Strange encounters

In the present chapter, I examine three documentaries that consist of encounters with ‘strange’ Others: North Korea in The Red Chapel (dir. Mads Brügger 2009), ¹ the Central African Republic in The Ambassador (dir. Mads Brügger 2011), ² and future beings in Into Eternity: A Film for the Future (dir. Michael Madsen 2010). ³ Of interest to me here is how these fairly recent Danish documentaries present the possibility of communication across ‘difference’ and how they produce social imaginaries of diplomacy. The focus is on the apprehension or conceivability of strange life: how do documentaries of distant communities – whether in terms of geographical, political, or temporal distance – apprehend or fail to apprehend life. To achieve this, I utilize two notions of Judith Butler’s (2006, 2010) in reading the films. First, how do the documentaries present ‘life’ when the subject matter is outside the sphere of the contemporary liberaldemocratic order? Second, how does ‘temporality’ play into this? Can communication and recognition take place outside ‘our time’? Furthermore, how do documentaries merge into more general semiotic flows of signs and social imaginaries on the (im)possibility of communication with life beyond the documentarian’s norm? How are encounters with the strange imagined in terms of representation, representativeness, and mediation? These three films suggest that communication across strangeness and temporalities is difficult.