Abstract
The Man Who Sold His Skin (2021) by Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania, looks at the transnational intersection or migration, art installation and cinema. The first Tunisian film to be nominated for an Academy Award, it offers a narrative steeped in the exploitative systems of late capitalism operating in the rarefied atmosphere of the global art world. Following a 15-year-long wave of documentaries, fiction films, or video installations on the topic, Ben Hania nonetheless flips the question of transnational visibility of the Maghrebi undocumented immigrants’ stories on multiple levels in a unique fashion by reversing representational codes and playing with notions of transnational and hyper visibility of transnational film in three distinct ways:
1) An undocumented immigrant is usually represented as leading an anonymous, clandestine existence. Here, Ben Hania films an itinerant art installation exhibiting a hyper-visible undocumented immigrant with the tattoo of a visa on his back.
2) In the age of post-cinema, Maghrebi filmmakers have occasionally found other outlets for their work, to make them visible to an international elite (e.g., Bouchra Khalili’s The Mapping Journey Project). Itineraries of anonymous migrants thus simultaneously appeared on museum screens and disappeared from neighborhood cinemas.
3) Maghrebi filmic narratives of undocumented migration into Europe, while highlighting social and economic inequities brought on by neoliberal policies, offer narratives that conform to European (mis)understanding of South-North migratory movements, by showing poor, uneducated protagonists in search of better lives. Ben Hania espouses a more authentic view of emigration as a desperate solution for a jobless, highly educated class. She makes visible the brain drain of the migrant’s country of origin.
An analysis of this film as a transnational filmic exemplar of representation at the intersection of migration, art installation, cinema, and exploitation in the age of late capitalism further leads to questions of the future of transnational filmmaking and of the possible shifts in cinema audience(s), especially in a post-Covid 19 era.
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