Introduction​

The Mole Agent (2020) by Maite Alberdi is only the second film from Chile to receive an Oscar nomination. Its approach is observational, but the film provides a ground-breaking reflective insight into the tools, practises, and ethics of undercover journalism. Our protagonist, eighty-three-year-old Sergio, is hired by a phony detective agency, armed with hidden cameras, and sent to a real home for the elderly to gather observations. He is tasked with sending regular reports back to his employers detailing the alleged malpractice kept hidden from the residents’ relatives. At the end of the film, he sends a final message:

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Romulo, I know you asked for hard facts and not opinions. But I'm going to voice my opinions anyway. The residents here feel lonely. They aren't being visited and some have been abandoned. Loneliness is the worst thing about this place. There's no crime for the client to report to the authorities. Her mother is definitely in good hands. The target needs special care, and we don't know whether the client can provide it. I don't understand the point of doing this investigation. The client should do it herself, she's her mother. She should face her own faults. That's why she can't live with herself or visit her mother. Lastly, when am I leaving? Please reply soon, I want to go home. Sergio

(The Mole Agent, 2020)

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The investigator, Sergio’s rejection of ‘fact’ is striking, but the full statement comes from several angles. It is not clear what troubles him. Does he dislike filming his friends without them knowing? Is keeping up deception exhausting? Are the “facts” (ibid.) of candid camera footage insufficient?

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It is typically understood that documentaries have reason to exist because they give us knowledge about the real world. Bill Nichols dubs our attraction to them ‘epistephilia’ (2017, p.27) compounding the Greek philía “of lovers, fondness” (Liddell and Scott, 1940) with epistḗmē “understanding, skill, as in archery…knowledge…scientific knowledge” (ibid.). Cinema seems like a useful tool for the production, or duplication of knowledge, but there are nuances in the word. Yes, knowledge can be applied to practical and intellectual activity, but where is knowledge located? In the world, in the mind or in the body? How exactly is knowledge different from belief?

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In 1639, Rene Descartes faced a similar problem. His ontological scepticism reduced consciousness to a description of itself, to a ‘Ghost in the Machine’ (Ryle, 1949, p.68), stating the only knowledge one can be sure of is the existence of the self as a thinking agent (Descartes, 1639, p.15). Philosophers since have attempted to build on the ‘foundation’ (Poston, n.d.) Descartes left, and reunite the mind and body for good. Edmund Husserl and the strain of thought which follows him, Phenomenology, is also concerned with what is self-evidently and logically verifiable, but not always from a sceptical or positivist standpoint. It seeks to describe the connection between conscious experience, and the real world as it presents itself to us (Smith, 2017).

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As a form of conscious experience like any other, the application of phenomenological theories, structures and principles is relevant to making and watching films. Hidden Camera Documentaries (Mole Films) such as Alberdi’s The Mole Agent (2020), Mads Brugger’s The Ambassador (2011) and Gunter Wallraff’s Schwarz auf Weiss (2009) specifically lay bare assumptions about conscious experience, knowledge and Theory of Mind that leave ripples through film and journalistic practise, as well as the world at large. This is by virtue of their form, of hidden camera photography; their method of obtaining information, through performance and deception; and their message, that the footage projected to the audience constitutes evidence, predicated on its direct relationship to the real world. Using Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Film and the New Psychology as a springboard into the topic, this essay will attempt to identify an ideal path for knowledge, between the filmmaker, the subject and the audience.

 

Definitions and Aims:​

I have identified a ‘Mole Film’ as a type of documentary where either the filmmaker, or an active participant, infiltrates an unfamiliar group or institution to extract information using surveillance techniques. I will use the term ‘Mole Film’ rather than ‘Hidden Camera Documentary’ because this essay will mainly focus on the people involved rather than the devices used to capture them.

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This essay will not aim to do phenomenology. The aim will be to investigate how phenomenology fits or does not fit the Mole Film.

The following definitions are preliminary and based on my understanding of Phenomenology. Meanings vary based on the philosophy of the writer, their treatment of language (Merleau-Ponty, 1969, p.96) and their school of thought.

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“Subject”: Someone experiencing from a first-person perspective.

“Object”: Something that is experienced by the subject through their senses.

“Other”: Someone who is perceived by, and/or interacts with the Subject.

“World”: The space which everything inhabits.

 

Chapter 1: Psychology and Subjectivity

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s 1964 essay, The Film and the New Psychology owes its origin to some of the first questions and observations in classical philosophy. Reflecting on abstract concepts such as colour, and their relation to object, he comes to similar conclusions as Aristotle. In a series of lectures over two thousand years prior, in 'De Anima' or 'On the Soul', Aristotle’s mission was to identify the origin of 'motion' in the body (Shields, 2020). To Aristotle, the soul functions as potential and actual, or of capacities and powers (ibid.), but is also given shape by deduction from fundamental Cartesian questions of the origin and quality of ‘Being’ itself. Aristotle discovered these characteristics by identifying perceptual objects and deducing what the soul had potential to do based on these experiences. As such, the text has been interpreted as empiricism (Dawes, 2017), functionalism (Shields, 2020), idealism (Phihol, 1901), even religious mysticism (Merkur, 2020).

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Merleau-Ponty attempts to forge a path between idealism, which asserts direct connections between the real and the perceived; and empiricism, which only accepts things which can be observed as evidence. For him, the five senses which ‘Psychology’ has declared responsible for our experience are incomplete. His ‘Psychology’ treats the “qualia” (Tye, 2018) of conscious experience as evidence for a new interior of scientific inquiry, and the combination of senses in consciousness as new quality that is distinct from the quantity of its parts. This is Ponty’s idea of 'Gestalt’ in action. Gestalt, translated from German is “form”, “shape” (Linguee, n.d.). Perception is then redefined as a spontaneous and productive thinking organ, which processes and ultimately transforms sense data (Merleau-Ponty, 1964, p.3).

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As evidence, cones in our retina are responsible for sending information about individual primary colours, therefore when looking at a flat red surface, there should be gaps in our vision, but the result is ‘homogenous’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1964, p.1). Optical illusions can appear and disappear depending on visible context. Ponty delineates between perception and intellect, intellect is a conscious act, and unlike perception, it is not able to generate an optical experience (ibid. p.3). Moreover, hearing is distinguished from vision as an exclusively temporal phenomenon, but Ponty reasons the elements of all senses are capable of combining into new Gestalt (ibid. p.1-2).

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This theory of perception as an experience which generates new qualities and contextual meaning, to some extent separated from the real world, encourages us to focus our attention back on ourselves rather than objects as abstracted from our judgment. Ponty uses this model and applies it to film and art more generally. Film’s technical innovation is uniquely suited to explore the exact nuances and relationships between the self, objects and others which Ponty outlines in the first section. Film is capable of layering image and sound, of displaying body language and mimicking the perspectives of other people. Its effectiveness is routed in an appeal towards our instinct to “decipher” the world (Merleau-Ponty, 1964, p.9). Although, like the senses, film appears to be a “mosaic” (ibid. p.3) of separate materials, it is actually experienced as a unified whole. Film makes room for expression and exaggeration, so that Drama can be more “exact” (ibid. p.9) than as it is experienced in the real world. However, quoting Kant, Ponty expresses the opinion that knowledge is a biproduct of art, because art is not descriptive of experience, instead it expresses feelings and “concepts” (ibid.).

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Ponty here lays the groundwork for many different features of cinema studies, the experience of watching a film, in its qualities of immersion and correspondence with perception, is noticeably distinct from examining film as a physical or metaphysical object. Just as the aim of poetry is to put the reader in a “poetic state” (Ponty, 1964, p.9) the aim of film could be to induce a ‘filmic state’. Ponty implicitly makes an ought claim, that film art is most effective when, and therefore it should reflect, the subjective experience of sensing the world in layers of audio and video. But film as an art form is limited because it cannot meaningfully describe experience.

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This description of the relationship between potential and actual, that Ponty invokes in ‘Gestalt’, is similar to what Aristotle called “Entelechy” (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1998). This is the name given to the result of capacity becoming form, which we see everywhere in nature. How can the dog bark if it is made of inorganic materials? The answer is that the dog’s form and the dog’s matter are interdependent and inseparable, the barking dog demonstrates the transition from potential to actual as an ongoing process called ‘actualisation’ (Sachs, n.d) (Anadale, 2016). These are the powers of the ‘soul’, or “animating principle” (Gregoric, 2014), that characterise organic beings. Ponty similarly combines capacity and form from within perception. We see and hear the dog barking on a cinema screen. A dog is projected, and its barking is spontaneously attached to that form. Aristotle is regarded as a pioneer of physical science and Ponty has assembled a new science about non-physical consciousness, but where does the Mole Film sit in this? Where is the ‘soul’ of the Hidden Camera Documentary?

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The Mole Film is a black sheep in comparison to fiction, and even documentary filmmaking, because the clear aim is to project reality. Documents are forged, disguises worn, and characters are invented solely in order to gain access to locations, institutions, individuals, or exclusive groups that would not be available in other ways (Aldridge, 2021). The camera is invisible, and on its own is taken as an objective gaze, for example we are used to CCTV as a way to spot criminal activity. The camera is often attached to the journalist because the information usually requires interacting and moving with the person(s) who wears it. The use of a hidden camera often comes with an assumption of risk, as the potentially dangerous subjects have not consented to be recorded, or have certain information released to the press (Paterno, 1997). Journalists behind these practises would not risk their reputation, freedom or even their lives for a simple art project. If so, they must have faith in the truth of their experience, the truth of their recordings and the capacity for film representation to communicate truthfully. Here truth can be taken as a direct connection to reality.

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For two years making ‘Schwarz auf Weiss’ (2009), veteran German journalist Gunter Wallraff interacted with people across Germany wearing hidden cameras (Schwarz auf Weiss, 2009). The film title translates to ‘Black on White’ (Lingee, n.d.) because over this time, Wallraff disguised himself as a migrant from Somalia, with an aim to expose racism. The images produced by his cameras are distorted by a wide-angle lens and digital noise, and the look is shaped by practical necessities. The wide angle ensures the subject will be in frame, the digital noise is due to the small size of the sensor, which is not able to capture a lot of light. The shot lengths are often long but Wallraff also uses other cameras to capture higher fidelity third-person points of view of his interactions. On the one hand, this gives us context of the scene, but on the other, Wallraff demonstrates what Ponty describes as one of film’s strengths: to explore and transition between different perspectives.

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Figure 1: 'Forest' by Cezanne, (1890)

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One may accept Ponty’s claim that art ought to reflect subjective experience, but what are his criteria? In his essay ‘Cezanne’s Doubt’ Ponty attributes the painter’s late life angst to a friction between depicting the world as it is, and how it appears to be. Cezanne swore not to work like the impressionist movement, who painted based on their immediate senses. Instead, he tried to combine the world as he saw it with how he thought it. But his later work expressed a paradox, described as his “suicide” (Merleau-Ponty, 1964, p.34), between nature as a united, continuous thing which he existed as part of, but also as the ‘spontaneously organised’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1964, p.35) structures we impose on nature through our perception and understanding. In other words, Cezanne exemplifies the original phenomenological issue of the real-world clashing with the experienced “Life-World” (Husserl cited in Beyer, 2020). Ponty explains this idea by invoking a forest. In a forest, naturally we see trees. To us, these trees spontaneously take on form, value and meaning, yet the space between the trees is equally part of nature (Merleau-Ponty, 1964, p.1). However, it would be an impressive intellectual achievement to assign that empty space the same mental significance as the trees. This was part of Cezanne’s mission “The landscape thinks itself in me…and I am its consciousness.” (Cezanne cited in Merleau-Ponty, 1962. p.39) Ponty thought Cezanne’s powerful affect was therefore a kind of intersubjective communication, or internal recognition “He wanted to make visible how the world touches us.” (Merleau-Ponty, 1964, p.41).

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In Wallraff’s camera we sense a similar friction. His camera is intended to capture reality, but his choice of perspective is charged with emotion. Unlike other investigative journalists armed with hidden cameras, Wallraff does not use them to access typically dangerous places. He explores suburban town centres, shops, concerts and football games(Schwarz auf Weiss, 2009). The hidden camera is shown to be disguised as a button on his jacket.

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Figure 2: Button cam in Schwarz auf Weiss (2009)

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We are at the centre of all interaction, but we are lower than his eyeline. The emphasis is therefore on his body. We hear Wallraff’s breathing, we see the sweat on his hand on a hot day, we feel the claustrophobia of a crowded train (Schwarz auf Weiss, 2009). Wallraff brings the audience as close as possible to a first-hand subjective emotional experience. The experience is parallel, somewhere between third person and first person. Like Cezanne looking out into the forest, Wallraff’s utilitarian camera takes on a different quality once inside our heads.

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Figure 3: First-hand experience in Schwarz auf Weiss (2009)

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‘Action Cameras’ are often attached to athlete’s bodies during sports events. Videos in this format receive a lot of engagement online. Comments beneath this video show how normal it is to feel a connection with the physical work of the cameraman. In contrast, Wallraff draws a more complex connection between his audio-visual body, and his emotions.

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Figure 4: Comments underneath a first-person mountain biking video (Owlaps, 2020)

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Brugger shares this device with Wallraff when he sends his cameras into hostile environments, the tension of the scene is often amplified by the position of the camera. Like Wallraff, Brugger sometimes chooses to use hidden cameras, even when there are options for better coverage. For example, in this scene from The Mole: Infiltrating North Korea (Brugger, 2020) a hidden camera and a videographer capture Ugandan government officials openly discussing the construction of a large weapons factory.

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Figure 5: Third person and first person in The Mole: Infiltrating North Korea (2020) and 'Shwarz auf Weiss (2009).

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It is given then, that both film makers are aware of the emotional and captivating affect hidden cameras bring to situations. The transition from third person to a pseudo-first person-perspective, and the use of hidden body cameras demonstrates that these works aim to be intersubjective. This move away from objectivity suggests the film-makers share an intuitive theory of knowledge.

 

Chapter 2: The New Doubt

Inheriting from Heidegger, Ponty believed the body to be the locus for knowledge. In most cases, it is not productive to think of the mind as natural or metaphysical, because our organ of perception helps our bodies navigate the world. We ingest information by interacting with objects through our perception. Even emotion is “not a psychic, internal fact but rather a variation in our relations with others and the world which is expressed in our bodily attitude” (Merleau-Ponty, 1961, p.5) which is a reaction to being “stuck” (ibid.). This is not, as it could be interpreted, a flat rejection of the existence of internal states of mind, but an assertion that knowledge of the world can only be mediated by perception, and in the case of emotions, other people. In turn, our knowledge of other people is shaped by what we can infer from observing other people. In support of this, Ponty refers to Lacan’s ‘Mirror Stage’ of infant psychological development, as a period where our imagination enables our Ego to leave our body and recognise ourselves and others as abstract entities (Johnston, 2018).

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So instead of an atomised world where people steer their bodies and impose their independent wills, this is a world where context largely influences what is expressed by bodies to other bodies. “Normativity goes right down to the bottom of experience.” (Dreyfus, 2011). Descartes’ “I” in “I think, therefore I am” (1637) becomes dependent on a corresponding “they” or “you”.

Context defines Mads Brugger’s The Ambassador. The Danish journalist acquires a passport from a black-market dealer and becomes an official diplomat for Liberia to the Central African Republic (CAR). Described as a “failed state” (The Ambassador, 2011) Brugger frames this exotic location as a dangerous but lucrative playground for foreign investment, aiming to use its cheap native labour and natural resources. The ground is ripe particularly for officials like Brugger, who hold privileges enabling them to smuggle illegal ‘blood diamonds’ across borders. In Bangui, the CAR’s capital city, Brugger hosts meetings from his Penthouse inside a “crumbling” hotel overlooking the Congo river (The Ambassador, 2011). Here we learn what the stakes are, and our instinct to “decipher” (Ponty, 1964, p.9) the world is excited. With the context we are given, it is encouraged to examine body language, particularly as individuals are revealed to lie, and Brugger’s own paranoia grows.

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As a self-described “sensationalist” (The Mole: Infiltrating North Korea, 2020) Brugger is aware of how attention-grabbing body-language can be, while deception and subterfuge seem to lace every interaction, but how much can we rely on body-language as an access-point to other minds?

YouTuber Jim C. Swim uses police interrogation tapes from the public domain to analyse body language alongside commentary. In under three years, his eighteen videos have been viewed one hundred and twenty-seven million times (JCS Criminal Psychology, 2021). In common with Wallraff’s style, shots are held for a long time, and in common with Brugger’s style, the narrator guides the emphasis and flow of information in the past tense. For his video about a murderer Stephanie Lazarus, Jim gives his analysis:

The suspect was just asked three consecutive questions relating to the victim. She was supposedly in a reflective state during all three of the questions, yet her facial expression completely changed for the third one. This is because she was pretending to be in a state of reflection for the first two questions, as she already knew the answers. Whereas for the third question, she actually was in a state of reflection and was genuinely searching her memory for the correct response...You wouldn't need to be an expert in body language to recognise the unmitigated terror emanating from the suspect’s face at this moment.

(JCS – Criminal Psychology, 2019, 16:40-18:21)

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Here, Stephanie’s guilt functions as a rhetorical device for Swim to assert facts about Stephanie’s inner life. Both Brugger and Swim assume that if one is attentive enough, one will be able to decipher external ‘tells’ about the other they might not want to reveal.

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However, unlike Brugger and Wallraff, Swim uses footage of people who are aware they are being recorded. This may significantly change the body movements of a given suspect. Brugger engages his subjects with questions which may lead to incriminating actions, but his interviewees are calm and unaware. On the deep-set sofa, their posture is relaxed, Brugger offers them alcohol and cigars. Whereas, in another notable video from Swim, murderer Stephen McDaniel sits motionless for two hours. As Müller (2017, pp.277) writes, the visible camera “impedes the dialectic struggle of the gazes and, subsequently, leads to an ‘internalization’ of the totalitarian setting.”. McDaniel might know how closely emotion and behaviour are linked. If emotions are “an expression of bodily attitude” (Ponty, 1964) which are the result of a failure to reach an object of intention, the object-less space of the empty interrogation room is effectively designed to provoke such reactions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 6: Stephen McDaniel sits still during his interrogation (JCS - Criminal Psychology, 2020)

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By sitting still, Stephen demonstrates a knowledge that behaviour alone can be incriminating, because movement can lead to emotions, and although not all movements are emotional, they may be interpreted as such, because this third-person footage is admissible as evidence in court. This knowledge might be useful, but McDaniel’s efforts are defeated by Swim’s framing. Swim highlights the abnormality of his behaviour with confidence because McDaniel’s verdict following the recording was guilty.

The framing of McDaniel and Lazarus as ‘guilty suspects’ within Swim’s online content influences how the audience interprets their actions. The same is true in both Brugger and Wallraff’s work. Context clues and rules are built over the course of their narratives, so everybody who interacts with the protagonist is transformed into an object suspected of prejudice or deception. In Schwarz Auf Weiss, this pattern is made clear in a scene on the Berlin Metro, where his camera lingers on two men with buzzcut hair, the transition to the next scene feels abrupt, because we have been poised to anticipate a racist confrontation.

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Figure 7: Implicit tension on the Berlin Metro (Schwarz Auf Weiss, 2009)

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Audio and/or visual recordings of bodily behaviour can strengthen previously held biases, and even lead to criminal convictions. This is strongly evident in the case of Amanda Knox who in 2007, was convicted of the murder of her then housemate, Meredith Kercher. Despite the presence of DNA at the crime scene which belonged to a stranger, Rudy Guede, the original verdict was reported to depend on the Knox’s unusually cool, calm, even detached demeanour (Leslie, 2011) to her “flirty”, “foxy” behaviour towards her also accused boyfriend (Platell, 2011)(Pisa, 2012), and to confessions made during “obsessively long” police interrogations (Battiste and Nattison, 2011). Before the overturning of her original guilty conviction, lead investigator Edgado Giobbi said this:

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By using specific interrogation techniques, this meant asking many questions, we could then test the answers given by all the witnesses. Above all, we could evaluate the behaviour of the witnesses during the interrogations, this led us to identify Amanda Knox and Raffaele Solecito.

(Injustice Anywhere, 2011)

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The conviction and media attention which follows Knox to this day is a result of a collision between empirical evidence and perception. Knox is not seen to fit the pre-determined mould of an innocent woman. Even though all eyes are pointed her way, she does not alter her normal behaviour, so she is shaped and judged by context.

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Figure 8: Comments underneath an uncut interview with Amanda Knox (TheDaily, 2014)

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So, if we put ourselves into Amanda Knox’s shoes, can we say with confidence that there is a reliable correspondence between what we feel and how we act, as Ponty asserts?

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A study by Reisenstein and Schützwohl challenged Darwin’s theory that the movements of the human face could be mapped to specific emotional states. After having them sit in a room listening to a short story, the experimenters changed the corridor where they had entered to a three-sided green room with a red chair placed in the middle. Sat in the chair was either a stranger, a friend, or nobody at all. After they were confronted with this situation, participants filled out a questionnaire. In the results, the scientists observed a disparity between the exhibited emotional behaviour in different social contexts and found a high degree of inaccuracy in their self-perception. Participants overwhelmingly reflected that the situation had been surprising. On a scale of 1-10, 83% rated their level of surprise as 7 or higher (ibid.), and they also believed their internal state corresponded to how they behaved.

‘…the majority of the participants in all three experimental conditions believed that they had raised their eyebrows (68%) and widened their eyes (80%), and about half also believed that they had opened the mouth (45%). In addition, a minority (17%) believed they had blinked.’

(Reisenstein and Schützwohl, 2012, p.15)

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However, armed with hidden camera footage, experimenters found that on average, the frequency of these expressions was under half compared to what was self-reported, and there were furthermore, no significant differences between the expressions of the 20 participants who reported the highest levels of surprise, compared to the rest (Schützwohl and Reisenzein, 2012, pp.17-18).

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Figure 9:(Reisenstein and Schützwohl, 2012, pp.17)

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At its extreme, the results of this experiment attack the practise of psychology from the ground up. Expressions could depend on impossible numbers of physical and social contexts. In addition, if our understanding of our own movements has fault, Ponty and Lacan’s assertion that self-knowledge is derived from an identification with other bodies as ours by “analogy” (Zahavi, 2001, p.1) is undermined. This criticism is particularly strong if one looks at the contrast between the reported levels of surprise versus actual, in social contexts. If we cannot accurately interpret other’s emotions, then self-knowledge must come from another source entirely, or in part. As the divide between ourselves and others increases, the use of hidden camera footage, and the informal deployment of Behaviourism as an interpretative approach, in the form of a ‘Mole Film’, is showing itself to be more and more unreliable. Wallraff and Brugger’s claim to intersubjectivity is under threat, and Ponty’s statement that cinema ought to mimic perception now has a huge moral impetus.

 

Chapter 3: The Other and the Edges of Experience

We have seen how Ponty’s science of consciousness can make intersubjective experiences not only possible but encouraged as a standard of artwork to aspire to. However, art has more expansive applications and goals than evoking the perception of the original artist. A deeper intersubjectivity could evoke a wider range of subjective experience, for example intellect, emotions, memory and time, all of which may combine into new qualities for the audience. When Wallraff and Brugger show hidden camera footage of interactions, they do not aim to expose subjective perception, they invite us to speculate on other minds. They are not only interested in simple binaries of truth and deception, or of prejudice, but on the full range of experiences people have in specific contexts.

Once again this is evident in Wallraff’s position of his camera. We are as close as possible to first-person experience as possible, and yet film does not give us access to his mind. We are told, by negation, to feel for and about him, based on the context, objects, others and his body. But for Brugger and Wallraff, there is a key difference between these two things. Of course, as a theoretical audience, we can feel for the cameraman, as if we are experiencing what they are, but our feelings about them are altered by their disguises and personas, which are essential components of the Mole Film.

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In his pursuit of knowledge about the inhumane treatment of workers and tribespeople in the CAR, Brugger adopts a character that is the opposite to what you would expect from a typical western presentation, he deliberately “overidentifies” (Reestorff, 2013, p.9) with the archetype of the coloniser. He wears knee-high leather boots, tan suits and smokes from a long cigar holder. This subversion brings light to assumptions we implicitly make when we talk about ‘The West’ and effectively exposes the “wheeling and dealing” (Park City Television, 2012) that goes on inside the country. However, this comes at the cost of exploiting ‘Pigmy’ natives for their labour and for their value as a silent symbol for the film.

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…it has to do with my own childhood fantasies about Africa. I read a lot of comic books when I was a boy…I am intrigued with Africa as it was in the 60s and 70s and that is to be found in the CAR.

(Park City Television, 2012)

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The role of disguise and persona in Schwarz Auf Weiss has a more existential dimension. The film begins with a long scene where Gunter perfects his disguise. He is helped by his black friend, who provides an authentic opinion.

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Figure 10: The first scene of Schwarz auf Weiss (2009)

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This narrative of shots tells us a story about transformation, but also addresses the audience’s concerns directly. At first, the disguise might be confusing or shocking, but it has been accepted by someone with the authority to do so. The camera is low on Wallraff’s friend, and high on Wallraff until they meet in the middle. In the final shot of the scene, they both look directly into the lens with the same gaze, as equals.

In German, there are three words for knowledge. ‘Wissen’ means to know a fact, ‘können’ means to know how to do something and ‘kennen’ is to know someone (Flippo, 2021). Though these are distinctions occurring in informal language, the difference between them phenomenologically, and in this scene, is stark. Wallraff attempts to alloy the inert fact of race and racism with knowledge of the other race and the activity of doing race. In changing his outward appearance, Wallraff is “being-toward-the-world” (Ponty cited in Toadvine, 2016) in a new way which changes his spacial relation to the world, which opens new experiences and potentialities that can become part of a new self-knowledge. Wallraff’s method for gaining access depends on his transition into another way of being. To ‘experience racism’, Wallraff knows one must be a member of a marginalised race. However, the boundary between experiencing racism and experiencing race is provocatively blurred.

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The provocation is theoretical and moral. Ponty’s foregrounding of the experience of objects and subjects which forms a “sedimented” (Merleau-Ponty, 1964, p.93) knowledge of the self can only result in a reading of politics which also points to the Life-World as the source which imposes people’s identities. Belonging to a group homogenously seen as ‘black’ more specifically changes one’s physical proximity to objects. Here Wallraff is unable to hold the gold watch because the shopkeeper is afraid that he will steal. In the following scene, a landlady does not offer him a flat to rent out because she wants to keep her neighbourhood culturally uniform.

 

With the same principle as his camera placement, Wallraff is negatively attracted to objects that are not accessible to him. The activity of the black body as opposed to the white body is defined by the environment created by the dominant culture; as Sara Ahmed writes, whiteness determines the “very ‘what’ that coheres as a world.” (1997, p.150). However, this is contested in Brugger’s work where we see the dominance of whiteness being challenged. In The Mole: Infiltrating North Korea (2020), Brugger gives his mole, Ulrich Larsen, advice on how to conduct himself in the hostile country. “The less you try to provoke, the better, the more they come to you, the better” (2020). Brugger may have recycled this tip from ten years before in The Ambassador, where a politician advises caution for when he plans to do business with a diamond dealer.

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Here, you have to know the relations people have with one another. If he thinks you have good relations with people more powerful than him, he will behave, if he thinks the contrary, you will lose everything.

(The Ambassador, 2011)

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Tongue in cheek, Brugger recognises this challenge to dominance by describing himself as a mix between black and white.

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Very very positive meetings. I really have a very powerful feeling now. Now, I really feel like the black albino. White on the outside, but really black on the inside.

(The Ambassador, 2011)

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The satirical tone of this statement originates from the imperialist drive to capture and categorise alien cultures. The thought of being ‘black on the inside’ is taboo because the sedimented knowledge of black people is not seen to be transferrable between socio-economic backgrounds. In other words, race is not an intersubjective experience, it is something you are born into. The irony is most striking in a scene where Brugger dances with a tribe who have been fed alcohol to perform for his visit.

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Wallraff fundamentally disagrees with this view, as evidenced by his camerawork, but also by his self-reporting and multiple scenes which seem to involve a deep intersubjective recognition. Although he dismisses the question of personal identity in his films as an attempt to distract from the “revealed facts” of racism (Högskolan Dalarna, 2011, 10:28-12:30), his active presence as a performer may fundamentally change the information gathered.

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Black friends in an asylum where I lived took me for a Somali. That’s how I became a Somali.

(Högskolan Dalarna, 2011, 12:00-12:11)

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Following Wallraff’s failed attempt to rent a flat, he hires a black family to perform a task with him. With Wallraff’s trailer, they attempt to rent a plot of land to live on for a year. His wife and children are all provocatively dressed in traditional East African clothing, Wallraff lets his youngest child run freely while he negotiates with the manager, but they are turned away and forced back into the camper van to debrief. Nancy the mother, and Gludi the oldest child, relay experiences of racism as Wallraff removes his disguise.​​

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Figure 12: Removing makeup in Schwarz auf Weiss (2009)

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In this scene, the youngest child seems to recognise Wallraff for who he is underneath the makeup, and, like a magic trick, it makes her laugh. She looks towards her mother and points to Wallraff’s face.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Figure 13: Recognition in Schwarz auf Weiss (2009)

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It is implied the child does not recognise Wallraff as white until he takes his makeup off. Through the lens of the film, this reinforces the idea of race as a learned way of being.

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Judith Butler, writing on gender: it is not a biological reality, but behaviour that is sedimented in us over time. Gender is something we “do” (Butler, 1990, p. 127), not something invested in us by our genes. Gender, as a “politically neutral surface on which culture acts” (Butler, 1990, p.7) is thereby learnt and performed.

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The effect of gender is produced through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and styles of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self.

(Butler, 2006, p.140)

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If Wallraff were to assert he had knowledge of what it is like to be black in Germany, this is the socio-political construction he would depend on. Just over twenty minutes into the film, Wallraff confesses his process when dealing with perceived white aggressors. He describes them as crocodiles who demand to be kept at a distance. “And then I suddenly thought: you have to play dead”. For his own survival, he feels the need to retreat into himself, metaphorically behind his own disguise, and supress his normally outgoing disposition (Schwarz auf Weiss, 2009). This moulding of behaviour tallies with what Butler describes as the “negotiated” (Owen Jones, 2021) development of identity, where intentional actions collide with others. Access to objects becomes consequentially determined by features of the body. Is the young child ‘black’ if, so far, she has been protected from these collisions? Wallraff actively seeks out confrontation and violence in the role of a culturally ignorant migrant. Does that qualify him as Black?

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Black sociologist W.E Du Bois muses “Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house?” (1897, p.2) from behind “the veil” (ibid.), an intangible, semi-permeable boundary between black and white experiences, Du Bois describes the black experience, and the particular state of being one of a handful of black academics situated at the turn of the 20th century. “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” (Du Bois, 1897, p.2) To Du Bois, self-consciousness and following from this, self-determination, is denied to black people by this third-person ‘Double-Consciousness’.

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Moving towards the fringe of phenomenology, Fanon theorises a similar “Racial-Epidermal Schema”(Fanon cited in Ahmed, 2007 p.153) , he describes being “woven” by the white ‘other’. Ponty writes that we are shaped by objects through perception, and Fanon provides his perspective that the objects of his world are inherited by and designed to be accessible for the white race. In public spaces the world is determined by dominance hierarchies and so one’s orientation is mediated by a schema that comes before body-bound perceptual phenomena (Fanon cited in Ahmed, 2007, pp.153-154).

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Fanon and Du Bois help us to see why Wallraff’s actions feel strange. Wallraff as a journalist with renown has the capability to transcend the appearance of race without fear of damage to his long-running career, he also has the freedom to return to his white body. We see a theme emerging, what distinguishes white and black is positive and negative liberty.

 

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Figure 11: Brugger dances with a Pygmy tribe in The Ambassador (2011)

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Returning to this scene, we see both Brugger and a group of Pygmies engaged in a performance. Neither is being honest with the other. Brugger as the “Guerrilla Diplomat” (Al-Jazeera English, 2012) is free to leave but his freedom is realised by performing his own mediated, distanced satire. Brugger even lacks the paperwork which certifies his diplomatic status, yet he is free to act (The Ambassador, 2011). In contrast, the cowboy capitalist CAR may welcome freedom of movement and entrepreneurship from all races, but the lack of education, documentation or healthcare available to Pygmies (Pemunta, p.212, 223-231) restricts their power to act, which leaves them here in front of this camera. Even their name is an English-Latin label which refers to their genetically small stature (Bahuchet, 2006, p.1). The catagorisation of Pygmy is accordingly third person, as the name encompasses multiple groups of peoples with diverse cultures, languages, and living conditions (ibid.). One can compare this to the visible ‘Black’ becoming widely adopted in thought and language as an effect of cultural integration and dominance, as Du Bois bitterly puts it:

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The red stain of bastardy, which two centuries of systematic legal defilement of Negro women had stamped upon his race, meant not only the loss of ancient African chastity, but also the hereditary weight of a mass of corruption from white adulterers, threatening almost the obliteration of the Negro home.

(Du Bois, 1897, p.5)

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The pursuit of knowledge for the sake of ownership can be inaccurate. Although he could be seen as a symptom of a trend in which minority races are sublimated; in attempting to become black, Wallraff nevertheless shows a desire to understand a minority group on a deeper level than Brugger. He transforms ‘knowing that’ (wissen) into ‘knowing how’ (können) however, as we have established for both filmmakers, that is far from the end-goal.

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One could argue that by wearing his disguise Wallraff attempts to make that which is different from him identical, that to make something known is to try and violently “totalise” it as part of oneself. As a Jewish man who lived through the Second World War, Emmanuel Levinas saw the ethical ramifications at the core of phenomenology and developed a foundational ethical principle which aimed to find a radical “First Philosophy” of ethics that could identify an elemental reason to do good. This is based on the description and expansion from a one-on-one encounter with The Other. Upon recognition, the other is defined by their fundamental difference or “alterity” to the subject, as an object that is “imminent” and yet tantalisingly unreachable. The subject is greeted by the “infinitely unbounded” Face, belonging to the other, but abstracted from the body (Bergo, 2019) (Reynolds, 2002). The Face, to Levinas, is mortal, “vulnerable” and “naked” (Levinas, 1992). It spontaneously demands rights over its perceiver. But “What concerns my selfhood is the specific circumstance in which that right has meaning.” (ibid.) The demands of the face at this primordial level are therefore pre-cognitive pre-normative, pre-linguistic and pre-cultural. In other words, they come before any justification, or agreed upon meaning. The correspondence between the Subject and The Face is described in spiritual terms. The spontaneous generosity of a subject is not self-conscious or calculating, it calls to something beyond the encounter itself and responds to a connection between The Subject and The Other from outside conscious Phenomena (Bergo, 2019).

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Ponty rejects traditional distinctions of self, other and world drawn out by Levinas. Deducing from what is evidently possible in our interactions with others, he puts forward a “Flesh” (Merleau-Ponty, 1969 p.111-135) which, like his Gestalt psychology, brings unity through multiplicity. Breaking rules of Phenomenology, the Subject, Object and Other each justify and depend on each other’s openness and permeability to one another, similar to Aristotle’s ‘Entelechy’.

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…the world and I are within one another…

(Merleau-Ponty, 1969 p.123)

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Ponty depends on an active recognition of alterity with the other, his duty to them maximises opportunities to spot points of difference, “alterity is that which literally alters.” (Reynolds, 2002, p.65) meaning both one’s self-knowledge and knowledge of others. These differences and similarities resonate with the subject and combine to form the necessary preconditions for an empathetic response (Rosan, 2014, p.166) Like Cezanne painting the forest, in touch with his horizon of experience beyond the immaterial self, we are then available to the other, and the other is available to us.

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Regardless of the limits of phenomenology, Levinas’ “Ethics as First Philosophy” as the standard for all interaction is persuasive, therefore it should be the first premise of ethical decision making in documentary film and journalistic practise. Journalistic ethics is now commonly concerned with lawful precedent, loyalty to brands and protecting the financial interests of media corporations.

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Following from this insight, the Mole Film is uniquely equipped to bring faces to the audience. The essential purpose of the Mole Film does not target our lack of access to information on the path to knowledge, but that we lack access to the specific type of ethical encounter with the other. In their qualified ways, this is what Brugger and Wallraff achieved with The Ambassador and Schwarz auf Weiss.

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For me, the movies are like a machine that generates empathy.

(Roger Ebert, 2018)

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Although Levinas vehemently disagreed with the metaphysical and epistemic forms of intersubjectivity packaged alongside empathy, the Mole Film can manifest a personal reminder to direct one’s attention towards the face. The capacity cinema has for changing perspectives (Merleau-Ponty, 1964, p.9) can be harnessed to emphasise this. When we sit down to watch a film, we acknowledge the possibility of being confronted with new ethical experience. Cinema as a form of distributable information can multiply this virtual experience of The Other without losing impact. Mole Films can have a positive impact on a large number of people by equipping them with qualitative the Levinasian encounters, completely divorced from their ontology. Here there is a possibility for transcendence (Girgus, 2017, p.3).