European Cinema in Motion: Migrant and Diasporic Film in Contemporary Europe
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European Cinema in Motion Migrant and Diasporic Film in Contemporary EuropeDaniela Berghahn Claudia Sternberg Europe...
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Daniela Berghahn Claudia Sternberg

European Cinema in Motion

Also by Daniela Berghahn GERMAN STUDIES IN TRANSITION (co-authored with Eva Kolinsky and Thomas Scharf ) HOLLYWOOD BEHIND THE WALL: The Cinema of East Germany MILLENNIAL ESSAYS ON FILM AND OTHER GERMAN STUDIES (co-edited with Alan Bance) UNITY AND DIVERSITY IN THE NEW EUROPE (co-edited with Barrie Axford and Nick Hewlett)

Also by Claudia Sternberg BIDDING FOR THE MAINSTREAM? Black and Asian British Film since the 1990s (with Barbara Korte) WRITTEN FOR THE SCREEN: The American Motion-Picture Screenplay As Text

European Cinema in Motion Migrant and Diasporic Film in Contemporary Europe

Edited by

Daniela Berghahn and

Claudia Sternberg

Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Daniela Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg 2010 Individual chapters © Contributors 2010 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–27898–1 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents List of Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgements

x

Notes on Contributors

xii

Introduction Daniela Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg 1

Locating Migrant and Diasporic Cinema in Contemporary Europe Daniela Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg

1

12

2

Migration and Cinematic Process in Post-Cold War Europe Dina Iordanova

3

State and Other Funding for Migrant, Diasporic and World Cinemas in Europe Anne Jäckel

76

Nostalgic Journeys in Post-Soviet Cinema: Towards a Lost Home? Birgit Beumers

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4

5

6

7

8

9

Transculturation in German and Spanish Migrant and Diasporic Cinema: On Constrained Spaces and Minor Intimacies in Princesses and A Little Bit of Freedom Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez

50

114

The Dark Side of Hybridity: Contemporary Black and Asian British Cinema Sarita Malik

132

Body Matters: Immigrants in Recent Spanish, Italian and Greek Cinemas Isabel Santaolalla

152

Gendering Diaspora: The Work of Diasporic Women Film-Makers in Western Europe Carrie Tarr

175

Queering the Diaspora James S. Williams

196 v

vi

10

Contents

Sound Bridges: Transnational Mobility as Ironic Melodrama Deniz Göktürk

215

11 Coming of Age in ‘the Hood’: The Diasporic Youth Film and Questions of Genre Daniela Berghahn

235

12

256

Migration, Diaspora and Metacinematic Reflection Claudia Sternberg

Future Imperfect: Some Onward Perspectives on Migrant and Diasporic Film Practice Gareth Jones

275

Filmography

293

Index

301

Illustrations Title image Courtesy of Doublemoon Records From the Album Cover of Baba Zula Photo by Gökben Sikrak Art Director Baba Zula 4.1 Merging the past and the present in Nostalgia (1983) 4.2 The Wedding Chest (2006) – Aidar (Bolot Tentimyshov) and Isabelle (Natacha Régnier). Courtesy of the film’s producer, Evgeniya Tirdatova 4.3 Steppe Express (2005) – Sauliye (Aizhan Aitenova) and Etienne (François Labbé). Courtesy of Eurasia Film Festival and Amanzhol Aituarov 5.1 Speaking and listening – Caye (Candela Peña) and Zulema (Micaela Nevárez) in Princesses (2005). Photo courtesy of Fernando Léon de Arenoa 5.2 Zulema and Caye in Princesses (2005). Photo courtesy of Fernando Léon de Arenoa 5.3 Baran (Cagda Bozkurt) and his camera in Hamburg’s St Pauli (A Little Bit of Freedom 2003). Courtesy of Peter Stockhaus Filmproduktion 5.4 Baran, Chernor (Leroy Delmar) and the ‘Käptn’ (Thomas Ebermann) in A Little Bit of Freedom. Courtesy of Peter Stockhaus Filmproduktion 6.1 For the global market – William Darcy (Martin Henderson) and Lalita Bakshi (Ashwarya Rai) in Bride and Prejudice (2004) 6.2 East is East (1999) – The Khan children, as British as their Salford neighbours. Courtesy of Film 4 6.3 ‘Keeping it real’ – the cast of Kidulthood (2006). Courtesy of Hanway Films Limited 7.1 Flowers from Another World (1999) – The reverse ‘colonisation’ of Spain by the Cuban Milady (Marilyn Torres). With permission from Producciones La iguana s.l. 7.2 Bwana (1996) – The desirable, sacrificial body of the black African male (Emilio Buale). With permission from Video Mercury Films, S.A. vii

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7.3

7.4

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8.1

8.2

8.3

8.4

9.1

9.2

9.3

9.4 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5

Illustrations

From the Edge of the City (1998) – The eroticised spectacle of Pontian masculinity (Stathis Papadopoulous as Sasha). Courtesy of Peccadillo Pictures Discovering the Orientalist realm of the senses – Francesco (Alessandro Gassman) and Mehmet (Mehmet Günsür) in Hamam (1997) Lamerica (1994) – Undifferentiated bodies: the Italian Gino (Enrico Lo Verso) among his ‘undesirable’ Albanian travel companions. Permission from Arena Films Tensions within the diasporic Jewish family in Little Jerusalem (2004). Courtesy of Karin Albou and Gloria Films Ruža and Ana (right) in the mountains near Zurich in Das Fräulein (2005). Courtesy of Dschoint Ventschr Filmproduktion The family home as the site of migrant mother Zouina’s silent rebellion in Inch’Allah Sunday (2001). Permission from Yamina Benguigui and Bandits Productions Nina, Bobbi and Lisa’s queer sexuality leads to the celebration of difference in Nina’s Heavenly Delights (2006). Courtesy of Pratibha Parmar and Kali Films Reading his girlfriend’s farewell letter, dreaming of his new man – Karim (Karim Tarek) in The Road to Love (2002). Courtesy of Rémi Lange Listening and translating (Yasmine Belmadi, Edouard Nikitine, Stéphanie Michelini) – new ways of being in Wild Side (2004) The heterosexual imperative – Bilidikid (Erdal Yildiz) seducing Lola (Gandi Mukli) in Lola + Bilidikid (1998). Courtesy of zero fiction film Fernanda (Ingrid de Souza) working the streets of Milan on her own terms in Princesa (2002) Musical interludes in Head-On (2004). © Wüste/Corazon Wedding in Hamburg: Sibel (Sibel Kekilli) and Cahit (Birol Ünel). © Wüste/Corazon Brief reunion in Istanbul: Sibel (Sibel Kekilli) and Cahit (Birol Ünel). © Wüste/Corazon Film poster Cholera Street (1997) Film poster Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul (2005). Courtesy of Doublemoon Records, from the Album Cover of Baba Zula, photo by Gökben Sikrak, art director Baba Zula

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206 209 218 220 220 225

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Boyz ’n the Hood (USA 1991) – On the wrong track. © 1991, 1992 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy of Columbia Pictures 11.2 Bullet Boy (UK 2004) – Ricky (Ashley Walters) about to be shot dead. Courtesy of Verve Pictures 11.3 Samia (France 2000) – Outside is France, in here is Algeria! Courtesy of Philippe Faucon 11.4 Bend It Like Beckham (2002) – Jess (Parminder Nagra), citizen of plural worlds 11.5 East Is East (1999) – Nazir (Ian Aspinall) masquerading in traditional Pakistani wedding attire. Courtesy of Film 4 12.1 Shared visual pleasure – The Bollywood ‘effect’ in Anam (2001). © Wüste/Bavaria 12.2 The apparatus as silent witness – amateur autoethnography in A Little Bit of Freedom (2004). Courtesy of Peter Stockhaus Filmproduktion 12.3 ‘Life will have to end, just like a film’ – metacinematic closure in Short Sharp Shock (1998). © Wüste/Bavaria

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242 242 244 247 248 260

266 271

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain permission for the use of copyright material. The editors and publisher apologise for any omissions in the above list and would be grateful if notified of any additions that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

Acknowledgements The present volume was made possible by and grew out of the international Research Network Migrant and Diasporic Cinema in Contemporary Europe, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council of Britain (AHRC) from 2006 to 2008. The Network was part of the AHRC’s strategic initiative Diasporas, Migration and Identities (DMI), and we wish to thank the AHRC and particularly Kim Knott, the director of the DMI programme, for providing not only the Network’s budget, but also an inspiring intellectual infrastructure during and beyond the funding period. The Network held two international conferences at Lincoln College, Oxford, in 2006, and at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, London, in 2007. We gratefully acknowledge the generous additional funding Margaret Forrest provided for these conferences and accompanying film screenings. We also wish to extend our thanks to John Akomfrah, Abdelkrim Bahloul, Pawel Pawlikowski, Ayşe Polat, Eve Gabereau, Thierry Lenouvel, Ralph Schwingel and Parminder Vir, OBE, for sharing their expertise and experience at these events and thus ensuring a productive dialogue between practitioners, audiences and researchers. We are equally indebted to our conference speakers and delegates, whose input informed and shaped the contributions to this volume. Our warmest thanks go to the Network members themselves – Asu Aksoy, Birgit Beumers, Dina Iordanova, Gareth Jones, Sarita Malik, Dominique Nasta, Isabel Santaolalla and Carrie Tarr. Working together over the course of several years and being able to draw, again and again, on each other’s complementary expertise, ranging from the analytical and theoretical to the cultural and linguistic, has provided an unusually sustained platform for discussion and critique. It has also been great fun and allowed us to forge bonds for future collaboration. Included in our thanks are also those contributors who were not members of the Network but who, through their additional vantage points, made the present volume much more complete. We are most grateful to Christabel Scaife, our commissioning editor at Palgrave, for embracing this book project so enthusiastically and for her extremely efficient support throughout. Further thanks go to the copy editor and the production team, Catherine Mitchell at Palgrave, James Bober and Anna Johnson, and those who supported the Network in other capacities: Chris Jennings of PageToScreen for developing and maintaining the project website (www.migrantcinema.net); Jackie Marty for her competent administrative support of the project; and Emma Morris and Rosemary Lambeth for helping with the organisation of the Network’s two conferences. Thanks also go to Royal Holloway (University of London), the University of Leeds, x

Acknowledgements

xi

Oxford Brookes University, the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies (University of London) and the University of Manchester, as well as the Phoenix Picture House in Oxford and the Ciné Lumière in London for providing additional resources and hosting workshops and film screenings. And finally, we would like to express our heartfelt gratitude to our respective partners, Chris and Brenda, for their patience, encouragement and feedback, and to our children Hannah, Zoë and Monroe for sparing us the time needed to complete this book.

Contributors Daniela Berghahn is Reader in Film Studies in the Media Arts Department at Royal Holloway, University of London. From 2006 to 2008 she was Project Leader of the international Research Network Migrant and Diasporic Cinema in Contemporary Europe, which was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Her monograph, Hollywood behind the Wall: The Cinema of East Germany (Manchester UP, 2005), is the first representative history of East German film culture from 1946 to the present. She edited Turkish German Dialogues on Screen, a special issue of New Cinemas (2009), and coedited Millennial Essays on Film and Other German Studies (2002) and Unity and Diversity in the New Europe (2000). She is currently researching a book on the representation of the diasporic family in cinema. Birgit Beumers is Reader in Russian at the University of Bristol. She completed her DPhil at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and specialises in contemporary Russian culture, especially cinema and theatre. Her recent publications include Nikita Mikhalkov: Between Nostalgia and Nationalism (2005), PopCulture: Russia! (2005) and A History of Russian Cinema (2009); she also edited 24 Frames: Russia and the Soviet Union (2007). She is editor of the online journal KinoKultura and of Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema. She is currently working on post-Soviet cinema and on the history of Russian animation. Deniz Göktürk is Associate Professor of German and Film Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her publications include a book on literary and cinematic imaginations of America in early twentieth-century German culture as well as numerous articles on migration, culture and cinema. She is co-editor of The German Cinema Book (BFI 2002), Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration 1955–2005 (University of California Press 2007) and Orienting Istanbul: Cultural Capital of Europe? (Routledge 2010). She is a co-founder of the electronic journal TRANSIT and leader of the Multicultural Germany/ Transnational Europe Project at the University of California, Berkeley. Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez is Senior Lecturer in Transcultural Studies in the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures at the University of Manchester. She is co-director of the Migration and Diaspora Cultural Studies Network at the University of Manchester. She is author of Intellektuelle Migrantinnen (1999) and Migration, Domestic Work and Affect (2010) and co-author and editor of Decolonizing European Sociology (2010, with M. Boatcă and S. Costa), Borders, Homes, Migration (2004, with Caixeta, Tate and Vega), Spricht die Subalterne deutsch? Migration und postkoloniale Kritik (2003, with H. Steyerl) and Gouvernementalität (2003, with M. Pieper). She co-edited the special issue on Method after Foucault in the on-line journal Forum: Qualitative Social Research (2007). xii

Contributors xiii

Dina Iordanova is Professor of Film Studies at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. Formerly Head of Film Studies, Director of the Centre for Film Studies, she currently serves as a Provost. She has written extensively on non-Western cinematic traditions, Eastern European film, and cinema at the periphery; she explores cinema on a meta-national level and focuses on the dynamics of transnationalism. Monographs include Cinema of Flames: Balkan Film, Culture and the Media (2001), Emir Kusturica (2002) and Cinema of the Other Europe (2003). More recently, she has been directing the Leverhulme Trust-sponsored project Dynamics of World Cinema on alternative channels of transnational film distribution. New work includes the edited collections The Festival Circuit (2009), Film Festivals and Imagined Communities (2010), Cinema at the Periphery (2010) and the co-written volume Moving People, Moving Images: Cinema and Trafficking in the New Europe (2010). Anne Jäckel is Visiting Research Fellow at the Faculty of Languages and European Studies, University of the West of England, Bristol. Her recent publications include numerous book chapters and journal articles on cinematographic co-productions, European cinemas and film policy. She is author of the pioneering study European Film Industries (2003). Gareth Jones is a television and film director/writer/producer, focusing particularly on multicultural and Holocaust concerns with The Trial of Klaus Barbie (1987), Shalom Salaam (1989), the documentary on Christianity and Judaism Au Nom du Même Père (1991) and the feature film Bonhoeffer: Die letzte Stufe (2000). His feature film Desire (2009) takes as its theme the cultural and emotional collision between two characters on either side of the migratory debate. He is a film consultant working in four languages for institutes across Europe and with his own production company Scenario Films Ltd. He teaches regularly at the DFFB in Berlin, Sarajevo Film Festival, Marubi Film School in Tirana, Euromed, and is Director of Studies for Scenario’s migrant and diasporic film development programme Babylon. He sits regularly on festival juries, most recently FADS at Amiens Film Festival and the Moroccan National Film Festival. He is a part-time PhD student in Holocaust Film in Germany and the Balkans at Cambridge University. Sarita Malik lectures in Media and Communications at Brunel University, London. Her research and writing has focused on issues of representation and identity within the context of media, cinema and the creative industries, and she has published widely on black and Asian British cinema. Publications include Representing Black Britain: Black and Asian Images on Television (Sage 2002) and numerous articles on racial and cultural identities – in relation to both media representation and social change in the UK. She is the guest editor of a special issue of the journal of South Asian Popular Culture on South Asian cinema (2009). Isabel Santaolalla is Professor of Spanish and Film Studies at Roehampton University, London. She has published on post-colonial literature, cultural

xiv Contributors

studies and film, with special emphasis on the representation of ethnicity and gender, in both Anglophone and Hispanic cultures. Her publications on cinema include works on John Ford’s The Quiet Man, Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever, Gurinder Chadha’s Bhaji on the Beach, Julio Medem’s Vacas and Imanol Uribe’s Bwana. She co-edited Luis Buñuel: New Readings (2004) and The Transnational in Iberian and Latin American Cinemas (2007), and authored Los ‘Otros’: Etnicidad y ‘raza’ en el cine español contemporáneo (2005). She has recently completed a book on Iciar Bollaín for Manchester University Press. Claudia Sternberg is Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. She was the co-coordinator of the international Research Network Migrant and Diasporic Cinema in Contemporary Europe (2006–8), funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Her research and publications have focused on screenwriting, black, Asian and Jewish British literature, film and television and media representations of the First World War since 1919. She is the co-author (with Barbara Korte) of Bidding for the Mainstream? Black and Asian British Film since the 1990s (2004) and guestedited Jewish Cultures, a special issue of the Journal for the Study of British Cultures (2009). Carrie Tarr is Professor of Film at Kingston University. Her publications include Diane Kurys (1999), Women, Immigration and Identity in France (as coeditor, 2000), Cinema and the Second Sex: Women’s Filmmaking in France in the 1980s and 1990s (with Brigitte Rollet, 2001), Reframing Difference: Beur and banlieue Cinema in France (2005) and A ‘Belle Epoque’? Women in French Society and Culture 1890–1914 (as co-editor, 2006). She also co-edited Focalising the Body in Contemporary Women’s Writing and Filmmaking, a special issue of Nottingham French Studies (2006), and Beur is Beautiful: Maghrebi-French Filmmaking, a supplement to Cineaste (2007), and guest edited French Cinema: Transnational Cinema?, a special issue of Modern & Contemporary France (2007). James S. Williams is Professor of Modern French Literature and Film at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of The Erotics of Passage: Pleasure, Politics, and Form in the Later Work of Marguerite Duras (1997), Camus’s La Peste (2000), The Cinema of Jean Cocteau (2006) and Jean Cocteau (2008) (part of Reaktion’s ‘Critical Lives’ series). He is also (co)editor of Gay Signatures: Gay and Lesbian Theory, Fiction and Film in France, 1945– 1995 (1998), Revisioning Duras: Film, Race, Sex (2000), and Gender and French Cinema (2001), as well as of a number of volumes on Jean-Luc Godard, including The Cinema Alone (2000), For Ever Godard (2004) and Jean-Luc Godard: Documents (2006) (catalogue of the Godard exhibition ‘Voyages(s) en Utopie’, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2006). He is currently completing a monograph, Space and Being in Contemporary French Cinema, and co-editing a volume entitled Rethinking May ’68.

Introduction Daniela Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg

Transnational mobility and migration belong to ‘the key forces of social transformation in the contemporary world’ (Castles 2002: 1144). Population movements during the second half of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century have resulted in the formation of new diasporas (van Hear 1998, Cohen 2008), different in a number of ways from those of earlier decades and centuries, typically associated with forced displacement, persecution and enslavement. While migration, dispersal and resettlement are still charged with anxiety for migrating as well as receiving communities, the concept of diaspora has been significantly revalorised over recent decades. This is partly due to an almost inflationary use of the term, which is frequently loosely applied to expatriates, political refugees, alien residents and ethnic minorities (Cohen 2008: 1), and partly to technological advances in communications and transport, which have made exchanges between enduring transnational networks considerably faster and easier. Today’s diasporic communities are celebrated as ‘paragons of the transnational moment’ (Braziel and Mannur 2003: 6) and a diasporic subject position has become an asset rather than a liability, as can be seen with US President Barack Obama and other public figures who openly acknowledge and promote their ethnic ‘roots/routes’ or ‘dual heritage’. The significant impact migrant and diasporic communities have had on the social and cultural fabric of societies across the world has resulted in increased scholarly attention in the social sciences and the humanities. In British academia, research in this particular field has been supported by strategic initiatives of two major research councils, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The present volume grew out of an international Research Network that explored Migrant and Diasporic Cinema in Contemporary Europe (www.migrantcinema.net) and was funded, from 2006 to 2008, by the AHRC under the Diasporas, Migration and Identities programme (www. diasporas.ac.uk). The Network brought together ten researchers who, in consultation with film-makers, producers, distributors, policymakers and 1

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festival organisers, set out to study the developments in the field over the past thirty years. The findings of this collaboration, alongside a number of contributions from experts outside the Network, are collected in European Cinema in Motion. The research project and this collection of essays are based on the premise that migrant and diasporic film must be seen – alongside music – as the most significant and influential popular and artistic practice with regard to the (self-)representation of migrant and diasporic groups and their experiences and concerns. Migrant and diasporic cinema addresses questions of identity formation, challenges national and ethnocentric myths, and revisits and revises traditional historical narratives. Over the past thirty years European cinema has been transformed as a result of the increased visibility of film-makers with a migratory background and a growing interest in the facets and dynamics of postmodern multiculturalism. Representations of migrant and diasporic experiences and cross-cultural encounters have assumed a prominent position in cinematic narratives. Coupled with an eclectic mix of ‘marginal’, non-Western or non-European aesthetic paradigms and generic templates, these new influences have changed and revitalised European cinema. Recent examples of Maghrebi French, Turkish German and black and Asian British cinema, as well as films made by transnationally mobile film-makers from the Balkans and countries formerly contained in the Soviet Union, have won considerable critical acclaim, and a few have even captured international audiences. The book seeks to examine how films of migrant and diasporic film-makers have redefined our understanding of European identity as constructed and narrated in European national cinemas. By adopting a comparative perspective in the search for the commonalities and differences between migrant and diasporic cinemas across Europe, the contributions in this volume transcend the limitations of an analytical framework that privileges discrete national cinemas. We contend that the still prevalent critical paradigm that examines cinemas in terms of their national specificity does not adequately address the shift from the national to the transnational that has occurred in European and other cinemas across the world in recent decades. Although ‘transnational’ denotes first and foremost a particular critical approach, the shift from a national to a transnational perspective is not simply a choice of method in the context of European film studies. This shift has been fuelled by the long legacy of colonialism, the ongoing process of European integration, the geopolitical repercussions of the collapse of communism, continuing intra-European mobility and the influx of migrants and refugees from across the world. As a consequence of these proliferating migrations, European cultures and societies have witnessed a hitherto inconceivable diversification, fragmentation and hybridisation. This is reflected in a growing number of films made by migrant and diasporic filmmakers, which challenge a traditional understanding of national identity

Introduction 3

and what it means to be European. Their interventions and the refashioning of European nation states as ‘multicultural’ have been instrumental in shifting the cultural spaces occupied by migrant and diasporic communities from the margins to the centre. Europe and European cinema are well and truly in motion, but, in light of the second part of the title of the present volume, it is necessary to briefly delineate some of the limitations that qualify its scope and underlying principle. The complexity of migrant and diasporic experiences in Europe, as well as the manifold and reciprocal relationships of respective communities with the – still existing and signifying – nation states, national languages and majority cultures, cannot be fully accommodated here. This collection is concerned with cinematic representations, and it is important not to conflate filmic narratives with social reality, despite the frequent use of specific references to this reality and a stylistic preference for social realism. The volume brings together the work of researchers with diverse disciplinary, cultural and linguistic backgrounds and discusses a significant number of well and lesser-known productions. It purposely cuts across the East–West divide that is so deeply ingrained in most approaches to European cinema, even in the 2000s. It does not, however, offer a representative survey of migrant and diasporic cinema in all of Europe, neglecting, for instance, a number of ‘smaller’ cinemas such as those of the Netherlands and the Baltic countries. Despite the multilinguality of the contributors, it has not been possible to fully incorporate conceptualisations in languages other than English, French and German. While many migrant and diasporic films, including earlier and ‘foreign language’ productions, have become available in recent years, it remains a desideratum to acknowledge scholarship outside the Anglo-American spectrum and to make those intellectual interventions available in English translation. The transnational without the translingual cannot escape the pitfalls of implicit hierarchisation. On a temporal rather than spatial and linguistic plane, our focus on feature films made in Europe since the 1980s leads to glossing over the importance of migrant and diasporic practitioners in earlier periods of film history across Europe, America and the world. More significantly, we exclude, to a certain extent, the pioneering work of the 1960s and 1970s by minority film-makers in Europe who, often independently and without chances of establishing themselves in the industry, opened up the market for the first time to self-representation. The time period selected here, however, is not entirely arbitrary: the majority of films considered have evolved from and reflect the movements from Europe’s former colonies to imperial ‘mother countries’ and other labour migrations since the 1950s. Also included are films that originate from the migrant flows following the collapse of communism since the early 1990s or from the political and economic inequities that continue to motivate journeys of hope from across the world to the prosperous and politically stable Europe. In other words, while the migratory

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Daniela Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg

histories narrated in the films under consideration here reflect an important historical caesura, dating back to the post-war period, migrant and diasporic cinema as we conceptualise it did not really come into existence as an identifiable critical mass of films until second-generation diasporic film-makers gained access to film production roughly simultaneously in Britain, France and Germany in the 1980s. Unlike the relatively isolated earlier attempts of film-makers with a migratory background to capture their personal experiences or those of their ethnic constituencies on screen, those films made by writers and directors who have come to the fore since the mid-1980s are feature films, rather than shorts, documentaries and TV dramas. The feature film format has enhanced the mainstream and cross-over appeal of migrant and diasporic cinema, a phenomenon that can also be observed in certain youth and music cultures such as hip hop or bhangra, Bollywood musicals and fashion. By using ‘migrant and diasporic cinema’ we remain intentionally ambiguous with regard to the referent of the adjectives. A focus on migrant and diasporic film-makers might imply an essentialist notion of identity, ascribing particular representational strategies simply (and exclusively) to a film-maker’s origin and biography. Admittedly, we propose that migrant and diasporic film-makers occupy a specific subject position, inscribed in their films through a ‘diasporic optic’ (Moorti 2003), and distinguish their work from that of non-migrant and non-diasporic screenwriters and directors. However, as explained further in Chapter 1, we also include films of the latter and contend that their subject position derives from a different access to the, nevertheless, shared history and memory of migration and diaspora. Most contributors to this volume, however, privilege the artistic practices, viewpoints and aesthetic strategies of those film-makers who were, by and large, relegated to the margins of European film studies until the late 1990s. The title of this collection might suggest that we are proposing a migration and diaspora-focused approach without entirely abandoning a vantage point that posits Europe as a socio-political and cultural ‘centre’ – a position that it occupied, albeit problematically, in Enlightenment philosophy, the varied discourses of imperialism, colonisation and First World hegemony. We might thus give the impression that we are perpetuating the Eurocentric perspective critiqued by Ella Shohat and Robert Stam in their seminal study Unthinking Eurocentrism (1994), and which we, too, are eager to overcome. In contrast to studies on specific diasporic cinemas such as those on black film (Martin 1995, Petty 2008) or South Asian productions (Desai 2004), we set out to trace how the ‘periphery’ has impacted upon the ‘centre’ and, thereby, endeavour to further destabilise the opposition of ‘the West vs. the rest’. In keeping with Shohat’s and Stam’s dictum that multicultural media studies constitute a critique of Eurocentrism, we take a decentred approach and argue that migrant and diasporic film-makers have not only enriched

Introduction 5

and revitalised European cinema but also brought about what we conceptualise as the World Cinema turn in European cinema. Without completely abandoning the convenience of previously established parameters that still structure the film industry, individual and group identity and academic thinking, we move away from the national to the regional and from models of centre and periphery to a more democratic world of cinemas. The present volume is thus intended as a critical intervention at the interface of European and World Cinema with a special focus on migrant and diasporic cinema in Europe. The first three chapters map the field of investigation and examine migrant and diasporic cinema in relation to the major coordinates outlined above. In Chapter 1, ‘Locating Migrant and Diasporic Cinema in Contemporary Europe’, Daniela Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg establish an overarching framework that underpins the more specific issues addressed in the book’s subsequent sections. ‘Migrant and diasporic cinema’ is defined by demarcating its boundaries in relation to overlapping concepts and terminologies such as ‘accented cinema’, ‘intercultural cinema’, ‘transnational cinema’, ‘hyphenated identity cinema’, ‘cinéma beur’, ‘Kino der doppelten Kulturen’ and others, used in a rapidly expanding corpus of critical writing in the area. Berghahn and Sternberg examine these terminologies by drawing attention to their respective socio-political subtexts: the racial or ethno-national implications of ‘cinéma du metissage’ and ‘Black British film’; the tropes of space and mobility invoked in ‘banlieue films’ and ‘cinema of displacement’ as well as in related concepts such as ‘contact zone’ (Pratt 1992) and ‘Black Atlantic’ (Gilroy 1993); and the socio-political associations of ‘Third Cinema’, ‘Third World Cinema’ and the ever more encompassing concept of ‘World Cinema’. Moreover, drawing on discourses of generation and memory as well as Avtar Brah’s concept of ‘diaspora space’, Berghahn and Sternberg remind us of the importance of authorship and subject position inscribed in films when distinguishing, on the one hand, between ‘migrant’ and ‘diasporic’ cinema and, on the other, between films made by film-makers with and those without a migrant or diasporic background. And finally, in tracing current debates on national and transnational cinema, the editors set the agenda for the present volume: it is intended to challenge the critical boundaries of film studies by adopting a comparative, transnational and dialogic perspective, which recognises the culturally diverse traditions of film cultures within Europe. In Chapter 2, ‘Migration and Cinematic Process in Post-Cold War Europe’, Dina Iordanova identifies a series of structural and historical homologies between post-coloniality and post-communism and, in doing so, develops the volume’s second framework, which allows us to consider the cinemas that have evolved in the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Empire and the decolonisation of its constituent states after 1989. Iordanova argues that the post-Cold War migratory flows have consolidated the status of the

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post-colonial diasporas in Europe that arrived and settled several decades earlier. Considering the impact of these changed migratory patterns from the point of view of the cinematic process, she examines how contemporary film narratives construct new hierarchies of belonging in their depiction of post-colonial and post-communist subjects. She suggests that, in order to do justice to the cinema of the transnational moment, ‘watching across borders’ is the only viable position of reception – a position that has underpinned the work of the AHRC Research Network and that lies at the heart of this publication. Following the recent career trajectories of some East European film-makers who migrate on a project-by-project basis to wherever the best funding and production opportunities arise, Iordanova suggests that this new type of ‘transnationally mobile film-maker’ of the post-Cold War period is fundamentally different from those exiled during the communist regime, who sought refuge from censorship and artistic freedom in the West. In the third chapter, ‘State and Other Funding for Migrant, Diasporic and World Cinema in Europe’, Anne Jäckel looks at a broad range of film funding initiatives and policies supportive of or designed to promote film production, distribution and exhibition of migrant and diasporic cinema in Europe. As France continues to be the European country with the most comprehensive system of public funding in the film sector, it is used as a point of comparison in this overview of developments that affect migrant and diasporic film cultures across Europe. Jäckel examines the extent to which long-established co-production systems and pan-European institutions such as Eurimages, Euromed and Arte benefit migrant, diasporic and exiled filmmakers. At the same time, she shows how European initiatives offer support and strengthen certain spheres of influence in the post-colonial age, for example by promoting the French language in Africa. Jäckel also considers the proliferation of film festivals as a particularly significant outlet and platform to garner prizes and critical acclaim and secure funding. Moreover, she reminds us that, from an industrial perspective, ‘migrant and diasporic cinema’ is not necessarily a category recognised by media professionals and that all film-makers compete with each other for national and international funding. Chapters 4 to 12 combine close readings of high-profile as well as lesserknown feature films with a critical appraisal of those discourses particularly pertinent to contemporary migrant and diasporic cinema in Europe. These relate to issues of space, place and displacement, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, the hybridisation of musical, stylistic and genre templates, and media reflexivity. Birgit Beumers’s chapter ‘Nostalgic Journeys in Post-Soviet Cinema: Towards a Lost Home?’ explores migrations along the East–West axis, which have traditionally been dominated not so much by an urge for economic improvement (as tends to be the case for South–North migration) as by political repression and/or a desire for a freer lifestyle in the (capitalist)

Introduction 7

democracies of the West. Stressing that the Soviet Union built its empire at a time when Western European countries began to lose their imperial control, Beumers investigates how post-communist Russian and Central Asian films respond to the belated collapse of Europe’s last ‘colonial power’ by creating migratory characters who negotiate conflicting systems of signification with regard to national and ethnic identity and the implications of their newly won freedom of movement. As Beumers shows, in post-Soviet cinema migration is depicted as an emotionally ambiguous experience, frequently overshadowed by a longing for a ‘homeland of the past’. Working with the categories of ironic (distanced) and utopian (nation-building) nostalgia developed by Svetlana Boym (2001), the chapter explores the disjunctures between past and present and home and abroad in films centring on the motif of the nostalgic journey. Contemporary cinematic narratives have given visibility not only to recently enfranchised Eastern Europeans, but also to so-called undocumented (‘illegal’) migrants. These are individuals or groups from non-European countries who lack the means and authorisation to ‘migrate’ officially, but who have managed to cross the closed borders of what is, in this context, frequently referred to as ‘Fortress Europe’. Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez’s chapter ‘Transculturation in German and Spanish Migrant and Diasporic Cinema’ discusses Fernando Ortiz’s anthropological concept of transculturation in relation to two films, Kleine Freiheit/A Little Bit of Freedom (Germany 2003) and Princesas/Princesses (Spain 2005), which belong to a new European cinema portraying the lives of undocumented migrants in Western Europe. Both films engage with the ambivalence and limits of transculturation through the representation of intimate relationships between members of disenfranchised groups, including undocumented migrants, non-migrant prostitutes and homeless people. While depicting the protagonists’ living and working conditions as adversely affected by migration policies, the films also show how the characters deploy creative strategies to challenge and invent new ways of transgressing boundaries. The films illustrate Ortiz’s notion of transculturation, situated in the divide between cohabitation and domination, and the simultaneous possibility and impossibility of cultural and social transformation. In Chapter 6, Sarita Malik turns to the long-established diasporas of Britain, which have probably received the most extensive coverage in contemporary migration studies and diaspora criticism, last but not least because of their cinematic representations. In ‘The Dark Side of Hybridity: Contemporary Black and Asian British Cinema’, Malik considers a range of contemporary films in the context of recent social, political and cultural developments in the United Kingdom. She describes how what was once regarded as a unified ‘black British cinema’ has, since the late 1990s, become fragmented. The most apparent shift has been between South Asian and African/African Caribbean (‘black’) British cinema, which have become critically separate

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from each other. While British Asian cinema is perceived as a successful, independent, transnational cinema, black British cinema is largely constrained and locally rooted. Malik discusses how these cinemas intervene in different but overlapping discourses around ‘race’, ‘Asianness’ and ‘blackness’. She concludes that black and Asian British cinema are engaged in struggles to produce a range of alternative representations of diaspora in Britain, continuing their legacy as significant benchmarks for migrant and diasporic cinema in contemporary Europe. With an emphasis on yet another facet of European migration history – the transformation of Southern European countries from sending to receiving countries – Isabel Santaolalla draws our attention to a sizeable body of ‘immigrant films’ that has emerged in Spanish, Italian and Greek cinema since the 1990s. In the chapter entitled ‘Body Matters: Immigrants in Recent Spanish, Italian and Greek Cinemas’, she suggests that the increased visibility of migrant groups and individuals in these national cinemas can be explained by comparable factors in the migratory histories of the three countries, which have shaped the surrounding ideological and cultural discourses and are, in turn, reflected in their respective film cultures. One remarkable commonality between recent Spanish, Italian and Greek films about migrants is the over-signified corporeality of the immigrant figure: the foreign, ethnically marked body is used as a visual and narrative stratagem to foreground questions of cultural, gender and sexual identity. The insertion of an ‘other’ in the cinematic narratives acts as a catalyst for change through crisis and suffering, both within the diegesis and for the audience. Audiences are invited to partake in the plight of migrant characters – an experience complicated by the masochistic/sadistic dynamics of pleasure in the contemplation of the simultaneously sexualised and suffering body of the ‘foreigner’ – and thereby undergo a form of catharsis. In ‘Gendering Diaspora: The Work of Diasporic Women Film-Makers in Western Europe’, Carrie Tarr assesses the contributions of diasporic women film-makers to post-colonial, post-communist Western European cinema since 2000, comparing and contrasting films made in France, Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Her chapter focuses on films that explore the complex identities of migrant or diasporic women in Europe of different origins and different generations, and analyses the extent to which they emphasise female subjectivity and agency. Tarr suggests that, despite differences due to the specificity of their historic and geographical contexts, these films offer what Sujata Moorti describes as a ‘feminine mode’ (2003: 356) of imagining diaspora. That is, they privilege the ways in which migrant and diasporic women negotiate between multiple cultural affiliations in domestic, intimate spaces, underlining the ways in which ‘processes of dislocation, affiliation and displacement’ (2003: 357) are gendered and creating visions of transnational, multicultural communities forged through homosocial affective ties.

Introduction 9

James S. Williams makes ‘Queering the Diaspora’ – an issue already touched upon by Tarr in her discussion of cross-cultural lesbian relationships – his main concern in Chapter 9. Focusing in particular on the significant number of Maghrebi French (beur) films engaging with queer identities, he also considers German Turkish, Italian Brazilian and black and Asian British films. Rather than simply searching for ‘positive’ gay images to counter prevailing stereotypes, his principal aim is to assess how different European gay film traditions and genres extend and inflect the notion of a ‘queer diaspora’, in particular concerning the representation of sexuality, immigration and citizenship. Williams concludes that queer diasporic cinema across different Western European film cultures is characterised by a set of recurring themes, notably the conflict between gender and nationhood and the quest for self-affirmation in the face of racism and homophobia. Moreover, the narratives of queer diasporic cinema encapsulate the migrant’s precarious state of being perpetually ‘in trans’, characteristic of the migrant experience as such but reinforced in the multiple fluid identities of transgender and transsexual diasporic subjects. The pleasures and challenges of migrant and diasporic cinema relate to its diversity of influences and multiple encodings. Music is an important element in nearly all films discussed in this volume and particularly suited to carry complex meaning and at the same time reach audiences on an affective level. Based on a discussion of the orchestral interludes in Fatih Akın’s Gegen die Wand/Head-On (Germany 2004) and their connections to his subsequent musical documentary about Istanbul, Crossing the Bridge (Germany 2005), Deniz Göktürk’s chapter ‘Sound Bridges: Transnational Mobility as Ironic Melodrama’ investigates how the representation of transnational mobility is underscored by ironic strategies of interruption and distancing. Akın’s musical interludes draw on a range of aesthetic templates, including music videos and Brechtian distantiation techniques as well as the aesthetic of inserts and switches, which Gopalan (2002) has termed with reference to Indian films a ‘cinema of interruptions’. In Head-On, music is used in a similar way, creating a fusion of distancing and emotional underscoring and thus providing the counterpoint to the film’s melodramatic plot. Tracing the film’s multilayered intertextual references to Romani music and to a range of films celebrating Gypsy musical traditions and their culture of mobility, Göktürk concludes that the convergence of intertwined musical traditions and the ‘celebration of sonic hybridity’ challenges any nationbased understanding of music, film and culture more generally. Generational relations as well as youth culture feature prominently in migrant and diasporic cinema. Daniela Berghahn’s chapter ‘Coming of Age in ‘the Hood’: The Diasporic Youth Film and Questions of Genre’ examines contemporary Turkish German, Maghrebi French and British Asian films depicting the identity struggles of children and adolescents from ethnic minority backgrounds. Applying a quintessentially American

10 Daniela Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg

critical paradigm, genre criticism, to European diasporic coming-of-age films, Berghahn asks to what extent these films conform to the generic conventions of the youth film (including African American ‘hood films’ of the 1990s) and how they contribute to the extension, renewal and hybridisation of the youth film genre. In contrast to Hollywood coming-of-age films, in which the protagonist’s maturation often coincides with an existential experience or a rite of passage, the adolescent’s maturation in the diasporic coming-of-age film is equated with the dominant cultural affiliation she or he makes. Hybrid identity formation is performed through the adolescents’ switching between languages and culturally specific dress codes, while the soundtracks underscore the multi-ethnic milieu and enhance the films’ crossover appeal. In Chapter 12, ‘Migration, Diaspora and Metacinematic Reflection’, Claudia Sternberg refers to historical relationships between migration and the motion picture and reminds us that as early as the first half of the twentieth century film-makers of various diasporas were instrumental in introducing new discourses and styles and (re)defining genres. Drawing on this continuous history rather than the notion of a ‘new’ and ‘emerging’ cinema, she investigates the many instances in contemporary migrant and diasporic films in which intertextual allusions to other films and scenes about cinema-going, discussing or making films are incorporated in the narrative. With reference to Western European films from Britain, France, Germany and Spain, Sternberg argues that metacinematic elements are indicative of postmodern pastiche and media reflexivity, but also attest to the importance of film culture within the discourses of migration and diaspora. Metacinematic references, she says, enable film-makers to reflect critically on migrant and diasporic subjects not only as objects of (clichéd) representation, but also as consumers, critics and producers of film, and serve as a tool for a revisionist take on film history. The conclusion to this volume, Gareth Jones’s ‘Future Imperfect: Some Onward Perspectives on Migrant and Diasporic Film’, combines a flashback to the preceding chapters and a flash-forward to the future of migrant and diasporic cinema. Written from the point of view of an industry insider, the final chapter complements the critical, academic perspective of the previous ones. Jones is a producer, writer and director and also the founder of Babylon, a cultural forum and film development programme designed to support the creative ambitions of diasporic and migrant film-makers from Europe’s varied minorities. He considers a number of Babylon-supported film projects still in development that deserve to be made but will find it hard to raise the necessary finance and distribution. Jones suggests that the experience of reaching the mythical Babylon of fabulous wealth and unremitting exile, a metropolis of competing languages, interests and traditions, is repeated across Europe today, since European nation states tend to treat their minorities proprietorially as ‘their own’, depriving them firstly

Introduction 11

of access to Europe and secondly of the chance to speak to each other. Notwithstanding this assessment of the difficult context in which creative artists of ‘double culture’ are operating, Jones optimistically forecasts that in years to come migrant and diasporic cinema is bound to gain momentum and significance: transnational migration has transformed European societies and may well prove to revolutionise the way we all see ourselves. Migrant and diasporic cinema functions as a sensitive indicator of this societal shift and has a vital part to play in this process.

Works cited Boym, S. (2001) The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Brah, A. (1996) Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London, New York: Routledge. Braziel, J. E. and A. Mannur (2003) ‘Nation, Migration, Globalization: Points of Contention in Diaspora Studies’, in Braziel, J. E. and A. Mannur (eds) Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader. London, New York: Routledge, 1–22. Castles, S. (2002) ‘Migration and Community Formation under Conditions of Globalization’, International Migration Review 36(4): 1143–68. Cohen, R. (2008) Global Diasporas: An Introduction. London, New York: Routledge. Desai, J. (2004) Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film. London, New York: Routledge. Gilroy, P. (1993) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso. Gopalan, L. (2002) Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema. London: British Film Institute. Martin, M. T. (ed.) (1995) Cinemas of the Black Diaspora: Diversity, Dependence and Oppositionality. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Moorti, S. (2003) ‘Desperately Seeking an Identity: Diasporic Cinema and the Articulation of Transnational Kinship’, International Journal of Cultural Studies 6(3): 355–76. Naficy, H. (2001) An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press. Petty, S. J. (2008) Contact Zones: Memory, Origin, and Discourses in Black Diasporic Cinema. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Pratt, M. L. (1992) Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London, New York: Routledge. Shohat, E. and R. Stam (1994) Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. London, New York: Routledge. Van Hear, N. (1998) New Diasporas: The Mass Exodus, Dispersal and Regrouping of Migrant Communities. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

1 Locating Migrant and Diasporic Cinema in Contemporary Europe Daniela Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg

Migrant and diasporic cinema in contemporary Europe is situated at the interface of the discursive fields of European cinema and World Cinema. The films discussed in this volume play a crucial role in the gradual conflation of these two critical paradigms and are indicative of the World Cinema turn which film studies has witnessed since the late 1980s.1 In this chapter we attempt to demarcate some of the conceptual boundaries of migrant and diasporic cinema in relation to overlapping terminologies and frameworks to be found in a growing corpus of related critical writing. We examine their heuristic value and socio-political implications by drawing attention to the inflections and subtexts of social categorisation (Migrantenkino), racial or ethno-national emphases (cinéma du métissage, black and Asian British film, French beur cinema), linguistic or spatial concepts (accented cinema, banlieue films, cinema of double occupancy) and transnational approaches (Third Cinema, black film, cinema of the South Asian diaspora). Representational strategies and aesthetic choices as well as questions of authorship and ownership lie at the heart of our exploration of the ways in which this new type of European cinema has been understood and named.

Migration and diaspora While this is not the place to survey the large body of literature on migration and diaspora, it is nonetheless necessary to consider these concepts briefly, given their centrality in the context of this study. ‘Migration’ (from Latin migrare: ‘to change one’s residence or position, to move from place to place’) is generally used to refer to population movements either within nation states or across borders. In this volume, we are first and foremost concerned with movements to and across Europe during the second half of the twentieth and the first decade of the twenty-first century and their impact on cultural formations, notably film, in European societies. While the histories of these movements differ considerably, two principal phases are generally distinguished during this period. The first took off in the 1950s 12

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and ‘was generally characterised by migrations of colonial and postcolonial populations to the imperial “mother countries” – for example, migrations from West Africa and the Maghreb into France, from Indonesia into the Netherlands, or from the Caribbean and South Asia into Britain’ (Robins 2007: 153). These colonial and post-colonial migrations affected a limited number of European countries and by and large resulted in permanent settlement in the metropolitan centres. At the same time, labour migration not based on (post-)colonial linkages also occurred elsewhere in Northern and Western Europe. Between 1955 and 1973, for example, almost four million migrants from Italy, Spain, Greece, Yugoslavia and Turkey came to Germany as Gastarbeiter (‘guest workers’); these labour migrants were eventually joined by their families and enduring diasporic communities developed. In what has been regarded as the second (and ongoing) phase of migration, starting in the 1990s, the fall of the Iron Curtain led to an increase of westward-moving Eastern Europeans as well as to migrations within the former Eastern bloc and the reunited Germany, reconfiguring the previously separate spheres of ‘East’ and ‘West’ in Europe. The former South European emigration countries – Italy, Spain and Greece – joined their Northern counterparts as receiving countries for Eastern Europeans as well as refugees, asylum seekers and (undocumented) non-European labour migrants (Castles and Miller 2003). Recent migratory movements from outside Europe follow a ‘more random logic’ (Robins 2007: 153) and involve economic and forced migrants from diverse parts of the world (Africa, the Middle and Far East, the Caribbean and South America) who make Europe their destination. These ‘new migrations of globalization’ are indicative of profound changes in the dynamics of mobility and have ‘dramatically changed the social and cultural composition of European societies’ in the twenty-first century (Robins 2007: 152). Migration refers to collective mobility and can be temporary (limited, for example, by work permits) or result in long-term settlement (whether planned, incidental or due to the impossibility to return or move on). Migration therefore constitutes the precondition for the formation of a diaspora, defined as a recognisable and minoritarian social group that preserves its ‘ethnic, or ethnic-religious identity and communal solidarity’ (Sheffer 1986: 9). Migration always precedes diaspora and, as Marienstras notes, ‘time has to pass’ before one can establish with certainty whether a community that has migrated ‘is really a diaspora’ (1989: 125). ‘Diaspora’ shares a number of features with ‘exile’, and in everyday usage as well as scholarly discourse some semantic slippage between the two terms can be observed.2 Exile refers to ‘a painful or punitive banishment from one’s homeland’ (Peters 1999: 19) and the trauma associated with this experience. Diaspora, too, ‘invokes the imagery of traumas of separation and dislocation [...]. But diasporas are also potentially the sites of home and new beginnings’ (Brah 1996: 193) and, therefore, entail the positive affective component of hope.3 While ‘exile’ implies solitariness, both migration and

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diaspora are by definition collective. Exile connotes banishment from what is considered home and precludes return (at least as long as the exile lasts), whereas contemporary diasporic subjects, in particular, tend to travel back. They are linked through multiple transnational networks and connections with their culture and/or place of origin, with each other in various locations and the societies in which diasporic groups permanently reside. Etymologically, the term ‘diaspora’ is derived from the Greek verb ‘speiro’ (to sow or scatter seeds) and ‘dia-’ (over, across) (see Cohen 2008: ix, Peters 1999: 23). The term was ‘first used in the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures explicitly intended for the Hellenic Jewish communities in Alexandria (circa third century BCE) to describe the Jews living in exile from the homeland of Palestine’ (Braziel and Mannur 2003: 1). The Jewish diaspora is still perceived to be the ‘ideal type’ (Safran 1991: 84), though James Clifford and others have argued that it should not be regarded as the definitive model but merely as a ‘nonnormative starting point for a discourse that is travelling or hybridizing in new global conditions’ (1994: 306). While not necessarily foregrounded in the present volume, the Jewish and African diasporas remain paradigmatic points of reference on account of their long histories and the traumas of enslavement, displacement, persecution and genocide and because they are, in conjunction with the much less discursively acknowledged case of the Roma and Sinti, inextricably linked to European history. In recent years, however, diaspora has become so widely appropriated that theorists are struggling to achieve a consensus about its distinctive attributes and boundaries. In an attempt to contain the inflationary use of the term, Robin Cohen builds on William Safran’s definition of diaspora (1991) and proposes nine features constitutive of the classical notion of diaspora. These include ‘dispersal from an original homeland [...] to two or more foreign regions [... and] a collective memory and myth about the homeland’ (Cohen 2008: 17), which often manifests itself in a nostalgic longing to return. Diasporic communities are further characterised by ‘a strong ethnic group consciousness [...] based on a sense of distinctiveness, a common history and the belief in a common fate’ and they tend to have ‘a sense of empathy and solidarity with co-ethnic members in other countries of settlement’ (Cohen 2008: 17). While their relationship with societies of settlement may be challenging in a number of ways, diasporas also ‘enrich life in host countries’, contributing not just to the economy but also to creative and cultural pluralism and diversity (Cohen 2008: 17). Helpful as such a list of constitutive features may be, Cohen and others concede that it would be unreasonable to expect ‘the working list of diasporic features’ to apply ‘on all counts, throughout history’ to any society or diasporic community (Clifford 1994: 306). Contributors to this volume are primarily concerned with relatively recent migrations and diasporas which form ‘exemplary communities of

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the transnational moment’ (Tölölyan 1991: 5) and have been theorised by Stuart Hall (2003[1990], 1991a,b), Khachig Tölölyan (1991), Paul Gilroy (1993), Avtar Brah (1996), Ulf Hannerz (1996), Nicholas van Hear (1998) and others. These migrant and diasporic communities call into question traditional ideas of national identity and ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 2006 [1983]) as being bounded by a particular cultural–national heritage. They defy, as Kevin Robins amongst others argues, notions of national belonging and identity, constructing instead alternative socialities, based around transnational networks and connections (2007: 156; see also Martin 1995: 8, Hannerz 1996). As Eva Rueschmann notes in the introduction to Moving Pictures, Migrating Identities (2003), most contemporary discussions about diasporic cultures rely on postmodernist theory, which has ‘by and large, stressed a nonessentialist, decentered conception of cultural identity, critiquing the notion of a fixed, unified self’ (2003: xiv). In his essay ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, Stuart Hall juxtaposes such a view of diasporic identity with a more traditional, essentialist understanding that upholds the belief in a collective true self, based on a shared origin and history. Hall, too, rejects an essentialist notion of diasporic identity, perceived as bound to a literal scattering of the ‘tribes whose identity can only be secured in relation to some sacred homeland to which they must at all costs return’ (2003 [1990]: 244). Instead, he suggests extending the concept of diaspora beyond ‘the old, the imperializing, the hegemonizing, form of “ethnicity” ’: The diaspora experience as I intend it here, is defined not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of ‘identity’ which lives with and through, not despite, difference, by hybridity. Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference. (Hall 2003 [1990]: 244)4 Consistent with this rejection of fixity, Hall contends that cultural identity is created in the act of representation itself and that ‘the most profound cultural revolution has come about as a consequence of the margins coming into representation’ (1991a: 34). It is precisely this ‘de-centred cultural empowerment of the marginal’ (Hall 1991a: 34) that is central to diasporic identity construction, and the cinema has been a crucial site for it. Since identity is constituted not outside but within representation [...], cinema [is not ...] a second-order mirror held up to reflect what already exists but [... a] form of representation which is able to constitute us as new kinds of subjects, and thereby enable us to discover places from which to speak. (Hall 2003 [1990]: 245)

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Whose history, whose memory? Filmmaking in diaspora space This present volume builds on the assumption that cinema is a prime site not just for the negotiation of migrant and diasporic identities, but also for the (self-)articulation of the collective histories of Europe’s respective communities. These histories have previously been marginalised or presented from non-diasporic points of view. Contributors to this book argue that the experience or memory of migration has had a profound impact on the imagination and aesthetic sensibilities of migrant and diasporic filmmakers in Europe. We distinguish between ‘migrant’ and ‘diasporic’ filmmakers. ‘Migrant’ (‘first-generation’) film-makers have themselves been part of a migratory movement and departed from a place of birth or residence in search of better economic conditions or a more secure and stable sociopolitical environment.5 ‘Diasporic’ film-makers are typically of the second, third or a later generation. They were born or raised in a diasporic setting and have no, or only a very remote, first-hand experience of migration. They are, however, connected to their family’s migration and history of relocation or dispersal through kinship networks, family narratives, cultural practice, language, artefacts, etc. Marianne Hirsch describes this connection as ‘postmemory’; it is ‘mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation. [...] Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth’ (1997: 22–3).6 It is ‘distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection’ (Hirsch 1997: 22). The concept of generational difference, however, is more complicated than it may seem. According to sociologist Karl Mannheim, who himself migrated from Hungary to Germany and then to Britain (1964: 542), a generation is defined not just by belonging to the same age group but, more importantly, by sharing the same experiences and destiny. Furthermore, a particular cohort of individuals may be united by the collective experience of a traumatic event. Migration is arguably a life-changing event, whose causes, circumstances and consequences can be traumatic, and which may well be more decisive for constituting a sense of generational belonging than being of the same age. Starting a new life in another country would represent a kind of birth or rebirth, making it conceivable that a ‘generation’ of migrants could consist of different age groups.7 By distinguishing between migrant and diasporic, we mark two conditions and posit implicitly that the difference between first- and further-generation film-makers has a bearing on their approaches to the representation of migratory or diasporic experiences. But, just as filmmakers with a migrant and diasporic background do not necessarily engage with migration and diaspora in their work, a considerable number of nonmigrant and non-diasporic screenwriters and directors have produced films that are centrally concerned with questions of migratory and diasporic

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existence.8 By including such films in the overall corpus of this volume under the rubric migrant and diasporic cinema, we wish to circumvent the biographical fallacy and contend that it is not the film-maker’s nationality or ethnicity which determines the classification of a production as migrant and diasporic. Such inclusion is not meant to diminish the role migrant and diasporic film-makers have played in challenging invisibility and misrepresentation by introducing specific themes, characters, points of view and styles to European cinema, nor should it gloss over the many struggles that preceded and accompanied such ‘coming into representation’. We consider it important, however, to acknowledge that migration, diaspora and cultural diversity are so central to the European imaginary of the present moment that they occupy a prominent position in the work of film-makers of very different backgrounds. Consequently, this volume considers migrant and diasporic cinema as being demarcated by subject matter in the broadest sense rather than by a combination of biographical and representational factors. A useful framework that accommodates the approach taken here is Avtar Brah’s notion of ‘diaspora space’: [D]iaspora space as a conceptual category is ‘inhabited’, not only by those who have migrated and their descendants, but equally by those who are constructed and represented as indigenous. In other words, the concept of diaspora space (as opposed to that of diaspora) includes the entanglement, the intertwining of genealogies of dispersion with those of ‘staying put’. The diaspora space is the site where the native is as much a diasporian as the diasporian is a native. (1996: 209) The concept of the ‘diaspora space’ as a site of transformation, intersection and intermingling, where syncretic formations take shape, ‘seriously problematises the subject position of the “native” [...] as well as the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, of belonging and otherness, of “us” and “them” ’ (Brah 1996: 208–9). Within the diaspora space, all film-makers can potentially articulate a memory in which the diasporic memory of minorities and the ‘traditional memorial culture of the “host nation” ’ (Huyssen 2003: 153) converge. The two are not identical, however, and authorship remains important when considering migrant and diasporic cinema. Migrant and diasporic film-makers can activate memorial or postmemorial connections to the migratory past, whereas non-migrant and non-diasporic directors and writers draw on what Alison Landsberg has called ‘prosthetic memory’. In contrast to those forms of collective memory, which are circumscribed by a particular community or group [...] and which serve to reinforce and naturalise a group’s identity, prosthetic memories are not the property of a single group. Rather they open up the possibility

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for collective horizons of experience and pave the way for unexpected political alliances. (Landsberg 2003: 149)9 Mediated through film and other mass media, prosthetic memory is a commodified type, a form of ‘mass cultural representation’ which is useful (as a prosthesis is in replacing a limb) in that it ‘generates empathy’ and a ‘sensuous engagement’ with a past distinct from one’s own (Landsberg 2003: 149). It allows non-diasporic film-makers to see through the eyes of the ‘other’ and ‘to make possible alliances across racial, class and other chasms of difference’ (Landsberg 2003: 156). Prosthetic memory thus ‘becomes the basis for mediated collective identification and for the production of potentially counter hegemonic public spheres’ (Landsberg 2003: 150). It may also, however, draw on clichés and stereotypes and thus reinstate images and narratives that others have struggled to deconstruct. Migrant and diasporic film-makers have often rejected labels such as ‘Turkish German’, ‘beur’ or ‘black’ because these set them apart from ‘unmarked’ practitioners and, explicitly or implicitly, identify them as (albeit authentic) voices who can and must speak (only) about and for their communities.10 One could argue that speaking of migrant and diasporic film-making – current only in academic discourse – is equally suspect and needs to be seen as analytically productive only within the contexts of its own parameters (e.g. post-coloniality, diaspora criticism). From the marketcentred point of view of distributors, exhibitors, festival organisers and retailers, the films under discussion here are broadly positioned as World Cinema – on account of the themes they address, their tie-ins with World Music markets, and, in many cases, the use of languages other than English. A further reason is that, in more general terms, European cinema is gradually being subsumed under World Cinema – in response to the ‘instability of the national’ (Higson 2000b: 35) which has been theorised within film studies since the 1990s.

From national to transnational Over the past thirty years, European national cinemas have increasingly been occupied with multicultural and multi-ethnic presences and themes. Critical paradigms that examine these cinemas in terms of their national specificity do not adequately attend to the shift from the national to the trans- and/or post-national which has been fuelled by the dislocating effects of globalisation, the ongoing process of European integration, the geopolitical changes following the collapse of communism and the arrival of labour migrants, refugees and asylum seekers desiring access to what they perceive as the politically and economically stable heartland of Europe. These wider socio-political processes have meant that the concept of national and even European identity is becoming ever more contested and fluid, and a growing

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number of films challenge the traditional understanding of national cinema and national identity. The notion of a homogeneous ‘imagined community’, whose affinity and ‘deep, horizontal comradeship’ (Anderson 2006 [1983]: 7) is discursively constructed by the act of reading the same texts, has been productively appropriated by film and media studies and has gained wide currency in virtually all debates on national cinema. Concepts of a national cinema are based on the assumption that film fulfils the same role as the print media, on which Anderson’s hypothesis rests (for a critique see Elsaesser 2005: 65–6). In attempting to define the national–cultural specificity of a given cinema in Europe, most literature on the subject has, on the one hand, taken an inward-looking perspective, examining the nation-building properties of the cinema in question, while, on the other hand, demarcating the boundaries of a particular cinema against Hollywood and other (European) national cinemas. These boundaries and demarcations, however, have increasingly become permeable and contested. The ‘growing lack of congruence between nations and states’ and the crisis of the nation state itself, which is struggling to retain ‘the congruence of polity, culture, and economy which characterised nation states before [1945]’ (Crofts 1998: 386), make the idea of national cinemas highly problematic. To underscore this disjuncture, Stephen Crofts proposes to replace the term ‘national cinema’ by ‘nation state cinema’ (1998: 386), while Arjun Appadurai in more general terms takes issue with Anderson’s ‘imagined communities’ and suggests that today’s imagined communities are supranational rather than national: Benedict Anderson did us a service in identifying the way in which certain forms of mass mediation, notably those involving newspapers, novels, and other print media, played a key role in imagining the nation and facilitating the spread of this form to the colonial world in Asia and elsewhere. My general argument is that there is a similar link to be found between the work of the imagination and the emergence of a postnational political world. [...] as mass mediation becomes increasingly dominated by electronic media [...], and as such media increasingly link producers and audiences across national boundaries, and as these audiences themselves start new conversations between those who move and those who stay, we find a growing number of diasporic public spheres. (2005 [1996]: 21–2) When mass migration, ‘hardly a new feature of human history’, is juxtaposed with the rapid flow of mass-mediated images, scripts, and sensations, we have a new order of instability in the production of modern subjectivities. As Turkish guest workers in Germany watch Turkish films in their German flats, Koreans in Philadelphia watch the 1988 Olympics

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in Seoul through satellite feeds from Korea, and as Pakistani cabdrivers in Chicago listen to cassettes of sermons recorded in mosques in Pakistan or Iran, we see moving images meet deterritorialized viewers. These create diasporic public spheres, phenomena that confound theories that depend on the continued salience of the nation state as the key arbiter of important social change. (Appadurai 2005 [1996]: 4) The sense of national identity and belonging is being replaced by other senses of belonging that ‘articulate themselves above or below, or next to the nation state’ (Elsaesser 2005: 116). The formation of social groupings with dual or multiple allegiances results in what Thomas Elsaesser calls ‘hyphenated nationals at supra- and at sub-nation level’ (2005: 116). At the supra-state level, one finds the ‘cosmopolitan elites’, consisting of intellectuals, business people, entrepreneurs, politicians and professionals who move freely between the world’s urban centres and who contribute to the ‘crisis’ of the nation state through the impact of the deals they make and the policies they devise. At the sub-nation level one finds migrants, refugees or asylum seekers who live within their own diasporic communities and closed family or faith circles, cut off from the social fabric at large through lack of familiarity with either language or culture or both. Also sub-nation in their allegiance are sections of the second-generation diaspora who, while sharing the language and possessing the skills to navigate their society, none the less do not feel they have a stake in maintaining the social fabric, sensing themselves to be excluded or knowing themselves to be discriminated against, while also having become estranged from the nation of their parents. In the best of cases, where they have found the spaces that allow them to negotiate difference, they are what might be called hyphenated members of the nation, or hyphenated nationals, meaning that their identity can come from a double occupancy which here functions as a divided allegiance: the nation state into which they were born, and to the homeland from which (one or both of) their parents came. (Elsaesser 2005: 118) It is mainly, but not exclusively, the conflicting allegiances of ‘double occupancy’ experienced by hyphenated nationals at sub-nation level that have given rise to what we call migrant and diasporic cinema. Elsaesser describes it as a New European Cinema, a cinema of double occupancy, suggesting – as Stuart Hall had done more than a decade earlier – that ‘cinema seems to have become the most prominent medium of self-representation and symbolic action that the hyphenated citizens of Europe’s nation states have made their own’ (Elsaesser 2005: 119). According to Crofts (1998) and Elsaesser (2005), migrant and diasporic film-makers belong to communities located at ‘sub-state’ level; it is debatable,

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however, where the film-makers themselves need to be situated: at sub-state or at supra-state level? Many of the practitioners considered in this volume occupy a privileged position, frequently enjoying greater geographical and social mobility and perhaps a higher social status than the majority of their migrant and diasporic ‘compatriots’. In other words, the more successful they become, the more elevated they are to what Elsaesser terms the cosmopolitan elites at supra-state level and what Hannerz discusses under the categories of ‘cosmopolitans’ and ‘transnational intellectuals’ (1996: 102–11). The latter may also encompass film-makers with a non-migrant and nondiasporic background who operate transnationally and turn to migrant and diasporic themes through an engagement with sub-state communities. Elsaesser’s ‘cinema of double occupancy’, Crofts’s conceptually related ‘sub-state cinema’, which is defined ‘in terms of suppressed, indigenous, diasporic, or other populations asserting their civil rights and giving expression to a distinctive religion, language or regional culture’ (1998: 390), and our migrant and diasporic cinema can all be subsumed under the broad notion of post-national cinema. They bear witness to the growing cultural empowerment of ethnic minorities within the nation state and challenge Eurocentric assumptions about national identity and national cinema. A further concept of some currency within the post-national debates is that of ‘transnational cinema’;11 it refers to a much more mixed bag, and it is useful to briefly consider the relationship between transnationalism and diaspora. Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur make the following distinction: Transnationalism may be defined as the flow of people, ideas, goods and capital across national territories in a way that undermines nationality and nationalism as discrete categories of identification, economic organization, and political constitution. We differentiate diaspora from transnationalism, however, in that diaspora refers specifically to the movement – forced or voluntary – of people from one or more nation states to another. [...] While diaspora may be regarded as concomitant with transnationalism, or even in some cases consequent of transnationalist forces, it may not be reduced to such macroeconomic and technological flows. It remains, above all, a human phenomenon – lived and experienced. (2003: 8)12 Transnational relations between national film cultures are almost as old as cinema itself,13 yet the ascription itself has only been in circulation for the past fifteen years and is indicative of a paradigmatic shift and ‘the recognition of the decline of national sovereignty as a regulatory force in global coexistence’ (Ezra and Rowden 2006: 1).14 Transnational cinema does not denote the demise of national cinema, but instead assumes a new perspective, placing emphasis on ‘the global networks of production, distribution

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and exhibition with which national cinemas function’ (Higbee 2007b: 82). In their introduction to Transnational Cinema (2006), Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden assert that the ‘transnational comprises both globalization – in cinematic terms, Hollywood’s domination of world film markets – and the counter-hegemonic responses of filmmakers from former colonial and Third World countries’ (2006: 1).15 The essays excerpted in Ezra and Rowden’s anthology reflect the inclusiveness – or diffuseness – of the concept of transnational cinema, as they cover the instantaneous worldwide release of Hollywood blockbusters, the role of the Internet in the formation of global fandom, English-language Indian cinema as well as post-ThirdWorldist feminist film-making, ‘accented’ and ‘beur’ cinema. According to some scholars, the designation ‘transnational’ implies processes of standardisation and mass production. Transnational cinema is seen as part and parcel of a US–American ‘McDonaldisation’ of culture and, to a somewhat lesser extent, of Western European homogenisation. If we consider the examples Andrew Higson discusses in ‘The Limiting Imagination of National Cinema’ (2000a), a transnational film is simply a film whose national and cultural provenance is no longer discernible because its creation is shaped by the confluence of many different cultural identities. He asks: When a British director teams up with an American producer, a multinational cast and crew, and American capital, to adapt a novel about the contingency of identity by a Sri Lankan-born Canadian resident (The English Patient, 1996), can [the film’s] identity be called anything other than transnational? (Higson 2000a: 68) The so-called ‘Euro-Puddings’, European co-productions funded with the assistance of Eurimages, Media and other subsidies, are another example. Their sometimes bland transnational aesthetics and submerged national– cultural identity are programmatic,16 since they are expected to traverse European borders and capture audiences across Europe and elsewhere. Other authors use ‘transnational cinema’ in a different fashion and interchangeably with what we term migrant and diasporic cinema (see Naficy 1994, Göktürk 2000, Elsaesser 2005, Iordanova 2007), whereas we argue that transnational cinema is a more generic category that comprises different aspects of film production, distribution and consumption which transcend national film cultures. While ‘Euro-Puddings’ and certain international co-productions downplay issues of national, ethnic and cultural identity in an attempt to capitalise on (a perhaps synthetic) Europeanness, migrant and diasporic cinema resists homogenising tendencies and focuses on issues of identity and identity politics, making the experience of minority social groups and individuals its prime concern. The standardised variety of transnational cinema (i.e. films such as The English Patient) is conceived at

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supra-national level by representatives of media corporations who emulate the universal appeal of global Hollywood. By contrast, the creative base of migrant and diasporic cinema can be located at sub-state level and its audiences are likely to be far more specific. Will Higbee (2007b) has also taken issue with the amorphous concept of transnational cinema because it does not adequately reflect the specificities of diasporic and post-colonial films. He proposes an alternative category, ‘cinema of transvergence’, to cover a terrain very similar to that of our migrant and diasporic cinema, with the principal difference that he focuses on post-colonial and diasporic Francophone cinemas. Borrowing the notion of ‘transvergence’, as used by Marcos Novak (2002) to capture the ‘liquid architecture’ of contemporary digital design, and combining it with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, Higbee’s ‘cinema of transvergence’ draws attention to the inversion of relations between the centre and the margin. Not only does this particular kind of transnational cinema deconstruct the relationship between centre and margin by foregrounding ‘marginal experiences’, it also ‘reflects postcolonial theory’s desire to re-frame marginality as a point of resistance’ by challenging hegemonic modes of thought and binary oppositions such as ‘inside/outside, centre/margin and self/other’ (Higbee 2007b: 86). Whereas national cinemas tend to follow the dynamics of convergence in so far as they are informed by a ‘nationalist ideology [which] attempt[s] to paper over the cracks of difference’, the cinema of transvergence ‘aims to expose and foreground (celebrate even) such differences’ (Higbee 2007b: 85). Before returning to the relationship between transnational, World and European cinemas, we take a look at a selection of existing terminologies that have had a bearing on our understanding of migrant and diasporic cinema. Terminological choices are determined by ideological and professional positionalities and conceptual priorities; they reflect historical and social developments as well as the productions available for analysis at a given time. The following sections do not review the entire nomenclature of the field, but rather read the various approaches as informing the current debates and underpinning the contributions in this volume.

Migratory and diasporic aesthetics and ‘double consciousness’17 Discourses on cultural formations in diasporic contexts frequently suggest or imply that the experience of displacement and resettlement, be it through forced or voluntary migration, manifests itself in a distinctive aesthetic response which reflects the ‘double consciousness’ of its creators. Extending W. E. B. DuBois’s late nineteenth-century concept of a ‘double consciousness’ for African Americans to contemporary European diasporas and the experience of ethnic minorities more generally, it has been argued that, on account of their societal position, migrant and diasporic artists, writers

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and film-makers are better placed to interrogate and deconstruct dominant discourses of nation and identity and to take issue with ideological monoliths such as Eurocentrism and its filmic equivalent, ‘Hollywoodcentrism’ (Shohat and Stam 1994: 29). In relation to cinema, ‘double consciousness’ and migrant and diasporic subjectivity have been theorised through recourse to various analytical models and metaphors. In his influential study An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (2001), Hamid Naficy defines ‘accented cinema’ as an aesthetic response to the experience of displacement through exile, migration and diaspora, which results in the film-makers’ ‘liminal subjectivity and interstitial location in society and the film industry’ (2001: 10). Accented cinema comprises different types of cinema made by exilic, diasporic and ‘postcolonial ethnic and identity filmmakers’ (Naficy 2001: 15) who live and work in countries other than their country of origin. The distinction between the subcategories of exilic, diasporic and post-colonial ethnic and identity films is ‘based chiefly on the varied relationship of the films and their makers to existing or imagined homeplaces’ (Naficy 2001: 21): exilic cinema is dominated by the focus on the there and then in the homeland, diasporic cinema by its vertical relationship to the homeland and by its lateral relationship to the diaspora communities and experiences, and postcolonial ethnic and identity cinema by the exigencies of life here and now in the country in which the filmmakers reside. As a result [...] they tend to deal with [...] the conflict between descent relations, emphasising bloodline and ethnicity, and consent relations, stressing self-made, contractual affiliations. (Naficy 2001: 15) Migrant and diasporic cinema as understood here incorporates Naficy’s tripartite distinction, but places, as outlined above, less emphasis on the filmmakers’ biography. With reference to Henry Louis Gates Jr’s The Signifying Monkey (1988: xxiii), Naficy uses the linguistic trope of accent to describe a filmic practice that differs from a society’s dominant or mainstream cinema, which he sees typified in Hollywood, with its industrial mode of production and emphasis on entertainment rather than political engagement. In relation to this somewhat vaguely sketched dominant cinema, which ‘is considered universal’ (Naficy 2001: 4), all alternative cinemas are accented, but each is accented in specific ways. Accented cinema derives its accent from its artisanal and collective production modes and from the filmmakers’ and audiences’ deterritorialized locations. Consequently, not all accented films are exilic and diasporic, but all exilic and diasporic films are accented. If in linguistics accent pertains only to pronunciation, leaving grammar and vocabulary intact, exilic

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and diasporic accent permeates the film’s deep structure: its narrative, visual style, characters, subject matter, theme, and plot. In that sense, the accented style in film functions as both accent and dialect in linguistics. (Naficy 2001: 23) Covering a large and heterogeneous corpus of films from different regional, national and cultural contexts, Naficy suggests that accented films ‘are interstitial because they are created astride and in the interstices of social formations and cinematic practices. Consequently, they are simultaneously local and global’ and ‘in dialogue with the [film-makers’] home and host societies’, their national cinemas and audiences (2001: 4, 6). Accented cinema does not shy away from imperfection (a feature it shares with Third Cinema) and probes mainstream aesthetics with alternative stylistic paradigms. Often faced with limited budgets, film-makers may opt for experimental shorts, documentaries and essay films instead of full-length feature films, although the latter are also included in Naficy’s range of examples. The film-makers’ interstitial position in society and the media industry may prove advantageous as well as disadvantageous for the production process: on the one hand, the film-maker may be conversant with film funding mechanisms in more than one culture and can tap into various resources; on the other hand, access to funding may be particularly difficult for the kind of oppositional, engaged films many accented film-makers have tried to make. In terms of exhibition, much of accented cinema still occupies – with a few exceptions – a niche position, being restricted to the international festival circuit, art-house cinemas, the specialised public of an academic market, or television channels and programmes devoted to the promotion of independent and alternative cinema (Naficy 2001: 60–2). Even more confined to a niche market is the body of films Laura Marks discusses in The Skin of Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (2000). She predominantly discusses experimental shorts shot on video, which have a small target audience and in all likelihood will not even reach dedicated cinephiles. Like Naficy’s accented cinema, Marks’s intercultural cinema contains the notion of resistance, which is connected with the hybrid cultural identity of the film-makers. Marks chooses ‘intercultural cinema’ as an alternative to competing concepts such as ‘hybrid’, ‘postcolonial’, ‘marginal’, ‘antiracist’, ‘interstitial’ or ‘Third Cinema’ in order to draw attention to the fact that films are conceived of as sites of ‘encounter between different cultural organizations of knowledge’ (Marks 2000: 6–7). She places emphasis on ‘culture’ rather than ‘nation’, because commonly the exchange is between cultures (e.g. Euro-American culture and black, Asian or Latino culture) that coexist and mingle in one nation state. Moreover, ‘ “culture” is something that travelers bring with them more consistently than “nation”; it is the stuff that passes through national borders and transforms nations from within’ (Marks 2000: 9). Marks proposes a theory of ‘haptic visuality’

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(2000: xi) which centres on the hypothesis that the experience of diaspora, exile, migration and displacement has a profound effect on the film-makers’ entire sensory apparatus, not just their vision but their olfactory and haptic perception, enabling them to decipher the auratic nature of objects in a way less commonly found in the work of non-diasporic artists. While hegemonic Western cinema privileges vision, intercultural cinema invokes the filmand video-makers’ individual as well as the displaced audience’s cultural memory by engaging viewers bodily, stimulating their sense of touch, smell and taste. Taking Indo-Canadian cinema as a representative example of the diasporic visual imaginary, Sujata Moorti contends that diasporic cinema is characterised by a distinctive ‘diasporic optic’. Through transnational flows of visual media, particularly in the late twentieth century, diasporic communities have been able to tap into a ‘warehouse of cultural images that western and Indian popular culture have on offer’ and to organise the signs retrieved there in accordance with a ‘visual grammar that seeks to capture the dislocation, disruption and ambivalence’ of the diasporic experience (Moorti 2003: 359). Thus, diasporic cinema captures a particular ‘way of seeing that underscores the interstice, the spaces that are and fall between the cracks of the national and the transnational as well as other social formations’ (Moorti 2003: 359).18 What makes Naficy’s, Marks’s and Moorti’s interventions relevant in the context of this volume is the shared assumption that the diasporic experience calls for a distinctive aesthetic response. Concepts such as ‘accent’, ‘haptic visuality’, ‘diasporic optic’ and ‘dialogic imagination’ (Mercer 1994) suggest that an aesthetics of double consciousness can be identified as a further distinctive feature of migrant and diasporic cinema. However, the notion of a diasporic aesthetic throws up the problem of whether films about the migrant and diasporic experience by film-makers who are not situated in the flux between two cultures are characterised by a similar aesthetic approach or in what respects they might differ.

Ethno-national perspectives Given that the cinema under consideration here frequently engages with the histories and subjectivities of ‘racial’ and ethnic minorities, it is not surprising that several terminologies in circulation invoke discourses of ‘race’ and ethnicity, often within a national framework. One need only think of categories such as black and Asian British cinema, German Turkish cinema and Maghrebi French cinema, but also black cinema or cinéma du métissage. ‘Black cinema’, used largely synonymously with ‘cinema of the Black diaspora’ (Martin 1995), refers to a cinema emanating from black diasporic communities (as opposed to films merely depicting black people), where ‘black’ has been used originally to denote people of sub-Saharan African or

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African Caribbean descent. While, in the context of British cinema, black representation dates back to the 1920s, it was not until the 1960s that black film-makers gained access to film production and thus to opportunities for self-representation on the screen. Following on from documentaries and shorts and the firs