The Cinemas of Italian Migration : European and Transatlantic Narratives [1 ed.] 9781443869942, 9781443846240

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The Cinemas of Italian Migration

The Cinemas of Italian Migration: European and Transatlantic Narratives

Edited by

Sabine Schrader and Daniel Winkler

The Cinemas of Italian Migration: European and Transatlantic Narratives, Edited by Sabine Schrader and Daniel Winkler This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2013 by Sabine Schrader and Daniel Winkler and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-4624-4, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4624-0

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 The Cinemas of Italian Migration: From Il cammino della speranza (1950) to Into Paradiso (2010) Sabine Schrader and Daniel Winkler The Southern Question and Italian Cinema Solid Borders, Fluid Nation: On Pietro Germi’s Il cammino della speranza (1950) ......................................................................................... 21 Laura Rascaroli Identity, Masculinity and Postcolonial Scenarios in Gianni Amelio’s Lamerica (1994) ........................................................................................ 31 Veronica Pravadelli The Mediterranean or Where Africa Does (Not) Meet Italy: Andrea Segre’s A Sud di Lampedusa (2006) ............................................. 41 Alessandra Di Maio New Italian Migrant Cinema between Cinematic Nostalgia and Trash (Bellocchio, Marra, Torre)......................................................................... 53 Daniel Winkler Transnational Mobility and Precarious Labour in Post-Cold War Europe: The Spectral Disruptions of Carmine Amoroso’s Cover Boy (2006) ........ 69 Alice Bardan and Áine O’Healy “The Journey from a Poor Country.” Attempts to Escape Italy’s Economic and Moral Poverty in Recent Documentaries ........................... 91 Francesca Esposito

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Northward, Westward. Italian Emigration and International Cinema Modernizing Italian Migration Cinema: Film Auteurs and the Economic Boom ....................................................................................................... 107 Alberto Zambenedetti “C’era una volta in Svizzera”—“The Italians” in Swiss Cinema ............ 123 Sophie Rudolph Playing with Stereotypes: Martin Scorsese’s Italianamerican (1974) .... 141 Camille Gendrault Cinema, Migration and Crisis: Sandra Gugliotta’s Un día de suerte (2002) ...................................................................................................... 157 Gudrun Rath Nomadic Narratives: Migration Cinema in Germany and Italy ............... 171 Aurora E. Rodonò Film Genre and “Italianità” “Mine vaganti”: Film Theoretical Considerations on Transculturality and the Cinema of Ferzan Ozpetek .......................................................... 201 Rada Bieberstein The (Migrant) Other and Crime: La Giusta Distanza (2007) by Carlo Mazzacurati as a Multilayered Depiction of a Clichéd Connection ........ 231 Doris Pichler “È giusto vivere così?” Contemporary Melodrama and Migration ......... 247 Jörg Metelmann Comedy Film and Immigration to Italy: Reading Masculinity, Hybridity, and Satire in Lezioni di cioccolato (2007), Questa notte è ancora nostra (2008), and Into Paradiso (2010) ............................................................ 263 Gaoheng Zhang Selected Italian Migrant Cinema Filmography........................................ 281 Selected Bibliography ............................................................................. 293 Contributors ............................................................................................. 317 Index ........................................................................................................ 321

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The present volume The Cinemas of Italian Migration: European and Transatlantic Narratives is the result of a cooperation with many colleagues that lasted from 2009 to 2012. A large number of the articles date back to our conference “Figurations of Italian Migration in International Cinema” that took place at the University of Innsbruck from March 31 to April 2, 2011.1 We would like to thank the Italien-Zentrum, Leopold-Franzens Universität Innsbruck, Land Tirol, Land Vorarlberg and the Provincia Autonoma di Bolzano-Alto Adige for the financial support. A great number of people assisted and supported us during the preparation and follow-up of this conference. We especially thank Antonia Bechtold, Vincenzo Folino, Romano Guerra, and Nicoletta Lucchini. Romano Guerra compiled the filmography at the end of this book. Saskia Fürst, Gerhild Fuchs, Burglinde Hagert, John Jacobs, Maria Kirchmair, Kilian Mehl, Sara Paterno and Patricia Riesenkampff proofread and designed layout with a great amount of diligence and perseverance.

Notes 1 See the conference report: http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/tagungsberichte/id=3638

INTRODUCTION THE CINEMAS OF ITALIAN MIGRATION: FROM IL CAMMINO DELLA SPERANZA (1950) TO INTO PARADISO (2010) SABINE SCHRADER AND DANIEL WINKLER

The films Il cammino della speranza (The Road to Hope Pietro Germi, 1950) and Into Paradiso (Into Paradise Paola Randi, 2010) constitute the time span for the present volume The Cinemas of Italian Migration: European and Transatlantic Narratives. In Il cammino della speranza, Pietro Germi stages the arduous path of Southern Italian mining workers and their families to France; it counts among the early Italian films that pick out emigration as their central theme. This film is in many regards paradigmatic for Italian cinema of migration. It gives shape to the narratives of hope and disappointment in conflict with italianità. The 2010 low-budget comedy Into Paradiso also bears the hope for a new beginning in its title, but it narrates immigration in today’s Italy. “Paradiso” is the great promise for former cricket champion Gayan from Sri Lanka, but at first “Paradiso” is nothing but the name of a run-down multi-ethnic tenement in Naples where he moves into a room, and, by way of absurd complications, meets an unemployed academic and a corrupt politician. The title of the introduction, “From ‘Il cammino della speranza’ to ‘Into Paradise,’” however, not only refers to the cinematographic history of migration, but also to different ways of presentation. In order to accommodate this scope, our corpus is recruited, on the one hand, from films that have migration within and into Italy as their theme, and on the other hand, from those dealing with Italian emigration. By doing this, not only can different aesthetics be analyzed, but strings of cinematographic tradition can also be sketched. The corpus thus stretches from Italian and American mainstream movie productions to more experimental, often regional and sometimes transnational contemporary movie and docu-

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mentary productions. Among them are narratives that critically reflect racism and give migrants a subject status (“whoness”) (Parati 2005, 121122). However, many mainstream productions also resort to stereotypical depictions by painting a picture of migrants as passive or residing in an object status (“whatness”), thus following typically European “endlessly recycled narratives of oppression and victimization” (Bergfelder 2005, 317). There are many narratives of migration, and this volume constitutes only a selection of possible modes of narration, without any claim to completeness. In this introduction, we will try to sketch the history of the Italian migration film and then broach the issue of central concepts and genres. We will return time and again to articles in this book in order to better contextualize the films reviewed. At the end of this volume, there is a selected bibliography and a filmography which—with an emphasis on Italian (co-) productions—draws together films with a migration focus. This is intended to be the beginning of a collection and an invitation for continuous addition. Let us return to the two films that opened up this introduction. Seen from a perspective of cultural history, Il cammino della speranza seizes a collective Italian experience; after all, Italy had been into the 1970s “the European migrant and emigrant country par excellence” (Bertagna/ Maccari-Clayton 2008, 205). Over a prolonged period of time, the number of Italian migrants was not only the highest in Europe, but they also dispersed over numerous target countries. The economic distress after the Italian unification in the middle of the nineteenth century had led many Italians—up until the beginning of the twentieth century—either to the cities in Northern Italy, Western Europe, or America. The second wave of emigration, which Germi makes the central topic of his film, takes place during the so-called economic miracle of the 1950s and 1960s, again leading towards the North(-West), especially towards France, Switzerland, Belgium, or the Federal Republic of Germany. In terms of cultural history, Into Paradiso refers to a completely different situation. Here, the immigration into Italy is at the centre of interest, i.e. the emigration country has become an immigration country. The narrative is sparked not so much by the voyage itself but by the attempt to gain a foothold despite disappointed expectations. When the film started at the biennial Venice Film Festival, Italian television broadcast pictures that were anything but hopeful. Since Spain fortified its southern frontier, the little Italian island of Lampedusa, situated close to the African coast, with only 6,000 inhabitants, has become the favourite landing spot for refugees from Tunisia, Morocco, Ghana, and many other African countries. The

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television pictures showing leaky boats in front of the island and rather too small and ramshackle emergency accommodations are well known; there are deaths to be mourned regularly. The reactions of the Italian authorities comprised entry bans for humanitarian organizations and members of parliament, hopelessly overcrowded refugee camps, mass deportations and mistreatment of the refugees, as well as the proposal made by Berlusconi’s minister Roberto Calderoni, who in 2004 demanded that the military shoot at the refugee boats (Milborn 2006, 55-58). It becomes clear once more that despite its own “collective” migration experience, Italy does not reveal itself to be an open, tolerant country. Beside the political and legal reforms, the mass media reporting practice attests to how the “racism,” which used to be targeted at Southern Italians, the terroni, is today transferred to the extracommunitari (Cincinelli 2009, 29-31; Russo Bullaro 2010, xvi). Nevertheless, Italy’s process of changing into a multi-ethnic society has actually been taking place for decades, even though it was widely ignored in political circles. In 1973, Italy had more immigrants than emigrants for the first time (Bertagna/Maccari-Clayton 2008, 216), and since the 1980s the country has gathered more and more migrants of different provenance: Eastern Europeans, first among them Albanians and Romanians; people from the Maghreb countries and from central Africa; but also many Chinese. In January 2011, the number of immigrants reached 4,570,317 or exactly 7.5 per cent of the total population, and continues to rise with increasing tendency.1 This does not include the clandestini, the irregular (“illegal”) immigrants. So the emigration country Italy has turned—despite a relatively restrictive jurisdiction—into a plural society. The New Migrant Cinema started in Italy during the 1990s,2 i.e. during a time when the country itself had already turned into an immigration country, just like other formerly typical emigration countries of the EU (e.g. Spain, Greece, Portugal, or Ireland) (Loshitzky 2010, 6; Berger/ Winkler 2012a, b). Paradigmatic for this transformation is the exceedingly successful documentary film L’orchestra di Piazza Vittorio (The Orchestra of Piazza Vittorio Agostino Ferrente, 2006), which positively stages the multi-ethnic urbanity of Rome by showing the coming-into-being of a multi-ethnic orchestra and its concert activities that continue to this day.

A Sketch of the Italian Migration Film The focus of this book lies on the analysis of the narrative of migration from a cultural studies perspective. In the sense of White (1980) or Müller-Funk (2002), we understand narrative as a central cultural technique

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for organizing the individual and collective memories which is then able to arrange events in an orderly sequence of time and space. Film genres in turn organize these narratives. When assuming that film genres and playing with them have an important function for deeper cultural and social textures (Schweinitz 1994, 105; Hickethier 2003, 82-83), then they will also provide information about the “basic stories” of Italian migration while staging the genre aesthetics in ever new forms. Migration and the formation of state are as closely linked in Italy as the history of Italian cinema and the history of historical film; after all the latter was for a long time the Italian cinema par excellence (Spagnoletti 1997, 151). First the silent movie and later Fascist cinema developed heroic narratives of a nationally intended unity to the detriment of (regional) variety. So it is not surprising that in an age of Italian monumental films, migration was not a central narrative (Bertellini 2010, 205-235).3 After the Second World War, the internal migration from the South to the North, just like emigration, finds its first echo in neorealistic films with neorealistic traits. Beside the already mentioned post-war films by Germi and Visconti, Vittorio De Seta’s documentary movies such as Contadini del mare (Peasants of the Sea, 1956) or Banditi a Orgosolo (Bandits of Orgosolo, 1961), and later Francesco Rosi’s often internationally produced films featuring prominent actors, such as Le mani sulla città (Hands over the City, 1963) or Tre fratelli (Three Brothers, 1981), paradigmatically represent this in the collective imaginary. There, the South takes on a dual narrative function; it is staged both as a poor and archaic region, so that the cinema is robbed of the old clichés of Italian travellers looking for the myths of antiquity; however, by focusing on poverty and exploitation of the South, the films also stage an “Africa a casa (Africa at home)” (Wood 2005, 142). This conditioning of Italian cinema can be explained from a standpoint of cultural history by the clearly different societal development, especially compared to other European countries: in contrast to France, for example, Italy does not have a long-standing history of colonialism followed by immigration from these colonies. Moreover, instead of French centralism and immigration, already strong in the late nineteenth century, there are massive internal regional frictions, which Antonio Gramsci traced back to the long history of Northern economic-political hegemony over the South in his classic “Alcuni temi della questione meridionale” (1926) (Gramsci 1971, 137-158). According to him, the South had on the one hand been discriminated against for a long time. On the other hand, it had been differently constituted, both discursively and culturally, namely as a region

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of crisis responsible for the lack of progress in all of Italy. Not least, it is these conditions that have led to a tradition of (e)migration—from Southern to Northern Italy or towards other countries and continents— which have been reflected in a strong thematic focus on internal North– South conflicts and also within the scope of the cinema d’emigrazione.

“La questione meridionale” The sometimes violent conflicts resulting from the cultural difference between the agricultural-Catholic migrants from Southern Italy and the customary behaviour in the big cities are a leitmotiv characterizing “Italian” cinema, regardless of whether the films focus on internal or external migration. Luchino Visconti, for example, focuses on the tragic content of intra-Italian migration in his film Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers, 1960), which—together with some other films—marks the beginning of the Italian cinema of migration but which can also be understood as a prototypical narrative of the failure of a truly lived ItaloItalian diversità. Sandra Ponzanesi summarizes this in her certainly accurate statement that Italy is characterized in its representational history by a “double mythology of rootedness and expatriation” (Ponzanesi 2005, 269). The cinematographic debate concerning internal Italian tensions in the neorealistic cinema is reflected in international cinema in the narrative of displacement. Italy is a nostalgic place of reminiscence, “il bel suol d’amore (the beautiful love land)” (Ponzanesi 2005, 269), whose presence, however, is narrated on both sides via a crisis that allows the country as a whole to seem “backward.” Cinema scientist Mary P. Wood also underscores this when she writes: for much of the last 150 years, the role of the awkward “Other” in Italian society was fulfilled by the Mezzogiorno and its inhabitants, whilst at the same time Italians from whatever region of Italy found themselves in that humiliating position in England, France, Germany, Argentina, Australia and North America. (Wood 2003, 96)

Via relatively closed and homogeneous film spaces, migratio serves as the narrative vehicle to tell of socio-economic conflicts, which are also a part of the cinema of migration, as Aurora Rodonò outlines across cinema history by citing exemplary German and Italian films like Pane e cioccolata (Bread and Chocolate Franco Brusati, 1974) and Palermo oder Wolfsburg (Palermo or Wolfsburg Werner Schroeter, 1980). This often ties in with a discourse of victimization as well as with clichés of a

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yearning for Italy. That both tendencies are closely linked with each other can be seen in the current Italian auteur cinema. It is as an exemplary representative of an “Italian” cinematographic aesthetic, which does borrow from international sources but which always takes recourse to the familiar tradition.

The Italo-French Axis Beside the North-South dualism, the early productions in the context of neorealism are interesting especially for analyzing the “coming-intobeing” of emigration cinema with regard to the Italo-French axis. Cases in point are Mario Soldati’s Fuga in Francia (Flight Into France, 1948)4 as well as Jean Renoir’s Toni (1935). While Soldati creates a criminalistic plot around war criminal Riccardo Torre (Folco Lulli), Renoir tells the tragic tale of the Italian eponymous hero (Charles Blavette) who migrated to southern France to get a job. This film, often neglected in cinema historiography, is particularly interesting, for one thing because not only Georges D’Arnoux, but also Luchino Visconti “assisted” Renoir in this production. Moreover, this film anticipates many traits of neorealist film aesthetics since it exclusively works with exterior shots and lay actors or regional actors and since it moves the everyday existence of work migrants with their cultural and socio-political conflicts into the centre of the plot. Also neglected by historiography for a long time, and in some ways rather successful, were other films that concentrated on migration, for example the following films located in Germany or Holland: I magliari (The Magliari Francesco Rosi, 1959) and La ragazza in vetrina (Girl in the Window Luciano Emmer, 1961) (Zambenedetti). This may lead to the conclusion that the (neo-)realistic cinema and its historiography mainly turns to national issues which in turn are closely linked to the North-South conflicts. Yet the four films mentioned above precisely illustrate two tendencies which accompany the cinema of migration and which moreover closely determine the construction of italianità up to this day: on the one hand, the family is given a special degree of attention while, on the other hand, crime, especially the mafia, is very much present. This also identifies two aesthetic tendencies that will strongly determine the cinema of migration: melodrama and the crime movie or thriller.

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Family and Mafia The first category is present in this volume with Swiss and (Latin) American documentaries like Martin Scorsese’s Italianamerican (1978) and Alexander Seiler’s Siamo italiani (The Italians Alexander J. Seiler, 1964), which are rarely considered in the context of emigration cinema. They give a central role to the collective memory of the Italian emigrant community in America or Switzerland, both in the scope of the family and the larger sphere, as the articles by Camille Gendrault and Sophie Rudolph show. However, contemporary movies like the Swiss-Italian-French production Azzurro (Denis Rabaglia, 2000) and the Argentine movie Un día de suerte (A Lucky Day Sandra Gugliotta, 2002), presented by Sophie Rudolph and Gudrun Rath, also place special emphasis on familismo as an Italian place of remembrance, in part they even use their title to depict Italy as a place of longing and crisis. Rabaglia and Gugliotta narrate the hopeful (work) migration to Latin America and Switzerland as well as the disappointment and nostalgia which in part will trigger a return to Italy for a later generation.5 Within this narrative of emigration and remigration, some auteur cinema directors combine the theme of the family with that of the mafia, the melodrama with the thriller. René Allio for example does this in Retour à Marseille (Return to Marseilles, 1980) in the character of the career businessman Michel (Raff Valone), who grows up in France in a family with Italian roots and who returns to Italy. Here, Marseille turns into a place where, upon his return to France, his business practices come to light and a breach with his family takes place. This link is especially dominant in B movies, films that strongly borrow from the genres of crime movies and thrillers. With a certain time lag, they respond to neorealist film in terms of cinema for wide audiences that juxtaposes the discourse of internal cultural tensions with a mainstream discourse that also reproduces complaisant clichés of Italy. These films narrate the emigration from Southern Italy towards France, Germany, or America more or less in passing. The focus resides mostly on the new life in the (North-)West beyond Italy. As Alberto Zambenedetti shows in his article, this is already the case for Rosi’s I magliari, which narrates the life of a group of people from Naples who live in Hanover and Hamburg. He uses the melodramatic-comical style of the Commedia all’italiana and its actors (Alberto Sordi, Renato Salvatori) but also has recourse to English and German ones (for example, Belinda Lee and Joseph Dahmen). Even more striking is the “criminalization” of the narrative of emigration in the sub-genre of the mafia movie starting in the

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1970s, often realized as commercial movies featuring a star cast—Francis Ford Coppola’s Hollywood movie The Godfather I–III (1972/74/90) starring Marlon Brando, Diane Keaton, and Al Pacino is a perfect example; or European co-productions like Jacques Deray’s Borsalino/ Borsalino et Cie (Borsalino and Co.) starring Alain Delon and Jean-Paul Belmondo (1970/74). Both directors place the Italo-American community on the scene under the sign of escalating crime and violence.

New Migrant Cinema: Road Movie and Melodrama In the 1990s, the Italian cinema finally turns to immigration as a theme. At first, productions are few and far between; among the first more widely received films are Pummarò (Tomato Michele Placido, 1990), Un’altra vita (Another Life Carlo Mazzacurati, 1992), and Gianni Amelio’s internationally successful production Lamerica (1994). Here one can already see the first signs of a cinema di impegno (cinéma engagé), which tries to take sides with immigration and at the same time, in order to reach a larger audience, harks back to the classic genre cinema as well as to Italian film history. Placido’s Pummarò is a paradigm for this in more than one sense:6 it shows—in a process reminiscent of road movies—the voyage of the Ghanaian medical graduate, Kwaku (Thywill Amenia), from Southern Italy to Germany. He embarks on a search for his brother, Giobbe, who went to Italy some time ago to look for work. Starting in Naples and the Campania region, where he does not find his brother but earns his keep as a tomato picker, finally rising up against the inhuman methods of the plantation owners, he stops at various stations, among them Rome and Verona. He learns that his brother was persecuted by the camorra and the police, and he finally ends up in Frankfurt, where he finds Giobbe dead. This film, presented in 1990 at the Cannes film festival as part of the series Un Certain Regard, can be regarded as part of the reaction of civil society to the killing of South African Jerry Masslo in Villa Literno in the Campania province of Caserta (Capussotti 2009, 62). In its criticism of racism, it is a classic Italian (migration) film, insofar as it devises a melodramatic cinéma engagé, like the early (emigration) films did, however without a big budget and a prominent cast, but to a great extent without questioning the binary concepts of Self and Other, of perpetrator and victim (O’Healy 2002, 234-235). It is also typical in its reminiscence of neorealism. With its treatment of motifs of hope and disappointment, it cites neorealist classics. Il cammino della speranza had already shifted the migratio all across Italy into the centre, as is clarified in the first article of this volume by Laura Rascaroli. Across several stations, from Sicily

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towards the North, the visual design of this film stages empty plazas and railway stations that become in-between spaces. The treatment of migration via a combination of road movie and melodrama is also performed by other early films of the New Italian Migrant Cinema, like Gianni Amelio’s successful production Lamerica (1994), Carlo Mazzacurati’s Il toro (The Bull, 1994) and Armando Manni’s Elvjs e Merilijn (Elvjs & Merilijn, 1998) (Rascaroli 2006, 150-160). Often, like Placido’s film, and in the style of a cinéma engagé, they deal with irregular migration—for example, the everyday life of Eastern European or African protagonists without any permit of residence in the “European fortress.” The “cinema of irregular migration” shifts the focus of interest to the ambivalence between the cinema as an audio-visual media, which seeks to draw attention to the precarious situation of the clandestini by means of images and just this precarious situation of the persons concerned, who as a result of their “illegal” status remain invisible (and invisibly exploited) both in the urban and the rural areas. Thus, they have to try to make a living by hiring themselves out as “neo-slaves” (Brown 2010, 19-21; Berger/Winkler 2012). In the sense of a “cinema of transvergence” (Higbee 2007), the aforementioned films often transform the relationship between centre and periphery by focusing on “marginal experiences.” Amelio’s film, which Veronica Pravadelli addresses in her article, makes this paradigmatically clear even in its title. Via its protagonist Spiro/Michele, it focuses on identity superimposition, such as the switch of national adherence due to experiences of migration and war or the recurrence of similar transformation processes in different countries and eras, shown by the cases in point: Albania, Italy, and America (O’Healy 2004; Duncan 2007). Amelio, too, harks back to the classics of post-war cinema, like Rossellini’s Paisà (Paisan, 1946) and Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948), by paralleling the Italian post-war era and the time after the downfall of the Communist regime in Albania, thus underscoring the ambivalence of liberation and occupation in the sense of an asynchronicity of the synchronicity of cultures. Towards the end of the 1990s, immigration becomes ever more present in Italian movie theatres, not least because of the reality of migration in Italy, but probably also because of the success of films like Pummarò and Lamerica. Time and time again, well-known filmmakers choose this topic within the scope of genre cinema as well as melodramatic cinema traditions. Prominent examples of big productions that were also screened outside of Italy are Bernardo Bertolucci’s L’assedio (Besieged, 1998), Marco Tullio Giordana’s Quando sei nato non puoi più nasconderti (Once You’re

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Born You Can No Longer Hide, 2005), and Giuseppe Tornatore’s La sconosciuta (The Unknown Woman, 2006). The success of the melodramatization of migration, as Jörg Metelmann’s article shows, is not least the result of the fact that the clear, affective structure of the melodramatic is particularly well suited to expounding upon the ethical implications of absolute, relative, and selfresponsible moralities. At the same time, today’s cinema of migration is more subject than genre; beside traditional narratives like those of illegality and crime, deracination and abscondence, the Italian cinema of migration takes on an increasingly wider spectrum of topics, layers, and spaces of the most diverse streams and realities of migratory life. Beside the melodrama, these narratives can be found in the road movie, the crime movie, and by now also in comedy. At the same time, there is an increasing hybridization of genres, so that we follow Jörg Schweinitz in assuming that genres are open, dynamic processes that are generated in a transnational, inter-medial, and generational exchange (Schweinitz 2002, 84; Altmann 2006, 49-68, 84). Nevertheless, playing with the genre or the audience’s genre expectations is a central feature.

Accented Cinema? In their introduction to European Cinema in Motion: Migrant and Diasporic Films in Contemporary Europe (2010, 12-49), Daniela Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg presented and discussed a great number of theoretical concepts of the international cinema of migration which in turn represent a reaction to the great number of contemporary productions. Below, we would like to address some concepts relevant for this volume and set out some further tendencies. One central approach in this context was developed by Hamid Naficy. He discusses the “accented cinema” for which the experience of migration or diaspora made by the director and/or the team is an important precondition, because this may lead to a “double consciousness” of the participants (Naficy 2001, 22). This “double consciousness” in turn can become the precondition for certain aesthetic procedures, for example, the staging of multilinguality. The concept of “accented cinema” tries to pay tribute to exiled film makers, but the classification of films via their directors’ biographies is also problematic in more than one sense. For one thing, the films thus get marked “collectively,” discounting individual aesthetics. Moreover, the films and their participants are once and for all ascribed as “peripheral” and thus “foreign” (Ruhe 2006, 34-36).

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When looking at the Italian cinema landscape, one can see that the “accented cinema” is still a rather small trend compared to other countries; this no doubt has to do with the comparatively short colonial and immigration history. In other words: the more widely received cinema of migration is produced predominantly by Italo-Italian film makers in the sense of a “cinema medio d’autore” that can be defined as “films of ‘good’ quality, produced on a reasonable budget and that can expect good to medium box office success” (Capussotti 2009, 57). With regards to “accented cinema,” apart from Ferzan Ozpetek, whose melodramas have made him one of the most established film makers in Italy, three directors should be mentioned: Maghreb-born Rachid Behnhadj (L’albero dei destini sospesi —The Tree of Hanging Destinies, 1997; El khoubz el hafi/Il pane nudo, 2005), Mohsen Melliti (Io l’altro—I, the Other, 2006), and the Ethiopiaborn US resident Haile Gerima (Adwa, 1999; Teza, 2008). In their films, alterity is a strong focal point, both thematically and aesthetically, but only a few films are dedicated to Italian migration or colonialism.7 The Italian directors Pablo Benedetti and Davide Sordeall are playing with exactly these biographical expectations from the audience and film criticism by giving their production Corazones de mujer (Women’s heart, 2008) a Spanish title and adopting a different-sounding pseudonym (Kiff Kossof). Still, it is an Italian production narrating the voyage of two protagonists living in Italy but indebted to Moroccan tradition. In the present volume, Rada Bieberstein’s article uses the example of Ferzan Ozpetek to show how problematic Nacify’s criteria are, among others, by showing the kind of difficulties that film criticism has in categorizing filmmakers with experiences of differentness. After all, Ozpetek does not so much narrate migration as the variety of everyday urban life in Rome, and does this in a melodramatic context.

Smaller productions It is precisely many smaller productions that practice a differentiated staging of the regionally and locally very diverse everyday existence of migration. Films like Vincenzo Marra’s Tornando a casa (Sailing Home, 2001), Giorgio Diritti’s Il vento fa il suo giro (The Wind Blows Round, 2005), or Vittorio Moroni’s Le ferie di Licu (Licu’s Hollidays, 2006) inscribe themselves into a concrete regional context, often in relatively short form and are characterized by a shooting practice that takes recourse to documentary procedures. The films are shot with handheld cameras, ideally outdoors, the pictures are not trimmed to high-gloss but show blurs and often only weak colour contrasts. Here, a realistic aesthetic is strength-

12

Introduction

ened, similarly to when it was reanimated in Europe, especially from the mid-1990s onwards by the Dogma group. In their soundtracks, such films often feature not only the dominant presence of everyday sounds, but also types of film music that strengthen regional traditions. In films such as Il cammino della speranza or Rocco e i suoi fratelli the otherness is hardly marked at all in terms of music or language, since the actors mostly talk in standard language, with an eye on economic interests and an (inter)national audience; however, everyday language and dialect are a hallmark of contemporary Italian cinema. In low-budget productions, lay actors often appear who speak their dialect or accent. Marra takes recourse to several members of the Naples family Iaccarino in his film, Moroni locates his film in an intercontinental context, and Diritti uses three languages for his film located in the Maira valley (province of Cuneo): Italian, French, and Occitan (Schrader 2012). All three films can be counted within “polyglot cinema” (Berger/ Komori 2010, 8) since they feature bi- and plurilingual dialogues, representing with their linguistic-cultural plurality a counterpoise to the smooth hegemonic aesthetics of Hollywood. These films are also similar in that they represent the cinema of the regions, which is very much present in Italy and which triggered a real film boom particularly in the south of the country: in regions such as Puglia, Campania, Sicily, and Sardinia (Wagner/Winkler 2010). In the sense of neo-neorealismo, they represent a cinema which draws regional cultures and differences more into the centre of interest, harking back to neorealist practices but also to documentary and/or melodramatic aesthetics. At the same time, the term neo-neorealismo is generally understood to denote a cinema which again increasingly addresses societal experiences of marginalized persons and political protest. Here, Brunetta refers to a young “realist” cinema which focuses on the dignity of the individual and the crisis-laden second Italian republic (from 1994) (Brunetta 1995, 392-397). Riccardo Guerrini, Giacomo Tagliani, and Francesco Zucconi, however, discuss a cinema— without using the term or referring to neorealism—which stages a “spaccato dell’esistenza quotidiana,” giving room to the country’s anxieties and latent tensions (Guerrini et al. 2009, 10). Yet, clear aesthetic and topographic differences also become apparent here. While Diritti and Marra strengthen the regional element within the scope of a mountain or fishing film in cinema history, Maroni transposes and exalts realistic procedures into a transnational context. Seventeenyear-old Licu, who has lived in Rome for eight years, has to go back to Bangladesh in order to follow his mother’s wish and marry an eighteenyear-old girl whom he does not know. Le ferie di Licu contrasts the

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bleakness of a Roman suburb where Licu lives with an exceedingly colourful Bangladesh. While Rome is depicted in an almost documentary style (which has led to the film being sometimes classified as a documenttary), Bangladesh has an exaggerated exotic flair, although local everyday life in Bangladesh is referred to and reinforced by the soundtrack (Feleschini Lerner 2010a). The documentary film also stages the variety of the regionally and locally diverse everyday life of migration and, in doing so, often takes recourse to the melodramatic and (neo-)realistic tradition of Italian cinema. Beside the aforementioned film L’orchestra di Piazza Vittorio, which conjures up multiculturalism with its melodramatic gesture, some other films have also gained wide attention, among them Vittorio De Seta’s film from the same year, Lettere dal Sahara (2006). The doyen of neorealistic documentary films chooses a completely different narrative and aesthetic method but shares the claim to authentic documentation by pathos with Agostino Ferrente. He does not portray in a collective’s but an individual’s fate; he takes the university graduate Assane (Djibril Kébé) and sketches his route from Lampedusa via Sicily all the way to Torino. This full-length documentary focuses on the experience of Assane as a representative of the new “subalterns” and successors of the dependent fishermen and peasants, for example, the “favorite figure” of the neorealists (Capussotti 2009, 63-66). The film almost completely dispenses with a visualization of the sea, as the spectacular, for example, and, similarly to some previously mentioned films, it chooses a multilingual staging (Italian and Wolof) which, however, is connected to a clear-cut, bipolar collectivist focus. Contextualizations via other film material and commentaries are avoided, as is the fact that the replication of the migration route is filmic and artificial. In both films, the audience should completely identify with the diegetic world.8 Especially during the past few years, the documentary film has experienced a new upsurge, thanks to new technological developments which have made shooting much less expensive as well as distancing it from “big” or traditional productions. An insight into this area of experimental Italian documentary film is provided by Francesca Esposito’s article that discusses technically-aesthetically innovative short films, such as those shot with a handheld camera. Esposito illustrates the continuity of the discourse of crisis and disappointment, especially with regard to the current internal tensions in Italy and to the political developments during the Berlusconi years. They have not only led to an increasing political and economic crisis but also to a massive (artistic and academic) emigration from Italy towards the US, Canada, and North-Western Europe.

14

Introduction

Not only in Italy, but also in Europe and America numerous short films have been made within the Italian communities during the past few years, films that treat the societal experiences of marginalization through less spectacular productions. The following are two cases in point that, in an analogy to Ferrente and De Seta, document the cultural memory of migration in a broad sense of the term by showing the examples of an individual and a collective, respectively. In their 100-minute-long Austrian-Italian documentary road movie Babooska (2005), the film team Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel accompanied this 20-year-old artist for one year. The film narrates, in the tradition of direct cinema, Babooska’s tours through Italy together with her family’s travelling circus because she lacks any other education or training. First and foremost, the circus here does not signify entertainment, but an everyday life at the edge of society and at the very brink of poverty. Almost simultaneously, Italo-Canadian film maker Paul Tana tried to document the collective memory of migration by citing the example of Montréal’s Little Italy. His 26-minute-long documentary film Ricordati di noi (Don’t forget about us, 2007) goes back to the archive of the first popular television programme Teledomenica, which was broadcast each Sunday in Italian between 1964 and 1994. Tana shows the efforts of the Cinémathèque québécoise to conserve the film material of the station and thus the media history of Italian emigrants.

(Gender) Perspectives Issues of rendering perspective and visual regime are central in such regionally located smaller productions, but they also dominate the genre cinema of established film makers. This often takes place in terms of an ethno-national cinema or a cinema of strengthening “ethnoscapes” (Torchin 2010, 56-73; Berghahn/Sternberg 2010, 27), for example, one that is defined by places where issues of socio-economic inequality are discussed with a focus on cultural diversity. A case in point is Carlo Mazzacurati’s appropriation of the “whodunit” in La giusta distanza (The Right Distance 2007). With the aim of discussing the relativity of the attribution of Self and Other, his film harks back to the decidedly stigmatizing tradition of the mafia movie. Films like La giusta distanza show, as Doris Pichler sets forth in her article, that this genre is particularly appropriate for tales of migration because it breaks through a very typical migration narrative. This film, which was awarded the Nastro d’argento in 2008, accomplishes this by playing with the “foreign” element on several levels of perception so that gaps are created time and again which are filled in by the viewers, depending on their perspective. The game of ambivalence, security, and

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insecurity is already ironically foreshadowed in the title with its question about the “right distance.” Turning the visual regime into an issue is also of central importance in the scope of innovative narrative techniques. As Alice Bardan and Áine O’Healy show, Carmine Amaroso’s Cover Boy: L’ultima rivoluzione (Cover Boy: The Last Revolution, 2006) stages a Romanian migrant and an unemployed person from the Abruzzi living together, both of them deracinated as foreigners and living in their respective precarious environments in Rome. The hegemonic masculinity is thwarted by their experience of migration as well as by their social inferiority or professsional failure. The film clarifies this, among other things, by its poly-local and polyglot structure. In doing so, the film broaches the issues of perspective and power structure: for example, through having the Romanian language dominate the first half of the film which was also shot in Romania. There, the film also finds its ending, thus breaking with the cyclical structure of classic narratives of the Italian cinema of migration such as those of victimization and disillusionment. The genre of the comedy film which in Italy only sparsely deals with the topic of migration, despite the tradition of the Commedia all’Italiana, is also being used in this way. In his article, Gaoheng Zhang presents Lezioni di cioccolato (Chocolate Lessons Claudio Cupellini, 2007), Questa notte è ancora nostra (This Night is Still Ours Paolo Genovese and Luca Miniero, 2008), and Into Paradiso (2010), three examples of this genre, and questions the (comic) potential of the digressions from normative constructions of masculinity. After all it appears predominantly to be “hegemonic masculinity” (Connell/Messerschmidt 2005) that seems jeopardized by migration. Linking cultural diversity with hegemonic masculinity, in other words the ideal of the middle-class, successful, heterosexual man, also takes place in Ozpetek’s early film Hamam—Il bagno turco (Hamam, 1997), questioning the heterosexual orientation of its protagonist in a “foreign” place. These examples clearly show that unsettling the Self and the Other is increasingly charged intersectionally in Italian cinema in that gender concepts and sexual orientation become topics. Despite Catholicism’s deep roots in Italy, which has for a long time hindered the development of a queer policy, there are more and more interesting productions which at the same time increasingly break away from the “national” narratives (such as family and machismo). The previously mentioned film Corazones de mujer does this in a particularly depressing way. Benedetti and Sordella “return” their protagonists, Zina (Ghizlane Waldi) and Shakira (Aziz Ahmeri), to Morocco. Zina lost her

16

Introduction

virginity but is still supposed to marry according to traditional norms. In order to “undo” her past sexual life, she goes to Morocco, accompanied by transsexual Shakira who is responsible for her wedding gown. So this film enacts a threefold transgression by not only crossing classic Italian topoi on a gender level but by crossing the continent at the same time and transcending “national” film aesthetics in the name of realism and melodrama, leaning towards trash and video aesthetics. Thus, the filmmakers broach the issue of a desire for strict borders in terms of topography, aesthetics, and sexuality all at once, as exemplified by using Italian and Arabic as languages in the film and by resorting to trashy aesthetics. A similarly hybrid film aesthetic is used by Roberta Torre, who throws any kind of realism overboard. As the article by Daniel Winkler shows, the Palermo-based film Sud Side Stori (South Side Story, 2000) crosses perspectives, starting with the plot of Romeo and Juliet and combining it with home video and trash aesthetics, documentary sequences, and musical tributes. The film, shot in the dialect of Naples, thus satirically narrates the “African invasion” of Palermo, broaching the issue of racism in Italy in an innovative way and distancing itself from the style and morals of the classic cinéma engagé. As different as the last mentioned films are, they still allow this conclusion: they all imply, in the sense of “transnational narratives,” a “hybridity of aesthetics, settings, acting and languages” (Berger/Komori 2010, 8), thus representing a cinema which not only differs from mainstream cinema in its aesthetics and production, but which also embarks on experimental paths. In the sense of Sandra Ponzanesi’s concept of an “outlandish cinema,” issues of perspective and power are drawn into the centre of attention, with the aim of showing a different Italy away from stereotypes of cinema history (Ponzanesi 2005, 270).

Glocalization and National Cinema Studies on transnational European cinema have been correct in pointing out that cinema in an age of globalization—maybe somewhat less than literature or graphic art—cannot be conceived from an exclusively national point of view (Ezra/Rowden 2006; Jahn-Sudmann 2009). With reference to European cinema, Elsaesser discusses a post-national, new “cinema of double occupancy” characterized by “hyphenated identities” and the conflicts brought about by multiple affiliations (Elsaesser 2009b, 32-33). Moreover, what can be observed in Italian cinema as well is “glocalization,” which in terms of economics, politics, and culture

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connects global (often hegemonic US-American) processes with national or regional traditions (Robertson 1995). So global film topics and aesthetics receive national or regional localization; at the same time, many films clearly show that a contemporary cultural and cinematographic history from the perspective of migration not only needs to transcend the boundaries of the national, but also of the European. The films analyzed here make it apparent once again that we cannot disregard national attributions when problematizing identity constructions; the former are always tricky and hence have to be raised as issues. Many films, from Il cammino della speranza through to Into Paradiso, already question the attributions of italianità and the Other through their staging of open and closed spaces alone. To phrase it with all due caution: in terms of aesthetics and content, certain procedures tend to crystallize what could be termed characteristics of the “Italian” film, which are the further writing, continued writing, and thus different writing of national film traditions in the name of transnational issues. For many filmmakers of the youngest generation, it is valid to state that—after the economic and political crisis of the Italian auteur cinema in the 1980s—the films made during the postwar decades serve as models for orientation both in terms of aesthetics and content. This serves to explain the frequent intra-medial recourses to neorealistic procedures in order to lend authenticity to what is narrated, or the many variations of the melodramatic. These are tendencies that may be observed in other European countries as well, such as France, Spain, Switzerland, or Austria,9 but which certainly have a particular characteristic occurrence in the Nouvo Cinema Italia (Wagner/Winkler 2010, 12). The Cinemas of Italian Migration places itself in a series of studies about film and migration and, in doing so, focuses on Italian migration, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, complements the perspective of film aesthetics by a perspective of cultural science. In this way, regions as well as genres and filmmakers that have often been neglected are given a voice. We hope that this contribution may serve as a stimulus for further research on Italian cinema in a trans-local and transcontinental perspective. The English translations of the original quotations are in the endnote; they are translated by the contributors unless otherwise noted. Translated from German by Ludwig Fiebig.

18

Introduction

Notes 1

Istituto nazionale della statistica. URL: http://www.istat.it/it/archivio/39726 (accessed on May 22, 2012). 2 The discussion about these new realities of life first takes place in literature in Italy during the 1990s. Authors like Salah Methnani, Pap Khouma, Mohamed Bouchane, and Garane Garane published texts that often have an autobiographical character, telling about the migration experience of the so-called boat people and often characterized by literary multi-linguality (Gnisci 2006). The journalist Fabrizio Gatti created attention all across Europe when he disguised himself as the irregular Kurdish-Iraqi migrant Bilal, experienced for himself the inhuman living conditions of the clandestini, and documented them (Gatti 2010). 3 In US-American movies, like D. W. Griffith’s The Italian Barber (1911), it is initially the comic presentation of Italians, e.g. as Latin Lovers, that characterizes the Italo-American film. In the US-American production The Italian (Reginald Barker, 1915), however, the New York struggle for survival of a former Venetian gondoliere and his family is narrated for the first time as a melodrama. An Italian exception is the silent movie Napoli che canta (Roberto Leone Roberti, 1926), which presents migration as absence, as a gap. Time and again, the viewers see fragmentary scenes from the everyday life back in Naples, scenes of happiness as well as those of poverty and departure. Migration here turns into the precondition for the nostalgic remembrance of times past (Illger 2009, 21). 4 Pietro Germi appears as an actor here. 5 The narrative of return is not only found in movies but also in recent documenttaries like Merica by Federico Ferrone, Michele Manzolini, and Francesco Ragazzi (2007), who—via the example of migrants in Brazil—use the title (similar to Gianni Amelio’s famous film shot in Albania) to ironically allude to the “American Dream” which has been dreamt. 6 This is Placido’s first work as a movie director and is based on a script written together with Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli. 7 In part, her films are European-American (co-)productions that sometimes also take recourse to Italian co-authors or international movie stars (Parati 2005, 108– 134). 8 The documentary Miss Little China (Riccardo Cremona/Vincenzo De Cecco, 2009) also shows traits of the direct cinema in that the camera accompanies the everyday life of the girls living in the Chinese community, who by participating in the Miss Italia beauty pageant hope to liberate themselves from poverty. Miss Little China—beside the movie China Girl (Abel Ferrara 1987)—belongs to the few productions that give a voice to Chinese migrants. 9 See for example, the dedicated issue “Cinéma régional, cinéma national” from the series Cahiers de la Cinémathèque. Revue d’histoire du cinéma (79, 2010).

THE SOUTHERN QUESTION AND ITALIAN CINEMA

SOLID BORDERS, FLUID NATION: ON PIETRO GERMI’S IL CAMMINO DELLA SPERANZA (1950)1 LAURA RASCAROLI

The title of the 1950 film by Pietro Germi, Il cammino della speranza (The Road to Hope), is a popular locution used to describe extremely long, laborious and demanding feats.2 The title is, of course, a metaphor for emigration in general but may also be seen as a reference to the slow and difficult forward movement of the entire Italian nation, a movement shaped by the hope for a better and fairer society. The double focus of the film on emigration and on national progress indicates two elements of interest. First, Germi’s film is about nation and national identity as much as it is about the illegal emigration towards France and other European countries around 1950. Second, the film ultimately argues that the state of evolution of a nation is mirrored and measured by its capacity to deal with the migrant, whether internal or external, national or international. While most films about emigration point to questions of identity—personal, local, and national—Germi’s film is especially poignant because it couples its reflection on such themes with an examination of ideas of nation building in the post-war era, as well as the role played by neorealist cinema in that same process. Placed as it is at the end of a decade marked by the war, by the end of Fascism, and by the most glorious and productive phase of neorealism, Il cammino della speranza offers a snapshot of Italy in 1950. Additionally, the film displays the marked ambition of reflecting back on the past decade and producing an assessment of the outcome of the Resistenza and the hopes of the early post-war era. Written by Federico Fellini and Tullio Pinelli, Germi’s fourth feature was produced by Lux—the only producer that in the post-war years attempted an industrial programming of the neorealist current (Sesti 1997, 47). Initially considered by critics as one of the finest neorealist films, Il cammino della speranza is no longer central to the canon. It is important to note that the film, which Germi initially intended to title Terroni,3 was deprived of government financial funding, “[Fondi] che fino ad allora non

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On Pietro Germi’s Il cammino della speranza (1950)

erano mai stati negati, nemmeno al più infimo dei film” (Giacovelli 1997, 34).4 The funds were finally assigned only after the exclusion of some sequences portraying the police in a negative light. This suggests that the film was considered by the institutions as antagonistic and damaging. However, its perceived threat did not necessarily reside in the unfavourable light in which it placed the Italian police but rather in its alarming and perturbing portrayal of an irreconcilably diverse and divided nation, which the film represented as fluid and foreign. The goal of this essay is to demonstrate that the Italy in Germi’s film, as seen through the eyes of its migrant protagonists, is ultimately presented as an interstice, as an inbetween, and as an unfinished nation. Il cammino della speranza’s ambition to pass judgement on the previous five years of the Italian political settlement, social order, and cinematic history is suggested by its choice to cover almost exactly the same territory as Roberto Rossellini’s seminal masterpiece, Paisà (Paisan, 1946). The film took it upon itself to tell the story not only of what had happened, but also of what had happened to everybody, to every region, to every Italian, and performed the first post-Fascist mapping of the country in 1946. While the narrative pretext of Paisà’s exploration of the entire national territory, from Sicily to the Po River Valley, is the northbound march of the Allies, in Il cammino della speranza, it is the illegal emigration of a group of Sicilian miners, travelling from their village to the border between Piemont and France.5 However, it would be wrong to compare Germi’s and Rossellini’s works without mentioning a third film which, in 1948, had already taken issue with Paisà and, in particular, with its portrayal of Italy, region by region, through the adoption of a similarly episodic narrative structure: Pietro Francisci’s Natale al Campo 119 (Christmas at Camp 119, 1947). Before comparing Francisci’s and Rossellini’s films, it should be mentioned that Cesare Zavattini was also planning a film in episodes encompassing the entire nation in 1950-51, Italia mia (My Italy), which was, however, never made (see Zavattini 1959, 122-45). The sheer number of such national films and film projects that emerged within five years of the end of the war suggests a potent need not only to discover Italy after twenty years of Fascist propaganda but also to convey certain ideas of the nation. Released in 1946 and 1947 respectively, Paisà and Natale al Campo 119 (a canonical neorealist film the former, a generic product the latter), even though temporally contiguous, are the outcome of two distinct historical moments. A war drama, Paisà still reflects the opening generated by the end of Fascism. A war comedy, Natale al Campo 119 mirrors the restoration of old powers, marked by such events as the Togliatti

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amnesty of July 22, 1946, the reopening of Cinecittà in November 1947, and the general election of April 18, 1948. While stylistically very different and endorsing distinct ideologies, the two films arguably share the same agenda of remapping the nation after Fascism. In his study of the motif of travel in Italian cinema from 1945 to 1965, Mirco Melanco claimed that in Paisà the Italian territory is presented in its maximum extension, but distances appear to be much reduced, thanks to the sense of solidarity, unity and cohesion which emerged as a force against the spreading of violence, injustice and barbarism. (Melanco 1996, 219)

This essay claims the opposite. In contrast with the Fascist mapping of a united, functional, wealthy, modern, industrialized, and homogenous Italy, Paisà chooses to emphasize fragmentation, division, and linguistic and cultural misapprehension. There is little need to retell the plot to substantiate this claim, as no character travels from episode to episode, from region to region. Most characters are at a loss in an utterly incomprehensible landscape, made unreadable by the massive ruination, the collapse of societal and power structures, and the fragmentation of the national territory caused by the war and the presence of foreign armies. Indeed, most episodes foreground the impossible negotiation of an unknowable landscape: Carmela cannot traverse the mined beach to search for her missing relatives; Fred is unable to locate Francesca in Rome; Harriet crosses into the occupied side of Florence at great risk but cannot be reunited with Lupo; and partisans and civilians are unable to hide from the Nazis in the Po River marshes. While the characters are trapped in their regions and episodes, only in the linking sequences, which adopt the omniscient style of the newsreel, is the film capable of transcending the painful unknowability of the local. Thus it offers a tragic overview of the country as a mosaic of human suffering in the face of the indifference of history. Paisà’s ideological mapping of the nation emerges in the interface between the gaze of an imminent narrator, who observes local situations through the eyes of characters-seers, and the voiceover and gaze-from-above of an allknowing and detached enunciator-historian. This enunciator-historian is not neutral but adopts the rhetorical tropes, narrative style, and timbre of voice typical of the newsreel—for years associated by the audience with the regime and then with the new powers. Through the stratagem of visualizing the memories of a group of Italian war prisoners in California, Natale al Campo 119 charts the peninsula focusing, like Paisà, on a number of key cities (Rome, Naples,

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On Pietro Germi’s Il cammino della speranza (1950)

Florence, Milan, and Venice) and regions (Sicily).6 The prisoners come from and represent all these places; the variety of dialects and accents is greatly emphasized, as well as the fact that the Italy that awaits them, three years after the war, is a new country, subjected to foreign influences. The historical question of the distance and contrast between North and South and between regional or even local identities and a new Italian identity are overtly if simplistically presented and resolved. For instance, in his final speech before the soldiers’ return home, a priest intimates that the shared wartime suffering should now unite Italians. Natale al Campo 119 reveals post-war Italy’s simultaneous anxiety about and need for national reconciliation, cross-regional solidarity, and cosmopolitan openings. The film evokes emotionalism and national pride, and its image of the Italian landscape is consistent with a tourist brochure. The visualization of the soldiers’ memories provide highly conventional regional representations with an emphasis on architectonic and artistic landmarks, in stark contrast with the neorealist canon, which mostly shuns well-known sights and favours novel, disquieting visions of Italian cities and landscapes. Regional difference is praised as cultural richness and is composed in the vision of a united, popular, apolitical Italy ready to start anew. Natale al Campo 119 promotes the optimistic image of a country of untouched cultural and artistic heritage and resources, something achievable only by resorting to (nostalgic) images of the past and by foreclosing the representation of the war.7 Oppositely, Paisà shows the conflict inside the cities, the ruination and death, the division of the country, and suggests that the positive view of a unification generated by common suffering is the discourse of authority, rather than the people’s reality. When comparing the Italy of Il cammino della speranza with that in Paisà and in Natale al Campo 119, the liminality of the nation depicted in Germi’s film becomes immediately and pronouncedly apparent. Consistently with many canonical neorealist films, and indeed even more radically, Germi cast his camera’s eye on an exceptionally marginal landscape. The roadside Italy seen by the migrants in his film from the windows of an old bus or train or from the back of a truck travelling along country roads contrasts sharply with Natale al Campo 119’s tourist brochure. Germi’s film shuns tourist images of the country; no emphasis is ever placed on famous landmarks. Germi even introduces an episode to clarify his position vis-à-vis cinematic tourism: When in Rome’s train station with five hours at their disposal, three emigrants ask Ciccio, the deceitful guide who will run away with the migrants’ money, whether they could wander off into the city to visit the Altare della Pace. Ciccio’s prompt and vigorous rebuff highlights the absurdity of their wish.

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The difference with Paisà is also significant. In Rossellini’s film, the landmarks, though defamiliarized by the war raging around them, are not absent. They include the Sicilian temples, the Coliseum, and Piazza della Signoria. Germi’s Italy is liminal, provincial, archaic, and devoid of familiar sights. Thus, the only national landmark that appears, St. Peter’s Basilica, is extremely significant. Its dome does not dominate the Roman skyline as in the final shot of Roma città aperta (Rome Open City Roberto Rossellini, 1945). Instead it is seen fleetingly from marginal places: from the train running at the periphery of Rome and then from the yard of a working-class trattoria. In the first instance, the dome becomes the signifier of the protagonists’ incongruous and absurd aspiration of being tourists in the capital of both spiritual and secular powers (absurd because, as we will see, they have no rights, neither as travellers nor as citizens). In the second sequence, the dome functions as a reminder of the Christian humanism proposed by Rossellini’s neorealist cinema as a solution to the barbarism of the war and to the lack of national unity. It appears, in fact, in the background of a scene in which the protagonist Saro, played by Raf Vallone, pleads with his fellow travellers not to treat the lost girl, Barbara, like an animal but to demonstrate solidarity and accept her as a rightful member of the community. Thus, it is a reminder of the betrayed hopes of the immediate post-war era and of early neorealist cinema.8 Marc Augé has noted that the social space bristles with monuments—imposing stone buildings, discreet mud shrines—which may not be directly functional but give every individual the justified feeling that, for the most part, they pre-existed him and will survive him. (Augé 1995, 60)

As a function of place, identity is formed by traversing one’s home-place while assimilating all the signs (including monuments and landmarks) that designate the site of social order as the common place. When travelling, a person looks for landmarks precisely in order to find him/herself at home and counteract the disorientation endangering his/her sense of identity. Even more radically than Rossellini, Germi sent his characters travelling through an Italy devoid of familiar sights, thus problematizing the idea of national identity and producing an effect diametrically opposite to the one sought by Natale al Campo 119. Not unlike Augé’s nonplaces of supermodernity, which include motorways, airports, malls, and supermarkets, which are reduced to mere billboards in the traveller’s experience, here cities and towns are signified by a sign in a train station or by a caption superimposed on the images. Instead, the film lingers on the anonymous interiors of vehicles (coaches, train carriages, trucks, etc.)

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On Pietro Germi’s Il cammino della speranza (1950)

or on places of transit and liminal zones (a port, train stations, the areas surrounding the railway, a farmyard, a frontier, etc.). Rather than emphasizing the sites privileged by mainstream discourses on the nation, like those of Fascism and of the tourist industry, Germi’s film shows an underdeveloped, pre-modern Italy of non-places. Thus, the filmmaker’s antithetical ideological position that could explain the government’s hostility towards the film is revealed. Germi’s Italy is one in between the urban and the rural, frequently composed of edgelands, of borders and interzones. At the representational level, the film privileges the cross-regional voyage form typical of neorealist cinema. In Paisà, the Allies’ northbound march was described as lengthy, difficult, and slow. Il cammino della speranza’s journey is also impressively long, dangerous, expensive, and physically demanding. Distances are vast: it takes the migrants two days and one night to reach Rome, first by an old coach, then by ferry and, finally, by train. When in the capital city, they must wait five hours for a connection that will take them northwards. They finally travel instead by truck. When in Emilia, the driver leaves them on the roadside and directs them to a train station 20 km away—a four-hour walk. Distances are significant even between nearby localities. When Saro’s daughter is hurt during a clash with the local workers, Barbara must walk a long way to the nearest town to call a doctor. The final leg of the journey by train to the Alps is compressed, as only the last stage is shown. However, the change of landscape is so dramatic that it again signifies great distance. The journey’s difficulties reflect the deficiency of the country’s infrastructure, still severely challenged five years after the end of the war. They also signify deep fragmentation, division, and lack of freedom to move and travel for Italian citizens—although it is even problematic to define the protagonists as such. Paisà questioned the gaze of both Italians and foreigners on Italy and drew attention to regional differences and division. It definitely queried the meaning of nation, although never casting a doubt on its “Italianness.” Paisà’s project was that of mapping the country at the time of its struggle to emerge from Nazi-Fascism—a divided, occupied, torn nation in the process of fighting for its geographical and political existence. While affectionately highlighting regional differences and rivalries, Natale al Campo 119 never once seriously challenges the idea of the characters’ belonging to a national community. Quite the opposite, Germi presents the journey across Italy as international travelling. Taking off from a shockingly archaic and deprived Sicily, the emigrants’ trip is, quite literally, a going abroad.

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Their guide, Ciccio, admonishes the travellers to entrust themselves to him, as places, people, and roads are radically unfamiliar to them. The characters’ disorientation is a recurring trope, surfacing in dialogues, in the lost, searching gazes of the emigrants, and in entire episodes, such as when one of the Sicilian women gets lost in Rome. When meeting the locals in Emilia, it is surely significant that the protagonists identify themselves as foresti, strangers, and not as paisà, compatriots. Italians from different regions are complete strangers to one another, as the encounter with the hired hands from northern Bergamo shows. Thus in between Paisà and Il cammino della speranza, Italians went from being compatriots to strangers; this is certainly on account of the fact that, by the time Germi made his film, “le speranze del dopoguerra sembravano essersi rivelate un breve intermezzo prima di rientrare tutti di nuovo nel tunnel buio di un conflitto permanente ed eterno” (Sesti 1997, 66).9 I have already highlighted how landscape in Germi’s film is characterrized as liminal and interstitial. In his sociological work on interstices in everyday life, Giovanni Gasparini (1998; 2007) describes travel as an interstitial phenomenon because it is a spatial and temporal in-between. Gasparini also reminds us that the etymology of “interstice” is oxymoronic, wherein “inter-” does not mean stable and well defined but fluid and movable. Meanwhile “-stitium,” meaning to stay, indicates permanence and solidity. From this perspective, the journey is in between solidity and fluidity: for example, the solidity of a point of departure and the fluidity and mobility of the space of the journey itself. This is certainly the case for the journey of migration in Germi’s film. The migrants leave behind the solidity of their native village: solidity that is found in the cohesion of the local community, in the sense of the eternity of the rural Sicilian landscape, and even in the ground in whose depths the miners work. The rest of the journey is dominated by fluidity, liminality, and impermanence. It could also be argued that the film itself is formally and generically liminal because it is divided between the solidity of established cinematic traditions (the formalism of Soviet cinema, seen in some frames and in shots of peasants; the many references to neorealist films; the borrowing of generic codes from melodrama and even from the western, as in the knife duel on the mountain) and its exploration of more unstable, open-ended and amorphous forms (the exploratory road movie). Gasparini argues that interstitial experiences are characterized by the metaphor of the limen (2007, 4). Indeed, many are the limens in Germi’s film, two of which are particularly notable, whereby solidarity prevails over hostility and antagonism. One is the yard of the Emilia farm, a place of work during the day and relaxation and gathering at night. Here, with

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On Pietro Germi’s Il cammino della speranza (1950)

the complicity of night, the Bergamo peasants and the Sicilian miners share a decent meal and a dance, in one of the rare moments of relief and even joy in the film. The second is the border between Italy and France, along which the French police and the illegal emigrants meet, scrutinize each other for long instants, and finally go their separate ways exchanging a salute from the distance. Thus, limens and borders not only separate and confine, but they may also allow for exceptional moments of solidarity, which defy the prevalent socioeconomic logic. This utopian undercurrent ultimately shapes the film’s overall postFascist and post-neorealist remapping of Italy. Despite his predominantly negative portrayal of a vast, diverse, and disconnected national territory, Germi still chose to enclose its space within the borders of his film, thus making the nation possible. Furthermore at the end of the film, the director’s voiceover emerges to convey to the audience a particular understanding of questions of mapping as well as an ideological reading of the film. From the white, snow-covered frontier, the director’s voiceover invites the audience to turn and mentally contemplate the white Sicilian village. In such a manner, the voiceover minimizes regional diversity and distance and ideally connects the far north and the far south, casting an all-embracing gaze on the national territory. It is also significant that Il cammino della speranza is not a fragmentary film in episodes like Paisà and Natale al Campo 119. The same characters as a group, a community, succeed in crossing the whole national territory, from region to region and indeed moving beyond it. Three years earlier, Rossellini also had chosen to embrace the nation within the limits of his film. However, as Angelo Restivo has observed, “Rossellini ends his film not on ‘solid’ images but on the fluidity of the sea” (Restivo 2002, 30). The indeterminacy itself of the Po River’s foggy marshes subverts “any notion of an articulable national boundary” (33). The discourse of authority is introduced in Paisà by the voiceover of an enunciator-historian observing the events from above and announcing the impending positive outcome of the war’s end. This was undermined by the close-up of the partisans’ horrific death in the water, in the here-andnow of a story abruptly left without retribution and without closure. Thus, Paisà allowed its ideological statement to surface from the fluidity and openness of a missing boundary (of the film and of the nation). Il cammino della speranza ends, instead, on a rock-hard mountain and on an official frontier. Thus, it maps Italy as a nation and, more precisely, as a working-class nation, whose unity and success ultimately depend on its people’s ability to overcome divisions and express human solidarity as the voiceover suggests. Such unambiguous enunciation of a generic

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populist ideology contradicts the film’s drive toward the exploration of a historical reality and its specific critique of post-Fascist Italian society’s treatment of subordinate classes. However, in between the two solid borders at the start and end of the film, the nation that the film shows is far from being rock hard. With their itinerary presence, their searching gazes, and their status as foresti without rights as emigrants or citizens, the travellers, in fact, highlights precisely the shapelessness and interstitiality of the nation. Germi’s 1950 Italy is a country in deep turmoil, whose great contradictions have not yet been resolved and in which a few signs of modernization coexist with exceptionally archaic realities. It is a stifling bureaucracy and police state, whose laws criminalize the poor and allow the exploiter to go unpunished. Most importantly, it is a vast, disconnected, diverse, and unrecognisable territory, which does not belong to its citizens and is not yet a nation. Italy, in Germi’s film, is an “interstitium.” Contained in between the solidity of two borders, it is impermanence of abode, perturbing and dangerous foreignness, and instability of identities.

Notes 1

A version of this essay was published as “Remapping the Neorealist Nation: ‘Il cammino della speranza’ and the Rhetorics of the Road to Realism.” In Italian Studies vol. 65, no. 3 (2010): 345-360. Accessed May 21, 2012. http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/maney/its/2010/00000065/00000003/art00004. 2 The film’s title was chosen by Sandro Rinaudo for his recent book on the history of Italian illegal emigration (2009), thus suggesting the continued centrality of Germi’s film to an understanding of Italy as a nation of emigrants. 3 Terrone (farmer) is a disparaging epithet for Southerner, used in derogatory terms since the 1960s as a result of the massive internal migrations of the economic boom (1958-1963). 4 “[Funds] which up to then had never been denied, not even to the most unworthy film.” 5 Capodarso, Sicily. In the wake of a failed attempt at averting the closure of the local sulphur mine, Ciccio (Saro Urzì) offers to escort the miners and their families to France. Saro (Raf Vallone), a widower with three young children, accepts the offer, along with other villagers, including Barbara (Elena Varzi) and her estranged, outlaw lover, Vanni (Franco Navarra). The journey takes them to Messina, Naples, and Rome, where Ciccio elopes with the emigrants’ money. The villagers, bar Vanni who escapes, are arrested. The travellers, who risk a charge of illegal expatriation, are given exportation orders but many decide to continue their journey. Once in Emilia, they accept seasonal work, thus provoking the hostility of striking workers. During a violent clash, Saro’s daughter is hurt; Saro and Barbara stay to attend to her, while the others set off towards the Alps. Here, Vanni

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On Pietro Germi’s Il cammino della speranza (1950)

reappears and joins the group, but at Saro and Barbara’s arrival, the tension explodes. Vanni and Saro duel by knife; Vanni is killed. After crossing the mountain in a snowstorm, the group are intercepted by French border police, who take pity on them and decide to let them through. 6 The effect is reinforced aurally by the records of popular regional songs donated to the prisoners by an Italophile American officer. The records are collected in a bound volume significantly titled “Italy.” 7 In the Florentine episode, for instance, the war is an ellipsis in the story signified by a shadow passing over the closed doors of the Uffizi, in stark contrast to Paisà, which lingers with tangible anguish on the Nazis patrolling Piazza della Signoria. 8 Among the several references to neorealist films, the one to Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves Vittorio De Sica, 1948) stands out: I refer to the moment when, after leaving the Police headquarters in Rome, out of despair Saro makes the decision to break the law and destroys the exportation order, under the eyes of his young child—a gesture which equals Antonioni’s theft of the bike in De Sica’s film. The scene takes place against the backdrop of a row of billboards, a clear reminder of Antonio’s job and troubles. 9 “The hopes of the immediate post-war now seemed just a brief interval before entering again the dark tunnel of a permanent and eternal conflict.”

IDENTITY, MASCULINITY, AND POSTCOLONIAL SCENARIOS IN GIANNI AMELIO’S LAMERICA (1994) VERONICA PRAVADELLI

Lamerica (1994) is a paradigmatic example of a certain genre of European film in which social themes accompany strong narratives and a spectacular style.1 This style is often grounded in “classical” narrative rhythm and wide, sweeping camera movements. Moreover, one can discern a clear similarity in approach and intent in films like La promesse (The Promise, 1996) by the Dardenne brothers or more recently, La graine et le mulet (The Secret of the Grain, 2007) by Abdellatif Kechiche. As in Lamerica, these two films deal with immigration and national identity in an “endearing” filmic form that simultaneously produces pleasure and thought, or emotional involvement and intellectual reflection. Along these lines, the discursive framework I will use to analyze Lamerica can also be extended to other works of contemporary European cinema. Set and shot in Albania, Lamerica tells the story of two Italians who try to start a shoe business in the former Italian colony, while throngs of Albanians flood the port of Durazzo in hopes of leaving their country for Italy. The film’s strength lies in its ability to fuse subjective psychic dynamics and historical processes. As such, Lamerica is both a representtation of postcolonial relations between Italy and Albania and a discourse on the formation of (male) national identity in a global setting. Thus, my analysis will begin with some theoretical reflections on the work of Frantz Fanon and the relation between the colonized and colonizer. Considering the gaze’s articulation and relation between spaces and subjects, I would like to show how the film realizes “the dream of the inversion of roles” (Bhabha 1994, 63) and sustains an anti-essentialist idea of national identity. In fact, through the figure of the migrant, Lamerica seems to propose a dissolution of the idea of national identity itself. The film begins as Gino (Enrico Lo Verso) and Fiore (Michele Placido) arrive in Durazzo to open a shoe business with funding from the Italian government. The real plan, however, is to pocket the money

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without ever opening the factory. Fiore and Gino’s father have already executed this kind of venture before. To do so, they need an Albanian middleman to act as “president” of the company. To this end, they choose an elderly man named Spiro Tozaj who has recently been freed from incarceration and forced labour. They temporarily leave him in the care of some nuns at an orphanage, but Spiro escapes before they return. However as Gino sets out to look for him, the film’s narrative trajectory drastically changes course. Gino is no longer the rich Italian, keeping his business and his money to himself. Instead, his search for Spiro forcibly brings Gino into contact with the reality of poverty and with Albanians’ desire to leave their country in order to improve their living conditions. His voyage is comprised of a series of encounters with the Other, or between the Italian Self and the Albanian Other. The journey will dramatically change the relationships between characters. Gino’s first discovery is that Spiro is not really an Albanian but an Italian named Michele. Lamerica’s postcolonial discourse revolves around these transformations and reversals of the relation between Self and Other. The film’s strength lies in having created a short circuit between a theoretical discourse on identity/postcolonial relations and their formal representation. The central point of contact between the theoretical discourse and the film’s mise en scène lies in the gaze, which carries with it determinate configurations of inter-subjectivity while exploring the dynamics between subjects and space. Frantz Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks, 1952) examines both the process of formation of the colonized-self and the relationship between colonizer and colonized. He argues that the black man is not rendered subaltern by the colour of his skin but by the colonial relationship itself. As such, Fanon’s work can be used to analyze almost any colonial or postcolonial dynamic. Indeed for this reason, Black Skin, White Masks stands alongside Said’s Orientalism (1978) as a foundational text in postcolonial studies. We should also remember that Fanon takes up Hegel’s reflection on the “master–slave dialectic” which is uninfluenced by any discourse on race. In particular, Fanon works with the concepts of identification and alterity or Otherness by situating himself within a major Western philosophical tradition. His thought is inspired not only by Hegel but also by Freud, Sartre, and Lacan, to name just the most important thinkers. It is by retooling such a tradition that Fanon is able to devise a definition of the colonized male subject’s psychic dynamics and to imagine the possibility of his “emancipation.” According to Fanon, socio-economic and psychic processes converge in the “colonial situation” in such a way that the colonized feels inferior

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and the colonizer superior. This is a specific version of the relation between Self and Other because the Other, as colonizer, is also the master: In this scenario, the colonized man “has two dimensions; one with his fellows, the other with the white man” (Fanon 1967, 17). For Fanon, such a condition elicits a specific psychic process as the colonized identifies with his colonizer. First and foremost, such an attitude implies acquisition of the master’s language and the refusal of one’s own: “the Negro of the Antilles will be proportionately whiter—that is, he will come closer to being a real human being—in direct ratio to his mastery of the French language” (Fanon 1967, 18). However, this dynamic of subordination is also evinced visually as the black colonized man is gazed upon and objectified by his white male colonizer. Indeed, Fanon recalls his own cultivation through the gaze of the Other: “Dirty nigger!” Or simply, “Look, a Negro!” I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things […] and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects […] But just as I reached the other side, I stumbled, and the movements, the attitudes, the glances of the other fixed me there, in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye. I was indignant; I demanded an explanation. Nothing happened. I burst apart. Now the fragments have been put together again by another self. (Fanon 1967, 109)

Thanks to specific techniques of mise en scène, the visual device of colonial narrative can be cultivated in Lamerica with absolute strength and efficacy. Identification is an ordinary, almost banal process of compensation for the loss of love objects. For Lacan, it is not about incorporation of the lost object into the Self as much as its image.2 Moreover, identification is the psychic mechanism that produces self-recognition: it structures the relation between the Self and the Other as a game of similarities and differences. In other words, the Self is shaped by a series of continual identifications with the Other. This is not the case for the black man engaged in a colonial relationship because as the white man puts himself in a transcendental position, he really becomes his own Other. As Diana Fuss argues, for Fanon the white man’s identity does not depend “upon the sign ‘Black’ for its symbolic constitution. In contrast, ‘Black’ functions, within a racist discourse, always diacritically, as the negative term in a Hegelian dialectic continuously incorporated and negated.” Fanon moves beyond this impasse with the notion of “mutual identification” or “reciprocal recognition” in a manner inspired by Hegel and Sartre (Fuss 1995, 144). In particular,

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Fanon draws on the famous chapter “Lordship and Bondage” from Phenomenology of the Spirit and discusses it at length. He affirms: […] “they recognize themselves as mutually recognizing each other.” (Fanon 1967, 217)

The internal dynamics of Lamerica develop precisely in these terms. In the film’s introductory episode, a 1939 Luce propaganda film recounts the Italian army’s arrival in Albania and sets up an opposition between civility and primitivism in classic colonial terms. The voice-over narrates: “per merito dell’Italia in Albania entra la civiltà […] l’Italia è la salvezza dell’Albania, la farà uscire dalla sua arretratezza.”3 Lamerica’s opening episodes immediately evince several key traits of Fanon’s argument. “Space operates as one of the chief signifiers of racial difference here: under colonial rule, freedom of movement (psychical and social) becomes a white prerogative” while the black man is forced to occupy “the static ontological space of the timeless ‘primitive’” (Fuss 1995, 143). In Lamerica, the two Italians enjoy ample freedom of movement, thanks to the help of their Albanian mediator. In their jeep they sit in a position of privilege, and control the surrounding space with a cold detached attitude. Looking off into the distance, they act as if they possess all that they see. Clearly, this attitude was underwritten by the colonizer’s real economic power in the colonial situation. Here it is ironic that Gino and Fiore do not actually have any money but only behave as if they do. This is the structure for all Italian-Albanian encounters in the first part of the film. The viewer always sees the Albanians get close to the two Italians, touching them and asking them for “something.” By contrast, Gino and Fiore, clean and well dressed, do not want to be touched. In fact, they seek to distance themselves from the “dirty Albanians.” The relationship between Italians and Albanians is explored in several ways: for example, the opposition between individual and collective and between clean and dirty. In Amelio’s film, the dirty-clean dichotomy is developed according to the paradigms established in classical ethno-anthropological literature.4 Perhaps more cinematic, the relationship between individual and collective seems to have a stronger visual presence on the screen. Analogous to the colonial relationship, the “primitive” is invariably seen as an unformed mass, a crowd, an indistinct pack of subjects/objects. Only the colonizer is described as an individual. By extension, one can also refer back to Fanon’s central dichotomy between subject (white colonizer) and object (black colonized). This opposition is particularly well represented in shots that bear the mark of an Eisensteinian “conflict of planes” (Eisenstein 1949, 54), when Gino and Fiore’s jeep moves in one

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direction down the centre of the shot, cleaving in half the Albanian crowd moving up the street in the opposite direction. Generally, Gino and Fiore’s trip is shot from their own point of view with classical subjective shots. Yet as Fiore appears to be the leader of the expedition, the representation of Gino as “pure gaze” would suggest otherwise and indeed anticipates his future role as protagonist. Somewhat of a “decontextualized Hitchcockian citation” (the policeman in Psycho, 1960), the shots of Lo Verso indicate the centrality of his gaze and define his primary dramaturgical function in terms of a colonial relationship. Lo Verso is silent and motionless and framed with close shots while he looks from behind his dark sunglasses. Although his glasses are a protective shield, they are also a sign of his “Italian elegance.” Significantly, Lo Verso will lose his glasses, along with other objects, once he starts losing his italianità. Subjects, space, and gazes are in discursive relation to one another and ultimately constitute the film’s narrative. Many episodes are structured by a neat division of space, with the two Italians on one side and the Albanians on the other. For example, there is the hotel meeting between Gino, Fiore, and some Albanians, the visit to the old people at the storage shed, and Placido’s speech to the women who are about to start work at the new shoe factory. This separation is achieved by frontal shots, not oblique framings as in a classic shot/reverse-shot configuration, effectively keeping Albanians out of Italian space. Later on in the film, this pattern is transformed through a postcolonial perspective. For example, in the beginning Gino treats Spiro like an animal or baby. However after losing his jeep and being forced to take rickety public transportation like so many Albanians, their relationship adopts an air of equality. This transformation is clearly perceptible when the two rent a room and later have a meal together. For the dinner scene, Amelio uses classic shot/reverse-shot techniques for the first time. The symbolic valence of this classic code is well revealed in the scene as it creates a true moment of exchange between the two, a conversation between equals in which one recognizes the other and vice versa. This outcome is a reversal of attitudes established at the beginning of the film and moves in the direction of Fanon’s dream of “reciprocal recognition.” By now, Lo Verso has changed his attitude toward Michele. Here, the young Italian starts losing his national identity and succumbs to an irresistible process of “Albanization.” First, for attempting to bribe an Albanian policeman to overlook certain business irregularities, Gino must give up his passport. The policeman offers some consolation, but Gino takes little comfort in the fact that “in Albania siamo tutti senza passaporto.”5 Thus, if during the film’s first part Gino repeatedly asserts his

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Italian identity to claim extra human rights, now he finds himself on a par with any other Albanian immigrant setting out to cross the Adriatic. Then, while aboard a boat heading back to Italy, Gino finds himself unable to visually distinguish himself from the throng of Albanian immigrants. His face looks tired, and he slouches over. He no longer wears his trendy glasses or beautiful clothes, which once demonstrated his national superiority and arrogance. Silent, he no longer even possesses his mother tongue. In effect, his national identity is completely erased. Yet, it should also be noted that in the character of Michele, who thinks he is en route to his long dreamed of destination of New York, Amelio creates a transnational and transhistorical migrant figure, evoking an earlier era of Italian immigration to the United States. Indeed, stuck in a fifty year old fantasy, Michele takes the viewer back to the immigrant past of Italians who were in many ways similar to their Albanian contemporaries. Through the figure of the transnational migrant, the film also undermines the very notion of national identity as Italians and Albanians are finally the same. Along with Gino’s “Albanization,” there are also signs of an inverted trajectory for Albanians. While it is true that they remain a collective subject/object through to the end of the film, Albanians become increaseingly active and resistant to Gino and Fiore’s pathetic Italian superiority. In general, the film’s discourse on postcolonial Albanian identity focuses on two issues: on the one hand, identification with Italian national identity and culture, on the other hand, assumption of an active gaze as a means of emancipation from subalterness. Indeed, the gaze becomes a visible act of defiance toward Italians hoping to exploit them. In her groundbreaking study on Fanon, race, and gender, Mary Ann Doane highlights Fanon’s idea that the black colonized subject is psychoanalyzable only from the moment he encounters the white colonizer. For Fanon, the psyche is always already articulated in a social relationship. As such, Fanon’s object of analysis is not the individual but the social network of gazes, desires, fears, and transgressions born of the colonial situation itself. According to Doane, Fanon’s study is situated between two extreme positions. On the one hand, the only possibility available to the black colonized subject is to identify with his white colonizer. On the other hand, for Fanon there is no white world or white ethic or intelligence. Ultimately for Doane, he “de-essentializes both blackness and whiteness (and hence race as a category). In the course of his analysis, racial identity becomes radically differential” (Doane 1991, 217).6 For Fanon, the interaction between cultures and races is a crucial historical fact and the emergence of a neurosis in the colonized subject is also an historical event. A desire to be like the colonizer is expressed

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through imitation and mimicry, hence the notion of “white masks” from Fanon’s book title. As such, in Lamerica there are a series of situations that render these processes of imitation and identification explicit. Albanians demonstrate a broad knowledge of popular Italian culture, mediated by their access to RAI television programmes. Soccer and pop songs, in particular Toto Cutugno’s L’italiano (1983), are largely diffuse and part of the daily cultural fabric in Albania, which is in part the reason why many Albanians speak Italian so well. At a certain point, one character declares that he wants “diventare italiano, sposare un’italiana, fare figli e parlare solo italiano.”7 Another affirms “meglio lavapiatti in Italia che la fame in Albania.”8 Later, we see a young woman giving an improvized Italian lesson near the port where hopeful immigrants set sail for Italy. Here, the dynamics of the gaze are more telling than language, demonstrating the central role of vision and sight in postcolonial relations. In Black Orpheus (1948), his introduction to an anthology of black poets, Sartre discusses the relation between seeing and being seen from a white man’s perspective: Here, in this anthology, are black men standing, black men who examine us; and I want you to feel, as I, the sensation of being seen. For the white man has enjoyed for three thousand years the privilege of seeing without being seen. It was a seeing pure and uncomplicated […] today, these black men have fixed their gaze upon us and our own gaze is thrown back in our eyes. (Sartre 1963, 7-8)

For Sartre, the sensation of being seen is unknown to the white colonizer because he has always posited himself as the active subject of a gaze, a privileged position that has made him feel invisible to the gaze of others.9 Lamerica is also the story of the colonized’s appropriation of the colonizer’s gaze as the film inverts Italian and Albanian gazes. This reversal is represented by a synergy between narrative development, camerawork, and editing. When Gino goes looking for Spiro/Michele, the film’s narrative trajectory changes course, and this has an impact on the film’s configuration of the gaze. The most significant episode in which this occurs is when Gino leaves the jeep with a police officer and goes off with Michele to urinate. When they return, they find their automobile tyreless and rimless. Gino reacts violently and begins insulting some nearby Albanians who return his gaze in silence. The scene is constructed of a series of shots alternating between Gino yelling and various groups of Albanians looking back from different perspectives. In each shot, Albanians remain silent and address a fixed gaze to a screaming Gino. The scene’s choreography makes it appear as if Gino is caught in a trap as Amelio literally

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encircles him with Albanians. Moreover, this episode is all the more significant if compared to preceding ones in which Gino was able to move safely among the Albanian people in his dark sunglasses and jeep. Indeed, the loss of his automobile now means the loss of his ability to distinguish himself as an Italian. As he and Michele are forced to board a bus packed full of Albanians, so begins the process of Gino’s Albanization. At the same time, however, the colonized Albanians become subjects of the gaze. They assume Gino’s structural position and his powers of vision as Gino’s words and gaze suddenly become ineffectual.10 Homi Bhabha, Fanon’s most important commentator, describes this reversal of the gaze by recalling an incisive remark from Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961): “there is no native who does not dream at least once a day of putting himself up in the settler’s place.” From this, Bhabha concludes that it is always in relation to the place of the other that colonial desire is articulated: the phantasmic space of possession that no one subject can singly or fixedly occupy, and therefore permits the dream of the inversion of roles. (Bhabha 1994, 63)

If the film’s “progressive” position is certain with respect to the colonial question, it must also be underscored that Amelio transforms the problem of vision and racial discourse into an exclusively male concern just as Fanon does. Rey Chow rightly identifies this imbalance in Fanon’s politics of gender. She observes that “unlike his analyses of the black man, with their intent of foregrounding the existential ambivalences of the black male psyche, Fanon’s depictions of women of color are […] direct and with little doubt:” and suggest a very “confident tone,” much as Freud’s theories on femininity had several years before (Chow 1999, 41-42). Moreover, in Lamerica, the relationship between older and younger male is so strongly based on a father/son model that Gino’s neocolonial experience in Albania can easily be interpreted as a classic oedipal male trajectory. As in many other Amelio films, this father/son relationship supports virtually any social structure. Likewise, Lamerica’s politics of gender are asymmetrical, and its representation of the feminine is “qualitatively” different than that of the masculine. Indeed, Amelio reserves a series of minor roles for women and refashions them as mythic figures outside history. First, there are the sisters of the Mother Teresa orphanage where Gino and Fiore “deposit” Spiro. Then, there is the female doctor who takes care of Spiro in the hospital and identifies his true nationality. In perfect Italian, she gives Gino a brief history lesson, explaining that Spiro arrived during Italian Fascism in Albania but was persecuted and put in prison

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with the advent of the Communist regime. Finally, there are all the mothers “without names” who migrate with their husbands and children to Italy. All of these figures fit the same timeless image of woman as mother, nurturer, and purely asexual. Indeed, it is symptomatic that the only other female figures appearing in the film are performers: one exhibits herself as a singer in a night club; the other imitates Michael Jackson, dancing to his music. As with all the other female characters in the film, these young women play secondary roles and have no significant narrative function. Moreover in both cases, the camera concentrates on their bodies and their performances to underline the purely erotic function of woman (Mulvey 1989). As such, much to our chagrin, Amelio reinforces two fundamental myths of femininity in Western culture—the mother and the eroticized woman—thus relegating woman out of history and historical transformation. In a foundational piece for Feminist Film Theory, Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema (1973), Claire Johnston reflects on Panofsky’s ideas on stereotyping and iconography in cinema and rereads it through a gendered perspective. For his part, Panofsky surmised that the spectator of early cinema had difficulty reading images on screen, and thus, cinema developed and repeatedly featured an iconography of fixed stereotypes and human figures out of necessity. Johnston, however, notes that as cinema developed into a more elaborate and mature form, male and female characters received different cinematic treatment. Indeed, there “is a far greater differentiation of men’s roles than of women’s roles in the history of the cinema” and this fact “relates to sexist ideology itself, and the basic opposition which places man inside history, and woman as ahistoric and eternal.” Therefore, women’s roles remain static and the image of woman easily becomes an icon or a myth. For Johnston, this is true of both Hollywood and European auteur cinema alike (Johnston 1979, 134). Lamerica is part of and continues such a tradition. Amelio’s film reinforces gender asymmetry as it excludes women from the historical formation of the nation state. It is the relation between Gino and Michele, as son and father, male Italians from different generations, that founds the film’s discourse on national identity. Indeed, male characters and masculinity assume a structural function in relation to Italian national identity and history. If, on the one hand, the film calls national identity into question by destroying the colonial and postcolonial dichotomy of Self/Other, on the other hand, it exploits this scenario to reconstruct Italian masculinity by giving new life both to the male subject and to the nation state, which have long been in crisis.11 Thus, the protagonist’s journey to Albania and his successive return to Italy is a typical example of male identity formation, a Bildungsroman like those recounted over and over

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again since the origins of Western literature.12 As in Western cultural tradition as a whole, in Lamerica, the Oedipal male trajectory develops exclusively in relation to the father. In the end, Gino emerges from his adventure a grown-up man with a new understanding of himself and of Italian history, thanks to his encounter with Michele. Unfortunately, the whole story is just a male affair. Translated from Italian by Michael Meadows.

Notes 1

Some scholars consider these social themes in relation to neorealism. See, for example, Ruberto and Wilson (2007). 2 “What one cannot keep outside, one always keeps an image of inside. Identification with the object of love is as silly as that” (Lacan 1978, 243). 3 “Albania is civilized thanks to Italy [...] Italy is Albania’s salvation and she will make her come out of her backwardness.” 4 On this, see Mary Douglas’ hugely influential Purity and Danger (1966), (2002). 5 “In Albania we are all without passport.” 6 This also explains why Fanon was critical of the “negritude” movement that believed in an ontology of race. 7 “To become Italian, marry an Italian, have children and speak only Italian.” 8 “Better to be a dishwasher in Italy than go hungry in Albania.” 9 The consistency with Mulvey’s later formulation in relation to gender is absolutely obvious. See Mulvey (1989). 10 In this context, the film shows the valence of the structuralist paradigm and, in particular, the “formal criterion of recognition” which Deleuze defines as “local or positional” see Deleuze (2004, 173). 11 For more about the crisis of the Nation-State in the era of globalization see Appadurai (1996). The discursive congruence between Amelio’s film and Appadurai’s analysis is strong but cannot be developed here. 12 On the Bildungsroman see Moretti (2000).

THE MEDITERRANEAN, OR WHERE AFRICA DOES (NOT) MEET ITALY: ANDREA SEGRE’S A SUD DI LAMPEDUSA (2006) ALESSANDRA DI MAIO

The Mediterranean For those who, like me, grew up on its shores, let alone on its islands, the Mediterranean is, first of all, a sea—the Sea. Il mare, we say in Italian, la mer, in French, el mar in Spanish, al-bahr in Arabic. For all of us, it is a ritual place for socialization, leisure, desire, transgression, and legacy. For each of us, however, it is a different seashore with a different name, community, marina. For me, that place is Mondello, a small, once marshy fishing village a few miles West of Palermo, transformed through land reclamation into a beautiful fin de siècle summer resort when Sicily’s capital city was one of Europe’s most prominent centres of the Belle Èpoque. It is a coastline whose cliffs blend into the calcareous mountains rising behind, and an ensemble of dunes that seem to be there to remind us that the largest sand desert in the world, the Sahara, is part of the Mediterranean landscape—its Southern border. Each of us born and raised on these shores has our own Mondello. On the other hand, each of us, independently from the specific original place, feels an identical sense of general belonging to the Sea—Our Sea, or Mare Nostrum, the Romans called it. For when you see it from the outside, the Mediterranean may appear a single entity; but seen from the inside, it is multiple, polychromatic, polyphonic. It is a site of différance, in the words of one of its most remarkable thinkers, Jacques Derrida. It is our cosmos. The différance of the Mediterranean is chromatically evoked by one of Europe’s greatest nineteenth century painters, whose use of colour has inspired many film directors worldwide. “The Mediterranean has the colour of mackerel,” Vincent Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo, about the sea by whose French shores he lived part of his adult life. “It’s

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changeable. You don’t always know if it is green or violet, you can't even say it’s blue, because the next moment the changing reflection has taken on a tint of rose or gray” (Van Gogh 1999, 76). If Mediterranean polychromy mesmerized Van Gogh, it was its polyphony which captivated French historian Fernand Braudel, the author of the monumental eponymous opus on the Basin, who writes: “the Mediterranean speaks with many voices” (Braudel 1995, 13). “My favorite vision of history,” Braudel explains, “is a song for many voices” (Braudel 1995, 1238). And yet, this vision, he clarifies, “has the obvious disadvantage that some [voices] will drown others: reality will not always adapt conveniently into a harmonized setting for solo and chorus” (Braudel 1995, 1238). The polyphonic quality of the Mediterranean continues to challenge its listeners and speakers alike—and, in view of recent events, one is tempted to say, increasingly so. It has been argued that rather than harmony, the Mediterranean displays a tendency to produce dissonance. This appears even more clearly today, after the media-dubbed “Jasmine Revolution” in Tunisia ignited people of the Maghreb and the Middle East to speak up, and stand up, against the dominant rhetoric and political practices of national regimes. To be sure, both the insurgents’ voices and those of the tyrants belong to the Mediterranean. It is an old story: “Mediterranean oratory has served democracy and demagogy; freedom and tyranny; Mediterranean rhetoric has taken over speech and sermon, forum and temple” (Matvejeviü 1991, 12). Thus speaks another important voice from the region, that of writer and political activist Predrag Matvejeviü, who concludes: “the Mediterranean is inseparable from its discourse” (1991, 12). Bosnia-born Matvejeviü strives to recompose what he calls the “Mediterranean mosaic” (1991, 12) by seeking a common discourse that at the same time implies and transcends history, geography, ethnicity, even national belonging. In light of these considerations, one can symbolically suggest that the “changing” colour of the Mediterranean and its manifold voices may be composed of tones that may metaphorically correspond to different geological soils, geographic regions, historical phases, and national formations, languages, religions, microclimates, winds, crops, and items of food. However, they all contribute to the composition of one, plural colour: that of the amalgamated intermixture of Mediterranean culture. I have suggested elsewhere that the symbolic colour into which all these hues come together giving unity to a common discourse is black. In my argument, which draws from Paul Gilroy’s theory of the Black Atlantic, black is, in particular, the colour of the contemporary Mediterranean.1 The Black Mediterranean is a transnational site of globalization. Black is the colour—or

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rather, non-colour—in which all shades merge, that which the sea assumes during the crossings pursued by the million migrants who have “burnt” it in the past three decades.

The “burning” The metaphor of burning, indicating crossing, is used in colloquial speech by North Africans, who, since the early 1980s, have traversed the Mediterranean with the hope of finding upon its European shores the potential to work, to participate in democracy, and establish better life conditions for themselves and their families. Besides its literal meaning, the Arabic verb haraqa (to burn) is used in Mediterranean Africa, from Morocco to Egypt, in a number of colloquial locutions, always indicating some experience of transgression. In Arabic, to burn a norm, a law, or even a red light (one says hargt l-feu rouge), one is in fact breaking rules, trespassing against norms, infringing laws. Similarly, harraga (literally, those who burn) are aware of the hargínamely the burning, or crossing, of the Mediterraneanías an act of transgression. In her study of the harg phenomenon among the youth of Morocco, anthropologist Stefania Pandolfo explains the complex, often contradictory implications of this transgressive act from an Islamic, eschatological point of view. Independently of the distinct positions taken by her interviewees on the subject, Pandolfo illustrates how all stories of harg imply an awareness of a “burned” life: “a life without name, without legitimacy; a life of enclosure in physical, genealogical and cultural spaces perceived as uninhabitable” (2007, 333). This happens, she explains, because “Migration […] is increasingly understood as the compelling yet often unrealizable project of an illegal crossing to Europe” (2007, 333). Departing to Europe, burning the Mediterranean, “hidden in the bottom of a truck, or by hazardous sea passage” (2007, 333), becomes a synonym for “taking the risk” (kanriski), or “gambling one’s life” (ghadi mghamar b-haytu). These are only two of the most common expressions that make up the discourse of the harg in Morocco and throughout the Maghreb (2007, 336): a discourse articulated through what Pandolfo describes as a “language of addiction” and in terms of rage, oppression, and even despair (2007, 352). Pandolfo suggests, however, that although these expressions connote “the potentiality of a destructive outcome” (2007, 336), in fact the experience of the harg also entails “the search for a horizon in the practices of self-creation and experimentation drawing on an imaginary of the elsewhere and of exile” (2007, 333).

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In other words, pursuing the metaphor of burning, one can infer that its symbolic fire results in incineration—namely, the end of a previous life, or, in the terms of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1980), of a territorialized identity. Yet ashes also bring forth a rebirth, a regeneration, assuring the possibility of a new life in the deterritorialized space of diaspora: a space that, according to Matvejeviü (1998), connects exile—leaving behind home—and asylum—namely, seeking refuge in the new home. The place in which this metamorphosis takes place is, indeed, the Mediterranean. By “burning” it, the migrant meets a symbolic death by fire; in its waters, however, he or she undergoes a sea change that will grant him or her a new life. This may appear reminiscent of the myths and legends common to the entire Basin: for example, that of the Phoenix, the sacred firebird repeatedly reborn from its own ashes; or that of sea-god Proteus assuming multiple semblances; or the several others that Ovid assembles in The Metamorphosis. Unfortunately, however, death is not always only symbolic in this “burning” process. Many are the casualties that occur along the multiple routes of these crossings, as attested every day in the news. Sicily, the largest island in the Mediterranean, has partially replaced the mafia-bound fame that has fed the world’s imaginary with that of an immigrant land since it has become one of the principal hubs for mass migration to Europe. Boatloads of harraga continuously land on its Southern shores, especially on the little island of Lampedusa, Sicily’s, and Italy’s, southernmost point. When they depart from the African coast, these boats are crammed. However, upon arrival in Lampedusa, or any of the crossings’ multiple destinations, it is too often the case that they are less crowded or if not, in the worst case scenario, completely empty. After a lull in 2010, in February 2011 the migratory route Zarzis-Lampedusa had resumed its incessant traffic, since numerous North Africans, initially mainly from Tunisia, had fled the uprisings. Soon after the rebels’ insurrection, there was a reprise of landings from Libya. One may advance several hypotheses as to why these people arrive in droves primarily to Lampedusa rather than, for example, to Pantelleria—another island that politically belongs to Italy and is as close to the North African coasts—or to the coasts of other European nations. Certainly, one may bring into play natural conditions (marine currents, easier routes, smoother landing conditions), but political conditions play an important role as well. A comment by sociologist Saskia Sassen (1999, 155) on the nature of migration gestures towards a partial response: “Migrations do not simply happen. They are produced. And migrations do not involve just any possible combinations of countries. They are patterned.” In Lampedusa’s

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case, the two countries that have mainly been responsible for the burning are Italy and Libya.2 Trade partners since the colonial era, in fact, one can trace their historical ties as far back as the Roman Empire. Since the inception of the new century, these two countries—Italy mainly under former Prime Minister Berlusconi, Libya under the rule of Colonel Gaddafi— have joined forces to “produce,” using Sassen’s term, and control the “burning” of hundreds of thousands of migrants by common consent. Many are the men and women who have not survived the “patterned” experience of the “burning,” independently of the route undertaken. Countless are those who ended up on the Mediterranean seabed, or, even before boarding the boats, as carcasses in the “sea of sand” that is the Sahara. The Mediterranean passage is often twofold: People who do not live on the North African shores must find a way to reach them, which means they must traverse, first of all, the Sahara. And it is not only people from the Maghrebi hinterland who must cross the desert. A great percentage of “burners” comes from sub-Saharan Africa, from West African nations such as Senegal, Ghana, and Nigeria, as well as from the Horn once colonized by the Italians (Somalia, Ethiopia, and Eritrea). The Italian award-winning documentary A Sud di Lampedusa (South of Lampedusa, 2006) directed by Andre Segre, in collaboration with Ferruccio Pastore and Stefano Liberti (who later turned it into a book), shows this very effectively.

Andrea Segre’s African Trilogy Together with Segre’s more recent Come un uomo sulla terra (Like a Man on Earth, 2008) and Il sangue verde (The Green Blood, 2010), A Sud di Lampedusa makes up what I refer to as Segre’s African trilogy, portraying the three major steps of African migration into Italy: the crossing of the Sahara, followed by eventual deportation from Libya in A Sud di Lampedusa, a pined-for destination that cannot be reached; the sea journey and final landing on the island, followed by transitional detention in what the Italian State oximoronically called the Centre of Temporary Permanence, in Come un uomo sulla terra, partially shot in Rome, the final destination; in Il sangue verde, the riots taking place in January 2010 in Rosarno, a small town in the Southern Italian Calabria region with a large population of undocumented migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa, mainly employed in underpaid, undeclared agricultural labour. My argument is that all three stages of migration—departure, arrival, and settling—are part of the complex “burning” process.

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If A Sud di Lampedusa, built upon a number of interviews of migrant workers from West Africa treading the Niger-Libya route, portrays the endurance of departure, Come un uomo sulla terra represents the following stage of the crossing, the sea journey from Africa to Italy. Remarkably, the protagonists in the second documentary are young men and women from the Horn of Africa, once colonized by Mussolini, eager to fulfill his imperial intent to conquer a “place in the sun.” The protagonists of Come un uomo sulla terra, in other words, are Italy’s postcolonial subjects, flesh and bone offspring of a historical process begun with colonialism. They gather at Asinitas, a school in Rome where they meet every day to learn Italian, which soon becomes a hub for their community. There, sitting around a kitchen table, these young people from Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia tell their stories—that of the crossing and the ensuing common adventure of settling in Italy. Among the protagonists is Dagmawi Yimer, who is also a co-director of the documentary. The third film of the trilogy,3 Il sangue verde, portrays the daily life of the African Italian community of Rosarno during the widely publicized riots of January 2010. These riots exposed the unjust and squalid conditions that thousands of African labourers, exploited by an economy controlled by the local criminal organization, ‘Ndrangheta, endured on a daily basis. For a few weeks, these undocumented migrants—mostly citrus pickers—caught the attention of the Italian public, who responded to protests with fear and violence. The media showed that they were soon “evacuated” from Rosarno (television footage is an important visual intertext in the documentary); as a consequence, the “problem” was considered solved. Yet the faces and the voices of the African Italians captured by Segre tell a different story. By filming their stories from their own points of view, Segre reveals a non-official, non-hegemonic record of the events. In order to make sense of what happened, the director seems to suggest with Il sangue verde, that one must hear the full story, not only the dominant version. In particular, one must pay special attention to the accounts of the subaltern of Rosarno, a Southern town whose history, overlooked and marginalized in the national discourse, has been marked by rural poverty and ‘Ndrangheta-induced degradation affecting both the migrant and native communities. The last documentary of the trilogy, in brief, seems to prove that the final stage of the burning process, namely the settling in the “welcoming” country, may prove as problematic as the initial two, departure and arrival.

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A Sud di Lampedusa This contribution focuses on Segre’s first film of the trilogy, A Sud di Lampedusa, hoping to demonstrate what is hinted at in the title of this paper: if, on the one hand, the Mediterranean has always facilitated relationships between Africa and Europe, promoting trade and cultural exchanges across the centuries even in the face of war, on the other hand, the two continents remain often at odds. Filmed mainly in the Sahara desert in May 2006, this thirty-minute documentary, which has received critical attention worldwide, shows the viewer the hidden face of migration from Africa to Europe, a face that remains largely invisible in the media and the EU political discourse on migratory policies. What the audience sees of the crossing on television is only the middle step: the landing of desperate men and women, whose names are never provided, on the small island of Lampedusa. Until recently, in the Italian imagination, Lampedusa was a beautiful, not even particularly fashionable touristic attraction (radical chic, rather), with idyllic, uncontaminated white beaches, turquoise water, and little else to recommend it. It is only in these past years that Lampedusa has become central to the Italian, and European, discourse on migration, making international news as a prime transit site in the burning. However in Segre’s documentary, despite the evocative title, Lampedusa never appears. In the film, Lampedusa remains merely a mirage, a hopeful destination, an expected yet unrealized arrival point.4 As the Italian saying goes, it is the island that is not there (l’isola che non c’è). In the documentary the action takes place, as the title suggests, south of Lampedusa. The film follows the route of a group of people leaving West Africa directed to the Libyan sahel—the coastline—with the intention of crossing the sea to Europe. A Sud di Lampedusa, essentially, is a documentary—the first Italian documentary—on the Mediterranean burning seen from the perspectives of the burners, interviewed by the director and his team. Made up of three parts, it opens with a three-minute preamble showing at first a close-up of one of the protagonists describing Libya’s “deportation camps.” Spectators are caught by surprise. Why is this man sitting at a desk talking about deportation camps when the film is supposed to be about the crossing of the Mediterranean Sea? Who is deported and where? And above all, why? The description of the camps is dreadful. At the beginning of the scene, it is not even clear where they might be. The man begins by saying, “They write in Arabic ‘Deportation Camps’. But they are not deportation camps, they are really terrible prisons, which in any other part of the world would be used for criminals who have committed

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the worst crimes—maybe killing.” The audience is still unaware of what exactly the man is referring to when he continues his description: “Each room can contain about fifty people, and they’re very small. There is no central AC, no ceiling fan.” Only at the end of the scene does the man reveal what he is talking about: “Even the toilets—the ones from the prisons I’ve seen on television are cleaner. But in Libya it’s not like that.” Thus, the theme of the documentary appears clear not even one minute into the film: the burning process, in which Libya plays an important role, is accompanied by blatant violations of human rights. When another young man sitting at another desk appears at the end of the documentary, one minute from the end, re-emphasizing the reasons for migration already explained by many protagonists, the audience realizes the framing narrative follows a symbolic circularity: the story ends where it began, namely south of Lampedusa. NortherníEurope remains inaccessible. After the first man’s commentary sets the theme, the action moves immediately to the field. The two remaining minutes of the preamble show the gathering of all the people who have decided to migrate north. They arrive in the city of Niamey, Niger, from several West African countries— Mali, Togo, Senegal, Nigeria. A sequence juxtaposing moments of diversion, such as watching television in the common room that also serves as a bedroom, and moments of prayer, shows that several among them are Muslims. Though the majority of the people are men, there are also women in the group. A young woman carrying a baby and wearing a blue headscarf, reminiscent of an archetypal nativity image, takes a seat in the big bus that will take the group to Agadez, the city commonly considered the gate to the Ténéré (a Berber name for that area of the Sahara), from where the caravan will begin its journey through the desert. The atmosphere is calm in this pre-departure phase, filmed at night. Movements are slow. The only audible sound serving as a background to this nocturnal scene is that of the bus engine running while everybody is getting on board, as if living and leaving have become equivalent. The camera finally shifts onto the image of a hand-drawn map marking the principal steps of the route to be trodden, closing up on a hand that draws a truck—a device that closes the preamble and punctuates the entire documentary. This seems to invite the audience to follow the expedition step by step while reminding them of the human element, symbolized by the hand, present in every journey. The film, as mentioned, is divided into three parts, each with a specific title. The first, “Partenza” (Departure), documents the initial steps of the crossing, when Africans from different sub-Saharan regions meet up in Agadez to begin the journey. Since the mid-nineties, Agadez has become

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something of a cosmopolitan city because of its role as a departure point for the Sahara crossing. “We didn’t know the other Sub-Saharians,” one of the interviewees says, “until the Togolese, the Cameroonians, the Nigerians came.” Some passeurs—people who guide the caravans and facilitate the crossing—are also interviewed. Their attempt at self-redemption is poignant. From their words, it is difficult to say whether they simply exploit the situation or are in fact casualties of it. “Here in Agadez, we live with the foreigners,” one of them explains; “we help them to flee to Europe or the Arab countries. We feel obliged to do it—we know the desert.” He concludes, explaining what the Western news often forgets to mention when reporting the migrants’ crossing of the Mediterranean, “If they’ve left their homes it’s because of problems such as unemployment, poverty. They are looking for food for their wives, for their children, for the old people they have left at home.” Migration is not tourism. If these Africans, adopting Pandolfo’s terms, “take the risk” (333), “gamble their lives” (336), it is because they believe burning the Mediterranean is the only way to support their families and find hope in a better future. When the journey begins, it is clear to everybody that the first step is Libya, whose borders, according to one of the protagonists of the documentary, were “opened” by Gaddafi to “all Africans” in 1998. As the man interviewed puts it, “Gaddafi put his hand on his heart and asked all Africans to come, because, he said, Libya belongs to everyone. So everyone rushed,” he concludes, with an ironic grin, his face in a slant close-up, “until… the pogrom.” After a few images, the same man explains from experience what Saskia Sassen explains in a scholarly fashion: Migration does not take place accidentally; it is well organized. “C’est strutturé,” he repeats three times. It is structured. The men who drive their fellow people to Agadez and deliver them to the passeurs who will guide them through the desert, like the men who put the migrants up for a few francs every night while they are waiting for their ride, are all essential parts of the intricate, patterned chessboard that is illegal migration. Part one closes with the camera following a truck crammed with people who are finally going to cross the desert in inhuman conditions; for as one of the burners from Nigeria says, “A truck is for goods, not for human beings.” Nevertheless, they are happy to leave: they wave goodbye, and one of them even makes a victorious gesture from the top of the lorry. The only background sound is the blowing of the wind, even after the camera zooms in on the handdrawn map reappearing in the final scene. The burners are merely in the company of each other and of the Harmattan wind.

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Although the second part of the documentary titled “Viaggio” (The Journey) opens with a further interview, the camera soon redirects itself to the truck crossing the desert. Visually, the crossing of the Sahara sea-ofsand prefigures the sea-crossing that is to come once the coasts of Libya are reached. In particular, the truck, overflowing with men, women, and children of different nationalities, foreshadows the boat that will take the undocumented passengers across the sea—those decrepit boats for which Italians have coined a new idiom, carrette del mare (sea-carts). Considering the state of these boats and the conditions of the passengers, it comes as no surprise that some burners do not make it through the Sahara, and in any case those who do cannot reach their final destination—Europe. However, the earlier stages of the trip look hopeful, energized by the notes of the late highlife musician Fela Kuti, Nigeria’s world-renowned music icon. Fela’s beat marks the movements of the steady-cam, suggesting dynamism, energy, and hope for a better future. The truck arrives in the oasis of Dirkou, a town on the important route of the trans-Saharan trade linking Libya to the Niger-Chad region. During an interview, the mayor of Dirkou complains that traditional seasonal migration to Libya has considerably diminished since the country signed a deal with Italy. The aim of the deal, from the Italian side, is to prevent migrants from arriving in droves. However, as anticipated, this energy does not lead to a happy ending. The third part of the film is called “Espulsioni” (Deportations). One would expect this third and final part to be titled “Arrival,” but there is no arrival at the end of the film, no happy ending, no tale of redemption. The people who make it to Libya are locked up by the local authorities in “deportation camps,” such as that of Sabha. These migrants end up staying in Libyan deportation camps for months or even years. Their only crime is their desire to go to Europe, looking for better life conditions. Sometimes Europe is not even the final destination: some of them would happily settle for North Africa, wealthier than many sub-Saharan regions. However, having served as cheap—or rather, free—labour, these burners are returned to the sender—their homeland—according to the agreement on forced expulsion signed by the Italian and Libyan governments. Lampedusa remains a mirage. One of the interviewees says: “I really think that spending eight months in jail for having done nothing at all, just because you want to go to Europe… No, I’m not going to do it.” What many do not know is that, had they crossed the Sea, had they got there, the chances are they would have been put in another detention centre—oxymoronically called the Centre of Temporary Permanence, now renamed Identification

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and Expulsion Centre—on another island, a metaphorical one this time, the island of crystal waters, where human rights are not even a possibility. Segre’s brilliant documentary asks questions and elicits responses from the audience: Who are these migrants? Where are they from? What are they willing to sacrifice for a supposedly better life? And especially: What is the final gain? A dramatic tension results from the contrast between the desire to answer these questions and the impossibility, and on the director’s part even unwillingness, to do so peremptorily. The director does not intend to provide an accomplished, sociologically based, finely polished picture of African migration to Europe. He does not wish to explain pedantically the political and economic situations from which these migrants are trying to escape; nor is he willing in the least to invade the depths of their private space, which, in fact, he seems to secretly share with his protagonists. He just barely shows his face in a couple of scenes, and his voice can be heard only when his questions seem necessary to better understand their answers. What he does, instead, is enter the dimension of the journey with them, letting the viewers perceive empathically the weight, as it were, the physical and mental burden that they are carrying within themselves, in what by necessity becomes an ineluctably in-transit life—a life perennially “on hold.” Segre is not interested in explanations. He is tantalized by the crossing: first of the Sahara, then of the Mediterranean Sea, which, however, does not, cannot reach an end. The route followed by the African migrants of the third millennium is as old as the Old World: as Fabrizio Gatti explains in his important volume Bilal. Il mio viaggio da infiltrato nel mercato dei nuovi schiavi (2007), which covers a similar journey as that of A Sud di Lampedusa, it was trodden by the African slaves brought to Europe in ancient times and has continued to be trodden for centuries. Things have not changed in the new millennium. Lampedusas multiply—and, as we all know, not only in the Mediterranean Sea. As Segre’s documentary shows, migrants burn the Mediterranean from Africa to Europe, its opposite-door neighbor. “Europe was conceived on the Mediterranean,” Matvejeviü (1991, 10) suggests. In his lifelong attempt to write a non-Eurocentric history of the Mediterranean, Braudel points out that “Europe would not be Europe without Africa,” without the Mediterranean that connects it to the Black continent. One cannot speak of the Mediterranean without considering the influence that Africa has had on Europe, on its formation and growth. Across the centuries, Africa and Europe have traded spices, gold, slaves, gas, oil, and, of course, arts, religions, and narratives. This trade has perpetuated unbalanced power relations, producing what Derrida would refer to as violent hierarchies—

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one might suggest Europe vs. Africa is one of them. The role played by the Mediterranean has been crucial to this exchange. Its intense maritime traffic has brought forth development and wealth—mostly to Europe. Today, unfortunately, this enriching circulation of produce, artefacts, ideas, traditions, and people has partly degenerated into human trafficking. Among those who arrive in Europe as economic migrants, seasonal workers, or refugees, protected—or supposedly protected—by international law, there are many whose fundamental human rights are denied—such as those African women, for instance, forced into prostitution by organized criminal networks, which are, for example, the subject of an episode of Matteo Garrone’s first long feature Terra di mezzo (1996). Migration, for those who control it, is a lucrative affair—at the expense of Africa, mainly. South of Lampedusa shows this to the audience. More than that, it shows viewers that in order to reassess a balance between the two old continents, it is necessary, and urgent, that Europe meets Africa.

Notes 1

See Di Maio (2011). See Trattato di amicizia, partenariato e cooperazione tra Italia e Libia, August 30, 2008; later transformed into PDL n. 2041, Camera dei Deputati (XVI legislatura), December 30, 2008. 3 Recently, a fourth film has been released by Andrea Segre, Mare chiuso (2012). 4 As it happens, a few years later, it became a privileged site for political campaigns. Italy’s former Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, visited the island in March 2011, a few weeks after the reprise of landings due to the Arab revolt, and promised the citizens he would “evacuate” all migrants in 48 hours. He emphatically declared his intention to invest in the economy of the small island by opening a state-owned casino in the near future, meanwhile personally purchasing a luxurious house, Villa Due Palme. Whether he really purchased the villa remains doubtful. 2

NEW ITALIAN MIGRANT CINEMA BETWEEN CINEMATIC NOSTALGIA AND TRASH (BELLOCCHIO, MARRA, TORRE) DANIEL WINKLER

“In Italia comandano i morti” In 2006, Marco Bellocchio (1939–) presented Il regista di matrimoni (The Wedding Director)—a self-reflective movie about film making in Italy.1 The film narrates a key period in the life of the successful Roman director Franco Elica (Sergio Castellitto), who is about to prepare a new adaptation of Alessandro Manzoni’s novel I promessi sposi (1840/42). While casting for the heroine, Elica is faced with accusations of rape, the police intrude the offices of the production company, and he escapes to Sicily. On the north coast, in Cefalù, he meets the marriage chronicler (hence the film title) Enzo Baiocco (Bruno Cariello). Thanks to him, Elica makes the acquaintance of the Principe di Gravina (Sami Frey), whose daughter Bona (Donatella Finocchiaro) is about to marry, and he is hired to do the wedding movie. Il regista di matrimoni offers—via place, plot and genre—many intramedial allusions to the “Golden Age” of Italian cinematographic history (Koebner/Schenk 2008). The place alone makes one think of a number of formative neorealistic Sicilian movies like Pietro Germi’s In nome della legge (In the Name of the Law, 1949), Roberto Rossellini’s Stromboli, terra di dio (Stromboli, 1950), or Luchino Visconti’s La terra trema: Episodio del mare (La Terra Trema, 1948). However, Bellocchio’s movie offers a whole portfolio of allusions that extend even further: The place and wedding motif are reminiscent of Germi’s cult movie Divorzio all’italiana (Divorce Italian Style, 1961) and its protagonist, Baron Fernando Cefalù. Elica’s professional failure also pays its respect to Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ (1963) with its sexually obsessed director Guido. Moreover, the musical dramaturgy refers to Pietro Mascagni’s Sicilian-based opera Cavalleria rusticana (1890) after the tale by the same name by Giovanni Verga. Quite specifically, what unfolds is an analogy to Visconti’s film Il

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gattopardo (The Leopard) from the same year, which also has the two antipodes Rome and Palermo and which, like Bellocchio’s film, is an Italian-French co-production: the Principe di Gravina (Sami Frey) is— parallel to Visconti’s Don Fabrizio Salina—the last archaically dignified character of the aristocratic world, who wants to save the family heritage. So Elica can be expected to stage a wedding à la Visconti in the style of Il gattopardo. In the framework of a parallel progression of melodrama and melodramma, the film adopts the national cultural production of the 1960s that symbolizes Italy’s cultural and economic prosperity. That the reflexive character of the movie goes beyond an intertextual duel with cinematographic history becomes apparent when one takes into account Bellocchio’s article “In Italia comandano i morti” which appeared in the journal MicroMega (2006, 39). There, he not only criticizes the Italian media system but also auteur cinema which he accuses of lacking poetic filmic language. It could only be successful if it offered sufficient emotional identification to the audience. He holds that the nostalgia for Italian film of the post-war decades was also a result of an overly strong concentration of auteur cinema on its own milieu. The title of the article was taken from the screenplay, where it is ascribed to Principe di Gravina and film-maker Orazio Smamma (Gianni Cavina): with his daughter’s wedding, the Principe wants to fulfill a promise made to his deceased wife to save the honour and possessions of the family. He summarizes this pledge when talking to Elica, whom he calls a “small director” because he “only” works in Italy, in this key statement: “In Italia sono i morti che comandano.”2 The crisis and the adherence to the past also directly apply to the film milieu: Elica is not only faced with a marriage chronicler but also meets the renowned film-maker Smamma in the evening coastal landscape, who—at the beginning of the film—had been announced dead due to an accident. However, he has only withdrawn from the cultural scene and now lives in a cave near Cefalù (fig. 1). In view of the fact that in Italy only dead artists are highly regarded, he is biding his time hoping to be awarded a “posthumous” David for his last film La madre di Giuda—a plan that will succeed in the end. Like Bellocchio, he criticizes the film milieu with the sentence, repeated several times, “(in Italia) i morti comandano”—a milieu that, so he claims, hands out awards as the result of agreements, paying more attention to politically correct subject matter and signals than to emotionally touching, lasting films. The taste of the television-watching masses in a time of Berlusconianismo will become more and more present

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as the film continues: Bona and Elica are being controlled by surveillance cameras, so as not to endanger the wedding. The Mafioso-style underlings of the Principe try to protect Bona in a monastery until the wedding and to keep Elica away from her. Once the wedding ceremony has been conducted, the Principe shoots his daughter’s husband, thus taking on the character of the calculating godfather who uses the wedding only to preserve the cosa nostra (fig. 2) The film is reminiscent of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972), which also harks back to Cavalleria rusticana, as well as famous Mafia films starring Alain Delon, like Borsalino (Jacques Deray, 1970). It has been repeatedly surmised that by making use of the cited sentence, Bellocchio was referring to Mario Monicelli (1915-2010), a representative of the ancient Commedia all’Italiana, who in 2003 “refused” to award him the Golden Lion when he was president of the Mostra internazionale d’arte cinematografica di Venezia. Instead of honoring his political film Buongiorno, notte (Good Morning, Night 2003) about the Aldo Moro assassination, the prize was awarded to Andrey Zvyagintsev (1964–) for his family drama Vozvrashchenie (The Return, 2003).3 This reference, however, would insinuate a twofold crisis of Italian film: Since Monicelli, historically speaking, stands for the internationally commercially successful but undemanding comedy, his comedy I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street, 1958) was nominated in 1959 for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. At the same time, his nomination as a jury president in the year of Silvio Berlusconi’s presidency of the EU European Council can also be read as a clearly political act to ensure that the biennial festival did not turn into an international stage for cinéma engagé.

Fig. 1: Smamma and Elica in front of his cave

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Fig. 2: The Principe as godfather in front of the camera

From crisis of cinema to nuovo cinema Italia With this backdrop, Il regista di matrimoni can be regarded as a mise en abyme of the crisis of Italian cinema which characterizes the movie industry from the mid-1970s onwards but, above all, as the reception of the Italian film in scientific discourse and feuilleton (Brunetta 2007, 434508; Schifano 207, 91-105). However, this film, shot entirely in Sicily and thus giving room to regional religious and musical traditions, also stages a cultural topography of Italy characterized by a hegemonistic spatial logic. Here, Sicily appears as a place of refuge from the reality of Italian society, quite in line with the style of filmic tradition, a place left untouched by the course of time. Also, Bellocchio only uses one Sicilian actress (Donatella Finocchiaro). In the sense of Mary P. Woods, Bellocchio expands upon a problematic mythography of the mezzogiorno as an archaic-mythical space (2005, 142-144). We will now focus on two filmmakers from the younger generation of nuovo cinema Italia, who are connected with a slow resurgence of Italian cinema in the context of a “cinema of the regions.” Like many others of their generation, they no longer set their sights on the formerly glorious Cinecittà as the sole creative centre, but they practice, both on a production and on a representational level, a plurality of the cinematographic landscape (Brunetta 1995, 378-397; Macchitella 2003). Marra and Torre show Sicily in the sense of glocalization (Robertson 1995) torn between

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tradition and transformation, regionalism and internationalization. With Tornando a casa (Sailing Home, 2001) by Vincenzo Marra (b. 1972 in Naples) and Sud Side Stori (South Side Story, 2000) by Roberta Torre (b. 1962 in Milan), the focus is on movies by film makers who, like Bellocchio, do not come from Sicily but who localize the island or the sea in terms of their relationship to local everyday life. In doing so, they chart a difference—each in their own way—to an auteur cinema inspired by canonized literary-filmic masters. As this contribution will argue, Marra and Torre open up the cinematographic locus of Sicily with regard to the categories of space and genre by contrasting regional traditions and international mass phenomena, which aesthetically or topographically transcend the insular microcosm.

Tornando a casa Naples-born Vincenzo Marra gathered experience as an assistant director with Mario Martone and Marco Bechis and presented his first movie in 2001: Tornando a casa, to this date not available on DVD. With his next (more widely distributed) movie Vento di terra (2004), he also inscribes a (sub-)urban movie into the direction of the Italian cinema described as neo-neorealismo over the past few years. This means a new cultural tendency that puts sociopolitical questions into the focus of interest, following up on low-budget or neorealistic practices and documentary or even melodramatic aesthetics. With regard to the cinema, Brunetta refers to a young, “realistic” cinema that focuses on the dignity of the individual and the critical Second Italian Republic (after 1994) (Brunetta 1995, 392393, 395). But this term, by now pretty well established, is also used in a broader context: for example in literature, in analogy to the term New Italian Epic.4 In the tradition of Visconti’s La terra trema and based on the screenplay by Roberto De Angelis, Marra broaches the issue of the difficult existence of the fishermen in the Naples area, while opening it up at the same time: since the Naples fishing grounds are controlled by the Camorra and not much can be earned there, Salvatore (Salvatore Iaccarino) and his people have to fish in the waters between Sicily, Libya, and Tunisia. The team of four or five also comprises Giovanni (Giovanni Iaccarino), Franco (Aniello Scotto D’Antuono), and the Tunisian Samir (Azouz Abdelaziz), who as an “illegal” migrant is afraid of being arrested by the coast guard when caught fishing in the Italian-North African border region. The fishermen, who are joined towards the end of the film by Giovanni’s son

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Silverio (Silverio Iaccarino), finally all want to return to Naples for family reasons, but they fail because of the Camorra and return to Sicily again. If one regards the movie in the context of Sicilian island cinema, Tornando a casa takes on a special role: by broaching the subject of “illegal” migration, Marra continues in the neorealistic tradition of tackling a topical issue, and he focuses on the dire life of the fishermen. He shoots his movie open-air with laymen who mostly come from the same family and who are called by their real first names. Marra films without pan shots or panorama shots which would show Sicily in spectacular perspectives from the sea; rather, everyday places and actions are presented. First and foremost, these are the boat, the sea, and the harbour, the apartments of Franco and Samir, a fish market hall, a hospital, a school, or a street intersection (fig. 3, 4). Marra focuses on these places with static shots, does away with melodramatic music, and puts his trust in a reduced volume of text and everyday sounds; only in a very few places does he actually make use of the instrumental film music by Andrea Guerra.

Fig. 3: The Crew Fig. 4: Franco after his rescue with the boat people

Fig. 5: Franco and Samir on the boat Fig. 6: Samir and Franco fishing

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Similarly to Visconti, Marra shoots the majority of the scenes on the sea, often at dawn or dusk, but he does not build strong symbolic pictures, minutely arranged and working with shadows and contrasts. He shows the view of an empty sea or around the fishing boat, and in the way of an “observing mode,” he borrows from the documentarism of Direct Cinema; via freeze-frames and “raw,” rather long shots, he creates the impression that his films provide a “window opening onto the world,” giving an overview of the fishermen’s day-to-day life (Hohenberger 1998, 21-24). Instead of black-and-white aesthetics like those used by Palermo director Costanza Quatriglio (1973–), he avoids overly strong stylizations, resorting to colour pictures with little contrast (fig. 5, 6). Even dramatic events are narrated in a prosaic mode. When the Tunisian coast guard discovers their boat, sounding the alarm and firing some shots, the fishermen cut off their nets in order to get back to Italian territory quickly. The cuts from one person to another are merely a bit faster than usual, and the pictures get a bit blurred and show brief arguments and repartees. On the spatial level, Matta clearly marks differences to a hermeticalregional localization of the Sicilian space as it is practiced in neorealistic island movies but with a difference, both to Quatriglio and Roman film maker Emanuele Crialese (1965–) in the movies set on Favignana and Lampedusa respectively, L’isola (The Island, 2003) and Respiro (Grazia’s Island, 2002). These two film makers also broach the subject of fishermen, but they not only cut out the tourist daily-life background but also the reality of migration so characteristic of Italian news reporting. Marra apposes a stylized microcosm with a depoliticized one through the presence of the global within the local, expanding the cinematographic space towards the African continent and the Naples metropolis. By this transformation of the genre entering into a synthesis with the migration movie, two lines of movement are connected that point towards the inside and the outside, to the past and to the future: Franco feels that fishing for tuna next to the African coast, which also keeps him separate from his girlfriend Rosa (Roberta Papa) who lives in Naples, is getting too dangerous. He wants to emigrate to America in order to build a better life. This old dream refers to a long-standing tradition in Southern Italy covered in film first by Jean Renoir and his assistant director Luchino Visconti in Toni (1935) and which finally enters Italian cinema with Pietro Germi’s Il cammino della speranza (The Road to Hope, 1950) in the context of Sicilian space. This historic migratory route is juxtaposed with a comparatively recent wave of North-African immigration to Southern Italy. For Samir, life here is not quite what he imagined when he was still living on the opposite

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shore. Without any papers, he is at the mercy of the fishermen’s clan, who with the exception of Franco treat him as a subaltern. However, for the time being he cannot return to Tunisia either because his family does not regard him as a subaltern in Naples but sees, in him, the successful laureate in the affluent centre of Europe, expecting presents should he come back to visit. Franco’s biography is also characterized by rupture and change, symbolizing a critical (Southern) Italy, offering only few opportunities for the future. His dream of America proves treacherous: Rosa doubts his emigration plans and wants to stay in Naples as a school teacher; finally, she is shot to death by one of her pupils playing with a gun, and the American dream expires. Back in Sicilian waters, Franco discovers a man in the water at night and jumps into the waves carrying a lifebuoy, but does not make it back to the ship. The two of them end up being discovered by a wooden boat with North-African migrants; the man he seemingly saved is dead, and Franco decides to restart his life from scratch. Back in the boat, he leaves behind his passport whose photo he obliterates and is picked up together with the other migrants by the coast guard and transferred “back” to North-Africa. In the context of this plot gleaned from everyday life and a puristdocumentary filmic aesthetic, Marra counts on a rather utopian ending which turns the Naples-born Franco into an “illegal” migrant, deconstructing the realistic narration within the framework of a reflexive topicalization of borderline issues. He contradicts the traditional reception of a one-track mass immigration into Europe as represented by Samir, a movement from the outside to the inside, from the periphery located outside the island or outside Europe towards the centre. At the same time, via this character, the movement from the South to the North—a classic direction in the Italian context—is reversed. Marra thus avoids the discourse of miserabilism mentioned by Mary P. Wood (2005, 144-145), which within the framework of a committed or militant cinema creates a trite picture of the mezzogiorno thus performing at least a latent Othering. The movie juxtaposes a Mediterranean perspective with the SouthNorth axis, as film makers like Ferzan Ozpetek and Gianni Amelio have already shown, who with Hamam—Il bagno turco (Hamam: The Turkish Bath, 1997) or Lamerica (1994) set—in the sense of a cinema of transvergence (Higbee 2007)—the West-East axis or the East-West axis, respectively, against the North-South axis (Winkler 2009).5 He not only refers to the fact that Italy itself used to be an emigration country until only a few decades back but also to the fact that—beyond any mezzogiorno stereotypes—life on the Sicilian islands is more closely

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related in some aspects to everyday life in Northern Africa than in Northern Italy. Thus, Tornando a casa also provides a new treatment of the geopolitical imaginary: the movie does not end on the European continent but with the image of a boat on the Mediterranean Sea localized as an inseparable cultural space. This, however, is accomplished for the price of a twist in the plot that hardly seems realistic, in view of the dayto-day existence of migrants living along the Southern fringes of the “stronghold Europe.” This somewhat romantic and melodramatic moment in the plot probably constitutes one of the few similarities to Bellocchio’s visualization of the Sicilian space.

Sud Side Stori Roberta Torre, Milan-born but living and filming in Sicily, by now ranks among the most distinguished film makers in Italy. Sud Side Stori is her second full-length motion picture and the only film treated here that is part of Sicilian (regional) cinema in a stricter sense of the word. Its central theme is the love story of Romea Wacoubo (Forstina Erhabor) and Toni Giulietto (Roberto Rondelli), the large African migration to Sicily and the increasing racism. Formally, Torre follows up on her film debut Tano da morire (To Die for Tano, 1997), a Mafia parody, which within the framework of a fragmentary aesthetic borrows from the genres musical, regional and animation film, television report and video clip. It is also located in Palermo and shares many similarities to the film analyzed here (Schrader 2007, 219-222). The screenplay for Sud Side Stori was written by Torre in collaboration with Franco Maresco and Francesco Suriano. In the film, beside more general genre references, two concrete quotes are important that refer to William Shakespeare’s tragedy Romeo and Juliet (around 1595), which was the basis for Felice Romani’s opera libretto Giulietta e Romeo (Romeo and Juliet Nicola Vaccai, 1825) and I Capuleti e i Montecchi (The Capulets and the Montagues Vincenzo Bellini, 1830), as well as to the Broadway musical West Side Story (Arthur Laurents/Stephen Sondheim/ Leonard Bernstein 1957), which was transformed into a movie in 1961 by Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise. Torre’s film, which on the video cover is announced as “La storia vera di Romea & Giulietto,” engages with the analogy between the Veronese families Montague and Capulet and the New York gangs of US-American Sharks and Puerto Rican Jets to present the conflicts between the Palermo natives and migrants. As with Romeo– Tony and Julia–Maria, ethnic-familial barriers are in the way of the happiness of protagonists Toni and Romea.

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Both references are also present in migration cinema, at least since Michele Placido’s Pummarò (1990) which includes an episode that takes place in Verona and cites both plays by means of a romantic balcony episode and an incident involving a racist biker gang, respectively; but for Torre, both pieces provide the basic structure for her film. Moreover, there is a transformation on the levels of milieu and genre that splits with all moral-political taboos but also with those of the “political” auteur cinema: Romea is a Nigerian prostitute who has come “illegally” to Italy and who still has to practice her trade in order to pay for the human trafficking. Island native Toni, who lives together with his aunts and is known here as an Elvis double, leaves his fiancée Maria for her. In a sense their relationship is a scandal and—even more so than migration itself—the talk of the town. Torre’s pop-cultural plot transfer from both plays turns the film into a hard-to-define conglomerate of references: the movie shows documentary pictures of Palermo as if in layman’s aesthetics, focusing its rusty brown images time and again on street prostitutes; but these images are not a clearly defined part of the film chronology, rather are part of a hybrid genre whose fundamental characteristic can be seen in an aesthetically contrasting montage principle. So the said images are contrasted, for example, by shaky camera scenes driving through narrow alleys covered by laundry lines, with Palermo women dancing unrhythmically, singing off-key, and making noisy music with their cleaning utensils on the balconies and in the streets, shown in full colour. These distorted meridional stereotypes of popular everyday activities are followed by interior scenes of Toni’s aunts Eleonora (Eleonora Teriaca), Rosa (Rosa D’Alba), and Dora (Giuseppa Vella) depicted as grotesque and eccentric, presented as bourgeois caricatures. They appear sitting on a Biedermeier sofa with beehive hairdos and overly made-up faces, screaming about Toni’s relationship with Romea. The scenes showing the aunts are also interrupted time and again by other perspectives or stylistically contrasting shots. By now, it has become clear that the film breaks with the “effet de réel” of Roland Barthes, trusting in strategies of authentication and emotional involvement (Barthes 1984), just as it does with the principle of a mere genre mix. A case in point: The three of them are shown standing on their balcony, as seen from the street, looking down with shock on the “African state of things” in Palermo, and crying “i cannibali” (fig. 7).6 The alley is filled by a group of African women who have just arrived, carrying suitcases and wearing dazzling clothes, starting to sing and dance. The camera moves closer to the throng, then away from it again; the alleys are shown from different

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perspectives, finally quickly focusing on Toni with his guitar on the balcony, before focusing on Romea from an upper angle (fig. 8). Then the picture freezes, voice-over giving a commentary.

Fig. 7: Toni’s aunts looking down on the migrant women Fig. 8: Romea and the migrant women dancing at their arrival

Fig. 9: Palermo in documentary mode Fig. 10: Palermo “Arabicized”

Fig 11: Toni on his balcony where Little Tony appears to him Fig. 12: Toni and his cardboard idol Elvis

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The fact that Sud Side Stori presents the aesthetics of a “hybrid genre” film, whereby an incoherently fragmented aesthetic is consciously being constructed, according to Jörg Schweinitz, is made clear in two ways. Besides linking “narrative resp. visual stereotypes” of different genres (Schweinitz 2002, 88-89), Torre’s single shots are often aesthetically hybrid in themselves; seen in isolation, for example, the genre references themselves appear alienated. The street scene in front of Toni’s aunts’ house is characterized by musical movie aesthetics as it is theatrically arranged; still, there are differences: quoting a layman’s video aesthetics and not using professional musical dancers but grotesquely costumed laypersons who do not even try to create the impression of musical or choreographic perfection. So the pictures show a break with Broadway or studio aesthetics, not least by presenting “real” Palermo locations (fig. 9). At the same time, the sound relies on short, spoken dialogues but above all on different forms of (spoken) singing, of screaming and sounds. Among others, the title song Sud Side Stori is used in combination with sound elements that constitute a clear breach with musical aesthetics. This comprises off-key singing, dialogue, and the screaming aunts but also a fairy-tale-like voice-over commenting and linking different scenes during the course of this film. The film exists mostly without movement, both in the concrete spatial sense and in the sense of development of plot and characters. Movement is created most of all by the rapid switches in aesthetic styles and sequences which in the sense of theatrically hybrid arrangements rely on contrasts, statis, and artificiality. On a meta-level, Torre still borrows from a politically motivated cinema, but she does not adopt the form of a committed cinema offering clear messages via identification, characters or plot developments. Rather, Torre refers to politics by sounding off the message “tutti uguali” several times at the end of the film,7 in the framework of an animation film aesthetic. Thus, the film clearly parodies the genre of traditional cinema engagé, but also the fear of what is foreign, for example, by contrasting it with radical cliché images in the sense of a selffulfilling prophecy. The aunts are confronted with African migrant women, who are also prostitutes. The predominantly old Sicilian women and men—one of them dies of a heart attack while having sex with Romea (whereupon all the migrant women have to leave Palermo and are sent back home)—are contrasted by a great number of young African women who are not characterized in more detail. Torre depicts an “Africanized” Palermo and juxtaposes a side plot to the main love plot (fig. 10): the campaign of the mayor who proclaims tolerance and integration as civic duties and who orders a statue of a santo nero, a black saint, that the Cosa

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Nostra uses as the target for an attack. This can be read as a commentary on migration politics but also on media stigmatization of Southern Italy in the sense of an “Italian Africa,” “an example of underdevelopment and the primitive” (Wood 2005, 142). The Sud Side in the title thus highlights that there are two sorts of racism, one towards foreigners and another towards the “foreign” Italian South. By pointing out the clichés Torre also tends to reverse them in order to satirize all kinds of binaries: it is not only Toni’s aunts who speak out against the relationship in racist terms but also Romea’s “black” friends. Following this logic, Toni is the only character who internalizes and sings about “black power” (“Se fossi negro anche io”)8. As a character, he is depicted as foreign and “wrong” several times: he is no Sicilian lover, no Romeo or Tony—not he but Romea looks up, to him standing on the balcony, in the scene mentioned. While she is confronted with existential reality, he lives as a kind of Elivis l’italiano9 in the dream world of ItaloAmerican mass culture characterized by Presley, Monroe, and Little Tony (fig. 11). Toni, whose appearances are depicted in glaring colours with his jerky movements and artificially grotesque stage aesthetics, is characterrized by the nostalgic principle, quite in line with a retro aesthetic marked as a quotation and grotesquely distorted just like himself as a character. Like his idols, Toni ends up on drugs, turning into an alcoholic and finally even into a criminal. Thus, the movie ends with the death of the protagonists, not following the logic of committed cinema but that of Romeo and Juliet and Tano da morire; Romea is not killed for racist motives, but she follows Toni—who only seems to be dead, due to a broken heart—and stabs herself with a dagger. Toni finally loses his life, together with his aunts, in an attack. These inter-media borrowings by Torre become possible through the character of the King of Rock ’n’ Roll (Little Tony): when Toni falls helplessly in love after seeing her for the first time from his balcony Little Tony appears to him as a messenger of love (fig. 12). He will later reappear several times, finally leading Romea to him before the film stages the lovers’ explosive death. With Little Tony, who originally came from the Lazio region, not only is the mass phenomenon of Italo-Rock conjured, but the character is also marked as a trash quote, as the “wrecked” version of former Rock singer Little Tony (Antonio Ciacci, 1941–), who covered Elvis’ hits in Italian and gives a rendition of his songs “Riderà” and “Il ragazzo col ciuffo” in the film.10 He is not supposed to depict the original Presley aesthetically correctly or to integrate him into the Sicilian ambiance, but he does follow paternalistic concepts of maleness of the quoted time. In the sense of an

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aesthetics of “recycling” (Flusser 2007, 294-297),11 as a person biologically aged, he is marked as perishable, as no longer market-compatible trash. He is contrasted with Toni as his younger self, filling the male image of a “softie.” Little Tony can thus be understood as a synecdoche for Torre’s cumulative-hybrid aesthetics of pent-up and superceded references to mass culture. In this sense, through a comparatively small cinema culture, Sud Side Story reflects upon the hegemonial power of the (American) mass media and the speed and cycles of the culture industry. Thus, the movie also refers to the Italo-American imaginary in the sense of an obsolete model of career and emigration. In the framework of hybrid genre aesthetics, Torre clearly distances herself from a committed cinema as well as from national or regional cinema under the token of neorealist tradition. She avoids a language setting in the Sicilian space, chooses a Roman singer (Little Tony from Lazio), and in one scene Re Vulcano gives him a sidekick, singer Mario Merola (1934-2006), who since the early 1960s has been the epitome of musical Naples. For the sake of the popular musical imaginary, the movie places its trust mainly on the language variant of Naples. Torre alienates and “glocalizes” Sicilian cinema by attending not only to meridional popular culture but also to Italo-American mass culture. While Marra contributes to a renaissance of “realist” cinema aesthetics, contrasting the continent or the island with the sea, Torre’s form of intermediality transcends the limits of traditional auteur cinema and political cinema; however, via the filmic space and method of production, it sticks to the regional principle. Both films localize Sicily clearly in a different way from movies that stage the South in the interest of commercial aims as a “metaphor for problems in Italian society as a whole” (Wood 2005, 143). They are also examples of how the term “national cinema” is particularly problematic in the Italian context and how regional cinema does not automatically end in regionalism, but that even far from the financial possibilities of big productions, it has transnational and transcontinental potential. Translated from German by Ludwig Fiebig.

Notes 1

An almost identical German version of this article was published in 2010: “Sud Side Stori. Genretradition und -variation im sizilianischen Kino. Marco Bellocchio, Vincenzo Marra, Roberta Torre.” In Nuovo Cinema Italia. Das italienische Kino

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meldet sich zurück, edited by Birgit Wagner and Daniel Winkler, 47-61. Vienna: Böhlau, 2010. 2 “In Italy it’s the deaths which are commanding.” 3 See Aspesi 2006; Mereghetti 2006; Retico 2003. 4 See http://www.wumingfoundation.com/. 5 See the contributions by Rada Bieberstein and Veronica Pravadelli. 6 “The cannibals are coming.” 7 “All shall be equal.” 8 “If I were also a negro” 9 The title of a film by Canadian, André-Line Beauparlant about an Elvis double in Montréal (2001). 10 “He will laugh.” “The youngster with the wisp.” 11 Schrader refers to trash borrowings in Tano da morire and characterizes Torre’s style as “camp aesthetics” (2007, 225-228).

TRANSNATIONAL MOBILITY AND PRECARIOUS LABOUR IN POST-COLD WAR EUROPE: THE SPECTRAL DISRUPTIONS OF CARMINE AMOROSO’S COVER BOY (2006) ALICE BARDAN AND ÁINE O’HEALY

Among the many films centering on the theme of migration to have emerged in Italy in recent years, one of the most complex and challenging is Carmine Amoroso’s Cover Boy: L’ultima rivoluzione (Cover Boy: The Last Revolution, 2006). With its focus on an intense and ultimately tragic relationship between a young Romanian migrant and an Italian citizen unable to escape the punishing cycle of precarious labour in present-day Italy, the film departs from the predictable representations of migrants as impoverished individuals obliged to travel far from home in search of a better life or as criminals who pose a threat to the host society. Rather than highlighting the desperation of the migrant in contrast to the assumed advantage of the Italian citizen, it illuminates their common vulnerability as they attempt to eke out a living in the face of limited employment options. Registering the sharp economic contrasts that underpin Italian society at present, the film exposes the hollowness of Italy’s self-image as a prosperous nation. At the same time, it acknowledges the illusory promise that Italy might hold for those transnational migrants willing to commodify their bodies for the sex market, the fashion industry, or— presumably—other forms of spectacle and entertainment. Singling out the fashion industry and the high-end sex market at the more privileged pole of the economic spectrum, it gestures toward Silvio Berlusconi’s grip on a vast media empire and his promotion of a culture of spectacle and entertainment that seems to have replaced civil society. Yet, the film does not limit itself to a straightforward commentary on the conditions of Italian social life at present. Rather, as this paper will demonstrate, it also engages with issues of memory, spectacle, and spectrality in order to question and to challenge the way that historical memory is transmitted, suppressed, or reworked in the service of contemporary capitalism. In its

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representation of the encounter between a survivor of the collapse of communist ideology and a victim of the ruthless logic of globalized capitalism, the film offers a sustained critique of the spectacular effects of late modernity, suggesting a world where spectacle has superseded ideology and where image has dislocated affect. Cover Boy is the Italian director’s second feature film.1 Its original budget of about two million euros was approved by the Italian Ministry of the Arts in 2002. This sum was reduced by 75 percent due to a drastic change in media policy imposed by Berlusconi’s right wing government in 2004, just after production had begun.2 Shot on high resolution digital technology in Romania and Italy between 2003 and 2005, the film bears the marks of its troubled production history: the script had to be radically revised following the drastic cut in funds which forced the director to abandon his initial plan to set a considerable part of the narrative in Romania in the winter of 1989. This historical moment features only briefly in the film’s final version, which unfolds for the most part in Italy in the present. Nonetheless, as will be argued, memories from 1989 retain an uncanny, spectral trace that infuses the narrative throughout.

Romanian Prologue The opening sequence presents a montage of archival images commemorating the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the intensification of the Cold War, and the events that heralded its dissolution over a quarter of a century later. The graininess of these images conjures up a strong sense of the past, of memories stirred but not fully recalled. Intercut with the black-and-white footage of distraught Berlin residents separated from their loved ones or seeking desperately to flee as the wall is raised to divide their city in two. There is an excerpt from John F. Kennedy’s famous speech in Berlin on June 26, 1962, which affirmed American support for West Germany shortly after the Soviet-backed East Germany had finished building one of the most potent symbols of the Cold War. Moments later, another newsreel fragment shows American President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George H. Bush in front of the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin in June 1987, twenty-four years after Kennedy’s speech. Here, at the height of the Glasnost era, the audience hears Reagan make a direct appeal to the Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev to “open up the gate.” These rhetorical interventions by two American presidents over the course of a quarter century are intercut with several black-and-white documentary images from the Cold War years—offering fragmentary glimpses of the institutions, monuments, rituals, and points of contestation in the Com-

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munist world, including a brief video excerpt from the bloody Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing in 1989. The sequence comes to a climax with footage showing Nicolae Ceauúescu, the Romanian dictator, giving what turned out to be his last speech in Bucharest on December 21, 1989. This uncanny scene reveals the leader’s incredulity and panic as he witnesses the anger of a crowd that was supposedly assembled in his support. No voice-over accompanies the entire introductory montage. The faces and places it presents, however, are familiar. Viewers old enough to remember will have already seen these images—sometimes repeatedly— in documentaries and television reports during or even after the Cold War. They will most likely recognize them as historic—without necessarily questioning how such histories are fabricated and reshaped. However, the reliability of history is subtly cast into doubt here by the melancholic piano music by Marco Falagiani and Okapi accompanying the montage, which evokes nostalgia rather than inviting critical distance from the era conjured up in the visual track. Once the focus shifts to Romania, the archival montage is intercut with fictional scenes, also set in Bucharest in December 1989. The viewers are thus introduced to Ioan, the film’s Romanian protagonist, as a small boy of six or seven years of age. While watching television with his mother, Ioan sees reports of the violent events occurring in the city and begins to worry about his father’s whereabouts. Moments later, his father shows up and decides to drive the boy to safety in the countryside. On their way out of the city, the boy watches as his father is shot down by a sniper when he steps out of the car to help an injured woman crouching in the street. With this scene of devastating violence focalized through the child’s perspective, the film’s prologue ends. The narrative then cuts to the present day, presumably about fifteen years later, at the moment in which Ioan (Eduard Gabia), now a mechanic working in Bucharest, is persuaded by a friend to give up his job and to move temporarily to Italy in order to make more money. Unlike most other films about migrants moving to Italy, Ioan is not depicted in dire economic straits. In fact, he is not immediately attracted to the idea of leaving Romania and his family. However, his friend argues so convincingly about the opportunities awaiting them in Italy that he finally agrees to embark on a shared adventure.

Precarious Friendship: Michele and Ioan The main body of the narrative unfolds in Italy, where Ioan arrives alone and virtually penniless after his friend is apprehended by the police during a passport inspection on the train. The scene showing his arrival in Termi-

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ni Station is emblematic; in a long shot the audience sees the young Romanian standing in bewilderment in the middle of the station’s crowded atrium, which is emblazoned with the markings of consumerist prosperity including giant-scale advertisements for Emporio Armani couture. After sleeping rough the first night, he returns to the station to take a shower and meets Michele (Luca Lionello), an Italian working there temporarily as a janitor. Though hostile at first, the Italian eventually offers to share his accommodation with Ioan for eight euros a night. Gradually, Michele’s attitude of superiority gives way to a more congenial disposition. He tells Ioan that he originally came to Rome as a student from Abruzzo (a region located in Italy’s geographical centre, but traditionally lumped together with the impoverished South). Hence, he too is a migrant. Having run out of money, Michele struggles to earn a living with any work he can find. Describing himself as uno straniero in patria,3 he appears scarcely less marginalized, scarcely less wretched than Ioan himself. The viewer soon realizes that his sense of marginalization is compounded by the fact that he is a closeted gay man. Drawn to Ioan sexually, he struggles to hide his feelings. Although the Romanian seems unaware of Michele’s attraction, the visual track does not ignore the homoerotic potential of their relationship, often showing them in close proximity to each other and, in the film’s happiest scene, frolicking together naked in the sea. As a friendship grows between the pair, they fantasize about opening a restaurant together in the Danube Delta (“the most beautiful place on earth,” as Ioan’s father claims in the prologue). After Michele unexpectedly loses his job, however, both men seek employment together doing menial work. In one comic scene, the Italian pretends to be Romanian in order to hold a job alongside Ioan as a car washer, an experiment that leads to failure and further unemployment. Soon afterward, Ioan happens to meet his old friend from Romania, who has recently arrived in Italy and who once again offers him the possibility of making easy money in an undisclosed line of work. Accompanying Michele to his presumed workplace in an elegantly appointed building, Ioan discovers, to his apparent horror, that his friend is involved in providing sexual services to wealthy male clients. With this, he finally understands that the lucrative work he was promised before his departure from Romania was in fact high-end prostitution. Without hesitation, Ioan rejects this option and returns to the streets to try washing windshields for money, while the image track cuts back and forth to Michele, languishing at home still unemployed. At this point, it becomes clear that the dominant theme in the present tense of the narrative is that of economic precariousness, a notion that is highlighted in the tag line with which the film was initially advertised:

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“Amore e rabbia di una ‘generazione precaria’.”4 Cover Boy is, in fact, one of several recent Italian films that explore the shift in employment practices that characterizes the post-Fordist era, focusing on the perplexity of a new generation of Italians who are unable to find the kind of work opportunities and economic security that were taken for granted by their parents. Such films include, for example, Fame chimica (Chemical Hunger Paolo Vari and Antonio Bocola, 2003); Mi piace lavorare—Mobbing (I like to Work—Mobbing Francesca Comencini, 2003); Volevo solo dormirle addosso (I Truly Respect You Eugenio Cappuccio, 2004); Riprendimi (Good Morning Heartache Anna Negri, 2008); Giorni e nuvole (Days and Clouds Silvio Soldini, 2007); Fuga dal call centre (Escape From the Call Centre Federico Rizzo, 2008); Generazione mille euro (1000 Euro Generation Massimo Venier, 2009), and Tutta la vita davanti (All Your Life Ahead of You Paolo Virzì, 2009). Amoroso has pointed out in an interview that while the issue of precariousness is hardly new, it has now become “a sort of brand or logo” (Povoledo 2008). The terms precariousness and precarity were mobilized in the early years of the twenty-first century as a new way of thinking about labour and life. They can be traced historically to a body of writings associated with autonomist Marxism, which flourished in Italy and France in the 1980s. Precarious employment refers to all kinds of temporary or flexible work, including housework, piecework, and freelancing. The specific term precarity is almost always used in the negative sense to signify the proliferation of temporary forms of employment and the insecure forms of living associated with such employment. Yet precarity also gestures toward the modes of political struggle and solidarity that have sprung up as a consequence of these circumstances and which differ from the traditional associative structures of political parties and trade unions. Despite the fragile solidarity that evolves between Ioan, the immigrant without a work permit (significantly, the film is set just before the accession of Romania to the European Union) and the sporadically employed Michele, in Amoroso’s film, the precariousness of their living conditions is depicted in exclusively negative terms. In the course of a conversation between Michele and an administrator at an employment agency, the film reveals that the Italian, now forty years old, has always had to make a living through temporary work, facing intermittent periods of unemployment and poverty. As becomes clear in the scene with his manager at Termini Station, the terms and duration of his employment are entirely at the whim of his employers. When summarily fired from his position as a janitor, he reminds the manager that he had been promised three additional months of work and had planned his

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finances accordingly. Pleading for even one more month of employment, he offers to forego benefits, but the boss is adamant, and Michele finds himself unemployed once again. His ongoing ambition is clearly to secure a permanent contract; however, as the administrator at the employment agency indicates, a secure job seems an unlikely prospect in light of his haphazard employment history.

Margins Creating Their Own Margins Cover Boy diverges from almost all other Italian films featuring immigrant characters by showing that despite the strong undertone of xenophobia and racism directed at migrants, Italians share with immigrants a level of economic precariousness and a strong desire to secure a better life. Many films about migration show immigrant characters phoning home to reassure their relatives about their wellbeing. More often than not, they have to lie about their circumstances. Here, by contrast, it is the Italian Michele whom the viewer sees in this position, as he informs his mother by phone that he has at last obtained a permanent job (un contratto a tempo indeterminato). Significantly, Michele’s apartment is located in the dilapidated Mandrione district of Rome’s outskirts, a favourite location in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s films. Yet unlike the impoverished characters depicted by Pasolini, many of whom are endowed with auratic dignity, the circumstances in which Michele and Ioan live and the people they encounter along the way are devoid of any exalted connotations. Amoroso’s film neither idealizes the margin nor affirms the importance of the centre. Rather, it subverts conventional notions about how nationals and migrants are fundamentally different from each other. It also suggests that marginalized people create their own margins, and, therefore, should not be romanticized. In a recent article, Temenuga Trifonova observes that contemporary European films about migration and diaspora no longer focus solely on the most visible conflicts between centre and periphery, between foreigners and nationals, but have begun to depict conflicts at the periphery itself. She suggests that migration films “deterritorialize nationality by deterritorializing the notion of the border, not by opening up borders but by redrawing them along transnational, social, class, gender, political and generational lines” (Trifanova 2007, 5). On a number of occasions, Cover Boy dramatizes the deterritorialization of the borders of the European city. For example, shortly after his arrival in Rome, Ioan is obliged to relinquish his sleeping space in the street because other marginal characters have created their own boundaries by laying claim to the public space he happens to have occupied.

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Similarly, when he tries to sleep on the grass beside the Colosseum, a man dressed as a Roman gladiator (presumably involved in precarious work at the margins of the tourist industry) wakes him up, telling him that he is not allowed to lie there—that is, in the public space over which the gladiator feels he has jurisdiction. In another scene, Ioan’s efforts to make money by washing windshields at an intersection are undermined by a Romani youth, also a migrant. Claiming the intersection as his own working area, the young man aggressively pushes Ioan out of the territory he has appropriated. In this way, Amoroso’s film reveals the constantly shifting configurations of public space, and, in this last example, alludes to the very real monopoly of windshield washing in Rome, where gangs control heavy intersections by assigning cleaning slots and deterring outsiders who try to squeeze in. In addition to commenting on the shifting territorial configurations of the contemporary metropolis, Cover Boy also refers to issues of racial boundaries and racial passing. It suggests, in effect, that racial distinctions in Europe today are no longer organized around a stark division between white and non-white. In one scene, Michele worries whether he will be able to pass as a Romanian migrant in order to get a job at a car-washing service, the sort of poorly paid work that is accessible to migrants. Although he has previously worked as a janitor, he is unused to the kind of humiliating manual labour that he is now desperately forced to seek. The implication is that although Michele has a visibly darker complexion than Ioan, he perceives himself ideologically as whiter, and he is afraid that his whiteness will hinder his chances of being hired. The scene ironically recalls a different form of passing in Franco Brusati’s Pane e cioccolata (Bread and Chocolate, 1973), where an Italian immigrant living in Switzerland dyes his hair blond in an attempt to pass as a Swiss citizen and thus avoid the discrimination meted out against Italians. In contrast to Michele, the protagonist of Brusati’s film fears that he will be viewed as insufficiently white.

Haphazard Contingencies Although Michele is destined to remain trapped in the punishing cycle of unemployment and poverty, a radical shift occurs in Ioan’s fortunes when he encounters Laura, a fashion photographer who is captivated by what she perceives as his look of fresh, unsullied innocence. She whisks him off to Milan, transforms him into a fashion model, organizes his work permit, and eventually becomes his lover. Ioan’s life thus changes dramatically overnight. He becomes an immigrant survivor, successfully rescued as if

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he were a character in a fairytale or a slapstick comedy. This trope of the accidental resonates with Siegfried Kracauer’s conviction that film has an inherent affinity for chance meetings and “haphazard contingencies” (1997, 62) and, in this way, subjects the viewer to encounters with contingency. For Kracauer, chance is a historical category, a concept which, as Miriam Hansen points out, “emerges as a historicophilosophical alternative to the closed dramaturgy of fate or destiny” (1997, xxii). Moreover, according to Kracauer, films that employ the accidental or the last minute rescue have the ability to “riddle fictions of an integral, identical subject” (Hansen 1997, xxii), casting doubt on individual agency and intentionality. They demonstrate “the solidarity of the universe” by allowing accidents to “supersede destiny” and unpredictable circumstances to “foreshadow doom” (Kracauer 1997, 62-64).5 Contrasting circus productions to film comedy, Kracauer notes that the latter does not highlight the performer’s courage in the face of death or the ability to overcome impossible difficulties. Rather, it “minimizes his accomplishments in a constant effort to present successful rescues as the outcome of sheer chance” (1997, 62). What this entails for the viewers is the possibility of reimagining the conditions of experience, memory, and interaction which defy “protocols of narrative development and closure” (Hansen 1997, 22). Like a character in a slapstick comedy, Ioan is saved not because he does something in particular or because of his skills as a model immigrant who is able to integrate but by the sheer accident of being in the right place at the right time. While an overwhelming number of films about immigrants seem to follow “a closed dramaturgy of fate,” to use Kracauer’s term (Hansen 1997, xxii), Cover Boy eschews such rehearsed trajectories by relying on the trope of the accidental and minimizing the relevance of Ioan’s talents, abilities, or achievements. Thus, Ioan is scarcely a hero but, rather, an anti-hero. Unlike his old friend from Bucharest who has learned to smile and exploit his social skills to survive, he remains relatively sullen throughout the film, refusing to make any special effort to market himself or to please those around him. When Ioan is eventually reunited with the young Romanian in Rome’s Piazza della Repubblica, the friend tells him to wake up and come to terms with the fact that, as an impoverished immigrant, he will always be despised and viewed as a worthless piece of meat. He reminds Ioan that only money counts in Italy. Without it, one is viewed as little better than a rag fit to wipe the floor. He also advises Ioan to wash himself and smile a lot in order to win the acceptance of the locals. At several junctures Cover Boy blurs or reverses the conventionally imagined roles of the (foreign) victim and the (national) victimizer.

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Whereas many films about migration present characters with angry, helpless, or pleading expressions, in this case, it is the immigrant, Ioan, who maintains a calm but decisive demeanor throughout the film, while Michele is the weaker character, always on the verge of an emotional breakdown. When Michele arrogantly informs Ioan that he might be able to provide him with papers by hiring him as his assistant for an importexport business, Ioan reminds the Italian that he is just a cleaner and cannot afford to have assistants. In a dramatic twist of the usual scenario, it is the Italian who dreams of going abroad to Romania in the hope of remaking himself as a businessman in a foreign land, and in this way escaping poverty. Problematizing the traditional geographical trajectory in which Eastern Europeans go West in search of financial gain (which has been explored in several films about East-West migration), Amoroso reveals the reverse, less explored trajectory of Westerners travelling to the East to exploit its resources and labour market in the constantly shifting landscape of the globalized economy. Moreover, the film deterritorializes even such a simplistic notion of border crossing. Although Easterners are frequently coded as always already trapped in a space from which they wish to escape, Cover Boy shows that Westerners can experience a similar sense of entrapment and a similar desire to leave for a better place. In Amoroso’s film, the desired place is no longer empirically better; it is instead a fantasy space, an abstraction that reveals the characteristics of a dream. The yearning expressed by Ioan and Michele to go to the Danube Delta is not due to the real qualities of this location, since neither of them has actually seen it. Rather, they long to move there because Ioan’s father said, just before his death, that there, on the far side of the Danube, one could find “the most beautiful place on earth.” Despite the anticipation instigated by this claim, when Ioan finally reaches the Danube Delta at the film’s end and Michele’s voice is heard repeating the words “the most beautiful place on earth,” the surrounding landscape seems strangely grey and vacant.

Divergent Paths: Michele’s Humiliation and Ioan’s Success When Cover Boy rescues Ioan from destitution through Laura’s intervention, his departure proves devastating for Michele. Unable to secure further work as a janitor and now bereft of the only friendship that holds any meaning for him, he becomes increasingly desperate. A striking image of his outstretched hand offering the sale of pendants imprinted with the Pope’s face to tourists visiting St. Peter’s from the global South

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underscores his desperation and humiliation. Here, he is reduced to the figure of the vu comprà, the typical, pejorative term applied to African immigrants selling trinkets in Italian cities.6 This is but one instance in which the film places Michele in the same position as the hapless foreigner, a trope that clearly sets it apart from other films structured around stories of migration to Italy. The clash between Michele’s assumed superiority as an Italian (which is the subtext of his early conversations with Ioan) and the realization that he is as powerless as many immigrants eventually leads him to hang himself. The catalyst occurs in his apartment as he listens to the televised speech given by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi at a conference hosted by Confindustria (the umbrella organization representing Italy’s manufacturing and service companies) in March 2006. Vehemently disavowing evidence of economic mismanagement, the premier is heard accusing the Left of falsely promoting a discourse of crisis. In crude, inflammatory language, he proclaims: la crisi sta solo nella volontà della sinistra con i suoi giornali di inventarsi un declino per andare al potere. Ma sappiate che quando andranno al potere per loro le imprese sono macchine che consentono lo sfruttamento dell’uomo sull'uomo, che il profitto è lo sterco del diavolo e che il risparmio non è una virtù come per noi, ma qualcosa da tassare e da penalizzare.7

As Ioan pursues new opportunities in Milan and seems to forget his friendship with Michele, he becomes fully immersed in Laura’s world. Spectacle, visibility, and image manipulation, along with the staging of history and the performance of memory are the tropes mobilized in the Milan scenes, all of which unfold against the backdrop of the global fashion industry. Though Laura assumes that Ioan is devoid of any memory of the violence that briefly convulsed his city during his childhood, there are hints in the texture of the film that reminders of the past can surface at any moment, triggered by the most unexpected cues. Thus, when Ioan is about to make his first important appearance as a model on the catwalk, the diegetic music provided as a backdrop to the show, the British band Audio Bullys’ hit “Shut You Down,” intrudes upon the scene with a powerful, haunting force. This track samples the earlier version of the song, “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” by Nancy Sinatra. In the remixed version, the words “shot me (down)” take over the melodic theme as if the needle of a record player were stuck in the groove. Thus the words “shot me,” which slowly fade into “cut me,” are repeated over and over, as though compelling Ioan to relive the traumatic moment when,

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as a small child, he watched his father being shot to death. Suggesting a fixation bordering on excess, the replay loop in Audio Bullys’ remix creates a hypnotic effect. Film music, as K. J. Donnelly contends, can sometimes have the power to haunt films “both as ghostly references to somewhere else and something else, and as a mysterious demonic manipulative device” (Donnelly 2005, 22). It becomes, in effect, a “second space,” one that is different in relation to the space of diegesis, and which can “rupture the writing surface from a repressed and powerful unconscious” (20-21). In this instance, the sound of gunshots that caught Ioan and his father unawares functions as a trace that summons up the past with a burst of emotion. According to Donnelly, film music’s relationship with film can be both parasitic and symbiotic, enhancing films in ways that are usually unexplored by film critics. As he puts it: film music is not simply a practice, there to be described in detail; it is a phenomenon, to be explained and explicated […] It has an effect that is not (easily) accounted for and not straightforwardly addressed… I would argue that the virtual space of film music and the soundscape might be conceived as the virtual space of mental processes, making film music the unconscious space of the film. (2005, 21)

As specific words in the Nancy Sinatra song resonate with Ioan’s past, they acquire an extra charge, functioning as activating cues. Phrases such as “I was five and he was six/we rode on horses made of sticks” convey a sense of lost childhood, of the joy and playfulness in Ioan’s young life that were forever shattered by his father’s violent death during the Romanian uprising. The lines “Bang-Bang, I hit the ground/Bang-Bang, that awful sound/Bang-Bang, my baby shot me down” are especially disconcerting, echoing the two shots that ring out in the film’s early scene when the small boy watches his father fall dead in the street. These fragments from the song’s lyrics give the music a meaning and weight that exceed its superficial diegetic function as background accompaniment for a fashion show.

“Wear the Revolution” The most emblematic image in Cover Boy is a large-scale black-and-white photograph that appears at a crucial point near the end of the Milan sequence. Created through Laura’s editing skills, the photograph is presented as a poster for “Exile” (presumably a clothing line), which Ioan discovers as he enters a bar with Laura at the conclusion of the fashion show.

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Inscribed with the words “Wear the Revolution,” the scene portrayed in the photograph ostensibly invokes the events of December 1989, showing a soldier in the uniform of the Romanian Army pointing his weapon at a naked youth, whose arms are raised in surrender as he faces the viewer. In the background of the photograph, a man’s body lies inert on the ground, eerily reminiscent of the position of Ioan’s father’s body at the scene of his death in the film’s prologue. The naked youth in the picture is Ioan, originally photographed by Laura as he stretched his arms above his head upon rising from her bed in the morning. Unbeknownst to Ioan, Laura has superimposed this image onto a documentary photograph glimpsed in an earlier scene, showing the same Romanian soldier pointing his gun at a defenseless civilian. Though Laura assumes that her young lover has no memory of the events of the Romanian uprising, she is mistaken. The manipulated photograph functions as a site of uncanny spectrality, which allows for a juxtaposition of the traumatic experience of history in the Romanian context and the effects of memory in the present. Upon viewing the digitally altered photograph for the first time and recognizing his own body within it, Ioan experiences a dramatic revisiting of the moment in which he witnessed the shooting of his own father in December 1989. As he remembers, the event unfolds once again for the viewer in an extended flashback. It becomes clear that Ioan experiences the poster as a violent betrayal by the woman who had become his mentor and lover and an exploitation of his body that he did not foresee. At an earlier moment in their relationship, Laura told Ioan that she had previously worked as a photojournalist but, having become skeptical about the usefulness of taking photographs of the mutilated and the dying, she switched to commercial photography. This knowledge has not prepared him for the shock of encountering the manipulated reflection of his own body on the poster. Turning toward her in anger, he utters “Shame on you!” Thereupon he walks out of her life for good, leaving behind the life of luxury and privilege to which she had introduced him. The complex imagery of the “Exile” poster placed in the mise en scène of Cover Boy invites multiple visual associations. First, it appears to reference the controversial advertising campaign created by photographer Oliviero Toscani for United Colors of Benetton, which was distributed around the world in the late 1980s and 1990s. Like the photograph in Amoroso’s film, the posters conceived by Toscani withheld any reference to the product actually made by the manufacturer. Instead, shocking scenes of human suffering and abuse or titillating juxtapositions of diverse human types were captured and displayed on gigantic posters for the viewers’

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amusement or contemplation. Voided of historicity, detached from their social context, and defiantly unrelated to the product they were apparently advertising, these images functioned as free-floating provocations. It could also be argued that the “Wear the Revolution” poster resonates with the similarly provocative images of the “Global Warming Ready” campaign by Diesel Jeans, which was released at approximately the same time as Cover Boy. In the images deployed by Diesel, indications of environmental catastrophe serve as the backdrop for the carefree antics of flawlessly groomed models. In fact, the styling and colour scheme of the (fictional) “Exile” logo is strikingly similar to that of the Diesel logo in the “Global Warming Ready” posters.8 In the large-scale photograph placed in the mise en scène of Cover Boy, however, the gestural dimension of the young man’s raised arms has a stark visual effect that transcends these commercial associations, ultimately rendering the nude body at the centre of the image not as an erotic object but as an uncanny spectral presence. The most obvious association that emerges from the poster’s figural composition is the well-known image of the anonymous child usually referred to as “The Warsaw Boy,” which was taken in the Warsaw Ghetto as Jewish families were being rounded up by the Gestapo. In fact, the same key figures are central to both images: a defenseless young male, his upraised arms indicating surrender, and an armed soldier pointing a gun in his direction. At this point, the viewer understands the complex significance of the film’s title and subtitle, which engage the topic of photojournalism and documentary representation to comment on the tendency of the contemporary image industries to appropriate images of traumatic human experiences for commercial purposes. The film circulated internationally with the subtitle L’ultima rivoluzione translated into English as The Last Revolution. However, this translation eliminates the double meaning that the adjective ultima contains in the original Italian. In fact, the words l’ultima rivoluzione may be understood not only as the last revolution but also as the latest revolution, as in “the latest fashion” or “the most fashionable revolution to date.” Depleted of its historical specificity, “revolution” is thus reduced to a pure sign in the service of market exchange. Cover Boy’s critique of the contemporary image industries is not unique. This critique can, in fact, be understood as part of a longstanding discourse of resistance that stretches back to Guy Debord’s landmark volume, The Society of the Spectacle, which was first published in France in 1967 and was later translated into several languages. In the 1990s, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben called for a new consideration of Debord’s critique of the spectacle. In turning to Debord, he sought to

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theorize the implications of several contemporary developments in the political sphere (from the events accompanying the breakup of the Communist bloc to the circumstances surrounding the outbreak of the Gulf War) and, particularly, to explain what he saw as the global emergence of a post-democratic spectacular society dominated by principles of biopolitics. For Agamben, one of the most striking elements of The Society of the Spectacle was the clarity with which its author grasped the contemporary unfolding of global politics (Agamben 2000, 80). Valuing Debord’s recuperation of the Marxian concept of commodity fetishism, which had been abandoned by Louis Althusser, Agamben sees the spectacle as the commodity’s ultimate metamorphosis in which exchange value completely eclipses use value and achieves sovereignty over human life in general (Agamben 2000, 75). For Agamben, the perpetuation of social relations among people which are mediated by the spectacle amounts to “the expropriation and the alienation of human sociality itself” (Agamben 2003, 79). Moving beyond Debord, whose formulation was principally concerned with the circulation of images, Agamben argues that both images and words are encompassed within the spectacle. He further claims that spectacle dominates communicativity to such an extent that there is no longer any possibility of describing or understanding the world which lies outside the reach of spectacle (Agamben 2003, 79-83). He also contends that the accumulation of power brought about by the imbrication of media, state forms, and capitalism conspires not only to alienate people from political participation but also to alienate the linguistic and communicative character of humanity: In the figure of the world separated and organised by the media, in which the forms of the state and the economy are interwoven, the mercantile economy attains the status of absolute and irresponsible sovereignty over all social life. After having falsified all of production, it can now manipulate collective perception and take control of social memory and social communication. (Agamben 2003, 79-80)

Specifically addressing the media’s representation of the so-called Romanian Revolution, Agamben provocatively claims that the events of December 1989 marked “a new turn in world politics,” where the true political function of the media was revealed through a staged event that “Nazism had not even dared to imagine” (2000, 80). In one of his most cited statements, Agamben claims that, “in the same way in which it has been said that after Auschwitz it is impossible to write and think as before, after Timiúoara it will no longer be possible to watch television in the same way” (2000, 82). He emphasizes that the process of legitimization adopted

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by the new regime claiming power in Romania seemed to follow precisely the script that Debord predicted in The Society of the Spectacle and revisited in his subsequent volume Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (published in 1988, the year before the Romanian uprising). Agamben’s declaration was triggered by the discovery that the grisly display of corpses presented to television audiences in Romania on December 23, 1989 had been assembled strategically for reporters in order to authenticate rumours that the death toll in Timisoara had reached tens of thousands and hence to instigate the toppling of Ceauúescu. Reflecting on the relevance of Debord’s insights in the age of the complete triumph of the spectacle, Agamben observes that “in this way, truth and falsity became indistinguishable from each other and the spectacle legitimized itself solely through the spectacle” (2000, 82). Although the Romanian revolution was the most dramatic of the insurgencies against communism that swept across former Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it remains the most mysterious, as the media reports that narrated its unfolding to Romanians and to the outside world are contested to this day. It is agreed, however, that the uprising began in mid-December 1989 in Timiúoara, near Romania’s western border with Hungary, a location that enabled residents to pick up radio and television broadcasts regarding the contemporary implosion of the communist regimes elsewhere in Europe. Emboldened by these reports, the residents of the western city staged a protest in response to a specific local event and were met with violent resistance from the authorities, triggering further protest. At the mass rally summoned to support Ceauúescu in Bucharest, the assembled crowd began to jeer and boo at their leader, as is shown in the newsreel footage included in the opening sequence of Cover Boy. Shortly afterwards, the dictator and his wife Elena were executed. The violence was extreme and the death toll in the period before and after Ceauúescu’s execution is still unknown. The events in Romania have achieved notoriety as the first televised revolution. Writing about the large-scale massacre that reputedly occurred in Timiúoara at the outset of these events, Jean Baudrillard proclaims, with heavy postmodern irony in a book suggestively titled The Illusion of the End, that “[With Timiúoara] we were able to say ‘It’s just TV!’” (1994, 55). Indeed, according to Baudrillard, the Romanian revolution should be understood as an invisible, virtual event that happened in the television studio. In this case, the street became a virtual space, “a non-site of the event,” an extension of the studio. Baudrillard explains that the Romanians, whom he perceives as mystified television viewers, became “touristic spectators of a virtual history” (1994, 56), witnessing a “parody

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of history” (1994, 55) where the screen became an empty space of representation. Not all commentators wish to reduce the Romanian Revolution to an invention of mass-mediated spectacle. Stephen Kotkin, for example, has argued that, contrary to the general impression, Romania in 1989 was not an exception but part of a continuum that included East Germany and other countries participating in the overthrow of Communism in Eastern Europe. Communist-era Poland, usually taken as paradigmatic, proved to be the grand exception, he claims, since only Poland had a fully articulated alternative to the regime. Kotkin concludes: “Romania’s 1989 revolution seems highly distinct—each country’s was, in its own way, yet Romania, too, fits a pattern of uncivil-society paralysis and non-organized mass mobilization” (2009, 71). Indeed, as George Lawson astutely argues in The Global 1989, one should be careful about using 1989 as a barometer of old and new (2011, 2). Given that in many ways post-Cold War capitalist expansion represents a return to old exploitative practices, “a complex picture emerges in terms of the temporality of 1989, one which embraces important continuities alongside, and to some extent instead of, simple notions of ‘all change’” (Lawson 2011, 3).

Spectrality Cover Boy does not ostensibly intervene in the debates on the Romanian uprising. Using the perspective of the child Ioan to construct a window onto the events of December 1989, it foregrounds the fact that real violence accompanied the overthrow of Ceauúescu and shows the random consequences of such violence on the lives of ordinary people. It is the grown-up Ioan who recognizes that the reality of this violence is distorted or mocked in the “Exile” poster—a photograph centred on his own nude image and emblazoned with the provocative, absurdly inappropriate imperative: “Wear the Revolution.” The crisis triggered by Ioan’s discovery of Laura’s appropriation and manipulation of his image becomes the catalyst that enables him to remember his connection with Michele and to abandon Milan for good. Within the moral order constructed by the narrative, Michele now represents a more appealing point of reference for Ioan than the illusory world of spectacle in which he had become embroiled. When he attempts to reach his friend by telephone, however, Michele’s landlady refuses to relay the message. Ioan then begins the long drive to Rome in his new Mercedes in a mood of happy anticipation. His night-time journey is intercut with the scene of the landlady’s discovery of Michele’s body, an

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event that is represented in such oblique terms that the viewer might miss its full significance upon the first viewing. In the scene that follows, Ioan is still at the wheel of his car and appears to be driving through the Romanian countryside. Suddenly, Michele is seated next to him, chatting about their plans for the restaurant in the Danube Delta. The reappearance of the Italian thus serves to reassure the viewer that Ioan’s friend is alive and well, and that they are happily on their way to the Danube. The subsequent scene confirms this as both men are seen standing on a wharf looking out over a broad expanse of the river. When, in the final shot, it becomes clear that Ioan is in fact alone, the viewer understands retrospectively the spectral status of the entire sequence. Michele is indeed deceased, but the ghost of the defeated precarious labourer and friend of the Romanian migrant refuses to be fully dead and insists on coming back. The film also suggests that Ioan’s fantasy of making a living in Italy is finished. Ironically, his adventure in the fashion industry may have left him with enough money to pursue the plan conceived with Michele of opening a restaurant in Romania. This final scene links Cover Boy to a growing body of European films that disrupt the conventional chronology of realist fiction by withholding the markers that usually designate diegetic shifts.9 What this entails for the spectators is a provisional suspension of the ability to distinguish between what is supposedly real and what is merely imagined, or to tell the difference between past, present, and future. Thomas Elsaesser has described such films as “post-mortem” since they convey a sense of haunting and raise issues of memory, history, and identity through a non-realistic configuration of temporality (Elsaesser 2009a, 58). In what follows, this paper draws on Elsaesser, Erik Bullot, and Jacques Derrida to show how the trope of haunting functions in Cover Boy to destabilize traditional notions of identity—personal, political, and national. For cultural commentators such as Elsaesser and, more famously, Jacques Derrida, contemporary Europe is haunted by its past—by the history of the Holocaust, the failure of Socialism, and the consequences of (neo-)colonialism. Organized around the principle of transnational sovereignty, the recently expanded European Union has prompted new ways of thinking about nationhood, including “the right of mutual interference in the internal affairs of the other” (Elsaesser 2008b, 23). This implies that the Union has the potential capacity to interfere in the way in which any member state pursues its specific national practices or national values. Yet, it also allows for a new social contract that can mediate between parties with grievances against each other. Elsaesser has argued that cinema can play a pivotal role in this new thinking about conflict management and

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communication and in creating a new understanding of the present crisis in the European Union. Indeed, for this critic, cinema “can contribute to its own crisis of representation” (2008b, 23).10 Instead of understanding the crisis in cinema in terms of a shift from realism to illusionism, he sees it as a (positive) change from “claiming the real” to “performing presence” (2008b, 24). What this triggers is “a new spectatorial contract: a renegotiation of belief and the suspension of disbelief … a different way of thinking about the cinema’s relation to fiction, to the mode of the ‘as if’” (2008b, 24). Elsaesser proposes the term “double occupancy” as a framework through which to address the post-1989 crisis of representation in Europe and to discuss questions of individual, cultural, or national identity. Claiming that everyone in Europe today can be perceived as displaced in relation to some marker of ethnic, regional, religious, or linguistic difference, Elsaesser suggests the adoption of a “post-identity” mode of thinking capable of accounting for the state of being “always-already” occupied. In other words, “double-occupancy” is considered a suitable metaphor for the discursive and geopolitical territories of Europe, which are “always-already occupied.” The term not only signals issues of power and politics but also serves as a reminder of Europe’s history of migrations, invasions, pogroms, and expulsions. While terms such as multiculturalism and diversity seem to underestimate asymmetrical power structures in play, “double-occupancy” draws attention to conflict and contestation (2009a, 51). Erik Bullot (2002) has similarly attempted to theorize “post-mortem” cinema as a distinctive phenomenon that emerged at the end of the twentieth century. “Il est frappant combien la figure du post-mortem inquiète aujourd’hui le cinéma contemporain,”11 he observes, identifying contemporary cinema’s relationship to a paradoxical temporality, conjugated in the future perfect, in a scenario that confuses the time of the living with that of the dead and blurring the identity of both (2002, 5). For Bullot, the “post-mortem” allows for the invention of new regimes of fiction that lie “entre deuil et metamorphose”12 (2002, 6). Post-mortem films suggest the interpenetration of different temporalities; time splits, tears, and opens up to enable different temporal dimensions to coexist in an aporetic manner (Bullot 2002, 7). With a concluding sequence that departs from the realist tradition in specific ways, Cover Boy clearly belongs to what both Elsaesser and Bullot envision as “post-mortem” cinema. By definition, such films employ a trope of haunting whose temporality is ambivalent, asynchronous. Time seems to freeze, making it unclear whether it is the past that haunts the present or the future that haunts the past. The shift in temporality, how-

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ever, remains unmarked, and the continuity editing characteristic of realist narratives is fractured, posing hermeneutic challenges to the spectator and character alike. As Elsaesser points out, post-mortem films fail to register the difference between actual characters and imagined ones, between those who know about their post-mortem status and those who do not (Elsaesser 2008b, 29). Thus, in Cover Boy’s final scenes, the usual techniques such as flashback, fade-in, or superimposition, which typically designate transitions from the supposedly real to the imagined, are absent. Indeed, Michele’s death is barely registered on the visual track since his hanged body is configured only as a faint shadow on the floor in the distance when his landlady enters his apartment to chide him for the noise coming from his television set. Yet in the following scene, Michele appears as Ioan’s real travelling companion, only to disappear and reappear both in the car and in the final scene when the two friends are standing on the wharf overlooking the expanse of the Danube. The non-realistic technique adopted in Cover Boy’s conclusion is aligned with the type of cinematic narration that Elsaesser describes as symptomatic of the new post-realist ontologies, performing presence as post-mortem, and thematizing the consequences—positive and negative— of mutually interfering with, mutually sustaining and mutually authenticating each other, as both “ghosts” and “real,” both actual and virtual at the same time (2008b, 31).

For Elsaesser, by activating these post-realist ontologies, European cinema today can contribute to redefining the conditions of being European, that is to say politically and socially responsible for each other, by constantly renewing […] the felicity conditions of belief and trust, that is: of being each other’s other: not mirroring the other in mis-cognition and endless deferrals of self-identity, but enabling the other to interfere in my own mirror image. [This] is the best, but also perhaps the most difficult way of living our hyphenated and always already occupied identities. (2008b, 31)

Elsaesser’s reflection on how cinema can address the problematics of living together in a new Europe also resonates with Derrida’s reflections on temporal disjunctures in his volume Specters of Marx (2006), a text that is inspired by the question of how to live in a rapidly changing world. Written after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the imputed reunification of Europe, and the founding of the European Union, this volume seeks to articulate a social critique adequate to an altered political landscape. In an era that Derrida considers to be bereft of ethics or politics and in the face

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of illusory declarations of the end of history, he outlines a critique of the globalizing world while calling for a fundamental break with the present. In the face of widespread claims that Marx and Marxism are defunct, Specters of Marx argues against the triumphal claims of neoliberalism. After a brief and damning assessment of late capitalism, Derrida argues that an adequate critique of today’s world must appropriate Marx while simultaneously criticizing him. He seeks above all to identify a certain spirit of Marx that can be separated from what he perceives as the ontologizing and dogmatic features of Marxist doctrine (2006). Implicitly denouncing the inadequacy of the predominantly political-economic considerations that tend to characterize critical approaches to globalization, Derrida builds his critique from the standpoint of a politics based on the non-presentist temporality of spectrality, a standpoint that rejects any understanding of the present as presence. He characterizes this approach as one of responsibility to the past, to the dead, and to the future. For Derrida, the question of learning to live entails coming to terms with death, that is, with the spectral. He sees the spectre, the revenant, in terms of untimeliness and anachronism. The time of the spectre is always already multiple, not reducible to a particular chronological moment. An individual cannot tell with certainty if, in returning, the spectre testifies to a living past or a living future. In his reading of Marx’s reflections on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Derrida observes that learning to live requires transcending Hamlet’s opposition of being and not-being, of life and death (Derrida 2006, xvii-xviii). As an entity that both is and is not, the spectre represents temporalities that cannot be grasped in terms of present time. Such temporalities include a past that has not ended and a future that breaks with the present (2006, 3-4). Spectrality thus expresses that which does not exist solely in the “chain of presents” (2006, xix, 4, 25-27). Derrida’s critique of the present as presence is undertaken from the standpoint of a politics based on the non-identical, non-presentist temporality of spectrality. He characterizes this politics as one of responsibility to the past, to the dead—victims of war, violence, and oppression—and to the future, to those not yet born (Derrida 2006, xviii-xix, xxix, 25-27, 7075). Derrida coins the word hantologie (hauntology) as a substitute for its near-homonym, ontologie (ontology), thus replacing the priority of being and presence with the figure of the ghost—a figure that is neither presence nor absence, neither dead nor alive. To learn to live, he argues, an individual must acknowledge death because it is only through the other and by death that individuals come into configuration as themselves. People must learn how to live with ghosts, in their company, and above all to learn how to talk to them and enable them in turn to speak again (Derrida 2006, 221).

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Though Cover Boy ends with a sense of loss, of dreams gone terribly awry, it raises the possibility of an ongoing dialogue with the dead. By introducing the spectral figure of Michele in the final scene, the narrative suggests that there is no simple way of closing the door on the past since the casualties of history—those lives truncated by various forms of violence and oppression—will continue to haunt the world of the living, demanding attention, remorse, or retribution. At the film’s end, the viewer is clearly invited to mourn the disruption of the dream shared by the Romanian migrant and the precariously employed Italian of working together to achieve a better way of life, albeit in a country where “wood is cheap” (as Ioan puts it in order to convince Michele that going to Romania might be profitable). With the ghostly visitation that occupies these concluding moments, Amoroso’s film ultimately asks the viewer to consider how the memory of such defeated dreams can serve to engage, enrage, or mobilize those willing to listen to the voices of the dead.

Notes 1 Amoroso’s first feature, the Italian-French co-production Come mi vuoi (As You Want Me, 1997), starring Vincent Cassel, Monica Bellucci, and Enrico Lo Verso, revolves around a romantic triangle with a transgender twist. Despite its star cast, it was poorly promoted and minimally distributed. It has never been released on DVD. 2 In an interview with Maria Vittoria Galleazzi, the director describes his frustration with the financing of the film. See http://www.movieplayer.it/film/articoli/cover-boy-e-il-cinema-di-serie-iindipendente_4312/. 3 “A foreigner in his own land.” 4 “Love and Anger of a ‘Precarious Generation.’” As a literature student, Amoroso wrote his thesis on Pasolini, whose 1963 film La rabbia (Anger), a collage of documentary footage assembled as a critique of contemporary political circumstances, may have influenced him when he was working on Cover Boy. Writing about La rabbia, Maurizio Viano argues that this is “the political and aesthetic manifesto of Pasolini” (1993, 117), a work that permitted him “to verify the potential that images have to convey a meaning which exceeds verbal and logical discourse” (1993, 115). Amore e rabbia (Love and Anger) is the title of another film in which Pasolini was creatively involved. A Franco-Italian production made in 1969, it contains episodes by Pasolini, Jean-Luc Godard, Carlo Lizzani, Marco Bellocchio, and Bernardo Bertolucci. 5 As Hansen rightly points out, Kracauer’s work is informed by an historical understanding which positions him as a writer from the perspective of a survivor, both in the literal sense of having survived his friend Benjamin’s suicide and in a

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more prophetic sense of having to confront life after the Holocaust (“With Skin and Hair,” 444). 6 “Vu comprà,” which can be translated approximately as “Wanna buy?” mimics the limited language skills of Italy’s new immigrants. Though widely used in the 1990s, the term is now rarely pronounced in public as it is considered offensive. 7 “The crisis exists only in the desire of the Left—in their newspapers they’re inventing [a story of economic] decline so that the Left can come to power. But you should know that when they attain power they will construe corporations as machines that enable the exploitation of people by other people; they will regard profit as the devil’s excrement and will maintain that saving money is not a virtue, as it is for us, but something that should be taxed and penalized.” See http://www.quotez.net/italian/silvio_berlusconi.htm. 8 The outline of the corpse lying crumpled in the background of the image prompts yet another visual association as its shape is similar to that of the dead body in Goya’s famous anti-war painting “The Shootings of May 3 1808.” 9 Such films include Yella (Christian Petzold, 2007), La doppia ora (The Double Hour Giuseppe Capotondi, 2009), Emmas Glück (Emma’s Bliss Sven Taddicken, 2006), Good Morning, Aman (Claudio Noce, 2009), and Biutiful (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2009). 10 Elsaesser understands this crisis as occurring not only on a political level (involving issues of sovereignty) but also in the realm of aesthetics (involving issues of trace, referentiality, and the truth of the image) and communication (involving the role of trust and good faith). 11 “It is striking how much the figure of the post-mortem troubles today’s cinema.” 12 “Between mourning and metamorphosis.”

“THE JOURNEY FROM A POOR COUNTRY.” ATTEMPTS TO ESCAPE ITALY’S ECONOMIC AND MORAL POVERTY IN RECENT DOCUMENTARIES FRANCESCA ESPOSITO

Introduction Migration is a topic which intersects different fields of thought and also various cinematographic genres in recent cinema productions. For example, in fiction films it has actually passed from noirs, like La doppia ora (The Double Hour Giuseppe Capotondi, 2009) and Una vita tranquilla (A Quiet Life Claudio Cupellini, 2010), to the neorealist sociological investigation of La nostra vita (Our Life Daniele Luchetti, 2010), to intimist dramas like Gorbaciof (Stefano Incerti, 2010), which takes place in the criminal world and to Io sono l’amore (I Am Love Luca Guadagnino, 2009), which chooses a hyper-aestheticizing context instead, to comedy in I baci mai dati (Lost Kisses Roberta Torre, 2010). 2010 was a very productive year for documentaries: Andrea Segre’s Il sangue verde (The Green Blood) emerged from the urgent need to record the particularly dramatic events of the revolt of the Africans exploited in the citrus groves of Rosarno in Calabria. Edoardo Winspeare’s Sotto il Celio azzurro (A School With a View) expresses the enthusiasm for the success of a multicultural experience in a kindergarten in Rome attended by children from 32 different nationalities, to which the polisemic title1 makes reference. Meanwhile, Una scuola italiana (An Italian school) by Giulio Cederna and Angelo Loy documents a different Roman experience, that of “Carlo Pisacane,” a school where the children of immigrants exceed 80 percent of the total intake of pupils. Solo andata—Il viaggio di un tuareg (One way—A Tuareg journey) by Fabio Caramaschi allows the viewer to reflect on the cinematographic dispositif itself and the therapeutic function of making cinema. The documentary maker, having followed various moments in the life in an Italian family of Tuareg who

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have settled for some years in Pordenone, allowed an adolescent member of this family to cross over to the other side of the camera, thus becoming active in the making of the film. Also, Wim Wenders’ Il volo (The Flight) (an Italian film as it was commissioned, produced, and filmed in Italy) displays a very profitable exchange with a boy, who should have simply been a figurehead in the film. This eight year old boy took the initiative to invite the German filmmaker to visit him in Riace where he lived. After several meetings with him, Wim Wenders developed his initial project of a 3D documentary about the refugee landing on the Calabrian coast, which then developed into a fiction film and then into a longer documentaryfiction set in Riace. Finally at the sixty-eighth Venice Film Festival, four Italian fiction films dealt with immigration and nearly all have been preceded, accompanied, or followed by controversy: Cose dell’altro mondo (Things From Another World Francesco Patierno, 2011), Io sono Li (Shun Li and the Poet Andrea Segre, 2011), Terraferma (Dry Land Emanuele Crialese, 2011), and Il villaggio di cartone (The Cardboard Village Ermanno Olmi, 2011). It is not accidental that the theme of migration is so common in filmmaking in a historical period in which work (the search for work and working conditions) represents the most pressing problem for an ever greater number of individuals. Work and emigration are closely connected because people emigrate mostly in order to ensure survival, which in their country of origin is denied, either by repressive political regimes or by historical and geographic conditions which do not seem to offer hope of salvation. This attempt to escape from a destiny of persecution and poverty necessarily becomes the search for work. Thus, people move to Italy, where the working conditions, hard and precarious as they are, are still better than those which these people would find in their country of origin. However for many years now, job opportunities in many fields at various levels have become precarious even for Italians, who move from the south to the north of the country or abroad. Moreover, people do not only emigrate in desperate and disastrous conditions, but the decision to move may also be taken any time they see the possibility of realizing a more rewarding existence outside of their homeland. Thus, migration can also be a means to improve conditions that are already acceptable. In the specific Italian case, for example, this is evidenced in all those people who move mainly from the southern regions towards the centres of design, fashion, entertainment, or finance such as Milan or Rome. There are also Italians who have found in France occupations in the cultural or academic fields2, which are less supported by current Italian financial politics because they are erroneously judged

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incapable of producing profit. Here, the list of film titles gets longer. Even a film engaged primarily in penetrating the intricate twists and turns of personal and private dynamics, such as La solitudine dei numeri primi (The Solitude of Prime Numbers Saverio Costanzo, 2010), cannot avoid recording the sad but by now well-known fact that it is only outside Italy that the young graduate in mathematics will be able to find suitable advancement for his excellent studies. Sometimes, after a long or short stay by migrants in other countries, they return to Italy empty handed, as happens to the main characters of Corpo celeste (Heavenly Body Alice Rohrwacher, 2011).3

Il mio paese, Il passaggio della linea and La paura The films focused on in this chapter are exploratory journeys in the national territory, documentaries which make their point on the “state of health” of Italy. They do not come from a specific requirement to study experiences of migration, but during their investigations, they have recorded in depth stories of departures, arrivals, and expectations, fulfilled, unfulfilled, or even betrayed. This fact confirms that migration is now a defining element of Italian society. The films Il mio paese (My Country Daniele Vicari, 2006), Il passaggio della linea (Crossing the Line Pietro Marcello, 2007), and La paura (Fear Pippo Delbono, 2009) are very different aesthetically; however, they are connected by the visual perambulation that often coincides with the movements of the protagonists. It is not only “the filmed subjects” who move, out of necessity (leaving their land of origin and moving city in order to find work), but also “the subjects who film,” with the aim of being accurate and thorough in their research, thereby following the interrelations that the studied subjects unfold: Their testimonies lead to places which were not anticipated when departing. The causes of certain facts or phenomena can be found many kilometres away from the phenomena themselves. Il mio paese based on the rediscovery of the film L’italia non è un paese povero (Italy is not a Poor Pountry) by director Daniele Vicari was made between 1959 and 1960 by the Dutch documentary maker Joris Ivens. L’italia non è un paese povero was one of many films which fell victim to the RAI censorship, which in fact never wanted to transmit it. The directors of RAI, the state television broadcasting station, did not like the results of the filmic research commissioned to Ivens by Enrico Mattei, the president of ENI (National Hydrocarbon Corporation).4 They enacted a “cover-up” and tampered with the editing for the television production, which was broadcast under another title in a season and time slot which

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was supposed to discourage viewers from watching it. Subsequently, the film was archived with labelling which made its identification difficult.5 The film was created with a precise aim; its results, however, refuted the original intentions. The audacious and innovative entrepreneur Enrico Mattei, who in his role as the leader of ENI pursued the objective of making Italy independent from the point of view of energy, wanted photographic evidence (Barthes 1980, 133) to prove that Italy had completely overcome the deprivations and backwardness of the post-second world war period. In his journey across the peninsula, however, the Dutch film maker (who was enrolled in the Communist Party) and his collaborators encountered situations of extreme poverty. Those testimonies would certainly have made many citizens angry, and they would not have benefited the government of the time, which was narrating quite a different story. For these reasons, Joris Ivens’ completed documentary suffered a tragic destiny. However, when it was found again thirty-six years later, it made a strong impression on Daniele Vicari and before him on the young director Stefano Missio, who, in 1997, made a documentary filled with numerous interviews of the people involved in that enterprise: young assistants of the Dutch master and future directors like the brothers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, Tinto Brass, and Valentino Orsini. Vicari, for his part, constructs his tribute to Ivens’ film-journey as another journey which traces the stages of that first route. His intention is to verify whether the much celebrated economic miracle of the 1960s, which ignited the hope of the poor in the most rural provinces of the south and also the labourers and peasants in the rural areas of the north, had indeed really happened. Initially, Vicari should have departed from the North, from Corte Maggiore in the Piacentino area, where the client Mattei wanted his film to testify to the efficiency of the plant for the extraction and distribution of methane.6 It is also the place where the Dutch documentary maker’s troupe filmed the plant’s specialist technicians and labourers on pipes suspended in the air. Instead, changing directions, Daniel Vicari begins his journey at Gela, in Sicily. Evident in this town, which once was a flourishing city of the Magna Graecia, are the signs of unchecked urbanization: the first and immediate result of that accelerated industrialization process which effectively took place in the early 1960s with the activation of the petrochemical plant, Eni, and its satellite industries. However, it did not ensure long-lasting well-being for the people living there. The greater part of the structures of that defunct industrial complex is now in disuse and lies there like cumbersome (and dangerous) abandoned refuse. Many workers were fired, others are still in legal battles for guaranteed safety standards in the work place; there are

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also those who see no other solution but migration. Every day a coach leaves from Gela with migrants headed for Germany. This “un viaggio che si credeva non più attuale” (Grosoli 2007, 10)7 becomes the backbone of the young director’s project and, metaphorically, the underlying structure of Italy. In fact, the problems of those who are forced to leave concern the entire country and not only those who are personally forced to go.8 The scenes on the bus in Il mio paese now act as a connection between the analyses of the micro realities that Vicari explores, guided by the Ivensian journey, as he travels northwards through Italy. The director decides to travel part of the way with travellers headed north of the Alps. On the coach, he collects their stories. For those people, the journeyinterview presents itself as one of the few opportunities to reflect on their unknown dramas. They do not feel integrated into German society, but neither do they have an easy relationship with the country they left behind: they cannot manage severing that bond with “un paese che un po’ li ha abbandonati e un po’ li ha traditi.”9 The highway artery gives them the illusion that there is continuity between the South, where they are from, and the North, beyond the border where they live. While they are travelling, it seems that the past and the present can still be held together.10 In reality, there is no dialogue between the “immobile” Italy (studied by Vicari11) and the passengers who have to cross the country but who have another destination to reach. Thus, the images of today—the peoples’ energy of renewal and the energy released (also) by their anger—are wedged between the “impervious” scene of the bus and the archive pictures of the 1960 film. They confirm how much Italy has changed, and not always for the better, yet the people seem to have difficulty in finding a place where they can exercise their influence. Pietro Marcello’s Il passaggio della linea is also made up of realities in motion (fig. 1). As the title already suggests, trajectories are formed. The first thing the viewer sees is an old man who speaks while travelling by train. Framed in a close up, slightly from below, he looks into the camera and speaks spontaneously, as if he had just decided to start telling his story. In fact, the audience hardly notices that Il passaggio della linea is made up of interviews because one never sees who asks the questions (if indeed questions are asked). The faces which speak are filmed up close, and they all tend to pause in their speech. Thus, there are dead moments in which no answer comes from that person, who is a little like a mute but very attentive and empathetically interested therapist who manages the thread of the interlacing routes on the night trains.

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Fig. 1: Screenshot from Il passaggio della linea

The documentary collects the testimonies of the travellers on the long distance trains, who transfer from the south of Italy to the north to work, even for limited periods of time as imposed by modern working contracts: Siamo come James Bond, andiamo in missione quando andiamo al Nord. Superman, tale e quale! Io un contratto a tempo indeterminato non l’ho mai avuto, sempre a tempo determinato. E che dobbiamo fare?, dobbiamo andare in missione, anche per 10 giorni, 10 ore, 5 ore, 20 ore, 6 ore.12

Some of them let off steam, others relate adventurous moments, and others argue, allowing their reflections to take shape in the long arc of time as night falls. The first sequences create suspense: the sense of direction is turned on its head.13 It is one train, yet, there are many trains, caught under the neon band of lights from the stations they travel through. Meanwhile, the wagons board the ferry (in the Strait of Messina, the only place where something so unusual happens), while they are reflected on the side of other convoys. Inside, in the corridors, the bodies are defined little by little, as the eyes become accustomed to the dim lighting. In the compartments, the faces are shown sleeping against windows. Under the neon light, the contrasts are made violently: on the yellowish background of the small area between the toilet and the footboard of the exit sign, the black frock of a priest stands out. The showy colour of a turban, the word “Italy”

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printed on a passenger’s back bent in sleep in the corridor, and a plastic bag with small bottles of mineral water are nothing but objective correlatives of a community of “exiles” in the national territory: “Non cambia mai nulla qui, se trovo un posto ‘fuori’ sono disposto a partire, ma se è per troppo poco tempo resto in Italia”; “Io ho la residenza in un posto, il domicilio in un altro e dormo in un altro posto”; “Ho avuto l’occasione di vivere 6 anni in Francia, j’ai émigré à l’âge de 27 ans, ho fatto la Germania, ho fatto l’Inghilterra. Emigrare è una questione di intelligenza, bisogna avere la forza di vivere per emigrare, di essere vivo; io sono un ragazzo vivo.”14

The sound track in the first scenes is made up of noises in the immediate surroundings; there is no one in sight. The people are either sleeping deeply or meditating; there is a moment of rarefaction expressed by the first notes of a requiem cantata.15 Then, the excitement typical of when a person cannot sleep and has just crossed the threshold of desperation arises: the single comments pile up, overlap, the voices grow acrimonious, and there is even violence in the conversations. Effective editing of the sounds gives the impression of a babel of languages and idioms. The compartment becomes a surrogate for the much extolled Italian piazza, intended as a place for exchanges of opinion beyond social barriers. However, those who travel in these trains belong more or less to the same social class and staying together here is inevitable, not sought after. “Le passage de la ligne,” the opening quotation of the film, taken from a story by the Belgian writer and inventor of commissaire Maigret, Georges Simenon, renders homage to a very precise imaginary world, both literary and cinematographic, in which the train offers the ideal context for the development of mysterious and adventurous journeys. The sociological dimension of Marcello’s inquiry mitigates this possible inspiration, but again, certain random expressions caught during filming reintroduce mystery and intrigue into the realism of the scenes. On the platform of a station, a street urchin, clearly involved in illegal business dealings, ends up in the director’s viewfinder. The gaze of the youth meets that of the viewer, and aware of being caught red handed, the boy maintains a defiant and challenging expression. He is the incarnation of “photogenia,” the added value of the photographed subject which the cinematographic device is able to catch. The intensity of that aggressive expression of Mediterranean youth does not only speak toward the degradation and criminality which reigns in any Italian railway station (which is the layer of reality) but also harks back to the image of “the South” (the layer of the immaginario). The viewer is reminded of Wilhelm von Gloeden’s mid-

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nineteenth century photographs of naked or half-naked children with uncombed curls leaning against rocks, ruins, crumbling walls, or in the Mediterranean undergrowth. With those faces and those poses, evidently requested by the photographer, they embody a primitive beauty, unsophisticated, and an uncivilized physicality which is frightening and charming at the same time.16 Due to a series of details like these, that Pietro Marcello and his troupe did not allow to escape, this documentary seems to be authentic even in its moments of lyricism. The beauty of the countryside coexists with a certain cruelty—which forces many to leave—and coexists with the moral misery of the nation, which closes its eyes to architectural disasters and does not rebel that the cultural patrimony is sold off.17 The rich range of tones, which is expertly exposed in the film, exalts the potential of certain scenes, which are without a doubt magnificent. For moments, the window of the train, like a frame, isolates the best fragments of a work of art, though when put together, this picture, seen as a whole, is corrupted. The single glimpses, in fact, must be reconnected. It does not take much to see functional, unfinished buildings that torture the coasts. What seems to be the fantastic spectacle of an aerospace station in the darkness reveals itself to be the effect of the excessive lighting of a refinery. The encounter with Arturo summarizes all these reflections well. Arturo is an old man who lives on the trains rather than remaining locked away in a hostel. Paying the ticket fee, he regularly travels from Bolzano, where he was born, to Rome (but no further because during the last few years the ticket prices have steadily increased) with the minimum baggage necessary. He prefers to live in the most humble place that exists, the train, rather than live in the “non-place,”18 the station, after the ungrateful province which did not welcome his European ideas took him to court and tried to establish that he was mad.19 He defines himself as a beggar because he has chosen to live in the most uncomfortable and forgotten of institutions: the means of transport which should unite Italy and instead establishes new ghettos. It is not the person who travels on the train who should be ashamed but the person who does not care about providing maintenance and suitable improvements to a “public” service. Instead, priority is given to users who, although they are few in number, require the high speed connections which also have a high impact on the environment. There is a direct relationship between that lack of respect for the citizen, which can be expressed by the microcosm of “the express train” (treni espressi) and the more general ruin of the country. This bitter knowledge seems to be behind the obstinate choice of Signor Arturo in filming on the train.

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No less worrisome is the diagnosis of the state of Italy’s health, which emerges in the film La paura. The film was shot with a mobile phone. In fact, it was commissioned by the film festival “Pocket Films” of Paris, a “laboratory of creation, around the various uses of the pocket cameras” (from the website of the event). The technical limitations of the “photocinematographic” device obviously had direct consequences on the superficial appearance of this work. The images are monotone at a chromatic level and standardized with dull tones. The relationship of light and shade in the different situations, whether internal or external, are within an average range of “acceptability” generated by any apparatus destined for mass commercial use.20 As a result, this style of filming has a crude surface: granular, like the first days of the era of television or in pixel limited regimes. The author’s first person comment soon becomes relevant. Unlike Pietro Marcello, who erased the traces of his presence, Delbono is not content with just appearing as a voice but aims at self representation. Without modesty, he literally aims the eye of the mobile phone, trained for voyeurism, on his belly which is shapeless and undulating with his breathing. After all, it is all part of the artist’s contemplation of the navel. Irony, however, has no place in this film with its pitiless approach, which does not grant mitigating circumstances to the observed reality and his body. Using his body as the starting point for the renunciation of superficial embellishment could be, in fact, a declaration of honesty. Concluding the film by filming his friend Bobò in the shower is a way to further highlight the central function of the body as an archive of received wounds (Bobò is a deaf-mute who before meeting Delbono was locked up in a lunatic asylum). A critic has spoken about the social body “infetto, malato, morente” (Buquicchio 2009, 171).21 This very well chosen metaphor returns the viewer to the idea of the global entity—“the body like the country”— where the parts are kept together which, as the audience have already seen in Marcello’s film, are already damaged. There is an insistent presence of dialogue regarding the presentation of the body in the film: it begins with a television programme which talks about obesity, and paradoxically the doctor who makes the diagnosis is, himself, overweight. Then there are faceless bodies in a clean gym. The culminating scene is commemorative of a dead body: An Italian boy with African parents, Abdoul Guiebre, is killed by two bartenders, a father and son from Milan, because he stole a pack of biscuits. Delbono goes to the funeral of Abba—the guy’s nickname—in the periphery of Milan. He displays his disdain for the absence of an official representative

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from the municipal institutions and also for the insufficient attendance by the local population. He gives caustic judgements (“è un paese di merda”),22 provoking a reaction from a police officer present that, in the opinion of the author, was a proper reaction. The police officer tells him to be quiet, probably intending to protect the decorum of such a tragic event. The fundamental but less obvious question in this scene is “what is the role of this police officer?” He does not make an appearance for and thus representing the institution, although he attends the funeral along with the victims of racist crimes. He is there for reasons of public order. Thus, his superiors have sent him to the funeral in order to prevent any disturbances from taking place, so that the event passes quietly and without notice. Delbono is there to document the event and to prevent it from being forgotten too quickly. However, the tone in which he tries to silence a girl, who is also bothered by his excessive intrusion in the drama of the event, seems offensive. Taking on the role of the artist (which he does not hesitate to show off), he feels he is exempt from dialogue with his critics: “Stai tranquilla, non ti preoccupare, tutto questo andrà a finire in un film, tutto questo diventerà un film… Non ti preoccupare….”23 It seems to be a contradiction: to be shocked because so few have attended and then to avoid the dialectic comparison with those who are there and who wish to express their own opinion. Continuing the investigation, Pippo Delbono’s walk is very bumpy for the viewer because no stabilizers such as those which can be found in professional video cameras were used, nor was the camera placed on a tripod and then on rails, as would have been done on any orthodox set. The artist does not even seem interested in the composition of the framing, which he could have influenced to a greater degree, even though he was filming with a mobile phone. The scenes, often framed from above, are expressed only by what is left on the ground and shown in all its squalor. The roads are dirty and uneven, the squares are flooded, and the flower beds are stripped. When Delbono begins to follow a hen that makes its way through a path full of rubbish and reaches the first caravan, one realizes a Roma camp24 is being approached. Two very effusive children want to be photographed (fig. 2): even living on the margins of organized society, they clearly know what can be done with technological inventions. They want to see the photos immediately. They want to be photographed with their small dogs, and they pose as television presenters.

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Fig. 2: Screenshot from La paura

As Pasolini noticed thirty years ago, the development of consumerism has also caught up with the “developing countries” (in which he includes the South and I would also add the urban suburbs)25 causing changes in behaviour and moral values. The gestures of the children mirror the ones they see on television. Now, it is only too clear that for Delbono the superficial performance of a mobile phone—low, standard and standarddizing—is ideal for expressing the anthropological changes which are taking place in Italy. The true face of the country is as it appears on a television screen. Translated from Italian by Julie Henderson.

Notes 1 Celio is one of the hills of Rome. This name is very similar to cielo, which means “sky.” In Italian, a phrase like the one in the title Sotto il Celio azzurro (Under the Blue Celio) automatically recalls the common phrase “under the blue sky” (“sotto il cielo azzurro”). 2 In their book I ricercatori non crescono sugli alberi (Labini/Zampieri 22010, 77), Francesco Sylos Labini and Stefano Zapperi refer to the French CNRS competition of 2007 as an “Italian invasion.” 3 Translation of the film titles provided by author. 4 Enrico Mattei (1906–1962) was an entrepreneur who was a partisan in the past. Close to the left wing Christian Democrat party but not subject to the governing power, he chose to oppose the demands of the United States, to whose government

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the Christian Democratic Party, then in power, had always been faithful. Under his management, for example, the activities of oil drilling in the Po plain and also planned searches in other regions were improved. Although he was asked to, Mattei did not liquidate the Agip agency (Italian Petrol General Company), but he “resuscitated” it, transforming it into ENI. For this company, he started diplomatic relationships and economic negotiations with Middle Eastern countries and Russia. In that way, he succeeded in bypassing the more influential oil companies worldwide which worked in agreement with the American government. Enrico Mattei died in 1962 in an aeroplane crash, which was discovered to have been intentional by investigations conducted six years ago (although Francesco Rosi had already claimed this in the film Il caso Mattei (The Mattei Affair, 1972). Apart from the fictional film just mentioned, there is also a documentary Potere e petrolio. La sfida di Enrico Mattei (Power and Petrol) by Fabio Pellarin and produced by Cinecittà and Istituto Luce in 2008. 5 Stefano Missio in Quando l’Italia non era un paese povero (1997, ‘91) relates: “The televised version, shown on the screens as ‘Fragments of a film by Joris Ivens’ was broadcast in July 1960 without having been promoted and announced, at night, as the last programme and behind schedule on the programming timetable. The film was subdivided into three episodes and RAI chose to show them in separate days as three installments. The title of the second episode ‘Le due città’ (‘Two Cities’), in the televised version became ‘L’albero di Natale’ (‘Christmas Tree’), and it was the height of summer!” (1997, ‘91). “Ivens at that point interruptted the editing of the film for the cinema, which should have been created from the film shot for TV, and he asked to have one copy of the televised work for his personal archive, as stipulated in the contract. The reply was negative because there was no censorship rating. Even Moravia’s comment was partly rewritten and [...] on the film boxes containing the three instalments were written the misleading key words ‘Potenza’ [a southern Italian city which is one of the locations], strictly regional” (Missio 2007, ‘93). 6 Joris Ivens’ filming is an homage to the methane pipeline which appears as an extremely useful cutting-edge construction, which is constantly supervised and where the labourers are very aware of the important role they are performing. 7 “A journey that nobody believed was still happening, from Sicily to Germany, inside a coach that every day takes the new migrants and ends up becoming itself a symbol of this place so delicately balanced between the old and new situations of migratory flows” (Grosoli 2007, 10). 8 The title of the film is actually Il mio paese, meaning all that which happens on national ground. Therefore also the movement north and south within the country, for the aforementioned reasons, is a phenomenon common to all of Italy. 9 “A country which abandoned them a little and betrayed them a little.” Comment made by Daniele Vicari, himself, in the film. 10 They live a dual existence on the coach, which is the same as the one found by other passengers headed for Germany in similar conditions and those met by the documentary maker Marcus Pichler (Mirabella/Sindelfingen. Rückfahrkarte nach Deutschland Andreas Pichler, 2001). The migrants comment upon how, returning in summer to the small village in Sicily, they heard themselves addressed by their

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ex-fellow countrymen—with a degree of sarcasm—as “the rich Germans,” “those people who have made a fortune.” Among the passengers the director, who is from the Italian South Tyrol, follows; there was a Sicilian who had transported a load of local Sicilian stone to the city of Porsche and the Daimler plants, which he then used to pave the front part of his German property. If travelling with a private vehicle (the state railway no longer even manages to ensure the last goodbye!) is the only remaining tie with the native land, then the pavement made of stone from Mirabella, his home town, is like a carpet which is unrolled and which extends that connection (ideally infinitely). That gentleman, in fact, felt deeply saddened about the probability of losing the relationship between his descendants—who were by now well integrated in Germany—and his small village of origin. 11 Apart from the stops already made by Ivens (Gela, Ferrandina, Grottole), Daniele Vicari also intentionally travels to those places in Italy where the dignity of work has been badly damaged, both in well-known (Termini Imerese, Melfi, Porto Marghera) and less well-known centres. Vicari’s film does not forget the research centres where high categories of personnel are forced to accept very low salaries; the production centres where the large presence of foreigners (for example the Chinese) has forced the economy of the place to renew itself and to experiment (employees and entrepreneurs together) with solutions which focus on the high quality of the product, and, also, those farmers who believe in organic products but need the support of the institutions. All of these are citizens who respect the laws of the state even though they are not helped by them and pursue the objective of a more satisfactory life. Among all those that construct the national picture drawn by Vicari, the migrants on the bus are the most resigned. After the (obviously brave) choice to leave, they seem to have no more initiative and passively accept what the new country has in store for them. 12 We are like James Bond, we go on a mission when we go to the North. Just like Superman! I have never had a permanent contract, only temporary. And what can we do? We must go on a mission, even only for ten days, ten hours, five hours, twenty hours, six hours. 13 This effect is the result of editing which has interspersed the filming of numerous trains in different places and in different atmospheric conditions. 14 “‘Nothing ever changes here. If I find a place “outside” I’m ready to leave, but if it is for too little I’ll stay in Italy’; ‘I’m resident in one place, I have my address in another and sleep in another place’; ‘I had the chance to live for six years in France, j’ai émigré à l’age de 27 ans, I’ve done Germany, I’ve done England. Emigrating is a question of intelligence, you need to have the energy or life to emigrate, to be alive; I am full of life.’” These are some of the stories that are heard in the film. 15 Requiem by Alfred Schnittke, 1975. 16 Even with him down below, on the pavement, while we are on the moving train with the doors closed, therefore safe and sound, I cannot say that feeling those fiery eyes upon the viewer does not make him shiver. 17 For a fundamental book on this theme, see Settis (2002). 18 See Augé (1992).

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19 Arturo was involved in politics and founded a pro-European party la Nuova Europa in Bronzolo, a municipality in the Italian South Tyrol. 20 A short reflection on the “automatic mode” of a camera could be useful here, because every time that one decides to use this modus, one accepts the precise Weltanschauung behind this technical option, too. Long before the digital era, with the introduction of compact cameras, camera manufactures determined the criteria of what the conventional picture should be: not unsharp, always a bit too bright rather than too dark, privileging symetry, etc. The camera “decides” how to capture reality. Those who take pictures manually decide themselves how much light enters the camera, which object or sector of the framed situation to bring into focus, etc. In all cases, a decision has to be made. The possibility of catching reality “as it is” is a myth: the technical apparatus is not neutral. Film historian Roberto Nepoti speaks about the “non-innocence of the technique”: “[It] is never a passive recording instrument, but a vehicle of linguistic, expressive and ideological choices (more or less free, more or less conscious) on the part of the representative in charge of the production of the documentary text” (Nepoti 1988, 17). 21 “Infected, sick, dying.” 22 “It’s a shit country.” 23 “Keep calm, don’t worry, all this will end up in a film, all this will become a film... Don’t worry....” 24 The Roma are not immigrants in a strict sense, but as eternal exiles, they can be considered as such. 25 “Lettera aperta a Italo Calvino: Pasolini: quello che rimpiango.” In Paese Sera, July 8, 1974, reprinted in Pasolini (1977, 60-63).

NORTHWARD, WESTWARD. ITALIAN EMIGRATION AND INTERNATIONAL CINEMA

MODERNIZING ITALIAN MIGRATION CINEMA: FILM AUTEURS AND THE ECONOMIC BOOM ALBERTO ZAMBENEDETTI

At the cusp of the economic boom that restructured Italian economy in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a handful of Italian directors, who were recognized by critics and audiences alike at some point in their careers as auteurs, made films concerning Italians emigrating or migrating internally. Thanks to the status that was granted to these directors, their films received a host of critical attention in monographic volumes and histories of Italian cinema, but rarely have they been considered together, as a result of a general preoccupation that captured the imagination of new filmmakers and veterans alike. This chapter will analyze four films that investigate the relationship between mobility and modernization in the wake of the relatively abrupt transition from post-war to the economic boom: I magliari (The Magliari Francesco Rosi, 1959), Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers Luchino Visconti, 1960), La ragazza in vetrina (Girl in the Window Luciano Emmer, 1961), and I fidanzati (The Fiances Ermanno Olmi, 1963). In the mid 1950s, a new understanding of film art came to the fore, famously spearheaded by a group of intellectuals gravitating around the French magazine Cahiers du Cinéma. They called it la politique des auteurs, or auteur theory, as Andrew Sarris dubbed it for the Englishspeaking world in his canonical article “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962.” The main tenet of auteur theory was the re-evaluation of the figure of the director, who these critics argued could be elevated from craftsman to author status. As a consequence, the films of a certain auteur could be studied not only individually, in relation to their genre, or the canon, but also as part of an artist’s oeuvre, as one brushstroke on the larger canvas of their career. Before André Bazin and the Cahiers critics he inspired engaged with their work, Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, and Vittorio De Sica already enjoyed the status of founding fathers of neorealism and that of film artists all around. The next generation of filmmakers, including Francesco Rosi and Ermanno Olmi, achieved such status after auteur theory became a consolidated approach in film scholarship in the

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early 1960s. While not discarding the apparent vale of auteur theory, this chapter will also engage with the larger structures that inform the four films in question, such as national film history, genre conventions, and political climate. This approach stems from a belief that when reflecting on a specific kind of film, such as a film about migration, it is fundamental to take into account not only the individual choices made by screenwriters and directors in presenting the material, but it is also crucial to understand the artistic and socioeconomic climate in Italian history. Film critic Francesco Bolzoni writes that il 1959 è, per il cinema italiano, l’anno del revival dei “grandi temi”: la resistenza e la seconda guerra mondiale. […] Rosi, da parte sua, non guarda indietro. Vuole vedere chiaro in una situazione difficile: l’emigrazione.1 (Bolzoni 1986, 54)

Bolzoni rightly identifies a trend that involved many filmmakers who felt that comedy and pepla had strayed too far away from neorealism’s lesson, which understood Italian film primarily as a socially and politically engaged cinema. Francesco Rosi’s I magliari certainly is about the present and, more specifically, about the state of Italian migration to Northern European countries in 1959. However, it is also a reflection on the past, as it capitalizes on the figure of the emigrant as it is constructed in films such as Il cammino della speranza (The Road to Hope Pietro Germi, 1950) and Napoletani a Milano (Neapolitans in Milan Eduardo De Filippo, 1953) as well as a forecast of Italians’ future mobility, which will take them to increasingly exotic destinations and faraway lands. Almost every story about migration is a story of individuals on the margins of society. However, the most common narrative trajectory is one that depicts the efforts undertaken by the characters in order to move from the margins to the centre, to assimilate, to climb the social ladder, or to gain wealth and respectability. I magliari focuses on characters that, because of the illegal nature of their activities, must remain on the fringes of society, even if their financial gains accumulate. The film tells the story of Mario (Renato Salvatori), an Italian worker in Germany who gets involved with a group of scam artists. Their chieftain, Totonno (Alberto Sordi), is the epitome of this marginality: as film historian Sandro Zambetti puts it, “Totonno è […] lo stare ai margini della legalità senza rispettarla e ai margini dell’illegalità senza rischiare troppo”2 (Zambetti 1976, 26). The magliari’s relative affluence is not an unproblematic narrative of success nor is it the fruit of hard and honest labour and national solidarity. Rather, it is predicated on the accentuation of the negative qualities attrib-

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uted to the Neapolitans in Napoletani a Milano; it is arte d’arrangiarsi mixed with international criminal activities. The originality of Rosi’s approach to the material stems from this point: In I magliari, he combined what is essentially a social issue (emigration and the sense of bereavement felt by the unemployed worker abroad) with a story of organized crime. What makes this melange possible is the encounter of the naive protagonist Mario and the cunning Totonno; these characters are imbued with different values and, as Alberto Cattini notes, different genre conventions are attached to them. Mario is associated with melodrama and populismo,3 whereas Totonno’s scenes alternate between comedy and gangster motifs (Cecchi D’Amico, Patroni Griffi, and Rosi 2001, 8). I magliari is focalized through Mario. It begins with a nod to the sentimentalism that characterizes him; before the opening credits we see Mario’s feet as he walks over a work of public art that maps out Hanover’s distance to other major European cities. When his feet reach Rome (“Rom,” which is 1200 kilometers away), he kneels down and caresses the silver letters inlayed in the pavement. Mario’s nostalgia for the motherland is quickly reinforced by his choice of food: disgusted by the smell of sausages sold at a food stand, he enters La Bella Napoli, an Italian restaurant, where he is welcomed with hostility by the staff. Totonno intervenes and invites Mario to his table, where he is enjoying spaghetti and wine in the company of other Italian men. The film clarifies that this is not a narrative of the Southern Question. When Mario tells his dinner companions that he is from Grosseto, Vincenzo (Nino Vingelli), shoulders toward the camera, remarks “Qui c’è tutta l’Italia rappresentata. O’ toscano, o’ rumano, e o’ napuletano!”4 From this moment on, I magliari’s narration proceeds by juxtaposing two discourses: Mario’s innocence versus Totonno’s cunning, the honest migrant versus the fraudster expatriate, legality versus illegality, melodrama versus dark comedy, populismo versus crime brutality. However, this initial dichotomy is progressively complicated: Mario starts off as a defeated man of solid principles, but the more he mingles with the magliari, the more he abandons his lofty ideals. Only the grand gesture of quitting the gang and the woman he loves—the boss’ wife, played by Belinda Lee—can ultimately redeem him. Mario’s worldview is informed by ideas of lawfulness and morality that are geographically bound: if Italy represents illegality and swindling, Germany must represent legality and honest work. Realizing that Totonno’s activity is a fraudulent one throws a wrench in his dichotomous system: the magliaro casts a dark shadow on Mario’s idea that migrating to Germany represents the opportunity for him to earn his living without

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having to step out of the legal bounds of society. Before meeting Totonno, Mario had already failed in his project of moving from the margin to the centre of society: a righteous worker who lost his job, Mario is about to leave Germany and return home, accepting defeat. From a storytelling point of view, Totonno hijacks Mario’s character arc. Totonno does not allow him to be sanctimonious and to write, for himself, a narrative of martyrdom, according to which he left Italy and endured terrible suffering and deprivation in order to make an honest living. Totonno, unlike Mario, does not have an arc. He is a linear character, and as such he stays true to himself and his values throughout the film. In fact as far as emigrants are concerned, Totonno is the evolution of the species. He uses the narrative of the poor Italian emigrant who is underpaid and exploited to his own advantage. He turns the rules of migration upside down and succeeds in getting ahead by scamming the local population and by outsmarting the host culture. Throughout the film and in particular during the sales pitches, Totonno practices a style of instrumental self-stereotyping; he taps into the narrative of the Italian emigrant and reappropriates its markers, using them at his convenience. The idea of movement from the margin to the centre is a driving force in Luchino Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi fratelli as well. Unquestionably the most celebrated film about internal migration of all time, Rocco is also one of the greatest films of Italian cinema at large. Loosely based on Giovanni Testori’s collection of short stories Il ponte della Ghisolfa, Rocco e i suoi fratelli “appartiene, in realtà, a quella categoria di film viscontiani che enunciano e denunciano ispirazioni (letterarie) plurime, alcune evidenti e conclamate, altre più segrete e occulte” 5 (Micciché 2002, 39). In five acts divided by intertitles, Rocco tells the story of five brothers from Lucania who migrate to Milan at the peak of the economic boom. Although the title seems to indicate Rocco (Alain Delon) as the film’s protagonist, it is the segment focusing on the first born, Vincenzo (Spiros Focás), which receives the most screen time.6 In fact, Rocco is not a film with a single, defined protagonist; it is about the arc of the whole Parondi family, from the eldest to the youngest brother and the hurdles they encounter on their way to assimilation. Housing, work, education, sexuality, and love are the themes explored by the film in its five segments. As Visconti monographer Geoffrey Nowell-Smith explains: each brother in a crude sense represents a certain kind of solution to the problems facing a Southern immigrant in a Northern urban environment. These solutions are not abstractly conceived, but evolve dialectically, each in response to the contradictions and inadequacies discovered in the last. (Nowell-Smith 2003, 128-129)

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Just like its contemporary La ragazza in vetrina, Rocco begins with a train pulling into a station at night. The Parondis exit the direttissimo BariMilano and unload their belongings on the platform before beginning their journey across Milan. With its monumental proportions, the central station dwarfs the crowd of migrants, who move slowly through the massive structure weighed down by their luggage. The mother, Rosaria (Katina Paxinou), and four of her sons—Vincenzo is already in Milan—continue their journey across the metropolitan landscape on a tram, gazing at the city’s modernity through the vehicle’s windows. Rosaria shows pictures of her eldest child to the conductor, who observes them with interest. However, the magic of this overture, in which human contact and integration seem like concrete possibilities for the migrants, is quickly reigned in. Rosaria clashes with the family of Vincenzo’s fiancée and forces her son to leave his own engagement party. Albeit being the first son to migrate and leave the family, Vincenzo is still quite tied to the ways of the South. He chooses a girl from the community of Southern immigrants, Ginetta (Claudia Cardinale), and a blue-collar job. His loyalty to the family is almost unblemished, and he follows the dictates of his mother almost to the point of renouncing his own personal life, even though a healthy, individualistic drive initially motivates his choices. His attachment to old fashioned ideas of masculinity and gender roles are fleshed out in his relationship with his fiancée. Conversely, Simone (Renato Salvatori) breaks the first taboo. He not only fails to seek a Southerner, he romances a prostitute, Nadia (Anne Girardot). A metonymical embodiment of decadent city life, the girl endangers the solidity of the kinship between the siblings and will drag Simone and Rocco to an irreparable dispute. Unable to find steady employment, Simone follows in Vincenzo’s footsteps and “becomes a boxer, which is a classic mode of advancement for ambitious members of exploited but emergent ethnic groups” (NowellSmith 2003, 129). In fact, three out of five Parondi brothers wear the boxing gloves to attain social mobility: Vincenzo without success, Simone without discipline, and Rocco without heart. Just like Vincenzo, Simone relies on his physical rather than intellectual ability to succeed. However like Totonno, the magliaro, Simone, who is depicted with animalistic similes throughout the film, also places himself at the margin of legality. The eponymous third born, Rocco, plays a pivotal role in the younger brothers’ process of integration. In fact, Simone’s shortcomings degenerate into criminal actions that Rocco attempts to redress. Despite their opposite natures—Simone is an arrogant “cock-of-the-walk” whereas Rocco is a goodhearted country boy—the brothers still share the core values of the rural society in which they received their upbringing.

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Concepts such as honor, loyalty, affiliation, and tradition simply have a different connotation in the host culture. Their inability to overcome their Southern imprint is what sentences their ultimate demise. When Rocco must leave the family to serve his draft term in the military, Rosaria keeps him updated through letters. This simple storytelling device allows Visconti to inform the audience on the family’s slow rise to middle-class status, on their slow crawl from the margin toward the centre. The driving forces are Vincenzo, who married Ginetta, and Ciro (Max Cartier), who obtained his high school diploma and became a skilled worker in an Alfa Romeo factory. Simone, however, cannot secure a steady job because of his boxing career, which initially goes well. After Vincenzo moves out, Ciro becomes the main provider with a steady income. However in order to conquer a position for himself in Milanese society, he must turn his back, at least partially, on the Parondi clan. In his segment, he rewrites the norms of familial loyalty by adjusting to the mores of the host culture: he dates a native (blonde) girl and relies on education rather than physical strength in order to earn his salary. Most importantly, Ciro is instrumental in finding a rational solution to the problems raised by Simone’s downfall. In his classic volume on the Italian character, Luigi Barzini writes that “most Italians still obey a double standard. There is one code valid within the family circle, with relatives and honorary relatives, intimate friends and close associates, and there is another code regulating life outside” (Barzini 1985, 194). After Simone turns his anger against Rocco and Nadia, Rocco chooses to desert his lover in the hopes of saving his brother; he pushes Nadia onto Simone, sacrificing his love for her in favor of his sibling’s well-being. Also when Simone steals from his first manager Morini (Roger Hanin), Rocco offers to repay his debt and agrees to fight, despite the fact that he does not enjoy boxing. While Rocco succumbs to the code of the clan and shoulders Simone’s wrongdoings, Ciro shows that he is able to operate outside it. Firstly, he tries to reason with Simone, who is hostile to his younger brother’s remarks and tells him off. Secondly, he approaches Rocco and foreshadows his intentions of breaking from the code. Thirdly, he tries to bribe Simone and send him away. The film’s most climactic sequence is a masterclass in cross-cutting between two locations: While Rocco fights to earn the money to save Simone from prison, his crooked brother murders Nadia.7 When Simone shows up at Rocco’s after-party covered in blood, Ciro runs to the police and turns him in. No longer identifying the clan as the core of society, the fourth sibling turns to its superstructure: having left rural Lucania and embraced the

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industrial world, Ciro aligns with the Northerners’ reliance on law-andorder as the system governing life in the metropolis. Luca, the youngest brother, represents the project of total assimilation: remnants of peasant knowledge are bestowed upon him by Simone and Rocco, who still envision Lucania as a lost paradise. However, the final lesson, in the end sequence, comes from Ciro, who has struggled throughout the film to absorb the Northern values and embrace the new way of life. Nowell-Smith argues that “Luca is still a child, and his horizons are bounded by the family. Unlike the others he remembers the South only vaguely, but he has the idea that he would like some day to go back, to renew contact with the world of origins” (Nowell-Smith 2003, 132). Luca’s project can be accomplished because he, thanks to his young age, is the sole sibling who can manage where the others failed or only partially succeeded: he can become a respectable citizen in the host environment and afford the luxury, somewhere along the line, to rediscover his origins in a trip to the motherland, as Rocco wishes. The film ends on Luca as he returns home after visiting Ciro at the Alfa Romeo factory. In a long shot, the boy walks off into the distance, moving across an urban landscape that is still very much in the making. He leaves the desolate, naked periphery of the plant behind, symbolically heading towards the city on the horizon. Luciano Emmer’s La ragazza in vetrina elaborates on the scandalous themes Rocco introduced in the conversation about emigrants’ sexuality. Vincenzo (Bernard Frasson), the film’s protagonist, is a young miner from the Veneto who migrates to Holland and gets involved with Else (Marina Vlady), a beautiful Amsterdam prostitute. The innovative director was deeply involved with every stage of this film’s production. He wrote the script with Rodolfo Sonego and Emanuele Cassuto and was part of the team of writers that collaborated on the screenplay, which included Cassuto and Vinicio Marinucci, Luciano Martino, and Pier Paolo Pasolini.8 La ragazza was deemed unsavoury by the censorship, which at the time was controlled by the Christian Democrats,9 and was restricted to audiences of sixteen or older. Not only did the film have a troubled release, it also had a very difficult production. Magali Noël (who plays Corry, Federico’s girlfriend) recalls that Emmer sul set ogni tanto si arrabbiava: non con gli attori, ma piuttosto con le situazioni che capitavano. Giravamo nella città proibita di Amsterdam, proprio nel quartiere delle prostitute, e spesso Luciano aveva problemi con con qualche gestore di bar, di locali. La situazione era difficile. Marina ed io eravamo molto truccate, e quando non giravamo venivamo spesso importunate.10 (Francia di Celle and Ghezzi 2004, 49)

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In addition to these problems on the set, Emmer did not get along with the producer, Emanuele Cassuto, and accused him of embezzling funds from the film’s budget. Reportedly, the actors had to contribute funding to finish the film. Because of its issues with the Italian censorship board, the film now exists in at least two different versions: the French version and the Italian version, which is a few minutes shorter. Emmer was always bitter about his film’s ill fate. In 1998 at a screening of La ragazza at the Centro di Cultura Italiano in Brussels, he addressed an audience of expatriates and remarked that “la stessa democrazia che vi ha spinto lontano dalle vostre case è quella che perseguitò con la censura il mio film”11 (Francia di Celle and Ghezzi 2004, 88). As Guglielmo Moneti notes in La ragazza in vetrina, riemergono, in una forma sostanzialmente tragica, i consueti temi emmeriani dello scontro fra pulsioni soggettive e resistenze materiali, e del rapporto fra desideri, progetti, tensioni individuali e dinamiche collettive.12 (Monetti 1992, 66f)

Emmer had already explored these themes in his 1951 Parigi è sempre Parigi (Paris is Always Paris), in which a group of Italians travel to the French capital to watch an Italy versus France soccer game and spend the weekend in the ville lumière. His second feature film and one of the first Italian travel comedies ever made, Parigi, is “uno dei più geniali film sullo spettacolo degli spettacoli nello spazio urbano europeo esploso del dopoguerra,”13 as Enrico Ghezzi dubs it (2004, 11). Francesco Rosi was Emmer’s assistant director, and many stars and rising new faces were cast in the film,14 including Aldo Fabrizi and his on-screen wife Ave Ninchi, Lucia Bosé, a young Marcello Mastroianni, Paolo Panelli, and Franco Interlenghi. The last named plays Franco, a handsome young man who romances a French girl, Christine (Hélène Rémy) who works in a newsstand. The short-lived romance, whose touching sweetness is made possible by its intrinsic brevity, contains the possibility of deracination and migration for either lover, which is ultimately curtailed by the group’s narrative. Franco must return to Italy and leave Christine behind for their fling to have memorable status; it is the very fact that their union remains only potential that makes it so compelling. Once the threshold between travel and migration is crossed, things lose their glamorous patina. This much bleaker scenario is embodied by the “Barone” character (Giuseppe Porelli), a poor Italian emigrant living in Paris who pretends to be rich and chaperons Fabrizi to the seediest nightclubs in Paris. It is through this character that “Emmer può inserire, accanto alla Parigi mitica dei monumenti e degli spettacoli notturni, quella,

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demitizzata, dei lavori umilianti, dei bassifondi, dei quartieri malfamati dove si vive di espedienti”15 (Moneti 1992, 44). However, Parigi è sempre Parigi is not a film about migration; it is a comedy about Italy’s fast growing economy, which for the first time allows its citizens to visit exotic locations for leisure and not only while searching for employment and social mobility. Migration must remain an unexplored avenue for the young international lovers in order for the film to project the image of a changed Italy: no longer that of post-war reconstruction and neorealism, but the optimistic one of an economic boom that was beginning to appear on the horizon. Emmer recalls that this storyline was added to the film after the others were completed: Volevo finire il film, ma i produttori l’hanno abbandonato, perché non volevano una storia come questa. Sono andato dal distributore, che era un greco, proprietario della Minerva Films. Gli ho detto che era criminale, che senza questa storia il film non esisteva. Mi ha dato un assegno, sono andato a Parigi, solo con un operatore, una macchina da presa e i due attori, e ho girato l’episodio. Era un momento molto bello.16 (Francia di Celle and Ghezzi 2004, 215)

While La ragazza revisits all these themes, Vincenzo’s choice is much more daring and controversial than Franco’s. Firstly, like Simone and Rocco, he romances a prostitute. The film makes no mystery of her profession, while also abstaining from casting any sort of moral judgement upon her. Secondly, by choosing to stay in Holland, he loses his innocence and becomes another Federico (Lino Ventura). This character arc both pleases and frustrates audience expectations in that Vincenzo’s motion is not thrust forward but follows a circular pattern. As Tonino de Bernardi writes, the film’s staging and cinematography reflects this trajectory: La ragazza inizia nel buio di una notte in terra straniera per finire quasi fatalmente in quello ancor più nero nelle viscere della terra la quale si richiude al si sopra di tutti nella miniera, come se alle tenebre non ci fosse scampo.17 (Francia di Celle and Grezzi 2004, 169)

Just like the Parondis in Milan, Vincenzo arrives at the station at night. He travels on foot to the villaggio degli italiani.18 After settling in, his descent into the mine plunges him into obscurity, gradually even tinting his skin. When the workers board the elevator that will travel 1,350 meters into the ground, their faces are fresh, but when they end their shift, they are covered in coal dust. Additionally when the gallery collapses and traps him underground with Federico and an African miner named Mustafà, the

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men decide to ration their electricity and use only one headlight at a time. It is in this womb-like, jet-black claustrophobic environment that the men plan their weekend in the capital. However, what follows is not a sequence that counterbalances the mine’s darkness: Amsterdam’s night, despite the lights of bars, windows, and signage, is not bright. It is yet another stage in Vincenzo’s circuitous motion towards the loss of his innocence. When Vincenzo and Federico spot Else in the window, she is bathed in light, her radiant complexion and blonde hair luring Vincenzo in.19 However, this fleeting promise of light is broken by Federico’s coarse manners and his inability to secure the woman’s company for the weekend. Before he is able to return to Else, Vincenzo has to suffer Federico’s drunken behaviour and Corry’s jealous tantrums. It is only after Federico is kicked out of the gay bar that Vincenzo can have what he wants. After she sleeps with him, immediately infringing her “no kus” (no kiss) rule, Else drives Vincenzo to the railway station, where he is supposed to board the eleven o’clock train to Italy. Tonino de Bernardi comments on the film’s many locations, including the station e la forza delle ambientazioni diverse in La ragazza in vetrina, quella stazione di Amsterdam che con la sua monumentalità notturna […] diventa un’immagine di Kafka, del luogo sempre eluso, dello smarrimento.20 (Francia di Celle and Ghezzi 2004, 169)

Dark and inhospitable, this location is emptied of its primary function in Emmer’s film. Vincenzo does not arrive in Holland through this particular port of entry, nor does he ever leave from it. Like Kafka’s bureaucracy, the modern Amsterdam station becomes a holding place, a strange locale where the main character is marooned. Vincenzo must return to Else for the story to continue: the station must bounce him back over and over again. Else takes him to her summer house, a small two-storey hut (another closed location), where she tells Vincenzo that “mai uomo stato in casa mia.”21 The lovers spend the night in the hut, and the next morning Vincenzo wakes up and walks to the beach, where Else is waiting for him. The open seaside space, which is whipped by a strong wind and filled with an abundance of light (in the sky, in the sand, and in the protagonists’ clothing) contrasts starkly with both the mine and Amsterdam’s night scene. Daylight paints a different Else, who has shed the prostitute clothes, for the moment. The transition from the city capital to the cabin, a much more welcoming environment, contains the possibility of home, the ultimate prize for a migrant worker whose status is predicated upon the loss of it. In daylight, Else is a potential mate with whom Vincenzo can create

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such a home abroad. It is while sitting on the beach that Else inquires about Vincenzo’s marital status. Framed frontally, their hair brushed back by the sea breeze, the couple looks very handsome and well-matched. Else takes Vincenzo’s left hand, brings it to her face, and strokes it with her cheek, and then points to his ring finger. Vincenzo, somewhat amused by the question, replies “Sposato? Chi, io? Son mica matto!” Else, put off by his coarse response, comments simply “Perché matto?”22 Vincenzo’s avoiding the question indicates his inability to envision Else as a potential life partner. This blindness affects his vision in daylight, reflecting the social conventions according to which Else, because of her nighttime occupation, is a tainted woman and, therefore, is unworthy of being considered a spouse. By conforming to the societal norm, Vincenzo condemns their relationship to being consumed only in the shadows of the night: darkness births it, and in darkness it shall exist. La ragazza does not end with an unproblematic lovers’ reunion but on a note that is accompanied by Federico’s booming laughter. Vincenzo stays in Holland, and the friends are again at work in the mine on the same shift. They descend again into the darkness, where they quickly make up and then go off for another day of work. The potential happy ending, one that would have the lovers reunite and Else lifted out of prostitution, does not happen. Audience expectations are fulfilled only in part: the lovers’ newly found agreement will not generate a home, like in Pietro Germi’s Il cammino della speranza, thus allowing for the assimilation of the migrant worker. Else’s affection, albeit genuine, remains paid affection for Vincenzo. Corry and Federico are the model for this sort of union. Hence, the film ends with the men walking into the recesses of the mine, modernity’s darkest pit, and embracing the precarious stability of concepts like love, home, and even life. As Tonino de Bernardi observes: “C’è un’infiltrazione d’acqua,” dirà qualcuno nel finale riguardo alla miniera a chi sta per discenderci come se appunto dovessimo aspettarci ancora sempre un’altra irruzione di quella morte imminente, è la cronaca di una morte annunciata.23 (Francia di Celle and Ghezzi 2004, 170)

Much like Luciano Emmer, Ermanno Olmi began his career as a documentarian. The director was employed by Edisonvolta, a massive conglomerate in the energy industry that had its own Sezione Cinema, (Film Division). They commissioned documentaries about the company and its activities from Olmi. Between 1953 and 1961, Olmi directed nineteen 35mm documentaries and oversaw the production of many more.24 In 1959, he made his first feature film, Il tempo si è fermato (Time Stood Still), which is the first instalment of a trilogy loosely based on the theme

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of work in contemporary Italy, of which I fidanzati is the final instalment. Thematically speaking, Olmi’s early films are highly personal meditations on the director’s own experiences in the workforce, but also on religion, family, and romance. In particular, I fidanzati elaborates on the relationship between work and personal life, capturing with superb humanistic sensibility the strange melange of bereavement and excitement that is felt by the migrant worker at the prospect of leaving his loved ones, as well as his difficulties in adjusting to a new culture and creating a social network in the host environment. A film about an unskilled factory worker from Milan who is relocated to Sicily and must leave his loving fiancée behind, I fidanzati stands apart from the many texts of Italian migration cinema for two main reasons. Firstly, it is one of the rare examples in which the main character’s displacement does not follow the canonical routes that Italian migrations have taken over the years. Giovanni (Carlo Cabrini) is offered the opportunity of career advancement if he agrees to move south and work in a new plant. Not only does his migration grant him an immediate promotion that contains the potential for social upward mobility, it also sends him out of the industrialized North and into the rural South, travelling literally in the opposite direction to all the characters in Il cammino della speranza, I magliari, Rocco e i suoi fratelli, and La ragazza in vetrina. Secondly, Olmi’s film is also unique from a stylistic point of view: it capitalizes on the experience of the French Nouvelle Vague and, specifically, on the nonchronological, fractured narratives of Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and L’année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad, 1961) as much as it does on the purest neorealist precepts of casting non-professional actors. Thus, it gives a voice to the meek and the humble, focusing on labour and everyday life. For the film’s masterful opening sequence, Olmi cross-cuts between four different time planes: the present, two distinct moments in the near past, and one in the near future. In the present, Giovanni and his fiancée, Liliana (Anna Canzi), are at the ballroom La Speranza. From their faces and their lack of communication, it is clear that they just had a fight, and that their night is ruined. The second sequence is the first one from the past. The protagonist is at his workplace, and he is offered a post—and a promotion from unskilled to skilled labourer—at a new plant in Sicily. The third sequence reveals Liliana’s distress at the news of Giovanni’s forthcoming departure, possibly depicting the argument they had just before arriving at La Speranza. The fourth sequence is concerned with the figure of the protagonist’s elderly father and his son’s arrangements with a retirement home for him after he decides to leave. The twelve-minute long

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opening ends with the shot of a four-engine aeroplane taking off in the night: the transportation technology Giovanni uses to migrate sets him apart from Rocco, Vincenzo, and all the other characters. In fact, I fidanzati is a story about Italy’s newly found status of modernized industrial power—as the scenes in the plant clearly display—as much as it is about self-discovery. As film scholar Jérôme Picant argues, “le voyage de Giovanni est vécu comme une rédemption”25 (Estève 1992, 47). Having been unfaithful to Liliana, Giovanni must be apart from her in order to rediscover himself, their relationship, and to atone for his misdeeds. Picant continues arguing that “l’arrivée de Giovanni en Sicile est placée sous le double signe de la recherche de l’identité et du retour à l’enfance”26 (Estève 1992, 49). The forced separation between the lovers creates longing—for home, for each other—and opens a space for them to renegotiate their union. As the film progresses, the words they exchange in their correspondence regain the meaning they had lost. While the soundtrack to the opening scene is almost entirely occupied by music, the more the film progresses and the lovers rediscover their feelings for each other, the more their voices and their words become important. The clearest example of this process is the extended letter sequence. In it, Giovanni and Liliana’s voices bare their feelings about the forced separation. Carla Colombo’s exquisite editing brings them together in a magical whirlwind of memories that climax in a passionate kiss. In framing and composition, the kiss is reminiscent of James Stewart and Kim Novak’s famous scene in Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958). Unlike Vertigo, I fidanzati does not use special visual effects but relies on editing (as it did in the opening sequence) as a way to conjure up the couple’s happy memories and, perhaps, even a space in which they imagine their possible future. Giovanni’s internal redemption is mirrored by his daily life in Sicily, which is split between the time at the plant and the time spent exploring the surrounding areas. The man’s quiet gaze provides Olmi with an unobtrusive lens through which he explores the cultural, sexual, and even climactic differences between Northern and Southern Italy. In his 1963 review of I fidanzati, Olmi’s friend and collaborator Tullio Kezich wrote: qualcuno potrà osservare che Olmi non ha visto la Sicilia che per rapide illuminazioni, senza connessioni di causa ed effetto, senza inserirsi in un discorso di fondo sui rapporti fra Nord e Sud. Ma questo è appunto il dramma di Giovanni, che spesso non vede al di là del proprio naso: ed è il motivo dialettico segreto del film, la spinta riformatrice ed educativa che s’intravede dietro la mobilitazione dei sentimenti individuali.27 (Kezich 2004, 26)

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In conclusion, I fidanzati breaks away from its predecessors in many ways: it offers an original take on internal migration in which it is the Northerner who travels south, it looks into the possible positive effects of displacement, exploring its potential for self-discovery and redemption, and finally, it suggests new avenues from a stylistic point of view. The film’s release coincided with the end of the economic boom and the golden season of migration cinema ended with it. After I fidanzati pointed the way to an aesthetic and thematic renewal, it was impossible for filmmakers to return to the well-established formulas. They had to move to forms that used reflexivity as a means to break apart the conventions and establish new ones.

Notes 1

“In 1959, Italian cinema revisited the ‘great themes’: the resistance and World War II. [...] Rosi, on the other hand, does not look back. He wants to shed some light on a difficult situation: emigration.” 2 “Totonno is [...] suspended between the margins of legality, which he does not conform to, and the margins of illegality, which he walks without risking too much.” 3 Cattini uses this word in a narratological sense. He refers to a particular set of clichés employed in the Mario storyline, such as Paula’s backstory—the poor woman who is set on the road to sin by the older, wealthy man—but also Mario’s own trajectory of a righteous man who strays from the path but ultimately returns to it. Raffaello Matarazzo’s many post-war melodramas are the model for this brand of perdition-to-redemption character arc. 4 “Italy is well represented here! The Roman, the Tuscan, and the Neapolitan!” All quoted dialogue is taken from the DVDs currently in distribution. 5 “Belongs to the category of Visconti films that spell out and expose many (literary) sources, some of which are evident and declared, others more secret and hidden.” 6 Lino Micciché offers a breakdown of the film’s structure, including a segmentby-segment shot count: The opening scene consists of shots 1 through 15; Vincenzo’s is the largest portion of the film, from 16 through 227. Simone’s story runs from shot 228 to 321, and Rocco’s is from 322 to 503. Ciro’s segment is from shot 504 to 623, and Luca, the youngest brother, has only a few minutes of film time from shot 624 to 693 (Micciché 2002, 40). 7 For a detailed discussion of the scene, see Rohdie 1992, 33-43. 8 Pasolini had a penchant for stories involving prostitution; his 1961 directorial debut, Accattone (Accattone!), tells the story of Vittorio “Accattone” Cataldi (Franco Citti), a low-life pimp in Rome. Pasolini also wrote the screenplay for Bernardo Bertolucci’s first feature film, La commare secca (The Grim Reaper 1962), which depicts the police investigation following the murder of a prostitute in the same city.

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As David Forgacs notes, the “state censorship was complemented by that of the Centro Cattolico Cinematografico (CCC), a body inaugurated in 1935 which was directly dependent on Italian Catholic Action” (1990, 121). 10 “Sometimes would get mad on the set: not with the actors, but rather with things that happened. We shot in the forbidden city of Amsterdam, in the red light district, and Luciano often had issues with bar or club owners. It was a difficult situation. Marina and I wore a lot of make-up, and when we were not shooting, people bothered us.” In the same interview, Noël goes on to describe the most memorable of these tense situations, a notorious anecdote that made the papers in 1961: Four local men cut the electricity on the set, bringing the shoot to a halt. They approached Emmer with the idea of blackmailing him, but he refused to pay them and told them off, so they threw him in a canal. After this forced bath, he caved and paid the men so that production could resume (Francia di Celle and Ghezzi 2004, 50). 11 “The democracy that pushed you far away from your homes is the same one that persecuted my film.” 12 “Emmer’s usual theme resurfaces in this film in a fundamentally tragic guise: there is the clash between subjective impulse and material resistance, and there is the relationship between desires, projects, individual tensions, and collective dynamics.” 13 “One of the most genius post-war films on the spectacle of shows in the exploded European urban environment.” 14 In a remarkable cameo appearance, Yves Montand sings one of his classics, Les feuilles mortes, during an extended cabaret scene. 15 “Emmer can work into the film, together with the celebrated Paris of its monuments and night life, the humble reality of humiliating jobs, of bad areas, and of ill-famed neighbourhoods where people scramble to survive.” 16 “I wanted to finish the film, but the producers deserted it because they did not want a story like this one. I went to the distributor, a Greek who owned Minerva Films. I told him that this was criminal, that without this story the film did not exist. He gave me a cheque, I went to Paris with one operator, a camera and the two actors, and I shot the episode. It was a beautiful moment.” 17 “Begins in the darkness of night in a foreign land and ends, almost fatally, in the even darker obscurity of the earth’s bowels, which is closed over people’s heads in the mine. It’s as if darkness were inescapable.” 18 The villaggio degli italiani was a camp that housed migrant workers. Many films about Italian emigrants have scenes set in these environments, including I magliari and Pane e cioccolata (Bread and Chocolate Franco Brusati, 1974). 19 In discussing his troubles with censorship, Emmer recalls “Avevano tagliato la scena della vetrina, che era molto casta, era una censura moralistica. Il responsabile del cinema del Ministero dello Spettacolo aveva concordato con Cassuto una bella somma per rigirare la scena in vetrina con l’autorizzazione a far vedere qualcosa di più di una spalla, magari nuda, a condizione che io aggiungessi una scena—figuriamoci se facevo una cosa del genere—in cui mentre lui dormiva lei vedeva sul giornale la foto di lui in un articolo che parlava dell’incidente in miniera. Allora si sarebbe dovuta avvicinare e dire:‘Tu sei un eroe e io sono una

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miserabile prostituta’” (Francia di Celle and Ghezzi 2004, 179). “They cut the scene in the window, which was very chaste; it was a moralistic type of censorship. The head of the Ministry of Entertainment had negotiated a big sum and an agreement with Cassuto that we would reshoot the scene showing more skin. A shoulder, maybe, or even a nude, but on one condition: I had to add a scene—God forbid I’d do anything like that—showing him sleeping and her seeing a picture of him on the newspaper in an article about the mine accident. She should have approached him saying: ‘You are a hero and I am a miserable prostitute.’” 20 “And what force do the different locations have in La ragazza in vetrina; Amsterdam station, which with its nocturnal monumentality [...] becomes an image by Kafka, of the always eluded place, of forlornness.” 21 “Never was a man in my house.” 22 “Married? Who, me? I am not crazy!” “Why crazy?” 23 “‘There’s a water leak,’ someone says in the closing scene to those who are about to descend into it. It is as if we need to prepare for another incursion of imminent death; it is the chronicle of a death foretold.” 24 For a detailed discussion of Olmi’s career as a documentarian, see Tabanelli 1987. 25 “Giovanni’s voyage is lived as a redemption.” 26 “Giovanni’s arrival in Sicily is placed under the double sign of his search for identity and his return to childhood.” 27 “Some may criticize Olmi for his take on Sicily, which is shown by rapid flashes without connections of cause and effect, without tapping into the discourse of North–South relations. But this is Giovanni’s problem: he cannot see beyond the tip of his nose. And this is the film’s secret dialectic motif, its push towards reform and education, which shines through the mobilization of individual feelings.”

“C’ERA UNA VOLTA IN SVIZZERA”— “THE ITALIANS” IN SWISS CINEMA SOPHIE RUDOLPH

A friend came to see me in a dream. From far away. And I asked in the dream: “Did you come by photograph or by train?” All photographs are a form of transport and an expression of absence. (John Berger, A Seventh Man) .

Introduction: Italians in Switzerland End of November 2011: an evening in Zurich. A group of mostly younger people is gathering for a projection of the film Siamo italiani (The Italians Alexander J. Seiler, June Kovach and Rob Gnant, 1964). The retrospective “Noi siamo loro,” organized by the association La Fabbrica di Nichi in Zurich, tries to connect the generations. However, there are very few older people, except Leonardo Zanier. Born in 1939, he spends more time outside Italy than in his home country, like many Italian migrants. He is co-founder of the ECAP in Switzerland, an institute for vocational training, continuing education, and research founded by CGIL (Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro) and was its president until 2004. Later, in the train on my way home, I reflect upon discrimination. What actually happened this evening? A group of young Italian immigrants, first and mostly second generation (so-called “secondos” who grew up in Switzerland), had organized a screening of a film that shows the discrimination against their parents or grandparents’ generation and tries to discuss the problems of migration today. There are some Germans and German-speaking Swiss people in the audience who do not actually participate in the discussion that develops after the screening as it is led exclusively in Italian. To begin with, one of the organizers tries to translate some of the statements, but meanwhile, the discussion continues. After fifteen minutes at the most, all the Swiss and German people have left the room to spend the rest of the evening at the bar. As the only remaining non-Italian person, I begin to feel uneasy. It seems impossible to bridge

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the gap that opens up immediately when people gather and belong to a group that is clearly marked by the use of language. It makes me think of Homi Bhabha’s description of a “time of gathering”: Gatherings of exiles and émigrés and refugees; gathering on the edge of “foreign” cultures; gathering at the frontiers; gatherings in the ghettos or cafés of city centres; gathering in the half-life, half-light of foreign tongues, or in the uncanny fluency of another’s language; gathering the signs of approval and acceptance, degrees, discourses, disciplines; gathering the memories of underdevelopment, of other worlds lived retroactively; gathering the past in a ritual of revival, gathering the present. Also the gathering of people in the diaspora: indentured, migrant, interned; the gathering of incriminatory statistics, educational performance, legal statuses, immigration status—the genealogy of that lonely figure that John Berger named the seventh man. (Bhabha 2004, 199)

What happened that evening is exemplary for the self-marginalization of minority groups in any national context. While Erin Manning talks about nations as “ephemeral territories” (Manning 2003), Thomas Elsaesser discusses “hyphenated identities” and claims that territories are always already occupied, which means they are at the same time real locations, fantasy spaces, and performative places creating multilayered cultural identities (Elsaesser 2008b). These categories will be addressed again in the discussion of three films on Italian migration in Switzerland at a later point. Siamo italiani, Il vento di settembre (September Winds Alexander Seiler, 2002) and Azzurro (Denis Rabaglia, 2000) are stories about migration, globalization, and personal life combined. They show an intimate globalization that is performed through these narratives: A man’s resolution to emigrate needs to be seen within the context of a world economic system. Not in order to reinforce a political theory but so that what actually happens to him can be given its proper value. That economic system is neo-colonialism. Economic theory can show how this system, creating under-development, produces the conditions, which lead to emigration: it can also show why the system needs the special labour power, which the migrant workers have to sell. Yet necessarily the language of economic theory is abstract. And so, if the forces which determine the migrant’s life are to be grasped and realized as part of his personal destiny, a less abstract formulation is needed. Metaphor is needed. Metaphor is temporary. It does not replace theory. (J. Berger 2010, 45)

Before looking in detail at the three films and the metaphors that recur in their narrative schemes, it is important to focus on the historical-political framework seasonal work in Switzerland is embedded in. In the following

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contribution, films will be considered as vectors of social images. This chapter will look at the stage setting of Italian migration and, in this context, more precisely at the representation of the immigrant worker, for a long time designated as the seasonal worker. The migration to Switzerland differs from other countries insofar as Switzerland is relatively “close to home” for the Italian immigrants, and the southern part of the country is even Italian speaking. It is thus a story of inner-European migration that questions European citizenship. Switzerland has never joined the European Union and remains an island within the “Fortress of Europe.” The country’s economic history after the Second World War is closely linked to its film history. Compared to other European countries, Swiss cinema is relatively unsupported by the state. However, the country's economic history is well reflected in its cinema. Like other North European countries, Switzerland perceived immigration as a short-term economic necessity in the context of reconstruction and the economic miracle of the 1950s and 1960s. In order to compensate for the lack of qualified skilled workers, the Swiss government releases labour permits (Arbeitserlaubnis A) that authorize immigrants to work in the country for nine months per year. The seasonal workers must return to their home country during the remaining three months. They are not allowed to bring their families to Switzerland during the first two years of employment. They cannot change employer or economic sector and are prohibited from signing a rental agreement. While paying their taxes as every Swiss citizen does, they do not profit from health or unemployment insurance. The migration policy is based on a principle of rotation, not of integration (La Barba 2009, 80; Porret 2009, 28-29). However, the economic miracle does not have an effect on film production, which remains an insignificant industrial sector in Switzerland. Filmmakers wanting to work on a regular basis usually need to expatriate. This would, in fact, be another story of migration, which will not be dealt with in depth in this contribution. However, it is worth briefly mentioning the famous example of Jean-Luc Godard and his career development in France: becoming a seminal figure of the Nouvelle Vague in French cinema and thus changing his national artistic identity. The filmmakers who remain in the country necessarily decide to produce low-budget films and are for the most part interested in exploring the social realities of their home country. Journalists, critics, and filmmakers likewise claim a “New Swiss cinema” that should be dedicated to actual social problems. Thus, one of the first films seriously concerned with the problems of immigrants is, at the same time, one of the films that marks the birth of the so-called

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New Swiss Cinema (Neuer Schweizer Film/ Nouveau Cinéma Suisse) in the 1960s.

Siamo italiani: Which bodies are qualified to speak? The début of New Swiss Cinema may well date back to the works of Henry Brandt, Claude Goretta/Alain Tanner, and Walter Marti in the middle of the 1950s. However, the year 1964 marked its actual birth with the presentation of Brandt’s five short films, La Suisse s’interroge, and Alain Tanner’s, Les apprentis, at the Swiss National Expo in Lausanne. Alexander Seiler's documentary, Siamo italiani, premiered that same year. Seiler’s film focuses entirely on seasonal workers in the German speaking part of Switzerland. The foreign workers had never been taken up as a subject in Swiss cinema before. Swiss film critics thus saw Seiler’s film as a milestone in the history of Swiss cinema (Dumont/Tortajada 2007, 11). Interestingly, the title of the documentary changes in the German translation from Siamo italiani to Die Italiener. This reflects the dialectics of homeland and alienation that the director Alexander Seiler views as a central motive in New Swiss Cinema. The film, Siamo italiani, shot between 1963 and 1964, is as much a documentary about Italian seasonal workers in Switzerland as it is a film about the Swiss themselves. It focuses both on the daily life of the Italian workers and their families and on the Swiss and their exposure to the immigrant workers—a difficult relation full of prejudices and a simmering fear of foreign infiltration. Max Frisch’s famous phrase, written for the foreword of the book Siamo italiani, expresses this feeling: “Ein kleines Herrenvolk sieht sich in Gefahr: man hat Arbeitskräfte gerufen, und es kommen Menschen” (Frisch 1965, 7).1 The book was published in 1965, a year after the film had been released, and contains interviews and talks with Italian workers in Switzerland. These interviews are not identical with the filmed statements. They document the complementary research and fieldwork carried out by the directors. The book, Siamo italiani, does not present any thesis but only material. It can be read in different ways. Max Frisch emphasizes that it may be read most efficiently not from a Swiss viewpoint but, for example, as a literary document. In this aspect, the book resembles John Berger’s essay, A seventh man, which also presents material instead of theory about the experience of migrant workers in Europe. The increasing inflow of Italian seasonal workers since the end of the 1950s is perceived as a major problem by a Swiss population totally immersed in consumer euphoria. The preamble that precedes the opening

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credits of Siamo italiani describes the situation at the beginning of the 1960s: Oltre 500 000 italiani vivono e lavorano in Svizzera. Essi costituiscono un “problema.” Un’economia in continua ascesa ha bisogno della loro mano d’opera—un piccolo popolo della spiccata individualità li riceve come un corpo estraneo. La barriera della lingua li tiene isolati. Come “problema” sono oggetto di discussion—come uomini restano degli sconosciuti.2 (Seiler 1964)

The film by Alexander Seiler and his colleagues, June Kovach and Rob Gnant, is constructed around images of the daily life of the Italian workers. They are filmed at their workplace, in their homes, with their families, and during their spare time. The film contains all the typical elements that constitute a programme for the new Swiss documentary style, which is aesthetically influenced by Italian neorealism and French cinéma direct: Die Realität, die es wieder zu entdecken galt, waren … die Menschen, und für diese Entdeckungsreise hatte sich mit der Technik des “Cinéma direct” (geräuscharme Handkamera, lippensynchroner Direktton, hochempfindliche Emulsionen) eben erst ein neues Instrumentarium herausgebildet. Statt über Menschen zu sprechen, konnte man sie nun selber sprechen lassen.3 (Seiler 2012, 1.1)

Seiler’s philosophy of filmmaking is highly influenced by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and his understanding of social research that tries to capture people as subjects in their social context and not as objects of quantifying and statistical science. In that perspective, documentary filmmaking becomes a way of engaging politically and should focus on repressed or segregated aspects of social reality. Seiler regards films as a tool for conducting social research that is not only interested in people’s origin, education, salary, housing, and work but in the subjective experiences of the individual, the very specific condition humaine. The scandalous living arrangements of the Italians coming to Switzerland in the 1960s affected him because his mother grew up in Milan and he often travelled to Italy. In an interview he declares: Italien ist für mich etwas sehr Sinnliches und Emotionales. Warum das so ist, weiß ich nicht. Diese Affinität hat es mir ermöglicht, Siamo italiani und Il vento di settembre zu realisieren. Ich hätte mir nie angemaßt, einen Film über Tamilen oder Ex-Jugoslawen in der Schweiz zu drehen, denn dafür habe ich zu wenig Bezug zur Kultur aus der diese Menschen kommen.4 (Seiler 2012, 2.3)

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Still, the opening sequence remains the most impressive picture of migration in general. After some close-ups of the protagonists telling their names, a man says, “I arrived in Switzerland like most Italians.” The image then switches to black, and the audience can read the preamble accompanied by the sound of an arriving train on the soundtrack. The following scene was shot at the border station in Chiasso, where the biggest part of Italian immigrants arrived by train. The scenes at the Italian-Swiss border show only male immigrants who have to qualify for the job market, although there were also many female workers. The medical examination at the Swiss border that all seasonal workers had to pass before entering the country evokes strong associations of what Foucault’s term of biopolitics may really refer to. The human being is reduced to its biological body that qualifies or does not qualify to cross the line. Thus, the sanitary examinations at the Italian-Swiss border generate a universal image of the migrant worker who owns only two things that count: a healthy body and a passport (fig.1.).

Fig. 1: Screenshot Siamo italiani

The filmmakers leave that scene uncommented upon: the images speak for themselves anyway. On the soundtrack two audio tracks are mixed: the

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constant calling of men by their names through a microphone is superimposed on anonymous statements taken from interviews. At the Swiss border, these men lose their personal identity and are merely regarded as “the Italians” or even just “the foreign workers.” The human being is becoming a commodity whose only reason of being is to function smoothly and to be easily manageable. The opening sequence of Siamo italiani also points to the argument that the basis for the modern experience of migration is nationalism: Nationalism, by its very nature depends on policed forms of entry […] The vocabulary of the nation can be understood as the structuring of a language that produces the distinction between qualified and unqualified bodies, where qualification within the identity and territory of the nation presupposes an attachment to the nation in its linguistic, cultural and political incarnations. (Manning 2003, XV)

The universality of this image can certainly be individualized through the stories single workers tell. The following citation is taken from the book Siamo italiani, as in the film the workers do not speak about their experiences at the border in front of the camera. Orozco C., one of the numerous workers portrayed in the book, says: wie ich zum ersten Mal in Chiasso angekommen bin, das war ein Durcheinander! Es ist immer dasselbe, die in Chiasso sind im vierten Jahr so unfähig wie im ersten. Du kommst an—einer, der um zwölf Uhr mittags ankommt, hat seinen Pass um zwei Uhr wieder, und einer, der am Vormittag ankommt, muss den ganzen Tag auf den Pass warten. Man muss die sanitarische Untersuchung machen, und wie so viele bin ich am Morgen angekommen und erst am anderen Morgen weitergefahren und die, die mittags ankommen, fahren noch am gleichen Abend weiter.5 (Seiler 1965, 27)

After crossing the border, the Italians enter and “occupy” Swiss territory. The real location, Switzerland, is divided into multiple fantasy spaces that are opened up through the double occupancy that is shaped by the increasing presence of the “foreigners.” Together, the Swiss and Italians create a new Switzerland, a performative place, where the “real” history of the country is negotiated as it can be told from different perspectives. Seiler’s film portrays both parties making statements of how different “the Others” are. He contrasts Swiss people stating that “acht Schweizer machen nicht so viel Lärm, wie zwei Italiener”6 with Italians complaining about the Swiss people being “too quiet” and boring. However, the filmmaker’s focus is clearly on the side of the immigrants who are portrayed

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as individuals, whereas “the Swiss” appear only in random images taken in the streets and a montage of voice-over fragments of dialogues about “the Italians” that do not match with any of the individuals the audience sees in the images on screen. There are other elements marking the difference of the Other, the most important one obviously being the use of language: Ich bin eines Abends im Restaurant, und einer sagt zu mir: sprechen Sie Deutsch? Ich sage nein, ich bin erst zwei Monate hier. Da fängt er an, über die Italiener zu schimpfen. Als mir die Ohren wehtaten, hab ich zu ihm gesagt: wänd Sie so guet, alte Snore jetz. Sofort hat er geantwortet und hat gesagt: aha, Sie verstehen ganz gut Deutsch. Ich sage: gut genug für Sie.7 (Seiler 1965, 31)

However, it is not only the difference of language; it is, foremost, the manner of making use of it and of expressing oneself. Max Frisch notes in his foreword, “die Fremden singen” (Frisch 1965, 8).8 This is also taken up in the statement of Orozco C.: Sicher, wir machen auch Lärm, aber wir gehen abends hinaus auf die Strassen und singen, denn in Italien ist das nicht verboten. Hier dagegen kann man nicht singen. Sofort kommt die Polizei, wenn einer anfängt zu singen.9 (Seiler 1965, 31)

Songs are intimately linked to emotional experiences and create a sense of community. Whereas in many films songs are used to emphasize or create atmosphere, Siamo italiani does not use any songs to accompany the documentary images. The music the audience hears is documentary as well; it is inherent to the filmed scenes: it is the music of a fair, a ballroom, or a cabaret. The question remains as to whether the film actually contributes to a renewal of ways to share territories, what Thomas Elsaesser calls the felicity of belief and trust, that is: of being each other’s other: not mirroring the other in mis-cognition and endless deferrals of self-identity, but enabling the other to interfere in my own mirror image. (2009a, 61)

To reflect upon this constellation as described by Elsaesser, it is necessary to focus on Leonardo Zanier, who is a central contributor to immigrant culture in Switzerland. He emphasizes that the problem was not necessarily the recognition of the seasonal workers as human beings, as pointed out by Max Frisch, but their power to organize themselves in associations and participate politically, formulating interests that the government could not ignore. Many immigrants, especially those who joined labour unions,

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were spied on between the early 1950s and the late 1980s. The registration of numerous fiches on around nine hundred thoasand persons, two thirds of them immigrants, by the federal State Security and also the cantonal police authorities later became known as the Secret Files or Fiche affair (Fichenaffäre). One central justification for the surveillance was the protection of the system from subversive activities organized by foreign countries to establish a totalitarian (communist) regime in Switzerland. When these procedures became public in 1989, the reputation of Switzerland's State security was seriously damaged, and the country, in general, was known as “Snooper-State Switzerland.” As a member of the CLI (Colonie Libere Italiane), Zanier, too, was shadowed as a subversive element in Switzerland. This exemplifies John Berger’s statement that “only if he [the migrant worker, S.R.] becomes a troublemaker does he earn an identity; and then he will be recognized in order to be kept out” (J. Berger 2010, 212). Between 1963 and 1976, numerous fiches reporting Zanier’s activities were registered. There is an entry dating from December 7, 1967 which says: am 3., 4. und 5.12.67 veranstaltete der CINECLUB der CLI-Zürich Filmvorführungen im Casa d’Italia und im Volkshaus Zürich. Am 4.12.67 wurde im Volkshaus Zürich der Film Siamo italiani des Schweizer Regisseurs Alexander Seiler gezeigt, der von Z. gefragt wurde, warum er bei der Herstellung des Films sich nicht an die CLI gewandt habe, um deren Tätigkeit darzustellen. Der Regisseur Seiler habe sich damals an die CLISektion Basel gewandt. Diese habe ihm jedoch lediglich einen Unterhaltungsabend bieten können, von welchem auch Szenen im Film enthalten seien.10 (Zanier 2003, 130)

This entry, on the one hand, shows the absurdity of the registered information, but on the other hand, is quite revealing about the relation between the Swiss filmmaker and the Italians—he is a stranger to them and remains a distant observer. The first movie on the conditions of the seasonal workers made by an Italian worker himself was the fictional film Lo stagionale (The Seasonal Worker Alvaro Bizzarri, 1973). This film received more critical attention in Italy than Seiler’s film, as it was presented at the Porretta Festival of Political Cinema organized by the Cineteca di Bologna in 1971. Later on, the film represented Switzerland at festivals in Moscow, Canada, and Berlin. Although Bizzari can be seen as a mediator between the Italian workers in Switzerland and the others, his work as cineaste has never been fully recognized: neither by the Italian public television that has never shown any of his films, nor by the Swiss Federal Cultural Office

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that has never financed any of his works. Yet, they were labelled as “Swiss” in the international festival circuit (La Barba 2009, 86). Seiler’s radical confrontation of the Swiss public with its prejudices towards the migrant workers may already mark the beginning of change; still, it was difficult to distribute the film in Switzerland. Between 1965 and 1969, it was sporadically shown in some cities and mid-sized towns. The German television station, ARD, showed the film in 1965, but only in 1970 was it programmed on Swiss television screens. Between 1965 and 2002, the film has only been shown in Italy three times. It has never been shown on Italian television (Bolliger 2003).

Il vento di settembre: The impossible comeback At the beginning of the new millennium, Alexander Seiler decided to follow up on the lives of the emigrants to whom he had dedicated Siamo italiani. He completed a second documentary, Il vento di settembre (German release title: Septemberwind), which premiered at the film festival Visions du réel in Nyon in 2002. The film’s subtitle is “Storie di Migranti.” It focuses again entirely on Italian migrants, yet, the subtitle points to a universal story of migration: Il vento di settembre è un film sulle sabbie mobili del tempo, sul cambiamento, sulla mancanza, sulla lacerazione, sul qui e il lì, sul non sapere più quello che si vuole. Ma è anche un film sui gesti quotidiani di chi lavora in fabbrica e in officina, di chi coglie un fico dall’albero, di chi suona la chitarra alla ricerca dell’armonia.11 (Nessi 2006, 14)

The emigrant workers are now retired and have returned to their home country, built their dream houses, but struggle with reintegration and continue to experience uprooting. Their children and grandchildren have remained in Switzerland and just pay a visit during the holidays. Contrary to the anonymous depiction of “Italian workers” in Siamo italiani, Septemberwind focuses on individual protagonists. A central motive of the film is the journey. The film begins with Anna, the daughter of Marco Scupola and Maria Assunta, protagonists of Siamo italiani. She lives in Aesch, near Basel, with her husband Graziano Barone and their two children. At the beginning of the holidays, they leave on a train from Zurich to Lecce, a direct connection that operates only during the summer holidays in Switzerland. On this train, there are virtually only Italian “secondos” going to visit their relatives. In the description of the festival catalogue Jean Perret writes:

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it’s in a train that connects Zurich and Lecce that the subject of Il vento di settembre takes shape straight away. This is the train of migrations, of uprooting, of joyful reunions, of tearful farewells. It links North to South, separates rich and poor countries. (Perret 2002)

Alexander Seiler inserts images from Siamo italiani and there is a sharp contrast between these black-and-white images and the colour images in Il vento di settembre. The black-and-white fragments evoke the past of the presently well-established senior citizens, and they remind the audience of the poor immigrants they once were. However, the images also emphasize that the migrants may well have realized their dream of economic welfare, but that they paid for it with disrupted families and thus remain in an inbetween state across different cultures. The most striking example for this shortcut between the different time levels occurs when Anna and her children pass the border at Chiasso, this time “returning” to Italy. Thus, the journey literally becomes a backward movement. The images of the lost border station at night and the sleeping children in the wagon are intertwined with a retrospective look at the registration processes of the immigrants at the beginning of the 1960s. The sequence is intercut with the testimony of Tonuccio (Antonio Scotti), now returned to his native village, Acquarica del Capo, who recalls his arrival in Switzerland: I left Lecce in 1957 to find a job. So I went to Switzerland. I had a contract and I got there on a Friday afternoon. It was on February 3 in 1957. We were not welcome. They were rude, saying we understood neither the language nor our work. They insulted us. Many were badly offended. But the worst thing was when they said: “Shut up, wop!” We couldn’t stand it. But we had to, because we needed to stay. […] Until 1964, 1965 we were like slaves. After 1965 the world opened up. And there was plenty of work in Switzerland. Even if you were unskilled, they always had a job for you.12

Subsequent scenes in the film show Anna’s parents, Marco Scupola and Maria Assunta, reporting their difficulties to reintegrate in the village: for the locals, they are “the Swiss.” Anna’s brother, Luigi, is depicted in Siamo italiani as a little boy crying in the kitchen when his father comes to play with him and console him. Seeing the film as an adult made Luigi change his mind about his father. After all, Il vento di settembre is a film that tries to reconcile the generations. The title, Il vento di settembre, is also a song that evokes emotions, a song about a summer love that fades when autumn begins, holidays are finished, and everybody returns home, leaving the holiday Paradise into which the homeland, Italy—where the children are only returning as tourists—is often transfigured. Carlo

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Olimpio, who lives in Acquarica del Capo together with his Swiss wife, sings at the end of the film: Il vento di settembre ti porta via con se perciò non voglio illuderti di rimanere qui gli amori dell’estate finiscono così ma tu non sai se tu potresti stare con me ma non si può perché l’estate finisce così E il vento di settembre quando ritornerà di questo nostro amore più nulla troverà.13

One problem with Il vento di settembre, which was pointed out in the discussion after the Zurich screening of Siamo italiani in November 2011, is that it portrays the same immigrants and their well-established children and thus forgets about all the others that came in between. The Italians have returned to Italy, their children remained in Switzerland, but is this a reason to complain? Are there not much bigger problems in the world? In that sense, the sequel misses topical social debates and does not reach the political relevance of Siamo italiani at the end of the 1960s. Thus, Il vento di settembre shows not only an impossible comeback for the Italian seasonal workers, whose families are never fully reintegrated into Italian society, but it is also an impossible comeback for the filmmaker, who cannot reclaim the success of Siamo italiani. However, the film is a touching portrayal of individual life stories and travels between Italy and Switzerland.

Azzurro: Permanent migration The motive of the journey reoccurs in the fictional film, Azzurro, by Denis Rabaglia, made in 2000. The French-speaking director represents a much younger generation than Alexander Seiler, as he is born in 1966. The child of a mixed marriage, he has a double citizenship: Swiss and Italian. His philosophy of filmmaking differs greatly from Alexander Seiler: My films are a re-enactment of reality. My work is about piecing together and carefully preparing a dramaturgy that arouses emotions, and not about capturing a moment. It really has to do with illusionism. (Rabaglia 2000)

Rabaglia sees Azzurro as a road-movie which connects two different cultures and languages. Something that starts one thinking about my contradiction between my Italian

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roots and my “Swiss”-personality. I want to tell a story which is sometimes supposed to be melancholic and mocking at the same time; often dramatic but nevertheless never seems to appear sad. Something told in a simple and serious way, always respectful to the ones who live their lives between inner conflicts and reconciliation (Rabaglia 2012, 8).

Rabaglia is not afraid of drama and big emotions and presents a very classical melodramatic dramaturgy that focuses on the main protagonists’ journey. The visual storytelling is simple and not very innovative, thus the film relies a lot on its likeable protagonists. Azzurro mixes melancholy, irony and slapstick but struggles to strike the right tone between social satire and family (melo)drama. Himself the son of an Italian, Rabaglia captures the feeling of being “foreign here and foreign there” that is common to many children of Italian guest workers, as shown in Il vento di settembre. In this SwissItalian co-production, the Italian comic star, Paolo Villagio, plays the role of an old man, Giuseppe de Metrio, who has worked for more than thirty years in Switzerland as the lead worker in a construction company. Now, after he has settled down in his native village in Apulia, he decides to travel north again in order to find his former boss, who once promised to help him should he ever really need it. He wants to ask him for money, which he needs to use to pay for a cornea transplantation for his blind granddaughter, Carla, who could then be healed. However, the Switzerland he discovers when he returns has progressed far beyond the one he remembered. It is not the first time that the theme of the exploitation of the seasonal workers from Italy (but also from Spain and Portugal) has been treated in a Swiss fictional film but perhaps it has never been done as explicitly as in Azzurro. The most successful film from the field of New Swiss cinema, Die Schweizermacher (The Swissmakers Rolf Lyssi, 1979), is actually a comedy interested in the tragicomic aspects of naturalization. It portrays a family of Italian immigrants applying for the highly treasured Swiss citizenship, among other applicants (a German couple working as doctors, a Yugoslavian dancer who finally falls in love with one of the policemen sleuthing her). In this film, the Italian character is regressed to the point of caricature. Also in Rabaglia’s film, the characters are rather stereotypical. Still, Rabaglia’s melodrama Azzuro won the Swiss film prize in 2001 and had over one hundred thousand viewers, which is relatively high compared to the admission rates of other Swiss films. However, the movie was no international success. It was released in Germany with approximately fifteen thousand viewers, and in Italy only about two thousand three

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hundred people saw it. The film was not even very well received in the Italian Press. To cite just one example: presentato due anni fa a Locarno e diretto dallo svizzero-italiano Denis Rabaglia, secondo le dichiarazioni del regista Azzurro (il titolo si riferisce alla canzone di Paolo Conte) aspirava a essere una fiaba nel solco della commedia all’italiana: personaggi molto tipizzati, mix di satira sociale e malinconia, pudore e cinismo, causticità e commozione. Buone intenzioni su cui il patetico prevale però largamente, fino a dilagare nell’ultima parte.14 (Nepoti 2001)

The song Azzurro (interpreted both by Paolo Conte and Adriano Celentano), which gives the film its title, also points to the metaphor of journey and evokes the emotions of holidays and summer loves: “Cerco l’estate tutto l’anno…”15 The film opens with an image of the sea bathed in the light of an evening sun, an archetypal image of freedom that evokes an association with the summer holidays. This image is superimposed on a close-up of an open eye. The camera then zooms in on an old black-andwhite photograph of young Giuseppe and moves around the picture that shows him in a group of people standing in the courtyard of the construction company, “Broyer,” where he once worked. The camera focuses on his former boss, his wife, and their little son. The woman is looking at Giuseppe. When Giuseppe travels back to Switzerland in a train from Lecce to Geneva together with his granddaughter who asks him many questions, the audience realizes that he feels more and more uncomfortable. At first the viewer is mislead by assuming that Giuseppe is suffering from the memories of the hard work on the construction sites. These memories appear in black-and-white flashbacks when he arrives in Switzerland, where he finds that Broyer’s firm is bankrupt. But finally Giuseppe has to reveal his best kept secret: he was in love with Broyer’s wife and the little boy in the photograph is actually his son. The Swiss-Italian co-production tries to build a bridge between the two countries: it is literally a bridge that emerges as another, not very subtle, metaphor of reconciliation. It is finally on a bridge, constructed under the supervision of Giuseppe years ago, that the two brothers, Carla’s father and the son of Broyer’s wife and Giuseppe, finally meet. The film ends with a new photograph that replaces the old one: no more black-and-white images of the former workplace and its inhabitants in the home of the returned migrant. Instead, Giuseppe places a photograph of the reunited family, his Italian and his Swiss son together in one picture, on the wall of his Italian house. However, this photograph also remains an expression of absence as the family will have to travel back and forth to be together.

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Even if the recurring image of the train passing the border seems retrograde, it has not lost its power to move—not only the passengers but also the viewers who immediately react to this virtually stereotyped metaphor for migration as a permanent journey with no end. “In his imagination every migrant worker is in transit. He remembers the past: he anticipates the future: his aims and his recollections make his thoughts a train between the two” (J. Berger 2010, 68). This is also reflected in the lyrics of the song Azzurro to which the film’s title relates: “Il treno nei desideri dei miei pensieri all’incontrario va.”16 The migrant remains caught in a fantasy space, constantly thinking or dreaming about other places where he has been or will be.

Where have all the Italians gone? The three films discussed in this chapter also represent different stages of the migrant experience: Siamo italiani shows the beginning, the arrival in Switzerland; Il vento di settembre deals with the (impossible) homecoming; and Azzurro focuses on the return journey to the prodigious immigration country that is no longer the one remembered by the returning migrant. To conclude, the homecoming of the migrant remains a myth; in fact there is no return. The moment an individual leaves, he or she will return as someone else. This is what the title of another film project, an oral history on Italian immigration in Switzerland suggests: Si pensava di restare poco: 12 storie d’emigrazione (Francesca Cangemi, Daniel von Aarburg, 2002). In the beginning, nearly everyone would have rejected the idea of remaining in Switzerland; otherwise, the Italians could not cope with their lives as “foreign workers.” They were entirely oriented toward a better life in the future: in their old village, among the family, in their own house. However when they returned, they found an alienated home country. A new documentary, with the title Der Italiener (The Italian Paolo Polini, 2011), was released recently in Swiss cinemas.17 It features the staff of the Italian restaurant “Santa Lucia” in Zurich, where no Italian works anymore. Instead, there are Afghans, Bosnians, Philippines, and Pakistanis engaging in an Italian lifestyle. The director, Paolo Polini (born in Switzerland), asks: Where are the Italians? In his film, he portrays a microcosm that is neither Switzerland nor Italy but something in between—a state of transition that questions our ways of living together. The film combines personal stories and global history within the daily routine of a restaurant. Everything is mixed up here: the protagonist’s biographies, the world of the local guests, the self-staging of Zurich and its

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urban everyday life, the theatrical atmosphere of the place itself. All these elements are put together to mirror that today “Swissness” as well as “Italianness,” can only be described as a multiplicity of shifting identities. The Italian restaurant as a real location is, thus, an already occupied territory. Italy becomes a completely imagined fantasy space that is performed through the restaurant staff and the local guests, who come to enjoy the Italian food prepared by a cook from Bangladesh: together they create the “Italian Restaurant” as a performative place in the city of Zurich. Who needs real Italians to run that place anyway? Yet, the film also shows that the Italians are better integrated nowadays than other groups of immigrants in Swiss society. Since the nineteenth century, Switzerland has been characterized by its high degree of democratisation. However, every integration of a minority has been followed by discrimination against another minority (Hafner 2010, 23). As the little girl in Azzurro asks her grandfather, “Ma allora tu eri come un Albanese?”18 End of January 2012: in a train that takes me back from Frankfurt, where I grew up and spent a weekend with my family, to Switzerland, where I work now. I open the newspaper and start reading an article about Apple’s global manufacturing network instead. I suddenly feel ashamed of the beloved iPhone in my bag, while reading about eight thousand Chinese workers roused in the middle of the night to work twelve-hour shifts fitting glass screens into bevelled frames, because Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen just weeks before the product was due on the market (Duhigg/ Bradsher 2012, 1). I think sometimes we are more in touch with each other than we ever realize. The touchscreen at my fingertips becomes an embodiment of globalization and its practices. The different pieces of the jigsaw are assembled: the films discussed in this chapter are outstanding examples of cinema’s potential to bring the audience to a new way of thinking about the relationship between character and environment. The stories about migrating workers may have become outdated and the world has changed; as John Berger notes “it has become as simple to build a factory where labour is cheap as to import cheap labour” (J. Berger 2010, 7). Finally, I would like to return to the title of the retrospective on Italian immigration in Switzerland: “Noi siamo loro/ We are them.” Instead of blaming others, the “Swiss Snooper-State” or the malign capitalists, each and every individual has to reflect upon his or her own discriminating practices, which involves moving beyond discussing movies to talking to each other more often and overcoming the obstacle of languages that divide rather than unite. Still, is discrimination necessarily discriminating? Sometimes, it is perhaps just more effective to organize in small groups. Let me conclude by citing a speech by Alexan-

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der Seiler, formulated as an open letter addressed to the “dear fellow passengers of starship earth,” held in Zurich in 1985, where he states that “uns einen abkrampfen liegt uns besser als leben und zusammenleben” (Seiler 2008, 76).19 After all, the world has not changed that much in 2012: people still have to learn how to be each other’s other without losing each other in “endless deferrals of self-identity” (Elsaesser 2009a, 61), travelling around the world in their self-created personality bubbles that are far less individual than they would like to acknowledge. “There, but for the grace of God, go I” (Seiler 1965, 11).20

Notes 1

“A small people of masters feels threatened: they have called for labour, and human beings arrive.” It has recently been cited at the beginning of the movie: Almanya—Willkommen in Deutschland (2011), by the German-Turkish director Yasemin Samdereli. The English translation of Max Frisch is cited in the brochure accompanying the DVD edition of Siamo italiani and Septemberwind. Zürich: Filmcoopi, 2006, 8. 2 More than 500,000 Italians live and work in Switzerland. They are considered a ‘problem’. An over-employed economy needs their labour—a small nation of distinct peculiarity perceives them as foreign objects. They live beyond the barrier of a different language. Discussed as a problem, they remain unknown as human beings. (English translation taken from the brochure accompanying the DVD edition. Zürich: Filmcoopi, 2006, 6). 3 “The reality to rediscover were... the people, and for this expedition the technique of ‘cinéma direct’ had just developed new instruments (low-noise camera, lip synch direct sound, highly sensitive emulsions). Instead of talking about people, we could now let them talk themselves.” 4 “Italy represents something very sensual and emotional for me. I can't explain why. This attraction allowed me to realize Siamo italiani and Il vento di settembre. I would have never presumed to make a film about Tamils or Ex-Yugoslavs in Switzerland, because my relation to the culture these people come from is not strong enough.” 5 “When I arrived at Chiasso for the first time: what a mess! It’s always the same: those in Chiasso are as incapable in the fourth year as they are in the first. You arrive—if you arrive at noon you have your passport back at 2pm, someone who arrives in the morning has to wait the whole day for his passport. You have to do the sanitary checkups and like so many others I arrived in the morning and departed the next morning and those who arrived at noon left that same evening.” 6 “Eight Swiss don’t make as much noise as two Italians.” 7 “One evening I am in a restaurant and someone says to me: Do you speak German? I say no, I’ve been here for only two months. Then he starts complaining about the Italians. When my ears hurt I told him: ‘wänd Sie so guet, alte Snore jetz’

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(Swiss dialect for: ‘Could you please shut up now’). He replied immediately: Well, your German is quite good and I said: good enough for you.” 8 “The foreigners sing.” 9 “Sure we also make noise, but we go out on the streets in the evening, and we sing because in Italy this is not forbidden. Here you can’t sing. The police show up immediately if someone starts singing.” 10 “On December 3, 4, and 6, 1967, the ‘CINECLUB’ of CLI Zurich organized screenings in the Casa d’Italia and in the Volkshaus Zürich. On December 4, 1967, the film Siamo italiani by the Swiss director Alexander Seiler was shown. He was asked by Z. why he had not contacted the CLI during the shooting of the film to document their activity. Seiler had contacted the CLI section in Basel. There he was simply offered an evening entertainment, scenes of which are included in the film.” 11 “September Winds is a film about the quicksand of time, about change, about what is missing, about inner conflict, about here and there, about no longer knowing what one’s heart desires. But it is also a film about the everyday gestures of people who work in factories and workshops, who pick figs from trees, who seek harmony in the playing of a guitar.” (English translation taken from the brochure accompanying the DVD edition, Zürich: Filmcoopi, 2006, 15). 12 Transcription of English subtitles from the DVD Septemberwind. Zürich: Filmcoopi, 2006. 13 “September wind takes you away / I will not lie I cannot stay / That’s how all summer loves must end/ You don’t know that you could be with me/ But it’s impossible, because this is how the summer ends/ And when the wind comes back in September our love will be gone. (Transcription of Subtitles from the DVD Septemberwind. Zürich: Filmcoopi, 2006.) 14 “Presented two years ago in Locarno and directed by the Swiss-Italian Denis Rabaglia according to the statements made by the director, Azzurro (the title refers to the song of Paolo Conte) aspired to be a fairy tale in the wake of the commedia all' italiana: very typed characters, a mix of social satire and melancholy, modesty and cynicism, causticity and emotion. Good intentions on which the pathetic prevails widely, up to escalate in the last part.” 15 “I am looking for the summer the whole year long…” 16 “In the desire of my thoughts the train moves the other way around.” 17 Interestingly, Nanni Moretti’s movie on Berlusconi (original title: Il caimano) had the same release title in Germany and Switzerland. 18 “So you were like an Albanian?” 19 “We are better in fighting hard than in living and living together.” 20 I am grateful to Mattia Lento for his comments on an earlier version of this chapter and for inviting me to the retrospective ‘Noi siamo loro’ while I was working on it.

PLAYING WITH STEREOTYPES: MARTIN SCORSESE’S ITALIANAMERICAN (1974) CAMILLE GENDRAULT

Italian emigration to the United States has received very little attention from the cinema of Italy itself. It has received a great deal more from American cinema, to which it has contributed a whole set of stereotyped images, the earliest of which date from the first decades of the twentieth century.1 Thus, from the years 1906–1908 onwards, several short silent films that appeared on the silver screen in the Italian-Americans' country of adoption, some of them the work of directors who would later be enshrined by posterity, such as E. S. Porter and D. W. Griffith, “inaugurated the tradition of presenting Italian criminals who belonged to gangs that practiced blackmail, kidnapped children, demanded ransoms, and planted bombs” (Hidiroglou 2007, 316-317). Hence a good many stereotypes involving Italian-Americans were, because they had long been in existence, already deeply rooted in the collective American imagination when, in 1974, the director Martin Scorsese went to work on a documentary on the community he came from. The film that resulted, entitled Italianamerican, deserves to be better known. A movie of medium length, running for not quite forty-five minutes, it came into existence thanks to the National Endowment for the Humanities, which had commissioned it with an eye to the upcoming celebration of the bicentenary of the United States. An extensive set of documentaries, each devoted to a particular minority, had been planned in the framework of the bicentenary celebration. Although it owes its inception to this official commission, Scorsese’s film is a very personal documentary. The way that the filmmaker, a representative of the third generation of Italian-Americans, chose to handle his subject was simply to visit his parents in the family’s apartment in Little Italy and invite them to talk about their experiences in front of the camera. Thus, the film offers the viewers a retrospective look at Italian immigration to the United States by way of the personal narratives of people who issued from it. However, it does a great deal more than that:

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letting the audience see and hear the director's parents tell their own stories, it allows the viewers to become familiar with their presentation of things, beginning with the presentation they offer of themselves. In this way, Scorsese takes a sharp look at what the very idea of Italian-American identity implies, and his film contributes to redefining it without, however, neglecting its stereotypical dimension. “Stereotype” is generally understood in a negative sense. However, as Ruth Amossy has forcefully pointed out in various texts on this subject, to treat stereotypes as wholly negative is to neglect their constructive functions, which, as schematic conceptions shared by a broad community, play a fundamental role in the community's elaboration of a social identity, contributing to “the cohesion of the group and the consolidation of its unity” (Amossy 1997, 43). From this perspective, which represents something of a departure from the standard discourse on the question, what calls for investigation is less the stereotypes themselves than the way they are put to work in various representations. That is precisely what shall be attempted in the following pages, which set out from an analysis of the documentary sui generis entitled Italianamerican. Indeed, it is from that standpoint that this film asks a specific set of questions about selfrepresentation—the self-representation that the director’s parents are induced to provide. In what ways are stereotypes and self-narration interlinked? What does the film tell the audience about this, and how? It seems that, in this regard, Italianamerican illuminates, in an interesting fashion, what is more generally at stake in Scorsese’s fictional oeuvre when it considers the community of his birth as a result of immigration.

Memories of Little Italy Although Italianamerican is largely based on the stories that Catherine and Charles Scorsese confide to their son, the director also makes ample use of archival images, both old family photos (the two protagonists’ wedding picture, for example) as well as images filmed several decades earlier in the Little Italy neighborhood: shots of the crowd, anonymous faces, street scenes. These street scenes are not the only outdoor shots that the documentary offers the viewers. One sees others filmed in the same streets—Elizabeth Street, where the Scorsese family’s apartment is located, and the streets nearby—but, this time, in the present and in colour. In this fashion, the film moves back and forth between past and present, making its way down today’s streets and yesterday’s, while always privileging distinct camera movements, endowed in their turn with a

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temporal dimension: the tracking shots that take the audience into the Little Italy of the 1970s have their pendants in slow background tracking shots that show the viewers archival images. They gradually distance us from this bygone day and age, while investing our gaze with a certain nostalgia. Thus, just as the audience sees the protagonists facing the film camera today the same way that they faced the photographer’s camera in the past, so too, in both present and past, is the neighbourhood in which they have always lived shown. This is one of the modalities that the filmmaker uses to indicate that private and public dimensions are closely bound up with each other. The same procedure makes itself felt in the way that the family living room seems, thanks to a montage effect, to open out directly onto the public realm. A close-up of Charlie Scorsese sitting comfortably on his sofa and recalling childhood memories of Little Italy while the viewers hear background noise from outside is followed by a street shot over which the narrative is pursued. The film shifts the audience directly from one type of space to another without drawing any kind of borderline— quite the opposite, in fact. Thus, the documentary impresses upon the viewers that the oral recollection it records is deeply rooted in a particular locale; the result is that the recollection appears to belong not just to Scorsese's parents but to a whole neighbourhood. The relation between memory and neighbourhood appears all the closer here in that it has its counterpart in a double movement: the locality serves as a support for this collective memory while that memory establishes the neighbourhood’s contours, defining it as a particular community’s space. When a broader view of Scorsese’s filmography is taken from this perspective, there is no avoiding the comparison between the space that the director delimits for the audience in Italianamerican and the one he had depicted one year earlier in his fiction film Mean Streets (1973). Here, too, Scorsese sets his narrative in the same Little Italy neighborhood, associating, just as closely, the community and family dimensions. This is especially striking in the shots that accompany the titles: images made with a Super 8 mm camera and presented as if they were scenes from family movies—which is, in fact, what some of them originally were. They show not only the family itself and the family celebrations (in particular, a christening) of which they are supposedly a recorded memento but also, more generally, the block and the neighbourhood with its merchants and community festivities. This leads to another remark. Family movies are typically exclusively for private use: the viewers are supposed to be the same people who recognize both themselves and their friends and relatives in them, sociali-

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zing at one or another gathering.2 That is why people so happily wave at the camera in such movies, as repeatedly happens, notably, in the simulated family movie that opens Mean Streets. In this way, the viewers are put, from the outset, in a very close relationship with the people who will become the film's protagonists. They find themselves in the position of a family member, just as the protagonist is, so to speak, part of the family in the documentary Italianamerican. They take a seat in the living room just opposite the paterfamilias in order to listen to his recollections or, later, sit at the family table after a meal. Putting viewers in this position is an effective way of neutralizing the mythic dimension privileged by many of the movies that bring ItalianAmericans on stage. Here one thinks, above all, of The Godfather and its sequels, directed by Francis Ford Coppola; the first film in the series came out in 1972, shortly before Mean Streets. To be sure, it would be rather facile to contrast Scorsese's modest documentary, shot in two three-hour sessions, with Coppola's sprawling three-part fictional saga, in order to contrast a narrative of remembrance with a mythic narrative. There would be, if one proceeded along these lines, two different kinds of approach to the Italian-American question, one represented in exemplary fashion by Italianamerican, the other by The Godfather. Should it not rather be postulated that this is concerned with the two poles between which representtations of Italian-Americans oscillate, poles that interact, so that one would be much better advised to consider the interrelations between them than to oppose them? It is encouraging to do so, in particular, because of the fact that, even if Scorsese’s documentary makes no appeal to the register of the spectacular in its mythicizing variant (as The Godfather, for example, does), this in no sense means that stereotypes and mythologies play no part in his representation of Italianness.

Staging Italianness As has already been pointed out, although the oral memories that Scorsese records in Italianamerican are his parents’, they cannot be confined to the private dimension: Catherine and Charles Scorsese face the camera and answer their son’s questions as representatives of their community. In the process, therefore, they are led to play the role expected of them, that of residents of the Little Italy neighborhood. The sociologist Erving Goffman, in work done in the 1950s, used the concept “presentation of self” (Goffman 1959) to designate this kind of play, in which everyone gladly takes part, the circumstances and the social interactions in which everyone is allowed to engage in. That is clearly what is involved here: the

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director’s parents participate in a performance, in the theatrical sense of the word, in which they are supposed to exhibit what they are, negotiating their status and identity—in the case at hand, their identity as ItalianAmericans. Scorsese makes the viewers very much aware of this dimension by keeping in his montage what might be considered the film’s off. At the outset a title card points to this off, announcing in white letters on a black background: “Film is about to start.” The next shot presents itself as a continuation of this title card by putting the cinematographic dispositive of which it is a component on display: before focusing on Scorsese’s parents themselves and then following his mother into the kitchen, this shot, which precedes the titles, shows us the soundman, who proceeds to clap the slate. It is Martin Scorsese who walks across the field of vision and then proceeds to give his instructions to his “characters”—instructions, may it be added, that his mother straightforwardly asks for, the better to play her role: “What should I say?”; “I’m supposed to be talking to you? Should I mention your name?”; and later, “How am I doing so far?” and so on. In a similar vein, the somewhat agitated remarks that the protagonists exchange a bit later in the film, when Scorsese’s father accuses his wife of simpering in front of the camera, are not natural. This sparks a little run-in between husband and wife, one of several that crops up in the documentary. It thus directly points to or explicitly displays the self-staging in which the two characters are engaged. This comprises part of the film. What are the stakes involved? Involuntary or programmed, as it is here, the presentation of Self, Goffman notes, presupposes the use of models to which one more or less consciously conforms. This, precisely, is what enables Scorsese, who confers this role on his parents and films their performance, to question, much more broadly, the cultural models that sustain their self-presentation (which it helps sustain in its turn). Thus, the director manages to depict on screen, again more broadly, the whole set of collective imaginary representations within the framework of which this presentation of Self takes its place. “The construction of an image of the self, whether individual or collective, is always beholden to collective imaginary representations,” (2010, 47) Ruth Amossy insists in a recent book precisely on the subject of the presentation of Self, in which she elaborates on her previous discussions of the notion of the stereotype, in Goffman’s wake. “Often, [the subject] adopts and replays an already internalized role that has become an automatism,” (2010, 47) she adds, spelling out later that stereotyping does not imply absolute conformity, of course. It must be understood that a stereotype, which consists of a thematic core (the Black,

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the artist, the New Yorker, the boss), is accompanied by a series of attributes supposedly essential, not all of which, however, are activated every time the stereotype recurs. As a rule, one or two typical features make it possible to reconstruct the whole and to set the new representation in relation to the model that has been stocked in the cultural memory. This is to say that the stereotype, defined as a fixed image, leaves room for play in its actualization. In Italianamerican, it is indeed not a question for Scorsese’s parents of actualizing all the features of Italianness in their performance but only a handful of them, such as the distribution of men's and women's roles around the special figure of the mamma and the familial relationships that arise from such a distribution of roles. The director needs no more than this in order to raise the issue of the internalization of stereotypes by the very people whom they are meant to designate, while also regularly reminding the audience, in the film, of just how much room for play actualization of a stereotyped role allows. This play is effectively indicated by the play that Scorsese opens up in his depiction when he introduces a metafilmic dimension by putting his own filmic dispositive on exhibit. In this way, the director situates the viewers in close proximity to his characters but, at the same time, affords them a distanced and usually amused point of view on the representation of themselves that they offer.

A Cultural In-Between Of the defining features evoked in his film, Scorsese puts very special emphasis, as has already been noted, on his parents' close ties to the Little Italy neighbourhood, a subject on which he questions them at considerable length. Yet in his documentary, he also questions their relationship to another space which, for its part, seems much more remote: their relationship to their country of origin. This other space comes into play in the film in the guise of photographs that his parents took on their one and only trip to Italy; their son looks at these photographs at the same time they do, listening to what they have to say and letting the viewers listen as well. Significantly, this sequence opens with a series of photographs of opulant dining tables: whether in Rome or in Venice, the photographs always capture the same scene. Apart from the comic effect produced by this handful of more or less identical snapshots shown in rapid succession, which seems to reduce the trip to Italy to one long series of meals, this naturally allows Scorsese to emphasize the central place that food holds in his parents’ relationship to their culture of origin. A great deal is made of this in the film at a more general level, since, in the film’s opening scene,

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the viewers see the director’s mother making the sauce for the macaroni that, a little later, is at the centre of the table; the titles give us the recipe for the sauce. Over and above the transmission of a culture by way of its cuisine, however, what these photographs (which appear full-screen) show and what is still more plainly brought out by the accompanying commentary is, above all, the looseness of the tie between these Americans of Italian extraction and the country from which their parents emigrated. Listening to the way the director’s parents pronounce the names of some of the places in the photographs, the viewers understand just how little they still speak the language of their ancestors. More generally, their comments seem quite similar to those any American tourist might make; this also holds for their disconsolate remarks about the poverty they witnessed in Southern Italy. The same is quite obvious when Scorsese’s mother shows the audience a photo of a monk’s mummified body and explains that she took a picture of it because “it was an impression the way the teeth were,” without referring in any way at all to the cultural or religious dimension with which such a relic was most certainly endowed. This makes Scorsese’s portrait of the community of Little Italy still more complex. His film does not restrict itself to recalling the history of Italian immigration to the United States, but rather, captures a process of acculturation in its entirety. In other words, the film emphasizes just how little Italian-American identity is a mere juxtaposition of two different cultural identities, treating it, rather, as a new and different form resulting from prolonged contact between these two cultures and the attendant contamination of each by the Other. It is in this respect, perhaps, that Scorsese’s depiction most sharply distinguishes itself from that offered by American cinema in general and The Godfather: Part III in particular, which, in sharp contrast, functions in a mode that focuses on doubleness. A shot in The Godfather: Part III, inserted before the scene that shows Don Corleone (Al Pacino) confronting the Vatican’s banker, shows this in a seemingly exemplary fashion: in the foreground, the viewers see a lowangle shot of Saint-Patrick's Cathedral in New York, with its Gothic architecture, while, in the left-hand side of the image, a skyscraper towers up, made of nothing but glass, apparently. Two spaces of two different kinds appear to be juxtaposed in a single shot: on the one hand, the business world, which evokes American identity; on the other, the world of religion, which evokes Italian identity. If space allowed, one would have to consider how, on the broader scale represented by the three parts of The Godfather, the constant shifting between the United States and Italy produced by the montage involves the same juxtaposition between a space

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presented as if it were the space of modernity and another that is presented as the space of tradition. Scorsese, for his part, envisages Italian-American identity much more as a cultural mixing than as a juxtaposition of this sort. In order to clarify the terms of that distinction, it seems appropriate to turn to the works of one of the people who have worked the most on this question of cultural mixing, the French historian Serge Gruzinski. Setting out from research on the Americas of the Spanish conquest with a focus on sixteenth-century Mexico, Gruzinski has produced a very fine-meshed analysis of the process of colonization, followed by the globalization of imaginary representations. This has led him to a much more general reflection that bears on the contemporary period and, in equal measure, on modernity. In Gruzinski’s thinking, the concept of mixing or the mestizo holds a pivotal place in the attempt to reframe the question of Otherness and the relation between cultures, which this concept makes possible to pose in terms, not of confrontations, but of melanges. However, phenomena of melange are difficult to grasp, as Gruzinski himself points out in The Mestizo Mind: “An understanding of mestizo processes runs up against intellectual habits which favor monolithic ensembles over ‘in-between’ spaces. It is obviously simpler to identify solid blocks than nameless gaps” (Gruzinski 2002, 22). It is precisely such a “nameless gap” that Scorsese’s documentary seeks to identify. He bestows a name on it: “Italianamerican,” spelled as a single word; in defiance of prevailing usage, Scorsese leaves out the hyphen or space that generally separates the two terms, assigning the people designated by the compound word a dual identity (in this name as in all the others constructed on the same model, such as “Irish-American,” “African American,” and so on).3 By thus running the words together in the title of his documentary, Scorsese seeks to underscore not duality, but rather mixing, gaps, the in-between: I’m an American… but I’ve been deeply influenced by Italian cinema. So I’m not really an American director, as I’m supposed to be, though I’m not an Italian filmmaker, either. I’m somewhere in between, and I guess I’ll have to find a place for myself between the two in order to feel comfortable.

With this declaration, which opens the documentary on the Italian cinema that he directed in 1999, Il mio viaggio in Italia (My Voyage to Italy), Scorsese encourages the viewers to expand their reflection on the inbetween to a consideration of the much broader question as to the extent to which his movies express an imaginary realm of mixing, the mixing of which the director himself is a product. Thus it may be said that his films

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happily draw forms and figures from Italian cinema, although they avowedly take their place within American cinema, thanks especially to the way they play with American film genres and their iconography. This is a particularly striking feature of Scorsese’s mise en scène of his “Italianamerican” characters in general. In such cases, what are the specific functions of including, in a way that can seem somewhat paradoxical, insistent references to American movies? What forms do such references take?

The Construction of Identity and the Iconography of American Cinema Italian cinema often insistently makes its presence felt in Martin Scorsese’s films, if under the surface. Perhaps the most significant example for present purposes is the echo of certain shots in Federico Fellini’s I vitelloni (1953) that one finds in Mean Streets: in particular, the drinking scene that the protagonists of Scorsese's movie organize to celebrate the return of one their friends from Vietnam. The intoxication of the character played by Harvey Keitel directly evokes the shot played by Alberto Sordi at the end of the carnival sequence in Fellini’s film. It is not just the situation of drunkenness which links the two movies but also the way that both directors film it. In I vitelloni, after the viewers have seen a semi-close-up of the character staggering wildly—in a frame of the film that itself remains stable—before collapsing outside the room where the party is coming to an end, a subjective camera forces the viewers to adopt the drunken man’s viewpoint: an extremely low-angled shot of the chandelier is followed by a pronounced swaying movement. In a similar scene in Mean Streets, in which the viewers find, albeit in a different setting, the same streamers that are seen hanging from the ceiling in Fellini’s sequence, Scorsese proceeds along much the same lines, while going even further than Fellini does. The drunken character remains in the centre of the frame, but the camera staggers along with him to the moment when he collapses in a heap on the floor, so that his uncontrolled movements seem to become the viewers’ as well.4 Thus, although the two scenes are not strictly identical, they are nevertheless closely akin. Scorsese, making a movie with autobiographical overtones— the subject of which is a small group of members of the Little Italy community—engages in a personal rereading of Fellini’s similarly autobiographical film, in which Fellini follows the lives of five friends from Rimini, the little town of which he, too, was a native. Setting out from this example, one of many,5 one may note how sharply Scorsese’s cinema differs from Coppola’s in this respect as well. Coppola, when he

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introduces Italian-American characters, can also allude to Italian cinema as may be seen, above all, in The Godfather: Part III, which unmistakably refers to two of Visconti’s movies: Senso (1954) and Il gattopardo (The Leopard, 1963). The second film, in particular, is repeatedly quoted, sometimes almost literally: Certain shots (such as the one in which the viewers watch as Prince Salina, shaving, sees his nephew’s face appear in his mirror) recur in the American film, which does not hesitate to reproduce them down to the very composition of the frame.6 In Coppola, however, the quotations follow on the heels of the next and are even telescoped, ultimately producing the effect of a wink to the viewers, whereas Scorsese reappropriates and elaborates his material rather than quoting it. Therefore, in Scorsese’s films, although they are saturated with sometimes powerful allusions to models drawn from Italian cinematography, such models are only allowed to appear in the background. It is another matter entirely when it comes to Scorsese’s allusions to American cinema: they are employed very explicitly, precisely in order to individualize “Italianamerican” characters. A conspicuous example occurs in Scorsese’s first full-length film, Who’s that Knocking at My Door? (1967), in which, four years before Mean Streets, he had already essayed a depiction of his community. The characters in the movie are young ItalianAmericans from Little Italy; in the scene of particular interest here, they are having fun at a small party. Slow movements of the camera show them toying with a gun, in a series of shots in slow motion woven together by cross-fadings. The fact that the viewers hear no diegetic sounds on the soundtrack, but, at this point, only Latin-American dance music (Ray Barretto’s “El Watusi”) helps produce an effect of suspended time, notwithstanding the violence that surfaces a few minutes later (one of the characters playfully threatens another by pointing the gun at his forehead). The charm is not broken until, suddenly, the sound of a gunshot rings out; abruptly, it prompts the apparition of a close-up, full-screen shot of a photograph of John Wayne. This paves the way for some extremely rapid cutting—punctuated by the sounds of explosions—of thirty or more stills taken from photograms of a Western; they are sometimes newly framed to bring out certain details and sometimes animated with a rostrum camera. Fragments of the poster for Howard Hawks’ famous Western Rio Bravo (1959) are interspersed between frames near the end of this sequence of very rapidly alternating images, after which a wider frame shows the viewers the same poster hanging in front of a movie theater from which the audience sees the film’s two protagonists emerge: the characters whom the titles identify as J.R. (Harvey Keitel) and “the Girl” (Zina Bethune). Thus the montage directly associates two worlds: the day-to-day world of

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Little Italy’s younger generation and the world of the Western, the American genre par excellence. Could one more effectively show the role played by, not just the cinema, but, specifically, the Western in creating a mestizo imaginary universe in the United States? In Cinema Genre, Raphaëlle Moine has clearly identified the social function played by the genre film: “by offering a representation of a society’s value system codified in rules and functions that are known by all, a genre helps viewers to recognize themselves as members of that society.” “[The Western],” she goes on, in a discussion focusing on that film genre: emerged in the United States at the beginning of the 1910s in the context of an Americanization of cinema in the USA that accompanied the larger development of a “New World” national identity… For decades, the American western has permitted “Americanness” to be clarified for diverse populations which had no opportunity to live through the actual winning of the West. These films establish a relationship of familiarity between recent immigrants and the past. (Moine 2008, 83)

In a later film, Goodfellas (1990), Scorsese again notices this kind of appropriation of the genre’s codes and figures and thus of a certain “Americanness,” by the community which has its roots in the immigration from Italy. In the last part of the movie, he includes a shot of Tommy, the character played by Joe Pesci, facing the camera and firing at the viewers the same way that the bandit Barns did in the opening (or closing) shot of Edwin Stanton Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903), often regarded as one of the very first Westerns in film history. Thus the figure of the gangster of Italian extraction is set in direct relation to that of the bandit from the American West. However conspicuously Italian-American they may be, Scorsese’s characters reactivate the stock figures of American movie mythology by identifying with them, including the stereotypical figures of themselves— of their community—that American cinema upholds. This circumstance is presented with particular force in Goodfellas. It is all the more interesting for these purposes that, in this film, it evokes a question that has already been discussed, that of the presentation of Self. Now, however, it is a matter of a self-presentation carried out, not in a documentary register, but in a fiction. This raises other issues, as Ruth Amossy has noticed, without expanding on the point (Amossy/Herschberg-Pierrot 1997, 214-215). It is well known that, in Goodfellas, Scorsese frequently revisits genres highly emblematic of the history of American cinema, such as gangster movies or film noir. In particular, he mobilizes the iconography of the

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former and certain procedures commonly employed in the latter, such as voice-over by a retrospective narrator. Of particular interest here is the way characters are presented as if they were themselves playing a role that they have often seen in the movies, that of the gangster. Thus they appear to be, as it were, characters to the second power. If this circumstance is typical of the film as a whole—the first words of the voice-over, “To me, being a gangster was better than being president of the United States,” draw attention to it from the outset—it is especially striking in certain scenes. One thinks, for example, of the moment when the film’s protagonist, Henry Hill, still an adolescent, presents himself to his mother in a resplendent costume that is altogether fitting for the role that he has chosen for himself. His spectacular appearance is underscored as such by the frame within the frame that lets the viewers see him the moment after a door swings open. The young man is first shown in a medium-shot; then, after a brief reverse-shot of his mother staring at him in stupefaction, the camera travels rapidly down his elegant figure to the part of his costume of which he is obviously the proudest, his shining shoes. “You look like a gangster!” is the only comment this inspires from his mother. The comment reflects, surely, terror rather than approbation; but, in any case, it invites viewers to notice how well Henry Hill is imitating the stance of a Scarface (Howard Hawks, 1932) or a Little Caesar (Mervyn LeRoy, 1931), Italian-American figures whose path or, at least, model he is following.7 This can, of course, be interpreted as a reflexive game on Scorsese’s part, one typical of post-classical film’s penchant for quotation.8 But it can also be interpreted as a great deal more, if one bears in mind that Scorsese’s quotations—to the extent to which, like the shots of the Western Who’s that Knocking at My Door?, they evoke the characters’ imaginary worlds—are used to focus attention on a process of acculturation.

An Ironical Mobilization of Stereotypes A swarthy man with a moustache leans toward the camera with a winning smile, winks, and greets it: “Hi.” Cut. The same man presents his necktie to the camera: “See this tie?” Following his gesture, the camera travels up to his face, which is turned toward us: “Twenty dollars.” Cut. A highangle shot submits a pair of well-shod feet to our inspection: “See these shoes?” The camera travels up to his face again, once more following the gesture of the hand that invites it to do so: “Fifty dollars.” Cut. His suit is exhibited on the same principle, and the viewers learn what it cost, too.

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Then, outside this time, the viewers see a beautiful white convertible: “Five thousand dollars.” This is the opening scene of one of Scorsese’s very first films, It’s Not Just You, Murray!, a short that runs for fewer than sixteen minutes. Scorsese made it for a 1964 summer seminar at New York University, where he was then studying. This opening in the form of a presentation of Self by the main character in a film that appears, from the start, to be a pseudo-documentary—it is a disguised portrait of one of Scorsese’s uncles—immediately locates the movie in the comic vein by exhibiting a stereotype: the Italian-American, who proudly displays the signs of his swift (and dishonest) social ascension. Beyond the comic intent, however, the primary effect of using these stereotypes as such,9 of foregrounding them, is to distance them. This distancing is reinforced by the voice-over narration, present in this short directed by a student as will later be the case with Goodfellas, where Scorsese proceeds in the same way. When one has seen this short film, an anticipation of Goodfellas, one understands just how much more than simple homage to the film noir the voice-over in Goodfellas is.10 The guiding thread in a retrospective narrative of a personal career reconstructed by means of a montage of intense moments presented in an unexpected light, the voice-over appears to be a tool for creating ironic distance, above all else. In view of what has just been said, this argument can be sharpened. As far as Scorsese’s films are concerned, it is appropriate to speak of a utilization of stereotypes that is not only playful but, more specifically, ironic, insofar as the representation reworks them and encourages the viewers to critically distance themselves from them. This is a delicate operation, to be sure, since irony, the principle of which is to affirm and simultaneously contradict what it affirms, is an effect that depends on reading, like the stereotype. To exist, it must be recognized for what it is by the viewers.11 The metafilmic dimension, in the forms in which the viewers have been able to identify it with the help of various examples, appears (thanks to the play of quotations, the comments and gestures addressed to the camera, the exhibition of the filmic dispositive) to be essential in this sense, for it works to establish the ironic strand that runs through Scorsese’s films, helping to signal its presence and throwing it into relief. One could perhaps venture a step further in order to propose that irony, because it allows participation and distancing at the same time, is a trope made to order for expressing the cultural in-between, that is, the fact of never being wholly in one cultural heritage or the other but of situating oneself, rather, in the play that develops between the two.

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Thus Scorsese’s films, when they consider members of the community descended of Italian immigration to the United States, by no means seek to sidestep stereotypes, as hopefully has been amply shown. It is not a question, for Scorsese, of ignoring stereotypes and, even less, of simply negating them. It is not even a question of deconstructing them. Yet neither is it a matter of simply reproducing them, that is to say, of straightforwardly utilizing fossilized collective visions. These stereotypes, because they are not used merely as such, are utilized in a more profound way in Scorsese’s films. As a director from Little Italy, Scorsese bears witness in his films “to the way an individual and a group appropriate [a stereotype] and put it in play within a dynamic of relationships with the other and the self” (Amossy/ Herschberg-Pierrot 1997, 118). His parents, in their way, bear witness to the same process in the presentation of Self which they present throughout the encounter in Italianamerican and in which the director invites the viewers to be a part. Translated from French by G. Michael Goshgarian

Notes 1

For an overview, see the well-documented compendium by the film historian Brunetta (2001, 489-514). The author goes so far as to write, in this connection, about a phenomenon of rimozione on the part of Italian cinema with regard to the question of emigration to the United States. 2 On this, see Odin’s very useful volume Le film de famille (1995), which has become the standard work on the subject. 3 On these questions, see Philippe Jacquin’s, Daniel Royot’s and Stephen Whitfield’s work on American culture and anthropology (2000, 16, 52 and passim). 4 Afforded an opportunity to explain how he produced this effect, Scorsese explained “Harvey was wearing an Arriflex camera harness that a scene-man had made for him under his jacket, with a piece of wood connected to the camera. When Harvey took a step forward, the scene-man, who was standing in front of him, backed up a step, and when Harvey fell down, the scene-man stepped to one side while holding on to the contraption. It was just a contraption that we’d slapped together; nothing very complicated” (Christie, Thompson 1989, 68-69). 5 One thinks, for example, of a moment in Goodfellas that again alludes to I Vitelloni; this time, however, the allusion comes at the beginning of the Bamboo Lounge scene (with reference to the year 1963). A fluid camera sweeps through a barroom at night, accompanied by a voice-over that presents different characters one after the next. The gaze comes to a stop on them in a way that is highly reminiscent of Fellini’s introduction to the opening sequence of his film, beginning with the first words of the voice-over soundtrack: “Here’s our town’s little casino.”

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6 In this connection, it is interesting to point out that in both of the films by Visconti to which Coppola has chosen to refer, the story takes place in the nineteenth century. It might be hazarded that, in a film that is supposed to be dealing with the contemporary period, recourse to such references testifies to the fact that the collective American imagination powerfully associates Italy with things past. 7 The same holds for Irish-Americans in the film. Another character, Jimmy Conway, in the scene in which the viewers see him orchestrating the theft of a truck’s cargo, engages in a performance that manifestly identifies him as a worthy heir to The Public Enemy (William Wellman, 1931). Thus, Robert De Niro plays the role of a character who himself plays the role that he has attributed to himself. The voice-over spells this out, while the viewers watch images that speak for themselves: “Jimmy was the kind of guy who rooted for the bad guys in the movies.” 8 On these questions, see the standard work on the subject: Bourget 2005, 78-81. 9 Another stereotype involving “Italianness” that expresses itself with special insistence in the film is the stock figure of the mamma, which is also outrageously exaggerated: draped in a big black shawl (under which the viewers recognize Scorsese’s own mother!), she stuffs her progeny with spaghetti every time she appears, doing so even through the bars of the prison cell in which her son has been imprisoned! 10 On Goodfellas’ recourse to the narrative structure of film noir, cast in the form of a tribute to that genre, see in particular, Beylot 2005, 163. 11 For a thorough analysis of ironic procedure and the different ways in which it is practiced, see Schoentjes 2001.

CINEMA, MIGRATION AND CRISIS: SANDRA GUGLIOTTA’S UN DÍA DE SUERTE (2002) GUDRUN RATH

Migration in Argentina: Building the American Myth In the imaginaries of the Argentine nation state, migration has always played a decisive role—with good cause. For the last two centuries, Argentina has been one of the major receiving countries for European immigration. It was, along with the United States, Canada, the Antilles, Australia and Brazil, one of the six favoured destinations for European emigrants in the nineteenth century (Delli-Zotti/Esteban 2008, 83-84). Among these countries, Argentina figures in second place concerning the total number of received immigrants. In 1914, 30 percent of Argentina’s population were immigrants, the largest part of them coming from Italy and Spain.1 Its welcoming immigration policy, settled upon after the formation of the young nation state and the country’s postcolonial independence at the beginning of the nineteenth century, sought to “civilize” the plains of the vast lands, the pampa, which until then were only inhabited by nomadic Argentine cowboys, the gauchos (Copertari 2009, 117-118). French culture, European diligence and English liberty should be “planted” in America in order to introduce moral standards and progress into the rural parts of the country. They would definitely put an end to, politicians and intellectuals such as Domingo Fausto Sarmiento and Juan Bautista Alberdi argued, the laziness and the lack of education the rural population stood for in their perception.2 However, the European upper class, which the politicians expected to accomplish their civilizing project, did not show up to “make the Americas.” Instead, Europe’s lowest social classes came and remained in the harbour city Buenos Aires, dashing the hopes of the civilizing project of the hinterland, turning it into a political Utopia. Subsequently, the transoceanic immigration flux from the south of Europe had a lasting impact on Argentina’s social, linguistic, economic

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and political formation at large (Delli-Zotti/Esteban 2008, 83). Migration inscribed itself in language, generating some of Buenos Aires’ characterristic linguistic varieties.3 With the arrival of immigrants, the urban landscape changed, converting the conventillos, affordable multi-family housings, in the docklands in the south of Buenos Aires into the misery quarters for immigrants.4 It was there, in the docklands, where another product of the nineteenth century arose, the Tango, setting to music the cultural encounter of the dockland areas. This cultural encounter, naturally, was not only judged positively: Ricardo Rojas, in La restauración nacionalista, critically describes a city where signs in Italian or Yiddish were displayed in shop windows of many traditional and, until then, criollo neighbourhoods, where children of immigrants mixed with children of the established Hispanic population, endangering linguistic purity and corrupting what more reactionary writers such as Lugones called “the race.” Immigrants—“the overseas mob,” as Lugones insultingly referred to them—were becoming the new barbarians. The unwelcome result of policies the elite had executed in the last third of the nineteenth century, following the enlightened program of Sarmiento and Alberdi, in order to build through state action a modern capitalist society. In fact, the outcome of the modernizing project was considered its distortion, the unforeseen consequence that transformed Buenos Aires not only into a cosmopolitan city but also into a dangerously mixed space haunted by the ghosts of cultural loss, by “bad” mixtures, and by political turmoil led by anarchists and socialists of foreign origin. (Sarlo 1999, 228)

Hence, even if the political dream of converting the Argentine Pampa into a European offshoot vanished, the arrival of European and especially of Italian immigrants had a great influence on the constructions of this emerging nation state. Not least, countering the nationalist discourse about dangerous mixings, it contributed to the imagining of Argentina as the “Europe enclave in Latin America […] with no African-born or indigenous population” (Grimson 2007, 264), a country, where the population had literally “descended from […] the boats arriving from Europe” (Copertari 2009, 117). Although the immigrants did not respond to the expectations the immigration policies had set—as many of them had formerly been members of trade unions or anarchists, who brought their claims for labour rights along with them to the new continent, causing malaise to the economic elite which consequently repressed any form of protest (Copertari 2009, 118)— the Argentinization of European immigrants became part of the progress promised by the nation. In spite of its conflicts and contradictions, then, as Grimson and Kessler (2005) confirm in On Argentina and the Southern Cone: Neoliberalism and National

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Imaginations, “the immigrant process was an integral part of the story of how the Argentine nation was born” (Grimson/Kessler 2005, quoted in Copertari 2009, 119). At the end of the twentieth century, migration became highly relevant again, this time not in the form of immigration, but emigration to Italy. This remigration was caused by the economic crisis the country was facing, a crisis of which the seed had already been sown in the 1980s and which then fully unfolded in the 1990s: In the 1980s, the Washington Consensus sought to jumpstart Latin American economies by reducing the size and programs of the welfare states that had been in place since the 1940s and 1950s. The implementation of these policies meant that Latin American states, albeit in different ways, had to reduce their spending for education, public health, the building and maintenance of infrastructure. (Rocha 2008, 115)

In the 1990s, “neo-liberal economic policies reversed the redistribution of wealth” (Rocha 2008, 115) and finally caused the 2001 economic collapse. The impact the collapse of the free market as it had been defined by the Washington-consensus had on society was enormous (Lehmann 2007, 23). The crisis impoverished the middle classes, causing a 23 percent unemployment rate and a 57 percent poverty rate (Delli-Zotti/Esteban 2008, 96), and forced President Fernando de la Rúa to step down. Finally, the impact of the crisis could also be seen on the level of migration flows. Due to the economic difficulties the country was facing, many descendants of immigrants chose to go back to where their ancestors had come from, and in many cases this meant back to Europe, back to Italy. After the first wave of emigration the dictatorial regime of the 1970s had caused, the economic crisis at the end of the twentieth century initiated a second and even bigger wave of migration (Delli-Zotti/Esteban 2008, 87). The 2001 crisis caused a phenomenon which, on the one hand, converted the traditionally immigrant-receiving country Argentina into a sending country.5 On the other hand, the visibility of migration also changed the urban landscape. Contrary to the transatlantic migration waves in the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth, Argentina contemporarily received migration flows from Bolivia, Paraguay and Peru, and this inner-Latin American migration became visible in the urban landscape due to the social changes caused by the crisis. Migrants and urban poor suddenly no longer exclusively belonged to the dockland and periphery setting, but appeared in the city’s and society’s centre. Nevertheless, those inner-Latin American migration flows had also existed before.6 Alejandro Grimson outlines how the early

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narrative of a homogeneous, “Europeanized” Argentine nation state would not admit the existence of other ethnicities: Of course Argentina has never been culturally, ethnically or racially homogeneous. In fact, the country has a proportionately larger indigenous population than Brazil. But the portion of the population that would be considered mestizo in other Latin American contexts had been subjected to a unique process of “de-ethnicization” here. Ethnic differences have been removed from public view and political language. And state pressures have made assimilation the only route for ethnically marked persons to attain the full rights of citizenship […] By the 1940s, ethnic identities in Argentina had lost all relevance in the national political scene. The myth of homogeneity prevailed. (Grimson 2007, 265)

Due to the economic crisis, this myth proved to be unsustainable. The crash of neoliberalism went hand in hand with the “making of new urban borders” (Grimson 2008, 504). The city would be remapped through new forms of protest, such as the cazerolazo and the piqueteros, and new occupations brought about by poverty, such as the cartoneros.7 In the latter case, the socially excluded, who made their living by collecting and recycling garbage from the city centre, would be marked as foreigners (Grimson 2007, 267): Within discourses commonly heard through the city, the cartoneros disturbed the homogeneity of the urban landscape and cast doubt on the official elite habitues of the capital. And this disruption is captured through a racialization of the cartoneros that sets them apart as a race darker than a lighter toned elite. As such, the cartoneros are often referred to as “negros” by the discriminatory common sense of the middle and upper class sectors that racialize class differences and reinforce a racial hierarchy that invokes a superior whiteness. This racial discourse exposes the idea that the cartoneros are “invading” the capital and disrupting the European spaces of the city, which holds fast to the idea that it represents a piece of Europe in a darker Latin America (Grimson 2008, 506).8

Cinema and Migration: the Argentine Case Having said this, one finds it rather surprising that immigrant protagonists only begin to play a major (and visible) role in Argentine cinema with the outbreak of the financial crisis in 2001.9 Cinema was immediately affected by the crisis.10 It is interesting to notice that the economic crisis went hand in hand with an emerging young cinema that centred on the social circumstances of the times, denominated “Nuevo” or, infrequently—

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because since the 1970s the term “New” had been applied due to Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s 1968 manifesto Towards a Third Cinema— “Newest Argentine Cinema,” “Cine Testimonial” or simply “Cine de la Crisis” (Schmidt 2010, 1546).11 Within this “New Argentine Cinema” of the last decade, documentary modes became increasingly popular, matching the growing importance of the social and the politically engaged themes the filmic work centred on (Aprea 2008, 67-68). Filmic and artistic representations began to focus on the elimination of borders between the urban centre and its peripheries and on the impoverished middle classes (Amado 2009, 209). For Ana Amado, it was the sudden visibility of socially marginalized groups within the urban landscape and the contact with those until then perceived as “Others” that led to a solidarity that was also manifested in filmic representations. Fictionalized representations and documentary testimonies in films and television mirrored the public agitation on the streets.12 In television, the series Okupas (Bruno Stagnaro, 2001) and Tumberos (Adrián Caetano, 2002) stand for fictional representations of the social. Both filmmakers had previously directed Pizza, birra y faso (Pizza, Beer and Smokes, 1998) which was one of the inaugural films of the New Argentine Cinema (Amado 2009, 221-222). As far as the theme of migration is concerned, it has been pointed out by critics like Gabriela Copertari (2009, 120-121) that it was precisely the crush of the neoliberal system that coincided with the uprising of imaginaries concerning the nation state in Argentine cinema and, therefore, once again with migration. So while, on the one hand, a tendency to revitalize the “European myth” in the origins of the Argentine nation can be observed, on the other hand the figure of the immigrant as a filmic protagonist inscribes itself in the construction of a social narrative that had previously remained beyond the official discourse concerning migration. In this sense, the immigration history of the country has been integrated into a whole spectrum of filmic and literary representations that, as has been stated, function as a counter-history. This counter-history explores the margins of official history and forms part of a perception of cinema as intervention and testimony, which is opposed to being exclusively mimetic (Delli-Zotti/Esteban 2008, 85). Filmic representations like Mala época (Bad times), directed by Mariano de Rosa, Rodrigo Moreno, Nicolás Saad and Salvador Roselli in 1998, and Bolivia, directed by Adrián Caetano in 2003, focus on this other side of immigration in Argentina, that is, contemporary inner-Latin American migration flows (Rocha 2009, 120). In contrast, a number of films in recent Argentine cinema seek to address the country’s history as a destination for European immigration. In films like Herencia (Inheritance) by Paula Hernández from 2001, Nueve

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reinas (Nine Queens) by Fabián Bielinsky from 2000 or, to a lesser extent, El hijo de la novia (Son of the Bride) by Juan José Campanella from 2001, the figure of the European immigrant begins to appear, contributing to the imagination of Argentina as the “European enclave” of Latin America.13 Via the account European immigration is attributed to in these kinds of films—all of them suggesting the idea of migration as legacy through the title or the plot— Gabriela Copertari (2009, 122-123) argues the accent is laid on a society that is the “child” or “inheritor” of European immigration.14 As the figure of the European immigrant appears in a moment in which the quantity of European immigration is comparatively low, Copertari further states, this can be related to the imaginaries of a nation that tends to negate its own “Latin Americanization,” that is, the falling apart of a prosperous society with a “European-like” broad middle class and access to labour, health care and education. With the impoverishment the crisis caused, aspects considered “Latin American,” such as inequality and unemployment, became once again visible and would conduce to the surge of imaginaries of European immigration to oppose the falling apart of previous social imaginaries (Copertari 2009, 122). Even if the attribution to one side or the other—the surge of migration in film as counter-history or contribution to social imaginaries—may not always be clearly discernable, what remains clear is that in both cases it constitutes a political intervention. Gustavo Aprea states that el cine parece ser un ámbito propicio para considerar cómo la sociedad—o al menos parte de ella—reconstruye aspectos fundamentales de su acontecer. […] Siguiendo esta perspectiva, todo film es político, ya que en él se expresan modos de aceptación o cuestionamiento de las relaciones de poder y los distintos roles sociales a través de la presentación de sus personajes, los vínculos que se establecen entre ellos y la sociedad en que se desarrolla la historia.15 (Aprea 2008, 47)

Apart from this general approach, obviously there are several modes to deal with the political in cinema. One of the approaches the New Argentine Cinema makes use of is the representation of society. Cinema, in this case, passes from being merely mimetic to representing and discussing ongoing transformations in society (Aprea 2008, 66). Migration, as in the case I want to analyse in the following, is thus integrated in a greater spectrum of political and aesthetical representations.

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Un día de suerte: Generational Bonds One film that does not entirely correspond to the scheme introduced above, which conceives the surge of the migration theme in cinema either as a counter-narrative or as a way of imagining the nation, is Un día de suerte (A Lucky Day). Directed by the Argentine filmmaker Sandra Gugliotta in 2002, the film focuses on questions of Italian-Argentine migration and remigration through the story of an Italian immigrant and his granddaughter. It has been considered one of a number of films by female filmmakers in which migration is depicted as a not exclusively male phenomenon as in other filmic representations, and, therefore, as a film staging “feminine nomadism” (Amado 2009, 230). Furthermore, as I want to argue in the following, it can be considered an example of a film that not only shows migration and remigration between Argentina and Italy, but also interlinks transnational issues with the blurring of formal conventions. Un día de suerte, at first sight, is a simple coming-of-age story. Elsa (Valentina Bassi), an unsettled twenty-five-year-old, urgently wants to find an Italian guy with whom she had an affair. She wants to follow him to Italy, to the country where her grandfather, il nonno (Darío Víttori), came from. During the film’s first part she is portrayed with her friends in Buenos Aires, trying to make a living from small jobs and to gather some money together to fulfil her dream and escape Argentina’s economic crisis in which the story is set. Towards the end of the film, Elsa is in Italy, looking for her former lover, first in Rome and then in Palermo, where she finally decides to stay and start a new life despite not having met her Italian lover again. Even if the main character of Un día de suerte is apparently Elsa, the film tells a double story. Through the relation between the generations and the focus on the emotional links between Elsa and her grandfather (fig. 1), the film uncovers the story of this migration and remigration and reveals Elsa’s grandfather as the second protagonist of the film. It is mainly due to this intergenerational bond that the film develops a parallelism that is additionally augmented by metaphorical images invoking the European and the Latin American migration experiences—and the ocean in between.16 The other side of the ocean, for the nonno as well as for Elsa, is the place to be: it is “where life is” (Gugliotta 2002, 72), as the protagonists repeat. Yet, the departure signifies not only setting sail. There is also something that is left behind, and in the case of the nonno this only comes to the surface when his granddaughter is daring the journey in the opposite

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direction. In a medium close-up on Elsa’s and her grandfather’s faces, illuminated only by a candle, the film narrates Elsa’s departure to Italy in a melodramatic climax. The scene thus refers to the darkness/lightleitmotiv which is repeated throughout the film. It is in this scene that Elsa gets to know the full scale of her family’s story only just before she actually goes to Europe herself: her grandfather did not only abandon Europe, but also a woman. When Elsa sets off to Italy, she leaves her friend Walter (Fernán Mirás) behind, who, contrary to in the Italian affair, is really in love with her. Elsa, thus, in a way repeats her grandfather’s story. The two sides of the ocean, Italy and Argentina, converge into the mirrored parts of the same story. Viewed from Second World War Europe, from where il nonno departed, Buenos Aires is the place where one can find employment and hunger comes to an end. “Atrás de esto mare sta la vita”17 (Gugliotta 2002, 72), il nonno remembers saying on his departure from Italy. On the other side of the ocean, the “Lamerica” awaits, which is also evoked in Italian film (Lamerica, Gianni Amelio, 1994). In this “New Italy” (Gugliotta 2002, 73) Italians will not be treated as foreigners; they are part of a universal and shared history. At the end of the twentieth century, Italy serves as the same object for the protagonist’s imaginations. Europe, as seen from Buenos Aires, functions as a canvas of hopes and desires.

Fig. 1: Screenshot Elsa and her grandfather in Un día de suerte18

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While the Argentine capital is perceived as suffocating and limiting, there is “a whole world out there” (Gugliotta 2002, 10). In this Buenos Aires of despair, Italy is imagined not to suffer from this claustrophobia. The country appears as a reference, and it is constantly present through the grandfather’s language, photographs, maps, songs and oral testimonies.19 As in other filmic representations, the appearance of European immigration in this film refers to stereotyped images mainly constituted through the figure of the Italian grandfather. The figure is not only strongly marked as an immigrant through his Italian accent when speaking Spanish, but is also portrayed as “typically” Italian, through his cap (fig. 1) as well as through reference to Italian dishes, religious superstitions and the usage of swearwords. Their red Fiat car, for example, appears as material memory in a scene in which Elsa and her father pick up the grandfather from a protest centre in the neighbourhood. While the grandfather had, in the previous scene, been cooking together with a companion who fought in the Spanish Civil War and remembering the typical food from these times, when Elsa and her father come to collect him to take him home for lunch, the differences between the generations become visible: at the wheel is his son, with a Christian cross on the rear view mirror, while the grandfather complains about the typical Argentine lunch, steak and salad. In a medium shot on the three generations driving through Buenos Aires in the Fiat, the grandfather evokes the moment when he bought the car: in 1963, when Fiat was still a cooperative in Italy and everyone wanted to have a car like this one, which was “all originally imported from Italy” (Gugliotta 2002, 28). The scene is finally framed by a quasidocumentary image from a protest centre in the context of the economic crisis with the slogan “Join the protest, neighbour” (Gugliotta 2002, 29) which the grandfather has already participated in. The figure of the Italian immigrant, in this case, has cut off all connections to the European past, a fact that is also accentuated by the grandfather’s refusal to go back to Europe, while at the same time he nurtures an idealized image of the Italian past. Thus, the film returns to the image of migration as a material importation as well as an inheritance from Europe—in this case established by the intergenerational bond—and therefore contributes to the imaginaries of a “Europeanized” Argentina. Nevertheless, it is not only in the Argentinean part that stereotypes play a major role in the film. The stereotyped images resulting from Elsa’s dream about Italy—which also inspire her romanticized love—clash violently with the real life she has to deal with after her arrival, a life that confronts her with stereotypes from the European side. Once Elsa has arrived in Sicily, she is accused of running after her Italian lover because

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of pregnancy—which is untrue. Both the stereotypes and the idealized images that were previously constructed, therefore, shatter the very moment the journey to Europe becomes a reality; those stereotypes are opposed by European stereotypes about Italian migrants who abandoned their families and wives. Elsa finally faces up to the facts and decides not to wait for her lover any longer. In the film’s last scene Elsa’s new plan is to look for a job and, according to the film’s title, “have a lucky day” (Gugliotta 2002, 62). The other side of the Buenos Aires imaginary is marked as the shattering of images, as the breaking of hopes, at the same time that it proves to be a new beginning. The focus on the protagonist, first on a bridge in Rome, then in Sicily with a suitcase in one hand and a map in the other (fig. 2) and, in the final scene of the film, throwing a coin into Fontana di Trevi (fig. 3) is therefore not only consistent, but also highly metaphoric.

Fig. 2, 3: Screenshots of Un día de suerte

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The Visualization of the Crisis: Skinny Cows, Precarious Labour and Remigration Yet, the Italian immigrant is not the only aspect of Argentine society that Un día de suerte refers to. The film is a 2002 production, the year after the 2001 economic breakdown that was still a year of heavy crisis. The film was only made possible through a Spanish-Argentine co-production (Delli-Zotti/Esteban 2008, 97). The crisis, therefore, is not only profoundly interwoven with the circumstances of the film’s production, but also the film’s plot, which is set in the years of the economic crash. Un día de suerte forms part of the New Argentine Cinema20 of the last decade, and it inscribes itself in the framework characteristic for these films: the representation and discussion of the political and social present (Aprea 2008, 66). Un día de suerte reflects the economic difficulties Argentina was facing at the time as a consequence of the crisis. The crash of the economic system went hand in hand with the crumbling of the world of labour as it had formerly been known. The universe of labour was no longer one through which one could gain access to advancement, but had turned into a place of instability (Aprea 2008, 69). New Argentine Cinema incorporated those social transformations and made the changes in the world of labour visible (Ibarren 2005). In Un día de suerte, labour is continuously presented as a constant struggle in precarious conditions, at the same time that, for the main protagonist, it is a gender struggle. Elsa and her friends are shown having to deal with unstable labour conditions and sexual harassment, promoting products and conducting surveys in the streets. Her friends try to step up to the economic challenges through tenuous labour and petty crime, and her father is not able to pay the mortgage and buy medicine because he is no longer employed. While Elsa dreams of escaping to Europe because nothing holds her in Buenos Aires, her friend argues that “in Buenos Aires no-one has anything” (Gugliotta 2002, 35). It is here where class structures and the precariousness of labour conditions are made visible as motivations for migration. However, it is also here—again, in a way similar to the intergenerational bonds between the old Italian deserter and the young Italian businessman in Amelio’s film Lamerica—, that the parallelisms of two generations, il nonno’s and Elsa’s, are crossed by politics. While il nonno is a highly political person, an anarchist who is still participating in the protests against the anti-crisis measures, his granddaughter does not participate in political struggle, the political scenery appearing only as the setting in front of which Elsa is portrayed. In scenes where fiction and

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documentary modes intertwine, she and her friends walk through streets full of protesting people. As the social protests are situated in the context of the 1999 Buenos Aires power outage which already announced the crisis, the film also makes use of candlelight and fire burning in containers in the streets, all of them elements which function in a complementary mode to the melodramatic elements. When Elsa finally decides to leave for Italy, for example, and the girl and her friend walk on the streets wildly arguing, burning containers in the background double the emotional argument the friends are having. The film blurs, in addition, not only elements from different genres from melodrama to fictionalized documentary, but also introduces black-and-white elements, as in the final scene, when the grandfather appears in a protest march. Again, the reference here includes European immigration which is presented as a factor contributing to traditions of political and social protest. While the nonno argues that he has already seen social agitation like this once before, in Europe, his friends are portrayed as immigrants from the Spanish Civil War, who immediately participate in Argentine political struggle. Hence, Argentine political protest is represented—among other factors—as an issue interwoven with European political immigration. Yet, it is the film’s setting that provides a political contextualization for Elsa’s personal migration history. Un día de suerte is profoundly embedded in the social circumstances that lead to emigration, and this contextualization is achieved by recourse to a quasi-documentary-form— one of the main techniques used by New Argentine Cinema. The film works with quasi-documentary news-clips and right from the start the power outage and the ensuing protest marches build the setting for the whole of Buenos-Aires part. It is through this “embeddedness” that the migration experience is contextualized (Delli-Zotti/Esteban 2008, 98) and marked as an experience that goes beyond Elsa’s romantic love story. Personal and collective histories are thereby highlighted as constantly interwoven. For the filmic representation of the migration experience, this crossing of personal and collective spheres inhibits the culturalisation of the migration experience related in the film.21 Neither Elsa nor the nonno are portrayed as part of an immigrant community, whose story they could represent. It is rather the personal motivation that is highlighted in the film and at the same time framed through the social context. The quasi-documentary is not the only aspect that stands out on a formal level: in sharp contrast to the quasi-documentary scenes, Un día de suerte also applies an element that has been referred to as part of filmic “magic realism” (Delli-Zotti/Esteban 2008, 97), the sudden and unexpected appearance of a cow in the middle of Buenos Aires. Rather than

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“magic realism,” I want to address this issue as a surrealistic element in the tradition of Eliseo Subiela’s 1992 film El lado oscuro del corazón (The dark side of the heart), where the protagonist encounters his mother, reincarnated in the form of a cow, in the Argentine pampa. Following the protagonist’s dream about a cow—one of Argentina’s most important export articles—in Un día de suerte a cow keeps showing up unexpectedly in the middle of the Argentine metropolis. “There are no more cows, there’s no more of anything” (Gugliotta 2002, 21), one of the protagonists reasons during the film and thus also refers to Elsa’s dream and the Spanish saying of the “skinny cow” bringing an end to the years of plenty. Thus, on a formal level, the film works with strategies that can be denoted as proper strategies of cinema dealing with transcultural issues such as migration and thereby introduces a new element to New Argentine Cinema: the mix of different modes and genres reveals a “hybrid” texture. Through the staging of the protagonist’s feelings and dreams within a setting of Argentinian social protest, Un día de suerte mixes melodramatic elements with documentary and surrealistic forms. As in migration, the crossing of different spheres therefore also takes place in consideration of the film’s techniques. Un día de suerte remains a film where different genres converge into one and both sides of the ocean merge to tell a personified, yet collective history of migration.

Notes 1

The immigration wave also involved Poland, Russia, and Germany (Delli-Zotti and Esteban 2008, 84). 2 That is how this utopia is conceived in Alberdi’s essays (Copertari 2009, 118). 3 Cocoliche and Lunfardo are some of the examples where Italy played a major role in generating a new variety (Rehrmann 2005, 159). 4 On the contrary, the northern quarters like Recoleta became the upper-class neighborhoods, therefore causing an uneven growth in the northern and southern parts of the Argentine capital (Rocha, 2008, 111). 5 Delli-Zotti and Esteban registered approximately 190,000 exiles from 2000-2003 (2008, 95). 6 Grimson refers to a constant 2percent immigration rate from neighboring countries since the 1890s (2007, 265). 7 While the cacerolazo (pot beating) represents a form of social protest that takes the private into the public space, the piqueteros, a term used for unemployed demanding work, introduced a protest phenomenon that was even more radical by cutting access to the Argentine capital. Grimson provides a detailed analysis of all three forms, including the cartoneros (2008, 506-508). 8 The “ethnicization” of the lower classes goes even further, as Grimson highlights: “in many contexts ‘Bolivian’ had become a generic label encompassing both

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‘poor’ and ‘black’” (2007, 266-268). Likewise, the stigmatizing term cabecitas negras during Peronism served to refer to the migrating masses from the rural areas for the middle and upper classes in the 1940s. 9 This is not the case for Argentine literature, where immigrant figures have been present since the 19th century (Copertari 2009, 119). In cinema, there have been some scattered examples focusing on the European migration history, especially from the documentary mode. 10 Rocha describes the changing conditions of cinema production during neoliberalism (2009, 841-851). 11 As the term “New Argentine Cinema” has become the most common one, it will be applied from now on to refer to the cinema of the last decade and not to the movement of the 1970s, in spite of bearing the same name. 12 For an analysis of this film, as an example for migration from the Argentine provinces to the city see Rocha 2008, 117. 13 For a detailed analysis of Herencia, see Copertari 2009 and Medina 2007. Medina also analyses Tango Lesson by the English filmmaker Sally Potter. 14 Nevertheless, Copertari differentiates Herencia from the other two films as the latter more complexly deals with the image of “heritage.” 15 “Cinema seems to be a proper ambit to reconsider how society—or at least a part of it—reconstructs fundamental aspects of its occurrences […] According to this perspective, any film is political because in it modes of acceptance or questions of power-relations and different social roles are expressed through the presentation of its protagonists, the links established between them and society in which the story takes place.” 16 In the film, this gap is also symbolized by the story that remains untold: the story of the generation in between, Elsa’s father, which corresponds to the dictatorial regime of the 1970s. 17 “Life is behind the sea.” 18 All images are taken from http://www.trigon-film.org/de/movies/Dia_de_suerte/photos, Accessed October 1, 2011. 19 See also Delli-Zotti and Esteban who assume that knowing Italy through family stories makes it an easier place to emigrate to (2008, 98). 20 Gustavo Aprea points out that this movement does not share an aesthetic programme, an ideology nor a manifesto and therefore cannot be considered homogeneous, as is suggested by the term “New Argentine Cinema” (2008, 67). 21 Kosnick states this for the films of Fatih Akn (2009, 45).

NOMADIC NARRATIVES: MIGRATION CINEMA IN GERMANY AND ITALY AURORA E. RODONÒ

The foreigner allows you to be yourself by making a foreigner of you. (Edmond Jabès: A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Book)

Premise A distinctive feature of our time is a society changed by migration processes. The existential experience of simultaneous dislocation and location (Bhabha 1994) due to migration created a generation of filmmakers in Germany that addresses the cultural in-between-spaces and finds creative and productive ways to cross geographic, aesthetic, and dramaturgical boundaries. Since the beginning of the 1990s, filmmakers with personal experiences of migration began depicting transnational spaces, cosmopolitan characters, and human drama beyond happy racial commingling and concepts of fixed identities. The most prominent example is the multiaward winning film Gegen die Wand (Head-On, 2004) by Fatih Akin, who was born in Hamburg. Others, particularly German-Kurdish and GermanTurkish directors like Yüksel Yavuz (Aprilkinder—April Children 1998, Kleine Freiheit—A Little Bit of Freedom 2003), Ayúe Polat (Auslandstournee—Tour Abroad Europe 2000, En Garde 2004), or Thomas Arslan (Geschwister-Kardeúler 1997, Dealer 1999, Der schöne Tag—A Fine Day 2001), also break away from the narrative of the Other in need of assistance, a concept of control usually promulgated by the mass media, among other social institutions. Different, yet similar, is the landscape of film in the context of migration in Italy. Given the country’s more recent history of migration until the end of the 1980s, many films of the previous era address mostly migration within Italy or emigration processes. Configurations on Italy’s transformation from a transit country to a country of immigration only began with such films as Pummarò (Tomato Michele Placido, 1990). With a few exceptions, such as the directors Rachid Benhadj (L’albero dei destini

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sospesi—The Tree of Hanging Destinies, 1997, El khoubz el hafi—Pane nudo, 2005), Mohsen Melliti (Io, l’altro—I, the Other, 2006), or Bobby Paunescu (Francesca, 2009), many of the more celebrated directors of Italian cinema without a migration background tell stories about migration. However more recent productions, such as Riparo (Shelter Me Puccioni, 2007), or Cover Boy (Amoroso, 2006) point towards different genres and story-telling patterns and go against the grain of the migration regime.1 Foiling the classic narrative of the migrant threatening the national body, a kind of counter-memory (Foucault 1987) is created that highlights the political imbalance and poses the question anew: in what kind of society do we even want to live? Using the example of paradigmatic German and Italian feature films throughout the decades, which are not necessarily representative of the whole decade but significant for the discourse, and focusing on a perspective of transnationalism, this article will explore the poetics of migration cinema. Since a detailed comparison between German and Italian cinema thematizing migration has been overlooked in the literature, I want to contribute to the rich body of work on migration and film that has been published by interweaving these two cinematic and political landscapes and by challenging the concept of national cinema and “the national.” Thereby, the concept of the “autonomy of migration” as postulated by research group Transit Migration2 and political scientist Sandro Mezzadra will form the essential theoretical basis: To engage with the autonomy of migration thus requires a “different sensibility,” a different gaze, I would say. It means looking at migratory movements and conflicts in terms that prioritize the subjective practices, the desires, the expectations, and the behaviours of migrants themselves. This does not imply a romanticization of migration, since the ambivalence of these subjective practices and behaviours is always kept in mind. New dispositifs of domination and exploitation are forged within migration considered as a social movement, as well as new practices of liberty and equality. The autonomy of migration approach in this regard needs to be understood as a distinct perspective from which to view the “politics of mobility”—one that emphasizes the subjective stakes within the struggles and clashes that materially constitute the field of such a politics. (Mezzadra 2010, 1; see also Mezzadra 2006)

Considering migration as a transformative (social) force and focusing on the “subjective practices” of the migrants, the goal of this paper is to tie migration films to the political context in which they were made. By looking at the dramatic structure, at the characters’ constellation, and the narrative strategies, I would like to reflect on an “analytics of migration

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cinema” that looks for patterns and archetypes with regard to the representation. The questions that arise are: What links these German and Italian films in the context of migration? What motifs, topics, and spaces are configured? And is there a universal narrative of migration, a sort of grammar? Fully aware that I will not be able to answer those questions sufficiently, the goal of this article is to propose preliminary considerations by crossing the different decades of German and Italian migration cinema.

To begin with, an offence When the members of the jury at the 2004 Berlinale awarded the Golden Bear to Fatih Akin’s drama Gegen die Wand, German journalists failed to attribute to the film anything other than the term Gastarbeiterfilm (guestworker film). Film critic Katja Nicodemus is right to wonder and asks in Die Zeit on February 19, 2004, “who would have thought that Fatih Akin has to explain, for what must be the hundredth time, the objectionable connotation of the word Gastarbeiter [guest worker] and take grave exception to the term?” (own translation). Soon afterwards, the reception of the film turned even more bizarre. After Gegen die Wand entered the competition, rather last minute, the supposed guest-worker film suddenly became a German film, then turned into a Turkish film, and in the end was considered a European film (Kosnick 2009). Even forty-nine years after the first post-war recruitment agreement regarding foreign workers between Italy and Germany dated 1955, and forty-seven years after the foundation of the European Economic Community there was, in 2004, a social demand to seal in cultural commodities and draw national boundaries that are contrary to artistic practice and the actuality of those creating cultural properties. Considering, in addition, that in 2004 about 7 million migrants (without German passport) lived in the Federal Republic of Germany—currently around 15 million have a migrant background— and a second and third generation of migrants were working artistically and intellectually, it begs the question: how many generations have to come to pass for films like Gegen die Wand to be considered “normal,” instead of being “accentuated” (Naficy 2001)? When do filmmakers and protagonists with a migration background lose their “accent” and come to be perceived as creators of cinematic-aesthetic works of art and indeed be perceived beyond a dedication of authenticity and the director’s biography? Furthermore, “how do we categorize a film like Gegen die Wand (Head-On), which was produced by a German company and made

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under the direction of a Hamburg-born ethnically Turkish director, and whose forerunners can be found in American genre film?” (filmportal.de)3. The fact that Akn’s film cannot be considered as belonging to the era of the guest workers hasn’t only to do with the viewers having historically surpassed the Gastarbeiter regime of the 1960s installed by governments4 but is rather based on reasons of film aesthetics that seem to have escaped those journalists who tend to label the film as a Gastarbeiterfilm. Such critics are sedated from the public debate about migration. Instead of focusing on the complex, melodramatic structure and plot, the different languages and musical styles, the architecture, and the entire narrative repertoire, they use the label guest-worker film to relate to the origin of the director or his parents and project imagined, victimizing images onto Akn’s film that have little to do with the imagery of the film itself. All in all, these are politics of reception which Sandra Ponzanesi, with reference to her concept of “Outlandish Cinema” (Ponzanesi 2005), criticizes as representative: Far too often the sociological content of a film is given attention totally apart from its aesthetic sensibility or merit. The resulting discourse reduces directors to their biographical and political motives, and films to nothing more than plots and themes. (Ponzanesi 2005, 271)

Regarding Gegen die Wand, the film can be explained as follows: Indeed the biographies of the main characters Sibel and Cahit reference migration, yet their goals and desires—their needs and modes—are universal, the story-telling is varied and the perspective is transnational. Therefore, a deconstructive reading relating to national and ethnic identity is necessary to be able to describe the heterogeneity with regard to content and aesthetics in the film. Since there have been numerous publications on Akn’s work5, pointing out among other things the director’s hybrid aesthetic and his reference to American Cinema6, my reflections on contemporary migrant cinema in Germany will concentrate on films such as Lola und Bilidikid (Lola and Bilidikid, 1999) by Kutlu÷ Ataman and Kleine Freiheit by Yüksel Yavuz. But first, let’s have a look at the German-Italian relations in post-war cinema.

German-Italian cinematic relations in the post-war era Before Neapolitan Francesco Rosi came to Hamburg to shoot one of his masterpieces I magliari (The Magliari Francesco Rosi, 1959), the subject of migration was basically invisible in post-war German film. There had

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been some feature films in post-war Germany that referred to the Heimatfilm, which deal with the character of “the foreigner.” However, it was not until the release of the film Bis zum Ende aller Tage (Girl from Hong Kong Franz Peter Wirth, 1961) that xenophobia and segregation were picked out explicitly as central themes. Following a dichotomic logic that postulates the Self and the Other as two separate entities, the film tells the story of Chinese nightclub dancer Anna Suh, who follows German sailor Glen to the Northsea holm of Olesund. While the two fight hostility from an allegedly homogeneous village community, golden couple Cornelia Froboess and Peter Kraus sing and dance Rock ‘n’ Roll at Lago Maggiore in Conny und Peter machen Musik (Werner Jacobs, 1960). Campy musical films boom! German tourists travel to Italian campsites with tins of Ravioli on board, accompanied by the popular hit Zwei kleine Italiener (Two little Italians), which wins the 1962 German Pop Song Festival, and a romanticized love of Italy takes its course. In films such as Italienreise—Liebe inbegriffen (Voyage to Italy—Complete with Love Wolfgang Becker, 1958) or Schick deine Frau nicht nach Italien (Do Not Send Your Wife to Italy Hans Grimm, 1960), young German women flee to the Mediterranean to flirt with hot suitors—the Italian man during this time is depicted as a prototypical Latin Lover—and escape the constrictions of domestic life. However in the end, the protagonists return to the Federal Republic of Germany, refined from their journey, to marry their fiancés and order is restored.7 These images do not describe the social reality of the many labour migrants, who come to the Federal Republic of Germany at the same time; there is nothing about terrible living conditions in barracks, exploitative labour conditions at the factories or discrimination. Still too fresh in many minds is the cruel experience of war. Dreams having collapsed together with the Nazi regime’s film industry, Germans only want to amuse themselves and imagine a better world south of the Alps. It is notable that it took an Italian filmmaker, Francesco Rosi, to make the first feature film about Italian Gastarbeiter in Germany. In I magliari, Rosi tells the story of Tuscan labourer, Mario, who falls into the hands of a Neapolitan gang of textile pedlars in Hamburg’s red-light district St. Pauli, where Polish crooks have already staked their claims. It is particularly impressive how Rosi depicts a very realistic portrayal of the seaport Hamburg and its heterogeneous urban life—worlds breaking with the nautic romance and kitschy aesthetics of music films and the films about Italy (Italienfilme) that were characteristic of the German film industry in that decade. Shot on location in the original bars of St. Pauli without any use of artificial light and using original sounds and jazzy music, Rosi,

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combining neorealist, commedia all’italiana, and noir elements (great photography by Gianni Di Venanzo), created a unique “migrant film,” for which the German film industry was not yet ready. As a result of Italian neorealism, which focused on social changes, Italian films often dealt with migration by depicting Italians travelling abroad.

Italian Cinema: Configurations of the Mezzogiorno At the beginning of the 1960s, Italian cinematography saw a number of films that articulated the motion of migration within Italy and into other European countries through the continuity of neorealist films. Starting with Il cammino della speranza (The Road to Hope Pietro Germi, 1950), which tells the story of a group of Sicilian miners on their way to France, many themes can be identified in the forthcoming films that articulate the classic narrative of an archaic South often configured in film and literature.8 Examples are the family tragedy Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers Luchino Visconti, 1960) that sees widow Rosaria Parondi and her four sons leave the Basilicata to stay with the oldest son Vincenzo in Milan and La ragazza in vetrina (Girl in the Window Luciano Emmer, 1961), a film about Venetian miner Vincenzo, who survives a mining accident in Belgium and falls in love with prostitute Else. Therein, this South is often synonymous with the Mezzogiorno (Southern Italy). Yet in relation to Northern Europe or the Benelux, it is sometimes also equated with the classic emigration area of Venetia, as in La ragazza in vetrina where the protagonist, like many South-Italian characters, grew up in poor circumstances and is clueless about the modernist, generous way of life in Amsterdam. He needs his savvy buddy Frederico (Lino Ventura), who acts as his “mentor.” Film theorist Mary P. Wood rightly pointed out the long tradition of archaic Mezzogiorno depiction in film that contrasts the South with an economically prosperous North and depicts the South as a kind of “Africa in casa”9 (Wood 2003, 96). One set of examples of this are the so-called commedie antimatrimoniali (Borsatti 2005, 100), for example Divorzio all’italiana (Divorce Italian Style Pietro Germi, 1961) and Sedotta e abbandonata (Seduced and Abandoned, 1964) by Pietro Germi (Wood 2003, 96) that deal with a variation of honour killings and rehabilitation weddings in Sicily after a woman gets raped. These events are due to the absence of a divorce law in Italy until 1970, thus acting as a medieval value system. The configuration of violence is a counterpoint to the representation of a modern North and Central Italy, where couples live separately without divorce laws as they do in the last film of the economic

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boom era, Il sorpasso (The Easy Life Dino Risi, 1962). An explicit Africaat-home image is articulated in the film Rocco e i suoi fratelli. In the film, two older women from Milan refer to inland migrants from the Basilicata (Lucania) as “Africa.”10 While more than 900,000 Meridionali (Southern Italians) migrated to the industrial triangle of the North (Turin, Milan, Genova) during the Italian economic boom between 1958 and 1963 (Ginsborg 1989, 293), it is the Federal Republic of Germany that, next to Switzerland and France, became the most important destination for Italian migrants after the demand for workers in Northern Italy waned. They not only carried their desires and hopes of a better life in their luggage; they also brought the labour disputes from Italian factories with them.

Germany in the 70s: Political and cinematic configurations of the “foreigner” In the 70s, a perception of scandal took hold in Germany, spreading an unspeakable repertoire of metaphors consisting of terms such as “stream,” “invasion” or “wave” that aimed to paint migrants as a threat to homeland security. For instance, weekly political magazine Der Spiegel published a report on July 30, 1973 with the title “The Turks are coming—save yourselves” (own translation) and weekly newspaper Die Zeit ran the headline “Turks at Europe’s gates” (own translation) on February 1, 1974 stating the Federal Ministry of Labour’s fear of a “stream of Turks” (Marchall 1974). Worrying about potentially being swamped with foreigners, the federal government tightened immigration measures for migrant workers in 1972. In consequence of the Oil Crisis, it imposed a recruitment ban on November 23, 1973 and enacted from 1975 to 1977 a ban on population influx for so-called “overstrained settlement areas” (überlastete Siedlungsgebiete): no population influx of foreign nationals to those districts that already have a share of foreign nationals exceeding 12 percent (Erylmaz 1998, 391). At the same time, since the beginning of the 1970s, migrants, students, German neighbours, and colleagues got organized and fought against investors and abysmal living conditions in the Frankfurt/Main district of Westend. They demonstrated for more kindergarten space and against the dictatorship in Spain and Portugal and went on strike because of the exploitative and discriminating labour conditions at factories of such companies as BMW (1972), Ford, and Pierburg (1973) in Neuss/Northrhine-Westfalia. At that time, Pierburg was the largest carburettor manufacturer for cars and aeroplanes. When the mostly female workers went on

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strike for five days on August 13, 1973, it was not their first protest. In May of the same year, the women had already gone on strike to achieve the abolition of low wage group 1 and presented a thirteen-point plan. Just nine days later, Turkish labourers went on a “wild strike” for one week and tied up the Ford factory at Cologne-Niehl because 300 Turkish colleagues had been fired. And one year prior to that, the Italian workers at BMW in Munich unionized to achieve a wage raise (Goeke 2008). This last “wild strike” especially, instigated by Italian migrants, represents the beginning of an activist phase that ended in about two hundred spontaneous work stoppages in the summer of 1973.11 Segregation and racism became visible, as well as the de facto formation of an “underclass” (Unterschichtung), and the migrants went public: a walkout culture characterizes the beginning of the 1970s, resulting, among other things, from the experience of Italian and French strikes and protest movements (Rapp and von Osten 2006). Especially interesting in this context is the fact that the recruitment ban did not initiate a percentage decrease in foreign nationals, as desired by the government, but on the contrary, the migrant resident population grew from 3.5 to 4.5 million in the years between 1973 and 1980 alone (Yano 2000, 5). Turkish migrants, in particular, settled, brought their families over, and established the centre of their lives in Germany. With their presence, their stories and the creativity of future filmmakers with a migration background remained. It is precisely this socio-political situation within which begins cinematic production in the context of migration, “foreignness,” and exile. Leftist intellectual auteurs like Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who in Katzelmacher (1969) tells of the condition of the Greek “guest worker” Jorgos, or Helma Sanders-Brahms begin to critically broach the issues of a society changed by migration, social asymmetries, German smugness, and racism. Films like Angst essen Seele auf (Fear Eats the Soul Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1973/1974), Shirins Hochzeit (Shirins Wedding Helma SandersBrahms, 1976) and films by migrant directors like Sohrab Shahid Saless’ In der Fremde (Far from Home, 1974/1975) tell of the marginalized position of the “foreigner” and point to the deep social divide that separates “the foreigners” from “the Germans.” The directors expound the problems of socio-political deficits as defined by the “dutiful social drama” (pflichtbewusster Problemfilm) and create spaces, wherein alternative social concepts and imagination configure. The form of the “foreign national” also gives the filmmaker the opportunity to protest his or her own marginalized position as a leftist intellectual artist, which is why the character of the migrant becomes a metaphor onto which Germans can project their discomfort. It is film critic Georg Seeßlen who, in a panel

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discussion organized by the German television transmitter WDR, brings attention to the coincidence of an outsider’s position in relation to the hegemonical order: German society in the 1960s was a fairly closed-off, rigid society. There were by no means different groups, but only society or outsiders. The outsiders were long-haired students and also guest workers. The longhaired students, who felt like strangers themselves, wanted to make films about other outsiders and thus they made films about guest workers. Katzelmacher, a film about a guest worker by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, was one of the first examples of New German Films (WDR 2011, 49).

Angst essen Seele auf/Fear Eats the Soul: Against German smugness While in Katzelmacher (1969) Rainer Werner Fassbinder staged a group of young adults, Brecht-style, who need a foreigner to deal with their own emptiness and frustration (Diederichsen 2005 and Rodonò 2011, 148), in his classic Angst essen Seele auf, he rather created a melodrama that intersects different ways of breaking taboos: an older woman’s love for a “foreigner.” To stay out of the rain, 60-year old widow Emmi, a cleaning lady, ends up in a pub mostly frequented by Arabs and meets Moroccan Ali, who is at least 20 years younger. The two become an item, get married, and despite continuous discrimination against them by faFig. 1: Brigitte Mira und El Hedi Ben mily, neighbours, and colleaSalem in Angst essen Seele auf gues, they remain together. It is only after a while that the external conflicts turn inwards and Ali reconnects with his younger lover. Yet, when he collapses due to an active gastric ulcer, Emmi is there for him.

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Looking at this plot and the topics, namely love and migration, discrimination and exploitation, one could say, according to Georg Seeßlen, that this film fits the category of “cinema of foreignness” and “misery” (Seeßlen 2000a, 3), meaning that it is migration cinema from the outset, in which the narrative of the victim dominates and migrants are subject to the gaze of the so-called “society of majority.” The dichotomy between Germans and foreigners is clearly marked in that phase. Ali is every female character’s object of desire and, towards the end of the second act, Emmi parades him in front of her false colleagues when they come over for coffee: —Der sieht aber gut aus Emmi, aber wirklich, und so sauber. […] und die Muskeln, die der hat.—Der kann ordentlich zupacken. Na komm mal her. Mach mal (zu Ali)! Fass den mal an (zu den Kolleginnen)!—Toll! Und die Haut ist so zart.—Er ist ja auch noch so jung. Aber er ist ein guter Kerl, wirklich ein guter Kerl. (Ali geht.)—Was hat er denn jetzt?—Tja, manchmal hat er seinen eigenen Kopf. Das macht die fremde Mentalität.12

Ali, —whose real name is El Hedi Ben Salem M’barek Mohammed Mustafa and whose interpellation by all (the Germans), representative of all (Turkish and Arab) foreigners, is Ali, thus constituting his position as a prototypical foreigner, —has not spoken at all during that scene and leaves the flat hurt; he seeks solace with his lover Barbara. His resistance is quiet but not invisible. He also refuses to be the exotic potent guy, as another scene shows: “—So, what’s it going to be, are you coming along today or not?—No.—Oh, and why not?—Dick broken.” His dis-subjection (Foucault 1996) is also articulated in the conscious reclamation of discrimination and racist conditions at the work-place (car factory). When he and Emmi dance together for the first time, he describes the situation as follows: “—German with Arab not equal person.—But at work?—Not equal. German master, Arab dog.—But that…—Doesn’t matter. Not think much: good. Think much: much crying.” This reveals that Ali is suffering and can only stand the situation by choosing not to focus upon it. His body, used as a “passive object of desire” (Gökturk 2005a, 510, own translation), remembers the suffering as becomes evident through his gastric ulcer: a disease often found by doctors in migrants that can be traced back to both psychological and social conflicts manifested as a typical somatization tendency (Kielhorn 1996). Ali finds a companion in Emmi. As a cleaning lady, she too is a member of the subaltern class and encounters Ali with an open mind. She asks real questions, addresses him formally13, and is shocked by his description of his exploitative and miserable labour and living conditions; she herself

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was married to a Polish Fremdarbeiter (foreign worker). It is her innocent voice—similar to the childlike perception in neorealist films—and the initial loving and respectful encounter and solidarity of the two main characters that foil the logic of “foreignness” and challenge hegemonic formations. Motivated by the desire to be loved and noticed, Ali and Emmi defy established conventions, thus opening up an Inbetween (Seeßlen 2000a, b) characteristic of the transnational cinema of later decades. That this “in-between” is ambivalent and not free of power and racism becomes apparent in the coffee scene mentioned above. While the distance between the couple and the antagonistic force of family/society is great at the beginning of the film, this dynamic shifts when Emmi can no longer withstand the external pressure (racism), and the internal conflicts (love, sexuality, age) intensify. All in all, Fassbinder manages, through his unique manner of pointing out the facts, (Bazin 2009) to turn these facts upside down. However, it is not only the references to non-cinematic, political realities of the 1970s that give the film its explosive force. Rather, it is the interplay of form and content, the spaces presented in the film, the framing and terrific camera-work by Jürgen Jürgens that protect the viewers from seduction and mobilize them to challenge their own feelings and attitudes. Since the characters are locked in closed quarters and are further framed by door frames or other architectural features as the camera remains mostly static and the shots are long compared to our modern perception, an alienation effect is achieved that creates a theatrical situation and ties in with the aesthetics of Brecht. On the one hand, the lines of escape in Angst essen Seele auf consist of concrete details concerning the power relations on a content and dialogue level. On the other hand, constituting the resistant and the critical is an anti-seducing mise en scène as well as a formal composition. In this sense, the film Angst essen Seele auf historically belongs to the category of “cinema of foreignness,” yet exceeds it aesthetically. In its radicalism, the film is far more revolutionary than many other subsequent migration films because it confuses the audience and makes their own strangeness tangible.

Pane e cioccolata/Bread and chocolate: Against Swiss migration policy Franco Busati, whose Pane e cioccolata (Bread and Chocolate, 1973), a commedia all’italiana of the later era, premiered in the same year as Angst essen Seele auf and won the Silver Bear at the Berlinale in 1974, chose an idiom very different from Fassbinder’s. Giovanni/Nino Garofoli, who has lived in Switzerland for years working as a waiter, is expelled because he

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urinates in public. Instead of returning to Italy, he begins working for an Italian manufacturer. When his employer dies from an overdose of sleeping pills, Nino finds shelter with his former neighbour Elena, a political refugee, who is hiding her son Grigory. Frustrated by having to live an illegalized life, Nino tries to return to Italy, only to eventually end up on a chicken farm run by Neapolitan migrants. One day when Nino (who is now a blonde) is cheering on the Italian team during a football broadcast at a bar, his cover is blown and he is arrested and deported. On the train to Italy, overflowing with singing Italians, he pulls the emergency brake in the middle of a tunnel and returns.

Fig. 2: Nino Manfredi in Pane e cioccolata

While Angst essen Seele auf disturbs and captivates the audience, especially due to its formal consistency, here it is the humour, the satire, and the tragicomic note that shifts the hegemonic perception of migration. Through an exaggeratedly naturalistic depiction, for instance, of the Swiss police, the Neapolitan farmer, or the South-Italian migrants on the train, the director interrogates stereotypes and, at the same time, displays to us public control mechanisms, exploitative labour conditions, institutional discrimination, and the idealization of Italy. When Nino is expelled because he has urinated, it is of course ironic and in a humorous way points towards a practice that is not at all funny: the creation of the illegal

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migrant. In this case, the irony’s core is the manifestation of those borders, ruling within a system, that are not exclusively physical. Even though the case of protagonist Nino concretely deals with a revoked residence permit, to which a work permit is tied, the story and depiction of all the migrant characters, concurrently, manifests that mechanisms of exclusion are far more complex and function according to the “differential inclusion” (Mezzadra 2006, 182) principle. This filtering mechanism, as described by Sandro Mezzadra with regard to the contemporary global migration regime, is not about preventing migration and hermetically sealing physical borders. Instead of administrating migration processes based on the dyad inclusion-exclusion, it is rather about making use of migrants and their workforce. Therefore, illegalizing them is an integral part of politics and assigns specific places to the migrant (Mezzadra 2006, 188). As long as Nino is working and remains inconspicuous, he is a good foreigner and may stay. However, the minute he commits a “misdemeanour” (peeing), he loses his job and, with that, his residence permit. His antagonist is a Turkish waiter-colleague, who, as an obedient, diligent worker, steals Nino Garofoli’s job. The Neapolitan chicken farmers, who live as crazy, happy fools in a barn, like animals on the edge of civilization, also show that the borders and filters are internal. Yet, it is the peripheral location, the production design, make-up, and wardrobe as well as hysterical acting that configure a grotesque setting, criticizing the marginalization of migrants in an ironic way. Unlike in a social drama, criticism is established through a distorted depiction of underlying facts, which evocates an absurd effect. In its collective composition, its extracted “ugliness,” the images are reminiscent of those created by the enfants terribles of Italian cinema, Ciprì and Maresco14 or sub-proletarian Ettore Scola’s Brutti, sporchi e cattivi (Ugly, Dirty and Bad, 1976), who, on the lines of the Neapolitan farmers, also live in a kind of huis clos.15 Since neither the (always singing) Italian workers in the barracks nor Elena’s son Grigory leave their assigned spaces and Nino has to hide after having his residence permit revoked, the configuration of claustrophobic space Hamid Naficy analyses in his book The Accented Cinema (2001), with regard to exilic and diasporic filmmaking, also applies to Pane e cioccolata. Even though Pane e cioccolata follows classical narration à la Hollywood in its structure16, one can say, based on the concept of “autonomy of migration” which observes the subjective practices of migrants, that the film expresses an alternative fiction. Within a regime that attempts to reconstitute the old order through government and police power to continue telling the fairy tale of the nation, migrants empower

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themselves and display practices in order to stay in Switzerland: Elena marries a police officer and Nino tries to get by as an “illegal.” With lots of creativity and productivity, they manage to transform established categories of belonging with regard to ethnicity, identity, and citizenship. Similar to the terrific Swiss comedy Die Schweizermacher (The Swissmakers Rolf Lyssy, 1979), the fabrication of this belonging and the absurdity of the residency and naturalization procedures are brought to light. Last but not least, Deniz Göktürk points to the fact that Pane e cioccolata is part of the tradition of Charlie Chaplin’s The Immigrant (1917) (Göktürk 2005a, 511): presumably because of its humour, but also certainly because of the resistance that each protagonist articulates against the governmental power.

Palermo oder Wolfsburg/Palermo or Wolfsburg: The “lamb” of migration Werner Schroeter’s almost three-hour long migration epic Palermo oder Wolfsburg (Palermo or Wolfsburg, 1980) also describes racism and discrimination. Working as a director for theatre and opera as well as arthouse films in the 1970s, the filmmaker turned his attention towards a more empirical and realistic style in 1978 and filmed Neapolitanische Geschichten (The Reign of Naples), a kind of family chronicle that interweaves the fate of two siblings with the history of Naples between 1943 and 1972. Due to its episodic narrative structure and realistic idiom (original locations, amateur actors, dialects), the film is reminiscent of neorealistic classics such as Paisà (Paisan Roberto Rossellini, 1946) and anticipates the operatic tragedy Palermo oder Wolfsburg, which was awarded the Golden Bear at the Berlinale in 1980. Just as in Neapolitanische Geschichten, Thomas Mauch is the director of photography (as well as producing this time), and Neapolitan actress Ida Di Benedetto is also a part of the film: this time together with Otto Sander and Fassbinderactors Ula Stöckl and Harry Baer as well as many amateur actors. The film is based on lengthy research on Sicily and on the collaboration with journalist Giuseppe Fava, who was murdered by the Mafia in 1984. Schroeter chooses the “wonderfully ugly place” (Mauch 2010) of Palma di Montechiaro in the province of Agrigent as a starting point for the plot. Here, he also finds his lead actor Nicola Zarbo, whose father went to Mannheim (Germany) to work as a builder in the 1960s. As in a triptych, the passion of Sicilian Nicola, who came to Wolfsburg from Sicily as a “guest worker,” unfolds in three clearly separate acts. The first act relates the poor and feudal circumstances in the Sicilian back-

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country: unemployment is high, many who lived in the village have emigrated, Nicola has lost his mother, and his desperate father drowns his sorrows in alcohol. Anywhere in the world would seem a better place to live than there. Even though there are many warnings about exploitative factory work in Germany, Nicola takes off to Wolfsburg to work at Volkswagen (VW). The first act’s style of tying in neorealism is very reminiscent of the canonic images of the South, as composed, for instance, by Pier Paolo Pasolini or the brothers Taviani and thus evokes the image repertoire of a world that is atavistic, slow, and unchangeable. A change of style towards German realism is executed in the second act, when Schroeter shows Nicola his workplace in Wolfsburg and often in front of the VW emblem. Unawares, the “lamb”—as the pub owner Giovanna later refers to Nicola in court—ends up in this city that is emblematic of its fordistic production processes and immediately meets a group of politicized Sardinians, who want to mobilize him against capitalist society. However, Nicola remains uninvolved and turns towards his love for his girlfriend, Brigitte. When she leaves him, Nicola kills his rival in the heat of the moment and is taken to court. It is the surreal and bizarrely staged trial and appearance of witness Giovanna (Ida Di Benedetto) in the third act that stipulates the narrative of the innocent victim and elevates Nicola to an angelic status. By interspersing the trial scenes with images of the Passion Play, taking place in Sicily around Easter, Schroeter employs Christian iconography and acquits Nicola in place of all guest workers. Nicola’s acquittal, his defence by witness Giovanna, and the defamiliarized depiction of German characters appearing grotesquely to Nicola, articulate that not only Nicola but also the excluding techniques of a society that reduces human beings to their workforce are on trial. Nicola endures his trial in silence and suffering, actively at first, while witnesses and judge negotiate his fate and the modernist aesthetics of Alban Berg’s violin concerto Dem Andenken eines Engels (To the Memory of an Angel) fractures the narrative logic. Used contrapuntally, the music makes the events the subject of irony and underlines Nicola’s innocence. Due to his stylization as a modern messiah, hope for a better world culminates in his character. For Schroeter, the guest worker is a “lamb” that allegorically stands for all suffering—including the Germans’—and symbolically brings salvation to the audience. Nicola’s double state of homelessness, his foreignness, finds a line of escape in religion, which again brings the audience back to Pasolini.

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40 qm Deutschland/Forty Square Meters of Germany: Enclosed women The drama 40 qm Deutschland (Forty Square Meters of Germany Tevfik Baúer, 1986), which was marked in film history as the first feature film by a Turkish immigrant, depicts an entirely claustrophobic situation. In this intimate play, set completely in a flat in an old building in Hamburg, young Turna follows her husband Dursan from Anatolia to the Hanseatic city. He locks her up because he worries that the German surroundings he considers to be far too liberal might corrupt her and tarnish his reputation. Entirely isolated, Turna surrenders to her dream world and experiences Germany only as a view from a window. Dursan also breaks his promise to one day take her to the fairground. Finally, his wish comes true and Turna becomes pregnant. Yet, just a few months later, Dursan dies from an epileptic seizure. Only now is Turna able to leave the flat, and she sets out into the unknown world outside. The few images and sounds of the outside world that make up an entire cosmos through their synthetic consolidation articulate not that the foreigner, but that the German world is a threat. Virtually symbolic of the corrupted world, from Dursan’s perspective, is the prostitute in front of Turna’s window. Also Dursan’s remarks about women emancipating themselves in Germany and his bewilderment at battered women’s shelters counterpoint the traditional community in Anatolia. Yet, despite her being locked up and her forced passivity, Turna develops a quiet resistance. She cuts her hair, talks to a doll, communicates with a girl in a window of the house across from hers, and eventually asks her husband why he locks her up: she is not an animal after all. Similarly to in the films already discussed, the motif of “becoming-animal” is evoked here. This becominganimal is not a productive position that crosses borders and territories as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (2005) understand it, but rather an expression of a power structure within which migrants suffer: Fassbinder’s Ali begins to suffer from a gastric ulcer and Turna almost goes mad. Not caused by exploitative labour conditions and discrimination by the Germans (as is the case with Fassbinder’s work), Turna’s ailment is the result of patriarchal logic, meaning a gender-related exclusion within one’s own community that only manifests abroad within the context of liberal Hamburg. To this effect, Turna is a victim twice over, as Deniz Göktürk emphasizes overall with regard to the female migrant’s configuration: first of all, she is a victim of the hegemonic masculinity, second of a foreign society. (Göktürk 2005a). Beyond the history of migration, one must therefore especially look at power structures within a relationship and at

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the back-stories and motivations that drive the characters. For the director, the most important thing was the inner workings of his protagonists. He wanted to give the audience a glimpse into their emotional state rather than into the external world and social dimension: When German directors make films—even really good films—about Turks, they always tell stories around it, emotionally but not from the core of experience of the persons concerned. I want to try to reveal some of the thoughts and emotions of people that are from a culture foreign to Germans and that I know a few things about I could critique, but that I understand from within their tradition. I want the Germans to get to know us, because what we don’t know scares us and fuels hatred, as is evident in the violence against Turks. Therefore, I describe a special case of guest worker conditions in the Federal Republic of Germany without leaving the flat and house even once in my film. (Mundzeck 1986)

It is mostly the visual language and the actors’ performances conveying that this conservatively portrayed unknown is fractured and ambivalent and that Turna finds her agency within this structure. Here, it is the long close-ups, the various mirror image shots, the play of light, and very vocal, very expressive facial expressions of actors Özay Fect and Yaman Okay, speaking for themselves, which raise Dursan’s helplessness and Turna’s anger and desperation. Again, all the dialogue is in Turkish. The film was released with subtitles, which was very unusual for the 1980s but welcomed by financers, distributors, and the (arthouse) audience.

German cinema of in-between: Cinematic and theoretical considerations—Interim Results Despite the lines of escape already shown here, narratives of foreignness that pitted disparate living environments against each other dominated German films until the 1980s. The representation of migration shifts in the 90s towards an opening of physical and mental space. At the same time, the conflicts shift towards the core of the migrant family; a new generation of filmmakers with their own background of migration start to make films. Dichotomies between Germans and foreigners or stories about the first generation of “guest workers” are no longer the centrepiece. Rather, the films of migrant filmmakers, i.e. the films of the second-generation migrants, including those taken into consideration above, are more concerned with the transformation that follows migration and depict a migration society in urban centres. It is no coincidence that the cities featured most often are Hamburg and Berlin and that the characters are not enclosed in

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claustrophobic interiors anymore, but are often in motion. Even though the effects of the migration regime as well as questions about residence, citizenship, refuge, and asylum play a pivotal role, the ethnic marking and the discrimination resulting from it are only two moments of conflict the protagonists have to solve, in addition to love interests or identity questions. The “cinema of foreignness,” as Georg Seeßlen refers to the first generation of films, seems outdated. Instead, a “métissage” culture of film, a “cinema of Inbetween” (Kino der doppelten Kulturen, Seeßlen 2000a, b) emerges: “in the eighties, therefore, the cinema of emigration, the cinema of foreignness has to be separated from the cinema of métissage, a cinema that tells of the irreversibility of cultural blending in a life within two cultures (at least)” (Seeßlen 2006, 3). Analogously to Seeßlen, Thomas Elsaesser also developed a repertoire of metaphors about duality and introduced the term cinema of “double occupancy” to the debate. In reference to W.E.B Du Bois and Gilroy’s “double consciousness” (Gilroy 1993), Elsaesser uses the term in regard to diasporic cinema, within which “hyphenated identities” would feel associated neither with the parent generation nor with the so called national “receiving society.” While agreeing with Gilroys rereading of Du Bois’ “double consciousness,” which opens up concepts of hybridity, I cannot concur with Elsaessers definition of “double occupancy” which he connects to the idea of “separate identities” that are supposed to produce “divided allegiance: to the nation state into which they [the hyphenated members] were born, and to the homeland from which (one or both of) their parents came” (Elsaesser 2005, 118). To this position—which is problematic insofar as it regards family, society, nation, and culture as closed containers and disregards the translation and transformation processes that are linked to migration movements and furthermore to the event of transgression that uncloses a third space (Bhabha 1994)—I would like to add a theoretical perspective that goes beyond dual thinking and feeling. Neither do dual logics meet the complexity of migration experiences nor do they encompass the ambivalences within global migration processes and transnational movements; adhering to binary reading instruments risks homogenization and essentialisation. Supplementarily, I would therefore like to expand this view considering the positions of the feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti on nomadism: The nomad does not stand for homelessness, or compulsive displacement; it is rather a figuration for the kind of subject who has relinquished all idea, desire, or nostalgia for fixity. This figuration expresses the desire for an identity made of transitions, successive shifts, and coordinated changes, without and against an essential unity. (Braidotti 1994, 22)

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Deconstructing fixed identities, Braidotti starts from the experiences of people, who are literally nomadic, in order to configure a figure of thought that extends beyond any kind of essentialism. I think her radical antiessentialist positions would be extremely fruitful for further discussion on migration cinema and on migration studies at large. In the following I will present two German films that articulate a sort of nomadic consciousness (Braidotti 1994) because they refuse fixed identities and rewrite classical narratives by focusing on the transitions, on the transgressive power of their protagonists.

Lola und Bilidikid/Lola and Bilidikid: Masculinity in crisis

Fig. 3: Gandi Mukli und Erdal Yildiz in Lola und Bilidikid

The drama Lola und Bilidikid by Turkish filmmaker Kutlu÷ Ataman is a film which relates transgression beyond ethnic boundaries and, first and foremost, is about the transvestite and gay scene in Berlin. Lead actor Gandi Mukli (Lola) says in an interview (Mukli 2010) that Ataman wanted to shoot his film in Istanbul, but because it deals with homosexuality, he was unable to secure financing and instead received numerous death threats. So Ataman went to Berlin, researched the scene, and shot his story about the couple Lola und Bilidikid with a German production company.

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It is the story of seventeen-year-old Murat, who in the gay community meets his gay brother Lola, who was disowned by his family and now performs with his group Gastarbeiterinnen (female guest workers) as a travesty artist. The two realize they are brothers and bond. In the meantime, Lola’s life partner Bili, a hustler and macho, tries to convince Lola to have sex-change surgery so they can live as a heterosexual couple in Turkey. However, one night Lola is killed by his own brother Murat, who, as the patriarch of a fatherless family, denies his own homosexuality. A typical field of negotiation in this drama with a tragic ending that is considered a cult film in the gay scene is the relationship of norm and deviant: the heterosexual matrix is the norm, the homosexual relationship is the deviant. That the story is set in the German-Turkish scene and Lola and Bili have Turkish families plays an important role for the depiction of the characters, especially for macho Bilidikid, whose name hearkens back to western hero Billy the Kid and thus evokes archaic power relations. Not only is it a matter of a social outcast situation in relation to the German “majority,” but—proving that communities are never homogenous and therefore the notion of approximativity—inside their “own” community Lola, his brothers, and Bili are also strangers due to their homosexuality. However, they transform this constructed “strangeness” differently. While Lola treats his own homosexuality naturally, his partner Bili submits to the heterosexual order, according to which the marriage between a man and a woman is normal: “We cannot live together like those German faggots. We have to live like normal people, like husband and wife, just like a normal family. I come home and you are there. There is just one little problem.” That by this “little problem” he means a sex-change reveals the constructed nature of gender and normality and poses the question of what other concepts of masculinity and romantic relationships there may be. Since Lola refuses the sex-change surgery, and since the film talks about the gay community and male prostitutes, being all in all the first German feature film that deals with homosexuality among Turkish men, Lola und Bilidikid has the potential to question the hegemonic idea of masculinity. Yet, the strength of Lola und Bilidikid lies in its fractures. On the one hand, heteronormativity is deconstructed;17 on the other hand, Bili, especially, tries to naturalize the deviation from the norm by subjecting it to the traditional family order and thus restoring masculine myths. It is exactly this ambivalence and the disclosure of rigid positions as social constructs fixed with it which overwrite the heterosexual matrix. In the maelstrom of this process of overwriting, a new fiction emerges with relation to gender, which in this case intersects with the category of race.

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Kleine Freiheit: Asylum, global cities, and self-representation The drama Kleine Freiheit by German-Kurdish director Yüksel Yavuz shows how the “differential inclusion” takes effect right in the centre of global cities. Thus, the title is programmatic. It is not only the name of a street in Hamburg’s red-light district St. Pauli, which stands for heterogeneity and disparate ways of life and, beyond that, with its port as well as its prostitution that is more public here than in any other German city, for openness and freedom or liberality. Rather, its title at the same time refers to the classic film Große Freiheit Nr. 7 (Great Freedom No. 7 Helmut Käutner, 1944), which depicts the life of ordinary people and turns the myth of the “German seafaring hero” on its head, opening up a narrative of freedom from the bottom up. With regard to the literal small liberties, Kleine Freiheit deals with those liberties that protagonists Baran and Chernor enjoy despite their illegalized status. Kurd Baran should be deported on his sixteenth birthday because his application for asylum was declined. Baran stays, goes into hiding with relatives, and works as a runner at a kebab shop. One day he meets the black African, Chernor, who is also undocumented and deals drugs to fulfil his dream of living in Australia in the distant future. The two become friends and have fun despite the precarious situation they are in. In the end, however, Chernor is caught by the police and Baran, who wants to free his friend, is also captured. Kleine Freiheit is first and foremost a film about two young adults, who live under the same conditions as illegalized migrants. By focusing on their survival strategies and their perspectives, the director completely cuts ties with the “cinema of foreignness” and puts the subjective practices of migrants at the centre. This does not only take place with regard to content. The very mobile, partly subjective camerawork and the many point of view shots characterizing the protagonist Baran shift the perspective inwards and reduce the distance between onscreen action and the audience. The audience effectively experiences the nightmare and the fears connected to deportation together with Baran. However, the two friends refuse to be marginalized, sit on Hamburg’s squares, and instead are always moving. Unlike, for instance, in 40 qm Deutschland, here, space is open. Criss-crossing the city, Baran’s bicycle trips (partly filmed from a subjective angle), and roaming the port are all acts of self-empowerment, which allow the characters to foil the position assigned to them. They share this space that Encarnacion Guitérrez Rodriguez describes as a “transit zone” (Gutiérrez Rodriguez 2010, 125) with others that are

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marginalized, such as a homeless, gay ex-seaman (lovingly called Captain) and other Kurdish and African characters as well as Alma, a political refugee from Sarajevo, who enters into a romantic relationship with Baran’s cousin. As in many other films about migration and Italian neorealism, which Kleine Freiheit poetologically refers to (original locations, amateur actors, firsthand description of the milieu), a solidarity among the ordinary people emerges, which on the one hand portrays the transnational actuality in a metropolis like Hamburg. On the other hand, this minority (group), in its complex, heterogeneous, and conflicted configuration, appears as a different fiction in relation to the hegemonic order and to the excluded policies of migration. The exclusions and borders, thus the differences within the inclusion, become perfectly apparent by hinging on the residence status: by representing the impact of asylum policies on the everyday life of Baran and Chernor, A Little Bit of Freedom demonstrates the limits of transculturation. While this film engages with the creative potential of transnational communities, it also shows their limits as a transformative force. The limits of transculturation remind us of the ambivalences produced in societies in which cross-cultural encounters are an ordinary feature of social life, but are restricted or denied by legislation and policing. (Gutiérrez Rodriguez 2010, 127)

For Yavuz’s drama to appear altogether very authentic and for us to get close to those transnational communities, the use of video footage, as included, is necessary. Starting with the first second of the film, protagonist Baran is equipped with a DV-camera, which he uses to look at family pictures and to film friends, neighbours, and his surroundings. Thus, the film begins with footage showing two elderly Kurdish women and pointing to Baran’s back-story in Kurdistan, where his parents were killed after they took care of an injured guerilla fighter. By way of these visualized memories that Baran looks at every night and that implicitly tell of the oppression of the Kurdish minority, Yavuz overlaps different levels of time and space and creates a form of “multilayered locality” (Göktürk 2005b). Beyond this, these images within the picture of protagonist Baran bestow authority upon him because he, himself, is the author of his own historic memory and chronicler of his environment. Not only do filmmakers with a migration background from the 1990s onward take on the camera themselves, even the characters in their films are subjects of their “own” representation.

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Transnational cinema: Looking (deep) South In addition to this analysis of several German film productions in the context of migration, I would finally like to provide a sideways view of contemporary Italian migration cinema. As already mentioned, the beginnings of the contemporary Italian migration cinema lie predominantly in the 1990s, and it is mostly created by Italian filmmakers. Similarly to transnational cinema in Germany, here the configuration of the open space and “multilayered locality” are essential for the narrative structure. In the Italian films, however, motifs of travel dominate as well as the image of the open sea that cross-fades with the many scandalizing television pictures that criminalize the many so-called clandestini (irregular migrants) in “the boat is full up” logic. The boat—which according to Foucault is a heterotopia par excellence because it is a “swaying piece of space, a place without a place, living out of itself, selfcontained and at the same time delivered into the endless sea” (Foucault 1967, cited in Gente 2004, 37)—is one of the predominant emblems, which in equal parts articulates motion and mobility as well as exploitation and conquest. Thus, the sailing yacht of rich manufacturer Bruno in Quando sei nato non puoi più nasconderti is a counterpoint to the refugees’ boat, on which South Italian people smugglers take migrants from Romania and other countries to Apulia (Winkler 2007). In Lamerica (Gianni Amelio, 1994), supposedly Albanian Spiro, whose real name is Michele Talarico and who deserted the military during Mussolini’s invasion of Albania in 1939 and went into hiding in Albania by “race passing,”18 boards a refugee ship to Italy as a clandestino. Apart from the fact that it puts the entanglement of Italian colonial history in relation to the history of migration in terms of postcolonial discourse, the film, with its title Lamerica,—Spiro believes the ship will take him to America—also points to the emigration movement of many Italians going abroad at the beginning of the twentieth century. These historic implications create an interesting change of the subject positions of the protagonists. While twelve-year-old Sandro in Quando sei nato non puoi più nasconderti pretends to be a political refugee from Kurdistan to prevent the smugglers from asking ransom money from his parents, Italian investor Gianni becomes a migrant after his colleague leaves him behind in Albania and Gianni loses his own documents. Such an explicit “passing,” turning social identity on its head and, in this case, making the Italian into a migrant, thus not allowing him to enhance his prestige, cannot be found in German migration cinema. Even though

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Emmi from Angst essen Seele auf in a way becomes a foreigner due to her marriage to Ali (and is also discriminated against), there are no overlapping subjectivations as in Lamerica and Quando sei nato non puoi più nasconderti. To Sandro, Michele/Spiro, and Gianni, passing as another ethnicity is a survival strategy that restores their familiar order to them but not without rattling it and making its ambivalence apparent. A similar occurrence happens to Italian protagonist Michele in Cover Boy, who meets Romanian Ioan, lets him live at his place, and falls in love with him.19 When the two friends both lose their jobs, Ioan offers Michele a job washing cars but on one condition: Michele must pretend to be a migrant. When a pompous Italian car owner makes stupid and racist remarks, Michele empties a bucket of water on his head and Ioan and Michele have to run. Both men lose their jobs again and are back, in terms of the narrative, at the same place in their external journey: they have the same social status. Unlike many German mainstream films of the last few years not analyzed in this paper,20 Cover Boy is not about cultural differrences or about national and ethnic lines of demarcation. Rather, the precarious labour conditions, the subjection to global capitalism, and the resistance against it, plus the schism between the rich and the poor within a heterogeneous, transnational society are far more vital to the story. How migration and tourism interact against the background of social tensions and how one person’s itinerary is another person’s escape route form the basis of the film Riparo, which premiered at Berlinale in 2007, immediately finding an American but not an Italian distributor. In this melodrama, Maghrebi Anis hides in the trunk of a car belonging to Mara and Anna, a couple just returning to Italy from a vacation in Tunisia. The two take Anis in. Anis falls in love with Mara and the relationship of the socially unequal couple—Mara is a worker at a factory owned by Anna’s family—falls apart at the seams. As in Cover Boy, here, the topic of migration is secondary, and Anis is not explicitly marked as a migrant. Instead, the story is characterized by the love triangle involving Mara, Anna, and Anis, who all desire love and appreciation. The external journey, the topic of labour (and Mara’s “labour dispute”), is secondary to the love story, yet plays an important role insofar as Mara and Anis both work at Anna’s factory and are thusly hierarchically beneath Anna. The lines of battle in this film, therefore, are not primarily of an ethnic or national but rather of a social and emotional nature. Rather, the transformed life’s reality within the migrant society, the socio-economic asymmetries, and the shared memories that characterize the narrative repertoire of the more recent Italian productions are taken here into consideration. However, these films should not be regarded

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solely as entirely critical positions towards hegemonic image policies. Instead, it becomes clear that in an age of global migration processes, the borders move inwards. Presumably in just a few years—hopefully more Italian directors with a migration background will pick up the camera—it will become apparent what role the directors’ biographies play with regard to the perception of migration, whether the political dimension is found in the content or the aesthetics of film and to what extent content and form are related with regard to an alternative, anti-representative representation. It would be nice if there were no need to detour via an explicit, “accentuated” cinema and if the stories of migrants and non-migrants easily found their way into the (German and Italian) offices of television executives and film funding institutions in terms of a joint, visual historiography and story-telling beyond migration and beyond essentialistic attributions. Closing my paper with this wish that addresses the production conditions as well as the theoretical premises and the gaze on migration processes, what emerges from the analysis is that there is no universal narrative of migration in terms of genre. Articulating multiple forms of migration, the German and Italian films discussed above create a dialogue with different social realities opening up alternative power configurations. Although there are recurring rhetorical situations and spaces, the films mentioned in this article call for disparate cinematic traditions interrogating the public discourse on migration. Referring to the aforementioned offence, I would like to conclude by saying that the discussion on migration cinema is not about finding the right etiquette but rather about both producers and recipients training a nomadic eye in order to promote a migration cinema that combines a sophisticated use of cinematic techniques with a deep emotional and “realistic” understanding of the conscious and unconscious effects of migration on individuals looking for a better life as well as of migration as a central force for social and political change!

Notes 1 I use this notion as proposed by Serhat Karakayali who talks about an ensemble of practices and policies that are not necessarily governmental and which control and regulate migration movements (Karakayali 2008, 16). 2 Transit Migration is a research group and an association founded in the framework of the exhibition project “Project Migration” (2005), an initiative of the German Federal Cultural Foundation, see Transit Migration Forschungsgruppe (2007).

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3 Filmportal.de. “Three Questions About Turkish-German Cinema.” Accessed June 6, 2012. http://www.filmportal.de/en/topic/three-questions-about-turkish-germancinema. 4 After recruitment negotiations with Italy, the German government concludes recruitment agreements with Greece and Spain (1960), Turkey (1961), Morocco (1963), Portugal (1964), Tunisia (1965), Ex-Yugoslavia (1968), South-Korea (1970). See Yano (2000). With regard to Italian labour migration in Germany, see also Rodonò (2005). 5 See for example Göktürk (2010) and Jones (2003). For German migration cinema in general, see also Göktürk (2000; 2005a, b). 6 Fatih Akn himself often referred to American cinema and neorealism as his role models (Ranze 2002). 7 In regard to films about Italy see Möhring (2007). See also Wahl (2011). 8 Regarding the latest German research literature see Vögle (2012). 9 “Africa at home.” 10 Dialogue between the two women: “—Oh my god, did you see?—Africa!— Where do they come from?—Lucania!—Lucania, where is Lucania? Never heard of it.—Deep South.” (Own translation). 11 Regarding the migrants struggles in Germany see Bojadžijev (2008). 12 “—He is good-looking, Emmi, really and so clean. [...] and those muscles. —He has a firm grip. Come on over. Show us what you got [to Ali]! Go on, touch him [to the colleagues]! —Great! And the skin is so smooth. —He is still really young, after all. But such a great guy, really, such a good guy. [Ali leaves.] —What’s wrong with him now? —Well, sometimes he has a mind of his own. It’s the foreign mentality.” 13 While he addresses her informally, which may be due to the fact that Germans address him informally, a majority often applied this practice. 14 Daniele Ciprì and Franco Maresco are two directors from Palermo (Sicily) who have been working together since 1986 realizing many short films and experimental television programmes. Their grotesque style caused intense discussions and their feature film Totò che visse due volte (1998) was censored. Other feature films are: Lo Zio di Brooklyn (1995) and Il ritorno di Cagliostro (2003). Regarding their aesthetics see Borvitz (2012). 15 Apart from this, Nino Manfredi is the leading actor in both films. 16 That means that there is a basic pattern, a sort of “hero’s journey”: a central protagonist (Nino) who is fighting for a goal (residence permit and a job) but against an antagonistic force (the government/migration policies) and thusly has to solve a conflict (stay or go). See Campbell (2008). 17 Regarding the deconstructed masculinity in Lola and Bilidikid see Treiblmayer (2011). 18 Racial passing means to pass for a member of a different “racial” group. In this specific case, Michele/Spiro and Gianni pass for Albanians; the Italian “colonizers” pass for the “colonised.” In regard to the nexus on passing and cinema, see for example Giovannelli (2005). 19 See Bardan/O’Healy in this volume.

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First and foremost, the many wedding comedies such as Evet, ich will! (Sinan Akkuú, 2008), Maria, ihm schmeckt’s nicht (Maria, He Doesn’t Like It Neele Leana Vollmar, 2009), Almanya—Willkommen in Deutschland (Yasemin Samdereli, 2011) and others must be mentioned, which configure dichotomic trenches between Germans and non-Germans that comply with the non-cinematic public discourse about dominant culture (Leitkultur).

FILM GENRE AND “ITALIANITÀ”

“MINE VAGANTI”: FILM THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS ON TRANSCULTURALITY AND THE CINEMA OF FERZAN OZPETEK RADA BIEBERSTEIN

The whisper of the wind on the ferry as the camera captures the breathtaking panorama of the Bosporus in Istanbul is only one of the sensuous experiences the spectator receives in Hamam—Il bagno turco (Hamam: The Turkish Bath F. Ozpetek, 1997). The scents of jasmine and oranges infatuate the spectator as well as the characters of Harem suaré (F. Ozpetek, 1999), both lulled into the fog of the hamam. In front of the silhouette of St. Peter’s in Rome, the final notes of a Turkish song resonate as two characters stand on the balustrade of their balcony—the opening sequence of Cuore sacro (Sacred Heart F. Ozpetek, 2005)—and jump unto their deaths. The Buddhist family altar of a Philippine housemaid in Rome becomes the mourning place for Antonia, the widow in Le fate ignoranti (The Ignorant Fairies F. Ozpetek, 2001). White children point out how to take advantage of prejudice against coloured children in La finestra di fronte (Facing Windows F. Ozpetek, 2003). The incomprehensible language and agitated voice of a patient’s relative echoes in the courtyard of a Roman hospital making the group of friends in Saturno contro (Saturn in Opposition F. Ozpetek, 2007) feel even more alienated and lonely, facing the death of their friend. These are only some glimpses of the films of Ferzan Ozpetek, in which he offers his audience direct and hidden references, impressions, and artefacts from cultures all around the globe including his native country Turkey and his adopted one Italy. In his films, the director weaves different cultural histories, pasts, and presents with languages and dialects, rites and traditions, beliefs and superstitions, evidencing his curiosity for the Other and his sensibility for diversity and cultural transformations. Focusing on the images of his films, the director presents an intriguing case study for inquiring into migration in Italian cinema from a new and different point of view. Film theory and film aesthetics are brought

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together to question whether his presentation of non-explicated blends of cultures, their artefacts and representatives, can be a fruitful approach in Italian cinema to broach the issues of the Other and the foreign from within. The particular position of Ferzan Ozpetek, being wholly integrated into the Italian film industry but having the possibility to look at issues from an external perspective, make the above noted transcultural references significant, as they are not yet what the film director is known and loved for by his audience. Ferzan Ozpetek, one of the most acclaimed representatives of contemporary Italian cinema, is recognized for his interest in the social reality of Italy and the stories of ordinary people he narrates in his films. The journey, the crisis of identity, and the longing for change are central topics. He tells these in intimate portraits of his characters and thus practices an unintrusive form of social criticism that shimmers through in the mise en scène and the stories of his films. Though close to the reality of his audience, daring like few other contemporary and popular national filmmakers, Ferzan Ozpetek plays with the favoured topics and themes of Italian society, many of which have a long tradition in Italian cinema such as the patriarchal family, the relationships between women and men, or the journey across space and time or within oneself. Above all though, the director confronts Italian society with its overt taboos such as the divide between poor and rich, collective and individual history and memory, sexuality and its various expressions ranging from hetero- and homosexuality to transsexuality, and Otherness or the Other within Oneself. Despite these close-ups of contemporary Italy, it is problematic to consider Ferzan Ozpetek and his work in an exclusively national context. For one, he was born in Turkey and came to Italy in his late teens in 1976. More relevant than his biography is Ferzan Ozpetek’s artistic vision. He looks at these topics and taboos from a different, new perspective. The topics are used as vehicles for meta-discourses on the search for identity in a globalizing world and for the appreciation that every identity (and the search for it) is a continuous and complex process of negotiation and renegotiation comprising a variety of elements such as sexuality and (national) culture. Of particular interest to the discourse of identity and cultural diversity in the work of Ferzan Ozpetek is the observation that film scholars and critics, especially in Italy but also abroad, have an ambivalent relationship to the director and his films in terms of national belonging. It is a situation the director himself seems to nourish as he writes on his official personal website in the English version: “Born in Istanbul on the 3rd of February 1959, he moved to Italy in 1976.”1 In the Italian version, he does not make

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any national references at all. This ambiguity about his national and cultural belonging seems cultivated. Perhaps they are part of the label “Ferzan Ozpetek.” However, scholars’ and critics’ handling of the issue of his national belonging is in itself telling, regarding their representations of figurations of the nation, the Other, and hence migration in Italian cinema. The director is frequently defined through reference to and the relation to his national belonging to both Turkey and Italy. These attributions are neither critically reflected upon nor questioned in the context of his work: “Abbiamo intervistato il regista turco (con cittadinanza italiana)”2 as he is described by the Italian news channel RaiNews24 in 1999. Also at the end of the 1990s, Italian film scholar Vito Zagarrio positions him without hesitation within the landscape of national Italian cinema: “il festival di Berlino propone molte opere italiane: in concorso, oltre a Malèna, Le fate ignoranti del turco “italianizzato” Ferzan Ozpetek—quello de Il bagno turco”3 (1998, 178). In 2006, Italianist Alberto Zambenedetti calls him an “exilic filmmaker” (Zambenedetti 2006, 110) in reference to Hamid Naficy’s concept of “accented cinema.” In an interview at the 2007 Festival delle Culture Giovani in Salerno, he is introduced as “il regista di origini turche.”4 Turkish film scholar Gönül Dönmez-Colin describes him in 2008 as “a filmmaker living in Italy” (218). In the interview book with Ferzan Ozpetek, published by Laura Delli Colli also in 2008, one chapter heading calls the director the “Italian Turc” (107). Film critic Gabriele Marcello labels him as “straniero in terra straniera”5 (2009, 14). In the revised edition of his seminal work on Italian film history, Italian Cinema from Neorealism to the Present, American film scholar Peter Bondanella does not mention the films and role of Ferzan Ozpetek in the context of Italian cinema (2001). Italian film scholar Gian Piero Brunetta, on the contrary, refers to Ferzan Ozpetek in the English version of his standard publication on Italian film history, The History of Italian Cinema: A Guide to Italian Film from its Origins to the Twenty-First Century, among the most important national directors of the 1990s and 2000s (2009, 307).6 The daily newspaper L’Unità’s review of Ferzan Ozpetek’s début film Hamam—Il bagno turco from 1997 is a rare statement pointing to the cultural context of the film in more differentiated terms: Il bagno turco è un buon esempio di cinema non convenzionale e culturalmente aperto. […] Capita di rado di vedere un film italiano girato in due lingue, rispettoso delle differenze antropologiche, non schiacciato dai toni della commedia esotica.7 (Anselmi 2009, 43)

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These statements, descriptions, and categorizations from academic literature and media reviews exemplify how the national belonging of Ferzan Ozpetek is represented and perceived in contradictory and wide-ranging terms. In either case, the director is “neutralized” in his cultural belonging and references. At the same time he is “nationalized” in terms of “Italianness,” meaning Italian cinema has appropriated him and his work on the basis that his films are set in that country, employ a predominantly Italian cast, and focus on the meta-topic of Italian cinema: the Italian family and its crisis (his first two films are exempt). However, the debate on what national cinema is, how it is defined, and to what extent the national is still applicable to the present situation of filmmaking is not at the core of this analysis. Rather, the focus on the national within the academic understanding of the films of Ferzan Ozpetek can originate, for example, from the general caution to label directors, who deal with experiences and themes of different cultures and their encounters, in terms of any theoretical framework as the categories applied such as transnational, intercultural, exilic and/or diasporic are not always sufficiently defined and are often used as a “self-evident qualifier” (Hjort 2010, 13). Another reason for the limitation of the scholarly reading of the discourse on the “national” may be that not many theories comprehensively apply to the themes and features of the films and directors of this complex and rapidly transforming area of transnational cinema and transcultural films (as well as this area not being well defined either). Furthermore, a specifically Italian element has to be considered. Until now, research on the topic of the foreign, the Other, or migration in Italian cinema has focused exclusively on the description of the representations of its various phenomena, such as the internal migration from South to North during the economic miracle of the 1950s and 1960s and the accompanying cultural clash or communicational and legal difficulties between the sexes. At that time, many people from the agrarian and poor South moved to the industrialized and wealthy North. The understanding of the Northerners for their Southern fellow countrymen is described by anthropologist Vanessa Maher: Southern Italians (meriodionali) were perceived by Northerners as having “barbarous” attitudes towards women, including their own wives, and as being bad-mannered, ignorant, delinquent, violent, and liable to have too many children. (Maher 1996, 171)

This perception of Southern Italians has its origins in the nation’s history and the questione meridionale, the political, economical, and cultural

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divide between Northern and Southern Italy. Its influence extends into the present. On a global scale, millions of people have fled from the world’s south seeking refuge in the north since the end of the twentieth century. Some of the most well-known and dramatic news images of this latest migration wave are, for example, Africans who arrive on the coasts of Italy in small boats, exhausted after many days of travel. Italian politics and the Italian nation face a huge challenge at the beginning of the twenty-first century as a country of immigration: contrary to its own history which has been, until now, one of emigration. Italy feels overstrained with the situation as the many violent assaults from the cronaca and the special laws for foreigners demonstrate. As Vanessa Maher also points out: the total number of recent immigrants amounts to no more than 1.8 per cent of the Italian population, a much smaller percentage than that found in Germany, France or Britain, but their presence has caused a degree of “social alarm.” (1996, 160)

Italian society reacts to these social changes according to strategies it already applied during the internal migration waves of the 1950s and 1960s: mass migration is often regarded as a large-scale contemporary version of the Southern Question [questione meridionale], and handled in a very similar fashion: this “new” cross-section of the population provides cheap labor for the industries of the north-east and the north-west […]. However, the immigrants are still largely looked at as an alternate population, destined to serve the need of the country but not to partake in the enjoyment of its resources: B-class individuals, when individuals at all, posited as “others” against the alleged unification of the citizen by birthright. (Zambenedetti 2006, 107)

This position of society is also mirrored on the symbolic level of language, where foreigners are quickly divided into groups of those who are in and those who are out. They are often called extra-comunitari meaning outside the community. Though the term aims to describe individuals who are not members of the European Union, the word implies the designation of these people outside the community of Italians. Hence, the examination of the topic in Italian cinema having been determined not only by the historic particularities of Italy’s internal history but also by the handling of the situation within Italian society. In other words, this part of Italy’s reality is in the 1990s and the following decade only marginally reflected in national cinema and only within a very

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limited thematic range. Among the more popular films that have treated the topic are Lamerica (Gianni Amelio, 1994) on the mass exodus from Albania at the beginning of the 1990s, L’assedio (Besieged Bernardo Bertolucci, 1998) about a young African woman in exile in Italy and La sconosciuta (The Unknown Giuseppe Tornatore, 2006) about a young Ukrainian woman tortured upon her arrival in Italy. Strongly evidencing cinema’s difficulty in focusing on the precarious and problematic handling by Italian society and politics of this situation, the blindness towards Ferzan Ozpetek’s references and signs of a positive blend of different cultures is striking. Scholar’s “non-observance” of the variety of languages, cultures, and cultural artefacts presented in Ferzan Ozpetek’s films inherent to the film texts and particularly to the film aesthetics, through which the director visualizes the Other and the process of negotiation between the Other and the Self, stands out. For example, the monograph published by Gabriele Marcello in 2009 approaches the director from the point of view of the auteur theory and elaborates distinct topics and aesthetics in his work. However, the evolution of a discourse on the various cultural references Ferzan Ozpetek employs and makes in his films is not mentioned. Focusing on this one-dimensional reading of Ferzan Ozpetek and taking into account the variety of modern forms of transcultural transformation processes, here it is argued that the director represents a phenomenon of migration in Italian cinema of its own kind. The representation of transculturality in his films is assumed to be the actual reason why he is successful in negotiating his discourse on the Other within Oneself, assuring the comfort of his Italian spectatorship with otherwise delicate topics such as the foreign, the stranger, and uncomfortable present-day discourses in Italian society and politics such as national identity and xenophobia. The extensive academic writing and media reviews on the thematic choice of the Other in Ferzan Ozpetek’s films demonstrates its significance to the director’s work because “[i]niziare a parlare del cinema di Ferzan Ozpetek […] significa […] partire da una folgorazione […] che colpisce lo spettatore conducendolo in una dimensione ‘altra’”8 (Marcello 2009, 13). The hypothesis that Ferzan Ozpetek is so successful in pursuing this discourse about the Other and getting it across to the audience without having to speak explicitly of internal migrants, immigrants, emigrants, foreigners, clandestini, or extra-comunitari and their discrimination stems from a number of observations: Firstly, Ferzan Ozpetek himself is a migrant, a person who wanders between cultures—not an immigrant and not an emigrant. In an interview given during the “Festival delle Culture

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Giovani di Salerno” in 2007, he points out his awareness of this position “in bilico tra due nazioni.”9 Hence in his personal experience, he perceives different cultures not as oppositions but in a transcultural manner which is mirrored in the artistic vision of his films. Secondly, Italian society does not recognize Ferzan Ozpetek as a migrant but as one of their own. He seems “nationalized” in the public and academic discourse on national cinema. Thirdly, the variety of cultures, languages, and artefacts referred to in his films are not a narrative feature or thematic issue in the stories, as such. They are not coded in a transnational context but in a transcultural understanding, comprising recognizable scenery, actresses and actors, as well as music. Fourthly, Ferzan Ozpetek himself has evolved in his understanding and representation of the discourse of the Other in a marked way. His first two films, Hamam—Il bagno turco and Harem suaré, literally locate the Other in a different culture, the one of his native country Turkey, and in a different historical period, the end of the Ottoman Empire. Since then, he has decisively moved away from this representation, setting his films in a distinctly Italian context while maintaining the narrative themes and aesthetic motives already manifest in the first two films for the very same discourse of the Other. Considering the possible interpretative approaches to the work of Ferzan Ozpetek, a reading of his films from the perspective of the cultural theory of transculturality as introduced by Wolfgang Welsch is proposed. It is argued that the director accompanies with his films the process of transcultural transformation of Italian society. He visualizes the present cultural diversification as well as the blend in Italian society, particularly in the individual, while embedding it in the familiar and hence nonthreatening dominant national narrative and its favoured topics. In other words, Ferzan Ozpetek aids the recognition of the Other within the spectator himself instead of confronting him with examples of marked Otherness in Italian society, a condition and a process whose discursive dimensions are generally located and conducted in the tension between the foreign and the Self/own, adaptation and distinction, assimilation and acculturation, discrimination or exclusion and appropriation. In order to embrace this neglected aspect of transculturality in Ferzan Ozpetek’s work, his films are related to major, present-day film theoretical approaches attempting to describe cinema in the context of globalization such as Hamid Naficy’s accented cinema, Thomas Elsaesser’s cinema of double occupancy, and transnational cinema as categorized by Mette Hjort. Building on these, the understanding of transculturality as defined by Wolfgang Welsch will be introduced as an approach that makes the films of Ferzan Ozpetek accessible in the context of current transcultural

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dynamics in Italian society. Finally, a rereading of the director’s aesthetic and narrative strategies in the light of transculturality is offered.

Cinema and Cultures: Theoretical Approaches Labelling films and their directors can be limiting to the discourses they are examined in and, for example, to the assessment of the critical and aesthetical potential of their work. A “non-labelling” or “wrong-labelling,” as shown by the above quotes on Ferzan Ozpetek, can produce an equally biased understanding and classification. Therefore, the particular transcultural offering in Ferzan Ozpetek’s cinema is related to current theoretical discourses and approaches in film studies that analyse and aim to conceptualize the present diversity of filmic manifestations of cultural variety and global intersections on a thematic and aesthetic level, as well as in terms of film production techniques. Ferzan Ozpetek’s ambiguous, rhetorical self-neglect towards his national and cultural belonging and the visual and referential complexity of his films do not permit his analysis within a single film theoretical framework. It has been argued that along with the progression of his artistic vision, his discourse on the interaction of different cultures and their filmic representations in the globalizing world develops. Film scholar Hamid Naficy has individuated particular aesthetic strategies employed by filmmakers stemming from their experience of displacement from one home, nation, or culture to another. He has gathered the representatives of this cinema under the name of “accented cinema,” though they are not to be understood as a unified group or movement. According to Hamid Naficy, these aesthetic strategies emerge from the filmmakers’ condition of tension and dispute with the native and the adopted countries (2006, 111). The handling of this condition is determined by whether the filmmaker has an exilic, diasporic or postcolonial background. In the case of Ferzan Ozpetek, Hamid Naficy’s observations on exilic filmmakers are illuminating. He defines them as “individuals […] who voluntarily or involuntarily have left their country of origin and who maintain an ambivalent relationship with their previous and current places and cultures” (2006, 112). Another characteristic of exilic filmmakers is the tendency to memorize their native country by inscribing it in their films through “the sight, sound, taste, and feel of an originary experience, of an elsewhere at other times” (Naficy 2006, 112). In his first two films, Hamam—Il bagno turco and Harem suaré, Ferzan Ozpetek has reflected explicitly on this discourse of the memory of his native country. Both films are set in Rome and Istanbul, and both refer

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to the present as well as to the past Ottoman Empire, transmitting a feeling for the differences between life in Turkey and in Italy. Typical of exilic filmmakers, Ozpetek tells a return narrative as in Hamam—Il bagno turco. The only difference to traditional interpretations of this narrative is that it is not an exiler (representing the alter ego of the director) who re-migrates but a young Italian man who returns to his Self: Francesco lives in Rome, works as an architect, and is married to Marta. From his aunt, he inherits a Turkish bath, the hamam, in Istanbul, located in the middle of the old city. Initially, he wants to sell the hamam but decides differently and begins to refurbish it. During this period, he also discovers his homosexuality. In time, his wife comes to visit, explaining that she is having an affair and wants a divorce. Francesco is shot before he can sign the papers, probably by the business people who are buying all the old city property to demolish it. Marta decides to remain in Istanbul and to finish Francesco’s plans for the hamam. The discovery of the Other, the foreign, and the unknown within one’s Self, in this case Francesco’s homosexuality, is the core of the film. Telling of this encounter of the Other by sending the protagonist on a journey to an exotic or unknown place is an established narrative in film (as well as in literature). The fact that Francesco’s journey is towards Istanbul, though, becomes significant in light of the cinema of Ferzan Ozpetek: it is a metaphorical not an actual return narrative. Therefore, instead of reading the film as a container for the memory of his native country, it can be considered as Ferzan Ozpetek’s expression of nostalgia, of his yearning for a lost place and time where the hamam was still a culturally distinct marker for a Turkey that did not exist anymore at the time of shooting. Interestingly, the director himself mentions in interviews his nostalgia for both cities, Istanbul and Rome, situating them in an historical time period that seems to have ceased, for example in the representation of Rome during the 1940s in La finestra di fronte (Delli Colli 2008, 92, 99). While nostalgia may be one aspect of the film, the director uses the narrative and particular aesthetics—as exilic filmmakers generally do, according to Hamid Naficy—to create “ambiguity and doubt about takenfor-granted values of [his] home and host societies” (Naficy 2006, 113). For the establishment of this discourse, Ferzan Ozpetek juxtaposes the two worlds between which the life of Francesco moves and that are to be related to each other in the film’s opening sequence,whereby Italy represents the Occident, and Turkey symbolizes the Orient. Similarly, Rome is defined by modern architecture whereas Istanbul is presented as traditional through older buildings; the Vatican stands for Christianity, the Blue Mosque for Islam. In Italy, modern and emancipated marriages are

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conducted while in Turkey the patriarchal family structure is focused on. Within the home, in Italy, people have Asian housemaids, whereas, in Turkey, the neighbourhood community offers support. Also, the sounds and images of television symbolize anonymity in Italy. In Turkey, the singing of the housewife stands for community and interpersonal relations. However, these established images and assumptions about both cultures are not advocated in the film. No images of a stereotypical Istanbul are presented and the myth of the magically-mystical Orient is not perpetuated. At first sight, Hamam—Il bagno turco appears to tell the story of how Francesco discovers himself thanks to the magic of Istanbul, the slow elapsing of time, and the quiet alleys of the old town. For this impression of the film, it is possible that the director may be criticized for advancing idealized images of Turkey and the Orient, so called Orientalism. Instead, the reading proposed here is that Ferzan Ozpetek actually aligns with Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism. In his benchmark publication, Orientalism (1978), literary and postcolonial theorist, Edward Said denounced the appropriation of the Orient through idealized and seductive Western artistic representations that have their beginnings in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but persist into the present. As for the director, Ferzan Ozpetek, he consciously plays with these cultural stereotypes of the Orient fostered by the West. Despite all the criticism of Hamam—Il bagno turco, the director actually shows contemporary Italy and Turkey represented through modern architecture, urbanization projects, as well as the old Italy and Turkey symbolized through the images of St. Peter’s in Rome and the hamam and traditional houses in Istanbul. His second film, Harem suaré, has also been accused by Turkish film critics of perpetuating Orientalism (Dönmez-Colin 2008, 218). This film is also set in Turkey. It tells the story of the dramatic life and love of Safiè, a woman in the harem of the last sultan of the Ottoman Empire. The screen is burdened with baroque and opulent images of the harem and barely dressed female bodies. These impressions of the harem may conform to a stereotypical Western image, but by matching them with the distinctly Oriental tradition of orality, they are critically commented on: two story tellers—the aged Safiè who is of Italian origin and a Turkish maid— narrate the film and, involuntarily, form parallels to Scheherezad in One Thousand and One Nights. The particularity of the oral tradition is that it allows not only details of stories to be altered but to be told in many variations: So ist in der selektiven Anpassung der Vergangenheit an die Erfordernisse der Gegenwart in der mündlichen Kultur die „strukturelle Amnesie,“ das

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gezielte Löschen und Vergessen von Vergangenheit und von alten Wissensstrukturen, möglich.10 (Nünning 2005, 158)

Rather than seeking to forget or falsify history, Ferzan Ozpetek aims to put into perspective the Western idea of the harem during the Ottoman Empire: not a prohibited and hidden place, but one populated with educated and self-confident women.11 To what extent the director has succeeded with this ambition in his filmic realization is disputable. Therefore, it is even more ironic that the Turkish partner sabotaged the production because he did not want such a realistic image of the historic period to be shown. Looking at the early films of Ferzan Ozpetek in the entirety of his oeuvre, it is suggested here that they could be read as a conscious elaboration on the phenomenon of Orientalism from within, meaning looking from within the Orient at the West’s perception of it and playing with these collective images. However, these images are in contrast to the concept of mimicry by literary theorist Homi Bhabha. His concept comprises a subversive engagement with ideologically dominant or colonial representations through copying or emulation by the subjugated (Bhabha 2004). Hence, despite the apparent reproduction of power and discourse serving to maintain the relationship of colonialist and colonized, it is actually destabilized. The concept, however, does not conceptualize mimicry as conscious and intentional, which, on the contrary, is Ferzan Ozpetek’s play. Ferzan Ozpetek, then, raises critical and pressing questions about both the cultures he lives in: the Turkish and the Italian. As in a personal strategy of cultural mediation and encounter, he does not focus on the history, tradition, and lifestyle of a particular nation, although it seems this way. Rather, he narrates one culture through the Other, gazing at one, in this case the Turkish, in order to see the Other one, the Italian. The multiple aesthetic and narrative layers, on which this metaphorical exchange of gazes is conducted, become transparent: for example, in Hamam—Il bagno turco when Francesco is accompanied by the executor of will into a place where locals and tourists alike enjoy belly dance performances. In honour of Francesco, an entertainer also performs the popular song Arrivederci Roma (Goodbye Rome) originally from 1955. Foreshadowing Francesco’s permanent stay in Istanbul, the sequence also critiques the homogenization of national cultures. Francesco’s face speaks of the sickness and boredom he feels at national cultures losing their identity as lived folklore, such as belly dance and Italian music becoming consumable from San Francisco to Tokyo. Building on this cultural discomfort, Ferzan Ozpetek presents the spectator with his Istanbul that is far from tourist picture postcards. Thanks to his profound knowledge of

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the city, the director chooses images that transmit the feelings, the vibe, the physicality, and the contradictions which make Istanbul a metropolis between tradition and modernity. In only two minutes, he acquaints the protagonist (as well as the spectator) with the city’s richness and variety aside from tourist expectations. It is an Istanbul distant from Sultans’ palaces and the buzz of the Oriental souq: one in the midst of religious variety and quiet alleys populated with educated elderly Turks who speak French fluently. Thus, these images seem to want to evoke the question in the spectator of what Rome must have been like before it had to pay its toll to modernisation and how many traditions must have vanished there since. Reading the representation of the city of Istanbul in the context of the discourse on modernization, which offers a mosaic of cultural practices, traditions, languages, and artefacts, it becomes difficult to locate the story exclusively in Istanbul. Instead, it could be set in any part of the world going through the same process. Though the cultural attributes of the place are specific and yet unspecific, looming between modernity and tradition, Istanbul becomes a metaphor in the film because neither the real Turkey nor the true Istanbul are narrated. However, the protagonist should find his true Self in the midst of these cultural offerings and opportunities. Next to categories such as the exilic, the diasporic, and the postcolonial filmmaker, as well as specific topics like the journey back home or the encountered difficulties in the new found nation, Hamid Naficy has also elaborated several aesthetic features common to accented cinema, such as the multiple voices and the mostly untranslated dialogues and lyrics in the various languages present in these films. From the start of his career as a director, Ferzan Ozpetek includes a sequence of untranslated dialogue in nearly every film. With his third film, Le fate ignoranti, he begins to tell choral stories. However, the reading of Ferzan Ozpetek’s cinema through the perspective of “accented cinema” has reached its limit. The director has moved on from the dichotomous discourse of native country and adopted country that is so distinctive of this cinema to a more discursive reflection on the variety of interrelations, interactions, and influences between different cultures and with this on the representation of the Other. Part of this broader understanding of the present transnational condition of certain filmmakers and their work is reflected in film scholar Thomas Elsaesser’s theoretical approach defining a cinema of double occupancy (Elsaesser 2009b, 27-44). In particular, he considers filmmakers from ethnically mixed and non-Christian backgrounds such as GermanTurkish directors (e.g. Fatih Akin, 1973) or British-Indian directors (e.g. Gurinder Chadha, 1960). Thomas Elsaesser views these filmmakers because of their hyphenated identities and complex past experiences as a

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chance for and evidence of a post-national European cinema. Mostly immigrants or immigrants of the second generation, they have created in their films a space of their own to negotiate the differences of their hyphenated identities, becoming actually hyphenated members of the nations in question. This allows them to find new representations for and embrace new discourses on multi-ethnical identities and traditions of telling history in Europe (Jahn-Sudmann 2009, 21). Still, similar to the discourse on Hamid Naficy’s accented cinema, Ferzan Ozpetek cannot be considered formally part of the cinema of double occupancy either, as he is not an actual immigrant nor does he belong to the second generation of immigrants. Nevertheless, his films relate to a number of thematic and aesthetic features Thomas Elsaesser has outlined, such as the above described possibility of new representations and discourses of identities and histories. Though the foreigner and the encounter of cultures is not at the core of Ferzan Ozpetek’s films, after Harem suaré, the different characters of his mostly choral stories mirror Europe’s rich ethnical, religious, and cultural mix. Subplots refer to the reasons and conditions of this blend, for example migration, non-assimilation, discrimination on the grounds of race or religion, and homesickness—the same topics Thomas Elsaesser specified as characteristic of the cinema of double occupancy (2009b, 28). In Le fate ignoranti, for instance, an upper-class Roman widow discovers that her husband had a secret life with a man and their self-chosen family was made of foreigners, immigrants, and people with different sexual preferences. In one way or another, all the characters live on the margins of society; they are all examples of non-assimilation. The Turkish refugee, Serra, has fled from her violent husband and yet is strongly homesick. Her brother comes to visit every now and then, representing the foreigner in the group or the discrimination on the grounds of sexuality that nearly all characters experience being homo- or transsexual. In La finestra di fronte, Ferzan Ozpetek tells the story of Giovanna and her search for Self-individuation. A number of subplots engage with the topics of migration and discrimination: Giovanna’s friend Eminè is Turkish and married to a coloured man. Her husband and children experience discrimination because of their race. Also, Giovanna works as an accountant in a poultry factory where many Asian workers are employed. The film hints at the hardship of these immigrants who even send their relatives to replace them at work when they are ill so as not to lose their jobs. Another feature Thomas Elsaesser has singled out as characteristic of the cinema of double occupancy is the concern with history and its tendency to present established historical narratives from a different angle. In La finestra di fronte, Ferzan Ozpetek also tells the story of the Holocaust survivor

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Simone who was in love with a Jewish man. The film shows the deportation of the Roman Jews in October 1943 and Simone’s dilemma of whether to warn his lover first or rather the Jews in the ghetto. He opts for the latter, and his lover dies. In Mine vaganti (Loose Cannons F. Ozpetek, 2010), the director refers to the hard times after the end of World War II: the difficulties of reconstruction and the deprivations of launching a small family business. There, Ferzan Ozpetek’s interest in history lies in the marginalized realities, in the social history, in the small stories of the common people through which the big events of history appear in a differrent light.

The “Turkish-Italian” Director The close reading of Ferzan Ozpetek’s work in the context of the cinema of double occupancy provides only limited new insight into the concern of positioning the director within present-day film theoretical frameworks on transnational cinema. Yet, it is intriguing to ask if the categories of the cinema of double occupancy can be applied to other criteria than the national. The idea of transferring the condition of double occupancy to the filmic and artistic identity of a director, such as Ferzan Ozpetek, is triggered by the analyses of various media reviews, such as those mentioned above, that describe the director as Turkish-Italian or “Italianized Turk,” hence placing focus on the hyphen. So far, not much is known about Ferzan Ozpetek in academic literature (Marcello 2009): He is a film director and scriptwriter born into an influential Turkish family in Istanbul in 1959. His older brothers, Siddik and Asaf Ozpetek, are film producers. His sister, Zeynep Akso (b.1949), used to be an actress. It is said that he was already fascinated by cinema in his childhood. During his frequent visits to the local cinema, he mainly watched Turkish productions but also some foreign ones. After finishing school, he wanted to study film in the United States as during the 1970s there were no film schools in Turkey yet. This choice of studies was supported by his father, despite the fact that he wanted his son to pursue a different career. Shortly before his departure to America, Ferzan Ozpetek visited Rome, apparently without any particular reason or aim: Nel 1976 arriva a Roma e […] se ne innamora perdutamente: i colori, le architetture e le atmosfere della capitale lo segnano profondamente tanto da convincerlo a stabilirsi in Italia contro il volere del padre.12 (Marcello 2009, 20)

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Ferzan Ozpetek studied film and directing in Rome. From 1982 onwards, he was assistant director to various renowned Italian directors of the 1980s and 1990s. In 1997, he made his début as director and has gradually become one of the most important directors of new Italian cinema, winning various awards. He also has Italian citizenship, and his film, Mine vaganti, was nominated for the Golden Globes 2011. However, this information about Ferzan Ozpetek’s childhood, youth, and early years in Italy does not give insight into the director’s artistic and cultural imprint. Rather, cultural influences on him and his films are revealed with every new film he makes and are embedded into their promotion. In Hamam—Il bagno turco, for example, it is said that the character of the deceased aunt is based on a real person: the director used to know a lady during his youth who came from Italy to Istanbul and ran a hamam (Marcello 2009, 31). The world of the characters in Harem suaré refers to those people Ferzan Ozpetek spent the first years of his life with: his grandmother and aunts (Marcello 2009, 58). To tell the story of the last harems at the end of the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the twentieth century is the director’s way of remembering his grandmother who was young in those days and married to a pasha. While selective information about personal or autobiographical references in Ferzan Ozpetek’s films can be found, hardly any research on his filmic and artistic influences have been conducted. Little is known of the influences the Turkish and Italian film histories have had on him in terms of film aesthetics, genre, or character development, particularly with regards to female characters. Yet, the exclusive contextualization of the director’s work by academics and media within the traditions of Italian film history serves toward the “neutralization” and leads to the “nationalization” of Ferzan Ozpetek into the Italian context, as previously mentioned: from Antonio Pietrangeli can be traced the influences on his representation of female characters, Vittorio De Sica is the model for his work with the actors, and Raffaele Matarazzo provides the framework for the development of his micro dramas (Marcello 2009, 13-14). Film scholar Gian Piero Brunetta locates the film aesthetics of Ferzan Ozpetek clearly within the tradition of national film history: In his composition of the frame and the strong sense of viewer participation he created, Ozpetek brought back the lessons of Visconti, Bolognini, and Pasolini, successfully applying them to contemporary situations. (Brunetta 2009, 307)

Perhaps the most conscious and apparent embracing of Italian film history can be seen in Ferzan Ozpetek’s Mine vaganti, a reinterpretation of Pietro

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Germi’s grotesque comedy Sedotta e abbandonata (Seduced and Abandoned) from 1964 on Italians’ customs and the prejudice of the economic miracle (Marcello 2009, 13-14). A brief sequence analysis of Mine vaganti shows which elements Ferzan Ozpetek adopts from Pietro Germi’s film and what use he makes of them: Both films are set in the South—it is the first for Ferzan Ozpetek—and tell the story of a father who desperately seeks to save the family honour—questione d’onore—so fundamental to a Southerner’s dignity and self-perception even today. In Pietro Germi’s film, honour is questioned because of the extramarital sexual encounter of the father’s youngest daughter, the girl’s following pregnancy, and the refusal of both her and the rapist to marry each other in order to restore the family honour. Ferzan Ozpetek’s film, on the other hand, tells a story of damaged family honour because of the homosexuality of one of the sons, actually both of them although the father is not aware of this. Most evident is the homage to Pietro Germi in the sequence where the father encounters the local public for the first time after the outing of his son—a sequence that follows the original closely in terms of performance and narrative. In Sedotta e abbandonata, the father enters the main square with his family and begins to laugh in an exaggerated, nearly grotesque manner in order to demonstrate his superiority, male power, and authority as he forces his family to laugh with him. Then, they walk into an ice cream parlour, and the father explains himself to the public (entirely made up of men) partially restoring his honour. Also in Mine vaganti, the father takes his younger son, Tommaso, out to a restaurant in the centre of town. While the son has a sad expression, the father laughs and grins in an almost grotesque way. Here, Ferzan Ozpetek employs laughter consciously with reference to the original film. The father’s despair at having lost his family honour is made evident in his talk, full of heterosexual allusions, and his continuously escalating laughter that first makes his face look like a mask and then becomes grotesque. Like Pietro Germi, Ferzan Ozpetek uses the grotesque and laughter as a motive of criticism: He cuts the grotesquely laughing faces of the other restaurant guests into the conversation between father and son, illustrating the subjective perception of the father. The opposition between the vision of the father and the son’s disappointed face speaks of the father’s inappropriate reaction and lack of understanding for his sons’ lives. As a result, Ferzan Ozpetek comments that the situation has not changed much since Pietro Germi’s criticism of Italy during the 1960s as social prejudice and discrimination of the Other still persist. While the contextualization of Ferzan Ozpetek’s work within Italian film history has been undertaken in a number of publications, hardly any research has been conducted on the influence that recent national film

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history has had on him. It is known that he took up his studies at the Accademia del Costume di Navona, followed by the director’s class at the Accademia di Arte Drammatica “Silvio D’Amico,” and film studies at the University La Sapienza in Rome. He also apparently applied for the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (Scuola Nazionale del Cinema) but was not accepted because of his young age of seventeen years (Marcello 2009, 21). During his studies, Ferzan Ozpetek wrote for the film journal La Rivista d’arte. Here, he had the opportunity to interview a number of the most influential Italian film directors of that time, for example the Taviani brothers, Carlo Verdone, Bernardo Bertolucci, Maurizio Ponzi, Elio Petri, and Massimo Troisi. By the end of 1982, he was working on the set of Massimo Troisi’s Scusate il ritardo (1983), which launched his career as assistant director on various sets such as those of Maurizio Ponti and Ricky Tognazzi, Giovanni Veronesi, and Marco Risi. It is Marco Risi who helped him make his début film. Similar to that of his childhood and youth in Turkey, the information about his entry into the Italian culture and his rise in the Italian film industry is a mere list of facts and names. Yet, Ferzan Ozpetek enters the Italian film industry during a period of deep crisis, when it was forced to take new paths—a condition similar to that of the Turkish film industry during the 1970s and 1980s. The director met the pathfinders of new Italian cinema who would lead Italian cinema to a national and international renaissance from the mid-1990s onwards. Massimo Troisi (1953-1994) represents the Neapolitan film tradition and was one of the most renowned and innovative actors and directors of new Italian comedy. On the set of Scusate il ritardo, Ferzan Ozpetek had the opportunity to experience that very specifically Italian cultural tradition that extended from the commedia dell’arte to the Neapolitan theatre of Edoardo and Peppino De Filippo and Totò. With Marco Risi, on the other hand, he worked with one of the critical Italian directors of that time who focused on issues such as the degradation of the Italian province (Il branco—The Pack, 1994) and the questione meridionale (Mery per sempre—Forever Mary, 1989 and Ragazzi fuori—Boys on the Outside, 1990). Regarding the artistic, social, and political context in which Ferzan Ozpetek entered Italy, academic literature has not yet considered the influence the years of terrorism and the brigate rosse during the 1970s or the corruption scandal tangentopoli and its aftermath in the operation mani pulite during the 1980s and 1990s might have had on his work. Just as research needs to be done on the relation between Ferzan Ozpetek’s work and recent Italian film history, it is still a desideratum to research if and how Turkish cinema (Dönmez-Colin 2008, 22-56) has

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influenced the director in order to consider a filmic and artistic double occupancy, for a double occupancy might persist in strategies of storytelling, preferences of genre, representations of female characters or the depiction of space. A brief look into Turkish film discloses similar developments between the two national film histories: The Turkish Yeliscam cinema of the 1960s and early 1970s with its focus on melodrama and on the differences between the rural and the urban population can be paralleled to the treatment of Italy’s internal migration in the comedy genre. The national cinemas of both countries shared interest in the question of identity in a rapid process of transition from tradition to modernity (Dönmez-Colin 2008, 38). Constant through all those years remained the debate about whether the Turkish audience could be addressed with the film aesthetic of the West. The 1970s were marked by a crisis that came to an end with the rise of young Turkish filmmakers and their international success by the end of the decade. By that time, though, Ferzan Ozpetek was no longer in Turkey. He might have observed the Turkish cinema d’autore from Italy, with its focus on the individual and its problems in the city as well as the rise of the new wave Turkish cinema from the mid-1990s: the same period in which Ferzan Ozpetek made his début film. It is also interesting that within the English language literature on Turkish cinema, Ferzan Ozpetek is only marginally mentioned and not contextualized at all. Unlike the Hamburg born German director with Turkish origins Fatih Akin (1973), Ferzan Ozpetek is not regarded as an exilic director or one of Turkish origin (Suner 2010, 21). Occasionally, Ferzan Ozpetek is mentioned in the context of the genre of transnational Istanbul films, among which some films of new wave Turkish cinema are counted (Suner 2010, 193). However, taking into account the topics and characters Ferzan Ozpetek deals with in his films, they are similar to those of the new, establishing Turkish cinema since the mid-1990s, as film scholar Asuman Suner summarizes in his monograph on Turkish cinema: New wave Turkish films, popular and art films alike, revolve around the figure of a “spectral home.” Again and again they return to the idea of home/homeland; they reveal tensions, anxieties, and dilemmas around the questions of belonging, identity, and memory in contemporary Turkish society. (Suner 2010, 1)

The negotiation of identity is a topic also prominently focused on in Italian cinema since the mid-1990s, though it narrates different stories, usually ones of the emancipation and self-individuation of female characters (Bieberstein 2009). Nevertheless, what concrete influences Ferzan Ozpetek carries with him from the history and films of Turkish cinema and the

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debates about the identity of national cinema until 1976, as well as his position in Turkish film history, still have to be researched and published. To what extent a Turkish-Italian hyphenation of Ferzan Ozpetek in terms of filmic and artistic identity can be advanced still has to be evaluated. Yet, the lack of this information facilitates the inscription of the director into Italian film history: Ferzan Ozpetek has been acknowledged as part of the new Italian cinema. Interestingly, one of the characteristics of new Italian cinema is a certain regionalization of its films—be that in terms of dialect, belonging of the director, or shooting location. Ferzan Ozpetek is decisively non-regional. At the most, he can be described as Roman, as the majority of his films are shot in the capital, though this is not an issue as such in his films. This allocation of the director within the national film history is based on the elements his work has in common with present developments in Italian cinema such as the search for identity. The nonconformist elements, the ones analysed in this chapter, are rhetorically left out of the academic and public discourse. One reason for this neglect may lie in what Thomas Elsaesser has termed the non-demarcation of cultural difference in a context of cultural difference in certain films of the cinema of double occupancy, for example, in the first part of Gegen die Wand (Head-On, 2004) by the German-Turkish director, Fatih Akin (Elsaesser 2009b, 43). In light of the development of Ferzan Ozpetek as a filmmaker, this can be observed in the shift from Hamam—Il bagno turco and Harem suaré, where he places cultural difference in the foreground, to his films since Le fate ignoranti, where he represents (intra- and trans-)cultural difference as a given condition.

Cinema and Cultures: Theoretical Approaches II The categories of demarcation and non-demarcation in transnational cinema are also central to visual studies scholar Mette Hjort, who has termed them marked and unmarked as well as strong and weak. A strong form of transnationality would exist if “a number of specific transnational elements related to levels of production, distribution, reception, and the cinematic works themselves” (Hjort 2010, 13) are involved: A film might be said to count as an instance of marked transnationality if the agents who are collectively its author […] intentionally direct the attention of viewers towards various transnational properties that encourage thinking about transnationality. (Hjort 2010, 13-14)

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A consideration of Ferzan Ozpetek and his work in terms of these categories seems more accessible than the concepts of Hamid Naficy and Thomas Elsaesser as they take into consideration a greater number of features from his films and his mode of production: The majority of his productions are European co-productions set in different countries such as Turkey and Italy. Parts of the characters’ dialogues or dramaturgically significant lyrics are in foreign languages such as Turkish, French, Spanish, or Finnish and are not always translated. He includes actors from various countries, such as Serra Yilmas from Turkey or Barbora Bobulova from Slovakia. Thematically, the reference to other cultures and nations is always present. A list of randomly chosen cultural references from three films across his career, Hamam—Il bagno turco, Le fate ignoranti and Cuore sacro, illustrates the variety of subjects and artefacts which the director integrates from different cultures: music such as the opera María de Buenos Aires by the Argentinean composer Astor Piazzolla; the songs of the Turkish singer Sezen Asku or the Italian Giorgia; locations such as Rome and Istanbul; superstitions from countries such as Turkey; literature such as Nazim Hikmet’s poetry or the novels by Melania Mazzucco; religions such as Christianity, Islam, Buddhism; art such as the Pietà by Michelangelo, Greek and Roman antique statues or the belly dance. Hence, in terms of Mette Hjort’s approach, for example, a weak but marked transnationality can be observed on a variety of levels in the films of Ferzan Ozpetek. The previously introduced film theories on the transnational and the discourse on various cultures in cinema have not contributed significantly to making Ferzan Ozpetek and his films more accessible in these terms, though they could be applied partially to certain periods and films of his career. The initial hypothesis that Ferzan Ozpetek is a unique phenomenon in Italian cinema on migration is confirmed. Yet, a more satisfactory positioning of his films is still due. Therefore, a dissociation from the transNATIONAL, and the herewith associated implicit binary opposition between Italy and Turkey as well as from the perpetual inscription of marked Italianness into his films, and a move towards the reading of Ferzan Ozpetek’s films in the light of the transCULTURAL as termed by philosopher Wolfgang Welsch is proposed.

Transcultural Cinema Wolfgang Welsch developed his concept of transculturality in the late 1990s starting with the criticism of the term culture as proposed by Johann Gottfried Herder in the eighteenth century. He described it as “social

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homogenization, ethnic consolidation and intercultural delimitation” (Welsch n.d.). Translated into today’s conception, this definition of culture signifies separation, distinction, and opposition—a definition that is no longer acceptable or applicable in the face of contemporary societies. Therefore, Wolfgang Welsch has outlined two levels where he defines his concept of transculturality. On the macro level, he includes the following four points: firstly the “cultures’ external network” (Welsch n.d.) referring to the interconnectedness of today’s cultures due to waves of migration and the technological developments of the last decades; secondly the hybridization of culture—not in the sense of Thomas Elsaesser—but meaning that “for every culture, all other cultures have tendencially come to be inner-content or satellites” (Welsch n.d.); thirdly the all-pervasiveness of cultural change embracing all areas of life; and fourthly the dissolution of the distinct markers between the Self and the Other. On the micro level, the characteristics of this definition of transculturality include, for example, multiple cultural backgrounds of individuals and a distinction between a national and a cultural identity (Welsch n.d.). According to Wolfgang Welsch, transculturality allows the films of Ferzan Ozpetek to be analysed in the context of Entgrenzung or the de-limitation of the opposition between the Self and the Other, a condition in which the blend—Thomas Elsaesser has called it the de-marcation of cultural differrence—is normalized. The director has chosen the theme of the Other as well as aesthetic forms such as the door, the window, or the mirror through which to metaphorically confront his audience with the foreign and the unknown in an unthreatening, naturalized way. Distinguishing between the national and the cultural identity of the director takes the reading of his films beyond the limits of the national, in particular the marginalizing discourse of marked “Italianness” or “Turkishness” and beyond the Italian-Turkish binary framework employed on the rare occasions when the director is addressed on issues of transnational cinema. While influences from Turkey and Italy may prevail in his films, the great variety of artefacts, music, and actors from various cultures and nations speak towards Ferzan Ozpetek’s reading in terms of transculturality. In particular, the director’s conscious withdrawal from attempts at being located or imprinted with a particular cultural context advocates for the hypothesis that he perceives himself as an artist migrating between a number of cultures and not just two. The numerous examples given so far on cultures and cultural references in the films of Ferzan Ozpetek show his genuine understanding of hybridizing cultures as well as of the blend between the national and the cultural identity in the terms of Wolfgang Welsch. Therefore, a closer look

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at the aesthetic strategies of his films and how they inscribe into his discourse on the Other is pertinent. How he pursues the thematic blend in formal and aesthetic terms is discussed with the focus on the visual and narrative motives of flats and homes, windows and doors, mirrors and reflections, as well as the aesthetic tools of the circling camera and the gaze onto the Other applying an inversion of Laura Mulvey’s gaze. The films of Ferzan Ozpetek are full of provocative, hidden, forbidden, and unreturned gazes and looks through which others as well as the Other within the characters themselves are placed in the spotlight. Occasionally, these gazes seem to be the actual protagonists of his films, for the director presents them as true taboo breaks. In Hamam—Il bagno turco, it takes only a few glances at the richly laid table of Francesco’s host family to reveal the attraction between him and the Turk Osman. Later on, the hidden gaze of Francesco’s wife, Marta, serves as a vehicle to make the homosexual love between the two men explicit as she secretly observes them in the hamam (fig. 1). In Le fate ignoranti, Antonia observes her dead husband’s ex-lover engage in love games with two other men from behind a blind and later she observes them sleeping (figs. 2, 3). Giovanna, in La finestra di fronte, spies on her secret love across the road as he undresses or has ladies’ visits from her window (figs. 4, 5). In Cuore sacro, Irene holds the half naked body of the homeless Giancarlo in her arms like Michelangelo’s Pieta (1498-1499) (fig. 6). The spectator is placed in the ambivalent position of choosing to look at Giancarlo’s attractive naked body or at the re-enactment of a classical piece of art. The female protagonists in the films of Ferzan Ozpetek repeatedly direct the view, especially those which look at the naked male body. Hence, the director breaks with the tradition of the viewing practice of the male heterosexual voyeuristic gaze in nearly all of his films. Laura Mulvey has revealed in her seminal article, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” from 1975, how the gaze is inscribed in the classical Hollywood narrative, which is based on restoration and preservation of normative heterosexuality (2000, 34-47). To achieve this, films are told from a male perspective. This means the man guides the gaze, the active look. The woman is the looked upon object who can, at most, return the look. Ferzan Ozpetek, then, challenges the traditional gaze by placing his female protagonists, and therefore his female spectators, in the powerful position of the active viewer: the longing gaze at the woman turns into the longing gaze at the man. In most cases, the women who look at the men are the active part of the film who seek a point of encounter between two ways of perceiving the world, as in Le fate ignoranti, or who gain pleasure from

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Fig. 1: Screenshot Hamam—Il bagno turco Fig. 2: Screenshot Le fate ignoranti

Fig. 3: Screenshot Le fate ignoranti Fig. 4: Screenshot La finestra di fronte

Fig. 5: Screenshot La finestra di fronte Fig. 6: Screenshot Cuore sacro

that look though it might reveal itself to be only a dream, as for Giovanna in La finestra di fronte. In a Catholic culture like the Italian one, it is a challenge on various levels to turn the man into an object, even more an object of explicit sexual desire. For this purpose, Ferzan Ozpetek casts as his male protagonists actors who are not only popular but who are, especially, sex symbols of contemporary Italian cinema, such as Alessandro Gassmann in Hamam—Il bagno turco, Stefano Accorsi in Le fate ignoranti, Raoul Bova in La finestra di fronte, Luca Argentero in Saturno contro, or Riccardo Scamarcio in Mine vaganti. The inversed gaze in Ferzan Ozpetek’s films can be read as his metaphorical call to look at people and issues from a different point of view, to see the Other within

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every one. Therefore, shifting the discourse on the Other away from the racial and national, it also addresses the nation’s difficult issue of gender equality, the representation of women in Italy in general, and the taboo of homosexuality. Despite the strongly Catholic sanctioned heterosexuality inherent to Italian culture, its self-definition and its representation in national media, Ferzan Ozpetek shows without reservation homosexual people and couples, their everyday lives and loves, in his films. Homosexuality is a topic hardly dealt with in Italian cinema. The only topic to have been put on screen that touches on apparently other or weak masculinity is male impotence. In Mauro Bolognini’s Il bell’Antonio (Bell’Antonio) from 1960, the Italian lover par excellence, Marcello Mastroianni, plays a husband who cannot perform his marital obligations to Claudia Cardinale and is divorced as a consequence. While Ferzan Ozpetek’s focus on masculinity and homosexuality as a topic is not new, its representation is. In Saturno contro, he directs his actors into a representation of homosexual intimacy unusual for contemporary Italian cinema. Pierfrancesco Favino and Luca Argentero play the gay couple Davide and Lorenzo. Tender looks, affectionate caresses, caring embraces, seductive games, and loving kisses characterize their relationship. Ferzan Ozpetek depicts homosexuality without prejudice and as a given part of Italian society and reality. In other words, the Other is already there; it only needs to be looked upon and seen. Ferzan Ozpetek’s representation of sexuality is closely linked to his challenge of the patriarchal Italian family concept as he introduces new and alternative family concepts in his films. He narrates married couples who do not wish to have children as in Hamam—Il bagno turco or Le fate ignoranti, civil unions as in Le fate ignoranti and Saturno contro, chosen families and not those of blood as in Mine vaganti, and strong, careerfocused women as in La finestra di fronte, Cuore sacro and Un giorno perfetto (A Perfect Day F. Ozpetek, 2008). The director refuses to give an idealized picture of the institution of the family, which is so central to both Italian and Turkish societies. He is, along with Silvio Soldini, one of the directors of new Italian cinema who gives female characters an individual voice and a critical and independent representation. While Ferzan Ozpetek’s thematic choice is to put the Other into focus through sexuality and the empowerment of female characters, the aesthetic tools he employs to visualize and transmit this discourse are rather traditional, some even archaic, and linked to the previously described staging of the gaze. Central to his mise en scène is the house or flat where his characters perform their inversed looks from behind a blind, in mirrors, or

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through a window. The German philosopher, Otto Friedrich Bollnow, defined the significance of the house in his seminal work on Men and Space (original title Mensch und Raum 1963) as a man’s centre of the world (1984, 123-191). It is from a house and home that people go away, and it is there that they return to find shelter, peace, and security. All the characters of Ferzan Ozpetek’s films have a house or flat to return to, for they are neither vagabonds, homeless, nor without an anchor but rooted in those flats and homes that are like a micro-cosmos in which the world with all its diversity comes together. These small worlds are represented most explicitly in Le fate ignoranti and Saturno contro—in a way they are the positive and negative of the same world. In the first case, the flat is a refuge that unites people marked by diversity and that is looked upon from an outsider of that group, Antonia. In the second case, the flat is part of the cosmos of a group that is looked at from the inside. In both films, there are sequences introducing the choir of characters who are actually families of choice referring to their names, national origins, relationship statuses, professions, habits, and roles in these communities. In other words, the materiality of the houses and flats provides the characters with a space in which to negotiate their coexistence and in which the individual characters can find their centre: Wenn es wichtig ist, daß der Mensch in seinem Raum wieder eine solche Mitte findet, wenn […] die Erfüllung seines Wesens an das Vorhandensein einer solchen Mitte gebunden ist, dann findet er diese Mitte nicht mehr als etwas Gegebenes vor, sondern er muß sie erst erschaffen und sich von sich aus in ihr begründen und sie gegen jeden Angriff von außen verteidigen.13 (Bollnow 1984, 125)

What Otto Friedrich Bollnow refers to as the need of the post-mythical individual can also be applied to the transcultural condition of individuals. Hence, Ferzan Ozpetek puts his characters into spaces where they can create a new centre of their world, a new house and home that accounts for the varieties and diversities of the Other. Therefore, to inhabit a space means to express ones relationship to the world (Bollnow 1984, 126). This relation to and understanding of the world is conveyed in particular through the image of the table with friends gathered around it and enjoying each other’s company. It speaks clearly of the director’s understanding of sharing the Other. In Saturno contro, one of his characters says “It is not a matter of acceptance, but of sharing!”—the table symbolizes this. Also, the motive of the table is often captured by a camera that circles around the table and focuses on every one who sits at it, demonstrating at once the unity of the Other in the group as well as the

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individuality of every single character. It is through the combination of the social power at the table, that stands for the fire or the heart of the house, and the circling movement of the camera that the unity of the individual Others is aesthetically conveyed. The sequences around the table usually also have a dramaturgically significant function, setting turning points in the narrative. Again in Saturno contro, it is during one of the traditional dinners of the group of friends around the kitchen table that one character dies. This motive of the first turning point in the film, which interrupts the Turkish dance, the praise of the delicious meal, and the hopeful glances of an aspiring writer to his idol, is addressed again shortly before the conclusion of the film when the group of friends gathers again around a table, collectively facing the pain over the loss of their friend. While the actual and the anthropological concepts of the house and home are the set of Ferzan Ozpetek’s characters’ world, he stages and frames many of the glances and looks at the Other through windows and doors. Besides the purely aesthetical issue of framing and hence focusing the view of the spectator, the images of windows and doors also address the audience’s experiences of thresholds. Otto Friedrich Bollnow describes doors as being of a semipermeable (Bollnow 1984, 154) character which, as such, allow people in or keep them out of the house. In Le fate ignoranti, for example, Antonia visits the flat of her husband’s ex-lover. She stands in front of a closed door and is admitted unwillingly after having rung the bell. Symbolically, she crosses the threshold into the world of the Other. This other world becomes threatened the moment Antonia realizes that she possesses the keys to that flat. During a second visit, she actually opens the door with those keys. Then, the community inside the flat perceives her as an intruder because the door no longer performs its function as a safeguard from the outer world. Instead, it opens the possibility for Antonia’s encounter with the Other. On various occasions, Ferzan Ozpetek takes his time to stage doors as thresholds and illuminates the potential they also bear when allowing through their symbolic, semipermeable character to let the new, the Other, the Unknown in. On the other hand, the window is defined by Otto Friedrich Bollnow as giving the possibility to look at the world outside from within: it is the eye of the house (Bollnow 1984, 159). Not surprisingly, Ferzan Ozpetek uses this image to allow his characters the safety of looking at the Other from within, as in the case of Giovanna in La finestra di fronte. The idea of looking at the Other from a safe point is also applied in the scenes where Antonia, in Le fate ignoranti, observes her husband’s sleeping ex-lover

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safely from behind the blinds. However, sometimes the window is also given an inverse function in Ferzan Ozpetek’s films. In La finestra di fronte, the window becomes the protagonist of two sequences. By looking at her family from her lover’s window, Giovanna realizes the beauty of her small world—hence the look from outside, which the other window allows, is metaphorically the gaze into her own soul. A similar sequence can be found earlier in the film. Coming in through the window, the camera enters the memory of the Holocaust survivor, Simone, and locates the film in the past, giving insight into the character’s feelings and desires: Simone is seen as a young man dancing with a girl; however, his eyes are fixed on his male lover. Hence, the audience as well as the characters are given the safe harbour from which to observe, look at, and contemplate the Other, which is different. In Mine vaganti, the window is used as a metaphor for the blindness of those who do not see the Other. Tommaso describes his love for his partner while looking up at a window from inside the house. The window, though, is placed too high. Thus, the inability to look out of the window stands for his family’s incapability of seeing and accepting his love for another man. In this manner, Ferzan Ozpetek has not only located the family and sexuality as a safe topic through which to make his discourse on the Other, but also through aesthetic forms and the motives the spectator is familiar with, yet, which bear a greater symbolic meaning than the obvious one. A close look and attentive observation of what the frames of Ferzan Ozpetek’s films offer is central to a broader reading of the director’s work. He does not place the discourses of the Other and the transcultural in the foreground but weaves them gently and with subtlety into human stories of love and separation, life and death. Saturno contro, for example, tells an apparently Italian story. Yet, Ferzan Ozpetek has incorporated at least a dozen elements that speak of cultural interconnectedness and hybridization in the terms of Wolfgang Welsch, for example the film’s dedication to the murdered Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, the interpretation of the song Remedios by the Roman singer Gabriella Ferri through Ambra Angiolini, a Turkish dance around the table at the first dinner, the Turkish actress Serra Yilmaz who is asked in the film if she were a foreigner and replies “no, Turkish,” a coloured housekeeper, Chinese decorations, the Italian Carmen Consoli singing in French, a character speaking Finish, and a book on the Turkish film diva Türkan Soray. These few examples testify to the curiosity for the Other and the sensibility with which Ferzan Ozpetek hints at and incorporates the cultural diversity and transformation taking place, trying to visualize the breaking down of boundaries and

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barriers between the national and the foreign, the Self and the Other. The reading of his work with the cultural theory of transculturality opens access to new dimensions of his films which have been neglected so far. The director himself says “Mine is an alien look, not involved in Turkey, not involved in Italy, not involved anywhere. On one side, not belonging to a place can be extremely annoying, but being a mould-breaker can give lots of freedom.”14 It seems as if only his position as a migrant allows him to break the mould, to take alternative representations and non-traditional paths. Hence, he can safely confront the Italian audience with his particular artistic vision, which unites established narratives and topics from Italian film history with psychologically, deeply rooted images and motives in order to reflect the long-standing Italian transcultural social condition.

Notes 1

http://www.ferzanozpetek.com (Accessed May 4, 2012). “We interviewed the Turkish director (with Italian citizenship).” Editorial. “Cinema. Intervista a Ferzan Ozpetek, regista di ‘Harem Suaré’” RaiNews24. http:// www.rainews24.rai.it/it/news_print.php?newsid=7836 (Accessed May 4, 2012). 3 “The Berlin [film] festival shows many Italian films: in competition is, next to Malèna, also Le fate ignoranti by the “Italianized” Turk, Ferzan Ozpetek—the one from Il bagno turco.” 4 “The director of Turkish origin.” Editorial. “Ozpetek ospite al ‘Festival delle Culture Giovani di Salerno’” http://www.cinemaitaliano.info/news/00533/ozpetekospite-al-festival-delle-culture.html (Accessed May 4, 2012). 5 “Stranger in a foreign country.” 6 Brunetta also mentions him among the few young Italian directors referring to his partially global perception that looks beyond the borders of the national (Brunetta 2007, 672). The presentation of the director’s work at the Museum of Modern Art in 2008 describes his films as showing “unforced multiculturalism” MoMA Film Exhibitions. “Filmmaker in Focus: Ferzan Ozpetek.” http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/films/645 (Accessed May 4, 2012). 7 “Il bagno turco is a fine example of unconventional and culturally open-minded cinema. […] It is rare to see an Italian film shot in two languages, respectful of the anthropological differences and not crushed by the tones of the exotic comedy.” 8 “To speak about the cinema of Ferzan Ozpetek […] means […] to start with a flash that hits the spectator and conducts him into ‘another’ dimension.” 9 “In the limbo between two nations.” Editorial. “Ozpetek ospite al ‘Festival delle Culture Giovani di Salerno.’” http://www.cinemaitaliano.info/news/00533/ozpetek-ospite-al-festival-delleculture.html (Accessed May 4, 2012). 2

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10 “In the selective adaptation of the past to the requirements of the present, the oral culture allows ‘structural amnesia,’ the deliberate erasure and oblivion of the past and of ancient knowledge structures.” 11 See audio comment by F. Ozpetek on Harem suaré (1999). 12 “In 1976, he arrives in Rome and […] falls hopelessly in love with it: the colours, the architecture, and the atmosphere of the capital have such a profound influence on him that he decides to remain in Italy against the will of his father.” 13 “If it is important that man finds in his space such a centre, if […] the fulfilment of his being is linked to the existence of such a centre, then he is not to find this centre as something given anymore, but he has to create it first. Then he has to constitute himself within that centre and has to defend it against every attack from outside.” 14 http://www.vogue.it/en/vogue-starscelebsmodels/vogue-masters/2010/11/ferzanozpetek (Accessed February 4, 2012).

THE (MIGRANT) OTHER AND CRIME: LA GIUSTA DISTANZA (2007) BY CARLO MAZZACURATI AS A MULTILAYERED DEPICTION OF A CLICHÉD CONNECTION DORIS PICHLER

In his film La giusta distanza (The Right Distance C. Mazzacurati, 2007), Carlo Mazzacurati returns to the topic of migration, which he has already explored in several previous films, and sets it in one of his favourite areas, Italy’s northeast (Veneto).1 The Padan plain, a region characterized by heavy industry, cities and wealth, has attracted immigrants and the concomitant social polarisation.2 Hence, this vast, endless plain and bleak landscape seems to be particularly apt to broach the issue of the Other, in general, and the migrant Other, in particular. The film’s basic plot revolves around several and sometimes conflicting encounters with the Other. At the centre of these encounters is the love story between Mara—a beautiful young primary school teacher who has come to the remote Padan village of Concadalbero to temporarily replace the former village teacher—and Hassan, a Tunisian migrant who runs the village garage. When Mara is found dead in the river the culprit is quickly decided upon: all the evidence points to Hassan who makes no effort to fight the accusations. After some years of imprisonment, he commits suicide, leaving a note in which he swears his innocence. Giovanni, a former teenage boy from the village and now an aspiring journalist, starts to explore the case and finds the real culprit: the local bus driver. On the night of the murder, he tried to rape Mara. In the ensuing fight, she falls, hits her head, is injured and subsequently drowns in the river. The plot outline already shows how the film borrows elements from several genres and subgenres such as the mystery and psychological thriller, the coming-of-age plot, the love story, and of course the crime story, which is dealt with according to the traditional whodunnit pattern. The film thus seems, inter alia, to evoke the well-worn connection between crime and migration. However, a crime only occurs three quarters of

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the way through the film. It is immediately, albeit only ostensibly, solved and when the case is reopened, it is once again quickly solved, this time correctly. Neither the crime nor the topic of migration seem to dominate the film; yet it is indeed this subtle treatment of the topic of migration and the all too orthodox handling of the whodunnit which produce a particularly strong effect. This paper, therefore, focuses on how the film connects basic patterns of the crime story with the theme of migration and raises the question ofthe extent to which the crime pattern reinforces or rather dismantles prejudices. For this purpose three key issues of the film will need closer analysis: firstly, the representation of the Other as a highly complex and above all ambivalent phenomenon; secondly the aesthetic device of the uncanny as one of the film’s central devices to indirectly mirror suppressed fears and to show a certain insecurity toward the migrant Other; and thirdly, the role of the observer in the perception of the Other. Observation and seeing and being seen is discussed as a means of both solving a crime (and thus one of the most important actions in a crime story) and of constructing and influencing reality or perceptions of reality and truth.

The Other: an omnipresent paradigm of the film The Other (das Fremde) is the core element of both crime stories and migrant cinema and the duality of Self-Other serves as the film’s key paradigm. Therefore, the remote village in the Padan valley, with its sometimes highly comical but always very clear-cut characters, functions as a perfect microcosm in which Otherness appears in different forms and facets. The philosopher Bernhard Waldenfels, who has developed a thorough theory of das Fremde (the Other) in numerous works and studies, points out: there is a dimension of otherness, or “Fremdheit,” that pervades all that is taken as our own inner and familiar world. Otherness presents itself as a central feature of all our experience and not as something special. The otherness of foreign people, foreign languages, of foreign cultures is thus symptomatic of what belongs to any experience. The “alien” begins at home. (Waldenfels 1995, 36)3

In taking a phenomenological stance, Waldenfels defines Otherness as a form of experience. Experience, however, always refers to and has to occur within a certain order or system and, therefore, implicitly defines the borders of the respective system, which in turn implies the coexistence of

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a number of different orders. The Other, as perceived from the perspective of a certain order, is always outside this defined order. Hence, a phenomenological and systems theoretical perspective underlines the contingency and subjectivity of the label “the other” (Waldenfels 1997, 19): “so viele Fremdheiten, wie es Ordnungen gibt” 4 (1997, 75). Taking Waldenfels’s terminology further and applying his classification of Otherness, we can distinguish between an “everyday” or “normal otherness” (alltägliche, normale Fremdheit) and a “structural otherness” (strukturelle Fremdheit) (1997, 35). Whereas the first describes the Other as existing within a certain system (for example the Otherness of our neighbour), the latter comprises the Other that is to be found outside a certain system, such as the migrant Other. Evidently, there is an increase in the degree of Otherness from the former to the latter. While everyday Otherness (as its name suggests) can be easily integrated within our daily routine, structural Otherness may have more of a disturbing effect. The film offers various examples of the migrant Other or of structural Otherness such as the village tobacconist’s wife, a Romanian woman “chosen” from a catalogue, a group of illegal Chinese workers, the Tunisian Hassan who runs the local garage and his Moroccan brother-inlaw who owns the local restaurant. The Arabian migrants as well as the Romanian woman appear to be very well integrated. For example, Hassan is particularly respected in the village because of his honest and skilled work and seemingly lives a content and perfectly assimilated life: “when does a migrant stop being a migrant?” is the question rightly raised by Sandra Ponzanesi (2005, 4). Hassan himself follows a strict policy of not standing out in his “Otherness” and tries to even out differences. When Mara asks Hassan why he is unable to cook couscous, his brother-in-law comments by saying, “Ma lui vuole fare l’italiano e dimentica tutto.” Hassan defends himself: “No, non è vero. Ma non mi piace la nostalgia degli stranieri. Se stai qui, stai qui. E basta.”5 Still, he is a part of several systems and, therefore, is always perceived as the Other. Even though Hassan is keen to repress his traits of Otherness, it surfaces occasionally, and he is reminded of his status of the Other by being caught in an undefined space of neither here nor there. In his famous essay The Sociological Significance of the “Stranger,” Georg Simmel defines the Other (that is the stranger) according to his or her mobility as someone who (to express it in modern terms) transgresses systems: The stranger […], who comes today and goes tomorrow […], the potential wanderer, so to speak, who, although he has gone no further, has not quite gotten over the freedom of coming and going. (Simmel 1969, 327)

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His or her position incessantly oscillates between proximity and distance. In spite of having entered a certain system, he or she can never fully break with his or her Otherness. Similarly, the Vietnamese filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha compares the migrating or migrated Self to the travelling Self who is stuck in the ambivalent status of feeling at home and yet not being at home. In accordance with Georg Simmel’s definition, the migrant is thus a traveller, a self that embarks on an undetermined journeying practice having constantly to negotiate between home and abroad, native culture and adopted culture, or more creatively speaking, between a here, a there, and an elsewhere. (Trinh T. Min-ha quoted in Merolla/Ponzanesi 2005, 5)

However, the structural Other does not only appear in the form of an immigrant but is equally represented by several native Italian characters such as the former school teacher who suffers from a mental disease, the slightly retarded Bolla (also known as the village idiot), as well as the newly arrived elementary school teacher who does not originally belong to the place and is still not settled. Just like the immigrants, these people stand out in a certain way. The normal Otherness (according to Waldenfels’s classification) is of course to be found in nearly every character of the film and is occasionally stretched to a structural Otherness. This is the case when Giovanni’s (native Italian) schoolmate, who is a track and field athlete, gets an entry in the local newspaper accompanied by a picture of a young Chinese woman. Due to her uncommon surname, Mancin, she has been mistaken for a Chinese athlete named Man-Cin. This small episode serves as a striking exemplification of the arbitrariness of the attribution of the label of Otherness. The Other, as a highly relative label, can be further explored through the ideas of Zygmunt Bauman. In Bauman’s approach, the Other challenges familiar dichotomies such as the duality of friend and enemy, which again includes further oppositions like good and evil, right and wrong. These dichotomies form the classification principles of modern society in as much as they help to facilitate our understanding of the world and to rule out ambiguity (Bauman 1990, 143). The Other then places these exact principles of modern society at stake by being neither/nor, as well as both/and. This is a trait which Bauman defines, according to Derrida, as an element of the “undecidable” (Bauman 1990, 145; see also Derrida 1981, 42),6 one of those entities that withdraws themselves from integration into any binary opposition but rather dismantles them and lays bare the shaky foundations of any dichotomy. The Other is therefore a phenomenon of

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undecidability by not conforming to either side of the friend and enemy dichotomy, as Bauman stresses, but also by breaking up a number of other dichotomies such as present and absent, Self and Other. By not conforming to and questioning dichotomies, the Other is inevitably caught in a paradoxical status between being part of a system while not being part of the system. Consequently, the Other is a source of ambivalence and is trapped in a highly ambiguous and ambivalent state.7

The uncanny Other The paradoxical foundation of the Other can be best described and further explained by the term uncanny: uncanny both as a story-triggering element of any crime story as well as the expression of the ambivalence of the Other. In his philosophical analysis of the crime narrative, Ernst Bloch ranks the element of the uncanny primarily when he states, in his very first sentence: “Etwas ist nicht geheuer, damit fängt es an” 8 (Bloch 1998, 38). The uncanny, roughly formulated, is expressed through “the contrast between a secure and homely interior and the fearful invasion of an alien presence” (Vidler quoted in Eckhard 2011, 16). In fact, the film La giusta distanza starts by juxtaposing the seemingly peaceful, idyllic with a somewhat inexplicable, uncanny element: We are introduced into the mysterious landscape of the River Po by a panoramic shot of the area from a bird’s eye view. The camera then slowly zooms in, at first following the course of the river and approaching the actual location, then following a bus and then, zooming in even closer, following an old vehicle, an Ape, with two of our main characters in it: Giovanni (the teenage boy, aspiring journalist and eventually detective) and the village idiot, Bolla. The spectator is quickly introduced to the quasi-stereotypical Padan village life and its characters. But the peacefulness seems deceptive as Roberto Escobar rightly observes in his film review: “Eppure qualcosa turba l’idillio, qualcosa sta sui margini, familiare e strano”9 (Escobar 2007). Indeed, the village gossip and everyday life is interrupted by the arrival of the new maestra, whose stunning appearance in a red coat is screened in a way reminiscent of the Gradisca scenes in Fellini’s Amarcord (1973). Her entrance causes interest, curiosity as well as spontaneous suspicion, and presents, without doubt, a moment of uncertainty for the village. This uncertainty continues to grow when the seemingly happy village atmosphere is tarnished by the mentioning of the mysterious killing of dogs in the area. “Pare che il mostro di Milwaukee abbia iniziato così”10 is how this recurring event is referred to initially by one of the

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villagers, alluding to the somewhat mysterious element in it but, at the same time, also foreshadowing that far more terrible things are about to occur. Ernst Jentsch (1906), one of the first scholars who worked theoretically on the uncanny from a psychological perspective with a link to the literary uncanny, argues that the uncanny is a device to create intellectual uncertainty (195-205). Significantly, the dead dogs always appear in moments of doubt. When Hassan is imprisoned, the slaughter of the dogs miraculously stops, (falsely) indicating that order has been reinstated. However, the moment Giovanni starts to investigate the case and begins to discover the truth about Mara’s death, the dead dogs reappear. In the context of migration, the uncanny is thus not only a device to create intellectual uncertainty, as described by Jentsch, but furthermore mirrors the existence of hidden, unpronounced prejudices. The uncanny as the expression of something that is hidden beneath the surface is also part of Sigmund Freud’s theory of the uncanny. In his widely discussed essay Das Unheimliche from 1919, which still forms the pivotal framework for any study on the (aesthetic) uncanny, Freud equates the uncanny with “the return of the repressed,” a process where repressed past events or traumata rise to consciousness again (Eckhard 2011, 28). Additionally, Freud draws revealing conclusions from the etymology of the German word unheimlich which underline the link between the uncanny and the ambivalent relation to the Other, the unfamiliar. He defines the uncanny as a highly ambiguous phenomenon that describes events as simultaneously strange and familiar. This is easily deduced from the term’s twofold etymological origin, the German unheimlich thus being the opposite of heimlich and heimisch (Freud 1976, 620). Heimlich, however, carries again a double meaning denoting something “familiar, belonging to a home” as well as something “hidden, secret.” The first temptation, to draw the conclusion that the uncanny is indeed frightening because it is unknown, is therefore misleading and too simplistic. Adding the prefix un in connection with the two meanings of the term’s opposites gives us then the two meanings of unheimisch, that is to say something unfamiliar but at the same time something unheimlich, nicht-heimlich, that is something not-secret, known, familiar: “what interests us most […] is to find that among its different shades of meaning the word ‘heimlich’ exhibits one which is identical with its opposite, ‘unheimlich’”11 (Freud 1976, 623). It is then the particular tension between the known and the unknown which triggers the effect of the uncanny/unheimlich. Freud primarily uses the term in a temporal dimension, namely the uncanny as the repressed from the past. Heidegger (2011), as Freud,

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translated unheimlich as un-zuhause (“un-at-home”; “not-at-home”)12 thus focusing even more strongly on the spatial dimension of the term and its origin. Hence, the lexicological study of the term unheimlich reveals its double binary semantics between then and now but also, and more importantly for the argument in this paper, between here and there. Bearing in mind the ambiguous origin of the term, Helmuth Plessner then proceeds to directly connect Freud’s definition of the uncanny with our reaction to and encounter with the Other (das Fremde) and introduces a modal dimension to the term. Working on Freud’s definition, he defines the Other that is “the unknown,” “the unfamiliar” as “das Eigene, Vertraute, Heimliche im Anderen und als das Andere und darum […] das Unheimliche”13 (Plessner 1981, 193). “Der Mensch sieht ‘sich’ […] im Dort des Anderen, und [dadurch] erschließt [sich] ihm die Unheimlichkeit des Anderen in der unbegreiflichen Verschränkung des Eigenen mit dem Anderen”14 (Plessner 1981, 193). Julia Kristeva even extends Freud’s use of the term so far as to translate “uncanny” directly as l’inquiétante étrangeté (Kristeva 1991, 183) and, therefore, connects uncanniness and Otherness. Like Plessner, she parallels the process of self-perception with the perception of the Other. Consequently, the encounter with the Other has a direct impact on the Self: Also strange is the experience of the abyss separating me from the other who shocks me—I do not even perceive him, perhaps he crushes me because I negate him. Confronting the foreigner whom I reject and with whom at the same time I identify, I lose my boundaries, I no longer have a container, the memory of experiences when I had been abandoned overwhelm me, I lose my composure. […] The uncanny strangeness allows for many variations: they all repeat the difficulty I have in situating myself with respect to the other. (Kristeva 1991, 187)

Hence, both Plessner and Kristeva explicitly link the perception of the Other with the process of Self-recognition and define the Other as uncanny precisely because of its binary status between being familiar and being simultaneously unknown. This is exactly the notion of “the Other,” “the unfamiliar” which we encounter in the film La giusta distanza: the Other in an undecidable place between neither/nor as somebody strangely familiar. The uncanny and its underlying paradox between simultaneously being familiar and unknown is particularly well expressed through the numerous shots of landscape which serve as an “uncanny tableau” for the whole film. The setting, as previously mentioned, is a village in the middle of the Padan valley in northeast Italy. The uniqueness of this landscape has

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already attracted a number of artists15 precisely because of its ambivalence and ambiguity. At first sight, it seems to be the most easily decipherable place, the landscape being nothing other than a plain. But then one realizes that a plain already bears within itself a paradox: it is endless (with no natural viewing restrictions such as mountains or places to hide), but at the same time, paradoxically, it is closed and restricted since its endlessness implies a homogeneity and immutability. This latter trait is also directly mentioned by one of the characters in the film when, looking out of his car window, he ironically comments on the landscape: “Certo che una volta qua era tutto campagna.” “Franco, ma qua è ancora tutta campagna,” Giovanni’s surprised answer. “Te ne sei accorto anche tu. Non è cambiato niente.”16 A second later, however, we see children walking alongside the road carrying another dead dog, clearly indicating change. Thus the landscape expresses an ambivalent status between invariability and change. This is also underlined by a further characteristic feature of the Padan Plain, namely the geometrically arranged and seemingly never-ending tree plantations. They function as a certain interruption of the plain, but their meticulous neat arrangement is a further confirmation of the endless repetition of the plain. Other than the trees and of course the river, the fog is a further important characteristic, occasionally covering the plain. Fog obscures the view, makes one lose one’s orientation and closes the formerly open plain, bearing within itself an endless repetition of the same. The plain and its ambivalent characteristics which oscillate between the known and the unknown, therefore, function as a perfect expression of the feeling of the uncanny, as is also observed by Guido Fink (with reference to the use of the plain in works by Celati): Questo paesaggio tutto in orizzontale, che sembra privo di asperità, di nascondigli, di zone oscure e di segreti, deve contenere il suo mistero nell’apparente assenza di ogni mistero.17 (Fink quoted in De Giusti 2002, 136)

All those traits of the landscape are cinematographically used to mirror fears, uncertainty and doubts. The uncanny is repeatedly put on stage by mirroring it within the landscape: One of the key scenes shows Mara walking home from the village after having felt a certain amount of hostility from the environment for the first time (fig. 1). In several point of view shots, the vastness and endlessness of the plain is captured, undermined by a slight wind. The distant cries of birds are interspersed with absolute silence. When she sees Bolla and waves at him while smiling, he turns his back and ignores her for no apparent reason.

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Fig. 1: Screenshot La giusta distanza

The atmosphere grows even more eerie and the camera then takes the position of a pursuer. Peculiar instrumental music begins and a large black car approaches from behind. The scene is set for something terrible to happen; instead, it is only the village tobacconist offering Mara a lift. These, and further episodes, serve to underline the inexplicable ambivalence of the place and its people. The uncanny Otherness and its fundamentally ambivalent status are likewise discussed in one of the film’s key episodes: the village fete by the river. The atmosphere is very jovial when suddenly the electrical power cuts out. Hassan solves the problem and “saves” the party, which the villagers want to celebrate with a brindisi. At first he politely declines, being Muslim, but becoming aware of the disappointed and also partly reproachful faces of the other villagers, he accepts the offered drink and earns applause. Then, as if wanting to pay him further respect, Arabic music begins playing and his Moroccan brother-in-law starts to dance. After a moment of hesitation (being a very self-conscious, humble and modest character), Hassan joins the dancing to his native music. Meanwhile, the other people form a circle around them and clap to the rhythm: a scene of an extremely successful encounter between two cultures. Mara, who has come to the party as Hassan’s girlfriend, watches them initially with a very happy smile, as does Hassan’s sister. In a shotreverse-shot between the two partners and the dancing men, the viewers come to notice that the happiness in Mara’s face gradually gives way to a rather contemplative expression.

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What is shown in the first part of this seemingly insignificant episode is the other as alluring, tempting, attractive as well as threatening. According to Waldenfels Bedrohlich ist sie [die Fremdheit], da das Fremde dem Eigenen Konkurrenz macht, es zu überwältigen droht; verlockend ist sie, da das Fremde Möglichkeiten wachruft, die durch die Ordnungen des eigenen Lebens mehr oder weniger ausgeschlossen sind.18 (1997, 44)

The successful encounter between two cultures is shown in the dancing scene, yet Mara’s expression reflects the ambivalence of the encounter with the Other as tempting and, at the same time, threatening while foreshadowing the cultural clash to come: immediately afterwards, Hassan proposes to Mara; however, marriage is completely out of the question for her and she is far too bewildered and shocked by this sudden proposal to even react. He is, of course, utterly offended and humiliated by her silence: an almost stereotypical depiction of a cultural clash. Simultaneously, we see the crowd moving towards an initially unknown destination for an unknown reason. Just like Mara, the rest of the crowd is silent. Mara stands up and joins the others, leaving Hassan alone. The viewers realize (and see) that the interruption of the happy village party is caused by the appearance of a ghost boat. It emerges from the fog with a former teacher on it, who is sitting motionless and expressionless: completely alone in the boat. This ghostlike experience creates a further moment of the uncanny and once again we are presented with the skilful juxtaposition of the somewhat idyllic, innocent and the Other. The uncanny thus reflects the above-mentioned ambivalence inherent in the encounter with the Other, between the sensation of threat, eeriness and temptation and once again serves to undermine a seemingly peaceful and open-minded atmosphere.

The Other and (the) crime After Mara’s refusal to react to Hassan’s proposal, he starts to behave with hostility and repudiation toward her. This new feature in his character is readily interpreted as the threatening Other/foreign. He thus becomes increasingly ominous in the eyes of his social environment culminating in the fact that, after Mara’s death, Hassan is rashly (and falsely) accused of having committed the crime. It is only after three quarters of the film that the plot of the crime story really develops, and its evolution is handled in a very traditional and thus stereotypical way: the crime is readily blamed on

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the migrant Other and Hassan’s particular characteristic traits are now interpreted as typical of an inherently aggressive and violent character. In his essay on the use of different genres in migrant cinema, Knut Hickethier stresses the predominance of the crime genre. Usually migrant films with an underlying crime pattern seek to meet an educational goal by trying to cast away the classical stereotype which equates migrant/ foreigner with criminal. In this manner, these films follow a pattern in which at first the migrant Other is accused of having committed the crime in order to be exonerated in the end. The actual culprit is always one of the natives. Therefore, Hickethier fundamentally questions the crime films’ success in addressing prejudices since the connection between migrant Other and crime is still maintained. The fact that the migrant Other is indeed not the criminal merely confirms the stereotype; hence the migrant’s integrity is shown as an exception to the (otherwise proven) rule (Hickethier 1995, 30). As the film’s key theme, ambivalence is also the significant characterristic of the handling of the crime pattern. To a certain extent, Mazzacurati’s film confirms the trend outlined by Hickethier and risks reinforcing prejudices. Traditionally, the crime story serves to support an epistemological optimism by propagating the notion of a stable and decipherable reality as well as a methodically confident subject (most clearly expressed through the figure of the detective). Mazzacurati’s crime story now offers two possible, though fairly opposite, interpretative readings. On the one hand, the plot structure seems to endorse the properties described by Hickethier and, therefore, has to be viewed in terms of a Kino der Fremdheit—a form of migrant cinema which offers a rather one-sided view taken from an inside perspective on the Other coming from outside.19 On the other hand, the crime plot seems to critically reflect stereotypes occurring in the encounter with the Other on a meta-level precisely because it is a well-established genre traditionally constructed according to a known and iterating pattern and thus relies on stereotypes. This second interpretative stance is strengthened by a constant shifting between the two poles of security and insecurity or, in other words, between an epistemological optimism and pessimism. Optimism, that is a certain confidence in a stable world order, is without doubt expressed through Giovanni’s competent case solving, which follows a well-known deduction process. The exact opposite, however, is alluded to by a number of different side actions which seem to undermine any epistemological optimism, first and foremost the case of the mysterious and never solved slaughtering of (innocent) dogs, or, more generally speaking, by the

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aesthetic device of the uncanny. A further means of questioning an overly simplistic worldview is shown through the staging of observation. Observation and observing as key devices to discover the truth, in general, plays a crucial part in any crime story and particularly in the film La giusta distanza. Mazzacurati’s film, however, offers a number of spy scenes which take place long before the crime. Mara is doubly spied upon: both by Hassan, who, attracted by her beauty, drives over to her isolated house at night and watches her through her windows and by Giovanni who, when helping her install an internet connection, gets hold of her password and subsequently reads her emails in which she talks about her new life in the village. Moreover, Giovanni also spies on Hassan when he leaves his house, which can be explained by Giovanni’s eagerness to become a journalist. Having been chosen as the (low-paid) local correspondent for a newspaper, Giovanni should watch his surroundings carefully in order not to miss a potential story. Observation, therefore, takes place both for the sake of observing (that is: apparently without any obvious need) and as an expression of the desire for the unknown, the Other: both elements are true for both spies, Giovanni and Hassan. In these spy scenes, there are multi-level observations. At the top is Giovanni who observes Mara observing her surroundings as well as Hassan observing Mara. Considering Luhmannian systems theory, the film stages a second order observation.20 The second order observation always sees more than the observation of the first level and, therefore, is empowered to recognize the blind spots which remain undiscovered by the first order observation. However, the second order observation does not manage to give a conclusive all-embracing view but rather demonstrates the inconclusiveness and subjectivity or relativity of observation as well as the powerful creative force of observation: by observing, the observer changes and interferes with the observed world, as expressed by constructivist theories, for example by one of the forerunners of modern constructivism Giambattista Vico and his formula: verum esse ipsum factu.21 The insertion of a second order observation into the plot as well as on the representational level consequently insinuates that the process of observation is not concluded, as such, and that further observations would be necessary in order to gradually approach the truth. However, every level of observation comes with certain blind spots which can be ruled out by the next level of observation, which in turn has blind spots, too. In order to address each blind spot (and thus to find the truth), observation must be endlessly transferred. Giovanni’s character, our “key observer” or “second-order observer” (in Luhmann’s terms) plays a crucial part in the story incorporating differ-

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ent roles. He is a journalist, a detective (at the end of the film) and at the same time he also represents the (homodiegetic) narrator as the film’s voice-over. For all three roles, observation is the main task. In this manner, Giovanni incorporates a rather conflicting interpretation of the role and potential of observation: through his character, observation is shown as a means of influencing and constructing reality because it is his observation of Hassan which then leads to Hassan’s false accusation and death. Giovanni’s observation is also the one which leads to the final resolution of the case. Consequently, Giovanni presents, within himself, an epistemological optimism as well as pessimism and therefore simultaneously serves to confirm and to challenge stereotypes. The film title serves as an (ironic) meta-commentary on a solipsistic worldview. Taking a different position of observation, the audience increases the distance to the observed and might therefore be able to perceive things more clearly. The title falsely conveys the notion that there is such a thing as a “right distance,” the perfect perspective, the ideal point of view. This is underlined by the advice which is given to Giovanni by the newspaper’s editor in which he urges him to keep the right distance: Se tu questo mestiere lo vuoi fare sul serio, c’è una cosa che devi imparare subito: è la regola della giusta distanza. La misura che tu devi mantenere fra te che scrivi e le persone coinvolte nei fatti. Non troppo lontano, se no non c’è più pathos, ma neanche troppo vicino, porca bestia!22

That the label “right distance” is open to interpretation is expressed in the double case-solving. The fact that Hassan is hastily accused is mainly due to pre-existing stereotypes and to misinterpretations drawn from several observations. In the second run of detective investigation, the real culprit is found, the “truth” is discovered and, paradoxically, the existence of a “right distance” is insinuated. Again, there is and there is not a right perspective. The film thus leaves the spectator in ambivalence by strongly advocating the role of the gaze as highly subjective, hence insinuating that there may be several other possible perspectives and distances to have. This is shown in the last scenes of the film when the bus, on which Giovanni travels back from the village to the town, plunges into the typically Padan fog, cancelling any perspective. In the next and also last scene, the viewers see Giovanni meeting with his former schoolmate, the track and field athlete, Mancin. By re-evoking the character of the Italian girl mistaken for a Chinese woman, the “multi-levelness” of the label “the Other” is once again mirrored.

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Consequently, Carlo Mazzacurati succeeds in showing the ambivalence and complexity of the encounter with the Other by embedding it in a seemingly simple and well-known whodunnit pattern without, however, limiting himself to a black-and-white picture. On the contrary, by skilfully juxtaposing the explicable with the inexplicable and uncanny, the film serves as a pendulum which permanently swings between two opposites but is reluctant to persist in one single perspective. That is exactly the complexity of the Other and above all of the encounter with the Other expressed within the film’s plot: everybody is at the same time also the Other; things can always be turned around; it is only a question of perspective.

Notes 1

For example, films such as Notte italiana (Italian Night, 1988), Il prete bello (The Handsome Priest, 1989), Vesna va veloce (Vesna Goes Fast 1996). The director himself says “Torno volentieri, […], in questo luogo da cui sono partito vent’anni fa con il mio primo film ‘Notte Italiana’. Mi interessano i mutamenti, ma anche il senso di fissità e immobilità di questa terra, la sua vastità e la solitudine che evoca.” (“I like to come back to this area from which I started off with my first film twenty years ago. I am interested in the changes but also in the sensation of immutabilità and immobility in this area as well as in the vastness and the solitude it evokes.”) http://www.kataweb.it/cinema/film/speciali/index.html?speciale=lagiustadistanza. (Accessed December 6, 2011). 2 For more information on Mazzacurati and his films’ settings in Italy’s northeast, see Rascaroli (2005, 253). 3 Waldenfels is aware of the difficulty of finding a direct equivalent to the German term das Fremde in English. He suggests three expressions: the “alien” that belongs to the Other, the “foreign” which comes from outside, and the “strange” which looks or sounds curious (1995, 35-36). 4 “As many types of Otherness as systems.” 5 “He wants to be Italian and to forget everything.” “No, that’s not true. I don’t like this nostalgia that foreigners have. If you’re here, you’re here.” 6 See also Derrida: “I have called undecidables [...] unities [...] that can no longer be included within philosophical (binary) oppositions, resisting and disorganizing it, without ever constituting a third term, without ever leaving room for a solution in the form of speculative dialectics” (1981, 42-43). 7 See also Bauman: “The opposition, born of the horror of ambiguity, becomes the main source of ambivalence” (1990, 151). 8 “Something is mysteriously eerie, that’s how it begins.” 9 “Yet something is disturbing the idyll, something is on the verge, something familiar and strange.” 10 “That’s how the Milwaukee Monster started out.”

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11 For more on the etymological analysis of “unheimlich” and “uncanny,” see Tatar (1981). 12 According to Heidegger, “Unheimlichkeit meint aber dabei zugleich das Nichtzuhause-sein. […] Das In-Sein kommt in den existenzialen ‚Modus‘ des Un-zuhause. Nichts anderes meint die Rede von der ‘Unheimlichkeit’” (2001, 188-189). 13 “The Self, the familiar, the feeling at home in the Other and as the Other and therefore the uncanny.” 14 “By recognising oneself in the Other, one encounters the uncanny of the Other in the incomprehensible intertwining between the Self and the Other.” 15 For example, film directors such as Roberto Rossellini, Federico Fellini and Carlo Mazzacurati himself in several previous films as well as authors such as Ermanno Cavazzoni, Gianni Celati and Ugo Cornia. 16 “This all used to be countryside.” “Franco, it still is countryside.” “You’ve noticedthat, too, huh? Nothing has changed.” 17 “This completely horizontal landscape, which seems to be free from asperity, hideouts, dark areas and secrets, has to contain its mystery within the apparent absence of any mystery.” 18 “[The Other] is threatening insofar as the ‘alien Other’ competes with the Self, threatens to overpower it; it is tempting because the ‘Other’ shows opportunities which are more or less excluded by the order and rules of one’s own life.” 19 Seeßlen sees the Kino der Fremdheit as the forerunner of the cinema of métissage. Whereas the latter considers the migrant’s “inbetweeness” of two cultures and therefore starts from a generally intercultural perspective, the Kino der Fremdheit, typically for 1970s German films, takes a more one-sided stance. The Kino der Fremdheit draws the picture of a failed integration and depicts the migrant other as trapped in solitude. To remain within the terms used previously: The Kino der Fremdheit stills works with dichotomies and does not take into account the element of the “undecidable” and ambivalence (Seeßlen 2000b, 22-29). 20 See observation according to Luhmann (1996, 144-145). 21 “Se i sensi sono da considerare delle facoltà, noi col vedere, col gustare, con l’ascoltare, con il toccare creiamo i colori, i sapori, i suoni, il caldo e il freddo” (Vico 1710, 121). 22 “If you’re serious about this job, there’s something you need to learn. It’s the rule of the right distance, the distance you need to keep between what you write and the people involved. Not too distant, or there’s no pathos, but not too close either, goddamn it!”

“È GIUSTO VIVERE COSÌ?” CONTEMPORARY MELODRAMA AND MIGRATION JÖRG METELMANN

Shortly before the emotional turning point in the plot of the film Quando sei nato non puoi più nasconderti (Once You’re Born You Can No Longer Hide, Marco Tullio Giordana, 2005), the young Romanian Radu and his (alleged) sister, Alina, are sitting in the stylish apartment of their “friend” Sandro and his family. Radu and Alina have followed them of their own accord from the immigrant reception camp in the South to putative “salvation” in the North. They all deliberate on what to do now after the two have left the camp illegally—what would be the best for Alina and Radu who have emigrated because of poverty. When Alina again insists that she wants to stay with her “brother” Radu, even though as a minor she could move in with the Italian family, this enrages Sandro’s father Bruno, to whom Radu angrily replies, “Ma è giusto per te che io e lei siamo separati solo perché io ho qualque mese più di 18 anni? È giusto che dobbiamo lasciare la nostra città, il nostro paese? È giusto vivere così?”1 After a moment during which Sandro’s mother, Lucia, averts her gaze and studies the floor, Bruno says in a compassionate but determined voice, “No, non è giusto, Radu,”2 and after a short pause, “Ma non è colpa mia.”3 Cut to the swimming pool. Bruno’s statement seems consistent and understandable given the situation. Probably any well-off and politically interested European would have said the same in view of the escape story described. In a global context, on a universal scale, it is not fair that such inequality exists within humankind. However with regard to an individual’s life, considering his or her own small possibilities and affairs, it is perfectly legitimate to point out that a person is ultimately not responsible, and that the situation is no one’s fault. In the film, this does not come across as self-righteous at all. During the night after this central, meta-reflexive dialogue, the Romanian “siblings” steal goods and money from the family. Through this act they cancel, especially for father Bruno, the emotional contract that Bruno had

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entered into with them in light of the distress of the reception camp. After returning from the South, he confessed to his son, “Sai che piangevano tutti? Mi ha emozionato, questa cosa. Ti vogliono bene.”4 When the son later asks, again, if they could return since the escape and robbery could perhaps be understood as their need for care and attention, Bruno answers brusquely: “Ma Sandro, non hai ancora capito che sono quelli? Avevano bisogno di soldi, di fregarci!”5 According to the Canadian social philosopher Charles Taylor, the two positions advanced by Bruno (“non è giusto / non è colpa mia”6) represent two different ideas of justice in the view of moral theory. The first is absolute justice (“non è giusto”). The other represents the historically relative forms of distributive justice in a specific country, for example, Italy. The two positions can stand in opposition to one another (Taylor 1985b). He states, the theft of goods or money against the background of absolute justice should be viewed as an encounter that takes place in a quasi natural state, in which people who are independent of each other meet and fight for their own survival. If someone is starving in such a situation, then he or she is permitted to take the wherewithal necessary to survive. This is precisely the way Radu seems to feel because the “brother and sister” take everything from the flat that night: there is too stark an imbalance between the opportunities in life and for the social participation of the film’s characters for the viewer to seriously judge who deserves what in the sense of the distribution of minimum standards of affluence. This imbalance is also well illustrated by Lucia’s helpless attempt to distribute old clothes “fairly” to the completely destitute women in the reception camp. It is entirely inappropriate if an individual is not from the same system of distribution—or a comparable one—to decide whether a young woman receives two pullovers or only one, for example. Taylor outlines that the two defining principles of distributive justice in our modern Western-democratic, market-based cultures are firstly, the egalitarian principle (Republicanism) and secondly, the contribution principle, according to which unequal distribution can also be fair because of an acknowledgement of the amount of effort expended. The basic requirement for these principles to function is the common idea of the “good” embedded in all members of society. This is what Taylor calls the “Aristotelian meta-view,” with which he rejects atomist views of the human good by Locke, amongst others, where it is conceivable that individuals are independent of others and can make her or his fortune on their own. To Taylor, justice can only be sensibly imagined in the collective. The issue of possible justice is not a reductionist minimal determination, as he expressly reflects upon in his essay “What’s Wrong with Negative

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Liberty?” by elaborating the conditions for realising (therefore positive) freedom and including both affective and rational influences (Taylor 1985a). One always has to take into account the system as it has evolved and the social belief in the notion of the common good. Therefore, it is possible that societies disintegrate, whereby members have “the general feeling” of being systematically “ripped off” or exploited by others, “even if this is not based on a single consistent principle” (Taylor 1985b, 316). Strikingly exemplifying this are the resentful voices denouncing the supposed “scroungers” of the German social system. Thus, it is mainly about belief in the common good and, more importantly, making the “good ones” visible. Hence, the people that believe in and practice this principle are considered to be “in the right.” However, when there is a lack of time for, or indeed interest in, deliberation on these complex questions of equality and justice, redistribution or recognition, as in academic circles or the political enquête commissions in Germany, then other systems of conviction or modes of perception have to come into effect that offer guidance in these elementary questions. In the history of modern times, the melodrama, or its mode of functioning, has acquired a rather special status in popular culture because it delivers uncomplicated answers to precisely these questions: who is a good person?; how can a person help victims?; how can an individual “know” this promptly and with the greatest measure of emotional security?

The Melodrama, “Moral Legibility,” and the Problem with Justice In the course of the Age of Enlightenment with its critique of the established order of Church and state as well as the American and French revolutions, in Western cultures the problem arose of how to acquire a way of life and behaviour which provides for the fact that all of us—all people, regardless of ethnicity, social class, sex or religion—are unique because of our differences, but as citizens (citoyens) are all the same. This problem of the dawning Republican age had not previously existed in the formerly hierarchically stratified social structures. Elementarily connected with this is the perceived evil of unfair distribution of wealth and opportunities in life, which in the post-sacred, post-Christian epoch could no longer be explained convincingly by appealing to a divine or “higher” authority. In what Peter Brooks describes as a problem of “moral legibility” (Brooks 1995, 5) with reference to this new complexity of the modern age, it is primarily a question of processes of recognition and distribution or their deficiencies. From a moral philosophical point of view, one can name the

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tensions that exist between egalitarian and difference models in secular democracies, should they wish to justify the establishment of distributional justice through the specificity of a group or culture (Fraser 1995, 68-93). An aesthetic or discourse-historical perspective on melodrama adds to this the focus on the victims of such processes of negotiation or of the exercise of power (Elsaesser 1987, 43-69; Elsaesser 2008a, 11-34). Instead of engaging with this problem from the rational point of view using reasoning, belief in progress, and confidence in technology, applying an approach that is irrational and affective is a hallmark of the “melodramatic mode.” This technique emerged around the 1800s to cope with the impositions and imperatives of the modern age through the creation of fictions, of a collective imaginary (Elsaesser 1987; Brooks 1995; Vicinus 1981, 127-143; Gledhill 1987; Kappelhoff 2004). The structures of the melodrama exhibit a fundamental ambivalence of feelings. If it operates in the service of extending democratic rights, then performances that affect the audience must stimulate their sense of injustice to produce feelings of compassion and to emphasize that existing norms must be applied and/or expanded. If, however, notions of equality or equal value are to be established, if feelings are to be curbed that derive satisfaction from differences in status or habitus, the sentimental reworking of morality has to enhance feelings, on the one hand, and contain them, on the other (Decker 2003, 14). Linda Williams has discussed this structure of tension in the melodramatic mode specifically with relation to the issue of justice in democracies (Williams 1998, 42-88). It is precisely this function of the melodrama in American and other Western cultures which renders its often-quoted dictum of being a meta-genre and a mega-genre plausible: Melodrama should be viewed, then, not as an excess or an aberration but in many ways as a typical form of American popular narrative in literature, stage, film, and television. […] Theatrical acting and Manichaean polarities are not the essence of this form. They are the means to something more important: the achievement of a felt good, the merger—perhaps even the compromise—of morality and feeling. (Williams 1988, 50, 55)

Williams lays particular emphasis on the “public or private recognition of virtue” and innocence (Williams 1998, 52), as central topoi of American self-definition to which narratively all melodrama seeks to return: The most classic forms of the mode are often suffused with nostalgia for rural and maternal origins that are forever lost yet—hope against hope—

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refound, reestablished, or, if permanently lost, sorrowfully lamented. (Williams 1998, 65)

In his major study Hollywoods kritischer Blick7 (2003), Christof Decker has remarked that it is misleading to understand melodrama as reactionary and accuse it of having an atavistic fixation on the past. Rather, the admission of loss is the precondition for any reorientation and for concerted attempts to reassert the cause of justice and social cohesion against the centrifugal tendencies of a post-metaphysical world (42), or to put it briefly, “after the tears is before the tears.” How exactly does the melodrama organize the notion of justice as the recognition of virtue? Williams cites five points. First, the plot is arranged around figures who are stuck in Manichaean roles; that is, they are clearly recognisable as “good” or “bad” people. Second, the struggles of virtue are depicted within a dialectic of pathos and action, which proceeds temporally in the tension between “in the nick of time” and “too late.” Third, the melodrama accentuates victims and heroes. Fourth, the melodrama employs devices from the realistic narrative to get its emotional message across.8 Finally all melodrama begins in a real or fictional “space of innocence” where, by its logic, it wants to end (Williams 1998, 65-80; Singer 2001, 44-49; Anker 2005, 24). In the following, film analyses will be used to comment on this function of melodrama in contemporary films that engage with emigration and immigrants. Williams’ criteria will also be tested in the following section. This paper starts from the assumption that melodrama and migration possess a seemingly natural connectivity as central aspects of melodrama as a “mode of experience” (Elsaesser 1987, 49) and overlap with dimensions of the experience of emigration overlap, presumably because melodrama is a cultural form of processing intense, local, and social migration.9 With regard to emigration, the following points should be mentioned: first, the social hiatus between “indigenous” and “alien” (whether emigration is due to work, poverty, or a political motive), which is often at least latently semanticized by the receiving culture as “good” (in the light) and “bad” (in the dark, non-transparent); second, the “villainous” intrusion of “poor foreigners” into the space of the innocence of a wealthy, satiated, and affluent society, which (allegedly) is thereby threatened with destruction—this corresponds to the immigrant’s feeling of lost innocence through leaving the home country (a prototype for this being Rocco’s monologue about home in Rocco e suoi fratelli / Rocco and His Brothers, Luchino Visconti, 1960); third, the highly charged emotional response generally elicited by the encounter between different affective cultures, for example between northern and southern Italy, or Africa and Europe). This

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connectivity is even more precisely founded in the fact that the melodramatic mode processes deficits in justice emotionally, which can be read as deficits in recognition,10 and to varying degrees thematizes issues of legitimate property, the dignity of a person, lifetime achievement, and the necessity of redistribution. The core theme of migration is recognition, at every level.11

Melodrama and Migration: The Example of Italy To make this link between melodrama and migration clear I will rely on Italian feature films of roughly the last decade. The films focus on migration, that is, the movement within a country with different cultures and the movement from one country to another. This perspective dominates the Italian film production in contrast for example to Germany, which engages intensely with the diaspora situation.12 For Giuseppe Tornatore’s La sconosciuta (The Unknown Woman, 2006) particularly the meta-structure of the melodrama as well as the “maternal melodrama” will be explored. In Marco Tullio Giordana’s Quando sei nato non puoi più nasconderti, it is interesting how he plays with the roles of the victim, the hero, and the villains as well as the temporal structure of the “too late.” L’assedio (Besieged, 1998) by Bernardo Bertolucci raises the question of the “melos” in the drama. The films Azzurro (Denis Rabaglia, 2000) and Solino (Fatih Akin, 2002) complete this review of elements of the (e)migration melodrama.

La sconosciuta At the very beginning of her review of La sconosciuta, Marijana Erstiü concludes that the film is “not a melodrama with Giuseppe Tornatore’s trademark theme of the Mezzogiorno”; instead, it is “a thriller that plays with the classic film noir tradition of Hollywood” (Erstiü 2010, 117). In the course of her text, Erstic explains that time and again La sconosciuta as crime film resorts to voyeuristic or melodramatic elements and thus becomes a film noir. She finally calls it “black crime melodrama full of suspense” (Erstic 2010, 129). Erstic’s quest for categories—thriller? crime film? categorically “voyeuristic elements” not fitting with “melodramatic”?—is an indication that in La sconosciuta various elements of different genres come together, which can be interpreted most coherently using Williams’ concept of meta-melodrama. In her five points, the question regarding the space of innocence and virtue, which ultimately is publicly recognized, plays a seminal role. In Tornatore’s film as so often in melo-

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drama, this is depicted as a space of love and also sexual fulfilment, which Irena shares with a construction worker but which can only now be engaged through memories triggered by objects (for example strawberries). These flashback images of happiness are set off aesthetically from the main, present time of the action through their vivid colour (compared to the dark atmosphere of the streets) and their haziness (compared to sharp images). The contrast between the levels of images is visually almost painful, like the loss itself which cannot be compensated by revenge— only through being close to the child that was born as a result of the love affair. It is this strong emotion, this pathos that drives the story forward: the feelings of a mother for her beloved child, even though the viewer only understands this properly later on. The motherly love sets in motion the dialectic of pathos and action in the course of which the virtue of the heroine emerges, which in the end is confirmed publicly in a court of law and privately by her “daughter” (in the last scene). Justice as social recognition has been served. The connection between the lost space of innocence, feelings of revenge, and maternal feelings leads to the actions, which in the beginning are enigmatic: renting the apartment, the cash carried along, the contact with the caretaker, as well as the intentional harming of the nanny. Penetrating the family space of the Adachers, as the new nanny, strengthens her maternal feelings, which culminate in Irina finding the (supposed) adoption papers in the safe and Irina’s strict educational methods for her “daughter” Tea. This in turn provokes the reactions of Ida Adacher and Irena’s former pimp. These then prompt Irena’s final act of resistance and ultimately her confession. For Williams, the dialectic of pathos and action is bound up with temporal oscillation between “in the nick of time” and “too late.” In La sconosciuta, the motif of the daughter, which is withheld for a long time, pushes the “too late” to the fore, which laments the loss of love and a harmonious physical relationship. Towards the end of the film, the viewer has a growing desire that this woman, who has been kept as a slave and forced to bear eleven children in nine years, should be successful in the battle for her “daughter” and recognition as a mother. The film saves this moment until the very end. Tea’s smile for Irena releases her tears, precisely because it is too late but not too late for a gesture of love. Tea is now grown up and no longer dependent on her mother; she leaves the home that never existed. With this plot structure La sconosciuta joins the ranks of the “maternal melodrama,”13 which revolves around a victim or the self-sacrifice of a woman for her child, whose goodness is acknowledged at the end of the story. A paradigmatic example is the classic

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Hollywood film The Old Maid (Edmund Goulding 1939), in which Charlotte (Bette Davis) is acknowledged at the very last moment by her daughter kissing her before she leaves home to get married and start her own life. Known only to her daughter as Aunt Charlotte, she consciously decided to relinquish acknowledgement of parenthood and instead secures a better future for her illegitimate offspring by allowing her to be brought up as the daughter of a married, well-off cousin. Here, rational choice outweighs feeling and results in Charlotte sacrificing her maternal instincts. It is on this emotional level that La sconosciuta develops its critical force with regard to emigration, birth relations, and justice. Although Irena is not Tea’s birth mother, her caring maternal feelings outweigh the official adoption papers. Her battle against the child becoming a victim ultimately prevails over the fact she, herself, is a victim, even though it is (almost) too late, for the judicial system imprisons her for many years because she fought against being abused. The viewers see that Irena is morally in the right, although she does not have any rights (she is not the mother). At the last moment the film establishes “felt” justice, for which purpose the melodrama was “invented.” The point of the film, of course, is that this woman, who has been so maltreated but is capable of such intense feelings of love, is an immigrant with no rights. She has virtually no options and can be, therefore, unwillingly complicitly sexually exploited and kept as a slave. It is the foreigner, the “Unknown Woman,”14 who is the moral heroine of this story.

Quando sei nato non puoi più nasconderti Marco Tullio Giordana’s film of 2005 plays with changing roles. Daniel Winkler has shown that the originally African sentence, “Once You’re Born You Can No Longer Hide,” is uttered by a black immigrant at the beginning of the film. Initially, this renders the role of the entrepreneur’s son a passive one. He has to “alienate” himself culturally before being born again towards the end of the film as a committed person, whereas the illegal alien (clandestino) becomes an aware and proactive subject (Winkler 2007, 248). The plot executes further interesting transformations of roles with regard to the three classical subject positions of the melodrama: victim, villain, and hero/heroine. In the film, exchanges of the stereotypical assignment of roles takes place at two points, which are both highly emotionally framed. The first one has already been described at the beginning of this essay. By stating the culminating accusatory question, “È giusto vivere cosí?,” Radu is no longer only the hero that rescued the rich kid, first from drowning in the ocean waves and then from the people

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smugglers. With their moral indignation, he and Alina become the innocent and virtuous victims of the worldwide injustice that exists between countries and cultures. They become victims that someone has to help, which Bruno intends to do. The fact that Radu is not wearing his friendship bracelet alerts the viewer to an imminent turnaround because the gesture of exchanging bracelets in the reception camp was so emotionally charged. In fact, the “brother and sister” leave the camp during the night after cold-bloodedly betraying the family’s trust: villains, who hide behind a mask of feigned pathos but really “only” want money. Thus, they destroy Sandro’s naïve and innocent belief in them, who with a theatrical gesture cuts off his friendship bracelet with a kitchen knife. The second switch of roles takes place at the end of the film: when it is revealed that Radu is not her brother but her pimp. Alina transforms from a villain into a victim again in a true melodramatic sense, for her innocence—not only her child-like trust, like Sandro’s, but also her physical innocence, her virginity—has been sacrificed. The realisation of this “too late” effect causes Sandro to weep because he cannot deal with this loss in any other way. This turnaround is also emotionally framed and highly melodramatic. The characters hardly speak at all; instead, the content of what passes between them (the “too late”) is communicated through music (melos) by the Eros Ramazotti song “Un’emozione per sempre.”15 The globally intelligible title of the song says it all. It is about a feeling that remains forever, although it actually has no reality: The encounter with a smile full of love (“sorriso acceso d’amore”) for two who do not have a place in the real world as a couple because, as for the singer, other things are important (“nel mio mondo non ci sei solo tu”). In the end, all that remains in people’s hearts (“nel cuore della gente”) is the feeling of having experienced wonderful moments in words and melodies. Here, the song attains a distinctly self-reflexive level semantically, as well as for the film. On the one hand, it describes the function of mass media sentimentality (the viewers are dominated by feelings that have no “real” place in everyday life), and on the other, it comments on how the story between Sandro and Alina will presumably proceed. In the story-world depicted, it seems highly unlikely that Alina could be more to Sandro than just a wake-up call that will usher in his departure from the ideal world of his parents. What remains are the intense emotions of “forever” and the tears over what has been lost, whereby it is not solely about regaining a state of innocence, which is an impossibility, but of mourning as a prerequisite for change. Sandro accomplishes this in a highly sentimental fashion: from hero of the Italian in-group community to member of the global family of man, to which all belong irrespective of nationality, including Alina. At an

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earlier point in the film, there were various scenes in which Sandro’s social circle react with effusive joy to his rescue: the child on the television that went missing returns home, a little hero. In the last sequence after the tears, Sandro renounces this role by denying his identity to a kiosk owner where he buys a panino. Instead, he sits down next to a young girl, who is being forced to prostitute herself: a simple, yet pathosladen gesture of solidarity, which is where the film ends. This ending clearly demonstrates the function of the melodrama with regard to the issue of justice in a secular world. It incorporates elements of realism (the kitschy-harmonious solution of adoption failings) in order to orchestrate more powerfully the emotional reaction that this injustice cannot remain. In this way, it compensates for the impossibility of mediating between absolute and distributive justice in the given circumstances by constructing the fiction of an “emozione per sempre,” which weepy cinemagoers can (and should) take home with them: how on earth can Europe sleep peacefully when even such a small incident suffices to blur the borders between the inside and the outside of the Schengen Agreement fortress? This comforting feeling of bringing an accusation that everyone agrees upon is especially conveyed by the close-up, which according to Hermann Kappelhoff is the central stylistic device of the melodrama (Kappelhoff 2004, 264-284). The close-up of the expressive, pretty face of Alina, who must lose her innocence—although as the song points out ironically this may not interest anyone particularly (“nel mio mondo non ci sei solo tu”)—is really (merely) melodrama and joins “Giordana’s logic of a melodramatic cinéma engage” (Winkler 2007, 250)—as Winkler calls this aesthetics of felt justice.

L’assedio L’assedio, made in 1998, could be construed as a film that is highly critical of Europe because it portrays the putative “besieging” of the European fortress by immigrants from all over the world as the besieging of the young immigrant women by those European men who have difficulty in finding a woman. Mr. Kinsky (David Thewlis) is an Englishman living in Rome who does not speak Italian. He is pale and socially incompetent to the point of autism and is consuming the inheritance left by his aunt in a seemingly indifferent manner. He could be a character out of Michel Houellebecq’s novels, which celebrate the decline of hegemonial masculinity. Indeed, L’assedio could be a preliminary study for his novel Plateforme (2001), which is about the sexual fantasies of a frustrated forty-year old man that then spawn the winning business idea of

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organising sex tourism from the developed to the developing countries. Mr. Kinsky’s sudden changeovers from passionate declarations of love to silent actions in the background can only be described as iniquitous exploitation and importuning, as “besieging” the young woman Shandurai (Thandie Newton) and driving her to a crisis of conscience and emotional distress. His proposal is: “Your body for the body of your husband.” The deal, which is her idea, is a test of female virtue. Thus, it is only logical that Mr. Kinsky and Shandurai end up drunk in bed together while her husband is downstairs at the door. The frequent inserts of white sheets seem to suggest that Shandurai was still a virgin, and therefore, the price she paid morally was high: the loss of innocence is both concrete and figurative. So far, so soberingly racist, sexist, and capitalistic—“so what’s love got to do with it?” Why does Shandurai write him a note saying “Mr. Kinsky, I love you”? In her interpretation of L’assedio in the chapter “Europe and the Third Space” in her book Screening Strangers, Yosefa Loshitzky identifies music as a possible answer: Despite the binary logic so evident in Besieged, the film can be read as attempting to challenge and deconstruct the very same logic with which it is imbued. It tries to break the binarism of man/woman, black/white, master/slave, expatriate, and voluntary privileged exile/involuntary exile-refugee. The role of music is instrumental in achieving this flight from binarism and it also shifts from contrapuntal to duet. (Loshitzky 2010, 87-88)

Although Loshitzky does not refer directly to melodrama as a mode in this context, she nevertheless names one of its principal strategies: melos. It is the Greek word for song, melody, or distinctive melodic character. Extended, the concept could include aesthetics in general. In addition to music, colour design, configuration of motifs, film editing sequences, interiors, or any feature that is “mute text”16 can potentially intervene in the narrative. Indeed, as a “system of punctuation” (1987, 50) it actually constitutes the melodramatic narrative, if one follows Thomas Elsaesser’s founding text of new melodrama studies (1987). In this sense, the duet between piano composition (music) and vacuum cleaner action (gesture) creates a filmic space of encounter (the only one) that is situated outside of clear differences, a kind of “third space” of the translation of cultures, of hybridisation, which Loshitzky observes with reference to Homi Bhabha’s theories. From the standpoint of the melodrama, the price for this encounter is also high (but that was always the case). Shandurai gives up her virtue and her pride and gives herself to the “villain” Kinsky, who “penetrates” in all senses of the word the moral,

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innocent space of her marriage to Winston. Kinsky, for his part, sacrifices European heritage, according to this reading, and gives up his cultural identity so that the music-making artist can mutate into a “fool in love.” This bond between the two protagonists is very weak, and the film ends with tears in Shandurai’s eyes. Similar to Quando sei nato non puoi più nasconderti, L’assedio addresses the theme of emigration as an inconceivable, absolute injustice, which the West does not confront emotionally. In the end, Kinsky wins the prize. The melos of the melo-drama seeks to construct, out of this sobering discovery, at the very least, a portrayal of love. This depicts the challenging problem of migration as private and not solely a social problem (Williams 1998, 68).

Azzurro and Solino Two productions that are not genuinely Italian which treat the theme of “Emigration and Italy” complete this analysis of the relationship between melodrama and migration. In Azzurro (2000), the scriptwriter and director, Denis Rabaglia, delivers a frank portrayal of the structures of exploitation obtained in the heyday of the emigration of foreign workers to Switzerland. Giuseppe di Metrio (Paolo Villaggio) not only laboured for his former employer Broyer, he also gave him the formula for applying bitumen to roads for a very small fee, with which Broyer made a fortune. Forty years later, di Metrio needs part of this fortune to pay for his blind granddaughter’s eye operation. However in the meantime, Broyer has become mentally confused and now lives in a “retirement” home. All that Broyer has to offer the old man and former friend is the sobering knowledge that the foreign workers had been completely “swindled.” (“Giuseppe, I owe you the truth, the whole truth. And the truth is that we Swiss conned you Italians. And I was the first.”) The small amount of money that he can give Giuseppe is probably not worth much today, according to Broyer. Di Metrio leaves, together with his disappointed granddaughter, frustrated at how blind he was himself. The motif of “inability to see” connects Azzurro with other melodramas, from Douglas Sirk’s film classic Magnificient Obsessions (1954) to Dancer in the Dark (2000) by Lars von Trier, made at the same time as Azzurro. The film’s motif is a counterpoint to Max Frisch’s 1975 dictum “We called for manpower, but people came instead.” At the wedding of his old friend Giorgio, Giuseppe bitterly caricatures Frisch’s assumed humanism and finds him guilty of blindness: “We called for manpower, but modern slaves came instead.” It is now too late for a just solution on a large scale. With globalisation, the world has entered a new phase of

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labour migration. Again, it is the melodrama—here using the mode of affective temporality between “in the nick of time” and “too late”—that in an individual case procures justice. Giorgio provides the money for the operation, the younger Giuseppe had an affair with Broyer’s wife, on the dam wall the two (half-) brothers meet who had not known of each other’s existence, and the grandfather returns home, hangs up a photograph of his “real” family, and dies peacefully. Although it is too late, everything happens at the right moment. The film ends on a conciliatory note with an instrumental version of Paolo Conte’s famous song “Azzurro.” Solino, German director Fatih Akin’s third film, is a dramatization of the book by Ruth Toma. It supplements this panorama of figurations of Melodrama and Migration: The Example of Italy with an uncontrived fantasy of “origins as innocence,” which is provided in the title. Solino is the town that the Amato family leave in order to go to Duisburg in Germany and to bring pizzas to the North. Solino is also the place that the mother immediately wants to return to when she discovers that she has leukaemia. Her younger son, Gigi, follows her. Cold Germany has changed the father, set the brothers against each other, and made the mother ill. By contrast, warm Southern Italy heals the mother and brings the son simple fortunes and happiness, although in the North he could have become a truly creative artist. The film explores these oppositions, Manichaean polarities, up to the very end: cold versus hot, father versus mother, culture versus nature, artificiality versus authenticity, early slapstick film versus political film or essay/documentary film. Thus, Solino is a celebration of a paradise lost and regained out of time, a romantic film melodrama with a focus on female-coded longing (the mother, the gentle and creative brother) to leave the faraway place and return home. Solino barely touches upon the wider contexts and historical caesuras; it negates the dialectic of pathos and action in a timeless, premodern space of nature where waves break in their eternally regular rhythm (and no boats full of illegal immigrants are shown, in contrast to Lamerica—Gianni Amelio, 1994—or Quando sei nato non puoi più nasconderti).

The Melodramas of Migration: Appeasement or Rebellion? In the moral philosophical discourse of the (late) modern era, the melodrama compensates the problems associated with creating social justice. The initial premise posits that problems emerge paradigmatically in connection with the subject of emigration and thematize questions such as

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legitimate property, a person’s dignity, lifetime achievement, and the necessity of redistribution. The melodrama provides powerful fictions (images and stories) for the affective processing of intolerable conditions and thus serves to mobilize moral feelings toward a sense of justice, but it does this in a non-complex way and is therefore not “good.” In her most recent study of the melodrama, Linda Williams has addressed precisely this question: “When is Melodrama ‘Good’?” (Williams 2011). It is “good,” she argues in her reading of the “mega-melodrama” television series The Wire, when it does not follow a Nietzschean logic of resentment according to which the victim is readable and recognized as morally righteous by the very fact that he/she is a victim; suffering, under attack, and therefore justified in defending him or herself and striking back. This logic of a reactive-resentful morality has been explored by Elisabeth Anker with reference to the melodramatic processing of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 (Anker 2005, 22-37). For Williams, the extreme temporal expansion of the narration in The Wire, where the viewers follow characters for a long time through several situations, demonstrates how a morally “good” melodrama can be narrated, by reflecting on the acknowledgement of the victim and questioning the automatism in recognising someone as “good.” The character Bubbles does not consider the justice he receives in an article in the Baltimore Sun for his reformed character as self-evident proof of his virtue but instead as a spur to become a responsible citizen. What Williams points to here is the decisive step from social recognition to conscious political intervention in the criteria for justice as outlined above. This is a step that the melodrama cannot and will not perform. Here, Williams is quite prosaic when she points out that striving for justice is the greatest virtue of melodrama, but this should not be confused with justice actually being carried out. In this sense, the melodramas discussed here are a call to rebellion: which, however, can go unheeded and disappear without a trace. The three female figures, Irena, Alina, and Shandurai, are victims who can be read as morally “good” without being static characters, in spite of being regarded as (sex) objects by their milieu. In this connection, Isabel Santaolalla has remarked: often, in films from all three countries [Spain, Italy, Greece, J.M.], the insertion of an “other” in the film’s narrative acts as a catalyst for change through crisis and suffering. […] More often than not, however, their heightened awareness is not about the marginalization of the other at all, but about aspects of their own self, personal life, and emotional strains. Audiences, too, undergo a cathartic experience through the “distant suf-

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fering” of the migrant characters. But we might want to question whether, more problematically, we are also lured into complicity in the film’s sado/masochistic dynamics of pleasure in the contemplation of the simultaneously sexualized and suffering “foreign” body. (Santaolalla 2010, 169)

That the melodrama has always sent its women characters through Purgatory is commonplace (Seeßlen 1980, 25). Also, that the aim of melodrama is not change but enduring the unendurable is one of the essentials even of “good” melodrama, as mentioned above. What the theme of migration featured here and in the films analysed shows, in this context, is the positively grotesque dimension of justice failing because of the maledominated reality of patriarchal Western societies (in this case Italy’s, but it could be any European society): justice, which is an integral component of the liberal, emancipatory, and enlightened community of values. Because the two principles of Republicanism and achievement characterize the model of justice, which only binds the individual politically to society (and which is not felt morally), the denial of worth shown in the films is a systematically produced disaster for the protagonists and creates such a deep rift that it can only be compensated by tears. Thus, contemporary Italian melodrama on the theme of emigration with a focus on the fate of women is once again close to waging war on patriarchy which reached its last high point in the 1940s and 1950s. Although not as dominant, it is still the middle-class family with its lovely home (the Adachers in La sconosciuta and the family in Quando sei nato non puoi più nasconderti) that serves as the foil for comparison. Above all, the films demonstrate the ability of the genre, of the melodramatic mode, to transform. This is particularly visible in the differentiated figures of the female protagonists.17 They are not flat characters that merely play “the goodies” but complex figures who work on gradually formulating innocence. In the given context, this should be understood as social justice—another further development of the genre. At the very least, the figures are embodiments of the longing for social justice, which is more important for the audience anyway because it is interested in strong (physical) effects. In this way, the feeling of a deficit, of a rift, of a lacuna in the divided good (according to Taylor) expresses “the need for social cohesion that evidently has not yet found adequate representation even though it is decisive for sustaining the norms of justice” (Decker 2003, 42). The melodrama of migration is the articulation of a need and an inability that makes both sentimentally legible.

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Notes 1

“Is it fair that they separate us because I’m a few months older than 18? Is it fair that we have to leave our country? Is it fair that we have to live like this?” 2 “No, it’s not fair.” 3 “But it’s not my fault.” 4 “Did you know everyone was crying? You’ve no idea! That really shook me, they really care for you.” 5 “You still don’t understand who they are? They needed money, needed to rip us off!” 6 “It’s not fair / it’s not my fault.” 7 Hollywood’s Critical Eye. 8 Here, Williams intervenes in debates found in Gledhill (1987). 9 See especially Gledhill (1987). See also Vicinus (1981). 10 Here, I follow Axel Honneth’s argument in the controversy with Nancy Fraser in Fraser and Honneth (2003). 11 Starting with Max Frisch’s legendary dictum “We called for manpower, but people came instead” in the film Siamo Italiani by Alexander J. Seiler (1965). 12 For more on this distinction, see Berghahn and Sternberg (2010). Whether this is a meaningful concept, however, is an open question; for example, Fatih Akn would probably not call himself a filmmaker of the diaspora, even though by this definition he is one. 13 In the sense of a sub-set of themes: “specifications of setting or milieu” (Williams 1998, 51). 14 Using the motif of the ‘Unknown Woman’, one could also propose a reading following the melodrama concept of Stanley Cavell (1997). 15 “An Emotion Forever” (2003). 16 See also Anker (2005, 24). 17 For the period up to 1980, see Seeßlen (1980, 226).

COMEDY FILM AND IMMIGRATION TO ITALY: READING MASCULINITY, HYBRIDITY, AND SATIRE IN LEZIONI DI CIOCCOLATO (2007), QUESTA NOTTE È ANCORA NOSTRA (2008), AND INTO PARADISO (2010) GAOHENG ZHANG

Introduction At this time, Italian comedy films that centre on immigration to Italy are uncommon. Typically, their narrative focuses on the Italian male protagonists and not the immigrants. In this article, three such films of different types will be analysed: Lezioni di cioccolato (Chocolate Lessons Claudio Cupellini, 2007), a screwball comedy; Questa notte è ancora nostra (This Night is Still Ours Paolo Genovese and Luca Miniero, 2008), an antic comedy; and Into Paradiso (Paola Randi, 2010), a transformative comedy. Lezioni di cioccolato is the story of a building contractor Mattia (Luca Argentero) who causes the injury of Kamal (Hassani Shapi), an Egyptian chef. Mattia is forced to participate in a course on making chocolate in the Perugina Company in place of and disguised as Kamal. In an amicable learning environment free of racism, he romances Cecilia (Violante Placido). Eventually, Mattia and Kamal win the top prize in a contest with a dessert that combines Italian chocolate and Egyptian dates. Questa notte è ancora nostra focuses on Massimo (Nicolas Vaporidis), a mortician in Rome who courts Jing (Valentina Isumi Cocco), a second-generation Chinese immigrant girl. In an effort to recruit her into his band, he learns to appreciate Chinese culture, which is initially alien to him. Later, he falls in love with Jing and takes her away from Ban Long (Shi Yang), her fiancé in an arranged marriage who has just arrived in Italy. In Into Paradiso, Alfonso (Gianfelice Imparato), a scientist-turned-Camorra courier, takes refuge in Paradiso, a building in which a Sri Lankan community lives. There, Alfonso befriends Gayan (Saman Anthony), a former cricket

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champion, who has arrived in Italy recently and becomes romantically interested in Giacinta (Eloma Ran Janz), an astrologist. The contrast between the harsh reality of life in Naples and the peaceful environs of Paradiso, together with the dramatic change in their professions, is the backdrop against which the masculine identities of Alfonso and Gayan are refashioned. According to Mark Winokur, three kinds of Hollywood comedy films may be identified in the 1930s in relation to audience responses to immigration and ethnicity: namely, screwball, antic, and transformative comedies. As he explains: transformative comedy is about physical inclusion into a physically dangerous world; antic comedy is about inclusion into a socially restrictive world; and screwball comedy is about inclusion into a social or physical world that seems deceptively safe. (Winokur 1996, 17)

Although elements of the three types are present in all three films, this categorization is useful to highlight their differences within the comedy genre. In this essay, focus is placed on the dynamics among masculinity, hybridity, and satire in the three films in order to analyse how Italian comedy film distinctively depicts immigration to Italy. Two major arguments will be put forth in the following two sections. First, in these films, the marginalized or complicit Italian male identity is constructed and negotiated by mirroring the comparably marginalized or complicit immigrant male identity. Paralleling Italian and immigrant masculinities is a rhetorical strategy employed in many films that make use of the past and present subaltern experiences of Italians to render the social experience of immigrants in Italy familiar and commonplace to an Italian audience. The special resonance of this rhetorical strategy in Italy in connection to the Oriental motif in these films is particularly interesting. In Lezioni di cioccolato, Questa notte è ancora nostra, and Into Paradiso, respectively, the gendered identities of Italian and immigrant men are paralleled through their mutual inferior social status, inexperience with foreign cultures, and professional disappointment. This representational strategy contributes to the cinematic negotiation of cultural blending or hybridity, which is one way of depicting Italy’s multiculturalism in cinema. Through this process, it is suggested in the films that although the immigrant protagonists do not become Italians, the Italian protagonists share many traits with immigrants, and in certain ways, they are like immigrants in their own country. The three types of comedy on immigration contribute to the nuances of such representation, which tends to obscure or disregard the real economic

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and social differences between native Italians and foreign immigrants, even as these themes are repeatedly addressed in the narrative. Second, one can contend that these comedy films satirize cultural hybriddity crucially through the intervention of female characters. In Lezioni di cioccolato, Mattia’s identity masquerade is constantly at risk because of Cecilia’s curiosity about his supposed Muslim background. In Questa notte è ancora nostra, Jing questions whether the intercultural skills of either Massimo or Ban Long could be compatible with her ItalianChinese upbringing. Finally, in Into Paradiso, Giacinta’s down-to-earth approach to the realities of immigration and everyday life is a world apart from Alfonso’s and Gayan’s fantastical and unrealistic thoughts and actions. In this way, the three films temporarily undermine the hybridized, essentially male-centred Italian and immigrant identities in satirical situations. However, they manage this with varying intensity of satire, whose reasons can be analysed from the perspective of the industry and tradition of comedy film in Italy. Ultimately, this paper shows how the double-edged nature of comedy film to both create and subvert cultural hybridity in the processes of immigration can cause audience members to reconsider the similarities and differences between Italians and others. It is from this perspective that these comedies partake in the social experience of immigrants and dynamics of their identities.

Paralleled Masculinities and Cultural Hybridity Analysing cinematic representations of paralleled masculinities that contribute to cultural hybridity; this section examines what rhetoriccal/communicative purpose these representations serve in relation to comedy film and immigration to Italy. To achieve these goals, a focus on scenes that address transnational or transcultural situations in the three films is particularly interesting. A rhetorical strategy shared by all three films is the deployment of migrant communities from the “Orient” in their representations: Egypt, China, and Sri Lanka. There may be several reasons for this commonality. First, comic effects in improbable situations can be achieved more effectively by juxtaposing Italian culture with “Oriental” cultures than European or American ones. For instance, in Lezioni di cioccolato, Christian and Islamic customs regarding alcoholic beverages are contrasted to evoke laughter. Unaware of the inappropriateness of his gift, Mattia brings a bottle of wine to Kamal. This causes Kamal to devise a series of hilarious tricks to make Mattia take his place in the chocolate course.

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Second, in order to depict multiculturalism in Italy with greater visual impact, it helps to focus on immigrants whose racial features are markedly different from those of most Italians. In Questa notte è ancora nostra, Jing is pursued initially because the song Massimo’s band is rehearsing mentions the “magic of oriental eyes.” In Lezioni di cioccolato, a sequence centres on Mattia’s drastic physical transformation from an Italian, middle-class professional to an unskilled, lower-class, undocumented Arab immigrant in preparation for his identity disguise in class. Because of the large immigrant populations from Albania and Romania in Italy who sometimes pass as Italians, the conspicuousness of immigrants from the “Orient” enables these films to indicate the multicultural condition in Italy more emphatically. Third, the employment of these racialized immigrant communities encourages the Italian audience to identify with immigrants through their memory of Italy’s own marginalization in Europe. It is well known that the centuries-long history of foreign tourism in Italy contributes signifycantly to the enduring image of Italy as Europe’s South (Agnew 1997). Furthermore, through processes of Orientalism within one country, the South became the North’s racial and cultural Other.1 Italy’s worldwide diaspora, the racial prejudice, and Orientalized remarks directed toward Italian emigrants abroad have also contributed to the country’s perceived marginalization in the international arena.2 In such a (trans-)national and socio-historical milieu, representation of underprivileged migrants from the world’s Orient and South is intended to bring about a greater understanding of immigration to Italy among the Italians. The scene in Into Paradiso in which sky lanterns are lit in celebration of a Sri Lankan Buddhist festival calls to mind the innumerable Catholic religious festivals in Italian migrant communities throughout the world. Finally, the Oriental theme also contributes to the films’ construction of paralleled masculinities through depicting the complicit or marginal condition of the male protagonists. Indeed, the marginalized or complicit masculinities of Italian and immigrant men are paralleled in the three films to show their common existential plights. This is a typical rhetorical strategy intended to increase Italian audience identification and to promote Italian humanism with regard to immigrants to Italy, which is evident not only in these comedies but also in many other relevant Italian films. Comedy adds a lighthearted and satirical touch to this representational approach. The use of the terms “marginalized” and “complicit” masculinities, in this paper, draws on the theorization of sociologist R.W.Connell. The critic contends that in any given gender system there are four kinds of relations among masculinities: namely, hegemony, complicity, subordina-

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tion, and marginalization. Hegemonic and subordinated masculinities are defined in opposing terms. If hegemonic masculinity represents the socially normative masculine ideal to which many men aspire, the subordinated masculinity fails to adhere to it almost entirely in public. Men of complicit masculinity endorse the hegemonic masculine ideal by performing it studiously, and for the most part, successfully. However, those of marginalized masculinity achieve conformity to this ideal only very partially, from which they do not reap significant material or social benefits (Connell 2005, 76-81). In these three films, the Italian and immigrant protagonists occupy the two intermediate masculine positions. For the purposes of this paper, masculine marginalization indicates the state of men who fail to enact core tenets of the hegemonic masculine ideal effectively in public and who often live on the periphery of society. Meanwhile, masculine complicity points to the extensive homosocial collaboration among men who maintain the patriarchal society and derive benefit from it by simulating the hegemonic masculine ideal. In Lezioni di cioccolato, Mattia and Kamal embody complicit masculinities, which are paralleled in their shared inferior social status in Italy. As a building contractor, Mattia is domineering and self-serving with immigrant workers but servile and accommodating with his wealthy client. While Kamal is exploited by Mattia and, more generally, by the labour market in Italy, as an undocumented construction worker, he is the undisputed head of his family. Their enactment of hegemonic masculine ideals in their respective Italian and Muslim cultures and their submission to men who are their social superiors, reveal their complicit position in the structure of masculinities and social power. Through dissimulation and transitory identity change, the two men mirror each other, and each experiences society from the other’s standpoint. In keeping with the conventions of screwball comedy on immigration, situations arising from their inferior social status are depicted as reasonably bearable and far from lifethreatening. Paralleled complicit masculinities are also manifested by Massimo and Ban Long in Questa notte è ancora nostra. Here, the comparable conditions stem from their inexperience with foreign cultures and low-level intercultural management. Throughout the film, Massimo is urged by his close male friend to act like a real Italian man with Jing in the hope that she will fall for him and sing with the band. The ribald jokes overloaded with sexual innuendos that are told by his friend and Massimo’s attempts to act upon them reveal the extent to which they are complicit with the hegemonic project (Connell 2005, 79). However, out of his milieu in the Chinese immigrant community, Massimo makes intercultural blunders. He

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careens between his Italian cultural background, which is charged with discursive masculine hegemonic aspirations, and the Chinese diasporic community in Italy, of which he knows virtually nothing. Like Massimo, Ban Long, Jing’s Chinese fiancé in an arranged marriage, is also caught between two cultures. He comes from a rich family in China, whom he brags about in the videos he sends to Jing. In them, he is dressed sumptuously in traditional Chinese attire, speaking and gesturing emphatically against the Shanghai skyline. However, rather than enthralling Jing, his posturing alienates her. Moreover, his lack of proficiency in Italian and inability to assimilate into Jing’s bicultural milieu, once he is in Italy, doom his courtship to ultimate failure. The socially restrictive environments in which both men find themselves—Massimo in the Chinese immigrant community, which is biased against the Italians and Ban Long in an Italy that is suspicious of Chinese immigrants—are prime ingredients for an antic comedy on immigration. In Into Paradiso, the marginalized masculinities of the two male protagonists are paralleled through their disappointing occupations in a competitive job market. As Alfonso—fired from his job as a laboratory scientist—adapts quickly and drastically to the world of the Camorra and his rooftop life, Gayan contends with a humiliating transformation from a famous cricket champion to a domestic caretaker who receives a tiny salary for looking after a whimsical old lady. To reinforce this, the camera intercuts between the two men and juxtaposes their similar actions in parallel situations. The film contrasts the peculiar phenomenon of employying Sri Lankan men in domestic service in Naples with the manly profession of cricket players in order to make fun of Gayan (Näre 2008, 103). The film also contrasts Alfonso’s laboratory coat in his work place with his boxers at home for a similar effect. For both men, the lowered status of their employment brings a sense of unease and a loss of dignity. Moreover, the building in which they live is in itself a testament to its residents’ marginality. Externally, Paradiso is indistinguishable from any other lower-class apartment building in Naples. Inside, however, it is the enclave of a Sri Lankan community that keeps its tradition alive through decor, business, and festivities. The identity transformation of the two men, the dangerous physical environment in which this occurs, and the immigrants’ inventive use of space are part of the conventions of transformative comedy on immigration. By offering various points of access for Italian audiences to identify with the existential dilemmas and to relate to the resulting jokes, the films suggest that these Italians who are nearly social outcasts are much like immigrants in their native country.3 Indeed, the mirroring of complicit and

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marginalized masculinities is an important mechanism through which cultural hybridity is articulated in the films. The cinematic negotiation of cultural hybridity—and by extension, cinematic multicultural Italy—is directly related to Italian government’s immigrant policy-making and public opinion toward immigration to Italy during the 2000s. When the centre-right coalition took office in 2001 and the Bossi-Fini Law 189 was passed in 2002 in response to the public discourse linking immigration to criminality and unemployment, state funds were increasingly spent on security and control of immigration rather than on the social integration of immigrants. The linking of immigration and criminality was accentuated by the inclusion of Law 94 in a package of laws concerning public security and not immigration legislation by the centre-right government in 2009. The Amato reform proposed by the centre-left government in 2006 was unsuccessful. Most integration strategies were developed by civic society actors who provided extensive social assistance independent of state funding.4 The mass media contributed significantly to the promotion of state immigration policy in the cultural domain in Italy.5 In the processes of policy-making in both centre-right and centre-left governments and in the mainstream media, the immigrants’ ability to integrate into Italian society is a critical point of debate. The Agreement of Integration between the Foreigner and the State introduced in the security package in 2009 (which became law in 2011) established the intent of the Italian state to transition from emergency measures to immigration management and integration strategies. In light of these social and media dynamics, the tendency of multiculturalist and pro-immigrant Italian films to reconcile the differences between Italians and immigrants seems unsurprising. This extends not only to cultural and religious differences, but also to social and economic ones. As comedies, the three films analysed the approach of the negotiation between cultural hybridity and identity difference by mixing routine and extraordinary situations in surprising ways. For Geoff King, a hallmark of comedy film is to address the gap between what are considered “‘normal’ routines of life of the social group in question” and what is considered “different in characteristic ways from what is usually expected in the noncomic world” (King 2002, 5). The incongruity and exaggeration engendered by this gap give expression to awkward mixing and temporal and geographical displacement in comedy film (King 2002, 5). The three films depict the state of being out of place as the Italians step into migrant communities and as the immigrants assimilate into Italian society. The construction of immigrant-Italian hybridity—typical of mixing and incongruity—occurs in improbable situations in which mistaken identities and

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dissimulation are enacted. However, by accentuating this aspect, these films partially perpetuate the perception that immigration to Italy is exceptional and, indeed, an intrusion into the routine life of Italians. To illustrate these points, a few scenes in which these enactments lead to a state of being in-between will be analysed, drawing on Homi Bhabha’s suggestion that hybridity consists of viewing identities as processes of dialogic and transitory negotiations (Bhabha 1994). Broadly speaking and using King’s words once more, there is a tendency in Lezioni di cioccolato and Questa notte è ancora nostra to move toward “harmony, integration, and the happy ending,” while in Into Paradiso, the opposite tendency is at work to produce “laugher, anarchy, and disruption of harmony” (King 2002, 8). In practice, this means an increasing rate of cultural hybridity in the first two films and constant disturbances to unsettle cultural hybridity in the third. In the final scene of Lezioni di cioccolato, the metaphor of ItalianMuslim hybridization is conveyed through the successful marriage of Umbrian hazelnuts and Egyptian dates in creating chocolate desserts that help Mattia and Kamal secure a top place in a contest. The metaphorical marriage of the two ingredients reflects a characteristic of screwball comedy whereby the immigrant’s difference is frequently legitimized through marriage (Winokur 1996, 19). Key episodes in the film move toward this final recognition. At first, Mattia masquerades as Kamal by means of physical transformation and changes of male accoutrements. He has his long hair cut, changes into working-class clothes, and switches to an older cellular phone and car model. As a parallel in order to fulfill his dream of opening a bakery in Italy, Kamal is compelled to learn what he perceives as the Italian specialty of using chocolate as the main ingredient in making desserts. The film then shows the comparable ecstasy, contentment, and perfection that well-made chocolate-based Italian and date-inspired Egyptian pastries are capable of evoking in their creators. This is reiterated by the meanings of the characters’ names: Kamal means perfection and Mattia means the gift of God. The male homosocialization between Mattia and Kamal is reinforced when the two characters compare men’s sexual behaviours and reproducetive patterns in Italy and Egypt and indulge in drinking alcohol. The solidified male friendship and mutual recognition—all manifestations of cultural hybridization—is then confirmed in the unexpected combination of ingredients. Made in 2007 which marked the centennial of Perugina, Lezioni di cioccolato promotes the international scope of the company’s School of Chocolate and the eye-popping assortment of chocolate products, many of which are made with ingredients from the “Orient” and

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proudly advertised as such. The comic gags performed by actors Argentero and Shapi contribute to the persuasiveness of the film’s screwball representation of hybridity. In general, the film draws on the stereotyped performativity of Italian and Egyptian cultures to illustrate cultural hybridity. This creates a sense of unity in the film through the display of supposedly shared Mediterranean habits, such as expressive hand gestures, rich vocal intonations, the tendency to be cunning and dishonest, and a passion for soccer and cars. In Questa notte è ancora nostra, the mixing of Italian and Chinese cultural elements is achieved by juxtaposing the stereotyped and biased views that the Italians and the Chinese have of each other. From the suspicious Italian point of view, the Chinese consume only food made of soy (in the words of Massimo’s father), do not die (their funeral house has never served the Chinese), practice Gong Fu (Jing is shown to be proficient in the Chinese martial arts), and are skilled negotiators (the Chinese shopkeepers bargain with neighbours to unload their merchandise where parking is forbidden). Similarly, the Chinese in the film are represented as having a biased view of the Italians, whom they perceive as womanizers (whereas the Chinese are serious about relationships established through arranged marriages), simpletons (two Italian women show their complete ignorance of the religions practiced in China), and hotheaded racists (a group of young men racialize Asian women and regard them all as prostitutes). Both sides express doubt that a Chinese and an Italian could be romantically attracted to each other. Jing and Massimo also tell each other lies for their own interests. These parallels culminate in the ending credits that champion hybridity by alluding to the combined skin colours of Massimo and Jing: They “will make a child who is a little white and a little yellow” and live in a “rosy future, finally full of colours.” The awkward and problematic convergence of skin colours and cultural attitudes highlights the tendency of films that address immigration to emphasize the higher degree of integration among second-generation immigrants. Having Japanese actors playing Chinese characters and using an incoherent combination of dialectal accents of Mandarin Chinese (and sometimes Japanese) in the film add another layer to the facile and chaotic hybridity depicted. In a comedy film with a clear racial slant, these antic comments on the Chinese and Italian cultural attitudes and skin colours are ways of both adopting and subverting existing stereotypes, which are based on the two cultures’ prior knowledge of each other, in order to achieve antic effects. This helps to reinforce the film’s message that through second-generation Chinese who have been brought up in Italy, the two cultures will bridge the communication gap. The fact that the actors

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portraying Jing (Japanese Italian) and Massimo (Greek Italian) are secondgeneration Italians of mixed races or ethnicities reinforces this message. In the above two films, there is a clear tendency to move toward a mutual understanding of the two cultures, although disruptions intervene intermittently to delay the eventual merger. In Into Paradiso, however, the tendency to disrupt brief moments of harmony dominates the narrative and presents a more complex view of the interaction among the ordinary Neapolitans, Sri Lankan immigrants, and the camorristi. What differentiates Into Paradiso from the other two films is that it depicts a dangerous place and a threatening situation in which the audience must consider the consequences of seemingly comic actions of eccentric characters. Consequently, the hybridization in Into Paradiso has a rather dark quality. Although there are some instances of intercultural harmony in the film, they often break down into discord immediately. For example, during their first meeting, Alfonso talks about the micro-communication between cells that he is working on, while Giacinta gives him a massage and teaches him meditation to cure his stress holistically by facilitating communication between his body and mind. The balance of microscopic and holistic communication, which is achieved momentarily, is cut short when the film moves to the parallel story of Gayan and the elderly lady in his care. The latter feigns a fall in retribution for having lost at chess and thus provides a pretext for Gayan to be scolded by the nurse. Another example is concerned with cuisine, as Alfonso cooks Sri Lankan food and Giacinta cooks pasta for their evening together. The dinner is cut short by the intrusion of the camorristi into Paradiso in search of Alfonso. Toward the end of the film, Alfonso explains the incompatibility of healthy and unhealthy cells within the same body, which metaphorically represents warring gangs within the Camorra as well as the Camorra’s interaction with a large sector of Neapolitan society. As Alfonso explains to the head of a gang that he wishes to understand how to re-establish communication with the unhealthy cells so that they will not develop into a cancer, members of another gang burst into the room. This ending casts major doubt on how hybridity may be transformed into something positive. Finally in keeping with its pronounced social and economic concerns, Into Paradiso accentuates the living conditions of immigrants. In the other two films, the houses in which the immigrants live are not significantly different from those of middle-class Italian families. This is contrary to the fact that housing presents one of the most tangible and difficult problems for immigrants in Italy.6 The overcrowded yet convivial Paradiso is a world apart from Alfonso’s spacious yet empty apartment.

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Hybridity and Satire Screwball, antic, and transformative comedies lend nuances to the construction and disruption of hybridity in the three films. While paralleled masculinities contribute to the representation of hybridity in them, female characters often cause trouble and dismantle hybridity. Satire calls cultural hybridity into question in these comedy films, and the female characters are the principal medium through which the satirical tone is articulated. Either the female characters themselves or the hybridity-related events as seen through their eyes are used to create satirical effects. Through these processes, the three films challenge the validity of the hybridization of the essentially male-centred Italian and immigrant identities in satirical situations, even though they have a varying degree of satire. The satirical tone of Lezioni di cioccolato and Questa notte è ancora nostra is rather gentle, making fun of intercultural blunders rather than attempting to make any serious social or political comment. In both films, satire is sporadic, unspecific, and weak in addressing the Italians’ ignorance of immigrant cultures. It does not pose a serious threat to the overall theme of cultural hybridity, which follows a progressive trajectory from ignorance to multiculturalism. Even so, female characters disturb this trajectory frequently. Cecilia’s probing questions undermine Mattia’s mimicry. Her curiosity about Islamic culture (e.g. polygamy) and desserts from the Middle East (e.g. balouza and mahalabia) reflect the general ethnocultural approach to immigration in the Italian media. These examples vividly show a mixture of anthropological interests and intercultural evaluations that are characteristic of this approach. That Mattia is able to answer the questions by either calling Kamal or asking a Hindu Pakistan immigrant on the street satirizes this approach. Furthermore, Cecilia’s ability to question cultural hybridity is discredited because she is ridiculed and depicted as being hysterical and impulsive as she admits her propensity to fall in love with men who lie. In Questa notte è ancora nostra, Jing’s satire of Massimo’s and Ban Long’s monocultural abilities challenges the authoritarian male voice from Italian and Chinese cultures that these characters sometimes assume. Because of Jing’s bicultural upbringing, she is torn between two worlds. Consequently, she challenges the intercultural skills and comfort levels of both men. She can go on a date with an Italian man who she has only met a few times, contending that she is “more Italian than Chinese” that night. Later on, however, she is so reverential of Chinese cultural mores and traditions that she prepares to sacrifice her happiness in order to keep her grandfather in Italy and to consolidate family debts by marrying Ban

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Long, the grandson of her family’s creditor. While the film caricatures these quandaries that show stereotyped sexual identities and female behaviours in two patriarchal cultures, it ultimately achieves reconciliation by resorting to the perennial theme of true love conquering all. Moreover, some satirical energy is also used to portray Jing herself. For instance, in the scene in which Massimo attempts to confront a group of Italian youngsters who make racist remarks in a Chinese restaurant, it is Jing who uses Gong Fu to fight them off for Massimo. The main purpose of this scene is to ridicule Massimo for his lack of physical vitality and, in particular, his ability to put up a fight, as male violence is often considered one of the defining features of Western masculinity. However, the film also disavows the representation of Jing as a mature and unruly woman who generates comic energy on her own in other parts of the film by casting her as a stereotyped, masculinized, Chinese woman who is adept at Gong Fu and also volatile in her decisions. Social satire and parody in Into Paradiso are much more prominent than in the other two films and are intensified by the contrast between Giacinta’s pragmatic approach to daily existence and the fantastical actions of Alfonso and Gayan. Unlike the two other films in which immigrants attempt to assimilate into Italian environments, Randi’s film takes place primarily in the immigrant community where Alfonso is the outsider. This is in keeping with the transformational potential of the main characters in this type of comedy film, which bears a resemblance to those of Charlie Chaplin. Critic Winokur contends that slapstick is an important tool for representing the culture of immigration to the United States in the cinema of 1930s because the films depict the physical danger imigrants face and a “fantasy method for avoiding that danger” (Winokur 1996, 47). He notes that “Chaplin transforms an alien, technological, industrial, politically amorphous world that governs the individual into a world that he administers” (Winokur 1996, 102). By analogy, Alfonso accomplishes exactly this in the three scenes in which he uses earplugs to detach himself from the physical environment and to enter into a world of fantasy and intense logical thinking. Through techniques that combine animation and diegetic acting, the film places Alfonso in game-like situations and mocks his inner logics that are conditioned by reports on criminal organizations and contemporary media. The first of these scenes caricatures the local authorities’ dealings with the Camorra and politicians and many other complications that might arise if he were to go to the police. He envisions the interrogation at the police station mentally and figures out that he needs to know whether the camorristi would recognize him if he were to leave the building. The second fantasy scene parodies the giallo (Italian

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detective film) by restaging the actual Camorra killing Alfonso has witnessed as fictional scenes in gialli. In his imaginary conversation with the actors in the killing scene, he asks for retakes so that he can find what he has been searching for: a photograph of himself that could be identified by the camorristi. Later, as he decides to jump across the gap between the rooftops of two buildings in order to flee without being noticed by the camorristi, Giacinta saves him from falling. The third scene involves a fake wedding in which Alfonso imagines himself dressed as a Sri Lankan and drinking champagne as he flirts with Giacinta to the music of The Blue Danube. This lampoons the silly and facile intercultural blending Alfonso foresees for himself and Giacinta after having taken refuge in a Sri Lankan community for only a few days. Appropriately, the scene is interrupted when Giacinta slaps Alfonso’s face in the wake of the camorristi’s brutal intrusion into Paradiso in search of Alfonso. At first, Giacinta blames him for having her community entangled with the Camorra, but eventually she helps him escape disguised as a Sri Lanka cricket player in training. From these analyses of the female characters, the varying degree of satire in these films becomes clear. Above, this aspect has been analysed mainly in relation to the three types of comedy films described by Winokur. There are a few more factors to consider, which will give more perspectives on how satire on cultural hybridity associated with immigration to Italy may be at work in the Italian film industry and among Italian audiences. The first is related to the nature and marketing strategies of the production companies. The main Italian producer of Lezioni di cioccolato is Cattleya (founded in 1997), which claims to be unique in Italy in terms of adopting an industrial—as opposed to artisan—approach to film production.7 Cattleya’s (co-)productions are characterized by a sharp focus on contemporary themes that appeal to a wide variety of Italian audiences— e.g. migration, transformation of the Italian family, coming-of-age stories, drugs, criminal organizations, and war. Cattleya has produced a few films on immigration to Italy, which typically do not polemicize immigration issues but rather extol humanism and cultural hybridity.8 In this respect, Lezioni di cioccolato conforms with Cattleya’s production philosophy and line of comedy films. On the other hand, Italian International Film (IIF) co-produced Questa notte è ancora nostra with The Walt Disney Company Italia. Founded in 1958, IIF produces and distributes Italian and foreign middlebrow films with a particular emphasis on comedies.9 It produced two commercially successful films directed by Fausto Brizzi starring Nicolas Vaporidis that have the word notte, night, in their titles.10 Questa notte è ancora nostra was renamed in order to appear as a sequel to those films. Given the film’s

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international scope and popular appeal, it also served to celebrate IIF’s fiftieth anniversary. A pointed satire could hardly emerge from the production contexts of these two films: of Lezioni di cioccolato and Questa notte è ancora nostra. Conversely, the energetic social and political satire of Into Paradiso is germane to its production company, Acaba Produzioni (founded in 2005), the aim of which is to make quality films.11 This company is characterized by a strong interest in depicting Italy’s dark side, including criminal organizations and migration.12 The film’s other production company, Cinecittà Luce, is the national institutional company charged with the long-term mission of promoting economic growth, social engagement, and environmental protection through film production.13 Into Paradiso, a serious social commentary, is an example of the gravity with which Cinecittà Luce approaches Italian cinema. Another perspective from which to consider the different satirical tone of these films is that of their target audience and focus on product attraction. Lezioni di cioccolato extols the century-long tradition of Perugina chocolate making, which appeals to those who are interested in Italy’s traditions of handcrafted food. The film refers specifically to the Perugina Company, and the classroom of the School of Chocolate is immediately recognizable. In fact, the School promotes its course offerings by advertising the film on its website.14 Meanwhile, Questa notte è ancora nostra is a vehicle for actor Vaporidis to exploit his comedic skills and handsome appearance by capitalizing on the success of his two previous notte films. Moreover, the film makes use of Vaporidis’ vocal talent to promote Daniele Silvestri’s music. Watching Vaporidis singing as he acts out the lyrics has potential appeal for middlebrow movie-goers. Finally, Into Paradiso is an art-house film intended for film festivals where the target audience would be familiar with the recent spate of films on Italy’s organized crime.15 While the comic component in Randi’s film differentiates it from these recent films, it shares the others’ concern to address Italy’s darker side during the Berlusconi administration. In particular, it gains advantage from actor Imparato’s very impressive performance as a Camorra courier in Matteo Garrone’s Gomorra (Gomorrah 2008). In addition to the immediate production and inter-cinematic contexts in which these films were made, the long tradition of the commedia all’italiana also contributes to their varying degree of satire. According to Gian Piero Brunetta, two strengths of this genre are its ability to document and comment on contemporary social changes in Italy in a timely and witty manner and the space it provides for experimentation with narrative

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models (2009, 164). Into Paradiso mixes comic and detective components to critique the ramifications of the Camorra in Naples and to make reference to earlier films on the same subject. In this respect, each of the other two films analysed also creates a microcosm in which the repercussions of immigration on the Italian labour market, social structure, and gender relations are examined. However, they do it with less sophistication. With its lineage going back to the works of Boccaccio and the commedia dell’arte, the Italian comic tradition allows for a very high number of carnivalesque and grotesque components. From this perspective, it is not surprising to find outrageous and vulgar pranks played on Italian funerals, obscene gags made about the male reproductive organ, and the archetypical jokes about passionate Italian males in Questa notte è ancora nostra. Such caricatures with unrealistic behaviours contribute to the audience’s detachment from the consequences of their actions. In addition, Lezioni di cioccolato and Questa notte è ancora nostra exploit the recent success and star quality of Italian actors Argentero and Vaporidis, thereby maintaining the close ties between comedy film and the star system in Italy, in which male stars like Marcello Mastroianni and Alberto Sordi played a major part. Although these films mirror social reality to some extent, the cinematic depiction of such “Italian male vices” as mama’s boys, opportunists, and the inept is consistent with the cross-referential tendency inherited from the tradition of the commedia all’italiana.16

Conclusion In Lezioni di cioccolato, Questa notte è ancora nostra, and Into Paradiso, cultural hybridity is reinforced crucially through paralleled masculinities but undermined through satirical situations involving the female characters. Because of its genre characteristics, film comedy provides a space where these disparate tendencies may negotiate. Although the degree of intensity and persuasiveness of these processes varies in these three films, it is certain that Italy’s rapid change from an emigrant-sending country to an immigrant-receiving one has impacted a large portion of the Italian public. In this light, these films may be interpreted as having a didactic dimension—e.g. to educate Italians about basic intercultural skills. Moreover by depicting the squalid aspects of immigration to Italy, the films also seem to teach Italian audiences that it is acceptable to feel hostile toward certain immigrants because they are outlaws. From this perspective, there is a notable collective and concerted tendency in the three films to extol Italian humanism toward immigrants, to show existential affinities between Italians and immigrants, and to smooth out internal diversity among

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immigrants within one country of provenance. This practice accentuates the role cinema plays in mediating between Italy’s social transformation and the public opinion and adaptation of its people to the changing circumstances. In these films, satire is used to show how immigrants and Italians grapple with racist and provincial remarks in everyday life, particularly in episodes in which Italians are represented as resembling immigrants. The satirical components also provide a lens through which to critique the reduction of crucial differences in rights between Italian citizens and immigrants in Italy. While the satire in Lezioni di cioccolato and Questa notte è ancora nostra is unquestionably based in reality and has a certain degree of newsworthiness for Italian audiences, those in Into Paradiso fall on the border between imagination and reality. The pleasure of seeing Alfonso and the Sri Lankan outwit the camorristi by disguising themselves has the audience appeal of a wishful flight from harsh reality. In the final analysis, because of the dual nature of comedy film, the extradiegetic space these films create in relation to the diegetic intercultural situations may be appropriated by the audience either to affirm or refute their bias toward a particular ethnic group. This may pave the way for collective reflection on the validity of such cinematic representations and their relation to reality.

Notes 1

For more information on Orientalism within Italy, see Schneider (1998, 1-23). For more about Italy’s many kinds of diasporas, see Gabaccia (2000). 3 King further explains this point in Hollywood cinema (2002, 153-154). 4 For a clear overview of Italy’s immigrant law-making up until 2007, see Campani (2007, 1-24). For a discussion of the “pacchetto di sicurezza” see D’Orsi (2010, 111). 5 For a general overview of the migration and media relations in Italy, see Campani (2001). 6 Näre presents field research on the housing condition of Sri Lankan immigrants in Naples (2008, 104-105). 7 www.cattleya.it/about/ (Accessed on October 16, 2011). 8 They include Quando sei nato non puoi più nasconderti (Once You’re Born You Can No Longer Hide Marco Tullio Giordana, 2005), Lezioni di volo (Flying Lessons Francesca Archibugi, 2007), Bianco e nero (Black and White Cristina Comencini, 2008), Oggi sposi (Just Married Luca Lucini, 2009), and Terraferma (Emanuele Crialese, 2011). 9 www.iif-online.it/chi_siamo.aspx (Accessed on October 16, 2011). 2

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They are Notte prima degli esami (The Night Before the Exams Fausto Brizzi, 2006) and Notte prima degli esami-Oggi (The Night Before the Exams Today F. Brizzi, 2007). 11 www.acabaproduzioni.com/web/index.php/homepage/about (Accessed on October 16, 2011). 12 They include I cento passi (One Hundred Steps Marco Tullio Giordana, 2000), Nuovomondo (Golden Door Emanuele Crialese, 2006), Galantuomini (Brave Men Edoardo Winspeare, 2008), and Una vita tranquilla (A Quiet Life Claudio Cupellini, 2010). 13 www.cinecitta.com/wp/?page_id=2 (Accessed on October 16, 2011). 14 www.perugina.it/Templates/SCUOLA/curiosita50500.aspx?pageid=50500 (Accessed on October 16, 2011). 15 They include I cento passi (M. T. Giordana, 2000), Buongiorno, notte (Good Morning, Night Marco Bellocchio, 2003), Romanzo criminale (Michele Placido, 2005), and Gomorra (Gomorrah Matteo Garrone, 2008). 16 See Patriarca (2010, 224-225). For a discussion on mama’s boy and opportunist as embodied by Sordi, see Patriarca (2010, 216-226). For more on the inept Latin Lover embodied by Mastroianni, see Reich (2004).

SELECTED ITALIAN MIGRANT CINEMA FILMOGRAPHY

The following films are all feature films, unless otherwise noted.

Italian Emigration Films 1981. Trogi, Ricardo. 2009. A occhi sgranati. Moscati, Italo. 2004. (Documentary) A sud di Avigliana. Tommasi, Irene. 2006. (Short film) All’infinito l’America. Morales, Ernesto. 2006. (Documentary) Andata e ritorno. Segre, Daniele. 1985. (Short film) Anni ribelli. Polizzi, Rosaria. 1996. Antipodi. Gandini, Pierpaolo. 2006. (Documentary) Argentina arde. Torelli, Roberto and Rodolfo Ricci. 2002. Azzurro. Rabaglia, Denis. 2001. Bella ciao. Giusti, Stéphane. 2001. Bello, onesto, emigrato in Australia sposerebbe compaesana illibata. Zampa, Luigi. 1971. Big Night. Tucci, Stanley and Scott Campbell. 1996. Borsalino et Cie. Deray, Jacques. 1974. Borsalino. Deray, Jacques. 1970. Braccia sì, uomini no! Ammann, Peter. 1970. (Documentary) Bronx. De Niro, Robert. 1993. Caffè Italia Montréal. Tana, Paul. 1987. (Documentary) Capo Nord. Luglio, Carlo. 2003. Cara moglie. Console, Silvano. 2006. (Documentary) Catenaccio a Mannheim. Di Carlo, Mario. 2001. (Documentary) Catene. Matarazzo, Raffaello. 1949. Chi sta bussando alla mia porta? Scorsese, Martin. 1967. Chiamami straniero. Ghirelli, Massimo. 1990. China girl. Ferrara, Abel. 1987. Ciao compagni—Salut camarades. Astolfi, Marco. 2000. (Documentary) Cinema Trans-Alpino. Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv (Cinegraph). 2010. Closing Time: Storia di un Negozio. Diaferia, Veronica. 2006. (Documentary)

282

Selected Italian Migrant Cinema Filmography

Come scopersi l’America. Borghesio, Carlo. 1949. Cristo fra i muratori. Dmytryk, Edward. 1949. Cronaca di una morte annunciata. Rosi, Francesco. 1987. Cuore napoletano. Santoni, Paolo. 2002. (Documentary) Dagli Appennini alle Ande. Quilici, Folco. 1959. Dallo Zolfo al Carbone. Vullo, Luca. 2008. (Documentary) Dimenticare Palermo. Rosi, Francesco. 1990. Doichlanda. Gagliardi, Giuseppe. 2003. (Short film) Du bist mein Glück. Martin, Karl Heinz. 1936. E ci toccò partire. Bianchi, Fabio, Davide Bini, Serena Mora and Simone Pecorari. 2005. Einmal Palermo—Berlin und zurück. Draeger, Thomas. 1992. (Short film) Emigrantes. Fabrizi, Aldo. 1948. Emigranti. Piavoli, Franco. 1963. (Documentary) Emigrazione 68. Perelli, Luigi. 1968. (Documentary) Emigrazione. Severi, Alberto. 1975. (Documentary) Fa la cosa giusta. Stuyvesant, Bedford. 1989. Familie Villano kehrt nicht zurück—La famiglia Villano non ritorna. Guttners, Hans Andreas. 1981. (Documentary) Farcadice. Peresson, Luca and Farle and Carlo Della Vedova. 1999. (Documentary) Finimondo. Vallero, Gianluca. 1999. (Short film) Fratelli. Ferrara, Abel. 1996. Fuga in Francia. Soldati, Marco. 1948. Già vola il fiore magro. Meyer, Paul. 1959. (Documentary) Gino. Domnick, Ottomar. 1960. Gli anni del carbone. Casciola, Marisa. 2000. (Documentary) Gli indesiderabili. Scimeca, Pasquale. 2003. Good morning Babilonia. Taviani, Paolo and Vittorio. 1987. Graças a deus. Casali, Leonardo. 1997. (Documentary) Hand of God. Cultrera, Joseph. 2006. (Documentary) Harem suaré. Ozpetek, Ferzan. 1999. Hotel Dajti—Una storia al di lá del mare. Fornari, Carmine. 2002. I build the Tower. Landler, Edward and Brad Byer. 2006. I magliari. Rosi, Francesco. 1959. I soliti ignoti. Monicelli, Mario, 1958. Il bandito. Lattuada, Alberto. 1946. Il cammino della speranza. Germi, Pietro. 1950. Il clandestino. Mercanti, Pino. 1970. Il duce canadese. Ramirez, Bruno. 2004. (Miniseries) Il gaucho. Risi, Dino. 1964.

The Cinemas of Italian Migration: European and Transatlantic Narratives

283

Il mare sul muro. Blanchietti, Ilario. 2007. Il mio paese. Vicari, Daniele. 2006. (Documentary) Il mio viaggio in Italia. Scorsese, Martin. 1999. (Documentary) Il Padrino I. Coppola, Francis Ford. 1972. Il Padrino II. Coppola, Francis Ford. 1974. Il Padrino III. Coppola, Francis Ford. 1990. Il rovescio della medaglia (Accolti a braccia chiuse). Bizzarri, Alvaro. 1974. (Short film) Il treno del Sud (Accolti a braccia chiuse). Bizzarri, Alvaro. 1970. (Short film) Il vento di settembre— Septemberwind. Seiler, Alexander J. 2002. (Documentary) Il volo. Wenders, Wim. 2009. (Documentary) Italianamerican. Scorsese, Martin. 1974. (Short film) Italiani del Brasile. Torelli, Roberto and Rodolfo Ricci. 2003. (Documentary) Italiani in Svizzera. Filef, Arci and Carmen Bertolazzi. 1995. (Documentary) Jungle Fever. Lee, Spike. 1991. Kaos. Taviani, Paolo and Vittorio. 1984. Kreuz und quer. Guttner, Andreas. 1996. L’America me l’immaginavo. Storie di emigrazione dall’isola siciliana di Merettimo. Marazzi, Alina. 1991. (Short film) L’anniversaire de Thomas—Quand le ciel s’est éteint. Menichetti, JeanPaul et al. 1982. (Documentary) L’emigrante. Campanile, Pasquale Festa. 1973. L’emigrazione italiana nella transizione bolivariana. Galli, Francesco and Rodolfo Ricci. 2006. (Documentary) L’onore dei Prizzi. Huston, John. 1985. La déroute. Tana, Paul and Bruno Ramirez. 1998. La donna della luna. Zagarrìo, Vito. 1987. La famiglia Buonanotte. Liconti, Carlo. 1989. La febbre del sabato sera. Badam, John. 1977. La grande emigrazione: L’emigrazione abruzzese negli Stati Uniti d’America. Falco, Stefano. 2005. (Documentary) La grande luce. Campogalliani, Carlo. 1939. La leggenda del pianista sull’oceano. Tornatore, Giuseppe. 1998. La mano nera. Thorpe, Richard. 1950. La Mortadella. Monicelli, Mario. 1971. La Pampa Gringa 2. Bianco, Gianfranco. 2001. (Documentary) La pampa gringa. Bianco, Gianfranco. 1994. (Documentary)

284

Selected Italian Migrant Cinema Filmography

La ragazza con la pistola. Monicelli, Mario. 1968. La ragazza in vetrina. Emmer, Luciano. 1961. La rosa tatuata. Mann, Daniel. 1955. La sarrasine. Tana, Paul. 1992. La sposa era bellissima. Gabor, Pal. 1986. La terra trema. Visconti, Luchino. 1948. La vera leggenda di Tony Vilar. Gagliardi, Giuseppe. 2006. La voce del popolo. Sgrò, Giovanni. 2005. (Documentary) Lassù qualcuno mi ama. Wise, Robert. 1956. Le clan des siciliens. Verneuil, Henri. 1969. Le radici dell’albero—130 anni di emigrazione trentina in Brasile. Provincia Autonoma di Trento. 2005. (Documentary) Le Svedesi. Polidoro, Gian Luigi. 1960. Léolo. Lauzon, Jean-Claude. 1993. Les sables mouvants. Carpita, Paul. 1996. Lo stagionale (Accolti a braccia chiuse). Bizzarri, Alvaro. 1971. Louis Prima: The Wildest! McGlynn, Don. 1999. (Documentary) Luciano Serra pilota. Alessandrini, Goffredo. 1938. Lucky Luciano. Rosi, Francesco. 1973. Mac. Turturro, John. 1992. Mambo italiano. Gaudreault, Émile. 2003. Marcinelle. Frazzi, Antonio and Andrea. 2003. Maria, ihm schmeckt’s nicht! Vollmar, Neele. 2009. Martin a little…. Ciprì, Daniele and Franco Maresco. 1992. Marty. Mann, Delbert. 1955. Me Paìs tropical. Bianco, Gianfranco, Paola Girola and Stefano Rogliatti. 2005. (Documentary) Mean Streets. Scorsese, Martin. 1973. Memorie Migranti. Museo Regionale dell’emigrazione Paolo Conti. 2003. (24 short documentaries) Merica. Ferrone, Federico. 2007. (Documentary) Mineurs. Wetzl, Fulvio. 2007. Mirabella/Sindelfingen—Rückfahrkarte nach Deutschland. Pichler, Andreas. 2001. (Documentary) Mon frère, ma soeur vendus pour quelques lires. Sallustio, Basile. 1998. (Documentary) Monongah, Marcinelle americana. Console, Silvano. 2006. (Documentary) My Cousin. José, Edward. 1918. My name is Tanino. Virzì, Paolo. 2002. Napoli che canta. Roberti, Roberto. 1926.

The Cinemas of Italian Migration: European and Transatlantic Narratives

285

Nel continente nero. Risi, Marco. 1992. Nella pancia del piroscafo. Signetto, Alberto. 2006. (Documentary) Nine Good Teeth. Halpern, Alex. 2003. (Documentary) Nuovomondo. Crialese, Emanuele. 2006. Once we were strangers. Crialese, Emanuele. 1997. Pagine della vita dell’emigrazione (Accolti a braccia chiuse). Bizzarri, Alvaro. 1976. (Short film) Palermo oder Wolfsburg. Schroeter, Werner. 1980. Pane amaro. Norelli, Gianfranco. 2007. (Documentary) Pane e cioccolata. Brusati, Franco. 1974. Passaporto rosso. Brignone, Guido. 1935. Percorsi di emigrazione italiana in Europa e Usa. Catucci, Marina and Daniele Salvini. 1998. (Documentary) Permette? Rocco Papaleo. Scola, Ettore. 1971. Piccolo Cesare. LeRoy, Mervyn. 1930. Piemonteses em Sao Paulo. Manfredi, Silvia. 2007. (Documentary) Pietro Di Donato, lo scrittore muratore. Falco, Stefano. 2005. (Documentary) Pizza Colonia. Emmerich, Klaus. 1991. Prigionieri in paradiso—Prisoners in Paradise. Calamandrei, Camilla. 2005. (Documentary) Prisoners among us. Di Lauro, Michael A. 2007. (Documentary) Puerto escondido. Salvatores, Gabriele. 1992. Quei bravi ragazzi. Scorsese, Martin. 1990. Radiografia della miseria. Nelli, Piero. 1967. Remembering Ellis Island: Everyman’s Monument. Savalas, Telly. 1995. (Documentary) Ricordati di noi. Tana, Paul. 2007. (Documentary) Riusciranno i nostri eroi a ritrovare l’amico misteriosamente scomparso in Africa? Scola, Ettore. 1968. Rouge Midi. Guédiguian, Robert. 1985. Sacco e Vanzetti. Montaldo, Giuliano. 1971. Scarface. Hawks, Howard. 1932. Sem Terra—Senza Terra. Meneghetti, César and Elisabetta Pandimiglio. 2001. (Short film) Sem Terra. Scimeca, Pasquale and RobertoTorelli. 2003. (Documentary) Serpico. Lumet, Sidney. 1973. Si pensava di restare poco. 12 storie d’emigrazione—Eigentlich wollten wir nicht lange bleiben. 12 Geschichten aus der Emigration. Cangemi, Francesca and Daniel von Aarburg. 2003. (Documentary)

286

Selected Italian Migrant Cinema Filmography

Siamo italiani—Die Italiener. Seiler, Alexander J., June Kovach and Rob Gnant. 1964. (Documentary) Simplon-Tunnel. Kolditz, Gottfried. 1959. Smash. Trogi, Riccardo. 2004. (Miniseries) Solino. Akin, Fatih. 2002. Sono partita all’alba. Bartolucci, Giovanna. 2002. (Documentary) Spaghetti House. Paradisi, Giulio. 1982. Storie di mondo. Pevarello, Lorenzo. 2008. (Documentary) Stories Worth Remembering, Stories Worth Telling. Hanson, Joann. 2008. (Documentary) Stranieri si diventa. Catucci, Marina and Daniele Salvini. 1998. Stregata alla luna. Jewison, Norman. 1987. Terra bruciata. Segatori, Fabio. 1999. Terra mia, terra nostra. Rotunno, Donato. 2012. (Documentary) Terza generazione. Woods, Kate. 2000. The Dream—Per non dimenticare. Candeloro, Dominic. 2007. The Godfather. Ford Coppola, Francis. 1972. The Godfather: Part II. Ford Coppola, Francis. 1974. The Godfather: Part III. Ford Coppola, Francis. 1990. The Italian Barber. Griffith, David W. 1911. The Italian Gardens of South Brooklyn. Corbin, Alexandra and Susan Morosoli. 2006. (Documentary) The Italian. Barker, Reginald. 1915. The Kiss of Debt. Diorio, Derek. 2000. The Lives of the Saints. Ciccoritti, Jerry. 2004. (Miniseries) Toni. Renoir, Jean. 1935. Toro scatenato. Scorsese, Martin. 1980. Touchoul (Accolti a braccia chiuse). Bizzarri, Alvaro. 1990. (Short film) Un confine di specchi. Savona, Stefano. 2002. (Documentary) Un italiano in America. Sordi, Alberto. 1967. Un nommé La Rocca. Becker, Jean. 1962. Una moglie americana. Polidoro, Gian Luigi. 1965. Una vita tranquilla. Cupellini, Claudio. 2010. Uno Sguardo dal ponte. Lumet, Sidney. 1962. Urussanga. Storie di Vita degli emigranti Veneti in Brasile. Melanco, Mirco and Federico Massa. 1998. (Documentary) Vedove bianche. Napolitano, Riccardo. 1968. (Documentary) Venezuela dopo la tempesta. Galli, Francesco and Rodolfo Ricci. 2006. (Documentary) Via Detroit. Massa, Giovanni and Elios Mineo. 1996. (Documentary) Vivere. Maccarone, Angelina. 2007.

The Cinemas of Italian Migration: European and Transatlantic Narratives

Wait Until Spring, Bandini. Deruddere, Dominique. 1989. Watch the Pallino. Foerster, Stephanie. 2007. (Documentary)

Films on Internal Migration Al bar dello sport, Francesco Massaro. 1983. Babooska. Covi, Tizza and Rainer Frimmel. 2005. (Documentary) Benvenuti al Sud. Miniero, Luca. 2010. Così ridevano. Amelio, Gianni. 1998. Delitto d’amore. Comencini, Luigi. 1974 Documenti Rai Teche—Meridionali a Torino? N. N. 1961. I bambini e noi. Comencini, Luigi. 1970. (Documentary) I basilischi. Wertmüller, Lina. 1963. I fidanzati. Olmi, Ermanno. 1963. Il passaggio della linea. Marcello, Pietro. 2007. Il viaggio della speranza. Bertacco, Gianfranco. 1963. (Documentary) L’altra faccia del miracolo. Spina, Sergio. 1963. (Documentary) L’amore in città. Antonioni, Michelangelo, Federico Fellini, Alberto Lattuada, Francesco Maselli and Dino Risi. 1953. L’una e l’altra. Nichetti, Maurizio. 1996. L’uomo nero. Rubini, Sergio. 2009. La bionda. Rubini, Sergio. 1993. La destinazione. Sanna, Piero. 2003. La Pivellina. Covi, Tizza and Rainer Frimmel. 2009. La terra. Rubini, Sergio. 2006. Mafioso. Lattuada, Alberto. 1962. Mimì metallurgico ferito nell'onore. Wertmüller, Lina. 1972. Napoletani a Milano. De Filippo, Eduardo. 1953. Oltremare—Non è l’America. Correale, Nello. 1999. Padre e figlio. Pozzessere, Pasquale. 1994. Preferisco il rumore del mare. Calopresti, Mimmo. 2000. Ricomincio da tre. Troisi, Massimo. 1981. Riso amaro. De Santis, Giuseppe. 1948. Rocco e i suoi fratelli. Visconti, Luchino. 1960. Totò, Peppino e la malafemmina. Mastrocinque, Camillo. 1956. Tre fratelli. Rosi, Francesco. 1981. Trevico—Torino… Viaggio nel Fiat-Nam. Scola, Ettore. 1973. Un’emozione in più. Longo, Francesco. 1979. Una questione d’onore. Zampa, Luigi. 1966. Vorrei che volo. Scola, Ettore. 1980. (Documentary)

287

288

Selected Italian Migrant Cinema Filmography

Films on Immigration to Italy A Sud di Lampedusa. Segre, Andrea. 2006. (Documentary) Alì ha gli occhi azzurri. Giovannesi, Claudio. 2012. Allullo Drom. Zangardi, Tonino. 1993. Approdo Italia. Bonatesta, Christian. 2005. (Documentary) Aprile. Moretti, Nanni. 1997. Auló. Brioni, Simone, Ermanno Guida and Graziano Chiscuzzu. 2011. (Documentary) Bianco e nero. Comencini, Cristina. 2007. Born again in San Salvario. Giliberti, Luca and Melanie Kindl. 2006. (Short film) Chi non rischia non beve champagne. Colusso, Erica. 2002. Come l’ombra. Spara, Marina. 2006. Come un uomo sulla terra. Andrea Segre, Dagmawi Yimer, Riccardo Biadene. 2008. (Documentary) Cominciò tutto per caso. Marino, Umberto. 1993. Conversazioni con Giorgina, Storie di Esilio e di Migrazioni. Alberto, Teresa, Mariella Alemanno and Michella Borio. 2006. (Documentary) Corazones de mujer. Kosoof, Kiff. 2008. Coverboy—L’ultima rivoluzione. Amoroso, Carmine. 2006. Da qualche parte in città. Sordillo, Michele. 1994. Dentro Roma. Costabile, Francesco. 2006. (Short film) Diritto di cittadinanza. Segre, Daniele. 1996. (Documentary) E la nave va. Fellini, Federico. 1983. Elvjs e Merilijn. Manni, Armando. 1998. Filo di Luce. Fasano, Michele. 2004. (Documentary) Francesca. Paunescu, Bobby. 2009. Gente di Roma. Scola, Ettore. 2004. Giallo a Milano. Basso, Sergio. 2009. (Documentary) Gli occhi stanchi. Salani, Corso. 1995. Good morning, Aman. Noce, Claudio. 2009. Guardarsi negli occhi. Casaroli, Armando, Rocco De Paolis and Caterina Muscará. 1990. (Short film) Hamam—Il bagno turco. Ozpetek, Ferzan. 1997. Honeymoons—Medeni Mesec. Paskaljevic, Goran. 2009. I figli di Annibale. Ferrario, Davide. 1998. I nostri anni migliori. Calore, Matteo and Stefano Collizzolli. 2011. (Documentary) Il colore dell’odio. Squitieri, Pasquale. 1989. Il mondo addosso. Quatriglio, Costanza. 2006.

The Cinemas of Italian Migration: European and Transatlantic Narratives

289

Il rito ortodosso rumeno. Buscaglia, Ilaria. 2006. (Short film) Il sangue verde. Segre, Andrea. 2010. (Documentary) Il toro. Mazzacurati, Carlo. 1994. Il vento fa il suo giro. Diritti, Giorgio. 2005. In This World. Winterbottom, Michael. 2002. Inatteso. Distilio, Domenico. 2005. (Documentary) Into Paradiso. Randi, Paola. 2010. Intolerance. Virzí, Paolo, Gabriele Muccino, Francesco Maselli and Mimmo Mancini et al. 1996. (50 Short documentaries) Io leggo un libro. Officina Parini and Corrado Iannelli. 2003. (Short film) Io sono invisibile. Curagi, Tonino and Anna Gorio. 2000. (Documentary) Io sono Li. Segre, Andrea. 2011. Io, l’altro. Melliti, Mohsen. 2006. Io, loro e Lara. Verdone, Carlo. 2010. Jetoj—Vivo. Soranzo, Mattia /and Ervis Eshja, Ervis. 2004. (Documentary) L’albero dei destini sospesi. Benhadj, Rachid. 1997. L’arrivo di Wang. Manetti, Marco. 2011. L’articolo 2. Zaccaro, Maurizio. 1993. L’assedio. Bertolucci, Bernardo. 1998. L’estate di Davide. Mazzacurati, Carlo. 1998. L’italiano. De Dominicis, Ennio. 2002. L’orchestra di Piazza Vittorio. Ferrente, Agostino. 2006. L’orizzonte degli eventi. Vicari, Daniele. 2005. L’ospite segreto. Modugno, Paolo. 2003. La ballata dei lavavetri. Del Monde, Peter. 1998. Là-bas: Educazione criminale. Lombardi, Guido. 2011. La bocca del lupo. Marcello, Pietro. 2009. La borsa di Helene. Quatriglio, Costanza. 2002. (Documentary) La giusta distanza. Mazzacurati, Carlo. 2007. La meilleure part. Allégret, Yves. 1955. La sconosciuta. Tornatore, Giuseppe. 2006. Lamerica. Amelio, Gianni. 1994. Lascia che ti racconti… di me. Iannelli, Corrado and Rocco De Paolis. 2001. (Documentary) Le ferie di Licu. Moroni, Vittorio. 2006. Lettere al vento. Budina, Edmondo. 2003. Lettere dal Sahara. De Seta, Vittorio. 2006. Mare chiuso. Segre, Andrea. 2012. (Documentary) Meridional Sound. Cavaglià, Alice. 2006. (Short film)

290

Selected Italian Migrant Cinema Filmography

Miss Little China. Cremona, Riccardo and Vincenzo De Cecco. 2009. (Documentary) Narciso—Dietro ai cannoni, davanti ai muli. Baldi, Dario and Marcello. 2008. Notturno Stenopeico. Schirinzi, Carlo Michele. 2009. (Documentary) Occidente. Salani, Corso. 2000. Orizzonti e frontiere. Morales, Ernesto. 2007. (Documentary) Ospiti. Garrone, Matteo. 1998. Pane e tulipani. Soldini, Silvio. 2000. Parole in pentole. Iannelli, Corrado and Rocco De Paolis. 2002. (Documentary) Portami via. Travarelli, Gianluca Maria. 1994. Pummarò. Placido, Michele. 1990. Quando sei nato non puoi più nasconderti. Giordana, Marco Tullio. 2005. Questa è la mia terra. Amato, Francesco, Daniel Baldotto and Alessia Porto. 2003. (Documentary) Respiro. Crialese, Emanuele. 2002. Retour à Marseille. Allio, René. 1980. Riparo. Puccioni, Marco. 2007. Rom Tour. Soldini, Silvio. 1999. Saimir. Munzi, Francesco. 2004. Santa Maradona. Ponti, Marco. 2001. Sarahsarà. Martinelli, Renzo. 1994. Scontro di civiltà per un ascensore a Piazza Vittorio. Toso, Isotta. 2010. Sei del mondo. Ruggiero, Camilla. 2006. (Documentary) Sidelki/Badanti. Bernardi, Katia. 2007. (Documentary) Solo andata—Il viaggio di un Tuareg. Caramschi, Fabio. 2010. (Documentary) Sono a Torino, una delle tante vie. Di Nunzio, Marco and Matteo Ravera. 2007. (Documentary) Sud Side Stori. Torre, Roberta. 2000. Terra di mezzo. Garrone, Matteo. 1996. Terraferma. Crialese, Emanuele. 2011. Teste rasate. Fragasso, Claudio. 1993. Tipota. Bentivoglio, Fabrizio. 1999. (Short film) Torino Boys. Manetti, Mario and Antonio Manetti. 1997. Tornando a casa. Marra, Vincenzo. 2001. Tra due terre. Carrillo, Michele. 2004. (Documentary) Tra Genova e Fez—Una famiglia in viaggio. Mancuso, Vincenzo. 2002. (Short film) Un confine di specchi. Savona, Stefano. 2002. (Documentary)

The Cinemas of Italian Migration: European and Transatlantic Narratives

Un día de suerte. Gugliotta, Sandra. 2002. Un posto al mondo. Martone, Mario and Jacopo Quadri. 2000. Un’altra vita. Mazzacurati, Carlo. 1992. Valentina Postika in attesa di partire. Carone, Caterina. 2009. (Documentary) Vesna va veloce. Mazzacurati, Carlo. 1996. Via Anelli—La chiusura del ghetto. Segato, Marco. 2008. Vlora 1991. De Feo, Roberto. 2004. (Short film) Volevo solo dormirle addosso. Cappuccio, Eugenio. 2004. Where we go. Pisanelli, Paolo. 2000. (Documentary) Zora la vampira. Manetti, Antonio and Marco. 2000.

291

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

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296

Selected Bibliography

Braudel, Fernand. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949). Berkeley-Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1995. Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. New Haven: Harvard University Press, 1995. Brown, William. “Negotiating the Invisible.” In Moving People, Moving Images: Cinema and Trafficking in the New Europe, edited by William Brown, Dina Iordanova and Leshu Torchin, 16–48. St. Andrews: St. Andrews Film Studies, 2010. Brunetta, Gian Piero. Cent’anni di cinema italiano: Dal 1945 ai giorni nostri. Rome: Laterza, 1995. —. “Emigranti nel cinema italiano e Americano.” In Storia dell’emigrazione italiana. Vol. 1: Partenze, edited by Piero Bevilacqua, 489–514. Rome: Donzelli, 2001. —. Il cinema italiano contemporaneo: Da ‘La dolce vita’ a ‘Centochiodi’. Rome: Laterza, 2007. —. The History of Italian Cinema: A Guide to Italian Film from its Origins to the Twenty—first Century. Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009. Buache, Freddy. Le cinéma suisse. Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1974. Bullot, Erik. “Le cinéma est une invention post-mortem.” Trafic 43 (Autumn 2002): 5–18. Buquicchio, Maurizio. “La paura di Pippo Delbono: Soliloquio in videochiamata.” In I film in tasca: Videofonino, cinema e televisione, edited by Maurizio Ambrosini, Giovanna Maina, and Elena Marcheschi, 167–174. Ghezzano: Felici, 2009. Campani, Giovanna. “Migrants and Media: The Italian Case.” In Media and Migration: Constructions of Mobility and Difference, edited by Russell King and Nancy Wood, 38–52. London, New York: Routledge, 2001. Campani, Giovanna. “Migration and Integration in Italy: A Complex and Moving Landscape.” Network Migration in Europe, 2007. Accessed November 16, 2011. http://www.migrationeducation.org/38.1.html?& rid=81&cHash=e5c8e1d629b6234d84577d1805d9a67b. Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Novato: New World Library, 2008. Capussotti, Enrica. “Moveable Identities: Migration, Subjectivity and Cinema in Contemporary Italy.” Modern Italy vol. 14, no. 1 (2009): 55–68.

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Cattleya Film and TV Production. “La compagnia. Chi siamo.” Accessed May 19, 2012, http://www.cattleya.it/about/. Cavell, Stanley. Contesting Tears: The Melodrama of the Unknown Woman. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997. Cecchi D’Amico, Suso; Giuseppe Patroni Griffi and Francesco Rosi. I magliari: Sceneggiatura originale dell’omonimo film di Francesco Rosi. Mantua: Publi Paolini, 2001. Chiozzi, Paolo. Manuale di Antropologia visuale. Milan: Unicopli, 1993. Chow, Rey. “The Politics of Admittance: Female Sexual Agency, Miscegenation, and the Formation of Community in Frantz Fanon.” In Critical Perspectives, edited by Anthony Alessandrini, 34–53. London, New York: Routledge, 1999. Christie, Ian and David Thompson (eds.). Scorsese par Scorsese. Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1989. Cincinelli, Sonia. I migranti nel cinema italiano. Rome: Kappa, 2009. —. Senza frontiere: L’immigrazione nel cinema italiano. Rome: Kappa, 2011. Cinecittà Luce. “Chi siamo: Cinecittà Luce.” Accessed May 19, 2012, http://www.cinecitta.com/wp/?page_id=2. Cinemaitaliano.info. “Ozpetek ospite al ‘Festival delle Culture Giovani di Salerno.’” Accessed May 20, 2012, http://www.cinemaitaliano.info/news/00533/ozpetek-ospite-al-festivaldelle-culture.html. Connell, R. W. Masculinities. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005. Connell, Robert W. and James W. Messerschmidt. “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept.” Gender and Society vol. 19, no. 6 (2005): 829–859. Copertari, Gabriela. Desintegración y justicia en el cine argentino contemporáneo. Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2009. Crialese, Emanuele. “Terraferma di Emanuele Crialese: Odissea Liquida.” By Anna Maria Pasetti. Vivilcinema 4 (2011): 20–21. Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Fredy Perlman and John Supak. Detroit: Black & Red, 1983 [= Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Malcolm Imrie. London: Verso, 1998]. Decker, Christof. Hollywoods kritischer Blick: Das soziale Melodrama in der amerikanischen Kultur 1840–1950. Frankfurt: Campus, 2003. De Giusti, Luciano. “L’immagine della pianura nel cinema italiano: Paessagi di ieri e di oggi.” In Voci delle pianure, edited by Peter Kuon, 131–141. Florence: Cesati, 2002. Del Grande, Gabriele. “‘Capitan Vergogna’ davanti ai suoi giudici.” L’Unità, February 6, 2009.

298

Selected Bibliography

—. Fortress Europe. n.d. Accessed May 3, 2012. http://fortresseurope.blogspot.it/. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Mille Plateaux: Capitalisme et Schizophrénie. Paris: Minuit, 1980 [= Tausend Plateaus. Kapitalismus und Schizophrenie. Translated by Gabriele Ricke and Ronald Voullié. Berlin: Merve, 62005]. Deleuze, Gilles. “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?” In Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953–1974, edited by D. Lapoujade, 170–192. New York: Semiotext(e), 2004. Delli Colli, Laura. Ferzan Ozpetek: Ad occhi aperti. Milan: Mondadori, 2008. Delli-Zotti, Guillermo and Fernando Esteban. “Migraciones y exilios: Memorias de la historia argentina reciente a través del cine.” Athenea Digital 14 (2008): 83–104. Dennerlein, Bettina and Elke Frietsch (eds.). Identitäten in Bewegung: Migration im Film. Bielefeld: transcript, 2011. Derrida, Jacques. Positions. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981. —. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. 1993. New York, London: Routledge, 2006. Di Carmine, Roberta. Italy Meets Africa: Colonial Discourses in Italian Cinema. New York e.a.: Peter Lang, 2011. Di Maio, Alessandra. “Mediterraneo nero: Le rotte dei migranti nel millennio globale.” In La città cosmopolità—Altre narrazioni, edited by Giulia de Spuches, 142-163. Palermo: Palombo, 2011. Diederichsen, Diedrich. “Verfolger, Opfer und schöne Seelen: Fassbinders Gastarbeiter und ihre Deutschen.” In Projekt Migration, edited by Kölnischer Kunstverein, 598–605. Cologne: DuMont, 2005. Doane, Mary Ann. Femme Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis. New York, London: Routledge, 1991. Dönmez-Colin, Gönül. Turkish Cinema: Identity, Distance and Belonging. London: Reaction Books, 2008. Donnelly, K. J. The Specter of Sound: Music in Film and Television. London: BFI, 2005. D’Orsi, Lorenzo. “The ‘Pacchetto Sicurezza’ and the Process of Ethnogenesis.” Network Migration in Europe, 2010. Accessed November 16, 2011. http://www.migrationeducation.org/38.1.html?&rid=161&cHash =b154855c4bf2bce792e2f2945aaf0f15. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London, New York: Routledge, 2002.

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Duhigg, Charles and Keith Bradsher. “Where the iPhone Work Went: Using a Global Network to Make Products.” The New York Times, Articles collected for Süddeutsche Zeitung, January 30, 2012, 1 and 4. Dumont, Hervé and Maria Tortajada (eds.). Histoire du cinéma suisse 1966-2000. Lausanne: Cinémathèque Suisse, 2007. Duncan, Derek. “The Sight and Sound of Albanian Migration in Contemporary Italian Cinema.” New Readings 8 (2007): 1–15. Accessed June 20, 2012. http://ojs.cf.ac.uk/index.php/newreadings/article/view/21. —. “Italy’s Postcolonial Cinema and its Histories of Representation.” Italian Studies vol. 63, no. 2 (2008a): 195–211. —. “Loving Geographies: Queering Straight Migration to Italy.” New Cinemas 6 (2008b): 167–182. Eckhard, Petra. Chronotopes of the Uncanny. Bielefeld: transcript, 2011. Eisenstein, Sergei. “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form.” In Film Form, edited by Jay Leyda, 45–63. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1949. Elsaesser, Thomas. “Tales of Sound and Fury; ‘Vincente Minnelli’.” In Home Is Where the Heart Is, edited by Christine Gledhill, 43–69. London: BFI, 1987, 43-69. —. “Double Occupancy and Small Adjustments: Space, Place and Policy in the New European Cinema since the 1990s.” In European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood, edited by Thomas Elsaesser, 108–130. Amsterdam: University Press, 2005. —. “Melodrama: Genre, Gefühl oder Weltanschauung?” In Das Gefühl der Gefühle: Zum Kinomelodram, edited by Margrit Frölich, Klaus Gronenborn and Karsten Visarius, 11–34. Marburg: Schüren, 2008a. —. “Real Location, Fantasy Space, Performative Place: Double Occupancy and Mutual Interference in European Cinema.” In Shifting Landscapes: Film and Media in European Context, edited by Miyase Christensen and Nezih Erdogan, 14–31. Newcastle/UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008b. [= European Film Theory, edited by Temenuga Trifonova, 47–61. London, New York: Routledge, 2009a]. [= “Transnationales Kino in Europa: Jenseits der Identitätspolitik. Doppelte Besetzung, Interpassivität und gegenseitige Einmischung.” In Film transnational und transkulturell: Europäische und amerikanische Perspektiven, edited by Ricarda Strobel and Andreas Jahn-Sudmann, 27–44. Munich: Fink, 2009b]. Erstiü, Marijana. “Die Wiederbelebung des Film Noir? Giuseppe Tornatores Film ‘La sconosciuta’.” In Nuovo Cinema Italia. Das

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italienische Kino meldet sich zurück, edited by Birgit Wagner and Daniel Winkler, 117–129. Vienna: Böhlau, 2010. Erylmaz, Aytaç and Mathilde Jamin (eds.). Fremde Heimat. Essen: Klartext, 1998. Escobar, Roberto. “La malattia dell’anima. ‘La giusta distanza’ di Mazzacurati racconta la vita di Concadalbero, un villaggio Veneto. Una quiete apparente che si spezza tra storie d’amore, d’immigrazione e di sangue.” Il Sole 24 Ore, Novembre 24, 2007. Estève, Michel (ed.). Ermanno Olmi. Paris: Lettres Modernse, 1992. Ezra, Elizabeth and Terry Rowden. “Introduction.” In Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader, edited by Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden, 1–13. London, New York: Routledge, 2006. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1967. Feleschini Lerner, Giovanna. “Ending ‘Ventriloquistic’ Discourses and Creating a Dialogue of Difference: ‘Lettere dal Sahara’ and ‘Le ferie di Licu’.” In Terrone to Extra-Comunitario: The New Racism in Contemporary Italian Cinema, edited by Grace Russo Bullaro, 366– 390. Leicester/UK: Troubador Publishing (Italian Studies Series), 2010a. Feleschini Lerner, Giovanna. “From the Other Side of the Mediterranean: Hospitality in Italian Migration Cinema.” California Italian Studies vol. 1, no. 1 (2010b): 1–19. Accessed June 20, 2012. www.escholarship.org/uc/item/45h010h5. Film Exhibitions. “Filmmaker in Focus: Ferzan Ozpetek.” Accessed May 20, 2012, http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/films/645. Filmportal.de. “Three Questions About Turkish-German Cinema.” Accessed June 6, 2012. http://www.filmportal.de/en/topic/threequestions-about-turkish-german-cinema. Fink, Guido. “Viaggi verso la foce.” Padania: storia, cultura, istituzioni: rivista semestrale dell’Istituto di storia contemporanea del movimento operaio e contadino 5-6 (1989): 3–11 [= Special issue Il cinema in Padania: i luoghi, le immagini, la memoria]. Fiore, Teresa. “Lunghi viaggi verso Lamerica a casa: straniamento e alterità nelle storie di immigrazione italiana.” Annali d’Italianistica 26 (2006): 87–106. Flusser, Villém. “Gespräch, Gerede, Kitsch: Zum Problem des unvollkommenen Informationskonsums.” In Kitsch: Texte und Theorien, edited by Ute Dettmar and Thomas Küpper, 288–298. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2007.

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Forgacs, David. Italian Culture in the Industrial Era 1880–1980. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990. Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, die Genealogie, die Historie.” In Michel Foucault: Von der Subversion des Wissens, 69-90. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1987. —. Der Mensch ist ein Erfahrungstier. Gespräch mit Ducio Trombadori. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1996. —. “Andere Räume.” In Michel Foucault: Short Cuts, edited by Peter Gente, Heidi Paris and Martin Weinmann, 20–38. 1967. Frankfurt: Zweitausendeins, 2004. Francia di Celle, Stefano, and Enrico Ghezzi (eds.). Mister(o) Emmer: L’attenta distrazione. Turin: Torino Film Festival, 2004. Fraser, Nancy. “From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a ‘Post-Socialist’ Age.” New Left Review 212 (1995): 68–93. Fraser, Nancy and Axel Honneth. Anerkennung oder Umverteilung? Eine politisch-philosophische Kontroverse. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2003. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” New Literary History vol. 7, no. 3 (Spring, 1976): 619–645. Frisch, Max. “Vorwort” to Siamo italiani—Die Italiener: Gespräche mit italienischen Arbeitern in der Schweiz, by Alexander Jean Seiler, vii–x. Zurich: EVZ, 1965. Fuss, Diana. Identification Papers. London, New York: Routledge, 1995. Gabaccia, Donna R. Italy’s Many Diasporas. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000. Gasparini, Giovanni. Sociologia degli interstizi: Viaggio, attesa, silenzio, sorpresa, dono. Milan: Mondadori, 1998. —. Interstizi e universi paralleli: Una lettura insolita della vita quotidiana. Milan: Apogeo, 2007. Gatti, Fabrizio. Bilal. Il mio viaggio da infiltrato nel mercato dei nuovi schiavi. Milan: Rizzoli, 2007. —. Bilal: Viaggiare, lavorare, morire da clandestini. Milan: Rizzoli, 2010. Gendrault, Camille. “Dialect and the Global: A Combination Game.” In Polyglot Cinema: Migration and Transcultural Narration in France, Italy, Portugal and Spain, edited by Verena Berger and Miya Komori, 229–240. Münster, Vienna: LIT, 2010. Giacovelli, Enrico. Pietro Germi. Milan: Il Castoro, 1997. Gili, Jean A. (ed.). Storie del Bel paese. L’Italia attraverso il cinema dal Risorgimento a oggi (1861-2011) [= Quaderni del CSCI. Rivista annuale di cinema italiano 7 (2011)].

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Sarlo, Beatriz. “Borges: Tradition and the Avantgarde.” In Modernism and its Margins: Reinscribing Cultural Modernity from Spain and Latin America, edited by Anthony L. Geist and José B. Monleón, 228–241. New York: Garland, 1999. Sarris, Andrew. “Notes on the ‘Auteur’ Theory in 1962.” Film Culture 27 (Winter 1962–63): 1–8. Sartre, Jean Paul. Black Orpheus. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1963. Sassen, Saskia. Guests and Aliens. New York: New Press, 1999. Schifano, Laurence. Le cinéma italien de 1945 à nos jours: Crise et création. Paris: Armand Colin, 2007. Schmidt, Susana. “Historia reciente y cine: Relatos migratorios en los albores del siglo XXI argentino.” In Encuentro de Latinoamericanistas Españoles, edited by Eduardo Rey Tristán and Patricia Calvo González, 1542–1554. Santiago de Compostela: n.p., 2010. Accessed February 2, 2011. http://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00531229/en/ Schneider, Jane. “The Dynamics of Neo-orientalism in Italy (1848– 1995).” In Italy’s ‘Southern Question’: Orientalism in One Country, edited by Jane Schneider, 1–23. Oxford: Berg, 1998. Schoentjes, Pierre. Poétique de l’ironie. Paris: Seuil, 2001. Schrader, Sabine. “Palermo als Broadway und die Mafia als Musical: ‘Tano da morire’ (1997) von Roberta Torre.” In Europäischer Film im Kontext der Romania: Geschichte und Innovation, edited by Gisela Febel and Natascha Ueckmann, 215–230. Münster: LIT, 2007. —. “Memory and Nostalgia in ‘Il vento fa il suo giro’ di Giorgio Diritti.” In A New Italian Political Cinema. Vol. 2, edited by William Hope. Leicester: Troubador, forthcoming. Schweinitz, Jörg. “Genre und lebendiges Genrebewusstsein.” In Montage AV vol. 3 no. 2 (1994): 100–118. —. “Von Filmgenres, Hybridformen und goldenen Nägeln.” In Film und Psychologie-nach der kognitiven Phase?, edited by Jan Sellmer and Hans J. Wulff, 79–92. Marburg: Schüren, 2002. Seeßlen, Georg. Kino der Gefühle. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1980. —. “Das Kino der doppelten Kulturen/Le cinema du métissage/The Cinema of Inbetween: Ein Streifzug durch ein unbekanntes Kinoterrain.“ epd Film 12 (2000a): 1-10. —. “Das Kino der doppelten Kulturen: Erster Streifzug durch ein unbekanntes Kino-Terrain.” epd Film 12 (2000b): 22–29. —. “At Home Abroad: German Film and Migration.” German Films 3 (2006): 4–13. Accessed June 6, 2012.

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http://www.german-films.de/fileadmin/mediapool/pdf/German_Films_ Quarterly/gfq3-06_scr.pdf. Seiler, Alexander. Siamo italiani / Die Italiener: Gespräche mit italienischen Arbeitern in der Schweiz. Zurich: EVZ, 1965. —. “Das Eigene und das Fremde.” In Daneben geschrieben, edited by Alexander Seiler, 68–77. Baden: hier + jetzt, 2008. —. 2012. Cited in Ciné Portraits, Swiss Films. Accessed February 15, 2012. http://www.swissfilms.ch/de/ download/cine-portraits/. Sesti, Mario. Tutto il cinema di Pietro Germi. Milan: Baldini & Castoldi, 1997. Settis, Salvatore. Italia S.p.A. Turin: Einaudi, 2007. Silvestri, Silvana. “Missio e i misteri di una copia RAI.” Il Manifesto, March 30, 2007. Simmel, Georg. “The Sociological Significance of the ‘Stranger.’” In Introduction to the Science of Sociology: Including the Original Index to Basic Sociological Concepts, edited by Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess, 322–327. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1969. Singer, Ben. Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and its Contexts. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Small, Pauline. “Immigrant Images in Contemporary Italian Cinema.” In Italian Colonialism: Legacy and Memory, edited by Derek Duncan and Jacqueline Andall, 239–254. Oxford e.a.: Peter Lang, 2005 Spagnoletti, Giovanni. “Perspektiven auf das Risorgimento und die Resistenza: Der italienische Film.” In Mythen der Nationen: Völker im Film, edited by Rainer Rother, 150–167. Leipzig: Koehler & Amelang, 1998. Suner, Asuman. New Turkish Cinema: Belonging, Identity and Memory. London: Tauris, 2010. Tabanelli, Giorgio. Ermanno Olmi: Nascita del documentario poetico. Rome: Bulzoni, 1987. Tatar, Maria M. “The Houses of Fiction: Toward a Definition of the Uncanny.” Comparative Literature 33 (1981): 167–182. Taylor, Charles. Philosophical Papers. Vol. 2: Philosophy and the Human Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Transit Migration Forschungsgruppe (ed.). Turbulente Ränder: Neue Perspektiven auf Migration an den Grenzen Europas. Bielefeld: transcript, 2006. Treiblmayr, Christopher. “Ein Mann ist ein Mann, und ein Loch ist ein Loch: Männlichkeit, Homosexualität und Migration in Kutlug Atamans ‘Lola und Bilidikid’ (1998).” In Identitäten in Bewegung, edited by

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Bettina Dennerlein and Elke Frietsch, 191–225. Bielefeld: transcript, 2011. Trifonova, Temenuga. “Code Unknown: European Identity in Cinema.” Scope 8 (2007): 1–20. —. (ed.). European Film Theory. New York, London: Routledge, 2009. Van Gogh, Vincent. “Letter to Theo, June 22, 1888.” In L’artista e le opere, edited by Enrica Crispino, 76. Florence: Giunti, 1999. Vernet, Marc. Filmer le réel: Ressources sur le cinéma documentaire. Paris: BIFI, 2003. Viano, Maurizio. A Certain Realism: Making Use of Pasolini’s Film Theory and Practice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Vicinus, Martha. “Helpless and Unfriended: Nineteenth Century Domestic Melodrama.” New Literary History vol. 13, no. 1 (1981): 127–143. Vico, Giambattista. De antiquissima italorum sapientia. 1710. Reprint, Rome: Angelo Signorelli, 1949. Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992. Vögle, Theresa. Mediale Inszenierungen des Mezzogiorno: Die “Südfrage” als Prüfstein der Einheit Italiens und der Idee Europas. Heidelberg: Winter, 2012. Vogue. “Stars Celebs Models: Ferzan Ozpetek.” Accessed May 20, 2012, http://www.vogue.it/en/vogue-starscelebsmodels/voguemasters/2010/11/ferzan-ozpetek. Wagner, Birgit and Daniel Winkler. “Einleitung: Zur Lage und internationalen Rezeption des neuen italienischen Kinos.” In Nuovo Cinema Italia. Das italienische Kino meldet sich zurück, edited by Birgit Wagner and Daniel Winkler, 7–13. Vienna: Böhlau, 2010. Wagner, Birgit. Sardinien-Insel im Dialog: Texte, Diskurse, Filme. Tübingen: Francke, 2008. Wahl, Chris. “Man spricht Italienisch: Italien im bundesdeutschen Film der 1950er Jahre.” In Tenöre, Touristen, Gastarbeiter: Deutschitalienische Filmbeziehungen, edited by Hans-Michael Bock, Jan Distelmeyer and Jörg Schöning, 132–143. Munich: text + kritik, 2011. Waldenfels, Bernhard. “Response to the Other.” In Encountering the Other(s): Studies in Literature, History, and Culture, edited by Gisela Brinker-Gabler, 35–44. New York: State University Press, 1995. —. Topographie des Fremden: Studien zur Phänomenologie des Fremden. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997. Waller, Marguerite. “The Postcolonial Circus: Maurizio Nichettis Luna e l’altra.” In Postcolonial Cinema Studies, edited by Sandra Ponzanesi

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and Marguerite Waller, 157–171. London, New York: Routledge, 2012. WDR (ed.). “Das Gedächtnis der Migration in Film und Kultur.” Panel Discussion with Georg Seeßlen et al. In Plötzlich so viel Heimat! Identität im Wandel in Film, Kultur und Gesellschaft, edited by WDR, 49–59. Cologne: Strzelecki, 2011. Welsch, Wolfgang. “Transculturality: The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today.” n.d. Accessed May 4, 2012. http://www2.uni-jena.de/welsch/Papers/transcultSociety.html. White, Haydn. “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality.” Critical Inquiry vol. 7, no. 1 (1980): 5–27. Williams, Linda. “Melodrama Revised.” In Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory, edited by Nick Browne, 42–88. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. —. “When is Melodrama ‘Good’? Mega-Melodrama and Victimhood.” Paper presented at the conference After the Tears: Victimhood and Subjectivity in the Melodramatic Mode, University of St. Gallen, November 11, 2011. Winkler, Daniel. “Quando sei nato non puoi piu nasconderti…: Gianni Amelio, Marco Tullio Giordana und der nuovo cinema di migrazione.” In Handeln und verhandeln: Beiträge zum 22. Forum Junge Romanistik, edited by Dagmar Schmelzer et al., 239–257. Bonn: Romanistischer Verlag, 2007. —.“Questioni meridionali, questioni europee? Ethnische und kulturelle Alterität im italienischen Kino der Gegenwart. Mit einem Exkurs zu Gianni Amelios ‘Lamerica.’” In Quo vadis Romania? Zeitschrift für eine aktuelle Romanistik 33 (2009): 39–52. Winokur, Mark. American Laughter: Immigrants, Ethnicity, and 1930s Hollywood Film Comedy. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. Wood, Mary P. “Clandestini: The Other Hiding in the Italian Body Politic.” In European Cinema: Inside Out, edited by Guido Rings and Rikki Morgan-Tamasunas, 95–106. Heidelberg: Winter, 2003. —. Italian Cinema. Oxford: Berg, 2005. Woolf, Virginia. Three Guineas. London: The Hogarth Press, 1938. Yano, Hisashi. “Migrationsgeschichte.” In Interkulturelle Literatur in Deutschland, edited by Carmine Chiellino, 1–17. Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler, 2000. Zagarrio, Vito. Cinema italiano anni novanta. Venice: Marsilio, 1998. —. (ed.). Italy A/R. Migrazioni nel/del cinema italiano [= Quaderni del CSCI. Rivista annuale di cinema italiano 8/2012, forthcoming].

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Zambenedetti, Alberto. “Multiculturalism in New Italian Cinema.” Studies of European Cinema 3 (2006): 105–115. Zambetti, Sandro. Francesco Rosi. Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1976. Zanier, Leonardo. “Fichen.” In Das Jahrhundert der Italiener in der Schweiz, edited by Ernst Halter, 130–134. Zurich: Offizin, 2003. Zavattini, Cesare. “How I Did Not Make ‘Italia Mia.’” In Film Book. Vol. 1: The Audience and the Filmmaker, edited by Robert Hughes, 122– 145. New York: Grove Press Inc., 1959.

CONTRIBUTORS

Alice Bardan holds a Ph.D. from the University of Southern California (USA). She has taught courses in writing and film studies at the University of Southern California, California State University, Fullerton, and Boston University’s Los Angeles Internship Program. Her articles on recent European cinema have appeared in several edited collections as well as in New Cinemas, Popular Communication, and Flow. Rada Bieberstein is Assistant Professor in Media Studies at Tübingen University (Germany). Recent publications on Italian cinema include Lost Diva—Found Woman: Female Representations in New Italian Cinema and National Cinema from 1995 to 2005 (Marburg: Schüren, 2009). She is co-author of a study on Michelangelo Antonioni, forthcoming from text & kritik (Munich) in 2013. Furthermore, she is the co-author of the documentary on the animation film pioneer Lotte Reiniger—Dance of the Shadows (2012) co-produced with arte. Alessandra Di Maio teaches at the University of Palermo, Italy. She is a postcolonial scholar. Her area of specialization includes black, diasporic and migratory studies, with a particular attention to the formation of transnational cultural identities. Among her publications are the volumes Tutuola at the University: The Italian Voice of a Yoruba Ancestor (Rome: Bulzoni, 2000), the collection An African Renaissance (Palermo: Eurografica, 2006), Wor(l)ds in Progress: A Study of Contemporary Migrant Writings (Milan: Mimesis, 2008) and Dedica a Wole Soyinka (Pordenone: Dedica, 2012). She has translated several authors from Africa and the diaspora into Italian. Francesca Esposito studied at DAMS of the University of Bologna and at the Academy of Fine Arts of Carrara (Italy). She held internships in several cultural institutions (Short Film Agency, Hamburg; Filmacademy Baden-Wuerttemberg; ARTE-TV, Baden-Baden; Il Festival della Mente, Sarzana). In edited collections such as Fast Forward 2: the Power of Motion, Media Art Sammlung Goetz (Munich: Cantz, 2010) and The cinematic experience: Film, contemporary art, museum (Pasian di Prato: Campanotto, 2010), she focused on the work of the German painter and

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filmmaker Jochen Kuhn. On the Italian film magazine Cinergie she has been exploring the fields of animation film and comic. Camille Gendrault is Assistant Professor in Film Studies at the University of Bordeaux 3 (France). She has published mainly on Italian cinema and her research is more specifically dedicated to the relationships between urban space, collective identity and film aesthetics (Naples au jeu du cinéma. Paris: L’Harmattan, forthcoming). She is currently focusing her attention on intercultural issues. Jörg Metelmann, born 1970, received his Ph.D. for a monograph on aesthetics and media violence in the cinema of Michael Haneke (Munich: Fink, 2003). After his dissertation he worked with theologians at the Humboldt University Berlin on the topic of “Media Religion,” for which he co-authored a second book. He has edited and co-edited volumes on video surveillance, pop culture and pornography, aesthetics and religion, decency, and education and entrepreneurship. With Scott Loren, he is currently co-authoring a manuscript on melodrama, aesthetics and subjectivity in auteur cinema. Áine O’Healy is Professor of Italian and Director of the Humanities Program at Loyola Marymount University. Her recent publications include the co-edited collection Transnational Feminism in Film and Media (New York: Palgrave, 2007) and a co-edited special issue of Feminist Media Studies (vol. 9, no. 4, 2009). Her study of contemporary Italian film, National Cinema in a Transnational Landscape, is forthcoming from Indiana University Press in 2013. Doris Pichler holds a Ph.D. in Italian literature and is currently a lecturer at the Institute for Romance Studies at the University of Graz. Her recent publications include articles on political literature and film, on the theory of fiction as well as the monograph Das Spiel mit Fiktion. Ästhetische Selbstreflexion in der italienischen Gegenwartsliteratur (Heidelberg: Winter, 2011). Veronica Pravadelli is Professor of Cinema Studies and Director of the Center for American Studies (CRISA) at Roma Tre University. She has been Visiting Professor at Brown University. She has written extensively on Italian Post-Neorealist Cinema, Hollywood cinema and Feminist and Gender Studies. Her recent publications include La grande Hollywood: Stili di vita e di regia nel cinema classico Americano (Venice: Marsilio,

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2007; Best Book in Italian Film Studies) and articles on Antonioni, Visconti, Bertolucci and Alina Marazzi. She is editing an anthology of essays in Italian by Laura Mulvey and completing a manuscript on cinema and gender for Laterza. She is an Associate Editor of the European Journal of Women’s Studies. Laura Rascaroli is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at University College Cork, Ireland. Her most recent publications include The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film (London: Wallflower/Columbia University Press, 2009) and Antonioni: Centenary Essays (London: BFI/Palgrave, 2011), which she edited with John David Rhodes. She is a co-founder and currently General Editor of Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media. Gudrun Rath holds a Ph.D. from the University of Vienna and currently works at the University of Konstanz. She has taught Latin American and French literature and film at the universities of Konstanz, Heidelberg and Vienna. She has recently published a study on translation and Argentine literature (Zwischenzonen. Theorien und Fiktionen des Übersetzens. Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2012). Aurora E. Rodonò is a lecturer in Italian Studies at the Heinrich-HeineUniversität Düsseldorf (Germany). From 2003-2006, she worked as a researcher for the Project Migration, an initiative of the German Federal Cultural Foundation. Since 2007, she has been working as a freelance script consultant for movies. Her recent publications include articles on Italian labour migration, German migrant cinema and Ettore Scola. She is currently writing her PhD thesis on German an Italian migrant cinema, a comparative work focusing on the nexus between politics and aesthetics. Sophie Rudolph is Lecturer in French Culture and Film Studies at University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. Her research interests include Film and Art theory, Literary Adaptations, Francophone and Swiss Cinema. She is the author of the monograph Die Filme von Alain Resnais: Reflexionen auf das Kino als unreine Kunst (Munich: text + kritik, 2012). She is currently researching francophone cinema in Switzerland and Canada. Sabine Schrader is Professor of Italian Literature and Culture at the Leopold-Franzens University of Innsbruck (Austria). She has written on Italian and French Literature of the nineteenth and twentieth century and on silent and contemporary cinema and television series in France and Italy.

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Her publications on film include “Si gira!”: Literatur und Film in der Stummfilmzeit Italiens (Heidelberg: Winter, 2007), with D. Naguschewski, a volume about Literature and Cinema in France and Francophone countries (Marburg: Schüren, 2008), and articles on queer cinema and various Italian, French and Francophone filmmakers such as Malaparte, Torre, Giordana, Diritti, Alouache or Gaudreault. Daniel Winkler teaches French and Italian Cinema and Literature at the Leopold-Franzens University of Innsbruck (Austria). He is the author of Transit Marseille: Filmgeschichte einer Mittelmeermetropole (Bielefeld: transcript, 2007) and co-editor of Montreal-Toronto: Stadtkultur und Migration in Literatur, Film und Musik (Berlin: Weidler, 2007), Apropos Canada/À propos du Canada: Fünf Jahre Graduiertentagungen der Kanada-Studien (Francfort e.a.: Peter Lang, 2009) and Nuovo Cinema Italia: Der italienische Film meldet sich zurück (Vienna: Böhlau, 2010). Alberto Zambenedetti is a Lecturer in the Department of World Languages and Literatures at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York (USA). He is also a freelance film critic, a sports writer, a translator, and he has worked on several film projects. He was born and raised in Venice, Italy, where he was awarded a Laurea in Foreign Languages and Literatures from Università degli Studi di Venezia, Ca’ Foscari. He also has a Master’s degree in Cinema Studies from New York University, and a Ph.D. in Italian Studies from the same institution. Gaoheng Zhang is a Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholar in the Humanities at the University of Southern California for 2012-14. He received his Ph.D. in Italian Studies from New York University in 2011, with a dissertation on travel and Italian masculinities in Gianni Amelio’s cinema. Since then, he has been pursuing a book project on the culture of Chinese immigration to Italy. Previously he co-edited a book entitled Power and Image in Early Modern Europe with Jessica Goethals and Valerie McGuire (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008).

INDEX

40 qm Deutschland (Forty Square Meters of Germany Tevfik Baúer, 1986) 186, 191 A Sud di Lampedusa (South of Lampedusa Andrea Segre, 2006) 41, 45–47, 51 Accattone (Accattone! Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1961) 120 Almanya–Willkommen in Deutschland (Yasemin Samdereli, 2011) 139, 197 Amarcord (I Remember Federico Fellini, 1973) 249 Amore e rabbia (Love and Anger Marco Bellocchio, Bernardo Bertolucci, Jean-Luc Godard, Carlo Lizzani, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Elda Tattoli, 1969) 73, 89 Angst essen Seele auf (Fear Eats the Soul Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974) 178–179, 181–182, 194 Aprilkinder (April Children Yüksel Yavuz, 1998) 171 Auslandstournee (Tour Abroad Europe Ayúe Polat, 2000) 171 Azzurro (Denis Rabaglia, 2000) 7, 124, 134–138, 140, 252, 258 Babooska (Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel, 2005) 14 Banditi a Orgosolo (Bandits of Orgosolo Vittorio De Seta, 1961) 4 Bianco e nero (Black and White Cristina Comencini, 2008) 278 Bis zum Ende aller Tage (Girl from Hong Kong Franz Peter Wirth, 1961) 175

Biutiful (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2009) 90 Bolivia (Adrián Caetano, 2001) 161 Borsalino (Jacques Deray, 1970) 8, 55 Borsalino et Cie (Borsalino and Co. Jacques Deray, 1974) 8 Brutti, sporchi e cattivi (Ugly, Dirty and Bad Ettore Scola, 1976) 183 Buongiorno, notte (Good Morning, Night Marco Bellocchio, 2003) 55, 279 China Girl (Abel Ferrara, 1987) 18 Come mi vuoi (As You Want Me Carmine Amoroso, 1997) 89 Come un uomo sulla terra (Andrea Segre and Dagmawi Yimer, 2008) 45–46 Conny und Peter machen Musik (Werner Jacobs, 1960) 175 Contadini del mare (Vittorio De Seta, 1956) 4 Corazones de mujer (Women’s heart Kiff Kossof, 2008) 11, 15 Corpo celeste (Heavenly Body Alice Rohrwacher, 2011) 93 Cose dell’altro mondo (Things from Another World Francesco Patierno, 2011) 92 Cover Boy: L’ultima rivoluzione (Cover Boy: The Last Revolution Carmine Amoroso, 2006) 15, 69–70, 73–77, 79–81, 83–87, 89, 172, 194 Cuore sacro (Sacred Heart Ferzan Ozpetek, 2005) 201, 220, 222– 224 Dancer in the Dark (Lars von Trier, 2000) 258

322 Dealer (Thomas Arslan, 1999) 171 Der Italiener (The Italian Paolo Polini, 2011) 137 Der schöne Tag (A Fine Day Thomas Arslan, 2001) 171 Die Schweizermacher (The Swissmakers Rolf Lyssi, 1979) 135, 184 Divorzio all’italiana (Divorce Italian Style Pietro Germi, 1961) 176 El hijo de la novia (Son of the Bride Juan José Campanella, 2001) 162 El khoubz el hafi (Pane nudo Rachid Benhadj, 2005) 11, 172 El lado oscuro del corazón (The Dark Side of the Heart Eliseo Subiela, 1992) 169 Elivis l’italiano (André-Line Beauparlant, 2001) 65 Elvjs e Merilijn (Elvjs & Merilijn Armando Manni, 1998) 9 Emmas Glück (Emma’s Bliss Sven Taddicken, 2006) 90 En Garde (Ayúe Polat, 2004) 171 Evet, ich will! (Sinan Akkuú, 2008) 197 Fame chimica (Chemical Hunger Paolo Vari and Antonio Bocola, 2003) 73 Francesca (Bobby Paunescu, 2009) 172 Fuga dal call centre (Escape from the Call Centre Federico Rizzo, 2008) 73 Fuga in Francia (Flight Into France Mario Soldati, 1948) 6 Galantuomini (Brave Men Edoardo Winspeare, 2008) 279 Gegen die Wand (Head-On Fatih Akin, 2004) 171, 173–174, 219 Generazione mille euro (1000 Euro Generation Massimo Venier, 2009) 73

Index Geschwister-Kardeúler (Thomas Arslan, 1997) 171 Giorni e nuvole (Days and Clouds Silvio Soldini, 2007) 73 Gomorra (Gomorrah Matteo Garrone, 2008) 276, 279 Good Morning, Aman (Claudio Noce, 2009) 90 Gorbaciof (Stefano Incerti, 2010) 91 Große Freiheit Nr. 7 (Great Freedom No. 7 Helmut Käutner, 1944) 191 Hamam—Il bagno turco (Hamam: The Turkish Bath Ferzan Ozpetek, 1997) 15, 60, 201, 203, 207–211, 215, 219, 220, 222–224 Harem suaré (Ferzan Ozpetek, 1999) 201, 207–208, 210, 213, 215, 219, 228–229 Herencia (Inheritance Paula Hernández, 2001) 161, 170 Hiroshima mon amour (Hiroshima, My Love Alain Resnais, 1959) 118 I baci mai dati (Lost Kisses Roberta Torre, 2011) 91 I cento passi (One Hundred Steps Marco Tullio Giordana, 2000) 279 I fidanzati (The Fiances Ermanno Olmi, 1963) 107, 118–120 I magliari (The Magliari Francesco Rosi, 1959) 6–7, 107–109, 118, 121, 174–175 I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street Mario Monicelli, 1958) 55 I vitelloni (Federico Fellini, 1953) 149, 154 Il bell’Antonio (Bell’Antonio Mauro Bolognini, 1960) 224 Il branco (The Pack Marco Risi, 1994) 217 Il cammino della speranza (The Road to Hope Pietro Germi,

The Cinemas of Italian Migration: European and Transatlantic Narratives 1950) 1–2, 8, 12, 17, 21–24, 26– 29, 59, 108, 117–118, 176 Il caso Mattei (The Mattei Affair Francesco Rosi, 1972) 102 Il gattopardo (The Leopard Luchino Visconti, 1963) 54, 150 Il mio paese (My Country Daniele Vicari, 2006) 93, 95, 102 Il mio viaggio in Italia (My Voyage to Italy Martin Scorsese, 1999) 148 Il passaggio della linea (Crossing the Line Pietro Marcello, 2007) 93, 95–96 Il prete bello (The Handsome Priest Carlo Mazzacurati, 1989) 244 Il regista di matrimoni (The Wedding Director Marco Bellocchio, 2006) 53, 56 Il sangue verde (The Green Blood Andrea Segre, 2010) 45–46, 91 Il sorpasso (The Easy Life Dino Risi, 1962) 177 Il tempo si è fermato (Time Stood Still Ermanno Olmi, 1959) 117 Il toro (The Bull Carlo Mazzacurati, 1994) 9 Il vento di settembre— Septemberwind (September Winds Alexander Seiler, 2002) 124, 127, 132–135, 137, 139 Il vento fa il suo giro (The Wind Blows Round Giorgio Diritti, 2005) 11 Il villaggio di cartone (The Cardboard Village Ermanno Olmi, 2011) 92 Il volo (The Flight Wim Wenders, 2010) 92 In der Fremde (Sohrab Shahid Saless, 1974) 178 In nome della legge (In the Name of the Law Pietro Germi, 1949) 53 Into Paradiso (Paola Randi, 2010) 1–2, 15, 17, 263–266, 268, 270, 272, 274, 276–278

323

Io, l’altro (I, the Other Mohsen Melliti, 2006) 11, 172 Io sono l’amore (I am Love Luca Guadagnino, 2010) 91 Io sono Li (Shun Li and the Poet Andrea Segre, 2011) 92 It’s Not Just You, Murray! (Martin Scorsese, 1964) 153 Italianamerican (Martin Scorsese, 1974) 7, 141–144, 146, 148, 154 Italienreise—Liebe inbegriffen (Voyage to Italy—Complete with Love Wolfgang Becker, 1958) 175 Katzelmacher (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1969) 179 Kleine Freiheit (A Little Bit of Freedom Yüksel Yavuz, 2003) 171, 174, 191–192 L’albero dei destini sospesi (The Tree of Hanging Destinies Rachid Benhadj, 1997) 11, 172 L’année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad Alain Resnais, 1961) 118 L’assedio (Besieged Bernardo Bertolucci, 1998) 9, 206, 252, 256-258 L’isola (The Island Costanza Quatriglio, 2003) 59 L’Italia non è un paese povero (Italy is not a Poor Contry Joris Ivens, 1960) 93 L’orchestra di Piazza Vittorio (The Orchestra of Piazza Vittorio Agostino Ferrente, 2006) 3, 13 La commare secca (The Grim Reaper Bernardo Bertolucci, 1962) 120 La doppia ora (The Double Hour Giuseppe Capotondi, 2009) 90– 91 La finestra di fronte (Facing Windows Ferzan Ozpetek, 2003) 201, 209, 213, 222–224, 226– 227

324 La giusta distanza (The Right Distance Carlo Mazzacurati, 2007) 14, 231, 235, 237, 239, 242 La graine et le mulet (The Secret of the Grain Abdellatif Kechiche, 2007) 31 La nostra vita (Our Life Daniele Luchetti, 2010) 91 La paura (Fear Pippo Delbono, 2009) 93, 99, 101 La promesse (The Promise JeanPierre and Luc Dardenne, 1996) 31 La rabbia (Anger Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1963) 89 La ragazza in vetrina (Girl in the Window Luciano Emmer, 1961) 6, 107, 111, 113–114, 116, 118, 122, 176 La sconosciuta (The Unknown Woman Giuseppe Tornatore, 2006) 206, 252–254, 261 La solitudine dei numeri primi (The Solitude of the Prime Numbers Saverio Costanzo, 2010) 93 La Suisse s’interroge (Henri Brandt, 1964) 126 La terra trema: Episodio del mare (La Terra Trema Luchino Visconti, 1948) 53, 57 Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves Vittorio De Sica, 1948) 9, 30 Lamerica (Gianni Amelio, 1994) 8– 9, 31–34, 37–40, 60, 164, 167, 193–194, 206, 259 Le fate ignoranti (The Ignorant Fairies Ferzan Ozpetek, 2001) 201, 212–213, 219–220, 222– 226, 228 Le ferie di Licu (Vittorio Moroni, 2007) 11–12 Le mani sulla città (Hands over the City Francesco Rosi, 1963) 4 Les apprentis (Alain Tanner, 1964) 126

Index Lettere dal Sahara (Vittorio De Seta, 2006) 13 Lezioni di cioccolato (Chocolate Lessons Claudio Cupellini, 2007) 15, 263–267, 270, 273, 275–278 Lezioni di volo (Flying Lessons Francesca Archibugi, 2007) 278 Little Caesar (Mervyn LeRoy, 1931) 152 Lo stagionale (The Seasonal Worker Alvaro Bizzarri, 1973) 131 Lola und Bilidikid (Lola and Bilidikid Kutlu÷ Ataman, 1999) 174, 189–190 Magnificient Obsessions (Douglas Sirk, 1954) 258 Mala época (Bad Times Mariano de Rosa, Rodrigo Moreno, Nicolás Saad, and Salvador Roselli, 1998) 161 Mare chiuso (Stefano Liberti, Andrea Segre, 2012) 52 Maria, ihm schmeckt’s nicht (Maria, He Doesn’t Like It Neele Leana Vollmar, 2009) 197 Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese, 1973) 143–144, 149–150 Merica (Federico Ferrone, Michele Manzolini and Francesco Ragazzi, 2007) 18 Mery per sempre (Forever Mary Marco Risi, 1989) 217 Mi piace lavorare—Mobbing (I like to Work—Mobbing Francesca Comencini, 2003) 73 Mine vaganti (Loose Cannons Ferzan Ozpetek, 2010) 201, 214–216, 223–224, 227 Mirabella/Sindelfingen— Rückfahrkarte nach Deutschland (Andreas Pichler (Andreas Pichler, 2001) 102 Miss Little China (Riccardo Cremona and Vincenzo De Cecco, 2009) 18

The Cinemas of Italian Migration: European and Transatlantic Narratives Napoletani a Milano (Neapolitans in Milan Eduardo De Filippo, 1953) 108–109 Napoli che canta (When Naples Sings Roberto Leone Roberti, 1926) 18 Natale al Campo 119 (Christmas at Camp 119 Pietro Francisci, 1947) 22–26, 28 Neapolitanische Geschichten (The Reign of Naples Werner Schroeter, 1978) 184 Notte italiana (Italian Night Carlo Mazzacurati, 1988) 244 Notte prima degli esami (The Night Before the Exams Fausto Brizzi, 2006) 279 Notte prima degli esami—Oggi (The Night Before the Exams Today Fausto Brizzi, 2007) 279 Nueve reinas (Nine Queens Fabián Bielinsky, 2000) 162 Nuovomondo (Golden Door Emanuele Crialese, 2006) 279 Oggi sposi (Just Married Luca Lucini, 2009) 278 Okupas (Bruno Stagnaro, 2001) 161 Paisà (Paisan Roberto Rossellini, 1946) 9, 22–28, 30, 184 Palermo oder Wolfsburg (Palermo or Wolfsburg Werner Schroeter, 1980) 5, 184 Pane e cioccolata (Bread and Chocolate Franco Brusati, 1974) 5, 75, 121, 181–184 Parigi è sempre Parigi (Paris is Always Paris Luciano Emmer, 1951) 114–115 Pizza, birra y faso (Pizza, Beer and Smokes Adrián Caetano and Bruno Stagnaro, 1998) 161 Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) 35 Pummarò (Tomato Michele Placido, 1990) 8–9, 62, 171 Quando sei nato non puoi più nasconderti (Once You’re Born

325

You Can No Longer Hide Marco Tullio Giordana, 2005) 9, 193– 194, 247, 252, 254, 258–259, 261, 278 Questa notte è ancora nostra (This Night is Still Ours Paolo Genovese and Luca Miniero, 2008) 15, 263–267, 270–271, 273, 275–278 Ragazzi fuori (Boys on the Outside Marco Risi, 1990) 217 Respiro (Grazia’s Island Emanuele Crialese, 2002) 59 Retour à Marseille (Return to Marseilles René Allio, 1980) 7 Ricordati di noi (Don’t forget about us Paul Tana, 2007) 14 Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1959) 150 Riparo (Shelter Me Puccioni, 2007) 172, 194 Riprendimi (Good Morning Heartache Anna Negri, 2008) 73 Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers Luchino Visconti, 1960) 5, 12, 107, 110, 118, 176– 177 Roma città aperta (Rome Open City Roberto Rossellini, 1945) 25 Romanzo criminale (Michele Placido, 2005) 279 Saturno contro (Saturn in Opposition Ferzan Ozpetek, 2007) 201, 223–227 Scarface (Howard Hawks, 1932) 152 Schick deine Frau nicht nach Italien (Do Not Send Your Wife to Italy Hans Grimm, 1960) 175 Scusate il ritardo (Massimo Troisi, 1983) 217 Sedotta e abbandonata (Seduced and Abandoned Pietro Germi, 1964) 176, 216 Senso (Luchino Visconti, 1954) 150

326 Shirins Hochzeit (Shirins Wedding Helma Sanders-Brahms, 1976) 178 Si pensava di restare poco. 12 storie d’emigrazione—Eigentlich wollten wir nicht lange bleiben. 12 Geschichten aus der Emigration (Francesca Cangemi and Daniel von Aarburg, 2002) 137 Siamo italiani—Die Italiener (Alexander J. Seiler, June Kovach and Rob Gnant, 1964) 7, 123–124, 126–134, 137, 139– 140, 262 Solino (Fatih Akin, 2002) 252, 258– 259 Stromboli, terra di Dio (Stromboli Roberto Rossellini, 1950) 53 Sud Side Stori (South Side Story Roberta Torre, 2000) 16, 57, 61, 64, 66 Tano da morire (To Die for Tano Roberta Torre, 1997) 61, 65, 67 Terra di mezzo (Matteo Garrone, 1996) 52 Terraferma (Dry Land Emanuele Crialese, 2011) 92, 278 The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) 8, 55, 144, 147 The Godfather: Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974) 8 The Godfather: Part III (Francis Ford Coppola, 1990) 8, 147, 150 The Great Train Robbery (Edwin Stanton Porter, 1903) 151 The Immigrant (Charlie Chaplin, 1917) 184 The Italian (Reginald Barker, 1915) 18 The Italian Barber (D. W. Griffith, 1911) 18

Index The Old Maid (Edmund Goulding, 1939) 254 The Public Enemy (William Wellman, 1931) 155 Toni (Jean Renoir, 1935) 6, 59 Tornando a casa (Sailing Home Vincenzo Marra, 2001) 11, 57– 58, 61 Tre fratelli (Three Brothers Francesco Rosi, 1981) 4 Tumberos (Adrián Caetano, 2002) 161 Tutta la vita davanti (All Your Life Ahead of You Paolo Virzì, 2009) 73 Un día de suerte (A Lucky Day Sandra Gugliotta, 2002) 7, 157, 163–164, 166–169 Un giorno perfetto (A Perfect Day Ferzan Ozpetek, 2008) 224 Un’altra vita (Another Life Carlo Mazzacurati, 1992) 8 Una vita tranquilla (A Quiet Life Claudio Cupellini, 2010) 91, 279 Vento di terra (Vincenzo Marra, 2004) 57 Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock 1958) 119 Vesna va veloce (Vesna Goes Fast Carlo Mazzacurati, 1996) 244 Volevo solo dormirle addosso (I Truly Respect You Eugenio Cappuccio, 2004) 73 Vozvrashchenie (The Return Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2003) 55 West Side Story (Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise, 1961) 61 Who’s that Knocking at My Door? (Martin Scorsese, 1967) 150, 152 Yella (Christian Petzold, 2007) 90