Description
Why do people hate the Berlin Wall and love the Great Wall of China? Both are tourist sites. But while people go to the Berlin Wall to lament division, they go to the Great Wall to celebrate Chinese culture, history, and power. And what does this tell us about our reaction to Trump’s Wall?
The research film ‘Great Walls: Journeys from Ideology to Experience’ (2019, 28 minutes) explores the ideological questions of what walls mean, and the affective intensities of how they can move and connect people. It juxtaposes our understanding of the (evil) Berlin Wall and the (good) Great Wall to reframe understandings of Trump’s Wall. It considers how texts (and textual analysis) are good for examining how border walls work as ideological sites for the Right and Left, while film are better at showing how people (both elites and the everyday) also experience walls as sites of joy, fear, anger, and fun. The film’s last two sequences – playing volleyball over the US-Mexico barrier, and fireworks art at the Great Wall – show how research films can address serious issues (i.e. the current migration crisis) through complex ideas (e.g. the sublime) in ways that engage the general public. The goal is to show the value of research that uses history, philosophy, and visual art to understand current social and political problems in new ways. The film targets academic and film festival audiences, and it is also made to engage with a secondary-school audience, and has been screened at schools in the UK.
