Chapter Three: Collaboration, Friendship, and Sisterhood

 

In the last two chapters, I have focused on filmic strategies that can help to reframe the woman traveler and bring into being new and different understandings of self and others. In Chapter One, I discussed the struggle related to showing the female body and presented a number of cinematographic strategies that thematize the other with the self. These strategies include: presenting a less complete image through haptic visuality (vid. Tango Traum), using embodied cinematography to reveal the social and physical presence of another (vid. Verriegelte Zeit), and relating the self to others who return the gaze through the camera (vid. Reise). In Chapter Two, I demonstrated how subjectivity always emerges in relation to someone or something else that is outside of the self, and how a “speaking with” (Nancy 20) manifests itself in different ways through voice and narration. I have thus shown how the ideas of relational selves and intersubjectivity manifest themselves in filmic accounts through cinematography and narration and I have started to demonstrate how our own film is marked by a reciprocal dependency between Maria and me. While the friendship that informed our collaboration has always been implied in these previous chapters, I now take a deeper look at the role of friendship in identity formation and as a factor in challenging the established order.

As a social bond that was set apart from other kinship bonds, but considered equally important, philosophers over time, like Aristotle, Cicero, and Montaigne, have been eager to ascribe many positive effects to friendship. Aristotle, for example, suggested that friendship is necessary to know the self (Biss 125), and Montaigne believed that friendship functions as a place to “search your soul and discover the scope of your mind” (Österberg 118). One major underlying assumption for these philosophers, however, is that friendship was not suitable for women. Indeed, up to the 18th century, friendship was largely assumed to be possible only between men (Österberg 120). Feminist historian Barbara Cain points out that this is not only because ‘true’ friendship was considered distinctively masculine, but also because virtue was viewed as indispensable for friendship and virtuous qualities were attributed only to men (Friendship xii). Cain then highlights how by the 19th and 20th centuries, the idea of friendship as being exclusively male had undergone an almost complete reversal. By the 19th century women had entered into the discussion about friendship as novelists and essayists and started to describe how friendships between women diminish the isolation of women in the domestic sphere.⁵⁷Cain describes how this happened thanks to a variety of women from many different walks of life and at different points in time: religious communities in the medieval and Renaissance periods, individual authors and aristocratic women in the 15th and 16th century, and philosophers and novelists in the 19th century (Friendship xii). With the women’s suffrage movement, in the beginning of the 20th century, friendship between women then also became more public.⁵⁸Throughout this chapter I will use the term “friendship between women” and avoid the term “female friendship.” While this may lead to some clunky language, it is the same reason why I tried to talk about “women filmmakers” instead of “female filmmakers.” “Friendship between women” then includes all friendships between those subjects who identify as women (regardless of their biological sex, gender, sexual orientation) while “female friendship” carries a connotation that implies heterosexual normativity and character traits that are considered “female” and is less inclusive of queer and LGBT filmmakers precisely because it evokes these binary gender role stereotypes. Personal networks of friends provided support systems and created the spaces in which women were able to organize and share their experiences (Österberg 11). Consequently, friendship and collaboration between women emerged as something that women depended on, and used to publicly draw attention to the lack of their voices in political decision-making.

The genealogy of friendship between women, its origins in the private, domestic realm and its shift to a political and public-facing movement, draws attention to the ways in which friendship between men and friendship between women might differ, but also raises questions with regard to the places in which friendship between women originates, is practiced and presented. Space and spatiality have played an important role in previous chapters as well. This becomes perhaps most obviously apparent in Chapter One, as the body itself is spatial, but also in Chapter Two, due to its focus on the relationship between the self and others at different times and in different cultural contexts. Susan Stanford Friedman argues that the spatial turn in feminist studies set up more fluid and flexible ways of thinking about identity and thereby encouraged a perception of identity processes that are ongoing and non-stable.⁵⁹S. Friedman describes how the second wave of feminism was marked by time metaphors like “awakening/revelation,” while the third wave of feminism is, for example, more likely to talk about “location” or “migration.” For the context of this cross-cultural project, the thinking about identity as fluid and the link between space and identity emerges as extremely important in order to explore the friendship between Maria and me, as “relational, situational, and interactive” (S. Friedman 20).

To begin with, I focus on the physical and cultural places in which friendship takes hold. Next, I look at how friendship evolves into communities of collaboration and how it connects to autobiography, self-development, and the location of female subjectivity. I have previously demonstrated how cinematography and voice-over narration afford access to self-development, and I now look into how friendship fulfills a similar function, especially in relation to others. Finally, I explore how these qualities and characteristics of friendship link to ongoing debates about sisterhood and the ways in which friendship between women displays disruptive socio- political potential in furthering a feminist agenda. As in previous chapters, I extend my investigation into the role of collaboration and friendship to other filmic examples by drawing on the works of German feminist filmmakers, and end with an-in depth discussion of our film.

 

Spaces of Friendship

Few people nowadays consider their friends as anything but a private matter. Commonly thought of as the “family we choose for ourselves,” friendship is viewed as something that belongs to our private lives in a similar way as our family, romantic relationships and sexuality do. Eva Österberg, a historian of friendship, however, shows that friendship was not always considered something located in the private realm. In fact, she demonstrates how from the classical and medieval period all the way to the early modern period of state formation, friendship was deeply intertwined with the public sphere (Österberg 16). In medieval times, for example, friendship served to “mould social and political alliances that were essential to the fabric of society,” and it was only with the advent of state-building in Europe that friendship was transformed into a phenomenon mostly viewed as private and personal (Österberg 12). From a feminist perspective, the intertwinement of friendship with the public sphere, of course, also explains why so many discussions of friendship focus exclusively on men, who were traditionally more involved in the public sphere (Cain Friendship xiv). In Friendship and Politics, John von Heyking and Richard Avramenko put a slightly different spin on the idea of the location of (post)modern friendship in the private sphere. They argue that nowadays our private realm has actually taken on characteristics of the public realm as it is increasingly marked by contractual, utilitarian and goal-oriented interactions:

[…], the liberal principle that society is grounded in a contract reaches into other areas of life to the point that we regard all our relationships in similar terms. We come to our private relationships, our loves and friendships, with the same desire to get a good bargain as we do when we purchase a car or a computer. We network, we schmooze, and we realize the “autonomous self,” the ideal to which much of contemporary liberalism seeks. (von Heyking and Avramenko 3)

While those two perspectives seem to differ in terms of the location of modern and contemporary friendship as a mainly private matter (Österberg) or a private matter that has been assimilated to the workings of public/professional realm (Heyking and Avramenko), both use the notion of private and public space to position friendship as something that inhabits those two spheres.⁶⁰Since both were published around the same time (Österberg in 2010 and Heyking and Avramenko in 2008), their different takes on friendship being embedded in the public sphere might also have to do with their own location. While Österberg writes mainly within the European context, Heyking and Avramenko focus more on the US context. Crisscrossing the imagined line between the private and the public realm, friendship emerges as something that points out the liminality of those spheres. In fact, any closer look into the public or private realm will show how the private realm is of course influenced by politics and how the public realm is challenged by what happens in the private realm. As I continue to use the terms “public” and “private,” I mainly use them as heuristic devices to understand friendship as something operating within the assumptions we have about these concepts, and in order to explore friendship as a trespasser that challenges these assumptions. Especially for women (travelers) who have traditionally been most strongly affected by the division of the private/domestic sphere and the public sphere, the ability of friendship to overstep these realms suggests a potential for disrupting the spatial and social control on identity to which women are often subjected. Finally, this notion of friendship as a trespasser also promises intriguing insights for cross-cultural encounters between subjects from different countries, as I will highlight by drawing on my friendship with Maria, and the spaces where our friendship developed.

Before embarking on our journey from Egypt to Germany together, Maria and I had only met each other twice. We first got to know each other in 2011 during a three-week documentary filmmaking workshop in Cuba, and a year later we saw each other again for a one-week reunion with the participants of the workshop in Brazil. Two years after Brazil, in 2014, another workshop was planned to take place in Egypt, which gave rise to the idea for Maria and I to travel together from the reunion site in Egypt to my home in Germany and to document this experience. The beginning of our friendship thus lies in Cuba and is embedded in a larger group of friends that was formed based on our mutual interest in documentary filmmaking. The international film school (La Escuela de Cine y TV) in San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba–the physical setting in which we spent a lot of time together–is located in a small village about an hour from Havana. Its unique location on an island, away from the capital and largely isolated from foreign media, allows for intense interaction and creates temporarily completely self-sufficient communities (in the sense of human interaction). With almost no internet and no outside distractions, we were literally locked down in the school (there is a big fence which surrounds the school; everyone who leaves or arrives has to pass through the entry gate and register) and forced to interact with each other. In retrospect, it is striking to me how much the physical place in which our relationship started facilitated collaboration and intense engagement with each other.

As a place that was outside of our homes and beyond what was known to us, Cuba also provided an environment in which neither one of us felt at home. In a sense, Cuba, and more specifically the film school we attended, placed us in a physical and cultural context that was vastly different from our ordinary environments. Intermittently, it freed both of us from familiar cultural signs and opened a space of cultural ambivalence that influenced the development of our friendship. Since meaning in this new space had to be constantly re-negotiated for both of us, our interactions were less dominated by the frameworks of our cultural origins than they would have been at home. For example, in this third culture context, I quickly became aware that my German desire to avoid uncertainties in conversations and to making plans was unachievable, partly due to the language barrier (my Spanish was not very good at that time and the mix of different types of Spanish coming together at the film school [Cuban Spanish, Argentinian Spanish, Peninsular Spanish, and so on] made communication challenging for me) and partly due to circumstances specific to the place we were in (e.g. the fact that meetings and events often do not start on time in Cuba). As a result, my existing knowledge system was rendered more unstable and incomplete than in an environment in which I feel more comfortable. Cuba thus caused ambivalence within, and between, Maria and me, and created a social space which allowed a grounding of our friendship largely outside any particular cultural prescriptions.⁶¹Our second meeting in Brazil in 2012 can be seen in a similar light. It was the first time we traveled together and provided another third-culture context.

Beyond the physical and social conditions in Cuba, the organization of the workshop also furthered the development of our relationship. During our workshop, we worked in small teams to produce a short film; Maria and I worked together with two other participants from other cultures (one from Chile and one from Colombia) on a project about a cinema in the small town of Quivicán, which was run exclusively by women. The thematic proximity to our film is striking. The short film, Cine Encanto (2011), which we completed in Cuba, features interviews with five women who used to run the local cinema, which is now closed. These women talk about how they did not just work together, but how their working together was more comparable to a relationship that sisters have (Cine Encanto 0:04:05). Evoking the themes of sisterhood, collaboration and friendship, Cine Encanto shares similarities with Wanderlust not just on a content level, but also in the way it was made and the way it links spaces and friendship between women.

 

 

For example, the cinema in Quivicán served as a physical and social space for these women to collaborate, and the finished film serves as a filmic space that pays tribute to their friendship and their mutual support for each other.⁶²When the film was finished at the end of the workshop, we showed it at the film school and invited the five protagonists to come and see it. Seeing themselves and remembering their friendship turned out to be a very emotional event for the five women who had not been in touch much since the movie theatre closed down. The foundation for the friendship between Maria and me was thus not only embedded within a transnational working space, but it is was also embedded in a group predominantly made up of women, who chose to tell a story about women collaborating to run a cinema. Of course, Maria and I, had no idea about all of this at that time, but Cine Encanto marked the beginning of our relationship, the discovery of our mutual interest in documentary and gender issues, and the starting point of our journey.

 

Friendship as a Community of Choice

The existing literature on friendship suggests that up until the 18th century most philosophers’ concerns with friendship were focused on “the moral connotations” of friendship (Cain, Friendship xi), which meant that they focused largely on the ways in which friendship aspired to do good for a higher end and to create harmonious and ethical societies. This changed in the 19th century, when more “[…] attention was focused on the extent to which friendships between men might challenge rather than support social norms by including erotic or sexual relationships […].” (Cain, Friendship xii, my emphasis). Particularly for Christianity, the fear that the friendship between two men could become a more important relationship than the one with God posed a struggle and shifted thinking with regard to classical ideas of friendship (Österberg 35).⁶³Every exploration of friendship eventually raises the question of how to deal with other relationships or facets of relationships. In my exploration of friendship I focus on non-romantic relationships while acknowledging that sometimes the lines are blurry. Friendships often exists alongside marital or other sexual relationships, and while erotic elements may be present in some friendships they are usually not the most important aspect (Cain, Friendship xiv).

As pointed out earlier, the pre-modern perception of friendship as something public- facing and aimed at doing good for a higher end largely excluded women and rendered friendship as something primarily relevant for men in their ethical-existential and social-political development. For women, it can be argued that friendship carried more of a disruptive potential from the beginning. Drawing on Jane Austin’s novel Emma (1815), for example, Cain illustrates how friendship between women not only reduced their isolation in the private sphere, but also emerged as a potential disrupter to compulsory heterosexuality with women imagining friendship as an alternative to marriage (Cain 217-221).⁶⁴In the wake of discussions about an increasing number of unmarried women in Britain in 1865, writer and women’s suffrage activist Francis Power Cobb suggests, for example, that women would not have to be alone, but could live their lives in the company of other women. A few decades later, the groundbreaking force of friendship between women becomes strikingly perceivable in the first and second waves of feminism that drew on friendship and solidarity in their movements for political and economic inclusion.

While friendship is not an easy relationship to define, Marilyn Friedman argues that voluntariness emerges as an important ingredient to it. In What are Friends for? Feminist Perspectives on Personal Relationships and Moral Theory (1992), Friedman explores the potential of friendship between women to create communities that allow subjects to challenge and question existing traditions. She highlights friendship between women as a community of choice and contrasts it to other identity-granting communities women are born into (e.g. the family, neighborhood or nation-state). Instead of being based on what is socially assigned or prescribed, Friedman shows how friendship is characterized by a certain degree of voluntariness (M. Friedman 245). This voluntariness “contributes to the potential of friendship to provide support for persons with unconventional values” (5).⁶⁵In her description of people “with unconventional values,” Friedman evokes the notion of outcasts with “unusual” lifestyles that are pushed into the periphery of a dominant culture and often neglected by family members and other communities (M. Friedman 248). In other words, friendship fulfills the important function of creating alternative communities of belonging that help to sustain enclaves of unconventional living, which might spark influential forces for social change. While friendship alone is not yet a public action, it is where Friedman sees the breeding grounds for feminist aspiration. Friendship as a community of choice provides support for subjects, despite, or precisely because, they embody values that are deviant from dominant culture’s beliefs and expectations and thus provide the grounds from which resistance can emerge:

Friendship among women has been the cement […] of numerous communities of women throughout history who defied the local conventions for their gender and live lives of creative disorder. In all these cases, women moved out of their given or found communities into new attachments with other women by their own choice […] (M. Friedman 248-249).

“Sisterhood is powerful.” This slogan became popular during the second wave of feminism and makes reference to the progress that happened with regard to women’s rights largely because groups of women organized under common causes and supported one another. The term “sisterhood,” broadly speaking, thus describes a community of women linked by a common interest and is usually associated with public action and women’s rights movements.⁶⁶Given how tightly connected the idea of sisterhood is to feminist agendas and how much women’s struggle for equality was and is dependent on relationships between friends, it seems almost impossible to untangle the relationships between friendship, sisterhood and activism. This, however, is not to suggest that political alliance between women automatically means friendship between women (and it also does not mean that political alliance necessarily needs to be in favor of, or in line with a feminist agenda). At the same time, the term and its often implied idea of an all-encompassing, global sisterhood has been rightfully critiqued and challenged by many who have seen the term as being misused to universalize the issues of white women. More specifically, sisterhood has been criticized for labeling all women as unified by their shared oppression under the structures of patriarchy, without accounting for the ways in which white, Western women are often part of that oppression (see for example works by Chandra Talape Mohanty or Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak for elaborations on this topic).⁶⁷Robin Morgan’s “Sisterhood is Global” (1984), provides an example of this problem. Here Morgan suggests that women in all cultures and countries are equally oppressed, which results in mutual attitudes among women and the “[…] common condition which, despite variations in degree, is experienced by all human beings who are born female” (Morgan qtd. in Mohanty 73). While acknowledging the value of Morgan’s anthology which documents women’s resistances in a number of places around the world, Mohanty, for example, has pointed out why it is problematic to present women as a unified group in which everyone is similarly oppressed by patriarchy (Mohanty 72). Mohanty highlights how such a vision not only implicates all men equally involved in patriarchy, regardless of race, class, and so on, but also obfuscates the ways in which white women profit from and participate in patriarchy (Mohanty 74-75). The work done in postcolonial studies, the debates in intersectional feminism, and the ongoing, critical engagement with the term sisterhood have pointed out that despite the good intentions associated with the idea of a global sisterhood, there is a pressing need to examine the possible complicities between feminist and imperial gestures when talking about women coming together to further a “common” interest.⁶⁸The term “sisterhood” has been adopted in different ways, and by different groups of women. Among groups of lesbian women the term is, for example, used to affirm their sexual orientation, or to call attention to the homophobia of mainstream society (Zimmerman 702).

Coming to this cross-cultural project from the position of a white, German woman, studying at a university in the US Midwest, these discussions also remind me to scrutinize my own complicities. This is not to set up a duality between Maria and me, where Maria would assume a specific role, but it means to acknowledge the many ways in which my cultural, geographical and social location influence my work and our relationship.⁶⁹An example of this is my very own writing and speaking of “waves” as it illustrates how my education and formation as a scholar has been influenced by the places I lived and worked in. Alka Kurian argues that when we organize the history of feminism as mainly based on events and personalities in Europe and North America, we create a situation where: “[…] the ‘grand narrative’ of feminism becomes the story of western endeavor, and relegates the experience of non-western women to the margins of feminist discourse” (Kurian qtd. in Narain 240).

The immediate question that arises then is: how a type of sisterhood that is not based on positioning whiteness and Westernness as the standard of womanhood can be conceptualized, talked about and practiced by Maria and me in our film, and in my writing about it? Mohanty suggests that instead of thinking of the unity of women as given, it should be:

[…] something that has to be worked for, struggled toward – in history (Mohanty 77, emphasis in original).

This is echoed in what another postcolonial, feminist scholar Sarah Ahmed refers to as a “(re)encountering what is already encountered” (178, emphasis in original).⁷⁰When I first wrote this chapter I unconsciously assumed Ahmed’s italicized writing style. After also putting the variations of (re)encountering what is already encountered (from secondary literature or my own adoption of it) in italics I realized that the italics also serve to highlight the idea behind this proposal, namely to call attention to something, which is unconsciously consumed and might otherwise be overlooked. I therefore decided to italicize these words every time I make reference to Ahmed’s proposal of (re)encountering what is already encountered. In the epilogue I will return to her work and apply it to the non-encounter between tourism and migration. Ahmed suggests that in order to really encounter other women, we must move beyond the difference presented and towards the work with the difference (179). Denise deCaires Narain describes this work towards the difference as a series of “intimate, provisional negotiations” that can come up with “transnational feminism(s) rather than definite prescriptions” (244). In an attempt to figure out what these struggles can look like on a practical (filmmaking) level, I turn to Wanderlust and my experience working with Maria in putting our own distance to work.

In the last section of this chapter I will elaborate in detail on how we engaged in “intimate, provisional negotiations” (Narain 244) and how we practiced our friendship. For now, I refer to the experience of crossing borders together, since it presents a good example of how I have come to understand Ahmed’s call for (re)encountering what is already encountered. Before embarking on our trip, Maria expressed great fear of crossing political borders and I could not really understand or relate to this fear. Given that we were both traveling with a European passport (with a German passport and she with an Italian passport), I ascribed her fear of crossing borders to her inexperience in traveling. I had already jumped to a conclusion based on what I thought I knew about her. In other words, I had already encountered her. Traveling alongside Maria for over two months, however, I re-encountered her and the many ways I previously did not see her (and therefore could not acknowledge her). I (re)encountered, for example, the fact that Maria hardly speaks English caused a lot of suspicion at border crossings. This reminds us that English is the dominant language of tourism and travel, and not being able to speak it often excluded Maria from being perceived as a tourist. I (re)encountered the fact that her “Latin” appearance often triggered different treatment at borders than my “Caucasian” appearance, and that in some cases her Italian passport was considered problematic, while my German passport was not (even when official entry regulations should be the same for all EU citizens).⁷¹I put “Latin” and “Caucasian” in quotation marks in order to draw attention to the problematic and ambivalent meaning of these labels. What I am trying to convey with these terms is that Maria’s appearance is what one would typically refer to as “Latin” (darker skin tone, dark hair and eyes), while my appearance would typically be considered “Caucasian” (with a lighter skin tone and blonde hair). The border crossing between Turkey and Bulgaria was the moment when I most intensely experienced the different ways in which we lived through the same situation. While I was allowed to pass immediately, Maria was questioned about what she had been doing in Egypt and whether she could present another Italian document to prove she was really who she claimed to be. In the epilogue I will return to this border-crossing and offer an in-depth analysis of the scene in our film. Obviously, my traveling alongside cannot be equated to her lived reality, but the shared embodied experience alongside each other on our journey often made the distance between us perceivable in the first place and indicated what had to be (re)encountered, thus rendering being with-and-alongside an important part of the labor that goes into the “struggle toward” (Mohanty 77).

At the intersection of our personal, lived experience and larger social and political structures, our friendship emerged as something that helped us to reflect on how we navigate the world as women, as friends, and as individuals, but also on how our experiences differ because of the distinct intersections in which our bodies, origins and backgrounds position us. Our friendship became an empowering space that enabled us to scrutinize the way we were subjected to each other, but also to certain roles or limits due to our gender. Following M. Friedman, I would argue that friendship between women can provide the support, backbone, and alternative community necessary to question some of the varying cultural beliefs put on them, and even serve to challenge and resist them. In our case, an apparent example of this is the way our plan to travel from Egypt to Germany was perceived and sometimes judged by our families and friends. When we announced the idea to travel by land from Egypt to Germany, there were a number of people close to us who disapproved of our journey or wanted to dissuade us.⁷²An important reason why our family members were unhappy about our plan had to do with the fear of something happening to us. This fear, however, is linked to the perception that as women travelers we were assumed to be more vulnerable than male travelers. The subject why women are perceived to be more vulnerable, the relation to actual dangers, and the lack of examples of women travelers as a result and cause of this assumption, would require at least another dissertation. Any answer, however, would need to consider the historical fact that for a long time power and patriarchy could not afford women the same possibility of exploration in the form of travel, as it afforded to men. This is because within patriarchal structures women are often appreciated as agents of social conservancy and not of social change (Veselka “Female Road Narratives”). In other words, the way women travelers are perceived today has a great deal to do with the patriarchal power structures that still permeate most of our identity-granting communities today. In the end, Maria and I did embark on our journey and the resulting documentation of this journey can be understood as our public action fueled by our friendship. Before I explore that idea in greater depth, I first turn to some examples of friendship in German feminist films and explore the ways in which friendship as a community displays disruptive potential.

 

Friendship in German Feminist Filmmaking

In the following, I set out to explore the role of friendship between women in works by German feminist filmmakers in the second half of the 20th century. I am particularly interested in the disruptive potential these friendships display with regard to their female protagonists, their coming-to-consciousness, and the places in which their friendship is enacted and practiced.

Exploring the way (autobiographical) filmmakers imagine collaboration and friendship between women as something that moves out of the private realm into a more public realm, often presents a critique of women’s position in contemporary society in subtle but powerful ways. By highlighting the ways in which a public notion of friendship serves a feminist agenda, I hope to also show the connection between friendship and sisterhood.

 

(Re)claiming Spaces

Following the focus on spaces in the previous section, the first aspect I want to point out is how friendship can help women to (re)claim spaces. Die allseitig reduzierte Persönlichkeit: Redupers [The All-Round Reduced Personality: Outtakes] (1978) by Helke Sander provides an example to illustrate this. In Sander’s autobiographical film, the filmmaker herself plays the main character Edda Chiemnyjewski, a freelance photographer who lives in West Berlin.⁷³Similar to the character, Edda, in her film, Sander became politically active and involved in the women’s movement in Berlin. Throughout the course of the film Sander demonstrates how Edda tries to manage her multiple roles as mother, creative artist, lover and friend, and how she finds support and strength in a women’s photography group.⁷⁴Similar to the character, Edda, in her film, Sander became politically active and involved in the women’s movement in Berlin. The way Edda and the other women join forces to (re)claim spaces can be understood as a disruptive act on at least two levels.

First, these women (re)claim public spaces together and challenge male dominance in them. Together, they occupy living rooms inside their homes, but also art galleries and the streets of a divided Berlin, which Sander’s film features prominently with a long opening shot of the Wall at the beginning of the film. While Edda often embarks on solo assignments, she is mostly seen walking through the city with the other women in search of motifs for their art project. Showing the diverse spaces and places where friendship between women is practiced not only depicts their lived experiences in the city in a spatial way, but also asserts them with authority in the city and challenges the dominance of male presence in public space. Moreover, the (re)claiming of public places is promoted by the women’s art project itself, which portrays the city. By photographing public spaces in West Berlin these women occupy the city not only by means of their physical presence, but also in a perceptible way by inscribing it with meaning through their photography.

Second, Edda and her friends are (re)claiming professional spaces as women photographers. Photography, like cinematography, is a profession with a long legacy of male domination. As a consequence, men largely monopolize and control these professional spaces, illustrated for example by the male decision-maker Edda talks to about their art project. Another example is Edda’s encounter with a male photographer at the women’s collective art exhibition, which provides an illustration of male domination of spaces beyond the professional realm. First the man wants to give Edda professional advice in a patronizing way, and then when Edda goes out on a date with him, he tries to dominate her personal/intimate space by kissing her against her will, to which she responds by pushing him away and throwing up. This scene underscores not only how the struggle for (re)claiming spaces permeates almost every aspect of life for women, but also enables possibilities of critique within a feminist framework of the personal as political.⁷⁵Another example illustrating how entangled the women’s private and public/professional lives are is the scene when the women of the photography group are preparing to take pictures for their art project at the Berlin Wall and one of the photographers has to head out and pick up her child. This provokes another photographer to complain about how those sorts of disturbances upset the working rhythm (Berg-Ganschow). The woman complains that her friend cannot leave her kid with her ex-husband so that they can work without disruptions, thus making perceivable how the things that happen at the women’s homes are also influencing their public lives. Friendship emerges as something that could potentially be threatened by other entanglements such as motherhood, but as a trespasser it also reveals the messy overlap and intertwinement of the two spheres in everyday chaos.

 Something similar happens in Margarethe von Trotta’s Die Bleierne Zeit [Marianne and Juliane] (1981). The 106-minute fiction film is loosely based on the real-life story of Christiane and Gudrun Ensslin. Marianne represents Gudrun, who commits herself to the terrorist group, the Red Army Faction, and Juliane represents Christiane, who works as a journalist to bring into being the feminist magazine Emma. The main plot of the story deals with the relationship and friendship between the two sisters and the way they both try to enact change in different ways. Juliane’s work alongside other women for the magazine Emma reveals similarities to Redupers as it challenges the dominance of men in controlling and shaping public opinion. Starting a magazine and publishing articles was not something which was generally considered women’s terrain, and the depiction of these women in such positions challenges that. Juliane’s organization and attendance of the protest march for the abolition of the anti-abortion statute in German law (§218) provides another example of women who come together, fight for a common cause and (re)claim public spaces and public speaking.

In a similar vein, von Trotta’s Heller Wahn [Sheer Madness] (1983) also presents female acts of defiance in (re)claiming spaces. The film deals with a friendship between two women, which leads one of the protagonists to rebel against her marriage and her isolation in her home. In the beginning of Heller Wahn the friendship between Olga, a successful and outgoing professor, and Ruth, a timid outsider who lives withdrawn from most of public life, is mainly expressed at home or in private. Ruth was traumatized by the suicide of her brother many years earlier and as a result has largely avoided public spaces and interaction with people. In contrast, Franz, her husband, is the embodiment of a public figure. As a peace expert he often appears on TV or the radio and it becomes clear that he is only seemingly bothered by Ruth’s emotionally vulnerable state which keeps her at home. As Ruth becomes friends with Olga, however, her life slowly starts to change and she begins to open up. As their friendship progresses, Ruth’s withdrawal into the private sphere finds its ultimate reversal when the two women travel to Egypt together and Ruth even goes back to teaching (a profession she used to carry out before her brother’s death) and plans an art exhibition to present the paintings she has secretly been working on. Her physical and artistic motion “out into the world” can be read as an act of transgression enabled by friendship. In many ways Olga was the source of encouragement for Ruth and the one who restored her sense of self. Ruth’s breach into the public, however, is met with a strong reaction from Franz, who manipulates his wife into believing that Olga only became friends with her because he asked her to, thus revealing how he cannot handle Ruth’s new found self-confidence, because his ego is dependent on keeping her weak. The friendship between Olga and Ruth thus challenges male power and dominance of public spaces at the very least by revealing how Ruth’s husband feels threatened by her stepping out.

 

Friendship as a Place of Resistance

Friendship as something that trespasses the division of private and public, and enables women to (re)claim spaces, then also emerges as a place of resistance where oppressive structures are recognized, analyzed, and countered. By means of forming alternative communities, thus M. Friedman, women can come to recognize the “[…] illegitimate moral claims that communities make on their members” (237). In Redupers, for example, the image of women working together indicates a place of resistance where the women recognize structural problems that go beyond their own lives.⁷⁶The photography collective knows that they have been given the art project because the art council figured they would not have to pay as much money to a group of women photographers, compared to a group of male photographers or a mixed group of photographers. When Edda and her friends get together to look at their works, they recognize that they have all focused on how the Wall mirrors Berlin’s social and political situation, instead of creating photographs that would be more representative of “women’s issues” (Katzman).⁷⁷Katzman argues that the arts council has the hope that their support for a women’s project will demonstrate their publicly their support of feminism, which leads them to apply a reductive feminism that expects the women’s photography collective to come up with “Sunday-supplement style, humanistic shots of working women in Berlin” (Katzman). Suspecting that the arts council will retract the funding if they persist on working with their photographs of the Wall, Edda and her friends come to a conclusion that is characterized by solidarity and asserting their personal and artistic integrity, as they reject the art council’s funding. Instead of giving in to an institutional authority, they exercise their artistic autonomy and realize how sexism and capitalism interlace and saturate every aspect of their lives.⁷⁸As Katzman argues, the collaborative thus comes to a deeper, “more complex vision of feminism.” She explains: “The arts council cannot see that feminism is a perspective that has as much legitimacy when it penetrates the ideological and political ramifications of the Berlin Wall as when it deals with ‘women’s problems’ of rape and abortion.” The arts council regards only certain topics to be women’s issues, while Edda and her friends see how all aspects in their lives are infused with the dynamics of sexism and capitalism. Katzman thus continues how “[…] the arts council’s circumscribing of certain social problems (day care, rape, and abortion) as women’s issues becomes a form of social domestication, a way of naturalizing these problems and thereby diverting attention from them.” Without romanticizing their commitment to each other, the women’s togetherness and solidarity emerges as a space to recognize systematic oppression and to form resistance by unification.

In a different but nonetheless related way, Verriegelte Zeit also presents friendship as something that emerges as a place where oppressive structures are countered by self-assertion. Schönemann’s autobiographical documentary about her own imprisonment in the former GDR dedicates a significant amount of screen time to her friendship with Punkt, a woman with whom Schönemann shared a prison cell for a duration of eight weeks. In three different sequences Schönemann and Punkt sit in what appears to be their old prison cell and reflect on their time together and how their friendship essentially helped them to survive. They talk about how they felt during those weeks in prison, the powerlessness they experienced because they were incarcerated, the pressure of giving in to authorities and what it took to remain mentally sane (Verriegelte Zeit 0:35:34). Throughout these conversations it becomes clear how important the friendship between the two women was and how the shared experience in prison created a strong bond of solidarity.⁷⁹Throughout their conversations it becomes clear how the ability to talk to someone else who is sympathetic and is experiencing a very similar situation created a strong bond between the two women. They also become aware of the many similarities between them. Friendship also provided both Schönemann and Punkt with the necessary endurance to withstand the manipulative strategies employed by the prison staff: both women were offered to be set free if they would denounce their husbands and withdraw their applications for an exit visa (Schönmann recounts how her father came to visit her in prison and tried to pressure her into withdrawing her application so she could take care of her children) (Verriegelte Zeit 0:46:21). Verriegelte Zeit thus provides an example of friendship as a space of opposition and resilience that stands against the powerlessness they felt and helped them stay strong and not give in.⁸⁰Prison grants its detainees no privacy, they are under constant surveillance and always exposed to orders. At the same time, prisoners are deprived of any involvement in the public sphere (they often loose their right to vote, cannot engage in most discussions or shape public spaces). Friendship emerged as something that allowed these two women to protect their privacy, in the sense of their inner sense of self against the authoritative power structures and intimidation they experienced in prison.

Talking about how friendship can serve as a space of resistance in times of oppression, Die Bleierne Zeit can be seen as providing another example of this. The friendship between the two sisters, Juliane and Marianne, establishes a link between two parts of society that are considered separate by many. While their relationship is constantly put under pressure by the disparate views between the two women, they remain connected. Their friendship prevents the complete isolation of Marianne, as Juliane visits her frequently in prison and even tries to reestablish the connection between Marianne and their mother. As a bridge, the friendship–both a literal and a metaphorical sisterhood–between the two women connects those who live a relatively normal life and those who are condemned by the public realm. In many ways, the friendship between Marianne and Juliane can be understood as symbolizing the refusal of many young, leftist people to comply with or accept authoritarian structures implemented by the German government at that time.

 

Imagining Alternative (Work) Futures

The way friendship works as a place of resistance in these films resonates with M. Friedman’s idea of alternative communities which help women to defy existing conventions. At the same time, these films make an argument for friendship as not just a place for resisting the status quo, but also for reorganizing and reimagining possible futures. In Redupers, for example, the women in the photography collective analyze and critique each other’s photographs and discuss what they should do with regard to the art council’s expectations. Their collaborative work not only challenges the idea of art as the solitary work of one genius, but also imagines a possible world in which collective work is based on a “common artistic and political vision rather than under the aegis of patriarchal capitalism” (Katzman).⁸¹As a comparison to Edda’s work in the women’s collective, her job does not seem to make her very happy, or fulfill her. The scenes which show Edda going on a solo assignment are usually marked by a voice-over which informs the audience about how much she is making and about the costs and effort associated with each assignment, pointing out how this type of work is carried out under what Katzman describes as the “aegis of patriarchal capitalism” (Katzman). The political importance of the depiction of women working together in Sander’s film thus serves the purpose of challenging what is currently done and pointing to alternative (working) cultures where work is not alienating, nor based on competition or exploitation of others.

Winter Adé, Misselwitz’ autobiographical documentary, which portrays women in different situations and life stages throughout the GDR, echoes this sentiment of meaningful and non-alienating work, through her own voice-over in which she mentions a “[…] Beharren auf sinnvolle Arbeit”⁸²“[…] Insisting on meaningful work” (translation mine). (Winter Adé 1:49:57) as one of the cornerstones of her life. Additionally, her film is also involved in the struggle of (re)imagining alternatives to the established order. Winter Adé can be considered a public action of bringing together diverse voices of women and calling for an end of the marginalization of these women’s stories under socialism (Creech 424). Taken individually, the relation these women have, for example, towards their work does not necessarily instill the desire for alternative (work) cultures.⁸³Taken individually, they merely indicate that some have a more alienated relationship to their work (e.g., Christine the factory worker who is banging pipes to keep soot from settling inside them eight times an hour), while others were able to engaged in work they have taken on largely out of their own will (e.g., the woman in the end who runs an orphanage). Taken collectively, however, an idea emerges that suggests a movement away from a season of “cold, death, emptiness, and silence” (Creech 424). The “winter” is the state in which Misselwitz interprets women’s voices and narratives as existing, and so Janis Joplin’s “Summertime” which starts playing at the end of the film as the camera shows first the rails of a train track and then the open water, suggests a departure into a better future, one in which summer will come.⁸⁴Creech argues that while the perspective from the ship towards the horizon suggests an optimistic outlook, the sequence remains evasive. She writes: “Yet it is not quite clear that the lyrics to ‘Summertime’ suggest the season of women’s true emancipation in the GDR, in which their voices will be heard, their personal narratives acknowledged, and they will embark on a new journey towards freedom. While the ending of the tracks and the introduction of water, of uncharted seas suggest that this journey exists beyond the frame of East German women’s current narratives, the image is not one of summer. Instead, the black and white of the film blurs the sky into a monotone grey, leaving the viewer to seek the warmth of summer elsewhere. While the film does not overtly suggest that a journey towards ‘freedom’ for these women exists outside of the frame of socialism, the ambiguity of the ship’s course and destination is juxtaposed to the ‘easy livin’’ and ‘jumpin’ fish’ of the song. As a result, the song takes on an ironic tone that underscores the grey ambiguity of the image. It becomes difficult to believe that any of these women will ‘spread their wings and take to the sky.’ In fact, the viewer is compelled to ask, ‘Where to? To the expansive nothingness of the sea’?” (424). The film itself then does the work of imagining a better future by connecting the different instances of friendship and encounters between women into a public view. The alliance of many voices becomes the space in which a better future for women can be imagined.

While referring to Winter Adé as a film that portrays friendship between women might seem a bit far-fetched, Misselwitz’ encounters and relationships can be argued to evoke the notion of “sisterhood,” in the sense that these women make up an (imagined) community linked by their shared reality of living in the GDR. Similar to Schönemann’s Verriegelte Zeit, the power of friendship and sisterhood derives from the intimacy the shared experience between women brings about. Compared to Schönemann and Misselwitz, von Trotta and Sander work with different aesthetic approaches and within distinct narrative modalities. The most obvious difference between them is that Schönemann and Misselwitz work within the genre of documentary, and von Trotta and Sander work within the genre of fiction. While Redupers blends techniques of both documentary and fiction, it is very scripted and stylized in its agenda of problematizing women’s status in society. Von Trotta uses the narrative discourse of melodrama to trigger spectatorial engagement, but also to approach political events in Germany at that time. Consequently friendship is represented and narrated differently in their works. While von Trotta and Sander actively construct women’s friendship in order to challenge established ways of perceiving women and their relationships, Schönemann and Misselwitz draw on intimacy and personal concern (Stainton 89).

The images in both Schönemann’s and Misselwitz’ films reflect this intimacy through visual proximity, for example, by means of the close up shots of the women Misselwitz interviews in Winter Adé and the close framing of Schönemann and Punkt in their former prison cell, as well as the personal connection the filmmakers have to the women they interview. It is from this intimate connection that the potentialities of collaboration and support between women become perceivable and conjure the political power of “sisterhood.”

 

Breeding Grounds with Differences

While indicating the disruptive potential of friendship, none of these German feminist films are obvious success stories. The women’s collective in Redupers, for example, is not an overtly optimistic story of a collaboration of women who succeed on all levels. After all, they do not get funded by the art council to go through with their documentation project. Nonetheless, they support each other and continue working on their art. Without romanticizing friendship between women, Sander’s film thus presents friendship as a powerful element to keep on fighting for equal opportunities. Another important aspect is that the women’s friendship described in these films never becomes a refuge that allows a temporary break from oppressive structures, only to later reintegrate into an existing patriarchal order. Instead, all women remain resistant: Edda and her friends do not compromise their artistic integrity, Schönemann and Punkt do not give in to the manipulative tactics of the prison personnel, Ruth realizes that her move towards independence must exclude Franz (and the only possible exit she sees is to kill him), and Juliane keeps on fighting for her sister and for justice to be done despite all odds. What emerges from these representations of friendship between women is a notion of collaboration and sisterhood that is full of differences, problems and tensions, and (partly because of those differences and tensions) provides a critical breeding ground for challenging the status quo, questioning normative roles and principles, challenging (male) domination of space, and imagining alternative communities (and visions of gainful employment). As communities of choice, friendship between women can empower and join different individuals in acute political and social awareness.

 

Friendship in Wanderlust

Moving from the examples of German feminist filmmaking to our film, I broaden my focus from the question of how friendship as an alternative community is represented, to how friendship as an alternative community is practiced. Given the many examples of imagined and envisioned friendship discussed in the previous section, I have been surprised to find very few examples of collaborative filmmaking practices in reality.⁸⁵Friendship and collaboration between women filmmakers emerges mostly as a survival or coping strategy to deal with financial limitations. This means that women filmmakers tend to turn toward some sort of collaboration or working with friends because of economic pressure, or because it promises greater artistic freedom (Silberman “Film and Feminism in Germany”). Marc Silberman conducted several interviews with feminist German filmmakers in the 1970s which show how the limited access to money from film funding bodies and TV stations often forces women filmmakers to rely on teams recruited from friends and volunteers (Silberman “Interview with Ottinger”). Of course, there were also other reasons for women filmmakers to collaborate with each other, or with their participants, such as an improved group cohesion and greater solidarity (Silberman “Conversing Together”). Brückner’s first two films, Tue recht and Ein ganz und gar verwahrlostes Mädchen, as well as Misselwitz’ Winter Adé or Schönemann’s Verriegelte Zeit can be seen as involving some/a certain degree of collaborative spirit that includes the protagonists and characters in the process of filmmaking (in Brückner’s case, the participation of her mother and of her close friend Rita Rischa; Misselwitz seeks the collaboration of diverse women throughout the GDR, and Schönemann solicits the help of her ex-prison cell roommate, Punkt). The creative decision making, however, remains largely with the respective film directors alone. Despite the imagining of female friendship in feminist German cinema during the second half of the 20th century, we do not see a clear emergence of a feminist non-hierarchical model of filmmaking. Exploring the disruptive potential of friendship for reframing the woman traveler and filmmaker, I look first into how Maria’s and my friendship was practiced on our journey in relation to the many different social and cultural spaces we were confronted with, and second I explore how our friendship was practiced and represented in (making) the film.

 

Traveling the Distance

In the first part of this Chapter I talked about how our friendship was influenced by the physical spaces in which it developed. I argued that Cuba and later Brazil presented a type of third-culture space in which neither Maria nor I felt at home and which therefore had a significant impact on the way our friendship evolved. This can also be said to be true for a large part of our journey in 2014 (until we reached Austria and Germany, places that are of course more familiar to me). This means that each place triggered something specific in us and between us, because each place implicated us differently within it. In Egypt, for example, I was made acutely aware of my whiteness, in Israel I became more concerned with my German history and legacy, and the divided island of Cyprus evoked strong associations with the past division of my home country, Germany. The way these places triggered something different within me, is likely the case for Maria as well, and consequently also for our friendship. In each place our cultural background positioned us as individuals differently regarding the place, but also regarding each other. By implication, this means that the changing places created ever new settings and new contexts to work with(in) our differences and distances.⁸⁶The Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb, Croatia provides a good example of the way in which we were implicated by a specific place we passed through together. Dedicated to honoring failed relationships, the museum exhibits personal objects from relationships that are over, sent in by individuals and usually accompanied by brief descriptions. In our film we retrospectively integrate our own story of a broken relationship into our film, illustrating how the museum positioned us in a place in which we were encouraged to disclose information between us and about our lives. Since we did not know about the existence of the museum beforehand (and had not actually brought our artifacts with us to leave them there), we decided to augment the collective exhibition of objects through our film by interweaving our own stories of broken relationships with those of other donors.

As I think about the way these physical places influenced our friendship, I am also starting to consider how we influence these places. After all, the spaces we travel through and which are in the end featured in our film, are the homes of others, and by traveling through them with our cameras we put them on display and inevitably mark them. This is even more the case because throughout our journey we occupied what would typically be considered public spaces: streets, cafes, trams, busses, stations, borders, parks, beaches, streets, plazas, corners, museums, and so on. Even the places where we stayed the night were almost always shared (dorm beds in hostels or other people’s homes) with little or no privacy, yet, one could say that our lives are rather private (in the sense that we are not public people of interest or fame). Still, the nature of our journey and of our project (a bi-autobiographial film) positioned us in physical and narrative places in which we were encouraged to disclose information between us and about our lives.⁸⁷The Museum of Broken Relationships is also a place that challenges the public/private dichotomy by exhibiting objects and stories that are considered extremely private. As a private-public trespassing, the exhibition thus bears some similarities to our bi-autobiographical project.

Looking back, I notice how acts of self-disclosure form not only part of our bi-autobiographical endeavor, but also function in numerous ways as important building blocks for intimacy and thus for the development of our friendship. This intimacy in turn is something that empowers Maria and me to put forward our feelings and lived experiences to each other and to ourselves. If exposing the self to the other also makes the self more available to the self, then in a way, the common wisdom that we know ourselves to the extent we are known to others is reflected in the way that, in the process of revealing each other to each other, Maria and I both gain self-knowledge.⁸⁸In the Museum of Broken Relationships, for example, we are both confronted with a specific situation from our individual past, and the joint visit encourages us to face those burdensome emotions each in our own way, but also together with a friend. The first image of that scene shows me filming at the entrance and then transitions to a number of photographs of the collection inside. The stills show trivial, everyday objects that are hung on walls, put on pedestals or protected behind glass walls: a vase with marbles, a summer dress, sculptured breasts, glass shards, dolls made of cloth, a painting, and a letter in a frame. Interspersed with these photographs appear images of Maria and me, each holding up our own object of a broken relationship accompanied by a short story of how we came to this object and how it represents a broken relationship. Every new place we passed through together thus triggered something, or moved us and our relationship in a new way by exposing a distance, struggle, (dis)agreement, or similarity (see for example the first part of this Chapter in which I explain how crossing borders together changed the way I thought about Maria’s fear). The crossing of distances, in a literal and in a figurative sense, can thus be considered the fabric of our relationship. Every bus ride, every border crossing, every meal, every argument, and every gesture shaped our friendship, but also practiced it. As a dynamic and also tentative unity, our friendship was characterized by constant movement.

 

(Re)presenting Differences

When Maria and I arrived at my parents’ house after our two-and-a-half month long journey from Egypt to Germany, we almost immediately sat down and spent an entire week looking at all of the footage we had recorded. Chapter One describes how cinematography can hold up a mirror for self-reflection and foster self-understanding in relation to others, and the joint documentation of our journey exemplifies this mirroring process in the sense that Maria’s camera served as a mirror for me, while my camera served as a mirror for her. However, the sum of our two cameras also carries the footprint of our relationship. Watching the recorded footage thus felt like an intensive crash course in one’s own attitudes, reactions and ways of being as a friend, and presented us with a filmic documentation of our evolving relationship.

In suggesting analogies between friendship, cinematography and mirroring as ways to gain self-knowledge, there are of course some important limitations to be considered. Unlike a mirror on a wall, which is stable and does not move, Maria moves around freely and according to her own agenda. She can film me regardless of whether I want to be mirrored at a specific moment. Maria’s camera does not merely provide a reflection of what happens to be situated in front of her. In contrast to a mirror, which is impartial in what it reflects back, Maria is not. As a friend, she herself “contains” information about the time or place or context and she has her own opinions which might interfere with the way she reflects my own self back to me. Friends (with cameras), unlike mirrors, are involved in interpreting the very moment they see and film. Reviewing the footage at the end of our journey, we thus realized that our recorded material not only holds up a mirror to look at ourselves, but also to look at our relationship.

The process of post-production (editing the images, music, and sound, as well as writing, and recording the voice-over) can be understood as another journey, not only in the sense that the joint work in post-production pointed out many more differences that we needed to work with, but it also took both of us on another physical journey. The crossing of cultures, borders, and languages in order to create a public account of our friendship brings me back to the question of how to practice and represent friendship in a cross-cultural encounter and stay alert to the possible complicities between feminist and imperial gestures. While the previous part in this section highlights the ways our cross-cultural friendship was practiced on the journey, I now want to turn to the way in which we worked with and within our differences in the post- production process.

When we arrived in Germany, we did not have a clear idea about when and how we would be able to edit our film, except that Maria expressed the desire that she wanted the film to have “something of Argentina” and suggested that we do the post-production in La Plata. I agreed, and before I went to La Plata in 2015, Maria came to the USA to live with me for one month and to start the editing process. A few months later, I traveled to Argentina and stayed there for a total of six months, working alongside Maria on finishing our film. While there were practical reasons we considered when we decided to do the post-production in Argentina, editing in Maria’s home country and writing our voice-over in her mother tongue can be understood as another way in which we worked the distance between us and this found its way into the representation of the work.⁸⁹Some of the practical reasons were that Maria could not take a long leave from her work again, since she had just taken a gap year to film Wanderlust and then continue her travels in Europe; also, she had a good network in Argentina of editors and sound designers we could work with. Moving to Argentina for several months involved a certain level of anxiety for me, and writing our voice-over in a language that was neither my mother tongue nor a language I felt comfortable writing in, presented me with some worries. In hindsight, the six months in Argentina and the writing of our voice-over in Spanish were decisive in our struggling towards each other, as for example, the uneasiness I experienced in struggling through the writing process in Spanish correlates with Maria’s lived experiences as a non-English speaker on our journey. Our struggle towards reducing the difference and distance between us then becomes perceivable not just in what we say, but also in which language we say it. International settings often default to English, and academia and its discussions about intersectional feminism, for example, are no exception to this. While there are practical reasons for using English, this clearly creates imbalances in socio-political power.⁹⁰I do not mean to claim that Spanish as a language does not carry similar risks to English in creating imbalances with regard to socio-political power, but the unacknowledged and often unreflected default choice of English cripples diversity in the discussions we are going to have because it excludes certain people/non-English speakers and puts scholars from non-English speaking countries at a disadvantage (see for example Mary Jane Curry and Theresa Lillis’ Academic Writing in a Global Context for a deeper exploration of this topic). By insisting on English we expect others to do the work of translation. Language thus emerges as a distance that also needed to be put to work in our journey of friendship. Or, as Ahmed points out: “The differences between us necessitate the dialogue, rather than disallow it – a dialogue must take place, precisely because we don’t speak the same language” (180).

In one of the last scenes of our film, Maria and I sit in a coffee house in Vienna and reflect on the impending end of our travels. My camera films Maria’s camera on the table and how she drinks her coffee, when my voice-over sets in:

Fue extraño ver nuestras cámaras arriba de la mesa. Sabiendo que grabar cada momento, en poco tiempo, se iba a terminar.⁹¹“It was strange to see our cameras on the table, knowing that in a few days filming every moment would be over” (translation mine). (Wanderlust 1:30:24).

Subsequently, Maria makes a reference regarding the coffee’s size:

Y bien el tamaño. No fue que poco rato dura la vida eterna […]⁹²“And it’s a good size. Not like how briefly lasts eternal life” (translation mine).

which is when I come in and complement her sentence, which I know is a the line in a song by Joaquín Sabina, a singer, songwriter, and poet from Spain she introduced me to:

[…] por el túnel de tus piernas (Wanderlust 1:30:34).⁹³“[…] through the tunnel of your legs” (translation mine).

Afterwards, I repeat the lyrics in my voice-over and reflect on our journey, which is slowly coming to an end:

Que poco rato dura la vida eterna – claro que estábamos hablando del café. Pero ahora el significado de esta línea me golpea con todo el poder de mi nostalgia (Wanderlust 1:30:49).⁹⁴“How briefly lasts eternal life – Of course we were talking about the coffee, but now the meaning of this line hits me with all the force nostalgia brings with it” (translation mine).

We talk about how strange it will be to not be together anymore and film each other while the setting changes to a shot of us lying in the grass in a park in Vienna where my voice-over continues:

Reconozco en esta escena el crecimiento de nuestra amistad, ya no molestaban los silencios y hasta podría completar tus frases (Wanderlust 1:31:10).⁹⁵“I recognize in this scene the growing of our friendship. The silences between us were no longer bothersome, and I was even able to complete your sentences” (translation mine).

In what could be misunderstood as a final “happily ever after” that has overcome all distance and difference between us, this scene reflects how towards the end of our journey, we did encounter moments in which we felt completely at ease with each other. This, however, does not mean that there is no more distance. Recognizing that friendship consists of similarity and dissimilarity and that everyone experiences things differently was essential to practicing our friendship during the journey, and our representation of it. Consequently, I hope this scene can be understood as underlining the idea that working the distance is an ongoing process, dynamic and volatile, but also rewarding and heavily influenced by the places and contexts we find ourselves in.

Following the image in the park, we wander through the Wiener Prater and arrive at a large, rotating earth globe that absorbs our attention (see figure 3.1). While images of us appear as we spin the globe, Maria’s voice-over sets in:

Tal vez, este viaje no comenzó con dos amigas viajando. Tal vez los miedos se llevaban muchos momentos. Tal vez, nunca vuelva a pasar por alguna frontera a pies a las tres de la mañana. Tal vez, hay muchas imágenes y muchas charlas que preferimos guardarlas solo para nosotras, pero volvería a intentar el mismo salto que me propusiste antes de salir. Porque si no fuera así, este viaje nunca hablaría de dos amigas viajando. (Wanderlust 1:31:43)⁹⁶“Maybe this journey did not start out with two friends traveling together. Maybe fear got the better of many moments. Maybe I will never again walk across some of these borders at three o’clock in the morning. Maybe there are some images and conversations that we prefer to keep to ourselves. But I would always take the same leap again. Because otherwise, this journey would not tell the story of two friends traveling together” (translation mine).

Her beginning “Maybe this journey did not start out with two friends […]” (my emphasis) can be understood as a reference to the idea of (re)encountering what is already encountered. Maria’s “[m]aybe” is an acknowledgment of how we thought that we had encountered each other, but we actually still had to reencounter each other first, before we could call each other friends. The end of her voice-over clearly suggests that now that we have been through this experience together, now that we have worked on the distance and struggled towards, we can actually address each other as friends. Her recalling of “[…] walk[ing] across some of these borders” evokes the importance of shared lived experience in this process of working the distance.

 

Epilogue: Different Mobilities

In September 2015, a few days after I arrived in Argentina, we found out that Wanderlust was accepted at the Work in Progress section at the International Film Festival Mar del Plata taking place at the end of October 2015. A little over a year had passed since we finished our journey from Egypt to Germany and the so-called “European migration crisis” was at a disastrous point. While the route across the Mediterranean Sea, or overland through Southeast Europe, was already established as a significant site of migration and flight, the beginning of 2015 marked a new chapter in terms of hundreds of thousands of people embarking on this dangerous journey in hope of reaching the European Union (EU).⁹⁷In a press release from July 2015, the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) points out that the first few months of 2015 had seen an 83 per cent increase in refugees and migrants who crossed the Mediterranean Sea compared to 2014, and this number was expected to rise even more during the summer months (UNHCR). When we presented Wanderlust in Mar del Plata, one of the jury members asked us how we see our film in context of the unfolding events in Europe. While her question did not exactly catch us by surprise, as Maria and I had had several discussions about whether and how to address this in our film, it did catch us unprepared, in the sense that we did not have a satisfying answer to her question.

In many ways, this jury member pointed to the immense privileges due to which it was possible to make our film. These privileges are inevitably reflected in our film, consciously and unconsciously, explicitly and implicitly, and they clash with migrants’ stories of death and hardship mainly known from the mass media. Our inability to provide a satisfying answer to the question then partly lies in the fact that there are no words, or theorizing, that can bridge the chasm that exists between our experience and that of millions of people trying to cross the same geographical distance with the “wrong” passport. At the same time, however, it is impossible and unethical to ignore the physical proximity of sharing the same places, the same waters, and the same air.

While the initial motivation that drove Maria and me to embark on this journey was to step out of conventional travel narrations of women travelers, it becomes increasingly clear to me at this point in the writing process that any attempt geared towards alternative representations of women travelers also means a critical engagement with representations of tourism. In other words, an attempt to reframe the woman traveler also has to acknowledge and scrutinize her embeddedness and complicities with global power hierarchies. Capitalism, like patriarchy, is based on societies being divided into classes. Both depend on the disproportionate access to resources and mobility in order to generate profit and privilege. Conversely, this means that attention paid to the female body in transit can and should not be separated from the dynamics that grant some people access to unrestricted mobility, and others not.⁹⁸For the sake of clarity I will talk about human mobility within the broad, often fuzzy, and highly constructed categories of tourism and migration. While there are many other forms of human mobility, I believe a focus on those two serves the purpose of this epilogue in drawing attention to the necessity of not foreclosing narrations about one type of human mobility to another type of human mobility. Cresswell argues that in order to really understand different types of human mobilities in an increasingly mobile world, we need to look at individual forms of mobility in relation to other forms of mobility: Mobilities need to be understood in relation to each other (9). Holert and Terkessidis do this, for example, by exploring the spatial places and social roles of ‘illegal’ migrants in relation to tourists and describe how spaces and mobility categories are charged with positive or negative connotations depending on the immigration politics of a given nation.

In Chapter Three, I brought up Ahmed’s call for “(re)encountering what is already encountered” (179, emphasis in the original) to explore the collaboration and cross-cultural encounter between Maria and me. Ahmed writes:

If transnational feminism involves crossing national borders, then we need to consider how it may do so in a way that does not simply reaffirm border-crossings that are already taking place in global capitalism (178).

Translating this to the context of encounters between tourism and migration provokes important questions for us as travelers: how can we (re)encounter not only each other, but also others, and other others? Is it even possible to (re)encounter others in the realm of tourism, to sidestep touristic experience and to conceptualize border-crossings in new, and different ways? While I do not claim to hold any answers to these questions, posing them assists me in exploring the ways in which an opening up of touristic experience and discourse, might help to imagine and provoke new types of discursive border-crossings between tourism and migration.

 

Sidestepping Touristic Experiences?

One way in which Maria and I tried to sidestep touristic experience was by deferring from what we thought was expected of us as tourists. This includes the duration of our travel, our travel close to the ground (without airplanes), staying with locals (for example through Couchsurfing), and the (predominant) avoidance of tourist tours.⁹⁹An example of this along with the obstacles we encountered in trying to avoid the touristic path becomes perceivable in the moment when we tried to cross over to Cyprus and the only official option to do so was to fly, which would have cost us a mere 29 EUR. While I do not want to disregard that this attempt to bypass (some) elements of the tourism industry did provoke certain encounters and experiences not usually associated with tourism, it is interesting to see how such a way of traveling (slow travel, staying with locals, and so on) is in many ways just another type of tourism that is also being commodified and that is embedded in global structures, accessible only to the relatively wealthy and privileged.¹⁰⁰In tourism studies, the practice of visiting a place for the sake of pleasure, interest or recreation is often defined either technically or conceptually. The technical definitions attempt to serve the purpose of measuring trips and collecting tourism related data (e.g., counting how many tourists go on a holiday in a specific time period or for how many days they are going on a journey), while conceptual definitions concentrate on motivation and seek to distinguish tourism from other forms of human mobilities based on what desire or need prompts a journey. The variety in both motivation and date points to the array of touristic activities and the sheer impossibility to escape it (Theobald 11). In other words, while going “off the beaten path” is often dressed up as a counter motion to a type of tourism that is associated with big resorts and continental breakfasts, it is, by and large, still reaffirming the border crossings we already know.¹⁰¹In this context it is interesting to see how backpacking also endows young people with “global capital.” Jana Binder explains in her work, Globality. Eine Ethnographie über Backpacker (2005), how young people nowadays use backpacking and volunteering abroad to distinguish themselves among their peers and to improve their standing in the job market. Binder argues how extended travels prove that young adults can inscribe themselves into processes of globalization. Hence, traveling is the way young people today achieve an important cultural (and economic) capital, which she refers to as globality (Binder 250). Tourism constitutes one the world’s largest industries and in many ways echoes the dynamics of imperialism, even on the level of going “off the beaten path.” It is usually based on inequalities, class differences, wealth gaps, and like imperialism, includes the occupancy of exotic lands. Considering this, I began to wonder whether it was perhaps impossible to take myself out of the touristic context.¹⁰²Debbie Lisle echoes this in her writing about travel and tourism in Cyprus, as she argues that no degree of distance or politeness can be used to occlude “historically constituted power relations” (qtd. in Bowman 172). Maybe we simply have to accept that we can never not be tourists.¹⁰³We might also turn this question around and ask under which circumstances a migrant might be able to step out of the migratory experience. The fact, for example, that a white, Western migrant living and working in a different country is usually considered an expat, while most other individuals of different ethnicities will be considered migrants, shows that the question of “status” is not only determined by social class, country of origin, and legal status, but also by questions of appearance and ethnicity. While in some ways, this may sound like a polemic simplification of the many complex ways in which very different forms of tourism and capitalism, global travel and power structures intertwine, tourism’s similarity to imperialism points back with urgency to the question posed earlier: How can we imagine, provoke, and assert different border crossings within the touristic context?¹⁰⁴As an economic and cultural phenomenon, tourism also has a number of positive effects for a destination and its local population, but the critical turn in tourism studies reveals how knowledge production in the field is often dominated by “[…] empirical and industry-driven business research” (Ateljevic et al. 42). The advent of critical inquiry into tourism practices, representation and knowledge production started to put issues of inequality on the agenda and triggered more critical and self-reflexive ways of thinking about tourism. For an overview and critique of the critical turn’s shortcomings in tourism studies see Raoul V. Bianchi’s “The ‘Critical Turn’ in Tourism Studies: A Radical Critique.” In the following, I want to explore this question by drawing on our own struggles around the representation of touristic experiences in Wanderlust. In an attempt to conceive of ideas and narratives that do not simply reaffirm the border-crossings that are taking place already, I set out to explore the ways in which we can reframe touristic discourse.

 

Re-Framing Touristic Discourse

In Wanderlust, the attempt to move away from aestheticizing and exoticizing places (something I would argue is typically done in tourism) turned out to be more difficult than imagined. Confronted with fascinating landscapes and sights almost on a daily basis, Maria and I were, especially at the beginning, subject to the urge to document and capture the beauty of these places. Consequently, we ended up with a lot of what we later labeled “touristic footage.” Since we often did not know what to do with this footage, we added a cynical or ironic dimension to it. An example of this is the scene which depicts our visit to the Dead Sea. The scene starts off with some close up shots of the salt, the shore, and the velvet-like water with a mountainous landscape in the background (Wanderlust 0:15:03). While this introduction evokes similarity with the beautiful images typically associated with tourism, this notion is confronted after just a few seconds by an image of two women wearing sun hats, jumping up and down in the water and a wide shot of vast amounts of blue and red colored sunshades that populate the landscape. Tourists are taking selfies and greasing themselves with the mud of the Dead Sea, while we are among them and immersed in the whole procedure. The cinematography in this scene uses the haptic feel of close ups to evoke the genuine pleasant, embodied experience, but also uses optical images to lay bare how the touristic experience is based on illusions and beautification.¹⁰⁵In an earlier version of our film the scene had a voice-over (which made it even more cynical) because it talked about how the place looks so beautiful in images, but when you get there it’s all vending machines, pop music, and so on.

 

Another example is our visit to the rock and cave formations in Cappadocia. This scene is introduced by the repetitive noise of a machine telling tourists who insert a valid ticket into the turnstile to “please pass,” thus drawing attention to the commercialization and commodification of landscapes (Wanderlust 0:54:29). While irony or cynicism now strike me as rather unsatisfying strategies to reframe touristic discourse, it was an attempt to reevaluate our own touristic gaze directed at these places and cultures. The way we depicted ourselves in our film provides another glimpse at how we tried to sidestep typical touristic narratives: not as travelers, who live one breath-taking moment after another, but as two women who face a number of mundane and unexciting tasks which are part of the journey, like getting your backpacks ready, preparing food, spending long hours on busses and trains, and so on. Throughout our film we thus tried to juxtapose the scenes and sites that are very much at home in touristic discourses with situations that usually do not form part of touristic experiences and/or their representation.

 

 

There is one incident in our film that lends itself particularly well to talking about the question of how touristic discourse can acknowledge and integrate the confrontation with other realities of human mobility, and point toward a different kind of representational border-crossing. It is the scene in our film where we cross the border between Turkey and Bulgaria and a young man from the Ivory Coast, who was traveling on the same bus as we were, was not allowed to cross. The scene begins with our departure from Istanbul at night and our arrival a few hours later, near the border with Bulgaria where we were told to wait for a second bus in the entry hall of a train station. Bulgaria is not part of the Schengen area yet (it is in the process of joining), but it has been a EU member country since 2007.¹⁰⁶The difference between EU member state and Schengen members is that the latter refers to the geographical zone which allows for the unrestricted movement of people. Countries can be a member of the EU without being a member of the Schengen area (e.g., Bulgaria) or they can be a member of the Schengen area without being part of the EU (e.g., Switzerland). Its geographical location at the periphery but within the EU territorial borders, turned the crossing from Turkey to Bulgaria into an intricate undertaking: our identities were checked three times and the process took several hours.

We arrived at the train station at about two o’clock in the morning, and after an hour of waiting a man entered, asked for our passports and within a few moments, he spotted the young man from the Ivory Coast (the only person of color in the room) and proclaimed, while looking at him, “You problem [sic]” (Wanderlust 1:05:19). Another passenger from Bulgaria, as well as Maria and I, approached the young man in order to help him figure out where exactly the apparent “problem” was. As the young man from the Ivory Coast spoke neither Bulgarian nor English, the Bulgarian passenger talked to the man who proclaimed that there was a problem (and who also turned out to be the driver of the new bus), while I translated what he said to Spanish and then Maria translated to French.¹⁰⁷Looking back to Chapter Three and the idea how the work with different languages reflected the struggle towards each other, the work of translation in this cultural encounter can be understood as reflecting the distance that has to be put to work in this situation. It turned out that, in fact, his papers seemed to be in order and he was allowed to board the Bulgarian bus.

At the Turkish border-crossing a border guard came on the bus to check our passports for the second time and took the young man with him into an office. After a while he came back and when he entered the bus everyone applauded. When we arrived at the Bulgarian border, a few hundred meters and only several minutes later, however, the solidarity he had been met with upon his return on the bus quickly faded. Everybody had to get off the bus and form a line outside, for another passport check. The protocol to cooperate with the authorities at the border and the lingering fear of how questioning their authority might result in an arrest, interrogation or punishment, coerced everybody to line up and comply with what the border guards expected of them, whether it was to cease filming (see Wanderlust 1:07:54) or to answer distressing questions about one’s travel itinerary.

When it was Maria’s and my turn, they asked Maria a number of questions about what she was doing in Egypt and then told us to step aside and wait. The young man from the Ivory Coast was also told to wait as more and more border guards gathered around him (the Bulgarian passenger stayed with the young man for a while to serve as an interpreter). We were told not to approach them and after Maria was questioned, we were ushered to the other side of the border and sent to the bus with the rest of the people who had already crossed the border. On the bus we waited a little longer until the Bulgarian “interpreter” also got back on the bus and then the bus driver drove off, leaving the young man from the Ivory Coast behind.

We do not know anything about him or what happened to him, and we never will. His story remains untold and his encounter with us did not change anything for him. For us, however, it was a push towards confrontation with other realities.¹⁰⁸Re-visiting that night and reflecting on the situation draws attention to how borders shape not only landscapes, but also the subjectivity of those who set out to cross them. While crossing this particular border in the middle of the night might generate a tension for most individuals, the degree of anxiety each individual feels is based not only on the place where one is born, but also on how one’s body relates to categories of race, gender, and so on. In this particular case this becomes perceivable through the racist comment of the Bulgarian bus driver, who without even having the slightest idea where the young man came from, already defined him as a “problem” simply based on his skin color/appearance. This incident clearly provides an example of how Maria and I were brushing up against the way people are segregated and divided as adequate or appropriate border-crossers and “problems.” During post-production it was thus never a question whether we were going to include it into our film, but rather how to include it. On our path to make it part of our travel narrative, we then also embarked on a journey of (re)interpreting and (re)telling the events of that night, developing the scene throughout different temporal levels.

The first temporal level is the one of lived experience. For our representation of this scene this includes all the moments captured on camera, like our own anxiety, as well as the unpredictability of the situation we were confronted with. From a visual perspective it is striking how this scene is marked by jerky camera movements, dark, unclear, and blurry visuals that were filmed in movement and without much attention to detail. Often the camera is pointing to the floor or filming from waist level. The reason for this is that most of the filming in this scene was done secretly.¹⁰⁹While I was only made aware of an explicit prohibition to film when we had to get off the bus at the second stop, there was a sense already in the waiting room that filming could upset the already fragile atmosphere even more and cause problems. The difficulty of filming at borders, which I have already addressed in Chapter One (see the border-crossing between Egypt and Israel), points to the segregation of places we usually associate with either a touristic or a migratory experience. Images of tourism usually feature beautiful places to promote and encourage people to visit them, and they tend to not focus on the waiting lines at border-crossings. Images of migrants, by contrast, are often and strenuously recorded at borders, or rather in the process of crossing borders.¹¹⁰Many broadcast reports shape a vivid image of hundreds of immigrants lunging the border fences and make it seem plausible that Europe is under attack by the poorest of the poor, the implied demarcation of ‘Us vs. Them’ or ‘legal vs. illegal’ is, at least partly, accomplished through representation. Migrants are typically represented as faceless masses (for example “a wave of migrants”, a flood of “illegals” or “boats full of migrants”), either as victims on their way to the European Union, or violently breaking into Fortress Europe, to swamp the streets with criminal activity (Thiele 215). Following some of the ideas presented in Chapter One, a visuality that depicts tourists in places they also occupy, but are never shown in, might trigger a visual ambiguity that opens up the tourism discourse to other places and forms of experiences.

The second level of recounting our experience are the interviews between Maria and me, the day after our arrival in Sofia. In order to create this scene, we used these interviews to intercut images of that night with Maria’s recounting of the situation and the moment in which I express bewilderment about how border-crossings are experienced so differently for all of us. While I am explicitly referring to the way Maria and I lived this border-crossing, I am implicitly also referring to the young man who was left behind:

Cómo puede ser que es tan diferente la experiencia que tenemos todos? Solamente porque tenemos diferentes nombres y porque nacimos en diferentes países. La experiencia de cruzar esta frontera para nosotras dos, aunque estar . . . aunque estando viajando juntas fue muy diferente. Y son esos momentos en que me . . . realizó conscientemente las diferencias que nos . . . que nos hacen sentir las fronteras por nuestras [sic] papeles de pasaportes que podemos perder tan fácilmente. (Wanderlust 1:08:26)¹¹¹“How can this experience be so different for all of us? Just because we have different names and were born in different countries. The experience of crossing this border, even for the two of us … even though we are traveling together, was very different. And it is in those moments … that I realize the different feelings borders can trigger in us, … just because we have different passport papers, which we could lose so easily” (translation mine).

While I was of course aware that there are terrible inequalities in terms of who is allowed to cross borders and under what conditions, stating the obvious and pointing out what happened that night, was all we were capable of doing in that moment. A lot of the interviews we conducted with ourselves during our journey are similar in that sense. They display a relatively shallow level of reflection, interspersed with describing what we had done and experienced during the previous days. However, describing and stating the obvious is not all travel narratives might potentially do in a situation like this. The question emerges: can incorporating perspectives and voices of those who are never heard help to re-imagine touristic discourse? Part of the problem of integrating those perspectives, however, is the lack of access to means of representation. There is a fundamental imbalance when it comes to the question of who has the resources to represent the self and/or others, and this cannot be bridged by simply calling for different types of touristic images. I have wondered, what if anything we could have done differently in that situation. A number of times, I wish I had asked the young man to share his story with us in order to integrate his “voice” into our film. At the same time, this idea raises numerous questions: would the act of integrating an interview with him be considered an act of “giving voice” or of “exploiting his voice?” Under which circumstances could the three of us have entered into a reciprocal relationship, where telling his story would not run the danger of us (mis)appropriating his story? Would his story in our film have any other impact besides creating a self-satisfied sense of “having done something”? These questions only begin to address the potential of fraud, and the level of complexities enclosed in the idea of telling someone’s story from a position of privilege.

On a third level, we find the recounting from the temporality of the voice-over. The scene ends with the border disappearing into the night, filmed from the rear window of the bus which continues its journey into Bulgaria. This is followed by a couple of shots showing the last leg of our journey that night as we arrive by train in Sofia. Once we reach the city, my voice-over sets in and mentions how Maria and I talked much about what happened the night of the border- crossing and how we feel bad about not having done more. With a temporal distance of over a year, we return to this incident while editing and writing our voice-over and express a sense of guilt and regret for the way we did not oppose the Bulgarian bus driver more forcefully when he called the young man a “problem,” for not having stopped the bus, for not having been more persistent in trying to figure out why he was not able to cross the border, and maybe also for the fact that we were able to cross, while he was not. As an afterthought this expression of guilt and regret lingers over our stay in Sofia and finds its assertion in the final sentence of my voice-over that “Sofia […] siempre va a ser el lugar en cual sentimos el peso del viaje” (Wanderlust 1:11:09).¹¹²““Sofia […] will always be the place in which we felt the weight of travel” (translation mine). At the point of voice recording, Maria and I both recalled the sensation of being emotionally and physically exhausted from the passage and used the term “weight” to express our vague feeling of being mournful.

 

Today, on the fourth level of recounting this situation, I also understand it as a mournfulness or distress that has to do with the fact that our experiences between Turkey and Bulgaria that night are connected in troubling and complicated ways. The intertwining of his limited mobility, Maria’s endangered/questioned mobility, and my certain/undoubted mobility is connected by more than just the shared infrastructure. In “Tourists and Vagabonds. Heroes and Victims of Postmodernity,” Zygmunt Bauman talks about tourists and vagabonds as the “[…] major, principal division of the postmodern society” (5). Vagabonds can be understood in this context as migrants or asylum seekers who are limited in their mobility and freedom of choice, while tourists can be what and wherever they want to be. While there are important differences between vagabonds and tourists (with the biggest one Bauman describes being their freedom of choice), the vagabond is also the alter ego of the tourist. Being an alter ego means:

[…] to serve as a public exposition of the innermost private, as an inner demon to be publicly exorcised, an effigy in which all that which cannot be suppressed may be burnt (Bauman 15).

While Bauman’s exploration of postmodern divisions and the vagabond’s “functionality” in making the tourist’s life bearable, provide little help in terms of reframing touristic discourse, his thinking about alter egos might prompt us to think about how one figure is implicated in the other (15). In most discourses both tourists and migrants are always already fitting in their respective place on a scale of different forms of human mobility. Conceived as an alter ego, however, Bauman helps us to recognize that they are part of the same thing, but in a different way. Thinking about an alter ego might provoke uneasiness, primarily because it begins to place the foreign inside the self, the familiar, and not outside the self, in another I hardly know. Any attempt to challenge the different representations of border-crossings also means a change in the subjects we see crossing the border. Making perceivable the migratory existence in the touristic existence might provoke an understanding of the touristic self in relation to larger, political failings and such non-encounters with their alter egos.¹¹³Holert and Terkessidis, for example, refer to meetings between tourists and migrants as non-encounters when migrants and tourists cross paths, but without ever touching (64-65).

The filmic strategies discussed in this dissertation can help to challenge these respective places of the foreign and the familiar, the self and the other or the tourist and the migrant. Cinematographic strategies, such as embodied cinematography, the camera as body, or haptic visuality encourage a negotiation not only with one’s self, but also with other selves and surroundings. Multiple voices and perspectives that speak from one’s lived experience make it harder to fall into a type of narrative that proclaims just one truth or reverts to abstract generalizations. The openness encouraged through these filmic strategies and the disposition to re-encounter what is already encountered can create an ambiguity that does not dominate, but instead opens the door to explore multiple meanings.

Acknowledging that our film only starts to test out possible ways of reframing touristic discourse, I would hope that others take up and continue this work of opening up discourses on human mobilities that can help to imagine and enable new and different border-crossings. By affording a side glance at other realities and laying bare the privileged perspective from which our touristic look is executed, I hope that our film does not foreclose acknowledging these other lives, other stories, selves and mobilities.