The most important colour in black and white films is grey. Kevin Smets is a film professor at VUB. He recently brought a European research project, Reel Borders, to VUB, looking at the perception of borders and identity in films. This is how a chance encounter heralded a life’s work.
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Kevin Smets is a historian by training and holds a PhD in film studies and visual culture. He became friends with a Turkish Erasmus student. She showed him her country, he learned the language and he has had an intense connection with the country, and its rich cinema, for almost 20 years. In his doctoral research into the role of popular visual culture in migration, he did fieldwork in the Turkish communities of Antwerp, London and Berlin. It also took him to a Syrian refugee camp in eastern Turkey, where he examined the impact of popular media. It was an intense experience that left a deep impression. It also coloured the approach of Reel Borders.
Meeting people, and enjoying the privilege of them opening their world to you, is something to be very humble about
The imagery around identity and borders
“The Reel Borders project starts from three types of borders. The Turkish-Syrian border is half open and half closed. The Spanish-Moroccan border is militarised, with fences, walls and soldiers. The Irish-British border in Northern Ireland is developing. All three share a history of colonial empires; think of the Ottoman Empire or the Commonwealth. All borders are also more or less on the edge of Europe, but that is coincidental. Although the imagery around ‘Fortress Europe’ can become part of the research.
“We are going to investigate what the cultural imagery is around borders, among insiders and outsiders. We will also look at how fiction film is used to build, contest and experience borders. This can be done literally, but also more symbolically, as with identity. And we will do this with inhabitants, institutions and makers, from both sides, of course, with special focus on the pitfalls of Eurocentric thinking. We even want to start making films ourselves, with them.
“Because one thing we know for sure: film and popular culture play a role in how we see migration, in all directions. As an accessible medium, it is an exciting resource for the social sciences.
“Some governments actively invest in films and series to discourage migration, while initiatives by artists and activists can tell a completely different story. Of course, it can also be the other way around. The power of film is to give tragedies and conflicts we know from the media a human face or story through factual reports and figures. Also in films about migration you have the compartmentalised narrative of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, the hero and the villain. Propaganda around migration is timeless. We are not going to speak out, only expose the mechanisms, so that people can gain insights into their own thinking about certain themes.”
Blurring as a purpose
“It is, of course, a tired cliché for a researcher to say that they want to bring nuance to the debate by exploring all angles. But it’s true. For me, that lies both in time and space.
“Perhaps because of my earlier education in history, I love to provide the historical perspective. There’s nothing more fun than showing how emoji have a lot in common with hieroglyphics, or motivating a student to watch a movie that is 100 years old. In turn, my research within film studies confronted me with the geographical nuance of borders. You can extend this to cultural identity, and to genres in film. It's never quite black or white.”
The Reel Borders website will be live soon. There will also be a film programme and an exhibition with CINEMATEK.