Border aesthetics and catachresis in Ali Abbasi’s Gräns/Border (2018)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Gräns/Border by Iranian-Danish director Ali Abbasi won Un Certain Regard at Cannes as it was proclaimed an ‘instant cult classic’. This paper argues that the ambivalent status of Border – seen as both an audacious genre bender and a social realist film addressing issues of migration – bespeaks its articulation of the borderscape as a catachrestic locus that challenges familiar representational modes in border aesthetics. In doing so, the film, this paper contends, de-structures our perception of alterity, forges a new sensory cognition of the world, and new aesthetic experiences of migratory transitions. Most contemporary films engage migrant and border ecologies through their thematic content, where the border emerges either as a vulnerable space in need of protection or as a hopeful place of politically exciting hybridity and moral possibility. Instead, Border rearticulates generic signifying practices to imagine the border not as spatial ‘fact’ but as an epistemological ground or ‘border effect’ that incites new modes of geopolitical attunement. At stake here is not just a different concept of borders, but the possibility of film form to restructure our sensory perception of the world to offer new figurative possibilities for migratory and border cinema.