Cameras, Pencils, Traumas: Drawn Images in and as Documentary Practice

Abstract

Night and Fog in Kurdistan, a documentary film in its last stages of post-production at the time this chapter is being written, documents six years in the life of seven teenage girls who survived the ISIS genocide of Yazidis in 2014. Night and Fog in Kurdistan is a hybrid documentary in its way of combining different types of images, various perspectives, and different approaches to documentary filmmaking. In this film, the photographic image is once in a while interrupted and joined by drawings that serve different functions: They illustrate what is being narrated, portray what has not been captured by any media, or reproduce the archival photographic images. Analysing these functions as situated in the broader frame of different media relations, the article aims to investigate the affordances of drawing for documentation, especially in the case of traumatic experiences and in interaction with other modes of representation. The article is based on an analysis of the final cut of the film plus different versions of the drawings as well as two in-depth conversations with the director and her team.

1 Night and Fog in Kurdistan: The Genocide of Yazidis and the Predicaments of Representation

The genre of documentary film is constantly changing not only thanks to the evolving digital technologies of recording, transforming, and creating images, but also through integration with older media types. This article looks at a documentary film with the latter type of hybridity in which recorded images are integrated with hand-drawn images. Night and Fog in Kurdistan (2023), the film at the focus of this article, is a documentary film that fills the gaps of its photographic representation with non-animated drawn images. How these drawn images are positioned in the broader photographic frame of the film, what functions they play, and how they affect the truth claims of the documentary film are questions that this article aims to explore. The article adopts a textual methodology while also partially looking at the production process, relying on conversations with the director and the creative producer of the film, and analysing preliminary sketches of the drawings.

Night and Fog in Kurdistan (2023)¹ is a documentary film by Shilan Saadi, an Iranian Kurd filmmaker, that documents the lives of seven Yazidi teenage girls over the span of six years, from their settlement in refugee camps in the aftermath of the ISIS genocide of Yazidis until their resettlement in other, mostly Western countries. Yazidis are an ethnoreligious minority mainly settled in Iraq, and to a lesser extent in Syria and Turkey, with a large diasporic population, especially in Germany. In August 2014, Sinjar in northern Iraq, the second most important area populated by Yazidis, was attacked by ISIS troupes. The ISIS attackers, despite their low number, could advance easily, as the Iraqi forces and Peshmerga (Kurdish military forces of the Kurdistan region in Iraq) withdrew from defending the Yazidi community.

According to statistics published by Yazda, a Yazidi community-led institution that advocates for survivors of the genocide, with this attack, 1268 Yazidis were killed, 360,000 were displaced, and 6417 were kidnapped. Among the latter, 3548 women were sold into sexual slavery and forced labour. As of today, there are still 2760 Yazidi women and children missing, and 200,000 remain in internally displaced persons camps.²

While the genocide received wide coverage in Western mass media, many Yazidi scholars argue that the Western media representation of the genocide was limited and biased. Buffon and Allison, for instance, argue that “Yezidis³’ narratives and subjectivities since 2014 are silenced across media representations in the West in favour of a ‘hyper-visibility’ of women’s ‘injured bodies’, which mobilises a specific narrative of victimhood” (2016, 177).

In the same vein of advocating for a more multifaceted representation of Yazidis that can account for the specific identity of the community, Ali, Pirbari, and Rzgoyan, in their study on the reformation and development of Yazidi identity in the aftermath of the genocide, analyse the way Yazidi identity has historically been trapped between the religious and ethnic tensions of the region. Yazidis are a non-Muslim minority surrounded by Islamic states who reside in Kurdistan and speak Kurmanji (northern Kurdish), yet as Ali, Pirbari, and Rzgoyan argue, “It has now become a form of hidden confrontation between Yazidis identifying themselves as an ethno-religious group and those believing themselves to be Yazidi Kurds” (2022, 2). The former stance strives for a specific ethnoreligious identity for Yazidis and is also connected to the idea that “[i]n Iraq and KRI,⁴ the Kurdish political parties ignore Yazidi attempts to represent a separate identity” (2022, 15).⁵

Night and Fog in Kurdistan follows the critique of the Western media representation of the genocide, turning its lens to the refugee-survivors of the genocide whose narratives are underrepresented. In terms of identity, the filmmaking process becomes a point of interaction and conversation for the two sides of the ethnic equation, with an Iranian Kurd filmmaker on one side of it and Yazidi teenagers on the other. The filmmaking process was initiated in 2015 with a workshop for the refugee teenagers in the Fidanlık camp in Diyarbakır, Turkey, which was at the time governed by Kurdish authorities and hosted many Yazidi families who had fled the ISIS genocide. The first idea was to familiarise the teenage participants of the workshop with cameras and documentary filmmaking and to encourage them to film instances of their everyday life in the camp. The recorded fragments were planned to be edited by Saadi into a single participatory documentary, which was tentatively entitled I promise. The workshop had to stop halfway through, as with the change of the political situation in the area and securitization of the camp, Saadi and her group were asked to leave before the planned time. However, Saadi edited the recorded images into a single short film and went back to the camp a year after to show it to the participants. This return led to multiple other journeys, following the characters and their life stories across different refugee camps and later in European countries.

The initial short participatory documentary has been recycled in the current version of the film that embraces both the footage filmed by the director and her team and what has been filmed by the characters with handy cams and cell phone cameras. The new title, Night and Fog in Kurdistan, is an homage to Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (1956), a documentary classic that captured one of the most breath-taking images of a genocide with its depiction of the abandoned grounds of Auschwitz and Majdanek, its shifts between past and present, and its poetic style of narration in recounting the lives of camp prisoners. The reference to Resnais’s film in Night and Fog in Kurdistan works as a two-fold claim of attachment for the film as well as the genocide. For the audience who is familiar with Resnais’s film, the title would on one hand suggest that Saadi’s film is probably following the same style. On the other hand, with this reference, the film makes a performative enunciation in positioning the genocide of Yazidis in the broader context of human history.

Such acts of producing additional layers of meaning and connecting separate narratives of suffering and violence are not limited to the paratext of the film. In the film-text and to establish a connection between her own experience and what the characters are going through, the director adopts a reflective mode and frames the representation of now and the recent past with the narrative of her own war-stricken childhood. Saadi, born in 1980, spent her childhood during the Iran-Iraq war in Mahabad, a Kurdish city in Iran close to the Iran-Iraq border and scene to various waves of state violence. Apart from a few recent shots of Mahabad, this personal narrative thread is mainly represented through hand-drawn images that represent distant memories and are embedded within the film.

According to the director and the creative producer of the film, the usage of drawn images, which goes far beyond representing the director’s childhood traumas, began rather incidentally, as the first idea had been to fill the gaps of the recorded images with animated scenes. A few sketches were used in the first rough cut of the film to sew different frames together, but the effect of the still, drawn images inspired the group to begin testing the idea of not animating the drawn images. The usage of drawn images did not stay limited to the personal memories of the director; in the final version of the film, drawn images appear in multiple instances, portraying scenes from the genocide, refugee journeys, and other events and experiences.

The hand-drawn images, with their subjective quality and vagueness in representation, affect the form, style, and narrative of the film while also unsettling the established truth claims of documentary film as a genre. In the following sections, I first discuss the theoretical implications of this representational shift between the photographic and hand-drawn images and then argue for the specific case of these drawn images as mobilised images, shaped at the heart of various media relations of combination and transformation. Analysing examples from the film, I address the implications and functions of the mobilised drawn images and finally examine the way the truth claims of the documentary film are affected, destabilised, or changed by the representational shifts.

2 Representational Gaps and the Representational Shift Between Photographic and Hand-Drawn Images

In Night and Fog in Kurdistan, the usage of drawn images is mainly motivated by the gaps in representation, namely what has not been captured, such as the ISIS attack, the long journey refugees had to take to arrive in Europe, and the childhood memories of the director. In an absence of visual traces that can claim to have indexical relationships with the happened events, drawn images are created as new signs that recreate the uncaptured memory. The representational shift not only refers to changes in mode of representation due to necessity but has further interpretive implications. Nancy Pedri, in her study on the usages of photographs in graphic memoirs, from which I have also borrowed the notion of representational shift, argues that the movement between the photographic and the drawn image introduces changes “in the degree of visual abstraction” and challenges the way “the factual can accommodate the interpretative initiatives signalled by stylistic or genre variations in the visual track” (2012, 249). What Pedri argues for in a different context can also be relevant in the context of Night and Fog in Kurdistan, where the visual abstraction of the drawing and the perceived preciseness of the photographic are at play.

Lacking the indexical relationship that photographic images have to the events they represent, drawn images have had a contested history for gaining legitimacy in documentary practices. Nowadays, the photographic still or moving images are generally accepted to function as evidence due to their “indexical iconicity” (Sadowski, 2011, 356) as they support a claim of “I have been there, and the scene exactly looked like this”. “Photographic realism”, as a dominant paradigm in visual representation of reality, is working, more than anything due to the function of recorded images as a “certificate of presence” (Mickwitz, 2016, 29).

Comparing photography with painting—a very popular comparison in the history of photography—Sadowski brings in the question of subjective interference to differentiate between the types of relationships each media type establishes with the world:

It is because of this fundamental difference between intentional and personal (that is, iconic) depiction, and natural and impersonal (that is, indexical) record of reality that we say that a painting is ‘made’, whereas a photograph is ‘taken’.… Unlike paintings therefore, photographs are causally dependent on the objects they represent, whereas paintings are causally dependent only on the beliefs and skills of the painter. This also means that paintings, iconic as they are in relation to the objects depicted on them, are also indexical in relation to their authors.… (2011, 361)

Thus, the hand-drawn image can only claim to be an indexical trace of the drawing hand and is only partially precise in terms of its iconicity and cannot usually escape foregrounding the constructedness of the image in the eye of the viewer. However, documentation via drawing has a long history, especially in the pre-photographic mediascape. A prominent example of the latter is the old but still-thriving tradition of court drawing, which began as a mode of documentation in the pre-photographic mediascape and is still active and even required in judicial contexts where cameras are not allowed. Court drawing, however, is not only a less exact substitute for a camera but provides another type of representative and interpretative frame for interaction with the law. As Anita Lam argues in her study of courtroom sketching, in contrast to the camera, the human courtroom artist approaches the law in a “primarily tactile way” that, unlike optical constructions, does not “give the illusion that the law is an immaterial specter” (2016, 143).

The haptic aspect is backed in the literature on the capacities of non-fiction comics in representing historical, personal and political narratives of violence and trauma. Hillary Chute, in Disaster Drawn (2016), explains the dominant cultural understanding of drawing as “an autographic mode of expression” that holds an authenticity claim similar to “signatures”: haptic, and with a “visible connection to its making” and “a perception of embodied subjectivity, especially by contrast to photographic technologies” (2016, 32–33). The integration of “haptic” and “visual”, in Chute’s view, establishes the potential in drawing for witnessing and creates a different type of presence than the photographic.

The proliferation of animated documentaries in the recent decades and the consequent theoretical discussions have contributed new perspectives to the photography-drawing equation, or as Murray and Ehrlich formulate it, the “relations between antinomic aesthetics of and aspirations towards artifice and authenticity” (2018, 3). Returning to widely accepted definitions of documentary films that are broad enough to include various semiotic practices has been popular in theorisations on animated documentary. These theories have sought to establish the legitimacy of the documentary potential of non-photographic images. As early as in 1997, in “If truth be told, can ‘toons tell it? Documentary and animation” Sybil DelGaudio used Bill Nichols’ emphasis on “representing reality” in defining documentary and situated animated documentary in the “reflexive mode”. In Nichols’ categorisation of documentary modes of filming in expository, participatory, performative, poetic, and reflexive mode, which is still widely used, reflexive mode is the one that foregrounds the relation between the filmmaker and the audience (Nichols, 1991). More importantly, the reflexive mode unsettles the potential claims of the documentary film to objectivity by laying bare the process of constructing the filmic image. DelGaudio argues that certain types of animated documentary equally function as a form of metacommentary and can be situated in the reflexive mode (1997, 192).

John Grierson’s definition of documentary as “creative treatment of actuality” (Grierson & Hardy, 1966) has also been popular in untangling the documentary practice from the necessity of photographic indexicality. Annabelle Honess Roe, in Animated Documentary (2013), draws on Grierson as well as Nichols’ idea that documentaries “address the world rather than a world imagined by the filmmaker” and argues for defining documentaries based on the world that they represent rather than their mode of representation. Emphasising the creativity and freedom that animation offers, Roe argues that animation releases the documentary “from the strictures of a causal connection between filmic and profilmic” and opens up for bringing the “temporally, spatially and psychologically distant” into closer proximity (2013, 2).

“The world” in Nichols’ terms or “actuality” in Grierson’s words are too broad and vague to be used as precise analytical concepts, but they both imply a sense of unimagined event-ness with no hint of excluding what cannot be seen by human eye or captured by cameras. Such broadening of the concept of documentary and disentanglement of its truth claims from the photographic indexicality leads to embracing subjectivity not as unreal or less real but as part of the experienced reality:

[T]he truth claims of non-fiction forms are no longer located in the ‘reality effects’ of the photographic trace. Rather, they reside in a developing understanding that the realities that surround us and the events that structure our present are not always visualizable, that their meanings are unclear, and that documentary evidence is not always possible, revealing or clarifying. Meanings and occurrences at times can only be pointed to through speculation or active imagination. But such speculative imaginings are, nonetheless, part of the dynamic of an event, and an integral part of what it is to document any issue or event in all its complexity. (Skoller, 2011, 207)

Furthermore, reliance on the indexicality of the photographic is also shattered, if it ever could be an absolutely unshattered point of reference. The photographic image can be manipulated to present false claims, especially in the current era of abundance for photo-manipulation tools. Even in the least manipulated cases, no photographic still or moving image can be unaffected by the choices of the person behind the camera. Going even further, Roe, drawing on Gunning (2007), argues that the semiotic notion of indexicality taken from Pierce’s complicated semiotic framework is used in a simplified and insufficient way to vouch for the exceptional value of the photographic image in documenting reality (2013, 29–31).

Departing from the ontology of the animated documentary in favour of a functional view, Roe suggests “mimetic or non-mimetic substitution” and “evocation” as main functions that animated images can adopt in a documentary context (ibid., 23). Mimetic and non-mimetic substitution are re-enactments of actual events with or without an aspiration to photorealism, and evocation refers to the representation of certain concepts, emotions, feelings and states of mind that are difficult to represent through live-action imagery (ibid., 25).

It is interesting to see how these functions are still defined in relation to the representational limitations of the photographic apparatus. While these functions are valid and useful, it is also important to look at the emergent and not only the substitutional capacities of drawn images. Destabilising the indexicality of photography as a trace and embracing the alternative indexicality of drawn images can lead to new frames of perception for animated documentaries. For example, Landesman and Bendor (2011) show how the different stylistic and material aspects of images and their hybridity in Waltz with Bashir encourage an embodied engagement with the film. Accordingly, the juxtaposition of drawn and photographic images in one single context, as happens in Night and Fog in Kurdistan, and the back-and-forth movement between the two modes does not need to be only understood as a shift from indexicality, objectivity, and presence to iconicity, subjectivity, and past. A more careful observation that considers how these binaries are unsettled in the historical perception of both modes justifies understanding the relationship more as a type of contamination of one another or exchange between the two media types, at the same time that the boundaries between the two are made visible.

3 Mobilised Drawn Images in Action for Remembering, Testifying, Witnessing, and Mapping

In the previous section, I outlined the theoretical discussion regarding the tensions and interactions between photographic and drawn images, mainly with reference to theorisations on animated documentary and to a lesser extent documentary comics. However, this is not to suggest that a one-to-one relationship exists between the drawn images analysed in this article and those in the context of animated documentary—distinguished by the frame-by-frame filming and the creation of an illusion of movement—or in comics—silent, still, and positioned in a sequence. Rather, I formulate the drawn images in Night and Fog in Kurdistan as “mobilised drawn images”.

The “mobilised” attribute refers to the point that in this context, drawn images are not animated but are presented with additional layers of movement and amplification through the movement of camera, the integration with narration and music, and the combination with the photographic moving images that come before and after them. These dynamics can be explained in terms of intermedial relations of media combination and media integration. In intermedial studies, media combination is defined as different basic media (image, sound, text, etc.) are mixed and enmeshed together in one single media product (as for example in film or comics) (Bruhn & Schirrmacher, 2022, 103), and the distinction between combination and integration is considered to be a matter of degree (Elleström, 2021, 75). In the following, however, I use media integration and combination to distinguish between the different temporalities of synthesis. With integration, I refer to the way the drawn images are synchronically integrated with camera angle and movement, voice-over, and soundtrack; with combination I refer to the diachronic relationship between drawn images and what comes before and after it, or in other words the sequential juxtaposition of photographic moving images and mobilised drawn images.

In terms of motion and temporality, these mobilised images stand in between moving and still images. In the scenes that include the drawings, the camera zooms in and out, moves between different parts of one single image in a sequence, and adds more affect through effects like shaking. The mobilised drawn images put the motion of the recorded image to a partial pause and in temporal terms act like a technique of delay. This can represent the tendency that is formulated as increased refashioning of the moving image in contemporary cinematic practices “in the direction of demonstrating its abilities to remain motionless, or to move in ways that are barely visible” (Røssaak, 2011, 16).

Furthermore, all these drawn images can, in one way or another, be understood as “transmediations”, namely “repeated representation of media characteristics by a different form of medium” (Elleström, 2021, 81). By looking at these images as transmediations, I highlight the point that they do not only substitute actual or potential photographic images but transform them into something new. As is addressed in the following sections, these different media relations that mobilise the drawn images make it possible for various acts of representation and patterns of signification like remembering, visualising, mapping, witnessing, and testifying to emerge.

4 Remembering the War-Stricken Childhood

One of the first images (Fig. 6.1) that the viewer is presented with very early in the film (00.01.19) is a drawn portrait of a smiling child, simple and minimalistic, with non-realistic body proportions. The frame is accompanied by the voice-over saying (in Kurdish), “This is my childhood. With this hairstyle, dress, and face”. With this initial uttering about a drawn image in the film, which sounds contradictory enough, the director’s narrating voice makes an authorial claim that sets the tone for the perception and evaluation of the drawn images in particular and the truthfulness of the whole film in general: The drawn portrait cannot be anybody’s specific childhood but perhaps only a cartoonish, minimalist, and imprecise picture of an imagery of a childhood. Moreover, it is too generic and stands in contrast with the narrator’s emphasis on the hairstyle, dress, and face.

Fig. 6.1

Hand-drawn child portrait

The frame is followed by other drawn images and an additional explanation, with which a representational gap is addressed, and the subjective memory is highlighted: “There aren’t many pictures of that time. In those days, we didn’t all have cameras like now. But I’ve painted my whole childhood in my mind”. Referring to the drawn image and making an authorial claim about its truthfulness, the narrator/director’s voice establishes an alternative type of indexicality: An index which is not a trace but points to its context (deictic index). At the same time, the integration of narrator/director’s voice and confirmation of the drawn image as a substitution for her childhood photograph works as an invitation for the viewer to perceive the drawings as truthful, however non-realistic, representations of what they are claiming to represent.

Most of the drawn images in the film that represent the director’s childhood memories have imaginary and non-realistic qualities to them. A look at the process of drawing and transmediation of sketches into the final drawings demonstrates that the non-realistic aspects are gradually added in the multiple stages of the process of transformation. This process, from personal memories to the final drawings, has been a collective and multi-level process with at least three main agents: the director herself, the creative producer, Keyvan Fahimi, and the illustrator of the film, Pejman Alipour.

In practice, different stages of transmediation were formed by memory retellings, sketches made by the creative producer in conversation with the director, and then a stylistically free transmediation of the sketches by the illustrator. Figures 6.2 and 6.3 present the sketches that have turned into the final image in Fig. 6.4. The scene portrays an iterative childhood memory of the narrator referring to the times she and her family took refuge in the basements from the Iraqi bombs in the mid-1980s.

Fig. 6.2

Sketch, refuge in the basement, panel on the right

Fig. 6.3

Sketch, refuge in the basement, panel on the left

Fig. 6.4

Final illustration, refuge in the basement

A quick comparison between the source (Figs. 6.2 and 6.3) and the target (Fig. 6.4) shows how a sober, minimalist but realistic enough image has turned into one that expresses both fear and excitement and reaches its highest non-realistic point, with the image of the woman on fire hovering in the air with a baby in her arms.

In the sketch (Figs. 6.2 and 6.3), the Sorani⁶ text that is combined with the images reads as such:

During the war, the basement was a place of protection. It was time for playing hide and seek. It was time for the adults to take a nap. The basement was a place for contemplation.

With the slightest pretext, the families gathered. There was always someone who could sing and tell epic stories. Without saying anything, everybody looked at him and he began singing. While a terrible war was going on outside, the storyteller kept on singing.

The figure of the singing man in the sketch, which can remain unnoticed at first sight, is indexically pointed out in the text. The information that the text provides in the sketch is transmediated to the visual cues of the illustrator’s version: The children’s positions and postures, the more distinguishable gesture of the storyteller, and more than anything, the curious image of the screaming woman on fire with her baby that anchors the whole image.

This quasi-mythical female figure seems to have evaporated from the story that is being told and creates a parallel to the woman in the room who is also protecting her children by covering them with her unusually long arms. At the same time, the female figure can work as a reference to the war going on outside, killing children. In the film (29:14), the image appears together with a voice-over⁷ that presents a recap of Saadi’s childhood in the war, and the scene ends with the singing voice of a man in Kurdish. Interestingly, right before this scene, the viewer is presented with material traces of the war, still visible and touchable on the walls of Mahabad. The viewer sees the director in her hometown walking alongside walls that have several dented points and deep holes in them: Shrapnel traces from a war that ended almost three decades ago. It is after this that the viewer sees the ambiguous drawn image, which oscillates between fear and excitement, as a child may have experienced the scene. The combination of the recorded image of the present with visible traces of the past and the drawn image in a sequence combines the trace of the war, as material as a fossil, with the subjective and affective memory that has become more loaded with affect and fantasy while being passed to other minds and hands. This synthesis resonates with what Pedri points to about how inclusion of photography in graphic memoirs “can very well draw attention to the divide between real life experiences and the telling of those real-life experiences” (2012, 252), but it is also symptomatic of an attempt to a multi-faceted representation that aims for including both the telling (remembering) and living of a war through different temporalities.

5 Testifying on the Genocide

First-hand testimonies of the genocide by survivors are implemented in the film in multiple occasions. First, fragments of such testimonies are presented through the lens of one of the participants, Faezeh, who for her part in the participatory documentary has interviewed people, especially women in the camp. Faezeh’s footage ends with the image of an old woman crying and saying, “They give four-year old girls as gifts to each other. God damn them” (00:20:19–00:20:27). A minute later, a longer scene offers a more extensive testimony, this time with more direct and visible interventions from the director and also with mobilised drawn images. The scene begins with the narrator telling the story of how a woman and her children, who are family members to two of the workshop participants, are captured by ISIS. Then the voices of multiple adult survivors, men and women are heard who narrate what they experienced the night of the genocide and then later during their flight and refuge in the Sinjar Mountains (21:35–25:17).

They entered our village with heavy weapons. We asked the peshmerga to give us weapons, but they refused. We didn’t have any weapons to defend ourselves. DAESH members who entered Sinjar were less than a hundred, ... the village all became DAESH.…

When we got to the mountain, people were all on foot and without shoes. Some had even left their children behind.…

Some ate tree leaves. We didn’t have water. We stayed on the mountain for nine days. We didn’t have enough food. We just fed the little kids. A few times the helicopter tried to bring us water, but people were so thirsty they rushed, and the helicopter couldn’t land. So they had to throw out the cans and they burst.…

All these retellings overlay mobilised drawn images that illustrate the genocide, captivities, and the flight in a minimalist style. Yet, unlike the drawn images that represented a strong subjective value, these images are closer to realistic substitutions for photographic documentations, as they are coherent with the oral testimony and illustrate many of the details described in the voice-over testimony.

The voice-over of witness accounts plays the main role in this scene, providing an indexical frame—we were there, and we are the first-hand, survivor witnesses—that supports the partial iconicity of images. The testifying voices do not show a face and remain anonymous, but the combination of these testimonies with the interviews that precede them can imply that the same or similar people are speaking. An additional cue for authentification of the testifying voices here is that the brief interviews in the previous scene are done by one of the participants, herself a survivor, and not the director, who has an outsider position to this narrative.

There are two types of hand-drawn images in this scene. Many of them are direct transmediations of the oral testimonies, (Fig. 6.5) but there are also those that transmediate the rare photographic evidence that exists of the genocide of Yazidis and their flight in Sinjar Mountains (Fig. 6.6). These two types of transmediations—from the oral testimonies and from the archival images—differ slightly in style of drawing in their degree of visual accuracy and subjective expression, a difference that may be even noted by the viewers who have not seen the archival images. An example of a transmediated archival images (Fig. 6.6) is a reproduction of a frame copy righted by Çira TV, a Yazidi channel based in Germany, which was released to the production crew. The source represents the dead body of a mother and her two sons on a dusty ground, with two empty water bottles in the corner of the frame. It is only the body of one of the sons who is lying face-down on the ground, that is clearly distinguishable. The mother’s body is covered by a big black cloth, likely her chador, and it is only her hands that can be recognized. A child and an adult are passing by, the camera only capturing the lower body of the adult and the child up to the chin. The adult is apparently a woman covered in a long grey chador, and the child is wearing a bright pink, layered dress which looks festive and is in clear contrast with everything else in the image.

Fig. 6.5

Hand-drawn representation of ISIS capturing Yazidi women

Fig. 6.6

Hand-drawn reproduction of an archival image: Yazidi family dead while in flight in the Sinjar Mountains

The source includes details that are not transferred to the drawn version (Fig. 6.6). The transmediated image presents a silhouette of the archival image, leaving out those passing by and centring on those who haven’t survived. It provides a softened and more ambiguous image of the painful and traumatic image that the original footage portrays. According to the directing group, reproducing archival images in drawing was primarily a stylistic choice: The more drawn images were integrated with the photographic, the less comfortable it became to break the rhythm with inserting archival images. In these transmediations, there is no striving for mimicking the indexical iconicity of a photograph, but, rather, through the transmediation to a drawn image, the photographic evidence is deemphasised and the oral testimonies are foregrounded. Media integration in this scene embeds the fragility of the drawn image as evidence within the truth claims of the oral testimony.

6 Mapping the Refugee Journey

From 38:50 to 40:57, Fig. 6.7 is mobilised in the film to narrate the story of the journey one of the girls, Leila, and her family take to join the rest of their family in Germany. The viewers never see the image in its entirety, but the information they receive is controlled by the camera movement that moves step-by-step, according to the arrows, while the voice-over gives a recap of the journey.

Fig. 6.7

Representation of a refugee journey from a refugee camp in Turkey to Germany

The image works like a map as it visualises various spatial elements and relationships. It summarises a quite unfathomable journey, which includes multiple arrests, deportations, and attempting again, walking for miles, passing the sea, hiding in back of a truck with numerous others, as well as many other incidents. The image provides another oral-to-drawn transmediation, as it visualises the information about Leila’s journey received in the form of oral retellings. But it is also a transmediation of the journey itself. It gives an outline of the agents and the spatial elements of the journey: characters (refugees, police, the smuggler, the rest of the family already in Europe), vehicles (trucks, buses, police car), borders (fences, flags), routes (water, desert, roads), and hiding places (woods). At the same time, it shares similarities with playing surfaces of many board games where the goal is to succeed in a journey and reach a destination.

The mobilised drawn image not only visualises the journey for the viewer but turns it into a narrative. In the film, the integration of various media, together with the “visual aid” quality of the image-map, narrativises the journey into a narrative of success. The camera movement, voice-over, and music enhance the plot and the sequencing of the events. The music plays a crucial role in this scene, as it moves from a low-key tone with ambient humming vocals, to an epic tone, ending in a calm and slowed-down rhythm at the point of arrival. The “evocation” function (Roe, 2013), which addresses the potential of non-photographic images for representing what is out of reach for photography, is brought in more clearly here: The image-map reduces the scale and simplifies the steps of the journey, and it uses the deictic type of index—arrows—to represent the path taken. The map, however, is not geographically correct or realistic. It presents an unfinished circle and represents the flight according to a game logic of repeated attempts and loss and win, while also offering an incomplete summary of Leila’s journey which can at the same time testify to other similar journeys.

7 Conclusion: Emergent Potentials and Critical Doubts

Remembering, testifying, visualising, witnessing, imagining, fantasising, mapping, softening, and narrativising: The drawn images act in multiple ways in Night and Fog in Kurdistan as they are mobilised with intermedial integrations and combinations. At the same time, the film never stops foregrounding its own constructedness, always remaining a transmediation and often a transmediation of transmediations. While the drawn images replace the existing photographic images or fill the empty place of the uncaptured photographs, they also interact with them or their absence, and the interaction opens up for new potentials and emergent meanings and affects. As Alistair Oldham also suggest, “an interdisciplinary approach to documentary, in this case between drawing and film, can help create a dialectical space where old forms are broken and new spaces can begin to emerge” (2014, 714).

When I asked the director and the creative producer of the film about whether they think that the usage of drawn images might reduce the trustworthiness of the film as a documentary, they responded by distinguishing between documentary film as art, and documentary film as reporting. What they are after, they said, is an artistic documentary film that does not provide a seemingly raw report of what has happened but is a personal take on events. In other words, it is not about defying the truth claims of documentary film but stressing how a documentary can rely on different forms of truth claims and combining them together.

The distinction between art and reporting, or art and documentation, that came up in the above practitioners’ formulation is of course echoed frequently in the theoretical discussions surrounding documentary film and photography. For example, intermedial scholar Lars Elleström argued in his article about photography for a distinction between photography as documentation and photography as art, not only as two different genres of photography but as two essentially distinct qualified media that are contextualised with different conventions and expectations (2013, 164). Night and Fog in Kurdistan, I argue, offers a context for an interaction between the two, with its hybridity, representational shifts, and conjunction of truth claims.

The drawn image here lacks the type of autographic indexicality that is so significant in graphic memoirs and would connect the drawn image to the body of the person who remembers. The mobilised drawn images in Night and Fog in Kurdistan are produced and mobilised in collective and multi-staged processes of transformation and integration and are not connected to a single body. Furthermore, they do not so much induce a haptic quality and a sense of embodiment, as their flatness and minimalist style are highlighted when they are seen in combination with recorded images. The drawn images in this context contribute to various acts of representation by producing added value in their synthesis with other basic media and other categories of signification. They do not stay with one function and one style but change and adapt to the acts of remembering, testifying, and witnessing. They change the temporal interface of the film by slowing down the recorded image and foregrounding its absence.

Though referring to one of the most atrocious mass killings and community eliminations of the very recent past, Night and Fog in Kurdistan does not include any traumatising images, neither photographic nor drawn. The drawn images have been especially prevalent in representation of the traumatic-traumatising images, as was explained in relation to the testimonies of the genocide and the survivors’ flight. An important function of the mobilised drawn images is thus that they help avoid traumatising the audience by portraying the traumatic event. The film in general and the drawing sections in particular make the audience hold their breath, but they do not suck out all the air and leave them out of breath.

However, there is always a risk when the harsh reality of sufferings meets aesthetic practices. As Skoller argues:

While this kind of argument that animated documentary, in its departure from indexical documentation toward subjective perception and phantasmagorical imaginings, can enhance our experience of war, deepening the richness and density of the depiction of complex events by showing what cannot be seen by the naked eye, it can also thin out our comprehension, erasing the realities of an event and their inconvenient truths. (2011, 211)

This critique stays relevant for a film like Night and Fog in Kurdistan, and the answer to it should perhaps be searched for in the actual reception of the film. The answer, I suspect, would be different among different types of audiences who can be considered as the targeted audiences for this film, most importantly the Yazidi audience who may or may not see it as a media witness to the genocide, displacement, and oppression of Yazidis and their identity.