TRANSIT

Philip Scheffner’s Havarie activates our mnemonic faculty and thus prompts us to put different temporal planes in relation to each other, so as to compare different histories of migration which, despite their specifics, share colonialism and neo-colonialism as framing conditions, and flight and genocide as consequences of those conditions. The site of this activation of viewers’ mnemonic faculty is a particular segment of Havarie that, while frequently noted, has yet to attract sustained analysis—the mid-film pan, during which the camera temporarily relinquishes its gaze onto the migrants and turns towards the cruise ship from where the filming proceeds.

The present essay centrally concerns itself with a discussion of this pan and how it subverts the Eurocentric looking relations in which the film partakes. My methodological approach is informed by two of postcolonial theory’s ongoing anti-Eurocentric projects. The first is to break down politically fraught categories of identity that have been shaped by and, in turn, help reinforce, the geopolitical chasm and pervasive power differential between the prosperous West and the Global South. The second is to better understand and promote the reparative role of cultural memory—both in its function of invigorating the bonds between victims of colonial violence, displacement, and deracination and in its potential to create points of contact even between unrelated cultures.