Split Screen As a Cinematic Technique of Sociological Inquiry: The Harragas of Melilla in the ‘Who Is Europe?’ Documentary.

The split-screen, placing a frame/s within a frame, has a long history in the evolution of cinema. But since the advent of digital filmmaking from the 1990s and the rise of screen culture in the twenty-first century, split screens have become both commonplace and mundane in the global mediascape (especially in news coverage). In this presentation I reclaim the potential of the split-screen in documentary filmmaking as a productive technique for visual sociological enquiry. Drawing on my practice as a sociologist and documentary filmmaker, I will reflect on my non-fiction filmmaking to make the case for why split-screen techniques open possibilities for forms of knowledge production that elude traditional non-visual text-based approaches. My split-screen film ‘Who is Europe? A Film in Four Acts’, a meditation on racism and the border barriers within ‘Fortress Europe’ will be used to illustrate that films themselves can be a dimension of sociological enquiry – a ‘technical and affective space’ in themselves, that offers alternative sociological understanding. The focus of my presentation will be on one particular Act in 'Who is Europe?', MELILLA, an encounter between the filmmaker and the Harragas on this Spanish exclave on the tip of Morocco. Melilla has long been a liminal space of crossings and contests between Africa and Europe, but which have now hardened into the ‘wall’ within Fortress Europe that the Harragas attempt to transgress. My presentation will reflect on the ways in which Who is Europe? (nominated in the UK for the AHRC Best Research Film, and Audience Award Winner at the Berlin Refugees Film Festival) deploys a split-screen cinematic treatment to convey a series of sociological dualisms; us and them, here and there, official and unofficial, ideals and ideology, as a tool to frame the lived experience of the Harragas that transcend conventional text-based sociological approaches.