Screening Strangers: Migration and Diaspora in Contemporary European Cinema
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Screening Strangers: Migration and Diaspora in Contemporary European Cinema
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253221827 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/08/2010 |
| Series: | New Directions in National Cinemas |
| Pages: | 232 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Screening Strangers
Migration and Diaspora in Contemporary European Cinema
By Yosefa Loshitzky
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2010 Yosefa LoshitzkyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-35453-2
CHAPTER 1
JOURNEYS OF HOPE TO FORTRESS EUROPE
CROSS-BORDER AND MIGRATORY FILMS
The long-standing dream that Europe would one day be borderless has for many turned into an angst-ridden scenario embodying insecurity and threatened identity.
Kate Connolly
IN this chapter, I attempt to address some of the prominent cultural motifs, metaphors, and tropes in some significant films of the contemporary migrant and diasporic European cinema. This cinema has become a recent site of articulation of Europe's new sociocultural space, shaped and negotiated by the experience of displacement, diaspora, exile, migration, nomadism, homelessness, and border-crossing, "putting in flux the idea of Europe itself." Today's "Europe" is a phenomenon that can no longer be described or experienced as a coherent whole, save as a site of negotiation over identity.
In recent years, Europe's multicultural struggles have become a prominent topic in European cinema. This cinema clearly utilizes issues related to ethno-religious diasporas, racism, and migrant culture in order to reflect, negotiate, and construct a new image of the "Old World." Europe, as represented in these films, is no longer predominantly white and Christian, but a multicultural, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious domain. My discussion of these topics attempts to show how the new European cinema projects and represents both the physical and sociocultural landscapes of Europe, which have been significantly altered as a result of migration and diaspora. The tropes and motifs that I discuss cross the national borders of their narratives, contexts of production and sociopolitical circumstances, and thereby transcend the traditional understanding of "national cinema," which is produced within the fixed boundaries of the nation-state and is thought to reflect its imagined collectivity. Conversely, the new transnational European films that deal with migration and diaspora — many of them multinational co-productions — are part of an independent, hybrid, transnational cinema which, in the words of Hamid Naficy, "cuts across previously defined geographic, national, cultural, cinematic, and meta-cinematic boundaries." Three evolving genres of films about immigration can already be traced in the emerging diasporic and migrant cinema, each referring to a different stage in the migratory tour/route, what might, ironically, be called the grand tour of the migrants, namely: the migratory journey from the homeland to the host country and sometimes back home. A fitting name for the first genre might be "Journeys of Hope," although very often they turn into journeys of death, as in the emblematic Swiss film Journey of Hope (Reise der Hoffnung) (Xavier Koller, Switzerland, 1990). By portraying the hardships endured by refugees and migrants on their way to the Promised Land (the host country in Europe), the films of this genre challenge and subvert contemporary media and public discourse on migrants which dehumanizes and criminalizes them.
The second genre might be called "In the Promised Land" (see chapters 2, 3, and 4) and includes films such as Beautiful People (Jasmin Dizdar, UK, 1999), Besieged (L'assedio) (Bernardo Bertolucci, Italy, 1998), Nordrand (Northern Skirts) (Barbara Albert, Austria-Germany-Switzerland, 1999), Dirty Pretty Things (Stephen Frears, UK, 2002), and many others that investigate the encounter with the host society in the receiving country. These films usually revolve around such issues as racism, miscegenation, cultural difference, and economic exploitation. They focus on the process of immediate absorption in the new country, portraying a reception of the migrants by the host society that in most cases is more hostile than hospitable.
The third genre deals with the second generation and beyond (see chapters 4 and 5). It explores the processes and dynamic of integration and assimilation and their counterparts, alienation and disintegration. The films in this category, best exemplified, perhaps, by the French genre of the beur and banlieue film (see chapter 4) as well as by some of the British films on the black and Asian diaspora in the UK, deal with the experience of the second generation, children of migrants who are still marginalized and oppressed by the host society. These films raise questions about the status of ethnodiasporas in relation to the national body. Are ethno-religious diasporas an integral part of the national body, or are they foreign to it? Do they threaten or transcend it so as to constitute a transnational body? Ultimately these films raise questions about the politics of belonging and non-belonging and the cultural identity of the "New Europe." This chapter focuses on the first genre, the journey films in, of, to, and even from Fortress Europe.
The Traumatic Landscapes of Fortress Europe
The city is the setting, backdrop, and principal stage of drama for the majority of the migrant and diasporic films. The prominence of the city in the cinemascape of Fortress Europe reflects the centrality and importance of the city in the migratory process and in the migrant experience. Because most contemporary migration to Europe is economically motivated, it is only natural that the city, with the economic opportunities it has to offer and its growing diasporas, is the main magnet for migrants in search of a better life. Yet since the city is usually the migrants' final destination, its appearance in the films is most often preceded, in reality as well as in these films, by journeys through the more varied landscapes of Fortress Europe. Moreover, because the journey motif constitutes one of the most abiding topoi of literature and film worldwide, the literal trip in the landscape becomes a metaphorical voyage necessary for the construction of a new world, a new self. These excursions thus become explorations of new identity, individual as well as collective.
The cinematic landscapes of Fortress Europe which these films use as a backdrop for their journeys in time and space are typically trauma-saturated rather than healing landscapes. Journey of Hope, for example, one of the first major films about migration to Europe and which won the 1991 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, takes place in the Swiss Alps, which in this film became the geographical and symbolic icon of Fortress Europe (though Switzerland is not a member of the EU). The film tells the story of a Kurdish Turkish couple, Haydar Sener (Necmettin Çobanoglu) and Meryem (Nur Surer), who start their journey of hope from a small village in the mountains of southeastern Turkey in September 1988. They have decided to take their 7-year-old son Mehmet Ali (Emin Sivas), who is the brightest of their eight children, following the grandfather's (Selahattin Firat) suggestion to the couple that "he is a fresh seeding to grow roots in the new soil of your future" and the one "who will save the family." The family has sold its livestock and farmland in order to finance the trip to the supposed Swiss Paradise of milk and chocolate. Their first stop after leaving their Kurdish homeland is Istanbul, where they are stowed away on a freighter to Genoa. Once in Italy, they are taken to the mountains by traffickers/smugglers and left to fend for themselves in the snow and cold as they make their way toward Switzerland. Their journey of hope now turns into their worst nightmare. Meryem breaks her leg in the freezing mountains, the child dies of cold, and Haydar is arrested by the Swiss authorities on charges of neglecting his son. The film ends as the couple awaits deportation back to Turkey.
The film mobilizes a mythical and epic journey about the expulsion of refugees from the Swiss Eden in an attempt to stop the exodus of poor migrants in search of the European Promised Land. A traditional space of luxury and privilege for wealthy Europeans since the end of the nineteenth century, Switzerland, the "Paradise beyond the mountains," as Haydar describes it, remains sealed, closing its heavenly gates to the poor "invaders" from Asia. The different modes of transportation that carry the family along their journey, buses, trains, lorries, ship, and private car, expose, as Hamid Naficy observes in his discussion of accented films, the dialectical relationship between "the inside closed spaces of the vehicles and the outside open spaces of nature and nation." These vehicles thus become mobile prisons within a foreign landscape. The film begins with Ali, the child, playing a dangerous game, lying still on the railway tracks under a roaring train. The menace associated with trains is carried over to the Milan train station at which the family arrives at night. The deserted and empty station is an image of alienation, displacement, and rootlessness. It is a non-place, which could be anywhere. A Turkish man, the only other living soul to be seen, approaches the family. Recognizing them as fellow travelers and co-patriots he says, "We are all going north, aren't we?" thus invoking the North/South divide at the heart of globalization and migration. When later he lends money to Haydar to pay for the extra fee charged by the traffickers, he tells the grateful family: "Exile brings people together." His kind and warm words create an emotional space of solidarity and humanity on the background of the deserted station.
The most enthusiastic traveler in this journey of hope is the child, Mehmet Ali, for whom the journey is an exciting adventure. This is his first excursion into the world beyond the remote, dry, and rugged mountain landscape of his birthplace, so different from the landscape of the lush green Alps crowned with white snow peaks as they appear on a postcard sent to Haydar's family by an uncle who immigrated to Switzerland. The child communicates easily with the people they meet throughout the journey. Meanwhile, the people in the various European countries that they traverse on their route to Switzerland, whose languages the family does not understand, also find it easier to communicate with him than with his parents. The child (as in many migratory situations) becomes the mediator between the migrants and the "indigenous," the outsiders and the locals, the "Asians" and the "Europeans," the past and the future. When he dies, therefore, the future dies with him. It is the death of hope.
The Hybrid Matrix of Memory: Jewish and Muslim Refugees
The multiplicity of languages employed in Journey of Hope (Kurdish, Turkish, Italian, Swiss German), as well as the shift from one language to another, is typical of exilic cinema and represent the in-between state of the migrant who shifts from one linguistic code to another or experiences this shift simultaneously. This linguistic journey demonstrates the transnational dimension of the migratory process as well as the transnational aspect of Europe itself. The multilayered linguistic code employed in the film is reverberated in the iconic religious palimpsest which the film creates. Although the Kurdish family is Muslim, the director grafts Judeo-Christian iconography into the religious matrix in order to visually portray their plight to a non-Muslim audience through familiar and recognizable symbolism. For example, the three family members recall the Christian holy family with Meryem the mother invoking Maria, and the father carrying in his arms the frozen, "crucified," dying child, echoing the famous Pieta image. The child also recalls the biblical son Isaac, sacrificed on the altar of his father's migration fantasy.
If the journey of hope to Fortress Europe is a journey in search of a new life, it also involves discarding the old life. As such, the journey in the foreign landscape is also a journey of forgetting, a passage where identity is lost yet where the prospects for gaining a new identity are dubious. One of the most interesting scenes in Journey of Hope occurs when the migrants lose their suitcases while wandering in the Alps. The suitcase, as Hamid Naficy observes, is "a contradictory and multilayered key symbol of exilic subjectivity: it contains souvenirs from the homeland; it connotes wanderlust, freedom to roam, and a provisional life; and it symbolizes profound deprivation and diminution of one's possibilities in the world." In fact, in this scene, the Turkish trafficker who leads the refugees through the mountains presses them to throw away their suitcases, telling one of the refugees, a devout Muslim dressed in traditional clothes and carrying an exceptionally heavy-looking suitcase: "You are making a fresh start — why carrying your suitcase with you?" Shortly afterward the suitcase of this religious Muslim (who, like Haydar, is later captured by the border police) is seen falling into the deep Alpine canyon as its contents — copies of the Qur'an and other sacred Muslim books — are scattered, lost and forgotten forever in the inhospitable landscape of the wintry Alps. Books — the basis and cradle of civilization — are reduced, in this scene, to objects that constitute obstacles to the survivalist refugees. For the less religious refugees, indeed, the heavy books and the suitcase are an obstacle to survival; but for the Muslim devotee, this suitcase is a reposi tory of Islamic civilization, a container of personal memory and Muslim identity.
In light of the growing "Muslim Question" in Europe, this symbolic suitcase becomes a prophetic icon of the status of Muslims in Fortress Europe. The loss of the suitcase is the loss of identity, memory, and home, whereby the journey becomes one of despair instead of hope. Massimo (Dietmar Schonherr), the Italian guide who walks the family through the Alps, tries to convince Haydar to "leave the suitcase." "It's all we have," Haydar responds. But when his son freezes, the father drops the last suitcase and instead carries his child in his arms. The shift from carrying the suitcase to carrying the dying child is an image of double loss, the loss of the past (whose metonymy is the suitcase) and the loss of the hope for a better future (the son). This shocking image of Europe's "Muslim Problem" is emblematic of the heavy toll paid by migrants in their search for hope: the loss of their cultural and religious identity and memory. The suitcase might be seen as the prop of the twentieth century, a century which has experienced massive exodus of displaced people, refugees, and transferred populations. Most notably, the suitcase has become a dominant and recurring motif in Holocaust iconography, inspired by the piles of suitcases (among piles of other objects such as shoes and eyeglasses) taken from the Jews in the death camps and sorted out by slave laborers to be sent to the Fatherland for recycling and reuse by the German war machine.
From this overwhelming scene, the film cuts to a shot of a full moon over icy cold white mountains, recalling the famous shocking montage of the cut from a shot of a moon "slicing" a cloud to a shot of the eyeball slitting in Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou (Andalusian Dog, France, 1928). A Swiss border control unit is seen patrolling the area, using powerful flashlights and binoculars to catch border-crossing activities. On the background of this icy, hallucinatory landscape, the Swiss flag appears, waving in the icy stormy air like an apparition. On the sound track, the wind howls gruesomely, joined by the terrifying barking of the patrol dogs, and a cold blue halo hovers over the mountains. These sonic themes, much like the images of the refugees with their shabby and battered suitcases, invoke the iconography of the Holocaust. Implicitly, they conflate the memory of World War II's Jewish refugee with the contemporary Muslim refugee, creating a junction where the Holocaust Jew (and even his precursor, the mythical figure of the Wandering Jew) and the contemporary Muslim merge into what I call a "hybrid refugee." This enriched matrix of past and present icons of victimhood and persecution opens up the possibility of seeing the contemporary European policy of enforcing its fortress as the point of departure in forging a new attitude toward migration to the New Europe. Journey of Hope can thus be read as rethinking the status of contemporary migrants and refugees to Europe in light of the Holocaust. Moreover, it casts a shadow over the past of Switzerland, its collaboration with the Nazis under the guise of neutrality, and its continuing callousness toward the new refugees.
On Swiss Hospitality and the Kindness of Strangers
The Swiss "Paradise beyond the mountains" turns into a nightmare in the Alps. Switzerland becomes a menace and its snow-covered mountains turn into a visual metonym of Fortress Europe, recalling the stories of Jewish refugees, who during the Holocaust tried to escape to "neutral Switzerland." (Today, particularly after the Swiss banks affair, the revelations that the banks were a major conduit for Nazi plunder during World War II and held onto assets belonging to Holocaust victims, there is an awareness that the Swiss not only collaborated with the Nazis but actually benefited from them.) In the context of the film, the famous Swiss neutrality is revealed as cruelty, a demonstration of indifference to the plight of the poor and suffering. This dispassionate state cruelty is reflected and echoed by the wintry Swiss landscape: cold, freezing, and indifferent to human suffering.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Screening Strangers by Yosefa Loshitzky. Copyright © 2010 Yosefa Loshitzky. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction Screening Strangers in Fortress Europe 1
1 Journeys of Hope to Fortress Europe: Cross-Border and Migratory Films 14
2 Cities of Hope: The Cinematic Cityscapes of Fortress Europe 45
3 The White Continent Is Dark: Migration and Miscegenation in Bernardo Bertolucci's Besieged (1998) 77
4 Intifada of the Banlieues: La Haine Revisited 94
5 The Camp Trilogy: Michael's Winterbottom's In This World, Code 46, and The Road to Guantanamo 117
Afterword: Beyond Strangers and Post-Europe 142
Notes 153
Index 201
What People are Saying About This
"Loshitzky (Univ. of East London, UK) here expands on her earlier fine work on cinema and politics: The Radical Faces of Godard and Bertolucci (CH, Sep'95, 33-0195) and Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen (CH, Jul'02, 39-6318). She works through contemporary European films that foreground migration, with the goal of describing each film's view of 'fortress Europe.' Loshitzky returns to Bernardo Bertolucci in Besieged (1998), while picking out Godardian elements in both Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine (1995) and Michael Winterbottom's 'Camp Trilogy' (In This World, Code 46, The Road to Guantanamo). She also discusses the Swiss film Journey of Hope (1990) and Stephen Frears's Dirty Pretty Things (2002). The range of films Loshitzky takes on is wide, but she makes no claim for comprehensiveness. She notes that she selects 'hegemonic' rather than 'minority discourse' films, i.e., films made by 'hosts' rather than 'strangers.' Given that principle of selection, this reviewer could have done with more unmasking of hegemonic ideology and less letting the films speak—however critically—for themselves. That said, this book is every bit as rewarding as the best recent work on European identity and the cinema, e.g., Rosalind Galt's The New European Cinema: Redrawing the Map (CH, Nov'06, 44-1429). Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and researchers. — Choice"
Loshitzky (Univ. of East London, UK) here expands on her earlier fine work on cinema and politics: The Radical Faces of Godard and Bertolucci (CH, Sep'95, 33-0195) and Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen (CH, Jul'02, 39-6318). She works through contemporary European films that foreground migration, with the goal of describing each film's view of 'fortress Europe.' Loshitzky returns to Bernardo Bertolucci in Besieged (1998), while picking out Godardian elements in both Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine (1995) and Michael Winterbottom's 'Camp Trilogy' (In This World, Code 46, The Road to Guantanamo). She also discusses the Swiss film Journey of Hope (1990) and Stephen Frears's Dirty Pretty Things (2002). The range of films Loshitzky takes on is wide, but she makes no claim for comprehensiveness. She notes that she selects 'hegemonic' rather than 'minority discourse' films, i.e., films made by 'hosts' rather than 'strangers.' Given that principle of selection, this reviewer could have done with more unmasking of hegemonic ideology and less letting the films speak—however critically—for themselves. That said, this book is every bit as rewarding as the best recent work on European identity and the cinema, e.g., Rosalind Galt's The New European Cinema: Redrawing the Map (CH, Nov'06, 44-1429). Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and researchers. — Choice
Loshitzky makes the crucial link between the political screening of new immigrants by European governments and societies with the cinematic screening of these immigrants by European directors, all the while offering sensitive and thick readings of the films.
Loshitzky (Univ. of East London, UK) here expands on her earlier fine work on cinema and politics: The Radical Faces of Godard and Bertolucci (CH, Sep'95, 33-0195) and Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen (CH, Jul'02, 39-6318). She works through contemporary European films that foreground migration, with the goal of describing each film's view of 'fortress Europe.' Loshitzky returns to Bernardo Bertolucci in Besieged (1998), while picking out Godardian elements in both Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine (1995) and Michael Winterbottom's 'Camp Trilogy' (In This World, Code 46, The Road to Guantanamo). She also discusses the Swiss film Journey of Hope (1990) and Stephen Frears's Dirty Pretty Things (2002). The range of films Loshitzky takes on is wide, but she makes no claim for comprehensiveness. She notes that she selects 'hegemonic' rather than 'minority discourse' films, i.e., films made by 'hosts' rather than 'strangers.' Given that principle of selection, this reviewer could have done with more unmasking of hegemonic ideology and less letting the films speak—however critically—for themselves. That said, this book is every bit as rewarding as the best recent work on European identity and the cinema, e.g., Rosalind Galt's The New European Cinema: Redrawing the Map (CH, Nov'06, 44-1429). Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and researchers. — Choice
Written in a clear, concise, and engaging style, [this book] will appeal to both students and scholars of world cinema.
Loshitzky makes the crucial link between the political screening of new immigrants by European governments and societies with the cinematic screening of these immigrants by European directors, all the while offering sensitive and thick readings of the films.