 Finally,
over the whole there is a essay-like commentary in the off which is autobiographical and includes especially memories of journeys made by the first
person narrator and his father, enriched by short asides on famous travellers in the Orient (Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta) and nomadism. The principle of
criss-crossing narratives reveals - and this is something that applies to “Traveller’s Tales” as a whole - the complex rasters that are always at work
in the representation of foreign, nomadic reality.”
Taking the above three moving image pieces together, they have one thing in common - a sound track which deals with issues of migration/nomadism in
conjunction with images created by western tourists and documentary film makers. |
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At this point it is important to repeat that what all these works deal with is the imagery and associations of geographical movement
in all its forms, not with the statistics or the socio-political situations directly but rather with the media presentation of migrants through stereotypes
and cliché pictures, their position in the structure of the status quo as assigned through images. These imaginings have such a powerful presence
that they act as a species of screen, obscuring the realities of migrants as people and the consequences and problems of migration and social adjustment.
At the same time they allow socio-political manipulation of the issue by facilitating dichotomies and thus counter categories of engineered imagery.
Thus the ‘intrusive migrant’ has his counterpart in the ‘steadfast patriot,’ and the ‘welfare parasite’ in the ‘hard-working citizen.’ It is the old
us-and-them game where the categories (and images) are mutable according to who the players are at any particular point. These same oppositions are to
be found in relation to national identities as well. In Britain, for a long time, it was the British versus the rest of the outside world, revisable
as needed to the English versus the Scots, Welsh or Irish. In post World War II Britain it swiftly became the (white) British against the (black) immigrants.
In Austria the structure is similar and frequently instrumentalised in the same manner. Austria versus the rest of the world, reducing to the German-speaking
population versus Slovakians, Slovenians, Croatians etc. Wherever it is played the game rules are the same. Those who organise the game are normally
concerned with getting enough leverage to play the politics of power. |
