Turning toward the Other: the face of humans, the face of things and the face of language in the documentaries of Sylvain George

Abstract In Sylvain George’s documentaries on migrants in Calais, aesthetics, ethics and politics figure together in such a way that revises the understanding of ethics currently held within scholarship on Emmanuel Levinas and documentary cinema. George’s films – L’Impossible (2009) and Qu’ils reposent en révolte (2010) are examined here in particular – move documentary ethics away from moral concerns of how not to offend the alterity of the filmed subject, to the very modes of visuality vis-à-vis the faces of others. The montage of faces in George’s films and the equivocal place of faces in Levinas’s ethics suggest how the immediate expression of the face comes into play through the very forms of mediation and representation, such as metaphors, language and technique. These are the forms through which the cinematic alters visual-sensible dispositions toward others, which is an ethics. The particularity of documentary ethics, then, transpires not as pre-given but only insofar as cinema’s alteration of sense results in moments in which the aesthetic-political work takes the form of documentary.