On the Radically Compassionate Films of Ai Weiwei and Agnès Varda

Human cultures are about place: where to live, and home: how to live and with whom. In Western capitalist culture, home is where the money is. And place, increasingly, is an abstraction. Our sense of place becomes more abstract, and scattered to the virtual winds, with each ever-more-advanced smart gizmo that we plug in our ears, strap to our wrists, and, with the innovations of the smart home, sleep in, securely we imagine. Come the day when these abstractions fail—the collapse of the financial system, or the energy infrastructure, or the failure of the climate itself—we will realize that we were in truth always out-of-place and homeless.

Perhaps this is why the plight of refugees has such grim fascination for us: there but for fate go we. The homeless and placeless—whether on a raft off the Greek coastline or in an RV in Seattle—make us anxious, but we don’t seem to be able to say quite why they make us anxious. We haven’t got any skin in that game… have we? In the fall of 2017 two feature-length documentaries by prominent artists—Ai Weiwei and Agnès Varda—took up the challenge of thinking about people out-of-place with very different results.

Ai Weiwei’s 2017 documentary Human Flow is an unrelenting visualization of the movement of refugees in all parts of the global south, people dispersed by war, poverty, and climate change, from Syria to Myanmar to Africa and to Mexico. It is about people out of place. It is a visually sobering film and does much to humanize their otherwise abstract sorrows. But it is curiously unlike most documentaries of its kind because it is not diagnostic. Ai Weiwei is not interested in analyzing why this “flow” is happening, and he does not prescribe any sort of remedy. Perhaps, given his own history as a refugee from Chinese communist oppression, a Marxist critique of global capital and its colonialist past is an awkward fit for him. (Not that there is anything remotely Marxist about China.) In any case, no such analysis is offered. Weiwei is no Zola, and he utters no “j’accuse.”

The closest he comes to something like an ideological judgment is a vaguely 18th century appeal to “humanity,” as in our “shared humanity,” which becomes the reason that we “should not ignore” the plight of people we ought to “care for,” and that, he emphasizes repeatedly, we ought to “respect.” In this way he joins Pope Francis in lamenting the “indifference of the world.”

Weiwei’s humanitarian concern is given voice by disconsolate officials of the United Nations and various NGOs who condemn the indifference of someone—the West, the World, You the Privileged Viewer?—but their complaints are like the keening and ululating of professional mourners. In the end, they are merely the paternalistic lamentations of the culprits, and are often seen in that light by the people that the officials claim to be helping.

As activist Masoud Qahar describes the situation at the Elliniko refugee camp in Greece:

Some NGOs are coming to help, but it’s just for two or three days. They play with kids, take a lot of pictures of the kids, and they take money for this. A lot of news channels come here and make movies, documentaries. They have a business [profiting from] the refugees. [It’s] like a zoo, and we’re like animals [to the NGOs and media].

Or, as Tessa Quayle, the leftist hero of John le Carré’s The Constant Gardener, observes, when she hears the “managerial elite” appealing to “Humanity, Altruism, Duty to Mankind, I want to vomit.” Put more diplomatically, as Peter Buffett has in the opinion pages of The New York Times, “[Philanthropists] are searching for answers with their right hand to problems that others in the room have created with their left.” This is most obviously true when the refugees are fleeing the consequences of climate change, whether African droughts, sinking Pacific islands, or rising North American shorelines. First World philanthropy is, in Buffett’s telling phrase, “conscience laundering.” Weiwei is tone deaf to this irony, and his film is precious close to being part of this institutional laundromat.

What Varda and JR show in Faces Places is that the people are already in control, they just don’t know it.

What Weiwei does explore fully is the novel vision of these fantastic migrations. Human Flow is a perversely beautiful movie, with many giddy overheads taken from drones of tent camps, boats, massive piles of abandoned life jackets, and lines of trekking asylum seekers. The film feels closer to National Geographic photography of vast herds of zebras migrating in the Serengeti than to, say, the gritty intimacy of Alain Resnais’s documentary on the Holocaust, Night and Fog (1956).

To put it bluntly, Human Flow aestheticizes the refugee crisis. Perhaps this is inevitable. Why else see a movie about refugees made by Weiwei? Part of the attraction of the movie is, of course, the fact that it was made by an artist famous for creating confrontational public art. But in this case the confrontation is meaningless because it doesn’t know what to ask for. It is protest without purpose. Even so, the question should not be “does he aestheticize suffering?” as if aestheticizing were always the wrong thing to do. The question should be “does the aestheticizing lead to or at least suggest a way forward?” Does it offer ideology (the mere consumption of aesthetic pleasure bought and paid for) or does it offer utopia (the rejection of the world as it stands and the offer of an alternative)? Crudely, is it National Geographic or Jean-Luc Godard?

Or Agnès Varda.

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In the same season that Human Flow was making the rounds of art house theaters in the United States, the great French Nouvelle Vague filmmaker Agnès Varda was collaborating with the artist JR on Faces Places (Visages, Villages). In the film, Varda and JR (like Weiwei, an installation artist) travel rural France meeting with waitresses, mailmen, miners, and factory workers, and photographing them in JR’s mobile photo booth. These portraits are then enlarged and pasted to the buildings that they work and live in—barns, abandoned homes, shipping containers—creating dramatic pop-up artworks.

As with Human Flow, Faces Places is disarmingly non-ideological, although there is every opportunity for making familiar political judgments. Everyone seems involved in one social ill or another: pollution, industrial farming, cruelty to animals, global shipping of consumer goods, etc., but the filmmakers do not hold the people responsible for the economic mechanisms within which they have no choice except to work. Rather, the people and, to a degree, the economic mechanisms are accepted as they are. They are real. The central metaphor, here, is “seeing”: both seeing “what is” without judgment, and seeing “what is” transformed through art.

Unlike Weiwei’s distanced call for “respect,” Varda and JR immerse themselves in the places they discover. They enact compassion and solidarity. They are one with their subjects. This compassion begins with the relationship between the two artists. Varda is aging, frail, and losing her eyesight.* JR treats Varda as the Buddha would, as if she were his mother. Together JR and Varda treat every human they encounter as if they were their mother. The people they meet are not treated as a spectacle but as a gathering, a family affair.

Nevertheless, Faces Places is politically radical because, unlike Human Flow, its understated protest does ask for something. For the moment in which JR’s art installations exist, before the next rain dissolves the glue and removes the image, we are allowed to imagine that the people own their built environments, whether factory or village, rather than the reverse. When the film’s subjects see themselves superimposed on abandoned brick miner’s homes, factory walls, and shipping containers, they feel some vanity, but their larger feeling is triumph. They are no longer the victims of an economic mechanism beyond their understanding; rather, they are its creators, never mind what the bank and the political state claim. The corporate state cannot determine economic and social relations through command alone; the people themselves must reproduce both work and social relations day by day. What Varda and JR show is that the people are already in control, they just don’t know it. The filmmakers proceed as if the boss doesn’t exist, and the people are, therefore, free.

This point is brought home poignantly when Varda and JR set up shop with local residents at a failed housing project. Squatters for a day, they occupy the shells of these homes as if they were playhouses, sharing food and pasting up photographs of themselves in remembrance of a lost world, and in rehearsal for a world to come. In essence, they rediscover the Commons, the world prior to private property’s great enclosure of the land. This picnic among the ruins of private property is the film’s most joyful moment. They look like squatters, but they’re really natives who have returned to claim their ancestral home . . . returned to claim their place.

Art destroys the world as it is and replaces it with something that is utterly other.

This scene offers a further pleasure: the audience’s happy recognition that this is the way the world ought to be. Human is reconciled to human, to work, and to animals (especially goats!). In accomplishing this, the artwork provides a way forward. Faces Places is art engagée, as Sartre put it. Its pleasures are transformational. It creates a powerful sense of the Ought, without which no revolution can begin. It creates a powerful sense of the Demand, without which no revolution can move forward. As Slavoj Žižek writes, “Every historical situation contains its own unique utopian perspective, an immanent vision of what is wrong with it, an ideal representation of how, with some changes, the situation could be rendered much better.”

That is Varda and JR’s gift to us: a story about the authentic relationship of people to their world, a profound as-if. Our challenge is to live as if this relationship were real now, and not in some uncertain future. That is the process through which the work of art creates its own appropriate world. The “otherness” of the work of art is both critique (of what we have) and solution (an act that does not merely appeal to but that is the world we want).

Seen in this way, Faces Places is not a film about how art helps one thing or another, or about how art is a complement to real political activity. You know, a little music or a poem after the march and after the heavy hitters have made their speeches. Art is not something that requires the more serious intervention of a political movement in order to achieve its ends. Rather, art destroys the world as it is and replaces it with something that is utterly other. (Thus the superimposition of the faces of workers on shipping containers, the human suddenly and impossibly larger than the industrial.) As art has done since the Romantics, Faces Places demands something other than the dictatorship of the present. It is an incitement to change. It is the vigorous call for what John Kenneth Galbraith called a “countervailing power.” It is a call for counterculture.

The work of art is not an ornament; it is where the artist thinks you should want to live, because the world it suggests is more intelligent, or more ruthlessly true, or more beautiful, or all of the above.

If Varda and JR’s film provides us with an instance of art’s political potential, it also shows how powerless and impoverished we are at present. It shows how far we have to go and how difficult the way will be. Midway through the film, they meet a homeless man—old, thin, shoulder-length dreads, nearly toothless—who offers to show them his home. It is a little den hidden in thickets where he has created a refuge of found objects and fanciful, colorful carvings, whirligigs, festoons, and childish improvisations. It is the “objective correlative” of his inner life, which is unexpectedly happy.

The moment is cognitively dissonant. Few of us would wish to trade places with him; in fact, many of us would feel that we need to be protected from him. The homeless produce a complex fear in us. The homeless frighten us both directly (disgust, fear of violence) and indirectly (you could become one of them if you don’t stay in line, keep your job, pay your debts). Yet, in this instance, missing teeth be damned, there is something deeply appealing about this man’s fanciful home—something free, and full of the happiness of human play. After we see his hideaway, he is transformed into something that is not threatening at all, but… perhaps “lovable” is the appropriate word. Can he and his little world apart be desirable? Unlike the disconsolate immigrants of Human Flow, this man is in place. He is at home in a world of his making.

Is this beggar’s little paradise a sad delusion? Is it an image of the impotence of art to achieve the world it wants? An image of art’s defeat? Of Varda and JR’s defeat? Of human defeat? Or do its details show not that we are defeated, but how far we have to go? It is a sign, in spite of everything, of what we must do: transcend the world as it is through acts of self-creation.

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From Living in a World that Can’t Be Fixed by Curtis White. Used with the permission of Melville House. Copyright © 2019 by Curtis White.