im/mobility and the planetary. The collection of essays performs this intersection on the level of language and writing: like most of the films discussed, it is containing articles originally written in the three languages of the journal Transtext(e)s Transcultures 跨文本 跨文化, with English translations provided for the articles written in Chinese and French. Opening the collection, Heike Härting’s essay (“Scopic Regimes of the Anthropocene: War, (Im)Mobility, and the Planetary Now in Cuarón’s Children of Men”) probes these intersections in various way by exploring normative visualisations of the Anthropocene in Alfonso Cuarón’s film Children of Men (USA/UK, 2006). On the one hand, her “investigative” reading practice develops a critical genealogy of the ways in which the film historicises anthropogenic and media-generated violence. On the other hand, she argues that the film’s use of a mobile camera, photography, and cinematographic referencing generate a countervisual practice of the Anthropocene that makes visible the heterotemporality of the planetary now through which to revise and reimagine the future. Simon Harel’s contribution, « De l’Afrique spectrale à l’objet ventriloque. Parcours de la mobilité dans Dakar – Djibouti, 1931. Le butin du musée de l’Homme et L’Afrique fantôme » (“From Spectral Africa to the Ventriloquist Object : Journeys of Mobility in Dakar - Djibouti, 1931. Le butin du musée de l’Homme and L’Afrique fantôme”), looks in the opposite direction and is interested in reimagining the past, focusing on how early twentieth-century motorised ethnographic expeditions across Africa served more than France’s imperial ambitions. Analysing Marc Petitjean’s film Dakar - Djibouti, 1931. Le butin du musée de l’Homme (France, 2020), the essay implies that, on the one hand, the conjunction of modernity’s dream of ever faster forms of mobility, rising petro-capitalism, and colonial knowledge economies of the present outlines a global imaginary of colonial modernity. On the other hand, Petitjean films the looted African artifacts in a way that shows their refusal to relinquish their meaning to the European gaze and, as such, insist on their alterity that can be claimed neither by the colonizer nor by the filmmaker and the film’s audience.

17The films discussed in the next two articles focus on the relationship between mobility infrastructure and different forms of migration and displacement. Anna-Tina Jedele and Johannes Riquet’s essay (“Caught in the Loophole: Film Aesthetics and the (Im)mobilisation of Migrant Dreams in Xavier Koller’s Journey of Hope”) examines Xavier Koller’s Swiss-Turkish coproduction Journey of Hope (Reise der Hoffnung, 1990) about a Turkish family’s attempt to enter Switzerland by crossing the Alps in relation to late-twentieth-century political debates about migration and mobility infrastructure. Arguing that the film juxtaposes state-sanctioned and clandestine forms of mobility by tying them to two culturally significant and symbolically charged routes (the Gotthard and the Splügenpass), Riquet and Jedele discuss how the film deploys an aesthetics of im/mobility, a viapoetics to comment on – and counter – the viapolitics that literally and figuratively immobilises its protagonists. Chan Du’s article, “静物的诗学重游《三峡好人》的废墟景观 (“Poetics of Still Lives: Rewalking the Ruinscape of Still Life”), focuses on Jia Zhangke film Still Life (China, 2006), a poetic reflection on the forced relocation of more than a million people caused by the infrastructural megaproject of the Three Gorges Dam. As Du argues, the film foregrounds various forms of slow mobility – the walking of the working-class protagonists, the slow movements of the camera, the movement of the river itself in deep time – to emphasise the transience of space. Challenging realist interpretations of the film, Du insists that the surrealist elements of Still Life effect a spatio-temporal rupture in Chinese narratives of modernisation, taking the story beyond its national boundaries and towards a planetary reflection on urban change.

18The next article also focuses on displacement but addresses the intersections of im/mobility and different forms of violence more explicitly. In « Un plus un fait un : Im/mobilités dans le film Incendies » (“One Plus One Makes One: Im/mobilities in Incendies”), Daniel Graziadei discusses the portrait of an unfinished lifespan in Denis Villeneuve’s film Incendies (Canada, 2010). In the film, Graziadei suggests, time is linked to both a complex orchestration of im/mobilities and the violence of war, whose long after-effects reach into the present. Systemic martial and gendered violence structures the im/mobility of the characters and reveals the planetary now of the film’s narrative, as it underlines the characters’ multiple presents – lived and unlived – across different times and geopolitical spaces. As a cinematographic trope, im/mobility here creates states of uncertainty and highlights the ways in which a planetary war on mobility devastates people’s most intimate bonds with themselves, each other, and their environment. Safa Kouki’s article (“The "New Collective Technoid Body": Immersive Environments and the Im/mobile Refugee Subject in Gabo Arora and Chris Milk’s Virtual Reality Film Clouds Over Sidra”) engages with a very different takes on the refugee experience by turning to the virtual mediation of a refugee camp and corresponding forms of time and subjectivity in Gabo Arora and Chris Milk’s virtual reality film Clouds Over Sidra (USA, 2015). The film’s multiple and shifting perspectives on life in the Za’atari refugee camp create an economy of global humanitarian affect and flatten the complex political and historical layers of the planetary now into technological virtuosity. Kouki argues that the VR film homogenises forced patterns of planetary movement by turning them into a unified sensory and personalised experience for the viewer. In doing so, the film raises important questions about the role digitalised and virtual technologies (can) play in generating both regulatory and emancipatory planetary imaginaries.

19The last two essays engage with different ways of imagining the links between im/mobility, relationality, and planetary thinking. Regina Kanyu Wang’s “通往行星主义的中途——电影《流浪地球》中的流动不可流动性 (“Midway towards Planetarity: (Im)mobility in The Wandering Earth”) turns to the mobility of the planet earth itself in its discussion of the Chinese science fiction blockbuster The Wandering Earth (Frant Gwo, China, 2019), in which the peoples of the earth unite to move the planet out of its current orbit as the sun is dying. Paying attention to the film’s content and aesthetics alongside its transnational production context, Wang argues that the film is suspended between a hegemonic cosmopolitanism and planetary possibilities. While gesturing towards the vision of a planetary community, Wang argues, the film’s techno-positivism ultimately creates new hierarchies and exclusions, treating the earth and its inhabitants as a resource to be exploited rather than a multidimensional sphere of coexistence. Such a sphere is aesthetically realised in the film discussed in the last article of this special issue. Jenni Niska’s “Towards a Hydropoetics of the Arctic: Watery Connections in Restless River examines the cinematic portrayal of the river in the collaboratively produced film Restless River (Arnait Video Productions, Nunavut/Canada, 2019), which adapts French Canadian author Gabrielle Roy’s novel La rivière sans repos (1970). Drawing on Inuit spatial philosophies as well as posthuman figurations of the gestationality of water, Ylönen argues that the film links two watery bodies, the human body and the land, to reflect on the production and planetary circulation of Indigenous (moving) images of the Arctic. Situated at the confluence of cultural currents, Ylönen argues, the film confronts a history of traumatic encounters while foregrounding a network of life-affirming relations. Taken together, the essays of this collection and the films they explore traverse multiple boundaries of language, space, and time to provoke debates about the multiple, frequently conflicting im/mobilities that shape our planetary now.

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Notes

1 Cary Joji Fukunaga (dir.), Sim Nomre, Scion Films, Canana Films, and Creanda Films, 2009.

2 Achille Mbembe, Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization, Columbia University Press, 2021, pp. 12-13.

3 Achille Mbembe, Bodies as Borders, From the European South, vol. 4, 2019, p. 13.

4 Mbembe, Out of the Dark Night, p. 13.

5 Axelle Karera, “Writing Africa into the World and Writing the World from Africa: Mbembe’s Politics of Dis-enclosure”, Critical Philosophy of Race, vol. 1, no.2, 2013, p. 233.

6 Richard Barsam and Dave Monahan, Looking at Movies: An Introduction to Film, fifth edition, New York, Norton, 2016.

7 Tim Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World, New York, Routledge, 2006.

8 Mimi Sheller and John Urry, “The New Mobilities Paradigm”, Environment and Planning A, vol. 38, no.2, 2006, pp. 207-26.

9 Mimi Sheller, Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes, New York, Verso, 2018.

10 Ousmane Sembène (dir.), La noire de…, Filmi Domirev and Les Actualités Françaises, 1966.

11 Xavier Koller (dir.), Journey of Hope (Reise der Hoffnung), Catpics AG and Condor Films AG, 1990.

12 Cherien Dabis (dir.), Amreeka, National Geographic Entertainment, Imagenation, and Levantine Entertainment, 2009.

13 Becs Arahanga, Amberley Jo Aumua, Matasila Freshwater, Dianna Fuemana, Miria George, Ofa Guttenbeil, Marina Alofagia McCartney, Nicole Whippy, and Sharon Whippy (dirs.), Vai, Brown Sugar Apple Grunt Productions and Department of Post, 2019.

14 Tim Cresswell and Deborah Dixon, “Introduction: Engaging Film”, in Tim Cresswell and Deborah Dixon (eds.), Engaging Film: Geographies of Mobility and Identity, Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield, 2002, p. 4.

15 See Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant Garde”, in Thomas Elsaesser (ed.), Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative, London, British Film Institute, 1990, pp. 56-62.

16 Giorgio Bertellini, “Film, National Cinema, and Migration”, in Immanuel Ness (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration, Hoboken, Blackwell, 2013, p. 1.

17 Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2001, p. 212.

18 Lucy Tulugarjuk (dir.), Tia and Piujuq, Arnait Video Productions, 2018.

19 Sean Cubitt, The Cinema Effect, Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 2004, p. 277.

20 For more on relationality and planetarity, see Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, Ann Arbor, Univeristy of Michigan Press, 1997; Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru (eds.), The Planetary Turn. Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2015. For metamorphosis, risk and planetarity, see Ulrich Beck, The Metamorphosis of the World, Oxford, Polity Press, 2016.

21 Crutzen, Paul J. and Eurene F. Stoermer, “The ‘Anthropocene’”, in Libby Robin, Sverker Sörlin, Paul Warde (eds.), The Future of Nature. Documents of Global Change, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2013, pp. 483-485.

22 For instance, James W. Moore suggests the “capitolocene” to emphasise the rise of capitalism and colonial modernity since the 15th century, via the Great Acceleration of the 1950s to the present; Haraway speaks of both the “chtuhulucene” and the “plantationocene” to underline the impact of 5000 years of agricultural revolution and the Columbian Exchange; Kathryn Yussof insists on a plurality of black Anthropocenes; historians Christoper Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fresso refer to the “thanatocene” and Justin McBrien to the “necrocene,” respectively underscoring war and species extinction as drivers of planetary transformations. With the exception of Haraway’s “chtuhulucene,” which remains future-oriented and embraces a symbiotic view of earthly entanglements and “multispecies muddles,” each of these terms draws attention to what Chakrabarty would likely identify as the global histories of modern capitalism. For more, see Jason W. Moore (ed.), Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, Oakland, PM Press, 2016; Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham, Duke University Press, 2016, pp. 99-103; 34; Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2018; Christopher Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene. The Earth, History and Us. Translated by David Fernbach, London, Verso, 2016, pp. 276-333; Justin McBrien, “Accumulating Extinction: Planetary Catastrophism in the Necrocene”, in Jason W. Moore (ed.), Anthropocene or Capitalocene?, pp. 116-137.

23 Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2021, p. 69.

24 Chakrabarty, Climate of History, p. 134.

25 Gayatri Spivak, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2012, p. 338.

26 Chakrabarty, Climate of History, p. 83 and p. 137.

27 Chakrabarty, Climate of History, p. 18.

28 More hegemonic representations of the Anthropocene might include climate fiction films such as Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer (2013) and The Host (2006), Roland Emmerich’s The Day after Tomorrow (2004), and Ursula Bieman’s video Deep Weather (2013), or earlier films and docufictions such as Kevin Reynolds’ Waterworld (1995) and Werner Herzog’s Lessons of Darkness (1992). To different degrees, all of these films entail an anthropocenic imaginary to foreground a post-global and post-apocalyptic moment in the wake of the planet’s anthropogenic derailment and biospheric collapse. As with the discourse of the Anthropocene, these films are often critical of the catastrophic ramifications of nature/culture, body/mind binarisms, but, as Donna Haraway argues with regard to the Anthropocene, they tend to reinscribe a narrative of the “the self-making Human, the human-making machine of history,” thus indulging, however covertly, in “human exceptionalism and bounded individualism” (39; 30).

29 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, New York, Schocken Books, 1968, p. 261.

30 Giorgio Agamben, What Is an Apparatus?, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2009, p. 41.

31 Agamben, What Is an Apparatus?, pp. 51-53.

32 Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, Kindle Edition, Durhame, Duke UP, 2019.

33 Ian Baucom, History 4° Celsius: Search for a Method in the Age of the Anthropocene, Durham, Duke UP, 2020, p. 26.

34 Baucom, History 4° Celsius, p. 67.

35 Baucom, History 4° Celsius, p. 92.

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Légende Figure 1. Aesthetics of im/mobility in the opening scene of Cary Joji Fukunaga (dir.), Sin Nombre, 2009.
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Heike Härting et Johannes Riquet, « Cinematic Im/mobilities in the Planetary Now »Transtext(e)s Transcultures 跨文本跨文化 [En ligne], 17 | 2022, mis en ligne le 30 décembre 2022, consulté le 14 mars 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/transtexts/2190 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/transtexts.2190

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Auteurs

Heike Härting

Heike Härting is Associate Professor of English Literature in the Department of World Literatures and Languages at the Université de Montréal. She specialises in postcolonial and planetary literary and cultural studies with a focus on narratives of global violence, African and Canadian literatures. She co-directs the Research Center for Planetary Literary and Cultural Studies and is the PI of the FRQSC research team Cultural and Literary Planetary Studies: Practice, Epistemologies, and Transformative Pedagogies. She holds a SSHRC Insight Grant for her research project, “Viral Conjunctures: Pandemics, Postcolonial Studies, and Planetary Health Narratives.” She co-edited Planetary Health Humanities and Pandemics (with Heather Meek), to be published by Routledge in 2024. She has also published on Canadian film and the aesthetics and politics of violence and global war in contemporary postcolonial fiction.

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Johannes Riquet

Johannes Riquet is Professor of English Literature at Tampere University (Finland). He is the author of The Aesthetics of Island Space: Perception, Ideology, Geopoetics (Oxford UP, 2019) and Trains, Interrupted: Railway Fiction and the Accidents of Modernity (Manchester UP, forthcoming) as well as the co-author of The Mediated Arctic: Poetics and Politics of Contemporary Circumpolar Geographies (also forthcoming with Manchester UP). He also co-edited Spatial Modernities: Geography, Narrative, Imaginaries (Routledge, 2018) as well as Imaging Identity: Text, Mediality and Contemporary Visual Culture (Palgrave, 2019). He has published widely on spatiality, the intersection of literature and geography, phenomenology, ecocriticism, mobility, and visual culture. He is the PI of the collaborative project Mediated Arctic Geographies (Academy of Finland, 2019-2023) and directs the research group Spatial Studies and Environmental Humanities (Tampere University).

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