Untether: Leaving the digital world to offer hospitality in the mess and mud of the global refugee crisis
Ai Weiwei’s self-reflexive filmmaking strategy in the documentary Human Flow
The aerial shot that opens Ai Weiwei’s film Human Flow gives a high angle view of a white bird flying over an endless sea. After this long take, a boat, filled with people on the blue waters, enters the frame moving in the opposite direction.
Throughout the film animals are woven into a story about human migration, often to highlight the stark comparison between the relative freedom of solitary wild beasts and masses of humanity caught between conflict and borders, people bound by physical barriers and the protectionist nation-state.
Ai disrupts the concept of the refugee in Human Flow through stylized mobile framing and through the insertion of himself as a subject of the film. Through a hybridization of documentary styles—the film’s combination of non-interventionist and interventionist approaches—the filmmaker challenges preconceived ideas of what it means to be a refugee and turns the gaze of the refugee onto the viewer, a move that smashes racist stereotypes and calls for a flow of empathy from audience member to the subjects of the film.
Ai’s gesture to turn his gaze and the gaze of the refugee directly to the audience is a political statement about human equality and rights.
Mobile framing: Hitchcock and emotional payoff
In her essay “Wreckage Upon Wreckage,” Paula Rabinowitz recounts the history of the World War II documentary first titled Memory of the Camps filmed by Allied troops to document the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps of Dachau and Bergen-Belsen. “Because of its disturbing pictures of mass graves being excavated and filled with emaciated corpses by captured S.S. guards, the film was considered so inflammatory to the newly forged postwar alliances that the British government suppressed it.”
The film was recovered and released as Frontline in the 1980s after the Greatest Generation had largely passed away. The documentary was originally meant to be shown to postwar Germans—people so “steadfastly refusing to ‘know anything’” after the sound of bombs ceased and the ashes of burned-out cities settled—however the content was so graphic and troubling the filmmakers were unsure how to convert the footage into a film. They recruited Alfred Hitchcock for advice, who suggested a provocative opening sequence:
The resulting establishing shot: blond children play before a bucolic bavarian cottage nestled within a forest, the camera pans through the trees to reveal barbed wire and piles of flesh and bones. This Hitchcockian touch may have provoked the official censorship of the film; it was the narrative established by the pan - the heart of darkness beating within the German people - more than the footage of the camps alone, which was potentially damaging to the postwar alliance. (120)
Ai employs mobile framing in Human Flow, most stylistically obvious through aerial views of the flow of humanity, to similarly implicate his viewer. The drone shots establish the space of the refugee, and give context to the places refugees embody. However, despite the desolation the audience sees close up in the film, the aerial shots are visually stunning.
They sweep over water, desert and jungles to capture breathtaking colours. The first moving aerial shot captures a stark, brown desert dotted with beige and tan tents that fill the entire frame in neat rows. The dusty, sand-filled air evokes the type of establishing shot that belongs in a big Hollywood blockbuster to set up the action of the inciting incident in a hero’s story.
Ai’s use of aerial footage contextualizes the landscape in which refugee narratives unfold and like Hitchcock’s bucolic establishing shot, is also emotionally evocative. A title, laid over the initial establishing drone footage, reveals devastating action that’s already taken place. It reads: “Iraq hosts 277,000 refugees, most of whom are fleeing Syria.”
The film’s next title comes soon after the drone shot of the Iraqi refugee camp, laid over a wide angle shot of a young girl, hair braided over both shoulders, holding onto a rope that loops from the canvas of the tent, centre frame.
The low angle shot looks beyond the girl into the camp to exaggerate the space between her and the viewer. The tent is barren, except for a dirt floor, covered with discarded plastic water bottles. “Following the 2003 US-led invasion,” the title reads, “268,000 people have been killed in violent conflicts in Iraq. More than four million Iraqis have been forcibly displaced from their homes.”
The camera soon flies through bombed-out streets somewhere in Iraq. Buildings are demolished and almost completely unrecognizable, while houses are shelled out. Frame right, a roof has collapsed and one side points at a forty-five degree angle towards the ground, like a grand piano’s lid opened for the performance of a tragic sonata. The shot begins at street level, then floats above to show an endless line of similarly bombed-out streets, all rubble to give the viewer a glimpse of what the little girl, and four million refugees like her, see in their memory.
The intensity of the close-up
From these early moments of the film, Ai begins to compress the distance between the viewer and the film’s subjects, moving from the distant and impersonal aerial view to the intimate. By degrees, the viewer gets closer and closer to the subject. At first, completely outside the space of the refugee, then in the refugee space yet far removed through the exaggerated depth of field of the wide angle lens, the viewer is suddenly give a straight angle view of the refugee subject, through a series of initial shots of refugees in Iraq.
The sequence, which captures a woman alone, three single men, then a woman with a child, is backlit with soft white light, in the same way a photographer would light a photo shoot for a portrait session with an artist or a model of a fashion line. In these medium long shots, the full body of the subjects, from head to toe are centre frame. They stand awkwardly, with no dialogue. They look at the camera, uncomfortable; some look confused, as if waiting instruction. Defiant, one smiles.
Bill Nichols notes that “the body represented by documentary film, must be understood in relation to a historical context which is a referent, not an ontological ground. History is where pain and death occur but it is in representation that the facts and events gain meaning.”
Ai’s representation of refugees who escaped a context of death and continue to live in an ongoing state of pain purchases meaning in these extended moments. Similar sequences—long takes of refugees at the centre of the frame, composed in medium or medium long shots—thread through the narrative of the film. Most of these subjects are silent and stare at the camera.
Without dialogue, it is impossible to know what they think or feel, however, their looks are at times defiant, angry, shy, humorous, vacant and suspicious. Because such shots are not mediated with voice over or the refugees’ own words, it is as though the refugees look directly back at the viewer to return the viewer’s gaze. In an interview with The Guardian, Ai described his intended audience and his motivation as a filmmaker: “The purpose is to show it to people of influence; people who are in a position to help and who have a responsibility to help.” The refugees’ gaze at the lens, then, implicates anyone “steadfastly refusing” to know about the ongoing global refugee crisis.
The cinematic techniques Ai employs are inherited from the same military complex, criticized for its complicity in creating refugees in the first place. The “hidden violence behind the humanitarian term ‘refuge’” is the hidden force that helped to develop the hand-held style, mobile camera movements and stylistic innovations that Ai’s film and most other documentary films depend: the war machine from World War II to the era of the Vietnam War.
The history and collision of war and cinema
The history of the documentary is inextricably linked to hegemonic powers of persuasion, and innovations from war time. From German filmmaker and Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl, who pioneered the tracking shot, to Hollywood director Frank Capra and U.S. soldier, who conventionalized the rhetorical documentary, documentaries, like refugees, emerge from militarized conflicts between nation states. Bill Nichols notes that “the radical potential of film to contest the state and its law, as well as to affirm it, made documentary an unruly ally of those in power.”
Ai’s extensive use of drones, devices used by the military for surveillance, emphasizes the intersection of the history of war and cinema with the refugee. In Human Flow, the refugee subject is aware of the film technique, which cues the audience to the self-reflexivity of Ai’s artistic approach in order to disrupt the notion of viewership.
For example, an aerial shot in a refugee camp for displaced Syrians emphasizes this inversion. Upon first view, the shot appears to be from a low angle with the camera set on the ground, pointed at the rafters on the ceiling of a refugee tent, “arranged like some vast abstract canvas.”
The frame zooms to focus on ants crawling along the white infrastructure of the ceiling. However, as the camera zooms, it becomes clear that the geometric shapes are in fact rows and rows of tents, side by side in a refugee camp. The ants are moving bodies. The optical illusion suddenly reveals itself as an extreme high angle aerial shot. Viewers clearly recognize the camera descends from the sky into a refugee camp in Turkey. Refugees form a semi circle, excitedly watching the drone drop until the viewer sees only pavement stones, bricks shaped like a chess board’s rook, set together in another geometric pattern, line after line marking the footpaths of refugees.
The above sequence ends with a title that reads, “Turkey, for centuries the bridge between East and West, now hosts the world’s largest number of refugees. Over three million, mostly from Syria, live there.” The collision of West with East, and the subsequent human collateral that historically results, advances the film’s narrative, especially through the presence of Western journalists.
These journalists litter the fringes of shots throughout the film as they document every apparent movement of refugee migrations. Ticker-tape news headlines mark the frames as key events. When a boat of refugees lands on the Grecian shore, the scrolling headline reads: “The Telegraph: More than 56,000 migrants arrive in Greece in one week.”
Displaced from home; tethered to the digital world
The film also repeatedly features refugees with smart phones. In the first instance of refugees arriving in Europe by boat that Ai documents, various passengers record the landfall on their cell phones as others wave and cry out for help. A montage of refugees with cell phones, speaking to relatives, posting to Facebook, faces lit up in the dark upon arrival at night onto European shores highlights humanity’s preoccupation with the digital image and self-tethering to smart phones.
Through the cell phone montage and a later sequence in which refugees huddle over a power station, phones charging by generator in a refugee camp, more than 15 cords and as many phones in frame, Ai captures a form of human connection that transcends borders and marks both refugee and freely moving citizens of nation states. He also critiques the limits of narrative film itself:
If you watch the news, you realise that film has lost its advantage in showing daily reality....So it’s over, it has gone, it has already happened. We have too many images on the internet every second. Spend half an hour on social media and you get much more information than you could ever get into a film. ~ The Guardian
The film’s preoccupation with the refugee who gazes into the lens and who creates and captures the story highlights another important characteristic Ai inherits from the documentary film canon, especially from those films concerned with the aftermath of conflict and the humanitarian implications of war.
This inheritance can be traced to third cinema, which, as Paula Rabinowitz notes, embraces a “level of self-reflexivity and self consciousness about the cinematic apparatus” in order to “alter the relationship of subject and object of documentary address.” If, as Jay Ruby asserts, “[t]he documentary film was founded on the Western middle-class need to explore, document, explain, understand, and hence symbolically control the world,” then Ai’s intervention into the medium and fixation on refugees connected to the internet of things announces that symbolic “control” is over.
Dissident, refugee, artist: Ai Weiwei turns the lens to himself
Another way Ai foregrounds control and collapses the distance between the subject and the object of Human Flow’s address is through the insertion of himself within the documentary. The first moment Ai appears in the film, he lays on the side of a road, among dried underbrush as a car approaches. Elbows on the wet, dirt road, he photographs the arrival of refugees to Greek shores. The sequence cuts (at 00:04:13) to selfie footage from Ai’s cell phone: his arms around a newly arrived man wrapped in a blanket, leading him to a warm drink of tea.
When he notices Ai is not only assisting but also filming his arrival after the dangerous journey at sea through the night, the man, Mohammed Hussan, says “Thank you very much” and Ai assures Hussan with, “you’re a good man.” The sequence, which leads into the film’s main title and introduces Ai as director, cues the viewer to expect the director’s presence, a signal to the audience of his “underlying epistemological assumptions which caused him to formulate a set of questions...seek answers, and ...present his findings in a particular way.”
Before Ai launches into the main argument of the film, he announces himself and his position to the viewer. He is present in the film—and as a filmmaker—to offer hospitality and to assist refugees, not merely to detachedly film and observe their world. He participates in it as a refugee: “I am a refugee, every bit,” Ai says. “Those people are me. That’s my identity.”
Throughout the film, without explication, insert shots of Ai on location fill the frame: roasting kebabs on a grill in a refugee camp, waving smoke with a piece of cardboard; capturing footage of a camel in a cave at the rock formations at Petra; in Jordan, Ai is wrapped in a red shawl while interviewing Princess Dana Firas; he bargains fruit from a vendor with an abnormal-sized bill then waits for the right change as a test of the refugees integrity; in Gaza he dances at a joyful wedding celebration.
While the effect of Ai’s intervention is at times jarring and strange, at other moments it is endearing and admirable. As a result, his personal intervention bridges the audience to the film’s subjects so that audiences, at various moments, may see the potential to similarly offer hospitably and basic human kindness to refugees, to not only consider their “responsibility” to help, but also to notice that “[t]hey need dry shoes. They need soup.” Jay Ruby argues that:
To be reflexive is to be not only self-aware, but to be sufficiently self-aware to know what aspects of self are necessary to reveal so that an audience is able to understand both the process employed and the resultant product and to know that the revelation itself is purposive, intentional and not merely narcissistic or accidentally revealing. (Ruby 4)
Ai’s intervention teeters between narcissism and a state of sufficient self awareness. His first intervention in the film, offering tea while holding a selfie stick to film the incident, in light of past criticism of Ai’s treatment of refugee bodies, could easily be read as a signal to his own virtue, a heavy-handed attempt to show sympathy to the plight of refugees.
Ai’s reenactment of the famous photograph of toddler Alan Kurdi, whose corpse washed up onto a Lesbos shore in 2015, for a feature article in India Today, stoked controversies and revived painful memories. One critic pulled no punches, describing the photograph as a “a horribly inappropriate banal publicity stunt.” Of the photograph, Ai recounts:
I was standing there and I could feel my body shaking with the wind -- you feel death in the wind. You are taken by some kind of emotions that you can only have when you are there. So for me to be in the same position [as Kurdi], is to suggest our condition can be so far from human concerns in today's politics.
The provocative gesture shocked Ai’s critics and followers and consequently jolted the global conversation about refugees. Notably, the reenactment of the photo took place while Ai filmed key footage of Human Flow in Lesbos, including the pre-title sequence in which Ai offers Mohammed Hussan tea.
While Ai’s first insertion into the film could be viewed cynically as a public relations campaign to counter negative perceptions of an artist hungry for the limelight—an artist willing to appropriate the image of a dead child for his own personal gain—Ai has an oeuvre of self-insertion into political moments that are “central to his art.”
After he was beaten by police and jailed for his installation piece that featured 9,000 backpacks and the name of every student who died in the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan, for instance, Ai “filmed his medical treatment and posted the picture on Twitter” so that “even the plastic bag of his blood becomes [a] work of art.”
Two moments from the film, in particular, emphasize Ai’s stance through his screen presence as a purposive revelation, and enact what Viet Than Nguyen describes as an “ethics of recognition.” In the first, Ai comforts a woman who gives an interview with her back to the camera, unwilling and afraid to show her face. She shares about being displaced with her child for 60 days with no where to go, perplexed about what to do.
The unnamed woman stops the interview, unable to continue with her story. The film cuts to a shot of Ai in the frame sitting beside her, offering her first a kleenex, then getting a bucket nearby as the woman throws up, overwhelmed by the trauma of her experience. He gives her a water bottle, gets more tissue, then steps out of frame to finally give her privacy, cutting the scene.
A second moment reveals Ai’s empathy toward refugees when he pretends to exchange passports with a Syrian man named Mahmoud in a Jordanian refugee camp. Mahmoud removes a clear plastic bag from his coat and pulls out his passport. Ai offers Mahmoud his passport and jokes that he will travel to Syria while Mahmoud will travel with Ai’s passport to China.
After an exchange of laughter, the refugee invites Ai to take his tent and Ai offers him his studio in Berlin. Mahmoud says, “Thank you, I really thank you,” defining the encounter with Ai as an exchange of “respect.” The moment between refugee and exiled dissident is a moment of profound human connection. However, in a press junket during Human Flow’s world premiere at the Venice International Film Festival, Ai recounts the moment with shame:
that was the worst feeling. That really got me. Because [if] you’re passionate, you think you mean what you say. You tell these people that you’re the same as them. But you are lying because you are not the same. Your situation is different; you must leave them. And that’s going to haunt me for the rest of my life. (Brooks, par. 8)
While Ai’s freedom to travel the globe is far greater than Mahmoud’s, like Mahmoud he cannot safely return to his homeland. An exile, Ai has been warned “Don’t ever come back” to China where he would face certain persecution, even arrest.
An endless flow of humanity
Images of imprisonment and immobility, like the static Mahmoud, loom large in a film about migration and the flow of humanity. The entrapment of the refugee subject is uniquely captured when the camera pauses for long takes. For instance, the close up of a white, origami bird, blown by the wind represents a confluence of images and themes.
The image recalls the film’s opening shot of the bird flying freely over the deep blue waters, the sun catching its wings. Here, the paper bird flips, turns and rotates on screen. Attached to a wire fence so it cannot fly away, it occasionally spins out of frame, but ultimately remains tethered. Here the bird is imaginary, a human construction, set in focus with a shallow depth of field so that the background is blurred with dark grey hues.
A title reads, “In March 2016, the European Union and Turkey struck an agreement to stop the refugee flow. The EU could now return refugees to Turkey in exchange for promising Turkey 6 billion Euros in aid and visa-free travel to Europe.” The shot ends with people, a medium close up of their silhouettes, crossing the frame, in the opposite direction as the free-flying bird at the film’s opening. Like the origami bird, the refugees that close the shot remain behind the wire.
The artifice of the origami bird foregrounds the artificiality of the imaginary borderlines and fences constructed by a European Union at a crossroads, facing the limits of its commitment to hospitality and its founding charter to ensure “universal values of human dignity, freedom, equality and solidarity.” Ai challenges the rationed capacity to hospitality of “people of influence” through the documentation of the Four Paws foundation’s tireless work to free a tiger, that appeared in the Gaza refugee camp through tunnels from Egypt.
In an interview, Dr. Amir Khalil, the Mission Leader for the foundation, describes the work of four nations—Jordan, South Africa, Israel and Palestine—to collaboratively rescue the displaced animal, and return it to its rightful habitat. “I believe it’s not nice for a tiger,” says the doctor of the tiger’s plight. “A wonderful creature like this deserves to be freed from these conditions.”
The insertion of animals, flying free like the white bird at the top of the film or championed for release by government authorities like the Gaza tiger, in a film about humans seeking safety and peace, challenges the audience to concentrate its view at the “disagreeable and dirty world” (Nguyen 79) of the refugee.
Returning the gaze
The film’s call to “people of influence” to truly consider the plight of refugees hinges on a moment with Ai at the centre. The moment links the audience to the film’s subjects and challenges the viewer to, as Nguyen notes, “deal with actual others...to confront their lives... their particularities.”
Set at the one-hour mark, the scene is at the chronological centre of the film. A hand-held medium close up of Ai who sits in a muddy refugee camp, the lens captures his long hair being shaved by a refugee. No other faces or bodies are recognizable, simply Ai who looks to the ground. The camera moves subtly, but its mobile framing cues the audience for the planned beat, so that when the camera slowly tracks towards him, Ai looks directly into the lens.
We see Ai’s craggy, crease lined face, a face that, if it shows any emotion, shows no happiness or contentment; the expression might be characterized as weariness. Ai stares directly into the camera, and therefore at the viewer, for more than fifteen seconds, when the scene cuts.
His gaze into the lens matches the length of previous shots of refugees who have stared at the camera, daring the viewer to look away. The “ethical recognition” required here is “intimate rather than panoramic, explicitly about individuals, beginning from face-to-face confrontation.” It is the film’s most direct gaze.
The sequence that precedes Ai’s hair cut documents a government crackdown at a refugee site. Tear gas dispensed by soldiers billows and the helicopters, flying just out of reach of the camp occupants, blow the gas through the air with their spinning rotors as refugees run to cover the canisters with blankets. Men, women and children are carried, in various levels of consciousness, coughing, blinded, eyes stung by the fumes.
The interjection of the military complex followed by Ai’s gaze contextualizes the plight of refugees even as it appeals to the audience to take action. “Without the film maker's body present on screen,” Paula Rabinowitz notes, “the camera's view is dehistoricized, while the filmed bodies are simultaneously over-invested with meaning and deprived of agency.” Without Ai’s presence at this central moment in the film, the audience might simply view the military action as another wound to the refugee body, an inevitable injustice in a series of inevitable injustices.
Ai’s presence in the mud enacts a moment of human solidarity with refugees. His presence goes beyond the hashtag people “in a position to help” employ to merely gesture toward such solidarity— like the #WithRefugees hashtag Ai uses in Kenya— to physically and emotionally embody what an actual “position” of assistance entails: giving a hot cup of tea, finding a bucket for trauma’s abjection, engaging in human, even humorous exchange—direct encounter characterized by hospitality.
“For artists, looking, remembering and creating are themselves ways of recognizing the ambiguities of the human and the inhuman” and Ai’s appeal to the viewer through his direct gaze suggests that acts of humanity begin first with the eyes. This look of artist to audience challenges the viewer to look honestly at the world. It provokes audiences to see the mud of the refugee camp and realize refugees “need dry shoes.”
From that gaze, humanity flows toward and away from both refugee and viewer. It creates the possibility for empathy toward the human throngs who travel toward and away from freedom. Ai’s film rejects “imperatives of catharsis and closure by pushing the audience through...disjointed effects to discomfort, and eventually to thought and action.”
As much as the gaze from both Ai and the refugee subjects of Human Flow serve as a challenge to recognition and action, that gaze offers people in a position to help an invitation. The invitation is to untether from the digital space and step into the mess and mud in order to offer hospitality to fellow human beings in the midst of the greatest refugee crisis the world has ever known.
Human Flow | Directed by Ai Weiwei | Learn more at IMDB.com
About Andrew Kooman: Andrew is a writer and producer. Along with his brothers Matthew and Daniel Kooman, Andrew co-founded Unveil Studios and launched the new streaming platform UnveilTV.
Andrew’s award-winning plays include She Has A Name, We Are the Body and Delft Blue. He is the producer of numerous the feature films and documentaries, including She Has A Name, Breath of Life, and Dream.
