Hawkins, Marta and Matthew

In this presentation the researchers and filmmakers, Marta and Matthew Hawkins, will discuss the potential of cinematic creativity in producing empathetic, non-binary politics grounded in the physical experience of the body. They will refer to their recent essayistic documentary film, “In The Face of the Other”, which engages the residents of the English and French town, Plymouth and Roskoff, in the exchange of personal and political views in the advent of Brexit. Following Emmanuel Levinas and his theory of the other, they propose that the connection between the personal space and the cinematic space triggers a physically experienced affective rupture which destabilises the binary relation between the subject and the object.  By looking into the face of the other, the film disrupts the personal and political discourse and enables the sense of compassion which is otherwise absent in the mainstream representation of politics. Through the use of the camera, the act of looking creates a triadic form through which an encounter with the face occurs. The meaning of two people looking at each other reinforces the reflection of the spectators looking at the screen. In the triadic space of affect, otherness is dissipated and compassion arises. The discourse surrounding Brexit in the UK, as much as the rising far right discourses worldwide, fed by fake news and social media farms, dramatise binary oppositions for political gains where there is no space for the face of a human being with their fragilities and uncertainties.  The interjection of the camera, however, allows one to be  in “relation with the other face to face” (Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous, 2006: 9), whether it is an immigrant, a stranger, a friend or an enemy.The Hawkins’ film and argument brings an alternative insight into the established discourse of the Other through a conscious rupture experienced through the body.

Marta Hawkins and Matthew Hawkins are a filmmaking and academic team working across documentary, ethnography and experimental film. As activists engaged with grassroot communities, they are committed to issues of belonging, migration, and social justice. As academics, they investigate those issues empirically and philosophically, while looking into the potential of cinematic narrative, affect, and representation in theory and practice.

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