The Empathic Resonances of Village of Women (2019): On Cinematic Expansion Through Retreat

The political efficacy of artistic output can be fleeting, especially when wedded to the emotional arousal of audiences for political ends. Nonetheless, much is attributed to the role of artists and filmmakers in framing, critiquing, and challenging political narratives. Migratory realities, for example, are often encountered by viewers through the mediated dramaturgies of news media, social-issues documentaries or artistic interventions which oftentimes reproduce representations of suffering. This chapter takes James Baldwin’s non-fiction book, Notes of the Native Son, with its critique of the protest novel as a starting point to ruminate on Tamara Stepanyan’s 2019 documentary, Village of Women. The film documents the communitarian coexistence and care among women in an Armenian village whose husbands are migrant workers in Russia. The film avoids an advocacy-led narrative, instead adopting aesthetic and conceptual subtleties such as a circular narrative composed of observational footage depicting relationships of collectivity and acts of solidarity rendered through fragmented anecdotes. This approach obliges viewers to partake in the labor of understanding and to become accountable to, rather than consumers of images. In doing so the film produces empathic resonances that serve to shift viewers’ responses from feelings of empathy toward acts of solidarity. The chapter addresses the limits of empathic identification by considering the potential of empathic resonance as a viable alternative.