When the People Behind the Scenes Come to the Fore

Abstract

In this essay, the notion of “the people behind the scenes” is used to build a bridge between the cognitive framework of film studies and migration research to describe those who are discursively categorized as “illegal” or “irregular” migrants and whose lives are exploited in the workforce and at risk in “Fortress Europe”. As a natural southern border of the Schengen area, the Mediterranean region sometimes offers fleeting encounters between “illegal” migrants excluded by this border regime and foreign travellers courted by the tourism industry. These ephemeral juxtapositions of people with contrasting political and economic stakes create what we call “visual clashes”, gathering in one frame antithetical human lived experiences of this maritime area. Drawing on Nicholas Mirzoeff’s concept of the “right to look”, which the visual culture theorist and activist uses as a bulwark against a dominant Western regime of visuality, this essay analyses a series of visual texts that bear witness to unwanted encounters by this dominant regime’s visual system of classification and separation. The essay examines two press photographs and television images alongside Elleke Boehmer’s short story “Synthetic Orange”, and analyses a cartographic experiment and a film; each case opposes the authority of Western visuality and makes a claim for the autonomy of the right to look.