Barcelona Metropolis

What ultimately happens at the human height? How do the numerous cameras in Human Flow view human beings? What do we ourselves, as the audience, see in this way of viewing? We see soldiers in Iraq positioned in an authoritarian stance above a mass of cowed refugees. We see men and women, silent about their misfortune, pose before the white canvas of a UNHCR tent. We see women speaking hurried and jumbled words to the camera. We see a man crying before the grave of five members of his family. But why so many cameras for so few face-to-face interviews? Above all because in this "artist's film", the idea is to film the artist himself, camera in hand, heading off to assist refugees all round the globe. The true "human height" in Human Flow is seen above all as the staged largesse of an artist engaging in hand-to-hand combat with the world's misery.

One could, then, see in this film the account of a great humanitarian pilgrimage of art towards the provinces of misfortune. In short, it is a film "laden with good intentions", and technically supported, technically built for this purpose. It undoubtedly manages to raise its own indignation, to raise ours once again, about the situation currently suffered by the world's refugees. But does this indignation, coming from a dignitary of the world of culture, restore to the refugees the civic dignity they are owed? One might say that the famous artist gives those over whom he casts his glance the same type of dignity by proxy that Angelina Jolie might so kindly give to the starving in Sierra Leone. But it is a quite ingenuous speculation as to the ethical virtues of our showbiz society: as if an artistic aura were enough to "touch" the downtrodden of the earth in order that they might, as through the laying on of hands, recover their dignity as individuals. Let this be quite clear: what is questioned here is not the fact that an art form should take a look at the situation of refugees, nor is the assertion that this should be forbidden. Quite the opposite; the aim is to state that a decision like this, to take a look at refugees, demands the constant reinvention of the ethics of form, to ensure at least that there is no assumption of power over the subject being filmed. It is always possible for anyone, even a "great" artist to address others or represent them visually without viewing them "from on high" (Vermeer and Rembrandt, as far as I know, never looked down from on high like this).

Whatever the case, it seems to me that the form constructed and implemented in Human Flow simply lacks both this aesthetic rigour and the "probity" and "fairness" that would result from it. This may be seen above all in the way the artist throughout the whole film frames his self-portrait "with the refugees in the background", or in a number of dialogues where the reciprocity is nothing more than faked. In Lesbos, the artist takes selfies like a star with his admirers. In Jordan, the artist prepares brochettes (or makes a show of doing so). He films the trails of refugees from afar, while a picturesque camel is seen in close-up. On another occasion he buys from a travelling fruit seller, and seems to check his change. In Idomeni, he walks for three or four seconds through the mud, speaks with someone on the other side of the fence, is thrilled by the image of a kitten on a mobile, films while walking over some emergency tents, shows an interest in his own shadow, and lastly pretends to exchange passports with a refugee, suggesting that he go and live in his studio in Berlin… The polite, or ironic, reply of the refugee: “Thank you, really thank you”. The artist replies with an expression that his own gesture ultimately contradicts: “I respect you”.

And so on successively: here he has a haircut (in close-up); there he helps a woman to throw up (there is a bucket to hand, or perhaps prepared in advance); on another occasion he encroaches on the space of a weeping man grieving his family; in Beirut, he walks along the street, accompanied by two soldiers who protect him; in Gaza he is filmed "on his own" on the beach, filming the sea, and then goes off to dance with the Palestinians; in Kenya, he would have us believe that he is lost, alone with his camera, in the middle of a sandstorm; in Berlin, he has himself filmed while filming migrants lined up as if for a military inspection; near Ciudad Juárez he talks to an American policeman, has his hair combed by a Mexican living in poverty, and takes selfies with his wife. On another occasion we again see him filming himself with a protest placard against his chest: “Stand # With Refugees”, as if it were his declaration alone. Written above the slogan in great big capital letters is: “AI WEIWEI”. He is aware that for some considerable time now, since Duchamp, since Warhol, an artist is to begin with a person who signs things, and his signature is worth something.

There is undoubtedly a good intention in the attempt to place this value of art at the service of a whole underprivileged population because they are deprived of certain fundamental rights. In the general context of the considerable concern shown today by artists and intellectuals as to the situation of refugees, which unfortunately has led to a considerable increase in photographic and cinematographic studies of the issue,[1] what makes Human Flow distinctive lies in the fact that, aside from its privileged media resources, the value of art ultimately occupies a central, and even fundamental, role. There are, of course, crucial artworks produced at certain moments in history, and one could even say that Ai Weiwei has done more than Picasso, who did not travel to Guernica. But the value of art is not in itself a policy. In conclusion, all we see in this film is an act of abstract charity: nothing more than alms placed by art in the hands of refugees.

"If people save us, we feel humiliated, if they help us, we feel lessened," wrote Hannah Arendt in Nous autres réfugiés, a text written after her own experience of being kept in French camps and her own stateless odyssey.^{[2] It is the fundamental sensation of indignity felt by a refugee when forced to say "thank you, really thank you". And it became a leitmotif of Hannah Arendt's political writings about the problem of refugees, stateless persons and society's outcasts in general. When she was exiled to Paris in 1935, Arendt declared that the problem of refugees would never be resolved through any "charitable institution": "Of course those without money need to be helped. But money cannot in itself resolve the problem of the displaced."[3]} In 1941, in an open letter to Jules Romains, she highlighted this "desperate question: can we really only choose between enemies who wish us ill, and condescending friends?".^[4]

The same year, Arendt wrote with powerful anger that "the existence of a people", or its survival when forced to flee persecution, "is too serious a matter for us to consider leaving it in the hands of the wealthy… because only a people itself is strong enough to forge a true coalition".^[5]Who was she referring to with that expression "the wealthy"? She meant, both specifically (addressing American Jewish organisations) and in general (within the context of a political theory), the moral "good intentions" of benevolent gestures offered always from on high. She referred to "benevolence" seen from the perspective of the "lesser of two evils", which, as we know, never comes to any good, and in terms of principles, a depoliticisation of the misfortune suffered by so many peoples over the course of history. It is what Arendt called in 1944 a "benevolence machine", the consequence of which is to "stifle the desperate cries of the oppressed"[6], forcing them to make do with the never-ending “Thank you, really thank you” towards the powerful.

Refugees, now as well as then, need much more than mere charity or benevolence. The benevolence of giving them refuge in Europe, it need hardly be said, does not only offer positive actions. It is often a benevolence on terms that suggest that there is a concealed aim of watchfulness and rejection. And so the benevolent form adopted by Ai Weiwei, juxtaposed with his images of watchfulness captured by the drones, does nothing more than reinforce the view from on high, that freezes refugees in a political impasse. Refugees, though do not need us to turn their skewers of meat for them, to pass them a bucket to be sick in, or pretend to give them an artist's studio in Berlin. All they ask for is to be viewed as equals, in other words, to have a civic and legal status that the general principles of our democracies carved one day in marble, but only in marble. An artwork addressing this question should not be a work of charity: it should aim to accuse, delve, publicly poke its fingers into this historical wound. In short, conduct itself in a critical manner.