Paper short abstract:

This paper asks whether and why experiences of absence and presence of temporary migrants living between two worlds is best rendered through visual media rather than through written texts.

Paper long abstract:

Does social sciences cold gaze correspond to what is at the core of the experience of migration? Far from the sociological concerns for migrants' integration in a new society or from the nostalgic turn towards their homeland and the past, I intended to study through the case of temporary migrants from the East (Romania) to the West (France) the double presence/double absence of the two worlds in their lives. European temporary migrants, more recently re-baptised mobile workers, live between two worlds, because cheap new technologies and affordable means of transportation allow them to physically keep in touch with both places and communities. While this modern face of migration also appears to render it more human, it also carries the seeds of a chronic absence, which anthropologists know so well from their own experience of life long commuting between home and the field.

Migrants are no more able than anthropologists to translate this feeling into words. I will therefore try to show in this paper, through the inserts from my recent films on migration, "Behind the masks", co-realized with Alin Rus in 2011, and 'Children left behind' (postproduction), how assembled images recreate the feeling of intense presence or absence better than statistics or words. Under one condition- that us, social scientists, generally refuse to admit- that of playing with the same rules as fictional films in their search for sensuous and affective resonance in the public. And, in this case, the public are also the actors of the film.