ON THE THRESHOLD

Liminal space, embodiment and encounter in the Finnish documentary films Ghosts and Neighbours

The article opens up ways to think about embodiment and encounter in the liminal spaces of refugee centre and suburban multicultural tenement. The Finnish documentary films Ghosts (Finland 2009, directed by Jan Ijäs) and Neighbours (Finland 2013, director Tuija Halttunen) focus on the transnational space where the relations between people and space are constantly on the move, challenging the national ‘order of things’. Here the borderlines between cultures and nationalities become difficult to discern and their nature as dynamic processes becomes tangible.

The vernacular and bodily transnational encounters in the films Ghosts and Neighbours convey in a very concrete way the negotiations between different cultural regimes and the experience of living in a multicultural world. The liminality experienced on the borderline is not only a crippling or constraining feeling, but in this threshold the ‘lived worlds’ of different cultures energise each other, dissolve into one another and form new hybrids. I am interested in what happens on the threshold in these particular films: in the realms of a refugee centre and a suburban multicultural apartment building where lived lives destabilise the ‘national space’. Films conveying the transnational experience, like Ghosts and Neighbours, can act as political agents while triggering the imagination and opening up new ways to see the world – perhaps with a cosmopolitan hue.

In this article I formulate a phenomenologically inspired analysis of the thresholds observable in the films and complement this analysis with interpretations of the cinematic techniques and the ethical considerations relevant to the documentary films’ transnational nature. In the films analysed, the thresholds are ‘occupied’ by human bodies transmitting the attitudes, emotions and meanings in the transnational and -cultural negotiations. The gesticulating bodies also form a bond between the film and the spectator, for example through the presence of the cinematographer.