PhD Defence: Jeroen Boom (Radboud University Nijmegen)
Strangers Unseen: On Disruptive Figures in Essay Films
6 March 2024 | 16.30hrs | Aula Radboud University Nijmegen
Supervisors: Prof. Anneke Smelik and Dr László Munteán
Strangers Unseen explores images of refugees and migrants that are deliberately obscure, opaque, and illegible. It examines these images within a group of recent essay films that employ fractures and frustrations as expressive cinematic elements to engage with the different realities of displacement and statelessness. Operating somewhere at the intersection of documentary filmmaking and experimental cinema, the filmmakers of these video works, such as Amel Alzakout, Philip Scheffner, Sara Fattahi, and Jan Locus, search for similar contingent forms to mediate the uncertainties and tragedies of dislocation, mobilizing questions revolving around memory, testimony, and representation. What binds their works together, besides a thematic interest in migration in Europe, is a commitment to the essayistic format: they all offer the viewer a mode of contemplation that exposes the limits of observation and encourages non-hierarchical ways of seeing by tearing cracks in the visual field. It is in their invitation to ‘unsee’ that the essay films in this study teach their viewers tolerance toward uncertainty and care for the other without complete understanding as the basis for solidarity.
