Out of context: Place, transcultural communication, and John Berger

This chapter presents a fragmentary reflection on my own film-making practice to explore the connectedness of seeing, place, and physical (as well as digital) forms of representation in conversation with John Berger’s arguments in Ways of Seeing and other seminal texts. This chapter therefore considers the influence of his influential analysis of decoding intercultural messages when introduced into a novel context: the author’s collaborative transcultural filmmaking with the Arhuaco community from northern Colombia. It also reflects on the idea of physical place within its geographic contexts, and how place is translated via filmic representation into other physical and metaphorical spaces.
Centred around a consideration of images (and communities) taken ‘out of context’, this chapter builds on Berger’s arguments concerning the historical and geographical relationship between object and viewer. It transplants it onto the analysis of contemporary intercultural filmmaking and its dissemination processes. Following Berger’s claim that “to look is the act of choice”, my reflections unfold as a slow deconstruction of this choice and its consequences when it comes to the relations of film-making, dissemination, and reception, employing a strategy of fragmentarisation in the process that is characteristic of much of his work. Finally, this chapter explores the idea that reception practices are subject to individual and collective preconceptions determined by the audiences’ previous experiences, education, and expectations, whether they are conscious or not.
As a film-maker, my relation to place and geography has pulled me in two seemingly opposite directions: there is the non-belonging linked to my multicultural sense of identity (as someone who has moved and relocated across the continents countless times and constantly switches between languages and national identities), and there is also a deep connection to various geographies and a strong belief that places and contexts matter profoundly. The use of ‘place’ and ‘geography’ in this chapter are more tacit, and conceptual: relating to the journey of cultural texts and creative works that travel across physical and digital boundaries to reach different audiences, intentionally or not; their situation in particular surroundings, relations, and power dynamics; and their entanglement with physical places and geographical contexts in different ways.