Glimpse
/8
- Glimpse
- Spojrzenie
- 2016-2017
- 16mm transferred into digital, b&w, no sound
- 13min, 53sec
Artur Żmijewski made “Glimpse” for documenta 14 in Athens in the wake of the recent refugee crisis in Europe and the corresponding failure of mainstream politics to address it properly. In this silent black-and-white 16 mm film, the artist created a dystopian scenario of migration and violence. The film was shot in three locales: at Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport, part of which was converted into living quarters for refugees; at the refugee camp in Calais shortly before it was liquidated by French authorities; and in front of shelter tents underneath the arches of the Paris Métro. The beginning features slow pans and close-ups of the camps’ predominantly male inhabitants, with dilapidated shelters as a backdrop. The camerawork emulates historical documentary aesthetics and rhetorically underlines the supposed incapability of refugees to express themselves in the language of the respective foreign country. Some of the protagonists receive new shoes in front of the camera—a wink at “welcome culture,” perhaps—and soon, the artist himself draws a white cross on the back of one person’s jacket, then on the foreheads of some occupants of the Paris tents. By appearing in the film himself, Żmijewski takes a stand against both the anonymity of the filmmaker’s gaze and faux-humanist sentiment, calling the current politics of assuming a distance to events and those affected by them into question. And in the way in which he implicates himself as co-protagonist, Żmijewski departs from the usual comfortable buffer zone between the roles of those who arrive as strangers and those who fix them with their gaze. W.S.