Structures of Feeling Bad: Identity, Guilt, and Shame in Imagining Emanuel

A Black man is seen on a stage in a studio, a black body against a totally black background. First, we see him in a medium close-up. We see the upper part of his shoulders and his head. He is dressed in dark clothes and a black leather jacket. We see him in profile, en face. The man is looking straight ahead, but not at us. We hear the susurrus of voices and bodies moving in the studio space, the film crew preparing the shot. The man looks down. He is waiting. His eyes and head move restlessly, showing uncertainty and unease, maybe even anxiety and nervousness.

After a cut, we see him from behind, still in a medium close-up, and then after another cut from the side again, the opposite side of the very first shot. The shots are mimicking the procedure of a screen test or the taking of a mug shot. Imitating how the police camera frames a suspect, inspecting and documenting him from all sides. We get a glimpse of the head of a White man adjusting something outside of the frame, maybe the Black man's posture or fastening a microphone. The Black man looks down, uncertain and a little disoriented by the unfamiliar activity around him. Suddenly, somebody holds up a white balance card close to his face, for the color calibration of the photographer, and he very briefly looks at us, looking at him. We hear a male voice-over: "You are in a studio, and you are being filmed for the very first time."

The Black man is still looking straight ahead. We see him en face, he is not saying anything, and the voice-over continues: "We are looking at you. What do we see? What are we looking for? Skin? Age? Two scars on your chin? Identity?" The Black man is smiling briefly, we see his lips move, he is talking, but we only hear the voice-over that talks about him. "You are of unknown identity," the voice-over says, and continues: "What is unknown?" At the end of this opening sequence, we finally see his face in a medium close-up. He is looking at us, while we look at him.

The very beginning of Imagining Emanuel (2011) signals that the film is less interested in telling a story or arguing about the social world through narrative than in examining core concepts in Western Culture and Norwegian society. Imagining Emanuel is most of all about the concept of identity, but also about race, guilt, and shame, and the relationship between an individual and the social institutions. The main character of the film, the undocumented, stateless asylum seeker Emanuel Agara, is put on stage or observed in different situations and locations.

We learn the story of his life and his experiences in Norway through ten different chapters or parts. It is like seeing him in a kaleidoscope, a fractured mirror, or a montage of ten different fragments, where different aspects of his identity, his life story, and his experiences in Norway are highlighted and examined. Using close-up direct address as well as more observational scenes, Imagining Emanuel not only questions the processes asylum seekers have to go through in Norway, but the film also restlessly questions the acts of representation and narration in a self-reflexive way, questioning or doubting the privileged access to reality and truth associated with the documentary form.

A Unique Project

In Imagining Emanuel, we meet Emanuel Agara. According to Emanuel's story, when he was around 10 years old, he had to flee his homeland Liberia in West Africa, which was torn apart in a civil war (1989–1997). He ends up in the western region of the neighboring country Ghana. For a period of 2 years, he and his mother live from hand to mouth on the streets of the harbor city Takoradi, but after the death of his mother from tuberculosis, Emanuel hides in the propeller room of a vessel sailing from Ghana.

Emanuel ends up in Norway, but the absence...