This debate is by no means new: Dogma may have been a shrewd movement, a kind of faux-declaration, but it was also downright Aristotelian in its idea of forcing the spectator through an emotional mangle. Nor was it new when it engaged André Bazin – perhaps the most influential film critic, responsible for inspiring a revolutionary generation of directors, the French Nouvelle Vague – in his essays on the nature of cinema, which pose the moral question of what form cinema should take.

For André, cinema reached the apotheosis of its expressive capabilities in 1946, with Roberto Rossellini’s Paisà. This film assured the director’s title as the father of neo-realism and inspired André’s essay ‘An Aesthetic of Reality’, which, like Lars Von Trier’s films, explores cinema’s ability to make reality signify. Composed of six discrete views of post-war Italy, Paisà (meaning ‘Fellow Countrymen’) follows people – abandoned American soldiers, partisans, families – in their journeys through a no-man’s land. The neutral tone of the film – ‘the impassive lens’ – was revolutionary, moving away from editorial conventions, which André saw as cutting up and digesting reality on the spectator’s behalf. Rightly, André identifies this aversion to didacticism as a reaction against the limits imposed on reality and its expression under fascism. Paisà is a film about freedom: freedom of representation but also, and perhaps most interestingly, freedom of interpretation.

Appropriately, Paisà is being shown as part of a series of films complimenting this year’s Oxford Amnesty Lectures. Although chosen for their representations of displacement, asylum and migration, films such as Three Colours: White (1993) which is the least heavy-handed of Kieslowski’s trilogy, often veer into an exploration of themes such as freedom, identity and love. They are perhaps most interesting in their different, often fantastical approaches to reality.

Pawel Pawlikowski’s Last Resort (2000), for example, is an unassuming but great film, taking a very real situation and transforming it into a modern fairy-tale. Tanya and her son, Artiom, arrive from Russia, supposedly to a new life with Tanya’s British fiancé. They are soon abandoned and quickly escorted to a centre for refugees with pending Home Office applications in Stonehaven. The monolithic tower block that provides the pair with temporary shelter initially becomes a form of prison, then a purgatory where Tanya feels she is being punished for her ‘sins’. Such connotations develop, until gradually the film emerges on the other side of realism, the bleak landscape becoming resonant with emotion. Tanya’s growing love for bingo-host Alfie provides us with a sense of her identity – her being – which takes us as close to the reality of her situation as any ‘objectivity’ ever could.

The interplay in this film of reality and fantasy is perhaps most clearly expressed through the use of an abandoned boat. At first, the film appears simply to come across this boat, stranded on the sand. Of course we identify it with Tanya’s own sense of abandonment, but it is presented merely as fact. Later, however, it is lifted into significance, becoming the means by which Tanya is rescued as Pawel rejects the reality of her situation, allowing her the freedom of fantasy in an exhilarating representation of escape.

Neo-realist films, inspired by Roberto Rossellini, often used ‘real people’ as actors – something Michael Winterbottom does in In this World (2003), a depiction of human-trafficking notably absent from the OAL’s series. In this film, Michael blurs the boundaries between art and life, following two Afghan refugees on their journey to the UK, using raw, documentary-style footage. It is, perhaps, the nature of the subject matter (immigration) which makes this technique so unsettling: we are constantly forced to ask ourselves if the situation unfolding is real and, on a certain level, we must realise that it is. Michael plays with our reactions in this film, and it is the rigorously intellectual nature of this manipulation, especially when compared to the ‘purer’, emotional landscapes of films like Wonderland, Jude and The Claim, that marks this British director as one of the most important film stylists of the moment.

Like Stanley Kubrick, Michael is an experimental filmmaker. Refusing to limit his output with questions of what cinema should do, he makes full use of the medium’s ontological relation to reality to create different worlds, which reveal what it can do. In this World poses questions about the relationship between art and reality at once political and aesthetic. It (like Dogville, it seems) would have made a great addition to the OAL’s already thought-provoking series of films.

Movement of the people: Displacement, asylum and migration in the cinema is now showing. For further information visit: www.oxford-amnesty-lectures.org

Marc travelled through what was French Equatorial Africa (‘the Congo’) with André Gide whose obsession with the African continent had led to the writing of L’Immoraliste. Marc was to act as secretary to André, documenting details of interest to the writer during their year-long journey which stretched from July 1925 to May 1926. Greatly influenced by the seminal documentary film made in 1922, Robert J Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (a film which explored the lives of the Eskimo people) Marc decided to create a cinematic document of his journey with André Gide. Impeded by the heat and the weight of his equipment, however, he soon found himself frustrated in his efforts to give an objective picture of African life. As André put it in his travel journal also entitled Voyage au Congo, just as the cameras would stop filming, an act of spontaneity would occur that film could not capture.

One of the most frustrating events for Marc is also recounted by André, who describes attempts to film ‘documentary’ scenes as producing ‘nothing of note’. Marc was aiming to obtain footage of people of the village of Yakoua, men and women, swimming together. Impossible. The people of Yakoua considered it indecent for men and women to swim together, and as the men waited on the shore they put their under-garments back on. Marc explained to André that the men would undress as they entered the water, and he hoped for a certain effect to come from this. Yet, as André puts it, their modesty before the cameras was too great; the men preferred to soak their clothes, which would soon dry out under the sun. The women were equally shy, demanding that all the men, all spectators except the film-makers, left the ‘scene’. All of which resulted in a pathetic spectacle, according to André.

Such limitations meant that Marc became more and more obsessed with the staging of his film, so much so that film expert Daniel Durosay has described Voyage au Congo as a film-chimère – half-documentary, half-fiction. Voyage au Congo suppressed all evidence of a journey and instead became an abstracted cinéma du corps (cinema of the body) presenting an idealised vision of native Africa divorced from time and space. In his attempts to justify this, Marc described the film as providing a pedagogy of the Western gaze which would teach the Western eye to see the African’s beauty. Instead it became a film of clichés, living up to Edward Said’s observation that in order to survey a different world one must ‘see every detail through a device of a set of reductive categories.’

After the completion of Voyage au Congo, and particularly after World War I, ‘reportage’ film equipment was highly improved and the possibilities of capturing the everyday life of other cultures increased. Yet a question André put to himself remains pressing: ‘My imaginary representation of this country was so lively (I mean, I had imagined it so vividly) that I wonder whether in the future this false image will not be stronger than my memory of the reality and whether I shall see Bangui, for instance, in my mind’s eye as it really is, or as I first of all imagined it would be.’

Voyage au Congo can be seen in extracts at Tate Modern or in full at the National Film and TV Archive, London.

by Nemonie Roderick and Dylan Lowthian