When the People Behind the Scenes Come to the Fore

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

Let’s Reset The Clock: Family footage to remediate distance created by mourning

Let’s Reset the Clock (from French On va remettre les pendules à l’heure), is a two-and-a-half minute colour video that uses a split screen to remove distances and puts two characters – one alive, one deceased – face to face. For img Journal Issue 03, I propose to discuss the topic ‘Remediating distances’ from this art video I made when my grandmother passed away. This would allow to discuss ways of remediating distance created by the loss (1) and to remediate distance through images (2). 1.To remediate distance created by the loss There is the space of what was and can no longer be, and there is the space of memory. Between the two is a feeling of absence and, sometimes, of loss. Through the use of family footage included in Let’s Reset the Clock, I illustrate my feeling of grief and attempt to remediate the distance between the living and the dead. With aim to erase this distance, I filmed myself while watching images of my grandmother that have been shot by my grandfather at the beginning of the 1960s. While watching images of her, I mimic a connection that no longer exists, and create a new relationship that now can only be found through fiction, within the space of an artwork. On this, Let’s reset the clock constitute utopia of a travel through time. Or rather, it recreates what Michel Foucault defined as a heteropia, a place which exists in the space where the imagination resides, in the child’s playhouse where one can find one’s grandmother again. By using images to create this imaginary space, Let’s Reset the Clock recalls Christian Marclay editing work The Clock (1985). In this film, the American artist challenges corridors of time by assembling various footage of well-known and lesser known films around a clock running for 24 hour in real time. With Let’s Reset the Clock I suggest that playing with images can remediate distance between temporal and spatial spaces that separates me with my grandmother. Yet even in this game, the interaction does not always work. A mourning process is thus proposed: that of playing a broken game, of facing someone who can no longer by found, even through a trick. 2.To remediate the distances thanks to images Let’s reset the clock also constitutes a reflection about images. It is part of a broader set of artworks in which I question my colonial European identity through the use of my grandfather footage. My family fled Franco's Spain to migrate to Algeria at the time it was a French territory. I only know this country and the story of migration which for me accompanies it, through old films footage shot by my grandfather. I have digitalised these images which constitute a time-window towards a bygone era of French history and a knowledge on my family past. The ‘mise en abyme’ arranged when filming myself looking at these archives is a way to consider this footage as part of my own imaginary. Through this act of family archaeology, I stage my identity and, in the same movement, when facing the camera in the end, I break the mise en scène and take distance from this identity. On this, remediation proposed by Let’s reset the clock is close to Allen’s Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) in which main protagonist tries to escape gloom of her existence by watching ceaselessly same film until being part of it. Distance provided through the mediation of images would thus saves us from such a disappointing reality and allows us to explore other hitherto unnoticed possibilities

Counteracting Dominant Discourses about Migrations with Images: a Typology Attempt

This article examines a series of art and media images which have contributed to counteracting dominant discourses about migrations. Through recourse to recent research in political science and psychology, it suggests that both the genre of the images and the very nature of their message contribute to shapingopinions and public policies. Specifically, it emphasises how the recurrence of certain motifs helps to diffuse a feeling of anxiety about the migration “crisis”. By doing so, this article updates the “Funnel of Causality”,a theoretical tool elaborated by political scientists to analyse voting behaviour that is now used to understand attitudes toward migrations. In this scheme, the media effect, in which images play an increasing part, is consideredto be of minor importance, whereas moral values appear to be crucial. However, the present article shows how these very values are fostered and conveyed by certain images, particularly those of fictional nature

Cartographies of migration and mobility as levers of deferral policies

This article questions the rhetoric of objectivity attached to cartographies of migration and their relationship to a contemporary political context. A search on Google Images for the keywords ‘migration’ + ‘Europe’ allows us to observe the increasing popularity of maps to portray displacements of people. These maps are created by geographers and analysts from data collected and compiled by international organisations and NGOs. These visual messages are widely disseminated in mainstream media, research papers and educational resources. An examination of these cartographies shows that in their greater part they are representing human displacements by broad arrows, often in warm colours, pointing in the direction of European countries. These cartographies have a war-like aspect conveying the idea of a threatening invasion. How can one reveal the relationships between the messaging conveyed by migration mappings and the public narratives on the same topic? Building on a wide scholarship on critical geography and on art historian Aby Warburg’s theories on the survival of images later theorised by Georges Didi-Huberman, this article focuses on cartographies illustrating the so-called 2015 migration ‘crisis’ to highlight the collective imaginary attached to mainstream cartographies of migration. As a first step, it provides an historical perspective on the way this kind of messaging has impacted visual descriptions of human mobilities to the point of influencing the Brexit referendum campaign. As a second step, it explores the experimental cartographies created by geographers and artists that embrace subjectivity and offer unique overviews of the experience of the border

A Conversation on Cinematic Representation and Resistance in the films "Altered Landscapes" (2016) by Juan del Gado and "The People Behind the Scenes" (2019), by Elsa Claire Gomis

This is a conversation between Juan del Gado and Elsa Gomis about their respective films. Juan del Gado has made the film Altered Landscapes (2016), which is the first part of a cinematically projected triptych entitled Drifting Narratives. Elsa Gomis has produced the film The People behind the Scenes (2019), a full-length film, which builds on interviews and memory work and address current visual representations of migration by the Mediterra-nean

ParaCrawl: Web-Scale Acquisition of Parallel Corpora

We report on methods to create the largest publicly available parallel corpora by crawling the web, using open source software. We empirically compare alternative methods and publish benchmark data sets for sentence alignment and sentence pair filtering. We also describe the parallel corpora released and evaluate their quality and their usefulness to create machine translation systems

Mémoires de l'exil : l'image de famille comme matériau

Fille et petite fille de pieds-noirs, travaillant depuis plusieurs années sur le matériau de l'image familiale, j'ai pris conscience que ma recherche était tendue vers ce pays d'alors qui n'existait plus ni politiquement ni matériellement et dans lesquels les miens avaient vécus. Le présent mémoire de Master 2 s'attache à faire dialoguer mes travaux avec les figures marquantes de la mémoire de l'exil ainsi qu'avec la diversité de ses modes d'expression. L'iconographie de l'exil recouvre un champ artistique dans lequel les images sont par nature ré-inventées. Pour dépeindre la mémoire du pays quitté, les artistes bousculent la frontière entre image documentaire et fictionnelle, en allant au bout d'une imagerie kitsch du passé colonial, en réinventant par leurs propres moyens les images manquantes ou en rejouant les conditions du départ et de la rencontre avec l'ailleurs

Challenging the collective imaginary of migration

Close your eyes for a moment and focus on the image that emerges when you hear the word ‘refugee’. My thesis deals with the collective imaginary attached to contemporary migrations. It aims to explore its foundations in Western visual culture and its impact on migratory policies. The notion of visual culture is considered broadly, to include media photographs, art, and fashion productions, as well as data visualisations ranging from infographics to cartographies. At the core of these images, the semiotic element of the motif is understood as being key in the genealogy of images that explains the success of the narrow range of mainstream photographs encapsulating the refugees. Emanating from Google Images, these images are arranged into typologies. The narrow range of motifs that can be found in these mainstream images is analysed in the light of the resemblance relationship between images and migrants suggested by art historian W.J.T Mitchell. The resonance of these images with the Western economic system and historical background leads to a consideration of the distribution of roles in European societies as a reflection on the distribution of roles in European films. From there, the film industry will serve as a cognitive framework for thinking about border regimes. The focus of this doctoral research is the 2015 so-called ‘crisis’ in the Mediterranean, but its conclusion encompasses more recent events, such as the Covid-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement, whose repercussions impact contemporary depictions of refugees. The present dissertation is part of a Critical PhD by Practice in Film Studies but also relies on refugee studies, visual studies, and art history. The People Behind the Scenes, a 77-minute film, is an integral part of this research. Both components of this research can be read and watched separately, but they must be considered jointly to appreciate the study to its full extent. This research is conceived as a practice, involving the creative visual productions of myself, as author, and as a constant self-reflection of my personal conditioning, as a white Western woman bearing a family history of migration linked to the French colonial past. Keywords Migration – Images – Collective Imaginary – Mediterranean – Critical PhD by Practice – Medi

Effect of general anaesthesia on functional outcome in patients with anterior circulation ischaemic stroke having endovascular thrombectomy versus standard care: a meta-analysis of individual patient data

Background: General anaesthesia (GA) during endovascular thrombectomy has been associated with worse patient outcomes in observational studies compared with patients treated without GA. We assessed functional outcome in ischaemic stroke patients with large vessel anterior circulation occlusion undergoing endovascular thrombectomy under GA, versus thrombectomy not under GA (with or without sedation) versus standard care (ie, no thrombectomy), stratified by the use of GA versus standard care. Methods: For this meta-analysis, patient-level data were pooled from all patients included in randomised trials in PuMed published between Jan 1, 2010, and May 31, 2017, that compared endovascular thrombectomy predominantly done with stent retrievers with standard care in anterior circulation ischaemic stroke patients (HERMES Collaboration). The primary outcome was functional outcome assessed by ordinal analysis of the modified Rankin scale (mRS) at 90 days in the GA and non-GA subgroups of patients treated with endovascular therapy versus those patients treated with standard care, adjusted for baseline prognostic variables. To account for between-trial variance we used mixed-effects modelling with a random effect for trials incorporated in all models. Bias was assessed using the Cochrane method. The meta-analysis was prospectively designed, but not registered. Findings: Seven trials were identified by our search; of 1764 patients included in these trials, 871 were allocated to endovascular thrombectomy and 893 were assigned standard care. After exclusion of 74 patients (72 did not undergo the procedure and two had missing data on anaesthetic strategy), 236 (30%) of 797 patients who had endovascular procedures were treated under GA. At baseline, patients receiving GA were younger and had a shorter delay between stroke onset and randomisation but they had similar pre-treatment clinical severity compared with patients who did not have GA. Endovascular thrombectomy improved functional outcome at 3 months both in patients who had GA (adjusted common odds ratio (cOR) 1·52, 95% CI 1·09–2·11, p=0·014) and in those who did not have GA (adjusted cOR 2·33, 95% CI 1·75–3·10, p<0·0001) versus standard care. However, outcomes were significantly better for patients who did not receive GA versus those who received GA (covariate-adjusted cOR 1·53, 95% CI 1·14–2·04, p=0·0044). The risk of bias and variability between studies was assessed to be low. Interpretation: Worse outcomes after endovascular thrombectomy were associated with GA, after adjustment for baseline prognostic variables. These data support avoidance of GA whenever possible. The procedure did, however, remain effective versus standard care in patients treated under GA, indicating that treatment should not be withheld in those who require anaesthesia for medical reasons