6 - Edge

Summary

They spoke to me of people, and humanity. But I've never seen people, or humanity. I've seen various people, astonishingly dissimilar, Each separated from the next by an unpeopled space.

—Fernando Pessoa, “They spoke to me of people, and of humanity,” quoted in La Permanence (Alice Diop, 2016)

All Europeans have their systems for the centralization of fingerprints in order to know where the man will arrive and when he will go. So the Europeans have their techniques and we have our techniques to hide our fingerprints. If it was possible to cut this one and throw it and bring another hand, I would do that. But it's not possible. So I just burn my hands.

—Anonymous migrants, Qu'ils reposent en révolte (Sylvain George, 2011)

Black screen. Silence. Image and sound cut in, abruptly. A black-andwhite shot in close-up on a pair of hands. The torso faces the camera. It is wearing a puffy winter coat that covers the arms up to the wrists. The bright whites of jacket, fingernails, fingertips blaze against saturated black shadows that nestle in armholes and blanket the backs of the hands. The right hand holds a disposable plastic razor, also black, and uses the blade to slice into the skin of the upturned fingertips on the left hand. With a gentle rocking motion, the hand rolls the blade across the identificatory surface of its partner again and again, slicing into skin without drawing blood. Several voices murmur, offscreen, one perhaps belonging to the cutting hand's owner, perhaps to an onlooker: “Ah, là là. Ah, là là.” The camera cuts to extreme close-up, five shots in all, for a full 60 seconds of razor against fingertip. Then, faces and words, comments such as those above by young men explaining their attempts to evade fingerprint identification by European authorities. After another black shot, another series of close-ups focuses on fire, metal wires holding screws into the fire, and fingers pressing down on the hot screws. “I say it's our tradition,” says a voice. “They did it to our grandfathers. We are not going to wait for someone else to do it. We burn ourselves.” Then, an extreme close-up of fingers, crisscrossed by the white lines of fresh burn marks that will make the individual impossible to identify in any database.