11 - Unfamiliar Film: Sisters Unsettling Family Habits

Summary

This chapter will take its cue from the recent debate on the renewed attention being paid to political engagement in contemporary art. In a reaction to fragmentary, self-reflexive, self-involved art, Documenta 11 (2002), the international contemporary art exhibition in Kassel, has replaced “post-modern” art with political art from Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Documenta 11 showed a special interest in the audiovisual arts, referring explicitly to Hamid Naficy's work on “Accented Cinema”, i.e., exilic and diasporic filmmaking. However, according to the Documenta 11 curators and to Hamid Naficy, contemporary political art has not put politics back into art by making global and/or local political issues an explicit theme for art. Political art is not necessarily about politics. In this chapter, Hamid Naficy's work on Accented Cinema will be used to answer the question: How can this otherwise-than-through-politics type of art be considered political? How does the distinction between politics and the political relate to Naficy's Accented Cinema? In this chapter, claiming political relevance for film, that is, not in terms of film as politics but rather in terms of film as political, implies a critical description of the political belonging to what will be called the home of familiar habits. Naficy has demonstrated how an inquiry into accented cinema entails an inquiry into the significance of diasporic family relationships; similarly, this chapter will explore the home life of the diasporic family. When this chapter describes how the family features in contemporary political film art, it understands the family as the medium in and through which an accented cinema explores the relation between the public and the private.

Bringing together the contemporary political engagement of Documenta 11 and Naficy's Accented Cinema, a close reading of particular scenes in the work of three diasporic filmmakers: Dominique Cabrera (France/Algeria), Clara Law (Hong Kong/Australia) and Atom Egoyan (Canada/Armenia) will provide the main thesis of this chapter. It acknowledges that there is a safeguarding tendency in the family, which protects its members from a dangerous outside world. Yet, within the family there is a specific role that mediates the outside world of public responsibilities for the private family, albeit a role different from the father as the head of the family household.