Migration, Dislocation and Movement on Screen

Introduction

Ruxandra Trandafoiu

This volume proposes a variegated exploration of migration on screen, mostly focused on feature films, although there are inevitable and occasional incursions into television drama and documentary. This edited collection arises from the conviction that migration, mobility, movement, displacement, dislocation, border crossing, transit, departure, arrival and in-betweenness, have not only become common and shared experiences for most of us, but they have also been turned into highly politicized and contentious issues. How cinema represents them, for represent them it must, is a necessary question. Consequently, an array of possible answers to this fundamental question is explored in all the eight chapters constituting this volume. While migration and mobility have been normalized by universal practices and lifestyles over the last few decades, they have also been stifled, contained and highly regulated by not only political decision, but also global events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. In only the last few years, Europe has seen at least two key moments (the 2015 so-called ‘refugee crisis’ spurred by the Syrian civil war and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022) that offered plenty of opportunities to pay attention to at least the plight of war refugees within the much larger context of global migration and dislocation. The Mediterranean region, Australia’s waters and the US-Mexican border have also received consideration as spaces of multiplying rhizomic movements but, also significantly, of obstruction, interruption and stuckness. We would not imbue movement with so much significance – indeed, we all engage in it readily and willingly – if movement flowed unimpeded. The reason filmmakers and audiences alike are interested in the theme of migration on screen is because mobility is, in today’s world, problematic, often rendered illegal and therefore dangerous, often contested, stopped or curtailed, often the site of inequality, human rights infringements, tragedy and death. Migration can, literally, kill you.

For centuries migration has been a key source of good stories that mythology, literature and, more recently, film have told and retold. Human mobility can indeed tell some damn interesting stories, with good but mostly bad endings. As audiences, we are transfixed and moved, we empathize and we often cry, we become migrants through the experiences we identify with on screen and in everyday life. How migration is represented on screen matters therefore a great deal, from political, economic, ethical and industry perspectives. It matters even more now, when this ancient human pursuit has become the object of so much contestation, hate and rejection. This is a crucial moral moment for humanity and cinema is right at the crux of the most crucial debates arising right now, right here. By projecting ‘small’, often individualized and confessional stories, cinema is once again telling us the bigger story. As Campanioni makes clear in the first chapter of this volume, film is firmly implicated in the critique of the present. It becomes, as Anisimovich too asserts, a contestation device, a site of resistance. This dissident quality is echoed in the chapters authored by Hudelist, Raj and Sreekumar, and Peruzzi, Bruno and Massa, and is also dissected in director El Hagar’s reflections of his own professional approaches in the final chapter of this volume.

The volume moves away from the temptation to categorize the films, television series and documentaries analysed within. If we adopt the accepted classification of first (Hollywood) cinema, second (European art house) cinema, third (anticolonial, ‘Third World’) cinema, fourth (indigenous) cinema and fifth (refugee) cinema, we quickly spot that some of the films showcased fall in between categories, even before we attempt to classify TV series like Years and Years or discuss Andrea Segre’s documentary work (both featured in the book). They get us, to paraphrase Ponzanesi (2012), to a ‘non-place’. However, we could say that the films analysed are engagé (committed and participative); they are defined by resistance, disruption, subversion and social action (Kaur and Grassilli 2019: 3); they claim visibility and voice for those usually unseen and unheard. They provide, in other words, a counter-narrative (Kaur and Grassilli 2019: 4), not that dissimilar from ‘accented cinema’ (Naficy 2001), in their striving for self-presentation and self-representation. They are doppelt or doubled (Berghahn and Stenberg 2010a: 5). Inherently, they are therefore political and activist.

What political, activist and critical approaches achieve via screens large and small is the development of a better alternative. Cinema reminds us that there is another way, that we are human, and that means that we are social, communitarian, moral and compassionate. In the film work scrutinized by Campanioni, Evans, Kocatürk, Hudelist, Raj and Sreekumar, and Peruzzi, Bruno and Massa, we have a clear exploration of the ethical outcomes of witnessing sacrifice, injustice and trauma. As Evans explains, reimagining the national imaginary to make it more inclusive and to bring into reality a more cosmopolitan outlook must be one of the main impacts of films about migrants and migration. However, as Kocatürk, and Raj and Sreekumar observe, films can also miss this opportunity and (self)reterritorialization and self-imposed immobility can often raise their ugly heads again, in the analysis provided by Andreas Hudelist in his chapter. Cinema is ‘imperfect’, as Campanioni asserts.

Within the context of ethics, we could argue that an important achievement of this ever-increasing body of films, television series and documentaries about migration is the re-elaboration of the theme of otherness or strangeness. It offers the opportunity to talk in detail about strategies of othering (see Anisimovich’s chapter in this volume), but more importantly, it allows ‘strangers’ to tell their own stories, as screen writers, directors and actors, or simply as people with a camera (see the chapters authored by Hudelist, Peruzzi, Bruno and Massa, and Trandafoiu and Shannon, in particular). This allows audiences to move away from parochial, nationalistic and ideologized storytelling and adopt multiple perspectives. We become ‘us’ and ‘them’ at the same time, we feel what foreigners feel as they are gazed upon and, similarly, we adopt the critical gaze of the stranger seeing things anew. Accordingly, films about migration are films of ‘ambivalence’, to adopt a term dear to Malini Guha (2015: 26). They adopt difference as a philosophical inquiry but, at the same time, they normalize difference, they transform it into a way of living with difference, while being different. They adopt a pendulum or seesaw approach, refashioning exterior experiences into interior ones, shifting perspectives, allowing viewers the freedom to appropriate or reject them, or even sew them into the quilt of their own lived experiences. And yet, in the same movement, they may perpetuate the troubling association between ‘strangeness’ or ‘difference’ and ‘anomaly’, as Campanioni explains in his chapter. While empathy plays a big part in seeing the lives of distant others, we are never far away from compassion fatigue (see Evans in this volume).

These screened migration stories are inevitably not without ambiguity, because of the complexity of contrary standpoints (see again Campanioni in this volume). The present is shaped by both past trauma and future projection, as evidenced by the analysis provided by Raj and Sreekumar in this volume. Both remembering and forgetting outline memory and nostalgia. The colonizer is constantly reminded of the existence of the colonized, while the colonized never escapes the inheritance of doubleness, for, as Bhabha contends, ‘the English weather also revives memories of its daemonic double: the heat and dust of India; the dark emptiness of Africa; the tropical chaos that was deemed despotic and ungovernable and therefore worthy of the civilizing mission’ (Bhabha 1990: 320). Cinematic narratives become political because of their disruptive and contesting double nature. Films about migration are necessarily contrapuntal, to use a term much favoured by Edward Said (1993) because the contrapuntal ‘speaks to the inevitable, continuous and significant juxtaposition of elements and threads in a life, a text, a history . . . the presence in a single discourse of more than one voice’ (Silverstone 2006: 85). As already mentioned, the ‘bigger story’ is the canvass that foregrounds the ‘small’ individual narratives. This view comes across strongly in the ongoing discussion between producer Roger Shannon and director Khaled El Hagar that is available in the Postscript to the volume. On screen the link between history, event, and reality on the one hand, and their fictional representation and visualization on the other, is often interrupted and problematic (see Raj and Sreekumar, and Trandafoiu and Shannon in this volume). There is often an ambiguity, a slippage. This makes for interesting viewing. Equally, it raises some important questions for cinema, and particularly European cinemas, often guilty of colonial hangovers that perpetuate hierarchies of power and practices of inclusion-exclusion.

In order to avoid the dangers of slipping back into inherited forms of representation, the volume engages more directly with the work of filmmakers who are migrants themselves and therefore dislocated culturally, ideologically and professionally. Simply applying the label ‘diasporic’ to their work would be reductive. We could argue that any filmmaker is dislocated, as artists can only produce something original if they acquire a new perspective, they shift their position and their vision away from what is already known, understood and accepted. Nonetheless, some of the filmmakers featured in this book are both physically displaced and symbolically dislocated, thus allowing for a more acute awareness of migration experiences: Rafi Pitts is an Iranian who lives in France and England, while Khaled El Hagar has lived in-between two homes (Birmingham and Cairo) for decades. They see the world, to quote another famously dislocated artist, in ‘broken mirrors’ (Rushdie 1982). Dislocated filmmakers are in the unique but ambiguous position of being both close enough and distanced enough from their multiple realities to acquire clarity and reflexivity – what Khaled El Hagar calls in this volume a ‘third eye,’ a third brain, a third perspective. The dislocated filmmaker never goes blind, on the contrary, their acuity increases with every new experience, whether that is the experience of going forward or that of being stuck. Rushdie might be right to deplore the loss of several shards in the ‘broken mirror’ of his diasporic existence, but he is also realistic in his insistence that the ‘double perspective’ of being ‘at one and the same time insiders and outsiders’ cultivates a ‘stereoscopic vision’ (Rushdie 1982). Dislocated filmmakers see beyond the surface and the immediate event. They make the jump from linearity to elasticity. They purposefully confuse the state of stasis and that of flow. They make the familiar unfamiliar and vice versa. They show us the absurd (see Anisimovich’s chapter) in order to make us understand our own racial prejudices.

Dislocation reconfigures place and space. Geography becomes symbolic but also politically problematic. While trajectories of mobility are often defined by the move from rural to urban and periphery to centre, with the city as the predilect destination of migration (see Guha 2015), the symbolic geography emerging from the chapters featured in this volume often takes us away from capitals and into various locations as far as Egypt, India, Mexico, Norway or Turkey. Moreover, the chapters zoom in on borders, spaces of transit and non-places, all of them locations that encourage potential transgression and resistance. Despite obsessive rebordering and containment attempts, borderlands are mostly defined by interstitial, temporary or nowhere spaces. They, once again, tell the story of migration effectively, albeit rather pessimistically. Migration is not just about departures and arrivals or landings, but also about returns, transits, limbos, journeys going no place, mobile bodies temporarily traversing in-between unstable spatial configurations, bodies drowning with no name attached to them. The local and the global are constantly reinterpreted through both motion and fixity. And yet these interstitial spaces, that are constantly conquered and lost through movement, can become purgatories leading to hell, not paradise (see Hudelist’s compelling analysis of Soy Nero in this volume).

Once optimistic in terms of cinema’s potential to subvert hierarchies of power and create something new and exciting out of sometimes grim experiences, films on migration nowadays transition to a more pessimistic position. The focus shifts towards impenetrable borders, immobility, feelings of being stuck, and fear. The migrant is often associated with danger and terrorism, in order to be controlled through regulation, censorship, dispossession and homelessness. The paradox of migration is that the search for new moorings, for desired anchoring at destination, is often replaced by stuckness, by physical and symbolic immobility, by inequality. The theme of violence, often symbolic and systemic, thus permeates much of the work scrutinized in this volume (see Campanioni, Kocatürk, Hudelist, Raj and Sreekumar). In a world in which people move more than ever, border crossings are only available to some, but not others. This pessimistic conclusion is reiterated by the engaged cinema (Schrader and Wrinkler 2013: 8) of migration. Both filmmakers and film researchers attempt to navigate an ethical path of cosmopolitan responsibility aiming thus to address inequality and repropose diversity and acceptance. The complexity of the films showcased in this volume may defy classification, which is why most authors in this volume simply refer to them as films about migration, but their political engagement and moral concern is never in doubt.

The Chapters

The chapters included in this volume span a number of countries and cinemas – Bulgaria, Cuba, Egypt, Germany, India, Italy, Mexico, Norway, Turkey, the UK and the USA – to outline how cinema represents migrants and migration in different geographic, historic and industry contexts. The films and fimmakers analysed here traverse several decades of film output and paint a rich picture of movement, colonialism, glocalism, cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, borders and (re)bordering, epistemic violence and space reconfiguration. In the process of moving from one reality to the next, we witness how film is able to produce a disruptive counterdiscourse to the more established discourses permeating popular culture. However, the authors are not afraid to point out, when required, that sometimes the scope and achievements of the films analysed can be limited in their ideological, social or cultural relevance and endeavour. Some of the chapters focus mainly on one film (see Anisimovich or Hudelist), albeit contextualized culturally, historically and politically, while other chapters rely on a large body of work (see Campanioni, Evans, Raj and Sreekumar, and especially Kocatürk and Peruzzi, Bruno and Massa) that comparatively paint a full picture of how different societies and their film industries have approached the theme of migration. This diversity speaks again to the power of the big migration story, one of the most compelling narratives of our time, often able to stand on its own and become an archetype, but also seamlessly spilling into other stories, conjoining the voices of other narrators.

The book’s structure primarily highlights processes of migration and dislocation. While movement and mobility link all eight chapters, chapters in ‘Part I: Migration’ are concerned with the more practical outcomes of mobility (departures, travel, arrival, identity remaking), while chapters in ‘Part II: Dislocation’ focus on the more symbolic aspects of movement (the moral crisis and ethical outcomes of migration). Once mobility is in process and migration becomes lived experience, with clearly delineated parameters and contrasting representations, as highlighted by the work of Campanioni, Anisimovich, Evans and Kocatürk, it was imperative to delve further into questions of loss, transition, in-betweenness and nowhere spaces, as evidenced by the work of Hudelist, Raj and Sreekumar, Peruzzi, Bruno and Massa, Trandafoiu and Shannon. The book thus moves from a focus on physical, spatial and temporal displacement, towards ideological dislocation, rebordering and immobility or stuckness. While the displacement of migration suggests a physical separation from place, dislocation engages more profoundly with cultural, ideological and moral rupture, interruption and inevitable but traumatic change. As the reader moves from the first to the second part of the book, the political commentary also becomes more incisive, highlighting clear inequalities both at the level of society and at the level of the film industry itself and thus reiterating structural contraints curtailing the fair representation of migrants and migration more generally.

The main themes of ‘Part I: Migration’ include practices of mobility, identity making, transnationalism, border crossing and intercultural negotiation. Campanioni’s opening chapter discusses diverse forms of mobility, understood as an important tool in the remaking of space. The non-linear nature of migration results in amorphous and therefore anomalous spaces. These spaces become indicators of a perceived migration ‘crisis’ that, in Campanioni’s view, results from neoliberalism, disaster capitalism and ecological insecurity. In bringing together Memorias del Subdesarrollo (Cuba, 1968), Transit (Germany, 2018), Beforeigners (Norway, 2019) and Years and Years (United Kingdom, 2019), Campanioni combines narratives of exile, escape, passage and asylum, produced in different social and political contexts. He shows how they all use ‘anomaly’ to invite the audience’s empathy through a discourse that condemns practices of surveillance and the tendency to ignore the plight of the displaced body. They therefore serve as ‘necessary counter documents’ that give visibility to those displaced, stateless or exiled. They disrupt colonial legacies and reimagine sites of systemic violence. Campanioni’s preoccupation with who is being watched and who gazes upon others leads him to conclude that the ‘difference between the ones watching and the ones being looked at is very often as arbitrary’. The power relationship can easily be reversed and reimagined. Campanioni is right to observe that film becomes a useful tool in critiquing the present and his chapter begins to unpack the moral dimension of representing migrants and migration in the current period.

In the chapter that follows, Anisimovich explores East-West migration through one of the most iconic post-communist Bulgarian films, Mission London (Mitovski 2010). She further elaborates on the issue of power, already present in the previous chapter, by arguing that the act of border crossing becomes a ‘transgressive’ act that reveals the ‘excessiveness and artificiality of the constructed imaginary spaces of East and West’. Border crossing therefore complicates strategies of othering. The migrants’ hybridity, acquired in the process of crossing real and symbolic borders, challenges othering tendencies at destination. At the same time, the themes of migration and hybridization are used to explore post-communist anxieties in Bulgarian society, such as refashioning national identity, while concomitantly being engaged in processes of transnationalization. Consequently, often it is not quite clear who ‘the other’ is or may be at any given time. The postcolonial legacies of Eastern European societies become a point of reference, with Anisimovich engaged in a challenging discussion about the East-West dichotomy seen through both the ballast of Soviet colonialism and contemporary enforced Westernization. Anisimovich appropriates the concept of ‘border thinking’ to discuss ideological replacement and theorize cinema’s role in ‘dialogical, vernacular acts of border crossing’. Anisimovich thus contends that Mission London, through its use of satire and absurdism, becomes part of the ‘cinema of intercultural negotiation’, represented here through the interplay between emigration and immigration. Her contribution is also relevant in highlighting processes that define postcoloniality without race.

Evans’s work also plays upon the notion of border (reaching it, crossing it, pushing it further) to argue that representations of migration in German films such as Lichter/Distant Lights (Schmid, 2003), Gold (Arslan, 2013) and Western (Grisebach, 2017) contribute to a new cinema of intercultural dialogue. Evans appropriates Alison Landsberg’s notion of ‘prosthetic cinema’ (2003) to show how the films under his lens challenge the inhospitable migratory regime in Europe by inviting the audience’s empathy. By assuming the role of the American ‘Other’ in the Karl May Westerns, German economic migrants become a metaphor for any migrant caught between mobility and stasis, agency and lack of, successful and unsuccessful settlement. Well contextualized with regards to current migratory flows in Europe and also recalling the frontier mobilities of classic American Westerns, the chapter raises important questions about the role of cinema in exploring migration from a political standpoint. It also problematizes notions of national identity, cosmopolitanism and transnationalism. The chapter thus reiterates the themes of power, agency and hierarchy already present in Campanioni and Anisimovich’s chapters and continues to champion the role of cinema in fostering a cosmopolitan outlook in our relationship with distant others.

Ali H. Kocatürk’s chapter surveys a vast array of Turkish films, from the 1960s to the 1990s, that engage with the theme of internal migration, to argue that they provide essential sociological and political insights, before the advent of the ‘new Turkish cinema’. The analysis reveals that the films are largely divided into didactic and descriptive, thus providing extensive coverage of the social phenomenon of internal migration in Turkey, yet their scope is rather limited, through a classic approach that includes repetitive themes, melodramatic structure and elements of social realism. Their moral teachings are therefore circumscribed by narrative parables that limit, rather than encourage, social transgression and radical change. It is a missed opportunity, since, as Kocatürk concludes, the ‘presentation of diverse problems, the criticism of the malfunctioning system and deteriorating society is used as the context for the stories, but the context itself is not developed further to overtly create a discussion on a social problem’. Kocatürk explains these limitations by alluding to financial difficulties, censorship and lack of creative vision characterizing Turkish cinema at the time. Like Anisimovich, Kocatürk circumscribes the film corpus analysed within Turkey’s historical developments, with cinema reflecting migration as part of its social duty. As in Bulgaria, the body of work analysed in this chapter emerges because migration becomes a defining and remaking moment for a whole generation.

‘Part II: Dislocation’ builds on the themes of the first part to take a closer look at well-established outcomes of movement, seen in spatial, temporal and symbolic or ideological terms. This part therefore focuses more clearly on dislocation as a process that results in in-betweenness, transit areas and ‘third’ spaces, but also elicits practices of rebordering and encourages stuckness and immobility. In this part, authors delve into the philosophical dimension of cinematic representations of migration to reflect on loss, border trouble, the ‘phantom’ nomad and the outcomes of being delegitimized. Trauma, violence and victimhood thus permeate more clearly chapters in this part of the book.

Hudelist’s detailed analysis of Soy Nero (Pitts 2016) is a philosophical commentary of the role forced dislocation and relocation plays on migrants’ sense of identity. Starting with the case of the Green Card Soldiers system in the USA, it explores the role of citizenship and of enforced borders in the erasure of a great number of people, delegitimized by dislocation and mobility. The ‘No Man’s Land’ Hudelist refers to thus acquires new and varied significance and meanings. By slowly progressing through diverse aspects of mobility, as represented in the film, Hudelist maps out ‘rhizomatic’ connections, disconnections and reconnections, in relation to ‘the fluid construction of the self’, which is typical of the migrant. Vacillating between moments of normalization and moments of differentiation, the analysis highlights the process of symbolically and legally deleting vast numbers of people, caught in-between legal systems of assigning nationhood, citizenship and ultimately identity. Hierarchies of rights are a reminder of the subaltern position of the immigrant, often subject to both symbolic and real violence, dished out haphazardly, without rule or reason. The phantomatic presence of the perpetual nomad is a reminder of the accidental nature of the way families and communities are configured and the illogical nature of borders.

Raj and Sreekumar provide a further study of dislocation and border change by questioning the nation-building and therefore political role of cinema, in relation to the Indian Partition of 1947 and resulting mass population movement. Their choice of films is carefully curated and includes MS Sathyu’s debut feature film Garm Hava (1973), Bhisham Sahni’s novel based film Tamas (1988), Deepa Mehta’s trilogy film Earth (1998), Kushwant Singh’s classic postcolonial novel based film Train to Pakistan (1998) and a Canadian co-production filmed in both British Columbia and on-location in India, Partition (2007). Their analysis highlights the traumatic legacy of the Partition evident in memory loss, a culturally ambivalent heritage, and the large-scale displacement of bodies. It also focuses on Bollywood’s ambiguous representation of Muslims on screen, the challenges faced by Indian cinema to come to terms with a violent historical past, and its attempts to contribute to mainly Hindu-based nation building. The resulting cinematic canvass projects a nation reconfigured through processes of remembering and forgetting, in which the border acts as a separating but also reaffirming device (as in Simon Lewis’s account of ‘border trouble’, 2019). Travel, border crossing and resettlement become defined by violence. The body of the Muslim thus becomes enmeshed in a process of contesting Bollywood’s unifying and family-related tropes. Politics takes centre stage through a process of unfairly legitimizing