Event

Anat Dan

Matters of Proximity: Defamiliarizing the Humanitarian Scene in the Mediterranean Sea

This talk presents new avenues for reconsidering the status of reflexivity in documentary studies by advocating for defamiliarization that leads not to distance but to proximity. Political self-reflexivity is often understood through Brecht’s concept of distancing or alienation effect. When a film turns inward, reflecting on its own assumptions and conventions to challenge the viewer’s perspective, it creates a distance between the signifier and the signified, as well as between the image and the viewer. This process facilitates “critical distance” on the part of the viewer, yet what is less recognized is that “critical distance” carries its own ethical and political implications.

In exploring this proposition, my talk centers on experimental documentaries that delve into the conventions underlying the representation of irregular migration in the media, all while demonstrating a profound sensitivity to matter, materiality, and mediation. Instead of approaching the heightened materiality in these films as a defamiliarizing technique intended to emphasize the film as a text, I explore this form of defamiliarization as a means of drawing the viewer closer to the image—blurring the line between image and object to the point they become indistinguishable. My aim is to unsettle the widely accepted alliance between political engagement and critical distance, and instead, to propose proximity as a form of immersion that guides the viewer toward an ethicopolitical appreciation of the so-called “pathological condition,” as it is philosophically and culturally manifested in Black social life.

Anat Dan is a PhD candidate in the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. Her multimodal dissertation, Humanism by Other Means: Global Documentary, Human Rights Cultures, and Posthumanism, examines the affordances and limitations of posthuman film aesthetics within the context of the liberal humanist agenda of the film festival circuit. Her video essay, Bodies on Hold, is forthcoming in the journal Visual Ethnography. She is currently working on an article titled “A Matter of Proximity,” which is drawn from one of her dissertation chapters and is the subject of her talk.