Diasporic Encounters and Affective Cinematic Landscapes in Bas Devos’s Film, Here (2023)
摘要
Affective theories conceptualize landscape as lived, inhabited, sensed environment imbricated with the social. Bas Devos’s 2023 film, Here performs an affective cinematic land-scaping, a re-imagining of the less visible urban landscapes of Brussels by enabling a particular diasporic and ecological sensibility. The camera follows an immigrant Romanian construction worker, Ștefan who strolls the peripheral streets of Brussels and a young Chinese-Belgian bryologist, Shuxiu, a second-generation immigrant who studies mosses in the suburban forests of the city. Both the immigrant worker and the bryologist experience a sort of (diasporic) placelessness: the former through an unsettling dream-like experience of linguistic amnesia, the latter through insomnia, which makes him engage into a recurrent flânerie, through which he re-inhabits urban spaces. The intermedial photofilmic shots of urban landscapes—that merge stillness with movement and capture the non-dramatic affective occurrences of quotidian life—reveal the urban-natural space as dwelling, as lived habitat. The haptic photographic close-ups of plants as vehicles of affect do not only dissolve the detached opticality of landscape into palpable, intimate images of proximity, but also have a revelatory or dislocating potential by enabling an ecological awareness of non-anthropocentric scales. The chapter discusses how Devos’s film conveys affective encounters and manifold entanglements between diasporic subjectivities, as well as between the urban and the natural, photography and cinema. It will map out how the affordances of cinematic intermediality acquire a revelatory potential and generate particular diasporic and ecological sensibilities which imply ethical, social and affective, corporeal modalities of getting in “touch” with the other and with the world, human and non-human.