This article takes Chantal Akerman's 2000 film, De l'autre cote (From the Other Side), a work concerned with the 'illegal' migration between the US and Mexican border. Installed and exhibited at Okwui Enwezor's Documenta, From the Other Side has not, until now, been read concurrently within a sustained art historical framework, nor within Akerman's wider body of work, particularly that of her four 'place' focused documentary films of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Rather than position my two motivating terms for analysis: absence and saturation, in the more familiar psychoanalytical feminist framework often used to approach Akerman's oeuvre, this article undertakes a close reading through the parameters of the realist debates as they emerged from feminist and postcolonial critique. The argument revisits the questions of ethnography and the document and the soliciting of affect in not only the work of Akerman, but in two additional video works by the artists Ursula Biemann and The Otolith Group. The article outlays how these two motivating terms have emerged in recent treatments of the documentary in the field of contemporary art. I examine how diegesis, technology and the authorial voice work to complicate the paradigm of visibility and invisibility questioning the burden (and possible necessity) this imparts on the filmed subject.
