indeterminate waters: Evangelia Kranioti’s Exotica, Erotica, Etc.
By Hannah Paveck
Exotica, Erotica, Etc. (2015) places us at sea —
a state less disorientating than it is indeterminate, unmoored from anchoring coordinates.
The film threads together images from twelve voyages. Between 2011 and 2014, Greek-born artist and filmmaker Evangelia Kranioti followed the migrations of sailors aboard container ships, crossing the Black Sea and the Mediterranean towards the North Pole, Panama, and the Strait of Magellan. Initially conceived as a research and photographic project into the lives of Mediterranean sailors, Exotica, Erotica, Etc. took shape when Kranioti began experimenting with audiovisual form.
Shot with one camera lens and natural light, the film moves between disparate locations: container ships and port towns often captured years and miles apart. Eschewing a linear or chronological structure, the film’s composition of sound and image follows the textures and rhythms of oceanic (and bodily) materialities: from the crash of waves against the hull of a ship, milky froth coating its steel contours; to intimate close-ups on the scarred body of an ageing dockside sex worker. With frequent shifts in scale, perspective, and lighting, the film directs our attention towards the smallest of details – the singular droplet of water that limns the window. Neither the voice-over nor Eric Neveux’s atmospheric score overpowers the soundtrack; instead they mix with the sounds of crew members’ voices, crackling ice, the drone of a ship’s engine. These materialities do not ground or anchor us, but instead capture the dynamics of drift and encounter in the everyday lived realities of sailors and sex workers.
Exotica, Erotica, Etc. turns on the relationship between sailors and sex workers, signaled in the shared voice-over between Captain Giorgos and Sandy. As the title suggests, this is a film intimately concerned with the poetics of desire. In alternating passages across the film, both the Captain and Sandy speak to the imbrications of desire and the sea, whether in the form of a yearning to trace the world’s contours, or to taste the salt off a sailor’s skin. The Captain’s voice comes to us from afar, inflected and muffled by the medium of recording; Sandy’s voice is not only close-miked, but often visually embodied – oscillating between voice-over and interview scenes filmed in a bedroom. Sandy’s visual presence within the film, and the acoustic mismatch with the Captain’s voice, creates a feeling of distance between them. At times their sensuous reflections veer towards romanticism; yet, as it unfolds, the film lays bare the ways in which desire brushes up against violence – both the sea’s elemental force, and more urgently, abusive sexual relations in the context of dockside sex work.
Both threads come together in the film’s climactic sequence, which opens with a frontal shot of a ship’s hull, pointed towards a clouded horizon. Focusing in on the approaching storm, the sequence intercuts close-ups of moving barometer needles with shots of crew members, steadying their balance against corridors or tying up furniture on-board. The camera is similarly unsteady, trembling as it traverses the navigator’s face in close-up and follows the ship’s rhythmic rise-and-fall. As the ship crests the waves, the image becomes increasingly elemental. Mist and fog overwhelm the frame, limiting visibility. The horizon line begins to tilt, left then right. This movement does not dis-place us, but rather guides the transition back to Sandy: her eyes fixed towards the window, away from the close proximity of the camera lens. Tearfully, she speaks of her struggles with infertility and the violence she incurred during her encounters with sailors: “I didn’t realise they hurt me…I don’t think it was the blows but all the squeezing.” In paralleling the binary of (hu)man/sea with man/woman, linking the oceanic with the feminine, the film’s structure risks equating the (elemental) violence of the sea with the (sexual) violence of sailors. This metaphoric equation could be seen to trivialise violence against women, to undermine its systemic nature and persistent effects. On the other hand, this sequence also exposes how Exotica, Erotica, Etc. deploys oceanic materialities to give form to Sandy’s experience of violence – an experience not often heard or given a platform. While the film focuses on desire, its force stems from this capacity to draw attention towards the labour of dockside sex workers.
On-deck, the gesture of labour is minimised in favour of more intimate, off-duty moments among the all-male crew. In one scene, the camera tenderly closes in on a lone sailor typing away at his laptop, his face illuminated in the blue light. In another, the camera moves among a group dancing to ABBA’s Dancing Queen, tracking their gyrating bodies in sensuous close-up. Off-deck, however, Sandy performatively recalls her own labour in scenes shot through with memories of desire. In a softly-lit bedroom, she flings herself atop the bed and grasps a pillow, mouthing the names of ex-lovers. She continues in voice-over, reflecting on economic transactions with Greek sailors as the film shifts to a contemporary strip club. Lights flash blue-green-red, intermittently revealing a young dancer. After a series of portraits of young sex workers, shot in long take, the film turns back to Sandy. The overhead camera tracks slowly across her inclined, naked body, revealing scars: residual traces of sailors’ violent interactions.
Despite highlighting the risk of violence in sex work, Exotica, Erotica, Etc. neither judges its subjects nor denies them agency; instead, it allows space for self-expression without determining the spectator’s interpretation. In doing so, the film asks us to consider the ethical dimensions of such a cinema of indeterminacy, where placing the spectator ‘at sea’ confounds the legibility, political or otherwise, of conventional documentary filmmaking. When is a shifting horizon line more appropriate than an anchor?