Images can convey rich semantic information about certain situations and characters. Affective images are those associated with certain emotions and forces, automatically gaining meanings in our minds without involving cognition. According to Seigworth & Gregg (1), they are “those forces – visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion – that can serve to drive us toward movement… that can even leave us overwhelmed by the world’s apparent intractability.” These images have been used to portray the stereotypes around gender, race, age and class, among others, in ways that leave our tongues wagging, given their intricacies. This research documents how race, sex, and class intersect with affective images, as seen in the film, “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul.” The movie is about an ‘unnatural’ love affair between the hunk-bearded Moroccan Gastarbeiter, Ali, and a native German woman called Emmi. Even though the two fell in love against the expectation of race relationship that society expected of them, they ended up meeting horrific treatment among friends and families and even the shopkeeper. Affective images play important roles in exhibiting the class difference between the Moroccan migrant worker and the betrothed women together with the families. It is also important to pay keen attention to the images of every character to understand how their depiction in the film is associated with class, sex, or race just by a glance. It shows how affective images define class, gender, class, and race, among others. According to (Massumi 36), people are capable of creating affective images and reactions, not by conscious thoughts but through autonomous processes of perception. Hence, we automatically know the race, sex, or class of a person by seeing how they are dressed, shaved, or groomed. This essay argues that affective images play critical roles in characterizing actors in movies for roles in gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity, class, and/or age relations in order to captivate us in magical ways.
How affective images intersect with race
Throughout the entire movie, the controversial betrothment of Emmi to Ali has played a key role in bringing to light the issue of racism in the embattled Germany. The staging of relationships between the two characters indicates that they were worlds apart, one being black of Moroccan origin and another being a native white. The lonely man at the bar finally comes across a woman who takes care of him, eventually inviting him home for dinner. However, throughout their interaction with people, who were mostly whites, the intricacies of race play out as some characters could not hide their aggression and abrasiveness towards their engagement. At the outset, as the movie begins, we can see people sneering at Ali to the extent that Emmi notices. She says, “I don’t like to say this… people always give you such a funny look.” But Ali positively replies, “People, not you.” This scene ushers us to the tumultuous race relationship between a black immigrant worker and the whites. We are then ushered into an emotional conversation where the image of Ali is seen to look sad in his cloths, as heard in the words of Emmi, “Dark cloths look so sad don’t they?” Emmi to Ali. She challenged Ali to try lighter clothes. This is a metaphorical statement connoting the deep sadness that this society associated with being black. It is evident that even the well-intended Emmi subconsciously feels that maybe Ali is looking sad merely because of ‘dark’ clothes. It speaks so deeply about the emotions that are associated with being dark. However, in all these, Ali took it easy and defended his dress code.
Affective images have been said to be sensationalized in order to communicate a certain stereotype. From the above scene, it can be seen that Ali’s state as a black Moroccan has been sensationalized, with every white man producing a negative reaction at his encounter with him, much more when they notice he is dating a white woman. According to Williams (4), “there is the spectacle of a body caught in the grip of intense sensation or emotion.” The sensationalization is so intense and proceeds throughout the film, especially when the neighbours realized that there is a black nigga in the area. The women exchanged niceties by saying, “Mrs. Kurowsi’s got a foreigner up there.” “A black man.” Yea “Well, not that black but pretty dark.” With this, it was enough for one of them to suggest that Emmi is not a German. It means that pure-breed Germans would not dare date a black man. With this sentimentalization of Ali’s black skin, it was easy to read the depth of racial hatred in the 20th century Germany. It did not end at this as we could see her children running away from her, with one of them calling the house ‘pigsty’ because the black man was brought in. With this kind of environment, we eventually see an overpowering sadness in the face of Emmi as she wept, wanting to have a lonely place where they could only have good times with Ali. Weeping, to Williams, is a critical feature in melodrama like the one we are discussing because it communicates serious pathos. It is this overpowering emotion that affective images basically use to portray information about such issues as racism in a society.
Sex
Sex has been used in films to captivate the audience and communicate deep information about impulses of libido. The psychodynamic theory puts sex as a very critical point in human development and existence, with Sigmund Freud arguing that human existence resonates around satisfying the impulses of libido at every stage of life. Affective images intertwine with sex in many ways as they are used to display the complexes and jealousies witnessed between different sexes. In the film, jealousy has been displayed in many circumstances, both at the bar and in the apartment where Emmi lived. These are majorly connected with the sexual impulses of the women who thought they would rather have Ali than the ‘old whore’ as was insinuated by one of the young women. From the outward appearance, Ali is physically seen as an alpha male: hunk bearded, heavily muscled and strong. With these sexually attractive features, the young women at the bar drooled over her, only to be disappointed by Mrs Emmi. The image portrayed of him is affective in the sense that it sexually arouses the women, who in turn show jealousy for Emmi as the custodian. According to Williams (40), “each of these ecstatic excesses could be said to share a quality of uncontrollable convulsion or spasm-of the body “beside itself” with sexual pleasure, fear and terror, or overpowering sadness.” In this film, there is an overpowering sadness of the neighboring women who end up embattling Emmi to the extent of heaping excuses on her shoulder. For instance, they keep following her up and wanting her to be distracted from her being with the man. That is the reason they brought up the issue of cleaning the staircases towards the end.
Otherwise, they were also sexually attracted to the police with long hair, with one woman exclaiming, “Did you see that? Police with long hair?” with the other one answering, “Sure.. things have changed.” These women’s expression of affection towards the police tunes the audience so that they are aware of the sexual attraction in the police. Williams (4) argues that ” what may especially mark these body genres as low is the perception that the body of the spectator is caught up in an almost involuntary mimicry of the emotion or sensation of the body on the screen.” Indeed, the bodies of the females on the screen showed a captivated persona, as shown by the fidgeting, which could easily lure other women watching them to also get sexually attracted to the police.
Class
The portrayal of class using the affective images entails hyping of the difference between immigrant workers and the local white natives, who are mostly middle class. This hyping follows the framework seen in the sentimentalization of sex and race in the same context. In this film, the class difference is written all over Ali’s face, given his dressing at the first instance and the commotion he creates while he tries to live among the other middle class natives. As an immigrant worker, he is expected to live with other workers, as exhibited when Ali lived in a room of six mates. This is so, even if it was apparent that Mrs Emmi was living in a large room all alone, with children living elsewhere. It could be normal to live six in a room, but the exasperation in the eyes and voice of Emmi reveals that the agony of the immigrant workers is worth paying attention to. Another instance where discussion causes rage was when Emmi mentions to Eugine whether there were foreign workers where they lived. The girl answered, ?” “Don’t mention foreign workers it makes him see red.” Again, the neighbourhood women expressed that they seemed to live with an explosive because of the presence of Ali around. This is why Carrera (219) insinuates that the affects associated with black men in search engines are aggression, ugly, or unkind. This contributes to the widely held stereotype that black people are aggressive and underserving. With this, it is evident that there is a razer wire erected between one class to the other, such that social mobility is hindered from every angle. The attempt by one class to climb the social ladder to belong in another causes extreme outrage by the members of a given higher class.
Therefore, affective images can play with our emotions to judge characters depending on their class. According to Mussumi (85), affects are a completely independent faculty that can exist whether the conscience exists or not. Presumably, affects mediate in the subconscious activities that determine how we react to different images. It means that we can spontaneously and unpredictably respond to a situation due to emotions which are not mediated by conscious thoughts. In the film, Ali is stereotyped as causing negative emotions wherever he went, even without one single character wanting to listen to him. It was an automated process which socialization had made the middle class to develop against the migrant workers. While watching this, an empathetic spectator is left wondering why a human being would face such cruel treatment from fellow humans. This is exactly what Shaviro (17) meant when he claimed that “Images have an excessive capacity to seduce and mislead, to affect the spectator unwarrantedly.”
In conclusion, affective images intertwine with sex, race, and class in many ways. Primarily, the effective images are used to sentimentally communicate the place of blacks in a white-dominated society. Ali and his wife-to-be were victims of negative energy projected towards people of colour in white-dominated Germany. This could be seen in the anathema associated with him in every social setting, including shop, Emmi’s home, the bar, and even in the hotel. Similarly, strong emotions were associated with sex relations, as could be seen in the jealousy of women who saw Ali and the newfound love. This jealousy and extreme emotion is psychological and follows Freudian theory of psychodynamics. Affective images are used to portray impulses of libido and how they play when love wins, it is unrequited, or it fails. Finally, Ali’s body and his appearance were used to exhibit the class difference between him and the German natives. The adversities he underwent as an immigrant worker trying to fall in love with native women clearly speaks of the adversities of other native workers who try to defy the odds and enhance their social mobility.
Works Cited
Carrera, Fernanda. “Race and gender of aesthetics and affections: algorithmization of racism and sexism in contemporary digital image databases.” Matrizes 14.2 (2020): 217-240. https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.1982-8160.v14i2p217-240
Massumi, Brian. “The Autonomy of Affect.” Cultural Critique, no. 31, 1995, pp. 83–109. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1354446. Accessed 28 Oct. 2023
Seigworth, Gregory J., and Melissa Gregg. “An Inventory of Shimmers.” The Affect Theory Reader, Duke University Press, 2020, pp. 1–26, https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822393047-002.
Shaviro, Steven. The Cinematic Body. University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
Williams, Linda. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” Film Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 4, 1991, pp. 2–13, https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.1991.44.4.04a00020.
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