


Transcultural studies often theorize third world diaspora from within the dominant Western context, and its relation to the culture of their postcolonial home. This essay takes on a reversed perspective, aiming to examine lmic representations of two young Western subjects in third world countries. The lmmakers Thomas Brück and Bentley Brown spent their formative years as members of Western diaspora families in Mexico and Chad. Using the medium of lm, their work navigates cultures — as the works of certain subaltern immigrant artists and lmmakers in the West do. By analysing their personal documentaries Third Culture Kid and Oustaz, the essay investigates their cinematic means of negotiating transcultural identity across geopolitical borders. Special emphasis is given to the employment of home video material to reconstruct and represent memory.



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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Video Memories of Diaspora: Searching for Identity in Between Homelands
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2017-03-01
2021-09-06
2017-03-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Ulrike Mothes
2017/03/01
Bauhaus University Weimar
2036-461X
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Video Memories of Diaspora: Searching for Identity in Between Homelands
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Video Memories of Diaspora:
Searching for Identity in Between Homelands
Ulrike Mothes, Bauhaus University Weimar




    Abstract

     Transcultural studies often theorize third world diaspora from within the
     dominant Western context, and its relation to the culture of their postcolonial
     home. This essay takes on a reversed perspective, aiming to examine filmic
     representations of two young Western subjects in third world countries. The
     filmmakers Thomas Brück and Bentley Brown spent their formative years as
     members of Western diaspora families in Mexico and Chad. Using the medium of
     film, their work navigates cultures — as the works of certain subaltern immigrant
     artists and filmmakers in the West do. By analysing their personal documentaries
     Third Culture Kid and Oustaz, the essay investigates their cinematic means of
     negotiating transcultural identity across geopolitical borders. Special emphasis
     is given to the employment of home video material to reconstruct and represent
     memory.


Introduction

   Transcultural studies often theorize the third-world diaspora within the
dominant Western context and its relation to the culture of their postcolonial
home.1 This essay investigates a reversed filmic perspective on diaspora identity:
the filmmakers Thomas Brück and Bentley Brown spent their formative years
as members of Western diaspora families in Mexico and Chad. Using the
medium of film their works navigate between cultures — as the works of certain
second and third world immigrant artists and filmmakers in the West do. What
strategies do the filmmakers pursue to discuss the subject of transcultural
identity in documentary film? What stylistic means do they employ to generate
and represent memory?


1
  This perspective has been represented in various personal documentary films such as Sandhya
Suri’s I for India (2005) about her family ties between Great Britain and India, or Arash T. Riahi’s
Exile Family Movie (2006) portraying the director’s Austria-based family that re-unites with their
Iranian relatives in Mekka after decades.

                                                      Cinéma & Cie, vol. XVII, no. 28, Spring 2017
                                        Ulrike Mothes


   To apprehend their works in the context of transcultural film practice, the
essay first discusses the key concerns of diaspora and identity, and then gives a
brief summary of Thomas Brück’s short documentary Third Culture Kid (2015)
and Bentley Brown’s short documentary Oustaz (2016). Referring to the memory
theory of Aleida Assmann, the second part examines notions of memory and
their representations in the films of Brück and Brown. This essay will also address
the narrative use and authentic impact of home video material as the visual base
of both documentaries. Finally, the essay looks at the stylistic device of personal
voice-over narration on the filmic quests for belonging and the strategies of self-
reflection inherent in the personal filmmaking style.


Diaspora and Identity

   Migration movements are not a new phenomenon. Wars, famines, political or
religious persecution, as well as invitations by foreign governments have been
impulses for translocation over centuries. Today, global economies, international
education systems and career opportunities, too, contribute to an increasing
amount of people leaving their ancestral countries and relocating into new
communities and spaces either for a particular time span or for good. Diaspora
experience is a much-debated factor in the context of subaltern communities
claiming agency as well as legal and social equalities. The diaspora experience
challenges a sense of identity and belonging of any person who for some reason
or another decides to leave their homeland.
   Contemporary definitions of diaspora focus on their community members’
experiences of transition and fragmentation in between the cultures of the old
and the new home. Stuart Hall describes these global citizens as ‘new ethnicities’
who share a deep experience of discontinuity.2 Their self-perception is decisively
shaped by the need to actively position themselves between the various and
sometimes-contradictory influences of both cultures. Vijay Agnew characterizes
them as ‘individuals who live in a variety of societies and cultures and who
emphasize their sense of belonging or exclusion, their states of mind and their
sense of identity.’3 Consequently, diaspora experience blends elements of the
ancestral and the new culture, into creolization and cultural hybridization.
   One may ask to what extent the self-concept and the notions of ‘home’ would
be governed by the same mechanisms in Western diaspora communities. Beyond
the economic and social pressure many migrants from second and third world
countries experience in the West, Western transnationals are equally affected by


2
  Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory,
ed. by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) pp.
392–403 (p. 395).
3
  Vijay Agnew, Diaspora, Memory and Identity: A Search for Home (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2005), p. 5.

12
         Video Memories of Diaspora: Searching for Identity in Between Homelands


notions of difference which make them question their understanding of self and
belonging. They appropriate elements from both cultures and integrate them
into their lifestyle and understanding of the world around them. This inevitable
process is seen as an important motor for the conception of art and culture. By
the means of art or media participation the Diasporic subjects ‘[...] generate
new and different images of themselves and their group that correspond
more closely to their evolving self-image and self-definition.’4 New York based
Indian anthropologist Arjun Appadurai extends this notion by arguing that the
imagination is a driving force for these artists.5
   This paper traces the subjective cross-cultural experience mirrored in the
works of the Western filmmakers Bentley Brown and Thomas Brück. Both
documentary directors participated in the new global mobility as ‘third culture
kids’, a term employed by Ruth van Reken and David Pollock for ‘children
who spend a significant period of their developmental years in a culture outside
their parents “passport culture(s)”’.6 Brück, of German descent, was born in the
Mexican town Zapopan, where his parents had settled for professional reasons.
He did not know much about his parents’ ancestral country and culture until
the family resettled to Germany when Brück was six years old.7 The resulting
struggle to identify his home and develop a sense of belonging is reflected in his
eponymic film Third Culture Kid.
   US born filmmaker Bentley Brown moved to Chad as an eleven-year-old
accompanying his parents on a healthcare mission, and stayed until he was an
adult. He learned Chadian Arab as well as French, the colonial officialese. This
allowed for an intense participation in the local culture. After completing his
studies in his native country, he returned to African and Arabian regions to
work in foreign aid as well as on film projects. Brown believes in cross-cultural
filmmaking and collaborating with local crew-members. All his films deal with the
subject of migration, moving between countries and ‘the identity transformation
that is happening as a result’.8
   It should be stressed that both filmmakers have been part of a numerically rather
small diaspora in a third world country. Their films focus not on the concerns
of a diaspora community but on their own personal experiences. They imagine
their childhood from the found video fragments and conclude their individual

4
  Agnew, p. 5.
5
   Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2005), p. 31.
6
  Ruth van Reken and David C. Pollock, Third Culture Kids: Growing Up among Worlds (Boston:
Nicholas Brealey, 2009), p. xi.
7
  Interview with Thomas Brück, 17 August 2016.
8
   Bentley Brown, ‘Linguistic Integrity in Cross-Cultural Filmmaking’, lecture at the Berlin
Language of Art & Music Conference, hosted by the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy, 2014, min.
12:00, online video recording, YouTube, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HfSomJzwxM>
[accessed 21 August 2016]. Examples of his film work are Faisal Goes West (2012) and Le Pèlerin
De Camp Nou/Captain Majid (2009). His autobiographic documentary Khawadjat (2016/in
production) uses home video footage we already know from his earlier film Oustaz.

                                                                                            13
                                                Ulrike Mothes


explorations. Thus, their quest for home and cultural belonging can be seen
as exemplary for translocation experience of the globalized world. As children
growing up in foreign countries, the directors were highly perceptive to the
influences of the new ethnic context and open to intercultural relationships: ‘I
was very concerned about fitting into the new community where my brother and I
were basically the only foreigners or new arrivers in a small town in which we grew
up’,9 Brown reflects about his position as a cultural outsider in Chad, confirming
Agnew’s theory of identity as a prevalent subject for hybrid communities.


Mansions and Mentors: The Cinematic Childhood Memories of Thomas Brück and
Bentley Brown

   Opening with a shot of his Mexican passport, Thomas Brück narrates the
story of his blurred notion of home after locating back to Germany with his
family in Third Culture Kid. The long-lost validity of this very passport troubles
his sense of identity. Twenty years after parting, Brück sets out on a quest to
his lost childhood home, to find out where he actually belongs. On his eight-
week journey through Mexico, Brück finds himself surrounded by symbols of
forsaken national identity. Shots of bare flagpoles become metaphors of the
young filmmaker’s scattered identity. In the course of the film Brück encounters
protagonists that struggle with their existence in Mexico, but encourage him on
his search for belonging. Finally, he is ready to confront his physical diaspora
home in Guadalajara.
   Bentley Brown’s Oustaz is framed by the visit to Montreal he made together
with his Chadian childhood friend and fellow filmmaker Abakar Chene Massar.
The trip becomes the inciting incident for Brown to review his old home video
recordings. Subsequently, he looks back at his childhood memories in the
Chadian small town Ati, to his friendships and his beginnings of filmmaking. By
doing so he pays tribute to Oustaz Boukhary, a painter, inventor and musician
from his neighborhood. Oustaz had taught him to speak Arabic and is therefore
a key figure to bridge Brown’s ancestral and the Chadian culture. While reflecting
upon himself and filmmaking Brown comes to terms with his Central African
past. This makes him reach a state of equality with the admired teacher.


Representing Memories

   Memories are an important element for autobiographical and cinematic
works. They are investigated and restructured in retrospect and enable the
artist to define an identity and reflect upon it with peers and thereby draft an


9
    Brown, ‘Linguistic Integrity’, min. 8:00.

14
         Video Memories of Diaspora: Searching for Identity in Between Homelands


image of the self: ‘Without memory, we cannot develop a concept of self nor
communicate with others. Biographic memories are indispensable, because
experiences, relationships and the image of the own identity are made of it.’10
Along these lines both directors survey their memories in hindsight. Their
documentary perspective is strongly shaped by the question of who they
are and which cultural factors influenced their image of self. Bentley Brown
summarizes the relevance of memory for his works in his voice-over: ‘Is who I
am just a series of memories? Conversations? Imaginations?’11 These uncertain
concepts form the basis of his film essay.
   Memories are fragmentary by nature, and Aleida Assmann is right to remark
that they are ‘mere excerpts’, ‘unconnected moments with no before or after’.12
Their ephemeral qualities might dwindle away during one’s life. This makes it a
challenge for the filmmakers to reconstruct their past in Mexico and Chad. In
Third Culture Kid, Thomas Brück takes up this line of thinking in his voice-over
text: ‘My time in Mexico often seems like a dream to me, hardly tangible. They
are disrupted and blurred fragments of memory. Sometimes I wonder if they
might originate from pictures or home videos.’13 The home video fragments
that find entry into his film support this fragile and blurred assessment of his
memory process.
   Although Assmann claims that memories are governed by subjectivity, she
argues that they never exist in an isolate way. They rather overlap with the
narratives of others and thereby confirm each other.14 Brown and Brück use
this mechanism by resorting to the video footage of family and friends as an
instrument of remembrance. They draw from these external memory carriers by
transforming them artistically. Both directors rearrange and condense various
fragments in the editing process, and frame them with their own voice-over.
Thomas Brück even created a questionnaire concerning his time in Mexico that
he handed over to his family members to correlate and contextualize his own
memory fragments, as to finally construct his film narrative. These perspectives
are incorporated in the film. For example, Brück quotes his mother in the
voice-over text: ‘Do you remember entering the small fence gate? I immediately
knew: here I can feel relieved and live happily with my small family for a few
years’ (my translation).
   Similarly, Bentley Brown gives voice to his childhood companion Abakar
whilst incorporating their dialog about the common friend Oustaz into the


10
   Aleida Assmann, ‘Individuelles und kollektives Gedächtnis: Formen, Funktionen und Medien’,
in Das Gedächtnis der Kunst: Geschichte und Erinnerung in der Kunst der Gegenwart, ed. by Kurt
Wettengl and others (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2000), pp. 21–27 (p. 21, my translation).
11
   Trailer of Khawadjat, min. 02:49. Source: Bentley Brown.
12
   Assmann, p. 21.
13
   Third Culture Kid, min. 01:40 (my translation).
14
   Assmann, p. 21. This links to Maurice Halbwachs’ observation of society and its collective
memories playing an important part in subjective reconstruction one’s past, Maurice Halbwachs,
On Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 51.

                                                                                           15
                                       Ulrike Mothes


film. Brown sparks off a conversation picturing the evening gatherings at
Oustaz’s place around a fire. Abakar would then add Oustaz’s way of provoking
the conversation by posing bizarre questions and thereby supplement the
filmmaker’s memory.15


Home Movie Material

   From the early beginnings of film, cameras have been used to depict private
family life, initially only by a privileged few. With the rise of Super 8 cameras
it became increasingly common for Western families to document their family
occasions in moving images. The development of video technology democratized
this practice further, as it did no longer depend on a chemical processing and
was thus easier to access and carry. The Latin root amare is commonly referred
to stating that ‘amateur’ films were shot for pleasure. Accordingly, they often
depict pleasant family events, such as new-born babies and their first steps,
first days in school, weddings, picnics, family members participating in various
games, vacations and other events considered worth documenting. According
to Roger Odin, these stereotypes appear in most home movies.16 As a record of
banal everyday situations that have never been documented by official sources,
these family productions offer endotic anthropological insights.17
   Sports games, trips and private music sessions from Brown’s video archive
become the source to reconstruct his teenage years. The material covers a long time
span of more than five years, which explains the difference in quality and format of
the private footage. As Brown’s parents record less, over the years, Bentley and his
friends take over the camera and thereby shape the future memories. Roger Odin
points out that home movies typically exist in snippets: ‘no narrative structure has
been superimposed onto it’.18 In the montage, Brown assembles these snippets into
a personal narrative. He juxtaposes documentations of the everyday activities with
performative sequences by the circle of friends: music and drama scenes, which also
star his teacher and role model Oustaz. The more the young filmmakers grow up,
the more complex their videos become: they start planning, editing, and structuring
them. Glimpses into their filmmaking process and excerpts from the collective’s
first fiction film are used to narrate Brown’s growth of his cinematic language.
   The amateur material Thomas Brück uses to reconstruct his memories of
his family home in Guadalajara originates from his elder brother. Although his


15
   Oustaz, min. 01:21.
16
   Roger Odin, ‘The Family Home Movie as Document’, in Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in
Histories and Memories, ed. by Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia Zimmermann (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1998), pp. 255–71 (p. 261).
17
   Odin, ‘The Home Movie and Space of Communication’, in Amateur Filmmaking: The Home
Movie, the Archive, the Web, ed. by Laura Rascaroli, Gwenda Young and Barry Monahan (New
York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), pp. 15–26 (p. 22).
18
   Odin, ‘The Home Movie and Space of Communication’, p. 18.

16
        Video Memories of Diaspora: Searching for Identity in Between Homelands


family archive comprises a great amount of video material from Mexico, Brück
restricts himself to Hi8 video footage of the family mansion his brother recorded
after the family’s decision to leave Mexico and return to Germany was made.19
Produced as a document to remember the house, the video material is marked
by the sad expectation of leaving: the camera scans the home, room by room,
showing us bedrooms, chairs, pets and toys and garden flowers.
   Patricia Zimmermann describes the archival relevance and narrative potential
of the private video recordings, as she states: ‘Amateur films and home movies
negotiate the space between private memories and social histories in a variety of
forms and iterations.’20 Brück’s home movie footage is a meticulous ethnographic
record of a German diaspora family at a given time in history that is revealed
through its architecture and interiors, which frame a certain time period. It
is hence an exemplary archival document, and a subjective reminiscence of a
childhood. By showing these interiors rather than members of the family, Brück
keeps the focus on himself and his subjective experiences. Shots from a recent
journey to his childhood country frame the family archive material and are
used to reflect upon the childhood memories. The material was recorded with
a Super 8 camera, the iconic equipment of home movie makers of that time.
The resulting imperfect, fragmentary aesthetic highlights the personal, nostalgic
character of the images in his film. The filming is strikingly similar, as in order
to reconnect to his old home, Brück’s handheld camera pans slowly over old
familiar landscapes the way his brother did all those years ago. Juxtaposing these
two layers of amateur material, Brück addresses the question what it means to
grow up in-between two cultures.
   Amateur film seems to promise a high degree of authenticity. The footage of
Bentley Brown and his friends benefitted from this effect. Using the video camera
the group obtains a cultural agency that is practiced in a playful manner, shooting
several films narrating local stories and destinies. ‘Everybody acted’,21 Brown
remembers in the voice-over of Oustaz, highlighting the great interconnection of
film crew, actors, musicians and audience. Their films were produced on a very low
budget and without professional editing systems. The great success the films had
in the community can be explained by their immediate and authentic character,
which local viewers could identify with. Brown expounds: ‘When we showed it
to the town where we lived […] people enjoyed watching it. They loved it. Not
because it was an excellent film, it was very amateur. But because it was the first
time that people saw themselves and their neighbors and their friends in a film.’22
   Both Brück and Brown use footage that mirrors the fragility of personal
memory: errors and transients allude to the historic dimension of the repurposed


19
   Interview with Thomas Brück, 17 August 2016.
20
   Zimmermann, ‘The Home Movie Movement: Excavations, Artifacts, Mining’, in Mining The
Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories, pp. 1–28 (p. 4).
21
   Oustaz, min. 11:30.
22
   Brown, ‘Linguistic Integrity’, min. 09:14.

                                                                                    17
                                         Ulrike Mothes


videotapes. Particularly the footage Brück’s brother recorded of the family house
has decayed. Signal loss and video pixel drops keep disturbing and sometimes
even erasing the original video images. These artifacts highlight the dated
footage. Dominik Schrey points out that those sections from the home video
archive that the family members love most are most often played or rewound
and subsequently most worn down. Their visual information is increasingly
replaced by ‘traces of appreciation or pleasure’.23 The visible deterioration of the
video footage becomes a metaphor for the blurred and fragmented character of
Brück’s childhood memory.
   It would be possible to argue that the amateur video material contributes
deeply to the question of hybrid cultural identity both filmmakers address. Brück
juxtaposes before-and-after shots of his diaspora home. Brown illustrates himself
not only belonging to the Chadian community — cycling through the savannah,
exercising Arab calligraphy and dancing to Chadian tunes dressed in a white
turban — but also rooted in the Western culture playing football and classical
piano — reminiscent of a colonial, Western identity in a postcolonial African
country. The piano melody melts into transcultural fusion when Oustaz takes
over the keys playing a dashing tune in the archival video footage. By connecting
their voice-over with the home movie material, the filmmakers knot ties to both
cultures and evoke a hybrid cultural mélange.


The Authors Presence in the Film

   Not only the use of home-movie material, but also the employment of voice-
over narration is considered another prevalent attribute of autobiographical films
and documentary self-portraits. According to Manthia Diawara, transcultural
filmmakers favor this form of first person narrative. It becomes ‘the filmmakers
revisionist construction of history in which the narrator is as central to the film
as the film´s object’.24 Both filmmakers make use of this revisionist method,
however, their stylistic approaches differ: Brown’s voice-over narration alternates
with dialog fragments and tale-telling chords of Western and Chadian music.
Thomas Brück on the contrary follows a more reduced concept. He deliberately
eschews his brothers descriptive narrative recorded on his archival tapes as he
considers it not personal enough and rather decides to focus on his own personal
search. Along his voice-over, derived from his Mexican travel diary, Brück
navigates through his life history. His tale puts the worn home movie material


23
   Dominik Schrey, ‘Analog Nostalgia and the Aesthetics of Digital Remediation’, in Media and
Nostalgia: Yearning for the Past, Present and Future, ed. by Katharina Niemeyer (Basingstoke:
Palgrave McMillan Memory Studies, 2014), pp. 27–28 (p. 35).
24
   Manthia Diawara, ‘The I Narrator in Black Diaspora’, in Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and
Transnational Media, ed. by Ella Shohat and Robert Stam (New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press, 2003), pp. 193–202 (p. 193).

18
            Video Memories of Diaspora: Searching for Identity in Between Homelands


into a subjective perspective. Brück’s narrative is structured into episodes by a
second layer of text: inserted quotes by Àngeles Mastretta, Albert Schweitzer
and the Dalai Lama serve to present an external view on the question of identity
and belonging. He opens the film with an aphorism of Schweitzer claiming
one will perish of homelessness — or reach purification and knowledge. This
preface becomes the central dramatic question for Brück’s film. Further quotes
underline his struggle or progress in his search. Most of the quotes stem from
the filmmaker’s Mexican journey, such as a Dalai Lama aphorism sprayed onto a
hostel wall, finding their way into the film as personal memories.
   Language is another aspect to express familiarity or strangeness and the
experience of discontinuity. Brück presents himself as a protagonist who learned
Spanish but contemplates in German. Thereby he stresses his perspective of
looking back from his ancestral country that dominates his current thinking and
verbal expression to the place of his early childhood. Bentley Brown speaks in
Arabic, which he learned as an eleven-year-old. Although not his mother tongue
Arabic is the language that connects him with his childhood companions. This
stylistic decision emphasizes the strong bond between the friends. Arabic is also
the language in which the friends conceived their theatre plays and film scripts for
the Chadian community. By contributing to this, Brown confirms his belonging
to the community. Reflecting about his first steps in filmmaking leads him to
revealing the circumstances of recording. Repetitively, he shows the family video
camera in frame or speaks about the improvised equipment the friends could
use for their first film experiments. Along these lines, he explains in his voice-
over: ‘This was before mobile phone cameras. We just had the family camera’25
while we see him looking through the viewfinder of an amateur camcorder.
Observational shots indicate that Brown was not the only camera operator, but
that he learned to handle the camera together with his friends. In his montage
we can overhear their excited conversations like: ‘Swear to god, am I a good
cameraman? […] This is a good shot, right?’, ‘It’s nice’, ‘Sure, fucker?’, ‘Here,
fucker, take the camera back!’26 We see the collective directing scenes of their
debut film Le Pèlerin De Camp Nou and make aesthetic decisions about framing.
Their shared love for film becomes the framework for the documentary’s plot.
It thereby creates a dramatic curve that culminates in Bentley and his friend
Abakar premiering the film at a festival in Montreal.
   Brück’s and Brown’s continuous presence in their films — visually or by the
means of voice-over — constantly reminds the audience of the very subjective
nature of their revisions of diaspora experience. The resulting sincere impact of
their essayist self-portraits enables the viewer to connect and identify.




25
     Oustaz, min. 06:16.
26
     Oustaz, min. 09:15.

                                                                                      19
                                 Ulrike Mothes


Conclusion

   The experience of hybrid cultural identity plays a formative role and can be
seen as an important motor for self-articulation — expressed here by the means
of film. The process of remembering forms the basic narrative structure for both
documentaries. Fragments of home videos, a personal voice-over narrative and
the juxtaposition of contrasting music from both cultural contexts are effective
tools to portray the filmmaker’s identities torn between two cultural poles. In
the voice-over they finally reconcile with the past: while Bentley Brown reaches
the state of equality with his teacher Oustaz before leaving the country, Thomas
Brück’s search leads towards introspection and finding an inner global home.
Both filmmakers de-colonialize the filmic gaze beyond the postcolonial contexts
and find images and filmic symbols to describe their own transcultural identity
— across geopolitical borders. In an exemplary and conciliatory way their films
represent a scattered identity in an increasingly globalizing world.




20
