Immigration Cinema in the New Europe [Illustrated] 9781783204113, 9781783204250, 9781783204267, 1783204117

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Isolina Ballesteros

Immigration Cinema in the New Europe

Immigration Cinema in the New Europe

Isolina Ballesteros

intellect Bristol, UK / Chicago, USA

First published in the UK in 2015 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK First published in the USA in 2015 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA Copyright © 2015 Intellect Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Cover designer: Shin-E Chuah Copy-editor: MPS Technologies Production manager: Claire Organ Typesetting: Contentra Technologies Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-411-3 ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-425-0 ePUB ISBN: 978-1-78320-426-7 Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK

Contents List of Illustrations

vii

Preface and Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction: Contextualizing Immigration Cinema

1

Chapter 1: Race, Mobile Masculinities, and Class

31

Chapter 2: Female Transnational Migrations and Diasporas

63

Chapter 3: Human Trafficking and the Global Sex Slave Trade

91

Chapter 4: Queer Immigration and Diasporas: Performative Identities, Cross-Dressing Displacement/Assimilation

121

Chapter 5: The European Family in the Face of Otherness: Family Metaphors and the Redemption of White Guilt

143

Chapter 6: Border-Crossing Road Movies: Inverted Odysseys and Roads to Dystopia

175

Chapter 7: Identities In-Between in Diasporic Cinema

205

Index of Films

263

List of Illustrations Figure 1.1: Angst essen Seele auf/Ali, Fear Eats the Soul by Reiner W. Fassbinder (© 2003 The Criterion Collection) Ali and Emmi at Osteria Italiana

38

Figure 1.2: Angst essen Seele auf/Ali, Fear Eats the Soul by Reiner W. Fassbinder (© 2003 The Criterion Collection) Ali and Emmi at Bier Garden

38

Figure 1.3: La faute à Voltaire/Blame It on Voltaire by Abdel Kechiche (© 2005 Warner Home Video) Jallel sells roses

45

Figure 1.4: La faute à Voltaire/Blame It on Voltaire by Abdel Kechiche (© 2005 Warner Home Video) Jallel is deported

45

Figure 1.5: Hop by Dominique Standaert (© 2006 Film Movement) Reservoir turns red 56 Figure 1.6: Hop by Dominique Standaert (© 2006 Film Movement) Neighbors watching the game

56

Figure 2.1: Inch’Allah dimanche/God Willing, It’s Sunday (2001) by Yamina Benguigui (© 2003 Film Movement) Returning home by bus

70

Figure 2.2: Inch’Allah dimanche/God Willing, It’s Sunday (2001) by Yamina Benguigui (© 2003 Film Movement) Zouina listening to the radio

70

Figure 2.3: Inch’Allah dimanche/God Willing, It’s Sunday (2001) by Yamina Benguigui (© 2003 Film Movement) Madame Donze listening to the radio

70

Figure 2.4: Extranjeras/Foreign Women by Helena Taberna (© 2003 Lamia Producciones Audiovisuals S.L.) Intercultural cuisine

75

Figure 2.5: Extranjeras/Foreign Women by Helena Taberna (© 2003 Lamia Producciones Audiovisuals S.L.) Taberna with her foreign women

75

Figure 2.6: Bhaji on the Beach by Gurinder Chadha (© 1993 Channel Four Television Corporation) At the beach

79

Figure 2.7: Bhaji on the Beach by Gurinder Chadha (© 1993 Channel Four Television Corporation) On the bus

79

Immigration Cinema in the New Europe

Figure 2.8: Flores de otro mundo/Flowers from Another World by Icíar Bollain (© 1999 Producciones La Iguana-Alta Films, S.A.) Milady on the road

83

Figure 2.9: J’ai pas sommeil/I Can’t Sleep by Claire Denis (© 1994 Arena Films, Orsans Productions, Pyramide Productions, Les Films de Mindif, France 3 cinema, M6 Films, Agora films S.A. (Munich), Vega Film Productions S. A. (Zurich)) Daïga flâneuse

83

Figure 3.1: Lilya 4 Ever by Lukas Moodysson (© 2004 Panorama Entertainment) Angels on the roof

102

Figure 3.2: Transe/Trance by Teresa Villaverde (© 2006 Gémini Films, Madragoa Filmes, Revolver Film) Sonia’s passive resistance

109

Figure 3.3: The Price of Sex by Mimi Chakarova (© 2011 Mimi Chakarova) Chakarova looking at stills

115

Figure 3.4: The Price of Sex by Mimi Chakarova (© 2011 Mimi Chakarova) Photo exhibition: “Sex Trafficking: How It Works”

115

Figure 4.1: J’ai pas sommeil/I Can’t Sleep by Claire Denis (© 1994 Arena Films, Orsans Productions, Pyramide Productions, Les Films de Mindif, France 3 cinema, M6 Films, Agora films S.A. (Munich), Vega Film Productions S. A. (Zurich)) Camille’s performance

127

Figure 4.2: Lola und Bilidikid by Kutlug Ataman (© 2003 Millivres Multimedia) Gastarbeiters’ performance

130

Figure 4.3: Lola und Bilidikid by Kutlug Ataman (© 2003 Millivres Multimedia) Murat watching the Gastarbeiters’ performance

130

Figure 4.4: Princesa/Princess by Henrique Goldman (© 2002 Strand Releasing) Princesa by streetcar

136

Figure 5.1: Poniente/West by Chus Gutiérrez (© 2002 Amboto Audivisual S.L. & Olmo Films S.L.) Burning Koran

154

Figure 5.2: Poniente/West by Chus Gutiérrez (© 2002 Amboto Audivisual S.L. & Olmo Films S.L.) Plastic

154

Figure 5.3: Poniente/West by Chus Gutiérrez (© 2002 Amboto Audivisual S.L. & Olmo Films S.L.) Exodus

154

Figure 5.4: Flores de otro mundo/Flowers from Another World by Icíar Bollain (© 1999 Producciones La Iguana-Alta Films, S.A.) Family picture

155

Figure 5.5: La promesse/The Promise by Jean Pierre and Luc Dardenne (© 2001 New Yorker Films Artwork) Singing

157

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List of Illustrations

Figure 5.6: La promesse/The Promise by Jean Pierre and Luc Dardenne (© 2001 New Yorker Films Artwork) Roger in chains

158

Figure 5.7: La promesse/The Promise by Jean Pierre and Luc Dardenne (© 2001 New Yorker Films Artwork) Igor tells Assita about Amidou’s death

158

Figure 5.8: Caché/Hidden by Michael Haneke (© 2006 Sony Pictures Classics) House under surveillance

162

Figure 5.9: Caché/Hidden by Michael Haneke (© 2006 Sony Pictures Classics) Drawing

162

Figure 5.10: Caché/Hidden by Michael Haneke (© 2006 Sony Pictures Classics) School entrance

162

Figure 5.11: Le Havre by Ari Kaurismäki (© 2012 The Criterion Collection) Boat people

165

Figure 5.12: Le Havre by Ari Kaurismäki (© 2012 The Criterion Collection) Max and Idrissa

165

Figure 6.1: Retorno a Hansala/Return to Hansala by Chus Gutiérrez (© 2008 Muac Films-Maestranla Film) Martin’s nightmare of drowned bodies

186

Figure 6.2: Retorno a Hansala/Return to Hansala by Chus Gutiérrez (© 2008 Muac Films-Maestranla Film) Martin and Leyla with hanging clothes

186

Figure 6.3: In This World by Michael Winterbottom (© 2004 Sundance Channel LLC) Jamal and Enayat on truck

188

Figure 6.4: In This World by Michael Winterbottom (© 2004 Sundance Channel LLC) Map and truck

188

Figure 6.5: 14 kilómetros by Gerardo Olivares (© 2008 Cameo Media SL) Overloaded truck

192

Figure 6.6: Eden à L’Ouest/Eden Is West by Costa-Gavras (© 2009 Cameo Media SL) Elias on the road

197

Figure 6.7: Eden à L’Ouest/Eden Is West by Costa-Gavras (© 2009 Cameo Media SL) Elias lighting the Eiffel Tower

197

Figure 7.1: L’esquive/Games of Love and Chance by Abdel Kechiche (© 2003 Lola Films-Noé Productions/2006 New Yorker Films Artwork) Krimo Reads Marivaux’s play

219

Figure 7.2: L’esquive/Games of Love and Chance by Abdel Kechiche (© 2003 Lola Films-Noé Productions/2006 New Yorker Films Artwork) Krimo watches the performance

219

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Immigration Cinema in the New Europe

Figure 7.3: Entre les murs/The Class by Laurent Cantet (© 2008 Sony Pictures Classics) In the classroom

221

Figure 7.4: My Beautiful Laundrette by Stephen Frears (© 1885 Channel Four Television Company, Ltd. Design © 2003 MGM Home Entertainment LLC) Omar and Johnny at the launderette’s back office

229

Figure 7.5: My Beautiful Laundrette by Stephen Frears (© 1885 Channel Four Television Company, Ltd. Design © 2003 MGM Home Entertainment LLC) Omar and Johnny before the launderette’s opening

229

Figure 7.6: Bend It Like Beckham by Gurinder Chadha (© 2003 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment Inc.) Jules’ and Jess’ public display of affection

234

Figure 7.7: Bend It Like Beckham by Gurinder Chadha (© 2003 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment Inc.) Jules and Jess on the field

234

Figure 7.8: Nina’s Heavenly Delights by Pratibha Parmar (© 2007 Regent Releasing) Televised coming out 237 Figure 7.9: Gegen die Wand/Head On by Fatih Akin (© 2004 Bavaria GmbH. Artwork & Design © 2005 Strand Releasing) Selim Sesler and Turkish gipsy orchestra by the Bosphorus

246

Figure 7.10: Auf der anderen Seite/The Edge of Heaven by Fatih Akin (© 2007 Corazón International. Artwork and Design © 2008 Strand Releasing) Nejat waiting for his father

249

x

Preface and Acknowledgments My interest in the subject of immigration and its cinematic representations grew out of a combination of personal and professional reasons. As a white Hispanic and European living and working in the United States since 1986, I share with the objects of my study the inbetweenness, double consciousness, and perpetual transience that result from belonging to two different cultural spaces and two linguistic codes. Like many of the characters in the films I include in this book, I have a merged border and bicultural identity. Although I assume my identity in all its diversity, on occasions I still see myself as the stranger; I recognize in myself the impossibility of fully assimilating to my adopted culture because of an accented identity that will forever mark me as a foreigner, destined to be an outsider, feeling fully at home in neither the homeland nor the host land. Empathy and self-reflection were indeed important motivations as I directed my attention to a multiplicity of immigration tales and progressively made them my primary subject of study for over a decade. The seed of this project, which centers on immigration to Europe, can be found in a previous academic book project in which I explored the evolution of socially conscious cinema made in Spain from the end of the dictatorship (1975) to the early 2000s. One of the (ins)urgent topics documented by Spanish filmmakers in the early 1990s, which I addressed in one of that book’s chapters, was the then-still-scarce phenomenon of immigration to Spain. In fact, immigration had become part of the Spanish government’s immigration agenda only in 1985, after the country was admitted to the European Community (EC) and was asked to conform to EC legislation that sought to restrict nonEC citizen immigration. The sharp increase in the number of foreign residents in Spain since the mid-1990s forced subsequent reforms and the regularization processes of the Ley de Extranjería/Law on the Rights and Freedoms of Foreigners in Spain (1985), which took place in 1991, 1996, 2000, and 2004, and made immigration one of the most contested issues in the media and the second most important national issue for Spaniards after terrorism. By the turn of the twenty-first century, Spain, along with other southern European countries, had become a receiving country of immigrants, a gateway and frontline state on Europe’s southernmost border. In the first decade of this century, Spain’s foreign-born population increased from less than 4 percent to almost 14 percent of the total population. The small rafts (pateras) that crossed to the southernmost parts of Spain (Tarifa, Algeciras) from Morocco, filled with immigrants from both North African and sub-Saharan countries, were

Immigration Cinema in the New Europe

followed by medium-sized fishing boats (cayucos) arriving from West African countries to the Canary Islands. The patera crisis of the 1990s gave way to the cayuco crisis in the 2000s. This phenomenon was not limited to Spain; soon Italy and Greece experienced it as well, and images of drowned bodies and emaciated immigrants landing on the pristine touristic beaches of southern European coastal towns have become commonplace every summer. But let me rewind to the point where in the process of tracing Spanish films about immigration to Spain for my previous book I became aware of the rapid increase in films made in Europe in the 1990s and 2000s that depicted the plights and challenges faced by economic immigrants and political refugees in Western European countries. I was exposed to most of these European immigration films, which are typically shown in festival circuits but are rarely released or distributed in the United States, primarily through the Film Society of the Lincoln Center in New York City and its various film series devoted to national cinemas and human rights films. The percentage of films that dealt with the issue of immigration from the global South to the North included in the European film series programmed in the city of New York—one of the major and most sophisticated hubs for the exhibition of international cinema—was large enough to consider it a trend. The coincidences in narrative and formal elements in the large number of films of different national origins that I viewed over the years were clear. An important part of my investigation covered the sociopolitical contexts that generated the need for and interest in these films and the engagement of intellectuals and filmmakers with the condition of immigrants on European soil. The investigation grew into a new book project; I gave the representational trend a title, Immigration Cinema; and my avid search for films about immigration and diasporas in Europe (and other parts of the West) continued until it became an obsession and a task that was almost impossible to complete. Old and new political conflicts and economic scarcity in the developing world, along with widespread globalization and the financial crisis in the developed world that began in 2008, propelled and complicated the human migratory impulse, and with it, the cinematic urge to recreate it. Thus, keeping up with the production of immigration European films proved to be a challenge. The more films I found, the more remained for me to locate and watch even in an era of instant streaming and online availability. In this book I attempt to put forth a coherent narrative framework through which I can examine a considerable number of immigration films, trace the diversity of filmmakers’ approaches to the subject, and establish a thematic or generic dialogue between them. Some of the questions that this book attempts to answer, among many others that I address in its chapters, are the following: What is immigration cinema? Which films are to be included in this category? Is the immigration tale always one of either alienation or assimilation? Does immigration always have to be filmed through the cinéma vérité lens? Immigration cinema is primarily about the depiction of migratory movements and the particularities relating to the settlement and development of immigrant diasporas and cannot be identified just through the anecdotal or tangential inclusion of immigrant individuals and communities. Immigration cinema is neither homogeneous nor subjected to rigid generic conventions, and, like previous film movements and trends, it reflects dominant feelings about a concrete xii

Preface and Acknowledgments

social issue and cuts across genres. In the 1940s and 1950s, Italian neorealist films were concerned with social content and ideology, with the scars and ruins of the war and the fascist past, the reconstruction of cities and nation, and the plights of lower-class workers and the disaffected. A realist aesthetic suited the daily struggles of the urban subject who would be captured in real locations and through conversational speech, surrounded by real sounds and impersonated by nonprofessional actors. A documentary, rather than a stylized aesthetic, complemented the filmmakers’ ideology and served the purpose of delivering social commentary. In the 1960s and 1970s subsequent European new waves and Third and World cinemas would continue the neorealists’ aesthetic and political projects of addressing issues that affect colonial and postcolonial realities and delivering social commentary with the aim of inspiring change. In immigration cinema—a similar attempt to raise consciousness in audiences about the issues of migration, mobility, and diaspora— the subject matter precedes and shapes the choice of genre and style. The documentary and realistic approach is incorporated one way or another into practically every immigration film. The ethical component inherent in the depiction of a humanitarian concern—a constant preoccupation and an unsolved yet urgent problem in Western governments’ agendas—is inserted through an aesthetic fictionalization that utilizes and combines a variety of genres and visual styles. Despite this book’s ambitious title, what follows is by no means an exhaustive catalog, and even less an analysis, of every immigration film made in Europe. The selection of films studied or mentioned in the book’s seven chapters reflects my personal preferences concerning the films’ sociocultural accuracy, aesthetic achievement, and commercial availability, and it intends to provide a sample of the trend of representing immigration from a cinematic perspective. Many of the arguments and interpretations I present in this book could be equally suitable to the analysis of many other films, European or not, whose main intent is to give voice to the non-Western immigrants in Western societies, expose their predicaments, and raise Western audiences’ awareness about both the immigrants’ circumstances and the audiences reactions to them. Following chronological order and going from the academic to the personal, I want to start by thanking Richard Peña, a colleague from my days at Barnard College/Columbia University and program director of the Film Society of the Lincoln Center in New York from 1988 to 2012. Because of the many film series devoted to worldwide national cinemas that he organized, I became aware of the existence of immigration films. I thank him not only for including those urgent films in the film series but, above all, for generously making some of them available to me in VHS and DVD formats. My affection and appreciation for their academic effort go to my students at Baruch College, mainly first- and second-generation immigrants, who have attended my courses on immigration cinema, which served as the laboratory where many of the ideas of this book came to fruition. My students have recognized themselves and their families in the films and provided intelligent perspectives and real-life angles on the fictional representations. This book has always had students in mind; its purpose is fundamentally pedagogical. xiii

Immigration Cinema in the New Europe

Baruch College and PSC-CUNY (Professional Staff Congress-City University of New York) have provided constant institutional support to this project from its inception: through generous grants, the office of the Dean of the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences and the PSC-CUNY Research Award Program have funded my research trips to Europe, my attendance at conferences on immigration, and the teaching load release and sabbatical leave that allowed for the additional time to conduct my research and writing. I give special thanks to Jeffrey Peck, Dean of the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences, for his support for the book’s publication and for his friendship. I am grateful to my colleagues in the Department of Modern Languages and Comparative Literature and the Film Studies Program at Baruch College for our collegial interactions and their interest in my project, especially Elena Martínez, chair of the Department of Modern Languages since my arrival in 2006, for accommodating my course schedule according to my research interests, and Ali Nematollahy and Esther Allen for all the intellectual conversations, dinners, parties, and movies we have shared together, for being friends as well as colleagues. This book’s diction owes a great deal to Janet Hendrickson for her rigorous and swift editing. I thank Michael Schuessler for reviewing and providing suggestions on the book’s proposal and for being a great friend and travel companion; Roane Carey for his pertinent comments on the Introduction and for bringing joy and happiness to my life; Santiago Fouz Hernández for his excellent comments on chapter 4; Barbara Zecchi for sharing materials relevant to chapter 3; and Josetxo Cerdán for our rich conversations about cinema and his sharing of titles and materials. Pilar Rodríguez’s friendship and camaraderie throughout the years have been absolutely essential to the gestation of this book. With her I have shared numerous materials, ideas, conversations, conferences, and publications on the subject of immigration and exile in Spanish and European cinema; in addition to mutual feedback, we have shared our homes and enjoyed many moments of fun and laughter. My New York friends have been a source of nurture, companionship, and intellectual and emotional encouragement. I am especially grateful (in strict alphabetical order) to Consuelo Arias, Marco Campello, Gabriel Cwilich, Mare Díaz, Isabel Estrada, Fernando de Giovanni, David Lounsbury, Cecilia Mandrile, Rafael Rosario, Alejandro Varderi, and Eva Woods. My appreciation goes as well to my extended US family of friends, in particular to my Boston “sisters” Irene Mizrahi and Lola Peláez, with whom I share the beginnings of my own migratory experience, for always being there for me, and to Tatjana Pavlovic, the greatest listener, colleague, hostess, and travel companion. On the other side of the Atlantic, gracias to my beloved Spanish clan for your love, support, and respect for my career: my mother Isolina Díaz, my brothers Pedro, Rafael, and Ignacio, and my nieces Sofía and Maya, I miss you every day of my life; and gracias to Ana Cris Royo for her continued sisterhood, and to José María Conget, Maribel Cruzado, María Camí-Vela, and Ignacio Prado for your long-distance friendship and our stimulating conversations on cinema.

xiv

Preface and Acknowledgments

I would also like to thank the filmmakers and producers who kindly granted me permission to reproduce some of the images included in this book. The List of Illustrations gives proper credit to all of you. Preliminary versions or parts of some of the chapters saw their life elsewhere. I gratefully acknowledge the following publications in which they appeared: a modified and much shorter version of the Introduction appeared under the title “Immigration Cinema in/ and the European Union,” in Basque/European Perspectives on Cultural and Media Studies, vol. I (ed.), María Pilar Rodríguez, Reno, Nevada: University of Nevada Press (2009: 189–215). The sections pertaining to the Spanish films in chapter 1 appeared in “Foreign and Racial Masculinities in Spanish Immigration Film,” Studies in Hispanic Cinemas 3 (2006: 169–185). A slightly different and shorter version of chapter 2 appeared under the title “Female Transnational Migrations and Diasporas in European ‘Immigration Cinema,’” in Gesa Zinn and Maureen Tobin Stanley (eds.), Exile through a Gendered Lens: Women’s Displacement in Recent European History, Literature and Cinema, pp. 143–168, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

xv

Introduction Contextualizing Immigration Cinema

T

he immigrant populations of the European Union (EU) have experienced a tenfold increase in recent decades, and with this increase has come a proliferation of immigration films as well as publication of sociological and theoretical studies that document this social reality—and the ramifications of racism and xenophobia—and support the immigrants’ cause. This book aspires to join the ranks of publications devoted to the subject of immigration in and to Europe from the distinct perspective of film. It reflects on recent waves of immigration from the Global South and East to the EU after the Schengen Agreement of 1985, and it excludes internal migration within Europe, namely from Southern to Northern and Central Europe after World War II and throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Due to the proliferation of films on the subject, it would be impossible for me to address, let alone analyze, all of them, not even the ones that are available commercially. This book is not an encyclopedic enumeration of names and titles. Instead, my goal is to provide a conceptual and comparative consideration of the visual and narrative filmic conventions found in immigration films that allow them to be grouped under the label “immigration cinema” within broader preexisting categories such as “social cinema,” “world cinema,” and “third cinema” and in relation to notions such as gender, hybridity, transculturation, border crossing, transnationalism, and translation. I provide close textual analysis of a wide selection of films, and I study common patterns of representation in a variety of cinematographic formats and genres, examining the use of documentary techniques as well as of more experimental or commercial formats and classic fictional genres (comedy, melodrama, film noir, the road movie, etc.). I propose that the unmappable and hybrid condition of immigration cinema results from its free combination and deliberate blurring of filmic conventions pertaining to two or more genres, which makes it thus resist categorization in authorial or national terms as well as in film studies’ established and canonical categories of production and reception. In addition, I argue that immigration cinema benefits from the rise of new technologies of production, distribution, and international coproduction and thus provides a territory for political resistance without renouncing the medium’s commercial potential. Today’s transnational means of production and the existence of multicultural authors and audiences facilitate the dismantling of stable filmic categories. Immigration films’ approaches and methods emerge from the filmmakers’ understanding of cinema as a cultural, ideological, and ethical apparatus that represents the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, and class. Before I situate my work within the corpus of recent publications on the subject of European immigration cinema and outline the book’s structure and contents, I want to

Immigration Cinema in the New Europe

provide a brief sociopolitical and theoretical context for the reconfiguration of Europe’s racial and ethnic identity and consider the populist anti-immigration and xenophobic discourses provoked by immigration and the creation of diasporas in the EU. It is important to consider Europe both as a “family of nations” and as a “Fortress” that defends its borders from migratory “invasions,” an entity whose members are affected by the tensions provoked by their double belonging (double appartenance) to both their native sovereign states that still function at the local level and a constructed continental ensemble (the EU) in an increasingly globalized world (Maalouf 1998: 10). In this seemingly contradictory state of affairs, immigration provides a post-postmodern and postcolonial substitution for the concept of race. As the illusion of racial and ethnic purity progressively dismantles, hybridity is becoming the defining characteristic of Europe’s new identity. Purity and Hybridity: Europe’s Changing Identity A depiction of the EU as a “family of nations” repeats on a larger scale nationalist narratives that, since the nineteenth century, have symbolically configured the nation in terms of familiar domestic spaces and genealogies (McClintock 1995: 357). As Anne McClintock points out, “the family trope” permeates most national narratives and is understood as the “natural figure for sanctioning national hierarchy within a putative organic unity of interests” (1995: 357, original emphasis). That hierarchy requires the ethnic and religious assimilation of “aliens” into the social and political structure of the nation as well as the progressive annihilation of their native customs and practices. While sociopolitical assimilation may be possible, racial blending remains problematic, since it carries with it the literal and symbolic darkening of the European constitutive racial identity. The constant flow of migratory movements from Southern and Eastern populations undermines the European effort to maintain racial purity. Racialized Others are perceived to be a danger to a constructed purity in a paradigm that opposes “ethnic unity” with “foreignness” (El-Tayeb 2001: 72–73). Decades ago, Frantz Fanon alleged that colonial space was divided into “two camps: the white and the black” (Fanon 1967: 10) and split by a pathological geography of power, separating the bright, well-fed settler’s town from the hungry, crouching casbah (Fanon 1967: 30). The current geographical organization of postcolonial European urban space still reproduces the colonial division Fanon observed. Foreigners are still deemed “to personify the strange, the uncanny, the impenetrable of certain customs, the vagueness of certain dangers and threats” (Bauman 2006: 27). As Smaïn Laacher also writes, “[Foreigners] are generally perceived as a kind of floating population who are, by definition, unable to settle. Their identities are fluid, their intentions unclear. From the point of view of the state and society they have no fixed identity and no real home” (2007: 18–19). They are relegated to ghettos as a consequence of a social mixophobia that prompts locals to protect themselves from a multiform and multilingual world in small fortresses of sameness and “interdictory 4

Introduction

spaces” (Flusty 1997). As Zygmunt Bauman writes, using Flusty’s architectural term, “interdictory spaces” are the “voluntary ghettos of the high and mighty” whose purpose is “to divide, segregate and exclude—not to build bridges, easy passages and meeting places, facilitate communications and otherwise bring the residents together” (Bauman 2007: 77–78). Bauman interprets that Flusty’s “interdictory spaces” are the “updated equivalents of the premodern [and colonial] moats, turrets and embrasures of the city walls; but rather than defending the city and all its dwellers against the enemy outside, they are erected to set and keep the various kinds of city residents apart from each other (and away from mischief)—and to defend some of them against the others, once they have been cast in the status of adversaries by the very act of spatial isolation” (Bauman 2007: 78). Interdictory spaces’ purpose is “to erect compact little fortresses inside which the members of the supraterritorial global elite can groom, cultivate and relish their bodily, in addition to spiritual, independence and isolation from the locality. In the landscape of the city, ‘interdictory spaces’ have become landmarks of the disintegration of locally grounded, shared communal living” (Bauman 2007: 78). However, as Bauman and other cultural critics also remind us, in these urban spaces, mixophilia coexists with mixophobia, since both impulses live inside of every citizen inhabiting such spaces (Bauman 2006: 36). In two earlier essays, Bauman delved into this ambiguity toward the figure of the stranger in the postmodern city. According to him, the stranger has two faces: one is mysterious, inviting, promising pleasure and joy, adventure, and opportunity; the other is also mysterious but sinister, menacing, intimidating (Bauman 1995: 137). For the native inhabitants of residential areas of urban centers, the foreigner is, above all, a service or source of aesthetic pleasure (for example, inexpensive domestic service, exotic food and customs) that does not compromise their freedom. As consumers, clients, and patrons, they are always in charge (Bauman 1996: 71). A decade later, Paul Gilroy writes along the same lines: “Exciting, unfamiliar cultures can be consumed in the absence of any face-to-face recognition or real time negotiation with their actual creators” (Gilroy 2005: 125). In this era of global capitalism, European major cities are cosmopolitan and multicultural centers thanks to the proliferation of “ethnic” neighborhoods that are indispensable urban fixtures where “ethnic” products are becoming “consumably chic” (Mandel 2008: 95). However, multiculturalism and ethnicity are not unequivocally positive terms as cultural critics have critiqued them for being euphemistic for colonialist and racialist categories. According to Slavoj Zizek’s negative perception of multiculturalism, the multiculturalist’s respect for the Other’s identity and specificity is nothing else but a patronizing form of maintaining his Eurocentric privileged universal position and asserting his own superiority (Zizek 1997: 44). In a more nuanced critique of multiculturalism and the current refashioning of ethnicity, Polona Petek and Ruth Mandel, referring to the specific case of Germany, remind us that Europeans’ (and more broadly, Westerners’) attraction to and respect for their “ethnic” Others are contingent on the commodification and assimilation of those Others to the nation state. Multiculturalism, Petek says, “only comes about once the non-Western Other’s radical alterity has been 5

Immigration Cinema in the New Europe

trimmed and transformed into something to be consumed” (2007: 179); and “ethnic” is “in,” Mandel argues, “when it does not extend beyond the friendly staff of the quaint and colorful ethnic restaurant, when it remains tourist-friendly in a native village, when it stays in its safe, commodified place” (2008: 96). Even when acknowledging the aforementioned critiques of Europe’s attempts at multiculturalism, the coexistence of mixophilic and mixophobic impulses complicate the construction of a single narrative of the “European family.” Most importantly, the simple division into black and white, native and foreigner camps should prove even more elusive once the European citizen is presented with the heterogeneity of diasporas and the unstoppable destiny of Europe as a multiethnic and multiracial family. Multiracialism should be understood as the European future, especially when one acknowledges that “heterogeneity, cross-cultural influences and hybridity have long been the living norms in the European past” (Tawadros 2001: 11). Since colonial times, Europe has been “defined by its others” (Jameson 2001: 297), constructed through the simultaneous regurgitation and erasure of the reality of those Others and  the perpetuation of a “deep denial about the global dimensions of its imperial history and the compromised morality of its colonial historicity” (Gilroy, 2005: 143). As Gilroy suggests, a critical work about the condition and future of European identity “must be ready to confront imperial denial and the flourishing revisionist scholarship that supports it” and be willing to demonstrate how “the presence of strangers, aliens and blacks, and the distinctive dynamics of Europe’s imperial history have combined to shape its cultural and political habits and institutions” (Gilroy 2005: 142–143). Gilroy is right to insist that knowledge of Europe’s colonial past must be employed to challenge fantasies of the newly embattled European region as a culturally bleached or politically fortified space, closed off to further immigration, barred to asylum seeking and willfully deaf to any demand for hospitality made by refugees and other displaced people. (2005: 141) We can only celebrate Gilroy’s commitment when he insists on the “need to conjure up a future in which black and brown Europeans stop being seen as migrants” (2005: 149) and as permanently “stuck in the present,” “devoid of historicity” to the point that “succeeding generations of their locally born descendants […] get trapped in the vulnerable role of perpetual outsider” (Gilroy 2005: 123). Thomas Elsaesser has used the term “double occupancy” to refer to European identity and as a counter-metaphor to Fortress Europe, a term often applied to the EU’s immigration policies (Elsaesser 2005: 108). As he rightly observes, “[T]here is no European […] who is not already diasporic in relation to some marker of difference—be it ethnic, regional, religious or linguistic—and whose identity is not always already hyphenated or doubly occupied” (Elsaesser 2005: 108). He anticipates the irrelevance of the notion of national 6

Introduction

identity and wishes it to be replaced by other narratives that would describe more accurately an increasingly “impure” and hyphenated world: [O]ur identities are multiply defined, multiply experienced, and can be multiply assigned to us, at every point in our lives, and this increasingly so—hopefully to the point where the very notion of national identity will fade from our vocabulary, and be replaced by other kinds of belonging, relating and being. Blood and soil, land and possession, occupation and liberation have to give way to a more symbolic or narrative way of negotiating contested ownership of both place and time, i.e., history and memory, for instance, inventing and maintaining spaces of discourse, as in […] the increasing prominence achieved by hyphenated European nationals (German-Turkish, Dutch-Moroccan, French-Maghreb, British-Asian) in the spheres of literature, filmmaking, music and popular television shows. (Elsaesser 2005: 109–110) Similarly, the Lebanese-French writer Amin Maalouf calls on immigrants to fully assume their own diversity, their double belonging (double appartenance), and their hyphenated identity (identité composée), and he calls on European societies to embrace the multiple belongings that have forged their identities throughout history. He argues that if we are willing to accept our hyphenated identity, we will never become fanatics, assassins of the identity of Others. We do not have to choose between negation of ourselves and the negation of others, between essentialism (integrisme) and disintegration (Maalouf 1998: 45). Andreas Huyssen proposes that one possible way to undermine the dichotomy of diaspora and nation may come from acknowledging that “in terms of their memory formation, diaspora and nation, rather than being in opposition to each other, may have more troubling affinities than are visible at first sight” (Huyssen 2003: 150) These affinities remain seriously understudied, above all, because “the millions of migrants who now live in dozens of diasporas within European nation states remain structurally excluded from such national historiography of memory” (Huyssen 2003: 152). As Huyssen points out in regard to the specific context of Germany and its Turkish diaspora, both diasporic memory and the traditional memorial culture of the “host” nation focus on the notion of loss. The host nation mourns the loss of a homogeneous culture, and the diasporic community is “by definition tied to that which has been lost rather than to its negotiation with the majority culture within which it operates” (Huyssen 2003: 153–54). However, Huyssen argues, insisting on a perception of loss does not necessarily promote a better understanding of the Other. The fundamental questions, according to Huyssen, should be “how the diasporic immigrant can relate to the memory of the host nation” and “how can diasporic memory have an impact on the national memory into which it migrates” (2003: 154). Huyssen proposes that a starting point toward a negotiation between host countries and diasporas could be an acknowledgment of the memory of a common colonial past, in the case of colonial empires such as France and Great Britain and their colonial ex-subjects, or of a 7

Immigration Cinema in the New Europe

common experience of victimization and genocidal perpetration, in the cases of Germany (with the Nazi genocide of the Jews) and Turkey (with the Armenian genocide). However, Huyssen’s point is that Germany, as well as other European host countries, need to go beyond recognizing their traumatic past to find in it lessons for a better understanding of diasporic culture in the future and a redefinition of nationhood (Huyssen 2003: 164). It is not a surprise that the liberal intellectual articulation of this hybrid and multiracial reality, along with the popular consumption and assimilation of “exotic,” “ethnic” Otherness, coexist with the still prevalent, official synonymy of the terms “European” and “white” and the fallacy of national purity, both of which contribute to the radicalization of official xenophobic discourses. What prevails in this worldview is a fundamental contradiction between Europe’s distinctive diversity and identity, which consists of multiple belongings, and the homogenizing official narratives that insist upon denying the reality of an inherently mixed system. In spite of the well-known fact that the EU’s economies still depend on immigrants’ cheap labor and their contributions to the welfare state, right-wing political parties survive to a great extent on populist anti-immigration and xenophobic narratives. In September 2007 the European Parliament called for more legal immigration into the EU, citing an aging population and low levels of skilled labor as justifications; meanwhile, the European justice chief told the EU that it had to relax its immigration controls and open the door to twenty million workers over the next decade, citing the need for more skilled labor from overseas. In opposition to German conservatives’ efforts to create measures to keep undesired foreigners out of the country, in January 2014 the European Commission sent a proposal to the European Court of Justice asking that Germany open its doors to more immigrants from “poor” EU member countries (namely, Romania and Bulgaria) and extend social benefits to all them, even if they have never worked in Germany.1 Nonetheless, People’s Parties, as they are called in many Western European countries (Switzerland, Denmark, and Holland, among others), grow in numbers every year while they propose the creation of laws both to reduce the number of new immigrants and expel the ones already in the state, and amendments to constitutions to regulate who belongs to the national family. France, Belgium, Denmark, Holland, Italy, Switzerland, and most recently Greece and Norway have all witnessed the rise of a conservative discourse that has shifted the gravitational center of immigration politics toward the right. The radicalization of these discourses and the xenophobia against Muslim populations all over Europe increased exponentially after terrorist bombings took place in Europe (in Spain on March 11, 2004 and in London on July 7, 2007) following the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States. In 2004, after filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was assassinated by a radical Dutch-born Muslim of Moroccan origin, a heated debate about the increasing Muslim population and the right to free expression took place in the Netherlands. The tragedy compromised Holland’s tolerant approach to immigration but also highlighted the broader dilemma of how to handle the tension between freedom of speech and the global impact of publicly offending the religious beliefs of others. A xenophobic campaign and violent right-wing extremist acts followed, encouraged by the media and the coalition 8

Introduction

government of the Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA) and the right-wing People’s Party for Liberty and Democracy (VVD). A similar controversy sprung up a year later in Denmark after violent reactions took place in the Muslim world following the publication of cartoons caricaturing and linking the Prophet Muhammad to terrorism in the newspaper Jyllands-Posten. Meanwhile, throughout Europe, repressive legislation has been passed in recent years targeting immigrants. While Nicolas Sarkozy held the French presidency between 2007 and 2012, his race politics included the creation of a new Ministry of Immigration and National Identity which pushed for a Europe-wide pact to keep immigrants from entering Europe illegally through tighter border controls, unified asylum policies, and fewer amnesties granted to the undocumented already in Europe. Sarkozy also proposed new legislation— approved by France’s National Assembly—requiring that immigrants who wish to bring relatives into their host country use DNA testing to prove bloodlines. Meanwhile, in 2008, under Silvio Berlusconi’s right-wing administration, the Italian Senate passed a law requiring, among other things, that illegal immigrants convicted of crimes face jail sentences a third longer than those given to Italians. Under the same law, courts can jail illegal immigrants for up to four years instead of simply deporting them; property rented to illegal immigrants can also be confiscated; and the period of detention for illegal immigrants waiting to be deported was increased from 60 days to eighteen months, in line with EU anti-immigration guidelines introduced around the same time.2 In Switzerland, before the country’s national elections in October 2007, the right-wing Swiss People’s Party (the most powerful party in the federal parliament) courted Swiss voters with an image of three white sheep kicking out a black sheep. On June 1, 2008, the same People’s Party introduced a referendum that would have given municipalities the final say in granting citizenship and would have allowed townspeople to vote in secret as to whether foreign members of their communities could receive Swiss passports. Even though almost 22 percent of Swiss residents are foreigners, the People’s Party insisted that they had the power to reject immigrants or deny them citizenship on the grounds of “insufficient integration” (Harnischfeger 2008). The measure was ultimately defeated by public referendum on June 8, 2008. Since 2008, southern European countries such as Spain, Italy, and Greece have been suffering the severe effects of the global recession, and their citizens have been struggling to survive a stagnant economy, record rates of unemployment, and austerity measures imposed by the European Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Against this backdrop, once nonexistent- or insignificant-ultranationalist, right-wing parties that espouse virulent antiimmigrant policies and rhetoric have gained popularity. One example is Greece’s Golden Dawn Party, which defines itself as a nationalist party that identifies with common Greeks and wants to get rid of political corruption and illegal immigrants so that the country can recover from the economic crisis. This party taps into anti-immigrant resentment, fomenting the idea that undocumented immigrants are a threat to Greek identity. The Golden Dawn platform resonates among a growing number of Greeks who feel dismayed with the economic and political direction of their country. The conception of immigrants as a threat 9

Immigration Cinema in the New Europe

is not held exclusively by this ultranationalist neo-Nazi party but has also been expressed by Prime Minister Antonis Samaras, who leads the conservative New Democracy Party, the main member of a three-party coalition government that has governed Greece since June 2012. Samaras and other politicians have accused immigrants of spreading infectious diseases, crowding day-care centers, and contributing to the sharp increase in crime in Athens, where most of the country’s undocumented immigrants live. As a result, Greece is becoming a hostile place for immigrants, and many have suffered xenophobic attacks by gangs of vigilantes, many sporting Golden Dawn t-shirts (Kakissis 2012). More broadly, the rise of Golden Dawn reflects the move of the Far Right into mainstream European politics over the past decade. For example, the success of France’s right-wing National Front (FN) led by Marine Le Pen in the 2012 general election (winning 18 percent of the vote) reflects a change in voters’ geography, age, and gender. The FN, whose message has always been popular among people living in poverty, now gets support from unemployed young people, who see little hope in mainstream politics and from women who identify with Marine Le Pen. In addition, the party has found increasing support not only in the urban centers that receive high levels of immigration but also in rural areas, small provincial towns, and above all, the banlieues. As Hugh Schofield observes in an article covering the election for the BBC, “For these people an FN vote offers both a protest (against the wealthy, against the EU, against the establishment), but also a claim: for an identity and the right to a traditional ‘French’ way of life” (2012). A similar situation has developed in Norway where the Progress Party, another populist anti-immigration party, won 16.3 percent of the vote in the September 2013’s general elections, enough to form a coalition with the Conservative Party, led by Prime Minister Erna Solberg, and despite the fact that a former party member, a Norwegian named Anders Behring Breivik, bombed government buildings in Olso, killing eight people and then 69 more people, mostly teenagers, in a mass shooting at a Labor Party summer camp on the island of Utøya in 2011 (Erlanger 2014). This populist, xenophobic, anti-immigration and often openly racist trend had its painful confirmation in the recent elections to the European Parliament that took place on May 25, 2014. Although centrist parties retained control of the parliament, Far-Right (and some Left) fringe political groups from countries such as France, Denmark, Britain, Austria and the Netherlands scored dramatic gains in the election. France’s National Front won 26 percent of the vote, more than any other party, defeating the governing Socialists and the Union for a Popular Movement, a center-right party. The significance of the parliamentary elections is limited, because politics in Europe remains highly local and turnout was only 43.1 percent. But these forces now have a larger platform to promote their hostility to the EU and to immigration in their home countries, so they could extend their gains in upcoming national elections. Anti-foreigner rhetoric is indeed at the heart of their campaigns; their common opposition to immigrants and the EU denote a Eurocentric anxiety over the instability of national identities within Europe and over the instability of European identity itself.3 Despite the aforementioned “Fortress”-like official measures and the explicit racism either inherent to extreme right-wing parties or manifested by isolated violent individuals, 10

Introduction

European citizens’ attitudes toward immigrants are primarily defined by the type of benign, cultural, or differentialist neoracism that Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (1991) and Robert Ackerman (1996) identified in their early work. In Balibar’s and Wallerstein’s classic study on the connection between racism, nationalism, and class, Balibar argues that the category of immigration is now used as a substitute for the old notion of race: a differentialist or cultural racism has displaced biological racism, as had happened in the case of anti-Semitism or is the case today with Arabphobia, or the systematic confusion of “Arabness” and “Islamicism” (Balibar & Wallerstein 1991: 24). In that study, Balibar also argues that working-class racism has taken the place of the old aristocratic racism and bourgeois racism (Balibar & Wallerstein 1991: 208–209). Working-class and populist racisms grow in weak or powerless sectors of capitalist societies, and the correlation between racism and social and economic crisis generates what Balibar has called an “immigration complex” in the population that perceives immigrants and their social conditions as “a problem” that generates or aggravates other social problems, whether they be unemployment, housing, social security, education, public health, morals, or criminality (Balibar & Wallerstein 1991: 220). Balibar and Wallerstein could not have anticipated how their arguments would prove even more true after the global economic crisis of 2008. As evidenced by the aforementioned surge of extreme populist political platforms, the decline of European living standards, high unemployment rates, and governments’ cuts in social spending due to austerity measures have produced enormous social polarization and a fear that social anger is diverting into racist, anti-immigration channels. Teun A. Van Dijk argues that many forms of the new racism are “discursive”: they are expressed, enacted and confirmed by text and talk, such as everyday conversations, board meetings, job interviews, policies, laws, parliamentary debates, political propaganda, textbooks, scholarly articles, movies, TV programs and news reports in the press, among hundreds of other genres. They appear to be “mere talk” and far removed from the open violence and forceful segregation of the “old” racism. (Van Dijk 2000: 34) Van Dijk analyzes the strategies used in these discourses to mask racism while targeting immigration. As he shows through his examples, European neoracism explicitly avoids racist labels, instead using negative words (that refer to legal status, social condition, insurmountable cultural differences, etc.) to describe the properties or actions of immigrants or minorities: illegal, welfare mothers, Arab terrorists, etc. Other subtle racist strategies include the use of disclaimers (“we have nothing against foreigners, but […]”) after which the negative part of the discourse is spelled out (Van Dijk 2000: 41); the use of passive sentences to avoid active sentences that may emphasize the responsible agency of the speaking subject; the hyperbolic use of metaphors in the media, such as “Britain invaded by an army of illegals” (passive sentence, use of invasion as a massive threat from abroad) (Van Dijk 2000: 42–43); and the consistently decontextualized proliferation of numbers and 11

Immigration Cinema in the New Europe

statistics. Along the same lines, David T. Goldberg uses the terms “raceless racism” and “racism without race” (2008), which encompass exclusionary or debilitating racist expressions in which the targeted group is not identified through the use of explicit racial language. The racial reference becomes implicit; in the world of presumptive whiteness, racial categories no longer need to be explicitly referenced or invoked for whites to continue to benefit from the social structures that privilege them (Goldberg 2008: 1714). In the same fashion, Albert Memmi differentiates between the old racism—“the rejection of the other in the name of biological differences” (2000: 121)—and “heterophobia”—“the rejection of the other in the name of no matter what difference” (2000: 121). Regardless of the term one chooses, racism or heterophobia, “the generalized assigning of values to real or imaginary differences” functions “to the accuser’s benefit and at his victim’s expense in order to justify the former’s own privileges of aggression” (Memmi 2000: 180). Immigration Cinema The (explicit or subtle) “Fortress” approach of the aforementioned official and public political discourses contrasts with and is counteracted by the variety and fluidity of social experiences, individual interactions, cultural movements, institutions, and products that spring from the global migrations and displacements that are taking place in the twentyfirst century. The constant movement of “outsiders” within the “borderless” European territory and the changing ethnic and racial configuration of European identity in the last three decades have captured the interest of intellectuals, activists, and artists, permeating diverse areas of the cultural arena. Among them, filmmakers have explicitly tried to provide alternatives to the partial coverage made available by the media, which, as we have seen, typically limits itself to sensationalist accounts that include the demonization of the immigrant as “illegal,” “delinquent,” or “terrorist;” the docu-dramatic and simplistic victimization of immigrants as isolated objects of abuse, targets of international mafias, or anonymous numbers perishing in dangerous crossings; and the abstract and impersonal account of anti-immigration policies that the EU is “obligated” to enforce. The way a community views itself is always mediated, and cinema plays an important role in showing the boundaries between the insiders and outsiders of a society. Immigration cinema, whose label refers mainly to its subject matter and the filmmakers’ (as well as its audiences’) ideological orientation, documents or fictionalizes the social phenomenon of immigration and the unfortunate but unavoidable ramifications of racism and xenophobia, and gives voice to the social group of immigrants and their allies on the margins, the “undesirables” of society that constitute the broader category of Otherness. Immigration cinema personalizes the abstract focusing on individual strategies of survival. In spite of the differences among European countries’ cinematographic industries, it is possible to identify common patterns of representation, particularly in terms of cinematographic formats and genres, the filmmakers’ ethical commitments, and audience responses to them. 12

Introduction

In his study of European cinema and its relation to Hollywood, Elsaesser uses the term “films without a passport” to refer to those stateless, in-between films that, while they interrogate the idea of the nation in the political and historical realm, also “serve in the spectators’ identity-formation” (2005: 20), and form “new spaces of collectivity and solidarity” (2005: 28). Immigration films are indeed “films without a passport:” literally, as they transcend national boundaries, symbolically, as they mirror the status of the undocumented characters they portray, and ethically, as they aim to create a collective understanding of immigrants’ ways of life and to expose and denounce the stereotyping of a naturally heterogeneous migration. These films seek to arouse the viewers’ sense of moral indignation and compassion (Fenner 2006) and can provide a symbolic space of both conflict and solidarity, a space for activism and the articulation of ethics and social justice. Immigration cinema can be considered, using Malik’s term, a “cinema of duty” (1996), insofar as “it presents social dramas of disadvantaged individuals and communities, articulating a perspective from within migrant and diasporic culture and providing a critique of hegemonic structures and dominant ideologies” (Berghahn & Sternberg 2010: 34). With this book I want to establish a dialogue with some of the existing studies that consider the transnational, multinational, intercultural, polyglot, hybrid, and border-crossing nature of European cinemas that depict the experience of immigrants and diasporic subjects. A variety of labels have been used in the attempt to categorize the filmic representation of immigration. Hamid Naficy (2001) coined the term “accented cinema” to characterize, as he later described it, “the cinematographic work of exiled or diasporic directors, whose productions share formal traits and narratives, themes, questions of identity and modes of production” (Naficy 2003: 207) and which “cuts across previously defined geographic, national, cultural, cinematic and meta-cinematic boundaries” (Naficy 2003: 203). Ella Shohat argues that in diasporic and post-Third-Worldist films “the boundaries between the personal and communal, like the generic boundaries between documentary and fiction, the biographic and the ethnographic, are constantly blurred. These films function as a collective memory of colonial violence and postcolonial displacement” (Shohat & Stam 2003: 74). Laura Marks uses the term “intercultural cinema” to refer to “the expression of a group of people who share the political issues of displacement and hybridity” and whose body of work pursues “significant changes in the politics and poetics of representation at a broad cultural level” (Marks 2000: 2). Much of the mostly experimental work of the filmmakers and video artists whom Marks includes in her study The Skin of the Film “is clearly activist, tracing the effect of racist, colonial, and imperial mis- (or non) representation on the lives of now-diasporic peoples” (Marks 2000: 4). In her discussion, “interculturalism” and “hybridity” replace “multiculturalism,” which, she says, “often ends homogenizing the struggles of the diverse groups it intended to empower” (Marks 2000: 7). She advocates the term “intercultural,” because “it suggests movement between one culture and another […] it implies a dynamic relationship between a dominant ‘host’ culture and a minority culture,” and “can describe exchanges between nondominant cultures” (Marks 2000: 6–7). Hybridity is “unpredictable and uncategorizable,” and applied to cinema, “also implies a hybrid form, 13

Immigration Cinema in the New Europe

mixing documentary, fiction, personal, and experimental genres, as well as different media” (Marks 2000: 8). In their introduction to their exhaustive compilation of essays titled European Cinema in Motion, Daniela Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg attempt to establish the features that characterize migrant and diasporic cinema, arguing that this mode of representation “reflects the ‘double consciousness’ or diasporic optic of its creators” (Berghahn & Sternberg 2010: 41). Further, it “juxtaposes and fuses stylistic templates, generic conventions, narrative and musical traditions, languages and performance styles from more than one (film) culture;” it shows “a preponderance of journeys and heightened mobility,” and speaks, above all, about “identities in flux located in the peripheries of global cities” (Berghahn & Sternberg 2010: 41). Verena Berger and Miya Komori use the term “polyglossia” metaphorically, following Chris Wahl’s (2005) definition, to refer to “polyglot films,” which contain bi- or plurilingual dialogues and focus on the representation of language diversity as its migrant protagonists experience it (Berger & Komori 2010: 9). Their definition of polyglot cinema is not limited to immigration films, since the filmic depiction of a variety of languages is not necessarily restricted to migrant filmmakers and can appear in any film dealing with the topic of migration (Berger & Komori 2010: 212). According to their definition, “polyglot cinema” incorporates the polyphony of migrants’ stories, and in doing so, Berger argues, it questions stereotypes normally transmitted by the mass media and reflects and combines the acoustic landscapes of the home countries and the countries of reception (Berger & Komori 2010: 223).4 In spite of the mobile, hyphenated, intercultural, polyglot, and deterritorialized nature of a cinema that transcends national borders, filmic genres, cultural and aesthetic trends, and even denomination, many of the aforementioned scholarly studies devoted to the genre still attempt to categorize its variants. They distinguish between migrant (made by first-generation immigrant filmmakers) and diasporic cinema (made by second- or thirdgeneration immigration filmmakers) (Berghahn & Sternberg 2010: 16), and between migrant/minority/diasporic cinema made by the immigrants/diasporic subjects—the Others—and hegemonic cinema “made by the symbolic representatives of the host/ receiving societies” (Loshitzky 2010: 9). The former presents immigrant and diasporic experiences from within; the latter offers white European filmmakers’ observations of the effects of migration in their societies and their ethical and political engagement, which differ from those offered by mainstream Hollywood cinema “with its industrial mode of production and emphasis on entertainment” (Naficy 2001: 24). Although I would endorse most of the divisions established in these studies, I prefer to conceive of immigration cinema as a thematic, wide-ranging category that encompasses all of the other categories previously established and refers to the variety of films that depict and address the lives and identities of both first-generation immigrants and children of the diaspora, whether they are authored by immigrants themselves or by white Europeans who choose to use the resources and means of productions of dominant cinema to politically engage with the immigrants’ predicaments. The reception and commercial availability of white European directors and producers’ immigration films is related to their privileged 14

Introduction

and dominant status, which allows them to have a relatively easier time anticipating and accommodating market demands, even as they remain committed to representing and generating awareness of some of the most important consequences of decolonization and globalization. Although new technologies and platforms provide non-Western filmmakers with alternative forms of sharing their migratory or diasporic experiences, many Western filmmakers, such as Michael Winterbottom, believe it is better to make political films “within the context of commercial cinema, something which affects a large number of people” (Sánchez 2002: 189). The ethics and political consciousness of white immigration filmmakers mirror those of postcolonial cultural historians and critics who specialize in the study of racism and xenophobia in the concrete context of racialized immigration to Europe. As postcolonial European variations of “white negritude” (Mailer 1957) and American variations of postcivil rights “white guilt” (Steele 2006), these white intellectual discourses deploy moral authority by acknowledging Europe’s history of xenophobia and racism and by eliciting a sort of “white obligation” toward the subjects of Europe’s colonial enterprises from a receptive white audience eager for “white moral redemption” (Steele 2006: 25–28). White guilt can be indistinguishable from moral responsibility, and most postcolonial discourses join Gilroy (2005) in urging scholarly and intellectual discourses to acknowledge the consequences of the colonial past, redefine the notion of race, and undermine imperial constructions of purity and their historic denial of hybridity. In Strangers to Ourselves Julia Kristeva (1991) emphasizes the importance of acknowledging the foreigner (the immigrant) in ourselves in order to understand external Otherness. Along the same lines, Bauman invites us to become foreigners to ourselves by doing things or entering into feelings that do not fit the familiar framework of identity (1995: 136). The psychoanalytical concept of “uncanny strangeness” is a starting point for both theorists, and, as a result, both call for a collapse of the opposition “us versus strangers” that frightens and causes anxiety. As Bauman explains, “[T]he chance of human togetherness depends on the rights of the stranger, not on the question of who—the state or the tribe—is entitled to decide who the strangers are […] The human right should not be the product of legislation” (1996: 77). Similarly, Memmi argues that “to relate positively to another […] one needs to abandon oneself to the other to an extent and identify with him or her. The stranger will not be acquitted until one succeeds in adopting him or her. Without that, the outsider’s opacity and recalcitrant autonomy remain irksome, disturbing” (2000: 138). According to Memmi, to treat “heterophobia,” we must be conscious of it, not just in others but in ourselves, individually and collectively (2000: 146). He goes on to say that “[w]hat is needed is an exercise of empathy which means training ourselves in the difficult task of participating in the other” (Memmi 2000: 147, original emphasis). In order “to understand the suffering of the other, his humiliation, his pain at being insulted or struck, one has to put oneself in his place—in thought at least, through a kind of creative conceptual overlap” (Memmi 2000: 147). Complementing Kristeva’s, Bauman’s, and Memmi’s arguments, in the already-cited Postcolonial Melancholia, Gilroy, inspired by Montesquieu’s Lettres Persannes (1721), 15

Immigration Cinema in the New Europe

presents the concept of “cosmopolitan commitment” as an ethical method, stating that “critical knowledge of one’s own culture and society can only arise from a principled and methodical cultivation of a degree of estrangement from one’s own culture and history” (Gilroy 2005: 67). Only after imagining oneself as a stranger is it possible to acquire a deeper level of self-knowledge through “the proximity to strangers in the postcolonial metropolis [as in the colonial for Montesquieu] [that] provides a fragmented and stratified location in which cultures, histories and structures of feeling previously separated by enormous distances could be found in the same place, the same time” (Gilroy 2005: 70). These aforementioned discourses can also be aligned with Pierre Bourdieu’s ideal of the “collective intellectual” whose aim is to counteract the media’s inclination to “insidiously reinforce all the habits of thought and behavior inherited from […] colonialism” (Bourdieu 1998: 22) and whose analyses of situations and institutions should be understood as “acts of resistance,” powerful antidotes “against partial views and against all forms of Manichaeism […] which, through the representations they engender and the words in which they are expressed, are often fraught with deadly consequences” (Bourdieu 1998: 23). Emmanuel Levinas also calls for an ethics of Otherness by which the West, “meeting the face of the other,” develops a “moral consciousness” by assuming responsibility for its colonial past (Levinas 1998: 11). Rosi Braidotti’s concept of nomadism, as “a means to inhabit historical contradictions and experience them as an imperative political need to turn them into spaces of critical resistance to hegemonic identities of all kind” (Braidotti 1994: 10), presents another injunction for intellectuals and filmmakers alike to “enact [with their critical thinking or creative work] a rebellion of subjugated knowledges” (Braidotti 1994: 25). In a more recent study on gender, identity, and multiculturalism in Europe, Braidotti (2002) speaks against Europe’s “metaphysical cannibalism” or the consumption of others through a model or definition of self in opposition to devalued others (women, the ethnic or racialized other, and the natural environment). At risk of sounding utopian, she suggests that a radical structuring of European identity as post-nationalistic can only be achieved through the implementation of flexible forms of citizenship disengaged from national foundations. Also relevant to this debate on Europe’s relationship with its others is Elsaesser’s aforementioned concept of “double consciousness” (echoing W. E. B. Du Bois, 1903) experienced by hyphenated nationals at the supra-state level. These are the cosmopolitan elites of intellectuals, businessmen, entrepreneurs, financiers, politicians, academics, artists, and architects who move freely between borders and whose influence and role in the world economy is, despite of their small numbers, so significant that they are able to set major trends in urban developments, the labor market, and employment, as well as in the spheres of entertainment and leisure (Elsaesser 2005: 118). As Elsaesser observes, “[U]nlike the sub-state hyphenated nationals, the political power of the cosmopolitan elites consolidates the traditional hierarchies of the nation state, rather than flattening them: it even extends the pyramids of power into international institutions and into global spheres of influence” (2005: 119). Most of the white European immigration filmmakers included in this book partake in Elsaesser’s “enlightened” view on immigration, that is, the social liberal one, which maintains that, altogether, 16

Introduction

immigration is a good thing, and that Europe, and in particular former colonial powers, have to honor their obligations toward and responsibilities of asylum (Elsaesser 2005: 121). The cosmopolitan commitment, conscious strangeness, nomadism, participation in the Other and double consciousness that European filmmakers engage in when dissecting the complexities and consequences of Southern migrations to the EU produce representations of Otherness that often reveal more about the “describers and imaginers” than about the “imagined and described” (Cornejo Parriego 2007: 27). In other words, white national intellectuals’ and filmmakers’ ethical commitment is in many cases less about the nonwhite Other than it is about crises in national identities and how they are articulated both publicly and privately. Laacher suggests, referring specifically to art forms, that “[i]f the clandestine wanderer has become such a riveting figure in the art of wealthy, democratic societies is because he allows us to develop critical analysis of the process of redefining the links between birthplace and nation, between man and citizen” (2007: 20). In that sense, as Simplice Boyogueno explains, filmmakers’ solidarity “remains with their subjects against the common enemy which is the Nation-state,” and their films critically examine the contradictions between reductive official narratives and their subjects’ concrete experiences of urban life (Boyogueno 2007: 172). However, it could be problematic to associate authorial activism with every single immigration film. The grouping of a variety of films under the category of immigration cinema may have more to do with patterns of representation of immigrant subjects and with spectatorial identification with them than with their authors’ explicit activist aims. Further, the narrative interactions and alliances between the characters, the preservation, subversion, or combination of preexisting genre conventions, and the choice of a specific tone and style may convey more about the directors’ aesthetic preferences and producers’ commercial demands than about a deliberate authorial intention to participate in a global trend that can be called immigration cinema.5 Most directors (and film critics) would probably feel more comfortable embracing broader categories such as social cinema or the newer world cinema and third cinema. However, echoing Martin Roberts’ remarks about world cinema, I wonder whether the category of immigration cinema might eventually become one of those universal categories used and imposed exclusively by First World film scholars and critics (among whom I include myself) who define these films’ practices and authors’ intentions mostly in opposition to Western cinemas (Roberts 1998: 77). World Cinema, Third Cinema, and Immigration Cinema Determining the features that world and third cinemas share with immigration cinema will help contextualize the concept within a much broader frame. In their introduction to the book Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film, Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim propose that world cinema, like “world music” and “world literature,” are “categories created in the Western world to refer to cultural products and practices that 17

Immigration Cinema in the New Europe

are mainly non-Western” (Dennison & Lim 2006: 1), principally “signifying non-English language products” (Dennison & Lim 2006: 2). The authors problematize the definition and meaning of the category of world cinema: “One could question if these film-viewing experiences only serve to reinforce one’s identity vis-à-vis, or one’s stereotypical image of an Other, by virtue of the latter’s pre-packaged, ready-to-consume, exotic quality” (Dennison & Lim 2006: 4). They respond to their own question by pointing out that today’s global spectator is less than homogeneous and that old categories should be dismantled: “because of the legacy of colonialism and neo-imperialism, essentialist notions of the West and the non-West have become increasingly untenable as their histories, cultures and peoples become inextricably intertwined” (Dennison & Lim 2006: 4). They continue: In an age of globalization and increased migration, spaces ranging from the geographical (such as national boundaries) to sites of cinematic exhibition (such as international film festivals) are invariably hybrid and plural, and distinctions between dichotomies such as Western and non-Western, self and Other, although entrenched in the popular imagination, are beginning to dissolve. (Dennison & Lim 2006: 4) If and once we transcend binary schemes, as Dennison and Lim suggest, what may make it possible to include immigration cinema as a subcategory of world cinema is the notion that each (world cinema and immigration cinema) may present the imaginary of resistance in non-dichotomous terms and function as a mediating apparatus that, as Rey Chow writes, “could serve to regulate the political relationship between the powerful and the powerless” (1998: 113). Both categorizations of cinema are, in Wimal Dissanayake’s words, “discursive contestations, representational spaces in which social and cultural meanings are generated and fought over” (1998: 527–528). In his introduction to Rethinking Third Cinema, Anthony Guneratne also dismantles dichotomous and rigid notions of creation, production, and distribution. According to him, “third” directors are in many cases First World-based directors “who address the very issues of First World dominance and Third World abjection which concern the more politically sensitive Third World filmmaker” (Guneratne 2003: 14). As Denninson and Lim also propose, it is important to theorize world cinema—as well as third and immigration cinemas—not only in terms of “the West vs. the rest” (Dennison & Lim 2006: 6). They challenge the definition of world cinema as either the sum of all national cinemas or as only opposed to a US or Hollywood cinema, against which all national cinemas must somehow define themselves. A conception of world cinema as a mere antithesis of Hollywood cinema would disregard the variety and complexity of both mainstream and world cinema. Furthermore, world, third, and immigration cinemas share similar aesthetics and modes of production and distribution with Hollywood film (Dennison & Lim 2006: 7).6 Another of the challenges we encounter when defining categories such as world cinema, third cinema, or immigration cinema is the need to defy the preconception that social 18

Introduction

commitment and political resistance go hand in hand with a denial of pleasure. The common dichotomy between popularity and integrity must be questioned, as must the binary of oppression and resistance (Dennison & Lim 2006: 6). A questioning of the dichotomy brings us to a consideration of the potential and real audiences that obtain both pleasure and a sense of purpose from watching immigration films. There is a general tendency to qualify multicultural cinemas as unviewable outside the festival and art cinema circuits and to perceive them as received exclusively by white, intellectual middle-class audiences who are already aware of the issues at stake. However, it is more productive to conceptualize immigration cinema, along with world and third cinemas, as hybrid products that declare a reluctance to be circumscribed to reductive categories such as authorship and nationality while enacting their opposition to a homogeneous understanding of Western spectatorial interests. The nomadic, unviewable, and unmappable status of world cinema must be seen as a positive and fertile condition (Andrew 2006: 26) shared by immigration cinema, insofar as it is a cinema, as Lucia Nagib explains, that “has no centre” and is conceived “as a method rather than as a discipline” made of interconnected cinematic experiences that is interested in “circulation” and mobility, documenting and creating “flexible geographies” (Nagib 2006: 34). Immigration cinema resists categorization in authorial or national terms as well as within film studies’ established and canonical categories of production and reception. Along with third cinema, it deploys a “specific ideological orientation” (Guneratne 2003: 7) while centering on the “development of a social consciousness” (Guneratne 2003: 11) about a specific social issue—immigration to the West—, which is intrinsically connected to the universal ramifications of postcolonial issues such as purity, hybridity, racism, and xenophobia. The processes and sequences of global migratory movements from the dark, poor South to the white, rich North keep reproducing themselves in nearly identical ways, regardless of specific countries or frontiers. In immigration films, barbed wire borders are both located and exposed in their absurdity and crossed and shown to be fluid by the mediation of cinema. As Robert Stam proposes, narrative and aesthetic purity gives way to contamination and hybridity. We can contemplate immigration cinema in terms of what Stam calls “chronotopic multiplicity,” or the “coexistence of simultaneous superimposed spatio-temporalities” (Stam 2003: 34) that creates a “conception that sees the ‘worlds’ as living the same historical moment, in mixed modes of subordination and domination” (Stam 2003: 36). Today’s transnational means of production and multicultural authors and audiences facilitate the dismantling of stable categories. Following Roberts’ argument, we see that “audiences may be as transnational as the films themselves and watching them may be as much a way of reconnecting with one’s own culture as of indulging a touristic curiosity about someone else’s” (Roberts 1998: 66). Immigration Cinema: Methods and Genres Although I want to argue for the widespread relevance of the subject of immigration within the multicultural and transnational nature of cinematographic production, its marketability 19

Immigration Cinema in the New Europe

and profitability should be considered. It remains a fact that the acclaimed auteur and art films that win prestigious festivals such as Cannes and Berlin do not usually do well at the box office. Still, we should acknowledge that access to world, third, and immigration films has increased exponentially in the last decade, thanks to the proliferation of alternative methods of distribution that include the creation of partnerships with TV and cable companies as well as online platforms (such as YouTube, Hulu, Google Play, Realyez, Netflix, Amazon, and Vimeo, among others). Notwithstanding this increased access, an examination of the evolution of the cinematic representation of immigration must involve a discussion of filmmakers’ selection of genres and formal methods according to the production and distribution resources at their disposal. Film production depends on potential commercial distribution, and filmmakers adapt their projects to market demands for profitability in order to achieve a financially independent status and to attract larger audiences. We should understand the diversity of filmic genres chosen to represent immigration cinema not only as a sign of the category’s unmappable and hybrid condition but also of its free combination and deliberate blurring of filmic conventions pertaining to two or more genres. Filmmakers often first approach the subject of immigration through documentary techniques and realist formats. While in some cases this formal approach is the practical result of a lack of resources or filmic experience, which nonetheless benefits from the growing accessibility provided by domestic and digital devices, in most cases the documentary format must be perceived as a deliberate attempt to convey a sense of actuality and urgency in the audience, an attempt to “[strip] away the veneer of artifice and [immerse] the viewer in the syncopated rhythms and rough textures of daily life” (Scott 2008). The ethnographic documentary format, usually considered a first stage in the filmic articulation of the social and political agendas of oppressed segments of a society, proves to be a very useful instrument for rendering visibility to immigrants. In addition, the blurring of boundaries between fictional and factual realities defines the aesthetics of a vast majority of immigration films. A clever blending of different generic conventions seems to be the recipe for commercial success. As A. O. Scott argues, referring to a powerful realist tendency in contemporary cinema—one that reacts against the artificial patterns that dominate most commercial moviemaking around the world (especially in Hollywood)—“the sturdy old term ‘realism,’ even with a prefix like neo- or hyper-attached to it, seems inadequate to capture this movement, which at its best combines a high degree of artistic sophistication with a bracing commitment to the literal” (Scott 2008). The commitment to the literal is enabled by a variety of documentary camera techniques that include the use of natural lighting, the prevalence of exteriors, the use of direct sound and hand-held cameras, and the casting of nonprofessional actors, which in many cases are immigrants themselves. These techniques force the viewer to experience, through movement and closeness, the daily life of the films’ characters, who are filmed in common, rather than exceptional, situations. The use of everyday settings works to eliminate the simple reduction of Western/non-Western characters to binary oppositions. The use of nonprofessional actors responds primordially 20

Introduction

to the filmmakers’ desire to share the results of a field trip or a personal research experience with the audience. The presence of bi- or plurilingual dialogues spoken in real-time scenarios and diegetic as well as extra-diegetic polyglot soundtracks contribute to the realist effect insofar as they highlight the immigrants’ original languages and cultural traditions and “also confront spectators with the feeling of foreignness experienced by immigrants once in the host country” (Berger & Komori 2010: 223–224). In addition to employing a cinema verité style, immigration cinema explores and blends a range of classic fiction genres like comedy, melodrama, film noir, and the road movie, among others, to create fictional alternatives without eliminating the effectiveness of documentary formats. Melodrama, for example, has traditionally used the family to reflect on larger social issues and sentimentality to draw cathartic reactions from the audience. Melodrama’s identificatory processes can be problematic, however, when they are applied to socially marginal and underprivileged subjects, as such identification introduces the danger of crossing into what Tony Bennet and Homi Bhabha have called “victim art” or “victimiology” (Bennet & Bhabha 1998). Victimizing the immigrants through sentimentalism not only homogenizes individual experiences by focusing exclusively on their tragic outcomes but may also annul the distance that would move audiences to reflection and activism. As Roberts argues, melodrama may enable First World audiences to confront the uncomfortable realities of racism and xenophobia and feel empathy with the victims, “while at the same time they absolve themselves of any responsibility of it” (Roberts 1998: 69). Memmi has also cautioned against a liberal “sentimental antiracism” that focuses on the emotional while evidencing an “insufficiency of analysis” (Memmi 2000: 155). According to Memmi, empathy with Otherness and the struggle against xenophobia and racism require that differences be “lucidly recognized, embraced and respected as such” (Memmi 2000: 155). Comedy, or rather, tragicomedy seems to be one of the genres of choice in immigration films, specifically those made by second-generation immigrant filmmakers. The lightness of the genre, established through comic situations and prototypical characters that prompt immediate spectatorial relief and identification, as well as depictions of the family as a privileged locus for referring microcosmically to society at large, serve the purpose of problematizing the tensions and complexities of diasporic relations. The comedic genre, for all its popularity and precisely because of its comic, and at times simplifying, relief, may also prove problematic insofar as it may tend to exacerbate stereotypes even while claiming to denounce them through humor and caricature. In the context of comedy, authorship becomes a crucial factor in establishing the often-thin line between homogenizing and even exoticizing the immigrant subject and ridiculing immigrants’ behaviors and traditions, which are depicted through the authority conferred to directors who themselves belong to the diasporic or immigrant group that they depict. In addition, the authority conferred to diasporic filmmakers, who represent their communities, may turn into a “burden of representation,” or an obligation to faithfully represent and speak for the many voices and viewpoints of disenfranchised diasporic groups, creating expectations of essentialism from members of the very same groups. 21

Immigration Cinema in the New Europe

Comedy attracts an audience that desires entertainment more than ideological commitment. However, while comedies may risk trivializing the complexity of the issues at stake, they may also inadvertently provide such audiences with positive outcomes and utopian resolutions to racism, and advocate the miscegenation of Europe’s racial identities. Diaspora filmmakers’ comedies provide an entertaining as well as engaging look at cultural and generational collisions. Through the use of common slapstick conventions, self-caricature, and the parodic blending of immigration-related themes with disparate subjects and genres, these films minimize tragedy, focusing instead on the absurdities that sometimes result from immigrant families’ efforts to juggle tradition, history, and the desire for acceptance and assimilation fostered by the demands of global popular culture. Coming-of-age narratives occupy also a central position in the oeuvre of diaspora filmmakers. Many of these films are semiautobiographical and reflect their protagonists’ experience of growing up between two cultures and their attempts to reconcile conflicting value systems and traditions. Diasporic films revolve around their protagonists’ search for ethnic and cultural belonging, a search for identity that is also “a refusal of identity amid a surplus of identity” (Mersal 2008: 1582). The road movie genre also occupies a privileged position in immigration cinema. The quintessential American genre is chosen by filmmakers who want to document and emphasize immigrants’ long and arduous journeys and border-crossings over the process of settling and assimilating into the host country’s society and culture. The road movie’s focus on travel and mobility allows for a reflection on the discriminatory and inhumane official politics of borders in an allegedly borderless global world. Immigration Cinema in the New Europe: Outline My criteria for selecting which films to include, which aspects to analyze, and how to divide the chapters was determined by the ethical concerns discussed above and the formal (generic) and thematic patterns shared by many of the films I have been exposed to in over a decade of studying immigration films. My analytic approach is above all guided by a focus on gender and sexuality and a reflection on how these aspects affect the films’ narrative and visual conception. One of the most apparent commonalities across these films is their tendency to articulate ethical and social concern by bringing together various marginal (or “undesirable”) positions in society to reinforce the category of Otherness. Foreignness, race, and ethnicity are depicted and juxtaposed with (working) class, age, gender, and sexuality. Often immigrants are discriminated against twice, once by virtue of their being foreigners, which makes them a threat to already disempowered classes, once for being women or gay, which makes them a threat to patriarchy and conventional forms of sexuality. Chapter 1, “Race, Mobile Masculinities, and Class,” analyzes narrative patterns commonly found in immigration films that focus exclusively on male immigration prior to family reunification and that link race, masculinity, and class. In these films, male immigrants are commonly represented as sexual 22

Introduction

subjects/objects and as members of ghettoized communities whose survival depends mainly on the masculine bonds they form within their diasporic communities and the romantic interactions they establish with (mostly female and working-class) nationals. To illustrate this twofold pattern of brotherhood/heterosexual romance, I examine Angst essen seele auf/ Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer W. Fassbinder, 1974), Las cartas de Alou/Letters from Alou (Montxo Armendáriz, 1990), Brothers in Trouble (Udayan Prasad, 1996), Saïd (Llorenç Soler, 1999), La faute à Voltaire/Voltaire is to Blame (Abdel Kechiche, 2001), El traje/The Suit (Alberto Rodríguez, 2002), and Hop (Dominique Standaert, 2002). Chapter 2, “Female Transnational Migrations and Diasporas,” explores the position and status of migrant women in Europe as they are represented in films made by women. Women filmmakers give their subjects a voice that is often at odds with many widespread assumptions about female immigration and subvert classical conventions of narrative and visual subordination in an attempt to redefine the films’ aesthetic to address the spectator as Other. They emphasize the essential role of female communities for adaptation and interracial coexistence and reflect on the cultural and religious aspects that affect and frequently prevent or delay women’s full integration into the adopted country. This chapter also emphasizes the different ways in which women portray the relationship between the local and the migrant Other: they are less interested in romanticizing the encounters between locals and migrants than in exposing a variety of situations of oppression and exploitation endured by immigrant women in the domestic sphere and in highlighting the role of women’s solidarity in the creation and perpetuation of diasporas. The aforementioned aspects of films by women are discussed through an analysis of Bhaji on the Beach (Gurinder Chadha, 1993), J’ai pas sommeil/I Can’t Sleep (Claire Denis, 1994), Flores de otro mundo/Flowers from Another World (Icíar Bollain, 1999), Inch’Allah dimanche/God Willing, It’s Sunday (Yamina Benguigui, 2001), and Extranjeras/Female Foreigners (Helena Taberna, 2002). Chapter 3, “Human Trafficking and the Global Sex Slave Trade,” focuses on five films that depict female migrants trapped in sex traffic rings across Europe: Lilya 4-Ever (Lukas Moodysson, 2003), La sconosciuta/The Unknown Woman (Giuseppe Tornatore, 2006), Transe/Trance (Teresa Villaverde, 2006), Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg, 2007), and The Price of Sex (Mimi Chakarova, 2011). These films, made by the observers of the phenomenon, rather than by trafficked victims themselves, draw attention to the fact that part of the transnational movement of women continues to be controlled by lucrative international routes of organized crime. They concentrate on the inhuman and dark nature of the clandestine circuits in which women’s bodies are commodified and deprived of all agency. The filmmakers rely on narratives of female powerlessness and victimization, which is established by the conflation of women and children, but avoid relegating their trafficked protagonists to the status of total victims. Chapter 4, “Queer Immigration and Diasporas,” focuses on the double discrimination experienced by gay and transgender diasporic subjects as it appears in the films J’ai pas sommeil/I Can’t Sleep (Claire Denis, 1994), Lola und BilidiKid/Lola and Billy the Kid (Kutlug Ataman, 1999), and Princesa/Princess (Henrique Goldman, 2001). By connecting 23

Immigration Cinema in the New Europe

immigration with homosexuality, cross-dressing, and transsexualism, filmmakers can expand their political agendas to denounce the double discrimination affecting nonheterosexual immigrants, coming either from nationals in their adopted countries or from members of their own diasporic communities. These characters face a dilemma very similar to the one experienced by non-Western female immigrants when they must respond to two conflicting sets of sexual mores. This dilemma results from the contradiction between the sexual freedoms acquired upon arrival to a Western country or that come from being brought up in Western societies, and the moral and sexual restrictions inherent to traditional and religious cultures in which heterosexuality is the norm and homosexuality is condemned. In this chapter I argue that drag performance enables these films’ characters to both transgress fixed social and sexual norms within their respective diasporas and express their desire to assimilate through simulation to the host countries. Given the prevalent role that the nuclear family plays in nationalistic formations, a great number of immigration films inscribe the family as an emblematic microcosm that epitomizes the Nation’s resistance, both passive and aggressive, to Otherness. They express the ethical commitment and critical self-knowledge that many European filmmakers have, who are interested not only in documenting their own countries’ individual and official xenophobic attitudes against immigrants but also in showing nationals’ sympathy and solidarity with the immigrants’ predicaments. In chapter 5, “The European Family in the Face of Otherness,” I study several films that use the family to allegorically represent both the opportunistic treatment of immigrants by the European community of nations and the daily gestures of kindness of strangers (toward strangers) that counteract xenophobic attitudes and racist aggressions. These films are La promesse/The Promise (Jean Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 1996), Taxi (Carlos Saura, 1996), Flores de otro mundo/Flowers from Another World (Icíar Bollain, 1999), Poniente/West (Chus Gutiérrez, 2002), Caché/Hidden (Michael Haneke, 2005), Le Havre (Ari Kaurismaki, 2011), and Terraferma/Dry Land (by Emanuele Crialese, 2011). Chapter 6, “Border-Crossing Road Movies: Inverted Odysseys and Roads to Dystopia,” is devoted to films that place border crossing as their central preoccupation and focus specifically on the migrants’ journeys—the passage rather than the process of settling in the receiving country. The films I selected for this chapter—Las cartas de Alou/Letters from Alou (Montxo Armendáriz, 1990), In This World (Michael Winterbottom, 2002), 14 kilómetros/14 Kilometers (Gerardo Olivares, 2007), Retorno a Hansala/Return to Hansala (Chus Gutiérrez, 2008), and Eden à l’Ouest/Eden is West (Costa-Gavras, 2009)—are structured around movement and displacement as rational responses to poverty, war, destruction, and oppression. These films follow the conventions of the road movie genre to create both a sense of unease and awareness in audiences with regard to the inhuman consequences derived from the “borderless” nature of globalization. These films contribute to the debate that questions the rationale behind the politics of closed borders and the Fortress approach that prevails within the EU’s sovereign systems and that determines most intercommunitary treaties. 24

Introduction

While white European filmmakers make the majority of immigration films produced in the EU, second-generation immigrants, European-born or naturalized citizens who had opportunities for education and access to production resources, constitute the second-most important nucleus of the immigration cinema corpus. Diasporic films made by hyphenated nationals, often through the genres of melodrama and tragicomedy, concentrate on issues emerging out of diasporic communities. Many of these films present the autobiographical experience of growing up between two cultures and are structured as coming-of-age films. They typically present the tension between the immigrants’ loyalty to their cultural and religious traditions and the rebellion against those norms that inevitably comes with assimilation. Some of the films expand on their protagonists’ conflicted feelings of nostalgia for and desire to return to the country of origin in search of a lost identity and peace of mind they do not find in their adopted country. Chapter 7, “Identities In-Between in Diasporic Cinema,” exceeds all the other chapters in length and it could have easily become a book on its own due to the impressive amount of films made in the last decades by and about second-generation immigrants, which document the experiences of well-established diasporas in France, the United Kingdom, and Germany. These diasporas include that of the Maghrebis in Paris’s peripheral suburbs (the banlieues) as represented in Le té au Harem d’Archimède/Tea in the Harem (Mehdi Charef, 1985), La haine/Hatred (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1996), L’esquive/Games of Love and Chance (Abdel Kechiche, 2003), and Entre les murs/The Class (Laurent Cantet, 2008). The South Asian diaspora in the United Kingdom is discussed through the films My Beautiful Laundrette (Stephen Frears, 1986), My Son the Fanatic (Udayan Prasad, 1997), East is East (Damien O’Donnell, 1999), Bhaji on the Beach (Gurinder Chadha, 1993), Bend It like Beckham (Gurinder Chadha, 2003), Anita and Me (Metin Huseyin, 2002), Nina’s Heavenly Delights (Pratibha Parmar, 2006), and Brick Lane (Sarah Gavron, 2007). Finally, the experience of the Turks in Germany is discussed through the films Gegen die Wand/Head On (Fatih Akin, 2004), Auf der anderen Seite/The Edge of Heaven (Fatih Akin, 2007), Ich bin Tochter meiner Mutter/I Am My Mother’s Daughter (Seyhan Derin, 1996), and Almanya—Willkommen in Deutschland/Almanya—Welcome to Germany (Yasemin Şamdereli, 2011). My own goal in this book is very similar to the one that immigration filmmakers try to attain through their films: to create an ideological and artistic awareness of the social conditions of immigrants in the EU and shake audiences out of their silent complicity with some of the issues concerning immigration patterns and policies. Contradicting the tendencies of a Fortress Europe that insists on erecting visible and invisible borders to police the Other, I emphasize the political potential of cinema, whose universal visual language and fluid, multiform medium reach beyond artificial borders and rigid categories of nationality. As I perceive them, immigration films may function as “narratives of redemption and emancipation” (Gilroy 1988: 46), which reflect both the commitment of white engaged European filmmakers who give voice to disenfranchised groups and the obligation of immigrant and diaspora filmmakers to avoid essentialist depictions of immigrants by documenting the racial and ethnic diversity within their communities. 25

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These films are intercultural, multi-accented, and interethnic products that acknowledge the place of history, language, and culture in their construction of multiple subjectivities and identities. It is my hope (possibly utopian) that the abundance and variety of filmic products that depict the stories of immigrants in Europe may help to change the social and cultural relations between Europeans and the Others in their societies; that the realist exposition of injustice and the fictional harmony and solidarity found in immigration cinema may translate into concrete social transformation. Paraphrasing the words of Cesare Zavattini in his neorealist manifesto, “Some Ideas on the Cinema,” it is not the concern of this book to offer solutions, it is enough, and quite a lot, to make the audience feel the need, the urgency, for them (Zavattini 1952: 56). References Ackermann, R. J., 1996, Heterogeneities. Race, Gender, Class, Nation, and State, Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press. Andrew, D., 2006, “An Atlas of World Cinema,” in S. Dennison and S. Hwee Lim (eds.), Remapping World Cinema. Identity, Culture and Politics, pp. 19–29, New York, Wallflower Press. Balibar, E. & Wallerstein, I., 1991, Race, Nation, Class. Ambiguous Identities, transl. E. Balibar and C. Turner, London and New York, Verso. Bauman, Z., 1995, “The Stranger Revisited—and Revisiting,” in Life in Fragments. Essays in Postmodern Morality, pp. 126–138, Oxford, Blackwell. Bauman, Z., 1996, “Making and Unmaking of Strangers,” in S. Fridlizius and A. Paterson (eds.), Stranger or Guest? Racism and Nationalism in Contemporary Europe, pp. 59–79, Göteburg, Göteburg University, Department of Sociology. Bauman, Z., 2006, Confianza y temor en la ciudad. Vivir con extranjeros, transl. Josep Sampere and Enric Tud—, Barcelona, Arcadia. Bauman, Z., 2007, Liquid Times. Living in an Age of Uncertainty, Cambridge and Malden, MA, Polity. Bennet, D. & Bhabha, H. K., 1998, “Liberalism and Minority Culture. Reflections on ‘Cultures In Between,’” in D. Bennet (ed.), Multicultural States. Rethinking Difference and Identity, pp. 37–47, London and New York, Routledge. Berger, V. & Komori, M. (eds.), 2010, Polyglot Cinema: Migration and Transcultural Narration in France, Italy, Portugal and Spain, Vienna and Berlin, LIT Verlag. Berghahn, D. & Sternberg, C. (eds.), 2010, European Cinema in Motion. Migrant and Diasporic Film in Contemporary Europe, New York and Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan. Bourdieu, P., 1998, Acts of Resistance. Against the Tyranny of the Market, transl. R. Nice, New York, The New York Press. Boyogueno, S., 2007, “El proceso de construcción de la otredad en Las voces del Estrecho y Las cartas de Alou,” in R. Cornejo Parriego (ed.), Memoria colonial e inmigración: La negritud en la España posfranquista, pp. 167–189, Barcelona, Edicions Bellaterra. Braidotti, R., 1994, Nomadic Subjects. Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, New York, Columbia University Press. 26

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Braidotti, R., 2002, Gender, Identity and Multiculturalism in Europe, Florence, European University Institute. Braziel, J. E. & Mannur, A. (eds.), 2003, Theorizing Diaspora. A Reader, Malden, MA & Oxford, UK, Blackwell. Chow, R., 1998, Ethics after Idealism: Theory-Culture-Ethnicity-Reading, Bloomington, Indiana University Press. Cornejo Parriego, R., 2007, “Introducción: De la mirada colonial a las diferencias combinables,” in R. C. Parriego (ed.), Memoria colonial e inmigración: La negritud en la España posfranquista, pp. 17–35, Barcelona, Edicions Bellaterra. Dennison, S. & Lim, S. H., 2006, Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film, New York, Wallflower Press. Dissanayake, W., 1998, “Issues in World Cinema,” in J. Hill and P. Church Gibson (eds.), The Oxford Guide to Film Studies, pp. 527–534, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Dubois, W.E.B., 1903, “The Souls of Black Folks,” in Project Gutenberg, viewed October 20, 2014, from http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=408 Elsaesser, T., 2005, European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press. El-Tayeb, F., 2001, “Foreigners, Germans, and German Foreigners: Constructions of National Identity in Early 20th Century Germany,” in S. Hassan and I. Dadi (eds.), Unpacking Europe. Towards a Critical Reading, pp. 72–81, Rotterdam, Museum Boikmans Van Beunigen and Nai Publishers. Erlanger, S., 2014, “Amid Debate on Migrants, Norway Party Comes to Fore,” New York Times, viewed January 29, 2014, from http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/24/world/europe/antiimmigrant-party-norway.html?_r=0 Fenner, A., 2006, “Traversing the Screen Politics of Migration: Xavier Koller’s Journey of Hope,” in E. Rueschmann (ed.), Moving Pictures, Migrating Identities, pp. 28–38, Jackson, University of Mississippi Press. Flusty, S., 1997, “Building Paranoia,” in N. Ellin (ed.), Architecture of Fear, pp. 48–60, New York, Princeton Architectural Press. Fanon, F., 1967, The Wretched of the Earth, transl. C. Farrington, New York, Penguin Books. Gilroy, P., 1988, “Nothing but Sweat inside the Hand: Diaspora Aesthetics and Black Arts in Britain,” in K. Mercer, (ed.), Black Film, British Cinema, pp. 44–46, London, BFI/ICA. Gilroy, P., 2005, Postcolonial Melancholia, New York, Columbia University Press. Goldberg, D. T., 2008, “Racisms without Racism,” PMLA (Publications of the Modern Language Association of America) 123(5), 1712–1716. Ghosh, B. & Sarkar, B., 1995, “The Cinema of Displacement: Towards a Politically Motivated Poetics,” Film Criticism 20(1–2), 102–113. Guneratne, A. R., 2003, “Introduction: Rethinking Third Cinema,” in A. R. Guneratne and W. Dissanayake (eds.), Rethinking Third Cinema, pp. 1–28, New York and London, Routledge. Harnischfeger, U., 2008, “Swiss to Decide on Secret Votes by Public on Citizenship Candidates,” in New York Times, viewed January 13, 2014, from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/01/ world/europe/01swiss.html. 27

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Higbee, W., 2007, “Representing the Urban Periphery. Maghrebi-French Filmmaking and Banlieue Film,” in C. Tarr and R. Porton (eds.), Beur is Beautiful. A Retrospective of MaghrebiFrench Filmmaking, Cineaste 33(1), 38–43. Higgins, A., 2014, “Populists’ Rise in Europe Vote Shakes Leaders,” in The New York Times, viewed 4 June, 2014, from http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/27/world/europe/establishedparties-rocked-by-anti-europe-vote.html Huyssen, A., 2003, “Diaspora and Nation: Migration into Other Pasts,” New German Critique 88, 147–164. Jameson, F., 2001, “Europe and Its Others,” in S. Hassan & I. Dadi (eds.), Unpacking Europe. Towards a Critical Reading, pp. 294–303, Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen and Nai Publishers. Kakissis, J., 2012, “Reclaiming Xenophobia: The Rise of Ultranationalisms in Greece,” in Time, viewed October 31, 2012, from http://world.time.com/2012/10/31/reclaiming-xenophobiathe-rise-of-ultra-nationalism-in-greece/. Kristeva, J., 1991, Strangers to Ourselves, transl. L. S. Roudiez, New York, Columbia University Press. Kulish, N., 2008, “Fatih Akin: A Filmmaker Who Builds Bridges across Cultures,” in New York Times, viewed January 13, 2014, from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/10/arts/10ihtakin.1.9125475.html?pagewanted=all. Laacher, S., 2007, “The Power to Name and the Desire to Be Named. State Policies and the Invisible Nomad,” in S. Ossman (ed.), The Places We Share. Migration, Subjectivity, and Global Mobility, pp. 17–26, Lanham, MD, Lexington Books. Le Segretain, P., 2008, “Fatih Akin, Crossing Borders and Boundaries on Film,” in National Public Radio, viewed January 13, 2014, from http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story. php?storyId=90643082. Levinas, E., 1998, Entre Nous: Essays on Thinking-of-the-Other, transl. M. B. Smith and B. Harshav, London and New York, Continuum. Loshitzky, Y., 2010, Screening Strangers. Migration and Diaspora in Contemporary European Cinema, Bloomington, Indiana, Indiana University Press. Maalouf, A., 1998, Les Identités meurtrières, Paris, Editions Grasset & Fasquelle. Mailer, N., 1957, “The White Negro,” in Dissent (June 20, 2007), viewed January 13, 2014, from http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-white-negro-fall-1957. Malik, S., 1996, “Beyond the ‘Cinema of Duty’? The Pleasures of Hybridity: Black British Film of the 1980s and 1990s,” in A. Higson (ed.), Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema, pp. 202–215, London, Cassel. Mandel, R. E., 2008, Cosmopolitan Anxieties: Turkish Challenges to Citizenship and Belonging in Germany, Durham and London, Duke University Press. Marks, L., 2000, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses, Durham, Duke University Press. McClintock, A., 1995, Imperial Leather. Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, New York and London, Routledge. Memmi, A., 2000, Racism, transl. S. Martinot, Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press.

28

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Mersal, I., 2008, “Eliminating Diasporic Identities,” PMLA 123(5), 1581–1589. Moore, M., 2008, “Silvio Berlusconi Says Illegal Migrants Are ‘Army of Evil,’” in Telegraph, viewed January 13, 2014, from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1895799/SilvioBerlusconi-says-illegal-migrants-are-army-of-evil.html. Naficy, H., 2001, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Naficy, H., 2003, “Phobic Spaces and Liminal Panics: Independent Transnational Film Genre,” in E. Sohat and R. Stam (eds.), Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media, pp. 203–226, Piscataway, NJ, Rutgers University Press. Nagib, L., 2006, “Towards a Positive Definition of World Cinema,” in S. Dennison and S. H. Lim (eds.), Remapping World Cinema. Identity, Culture and Politics, pp. 30–37, New York, Wallflower Press. Petek, P., 2007, “Enabling Collisions: Re-thinking Multiculturalism through Fatih Akin’s Gegen die Wand/Head On,” Studies in European Cinema 4(3), 177–186. Roberts, M., 1998, “Baraka: World Cinema and the Global Cultural Industry,” Cinema Journal 37(3), 62–82. Sánchez, S., 2002, Michael Winterbottom: El orden del caos, Donostia/San Sebastián, Festival de cine de Donostia/San Sebastián S. A. & Filmoteca Vasca. Schofield, H., 2012, “What Next for Marine Le Pen’s National Front?,” in BBC News Europe, viewed January 13, 2014, from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-17824436? print=true. Scott, A. O., 2008, “Quasi-Reality Bites Back,” in New York Times, viewed January 13, 2014, from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/26/movies/26fest.html. Shohat, E. & Stam, R. (eds.), 2003, Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media, New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press. Steele, S., 2006, White Guilt. How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era, New York, Harper Collins. Stam, R., 2003, “Beyond Third Cinema,” in A. R. Gutneratne and W. Dissanayake (eds.), Rethinking Third Cinema, pp. 31–48, New York and London, Routledge. Tawadros, G., 2001, “Preface—Modern Europeans,” in S. Hassan and I. Dadi (eds.), Unpacking Europe. Towards a Critical Reading, pp. 8–11, Rotterdam, Museum Boikmans Van Beunigen and Nai Publishers. Van Dijk, T., 2000, “New(s) Racism: A Discourse Analytical Approach,” in S. Cottle (ed.), Ethnic Minorities and the Media, pp. 33–49, Milton Keynes, Open University Press. Wahl, C., 2005, “Discovering a Genre: the Polyglot Film,” in Cinemacsope—Independent Film Journal 1, viewed January 13, 2014, from htpp://www.cinemascope.it. World Cinema Foundation, viewed January 12, 2014 from http://worldcinemafoundation.org/ Zavattini, C.,1953 [1952], “Some Ideas on the Cinema,” in H. Curle and S. Snyder (eds.), 2000, Vittorio de Sica: Contemporary Perspectives, transl. P. L. Lanza, pp. 50–61, Toronto, Buffalo, London, University of Toronto Press. Zizek, S., 1997, “Multiculturalism or the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism,” New Left Review 1(225), 28–51.

29

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Notes 1 2 3 4

5

6

See article published on Spiegel Online: “Welfare for Immigrants: EU Wants Fortress Germany to Open Up”: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/brussels-may-forcegermany-to-loosen-access-to-social-benefits-a-943224.html. See article about this policy at http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/europe/7522612. stm (2008); and Moore (2008) for Berlusconi’s public attitudes toward immigrants. See article by Higgins (2014). Many other terms are used broadly to refer to the cross-cultural and transnational nature of a certain type of cinema whose national and cultural provenance is no longer discernible because its creation has been shaped by the confluence of many different cultural identities or that centers on mobile populations, particularly those in the Third World, and is concerned with the act of self-construction in the slippery zone between home and host cultures (See Braziel and Mannur [2003] and Ghosh and Sarkar [1995]). Other common labels used to refer specifically to migrant and diasporic films made in France depicting French-Maghrebi interactions include “cinema of transvergence” (Higbee 2007), “cinema du métissage,” “cinema de l’emigration,” and “cinema de banlieue” (defined by its geographical location), among others. A case in point is that of Fatih Akin, the son of Turks who migrated to Germany in the sixties as part of Germany’s guest worker program. Akin exemplifies a generation of bicultural filmmakers caught in the debate about the “nationality” of their films. While Akin shows a strong commitment to representing the interactions between Turks and Germans in Germany and the stories of multicultural characters who move across borders and different spaces, he refuses to be categorized as a cultural spokesman or a messenger for immigrants. See interviews by Kulish (2008) and Le Segretain (2008). The World Cinema Foundation can serve as an example of the cinematic interactions between First World (represented by Hollywood) and Third World (world and third cinemas). This foundation was established as a nonprofit organization by Martin Scorsese and, according to its mission statement, is “dedicated to preserving and restoring neglected films from around the world—in particular, those countries lacking the financial and technical ability to do so.” The mission statement also emphasizes the instructive function of cinema: “Cinema is an international language, an international art, but, above all, it is a source of enlightenment.” Some of the filmmakers on the advisory board—Fatih Akin, Stephen Frears, Walter Salles, Bertrand Tavernier, and others—are engaged in the project of enlightening audiences about the subject of immigration in their own filmmaking. As an example of the Foundation’s goal, the restored film that the foundation presented at the Cannes Film Festival in 2008 was an immigration film titled Touki Bouki, and made by the Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambéty in 1973. See World Cinema Foundation’s mission statement at http://www. worldcinemafoundation.org

30

Chapter 1 Race, Mobile Masculinities, and Class

B

etween 1945 and the early 1970s, quickly growing Western European countries created guest worker programs to speed up postwar reconstruction and cope with labor shortages. Central and Northern European countries made recruitment agreements with Southern European countries and later with Yugoslavia, Turkey, and Morocco. In colonizer countries, such as the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and France, migrants were recruited from current and former colonies. In these colonizer countries, labor migration was intended to be temporary, “to ensure ‘rotation’ by recruiting workers for a limited period, restricting their rights, and minimizing family reunion.” In other words, Western European states sought to import “labor but not people” (Castles 2006: 742). As Stephen Castles writes, “Policies were shaped by the view that migrant workers were temporary labor units, which could be recruited, utilized, and sent away again as employers required” (1986: 769). The majority of foreign guest workers were single young males without much education or training who were steered toward unskilled, dirty, and difficult jobs. These workers were housed in communal factory housing or crammed in run-down and unsanitary apartments located in marginal urban areas. They were not allowed to bring dependents with them and were not regarded as permanent citizens, and their civil rights were severely restricted (Castles 1986: 762). By 1974, however, most European governments had put an end to regulated migrant entry. Although the main reason for ending regulated migration was the 1973 oil crisis, which was seen as the onset of a period of economic stagnation and high unemployment, other factors were also at play. Industries were becoming dependent on migrant labor, which contributed to a discontinuation of the “rotation” principle. Migrant families grew and their social needs (schooling, health benefits, housing) increased, and migrant workers joined trade unions and participated in a wave of labor militancy in the early 1970s (Castles 2006: 743). The reality was that despite the restrictions the rotation principle implied, family reunification and undocumented entry had been increasing since the late 1960s, and what had been conceived as a temporary labor system transformed into permanent settlement. One of the principal negative consequences of the guest worker system was the contradiction that emerged between theory and practice, that is, Western European societies were unwilling to integrate immigrants as equals, forcing them to remain disadvantaged minorities who suffered racial discrimination and who settled in separate neighborhoods, marked by inferior housing and infrastructure, leading to “today’s ethnically diverse but socially divided European societies” (Castles 2006: 744). This situation was aggravated in the early 1990s as undocumented migrants and asylum seekers continued to enter Western

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Europe irregularly in larger numbers, and Southern European countries, which had been major sources of migrant workers in the past, became immigrant destinations. Although official views have changed and Western European governments have had to admit that they need to rely on labor migration to fill less-skilled jobs and compensate for their demographic decline, the European Union has failed to set up mechanisms to regulate legal migration for lower-skilled workers, leading, in Castles’ words, to: the great hypocrisy of modern migration policy: the systematic use of undocumented migrant workers, who are denied many of the rights laid down in the human rights instruments and labor conventions endorsed by these same countries […] The EU and its member states seem still to be trying to import labor but not people—just as the Western European countries did forty years ago. (2006: 760) A great number of immigration films have documented the situation of single male guest workers and undocumented immigrants as well as the exploitation and social exclusion they went through in European societies since the creation of guest worker programs. Many of them focus on the experiences of nonwhite immigrants and portray racial discrimination as the salient feature of their disadvantaged positions in European societies. These films frequently establish connections between race, masculinity, and social class and prioritize the exchanges between the different marginal (or undesirable) positions that constitute Otherness in their given societies. In these films, male brotherhood is presented as a survival resource for immigrants to cope with societal rejection and racial discrimination, and social class functions as an equalizer that provides common ground between the male (nonwhite) immigrant and the working class local (white) woman, who typically plays the role of a sexual as well as social mediator between the omnipresent reactionary segments and institutions of the receiving society and the invisible—and thus vulnerable—Others. Redemption of the white national character is accomplished through romance and/or solidarity with the discriminated Other, and the racial objectification of nonwhite immigrants is exposed and denounced. The purpose of this chapter is to analyze the diverse fictional representations of racial masculinities and the twofold pattern—brotherhood/ heterosexual romance—found in the following films: Angst essen seele auf/Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer W. Fassbinder, 1974); Las cartas de Alou/Letters from Alou (Montxo Armendáriz, 1990); Brothers in Trouble (Udayan Prasad, 1996); Saïd (Llorenç Soler, 1999); La faute à Voltaire/Blame It on Voltaire (Abdel Kechiche, 2001); El traje/The Suit (Alberto Rodríguez, 2002); and Hop (Dominique Standaert, 2002). These films present masculinity in transition, or “on the move” and “mobile,” insofar as it is contingent on an internal–external dialectic: the immigrant characters’ performances of masculinity are located at the intersection between subjective positions and social and cultural situations, which are defined by the immigrant characters’ movement across and between public and domestic spaces and in relation to other immigrant men with whom 34

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they share a sense of community. The immigrant characters move constantly and shift between settings, and public and private are not necessarily separate spheres. Work has a major influence on definitions and performances of masculinity. Men’s sense of who they are is constantly reaffirmed at work (Robinson & Hockey 2011: 20). However, this reaffirmation is compromised as the immigrants’ public world and their workplaces—the street, factory, greenhouse, or construction site—are defined by instability and concealment. The immigrants don’t fit in the larger community and society as a consequence of their unstable and undocumented status or the social/racial discrimination they suffer. Often, within the private sphere, home (a feminized environment) can be seen as a haven in a heartless world. However, in the context of these films, home—a brotherhood in a shelter, a boarding house, or an apartment shared only between men—is less than private and is a masculine environment that is not always feminized. Masculinity is often defined in relation to other men, in homosocial terms, as communal rather than differential. Interdependency between men in a communal living environment can make a house seem like one shared among “one big family,” as Whitehead explains: “[W]hether based around straight, gay, white, or black identities, men’s friendships with other men can be seen to be crucially important in sustaining masculine subjectivities and men’s sense of identity as men” (Whitehead 2002: 158–159). At the same time, the male characters’ heterosexual romantic relationships with white European women seem heavenly, a respite from the stress and vulnerability that result from an irregular and undocumented work status and social rejection. The male characters perform in the public sphere and survive social and racial alienation because of women’s emotional involvement in relationships and in the private sphere. In these films, immigrants are not depicted as mere erotic objects but rather as human beings vulnerable to distress, both physical and emotional. Women’s empathy and support is crucial to the immigrants’ well-being. Fassbinder’s Tale of Immigration: Guest Workers in Germany Although I have consistently limited the scope of this chapter (and this book) to immigration films released since the early 1990s, I could not leave out Fassbinder’s film Angst essen Seele auf/Ali, Fear Eats the Soul, released in 1974. Fassbinder, following his usual method of combining social issues with avant-garde techniques, offers one of the earliest and most accurate depictions of West Germany’s xenophobia against immigrants and of the romantic interaction and economic alliance between a black guest worker and a white European woman. I consider it an exemplary model and a precursor to the conflation of race, masculinity, and class found in the more recent examples I include in this chapter. The film is considered a milestone in the history of German cinema, and it brought international recognition to Fassbinder himself and to the New German Cinema and its contribution to the debate on the subject of immigrant workers when the film was awarded the International 35

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Critic’s Prize at the Cannes Festival in 1974 (Burns 1995: 56–57). Fassbinder’s film depicts a love story between a German cleaning woman in her fifties and a young Moroccan immigrant in his thirties (played by Fassbinder’s lover at the time, El Hedi ben Salem) who is participating in Germany’s guest worker program.1 The two characters are drawn to each other through a mutual need for company and comfort, but as their relationship becomes known, they experience various forms of hostility and public rejection. Fassbinder makes it apparent that social and economic factors constrain the couple, and as in all his films, he denounces exploitation and social complacency and emphasizes how capitalist society infects relationships at every level. In the eyes of German society, by marrying Ali, a black Moroccan mechanic, Emmi, the German cleaning lady, has become a foreigner herself, “a disgrace.” Emmi has the experience Franz Fanon warns about in the chapter of Black Skin, White Masks titled “The Man of Color and the White Woman:” “Associating with anybody of that race is just utterly disgracing yourself ” (1967: 66). However, Fassbinder’s characterization of Ali and of the couple’s interaction counteracts racist and xenophobic prejudices against the foreigner and problematizes the German/foreigner dichotomy. While German neighbors and Emmi’s children project the common prejudices against guest workers in the 1970s onto Ali— filthiness, lust (the guest workers were after German girls), anger, aggressiveness, and an inability to speak the language (Castles 1996: 626)—Ali’s character defies these prejudices. He is cleaner than anyone (he constantly takes showers); he is more resigned and less angry than Emmi’s sons and son-in-law; he learned German in two years; and rather than chasing German girls, he is chased by them at the Asphalt bar, where he and his Moroccan friends hang out, and he is made into an object of desire and admiration by Emmi’s coworkers. Finally, he marries an older woman, not for sex (or to legalize his residency status) but because of their mutual loneliness and search for understanding. The film conspicuously lacks explicit references to race. Ali is referred to as “scum” and a “foreign swine,” but no mention is made of the color of his skin, the implicit reason for the familial and social rejection Emmi suffers for being with him. Racism is hidden under the supposedly more benign category of nationalism, which is systematically opposed to foreignness. The German/foreign dichotomy is reproduced in the prejudiced view of Ali held by Germans who suspect him of being a terrorist, but it is also reproduced in the music (Arabic/German) played at the Asphalt bar, in the different foods Emmi and Ali prefer (German food/couscous), in the workers’ relationship with their bosses and colleagues at both Ali’s and Emmi’s workplaces (German master/Arab dog, German national worker/foreign swine worker), and in the languages spoken by characters (German/broken German–pidgin Arabic). Despite this binary backdrop, Fassbinder’s interest resides in showing the couple’s shared foreignness, what they have in common, and what makes them both foreigners to the German culture: they are both lonely, and as a cleaner and mechanic, living in a shabby neighborhood, they both belong to the lower working class. Most importantly, as Judith Mayne argues, their identity as “undesirable others” is determined by how they are looked at and how they are progressively reduced to a spectacle 36

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(1997: 72). As an older woman, Emmi in particular is made an object of gossip and discrimination by her children, neighbors, and coworkers, who consider her too old for romance with a younger black man. Emmi’s female coworkers objectify Ali for having a handsome and muscular body. Their love story is staged both for other characters who are diegetic spectators whose objectifying gazes serve as a metaphor for social prejudice and xenophobia and also refer to spectatorship itself. At the Asphalt bar, where Emmi and Ali meet and where Ali regularly hangs out with his Arab friends, Emmi occupies the place of the foreigner and is exposed to the alienating gazes of both bartender and bar patrons because of her old age and disheveled looks at the film’s beginning and end. In the opening sequences, Emmi finds refuge from the rain in the bar. As she timidly sits in one extreme, her foreignness is emphasized through the use of long shots and the spatial separation between her and the insolent watchers, both of which are never captured in the same frame. After Ali asks her to dance on a dare from his friends, Emmi and Ali dance together, and are exposed to uncomfortable stares as the dance floor becomes a stage where their relationship is staged for other characters and spectators to judge. Beginning with the film’s first scenes, the spectacular and performative element is highlighted by the recurrence of still shots composed as tableaux vivants in which immobile characters in a group stare impassively and at length at Emmi, Ali, or the couple together. Rob Burns and Stephen Lamb write that “both camera and characters assume a static position, as if the action has been suspended and we are looking at a photograph,”2 referring implicitly to spectators in the movie theater whose gazes are fixed without expression or movement (1981: 203). The day Emmi and Ali get married, they decide to have lunch at the Osteria Italiana, a formal restaurant famous because it used to be frequented by Hitler. The waiter stares at the couple condescendingly and refuses to help them as it becomes clear that they have never dined in a fancy restaurant and do not know what to order. The objectification effect is emphasized when the camera zooms out until it holds the lonely couple in the door frame. Later, while Emmi and Ali sit outside in the empty garden of another restaurant, cooks and bartenders stare at the couple from the distance, and their judgmental gaze is maximized as the camera pans around the couple. This sequence serves as a metaphor for the extreme social scrutiny that the characters suffer and prompts the couple to take a vacation and seek change. The theatrical element is enhanced not only through the static still shots but also through the consistent use of double framing still long shots taken from another room that always use the door to frame the scene. These shots create the sensation of a play being acted and then filmed and may bring to mind a previous theatrical condition or characters in a painting. As Mayne points out, Fassbinder shoots the characters through door frames, as if contained by image and sound, so that the contexts in which the characters appear are marked by a series of formal constraints that implicitly refer to their liminal, transitional, and vulnerable situations in society (1977: 72). Emmi’s coworkers, who belittle her once they find out she is with Ali and discriminate against a new Yugoslavian guest worker, are shot through the bars and railings of the workplace staircase where they usually sit to have 37

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Figure 1.1:  Angst essen Seele auf/Ali, Fear Eats the Soul by Figure 1.2:  Angst essen Seele auf/Ali, Fear Eats the Soul by Reiner W. Fassbinder (© 2003 The Criterion Collection) Reiner W. Fassbinder (© 2003 The Criterion Collection) Ali and Emmi at Osteria Italiana. Ali and Emmi at Bier Garden.

lunch. Fassbinder also emphasizes the neighbors’ nosy and intolerant attitudes by shooting Emmi going up and down her apartment staircase, always from the point of view of the neighbor who spies on Emmi through the window of her room. As Burns and Lamb point out, “[S]till camera and mise-en-scene collude, and by dint of a camera angle, characters appear literally enclosed within windows or doorways, thereby enhancing the impression of a still” (1981: 203). In the second half of the film, after the holidays, Emmi and Ali find their neighbors and family members suddenly cooperative. Once they need the couple, they seem to conveniently forget their previous distaste for them. The prying neighbors need Emmi and Ali’s basement space and Ali’s help moving furniture. The shopkeeper, who until this point has refused to attend Ali and as a consequence has lost Emmi as a customer, now fears competition from other shops in an increasingly globalized market. Emmi’s son, who insulted her and angrily destroyed her TV when she introduced Ali to the family, now needs Emmi to babysit his child. Emmi’s coworkers face the firing of a coworker and the hiring of a foreigner, and they fear being fired themselves and seek Emmi’s sympathy. They are all willing to forget Ali’s Otherness in their time of need. The characters’ changes in attitudes as a result of self-interest serve as a microcosm of the larger socioeconomic situation: social and racial prejudice is appeased and integration measures are supported when a foreign labor force is needed. Fassbinder acknowledges that consciousness and attitudes do not exist in a vacuum but are determined in part by material factors; prejudices are rooted in social reality and as such are neither monolithic nor immutable (Burns & Lamb 1981: 198). What also changes after the holidays is the fact that Emmi and Ali have to confront their personal problems, which begin to surface once social scrutiny diminishes and result from their differences in age and culture. The couple solves their problems in the end mostly through their ability to communicate well, which reflects the richness of their relationship. Emmi and Ali’s 38

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communication skills contrast with the absent or aggressive interaction between Emmi’s daughter and son-in law, and their ability to communicate helps destroy “the myth of the unbridgeability of the culture gap and with it the bedrock of prejudice against immigrant workers” (Burns & Lamb 1981: 200). Nonetheless, as Burns and Lamb point out: “Fassbinder eschews the conventional happy ending of reconciliation between the couple by reasserting the omnipresence of an ineluctable social dimension in the form of Ali’s stomach ulcer, diagnosed by the doctor as a physical manifestation of stress common amongst immigrant workers” (1981: 197). Fassbinder both follows and deconstructs melodrama’s rigid ethical framework, binary schematization of characters, symbolic projection of the everyday and the personal, and its emotional appeal. He uses the private to reflect on the public in order to stimulate the audience to connect class and race, and at the same time, he successfully merges realism with stylistic techniques that complicate a facile sentimental complicity with the characters’ private and social predicaments. Not all characters are emblems of prejudice: the landlord’s son and the policeman, summoned by Emmi’s neighbors to check on Ali’s legality in the building, react against type, dismissing the neighbors’ complaints as unfounded. Fassbinder’s techniques of stylization and disaffection counter naturalism in a Brechtian manner, prompting viewers to reflect as they confront their own prejudices.3 Brotherhood and Heterosexual Romance: Las cartas de Alou, Saïd and La faute à Voltaire Although the guest workers’ dire circumstances and the biracial heterosexual dynamics resulting from miscegenation depicted in Fassbinder’s film were set in the 1970s, they remain acutely relevant decades later and anticipate recent filmic representations that critically expose the coexistence of societal rejection and the sexual objectification of the racialminority immigrant. By making Ali the object of the female waitresses’ desire at the Asphalt bar and the exotic object of Emmi and her coworkers’ erotic gaze, Fassbinder comments on racism’s complex libidinal component. Since the early 1990s, the arrival of black immigrants from the global South and former European colonies to the European Union has contributed largely to an increased public awareness of the existence of racial Otherness. More than ever, the racialized body of the male (as well as female) black immigrant stands out and enters the European space and imaginary, confounding the notions of national “oneness” and alleged “purity.” Many immigration films that document real-life situations still portray black immigrants through their exotic/erotic appearance, their voicelessness, which comes from a lack of mastery of the host country’s language, and their sexual interactions with white female nationals. All of these portrayals reinforce both the immigrants’ racial visibility and their social invisibility. Utter vulnerability and a lack of subjectivity often result from (or in) the immigrants being reduced to sexual objects or passive martyrs of supremacist violence. 39

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The alliance between the black male immigrant and the white female national in recent immigration films may be interpreted as an example of the traditionally theorized connection between racism and patriarchy in which marginalized members (women, foreigners, blacks) of patriarchal societies join forces to subvert the oppression of the white male. This complicity is demonstrated in Fassbinder’s film and is reinforced at the end of the film as Emmi declares her determination to take care of her husband’s health: she is the implicit source of Ali’s physical and emotional recuperation. However, a conception of an antiracist feminism that fights for the rights of all those oppressed under patriarchy may appear unrealistic and utopian in many cases. Bell hooks, while discussing the history of women’s movements in America, notes that while it is commonly believed that feminists supported social equality for blacks, the feminist struggle often excluded nonwhite women whom white feminists never ceased to perceive as Others (hooks 2000: 381). As hooks argues, white women have been historically socialized “to accept myths, stereotypes, and false assumptions that deny the shared commonness of [their] human experience” (2000:  387) and “to be racist, classist, and sexist, in varying degrees” (2000:  388). She proposes that unless white feminists “consciously work to rid themselves of negative socialization” and “acknowledge that racism undermines the potential radicalism of feminism” (hooks 2000:  388), facile analogies between “woman” and “black” should be approached with caution. Following hooks’ argument, the feminist/antiracist equation, or the myriad relationships established by racial immigrants and white woman nationals, may not establish political strength but rather may allow directors as well as spectators to capitalize on the stereotype of white women being more open to racial difference, but only in sexual terms (wanting “black dicks”). The films’ use of such stereotypes could consequently encourage the sexual objectification of both white women and black men. The Spanish films Las cartas de Alou and Saïd offer variations on the heterosexual romance between black African male immigrants and white female Europeans. The films delve into the complicity established between them but purposely avoid reducing black immigrant and white European characters to exotic sexual objects/subjects of the gaze or to negative or positive stereotypes. The two films depict African immigrants crossing the maritime border between Africa and Spain on small domestic rafts (pateras) and the situations of misery and discrimination they find when they begin their lives as undocumented immigrants in Spain. The two films avoid Manichean binary reductions (good victimized immigrant/bad victimizer European) by including relationships, both positive and negative, compassionate and aggressive, between characters in the immigrant community that offer a broader and more complex view of their circumstances that goes beyond the immigrant protagonist’s romantic/friendly involvement with the European female character. Both Las cartas de Alou and Saïd base their protagonists’ desire to stay in or return to Spain after deportation on their romantic involvement with Spaniards. Both films’ protagonists suffer similar rejections from their girlfriends’ middle-class families, although the rejection they experience is not as extreme as that experienced by Emmi and Ali in Fassbinder’s film. In addition, both protagonists find friends and foes within the African/North African diasporas, complicating 40

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the black/white, foreigner/citizen rivalry. The films carefully trace the characters’ evolution in the construction of their identities as members of a diasporic community and in their progressive adaptation to the Spanish society. The films do this by incorporating scenes in which immigrants engage in activities that reconnect them with their roots—that is, their language and culture of origin—and by reinforcing their narrative protagonism and mastery of their adopted country’s language. Such portrayals work against a common conception of immigrants’ linguistic inferiority and illiteracy. In Armendáriz’s film, the romantic relationship between Alou and a Spaniard takes place in the second part, only after Alou’s identity as an independent and resourceful worker has been established through a naturalistic treatment that avoids a condescending, melodramatic victimization of his character and a sentimental manipulation of the audience. After Alou finds temporary work picking fruit on the coast of Almería and after a brief and unfortunate stay in Madrid, he arrives in a small agricultural area in the Catalan Maresme, where he meets Carmen, the daughter of a village bar owner. The end of his journey coincides with his relationship with Carmen, as he becomes actively involved with civil protests in favor of legalizing immigrants’ status. The couple hides their sexual interaction, fearing a racist reaction from Carmen’s father, and consequently their relationship is kept in ellipsis and behind closed doors in every sequence. In this way Armendáriz evades the bodily exhibition of both Alou and Carmen. In addition to the romance between the male immigrant and the female national, Armendáriz incorporates implausible but comedic coincidental encounters between Alou and Moncef, a Moroccan immigrant, along their journey through the Iberian Peninsula, and he establishes a bond of friendship between them. Alou and Moncef cross from Morocco to Spain in the same patera but lose track of each other after Moncef goes overboard in the rough seas. They meet again by chance in El Maresme, where they are forced to sleep in the ruins of a factory without light or running water, and they consolidate their friendship hanging out and playing checkers both with each other and on a team with the townspeople at the bar owned by Carmen’s father.4 The bonding between two male immigrants who do not share language or culture (Alou speaks Wolof and Moncef Arabic) underscores a sense of community and brings the immigrants’ common struggle and the class and racial solidarity between Africans to light. Llorenç Soler’s intention of documenting social reality in Saïd—a film about the experience of a community of Moroccan male immigrants in Barcelona and the racial and ethnic discrimination and physical aggression they suffer in Spanish society in general and more specifically from a gang of young skinheads—is evident through his use of multiple perspectives. These perspectives can be seen through the immigrants’ stories and flashbacks to their past in Morocco, the benign racist attitudes of middle-class Spanish families and governmental institutions (the legal system, the courts, the police), the commitment to help immigrants of NGOs such as SOS Racisme, and the extreme and violent racism of right-wing groups of skinheads. The film seeks to provide reliable information about the immigrants’ situation, so it maintains a didactic tone that matches the anthropological essay 41

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that Ana, the white woman national who falls in love with the Moroccan immigrant, is writing for one of her university courses. The film prioritizes its social thesis over dramatic and fictional elements to convey a strong message of urgency to the audience. Soler privileges the immigrants’ perspective, not only by granting them narrative protagonism, but also by bringing their aggressors to trial. The young skinheads are prosecuted in a public hearing and are sentenced to prison for their violent racist acts, even though their punishment does not grant the immigrant protagonist, Saïd, the right to legalize his status in Spain, and he is deported as a result of his public exposure in the trial. The black immigrant is not reduced in this film to a beaten and victimized body. He is granted recourse to the law and given the opportunity to testify in trial and thus identify his assailants, by which his helpless position in society is legitimized (albeit not legally recognized). The power of his voice outweighs his physical vulnerability and grants him the subjectivity denied to him by the racist sectors of society that aim to relegate him to invisibility or to the anonymous status of victim. Musical and theatrical performance is typically incorporated in immigration films to honor the language and cultural traditions of the immigrant characters and to show how spectacle and performativity are essential components in the immigrants’ identity. In Fassbinder’s film we see how Ali’s foreignness is made into a spectacle, staged in front of others, and how a negative outcome results from this spectacularity. Theatrical performance and diegetic spectatorship are parodied in highly critical terms and refer to the objectification and homogenization of foreigners in society at large. Conversely, in Saïd, music and performance are fundamental to the characters’ affirmation of identity and culture and are usually a means of survival in the new country. Upon arrival in Barcelona, Saïd joins his housemates’ band, “Baraka,” which plays traditional raï music. The band’s rehearsals and performances are the only possible means by which these displaced and socially discriminated Moroccans can stay connected to their roots and affirm their culture in their adopted country. The movie’s soundtrack also reinforces traditional Spanish music’s Arab heritage through its fusion of raï and flamenco, and music marks Saïd’s arrival on the Spanish coast and his love encounters with Ana, the Spanish national. Saïd and Las cartas de Alou share a similar circular structure insofar as they open with images of their protagonists’ illegal border crossings and end with images of their deportation or second attempt at crossing. Saïd’s ending differs from Las cartas de Alou’s optimistic ending, which allows its protagonist to cross the straits a second time and have a hopeful reunion with his beloved Carmen. Saïd’s deportation follows a history of displacement and marginality and his failure to solidify a relationship with Ana because of their differences in social status, education, and religion. As Parvati Nair notes, Saïd’s time in Spain is “a negation of his identity that lived itself out most evidently at an emotional level in terms of his failed embryonic romance with Ana” (2004: 113). Saïd’s subjectivity also suffers as he lacks the affective support that should have been provided by his friend and mentor Hussein, whose lifestyle and success in Spain are connected with his role as a pimp and who resorts to violence against his compatriots and abuse against women, resulting in his marginalization from the Moroccan community. Hussein fails to provide Saïd with the male 42

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sympathy that sustained Alou’s disempowered masculinity. Although Saïd’s deportation is not counterbalanced, as Alou’s is, by a second chance, his identity as a victim of violent racism is publicly legitimized, which happens to a great extent because of Ana’s contacts with individuals and legal organizations that help immigrants. La faute à Voltaire (2001), by Franco-Tunisian director Abellatif Kechiche, is another immigration film whose plot is based on the intermingling of marginal social subjects who live in Paris and who survive social alienation through their friendship, camaraderie, and support for each other. The film’s main protagonist, Jallel, is an undocumented Tunisian immigrant, who, like Ali, Alou, and Saïd, endures his precarious and disenfranchised existence and the anxieties caused by a life beside and against the law through the male bonds he establishes with a community of Maghrebi refugees and the homeless French who live in a state homeless shelter in the center of Paris, as well as through his romantic involvement with two women, Nassera and Lucie. Nassera is the Tunisian-French girlfriend he loves and is going to marry but who changes her mind minutes before the wedding is going to take place. Lucie is a French woman he meets during his brief stay at a psychiatric institution, where he was admitted following a nervous breakdown caused by his failed wedding. Remy Bresson (2011) notes the powerful role that women have in all of Kechiche’s films as the bearers of language, sexuality, movement and as agents of action and change.5 This role is evident in his first film, La faute à Voltaire. Jallel’s potential to legalize his status as well as his psychological stability depend on his connections with the two women. His marriage with Nassera appears to be the perfect solution to his problem of being undocumented, as it would legalize his status, and it would also facilitate his integration into the Maghrebi diaspora. Once that option vanishes after Nassera’s disappearing act, Lucie provides companionship, affection, and solace. Both women share his position of social and psychological disadvantage. Like Jallel, both women have had the experience of living in state institutions, either for the homeless, in Naserra’s case, or for the mentally unstable, in Lucie’s case. In addition, both women share the experience of single motherhood. Nassera becomes a single mother after she is impregnated and later abandoned by her Tunisian boyfriend, and Lucie finds out that she is pregnant during the course of the film. Kechiche does not employ the kinds of subtle, elliptical, or critical renditions of sex and bodily exhibition used in the films analyzed above. Instead, in La faute à Voltaire he opts for an open and explicit treatment of sex between Jallel and the two women, thus complicating the bodily objectification of the nonwhite male and both white and nonwhite female characters and granting the women both financial autonomy and sexual agency. The audience is privy to intimate scenes that expose the connection between libidinal interaction and social integration and supply a source of pleasure for the viewer without subjecting the characters to objectification. Nassera’s ambivalence about and fear of involvement result from a traumatic experience with a previous Tunisian boyfriend, and her fear and ambivalence are conveyed visually through her inability to give herself completely to Jallel. Her emotional block is communicated through an interrupted sex scene, in which, fully dressed, she actively initiates sex and strips Jallel of his clothes, only to halt their interaction 43

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as she does not feel ready for penetration. The scene contains no fetishistic objectification, and the interruption of the sexual flow undermines the audience’s voyeuristic pleasure. Conversely, the sexually open Lucie offers her body to Jallel: she explicitly asks for sex without reserve or consciousness and replaces Nassera’s doubts, ambivalence, and selfcontrol with confidence, self-indulgence, and joy. Lucie is a free spirit who acts as the psychiatric center’s “whore,” charging the ridiculous sum of twenty francs to her “clients,” and she uses her body and exerts her sexuality as and with whom she pleases, disregarding society’s disapproval and making ends meet from it. Lucie’s sexual freedom confounds Jallel, who resists her advances at first, and it makes him confront his own (and the audience’s) preconceptions about male-dominated heterosexuality and gender roles. She is also a complex and problematic character for the audience because she is simultaneously an agent of her own body and sexuality and yet is mentally unstable and in desperate need of affection. It is almost painful to see her chasing and offering herself physically and verbally to a reluctant Jallel, yet it is clear to the spectator that she is a character that does not know how to repress her sexuality and is unaware of the boundaries between private and public. However, as she progressively wins Jallel over with her spontaneity and devotion, both his character and audience withdraw their judgment and empathize with her. A number of explicit sex scenes mark the evolution of their intimate relationship. The first one takes place at the psychiatric center where Jallel is briefly admitted after his breakdown. Their physical encounter is awkward and shot in full daylight, and it is interrupted by the nurse while Lucie is performing oral sex on Jallel. The scene conveys Jallel’s emotional distance and shame. The second encounter takes place in the privacy of a hotel room. Lucie strips from the waist down, offering herself to a still reluctant Jallel, who manages to get aroused, only to retract his interest in sex when he realizes that Lucie is pregnant. The scene is also interrupted, frustrating both consummation and visual objectification again.6 As Lucie and Jallel’s intimacy grows, the sex scenes are shot with a handheld camera, with tenuous warm lighting, and in close-ups that highlight the tenderness of their kissing rather than the eroticism of their lovemaking, and these scenes completely avoid exhibiting their bodies and sexual parts. A reversal of the traditional active/passive roles takes place in the way that Lucie always takes the initiative but never is made the object of Jallel’s (and the spectator’s) gaze. Jallel protects her in her role as a vulnerable and sensitive human being, and he never judges or takes advantage of her. A big party takes place at the homeless shelter where Jallel, Lucie, and the other characters, who are destitute and yet still in solidarity with each other, play, dance, and drink. The scene promises a hopeful and happy outcome for Jallel and Lucie’s romance and for Jallel’s emotional recovery, and perhaps even for Jallel’s integration in French society through marriage with Lucie. However, spectatorial satisfaction is also suspended in this scene, as it was in every sex scene. After a wild party and a night of drinking, the responsible Jallel wakes up to do his usual job, selling roses on the street, and as he enters the subway station significantly called “Nation,” he is detained by the police. This scene is shot with a static camera from a distance, and a tree blocks the view, and is followed by 44

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Figure 1.3:  La faute à Voltaire/Blame It on Voltaire by Abdel Kechiche (© 2005 Warner Home Video) Jallel sells roses.

Figure 1.4:  La faute à Voltaire/Blame It on Voltaire by Abdel Kechiche (© 2005 Warner Home Video) Jallel is deported.

a cut to a rainy scene at the airport where, again through a static long shot, we see Jallel boarding the plane that will deport him to Tunisia. If the visual composition of the final sequences, according to Colin Nettelbeck’s reading, “[underscores] the de-individualising, de-personalising process to which he has been subjected” (2007: 311), it also eliminates the possibility of the audience’s emotional manipulation and the character’s victimization. Music and performance also play an essential role in this film. A soundtrack of raï music accompanies most bedroom scenes between Jallel and the two women. This choice of music highlights not only Jallel and Nassera’s shared cultural roots but also Lucie’s progressive adoption to Jallel’s habits. Two parties featuring music and performance structure the plot and serve as joyful moments of communion and camaraderie between the marginal characters, both French and foreign. The first party takes place at the beginning of the film at the small bar where Nassera works, and it is where the connection between Nassera and Jallel is established. Jallel dances and gets drunk to the rhythm of raï, and he forgets his displaced identity by connecting with his original culture. The second party, at the end of the film, is organized by the homeless shelter, and it includes the outdoor performance of a band playing French music. Jallel’s performative embodiment at both parties, as well as his romantic involvement with two different women, signal Jallel’s transition from a diasporic space to a more visibly integrated space in French society. The anticlimactic deportation scene with which the film ends brings the audience back to the social reality of undocumented immigrants, and it makes the limited possibilities of economic and emotional stability very clear. Brothers in Trouble in the South Asian Diaspora After World War II and the breakup of the British Empire, Great Britain turned to South Asia and the West Indies to recruit the labor very much needed to restore the postwar economy. 45

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Thousands of semi-skilled and unskilled South Asian males migrated to England to work in manufacturing industries in the West Midlands, Lancashire, and Yorkshire, accepting jobs considered undesirable by the British. Before 1962, the United Kingdom maintained an open door immigration policy, recognizing all Commonwealth citizens as British subjects, according to the British Nationality Act of 1948. Between 1948 and 1962, some 500,000 primary migrants (migrants without families in the United Kingdom) entered the country (Hansen 2000: 19). As this migration reached its peak in the early 1960s, the Commonwealth Immigration Act (1962) introduced the first legislation to limit the rights of Indians and other British protected persons to settle in the United Kingdom. After 1962, South Asian immigrants typically came from a rural background and were generally unfamiliar with Britain’s language and culture. Subsequent South Asian migration was characterized by chain migration, meaning that the early pioneers who found accommodation and employment in England sponsored other men, usually from the same family group or village, to join them. In the 1960s and 1970s, African and South Asian immigrants (mainly Indians) arrived, not as labor migrants but as refugees. These refugees’ immigration to the United Kingdom got underway in the early 1960s as the East African colonies were about to gain independence. A majority of the immigrants in this group was educated, had a good command of the English language, and had commercial, professional, or business experience before entering Britain. Parliament passed two other Immigrants Acts in 1968 and 1971, adding further restrictions to the flow of East Africans and Asians holding United Kingdom passports into Britain.7 The film Brothers in Trouble is paradigmatic in its representation of the South Asian male communities in 1960s England. Initially made for television and based on Abdullah Hussein’s novella Return Journey, the film documents the predicaments of a community of undocumented South Asian (Pakistani and Bangladeshi) immigrants who live “as brothers” under the wing of their patriarch, Hussein Shah, in a house in an undisclosed industrial town. Although the precise date of the narrative is never revealed, the South Asian immigrants’ undocumented status and constant fear of deportation indicate that the action takes place after the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962, when primary immigration was severely restricted. The patriarch, Shah, sets the rules of the boarding house, occupies the biggest room on the top floor, is the first to enjoy the communal prostitute, and is the only one allowed to bring his girlfriend to the house. Shah is always framed by himself, in medium close-ups or medium long shots, usually through doors and windows, and is perceived by his “sons” as a shadow, a voice, or a noise. He usually keeps to himself, and everyone respects him. The brothers’ respect for him is related to their fear of the British society in which they live and their absolute dependence on the father for housing, work, and the sense of community that the house provides. Unlike Shah, the brothers are usually framed together in the central room of the house as a way to emphasize the lack of space in the house and to represent them as a group, minimizing their subjectivity. High angles from the top of the staircase emphasize Shah’s position of control and signal the brothers’ lower position as well as their lack of independence and control both in the house and in a larger society. 46

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Three characters, along with Shah and his girlfriend Mary, are emblematic of the house dynamics and the immigrants’ outcomes: Amir, Shakib, and Shah’s nephew, Irshah. The film opens with Amir being smuggled into England and his arrival at the house, and he holds the point of view throughout the entire film. He soon becomes the brotherhood’s leader and voice: he mediates between the brothers and between Shah and Mary, and he is the only one to succeed in British society in the end. Shakib is the youngest brother: he is the only one who does not have a wife waiting for him in Pakistan and is more dependent than the others on the patriarch. His attic room, accessible through a hole in the ceiling, symbolizes his difficult position in the house: to enter or leave his room he needs a ladder, which demonstrates his vulnerability in terms of his relation to the space. Mary, a working class white British woman, enters the house as the patriarch’s girlfriend and is pregnant with a child from a previous relationship. On one hand, as the master’s girlfriend, the only woman, and a white British citizen, she is the “queen” of the house. On the other hand, through her upbringing and social class, she is the immigrants’ sister: she is the target of domestic abuse and a victim of sexism in the way the Pakistanis are victims of racism. She is a literal mother because she enters the house pregnant and gives birth in it, and she becomes the symbolic mother of them all (her name is Mary) and a symbolic queen of colonial England (the mother country). She also becomes the brothers’ object of desire when she is forced to marry one of them, Shah’s nephew, so that he can obtain legal residency. The presence of a free (legal) man in the house, through his marriage to Mary, disrupts the sense of community when the nephew rebels against Shah’s authority and eventually kills him. Shah and his nephew embody the dichotomy that pits the traditional Muslim and ghettoized community of brothers against the Western modern and assimilated free man. Irshah’s arrival carries with it the rupture of Muslim rituals, respect for traditions, and the father’s embodiment of them, and Irshah promotes the brothers’ interaction with English society and the subsequent disintegration of the community. His disrespect is clearly related to his freedom and independence from his uncle. As one of the characters says, “[N]o papers, no existence, no rights,” and the only character that has papers also has rights outside the house and exercises them inside it. The movie is filmed almost entirely inside the boarding house and the factory where the brothers do “dirty work.” In the few scenes in which Amir and Sakheb walk through the streets, they are framed too close to the walls, looking down, walking fast, afraid of everything. Their social life is limited to their ghetto and the Bollywood films they watch on Sundays, a transposition of their culture to the new country. Meanwhile, the English are either portrayed as exploiters at the factory, where immigrants are hired to do the dirty work, or in groups: as neighbors and clerks in stores, wary, circumspect or indifferent to the immigrants. The two groups are portrayed as strangers to and suspicious of each other. After Irshah kills Shah in a drunken fight and the brothers flee the house for fear of being caught undocumented, there is a temporal ellipsis. The last sequence of the film takes place at the mental hospital where Shakib has been confined after the tragedy. Just before he is deported to his native country, Amir pays him a visit. Amir is now a legal worker about to bring his family to England. At the hospital he behaves like a free man, runs through a poppy 47

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field, rides a bike, and smells the flowers. He asks Shakib, “Did you ever think England could be so beautiful?” and he offers him a poppy, saying, “An English flower for Pakistan.” Shakib, on the other hand, is still afraid, unable to follow him, constrained within the hospital walls of the hospital, and deported in the end. As a free man, Amir suddenly realizes that England can be beautiful. He is even freer than Mary, who in spite of being white and a citizen, has not moved on. She is stuck in the same circle of domestic violence. The film begins with an immigrant being smuggled to England in a truck and ends years later with the same immigrant, now a legal alien, saying goodbye to another immigrant who collapsed from the hardship of his experience and is being deported to Pakistan. The outcome implies that success can only come with perseverance and assimilation, if we understand assimilation as cutting ties with one’s own past. The symbolic brotherhood and its dependence on the “father” (Shah) cannot be maintained in the “mother country” (Mary). Survival is only possible if one cuts ties with the past/tradition and embraces the new land and learns how to like it. Comedic Renditions of Masculinity and Male Fraternity: El traje and Hop Complicity among disenfranchised white and nonwhite masculine characters has historically proven difficult to represent and is rarely seen in most immigration films. Theories of racism stress the lack of solidarity between marginalized and working class sectors of society (both national and foreign) since the times of slavery. Members of the working class allegedly resent the arrival of new immigrants who, according to widespread beliefs, “take their jobs and their women.” The films La faute à Voltaire and Poniente/ West (Chus Gutiérrez, 2002, analyzed in chapter 5) are two exceptions that delve into masculine interracial complicity, albeit as a subplot subordinated to the main narrative’s theme of heterosexual romance. Alberto Rodríguez’s El traje (2002) is extraordinary insofar as it focuses exclusively on the interracial male bond in the context of underprivileged social class, a bond which functions as the grounds on which to fashion the immigrant’s move toward racial integration. El traje eliminates the romantic heterosexual component previously analyzed in this chapter, and it also foregrounds an issue rarely raised in the previously discussed immigration films: the limited spaces where a black man can gain popular recognition in Western societies, either as a commodified sports star or model. Through success as the former, the black man also becomes the latter, since the black sportsman’s athletic body is exploited, multiplied, and made ubiquitous through publicity, and thus he attains the same spectacular status that the model has. The suit to which the film’s title refers is introduced very early on and belongs to a black basketball star who needs help changing his brand new Mercedes’ flat tire. Another layer of the social scale is presented as one “undesirable” black immigrant, Patricio, a security guard and mechanic at a parking lot, services and plays a subservient role to a “desirable” 48

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black immigrant, an unnamed basketball player made visible by the media for his athletic achievements, and whose race becomes invisible (forgiven or forgotten) through the public service he renders to the sports-obsessed society. A third black immigrant, Roland, Patricio’s friend and roommate, enters the scene to admire the player’s Mercedes coupé while he solicits the player to buy a magazine from him. The two “invisible” immigrants do not resent the athlete’s economic status and his service request because they share foreignness, race, and ethnicity (the three are African, although from different countries, as is evidenced by their use of Spanish as their lingua franca). Tension arises when the sportsman refuses to purchase a magazine from Roland, and in turn, Patricio refuses to help him change the tire. Facing the athlete’s inability to change the tire by himself, Patricio finally agrees to help him out and refuses to accept payment, but he receives a present—the suit—as compensation for his service. A moral lesson is established in these early scenes that anticipates some of the themes that will evolve throughout the film: interdependence is not only unavoidable but necessary among foreign individuals in any given society, and masculine solidarity is the key to survival regardless of one’s race, social status, and recognition. When Patricio starts wearing the suit later in the film, he receives the visibility granted to the famous athlete or the model. The suit temporarily eliminates the social gap not only between white Spaniards and the black Africans but also between the two African men of different backgrounds. The disparity in the two men’s physical appearance—Patricio has a decidedly un-athletic build—and nationality is erased in the eyes of the Spaniards by the fact that they both wear the same suit and both have a perfect command of Spanish. The Spanish nationals, oblivious to difference, see only the suit and consistently take Patricio for a sports star whose image is omnipresent in the city billboards. In the fields of sports and entertainment, which emphasize body more than mind, the black male body is racialized, sexualized, fetishized and commodified, resulting in a double image—successful and underclass (hooks 1995). According to Rodríguez, that disparity is an undeniable reality in our mediatic societies as well as in our daily interactions: Day after day I kept seeing the same Nigerian man selling magazines by the same traffic lights. I pictured him all dressed up and wearing an expensive suit, and suddenly, he became a Denilson or a Jordan. I became aware that [in our society] black people are seen on the one hand as the embodiment of modernity in television ads while on the other, they are the poor African [immigrants] that we see in the daily news. (Molina 2002, my translation) That double image, established, as noted, in the film’s opening scenes, will remain untouched at the end. By then, Rodríguez will have proven that the two sides of black masculinity cannot be altered or overcome easily. However, he first plays with the idea that Patricio may alter (provisionally) the invisible position he holds in Spanish society, or at least become a free urban flanêur without constantly being scrutinized because of his race 49

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and underprivileged status, as long as he shows sartorial signs of his improved economic status through the possession of a tailored suit. Indeed, dressed in his new suit, Patricio ceases to attract suspicious gazes on the street and gets the attention of store clerks, thus demonstrating that the visibility he can have in white society is inextricably tied to his new appearance. Homi Bhabha used the term “colonial mimicry” (1994: 120) to describe the empowering process of appropriation and resistance: “a camouflage from which to act, rather than a mask behind which to hide” (Barrow 2003: 28). In the film, the suit (the symbol of success) represents the process of passive appropriation, a mask (in the sense that Fanon [1967] used it) under which Patricio hides his real marginalized social condition, a form of “camouflage of respectability”8 that ultimately proves ineffectual since it does not grant Patricio real choices for social legitimization. Because the suit proves an insufficient tool for Patricio to advance in Spanish society during the first half of the film, the second half focuses on an interracial non-sexual fraternity between the black and white marginal characters who are forced to compete for—and ultimately cooperate to gain access to—the scarce resources available to them.9 Robyn Wiegman (1997) traces the construction of interracial fraternity in US literature and popular culture following the model presented in previous works on the “American quest genre” by Leslie Fiedler (1960) and Joseph Boone (1986). These analyses refer primarily to US social and discursive contexts, but they may also be applied to recent European fictional incursions in masculinity and race. In this context, the “symbolic marriage” between black and white males “who confront and overcome the tableau of differences among them,” constructing a “common” subjectivity that relies on gender sameness instead of differences of race and region, may have great subversive potential because it “is defined by women’s absence” (Wiegman 1997: 46) and therefore is “seemingly devoid of the hierarchical consequences of the heterosexual contract” (Wiegman 1997: 62). Following Wiegman’s discussion of Boone, the male bond’s defiance of the history of white supremacy through “narratives that posit the similarities and compatibilities among black and white men, subverts the heterosexual model of social interaction by translating alienation and differentiation into mutuality and sameness” (Wiegman 1997: 63). If this model presents a provocative alternative to the usual heterosexual contracts between the black immigrant and the white national woman to which I have been referring in this chapter, it also upholds, however, the equation of different marginal positions and decentered identities as the same, idealizing the margin as “an inherent locus of subversion” and “metaphoric miscegenation” (Wiegman 1997: 56). This idealization aims to transcend (or ignore) the fact that historically, “the specter of black male equality [has threatened] the racial supremacy ensconced by (…) patriarchal formations” (Wiegman 1997: 46), focusing rather on the antiracist struggle’s need to forge alliances across categories of identity. The bond between the illegal African in the film, Patricio, and the Spanish pícaro, a homeless and unemployed street urchin nicknamed Pan Con Queso (Bread with cheese), becomes the central focus of the film and a locus for a productive dismantling of gender 50

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and racial tensions. As Patricio and Pan Con Queso’s relationship unfolds, traditional or stereotypical social assumptions about, and filmic representations of, the black immigrant are reversed or deconstructed. Specifically, Patricio’s victim status and moral integrity (as the good savage) are complicated as he cohabits with and is influenced by the national pícaro; sexuality is no longer used as a metaphor for cultural relations; and a positive, albeit utopian, outcome results from the interracial sharing of space and discourse. The first half of the film provides a dismal portrayal of the prejudiced, intolerant, and exploitative society that makes Patricio its target and victim. In addition, Pan Con Queso robs Patricio at the shelter where he had to spend the night after his apartment was sealed by the police, after which he is subjected to verbal abuse and deception while trying to find his robber’s whereabouts. Patricio is first portrayed as a victim of prejudice, abuse, and theft: his body and space are invaded and his community of African friends is dispersed by white society. But once he occupies the white man’s inner space (Pan Con Queso finds himself forced to host Patricio temporarily in the empty hotel that he occupies as a squatter while he finds the means to pay Patricio back) and conquers the outer urban space by wearing the suit, a series of physical and moral inversions take place. Pan Con Queso, who has gone from being a petty thief to a debtor, is now the object of Patricio’s surveillance. Patricio follows Pan Con Queso around the urban space to make sure he does not disappear without returning the money he robbed from him at the shelter. Patricio’s sartorial distinction contradicts his homeless status and prompts his housemate and provider to jokingly note that while Patricio is “dressed like a prince,” he has become “his butler.”10 As the modern pícaro carries on with his tricks and petty thefts—and requires Patricio’s complicity in them to settle the debt faster—Patricio positions himself as a model of decency and morals. His victimization and ethics are juxtaposed with Pan Con Queso’s cunning and sometimes cruel behavior. However, the moral superiority that Patricio attributes to himself is subtly undermined by the audience’s knowledge of information that is unknown to his housemate, namely, the fact that he also perpetrates robbery and impersonation: after the police raid he takes his African friend Roland’s savings from the apartment they shared, and he does not admit to the theft, even though he witnesses Roland’s distress. In addition, he pretends to be a businessman while clad in the suit in order to get a date with a female Spanish sales clerk. Though Patricio’s misdeeds are justified by the harsh circumstances we see him endure as an illegal immigrant, Pan Con Queso compensates for his petty crimes through hospitality, respect, and genuine blindness toward Patricio’s race and social status. Not once do race, sexuality, or nationality become an issue in their daily interactions. Both characters’ disadvantaged situations, whose causes and origins are deliberately omitted from the script, make them equals in the abandoned hotel they share: a space of ruin, decadence, and secrecy that mirrors as well as harbors their own marginality. A deep, progressive interdependence that becomes a friendship between the national pícaro and the foreign African is emphasized, and a manual for interracial coexistence and respect is constructed daily within the shattered walls of the hotel where Pan Con Queso and 51

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Patricio are squatters. A “new society” is slowly being built, though not without difficulty. The abandoned hotel should be interpreted as a microcosm of Spanish/European society where social and racial Others must learn to live and relate. Spatial boundaries are redefined and turned upside down, and new rules have to be created, because both characters (black and white) realize that they can only survive through the creation of links of interdependency. The characters’ survival instincts and positions as losers within capitalist society make them equal, bolster their alliance, and eliminate, at least between the two of them, the subservient role blacks play in white society. This happy outcome allows for a utopian reading of the film: in spite of numerous obstacles, the road to tolerance can be built as long as individuals set aside their differences and are blind to color. (As noted, race never factors into their relationship; and Patricio’s complete mastery of Spanish keeps him from experiencing the communication difficulties that result from language deficiencies, a phenomenon that occurs both in society at large and in most immigration films.) Moreover, solidarity between men in distress, (a solidarity commonly associated with the feminine) and by extension, between underprivileged sectors of society, is shown to be possible, in spite of evidence to the contrary. El traje may indeed be read as a parable of successful race relations that optimistically proposes that Otherness and difference may coexist, “particularly as a sense of marginality, creating new bonds of identity and purpose, which cut across and undermine traditional, spatial and historical boundaries […] turns ‘inside out’ (upside down) the simplistic dichotomy implicit in those concepts (‘insider,’ ‘otherness’), and all the oppositions associated with that dichotomy” (Rings & Morgan-Tamosunas 2003: 11). The reading of the film as a parable of black–white relations—with the suit and the abandoned hotel serving as useful metaphors—is reinforced by the stories told in the opening and closing scenes and a stuffed lion that Roland, Patricio’s African friend and first roommate, finds in a dump. In the film, Roland is associated with primitivism, simplicity, innocence, and good nature, qualities that are all opposed to Patricio’s modernity, pragmatism, pride, and frequent unfriendliness. Although Roland embodies some of the features traditionally associated with the black man (he is the storyteller; he believes in magic; and he is fascinated by a lion), he proves to be more resourceful than Patricio, as he manages to survive by working odd jobs and ultimately provides the film’s moral voice. The two stories and the sequences with the lion are associated with Roland’s Africanness, which is opposed to Patricio’s Europeanness, symbolized by the tailored suit. Moreover, these stories frame the film structurally and work as implicit metaphors that both refer to and challenge stereotypical images associated with the black male: sexual prowess, savagery, and primitivism. The film opens just before the flat tire scene with a conversation between Patricio and Roland in which the latter tells his friend a story that illustrates his fantasy-prone nature: he is convinced that in France “they are using magic to make money.” In his story, Roland relates how a man wakes up one morning and realizes he is missing his penis. Someone has used a strand of his hair to employ black magic on him, and as a result, his penis has 52

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disappeared. He panics, but the person who has his penis tells him that he has to pay to get it back. The castrated man pays and recovers his penis. Incredulous, Patricio asks Roland, “Do you believe these stories?” Roland replies, “No…but these things happen… in France.” As the first and only information we have at this point about the film’s characters, the story provides another binary representation of African men that confronts the superstitious “good savage” with the “civilized” and assimilated black. Besides being an ironic commentary on Roland’s “primitivism,” the story refers to white society’s long-standing obsession with black men’s penises and white men’s anxiety about losing phallic power. Since African slave trade began, the male member has been seen as a site of excessive sexuality as well as the object through which white men stereotype and objectify blacks (Africans).11 The lack of correlation between the “penis story” and the asexual masculinity of the (black and white) characters in the film suggests that Rodríguez does acknowledge that one of the visible positions of power that the black man holds in white society derives from his sexuality, although he deliberately refuses to turn his black characters “into a penis” (Mercer 1991: 187). Meanwhile, Roland’s story speaks about the magic vanishing of the penis, or in other words, about the elimination of sexuality and its normative features (hetero, size, prowess, nudity) as the only locus of masculinity, the only definition of manliness, and the only space in which interracial relations may take place.12 In the closing scenes of the film, the three friends (Patricio, Roland, and Pan Con Queso) bury Patricio’s suit and the stuffed lion in the garbage dump where Roland originally found the lion. Non-diegetic African music is superimposed on the two scenes with the lion, which evidently functions as a metaphor for the stereotype of the African continent in the colonial mentality. The burial of the lion and the suit signify the symbolic burial of both African “savagery” and European “civilization” with its obsession with consumerism and appearance. The lion cannot represent the African in a post-colonial and globalized world any more than the suit does not solve the economic and legal problems that Roland and Patricio suffer. Neither object represents or resolves the complex race relations that operate in Western societies. After Pan Con Queso buries the lion, he entertains himself by throwing stones at a giant billboard bearing an image of the African athlete wearing Patricio’s suit and jumping to score a basket with a television (instead of a ball). Meanwhile, Roland tells Patricio the parable of “the jackal, the goat, and the lion.” The story goes as follows: the jackal had a restaurant. The goat was hungry but poor. He only had dry bread. He went to the restaurant and ate his dry bread, accompanied by the smell of the kitchen. The jackal demanded, “Pay me, because if it were not for the smell of my kitchen, you could not have eaten the dry bread.” The goat refused, so they went to see the lion. The lion asked the goat for some coins, tossed them in the air, and said to the jackal, “Did you hear the coins?” The jackal said, “Yes,” and the lion replied: “Well, that pays for the smell of your kitchen,” returning the coins to the goat. Even if the real (stuffed) lion and the symbolism it embodies have been buried underground, the fictional lion, as the incarnation of justice, and the African parable, representative of “primitive” popular knowledge, prevail at the end as a powerful and valid 53

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narrative counterbalance to “civilized” compulsory consumerism. The very last scene of the film shows Patricio looking at and then turning his back on a billboard with the commodified and fetishized black male model. The promise of social advancement encoded in the suit has failed and thus is interred. The three friends walk out of the burial site into an uncertain but somehow hopeful tomorrow which is grounded on a previous experience of solidarity that may help them cope with their unremedied disadvantaged social position in society. This ending may not open a space for real social transformation of marginal segments of society or for real integration of the racial Other beyond the potential that the interracial male bond may provide, as their bond is circumscribed to the margin. As Wiegman cautions, one has to question the idealized nature of the bond: “[T]he interracial male bond’s vision of gender and racial transcendence, heralded as emblem of equality, does not necessarily encode broad social transformation, no matter how evocative and seemingly innocuous the central image of men can be,” and yet “the antiracist struggle does necessitate forging alliances across categories of identity” that can resist stereotypical and repetitive representations of racial and foreign masculinities (Wiegman 1997: 63). El traje successfully dismantles most of the patterns that permeated early representations of the nonwhite male immigrant and offers a complex image of the character and his interactions with the (male or female) white national. Rodríguez’s choice of comedy as a genre facilitates his idealized portrayal of the interracial masculine bond and the film’s optimistic outcome. Comedy also provides the space for the parabolic storytelling that both offers a moral lesson and parodies the Western stereotypes that associate African popular culture with superstition and the “primitive.” Dominique Standaert provides a similar scenario in his comedy Hop. The storyline, an immigration tale taking place in Brussels, centers around the masculine bond established between Justin, a thirteen-year-old African teenager escaping deportation, and Frans, an old Belgian former anarchist activist who comes to his aid. The film incorporates an African Pygmy legend—the secret of “the hop”—to trick the establishment and poke fun at the officers of the Belgian Office of Foreign Affairs and their colonialist preconceptions about African subjects. According to information that the distribution company, Film Movement, included in the film’s press kit, Standaert was inspired to make Hop, his feature film debut, after hearing on the radio that an illegal Nigerian immigrant had been arrested in Belgium, but no traces were found of his son, a student at a Belgian school. Though the boy had disappeared, the father was still expelled from the country. Standaert fictionalizes this true story with the enthusiastic financing of the French and Flemish communities in Belgium, using an uplifting and humorous tone that lightens the tragedy while calling attention to the racism experienced by black immigrants in blue-collar European neighborhoods and denouncing the callous deportation measures implemented by the Belgian Office of Foreign Affairs. The film’s black and white photography functions as “a sort of analogy for the racial tensions that exist in some modern day European countries” (Young 2004), and it mirrors the binary system that structures the film and creates a balance between a tragic situation and comic detail, the moving and the burlesque, social reality and utopian fantasy, Belgian and African culture, Flemish and French dialogue, and social comedy and film noir.13 54

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Justin and his father Diudonné are immigrants from Burundi who have lived in Brussels since Justin’s mother died when he was a small child. Though both Justin and his father are undocumented, Justin does not know any other life than the one he has in Belgium and is perfectly integrated into the Belgian educational system. One evening they watch a soccer game between Belgium and Sweden, in which the Congolese player Emile Mpenza is playing for the Belgian national team. Unable to afford cable television, Justin plugs the neighbor’s cable running outside their window into their TV, unaware of the fact that in doing so, he affects the neighbor’s reception. When the neighbor and his hooligan friends discover the cause of the problem, they force themselves into Diudonné’s home, insult him, and throw his TV out the window, smashing a car parked on the street. The comicality that usually results from throwing objects out of the window is countered here by the violent racist aggression that lies behind the action and the serious consequences that follow.14 Fearing detention and deportation, the father and son run away, but the police arrest Diudonné while Justin escapes, hiding in Frans’ van. Immigration agents interrogate Diudonné, who identifies himself falsely under the name of a Congolese friend in order to protect Justin from being chased down and deported with him. Eventually, the immigration authorities discover that his identity is false but, insensitive to the fate of a fatherless Justin, nevertheless decide to deport Diudonné to the Congo, the African country with which Belgium shares a colonial past. The rest of the film balances comedy and film noir as Justin, with Frans’ help, devises a strategy to force the government to bring Diudonné back. Hop’s storyline focuses on the relationship that develops between Frans and Justin and provides Justin’s point of view to underscore the absurdity of deportation laws as seen from the gaze of an innocent child who is orphaned by the state. In Diudonné’s absence, Frans and his domestic employee, Gerda (who is secretly in love with him), work as surrogate parents who hide Justin from the police and help him investigate his father’s whereabouts. The masculine bond between Frans and Justin and white solidarity with the immigrant’s predicament are established in ideological terms and mediated by the motherly Gerda, who substitutes for Justin’s deceased mother. Frans, a former activist and dynamite expert (for the CCM: Cellules Communistes Militantes/Communist Militant Cells), who retired after he was convicted of his involvement in a terrorist attack gone awry that cost three lives, unconsciously plants the idea in Justin’s head of terrorizing the system as a strategy to force the authorities to bring his father back.15 Frans’ idealistic commitment to fight the capitalist system and Gerda’s humanitarian and motherly concern match Justin’s determination. Frans and Justin invent the Anarchist Pygmy Revolutionary Front and threaten to bomb the Atomium, an iconic monument originally built in 1958 for the Brussels World’s Fair, a symbol of the European Union’s capital, and the country’s most popular tourist attraction. After Frans prevents Justin from bombing the Atomium, just in time, Justin plants a bomb in the base of a dam, threatening to cause a natural disaster of unknown proportions. At this point the film turns into a comedic thriller as the police desperately chase down Justin and try to prevent the explosion. 55

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Figure 1.6:  Hop by Dominique Standaert (© 2006 Film Movement) Neighbors watching the game.

Figure 1.5:  Hop by Dominique Standaert (© 2006 Film Movement) Reservoir turns red.

The film opens as Justin presents a Pygmy legend to his history class. According to the legend, Hannibal won an important battle against the Romans using a Pygmy technique of immobilizing elephants by tying a rope around their testicles. The film ends with the portrayal of a paralyzed Belgian system, like a colossal elephant, at the hands of a thirteen-year-old who will stop at nothing to bring his father back. Through Justin’s practical application of “the hop”—a sort of trickery, a tactic, an evasive maneuver, a bluff, or a smokescreen used to gain an advantage over an adversary—the film presents a variety of David-versus-Goliath clichés (Young 2004), and it develops variations on the theme of small versus large, “good versus evil, child versus adult, the individual versus the society, the people versus the law, the heinous reactions resulting from racism and the humanism that combats them” (Perpète 2002). The film’s black and white aesthetic, along with its suspenseful rhythm, support the film noir dynamic of the second half of the film. Ultimately, Justin refuses to go ahead with his plan, as he sees the reservoir turn red (in the same way that the Pygmies of the legend refuse to continue to help Hannibal when they see that the lake into which the Romans had jumped turn red). The sporadic inclusion of red in the black and white photography works to visually connect the Pygmy fable and the film’s action, symbolically anticipates the catastrophic consequences of terrorist actions, and elucidates the differences separating anarchism from terrorism. The comedic, rather than the noir factor, is effectively used in the end to bring Diudonné back and to ridicule the lack of consistency inherent in the Belgian state’s immigration and deportation policies. With the soccer player Emile Mpenza’s help, Justin forces the state to bring his father back and allow them to stay legally in the country. Just before Belgium hosts an international tournament, Mpenza pretends to fall ill as the result of a Pygmy curse and claims that only Diudonné’s intervention will heal him in time for the match. After nothing else works, the Minister for Domestic Affairs (Ministre de l’Interieur) succumbs to this final instance of blackmail, fearing that without Mpenza, the national team will lose the game. Much like Rodríguez in El traje, through Hop Standaert denounces Europe’s mediatic “double image” of poor black immigrants and the black athletes who integrate European

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national teams in a soccer-obsessed society. He makes his critique compelling by having the real Mpenza play the character of himself in the film and by showing segments of real games in which he plays and the fanaticism surrounding him. This act of remediation supports the comedic and the satiric elements in the narrative and creates a sense of spectatorial immediacy: at the time of the film’s release, Belgium audiences would have probably remembered that Mpenza was on the national team and had scored a goal that helped Belgium to win the opening game against Sweden at the UEFA European Football Championship in 2000.16 Soccer in the film serves as a metaphor for how European countries benefit from immigrants’ contributions to their societies but refuse to implement concrete measures to protect them. Sport stars are often naturalized immigrants or children of immigrants from poor neighborhoods who are fashioned into commodities that generate millions in revenues and whose race is conveniently forgotten by sports’ consumers. Although most European national teams are multiracial, racist attitudes remain prevalent in European societies. Standaert exposes this paradox juxtaposing “color blind” sports nationalism with the racism prevalent among soccer fans:17 while white hooligans revere Mpenza, the black Congolese soccer star playing for the Belgian team, they bully and disrespect their black African neighbor. In the final sequences of the film, after order has been restored and Justin and his father are reunited, they, along with Frans and Gerda, force themselves into their neighbor’s apartment just as he is about to watch a soccer game. A pacific repetition of the opening scene develops: the roles are inverted and the neighbor has no option but to watch the game with his black neighbors and their friends. In this optimistic and hardly plausible ending, soccer is ironically shown to have the power to unite people and eliminate race barriers. In Hop, the noir conventions are blended with and diluted by the conventions of comedy. Vincent D’Hondt’s musical score, which is playfully melodic and “reminiscent of some of Nino Rota’s work for Fellini” (Young 2004), provides a luscious accompaniment to the comedic situations, undercutting a reaction of pathos. The maneuvers of the antiterrorist police unit, while contributing to the suspense, almost caricature sensationalist media reports. The hero and his extreme tactics lack integrity and contradict the law, but with the final restoration of order, the injustice committed by the state is comically condemned. Justin does not pay for the havoc he has wreaked. On the contrary, the villains of the film are the state and the racist neighbor, who pay the consequences of their actions while Justin is rewarded with his father’s return. The hopeful outcome is obviously more utopian than realistic. Standaert’s tale of interracial masculine’s complicity in fighting the establishment rehabilitates 1970s idealism and its commitment to fight for just causes, albeit with the wrong weapons. The redemption of this idealism, embodied in the character of Frans, is now transferred to the urgent issue of immigration and is achieved through humor, which, according to the director, “is a more effective weapon than indignation or pervasive complaint” and “provides the means to evade facile and Manichean critiques” (Verhaeghe 2002).18

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Conclusion The seven films included in this chapter show that social and racial prejudice is appeased and integration measures are supported when the foreigner’s labor force or athletic performance is needed. As Fassbinder acknowledges early on, consciousness and attitudes do not exist in a vacuum but are determined in part by material factors; prejudices are rooted in social reality and as such are neither monolithic nor immutable. The films Angst essen seele auf, Letters from Alou, Saïd, Brothers in Trouble, and La faute á Voltaire represent different waves of single male migration and survival strategies through diverse genre conventions that range from the experimental to the realistic, and they present characters who can perform in the public sphere and survive social and racial alienation thanks to the emotional involvement undertaken by women in the relationship and private spheres. In these films, immigrants are not depicted as mere erotic objects, but rather as vulnerable to distress, both physically and emotionally. Women’s empathy and support is crucial to the immigrants’ well-being. El traje and Hop rely on the comedic to show myriad instances of resistance to the capitalist system that marginalizes them through black/white, foreigner/national male camaraderie. Their utopian outcomes demonstrate the directors’ intent to communicate a positive resolution to Europe’s resentment and distrust of its Others. Immigration films made by male directors (who do not necessarily define themselves as feminists) consistently present the political solidarity and romantic involvement of white woman nationals with black and nonwhite immigrants (one must not forget the commercial benefit of romance in film). On the other hand, as we will see in the following chapter, female directors dealing with the same issue tend to include the divisive force of racism among white nationals and nonwhite immigrants and prefer to focus on the importance of solidarity among female immigrants, mirroring their own complicity with their immigrant female protagonists.

References Barrow, S., 2003, ‘Stretching the Limits: Hybridity as Cultural and Artistic Strategy in Contemporary British Cinema’, in G. Rings and R. Morgan-Tamosunas (eds.), European Cinema: Inside Out. Images of the Self and the Other in Postcolonial European Film, pp. 27–43, Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter. Bhabha, H. K., 1994, The Location of Culture, London and New York: Routledge. Boone, J. A., 1986, “Male Independence and the American Quest Genre: Hidden Sexual Politics in the All-Male Worlds of Melville, Twain and London,” in J. Spector (ed.), Gender Studies: New Directions in Feminist Criticism, pp. 187–217, Bowling Green, KY: Bowling Green State U Popular Press. Bordo, S., 2001, “Does Size Matter?” in N. Tuana (ed.), Revealing Male Bodies, pp. 19–37, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 58

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Bresson, R., 2011, “Chronique d’une désillusion—Abdellatif Kechiche,” Cinemadoc, viewed December 6, 2013, from http://culturevisuelle.org/cinemadoc/2011/03/01/chronique-dunedesillusion/. Burns, R. & Lamb, S., 1981, “Social Reality and Stylization in Fear Eats the Soul: Fassbinder’s Study of Prejudice,” New German Studies 9(3), 193–206. Burns, R., 1995, “Fassbinder’s Angst essen Seele auf: A mellow Brechtian drama,” German Life and Letters 48(1), 56–74. Castles, S., 1986, “The Guest-Worker in Western Europe—An Obituary,” International Migration Review 20(4), 761–778. Castles, S., 1996, “Racism and Politics in West Germany,” in C. Holmes (ed.), Migration in European History, Chentelham, UK, Edward Elgar Publishers, pp. 623–637. Castles, S., 2006, “Guestworkers in Europe: A resurrection?” International Migration Review 40(4), 741–766. Fanon, F., 1967, Black Skin, White Masks, transl. C. Lam Markmann, New York, Grove Press. Fiedler, L., 1960, Love and Death in the American Novel, New York: Stein and Day. Hansen, R., 2000, Citizenship and Immigration in Postwar Britain. The Institutional Origins of a Multicultural Nation, New York: Oxford University Press. hooks, b.,1995, “Doing it for Daddy,” in M. Berger, B.Wallis and S. Watson (eds.), Constructing Masculinity, pp. 98–106, New York: Routledge. hooks, b., 2000, “Racism and Feminism,” in L. Back and J. Solomos (eds.), Theories of Race and Racism. A Reader, pp. 373–388, New York: Routledge. Mayne, J., 1997, “Fassbinder and Spectatorship,” New German Critique 12, 61–74. Mercer, K., 1991, “Looking for Trouble,” Transition 51, 184–192. Molina, S., 2002, “Baja costura,” El Mundo, viewed December 6, 2013, from http://www.elmundo. es/laluna/2002/193/1035458841.html. Nair, P., 2004, “Borderline Men: Gender, Place and Power in Representations of Moroccans in Recent Spanish Cinema,” in S. March and P. Nair (eds.), Gender and Spanish Cinema, pp. 103–118, New York: Berg. Nettelbeck, C., 2007, “Kechiche and the French Classics. Cinema as Subversion and Renewal of Tradition,” French Cultural Studies 18(3), 307–320. Perpète, S., 2002, “Hop! de Dominique Standaert,” Cinergie.be 66, viewed December 6, 2013, from http://www.cinergie.be/webzine/hop_de_dominique_standaert_2002_11_01. Rings, G. & Morgan-Tamosunas, R., 2003, “Images of the Self and the Other in Postcolonial European Film,” in G. Rings and R. Morgan-Tamosunas (eds.), European Cinema: Inside Out. Images on the Self and the Other in Postcolonial European Film, pp. 11–23, Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter Heidelberg. Robinson, L., 2005, “South Asians in Britain: Acculturation, Identity and Perceived Discrimination,” Psychology in Developing Societies 17, 181–194. Robinson, V., & Hockey, J., 2001, Masculinities in Transition, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Santaolalla, I., 2005, Los “Otros.” Etnicidad y “raza” en el cine español contemporáneo, Zaragoza: Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza. Schmitt, R., 2001, “Large Propagators. Racism and the Domination of Women,” N. Tuana (ed.), Revealing Male Bodies, pp. 38–54, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 59

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Verhaeghe, M., 2002, “Dominique Standaert à propos de Hop,” Cinergie.be 66 viewed December 6, 2013, from http://www.cinergie.be/webzine/dominique_standaert_a_propos_de_hop. Whitehead, S. M., 2002, Men and Masculinities, Cambridge: Polity. Wiegman, R., 1997, “Fiedler and Sons,” in H. Stecopoulos and M. Uebel (eds.), Race and the Subject of Masculinities, pp. 45–68, Durham: Duke University Press. Young, R., 2004, “Hop,” Flickhead, viewed December 6, 2013, from http://home.comcast. net/~flickhead/Hop.html.

Notes   1 Fassbinder’s film is a free remake of All That Heaven Allows (1955) by Douglas Sirk. In Sirk’s version, an upper-class middle-aged widow has a relationship with her handsome and younger gardener, and is greeted with her children’s disapproval and criticism from her country club peers. Fassbinder complicates the class issues at the core of the original with issues of race. In 2002, Todd Haynes made another version of Sirk’s film, Far from Heaven. In this version, the social stagnation present in Sirk’s original and the xenophobia and racism of Fassbinder’s version collide with another complication, homophobia.   2 Burns and Lamb argue that still shots are “the filmic equivalent of the Brecht’s interruption of narrative flow, to remind the viewer of the fictional construct, which for Brecht was a precondition for the process of critical reflection that he always designated as the ultimate objective of his theater” (1981: 203).   3 For a study of the film as a subversion of melodrama through Brechtian techniques in comparison with Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, see Burns, “Fassbinder’s Angst Essen Seele Auf: A Mellow Brechtian Drama” (1995 : 56–74).   4 In a previous article I interpreted the checkers game as a metaphor for a simultaneous coexistence and confrontation between black immigrants and white townspeople and as a means through which Alou and Moncef exercise an active role in their integration into the Spanish community and win the town’s respect (Ballesteros 2005: 53).   5 Other films by Kechiche are L’esquive/Games of Love and Chance (2003), La graine et le mullet/The Secret of the Grain (2007), Venus Noir/Black Venus (2010), and most recently, La vie d’Adèle/Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013). He won the Golden Lyon for First Film at Venice in 2000 for La faute à Voltaire, four Cesars at Cannes for L’esquive and La graine et le mullet, including Best director and Best Film, and the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2013 for La vie d’Adèle. See my analysis of L’esquive in chapter seven.   6 See Nettelbeck’s symbolic interpretation of Lucie as “the very image of the France that Jallel has to learn to love—an ambiguous image, certainly, that provokes caution and frustration in Jallel as well as hope for a more secure future” (2007: 309). She reads the sex sequence in which Lucie offers her behind to Jallel as a reference to the inviting and contorting forms of the voluptuous nude female figure at the rear of the Jules Dalou’s monumental Statue Le Triomphe de la Republique at the Place de la Nation—a landmark chosen as a conspicuous location in various significant sequences in the film (309). 60

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  7 See Hansen (2000) and Robinson (2005).   8 Mercer (1991: 188) uses this term when analyzing Mapplethorpe’s photograph, “Man in a Polyester Suit” (1980).   9 This approach was the focus of two other Spanish immigration films: En la puta calle/ Hitting Bottom (1997) by Enrique Gabriel and Se buscan fulmontis/Full Monty Required (1999), by Alex Calvo Sotelo, which, according to Santaolalla, fit into the category of buddy films. See her analysis of the three films in the context of the buddy film genre (2005: 25–131). 10 As a parodic reenactment of the classic picaresque novel, the anti-hero Pan Con Queso “serves” Patricio, “the nobleman,” and—dragging Patricio with him—lives out of the “honor” codes of his time. Like the classic pícaro, his status as an outcast makes him free to critique social institutions, and he is never granted an opportunity for upward social mobility. Unlike the original pícaro, however, he is an “example” of aberrant conduct that remains unpunished. El traje, as a modern picaresque text, is not a moralizing tale intended to teach a lesson about the perils of amoral behavior, which appear to be the logical consequence of social marginalization and racial discrimination. 11 For further discussion see Bordo (2001) and Schmitt (2001). 12 I cannot resist the temptation to find a visual connection between El traje and the aforementioned Mapplethorpe photograph, “Man in a Polyester Suit.” Bordo’s reading of the photograph perfectly sums up the artist’s intention: “Robert Mapplethorpe’s controversial photograph ‘Man in a Polyester Suit’ satirically illustrates this racist opposition between the White man’s civilization and the Black man’s primitive endowments, by showing a gigantic organ spilling out from the unzipped fly of a Black man in a tidy business suit, whose polyester material jokingly represents the tacky, K-Mart artifice of civilization” (2001: 36). Although Rodríguez’s intention is also to play with the stereotyped dichotomy of primitive/ civilized, he eliminates sexuality from the “primitive” category and associates it instead with Roland’s “magic story.” The reference to the organ (sexuality) is absent in and irrelevant to the representation of Patricio, and the symbol of “civilization” is an elegant and well-tailored suit—definitely not a polyester one—that belonged to another Black man, the athlete, who embodies society’s obsession with body and size but disappears from the diegesis after the first ten minutes of the film. 13 In an interview, Standaert acknowledges that his choice of black and white (as well as HD) responds to his preference for the photographic nuances and contrasts created by the black and white texture but also to economic factors. With his limited budget, he would not have been able to master color as he would have liked, and color would have created a docu-dramatic effect that would have prevented the audience from unleashing their imaginations and constructing their own imagery (Verhaeghe 2002). 14 Interestingly, this racist act of destroying the TV is identical to what Emmi’s son does in Fassbinder’s Angst essen seele auf. 15 The fictitious communist group refers to a real revolutionary group, the CCC (Cellules Communistes Combattantes/Combatant Communist Cells), which carried out terrorist attacks against corporations and political institutions in the 1980s. 16 Emile Mpenza played for the Belgian national soccer team from 1997 to 2012. 61

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17 Soccer fanaticism includes both reverence and derision toward foreign players. There has been a recent surge in discriminatory and racist behavior toward black soccer players by fans and other players, including monkey-like chanting, derisive singing, the hanging of banners that reflect neo-fascist and racist beliefs, and the tossing of bananas or banana peels into the field. The escalation of these racist incidents has dovetailed with the increase of players from Africa and Latin America by elite European clubs. 18 Standaert’s film invites comparison with Kaurismaki’s Le Havre, analyzed in chapter 5, insofar as it establishes complicity between an old European idealist and an African teenager, and it uses humor to denounce racist attitudes and European states’ failure to deal with the complexities of immigration.

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Chapter 2 Female Transnational Migrations and Diasporas

W

ithin the broad context of responses to the global phenomenon of migratory movements, it remains a poignant fact that political as well as media discourses consistently deny or minimize female protagonism (Nash 2005: 21), reducing the panoply of migrant women’s roles to contributions to domesticity and depicting them as dependent, economically passive subjects, often contextualized solely in terms of family reunification, domestic service, and sexual work (Nash 2005: 26). To counteract this reductive portrayal, feminist sociologists have denounced the general lack of awareness regarding female migration that has existed since the 1980s despite a considerable amount of studies related to the subject. These sociologists have shown that the existing literature has a male bias insofar as it ignores the contributions of immigrant women to the development of a future workforce (Kofman 1999: 287), and that therefore it has had little impact on policymakers and the media (Morokvasic 1984: 899). By analyzing legislation and immigration policies, these feminist sociologists have also pointed out that the state contributes to the construction of a labor market segmented along gender lines, and thus it sustains female dependency in conformity to the model of the nuclear family (Kofman 1999: 279; Solé & Parella 2003: 68) and allows for subcontracting labor networks in areas traditionally considered as feminine. In Western countries where the recruitment of overseas labor migrants is organized by the state and laws give total control to employers, female immigrants sustain the global sweatshop economy, the garment industry’s workforce, and the domestic service industry (usually involving child care and housekeeping) (Raijman, SchammahGesser, & Kemp 2003: 733).1 Women contribute in large numbers to what Encarnación Gutiérrez has called the “hidden side” of the new economy, which now makes care and domestic work in private households the largest employment sector for migrant women entering the EU (2007: 65). Gutiérrez argues that the character and the location of care and domestic work, traditionally considered “unskilled” work, done in privacy and isolation, and defined by a paradoxical “intimate anonymity” contributes to immigrant women’s physical, societal, and political invisibility (2007: 70–71). Within this context, because women have limited access to representation within mass media, their opinions do not carry much weight or are deemed irrelevant in the construction of immigration discourses and legal policies (Van Dijk 2005: 39). In order to bridge the gap between women and the media, many European female (and some male) filmmakers have become engaged with the issue of immigration, counteracting the female immigrant’s social invisibility and the media indifference about

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their predicaments, and generating “strategies of positive self-representation” (Van Dijk 2005: 40). Their films attempt to correct the reductionist framework used to contemplate female migratory patterns, providing feminist approaches that emphasize agency in female migrants and calling attention to the roles they play in maintaining transnational economic networks. Moreover, women filmmakers find diverse and heterogeneous ways of portraying relationships between the local and the migrant Other, highlighting the importance of family reunion and the role of women’s solidarity in the creation and perpetuation of diasporas. In European countries with a long tradition of immigration and established diasporas, such as the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, second-generation immigrants have joined European filmmakers in their mission of representing female migrants’ agency, mostly from a personal perspective. They often conceive of their films as autobiographical projects that provide them with a way to understand their own hybrid identities and the challenges of living in-between. They emphasize the role of mothers and grandmothers in laying the ground for the next generation, and their films often function as homages to them. As Thapan observes, women figure out “strategies to deal with the sense of dislocation,” and “they return to the past, staged metaphorically and narratologically through films and videos […] songs and poems” (2005: 30). Second-generation immigrants’ films function as a reenactment of their immigrant past: the films can represent nostalgia for the ancestral homeland and serve as a means to deal with the sense of dislocation to which Thapan refers. In order to illustrate the plights of female immigrants, I have selected five European immigration films made by women: Bhaji on the Beach (Gurinder Chadha, 1993); J’ai pas sommeil/I Can’t Sleep (Claire Denis, 1994); Flores de otro mundo/Flowers from Another World (Icíar Bollain, 1999); Inch’Allah dimanche/God Willing, It’s Sunday (Yamina Benguigui, 2001); and Extranjeras/Female Foreigners (Helena Taberna, 2002). I analyze these films as specific examples of the tendency found within immigration films made by women to show a desire to undo female migrants’ invisibility, focusing on female agency and mobility and on the processes of family reunion and integration of migrant women into the workforce, and highlighting migrant women’s contributions to the preservation of traditions as well as to the creation of networks of sociality and solidarity. These films concentrate on women immigrants’ interactions with diasporic and adopted communities, and in doing so they ignore widespread yet incomplete media sensationalist discourses on female migration and present alternatives to the immigration films that opt for stories about women caught in no-exit situations constructed in terms of exploitation, seclusion, and isolation. Home, Family Reunion, and the Redefinition of Diasporic Identities Inch’Allah Dimanche was conceived by Yamina Benguigui (born and raised in France to Algerian parents) as a personal project to pay homage to her own mother and as a work of memory to capture the experiences of the first wave of Algerian female immigrants to France. Benguigui had already tackled the issue of Maghrebi immigration to France and of 66

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Muslim female immigrants in Europe in her documentaries Femmes d’Islam/Women of Islam (1994) and Memoires d’immigrés: l’héritage maghrébin/Immigrant Memories: The Maghrebi Heritage (1997). Inch’Allah tells the story of a woman named Zouina who arrives in France with her three children following the 1974 family reunion law that allowed Algerian women to rejoin their husbands working in France.2 With a tragicomic tone, Benguigui documents the hardships Zouina has to suffer to adapt to the new foreign society and to finally liberate herself from the limitations imposed on women within her native culture, which are strongly embodied by the matriarch of the family, the grotesque, monsterlike mother-in-law, Aïcha. Benguigui locates her character at the intersection of and in the process of transition and negotiation between the oppressive traditions imposed by her cultural heritage and the simultaneous liberties and oppressive preconceptions about Muslim foreigners that are prevalent in France. As sociologists have noted, women migrants are generally more committed than men to maintaining their ties with their countries of origin (Zontini 2005: 110). This commitment results sometimes from a need to deal with the sense of dislocation through the reenactment of traditional roles and the recreation of the homeland “as a strategic move to resist the subordinate, inferior, and demeaning definitions of their race and class position in the host country” (Thapan 2005: 31). Inch’Allah illustrates the difficulties women have in challenging patriarchal authority, especially when the patriarchy is sustained and solidified through matriarchy in their native cultures. However, the film also shows the extent to which immigrant communities preserve and value their traditions and cultural practices in order to survive in a hostile society that can only see them as strangers. Most importantly, the film highlights the dual role women play in diasporas as both keepers of traditions from the old country and organizers of spaces of community and socialization in the new society, acting as the fundamental link between the two worlds. The film’s action is driven by Zouina’s desperate need to connect to her roots and preserve her culture’s traditions through the communal celebration of Eid al Adha—Festival of Sacrifice, a commemoration of the willingness of Ibrahim to sacrifice his son Ishmael for Allah that involves the sacrifice of a domestic animal, usually a goat or a sheep. The meat is cooked as part of a celebration meal to share with family and friends. In order to celebrate Eid following the socializing custom, every Sunday, while her husband and mother-in-law search for the sacrificial sheep, Zouina secretly leaves her home, accompanied by her three children, and goes through a myriad of arduous adventures in search of an Algerian family with whom to share the celebration. The resolution of the character (as well as the meaning of the film’s title) involves a paradox: Zouina’s insistence on preserving a tradition and socializing with other Algerians facilitates her liberation and integration into French society. Indeed, her agency contradicts the stereotype of immigrant women as passive women dependent on their husbands, and a new liberated and hybrid identity ensues from Zouina’s willingness to reach out to and make alliances with other women. Her attempts to establish a connection with Malika, the mother of the only other Algerian family in town, fail in the end: upon seeing Zouina’s courage and willingness to rebel against patriarchal 67

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impositions, Malika breaks her culture’s hospitality rules and rejects Zouina in an act that shows her self-imposed resignation to patriarchal oppression. While Zouina screams, cries, and breaks a windowpane with her hand in an attempt to change Malika’s mind, a cut to Malika cloistered inside the house shows her in slow motion, unresponsive to Zouina’s plight but emotionally devastated by her determination. Taken together, Zouina’s melodramatic reaction to Malika’s rejection and Malika’s self-protective lack of solidarity emphasize the gap between the two women, prompt spectatorial empathy toward both of them, and produce a catharsis leading to Zouina’s happy, yet implausible, liberation at the end of the film. With the help of a friendly bus driver from the neighborhood, Zouina returns home with her injured hand bandaged with her headscarf,3 only to find her family and neighbors anxiously waiting for her. Her escapade has been discovered, but her husband, instead of beating her or yelling at her as he did in earlier scenes, looks her in the eye for the first time, accepts her willingness to take the children to school from then on, and confronts his mother’s alienating authority. Malika and Aïcha, the castrating mother-in-law, function as guarantors of the Algerian tradition of feminine subservience (Fauvel 2004: 152) and as counterparts to Zouina’s desire to integrate into France and benefit from the liberties enjoyed by French women. As Maryse Fauvel has shown in her lucid analysis of the film, the contrast between these women and Zouina’s transition from imprisonment to liberation are visually translated through the fluctuation between closed/open spaces and subjective/objective shots (Fauvel 2004: 149). Close-ups and medium shots situate Zouina inside the closed spaces of the house or the interior yard and highlight her suffocation and feelings of imprisonment. She is typically framed by windows and doorways that represent passages to the outside world and symbolize her desire to reach beyond the confines of the domestic space and chores. Long shots and extreme long shots depict Zouina and her children during their Sunday escapades, lost in the middle of an unknown and vast landscape. Through these shots, Benguigui emphasizes the family’s displacement and vulnerability as well as the freedom of movement that they lack inside the house. Zouina’s character is defined by her silence in the domestic realm, which is dominated by her mother-in-law’s loud voice insulting and cursing her, accusing her of being a bad wife and mother, as well as by her verbal skillfulness in the public sphere, whether when shopping for groceries in the neighborhood or talking to other women in her pursuit of a community. Although voiceless and motionless inside the house, Zouina is granted the gaze: she is consistently framed peering through the window and observing neighbors, by which she establishes a platonic relationship with the bus driver based on mutual visual curiosity. Her agency is progressively constructed through subtle daily transgressions, such as opening the door to unknown people, listening to a daily radio program addressed to women, applying and hiding the makeup that Nicole, her friendly French neighbor, has given her, neglecting her prayers, asking for her children’s complicity in her Sunday excursions, and furiously rebelling against her next-door French neighbor’s hostility and Malika’s stolid

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reaction in violent scenes that are presented in extreme opposition to her otherwise silent and abiding demeanor. The mobility and verbal dexterity that Zouina’s character exhibits on Sundays and in the last scenes of the film illustrates the double and even plural identifications (cultural, linguistic, ethnic, and national) that diasporic subjects experience and that constitute hybrid forms of identity (Braziel & Mannur 2003: 5). As Meenaskshi Thapan points out, self and home can be “experienced in movement” (2005: 29) and “the immigrant woman thus reconstructs different aspects of her life and conceives of home and nation not in terms of either past or present but through the combination of the categories of the native as well as host society. Identities are constructed in the space between past and present, the two representing a continuum rather than separate worlds” (Thapan 2005: 55). In that sense, Zouina’s desire to connect to her roots does not imply rejection of the commodities available to women in France nor of the friendship that French individuals offer her. The film’s actions are also driven by the fierce yet comedic confrontations between the female (Algerian and French) homemakers that take place on their adjacent backyards. The French next-door neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Donze, are caricatures of the French nation’s fear of Otherness and agents of the film’s comic relief. The Donzes, like the French people Tahar Ben Jelloun describes in French Hospitality: Racism and North African Immigrants, are disturbed by the “primitive” customs of their Algerian neighbors who, among other things, make coffee on a camp stove, spit, and play ball in the backyard. The Algerians’ arrival with their different habits produces a culture shock that evidences what Jelloun has called the “threshold of tolerance:” a type of peaceful, benign racism based on the idea that “it’s impossible for different cultures and the people belonging to them to coexist peacefully” (1999: 87). This theory concedes individuals and cultures “the right to be different as long as hierarchical relationships are preserved” and translates into a praxis that encourages the herding together of immigrants in transit centers, hostels, and insalubrious districts, thereby impending situations of neighborly coexistence (Jelloun 1999: 87–88). In the film, the Donzes’ backyard (separated from their Algerian neighbors’ backyard by just a short fence) functions as a metaphor of the French nation and by extension Fortress Europe: it has to be carefully tended and kept beautiful for the annual garden competition, and its borders must be heavily guarded to prevent the immigrant neighbors from invading and destroying it. The Donzes are willing to commit acts of violence in order to protect their property from invasion: Mrs. Donze destroys the Algerian kids’ ball that accidentally rolls into her backyard, and Zouina retaliates, attacking Mrs. Donze and breaking a decorative clay rooster—the national symbol of France. Jelloun observes how immigrants and their children are likened by French nationals to “weeds that invade the whole garden that you have to pull up” (1999: 94). When Zouina acknowledges that she is growing mint in her backyard, Mrs. Donze frets that this “foreign weed” will spread quickly and contaminate her very French garden, only to discover, upon looking up the herb in an encyclopedia of plants, that mint is a native French herb.

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The tragicomic tone achieved by these symbolical confrontations becomes ironic as Benguigui creates parallel scenes in the two households in which the two women, Algerian and French, do the same domestic chores and listen to the same radio programs. Through the mirroring of these women’s private spheres and endeavors, Benguigui erodes a dichotomous representation of the two households in terms of invaders/invaded and fosters the notion of the need for solidarity and communication between women who share the same experiences and have the same interests. The animosity developed between the two women is also compensated by the friendship and support offered to Zouina by her other neighbor, Nicole, and by Madame Manant, the widow of a French general who died in Algeria during colonial times, whom she met while looking for Malika. As Dora Carpenter-Latiri has noted, the friendship between Madame Manant and Zouina is “the optimistic representation of a sisterhood that exists without resentment despite the colonial history” (2003; my translation from French). The links Zouina creates with these French women pave the road to her acceptance of and integration into the new society and create a “continuum between the two worlds” (Thapan 2005: 55).

Figure 2.1:  Inch’Allah dimanche/God Willing, It’s Sunday (2001) by Yamina Benguigui ( 2003 Film Movement) Returning home by bus.

Figure 2.3:  Inch’Allah dimanche/God Willing, It’s Sunday (2001) by Yamina Benguigui ( 2003 Film Movement) Madame Donze listening to the radio.

Figure 2.2:  Inch’Allah dimanche/God Willing, It’s Sunday (2001) by Yamina Benguigui ( 2003 Film Movement) Zouina listening to the radio.

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Bollain, like Benguigui, opts for the genre of comedy and the microcosm of the family to address the issue of female immigration. Her second film, Flores de otro mundo, is not about family reunion in the traditional sense but about family repopulation, interracial relations, and miscegenation in Spain. The film documents the arrival of three women (one Spaniard and two immigrants) to the remote Castilian village of Santa Eulalia as part of a repopulation project and their interactions with the rural community during the following year. The film fictionalizes an actual emergency solution devised by Spanish rural communities to reverse migration to cities and revitalize decreasing populations. The villagers sponsor visits from single migrant women who can potentially become wives and save local families.4 The initiative is not restricted to single women but also reaches out to families of immigrants with children, mainly from Latin America and Eastern Europe. In exchange for coming, immigrants are offered jobs, housing, and free access to public health and schooling for their children. Bollain’s immigrant characters are from the Caribbean: Patricia, a single mother of two from the Dominican Republic, has lived in Spain for four years and is looking for familial stability for her children and herself. She marries Damián, a local farmer who lives with his widowed mother and who offers her respect, affection, and security. Milady is a twenty-year-old Cuban who arrives in the village invited by Carmelo, the local contractor and her former lover whom she had met during one of his touristic visits to the island. Milady leaves Cuba looking for new horizons, mobility, and economic comfort; however, she is uninformed about the provincial reality of the place she has been taken to, and she does not easily adapt to the village’s customs and expectations. She ends up leaving as Carmelo turns progressively more possessive and violent. Icíar Bollain delves into many of the same topics that Benguigui explores in her film, such as migrant women’s survival in a hostile society, a survival that is aided by feminine solidarity yet hindered by native women who thwart their integration efforts. Other common threads include the use of the mother-in-law character as an emblem and defender of the native nation from contamination, the simultaneity of displacement and movement as aspects inherent to the immigrants’ characterization, the immigrants’ final liberation from both patriarchal domestic abuse and matriarchal authority, and the construction of domestic stability as a legitimate option for both securing citizenship for immigrants and preventing the disappearance of Spanish rural communities. Bollain starts by denouncing the homogenizing and eroticizing processes to which women migrants are subjected, and to which racism is intrinsic. She mocks old villagers for their inability to distinguish between “the Dominican” and “the Cuban” when Milady arrives in the village and for referring to the women only as men’s possessions: “Damián’s woman” and “Carmelo’s woman.” She also exposes the villagers’ stereotyped preconceptions about black Caribbean women, which include exoticism, sexual prowess, promiscuity, and opportunism (“they only come to obtain working papers”). In order to contradict this homogenizing tendency, on one hand, the film emphasizes the differences between the immigrant women in terms of age, national identity, profession, independence, exposure and commitment to the rural world, and willingness to assimilate. On the other hand, Bollain’s film emphasizes 71

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the commonalities the immigrant women share with women in the Spanish village.5 She creates a different outcome for each character in order to challenge the suspicion that they came just to get their papers: Patricia assumes the traditional domestic roles expected of her by the community and adapts to her mother-in-law’s authoritarian regime, while Milady frees herself from Carmelo’s possessive and violent attitude and leaves the village, despite having an undocumented status. Both women have to fight the village’s hostility toward their Otherness. Patricia, like Zouina in Inch’Allah, has to negotiate every inch of her domestic space with her mother-in-law, Gregoria, who is a castrating mother who perpetuates patriarchy, much like Aïcha in Inch’Allah. Gregoria perceives the exotic foreigner as a threat to her sovereignty in the house, which figuratively represents the Spanish nation as a fortress, which is being invaded by aliens. Carmelo violently represses Milady’s freedom and desire to know the world and move independently; her assimilation is equated to “taming,” and it requires adaptation to domestic roles and spaces. Like Zouina, Milady is subjected to physical violence and restricted to the house as a consequence of her transgressions, but in the end, she refuses to be domesticated and recovers her freedom. Her character is consistently visualized in transit, defined in terms of mobility, and is located in the public rather than in the domestic sphere. I will expand the analysis of Milady’s mobility, liberation from the domestic, and control of the public space in the last section of this chapter, where I compare her with the female immigrant in Claire Denis’ J’ai pas sommeil. The film has a happy ending in which Patricia’s self-determination and willingness to adapt pay off, and her mother-in-law realizes that Patricia is not taking advantage of her son and that she loves him for the same reasons she herself loved her late husband. In a scene at the cemetery where both women tend to the tomb of Gregoria’s husband, they discover that what unites them is more important than what separates them. As the filmmaker has declared in interviews, the fundamental goal of the film is to emphasize the positive aspects of miscegenation over conflicts and to foster in the viewers an appreciation for the culture immigrants bring with them: the music, the color, and above all, the female solidarity that ensues after their arrival.6 The aforementioned scene at the cemetery, along with the numerous scenes that show Patricia with Milady and Patricia with her Dominican aunt and friends, socializing and strengthening their bonds of affection and support through their shared foreignness, capture the filmmaker’s belief that female migrants’ adaptation to a foreign culture is facilitated by the creation of and participation in female networks of sociality and solidarity. These networks often form along gender lines that are capable of dissolving the boundaries imposed by race, tradition, and national identity and force the “collapse of the opposition us versus strangers” (Bauman 1996: 68). Domestic Service, Female Networks of Sociality and Solidarity A significant common element found in immigration films made by women is their inclination to portray immigrant women in traditional domestic roles and/or as contributing to the workforce in domestic service areas since women in developed countries are 72

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increasingly joining the public workforce and relying on domestic help to successfully manage their professional and parental responsibilities. Gutiérrez has argued that, although this type of work in private households represents a chance for undocumented migrant workers to make a living, it is also in the private nature of the work, with its non-regularized status—and due to its definition as “unskilled” work, emptied of social and cultural value—that undocumented migrant workers may encounter semi-feudal structures of exploitation (Gutiérrez 2007: 65, 73). Women filmmakers’ immigration films represent this dual reality—the benefits and downsides of domestic and service-related work—for women. However, in search of positive instances of self-representation, their films more often than not acknowledge that domestic service provides an impetus for independent female migration and presents immigrants with resources and networks of sociality through which they can better adapt to their adopted societies. They also show that in many instances the immigrants’ public profile stems from the so-called private sphere. Women inhabit the social space of the ghetto or neighborhood in a much more interactive way than do men through the formation of fixed habits, daily interactions, and banal conversations with neighbors in stores, in public squares, at playgrounds, and in other public spaces. Their activities in the public space are a continuation of their activities in the private, domestic space, or the “feminine space” (Tello i Robira 2005: 93). Asun García Armand’s research on the public roles of female immigrants in the neighborhood of El Raval in Barcelona can offer insight into situations in other Western European countries as well as elucidate the construction of a “feminine space” in women’s immigration films. In her view, because women have to assume a multiplicity of “domestic” activities in the neighborhood, following traditional gender-role configurations, they tend to have a broader and more global vision of their environment than their male counterparts do. Women have the main responsibility for the family’s functioning, and so they are more visible in the neighborhood. They learn codes and symbols sooner than men do; therefore they can more quickly become potential interpreters and transmitters of those rules and codes of behavior in ways that may facilitate the family’s evolution in the new environment. Traditional gender roles, generally associated with subordination and dependency, can provide a crucial source of agency as women use their roles of spouse and mother strategically. They also become agents of new identities by highlighting the similarities between their female functions and those of their autochthonous female neighbors (García Armand 2005: 135–136). Extranjeras, Taberna’s film, is in many ways a paradigmatic production within the immigration genre. Based on her interviews with female immigrants who are representative of the larger immigrant communities in Madrid, Extranjeras is the first Spanish film to use the documentary format to give absolute protagonism to women and to follow the aforementioned “feminine” patterns of sociality and adaptation. The film contributes to Madrid’s new image as a globalized and cosmopolitan city in which a conglomerate of international cultures coexists (Taberna & Costa Villaverde 2005: 37; Camí-Vela 2005: 49). In this sense, the film successfully demonstrates the heterogeneity of migrant groups in Spain and of migrant women’s experiences. 73

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Taberna counters the lack of information about female immigrants’ protagonism in the city by interviewing a large number of women who are the main breadwinners in their households and who own and manage businesses such as telephone parlors, beauty salons, restaurants, and local grocery stores. Her film makes a conscious, feminist effort to let the subaltern speak and to establish a public dialogue with women immigrants and women’s associations. It counteracts the “scarcity of feminist approaches that emphasize agency in female migrants and the roles they play in maintaining transnational networks” (Kofman 1999: 288). Taberna’s approach illustrates women’s social function as transmitters of ethnic culture and language (Camí-Vela 2005: 52). The immigrants’ autobiographical narratives underscore their direct participation in maintaining the language and traditions of their countries of origin and passing them on to their children. Secular and religious celebrations and rituals are filmed on location. For example, the film shows a Chinese New Year celebration in a public square and social and musical gatherings in parks and public areas on Sundays as well as scenes filmed at a Buddhist temple, an Orthodox church, and a mosque—always from the women’s point of view. The film depicts Muslim youth defending their right to wear the hijab at school, showing Taberna’s respectful position toward a very controversial issue in Europe.7 Extranjeras is a visual testimonio8 whose subjects come from a variety of ethnicities, social and educational backgrounds, and experiences regarding racism and discrimination. In her already-canonical essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988), Gayatri Spivak (referring mostly to the Indian subaltern) concludes that the economically dispossessed cannot speak because their voice is always controlled by Western transcribers, interpreters, and mediators. Spivak suggests that attempts from the outside to ameliorate the condition of Indian subalterns by granting them collective speech invariably encounter the following problems: 1) a logocentric assumption of cultural solidarity among a heterogeneous people, and 2) a dependence upon Western intellectuals to “speak for” the subaltern condition that does not allow the subaltern to speak for themselves. By speaking out and reclaiming a collective cultural identity, Spivak argues, subalterns can only in fact reinscribe their subordinate position in society. Taberna creates a positive alternative to Spivak’s reservations about the potential role of the Western intellectual in ameliorating the silencing of subaltern voices: she carefully attends to the heterogeneity in the group of immigrants she interviews, and she avoids reinforcing their subaltern position in Spanish society by hiding her “intellectual” presence from the diegesis. She omits the introductory scenes and voice-overs through which documentary authors traditionally declare their ethical stance. The interviewees are introduced visually, rather than orally, in the opening scenes through a series of close-up photo shoots that emphasizes the diversity of the group in terms of age, race, and ethnicity. The interviews that follow are conducted without enunciation of specific questions, which creates a sense of closeness and spontaneity as the women talk freely and in their own terms about their different experiences, and the film transfers to the audience the task of inferring the questions and establishing a common discursive pattern. 74

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The filmmaker’s absence from the diegesis has to be read as an aesthetic as much as an ethical statement. The apparent open nature of the questions leaves ample space for improvisation in the subjects’ narrations, thus facilitating the spectators’ direct contact with the foreigners without the authoritative intervention of the filmmaker. By choosing to absent herself from the diegesis, Taberna reinforces the idea that immigration is a bilateral, dual, reciprocal process that affects not only immigrant individuals but also host individuals once they both make contact in any given way. The closing scenes are filmed at a concert by an African group formed by two of the film’s protagonists. Only at the end does Taberna establish the connecting link between herself and all her interviewees by appearing in the scene, inadvertently to those who do not know her, among the foreign women who appear in the film. This last scene provides closure to her filmic text, shows the importance of social and communal female activities for these women, and validates the role that music and traditions play in unifying people.9 The selection and montage of narrative and visual material denote restraint: they avoid situations of victimization and manipulation of the audience’s emotions by limiting references to the women’s lives previous to immigration and to generalities such as dire economic situations or persecution in their countries of origin. Contrary to ethnographic documentaries that focus on the suffering of specific subjects that are very distant from the spectators’ daily lives, the small stories narrated in Extranjeras take place in ordinary neighborhoods and are not that different from the spectators’ own reality. When asked why she did not include interviews with sex workers, Taberna replied that her primary intention was to follow the ordinary lives of women who do not make the sensationalist news and to deliberately stay away from the simplistic equations established by the media between immigration and illegal border-crossing and between delinquency and prostitution that typically reinforce the stigmatization of prostitution by highlighting sexual stereotyping and exploitation situations (Camí-Vela 2001: 52). Taberna introduces her protagonists by locating them instead in the spaces they inhabit or in which they work, both private and public. She wants to reinforce the fact that they are high achievers who have attained a level of success in Madrid with the backing and encouragement of female networks. Feminine

Figure 2.4:  Extranjeras/Foreign Women by Helena Taberna ( 2003 Lamia Producciones Audiovisuals S.L.) Intercultural cuisine.

Figure 2.5:  Extranjeras/Foreign Women by Helena Taberna ( 2003 Lamia Producciones Audiovisuals S.L.) Taberna with her foreign women.

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camaraderie and networking are reinforced in encounters in public urban spaces like parks, churches, cultural associations, beauty salons, and music concerts, and Taberna takes the camera to these places to highlight the urban mobility and independence these women enjoy. In an article they coauthored, Socorro Pérez-Rincón and Asun García Armand find that the reinforcement and sharing of “culinary uses” are some of the fundamental strategies of sociality for immigrant women: gastronomy is understood and implemented as a common practice to promote the exchange of identity codes and the dismantling of stereotypes. A variety of culinary celebrations serve the purpose of transmitting elements of the immigrants’ culture to the host society in the public space, which becomes a space of intercultural contact. Women have a crucial role in creating such “contact spaces” where they can return symbolically to the culture of origin and reproduce it partially in the new space. These contact spaces trigger the hybridization of tastes, alimentary habits, and festivities. “Ethnic” restaurants and stores run by immigrants become intercultural spaces where autochthonous neighbors can take their first steps in the acceptance of foreign practices (Pérez-Rincón & García Armand 2008: 110–12). In a scene that vividly illustrates the findings of this research, Taberna films a gathering by the “Cocina intercultural” (Intercultural Cuisine) association and the “Jornadas culinarias” (Culinary Meetings) in which immigrants from different Latin American countries get together to exchange traditional dishes. Upholding the culinary traditions of their countries of origin is shown in the film to be as important for these female communities as the preservation of other major cultural components such as language and music (Rodríguez 2005: 41). In addition to demonstrating the communal and social function of cooking in these groups, Taberna films many of her subjects inside their kitchens and interviews them while they prepare lunch or dinner. Cooking at home for family, friends, and neighbors often leads to the opening of their own businesses, the ethnic restaurants or catering services that become “contact spaces” for immigrants and natives alike. Telephone parlors, fundamental spaces of international communication for immigrants, are managed by Ecuadorian women, and a delivery hub run by Polish women operates as an essential source for exchanging native newspapers and sending and receiving parcels from home. Though Taberna never shows these immigrant women interacting with Spanish women, their businesses are spaces of ethnic cultural preservation central to the immigrants’ diasporas, and they provide the neighborhood with a space for social interaction that ultimately facilitates communication and mediation between natives and immigrants. Immigrant Associations and Female Networking Female networking fosters a sense of community and belonging, but it also provides very concrete services to immigrants in their processes of integration into the host society. Bhaji on the Beach, Gurinder Chadha’s feature directorial debut, follows a group of related South 76

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Asian women on a day trip to Blackpool (a traditionally white, working-class seaside resort), organized by Simi, who is the coordinator of the Saheli Asian Women’s Center, an association created to provide both support and entertainment to South Asian women immigrants in their integration into British society. Chadha is the first British South Asian woman to direct feature films. According to Yasmin Hussain, Chadha “occupies an important role as spokesperson for South Asian women as well as being in the position to challenge the misrepresentations of South Asian women within mainstream film” (2005: 71). In all her films, and more specifically in her documentary for the BBC, I Am British But … (1989), and the commercially successful Bend it like Beckham (2002) (analyzed in chapter 7), Chadha explores many of the dilemmas affecting South Asian women, like herself, born and living in a multicultural and hybrid United Kingdom, and the generational differences between young British South Asians and their parents. Bhaji on the Beach examines the generational gap between three generations of South Asian women regarding their process of assimilation. The film explores the first generation’s confusion and ambivalence about respecting tradition and listening to their own needs and desires, the second generation’s defiance of family impositions and desire to assimilate into British society, and the third generation’s integration into British culture and ability to maneuver between the two cultures. In the film, the Saheli Asian Women’s Center and its day trip are introduced not only as “female fun time,” but more importantly as a shelter for South Asian women struggling to emancipate themselves from patriarchal abuse and as a vehicle for bridging the generational gap between first-generation immigrants, with their desire to maintain patriarchal traditions that also lead to female subjugation, and the UK-born younger generation, with their scorn for and rebellion against patriarchy and tradition. Although the trip is planned as an escape from the women’s families and chaotic lives, their problems inevitably follow them, and the seaside trip becomes a “platform for their grievances to be heard and discussed” (Hussain 2005: 74). The older women’s traditional values, such as honor, duty, and sacrifice, along with their prejudices and racist attitudes against other ethnic groups, are introduced through a mix of comedic, dramatic, and fantastic scenes that evidence the racial and gender marginalization that South Asians themselves experience in British society. For example, the film features waiters’ whispered racist remarks in a coffee shop, a gang of hooligans’ explicit racial insults, and drivers’ mockery of the Saheli Asian Women’s minibus on the highway. As was the case in Inch’Allah and Flores de otro mundo, gender discrimination is also criticized in this film as an abusive pattern ingrained in a patriarchal culture in which feminine subservience is the norm, tolerated and perpetuated by female family members. Two subplots constitute the dramatic core of the film and involve self-criticism of the Indian diaspora’s racism and sexism. In one of these subplots, Ginder, who has left her abusive husband, Ranjit, and taken their son Amrik with her to the shelter provided by the Saheli Asian Women’s Center, is condemned by the older generation of Indian women for adopting “English” agency and independence and for destroying the “Indian” family (Hussain 2005: 75). The physical abuse to which Ginder has been subjected is ignored by older female 77

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family members, and physical evidence is required for them to believe her testimonies: only after her bruises have been exposed publicly at a male strip club they visit at the end of their trip do they start acknowledging the harm and take action to protect her (Desai 2004: 149). A related plot, the story of Hashida, who has been dating an Afro-Caribbean man, Oliver, exposes the prejudices against blacks within the South Asian community. Her relationship with Oliver also elicits reactionary responses from women of the older generation, especially after they discover her pregnancy, which reaffirms their view that contemporary England has contaminated Indian values and morals providing their children and grandchildren only with “social disharmony and religious decline” (Hussain 2005: 78). The film’s positive ending shows the possibilities of gaining support and affirming solidarity by consciously belonging to and participating in a women’s group.10 After their journey—which functions, following the convention of the road movie, as a budding and cathartic journey of self-discovery—the older South Asian women begin to understand their daughters and granddaughters’ plights, and Auntie Asha, who at the beginning of the film was the most recalcitrant defender of patriarchal traditions, finds the strength to confront the abuser and defend the victim of patriarchal abuse within her own family. Melodrama unfolds when at the end of their journey, Ranjit, backed up by his brothers, finds Ginder in Blackpool, and after she refuses to return to him, insults her, beats her, and forcefully tries to kidnap their son Amrik. Patriarchy at its worst has been unveiled through Ginder’s bruises and is now staged in front of the women who need no more evidence to finally embrace Ginder’s cause. By the end of the film the women have witnessed the men’s violence and sexist prejudices against women who “divorce” and have fun “without their husbands.” The unified final reaction is the plausible result of the budding relationships that have been established among them during their journey to the beach and prompted by Simi’s feminist leadership. The bus scenes from the round trip between Birmingham to Blackpool function as a device to measure the characters’ process of gaining feminist awareness. Before the journey starts, Simi addresses the “sisters” and states the Saheli Women’s Center mission: “It is not often that we women get away from the patriarchal demands made on us by our daily lives, struggling between the double yoke of racism and sexism that we bear. This is your day. Have a female fun time.” As Simi speaks, the camera fluctuates between the disapproving looks of Indian women from the older generation and the cheerful screams of the younger UK-born girls, showing the generational gap that exists with regard to women’s attitudes toward patriarchy and racism, all of which will unfold in detail in the subsequent episodes in Blackpool. In the closing scenes of the film, after Asha slaps Ranjit in the face, calling him “brute and animal,” and after the younger brother rebels against his older brothers and helps the women counteract male aggression, the women get into the bus and pensively start their trip back home. The older women, who had shunned Ginder on their ride over and insulted Hashida while in Blackpool, now show Ginder their affection and support. As they pull out from Blackpool, Hashida greets them from her boyfriend’s motorcycle, and the older women acceptingly acknowledge her choice of a partner by saying, “Oh, well, what can you do?” The journey has been cathartic for everyone, and what prevails is the sense of female 78

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solidarity against male oppression. The journey’s purpose and positive resolution are also highlighted by the musical soundtrack that accompanies the two aforementioned scenes: a Punjabi rendition of the joyful Cliff Richard classic “Summer Holiday” (1963), translated into Punjabi by Chadha herself and performed by the Bhangra band KK Kings. As Jigna Desai argues, mobility and travel are significant to the agency of gendered diasporic subjects (2004: 135). Although the agency and mobility of the film’s characters are accompanied by ambivalence, they resist power relations by seeking mobility away from abusive domestic spaces (Desai 2004: 136). Chadha utilizes the conventions of the road movie genre to better construct her immigrant characters’ mobile, transitional, and transnational identities. In road movies, the road is in essence the passage to a new beginning, free from the bonds of the past, and is potentially a journey of self-discovery. Dangers and obstructions typically hinder the road to utopia, signifying that liberation from past and present constraints is not without complications and creating the suspense that delays a successful conclusion. In a feminist variation of the road movie pattern, Ginder and Hashida, who hope to escape, albeit momentarily, from their problems—domestic abuse and unwanted pregnancy—have to actively confront them while on the road. The road trip to Blackpool, as in most road movies, turns out to be not just a distraction but, on the contrary, a movable, unstable, and public arena where domestic and cultural patterns consubstantial to their gender roles in the diaspora unfold and ultimately get resolved.11 The cemetery scene in which Gregoria is finally convinced of her daughter-in-law’s honest intentions (Flores de otro mundo) and the public silencing of Zouina’s main oppressor, her mother-in-law Aïsha, effected by her husband and witnessed by the neighbors (Inch’Allah) present characterizations, narrative developments, and positive resolutions similar to the one introduced at the end of Bhaji on the Beach. The abuse and subjugation of immigrant women is affected by a patriarchal system based on tradition and supported by other women, who in the end understand their predicament through dialogue and shared experiences. At the same time the patriarchy is counteracted by the panoply of female immigrant and

Figure 2.6:  Bhajhi on the Beach by Gurinder Chadha ( 1993 Channel Four Television Corporation) At the beach.

Figure 2.7:  Bhajhi on the Beach by Gurinder Chadha ( 1993 Channel Four Television Corporation) On the bus.

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national characters who offer the immigrant women their support from the start. The three films offer a multiplicity of female characters and are heterogeneous in their depiction of gendered migratory subjectivities. Women on the Move: The Urban Flâneuse I stated in an earlier section, quoting from Taberna’s interview, that female filmmakers rarely address the subject of female sex work and explicitly avoid oversexualizing and objectifying their immigrant characters on-screen. Nonetheless, I want to address here the treatment and outcomes that Icíar Bollain (in Flores de otro mundo/Flowers from Another World) and Claire Denis (in J’ai pas sommeil/I Can’t Sleep) give female characters who are associated with sex tourism or presumed to be sexually available either because of their nationality and ethnicity or because of their mobility and autonomy (in both films). Milady, the Afro-Cuban immigrant in Bollain’s film, and Daïga, the Lithuanian immigrant in Denis’ film, obtain agency and freedom as they conquer the public space and refuse to be confined to the domestic domain and be reduced to sexual subjects/objects or defined exclusively in terms of their romantic relationships with men. I view these characters as contemporary female versions of the modern flâneur, as characterized by Walter Benjamin and Charles Baudelaire, and as individuals in control of their own life choices as a result of their flâneurial endeavor. The nineteenth-century flâneur, an emblematic figure of urban modern experience, was male and benefitted from the freedoms and possibilities inherent to the modern metropolis. He was a man of leisure, an idler, an urban explorer, and a detached spectator who rejoiced in his anonymity. Invisibility was the condition of his mobility, which provided freedom without constraint. Like the modern flâneur, the cinematic postmodern immigrant takes refuge in and is defined by invisibility, anonymity, and transience. S/he both displays and fears visibility in the urban space: his or her exotic, nonwhite, ethnic appearance betrays him/her as a foreigner, a nonnative, and an Other—and may attract police scrutiny, which may ultimately lead to racial profiling, harassment, and deportation. The modern flâneur was essentially male; the female who dared to explore and walk the streets of the modern city could be perceived as a questionable character, a prostitute. As Phil Hubbard has illustrated, while the modern flâneurial man was celebrated, public women were condemned for their incursion into public space. In the modern society, there was “no possibility of a female flâneur, just the prostitute” (Hubbard 1999: 86). The binary division of urban space (and roles assigned to it) according to gender categories, as well as the conception of female urban mobility as disruptive to the civic order and a cause of female’s disgrace, cannot be entirely subscribed to in twenty-first century Western societies, and yet some of those old gender-based preconceptions and tensions still remain. They are commonly explored in women immigration films that denounce the patriarchal and sexist behaviors that still exist in European societies. In Europe’s immigrant and diasporic communities, respect for traditional and religious values that 80

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relegate women to the roles of daughter, wife, and mother inside the home and men to the role of breadwinner in the workplace are still prevalent. We have seen these patterns tragicomically depicted in Benguigui’s and Chadha’s films, where female characters are both victims (young or second-generation immigrants) and executioners (older generation) of a rigid and obsolete patriarchal system that is presented in contrast to the rights and liberties taken for granted by European female characters. Daïga and Milady, unlike Zouina and the South Asian characters of Chadha’s film, who are constrained by their Muslim communities’ demands, have migrated from societies (Cuba and Lithuania) whose communist regimes, in theory, granted women the right to work and participate in all spheres of public life. Daïga and Milady are single and independent women who migrate alone, though in both cases lured by men who promise work, stability, or a refuge from the stagnant economic situations in their countries of origin. Both suffer from still-existing social preconceptions about the exotic female foreigner walking the streets alone. Their youth, indifference to domesticity, and free movement in the public space are transgressive and engender visibility and invisibility simultaneously: their position fluctuates between seeing and being seen (and unseen), between that of the anonymous observer and the object of the male’s gaze and sexual interest. Being observed and scrutinized is a characteristic associated with the feminine, and the city is often defined for women as “a series of sites for exposure or concealment” (Murphy 2006: 38). This duality plays out in both films. In Bollain’s film, Milady is a Cuban jinetera who becomes the lover of Carmelo, a Spaniard whom she does not love, in order to flee Cuba. Since Cuba’s economic crisis, linked to the collapse of the socialist trade bloc in 1990 and the subsequent loss of Cuba’s main trading partners, the Cuban government gradually opened the island to Western tourism and decriminalized the US dollar in an effort to attract foreign investors. The influx of US currency has thus engendered a black market where commodities become available only to those with access to dollars. Cubans have progressively abandoned their state jobs and careers to work for dollars in the tourism industry, producing a “prostitution of values” that has jeopardized the advances granted by socialism in terms of education and social and gender equality (Fleites Lear 2003: 293). Sex tourism and a new subtle form of prostitution, jineterismo, that emerged during the “special period,” especially in Havana, reproduce the pre-revolutionary image of Cuba as “the brothel of the Caribbean” and affect women in particular “as their gains in gender equality progressively erode” (Fleites Lear 2003: 293). Although the term jineterismo is commonly used as a synonym for sex work, it is a much more complex “survival activity revolving around the tourist industry” and is inseparable from “the various daily struggles that Cubans in general face” (De Sousa e Santos 2009: 409). Dina De Sousa e Santos defines it “as a range of actions which involves the pursuit of sexual, economic, love and cultural relationships with tourists” (2009: 412). The Cuban government has had a contradictory stance on the issue, indirectly promoting sex tourism as one of the attractions of the island and yet condemning the jineteras for having “low morals” and being “embarrassing to Cuba” (De Sousa e Santos 2009: 408). From her fieldwork and personal interviews with Cuban women, De Sousa e Santos concludes that female jineteras 81

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are systematically harassed by the Cuban police and stigmatized in their neighborhoods, more so than their male counterparts (De Sousa e Santos 2009: 418), and that in fact, black Cuban women as a whole are perceived as being more likely to be jineteras than other social groups, because the stereotype of the easy and promiscuous mulata is “entrenched in historical constructions of black Cuban sexuality” (De Sousa e Santos 2009: 410). In turn, she argues, most of these women appropriate the stereotype and perform their own racialised and eroticised identities, which have been “packaged” by local and global tourist industries, using them to attract foreigners. But they do this not [only] in search of brief sexual encounters with foreigners—instead many see these men as ideal partners, capable of providing not just love, but also of “improving” [them] and their families economically, socially and racially. (De Sousa e Santos 2009: 408) The character of Milady has to be considered within this context. As a black Cuban woman, she is subjected to benign racial prejudice and is stereotyped and exoticized by the villagers, who assume that she is sexually available (a jinetera) and that she is using Carmelo to regularize her legal situation in Spain. Carmelo’s character embodies the white sex tourist type who travels to Cuba on a regular basis, taking advantage of the economic situation of young black Cuban women. His racist preconceptions about black Cubans’ hypersexuality and submissiveness are articulated at the film’s beginning, anticipating his expectations upon Milady’s imminent arrival to the village. Once she is in Spain, he treats her as his possession, turns violent when she tries to obtain some independence, and represses her freedom, confining her to the house. In turn, Milady’s expectations are frustrated as soon as she settles in the small village of Santa Eulalia. In the fantasies of many Cuban women, the “desirable” European, imagined as a rescuer, embodies liberation and progress, and “Europe is constructed in an almost paradisiacal fashion as a place where economic prosperity can be achieved and as a democratic area that awards its citizens the right to travel.” Also, “the tourist acts out and emulates a lifestyle that not always reveals his identity or corresponds to the reality in his home country” (De Sousa e Santos 2009: 422). Milady soon realizes her mistake and complains to Patricia, her Dominican friend, about how much more attentive, affectionate, and fun Carmelo used to be when he visited her in Havana. Trapped in a small rural environment where she is perceived only as the exotic foreigner and “Carmelo’s woman,” Milady feels stagnant and suffocated. After an unpleasant episode in which she is subjected to offensive racist and sexual comments at the local bar where she has been helping out, she hitchhikes out of the village on her own and spends a few days in the city of Valencia. The two scenes showing her departure from and return to the village are relevant visual markers of Milady’s desire for mobility and her inadequacy in the depopulated rural space. As Parvati Nair (2002) has shown, the camera’s persistent focus on the lone village and rural landscape are suggestive of depopulation and help signal Milady’s displacement. She starts her journey on foot, and her small exotic figure, clad in colorful and provocative attire, 82

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contrasts with the arid, vast, and colorless Castilian countryside. A young truck driver who has been in Havana (also as a sex tourist) pulls over and offers to take her to Valencia so that she can see the sea. Her stay in Valencia remains in ellipsis except for a slow motion glimpse of her ecstatic dancing at a disco club. The city represents an escape from the isolation to which she is subjected in Santa Eulalia, providing her with activities more suitable for her age. It is also an exit to the sea and from the village’s literal and metaphorical dryness. She returns to the village, walking along the same road and framed by the same landscape. Oscar, the young man who works as Carmelo’s assistant, takes her back on his motorbike and drops her off at the construction site where Carmelo is working. When she reaches Carmelo, excited and eager to tell him all about her trip, he beats and kicks her violently while calling her whore. After the violent episode, Carmelo confines her to the house, where her only task is taking care of the domestic chores, and he suggests that having children would be the solution to her boredom and isolation. These scenes illustrate the patriarchal imposition of domesticity on women and the domestic abuse that results from Milady’s attempt to escape from it. They fuel Milady’s final escape from the village with Oscar, who offers her refuge and love and provides the vehicle she needs to leave the village and regain her independence. Still, she refuses to repeat the mistake she made with Carmelo and leaves Oscar to continue her journey alone. This open ending is promising: it grants agency and autonomy to the character of Milady, who may be able to perform a new identity far away from the constraining patriarchal surveillance experienced in the provincial rural environment. As Van Liew observes, “Milady resists the implied necessity of participating in diasporic hybridity (forming a family with Carmelo), thereby remaining liminal to the transnational subjectivity explored as a possibility in the film” (2010). Her racialized physical appearance and exotic attire may blend in better in a bigger and more diverse city. She leaves the village and starts her journey toward independence wearing the same spandex leggings with the US flag pattern that she wore when she arrived from Cuba and which have to be understood as a symbol of her resistance to submission and desire for freedom.

Figure 2.9:  J’ai pas sommeil/I Can’t Sleep by Claire Denis ( 1994 Arena Films, Orsans Productions, Pyramide Productions, Les Films de Mindif, France 3 cinema, M6 Films, Agora films S.A. (Munich), Vega Film Productions S. A. (Zurich)) Daïga flâneuse.

Figure 2.8:  Flores de otro mundo/Flowers from Another World by Icíar Bollain ( 1999 Producciones La IguanaAlta Films, S.A.) Milady on the road.

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Daïga, the young Lithuanian in J’ai pas sommeil, arrives in Paris by herself, lured by a compatriot theater director who promised her an acting job and failed to fulfill his promise. Denis makes her a free spirit wandering the streets of Paris, a flâneuse who mirrors the two male Martinican immigrants: Camille, who with his French boyfriend’s complicity, is a serial killer of old ladies and a model and performer in drag clubs, and his brother Theo, who is married to a French woman and who leads a band that plays Martinican music.12 The film’s structure is constructed through a fragmentation that follows its inaccessible, unapproachable characters as they wander aimlessly around the city, without crossing paths or speaking the same language, and are “brought close to one another through parallel montage or by virtue of the depth of field” (Beugnet 2004: 90). Paris is filmed as a place of transit, a locus of cosmopolitanism, heterogeneity, alienation, and anonymity. In this contradictory urban experience, Daïga is defined by the calculated silence and invisibility that give her the freedom to be the anonymous flâneuse in Paris, and yet she is also the target of libidinous policemen and men who follow her assuming sexual availability from a woman walking at night alone. Daïga is exposed to objectifying looks from policemen, other drivers, stalkers, spectators at a porno film, her aunt, and Ninon, the hotel owner, but never by the camera, which gives her the point of view, follows her, and never exposes or objectifies her. According to Cynthia Marker, she rejects the role of sexual object and counters her lack of linguistic mastery with a “resistant gaze” that refuses to succumb to the oppressive gaze and sexual harassment of these men (Marker 2003: 141). Her autonomy extends also to her refusal to submit to her aunt’s attempts to integrate her into the Russian diaspora in Paris. She fluctuates between visibility—fixed as the object of the men’s gaze and linguistic pestering—and invisibility and extreme mobility, wandering the streets aimlessly and entering and leaving the city at will. In spite of her desire to make it in Paris, Daïga remains primarily the anonymous observer of city life and of interactions between Camille and his boyfriend Raphael inside the hotel where they live and where she works as a maid. She is filmed constantly looking through the hotel windows, at photographs on the walls in Camille’s room, and as a spectator of a pornographic film at a porno theater where she takes refuge from a stalker. Ultimately, the film’s cyclical structure is constructed around Daiga’s arrival to and departure from Paris, driving the same old Soviet car. Her experience in Paris does not fulfill her desires for professional improvement, but she is ironically the one who benefits in the end from Camille’s arrest, leaving with the booty he and his boyfriend stole from the women they killed. Like Milady’s fate in Flores de otro mundo, Daïga’s fate remains open at the end as she leaves Paris for an undisclosed destination. Denis and Bollain resist facile romantic endings, putting their characters instead on the road, searching for new horizons. Freedom and independence prevail in the end. Conclusion European women filmmakers who tackle the subject of female immigration, regardless of nationality or ethnicity, share similar concerns and representation patterns: they emphasize female immigrants’ agency, survival strategies, mechanisms of identity construction, and 84

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integration into the receiving society over exit-less instances of subordination and domination. Their films may leave audiences with the impression that women filmmakers are prone to creating utopian narratives that offer change and hope rather than stagnation and despair. However utopian, their characters’ growth is always contingent on the construction of affective links with other women, whether they are immigrants or natives, and the formation and upholding of female communities and associations. The daughters of immigrants themselves, Benguigui and Chadha focus on issues that hinder the integration of newly arrived immigrant women into European societies. These are issues that originated equally with the host country’s indifference or overt rejection and with the pressures migrant women are subjected to within the diaspora. Denis, Bollain, and Taberna, engaged white European intellectuals, position themselves with their immigrant subjects while critically contemplating the myriad attitudes that the immigrants’ presence elicits in their European compatriots. Intellectual and institutional awareness by European citizens about the prejudices and misconceptions that affect immigrants is an essential factor for positive change. What these women filmmakers add to the immigration genre is a gendered perspective that is still lacking in most media representations of female migration. Although most female-authored immigration films present a variety of strategies of positive self-representation that counteract the invisibility surrounding the lives of ordinary female migrants, other films authored by both men and women are increasingly focusing on female characters trapped in situations of exploitation, sex trafficking and slavery. Faithful documents to the terrible reality affecting the real women on which their characters are based, most of these films, whether they are fictional or documentary depictions of the subject, offer pessimistic representations and dismal outcomes that aim at rising awareness of an issue that concerns migration as much as human rights. However, as we will see in the next chapter, they contextualize and problematize the traumatic experiences of their characters, and avoid representing them exclusively as total victims.

References ASOCAMU (Asociación de Caravanas de Mujeres/Association of Women’s Caravans), viewed January 21, 2014 from http://www.caravanasdemujeres.com/. Ballesteros, I., 2005, “Embracing the Other: The Feminization of Spanish ‘Immigration Cinema,’” Studies in Hispanic Cinemas, 2(1), 3–14. Bauman, Z., 1996, “Making and Unmaking of Strangers,” in S. Fridlizius and A. Paterson (eds.), Stranger or Guest? Racism and Nationalism in Contemporary Europe, pp. 59–79, Stockholm, Sweden, Göteburg University. Beugnet, M., 2004, Claire Denis, Manchester and New York, Manchester University Press. Braziel, J. E. & Mannur, A. (eds.), 2003, Theorizing Diaspora. A Reader, Oxford, Blackwell. Camí-Vela, M., 2001, Mujeres detrás de la cámara. Entrevistas con cineastas españolas de la década de los 90, Madrid, Ocho y Medio. 85

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Camí-Vela, M., 2005, “Entrevista con Helena Taberna (Madrid: enero 2004),” in H. Taberna and E .Costa-Villaverde (eds.), Guía didáctica: Extranjeras. Una película documental de Helena Taberna, pp. 48–53, Pamplona, Lamia Producciones Audiovisuales S. L. Carpenter-Latiri, D., 2003, “Représentations de la femme migrante dans Inch’Allah dimanche,” The Web Journal of French Media Studies 6, viewed December 16, 2013, from http://wjfms.ncl. ac.uk/LatiriWJ.htm. Chapkis, W., 2003, “Trafficking, Migration, and the Law: Protecting Innocents, Punishing Immigrants,” Gender and Society 17(6), 923–937. Chun, C., 1996, “The Mail-Order Bride Industry: The Perpetuation of Transnational Economic Inequalities and Stereotypes,” University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Economic Law 17(4), 1155–1208. Delphy, C., 2005, “Gender, Race and Racism: The Ban of the Islamic Headscarf in France,” in M. Thapan (ed.), Transnational Migration and the Politics of Identity, pp. 228–251, New Delhi; Thousand Oaks, CA; and London, SAGE. Desai, J., 2004, “Homesickness and Motion Sickness: Embodied Migratory Subjectivities in Gurinder Chadha’s Bhaji on the Beach,” Beyond Bollywood: the Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film, pp. 133–158, New York and London, Routledge. De Sousa e Santos, D., 2009, “Reading Beyond the Love Lines: Examining Cuban Jineteras’ Discourses of Love for Europeans,” Mobilities 4(3), 407–426. Fauvel, M., 2004, “Yamina Benguigui’s Inch’Allah dimanche: Unveiling Hybrid Identities,” Studies in French Cinema 4(2), 147–157. Fleites Lear, M., 2003, “Women, Family and the Cuban Revolution,” in I. L. Horowitz and J. Suchlicki (eds.), Cuban Communism 1959–2003, 11th edn., pp. 276–302, New Brunswick, NJ, Transaction. García Armand, A., 2005, “El rol de las mujeres en el devenir de un barrio intercultural: el Raval de Barcelona,” in M. Nash, R. Tello and N. Benach (eds.), Inmigración, género y espacios urbanos. Los retos de la diversidad, pp. 123–140, Barcelona, Edicions Bellaterra. Gutiérrez Rodríguez, E., 2007, “The Hidden Side of the New Economy: On Transnational Migration, Domestic Work, and Unprecedented Intimacy,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 28(3), 60–83. Hondagneu-Sotelo, P., 2007, “New World Domestic Order,” in Domestica, pp. 3–28, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press. Hubbard, P., 1999, Sex in the City: Geographies of Prostitution in the Urban West, Aldershot, Ashgate. Hussain, Y., 2005, “Bhaji on the Beach and Bend it like Beckham: Gurinder Chadha and the ‘Desification’ of British Cinema,” Writing Diaspora. South Asian Women, Culture and Ethnicity, pp. 71–90, Hampshire, UK, and Burlington, VT, Ashgate. Jelloun, T. B., 1999, French Hospitality: Racism and North African Hospitality, transl. B. Bray, New York, Columbia University Press. Kofman, E., 1999, “Female ‘Birds of Passage’ a Decade Later: Gender and Immigration in the European Union,” International Migration Review 33(2), 269–99. Laderman, D., 2002, Driving Visions. Exploring the Road Movie, Austin, University of Texas Press. 86

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Marker, C., 2003, “Sleepless in Paris: J’ai pas sommeil (Denis 1993),” in P. Powrie (ed.), French Cinema in the 1990s. Continuity and Difference, pp. 137–147, London and New York, Oxford University Press. Morokvasic, M., 1984, “Birds of Passage Are also Women …,” International Migration Review 18(4), 886–907. Murphy, A., 2006, “Traces of the Flâneuse: From Roman Holiday to Lost in Translation,” Journal of Architectural Education 60(1), 33–42. Nair, P., 2002, “In Modernity’s Wake: Transculturality, Deterritorialization and the Question of Community in Icíar Bollain’s Flores de otro mundo (Flowers from Another World),” Postcript 21(2), 38–49. Nair, P. 2003–2004, “Moor-Veiled Matters: the Hijab as Troubling Interrogative of the Relation between the West and Islam,” New Formations 51, 39–49. Nash, M., 2005, “La doble alteridad en la comunidad imaginada de las mujeres inmigrantes,” in M. Nash, R. Tello and N. Benach (eds.), Inmigración, género y espacios urbanos. Los retos de la diversidad, pp. 17–31, Barcelona, Edicions Bellaterra. Pérez-Rincón, S. & García Armand, A., 2008, “Estrategias identitarias en los espacios de contacto,” in R. Tello, N. Benach and M. Nash (eds.), Intersticios. Contactos interculturales, género y dinámicas identitarias en Barcelona, pp. 100–245, Barcelona, Edicions Bellaterra. Raijman, R., Schammah-Gesser, S. & Kemp, A., 2003, “International Migration, Domestic Work, and Care Work: Undocumented Latina Migrants in Israel,” Gender and Society 17(5), 727–749. Rodríguez, I. (ed.), 2001, The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader, Durham, Duke University Press. Rodríguez, M. P., 2005, Extranjeras: Migraciones, globalización, multiculturalismo, Vitoria, Arabako Foru Alduncia and Diputación Floral de Álava. Rodríguez, M. P., 2010, “New Documentary Productions: A New Speaking Position for Migrants in Extranjeras and Si nos dejan,” in Catalan Journal of Communication and Cultural Studies 2(1), 43–58. Shelley, L., 2003, “Trafficking in Women: The Business Model Approach,” Brown Journal of World Affairs 10(1), 119–31. Solé C. & Parella, S., 2003, “Migrant Women in Spain: Class, Gender and Ethnicity,” in J. Andall (ed.), Gender and Ethnicity in Contemporary Europe, pp. 61–76, Oxford and New York, Berg. Spivak, G., 2001 [1988], “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in P. Cain and M. Harrison (eds.), Imperialism. Critical Concepts in Historical Studies, pp. 171–219, London, Routledge. Taberna, E. & Costa-Villaverde, E., 2005, Guía didáctica: Extranjeras. Una película documental de Helena Taberna, Pamplona, Lamia Producciones Audiovisuales S. L. Tello i Robira, R., 2005, “Espacios urbanos y zonas de contacto intercultural,” in M. Nash, R. Tello and N. Benach (eds.), Inmigración, género y espacios urbanos. Los retos de la diversidad, pp. 85–97, Barcelona, Edicions Bellaterra. Thapan, M. (ed.), 2005, “Introduction: ‘Making Incomplete’: Identity, Woman and the Politics of Identity,” in Transnational Migration and the Politics of Identity, pp. 23–62, New Delhi; Thousand Oaks, CA; and London, SAGE. 87

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Van Dijk, T. A., 2005, “Nuevo racismo y noticias. Un enfoque discursivo,” in M. Nash, R. Tello, and N. Benach (eds.), Inmigración, género y espacios urbanos. Los retos de la diversidad, pp. 33–55, Barcelona, Edicions Bellaterra. Van Liew, M., 2010, “New Modernity, Transnational Women, and Spanish Cinema,” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 12(2), viewed December 17, 2013, from http://docs.lib. purdue.edu/clcweb/vol12/iss2/. Zecchi, B., 2010, “Veinte años de inmigración en el imaginario fílmico español,” in M. Iglesias Santos (ed.), Imágenes del otro. Identidad e inmigración en la literatura y el cine, pp. 157–184, Madrid, Biblioteca Nueva. Zontini, E., 2005, “Migraciones, género y multiculturalismo. Una perspectiva de Europa meridional,” in M. Nash, R. Tello and N. Benach (eds.), Inmigración, género y espacios urbanos. Los retos de la diversidad., pp. 99–122, Barcelona, Edicions Bellaterra.

Notes   1 Referring to Latinas in the United States, Hondagneu-Sotelo points out that domestic work performed by immigrants “represents a bargain” for Western families and Western societies (2007: 24). The same can be stated about the lucrative businesses of mail-order brides, prostitution, and sex slave rings, which I contemplate at length in chapter 3. See articles by Chun (1996), Shelley (2003), Chapkis (2003), and Gutiérrez (2007).   2 After Algeria gained independence from France in 1962, Algerian workers were positioned as guest workers and no longer as colonial subjects. Guest workers were not allowed to bring their families in an attempt to prevent them from becoming uprooted in France. Only in 1974, the government of Jacques Chirac authorized families to regroup and encouraged the integration and assimilation of immigrants into French society.   3 Zouina’s failure to establish a connection with her roots is symbolically enacted in her use of the headscarf to cover her self-inflicted wound. Zouina subverts the traditional Muslim custom of covering the head and moves the headscarf from head to hand, literally stopping the bleeding and symbolically signifying Muslim women’s suffering. I thank Vilna Bashi Treitler for this interpretation.   4 The so-called Caravanas de Mujeres (Women’s Caravans) were initiated in 1985 by a group of single men from the village of Plan in the province of Huesca (Autonomous Region of Aragon). In 1995 another group of single men from Segovia (Autonomous Region of Castilla-Leon) founded ASOCAMU (Asociación de Caravana de Mujeres/Association of Women’s Caravans). The association is active and functioning to this day. See their Web site: http://www.caravanasdemujeres.com/.   5 Barbara Zecchi (2010) argues that in Spanish immigration films authored by women, the female experience is universalized insofar as there is a tendency to create an identification between the Spanish woman and the Other. This tendency is not only found in films made by women. The shared subordinate and marginal position of Spanish and immigrant women and the solidarity and friendship they build in order to survive is also explored in Princesas/Princesses (Fermando León de Aranoa, 2005) and Agua con Sal/Water with 88

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Salt (Pedro Pérez Rosado, 2005). In Princesas, Caye, a Spaniard, and Zulema, a Dominican immigrant, are sex workers who first compete for clients in Madrid and soon become best friends. In Agua con Sal, María Jo, the Spaniard, and Olga, the Cuban immigrant, are complementary characters who endure similar situations of scarcity and labor exploitation through camaraderie.   6 See the interview included in Camí-Vela’s book (2001).   7 In 2002, Spain was the epicenter of public controversy when Fatima Eldrisi, a thirteen-yearold Moroccan girl, was forbidden to wear the hijab (headscarf) while attending a public school. After months of debate and a long legal struggle, she was finally allowed to wear the hijab in public school, which provided a significant victory for the Muslim community in Spain. On February 10, 2004, after five months of intense public debate, the French General Assembly, following the recommendation of the Stasi commission, voted 494 to 36 to ban headscarves and all conspicuous religious signs, including Christian crosses and Jewish yarmulkes (Delphy 2005: 229). For more information about “the battle of the hijab” in France and Spain, see articles by Delphy (2005) and Nair (2003–2004).   8 I am borrowing the term used in Latin American subaltern studies to refer to a genre of literature that retells historical events from a subaltern’s eyewitness perspective and uses strategies that describe the subject on its own terms instead of recasting it as the Other of the dominant culture. Most testimonios, prompted by periods of social and political upheaval throughout Latin America, are based on traumatic sociopolitical episodes, convey a sense of orality, and are told from an individual perspective which nonetheless serves as an allegory for the communal experience as a whole. Some testimonios, such as Rigoberta Menchú’s and Domitila Barrios’s, are told by a person with limited literacy and are transcribed by an intellectual or academic. See Rodríguez (ed.), The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader (2001).   9 For previous close readings of the film, see Didactic Guide by Taberna and Costa-Villaverde and the articles by Ballesteros (2005) and Rodríguez (2005). See also Rodríguez (2010) for a nuanced application of Spivak’s theories and an analysis of the documentary genre. 10 Un novio para Yasmina/A Fiancé for Yasmina (Carmen Cardona, 2008) focuses on some of the same issues pertaining to the films included in this chapter. It explores the role that women-run immigrant associations play in providing support to newly arrived female immigrants and their families. The film also challenges the stereotypes associated with Arab women, presenting an alternative to a traditional understanding of female immigrants as vulnerable and dependent on male family members.   Das Fräulein/Fraulein (Andrea Staka, 2006) is another immigration film that centers around the friendship and camaraderie established between different generations of Serbian immigrants in Zurich. 11 For an introduction to the genre’s conventions, see Laderman’s book, Driving Visions. Exploring the Road Movie (2002). For an application of the road movie conventions to immigration cinema, see chapter 6: “Inverted Odysseys and Roads to Dystopia.” 12 See my analysis of Camille’s performative identity in chapter 4.

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Chapter 3 Human Trafficking and the Global Sex Slave Trade

I

mmigration films dealing with the thorny subjects of prostitution, human trafficking, and the sex trade are in the minority among the increasing number of films depicting the myriad issues affecting immigrants. Women filmmakers often acknowledge that they voluntarily refuse to engage in reductive sensationalist narratives that typically reinforce the stigmatization of prostitution by highlighting sexual stereotyping and situations of exploitation. As we saw in the previous chapter, they prefer to follow the ordinary lives of women who do not make the sensationalist news and instead emphasize female immigrants’ agency, survival strategies, and mechanisms of identity construction and integration into the receiving society over exit-less instances of subordination and domination. However, a reluctance to represent the issue means ignoring the hundreds of thousands ordinary girls who are trafficked every day on a global scale, and for that reason the disinclination to depict them is gradually waning. As the international sex trade is becoming a multimillion dollar industry of epidemic proportions, first-time as well as experienced female (and male) filmmakers are beginning to document this global tragedy in order to counteract either these women’s invisibility or the mostly sensationalist accounts prevalent in the media. A small number of national and co-produced fictional films, as well as commercial and TV documentaries and mini-series, have brought to light in the last decade the global nature of the sex trade affecting the most vulnerable women living in (and trying to escape from) the most impoverished parts of the world. Among them, Promised Land (2004), by Israeli director Amos Gitai, tells the story of a group of young Estonian girls smuggled through Egypt to Israel where they are sold as prostitutes; Holly (2006), by Israeli-American director Guy Moshe, tackles child trafficking and sexploitation in Cambodia and Vietnam; Trade (2007), by American filmmaker Marco Kreuzpaintner, depicts the sex trade operating between Mexico and the United States; The Whistleblower (2010), by Canadian director Larissa Kondracki, is inspired by the story of a real UN peacekeeper who uncovers a sex trafficking operation in Bosnia; and Evelyn (2012), by Spanish filmmaker Isabel de Ocampo, tells the story of a young Peruvian girl trafficked to Spain under the false promise of getting a legal job. A PBS Frontline documentary, Sex Slaves (2006), by Ric Esther Bienstock, follows a man’s journey into the world of sex trafficking in an attempt to find his wife, who was sold to traffickers in Turkey. The Canadian-British coproduced television mini-series Sex Traffic (2004) by David Yates follows the story of two Moldovan sisters, Elena and Vara, who are deceived by Vara’s boyfriend and sold into sexual slavery and forced to work in brothels in Belgrade and Sarajevo; and Human Trafficking (2005), another international television mini-series co-produced by Canada and the United States, follows the stories of

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three women (two Eastern Europeans and an American) who are sold into an international slavery ring by a single Russian man.1 Given the tragic fact that the sex trafficking and enslavement of women and children has increased exponentially in Eastern Europe and Russia since the collapse of the Soviet bloc, I am restricting my analysis to the trafficking of the so-called Natashas to the countries of Western Europe and the Middle East (Malarek 2005). I have selected five films that focus on the sex trafficking and enslavement of women and children. Four are fictional representations of the subject: Lilya 4-Ever (Lukas Moodysson, 2003), La sconosciuta/The Unknown Woman (Giuseppe Tornatore, 2006), Transe/Trance (Teresa Villaverde, 2006), and Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg, 2007). The fifth is a documentary, The Price of Sex (Mimi Chakarova, 2011). My decision to focus exclusively on films depicting the sex trafficking of Eastern European women responds to the need to limit the scope of this chapter and maintain a geographical consistency that allows me to address with more precision the socioeconomic factors that have made these women extremely vulnerable after the collapse of Communism. Nonetheless, similarities with respect to thematic, generic, and visual patterns can be found in the different films dealing with this subject matter, as most of them choose either the thriller genre or the documentary format in order to expose a global trade that operates in similar ways regardless of the origin or destination countries. The Global Sex Trade: An Overview A look at global patterns and flows shows that the trafficking of persons is a crime with a strong gender connotation. According to a 2012 report published by the United Nations Office of Drug and Crime, women and children are the two most frequently trafficked groups. Girls and female adults make up 75 percent of the total number of victims (UNODC 2012: 26). The insatiable appetite and persistent demand for commercial sex makes the international sex trade a more consistently profitable business than drug and arms trafficking, which yield one-time profits (Ray 2006: 910). In Europe, Central Asia, and the Americas there are more victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation (62 percent) than of other forms of exploitation (UNODC 2012: 35). Countries and regions with poor economic and social conditions provide traffickers with opportunities to access and recruit individuals who are extremely vulnerable to exploitation. Traffickers enjoy virtually no risk of prosecution because they use sophisticated modes of transportation and communication and because they operate in places where there is little rule of law, a lack of anti-trafficking laws, poor enforcement of such laws, and widespread corruption. As immigration laws and their enforcement have gotten stricter, the role of organized crime in trafficking has increased, since only large organized criminal networks can have the resources to bypass strict state control (Ray 2006: 922). The very illegality of contemporary slavery is what “paradoxically enables it to persist invisibly within the system” (Brown, Iordanova & Torchin 2010: 44). 94

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Victims are trafficked from poorer areas to richer areas, and there is an obvious correlation between the level of unemployment in countries of origin and the share of victims from those countries in countries of destination (UNODC 2012: 45). Because women face dire economic conditions in their countries of origin, they can be deceived by lucrative and legal job offers in the domestic and service industries of the West from relatives, acquaintances, or boyfriends. Traffickers take care of forged documents and travel arrangements. Upon their arrival in the country of destination, women are told the truth, are assigned to a pimp, and locked in a brothel where they are forced to work as prostitutes without their passports or contact with the outside world. In many cases they are even charged for room and board and any other expenses, and they are forbidden to establish contact with their clients or anyone outside their dwellings. They are physically and psychologically manipulated, broken with rape, drugs, and alcohol as well as beatings, torture, starvation, and intimidation directed against their families’ well-being. They are made to believe that if they work off their debt (the amount their traffickers paid for them in addition to their daily expense), they can return home. They are often sold multiple times to different traffickers in different countries so that “the cycle of debt is never broken” (Chakarova in UN.GIFT 2012). They become commodities to be expelled once they cease to be profitable. Trafficking networks depend largely on corruption within local law enforcement agencies, such as border and custom officials, and on the complicity of highly paid facilitators in the Western receiving countries (Shelley 2003: 120–121). Local policemen are easily corrupted and enjoy impunity: they are not only consumers, but they also give protection to the criminals, return the few women who manage to escape to their traffickers, and deport the women once their captors no longer want them. An official from an anti-trafficking division in Greece confirms in an interview in Chakarova’s film that in many cases policemen (who would never get enmeshed in a drug-dealing operation) protect sex trafficking criminals because “they [conveniently] don’t understand the importance of their crime.” In addition, sex trade rings are elusive, the same Greek officer states, because they work like terrorist organizations. They are split into unrelated cells, preventing communication and the exchange of information between them. International organizations send a lot of money to the countries of origin to be used for advertising against and prevention of sex trafficking, victim rehabilitation, and support for the victims’ families, but it is often the case that those funds never reach the victims, ending up instead in police officers’ hands. Although the vast majority of traffickers are adult males and local nationals from the source and destination countries, they benefit from women’s involvement in the transactions. On average, 12 percent of trafficking offenders are female. Few other crimes record this relatively high level of female participation (UNODC 2012: 29). Trafficking networks “widely use women as recruiters of victims of sexual exploitation, as they may be more easily trusted by other females, who are more vulnerable to this type of trafficking” (UNODC 2012: 29–30). Women are normally placed in low-ranking positions to fulfill duties that carry greater risk of being caught and prosecuted, such as escorting and transporting the victims, guarding them in the location where exploitation takes place, whether it is the street or a brothel, 95

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and receiving cash from the clients (UNODC 2012: 29–30). As Chakarova shows in her documentary, traffickers also rely on families’ lack of education and indifference regarding women’s whereabouts and activities abroad. This situation is particularly severe for women in the poorest Eastern European countries which, after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, have become the biggest exporters of sex slaves to the West and the Middle East. The UN study shows that people from Eastern European nations are among the most widely trafficked at the global level (along with South Asians, South Americans, and sub-Saharan Africans) (UNODC 2012: 47). As Nilanjana Ray documents in her study, the move of former Eastern European communist nations to a market economy “has proved to be costly in terms of real income and output decline, loss of employment and security, rapid deterioration in social conditions, and deepening gender inequalities. Throughout the region, towns were built around a single industry, and when the industry collapsed, the entire town lost its livelihood” (Ray 2006: 925). Although unemployment has affected the entire population, women have suffered the most “because the industries in which they predominated—social services, medicine, textile, and the government sector—underwent maximum downsizing. In the rural areas, the closure of State and collective farms were not substituted by development of private farming. Women previously employed in State-run agricultural units migrated to cities in search of employment” (Ray 2006: 925). With the absence of contacts in managerial positions, effective retraining programs, and sufficient State unemployment compensation, a large number of unemployed women, especially single mothers, were left destitute. Even for those who secured jobs, sexual harassment, workplace discrimination, salaries below the level of a living wage, and a lack of alternative employment made the traffickers’ promise of highsalary jobs and housing in affluent countries very attractive (Ray 2006: 926). Victims and Agents In 2000, at the Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime (signed by 140 countries and ratified September 29, 2003), the United Nations declared that the problem of human trafficking required an international comprehensive approach in the countries of origin, transit, and destination to punish the traffickers and to protect the victims. The accompanying 2000 Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons used the following terms: (a) “Trafficking in persons” shall mean the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of 96

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sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs. (b) The consent of a victim of trafficking in persons to the intended exploitation set forth in subparagraph (a) of this article shall be irrelevant where any of the means set forth in subparagraph (a) have been used. (United Nations 2000: 41–42) The UN Protocol provided a very needed measure and approach and has had a positive impact, with the number of countries having legislation criminalizing all or most forms of trafficking in persons doubling since the protocol was ratified (UNODC 2012: 81). By 2012 at least 134 countries and territories had criminalized trafficking and established a strong legislative basis for cooperation, exchange of good practices, and a common understanding of what trafficking in persons is and that victims of trafficking are to be protected (UNODC 2012: 81). At the same time, however, the 2012 Global Report has highlighted that the knowledge crisis with respect to human trafficking and the still relatively weak criminal justice response to this crime continued to exist twelve years after the Trafficking in Persons Protocol was opened for signature (UNODC 2012: 80). Conviction rates in many countries are still embarrassingly low, prevention efforts fail to reach their targets, and actual protection of the vulnerable is far from meeting the objectives presented in the Protocol (UNODC 2012: 81). Some sociologists have questioned the wording used by the UN Protocol in 2000 to define “sexual exploitation” (especially regarding the “irrelevance of consent”), pointing out that under the laudable intention to control sex trafficking, all immigrant women, regardless of the agency they had in seeking new livelihoods across borders, may be categorized as invisible victims of trafficking, and the reasons that force them to move clandestinely may be ignored (Sharma 2005: 89). They claim that the broader social problems and globalized capitalist practices that deprive such workers of their livelihoods in the first place, increasing their vulnerability to trafficking, are rarely discussed, since the current discourse presents trafficked persons merely as “innocent victims” who need to be rescued from traffickers and reunited with their communities of origin (Sharma 2005: 89; Alvarez & Alessi 2012: 147). In other words, they point out that in order to address the problem in a comprehensive way, the structural inequalities that precede the trafficking as well as the push and pull factors that lead many trafficked individuals to leave their countries in search of better living and working conditions should be acknowledged (Alvarez & Alessi 2012: 148). It is also important to recognize the level of agency of trafficked persons, whose basic human rights are already denied in their countries of origin and who, ironically, become victims of labor exploitation in an attempt to regain control over their own livelihoods. Changes in gender roles in sending countries, economic needs that affect women disproportionately in times of crisis, and the desire to escape from oppressive or violent environments have led to enhanced mobility of women (Ray 2006: 922–923). Trafficking has to be conceptualized not only as a denial of rights after they are first trafficked, but also as a denial of rights 97

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prior to this point. It is the denial of social, economic, and human rights that leads to loss of control over life situations and, therefore, exploitation (Ray 2006: 924). Ana Revenco, the director of La Strada (a Moldovan NGO), interviewed in Chakarova’s documentary, remains skeptical about the real possibilities of solving the situation any time soon unless discrepancies between rich and poor countries and official corruption are addressed. Along those lines, the UNODC report also makes clear that “the police and the criminal justice system need to work across borders, which are so easily crossed by criminals, to ensure that traffickers are investigated, prosecuted and convicted” (2012: 81). In the meantime, the fact remains that under the influence of reductive media discourses about sex trades, immigrant sex workers figure into the collective conscience as “total victims.” While media discourses call for their protection, they also reveal the sensationalized persistence of the stigmatization of sex workers rather than a genuine interest in their life and work conditions (Juliano 2008: 216). Sex workers often remain one-dimensional figures whose stories are condensed and simplified, which does not bode well for the development of culturally appropriate services (Godziak & Bump 2008: 46). At the same time, William Brown, Dina Iordanova, and Leshu Torchin have rightly noted that there is a lack of interaction between the social theory addressing trafficking and the study of representation, that is, “a reluctance of social scientists and policy makers to take advantage of the insights that the analysis of popular representations and narrations of trafficking can offer” (2010: 115). Within this debate, cinema clearly plays a fundamental role in defying the knowledge crisis and promoting criminal justice by instructing audiences about both the causes and consequences of trafficking for vulnerable women and portraying them as agents, not just as total victims, of their own fates. Within this general context, the five films I am studying in the rest of this chapter are fundamental examples of what cinema can achieve in terms of providing visibility to victims of trafficking around the globe. Moodysson and Cronenberg make conscious efforts to document their characters’ social and working conditions while simultaneously representing them as innocent and vulnerable victims of sexual exploitation, destined to perish in their attempts to liberate themselves from it. Their films rely on narratives of female powerlessness and victimization, established by the conflation of women and children (Chapkis 2003: 931). Moodysson provides a twofold perspective on the problem by locating the action both in Russia and Sweden in order to demonstrate the social stagnation that drives disenfranchised Russian teenagers to blindly embrace the false promises of the West. Meanwhile, Cronenberg focuses on the intricacies of the Russian mob in London and its complex web of violent interactions based on family loyalties and hierarchies. While both filmmakers expose the Russian organized crime scene and its involvement with the trafficking of women, they also denounce Western Europe’s complicity with the existence of a lucrative business that is never severely penalized and is deemed less dangerous than businesses that traffic other commodities. Tornatore’s film addresses both the trafficking of women for sex exploitation and the trafficking of babies. It tells the story of an Ukranian prostitute who was forced into sexual slavery in Italy and into giving birth to babies who were sold illegally to Italian families. 98

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In this film, sexual slavery and human trafficking are presented as fragments of a past from which the protagonist is trying to escape in the present. Vietry Janak Nathan’s description of Tornatore’s style is pertinent also to the analysis of Moodysson’s and Cronenberg’s films. The three mix several cinematic genres—noir, the detective film, the psychological thriller, and melodrama—and offer a highly stylized composition that departs from the sociological neorealistic approach and from a mere exposition of discrimination and injustice (Nathan 2010: 267). Villaverde’s film also departs from the naturalistic approach and employs a sophisticated and mannerist style through symbolic and distanced camera work and editing that contrast vividly with the tragic reality depicted and are consistent with the narrative intention of showing the character’s trance and progressive loss of self. Meanwhile, from a personal and feminist perspective, Chakarova introduces the viewers firsthand to the world of underground criminal networks. More than the other four films, her documentary sheds light on the socioeconomic causes that lead so many Eastern women to look for work abroad and end up in the hands of traffickers. Through its detailed and sober examination of causes, consequences, and modes of operation, Chakarova’s documentary successfully demystifies sex trafficking, shying away from sensationalist accounts that portray these women as mere victims, oversexualizing and objectifying them. In contrast to the pessimistic, albeit realistic, outcomes found in films by Moodysson, Cronenberg, and Villaverde, Tornatore and Chakarova choose to tell their stories from the survivors’ perspectives as these survivors try to come to terms with the past and their participation in it and regain their dignity from their liberated present. Regardless of the myriad generic, narrative, and stylistic approaches that these filmmakers use to convey their characters’ predicaments, their films contribute to solving the knowledge crisis that exists in regard to the sex trade and generate awareness about the causes and consequences for women caught up in it. Lilya 4-Ever: Europe Is No Paradise Upon the release of Lilya 4-Ever, Moodysson declared that he wanted to “call attention to a specific social issue afflicting Eastern Europe” (Frazer 2003) and that his film is “a statement about human dignity, a quality that is constantly being eroded and corrupted in the world today by forces like political systems and a materialistic culture that allows anything and everything to be bought or sold” (Torneo 2003).2 Lilya, the sixteen-year-old protagonist of Moodysson’s film, lives with her mother in a wretched housing project in an unidentified Russian town. She is left behind in Russia when her mother decides to migrate to the United States with her boyfriend. Abandoned by her mother, mistreated by her aunt, and rejected by friends and neighbors, she finds her only solace in her friendship with eleven-year-old Volodya, another abandoned child. Her situation grows worse every day, and once her mother legally renounces her maternity, she ventures briefly into local prostitution, only to be saved by a “decent” boyfriend, Andrei, who claims to live and work in Sweden. He seduces her and soon lures her into migrating with him to Sweden, where he promises her work and 99

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housing. She is given a false passport and a plane ticket, and immediately after landing in Sweden, she is taken to and locked in an apartment and turned into a sex slave. Lilya is able to escape from her captors but commits suicide in the end, mirroring Volodya’s earlier suicide, which he commits after Lilya departs from Russia and leaves him behind. Lilya 4-Ever calls attention to the universality of destitution and of children’s vulnerability in Western capitalist countries where everything has become a commodity by maintaining the anonymity of the two locations in Russia and Sweden and by creating a visual parallel between them in terms of the impersonality of their buildings, the bareness of their surroundings, the bleakness of their skies, and the similar appearances of the highway and bridge from which the two children contemplate suicide. By emphasizing similarities, the film minimizes the differences between East and West and challenges the glorification and mystification of immigration to America and Europe and the prosperity it promises. At the same time, the film addresses the specific sociopolitical situation of post-Soviet Russia. Moodysson decided to shoot the film in Russian and with Russian actors, allowing them to improvise their dialogues, following his instructions in translation, in order to privilege the voice of his characters, despite the fact that he does not speak Russian and that the crew spoke neither Swedish nor English. An emblematic scene of teen bonding between Lilya and Volodya takes place at a former Army base, now in ruins, where they tell each other about parental abuse and absence in their lives. In this worn-out building, they find a speech written by Leonidas Breznev and sit by a mural of Lenin as they sniff glue, which symbolizes their irreverence toward the Soviet revolution and the worsening of social conditions after the fall of the Soviet system. Although the film was nominated for an Oscar and was well received, it was criticized as being “unbearably bleak.” For example, in an interview with Moodysson, Erin Torneo describes the film as a “bleak portrait of Russia’s housing projects under its new capitalist façade” that is “filled with relentless inhumanity” (Torneo 2003). In another review, Frazer describes the film as “discouraging,” “deliberately hopeless,” “cruel,” and “too bleak to bear” (2003). Indeed, elements such as the camera work, lighting, and soundtrack highlight the images and sounds of desolation, poverty, and hopelessness. The handheld camera conveys movement and instability but also intimacy with the characters through a documentary style. The cyclical configuration of the film’s plot, based on the coincidence of the two suicide scenes, also denotes the repetitious and inescapable nature of the characters’ situations. The plot repeatedly offers an escape to Lilya, only to crush both her expectations and the spectators’: first, she leaves Russia only to find herself involved in the sex trade; then, she escapes from captivity, which seems to offer some hope of a better life, but she commits suicide; at the very end, she is taken to the hospital and seems to have a chance of surviving, but then she dies. Other actions and filmic devices provide a counterweight to the bleak imagery and allow spectators some relief from the endless chain of abuse Lilya endures. Most importantly, these actions and devices facilitate the development of the character in terms of innocence and rebelliousness, childishness and mature agency. Moodysson juxtaposes Lilya’s childish 100

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naiveté with the sexual maturity that she fakes as a prostitute in Russia and that has been forced out of her as a sex slave in Sweden. As a respite from the film’s overall harshness, Moodysson not only provides numerous childish, playful, and tender scenes of affection and love between Lilya and Volodya but also avoids overexploiting Lilya’s body in sex scenes with clients, which are typically restrained and shot from her point of view. The crude repetition of short sex scenes with different men in different places, usually shot close-up in order to emphasize the men’s distorted faces, very effectively illustrates the mechanical nature of the sex trade without recurring to sentimentality and exploitation: they show that Lilya has become a commodity as her body is made into a site of oppression and an object of transaction purchased by anonymous and undifferentiated patrons who do not ask questions. The film differs most strikingly from the feminine narratives of female bonding and solidarity analyzed in the previous chapter in its negative treatment of all the female characters—including family members, neighbors, and friends—that surround Lilya in Russia. The script falls into the “bad mother” category by depicting a mother who not only abandons her child but also renounces her parenthood, handing her child over to social services. One of the few instances in which Moodysson alters the film’s prevalent documentary aesthetic to enhance sentimentality occurs during the mother-daughter farewell sequence, which is shot in slow motion and is accompanied by classical music to underscore Lilya’s despair and her mother’s insensitivity. The aunt figure, initially assigned by the mother to be Lilya’s caretaker, turns out to be worse than the mother. She kicks Lilya out of her flat to move in herself, she does not help her economically, and she suggests that Lilya follow her mother’s path in prostitution to avoid starvation. Lilya’s female neighbor, portrayed as a witch, clad in black and framed mostly in dark corners inside the rundown building, maliciously reminds Lilya of her mother’s neglect and absence of epistolary contact. In one particularly cruel scene, she steps over Volodya’s body at the entrance of the building as he lies dead from an overdose of pills. This representation of insensitive and inhuman female figures does not challenge plausibility: mothers abandon, sell, and kill their children every day in the real world as well as in fiction. What remains problematic is the callous blaming of both biological and surrogate mothers for Lilya’s decision to migrate and its subsequently tragic outcome. The only potential redemption the mother gets occurs through Lilya’s desertion of Volodya, her only friend, in a scene reminiscent of her own abandonment by her mother, which is also shot in slow motion. Although this mirroring might be interpreted as a plot device to link the mother and daughter’s survival strategies—Lilya tries without success to convince her “boyfriend” to also help Volodya migrate to Sweden, just as her mother may have been unable to convince her boyfriend to take Lilya with them to the United States—this redemptive interpretation also proves problematic in light of an earlier bedroom scene between Lylia’s mother and her boyfriend, in which she reaffirms their decision to leave Lilya behind, saying, “Its only you and me, no one else.” The film’s demonization of female figures extends to Lilya’s friend Natasha, who lures Lilya into joining her in local prostitution, incriminates her in front of her father when he finds the money she made, and circulates the rumor about 101

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Figure 3.1:  Lilya 4 Ever by Lukas Moodysson (© 2004 Panorama Entertainment) Angels on the roof.

her involvement in prostitution. Her friend’s betrayal causes her to be ostracized, bullied, and ultimately gang-raped by other adolescents in the community. Lilya’s determination to improve her lot and develop agency is consistently trampled. Solidarity is created not along gender lines but along the lines of age, as the two younger protagonists support and protect each other in order to survive. Throughout the film, Lilya plays the role of surrogate mother to Volodya, who in turn warns Lilya about her “boyfriend,” foresees the fate lying ahead for her in Sweden, and becomes her guardian angel, appearing in her dreams and helping her to cope with her entrapment after his death. The fantastic, magical-realist, conversion of the children into angels with large white wings is the only happy outcome that the film offers. The last scene of the film seems to imply that the only solace from the characters’ misery is to be found in the religious belief of a heaven, “where kids laugh and play rooftop basketball all day” (Frazer 2003). Lilya’s descent into hell, caused by other female characters, seems to be followed by divine redemption. At first, this miraculous conversion seems disturbing within a social text, as it comes close to preaching resignation and offering only the consolation of inheriting a richer and happier life in heaven. However, there is another way of interpreting the religious connotation promoted by the film’s ending by considering the characters’ earlier association of paradise with America and Sweden, which, compared to Russia, seem to them like heaven. In reality, the American and Swedish paradises turn out to be hell for Lilya, in the same way that a fantastic heaven does not provide a real exit from this earth’s problems. When Volodya appears near the end of the film and tries to prevent Lilya’s suicide, he warns her that “this life is the only life we have,” putting into question the redemptive nature of heaven; because the real Volodya is dead at this point, his words should be understood as Lilya’s own unconscious strategy, based on her religious belief, to escape from her grim reality. The film’s closure consists of a sequence of flashback scenes in which Lilya’s life is rewound and repaired with the addition 102

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of positive resolutions to several of her life’s actions and decisions. Specifically, she listens to Volodya’s warnings and decides not to go to Sweden, avoiding being trafficked; she responds to her neighbor’s heartlessness with kindness; and she lives happily with Volodya. The film blames female figures for Lilya’s downfall, and consistently, in the idealized revision of her life that she imagines just before dying, there is no second opportunity for reunion with the female friend or the (un)motherly characters who harmed and abandoned her. If the negative treatment of female characters could be perceived as far-fetched, adding to the melodramatic component of the film, one only has to review the UN reports, as well as Chakarova’s documentary, to verify that women are very often deceived into trafficking by female family members, neighbors, and acquaintances. Eastern Promises: The Russian Diaspora’s Involvement in Europe’s Sex Trade Cronenberg, an independent filmmaker who shoots predominantly in Canada and whose films are financed by independent production companies, locates Eastern Promises in London to better depict the European sex trade, but he still follows the conventions of the horror genre that made his reputation at the beginning of his long career several decades ago.3 Cronenberg’s film, like Moodysson’s, can also be considered a reflection on the indignity and ethical implications of turning women migrants into commodities to be bought and sold in capitalist markets, but it specifically fictionalizes the legitimization of criminal organizations in post-Soviet Russia and the role that violence and crime have played in the development of Russian capitalism. As the film opens, a pregnant Russian teenager named Tatiana gives birth to a baby girl and dies in labor in a London hospital. The midwife, Anna, takes it upon herself to find the deceased girl’s family in Russia in order to keep the newborn child out of foster care. With information Anna finds in Tatiana’s diary, Anna becomes associated with and soon threatened by London’s Russian mafia, led by restaurant owner Semyon, when it becomes clear that the diary contains incriminating evidence about Semyon and his son Kirill. After Semyon obtains the diary, he orders his son to find and kill the baby, the only remaining evidence of his crimes. The mobster’s driver and ambiguous insider character, Nikolai, helps Anna achieve her goal of saving baby Cristina. In order to do that he manages to have Semyon arrested on charges based on the evidence provided in Tatiana’s diary and persuades Kirill to abandon the barbarous idea of killing the baby. Nikolai’s reasons for doing this, however, remain ambiguous at the end of the film. He seems to be patiently waiting either to inherit the throne from weak Kirill (a closeted gay man who is in love with him) or to disclose the whole operation to Scotland Yard (for which he has been working undercover) and have the traffickers finally convicted for their crimes. Eastern Promises shies away from visual instances of exploitation and over-victimization by confining details of the enslaved women’s sordid lives to the narration of Tatiana’s diary and by deferring moral responsibility to members of the Russian diaspora. Still, Cronenberg shoots a long, explicitly sexual sequence inside the apartment where these underage women 103

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are imprisoned, presumably to visually depict the conditions they have to endure and to give us a sample of the sexual abuse that their captors (rather than patrons) inflict upon them. The sequence mimics a previous scene recounted in Tatiana’s diary in which Kirill attempts to rape her and is unable to; subsequently, his father Semyon takes over, raping her and leaving her pregnant. In the filmed sequence, Kirill forces Nikolai to choose one of the women and rape her in front of him to prove that he is not gay. This sequence is part of the gay subtext of the film—Kirill experiences a closeted desire for Nikolai, and Semyon blames the “queer disease” on the London temperate climate, which apparently does not build character in the way that the cold climate of the old country did.4 Nikolai’s rape of the girl does not provide the woman’s point of view but instead is framed as an exhibition for the scrutiny of the male voyeur, which might be equated to the visual enjoyment of the male spectator. And yet, the gayness of the subject of the gaze (Kirill) problematizes the equation and complicates the facile objectification of the woman. Nikolai, the real object of the gaze, is perceived as another victim who is redeemed after the act by paying the girl for the “service” (reducing the connotation of rape) and, above all, by learning her name and providing her with a telephone number that she can call for help. Later in the film, we learn that his intervention saved the girl. The script’s characterization of Anna and Nikolai as mediators between the Mob and the victim’s families, as well as between perpetrators and victims, mobsters and law officers, is consistent with the general tendency within immigration cinema to critically examine the contradictions between reductive official immigration discourses and laws and immigrants’ concrete experiences of urban life as well as Europe’s individual and institutional connivance with human rights abuses. In this vein, the protagonist of Eastern Promises is not so much the fourteen-year-old teenager Tatiana, trafficked to London from Russia, but rather Anna, the midwife who brings Tatiana’s newborn baby girl to life and who is a British citizen and the daughter of a Russian immigrant father. By making Anna the moral character and mediator between the Russian mafia and the invisible and deceased Other, the script proposes that the awareness and direct involvement of European citizens (and institutions) are essential factors for positive change. The film transfers the moral responsibility to Russians themselves—Anna, a second-generation Russian woman (and her family) living in London and the Russian ex-convict-turned-Scotland-Yard-undercover-agent Nikolai— asking for their involvement and allowing them a moral authority entrenched in both their new national and native or ancestral cultural identities. In doing so, the film minimizes the narrative of the immigrant’s journey and prioritizes the modus operandi of a fictional Russian mob, called “Vos V Zakone” (“Thieves by the Code”). Nonetheless, Tatiana’s account of her journey, from the moment she left Russia following false promises to her slavery and death in a London hospital, is saved from oblivion by her diary, which is narrated in voice-over whenever other characters read portions of it onscreen. Through the diary, her character persists as a disembodied voice and the ghost of the original trauma. This aural device also calls attention to the acts of writing, translating, and reading. Tatiana’s point of view is thus preserved and provides the details of the sex 104

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slaves’ ordeals: their families’ miserable economic conditions in Russia; the false promise of work as singers and dancers at a London restaurant owned by Russians; the daily injection of heroin to ensure the women’s dependency on their enslavers; the abuse and rape imposed by both captors and patrons; the interruption of pregnancies with pills that in some cases cause the women’s death. The diary, written in Russian, functions as a narrative flashback of Tatiana’s experiences that is useless without translation to English. It is thus the document that epitomizes the vulnerability and isolation felt by immigrants who do not master the language of the adopted country, a fact that, when added to their undocumented status, prevents them from asking for help or trusting the authorities. La sconosciuta: Fighting the Ghost of the Past Tornatore, best known for his nostalgic Cinema Paradiso (1988), radically changes tone and visual style in La sconosciuta to touch upon, albeit tangentially, the subject of sex trafficking. Unlike the other films analyzed here, and consistent with the mystery conventions that Tornatore uses to depict the subject, Tornatore leaves unknown the social background and personal circumstances that led to his protagonist’s fate as a sex slave. Irena, the protagonist, is a Ukranian woman who was trafficked and enslaved for sex in Italy and who succeeded in escaping her captors. She believes she has found the daughter she was forced to conceive and give away to be sold illegally four years before, who lives now with her adopted Italian parents, the Adachers, who are goldsmiths in Trieste. Irena rents an apartment across the street from the Adachers, where she can spy on their moves, and she manages to land a job as the family’s maid after gaining the trust of the building’s doorman and manager and befriending the Adachers’ old maid, whom she causes to fall down the building’s staircase, after which the maid becomes paraplegic. Once she becomes part of the Adacher’s household, Irena manages to open the family’s safe and find Tea’s adoption documents that reassure her that she has found her lost child. Faithful to the film’s title, the protagonist’s intentions are unknown to both characters and viewers for the first half of the film. But we are soon exposed to her past as a prostitute and sex slave through a series of subjective flashbacks that interject abruptly and consistently from within the present. The past haunts Irena, not only in her recollections, but also in the present when Muffa, her former pimp, finds her whereabouts and seeks revenge, resorting to violence and threatening to kill her unless she returns the money she stole from him when she escaped. Mystery and suspense guide the spectator though Irena’s life, and the film’s thriller/ horror quality is achieved precisely through the fragmented structure that juxtaposes, in chronological order and triggered by present situations, the violent scenes of torture, bondage, and sexual abuse that determined her former life as a sex slave. Above all, the film centers on Irena’s resolution to undo the past, repossess her body, and regain her agency in the present. In the same way that past and present alternate, producing disquiet, the film’s point of view fluctuates from that of Irena as the subject of her actions and recollections and of 105

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the gaze over the Adachers and Tea in the present, and that of Irena as the object of men’s voyeuristic gaze and sexual exploitation in the past. Nathan has argued in his study of the film that this alternation between the revealed past and the unknown nature of Irena’s intentions in the present and between subjective and objectifying viewpoints creates an ambivalence in the viewer, who is led “in opposing directions of allegiance and repugnance” and is both moved by the dehumanization and suffering of Irena’s body and as an unwilling participant in the process (Nathan 2010: 275). According to Nathan, this ambivalence that captures the disquiet of being both the self and the Other at the same time, which includes being simultaneously immigrant/citizen, sexual victim/voyeur, mother/assassin, and judge/ criminal, symbolizes the hybridity of the migrant condition in Italy (2010: 277–278). Irena’s agency and willpower also permeate the narrative of the past. Despite her captive condition, she had a lover with whom she had a fulfilling romantic relationship and who provided her with the only solace and hope in her life and who fathered her last and lost child—and for which he became another of Muffa’s victims. His death led Irena to attack her captor with a pair of scissors and escape with all his money. Following the conventions of the horror/slasher film and the Manichean melodramatic method, a dehumanized and monstrous Muffa is opposed to the angelic and handsome lover in a characterization that differs greatly from the nuanced and ambivalent representation of Irena. As Nathan states, the flashbacks from Irena’s time with her lover are the only ones “bathed in a wholesome golden light,” presenting visual opportunities for the character’s “repossession of her body and its associated memories of maternal and sexual pleasures” (2010: 274). Tornatore resists objectifying and victimizing Irena visually. With the exception of the opening scenes, where half-naked women wearing masks (one of whom is a younger Irena) model and are scrutinized by a hidden voyeur, the startling jump cuts that offer glimpses of her violent and alienating past are filmed in a fast-paced, fragmented, and stylized way to avoid a slow exposition of her exploited and tortured body. These scenes take place in undisclosed locations and are ambiguous in their composition; they mainly serve the purpose of creating a feeling of terror in the viewer as the character relives and fears them, rather than reveling in the oppressive non-exit situations she experienced. Ennio Morricone’s soundtrack, composed before the script was finished, reinforces both the suspenseful tension belonging to the noir convention and a melodramatic sentimentality. The soundtrack is of vital importance to the creation of an atmosphere of nostalgia for the few good moments Irena experienced in the past as well as to the alleviation of the crudeness of the violence imposed upon her.5 Tornatore’s ambivalent characterization of Irena—who does not stop at anything to achieve her goal of getting close to and then protecting Tea—as both victim and perpetrator departs from Moodysson’s and Cronenberg’s grim narratives of female powerlessness, wherein their protagonists’ unsuccessful attempts to free themselves from sexual slavery ultimately lead to their deaths, though not before they are similarly rushed to the hospital’s emergency room, “too late” to be saved, thus reinforcing the melodrama. Unlike Moodysson and Cronenberg, Tornatore “saves” his protagonist in the end. She goes to prison for her 106

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implication in the deaths of Valeria Adacher (who is murdered by Muffa) and Muffa (whom Irena kills in self-defense), but only after she cooperates with the investigation and provides invaluable information for the prosecution of the trafficking (of sex slaves and babies) network. In the closing scene, Irena is rewarded with the loyalty of a grown-up Tea, who turned out not to be her daughter after all but is still waiting for her at the prison entrance the day of her release. Transe: Broken Identity Teresa Villaverde is one of the leading filmmakers of the young generation of Portuguese cinema. Her first film Os mutantes/The Mutants (1998) examined the reality of three street children abandoned by the Portuguese juvenile system who, left on their own, drift into petty crime and are exploited by sexual predators. Filmed with a non-professional cast, the film was very controversial in Portugal, inspiring a national debate over reform of the nation’s juvenile system. The screening of the film in the category “Un certain regard” at the Cannes Film Festival brought her work international recognition. In Transe, her fifth film coproduced by Portugal, Italy, France, and Russia, Villaverde continues the trajectory of documenting social realities without compromising the aesthetic quality of her film. In it, Sonia, a twenty-year-old Russian woman living in St. Petersburg, leaves her boyfriend and small son to travel to Germany, where she hopes to find work and improve her economic condition. After a long trip by train, bus, and boat, she lands a job as a cleaner at a German car dealership dealing in stolen parts, where she is kidnapped by a Russian coworker under the pretext that the shop is being raided and sold to a low-class brothel in Italy where she is forced to be a sex slave. Her lack of cooperation provokes numerous instances of violence from her captors in an attempt to break her down. She is sold to a rich man who wants her for his mentally challenged son, who lets her escape. Captured once again, she ends up as a sex slave in a Portuguese brothel. Her trajectory follows the geography of the coproducing countries, illustrating in the process the interregional nature of trafficking flows. The film ends with a deranged and broken Sonia trying to determine her location by repeatedly asking a client if she has seen him before. When he asks her how she ended up there and what her name is, she replies that she does not know and refuses to reveal her name. Her unsaid name is the only piece of her identity that remains untouched at the end of the film. Transe follows Sonia’s descent into hell and her progressive degradation and final loss of self, which are portrayed in both realistic and symbolic terms. After her brief attempt to escape from her captor, she finds refuge in the woods. As dawn breaks, a few tall trees begin to groan and fall, possibly cut down for timber. Sonia’s intense gaze draws a parallel between the trees’ death and the audience’s reading of her fate (Bitencourt 2012a). She is recaptured and taken to a house where she is locked in the bathroom without her clothes for hours and then raped by her Russian captor. This early forced 107

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state of undress foreshadows her identity’s total dispossession in the rest of the film. Like Moodysson, Villaverde defies the solidarity pattern often portrayed (and analyzed in the previous chapter) by women filmmakers insofar as she consistently exposes, as Ela Bitencourt writes, “situations in which social contact and human solidarity and kindness are irreparably broken” and in which “family ties are precarious and kindness and love are splinters that appear sporadically in a vast bleak landscape” (2012a). Villaverde’s portrayal of Sonia’s mother and other female relatives previous to her departure recall the female relatives in Lylia 4-Ever. A somber cinematography of faded and green shades highlights the decayed spaces and locations Sonia inhabits both in Russia before she leaves and at the Italian brothel where she is forced to work. Her loss of self is conveyed through static shots and a slow rhythm that mimic the character’s immobility and extra long takes of doors and corridors that indicate liminality as well as transit and stagnation. Bitencourt (2012b) argues in her analysis of the film that the long takes mirror Sonia’s disintegrating sense of time and, I argue, her sense of space. In an interview with Bitencourt, Villaverde says that she was interested in portraying “the psychological space a woman must find, or create, in order to survive extreme sexual abuse” (Bitencourt 2012a). Therefore, she privileges the character’s internal life and the ways the character copes with degradation. The film is an impressionistic depiction of the trance that takes place inside Sonia’s mind, and it incorporates the subconscious through a surreal imagery that reproduces Sonia’s state of mind. Sonia’s resistance is articulated through passive resistance, silence, and immobility, unlike the resistance of Daïga, the Lithuanian character of J’ai pas sommeil, who, like a postmodern female flâneur, is empowered through silence and mobility, and unlike the resistance of Irena, who maintains a mysterious and active control of her present circumstances in La sconosciuta. Silence responds to the rules of plausibility: the language barrier between Sonia, her captors, and her clients reduces her to silence and stresses her isolation (Bitencourt 2012b). Moreover, her silence reflects willpower, rather than just inability to communicate. She fights exploitation with concrete acts of resistance and rebellious passivity. In a number of scenes, she is shown sitting still in chairs with her gaze fixed on an unknown point as she awaits the client’s solicitation in the main living room. In one long, still medium-shot scene, she sits dressed and made-up while a Russian sentimental song is played back and psychedelic circling white clouds are projected on the walls and over her own hieratic figure. Suddenly she gets up, and the chair remains empty for more than twenty seconds, after which she returns with her red lipstick smeared, symbolizing her refusal to assume her forced identity as a prostitute. She boycotts the commercial transaction, rejecting interaction with clients who ask her questions by refusing to answer them or answering in Russian. She protests her incarceration, refusing to eat or drink. Forced to drink, she smashes the glass against the walls, after which she is injected with drugs to appease her and force her to comply. Her passive and private acts of revolt are countered in a scene in which a coworker breaks the silence and the imposed anonymity by frantically prancing and lip-synching to the sound 108

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Figure 3.2:  Transe/Trance by Teresa Villaverde (© 2006 Gémini Films, Madragoa Filmes, Revolver Film) Sonia’s passive resistance.

of an Italian popular song in front of the other sex workers in the common room where they await their clients. This scene is filmed in a long take that lasts for the entire song and in which the woman is observed with indifference by her coworkers until the female guardian interrupts her, forcing her out of the room. As Bitencourt observes in her interpretation of the scene, “[A] distinction is drawn between the woman’s pleasure, which is suppressed, and the sex industry that commodifies and subjugates it to the men’s needs” (2012b). The more Sonia resists her captivity, the fiercer is the physical humiliation and degradation her captors inflict upon her. Like Lylia in Moodysson’s film, her attempts to escape and her active and passive rebellion are constantly trampled in order to emphasize the futility of her rebellion. She manages to escape twice, only to be recaptured and punished with rape in both instances. After she is set free by the rich Italian’s mentally challenged son, she is forced into an act of bestiality with a dog. A naked and sweaty Sonia fights and screams while various men hold her still and, we assume, a big, panting dog penetrates her. This shocking scene, which adds to the list of indignities imposed upon her or any other character in any other film dealing with the subject, remains ambiguous, as it is shot in extreme close-ups and with a moving handheld camera, thus avoiding a graphic depiction of the rape. The viewer’s shock is countered by Sonia’s impassive reaction after the act ends. However, bestiality marks the last step in her descent to hell and leads to Sonia’s final defeat. Villaverde, like Moodysson, received criticism for her distanced directorial approach, her elliptical shooting style, and her lack of emotion, and critics questioned the appropriateness of the film’s “cold artiness” to portray such painful subject matter (Young 2006). Yet these stylistic elements are arguably used to avoid sentimentality and spectacularization, rather than to simply “poeticize pain” (Young 2006). Poetic and lyric interludes—created through dreamed or imagined escapes from reality—are juxtaposed with brutal instances of sexual exploitation, which, like in the bestiality scene, are 109

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nonetheless filmed with a handheld camera and in extreme yet fragmented close-ups that block a voyeuristic exploitation of Sonia’s tortured body. Most sex scenes take place under covers or with a fully dressed Sonia, and in various instances the commercial transaction between her and clients is left in ellipsis or is not consummated due to her refusal to cooperate. Villaverde’s juxtaposition of past and present is similar to Tornatore’s in La Sconosciuta, in that actual and imagined sequences are intended to provide respite to both character and viewers from the gruesome and horrific situations the character experiences. In Transe, like in Tornatore’s film, the narrative flow is interrupted by flashbacks from the past in Russia (Sonia’s last conversations with her boyfriend and nostalgic memories of the Russian snowy landscape) and by dreamed or imagined sequences that function as symbols of her resistance, paralysis, and hopelessness and that provide a respite or “lyric interludes” from the unbearable reality. Her transitions through different locations are determined by the landscape. She absorbs what is around her, despite the fact that she, along with the viewer, lacks geographical and spatial references. A sequence with a child in a tunnel carrying a torch, which indirectly refers to the child she left behind, followed by a conversation with a soldier opens the film. Child and soldier reappear in the last sequences, providing the film with a cyclical structure. Toward the end, past recollections, dreams, and imaginings collude and are undistinguishable, signaling the character’s desertion and mental derangement. In the last scene, after the last conversation with the Portuguese client and her vision of the Russian soldier, Sonia lies still in her bed. The scene, a high-angle shot, is, according to Bitencourt, a “dark still life” where Sonia’s paleness contrasts with the room’s grimness, recalling “martyred saints in religious paintings” (2012b). The religious iconography that Bitencourt notes is related to Sonia’s final status as a total victim and martyr, despite her attempts to rebel. Although her agony does not end with death, as happens in the other films, and her mental evasions have provided her with some solace, her self has been totally broken. The film provides the character with no hope or redemption. The only agency Villaverde offers her character is her passive rebellion and a delusional mindset. In Sonia’s last imagined conversation with the soldier, who rescues her from the dark tunnel where she is holed up and offers her water to appease her thirst, he tells her, “Don’t sleep, resist, you are as much of a soldier as I am.” The Price of Sex: How the Sex Trade Works The documentary format of Chakarova’s film facilitates the most detailed contextualization among these films of the disadvantaged economic situation endured by Eastern European countries and states of the former Soviet Union. Chakarova dedicated a decade to her subject: she spent seven years researching and reporting on the sex trade and another three producing and distributing the film. The project started as a photo-reportage in 2003, and it was released as a 73-minute documentary in 2011. It was produced in association with the 110

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Center for Investigative Reporting and distributed by Women Make Movies.6 It was broadcast in the United States (in its shortened version) in the investigative documentary series Frontline (PBS) and 60 Minutes (CBS) and received an Emmy nomination, the Magnum photo agency’s Inge Morath Award, the 2011 Daniel Pearl Award for Outstanding International Investigative Reporting in Kiev, Ukraine, and the 2011 Nestor Almendros Award for Courage in Filmmaking at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival. Since the film was released in 2011 it has been screened at film festivals, colleges, conferences, embassies, forums organized by human rights organizations, and theaters worldwide. The US Department of State uses the film as a training tool in embassies throughout the world. Chakarova was born and raised in a small village in Bulgaria before she and her mother migrated to the United States in 1990 when she was thirteen years old. Already a successful photojournalist, Chakarova embarked on the project of this film to document the women of her generation who were “forgotten and deceived” after the collapse of Communism and to find answers to her own questions: “[W]hy were so many Eastern European women deceived into sex trafficking; where are the women who survived; why so silent?” Chakarova found that the only way to break the silence and answer these questions was to put herself “in the mouth of the wolf,” that is, to return to the region of her birth to trace and involve herself in the dangerous world of the global sex trade, to reach and earn the trust of victims, traffickers, and clients, and to provide a space for the survivors to talk about their experiences, analyze their survival strategies, and share their insights and perception about their past and present circumstances. She photographed and interviewed dozens of women; however, in the film she focuses on the experiences of five women who allowed her to film them undisguised: Vika, a woman from Moldova who was deceived with the promise of a $500 a month job as a waitress in Dubai when she was nineteen; Jenea and Aurica, both from poor peasant families in Moldova, who were trafficked to Turkey when they were eighteen; Olesea from Transnistria, a poor, independent state at the border between Moldova and Ukraine; and Irina from Bulgaria, who were both trafficked to Greece. The shared and tragic commonality between these women is that their active pursuit of mobility and a better life for themselves using legal means, which is a key human right, turned out to be their downfall. Chakarova’s film is exceptional insofar as it provides a thorough exposition of the root causes and factors that have created a demand for Eastern European women both in Europe and the Middle East. The victims describe their living conditions before they were duped and after they were liberated as well as the effect their dislocation and relocation has had in their families and communities. To contextualize the victims’ testimonial perspective, large segments of the documentary focus on the trafficking networks’ intricate, elusive, and unpunished operation modes, as well as on the work of anti-trafficking activists and governmental and nongovernmental agencies struggling to cope with the problem. From the perspective of someone who spent part of her life under a Communist rule “that made citizens equally poor but protected and safe,” Chakarova documents the scarcity of resources, unemployment, and lack of government support that has affected the poorest countries in Eastern Europe (namely, Moldova and Transnistria) since the collapse of the Soviet bloc, 111

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countries in which rural areas are depopulating as young people move to the cities and abroad. Even Chakarova’s own village, Boboshevo, in the more prosperous Bulgaria, which became part of the EU in 2007, has experienced the same fate, becoming a ghost town. The situation of depopulation creates high levels of vulnerability for the women who remain in these rural areas and who under Communism worked the same hours and earned the same salaries as men. After 1989, the free market ended Communist dream of gender equality. Desperation and uncertainty about the future makes young women an easy target for traffickers, as their impoverished countries have turned into the biggest exporters of women in Eastern Europe. Chakarova devotes large portions of her investigation to Turkey’s red light district, Askeray, which has become the primary destination for women trafficked from the former Soviet bloc due to its geographical proximity and the fact that prostitution is legal there. Chakarova’s conclusions match the 2012 UNODC report that states that although most victims tend to be trafficked within their region of origin, interregional trafficking is very prominent in the Middle East subregion, where about 70 percent of detected victims are nationals from other regions (2012: 46). Middle Eastern countries reported more cases of trafficking for sexual exploitation than other forms of exploitation (UNODC 2012: 77). In the documentary a Turkish friend helps the filmmaker infiltrate the underground world of prostitution in Askeray. With his help she manages to get inside one of the clubs undercover as a prostitute and film with a camera hidden under her clothes. To the sex workers inside, “ordinary girls who could have been neighbors or friends,” and who have lost their identities as anything other than the victims and protagonists of a business they are forced to contribute to, she is invisible. In her last of many trips to Turkey, Chakarova finally manages to get an interview with a hotel owner in Askeray who, on camera, denies that women are forced into prostitution and claims that they are there “out of their own choice and because they love Istanbul.” She also interviews two clients who are Turkish policemen who brag about the number of Natashas they have paid for. They also admit through graphic explanation and without remorse that they know about sex trafficking and do nothing about it and that they themselves use the sex workers’ services (“we need them”), preferring Eastern European women for their beauty and expertise. By daring to infiltrate the sex trade world and risking her own safety, Chakarova contributes to her film’s credibility, as she can confirm for herself what has been documented in investigative reports: security guards and pimps control the red light district where sex transactions take place openly and with police complicity and total impunity. This status quo is similar in Dubai, which one of the interviewees describes as “a globalized place with minimal regulation.” The scarcity of women (three men to one woman) and the combination of extreme affluence and rigid Islamic moral codes regarding sexuality make Dubai “the playground of the Middle East,” where prostitution is officially illegal but flourishes on display for everyone to see and is not hidden in red light districts. Chakarova has expressed in interviews that some of the motivations behind her project were to defy the “sensationalism,” “stigma,” and “silence” surrounding the violence 112

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committed against women, to oppose the women’s status as that of mere “statistics” and “victims,” and to change “the mentality of demand.”7 To that end, the film avoids overvictimizing the characters who, although still poor, physically and psychologically broken by the experience, and stigmatized and socially marginalized as a result of their past, are now alive and free to tell their stories. Chakarova’s determination to avoid portraying her characters’ identities exclusively as that of victims is evidenced in the content of the oral testimonies that she obtained little by little over the course of years and also in the film’s fragmentary and cyclical structure. Interviews with each of the women are divided into short segments, and contextual information, in the form of photographic or film footage or interviews with officials and activists, is offered to sustain their testimonies. This format helps viewers contextualize and understand the victims’ particular circumstances and also shows the similarities in traffickers’ operation patterns, regardless of the region to which the women were trafficked. The film begins and ends with Vika’s interview. The most outspoken of all the women, Vika has managed to reconstruct her life and support herself with her work as a seamstress. She begins and ends her interview by admitting her responsibility and regretting her naiveté and the high price she had to pay for her “ambition” (for a $500 a month job): “[O]ne wrong move and you suffer all your life.” Her final words provide the film’s closure, and with it, a warning. Asked by the director “what she would say to women wanting to go abroad,” she advises women not to be deceived by improbable promises of easy earnings and a good life and encourages them instead to adjust their expectations to their reality and work for themselves. Vika’s is a cautionary tale that represents the documentary’s multiple objectives: to provide information not only to empathetic viewers and educate current or potential consumers of prostitution in the West, but also to offer advice and warning to vulnerable women by exposing the horrors the characters had to endure. In an interview with CNN (2012), Chakarova emphasizes her film’s cautionary message, explaining that in every interview she conducted, she asked women why they were deceived, since they knew the risks they incurred, only to hear the same answer consistently: “I knew but I didn’t think it would happen to me” (Official Web site of The Price of Sex). For these women, desperation and uncertainty outweighed the risks. The other interviewees’ fates reflect the reality of the majority of women who survive trafficking. Back in their poor and abandoned villages, they struggle to get by and support a child or other family members without resources, isolated and unprotected in their poor rural communities. Jenea, who jumped out of a window while captive, becoming partly paralyzed as a result, confesses that time has not healed her pain and that now as then she wishes she had never been born. Since Jenea was unable to continue working, her captors forced her sister Natalia to work as a prostitute for a month to repay her sister’s debt and as a condition to free her. Olesea, who lives with her six-year-old son and her mother, struggles to survive in a community where the women find themselves alone, stigmatized, and unprotected. Stigmatization in their rural backward communities prevents the women from talking about their experiences. When they do, that talking makes their recovery almost impossible, 113

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because regardless of the fact that their involvement in the trafficking was involuntary and that they are eager to lead normal lives, these women are always perceived as prostitutes. Their unwillingness to talk also fuels the traffickers’ impunity. Olesea and her mother were the only ones in their village to press charges. All the other girls in the area who went through the same experience refused to testify out of fear or after their families were bribed. Chakarova portrays women as agents of their own destinies, capable of assuming their responsibility in the process, without blaming the victims for their naiveté and through a thorough documentation of all the factors at play. Chakarova’s appeal to women to renounce the role of passive victims extends to her denunciation of women who become perpetrators in complicity with the male traffickers. Sex trafficking victims depend on the intervention of activists and creators who provide them with a vehicle to articulate and record their testimonies and mediate between them and the larger population. The documentary genre not only aims at generating social impact through the representation of real subjects who reveal and “act” their identities and circumstances in front of the cameras (Nichols 2001: 6). It also (re)constructs their characters’ identities in the process of filming and editing (Nichols 2001: 6), establishing a “tension between veracity and point of view” (Weinrichter 2004: 85). Contemporary documentary filmmakers incorporate self-reflexive and “performative” strategies that question the reality pact and its illusion of faithfulness and objectivity. They incorporate markers of their subjective interactions and affective identification with their subjects, emphasizing the emotional element and seeking the audience’s empathy.8 The mediation process is a key element to achieving “triangular communication” between creators, actors, and spectators (Nichols 2001: 61) and fostering the audience’s ethical commitment. Nowadays mediation is achieved through multimediality and intermediality—the co-relation and interaction of different media: photographic, videographic, cinematic, and digital—emphasizing mutual influence between them and allowing new dimensions of perception and experience (Kattenbelt 2008: 25). Chakarova’s initial intent and challenge was to document sex trafficking with objectivity and distance to fight the sensationalism typically used to report the issue. With time, she realized the impossibility of representing the subject without a close personal involvement. This approach is clearly declared in the narrative voiceover that guides viewers through her journey and is illustrated visually by intermediality and its exchange of mutual affects. At the very beginning of the film Chakarova includes home video footage of herself as a child while still living in a Bulgarian small village as a way to visually introduce her Eastern European background and her cultural, linguistic, and generational connection with her subjects. Immediately after, as Chakarova explains the origin and purpose of her project, we see her in her laboratory developing the photographs that will form the core of her film and the 2003 photo exhibition. The inclusion of past images of herself from her current perspective as a successful photojournalist and filmmaker reinforces the subjective element and dramatic impact of the film, as it evidences two drastically opposed outcomes for similar migratory initiatives. The parallel (or rather the disparity) is established for the viewers through 114

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Figure 3.3:  The Price of Sex by Mimi Chakarova (© 2011 Mimi Chakarova) Chakarova looking at stills.

Figure 3.4:  The Price of Sex by Mimi Chakarova (© 2011 Mimi Chakarova) Photo exhibition: “Sex Trafficking: How It Works”.

intermediality, as it becomes clear from the start that the women’s positions as director and subject (or even spectator) of the documentary could have easily been inverted. Chakarova has acknowledged in interviews that this divergent fate became one of the most important reasons why she embarked on this project, because she felt “driven by guilt and obligation” (CNN 2012). The feminist premise that the personal is political guides her intent. A slideshow of the still photographs that Chakarova took over the course of her investigation is interspersed throughout the film. The photographs show the environment that surrounds the women’s lives both in their countries of origin and destination: the poverty and abandonment of houses and villages, the squalor of the rooms and hotels where they are kept prisoners, the neon lights advertising sex parlors and clubs in red light districts, the windows and balconies from which they long for freedom or jump in the attempt to escape or end their lives, among other scenes. Interviews, video footage, and photography are juxtaposed and their content and meaning are explained by Chakarova’s voice-over, which also complements the women’s testimonies by providing additional information about their experiences. She devotes a specific section of the film to the opening at a San Francisco gallery of her 2003 photo exhibition, “Sex Trafficking: How it Works,” which consisted of the photographic (and some of the videographic) material included in the documentary. The correlation and dialogue between the multiple media discourses is established in this section of the film, creating a “transformational intermediality:” one medium refers to and dialogues with the other, allowing comments and references to the self-conception of both the represented and representing medium (Schröter 2011:  5). The viewers’ empathetic reactions to the photographic material exhibited on-screen replicate those expected from film’s spectators out-screen, and the interplay of media provides an effective and affective way to expose the global nature of the sex trade. The affective interplay becomes stronger when applied to the subject matter in question. The cameras Chakarova uses to photograph and video-record the women’s testimonies are similar to the ones used 115

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by traffickers to document the women’s gang rapes and sexual activities with pimps and clients and then to threaten the women with sending the images to their families, should they attempt to escape or refuse to cooperate. The medium of film, which played against Chakarova at first as she pursued these women’s trust, ultimately provided them with the visibility they needed to reclaim their dignity, fight social stigma, and break the cycle of silence and invisibility. The combination of intermediality and self-reflexivity in The Price of Sex facilitates the pursuit of knowledge and strengthens the film’s moral message. The ultimate goal of any social documentary is not only to increase the audience’s awareness but also to move the audience to advocate for the cause after viewing the film and to bring about concrete action. Chakarova ends her documentary by inviting the audience to “find out what to do to help” and “get involved” by visiting the film’s official Web site, where curious and engaged spectators can access complementary material about the making of the film and a variety of interviews with the director. The Web site includes three sections specifically aimed at the audience’s active involvement. “Get Involved” offers concrete information on how to donate to two human rights organizations featured in the film—La Strada International, which has eight member organizations operating in Belarus, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Macedonia, Moldova, the Netherlands, Poland, and Ukraine; and ENOW (European Network of Women)—which offer a variety of services that include shelter, support, and education to survivors and training to counselors. “Resources” provides a comprehensive list of hotlines, organizations, and agencies in Europe and the United States, and “News” provides links to recent publications and radio and TV programs on the topic. The impact of Chakarova’s outreach campaign is reflected in the thread of posts and replies offered in “Share Your Reaction.” This section invites viewers “to offer [their] reactions to the film and [their] solutions” in an attempt to create a constructive “global conversation.” Most people who have posted their thoughts in it not only thank Chakarova for opening their eyes but also express their desire to help with money, time, and shelter for victims in need. Their reactions prove that it is possible for a filmmaker to move audiences to act beyond the comfort zone of their movie theater seats or living rooms, not only through a compelling and informed depiction of the issue but also by actively engaging in outreach and distribution campaigns. As Chakarova stated in an interview with BBC World Today (2012), her documentary aspires to be an essential tool to fuel activism because it presents people with credible information and demands policy change and accountability. Conclusion These five films’ methods of raising their audiences awareness indirectly entail the exposure of a political double standard and a tragic irony: the EU as a whole and the individual sovereign states appease a popular panic about “migratory invasions”—which they have contributed to creating with the complicity of the media—by strengthening physical barriers with walls and high technology infrastructures and enforcing drastic and inhumane 116

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immigration control measures. These processes are in total opposition to a global market that promotes the porosity of national borders to facilitate the free flow of material and human commodities. This contradiction is even more flagrant in light of the global community’s indifference to the human component of the specific type of commercial transaction that is sex trafficking. Strict measures to control immigration and restrict borders conveniently bypass sex trafficking networks which perceive victims as commodities and which are run by men and for the benefit of male customers. The fundamental questions posed by Chakarova’s documentary, as well as by the fictional depictions of Moodysson, Cronenberg, Tornatore, and Villaverde, are, as Chakarova states, “How important are the lives of these women?” and “Why does punishment not equate the crimes committed against them?” (BBC World Today, 2012). References Alvarez, M. B. & Alessi , E. J., 2012, “Human Trafficking Is More Than Sex Trafficking and Prostitution: Implications for Social Work,” Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work 27(2), 142–152. BBC World Today, 2012, “The Price of Sex Interview,” (September 7), viewed December 8, 2013, from http://soundcloud.com/bardaune-1/bbc-world-today-the-price-of/s-HkQLC. Bittencourt, E., 2012a, “‘One Day, the Swan Sang This with its Wings’: An Interview with Teresa Villaverde,” Senses of Cinema 65, viewed December 8, 2013, from, http://sensesofcinema. com/2012/feature-articles/one-day-the-swan-sang-this-with-its-wings-an-interview-withteresa-villaverde/. Bittencourt, E., 2012b, “‘To Accept the Unacceptable’: Reflections on Three Films by Teresa Villaverde,” Senses of Cinema 65, viewed December 8, 2013, from http://sensesofcinema. com/2012/feature-articles/to-accept-the-unacceptable-reflections-on-three-films-by-teresavillaverde/. Brown, W., Iordanova, D. & Torchin, L., 2010, Moving People, Moving Images: Cinema and Trafficking in the New Europe, St. Andrews, UK, St. Andrews Film Studies. Chakarova, M., n.d., The Price of Sex Official Web Site, viewed December 8, 2013, http:// priceofsex.org/. Chapkis, W., 2003, “Trafficking, Migration, and the Law: Protecting Innocents, Punishing Immigrants,” Gender and Society 17(6), 923–937. CNN International, 2012, “Clandestine Film Exposes Sex Trade,” viewed December 8, 2013, from http://edition.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/showbiz/2012/03/29/cfp-the-price-of-sexchakarova-intv.cnn.html. Frazer, B., 2003, “Lilya 4 Ever (2002),” in Deep-Focus.com, viewed December 8, 2013, from http:// www.deep-focus.com/dfweblog/2003/05/lilya_4ever_2002.html#more. Godziak, E. M. & Bump, M. N., 2008, Data and Research on Human Trafficking: Bibliography of Research-Based Literature, viewed December 8, 2013, from https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/ nij/grants/224392.pdf. 117

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Juergens, B., 2007, “Review of David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises,” in The Backlot, viewed December 8, 2013, from http://www.thebacklot.com/review-of-david-cronenbergs-easternpromises/09/2007/. Juliano, D., 2008, “La reconstrucción de la identidad a partir de sus límites,” in R. Tello, N. Benach and M. Nash (eds.), Intersticios. Contactos interculturales, género y dinámicas identitarias en Barcelona, pp. 193–223, Barcelona, Edicions Bellaterra. Kattenbelt, C., 2008, “Intermediality in Theater and Performance: Definitions, Perceptions and Medial Relationships,” Cultura, Lenguaje y Representación/Culture, Language and Representation. Revista de Estudios Culturales de la Universidad Jaume I/Cultural Studies Journal of University Jaume I 6,19–29. Malarek, V., 2005, The Natashas: Inside the New Global Sex Trade, New York, Arcade. Mongio, C., 2009, “La sconosciuta by Giuseppe Tornatore” in Behind the Scenes Featurette, Chatsworth, CA, Image Entertainment. Nathan, V. J., 2010, “Nuovo Cinema Inferno: The Affect and Ambivalence in Giuseppe Tornatore’s La sconosciuta,” in G. R. Bullaro (ed.), From Terrone to Extracomunitario. New Manifestations of Racism in Contemporary Italian Cinema, pp. 264–279, Kibworth, Leicester, Troubadour. Nichols, B., 2001, Introduction to Documentary, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press. Ray, N., 2006, “Looking at Trafficking through a New Lens,” Cardozo Journal of Law & Gender 12, 909–929. Sharma, N., 2005, “Anti-Trafficking Rhetoric and the Making of a Global Apartheid,” NWSA Journal 17(3), 88–111. Shelley, L., 2003, “Trafficking in Women: The Business Model Approach,” Brown Journal of World Affairs 10(1), 119–131. Schröter, J., 2011, “Discourses and Models of Intermediality,” Comparative Literature and Culture 13(3), viewed on December 8, 2013, from http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/ vol13/iss3/3. Torneo, E., n.d., “Mood Swing: Lukas Moodysson’s Lilya 4-Ever,”in Indiewire, viewed December 8, 2013, from http://zakka.dk/euroscreenwriters/interviews/lucas_moodysson.htm. UN.GIFT (Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking), 2012, “Interview with Filmmaker Mimi Chakarova,” viewed December 8, 2013, from http://www.ungift.org/knowledgehub/ stories/april2012/un.gift-interview-with-filmmaker-mimi-chakarova.html. United Nations, 2000, Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, Supplementing the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, viewed December 8, 2013, from http://www.unodc.org/documents/treaties/ UNTOC/Publications/TOC%20Convention/TOCebook-e.pdf. UNODC (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime), 2012, Global Report in Trafficking in Persons 2012, United Nations Publication, Sales No. E.13.IV.1, New York, viewed December 8, 2013, from http://www.unodc.org/documents/data-andanalysis/glotip/Trafficking_in_Persons_ 2012_web.pdf. Weinrichter, A., 2004, Desvíos de lo real. El cine de no ficción, Madrid, T&B Editores. Women Make Movies, n.d., The Price of Sex by Mimi Chakarova, viewed December 8, 2013, from http://www.wmm.com/filmcatalog/pages/c804.shtml. 118

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Young, D., 2006, “Review: Trance,” in Variety, viewed December 8, 2013, from http://variety. com/2006/film/reviews/trance-1200515673/.

Notes 1

2

3 4 5 6

7 8

PBS’s two-part series, Dying to Leave (2003) by Chris Hilton and Aaron Woolf, explores human (not just sex) smuggling and trafficking following the concrete experiences of five migrants. Two other films about the commodification and trafficking of women’s bodies in the organ and drug trades are Dirty Pretty Things (2002) by Stephen Frears and María llena eres de gracia/Maria Full of Grace (2004) by Joshua Marston. Moodysson’s film, Mammoth (2008), another immigration film that was selected for the 2009 Berlin Festival, is a sensitive and engaged representation of the complexity of transnational motherhood and the racialization of domestic work in the West and the sexual trade of women and children in Thailand and the Philippines. He was initially known for his horror films, The Dead Zone (1983) and The Fly (1986) but has gained international acclaim for his psychological explorations of human violence in films such as Naked Lunch (1991), Crash (1996), and A History of Violence (2005). For an interpretation of the film from a gay perspective, see Juergens’s review (2007). According to Tornatore’s interview in Mongio (2009), the music in the film determines the image rather than the opposite. Women Make Movies has a crucial role in distributing, assisting with production, and promoting films “by and about women” in North America. This is how they define their mission: “Established in 1972 to address the under representation and misrepresentation of women in the media industry, Women Make Movies is a multicultural, multiracial, nonprofit media arts organization which facilitates the production, promotion, distribution and exhibition of independent films and videotapes by and about women” (Women Makes Movies Web Site). See interviews included in Women Make Movies’s and the film’s official Web sites. For an elaboration on the documentary’s “reflexive” and “performative” modes, see Nichols (2001: 125–137) and Weinrichter (2004: 49–60).

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Chapter 4 Queer Immigration and Diasporas: Performative Identities, Cross-Dressing Displacement/Assimilation

Q

ueer immigration cinema follows the political agenda often found in films that delve into gay issues and exposes the double marginality that gay immigrants inhabit by being both immigrants (outsiders to a foreign nation, language, and culture) and gay (outsiders to heteronormativity). Many gay and lesbian immigrant characters in immigration films are caught between the generally open views regarding homosexuality that exist in most Western European societies and the homophobia still present in these very same societies and in the traditional patriarchal structures prevalent in the diasporas to which the immigrants belong. In immigration and diasporic films, the positive depiction of queerness as hybridity and transgression—as “a further dimension of fluidity, gender ambivalence and boundary crossing, representing a vector of alterity that challenges dominant expectations of heteronormativity” (Berghahn 2013: 105)—coexists with less positive representations of queerness that include closeted, homophobic, and abusive performances of sexual alterity, which function as attempts at normalization and assimilation inside national and diasporic communities. In queer immigration films, such as J’ai pas sommeil/I Can’t Sleep (1994) by French director Claire Denis, Lola und Bilidikid/Lola and Billy the Kid (1999) by Turkish director Kutlug Ataman, Apo tin akri tis polis/From the Edge of the City (1998) by Greek director Constantin Giannaris, Princesa/Princess (2001) by Brazilian director Henrique Goldman (based in London), Vivre me tue/Life Kills Me (2003) by French filmmaker Jean Pierre Sinapi, and Los novios búlgaros/Bulgarian Lovers (2003) by Spanish filmmaker Eloy de la Iglesia, homosexuality is aligned with cross-dressing and drag performance, transsexualism and prostitution. The gay immigrant characters of these films are either macho hustlers who perform an aggressive masculinity that disavows homosexuality within the diaspora and experience public space as heterosexual (Lola and Bilidikid, Apo tin akri tis polis, Los novios búlgaros), gay prostitutes who resort to sex work in order to make a living (Princesa, Los novios búlgaros), or drag queens who survive social and linguistic alienation by performing their transsexual identities on stage or dream of sex change operations that will create the appearance of gender “normalcy” (Lola and Bilidikid and Princesa). This chapter is devoted to analyzing the role and function of “transness,” defined by Christopher Clark in his analysis of Lola und Bilidikid as a condition of in-betweenness, liminal status, and transformation from one genre category to another, and the concept of “transe,” which refers to drag queens, transvestites, pre- or post-operative transsexuals, and transgendered people (transpeople) (Clark 2006: 557–558) in three films: J’ai pas sommeil, Lola und Bilidikid, and Princesa. More specifically, I argue that in these films, performance in general and drag as a particular genre of theatrical performance provide their immigrant

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gay characters with subversive potential insofar as it is through live performance that they (re)define or (de)construct their gender and diasporic identities, generally in opposition to rigid social and (hetero)sexual norms. Performance as a chain of signifying acts “may enable new subject positions and new perspectives to emerge, even as [or precisely because] the performative present contests the conventions and assumptions of oppressive cultural habits” (Diamond 1996: 6). Performance is a means of gaining personal control and provides a ground for identity construction or expression (Carlson 2004: 161). As Mexican-American performer Guillermo Gómez-Peña affirms, performance is primarily a mode of cultural action through which marginalized groups can gain agency in the making of culture, a space “where ritual can be reinvented, and where boundaries can be crossed” (quoted in Carlson 2004: 178). As John McKenzie notes, it is indeed possible to analyze the everyday workings of race, gender, and sexual politics in terms of performance when it is understood as a “liminal process and a reflexive transgression of social structures” (2001: 8). The concept of liminality is key to articulating the efficacy of cultural performance insofar as it is “a mode of activity whose spatial, temporal and symbolic ‘in-betweenness,’ allows for social norms to be suspended, challenged, played with, and perhaps even transformed” (McKenzie 2001: 50). In Denis’ and Ataman’s films, cross-dressing on stage is part of a queer aesthetic, a way for the characters to express themselves theatrically within a hegemonically heterosexual society. In Goldman’s film, the protagonist performs her cross-dressing and transgendered status both through street prostitution and through her role as a conventional housewife. Moreover, through drag performance—in the context of the films a liminal activity that takes place on the edge and at the interstices of institutions—these films’ characters reinforce a queer culture defined as a “brotherhood in oppression” within a foreign context in which, as gay/transsexual and immigrants, they are outlaws with respect to both gender and nation (Bornstein 1995: 95). The use of masquerade and disguise allows the immigrant characters to embrace gender fluidity and perform separate national identities that, using Verta Taylor’s and Leila Rupp’s terms to refer to drag queens in general, “they can put on and take off ” (Taylor & Rupp 2004: 120). Gender and queer theoretical approaches have problematized the transgressive potential implicit in drag, which resides in the hyperbolic imitation of the heterosexual mold and in the reappropriation and parody of styles and discourses of the dominant culture. The political weight that drag has come to possess springs primarily from the work of Judith Butler who, in her canonical work Gender Trouble (1990), spotlighted drag’s aptitude for making fun of and parodying the notion of an “original” gender, thus opening the door to interpreting gender as a metaphor for performative identities. Butler proposed that a destabilization lies behind a man dressed as a woman, and that destabilization threatens the social demands of normality and originality by which gender and sexual oppression operate. Along with Butler, Carol Ann Tyler assigned the parodic potential of drag to “the use of incongruous contrasts, signs of a double gender identity (the anatomic and the disguised),” and concluded that “excess is what prevents drag from being mere inversion” (Tyler 1991: 55). However, Butler herself in a subsequent book, Bodies that Matter, and specifically in the chapter 124

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“Critically Queer,” questioned the subversive function that she had initially assigned to drag, concluding that drag does not always attain a transgressive effect; instead, it can be put to the service of the reidealization of heterosexual norms and hegemonic power forms (Butler 1993: 125). Drag provides a space in which it is possible to question gender and other stable roles constructed by society, and thus it can offer homosexuals an alternative that shares and reaffirms a queer political agenda. However, in many instances, the space of drag does not seriously challenge the homophobic oppression that prevails in society and can operate as a space of “recuperation” by reinstating conservative cultural norms. Discussions about drag performance still remain divided by two contrasting readings of it: the first attests that drag reinforces dominant assumptions about the dichotomous nature of gender and sexual desire by appropriating gender displays associated with traditional femininity and institutionalized heterosexuality; the second attests that drag is a transgressive action that destabilizes gender and sexual categories by making visible the social bases of femininity and masculinity, heterosexuality and homosexuality and by presenting hybrid and minority genders and sexualities (Taylor & Rupp 2004: 115). In this chapter I locate this discussion inside the experience of gay men immigrant crossdressers who perform a double Otherness within their new culture. The central question in the context of gay immigrant cross-dressers is as follows: Do the immigrant characters in these films use cross-dressing to assimilate and reinforce the heteronormative impositions of both the adopted country and the diaspora, or do they use cross-dressing to signify displacement and bolster the double Otherness they represent? In response to this question I argue that performance enables these characters’ hyphenated identities and transgendered bodies to transgress fixed and stable social and sexual norms while at the same time express their desire to belong and assimilate through excess and simulation. As performative subjects and as immigrants, they are constructed as fragmented, decentered, and unstable; they do not occupy a “proper” place in the sociocultural discourses of any of their “original” or “adopted” environments. Drag and Noir: Performing Displaced Identities Claire Denis was the child of an administrator of the French colonial services who grew up in different African countries, and as such she has an autobiographical interest in foreignness, alterity, displacement, exile, and the cross-racial and cross-cultural tensions produced by colonialism and recent immigration to Europe. Beginning with her first feature film, Chocolat (1988), she has consistently explored themes of colonization, national identity, and decolonization—particularly in Beau Travail/Good Work (2000), and White Material (2009)—as well as immigration and new racism in S’en fout la mort/No Fear, No Die (1990), J’ai pas sommeil/I Can’t Sleep (1994), and 35 rhums/35 Shots of Rum (2008). J’ai pas sommeil uses “multi-plot narratives and parallel editing” to tell the story of an array of immigrant characters from Eastern Europe and the West Indies who live in the 125

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eighteenth district of Paris (Beugnet 2004: 90). Along with Daïga, a young Lithuanian woman whose arrival to and departure from the “city of lights” frame the film at its opening and close, and Théo, who works as a carpenter and moonlights as a musician to earn a living and dreams of returning with his son to his native Martinique over the objections of the child’s mother, the central character, Camille (Théo’s brother) is loosely inspired by the “granny killer” of the infamous “Paulin affair” that took place in Paris in 1987.1 As both Cynthia Marker and Martine Beugnet observe, Denis’ characters “defy one-dimensional psychological portraits” and “engage to varying degrees in a masquerade which complicates a facile labeling of their identities” (Marker 2003: 139). In her exploration of the Other, Denis typically eschews “traditional categorizations and the temptation of binary oppositions. The issues of identity and alterity initially emerge as complex and fluctuating, a nexus of external, social, and historical determinants, of circumstances and of internalized feelings of belonging and alienation” (Beugnet 2004: 83).2 Even the representation of the serial killer “remains essentially complex and elusive” (Beugnet 2004: 84). The film’s ambivalent representation of the Other results from Denis’ skillful diversion from gender, racial, and genre conventions. She marks her subversion of the traditional order of the gaze, addressing her audience as female and gay, and, illustrating Laura Mulvey’s (2004) theorization, inverting the traditional cinematic dichotomy of bearer of the gaze versus erotic spectacle. Daïga, the young Lithuanian, is fascinated by Camille, the gay/transvestite, who lives in the same cheap hotel where she works as a cleaner. While Camille defines his sexual identity (and his survival in Paris) by posing as an object of desire in photographs and by performing at drag clubs, there is power in his self-objectification, because he controls when and where he is the object of the gaze. Similarly, Daïga rejects the role of sexual object with a “resistant gaze” that refuses to succumb to the oppressive gaze and sexist harassment from policemen and nocturnal wanderers (Marker 2003: 141). Denis’ treatment of Daïga subverts classical conventions of female representation, especially in film noir, and some of the situations she confronts daily mirror the ones female immigrants have to cope with in general: mainly, vulnerability due to the social assumptions about their sexual openness and availability. Moreover, her fascination with Camille’s narcissistic bodily exposition constitutes a different way of portraying desire in film, where same-sex desire is visually restricted or concealed by ellipsis. Before analyzing drag as metaphor in the film any further, it is worth mentioning that theatrical, musical, and dance performances are (or are looked into as) a means of gaining personal control and agency in the foreign society for all of the immigrants in the film. It provides them with a basis from which to construct or express their identities. Camille’s brother, Théo, leads a band that plays Martinican music. Performing with the band is the only way he can reaffirm his Caribbean identity in a hostile Paris, creating a “nostalgic connection with his cultural roots” (Beugnet 2004: 95). Camille’s performances reaffirm his marginal sexuality, and through drag and modeling for photographs he can use his body to make art. Similarly, Daïga, who is defined in the film by her silence and lack of command of French, is an actress and model who has come to Paris because she had been (falsely) 126

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promised an acting job by a compatriot. In the hotel where the protagonists live, the music played by the hotel’s Russian owner expresses nostalgia for the original country and culture left behind a long time ago as well as an affirmation of a female homoerotic bonding with Daïga, the newcomer. While the film presents a complex exploration of performance, I wish to focus specifically on Camille’s cross-dressing and drag performances. Through the performative constructions of drag culture, including exhibition, concealment, and costume, Denis offers a metaphor for the conditions of immigration. Just as the immigrant undergoes a transnational transfer or passage from one culture or country to another, the drag queen experiences a relocation to a gendered identity with a “foreign body.” Camille’s drag performance at a gay nightclub during a central scene in the film not only highlights Camille’s gender ambivalence, already present in his feminized name, but also his refusal to identify completely with the masquerade and drag sartorial culture. Camille performs barefoot, wigless, barely madeup and clad in a low-cut, black velvet dress, which barely covers his (male) breasts. While evidently dressed as a woman, Camille’s physical, tangible masculinity offers itself to the viewer’s gaze throughout the show. In drag queen culture, it is precisely the maleness underneath the veneer of female clothes that permits gender subversion: the juxtaposition of the transvestite’s anatomy with his/her dress arouses attention and both parodies gender and reveals its construction. As Butler observed: “In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency” (1990: 137). However, in Camille’s show, the intentionally incomplete concealment of his masculine features, as well as the conspicuous lack of drag

Figure 4.1:  J’ai pas sommeil/I Can’t Sleep by Claire Denis ( 1994 Arena Films, Orsans Productions, Pyramide Productions, Les Films de Mindif, France 3 cinema, M6 Films, Agora films S.A. (Munich), Vega Film Productions S. A. (Zurich)) Camille’s performance.

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props, such as wigs, hairdos, make-up, falsies, and high-heeled shoes, neutralizes the parodic element of transvestism. The unusual length of the performance scene, the slow and synthesized rhythm of the song (“Le lien défait”/“Broken bond” by Jean Louis Murat) he lip-synchs, and the bare stage lit by blue neon lights all conspicuously denote an absolute absence of the camp component intrinsic to drag. The nightclub audience does not fit into the conventions of drag shows, either. A row of exclusively gay men, some of them crouched behind bars or suspended in cages, surround the stage and watch the performance in silence; they do not cheer or offer the performer money. Camille refuses to engage and interact with the audience in an explicitly erotic way: he turns his back on the viewers who seem mesmerized and “caged.” There is both distance and extreme closure between performer and audience that both reinforces voyeurism and shuns an objectification and exotization of the body by queering the gaze and avoiding a fetishizing mise-en-scène. As Beugnet notes in her illuminating analysis of the scene, “[E]ven as the camera lingers on the body, nothing is disclosed: in many shots, the lens is too ‘close,’ and the young man’s body […] blocks out part of the frame, becoming obtrusive” (2004: 95). Beugnet maintains that this recurrent technique “directly questions the authority of the cinematic representation as a visual mode that fetishises difference and in particular racial difference” (2004: 38). Her characters’ existence, Beugnet goes on to explain, is always beset by a more or less marked sense of displacement. The off-centered framing, the dwarfing of the characters in landscapes, the contradictory directions of the travelling shots that follow their wanderings, but also the melancholy soundtrack and the mixing of languages, all participate in a process of defamiliarisation and estrangement […] They tend to live at the fringes of society, and the narrative space they inhabit is often a space of exile, borderline, changing and unfamiliar. (2004: 40) Essentially, the performance scene demonstrates that Camille does not assimilate to or “properly” appropriate the conventions of the Paris subculture into which he has ensconced himself. This cinematic dis-identification expressed in the drag performance mirrors the immigrant’s own dislocation upon arriving in a new country. Following Denis’ implicit metaphor, we see that just as Camille exudes an almost unadulterated masculinity as a drag queen, the estranged immigrant refuses to assimilate fully into society, retaining an outward marker of his foreignness and displacement. Denis uses masquerade and performance as a way of complicating gender and cultural identifications. Drag exposes the performativity of gender, and if we understand gender in the French sense in which “genre” translates as both gender and genre, “deconstructing the performativity of gender has everything to do with subverting not only the genders but also the genres” (McKenzie 2001: 211). In that sense, the subversive pattern of Denis’ film extends also to the filmic genres she chose to represent immigration. J’ai pas sommeil is a hybrid that combines—and subverts—the conventions of the film noir and the serial killer film while 128

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documenting the seemingly benign racism of Parisian society toward immigrants. Both Marker and Beugnet have noted the restrained use of suspense, the de-dramatization of the mise-en-scène and music, and the unpredictability and banality of the murder scenes (Marker 2003: 146; Beugnet 2004: 99). The noir’s marked dichotomy of good/bad characters is deconstructed throughout the film, and the reasons for Camille’s crimes as the grannykiller remain unknown. Beugnet interprets Camille’s crimes to be the result of the same identification/alienation process that I find in his drag performance. According to Beugnet, Camille “represents social integration through crime;” that is, he assimilates into Parisian society “by virtue of the dissolution of the self into the preconceived and the stereotypical” (2004: 96). At the same time, his crimes are not acts of defiance against society, but rather are prompted by a desire to participate fully in a materialistic system “where wealth, appearance, and consumption have become ends in themselves” (Beugnet 2004: 102). Camille’s refusal to fully identify with the masks suggested by his environment applies not only to his assimilation to the French white society but also to his relation with the cultural and ethnic roots that the rest of his Caribbean family embodies (Beugnet 2004: 95). At a family celebration on the occasion of his mother’s birthday, Camille refuses to fully integrate the happy celebratory atmosphere and the group’s dancing to the rhythms of West Indian music, which his brother Theo performs for a living, and only agrees reluctantly to dance with his mother after she begs him to do so. At the end of the film, as a counterpart to Camille’s drag performance, Denis includes the live musical performance of his brother Theo’s band in their rendition of the famous song “Racines” by Martinican composer and singer, Kali. As the band performs, and the camera focuses on Theo’s violin performance, a shot-reverse-shot indicates the brothers’ mutual acknowledgment of Camille’s rare presence at the performance. The song continues to be heard, now non-diegetically, as Camille leaves the club, walks along the streets and is inadvertently followed by a police car minutes before he is apprehended and accused of being the granny-killer. The scene positions Camille as the spectator (and not the spectacle) of a performance of Caribbean (not French) music and, as it precedes his final arrest, it reinforces the dichotomy that the film has established throughout the film between the two brothers suggesting that Camille’s rejection of his own familial and cultural roots is partly to blame for his downfall. Gasterbeiters in Drag: Coming of Age and Coming Out in the Turkish Diaspora in Berlin Although Claire Denis and Kutlug Ataman work through radically different filmic styles, they both use an unconventional treatment of traditional Hollywood genres to explore issues of migration, belonging, and identity. If J’ai pas sommeil is a combination of film noir and the serial killer film, Lola und Bilidikid is both a reenactment and a parodic subversion of the western (as made explicit by the title), a coming-of-age film, a comedy, and a camp melodrama. By combining genres, Ataman’s film resists conventional gendered categories of 129

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narrative film. As Christopher Clark observes, “Ataman effectively echoes the content of the film—queer sexualities and transcultured identities—at the level of genre, queerly challenging the audience’s expectations of genre conformity” (2006: 563).3 The story of seventeen-year-old Murat, a second generation Turk who lives with his mother and older brother in Kreuzberg, the Turkish sector of Berlin, follows the conventions of a coming-of-age film. Murat’s coming-out is fueled by the drag queen performance of his transvestite brother, Lola, who left the family home years ago and whose existence was previously unknown to him. Murat will later learn that it was Lola’s older brother, Osman, who expelled him from the house after he showed up to dinner one night in drag. Even before Murat knows about Lola’s existence, he is already curious about homosexuality. In the opening scenes he ventures into a park at night—the Siesgesäule, Berlin’s best-known site for male gay cruising, located in the Tiergarten. These scenes both replicate queer scenes found in folk coming-of-age stories in which the young hero begins his initiation into adulthood by entering a dangerous place (for example, a forest or a park) where he has to go through a series of rites of passage, after whose completion he will successfully reach maturity. The opening scenes anticipate Murat’s search for a gay identity that unfolds throughout the film, a search that requires him to imitate Lola, to immerse himself in the gay/transgender culture that Lola inhabits, and to rebel against the patriarchal figure, Osman (a closeted gay man himself) who has replaced the father in Murat’s household and maintains the homophobic views ingrained in the most traditional members of the Turkish diaspora. The coming-of-age narrative format is reinforced by telling the story through Murat’s point of view and by demonstrating an explicit awareness of the gaze (of both the camera and audience). Murat is the observer at all times and actively defines his identity through looking, while Lola defines her identity by performing and voluntarily being made into a spectacle. Murat’s fascination with the gay and drag worlds is similar to Daïga’s fascination with Camille’s body and story in J’ai pas sommeil. In both films immigrant women and gay men actively define their identities as Others through looking, and the drag queen characters, Camille and Lola, fluctuate between their being-looked-at-ness (the objects of their audiences’ gaze) and their active performative subjectivities.

Figure 4.2:  Lola und Bilidikid by Kutlug Ataman ( 2003 Millivres Multimedia) Gastarbeiters’ performance.

Figure 4.3:  Lola und Bilidikid by Kutlug Ataman ( 2003 Millivres Multimedia) Murat watching the Gastarbeiters’ performance.

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Lola und Bilidikid is also a reenactment and a parody of a western in its filmic and cartoon formats. The western hero Billy the Kid is reincarnated in the character of Bili, Lola’s macho lover who, like the Old West outlaw, is a cruel, feared bully and a manipulator, but also an avenger. Bili and Murat believe that Lola has been killed by a gang of homophobic neo-Nazi youth who attend Murat’s school and who had previously harassed Lola for being a Turk and a drag queen, and a suspenseful western-like chase takes place after which Bili avenges Lola’s death by castrating one of the young neo-Nazis. In a melodramatic fashion, Lola dies tragically but is avenged by the macho character in the end. The film enlarges its testimonial and critical position against racism and xenophobia to include homophobia and directing its position against both reactionary segments of German society and the Turkish diaspora in Berlin. Racism and homophobia are linked in the young neo-Nazis’ use of stereotypical race identifiers and slanderous and pejorative terms (Kebabs, camel-fuckers, go back to Bagdad, etc.) that equate Turks and “fags,” both in their attacks on Lola and during a class visit to the site of the Olympic games of 1936.4 Murat is subjected to a rite of passage at this emblematic site in the form of traumatic gay bashing: he engages in his first homosexual experience with one of his neo-Nazi classmates who is also gay-curious like him but is afraid to tell his friends. As the classmate begins to perform oral sex on Murat at the Olympic site’s public toilets, he and Murat are discovered by the others, who kick Murat to the ground, beat him, and urinate on him. The Olympic stadium setting obviously connects the National Socialist ideology and its persecution of Jews and homosexuals and the ethnic and sexual hate crimes of today (Clark 2006: 568; Hamm-Ehsani 2008: 37; Berghahn 2013: 106).5 Apart from these xenophobic and homophobic attacks, which reflect the documented increase in violent xenophobic and racist attacks against foreigners and ethnic minorities in the early nineties after German reunification, German society in general is portrayed as tolerant toward racial and sexual Otherness. As a subplot and counterpoint to the Turkish family melodrama and to Murat’s process of coming out, the film offers the comedic romantic relationship between Iskender, Bili’s macho hustler friend, and one of his former German johns, Friedrich, a middle-aged, well-to-do architect who lives with his overbearing aristocratic mother, Ute. While Ute fully accepts her son’s homosexuality, she insists on the need to keep up appearances in terms of class rather than race or sexual orientation, stating, “The most important thing is to maintain your reputation.” Friedrich himself has migrated from East Berlin, where he was deprived of the opportunity to be open about his sexuality, to the more open and less homophobic society of West Berlin. Hence, the dichotomy of East/West Germany is subtly added to other dichotomies the film presents, including Germans/Turks, straight/gay, gay/drag queen, drag queen/transsexual, and tradition/ modernity. Ultimately Iskender and Friedrich’s romantic relationship, the only successful one in the film, represents “a queerness that transcends and transgresses boundaries of geography, ethnicity, age, and class” (Clark 2006: 564). Overall, the film is more critical of the homophobia prevalent in the overprotective and constraining Turkish diaspora than it is of German discrimination against Turks. There is a prejudice against open homosexuality 131

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among the Turkish gay community. The macho gay model represented in the characters of Osman, Bili, and Iskender still holds that “a man is a man, and a hole is a hole.” According to this model, as Bili tells Murat, “Life as a gay man isn’t worth living.” In Lola und Bilidikid, as in J’ai pas sommeil, performance is a privileged vehicle through which to define sexual identity, advocate fluidity, and subvert cultural oppressive conventions. Cross-dressing is the way in which these gay characters assert their ambiguous and hyphenated Turkish-German identities. Performing as a drag trio significantly called “Gastarbeiter” (guest workers), Lola, along with her drag buddies Kalipso and Shehrazade, represent camp alternatives for gay Turks in need of feminized models “in a culture in which images of gay men, let alone strong Arab women, are non-existent” (Morris 2000). As Charlotte Suthrell argues, by definition “cross-dressing implies that there must be some movement across a place of coming from and a place of going to, which is between the worlds of gender polarity” (2004: 17). In her study of the United Kingdom’s transvestites and India’s hijras, Suthrell documents how both men and women who cross-dress state that cross-dressing gives them an experience of the Other in a culture that expects gender roles to be defined early and maintained throughout life. Suthrell’s observations seem especially applicable in the traditional Turkish culture in which women’s roles are determined by the authority of a patriarchal and religious society and in which their oppressed condition is symbolized by the headscarf, a sartorial way to (un)project themselves, to visually express their social status and their belonging to a category. In Ataman’s film, the cross-dresser’s clothes potentially signify the opposite: the conscious act of renouncing belonging, or in Suthrell’s words, “the act of belonging to an ‘anti-category’” (2004: 14). In the film the symbol of transvestism, understood as a disavowal of rigid gender and cultural norms, takes the form of a red wig that belonged to Lola before the traumatic episode that forced him to leave the family home and was found by Murat, who returned the wig to Lola the night he was killed. The wig’s significance for both Lola and Murat can only be understood in opposition to their mother’s wearing of the traditional headscarf and as an act of resistance against dominant structures of subjection. In the final scenes of the film, after Murat tragically learns that Lola has been killed by their closeted, homophobic brother Osman, Murat returns home as the ghost of Lola, wearing Lola’s outfit and red wig, to confront the repressive patriarchal order. The mother finally acknowledges the fratricidal drama that has unfolded under her submissive eyes, takes off her headscarf, and throws it out on the street as a symbol of her rebellion against the very patriarchal society that repressed both her sons and herself. The film’s penultimate scenes with a headscarf-less mother and wigless son walking away from the family home convey a sense of optimism and faith in the new generation’s power to confront oppression in a new society. These sequences suggest that Ataman intends to equate the mother’s headscarf-wearing with submission and powerlessness. However, it is important to remember that in contemporary Germany (and other European countries with large Muslim populations) Muslim women also wear the headscarf as a symbol of power and social defiance, although very much to the objection and discomfort of most Germans who associate the practice “with the Turkish patriarchal 132

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oppression of women, an unwillingness to integrate and adopt German modernity, and a persistent Islamic presence” (Mandel 2008: 11). As Ruth Mandel observes: “The ubiquitous proliferation of headscarved women in urban spaces, from the cleaner to the grocery store, from the university classroom to the cinema, is seen by many as the signal of a stubborn defiance of Western modes of being, as the antagonistic hardening of an already troubling identity” (2008: 11).6 At the same time, as much as the film celebrates the liberating opportunities promised by immigration, it problematizes the subversive potential of drag and cross-dressing and critiques the rigid patriarchal and homophobic structures prevalent within the Turkish diaspora in Germany. Butler’s theorizing of performativity as not only marginal, transgressive, or resistant, but also as a dominant, punitive form of power that both generates and constrains human subjects is pertinent to an analysis of the characters’ performative identitary constructions. McKenzie, referring to Butler’s line of reasoning, argues, “Drag may further sediment gender identities by repeating and reinforcing the orbit of hegemonic significations while at other times destabilizing those very significations through exorbitant, hyperbolic repetitions that give rise to political resignifications” (2001: 168). The citational, repetitive element inherent in performance is highlighted in the film by a double parody: a parodic deconstruction of femininity and a camp repetition of the Turkish cultural tradition of belly dancing, which is usually directed to male heterosexual spectators. At the same time, by belly dancing and lip-synching traditional Turkish dances, the Turkish drag queens of Ataman’s film enact a camp replication of a Turkish tradition on stage that is less a mockery than a metaphor for their real desire to embody a new “transgender” that will grant them respect both offstage and in their diasporic community. As Clark observes, “Dancing in headscarves, lip-synching to a Turkish song with lyrics expressing subservient devotion to a man, they engage in multiple modes of drag simultaneously: not only as ‘women’, but also as ‘Turks’” (2006: 564).7 Through spectacle and cross-dressing, these Turkish drag queens also perform their desire to assimilate to and accommodate (ideally by sex change) both their adopted and diasporic societies. Transsexualism emerges as the only option for some members of the gay/transgender Turkish community in the film to live a “normal” life, accommodate heterosexual conventions dictated by the Turkish diaspora, and to deflect homosexuality through the perpetuation of heterosexual relationships. This position is embodied mainly by the character of Bili, Lola’s lover, who pressures Lola to undergo a sex change so that they can get married, return to Turkey, and “live like others.” His explicit desire to get rid of the stigma of being “a fag living with a fag” makes the film more critical of the prevalent homophobia in the Turkish diaspora, which it depicts as overprotective and constraining, than it is of German discrimination against Turks.8 In this context, sex change, equaling castration, is criticized in the film for being a drastic way of reproducing the very same patriarchal norms that the transvestites parody and supposedly subvert, and for conforming to conventional forms of relationships that may grant them return to the homeland. Ironically, in the final confrontation, before he dies, Bili avenges Lola’s death by castrating one of the young neo-Nazis who had harassed Lola for being a Turk and a drag 133

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queen. This act signifies that castration (or a sex change operation) is not a solution for gay Turks’ constraints within Berlin’s Turkish diaspora but rather an extreme punishment for racist and homophobic acts. After Bili’s death, Murat’s tragic coming out in front of his mother, clad in Lola’s drag outfit, and direct confrontation with his homophobic brother Osman, Lola’s killer, are followed by a comedic coda that presents a positive outcome for the other film’s couples, expressing their “willingness to defy oppressive powers” (Hamm-Ehsani 2008: 375). The relationship between Iskender and Friedrich consolidates and is finally accepted by Friedrich’s aristocratic mother after Iskender refuses to accept a bribe (a valuable antique brooch) she offers him in exchange for his leaving Friedrich, thus proving that he is with Friedrich out of love and not economic interest. Kalipso and Shehrazade, Lola’s performer friends, close the film openly assuming their transvestite identity offstage and in broad daylight: they ride in a taxi, and Kalipso flirts with a visibly amused Turkish taxi driver on their way to recover Ute’s brooch, which Iskender had previously thrown out of Friedrich’s car window after Ute probed him with it. The taxi driver’s accepting attitude toward his clients’ drag and queer identity, evident in their humorous dialogue, is offered as a comic counterpart to Osman’s (another Turkish taxi driver) tragic homophobic reaction against the members of his own family. These two opposed models of behavior lighten the strong negative outlook over the Turkish diaspora by dismantling heteronormativity and patriarchal authority and validating multiple sexual and gender identities within the diaspora.9 Retaining Gender Duality: Brazilian Transe Sex Workers in Milan Princesa is also the story of its racial immigrant character’s intent to (re)define and (de)construct his/her gender and diasporic identities and assimilate to the expectations of a heterosexual society in both the departing (Brazilian) and destination (Italian) cultures. The film’s script is freely based on the testimonio of Fernanda Farías de Alburquerque, Depoimento de un Travesti Brasileiro a um Lider des Brigadas Vermelhas/Testimony of a Brazilian Transvestite to a Red Brigades Leader, transcribed by the Italian journalist and Red Brigades leader Maurizio Janelli.10 Both testimonio and film script narrate the story of Fernanda, an eighteen-year-old transsexual from Brazil who moves to Milan to work voluntarily as a prostitute to save money for a sex change operation. She experiences abuse from the moment she sets foot in Italy, but a married john named Gianni, who at first is shocked and repulsed to discover that she is, at least partly, a man, soon falls desperately in love, and he leaves his wife to be with her and offers to pay for the operation. Fernanda’s life with Gianni becomes “a parody of the normalcy she dreams of: she’s like a suburban housewife in a mid-60’s American sitcom, ironing shirts and vacuuming the rug while undergoing hormone treatments and meeting with a therapist” (Scott 2001). After Gianni’s pregnant wife desperately begs her to convince her husband to return to the marriage, Fernanda decides 134

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not to undergo the surgery, to leave Gianni, and to return to her work on the streets. Goldman modifies the testimonio’s outcome in which the real Fernanda commits suicide. He opts instead to create a melodramatic type of golden heart prostitute who selflessly renounces her happiness for the sake of her beloved. And yet he provides Fernanda with the agency to choose not to renounce her “transe” identity in becoming a conventional housewife and gives her the opportunity to survive in Milan with the support of her Brazilian transsexual friends. Sex change is portrayed in Princesa, as in Lola und Bilidikid, as a way of gaining acceptance in the predominantly heterosexual societies of both the host and adopted countries. Francisca’s desire to become “a full woman” through a sex change operation initially responds to the pressure to accommodate to heteronormativity once she returns to Brazil but also comes from a desire to assimilate and normalize her legal status in Italy. The latter is made evident in the opening sequences of the film in which she is detained as she tries to cross the border into Italy because her passport still has the picture of Fernando, her former self. Fernanda’s female appearance contradicts her original biology and her current transe identity, thus compromising her legal status. However, at the end of the film, as her search for “normality” involves castration and the loss of her hybrid identity, she renounces the idea of normality, retaining her double gender identity and her she-male sexual versatility. Princesa goes beyond depicting the tale of a real transsexual sex worker to reflect the overall social reality of transgender prostitution in Milan. Brazilian transvestites and transsexuals had, at the time the film was made, a significant presence in both sex and marriage markets in some Southern European countries (Piscitelli 2008: 788). Most of them came from northeastern Brazil, specifically, from the city of Fortaleza. As is the case in most Western European nations, Italy has abolitionist laws regarding prostitution. Since the Merlin Act was passed in 1958, Italy has decriminalized prostitution when practiced privately. This abolitionist legal regulation suggests that men and women should not be penalized for working in the sex industry because they are “victims,” and that “the sex industry should generally be abolished by penalizing and prosecuting those clients, pimps, and brothel owners who encourage prostitution” (Hubbard 1999: 100). Yet, in practice, as Phil Hubbard has pointed out, “this creates a paradoxical situation where, although prostitution may be not illegal, it is impossible for [sex workers] to work without breaking a number of laws in the performance of their work” (1999: 100). To illustrate this reality, Goldman interviewed more than two hundred Brazilian transvestites in Italy. Ingrid de Souza, the actress who plays Fernanda, was one of them. Goldman, a Brazilian-born filmmaker based in London, stated in interviews that through his rendition of Fernanda Farías’ testimonio he wanted to document sex workers’ situations on the streets of Milan and also, as a Brazilian immigrant in Europe, to express his empathy with his character’s search for personal identity. The film follows the first-person-narrative format of Fernanda Farías’ testimonio to depict immigrant life in Italy as well as the world of sex workers and the community of Brazilian transsexuals through Fernanda’s eyes. When Fernanda arrives in Milan and takes a taxi to go to her friend’s house, the camera pans in slow motion over Milan’s streets and monuments, 135

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Figure 4.4:  Princesa/Princess by Henrique Goldman ( 2002 Strand Releasing) Princesa by streetcar.

reproducing Fernanda’s touristic and expectant gaze. Beginning with these initial sequences, monumental Milan is contrasted throughout the film with the gritty urban locations where sex work takes place. To give predominance to Fernanda’s point of view, Goldman uses voice-overs to disclose the content of the letters she writes to her mother in Brazil. She signs these letters “from your loving boy, Fernando,” indicating the division between her closeted identity as a good, rural, Catholic boy, devoted to his mother, who has migrated to Europe to support his poor family, and her gay/transe identity as an urban sex worker who walks the streets of Milan to make money, essentially, for a sex operation. Through Fernanda’s gaze, Goldman also documents the harassment and violence that transsexuals experience due to the conventional association between “homosexuality/transeness” and sexual availability and promiscuity. In the aforementioned opening scenes in which Fernanda is detained at the border, as soon as the officer in charge looks at her passport and learns that s/he is a transsexual, he forces her to perform oral sex on him in exchange for her freedom. That scene prefigures the sexualization, exoticization, and marginalization that await Fernanda as a result of her multiple Otherness as a black Brazilian transsexual. The scene also functions as a metaphor for the role of black immigrants who service Italians (as opposed to Germans servicing orally Turkish hustlers and paying for it in Lola und Bilidikid). As one of Fernanda’s friends and colleagues says later in the film, “All Italians are clients.” However, the rest of the film does not insist on the sordid aspects of prostitution and never objectifies its transsexual characters. Overall it avoids bodily exposure and graphic treatment of sex scenes in squalid locations. Instead, Fernanda is invited to live in the luxurious apartment that belongs to her pimp Karin, who fancies and protects her; she has a supportive community in the Brazilian diaspora; and, like in a fairy tale, she finds a “prince” who is devoted to her and accepts her as she is. Goldman clearly distinguishes between sex scenes that take place between prostitutes and their johns at night in cars in streets and alleyways and the intimate and romantic scenes between Fernanda and Gianni that take place in the privacy of elegant hotel rooms and the comfortable apartment they share as 136

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well as in public venues and at city landmarks. The former are filmed in a documentary style that provides a graphic yet hasty glimpse of sexual offerings and performances, reproducing the hurried sex encounters that define transgender street prostitution. The latter communicate the characters’ erotic passion and tenderness through the use of closeups and exquisite lighting that accentuate their loving and tender interactions. Their first encounter, which takes place in Gianni’s car, before Gianni becomes aware of Fernanda’s transness and violently kicks her out of his car, leaving her half-naked in a dark alley, already conveys the strong sexual attraction between them. In a later scene, Gianni redeems himself, apologizing for his violent outburst and inviting Fernanda on a date that will mark the beginning of their romance. Goldman counters the squalor of the prostitution world with the tragicomic and camp interventions of the Brazilian drag queens that work with and befriend Fernanda. Dialogues between them are funny and self-deprecating. Comic fights take place between the drag queens working the streets and drivers who approach them only to verbally hassle and mock them. Goldman documents their fabulous outfits and their interactions with clients in slow motion without objectifying or ridiculing them. The film also avoids xenophobic or homophobic situations through what appears to be Milan’s openness to sexual and racial Otherness. The film calls attention to the fact that “exotic” prostitution is a profitable global commodity in a global market and therefore protected by both institutions and corrupt individuals in positions of authority who occasionally take advantage of the vulnerable position of undocumented sex workers. At the same time, the Italian characters, the johns Gianni and Fabrizio and the female pimp Karin, are represented in a sympathetic light: Karin shelters, protects, and treats Fernanda exquisitely, taking her back after she breaks up with Gianni. Fabrizio is a regular customer who befriends Karin and the Brazilian transgender community and pays Princesa mostly for listening to his desperate accounts of his complicated relationship with his girlfriend. Gianni’s and Fabrizio’s heterosexuality does not entail disrespect for or commodification of sex workers and, interestingly, does not preclude their bi-curiosity and openness to transgender sexuality. In the closing scene, Princesa and her Brazilian friends cheerfully congratulate Fabrizio on his engagement with his girlfriend and celebrate with him. In a repetition of the scene in which a newly arrived Fernanda was introduced to street work, a happy Fabrizio invites her, by now his best friend, “to go for a ride” just to tell her the details of his engagement and communicate his excitement about his prospective wedding. The relationship between Gianni and Fernanda is a dream come true that would have sounded implausible if it were not for the fact that it is based on Fernanda Farías’ real story. The happy outcome—which occurs after Princesa abandons the idea of a sex change operation, is saved from committing suicide in the nick of time by a nice policeman, and returns to her pimp and her work on the streets—validates sex work and the Brazilian immigrants’ drag preferences and performances. Sex work is represented as far from monolithic and homogeneous and as a space both constraining and enabling. Despite the double marginalization that gay/transsexual sex workers experience in relation to 137

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the orthodoxies of heterosexuality, Princesa offers a positive interpretation of sex work. As Hubbard has illustrated in his comprehensive study, Sex and the City: Geographies of Prostitution in the Urban West, there is a story of prostitution that is “not so much of coercion, exploitation and suffering, but of rights, personal expression and emancipation,” wherein women can “exercise bodily and career autonomy” (1999: 17). Such positive representation of sex work is based on the radical (feminist) argument that commerce in sex is similar to that of other industries and that prostitution can be empowering and liberating. Hubbard refers to the fact that few things have split feminists as much as the sex industry, “with a sharp divide between those who depict prostitution as a form of sexual exploitation epitomizing women’s devaluation and objectification” and those “who paint prostitution as a form of sexual emancipation and empowerment which resists male domination” (1999: 18). Goldman’s overall de-victimization of Princesa, which includes her decision to return to the streets after refusing to surrender to a white, middle-class homogeneous and monolithic conception of heterosexuality, suggests a conception of the sex worker as a potential agent of sexual freedom “in an urban realm characterized by heterogeneity, anonymity, and the coming together of different moralities” (Hubbard 1999: 60). I want to apply Hubbard’s reading of Butler’s notion of gender performativity to Princesa’s transe sex workers: the sex workers’ “mode of dress and bodily adornment” may be understood as “oppositional, transgressing (and perhaps parodying) of heterosexual norms” (1999: 155).11 As such, Hubbard follows, “the visible eroticization of the public realm through a display of conspicuous sexuality (and the promise of ‘unfettered sex’ in exchange for money) appears as a major threat to the stability of a heterosexuality-ordered society” (1999: 155). In this sense, the film discards “normality” and heterosexuality as the desired goal and instead embraces sexual and gender hybridity and Otherness. When Fernanda arrives in Milan at the film’s start and declares to her friend Charlo her intention to work the streets to make money for a sex operation, Charlo mocks her for thinking naively that she will ever reach normality through a sex operation. Charlo warns Fernanda that she will never make money by being a woman, but only by having a penis. In the world of prostitution as well as in drag performance, a male body with a wig is what sells; having a penis is what counts. Charlo’s warnings become true at the end of the film as Fernanda embraces her double gender identity, refusing “castration” and the “normal” life of a housewife. By retaining both her penis and her breasts, she refuses to eliminate the mark of her original biological genre and her acquired transgender identity. By renouncing the possibility of becoming a “full woman” and having domestic life with Gianni, Goldman’s Princesa also relinquishes, or recognizes the impossibility of, her full assimilation into Italian society. By holding onto a transsexual gender duality, Fernanda, like Denis’ Camille and Ataman’s Turkish drag queens, retains her foreignness/ displacement, opting also for a hybrid national (black immigrant in Europe) identity sustained thanks to the support and solidarity found among the Brazilian transgender community. 138

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Conclusion J’ai pas sommeil, Lola und Bilidikid, and Princesa offer transness and drag performance as a medium through which gay immigrants can subversively construct, deconstruct, and parody their identities as doubly Other. Drag also functions as an apt metaphor for these characters’ displacement within European society. The three films ultimately reaffirm the gay and transgender identities of their characters. Cross-dressing and transness are presented as part of a hybrid and minority gender and sexual lifestyle they share with other members of their diasporic communities. This lifestyle transgresses and parodies the assumption of normality and simultaneously seeks the recuperation of heteronormativity. Ultimately, cross-dressing and transsexualism both conceal and reveal the (im)possibility of assimilating into the foreign culture and of rebelling against an original national cultural identity.

References Berghahn, D., 2013, Far-Flung Families in Film: The Diasporic Family in Contemporary European Cinema, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press. Beugnet, M., 2004, Claire Denis, Manchester and New York, Manchester University Press. Bornstein, K., 1995, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us, New York, Vintage. Butler, J., 1990, Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York, Routledge. Butler, J., 1993, Bodies that Matter. On the Discursive Limits of “Sex,” New York and London, Routledge. Carlson, M., 2004, Performance. A Critical Introduction, 2nd edn., New York and London, Routledge. Clark, C., 2006, “Transculturation, Transe Sexuality, and Turkish Germany: Kutlug Ataman’s Lola und Bilidikid,” German Life and Letters 59(4), 555–572. Diamond, E. (ed.), 1996, Performance and Cultural Politics, New York: Routledge. Hamm-Ehsani, K., 2008, “Intersections: Issues of National, Ethnic and Sexual Identity in Kutlug Ataman’s Berlin Film Lola und Bilidikid,” Seminar 44(3) (September), 366–381. Hubbard, P., 1999, Sex in the City: Geographies of Prostitution in the Urban West, Aldershot, Ashgate. Mandel, R. E., 2008, Cosmopolitan Anxieties: Turkish Challenges to Citizenship and Belonging in Germany, Durham and London, Duke University Press. Marker, C., 2003, “Sleepless in Paris: J’ai pas sommeil (Denis 1993),” in P. Powrie (ed.) French Cinema in the 1990s, pp. 137–147, London and New York, Oxford University Press. McKenzie, J., 2001, Perform or Else. From Discipline to Performance, London and New York, Routledge. Morris, W., 2000, “Lola und Bilidikid and Manhood,” Examiner Film Critic, viewed November 28, 2013, from http://sfgate.com/cgibin/article.cgi?file=/e/a/2000/01/28/WEEKEND3305.dtl. Mulvey, L., 2004, “Looking at the Past from the Present: Rethinking Feminist Film Theory of the 1970s,” Signs 30(1), 1286–1292. 139

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Parati, G., 2005, Migration Italy: The Art of Talking Back in a Destination Culture, Toronto, University of Toronto Press. Piscitelli, A., 2008, “Looking for New Worlds: Brazilian Women as International Migrants,” Signs, 33(4), 784–793. Santaolalla, I., 2010, “Body Matters: Immigrants in Recent Spanish, Italian and Greek Cinemas,” in D. Berghahn and C. Sternberg (eds.), European Cinema in Motion. Migrant and Diasporic Film in Contemporary Europe, pp. 152–174, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan. Scott, A. O., 2001, “Film in Review: ‘Princesa,’” The New York Times, viewed November 7, 2013, from http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/07/movies/film-in-review-princesa.html. Suthrell, C., 2004, Unzipping Gender. Sex, Cross-Dressing and Culture, Oxford and New York, Berg. Taylor, V. & Rupp, L. J., 2004, “Chicks with Dicks, Men in Dresses: What It Means to Be a Drag Queen,” in S. Schacht and L. Underwood (eds.), The Drag Queen Anthology. The Absolutely Fabulous but Flawlessly Customary World of Female Impersonators, pp. 113–133, Bighamton, New York, Harrington Park Press. Tyler, C., 1991, “Boys Will Be Girls: The Politics of Gay Drag,” in D. Fuss (ed.) Inside/Out. Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, pp. 32–70, New York, Routledge.

Notes   1 Thierry Paulin and his gay lover Jean-Thierry Mathurin (two young Caribbean immigrants) were arrested in 1987 for robbing and murdering more than twenty elderly women over the course of two years in Paris’s eighteenth district.   2 See the chapter “Foreigness and the Aesthetics of the Unsaid” in Beugnet (2004: 8–44).   3 The film was shot entirely in Berlin with funding from German and American production companies, and at least a third of the dialogue is in Turkish. It opened the Panorama segment of the 1999 Berlinale festival and later that year won the top prize for a foreign film at the Istanbul Film Festival (Clark 2006: 560).   4 This discriminatory association of Turk and “fag” is in direct contradiction to the perception of Turks as machos in the German gay imaginary. This perception is recurring for example in the work of German cartoonist Ralf König, where the machos are usually Turkish or Southern Europeans (Greeks, Italian, Spanish) and always construed in opposition to the local German men, who are gay. Their physical contrast is often perceived by the German gay male characters as extremely desirable: muscular, fleshy, and very sexual. I thank Santiago Fouz Hernández for this insight.   5 See Hamm-Ehsani’s article in which she establishes the cultural and political history of the gay liberation and homosexual persecution in Berlin, and she interprets the points of intersection between historical memory and personal history, such as the emblematic nature of the Turkish characters’ names (Osman and Murat) and of Berlin historical sites and national monuments where the action takes place, such as the Siegessaüle monument, the Victory Column, and the Olympic Stadium at Berlin-Charlottemburg built by Hitler for the 1936 Olympic Games (2008: 366–381). 140

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  6 In addition to being a filmmaker, Kutlug Ataman is a visual artist with a varied body of work which has granted him recognition in the Berlin, Venice, and Istanbul Biennials, among others, and he exhibits regularly in major art circuits in Europe and America. His film-based museum installations are portraits of individuals who live on the peripheries of society and are defined by ghetto life, peculiar obsessions, or transgressive sexualities. One of his bestknown installations is a four-screen projection called “Women Who Wear Wigs” (1997). The four videos, each of which last approximately one hour, projected side-by-side in a row, show Ataman’s interviews with four Turkish women who wear wigs, each for very different reasons. Ataman’s interest in the wig/veil connection was already established here.   7 The potential subversion of the headscarf, mentioned before, is present here, albeit circumscribed to the drag and gay performance context. When Kalypso and Sherezade, after Lola’s death and at the end of the film, decide to adopt the female attire in their public daily lives (and not only for their drag performances), they choose Western outfits without the headscarf accessory.   8 Although the film received the Audience Award at the Eighteenth International Istanbul Film Festival (1999) and the Teddy Special Jury Award at the 1999 Berlin International Film Festival, Ataman was obliged to flee his homeland to escape the death threats that followed its release. The film was also awarded Best Film at the Fourteenth Turin International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival (1999) and the Audience Award at the 1999 Oslo Gay and Lesbian Film Festival.   9 Hamm-Ehsani argues that the film’s epilogue indicates that there is a chance for the characters “to liberate themselves from historical, political and social constraints” and it symbolizes “the erosion of the heterosexual patriarchal authority of the German “nation state’” (2008: 378); along the same lines, Berghahn argues that the film advocates “fluidity and cross-over, not only in terms of gender and sexuality, but also in terms of transcultural encounters” (2013: 109). 10 Fernanda Farias had already been the subject of a 1997 short film, Le strade di Princesa: ritratto di un trans molto speciale (Princesa’s Streets: Portrait of a Very Special Transsexual). The director, Stephano Consiglio, interviewed her in prison (convicted of attempted murder) following the success of her autobiography (Parati 2005: 220, note 62). 11 Isabel Santaolalla reiterates this duality, arguing that “Princesa’s body is a site of oppression but also a vehicle for transgression” (2010: 159).

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Chapter 5 The European Family in the Face of Otherness: Family Metaphors and the Redemption of White Guilt

G

iven the prevalent role that the nuclear family plays in nationalistic formations, a great number of immigration films reintroduce the family as an emblematic microcosm that allegorically represents the European community of nations and its citizens’ xenophobic as well as compassionate and sympathetic reactions toward immigrants. The films I have chosen to analyze in this chapter were made by renowned, prize-winning, and commercially successful white European filmmakers who have consistently shown a concern for social issues in general and for the subject of immigration in particular and who share the European liberal intelligentsia’s critical position regarding Europeans’ ambivalent attitudes toward Otherness. These films are La promesse/The Promise (Jean Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 1996), Taxi (Carlos Saura, 1996), Flores de otro mundo/Flowers from Another World (Icíar Bollain, 1999), Poniente/West (Chus Gutiérrez, 2002), Caché/Hidden (Michael Haneke, 2005), Le Havre (Ari Kaurismäki, 2011), and Terraferma/Dry Land (Emanuele Crialese, 2011). These films reflect their filmmakers’ ethical commitment and critical self-knowledge and avoid simplistic and reductive takes on the issue of immigration. They provide audiences with an opportunity for redemption through identification with their white European characters’ empathetic alignment with immigrants and their concrete acts of solidarity. To interpret the concepts of home, family, community, and place as symbols of the nation, it is important to consider (and interrogate) the complex dialectics of apparently opposed concepts such as inside(r) and outside(r), private and public, pure and contaminated, stable and unstable, here and there, localizable and un-localizable, and us and them, among others. Zygmunt Bauman (1995) reminds us that the European family still inhabits the “secure home” that perceives the “outside home” as something dangerous. This basic dichotomy between secure home and outside home carries with it a series of oppositions such as control/risk, security/danger, peace/combat, perpetuity/episode, and the whole/fragmentation that are at the core of many European nationalist and populist movements that grew out of the fear of losing national identities (Bauman 1995: 135–136). However, in our current globalized world and despite widespread individual and institutional resistance to foreignness and Otherness, these binary dichotomies hardly remain fixed: their terms are interchangeable and often occur simultaneously. The notion of the home as a private and stable space has to be understood always in relation to its outside(s) (Morley 1999: 153). The home is “located in space” and “structured in time” (Douglas 1991: 289), and it may be profaned by out-ofplace objects that destabilize its spatial organization and by the presence of outsiders that alter its structure or question the established hierarchy. Similarly, the homeland and the national culture may be “contaminated” by the presence of strangers and of foreign cultural

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products, respectively. In either case, the “unclean” element that brings the danger of profanity must be “cleansed” (Morley 1999: 161). Yet the idealized and nostalgic notion of an era in which places were supposedly inhabited by coherent, impenetrable, and homogeneous communities is often contrasted to an image of destabilizing, postmodern fragmentation and disruption. David Morley, citing Doreen Massey’s (1994) work, argues that: destabilizations of the postmodern period have certainly given rise to a variety of defensive and reactionary responses: the rise of various forms of born-again nationalism, accompanied both by sentimentalized reconstructions of a variety of “authentic” localized “heritages” and by xenophobia directed at newcomers or outsiders. (Morley 1999: 156) Populist anti-immigrant feeling has been fueled by right-wing politicians’ rhetoric of exclusion and affirmation and protection of the inside/outside boundary, extolling the virtues of a form of national identity predicated on cultural exclusiveness and on the presumption that people prefer to dwell among their own kind. This form of cultural fundamentalism exacerbates differences of cultural heritage and the incommensurability of different cultural identities. The presumption is that people have a natural propensity to distrust, fear, and reject “strangers” or “outsiders,” simply because they are different, and to be hostile to all that is “foreign” precisely because it is “strange” to them (Morley 1999: 164). Thus culture is territorialized and the “problem” of immigration is construed as a political threat to national identity and integrity on account of immigrants’ cultural diversity (Morley 1999: 164). In opposition to the belief that any sense of place (home, community, and nation) must necessarily be reactionary, Massey argues that it is in fact possible “for a sense of place to be progressive; not self-enclosing and defensive, but outward-looking” (1994: 147). As an alternative to the traditional association of penetration with impurity, in which incoming elements (“foreign” immigrants, commodities, or TV programs) represent “matter out of place” (Morley 1999: 157), Massey argues for “a sense of place which is extroverted, which includes a consciousness of its links to the wider world and which integrates in a positive way the global and the local” (1991: 155) and “where what gives a place its identity is not its separate or ‘pure’ internalized history, but rather its uniqueness as a point of intersection in a wider network of relations” (Morley 1999: 157). For Massey a progressive concept of place entails the understanding that places are absolutely not static and have to be conceptualized in terms of the social interactions which they tie together, and which themselves are not motionless things, frozen in time, but processes (Massey 1994: 155). Massey also questions the need for boundaries for the conceptualization of place: the identity of a place does not necessarily have to come through “counterposition to the outside” but rather “through linkage to that outside which is therefore part of what constitutes that place,” dismantling thus “the common association between penetrability and vulnerability,” which makes invasion by newcomers so threatening (Massey 1994: 155). 146

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The aforementioned arguments resonate in the films I include here. Some dramatize within their diegesis the reductive and reactionary conceptions of home and place that articulate a desire for fixity and security in a mobile and global reality; others, on the contrary, present utopian situations and hopeful outcomes in which family and community are defined not only in terms of support for their own members, but also by openness to outsiders and sympathy for their predicaments. I propose a reading of these films’ narratives as potentially symbolic of the dilemmas affecting the current European family of nations in terms of how it defines its identity, its boundaries, and its vulnerability resulting from the interaction with what some consider to be exogenous and out-of-place elements that threaten its stability and unity. All of these films show that the nuclear family is “a fragile system, easy to subvert” (Douglas 1991: 301), and that subversion may emerge from within, inside its own structure, by its own members. Even the films that focus on a family’s xenophobic aggressive reactions to immigrants (Taxi, Poniente, La promesse) provide positive and hopeful solutions to the dilemmas they present by transferring responsibility and ethical commitment to the children, the younger generation, who consciously rebel against their parents’ reactionary positions or are expected to make up for their parents’ mistakes (Caché). My allegorical reading of these films extends to the role they play in articulating a postcolonial guilty conscience for the ills of colonization and its remnants after decolonization, as well as the inequalities posed by economic neocolonialism. These films’ morality tales mirror other European intellectual discourses that deploy moral authority by acknowledging Europe’s history of xenophobia and racism and by eliciting a sort of “white obligation” toward the subjects of Europe’s colonial enterprises from a receptive white audience eager for moral redemption. However, many of these intellectual discourses also problematize the white guilt paradigm when it focuses more on pitying the adversary-victim than on condemning one’s own side, when it is less about helping the victims than about denouncing the victimizing Other in ourselves (Gans 2006–2007). In most cases the ethical commitment of white national intellectuals and filmmakers has the purpose of addressing the crises affecting national identities within the EU and showing how they are articulated both publicly and privately. Among the participants within this debate, the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner has consistently argued against what he considers Europe’s exercises of self-flagellation and rhetoric of expiation for the evils of colonialism. In his books The White Man’s Tears: Compassion as Contempt (1986) and the Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism (2010) he criticizes Western attitudes toward the Third World as being characterized by guilt, hypocrisy, and paternalism; in particular, he decries left-wing intellectuals’ selective championing of Third World causes for sentimental reasons that are not subjected to rational analysis. Bruckner argues that Europe’s endless atoning for what it has inflicted on other parts of humanity and self-denigration can be a form of indirect self-glorification: “This is the paternalism of the guilty conscience: seeing ourselves as the kings of infamy is still a way of staying on the crest of history” (Bruckner 2010: 35). Paternalism is a synonym 147

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for the victimization of decolonized subjects who, on being relieved of all responsibility for their situation “are plunged back into the condition of infantilism that was obtained under colonialism” (Bruckner 2010: 42). Bruckner claims that victimization equals positive discrimination insofar as the victim is made a candidate for exception (2010: 142) in whom “the prejudices that were to be eradicated are reinforced: we can no longer see others as equals but must see them as inferiors, victims of perpetual oppression whose past ordeals interest us more than their present merits” (2010: 146). He continues, “Victimization may be an ephemeral salve, but it is also an additional humiliation, a second servitude on top of the first one” (2010: 152). The alternative to culpability and the duty of repentance toward decolonized minorities, according to Bruckner, would be to protect them by “emancipating” the individual and reckoning that “their singularity is more important than their nationality, their color of skin, or their membership in a group” (2010: 147). The ideal, he argues, would be to arrive at an indifference to color, ethnic group, and identity, seeing only talents, proper names, individual strengths, exceptional persons rather than individuals crammed into fixed categories […] We should be working on enlarging the human family, not on sanctifying past sufferings, which is always degrading for those who complain about them. (Bruckner 2010: 164) Applying the rhetoric of expiation to concrete texts, the term “white-savior narrative” is often used to refer to narratives that are constructed upon the inclusion of a white protagonist who rescues people of color who lack the strength, wisdom, or resources to rescue themselves. The white savior purges him or herself of whiteness and frees him or herself from guilt and responsibility while also becoming the hero to be worshiped by people of color. White audiences identify with that savior and in doing so are absolved from white guilt. There is abundant criticism of Hollywood’s tendency to exploit the “white savior” protagonist for its own commercial benefit.1 A number of black intellectuals and writers in the United States have denounced the so-called white-savior industrial complex (Cole 2012) as a simplistic way to transmute the complexity of evil into “the banality of sentimentality,” which ultimately denotes a condescending superiority and a validation of privilege through emotional experience (Cole 2012). This position parallels Bruckner’s critique of a facile remorse that remains disconnected from precise historical circumstances. Similarly, Alfred López, in his study, Postcolonial Whiteness (2005), tackles the same process, alluding to Dyer’s exploration of white liberal guilt. For Richard Dyer the “exquisite agony” of white liberal guilt does little to surrender its own entrenched privilege. In his words, “White liberal guilt at its most performative has the additional effect of diverting attention from the facts of white racism to how badly the Enlightened White Liberal feels about it” (Dyer 1997: 206). As López puts it, referring to Dyer’s argument, in spite of the fact that white guilt appears as sensitized and morally refined, it blocks “any careful examination of precisely how whiteness has managed 148

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all the damage it has inflicted on its others and what other forms a postcolonial whiteness might take” (López 2005: 23). New York Times op-ed columnist and Pulitzer Prize-winner Nicholas Kristof—best known for his altruistic journalistic work on developing countries’ problems, including rape, prostitution, hunger, and lack of education—was asked by a reader of his blog in July 2010, “Why do your columns about Africa almost always feature black Africans as victims and white foreigners as their ‘saviors’?” He responded that given the fact that it is hard to get white readers to care about distant crises in developing black countries, one way to get their attention is to have a white protagonist with whom “they can identify as a bridge character.”2 Although the work of white foreign journalists engaged with the cause of injustice in the developing world is not exactly the same as the role potentially played by white Western citizens in terms of understanding immigrants and “saving” them from exploitation, deportation, imprisonment, or death in the West, Kristof ’s defense offers an argument crucial to my interpretation of the work of white European immigration filmmakers who elicit a spectatorial identification with white “bridge characters” who are aware of and sympathetic to immigrants’ predicaments. As Carrie Tarr puts it, the kindness of European citizens willing and able to accept difference toward the Others, as offered by many immigration films, can be flattering to European audiences, providing “utopian fantasies of social, religious, and ethnic harmony” (2007: 17). There are those who object to this “saving,” sympathetic initiative, seeing in it a hidden condescending superiority based on the premise that Westerners have to rescue non-Western Others who are seemingly unable to rescue themselves, and also viewing this initiative as a way to induce self-congratulatory, cathartic reactions that never lead to concrete action. Such objections could be potentially transposed to the discussion and analysis of immigration films, especially to those in which the Others’ point of view and agency are ignored and that focus mostly on whites’ expiatory gestures that fail to provide audiences with an opportunity for ethical reflection and a motivation for political action. As Michelle Aaron argues, applying Emmanuel Levinas’ (1989) writings on ethics to the arts and media, the films that “nurture reflection, recognition, and responsibility” are the ones that promote “spectators’ encounter with someone else beyond themselves” (2007: 112). Spectatorship can turn into “affective thinking” (Frampton 2006: 172), insofar as it depends upon the spectator’s intersubjective alignment with the prospective suffering of others (Aaron 2007: 112). Yet following the work of Susan Sontag (2003) and Judith Butler (2004) on the power of images to move the viewer and Nanni Moretti’s (1983) work on melodrama, Aaron also cautions us that moving tales that seek allegiances between the spectator and the tragic but triumphant hero through visceral reactions, “while fueled by morality, are far from being ethical” (2007: 114). Aaron observes the ethical impossibility inherent to the emotional and imaginative connections that spectators make with a film’s characters: the involuntary emotion experienced in front of the suffering of others is moral but not ethical, as it is “the opposite of reflection and implication” (2007: 116). She argues that “we cry, gasp or grimace and in so doing we acquit ourselves of our part in the production of and indulgence in 149

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the pain of others” (Aaron 2007: 116). By simply being moved, we do not necessarily take responsibility for the tragedies that cause the pain, but on the contrary we may be absolving ourselves of responsibility (Aaron 2007: 117). The ethical judgment and morality that can be extracted from viewing the films included in this chapter are closely related not only to the filmmakers’ goal to create awareness and a sense of moral responsibility in audiences by challenging their complacency with privilege and exposing the apathy of national majorities to the plight of immigrants and minorities and the role of Europeans’ ignorance in perpetuating immigrants’ persecution and marginalization (Lykidis 2009: 40). More importantly, these films go beyond flattering European audiences, as do films that create mere remorseful and utopian narratives that provoke emotional responses that are “fiercely controlled and contained within the text” and are reduced to the isolated and sealed-off site of cinema (Aaron 2007: 113). Instead, these films achieve their ethical goal by applying anti-sentimental distancing devices and processes of disavowal and through the combination of apparently contradictory qualities: closeness and distance, individual moral exposure and collective ethical involvement, spectatorial insulation, reflection, and implication, as well as the blending of form and meaning. These films prove that perhaps it is possible to both act on a guilty conscience and show solidarity without being paternalistic. Simplistic rhetorical expiations for the sins of colonialism, postcolonialism, and neocolonialism, which do not involve concrete measures to change things, are replaced in these films by microcosmic, local, small-scale individual actions to help concrete individuals in concrete daily situations. Instead of blaming themselves for the world’s wounds and for their inability to cure them, the characters of these films are assigned to take specific actions to advance the healing of at least one wound. Spanish Allegorical Families: Taxi, Flores de otro mundo/Flowers from Another World, and Poniente/West During the Franco dictatorship (1939–1975), the Spanish patriarchal family operated as a microcosm of the state, facilitating “imposition of order and regime stabilization” (Graham 1996: 189). As Helen Graham writes, “The family was connected vertically with the state […] reinforcing its unity and power, rather than challenging it as did the horizontal solidarities of civil society (such as other sorts of ‘family’/affective ties, civil associations, political parties, and trade unions)” (1996: 184). The regime’s ideology promoted an idealized image of the nuclear family in which the father was the authoritarian head of the household and the mother was asexual, non-working, devoted to the family and whose only desire and mission in life had to be no other than the fulfillment of her reproductive function. Given the prevalent role of the family in the regime structure, independent anti-Francoist filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s reappropriated it in their films as a means to tangentially address social and political issues otherwise repressed by official censorship. They consistently deconstructed the idealized official image by presenting dysfunctional and perverse families 150

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that introduced parodic and grotesque representations of the Francoist nation and functioned as allegories of sociopolitical repression. After the end of the dictatorship, the sacredness of the nuclear family and patriarchal authority continued to be demystified, and filmic representations of the institution of the family kept referring symbolically to the nation’s present sociopolitical issues. By the 1980s Spain had transformed itself into a democratic state, had become a full member of the EU, and had ceased to send economic migrants to Central and Northern Europe, becoming instead a receptor of immigration. Since the early 1990s immigration has been one of Spain’s most urgent national, as well as international, “problems” insofar as it is altering the (so far) homogeneous cultural and racial configuration of the democratic state. Within this context, it is not surprising that contemporary Spanish filmmakers continue to use the family as an emblematic space in which to represent diverse and complex issues (such as xenophobia, benign or violent racism, fear of invasion and contamination, assimilation, miscegenation, etc.) deriving from Spain’s current status as a receptor of immigration. In films such as Bwana (Imanol Uribe, 1996), Taxi (Carlos Saura, 1996), Flores de otro mundo/ Flowers from Another World (Icíar Bollain, 1999), Salvajes/Savages (Carlos Molinero, 2001), Poniente/West (Chus Gutiérrez, 2002), and Ilegal/Illegal (Ignacio Vilar, 2003), the family is either the perpetrator of white supremacist violence and directly involved in the organization and perpetuation of international immigration mafias, or, conversely, the locus through which to articulate the subversion of the patriarchal xenophobic order, display acts of solidarity toward immigrants, and develop a new racially mixed, transnational, and multicultural family model. Since analyzing all of the aforementioned films would exceed the length of this section, I will focus on Taxi, Flores de otro mundo, and Poniente because they present compelling examples of symbolic families whose members both harbor and transcend passive and aggressive resistance to the arrival and settlement of exogenous elements within the national family. Carlos Saura, one of Spain’s most influential filmmakers, who is best known for his politically charged films from the 1960s and 1970s and his flamenco dance dramas from the 1980s and 1990s, returns to the filmic practice of social commentary in Taxi after almost a decade dedicated to the musical film genre. In this family morality tale, he takes up one of the tropes that permeate his oeuvre: the family’s, and specifically children’s, position as protagonists and witnesses of Spain’s main historical events of the twentieth century.3 In Taxi, a family of taxi drivers decides unilaterally to “clean Madrid” of “undesirables:” Arabs, blacks, South Americans, gays, transsexuals, junkies, and prostitutes.4 The alliance between different socially or sexually marginalized characters found in immigration films (and analyzed in chapter 1) as a resistance strategy against the discriminating and oppressive forces of society is perversely inverted here, as their shared relegated socioeconomic, sexual, and racial status annuls their subjectivity and indeed makes them more vulnerable to the white supremacists. Their reduction to a homogeneous, undifferentiated, anonymous, and voiceless mass (that must be eliminated) is both consistent with neo-Nazi ideology and representative of racist stereotypes, which are sustained, among other things, by the refusal 151

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to acknowledge and respect the diversity and heterogeneity that defines immigrant societies. Taxi’s depiction of the victims of supremacist acts as an undifferentiated horde mimics, if only with the intention to denounce, the colonialist tendency identified by Albert Memmi to depict the colonized subjects as depersonalized and thus “drown [them] in an anonymous collectivity” (Memmi 1990: 151; Young 2000: 281). The film’s ending offers a hopeful solution to the violent acts perpetrated by the family that Saura associates with the remnants of reactionary and xenophobic Francoist Spain. In the film’s narrative, tolerance has to be born within the family ranks. In direct confrontation with their elders, the members of the younger generation assume the responsibility of ending supremacist acts and actively create the basis for a more open-minded society. By depicting the “undesirable” Otherness as an at once voiceless and anonymous victimized collective body and the Spanish family (standing for the nation) as a microcosmic body of victimizers, Saura suggests that responsibility for awareness and acceptance of Otherness resides solely with Spanish citizens, regardless of (or perhaps because of) the Others’ voiceless status. Nevertheless, the invisibility (reinforced by the fact that the aggressions take place only at night) and voicelessness of the victims (who are silent passengers in the taxi’s back seat), contrasted with the extremism and verbal profusion of the aggressors, can be problematic insofar as it may be interpreted as a Manichean simplification of a complex problem that eliminates the possibility of the audience’s active identification with the victims beyond their sacrificial status.5 Though one could argue that Spain provides a good example of “benign racism” (Ackerman 1996), sporadic outbreaks of extreme neo-fascist racism occur both on an individual and collective scale, as Saura’s film illustrates. As Parvati Nair argues, Spain both depends upon and rejects the immigrant presence, as “the sudden acceleration of its economy has clearly not been matched by an ethical or cultural awareness that allows Spaniards to take stock of their new position or even to recognize their need for the immigrant.” Thus, Nair continues, “A provincial xenophobia endures despite globalization,” which in turn, may “translate into sporadic violence” (2003: 8). Chus Gutiérrez tackles this provincial xenophobic fundamentalism in Poniente/West, a film that echoes the real tragic events that took place in El Ejido (Almería) in 2000. On February 5 of that year, a female resident of a village near El Ejido was stabbed to death while doing her weekly shopping by a 22-year-old Moroccan immigrant who had been receiving medical treatment for mental illness. As soon as the police had arrested and identified the aggressor as an immigrant, a wave of hatred and violence swept the region with immigrants as its targets. For 72 hours, hordes of farmers wielding iron bars, joined by youth from the high schools, beat up their victims, chased them through the streets, and pursued them out among the greenhouses. Roads were blocked, barricaded, and set aflame. Shops owned by Moroccan residents were smashed, their homes destroyed and set on fire, the mosque wrecked, and its sacred texts desecrated. Public authorities simply let the destruction happen (the police had been given “firm instructions” not to intervene).6 Poniente’s plot, referring loosely to El Ejido tragedy, introduces the binary premise in which the Spanish family (nation) plays the role of exploiters and immigrants play the role 152

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of victims.7 An extended patriarchal family of horticulturists from Almería oppresses and discriminates against the African immigrants who work in their greenhouses. As a reaction to the immigrants’ demands for better working conditions, the family ends up vandalizing the immigrants’ houses, burning their workplaces, and causing their final exodus from the land. The dichotomy of nationals/immigrants that is articulated in patriarchal terms in the aforementioned Spanish films is both reinforced and twisted in Poniente when the daughter of the deceased patriarch, Lucía, assumes the responsibility of managing the family’s greenhouses. Having left her job as a teacher in Madrid to return to her village, La Isla, with her daughter Clara, the protagonist, subverts the patriarchal hierarchy and the sexism prevailing in the rural environment and dedicates herself to improving the immigrants’ working conditions and confronting preexisting unjust labor practices. Her character functions as a third party that observes and judges the racially discriminatory attitudes while simultaneously being the target of gender discrimination herself. Lucía’s alliance and solidarity with the African workers is reinforced by her romance with the Spanish male protagonist, Curro, who was born to a family of Spanish migrants in Switzerland but has returned to Spain recently and who has a relationship of friendship and potential business partnership with one of the North African male immigrants working in the greenhouses of Lucia’s family. Gutiérrez, like Saura in Taxi, makes the young generation transgress the family “rules” of the land and alters the convention of interracial romance (discussed in chapter 1) to focus instead on the sympathetic position and friendly relationship of white nationals toward immigrants. The purpose of including a Spanish migrant to Switzerland as the male protagonist of the film is to emphasize the link between Spain’s own past migratory experiences and the current situations and attitudes resulting from present immigration to Spain. That association is represented both in the narrative and in the cinematography. The two migratory experiences, that of the Spanish to Northern Europe in the 1950s and 1960s and that of Africans to Spain in the 1990s and 2000s, are visually joined through a Super 8 film documentary of poor and hungry Spanish immigrants in Switzerland shown within the film. The images in this film prompt emotional reactions in Curro and Pepe, who both share the experience of the on-screen migrants. This cinematographic self-reference provides a powerful visual statement to illustrate and reinforce Juan Goytisolo’s and Sami Naïr’s moral imperative in their book El peaje de la vida: Integración y rechazo de la emigración en España/Life’s Toll: Integration and Rejection of Immigration in Spain (2001), their written response to the El Ejido incidents, in which they argue that Spain needs to create a collective memory of traumatic historic episodes in order to transcend the chronic amnesia that has historically characterized Spanishness and, by doing so, reshape the national identity. Sophisticated cinematography and camerawork forcefully highlight the beautiful coastal landscape of Almería and contrast it throughout the film with the miserable and subhuman environments where immigrants are forced to live and moreover, with the greenhouses’ endless covering of plastic sheeting that is the defining mark of the “synthetic fertility” (Nair 2003: 1) that has created “accelerated prosperity in a chaotic 153

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Figure 5.1:  Poniente/West by Chus Gutiérrez (© 2002 Figure 5.2:  Poniente/West by Chus Gutiérrez (© 2002 Amboto Audivisual S.L. & Olmo Films S.L.) Burning Koran. Amboto Audivisual S.L. & Olmo Films S.L.) Plastic.

Figure 5.3:  Poniente/West by Chus Gutiérrez (© 2002 Amboto Audivisual S.L. & Olmo Films S.L.) Exodus.

manner” (Gutiérrez 2002), resulting in wealth for the owners and stagnation in the workforce that labors under its asphyxiating heat. A poetic leitmotif is used to reinforce that disparity: the plastic sheeting immigrants use to cover both the greenhouses and the shacks they live in has been let loose after the villagers’ attack and flies in the sky, where it is indiscriminately paired with clouds and fog; the plastic sheeting provides warning signs of the immigrants’ presence, reminders of the immigrants’ invisibility and ethnic segregation, and metaphors for the fragility of their living conditions and the constant threat of relocation. The intertwining of past and present, history and collective conscience, is reintroduced in the film’s ending sequences. Following a landscape of devastation, Gutiérrez uses slow motion to dramatize the immigrants’ exodus. This sequence forcefully reminds us of the previous historic exodus forced by the Spanish nation on religious, ethnic, and racial Others and suffered by its own citizens in the various exiles of the twentieth century.8 Gutiérrez’s film, along the lines of Goytisolo’s and Naïr’s book, urges the national audience to accept the hybrid nature of a national identity whose roots rest in Al-Andalus and presents dialogue with the past as the only possible way to approach the phenomenon of immigration and the racist reactions it provokes. Spaniards’ and immigrants’ parallel border crossings and migrations and the fraternal bonds established between the film’s 154

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subjects prevail and metaphorically provide a logical solution in the film to the cultural and racial miscommunication between natives and immigrants. The emphasis relies on shared cultural links, rather than differences, as the only possible means toward eventual integration and acceptance. Bollain’s Flores de otro mundo, analyzed in chapter 2 for its representation of female immigration, provides another allegorical representation of the Spanish family, in this case by fictionalizing the increasingly current phenomenon of miscegenation. When Damián, a rural farmer who lives with his widowed mother in a village in Extremadura, marries Patricia, a black Dominican immigrant with two small children, the household becomes the site of passive-aggressive interactions and intercultural negotiations between the two women, Patricia and Gregoria, her mother-in-law. Following the previously mentioned Spanish cinematic tradition that uses the patriarchal family in general and the castrating mother in particular to embody the repressive Francoist nation, Bollain introduces the character of Gregoria as an emblem and defender of the native nation from contamination. Gregoria, who allegorically represents provincial xenophobia, perceives Patricia, the exotic foreigner, as a threat to her sovereignty in the house, which figuratively represents the homeland as a fortress being “invaded” by aliens. A happy ending ensues after they both realize that they are not that different from each other and that they both want the best for Damián, and more importantly, after Gregoria redeems herself by mediating between the couple and intervening on behalf of Patricia, helping to solve a serious dispute that threatens the stability of the family. A family photograph taken the day of the daughter’s first communion toward the end of the film is used as a potent visual symbol of the desired interracial coexistence. The ending scenes show the village’s children, indifferent to color differences, waiting happily for another bus that brings more immigrant women to repopulate the village. Here again, the younger generation is expected to correct the previous generation’s fearful and intolerant attitudes, hopefully contributing to a new multiracial and multicultural Spain.

Figure 5.4:  Flores de otro mundo/Flowers from Another World by Icíar Bollain (© 1999 Producciones La Iguana-Alta Films, S.A.) Family picture.

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La promesse: Betrayal of Patriarchy and Ethical Development Although the Dardenne brothers, Belgium’s most acclaimed filmmakers, have been making shorts and fictional and documentary films since the 1970s, they first came to international attention with La promesse. Over the span of almost twenty years they have won numerous awards at the Cannes Film Festival.9 The Dardenne brothers are considered major exponents of socially conscious European cinema, and their committed oeuvre includes two incursions into the subject of immigration (La promesse and Le silence de Lorna/Lorna’s Silence, 2008). La promesse offers a profound view of the exploitation of illegal immigrants’ labor in Europe, which in this fictional tale is presented through the relationship between Roger, a Belgian contractor, and his teenage son, Igor. Father and son are building themselves a house in Seraing at the outskirts of Liège, a working-class city in French-speaking western Belgium and the Dardennes’ hometown. They are involved in the business of smuggling immigrants who rent their house’s small and dingy rooms and work on the house’s construction. In addition to their rent, the immigrants’ groceries, electricity, and heating are deducted—at exorbitant prices—from the already low salaries Roger pays them. When the film begins, Igor is working as an apprentice to a mechanic but has to quit his job because Roger forces him to help with the smuggling and running of the household. In an unfortunate construction accident, Amidou, an African immigrant living and working in the house, dies after Roger refuses to take him to a hospital for fear of being subject to questions that may disclose their clandestine business. Before he dies, Amidou asks Igor to promise him that he will look after his wife, Assita, and their baby, who are about to arrive in the next shipment of trafficked immigrants. Igor, who at the film’s beginning is unquestionably devoted to his father’s authority after his mother’s death, keeps his promise, developing a strong bond with Assita and in the end rebelling against his father, despite his father’s manipulations and threats. As happens in the films analyzed above, Roger’s and Igor’s household works as an emblem of a “motherless” nation that builds itself on the exploitation of illegal immigrants who pay rent and work in the house. The house they are building and paying for is symbolic of Western European countries that build their economies through immigrants’ cheap labor. Roger and Igor have understood that immigrants are not bad for the economy but, on the contrary, a source of cheap labor and easy income for them. This symbolism is anchored in the emotional and moral complexities of an Oedipal father-son relationship. Igor, who is fifteen, is expected to assume responsibilities that exceed his young age and is punished by Roger if he fails to do so. In the mother’s absence, their relationship is based on a fluctuation between love, mutual dependency, abuse, and fear, a pattern that is consistently sustained throughout the film in order to show Igor’s development of a moral self, which deviates from and opposes Roger’s immoral behavior. Igor’s progressive rejection of the abusive patriarchal authority and of the father-son bond drives the action and is established (and eventually broken) both visually (through camera work) and symbolically. A series of scenes illustrates the coercive and ambivalent dynamics between them: Roger physically abuses Igor for disobeying him and showing compassion to Assita, and then he tries to reconstruct their 156

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Figure 5.5:  La promesse/The Promise by Jean Pierre and Luc Dardenne (© 2001 New Yorker Films Artwork) Singing.

bond by offering the teenager a tattoo, a ring, and a night outing to a pub, thus appeasing the child’s fears and rebelliousness by treating him like an adult. The law of the father is literally engraved in the son’s flesh in the form of a tattoo, and the ring, the exact replica of the one the father wears, works as a mark of their indestructible bond. At a pub, Igor is allowed to drink beer and smoke, and joins his father on stage to sing a duet of the song “Siffler sur la coline: Zaï, Zaï, Zaï” (1979) by Joe Dassin. Shot with steady-cam, in close-up and without shot-reverse-shots that would offer the audience’s perspective, father and son share (and fill up) the frame and look at each other in the long singing sequence that highlights their complicity and emotional proximity. As Igor gradually develops a conscience and feels regret for Amidou’s death and sympathy for Assita, who has not been informed of her husband’s fate, his complicity with his father is replaced by a wordless bond with Assita, who is both a substitute for the mother he does not have and an object of desire to be imitated. Shot consistently from Igor’s point of view, La promesse is a coming-of-age immigration film that focuses on Igor’s progression from childhood to adulthood, from innocence to knowledge, and from indifference to moral and social consciousness. The change is shown through the fluctuation between Igor’s childish activities—go-karting with friends, an absence of sexual interest, emotional dependence on his father—and his adult activities—he works as a mechanic and in house construction as an adult; he is very serious; and he is overburdened with responsibilities for his age. A repeated image of Igor on his motorbike seeks to create a sense of a fast-moving life, a speedy image of a boy growing up too fast, beyond his years (Frampton 2006: 145). Igor’s perspective is given to us through constant close-ups and a “hyperactive, and at times, dizzying” handheld camera (Mai 2007: 136), which follows him without cuts, creating a sensation of close intimacy with him.10 He is the bearer of the gaze, constantly observing and taking an interest in the immigrants who live in his house, and spying on Assita through a wall crack. The close attention to detail in filming 157

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characters is a characteristic feature of the Dardenne brothers’ films. As they have said in interviews, “[B]y filming the gestures as precisely as possible you can render apprehensible that which is not seen” (West & West 2009: 133). Igor’s adulthood begins with the emergence of his moral convictions. At the beginning of the film he is a petty thief, a voyeur, and an accomplice to his father’s acts. At the end of the film he subverts the father’s authority to keep his promise and protect Assita. At the film’s climax, Roger finds Igor and Assita, who had escaped from Roger’s attempt to sell her to a sex trafficking ring, hiding in the mechanic’s workshop, and he refuses again to tell her the truth about Amidou’s death. A fight ensues between the three of them and, with Assita’s help, Igor shackles his father’s foot to a mechanical device to prevent him from getting hold of her. As Roger hops clumsily on his unchained foot reaching out for his son, he flails and slaps himself with the chain, knocking off his glasses. Bert Cardullo has pointed out that the image of a shackled Roger provides “a stark visual symbol of the blindness, wrongheadedness, and construction of Roger’s moral code” (2009a: 34). Joseph Mai also notes that “Roger has been unmasked; his face becomes naked and visible (though he remains blind, literally and ethically)” (2007: 141). An emotionally tense scene follows, in which an initially ambivalent Igor winds up leaving his father chained and accompanies Assita to the train station where she is supposed to take a train to Italy, where she has been led to believe her husband moved to escape his impending gambling debts. In this scene the father’s control over Igor ends, and their bond is literally severed. Symbolically, when Igor pawns the ring his father gave him (which has to be removed by force, literally cut off from his finger, signaling the breaking of the bond between father and son) to make money for Assita’s trip, and gives away his go-kart keys to a friend before he runs away with Assita, and when he leaves his father chained and impotent to exercise his authority, Igor abandons childhood forever and renounces his unethical association with patriarchy. The conflict of loyalties and Igor’s awakened conscience finally lead to his betrayal of the father, which is replaced by liberation of and love for the adopted black mother.

Figure 5.6:  La promesse/The Promise by Jean Pierre and Luc Dardenne (© 2001 New Yorker Films Artwork) Roger in chains.

Figure 5.7:  La promesse/The Promise by Jean Pierre and Luc Dardenne (© 2001 New Yorker Films Artwork) Igor tells Assita about Amidou’s death.

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Once at the station, Igor finally reveals to Assita that Amidou is dead and buried in cement near the house, thus admitting his previous dependence on his father (“J’ai obey”/I obeyed) and articulating his ethical development. Both characters present their backs to the camera, which fluctuates between Igor and Assita. The whole scene is filmed without the interruption of sound or music. Assita listens in silence, turns to Igor, looks at him, and without a word, walks back to the station’s exit, followed by Igor. In the last scene—one of the few shot with a static camera—they walk together through a long corridor, leaving the ending open in terms of the consequences of Igor’s decision for both himself and the Belgian and African families. However, truth prevails in the end and it may be inferred that Assita will stay in Belgium to mourn and give her husband a proper burial, which has vital importance in her African culture. The awakening of Igor’s conscience and his final redemption expresses the directors’ hope that Europe’s younger generations will confront and undo the older generations’ xenophobic and intolerant attitudes. In this way the film is similar to Taxi and Poniente. All of the Dardennes’ films deal with moral issues posed by crises in the lives of their central characters, and many of them concern relationships between parents and children. Moreover, the films are driven by “the desire to take people—people, not political ideas necessarily—from the margins of society and put them in the center” (Cardullo 2009b: 191). Along with this sociological desire, their films take a philosophical stance, influenced by their readings of Levinas’ writings on ethics, whereby characters have to encounter the Other face to face—an Other who demands a response and creates a responsibility that determines what it means to be human (Cummings 2009: 56). In opposition to the skepticism prevalent in some of the critical views on postcolonial guilt, the Dardennes declare that guilt is a subject that interests them and can be found throughout their work because, as they say, “[I]t’s when we feel guilty that we become more human. In all our films, it’s thanks to feelings of guilt that the character breaks his or her routine and changes […] [F]or us guilt is not narcissistic because it enables us to work towards something better” (Cardullo 2009b: 203). Caché/Hidden: The Return of the Repressed Michael Haneke is one of Europe’s best-known filmmakers. Although he was born in Austria, he makes films in German, French, and English, benefitting from European coproduction systems. Caché is his second French-language film dealing with the subject of migration and assimilation, which he had already tackled in Code inconnu/Unknown Code (2001). In Caché, an intellectual Parisian couple, Georges and Anne Laurent, and their twelve-year-old son Pierrot have their bourgeois stability disrupted when they start receiving anonymous surveillance videotapes of their house along with childish drawings of faces and animals spitting blood. Soon the tapes and drawings take on personal significance as they lead to a hidden episode in Georges’ childhood. As the couple tries to locate the sender of the parcels and the meaning behind them, the repressed memory of 159

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the past unfolds and unveils Georges’ guilt and inability to take responsibility for his actions as an adult. The film, which was coproduced in France, Austria, Germany, and Italy and which won the Best Director Award at Cannes in 2005, establishes the symbolic connection between the hidden in an individual family and the hidden in European society and politics. The hidden has multiple meanings and establishes multiple layers of performance and spectatorship. First, the original secret, which unfolds throughout the film, involves Georges’ shameful behavior when he was six years old toward Majid, the son of the family’s Algerian employees who was adopted by the family after his parents were murdered in the infamous Paris massacre of 1961.11 As Georges’ spoiled status in the bourgeois family was threatened by Majid’s adoption, he made up a series of lies (that Majid had spit blood, beheaded the farm’s rooster, and threatened Georges with the ax he used on the rooster) to force his expulsion from the household, ultimately leading to Majid being sent to an orphanage. Because of a location shown in one of the tapes, Georges suspects that Majid is sending them. He visits Majid’s apartment in the housing projects of La Romainville in the suburbs of Paris, after which a confrontation between Georges and Majid, who have not seen each other in 40 years, and then between Georges and Majid’s son, ensues, leading Majid to commit suicide in Georges’ presence. The more Georges refuses to admit responsibility for Majid’s past and present outcomes, not only to Majid and to Anne but, above all, to himself, the more his personal and family stability and professional reputation are damaged. Much has been written about the symbolic connection Haneke establishes between Georges’ bad conscience and the muddy and complex position of France regarding its colonial past in Algeria. Georges’ hidden, repressed secret haunts him like a ghost decades later, symbolizing an entire nation’s sense of white guilt for the abuses of colonialism. The confrontation between Georges and Majid mirrors the one between the former colonizer and the former colonized (Rivi 2007: 132). The allegory extends to symbolize postcolonial Europe being summoned to confront its colonial past (Rivi 2007: 125). As Yosefa Loshitzky puts it, “The refusal of France, and even its educated elite, to take responsibility for the continuation of past and present atrocities committed against colonial and postcolonial subjects […] extends in Caché […] to the rest of the West, which not only continues to hide its past crimes against the Third World but continues to enact them in the present (2010: 152). Caché features a literal home “invasion” that threatens the personal stability and professional reputation of its bourgeois protagonist (Lykidis 2009: 41) However, as Majid and his son continue to deny their involvement in the “invasion,” the sender’s identity remains hidden at the end of the film while Georges’ childish actions and immoral behavior in the present are unveiled. As Frampton observes, “[B]ourgeois society hides its fears, its memories, its humanity,” and “Haneke’s films force that society to reveal what is hidden” (2006: 144). What is particularly interesting in Caché is that Georges’ repressed memories are imposed on him in the form of videotaped films in which he and his family become both spectators and actors. Ironically, Georges is a TV producer and a host on a literary review show who spends his working hours 160

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watching and editing images and whose public intellectual image is broadcast to millions of spectators. Haneke’s film blurs the boundaries between private and public, indoors and outdoors, past and present, the conscious and the subconscious, colonial and postcolonial. A recollection of the past and present guilt is associated with the family houses, which function as spaces of memory. The first three tapes consist only of long-sequence shots of three houses: Georges’ current house, the family house where Georges (and Majid before his expulsion) grew up, and Majid’s current apartment in the banlieue. The last tape, which takes place inside Majid’s apartment and reproduces Georges’ verbal aggressive behavior against him, is sent both to him and to his boss at the TV channel. There is a reciprocal intrusion of space that refers to the characters’ literal and symbolic antagonism, as the videotapes penetrate the privacy of Georges’ bourgeois house and workspace and Georges penetrates the privacy of Majid’s working-class dwellings. As the inner and outer spaces of memory are played back for Georges, his family, his friends, his boss, and the audience to see, the past and the present merge, and the private and hidden are made public and become visible. As Georges’ past takes over the present, his current nightmares and past memories, in the form of flashbacks, coalesce, becoming indistinguishable for the spectators and adding another level of mystery regarding the children’s interaction in the past. Similarly, the films (that is, the videotapes) within the film and the on-screen reality are interchangeable and often look the same. Each scene could be a video within the film, starting with the opening one: a long still sequence of a house and a street. The camera is still; there is no sound until we start listening to the couple’s voices referring to the anonymous videotape and try to understand its meaning. The shot cuts inside the house, and we see the characters watching and rewinding the tape, after which Georges goes out to try to locate the film’s point of view. We understand then that what we were seeing was a film within the film and both characters and spectators are made to share the position of onlookers. The structure repeats in every instance and with every recorded space: the sequence shot of one of the houses precedes the characters’ (and our) viewing of the videotape on the living room TV, in the same way that the creepy drawings recreate the children’s interactions in the past and prefigure Majid’s fatal outcome. As the film progresses, Haneke alters the pattern in order to build suspense: numerous scenes that work as transitions between events show the house from the same angle, provoking the viewer to think that another tape is coming, when that turns out not to be the case. Characters are consistently turned into voyeurs, and the on-screen reality can potentially be penetrated by inadvertent onlookers. In one scene, Anne, disturbed and saddened by Georges’ evasive attitude and lies, is tenderly consoled by her boss and friend, Pierre, at a café. The intimate yet public scene appears to have been “watched” by Pierrot (as well as the audience), who concludes that they are having an affair. We never see Pierrot watching the scene (as we never see anybody watching or filming the houses or the confrontation between Georges and Majid), but Pierrot’s reaction and subsequent conversation with Anne let the audience know that he “saw” the scene like us. All of this increases the confusion between reality and fiction, live and recorded, looking and being looked at, emphasizing the fact that there are multiple 161

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Figure 5.8:  Caché/Hidden by Michael Haneke (© 2006 Sony Pictures Classics) House under surveillance.

Figure 5.9:  Caché/Hidden by Michael Haneke (© 2006 Sony Pictures Classics) Drawing.

Figure 5.10:  Caché/Hidden by Michael Haneke (© 2006 Sony Pictures Classics) School entrance.

perspectives on truth. Spectators are left in the end with all of their questions unanswered, including the most important one: who is responsible for recording and sending the tapes. As Luisa Rivi notes, Caché is “a thriller in which both the protagonist and the spectator are in the position of the detective, but unlike in the classic whodunit, both are destabilized by the lack of a solution” (2009: 129). While suspense, tension, and manipulation are inherent to the plot of the film, there is no manipulation of the image. The camera does not judge; it simply stares. Outdoor scenes are shot in long sequence shots, with a steady-cam, avoiding traveling shots in order to mirror the videotapes’ angle and point of view. The last scene of the film is as obscure as the rest and creates a final layer of ambiguity, allowing for a variety of viewings and interpretations. It is an extreme still long shot of the entrance of Pierrot’s school where students linger on the stairs and pedestrians and cars traverse a busy street. We have seen the school from exactly the same angle early on in the film when Georges picks up Pierrot at school. Now, as the camera lingers for a few minutes just before the final credits appear, Majid’s son enters the scene and approaches Pierrot. They have a cordial conversation we cannot hear, after which Majid’s son leaves and Pierrot goes back to his friends. It is a very ambiguous, yet unthreatening, scene. Without sound, viewers have to decide what is happening, but before that, they have to be very attentive to even 162

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notice the boys’ interaction amid the place’s activity. In an interview with Haneke conducted by Serge Toubiana (2005), the director is amused to find that viewers are divided between the ones who see the boys’ conversation and those who do not notice their presence on the scene. In any case, Haneke says, spectators declare it an appropriate ending that leaves them musing about the hidden meaning of either the blank school scene or the content of the characters’ conversation. According to Haneke, his films aim at empowering the spectator, transforming him or her from “simple consumer to active evaluator.” He says, “[T]he more radically answers are denied to [the spectator], the more likely he is to find his own” (in Arthur 2005: 28). Indeed, the ending does not provide answers but requires an active spectatorial involvement and prompts a myriad of questions: Is this the last videotape being played back by the Laurents? Are the boys accomplices in the filming and sending of the tapes? Will they inherit their parents’ problems and reproduce their animosity? Or, rather, as critics have argued, will they take responsibility and make up for their parents’ mistakes? (Frampton 2006: 144). For Rivi, the ending indicates that it is up to the next generation to come to an agreement and seek a common code, however unknown at present, for a postcolonial Europe (2007: 137). In Caché, Orwellian control takes the shape of “the gaze of an Other” (Frampton 2006: 142); it is used as a reminder of individual and collective ethical obligations. As Haneke points out in his interview with Toubiana (2005), Georges is not guilty for having behaved selfishly as a child, but rather for denying his responsibility in Majid’s fate and refusing to atone for it as an adult. The child is not accountable; the adult is, in the same way that the Algerian massacre cannot be undone, but it can be acknowledged, remembered and mourned. In a review of the film, Paul Gilroy critiques Haneke for limiting the reference to the 1961 Algerian tragedy to “an overly casual citation,” “a passing acknowledgment,” and “a piece of tragic machinery in the fatal antagonism that undoes [its] protagonists” (2007: 233). He also finds fault in the characterization of Majid for lacking psychological gravity and complexity and for being sacrificed too soon and without consequences. In my view, Haneke is not interested in documenting the concrete political event (which is nonetheless the intertext and political background to the character’s personal situation) or in giving prominence to the Algerian characters’ perspective. Caché is a film about the individual and collective failure to acknowledge the wrongs of the past and about how that failure affects the possibility of a better understanding between colonizer and colonized groups in a multicultural Europe. Le Havre, “Political Fairytale”: It Takes a Village Le Havre is Ari Kaurismäki’s second French-language film, set in the Norman port city of the title. Kaurismäki’s first French-language film, La vie de Bohème/The Bohemian Life (1992), based on Henri Murger’s nineteenth-century novel, Scenes de la vie de Bohème/ Scenes of a Bohemian Life, is a comedic portrait of down-and-out artists in contemporary Paris. In addition to sharing a linguistic and cultural connection, these two films share the 163

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protagonist Marcel Marx, whose dreams of a successful career as an author in Paris collapsed in the first film but who remains a bohemian twenty years later (Von Bagh 2011). As A. O. Scott states in his review, Le Havre is a love letter to France, in particular to a half-imaginary, half-vanished realm of proletarian Frenchness incarnated in the films and popular music of the first half of the twentieth century. It is no coincidence that one of its characters (played by the Finnish actress Kati Outinen, a fixture of Kaurismäki’s universe) is named Arletty after the singer and actress who embodied the spirit and pathos of the Gallic working class in the 1930s and 1940s (Scott 2011). Robbie Collins’ review also characterizes the film as a tribute to French cinema: “There is deadpan comedic business and absurd detail here worthy of Jacques Tati […] and also the formal precision of Robert Bresson, with the cast clicking and whirring their way through scenes like figurines on a mechanical clock” (Collins 2012). Kaurismäki himself has declared in interviews that he used “outrageous French clichés [such as] a bread shop and accordion music” (Von Bagh 2011). The musical soundtrack is also reminiscent of old French music from the 1950s and 1960s and includes a performance by the old rocker Little Bob, a native of Le Havre and the mythical pioneer of French rock and roll in the 1970s. Moreover, the film’s setting is restricted to the humble fishing neighborhood where Marcel lives. Claire, the owner of Café La Moderne, Jean Pierre, the grocer, Yvette, the baker, the fishermen, and even the police inspector are prototypes of the old concept of community in a small French village that helps and supports each of its members. Despite its prototypical characterization, this community is an open and progressive one in which Marcel Marx, a humble shoe shiner, befriends and works along side another shoe shiner, Chang, a Vietnamese immigrant, and whose wife is also an accented foreigner. When a container bound for London loaded with undocumented African immigrants is discovered in the port of Le Havre, young Idrissa manages to run away and is fed by Marcel, who finds him hiding at the port. While Arletty is in the hospital being treated for an unnamed fatal ailment, Idrissa goes to Marcel’s home looking for protection, after which Marcel hides him in his home and, with the support of the local community, takes care of him and collects enough money to organize his smuggling to London, where his mother lives, and helps him escape deportation. Le Havre has been defined by reviewers, critics, and the director himself as a “political fairytale,” a utopian testament to the power of goodness and the value of a close-knit community. Its utopianism derives, on one hand, from the pattern found in many immigration films that revolve around solidarity between marginal members of society and which in many cases defy plausibility, contradicting a more probable reality in which the smaller and more enclosed a community is, the more fearful of the Other it is. On the other hand, its utopianism is encapsulated in its “unashamedly optimistic fairy tale” structure and its camp aesthetics, which are combined with a neorealist style reminiscent of the Italian neorealists Vitorio de Sica and Cesare Zavattini and their French followers Marcel Carné and Jacques Becker (Kaurismäki in Von Bagh 2011). The film addresses an international refugee crisis produced by the thousands of asylum seekers that pass through northern France (in particular, the Nord-Pas-de-Calais coast) in an effort to cross the Channel into England. 164

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Figure 5.11:  Le Havre by Ari Kaurismäki © 2012 The Criterion Collection) Boat people.

Figure 5.12:  Le Havre by Ari Kaurismäki (© 2012 The Criterion Collection) Max and Idrissa.

In 2009, Calais was the center of controversy after French immigration minister Eric Besson ordered the dismantling of “la Jungle,” a major makeshift migrant camp where hundreds of “sans papiers” (“without papers”) lived in overcrowded and squalid conditions with the hope of reaching England. This event provides the film’s context, and Kaurismäki includes actual news footage of the event, documenting what is being personalized in Idrissa’s individual story (Hendrix 2012). The film’s deadpan humor and subtle irony are used to satirize the discriminatory politics and xenophobia that have defined French immigration legislation for the last decade and the media’s sensationalist fear-mongering treatment. For example, as Marcel shines a man’s shoes, he glimpses a newspaper whose front page article describes a runaway (Idrissa) and his captured traveling companions. The headline reads, “Armed and Dangerous? Connections to Al Qaeda?” and below is a photograph of helpless women and children sitting in a dark container, receiving help from the French Red Cross  (Hendrix 2012). The refugee’s helplessness seen in the picture makes the press’s headlines laughable and point out the prevalent post-9/11 Islamophobia. A realistic treatment of exterior locations contrasts with studio interiors that are filmed with hyperrealist, saturated colors (blue walls both at Marcel’s home and the hospital), shadow-casting lighting, and 1960s retro furniture, objects, old cars, and telephones, although the film is set in 2011. This retro style bypasses the specific time period in which the film is set, creating a universal and timeless aesthetic, but “the rosy, old-time charm never totally overrides the current situation and the film is never reduced to pure escapism” (Hendrix 2012). Realism is juxtaposed and contrasted not only with the camp decor but also with the film’s fairy tale format. This contrast is established from the film’s start. Instead of showing the container where immigrants have been locked as filthy and deadly, Kaurismäki decided to do exactly the opposite: “I’d show them wearing their respectable Sunday best— to hell with realism. I’d make them arrive as proud people instead of having them lie in the container in their own filth, as some of them realistically would have done after two weeks’ incarceration” (Von Bagh 2011). The social prototypes that characterize the film and its two happy endings are consistent with the comedic genre and the film’s fairy tale aspect (Von Bagh 2011). In the end, Idrissa is safely smuggled to Dover by a local fisherman while Arletty 165

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is miraculously cured of her terminal ailment, as if Marcel’s ethical and compassionate deed had paid off. The blend of old and new contributes to the film’s nostalgic, moral message of utopian empathy, which Kaurismäki calls “conterfactual utopianism” (Von Bagh 2011). As Michael Sicinski puts it, Kaurismäki uses cinema to envision a world in which the love of humanity overcomes borders, even the one between life and death. His film demonstrates the necessary humanistic dialectic—that opening to the other, being changed, means becoming the other, shifting who our family, the very “we” is. (Sicinski 2012: 11) In this film, the camp style services social commentary and ethical action, recalling a nostalgic conception of a world in which small communities used to protect their members and act compassionately toward each other: “[a]n image of our world as we all wish it could be” (Sicinski 2012: 5) or “a vote of confidence in the human race” (2012: 6). Kaurismäki’s “conterfactual utopianism” extends to the character of the police inspector, who redeems himself from the authoritarian and overly detested position he holds in society by helping the boy escape. He represents a dream image of an official who retains an emotional life. In contrast with the police officer, an invisible bad neighbor betrays Marcel and assumes the role of the informer, which is inspired by the world of Henri Georges Clouzot’s Le Corbeau (Von Bagh 2011). He is the voyeur peering into Marcel’s courtyard through his rear window. Both the informer-voyeur and the police inspector, with their fedoras and raincoats, imitate the aesthetics of thrillers and film noir, adding another retro element and a world of cinematographic references that make the film a camp mix of genres and styles. In Kaurismäki’s fairy tale, the village’s communal engagement with the boy’s cause is made emblematic of the potential involvement of European individuals and small communities in concrete situations that result from global displacements and economic migrations. It is consistent with a liberal left-wing ideology that distrusts a helpless political system that is unable to solve the problems of immigration flows and that still operates under the shadow of colonialism (Von Bagh 2011). In Kaurismäki’s view, individual small-scale actions at the micro level can offer temporary remedies for systemic helplessness and political negligence. The reality is that refugee camps are often shut down and undocumented refugees are deported to their countries of origin or sent to other detention centers, but in Kaurismäki’s fictional and contained universe, individual characters lack prejudices, open their doors and businesses to foreigners, and adopt one single African boy to assist him in his effort to join his mother. One could claim that the village’s deed does not contribute to altering the largescale problems related to immigration and that the rosy moral tale works only to appease Europeans’ bad conscience and sense of culpability, becoming another example of the reviled white savior narratives. Conversely, however, Kaurismäki subverts that categorization throughout the film’s parody of both sentimental melodrama, with its tendency to induce audiences to cathartic yet unengaged reactions, and comedy’s banal happy endings. 166

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The scenes that take place at the hospital (involving a fatal diagnosis, the doctor’s bluntness, and Arletty’s strength and request to be left alone at the hospital until the treatment is complete) imitate the typical hospital scenes of classic melodramas. In the last scenes of the film, after Idrissa is safe and bound for England, Marcel goes to pick up Arletty at the hospital. When he arrives at her room, the bed is empty and a nurse indicates to him that he can pick up her personal belongings. For a few seconds the audience, along with Marcel, is led to believe (through musical accompaniment and Marcel’s anguished expression) that she has died, counteracting Idrissa’s happy outcome and somehow creating the sense that Arletty had to be sacrificed in a melodramatic fashion so that Idrissa would be saved. Instead, ignoring verisimilitude, or rather, parodying the melodramatic outcome, Marcel finds Arletty miraculously cured and wearing a yellow dress reminiscent of the good old times when they were a young couple. Inside the taxi that takes them home, Marcel looks at Arletty lovingly and in silence, reproducing old melodramas’ scenes inside cars. They arrive home to find the cherry tree in their courtyard blooming under a bright spring sun, highlighting the overall optimistic denouement and foreshadowing a hopeful future. The excessive happiness contained in the parody is self-conscious and promotes an ironic distance that undermines any spectatorial cathartic sentimentalism. Terraferma: The Law of the Sea Emanuelle Crialese had already tackled the subject of immigration (from Italy to the United States in the early twentieth century) in his previous film Novomundo/Golden Door (2006). Terraferma, co-produced by Italy and France, won the Special Jury Prize at the 2011 Venice Film Festival and focuses on risky migratory sea-crossings from Africa to Europe. In the last decade the Pelagie Islands in the Sicilian Channel (Lampedusa, Linosa, and Lampione) as well as Malta have become destination points for East African and Asian migrants heading to Europe and leaving from the two main departure points of Libya and Tunisia.12 As illegal crossings increase, fishing boats routinely encounter refugee boats stranded after days in precarious conditions and are faced with the dilemma of either following the traditional law of the sea—whereby seamen will never let people drown in their jurisdiction—or abide by new international regulations that forbid boats to rescue immigrants and force them to inform the Coast Guard instead.13 The situation has worsened since the beginning of the Syrian War. More than two million people have left Syria, most resettling in neighboring countries (Jordan, Turkey, and Lebanon). Since the summer of 2013, many Syrians are being smuggled into Europe in small trawlers that take the Mediterranean route from the port of Alexandria in Egypt, and which has created one of the gravest humanitarian crisis of the decade. After two major shipwrecks along the coast of Sicily and Lampedusa in October 2013, Italy has increased patrols and rescue operations in the Mediterranean. Officials are constantly presented with the dilemma: help or arrest the refugees, and, along with other Southern European countries, it has complained of bearing Europe’s burden (Yardley & Pianigiani 2013). 167

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Terraferma’s plot fictionalizes this reality and voices this dilemma through the point of view of a fishing family from Linosa, a small fishing island off the coast of Sicily, with a population of 450 inhabitants whose habits and culture of the sea are being changed by tourism and the arrival of undocumented immigrants to their coasts. As fisheries become less and less sustainable, the younger generation of fishermen are adapting to the times and channeling their resources to satisfy tourists. Ernesto, the family patriarch, and his grandson Filippo, whose father died at sea, struggle to continue the fishing businesses, while Ernesto’s living son, Nino, along with his wife, María, and Filippo’s mother, Giuletta, are invested instead in entertaining and renting their house to tourists in the summer months. One summer day, Ernesto and Filippo run into a stranded raft teeming with exhausted, dying African migrants, and while they wait for the Coast Guard to arrive, they rescue some of the migrants that had jumped into the water, among whom there is a pregnant woman and her son. Filippo and his mother Gulietta hide the woman, who gives birth in their garage, and her son at their home while they decide what to do. The next day the authorities confiscate Ernesto’s boat because he failed to report the illegal immigrants that they took to the island. The first part of the film establishes the economic and moral position of the island’s inhabitants. The younger generation, represented in the character of Ernesto’s son, wants to protect vacationers and the tourist business from the drama of half-dead immigrants stranded on their beaches. To do so they defend the Italian Law of Coasts that prohibits fishermen from rescuing immigrants. Conversely, the older fishermen insist on their obligation to carry on the “law of the sea” and rescue the shipwrecked. Their position reveals nostalgia not only for a time in which small fishermen lived a simple life and were able to support their families with the products of the sea, but also for a belief in the value of selfless solidarity and ethical commitment that rises above materialistic rewards. The altruism that this small traditional fishing community demonstrates toward the immigrants’ cause is similar to the utopianism permeating Le Havre. However, unlike the counterfactual denouement and outcome that prevails in Kaurismäki’s film, Terraferma is faithful to the facts, exposing the economic predicament affecting fishing communities and the generational disagreement regarding material and ethical stances—the dilemma deriving from the opposition between the traditional “law of the sea” and recent Italian coastal and border laws imposed by the European Union. Facing this dilemma, twenty-year-old Filippo is torn between his allegiance to his grandfather’s morals and his mother’s fear of the consequences of breaking the law, between a simple fishing life on the island and his mother’s desire to leave in search of new opportunities beyond fishing and tourism. Like La promesse, Terraferma is a coming-of-age film insofar as it consistently provides Filippo’s point of view, and the positive outcome is the result of Filippo’s ethical awakening. He is made the individual representative of a dilemma that affects the EU’s policies regarding immigration quotas. While his family strengthens the bonds with the African family that they shelter and the two mothers—Filippo’s mother and the African mother—help each other and become “sisters,” Filippo is confronted for a second time with the situation of running into a stranded raft with desperate migrants 168

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when he takes Maura, a vacationing girl who lives in his house, on a night tour to watch the ocean floor. Afraid of the repercussions and unable to save all of swimmers that try to climb into his small boat, he violently uses the paddle to chase them away, as if they were sharks, and flees the scene, leaving them behind. Filmed with a handheld camera and close-ups to emphasize movement and increase the tension, the scene pits Filippo against Maura because he refuses not only to rescue the swimmers but also to inform the police. This scene is followed with a cut to a close-up of Filippo asleep at the beach next morning. The scene appears not only excessive in retrospect, but also ambiguous and nightmarish, as it is not clear whether it happened in reality or whether Filippo dreamed it. The scene exposes Filippo’s panic and confusion and, above all, contributes to reinforcing the myth of the immigrant invasion.14 The apocalyptic tone of the scene is reinforced by its formal composition, which in turn is counteracted by the overall nightmarish atmosphere. Above all, the scene has to be perceived as a rite of passage in the construction of the young character’s moral development. In order to compensate for his previous lack of solidarity and to appease his guilt, at the end of the film Filippo assumes the task of taking the African mother and her two children to the mainland so that they can join her husband who lives in Torino. Filippo’s courageous action redeems him from his initial failure and leads to the same outcome we saw in Le Havre. Unable to save all of the immigrants attempting to board a boat or enter Europe, the Italian family, like the French family in Le Havre, does its best to save one family and make family reunification possible. The film also makes a point of highlighting the female bond between the two mothers, despite Gulietta’s initial reluctance, supporting the allegorical interpretation that the mother and the family are the pillars of an Italian nation that puts itself at risk in order to save an African family of immigrants and protect its unity. In the end, Filippo inherits the patriarch’s ethical commitment. As in all the films analyzed in this chapter, the alignment with the suffering of others is transferred from the old generation to the new and the hopeful ending entails the immigrants’ successful escape and the European family’s redemption. Nino’s argument that dying immigrants are harmful for the tourist business is counteracted in an emotionally charged scene that takes place when the survivors of the second boat start arriving at the beach in the middle of the day while white European tourists are happily enjoying the pristine waters and their drinks. The melodramatic effect is achieved through the use of subjective shots of the compassionate bond established between tourists and immigrants as the tourists in bathing suits offer their water and provisions to the moribund immigrants, all of which is filmed in slow motion. Conclusion The seven films included in this chapter propose that individual attitudes of understanding and solidarity precede and have the potential to affect institutional initiatives and governmental policy; they convey the message that tolerance has to be cultivated within the family’s structure as a first step to achieving a broader communal and supranational 169

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acceptance of Otherness. As it was the case in previous chapters, this conciliatory message may appear utopian, especially if we consider that reactionary attitudes of European citizens toward immigrants are getting worse—and are showing in the increasingly popular support of anti-immigration and xenophobic parties—as the global economic crisis and unremitting unemployment continue to affect most European countries. The utopian message is both articulated in and counteracted with representations of families and communities that offer fictional yet possible alternatives to introverted, reactionary, and xenophobic models and function as allegories of a more extroverted and progressive nation. The utopian is first and foremost reinforced through the resolution of generational conflicts and the transference of moral responsibility to Europe’s younger generations. The ethical in these films transcends a simplistic articulation of white guilt sustained in paternalism and sentimentality, and is achieved through narrative reflection and the characters’ direct implication. References Aaron, M., 2007, Spectatorship. The Power of Looking On, London & New York, Wallflower. Ackerman, R. J., 1996, Heterogeneities. Race, Gender, Class, Nation, and State, Amherst, MA, University of Massachusetts Press. Arthur, P., 2005, “The Paranoid Universe of Michael Haneke,” Film Comment 41(6), 24–28. Ballesteros, I., 2005, “Screening African Immigration to Spain: Las cartas de Alou and Bwana,” in A. Varderi & N. Glickman (eds.), Bridging Continents. Cinematic and Literary Representations of Spanish and Latin American Themes, Chasqui: Revista de Literatura Latinoamericana 2, 48–61. Bauman, Z., 1995, Life in Fragments. Essays in Postmodern Morality, Oxford, Blackwell. Bruckner, P., 1986, The White Man’s Tears: Compassion as Contempt, transl. W. R. Beer, New York, Free Press. Bruckner, P., 2010, The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism, transl. S. Randall, Princeton, Princeton University Press. Butler, J., 2004, Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence, London, Verso. Cardullo, B., 2009a, “Lower Depths, Higher Planes: On the Dardennes’ La Promesse, Rosetta, The Son, and L’Enfant,” in Committed Cinema: The Films of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne; Essays and Interviews, pp. 30–54, Newcastle, Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Cardullo, B., 2009b, “The Cinema of Resistance” An Interview with Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne,” in Committed Cinema: The Films of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne; Essays and Interviews, pp. 188–204, Newcastle, Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Cole, T., 2012, “The White-Savior Industrial Complex,” in The Atlantic, viewed December 14, 2013, from http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/the-white-savior-industrialcomplex/254843/2/. Collins, R., 2012, “Le Havre, Review: Finnish Filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki’s Le Havre is a beguiling tribute to French cinema,” in The Telegraph, viewed April 5, 2012, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ culture/film/filmreviews/9189178/Le-Havre-review.html. 170

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Cummings, D., 2009, “The Brothers Dardenne: Responding to the Face of the Other,” in B. Cardullo (ed.), Committed Cinema: The Films of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne; Essays and Interviews, pp. 55–68, Newcastle, Cambridge Scholars Publishing. De Haas, H., 2008, “The Myth of Invasion: The Inconvenient Realities of African Migration to Europe,” Third World Quarterly 29(7), 1305–1322. Douglas, M., 1991, “The Idea of a Home. A Kind of Space,” Social Research 28(1), 287–307. Dyer, R., 1997, White, London, Routledge. Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Law of the Sea,” viewed December14, 2013, from http://www. britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/530433/Law-of-the-Sea. Frampton, D., 2006, Filmosophy, London and New York, Wallflower Press. Gans, E., 2006–2007, “White Guilt. Past and Future,” Anthropoetics 12(2), viewed December 13, 2013, from http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap1202/wg.htm. Gilroy, P., 2007, “Shooting Crabs in a Barrel,” Screen 48.2, 233–235. Goytisolo, J. & Naïr, S., 2001, El peaje de la vida. Integración o rechazo de la emigración en España, Madrid, Aguilar. Graham, H., 1996, “Gender and the State: Women in the 1940s,” in H. Graham & J. Labanyi (eds.), Spanish Cultural Studies. An Introduction, pp. 182–195, New York, Oxford University Press. Gutiérrez, C., 2002, “Chus Gutiérrez, directora de cine: ‘En el tema de la immigración hemos querido borrar nuestro pasado pero no podemos ignorar el futuro,’” Revista Eroski Consumer, viewed December 14, 2013, from http://revista.consumer.es/web/es/20021001/entrevista/. Hendrix, E., 2012, “Le Havre and the Cinema of Nostalgia,” in Full Stop, viewed December 14, 2013, from http://www.full-stop.net/2012/03/06/features/essays/erika-hendrix/le-havre-andthe-cinema-of-nostalgia/. Levinas, E., 1989, “Ethics as First Philosophy,” in S. Hand (ed.), The Levinas Reader, pp. 75–87, Cambridge, MA, Blackwell. Lykidis, A., 2009, “Minority and Immigrant Representation in Recent European Cinema,” Special Issue, Building Walls in a Borderless World: Media and Human Mobility across Divided Spaces, J. Nasser (ed.), Spectator 29(1), 37–45. López, A. (ed.), 2005, Postcolonial Whiteness. A Critical Reader on Race and Empire, Albany, SUNY Press. Loshitzky, Y., 2010, Screening Strangers. Migration and Diaspora in Contemporary European Cinema, Bloomington, Indiana, Indiana University Press. Mai, J., 2007, “Corps-Caméra: The Evocation of Touch in the Dardènnes’ La promesse (1996),” L’Esprit Créateur 47(3), 133–144. Massey, D., 1994, Space, Place and Gender, Minneapolis, Minnesota University Press. Memmi, A., 1990, The Colonizer and the Colonized, transl. H. Greenfield, London, Earthscan. Moretti, F., 1983, Signs Taken for Wonders, London and New York, Verso. Morley, D., 1999, “Bounded Realms: Household, Family, Community and Nation,” in H. Naficy (ed.), Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place, pp. 151–168, New York & London, Routledge. Nair, P., 2003, “Fire Under Plastic: Immigration, or the Open Wounds of Late Capitalism,” in Latin American Council of Social Sciences, 1–10, viewed January 25, 2014, from http://www.academia. edu/282390/Fire_Under_Plastic_Immigration_or_the_Open_Wounds_of_Late_Capitalism. 171

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Rivi, L., 2007, European Cinema after 1989: Cultural Identity and Transnational Production, New York, Palgrave Macmillan. Rodríguez, M. P., 2010, Cultura audiovisual: el cine europeo como espacio para la reflexión social, Vitoria, Diputación de Álava. Scott, A. O., 2011, “Finding Solace, Oceans from Home,” in New York Times, viewed December 14, 2013, from http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/10/21/movies/le-havre-by-aki-Kaurismäkireview.html?_r=0. Sicinski, M., 2012, “Always Be a Human,” The Criterion Collection, viewed January 25, 2014, from http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/2399-le-havre-always-be-a-human. Sontag, S., 2003, Regarding the Pain of Others, London, Hamish Hamilton. Tarr, C., 2007, “The Porosity of the Hexagon: Border Crossings in Contemporary French Cinema,” Studies in European Cinema 4(1), 7–20. Téllez, J. J., 2001, Moros en la costa, Madrid, Debate. THE NYTPIKER, 2010, “NYT Columnist Nicholas Kristof Admits: ‘I Tend to Focus on the White Foreigner as Savior, Black African as Victim Narrative,’” viewed December 13, 2013 http://www.nytpick.com/2010/07/nyt-columnist-nicholas-kristof-admits-i.html. Toubiana, S., 2005, “Caché: Entretien avec Michael Haneke/Hidden: Interview with Michael Haneke,” Les Films du Losange, Paris, in DVD Sony Picture Classics. Von Bagh, P., 2011, “Ari Kaurismäki: The Uncut Interview,” in Film Comment, viewed December 14, 2013, from http://www.filmcomment.com/article/aki-kaurismaki/. West, J. & West, D., 2009, “Taking the Measure of Human Relationships: An Interview with the Dardenne Brothers,” in B. Cardullo (ed), Committed Cinema: The Films of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne; Essays and Interviews, pp. 124–133, Newcastle, Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Yardley, J & Pianigiani, G., 2013, “Out of Syria, Into a European Maze,” in New York Times (November 29), viewed December 15, 2013, from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/30/ world/middleeast/out-of-syria-into-a-european-maze.html?_r=0. Young, L., 2000, “Imperial Culture. The Primitive, the Savage and White Civilization,” in L. Back & J. Solomos (eds.), Theories of Race and Racism. A Reader, pp. 267–286, London & New York, Routledge.

Notes   1 For example, Avatar (2009) by James Cameron and Django Unchained (2012) by Quentin Tarantino drew heated controversy for allegedly reducing complex race interactions to simplified versions of the “white savior narrative.”   2 See Kristoff ’s answer to his blog reader’s question at The NYTPicker (2010).   3 The children’s subjective gaze over the civil war and immediate postwar years (along with the infantilization of adults) was the central narrative theme of films such as Ana y los lobos/Ana and the Wolves (1972), La prima Angélica/ Cousin Angelica (1973), and Cría Cuervos/Cria (1975).   4 In Taxi there is an obvious reference to Martin Scorsese’s classic film, Taxi Driver (1976), in which the eponymous protagonist, Travis Bickle, a Vietnam veteran and a psychotic misfit, 172

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  5

  6   7   8   9

10

11

12 13

imposes on himself the mission to “clean” the streets of New York City of “filth and scum.” In Travis’ own words: “[A]ll the animals that come out at night: whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal.” Like in Scorsese’s film, the taxi in Saura’s film is made a character cruising the streets of Madrid and a rolling metaphor for its driver’s antisocial hostility. Imanol Uribe’s Bwana (1996), which centers around an encounter on a deserted beach between an African immigrant who has survived the shipwreck of his raft (and carried to the shore the corpse of his friend who drowned in the trip) and a lower middle-class Spanish family on a Sunday excursion, is another example of the Spanish family’s passive aggression and its victimization and objectification of the immigrant character. For an extended analysis of the film, see Ballesteros (2005). For a detailed exposition of the events of El Ejido, their causes and consequences, see Goytisolo and Naïr (2001: 211–226), Téllez (2001: 235–306), and Nair (2003). For an excellent analysis of the sociopolitical context of the film, see Rodríguez (2010). I am mainly referring to the expulsion of Jews and Arabs in 1492 and the exile of Republicans during and after the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and the Franco dictatorship (1939– 1975). Awards include the Palme d’Or and Best Actress to Emilie Dequenne for Rosetta in 1999, Best Actor to Olivier Gourmet for Le fils/The Son in 2002, Palm d’Or in 2005 for L’enfant/ The Child, Best Screenplay in 2008 for Le silence de Lorna/Lorna’s Silence, and Grand Prix in 2011 for Le gamin au vélo/The Kid with a Bike. Mai has applied Laura Mark’s work on “haptic visuality” in intercultural cinema to his interpretation of the film and the way the Dardennes depict Igor’s character: “The body-camera, haptic visuality, the texture of skin, the skin of objects: so many film techniques seem to foster identification between the viewer and Igor, giving us the impression of touching him and his world” (2007: 142). On October 17, 1961, the Paris police, under orders of Maurice Papon, the head of the Parisian police, savagely repressed a pro-independence peaceful demonstration organized by the FLN (National Liberation Front) during the Algerian War (1954–1962). The unarmed demonstrators were attacked, murdered, and thrown into the Seine. It is estimated that two hundred Algerians died in the confrontation. The French government did not acknowledge the massacre until 1998. See Rachid Bouchareb’s film Hors la loi/ Outside the Law (2010) for a fictional depiction of the creation and development of the FLN and the Algerian War. Geographically, these islands belong to the African continent, although politically and administratively they fall within the Sicilian province of Agrigento and represent the southernmost part of Italy. In fact, until World War II the Law of the Sea meant that states had the right to control fishing, commercial navigation, travel, and migration by both ships and aircraft, improve communication and supplies by laying submarine cables and pipelines, conduct oceanographic research, naval, and aerial warfare, have military installations, and use oceans as a place to dump waste. In 1982 the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea devised a comprehensive treaty to codify international law concerning territorial waters, sea lanes, 173

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and ocean resources. It was ratified by 117 nations in 1982 and by 143 in 2003. Under the Convention rules, a state’s territorial waters extend between 3 and 12 nautical miles. Foreign commercial vessels are granted the right of innocent passage through the twelve-mile border zone. Beyond that zone all vessels and aircraft may proceed freely. Coastal nations are granted exclusive rights to the fish and marine life in waters extending 200 nautical miles from their shores. Every nation that has a continental shelf is granted exclusive rights to the oil, gas, and other resources in the shelf up to two hundred miles from shore (Encyclopaedia Britannica). 14 According to sociologists such as De Haas, the apocalyptic view, exaggerated by the media, that claims that the new tide of African migration to Europe is massive and is swamping Europe is based on fundamentally flawed assumptions about the (limited) magnitude, historicity, nature, and causes of this migration. De Haas argues that dominant discourses obscure the fact that African migration to Europe is fueled by a structural demand for cheap migrant labor in informal sectors, which explains why restrictive immigration policies have invariably failed to stop migration and have had various perverse effects (De Haas 2008). Nonetheless, the recent Syrian refugee exodus is intensifying the invasion perception as EU members have been unable to come up with a unified policy to help relocate the mostly middle class Syrian refugees arriving to Italian shores. Although countries like Sweden and Germany have promised asylum and benefits to Syrian refugees, common European law requires asylum seekers to make their asylum applications in the country of entry, where they are first fingerprinted and registered. Even if Syrians make it north to Sweden or Germany, they are sent back to Italy, where the asylum process can drag on for months and where benefits are paltry (Yardley & Pianigiani 2013).

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Chapter 6 Border-Crossing Road Movies: Inverted Odysseys and Roads to Dystopia

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he popular fear of migratory “invasions” and the dismantling of the homogeneity that once defined Europe’s national identities drive European sovereign states to fortify physical frontiers with boundary walls, fences, barbed wires, and high-technology infrastructures and to authorize drastic and inhumane control measures. This trend occurs simultaneously and in opposition to some globalist and transnational perspectives that encourage national borders to be porous or to vanish and encourage the free flow of people, money, consumer goods, and information. As Saskia Sassen eloquently puts it, “Economic globalization denationalizes national economies; in contrast, immigration is renationalizing politics. There is a growing consensus in the community of states to lift border controls for the flow of capital, information, and services, and more broadly, to further globalization. But when it comes to immigrants and refugees, whether in North America, Western Europe, or Japan, the national state claims all its old splendour in asserting its sovereign right to control its borders” (1996: 63). A large number of immigration films made in this context focus specifically on the migrants’ journeys—the passage rather than the process of settling down in the receiving country—and all of the factors that enable and hinder them along the way: border crossings, a lack of documentation, transportation systems, risky passageways, smuggling rings, police controls, detention camps, and deportation. Recent studies on European travel and road movies have established the difference between “positive cinematic travel,” driven by free choice, and “negative voyages” that show the darker side of transit undertaken by travelers in distress, “be they clandestine refugees, economic migrants or asylum seekers” (Gott & Schilt 2013: 3–4). The former are constructed as positive voyages through open roads in a borderless Europe and emphasize the quest for free mobility. They are conceived as self-exploratory road films, in which the route leads to a discovery of/return to the roots, and provides liberation from spatial boundaries or societal constraints. In Michael Gott’s words, “[P]ositive cinematic travel is engaged in the process of fashioning and demarcating the soft boundaries of Europe.” Positive travelers, “rather than protesting against or implicitly outlining Europe’s exclusionary parameters, they are concerned with coming to terms with the new parameters, the practical and psychological implications of the broader space one finds oneself in within an ostensibly united Europe” (Gott 2014: 3). The films included in this chapter, on the contrary, offer a pessimistic and dystopian vision of social mobility. They show the dark side of the European road and are primarily concerned with the implications of closed borders. Las cartas de Alou/Letters from Alou (Montxo Armendáriz, 1990), In This World (Michael Winterbottom, 2002), 14 kilómetros/14 Kilometers (Gerardo Olivares, 2007), Retorno a Hansala/Return

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to Hansala (Chus Gutiérrez, 2008), and Eden à l’Ouest/Eden is West (Costa-Gavras, 2009) are immigration films that, through a cinéma vérité treatment of situations and characters and offering variations of the road movie genre, are structured around movement and displacement as logical reactions to poverty, war, destruction, and oppression, creating both unease and awareness in audiences with regard to the inhuman consequences derived from the “borderless” nature of globalization.1 I interpret these films to be intellectual products that contribute to the discussion of the subject of migration to Europe from an ethical perspective that questions the rationale behind the politics of closed borders and the fortress approach that prevails within EU’s sovereign systems and determines most inter-communitary treaties. Following Kant’s premise of “the right to visit,” the ethical perspective defends the idea that “the right to mobility should become one of our key human rights” and “is part of the universalist and individualist values of the citizen of the world” (Wihtol de Wenden 2007: 60). This perspective points out the contradiction between the notion that emigration is recognized as a fundamental right (included in Article 13(2) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that “everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country”), but it is not complemented by a right to immigrate, which is regarded exclusively as a matter of national sovereignty; consequently, the right to leave one’s own country is meaningless if it is not exercisable in practice (Pécoud & Guchteneire 2007: 8). With respect to this context, the films by Armendáriz, Winterbottom, Olivares, Gutiérrez, and Costa-Gavras emphasize the fact that borders are areas of both crossing and closure and are a resource that fuels the businesses of international networks that “facilitate” migrants’ mobility, allowing for a lucrative economy built around the illegal crossing of borders (e.g., through trafficking in forged documents and visas, smuggling people, the sex trade, etc.) (Wihtol de Wenden 2007: 58). These films share an ethical perspective that calls for an understanding of human mobility in terms of a universal human right. In order to expose the dangers and the corrupt and dehumanizing nature of a bordercrossing process in which immigrants risk their lives in the crossing and are reduced to dehumanized objects to be transported for a profit, these films follow (and modify) road movie conventions and a documentary aesthetic in order to better represent the passage or the journey as an odyssey that in many cases is futile and ends in death or deportation. Border-crossing movies are in essence road movies, inspired by the quintessential American genre that emerged in the 1960s as a vehicle of anti-genre sensibilities and countercultural rebellion, typically linking liberation and transgression with mobility (Laderman 2002: 20). In both classic road movies and immigration border-crossing movies, the road becomes a signifier for freedom and the road West is perceived as an escape from poverty or reality. Road movies are a search for utopia but often end in dystopia, and the journey is a metaphor for both resilience and futility. As David Laderman shows in his dissection of this American genre, there is a historical continuity between journey literature and road movies insofar as both tend toward cultural critique and serve as a vehicle for social commentary (2002: 6). Two canonical models of journey literature, Homer’s Odyssey and Jack Kerouac’s On the 178

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Road (1957), were also structured in terms of a narrative and visual emphasis on the journey itself and a celebration of the quest and transience over destination and stability (Laderman 2002: 6). Road movies, following those literary examples, are mainly about mobility, and that mobility is enhanced by periodic stationary pauses that provide the characters with a space for self-examination (2002: 253). The primary narrative focus of border-crossing films is also the journey—and finding in the process newfound knowledge or personal awakening. However, the journey is determined by the character’s desperate need to reach the ultimate goal, and their movement across open space is curtailed by visible and invisible borders and thus not necessarily liberating, as it usually carries with it fears of being captured and deported, suffocating inside a vehicle, dehydrating in the desert, or drowning at sea, among other hazards. Border-crossing films are often adaptations of the outlaw road movie, in which characters are on the road out of necessity rather than choice; they are fugitives escaping from oppression, persecution, or economic disadvantage whose liberation depends on the success of their flight, their survival, and their arrival at their destination. As Laderman observes in reference to the European road movie, “[T]hese films refuse to romanticize rebellious driving/traveling” (2002: 267). In these films, traveling means being exposed to “different national identities in intimate topographical proximity.” The films imbue the quest with explorations of national identity and community, and revelation and realization receive more focus than the act of driving itself (Laderman 2002: 248). In road movies the road (with its stops and encounters) provides the space in which to explore the individual tensions between the traveling characters, and to reflect on the social conditions and people’s attitudes and effect a cultural and political critique within a concrete historical moment. In that vein, in border-crossing immigration films, the road trip functions as an allegorical contemplation of European attitudes toward its Others. They are open-ended films whose stories end with more movement and new destinations. Las cartas de Alou: Mobility, Circularity, and the Inevitability of African Flows A commonality found not only in border-crossing films but also in a large number of immigration films that focus on the move of first generation immigrants to Europe is a cyclical and open-ended narrative structure framed by beginning and ending scenes of departure and arrival that call attention to the unstoppable nature of immigration and border crossing. An early example of cyclical structure and forced displacement can be found in Las cartas de Alou by Montxo Armendáriz, one of the first films made in Spain about African immigrants attempting to enter Spain by crossing the Strait of Gibraltar on small rafts or pateras. The film is structured as a road movie that traces the travails of Alou, an African immigrant, since his arrival on a raft to the Spanish coast. The film follows his journey through the Iberian Peninsula, specifically, through southern Spain, Madrid, the Catalan region of El Maresme, and Barcelona. Armendáriz is interested in highlighting, on one hand, the circularity of the stories of immigrants who keep attempting to enter Western 179

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countries in spite of increasingly sophisticated and tougher forms of border control. On the other hand, his film addresses and fictionalizes what Antoine Pécoud and Paul Guchteneire state in Migration Without Borders, that “border controls are more a matter of symbols than actual results” and that they lead to a “self-perpetuating process: border controls create problems (such as smuggling or trespassing) which then call for more control” (2007: 6). A dialectical interplay between borders and human smuggling is at work, as each deportee becomes a new client for smugglers (Khosravi 2010: 20). Border controls are policies that generate visibility but few results and enable governments to develop a pro-control (or even anti-immigration) rhetoric while maintaining access to a foreign labor force (Pécoud & Guchteneire 2007: 6). The film’s circularity and its character’s mobility are dually established via the journey and the letters that give the film its title. A trip on a raft across the Strait of Gibraltar from the African to the Spanish coast begins and ends the film, and the letters to and from Alou’s family in Africa are interspersed through his voice-over. The ending of the film, which depicts Alou crossing the Strait by raft a second time after having been deported, explicitly defines immigration’s circular nature and exposes the futility of border controls in a country that keeps demanding a cheap labor force. The repeated scene denounces the inevitability of the African migratory flow, the danger of the crossing, the uselessness of police controls, and the fate of the African immigrant who must continue risking his life if he wishes to choose his destiny. Armendáriz explained the social significance of his character’s return in 1990, and his description of the inevitability of immigration flows remains true (and it is even more relevant) today: With the return of Alou and his Moroccan friend I wanted to synthesize a basic idea about the problem of emigration: that no matter how many laws are created, no matter how many members of La Guardia Civil control the coasts, no matter how many rafts are intercepted […] the problem is not going to be solved. The solution has to be of another sort, because as long as they continue to suffer from hunger and misery in their countries, immigrants will continue to enter over and over where they hope to find food and work. (Angulo et al. 1998: 251)2 The situation has worsened since Armendáriz directed this film. Spain, like other Southern European countries that have recently seen a large number of undocumented immigrants, feel pressured to show their citizens and other countries in the EU that they are addressing the “problem” of immigration within parameters or legal structures defined by the EU open borders system. Since Spain’s government adopted the Schengen Agreement in 1985 and joined the EU in 1986, the EU has consistently compelled Spain to tighten its border control measures. In recent years, it is Spain that has increasingly pressed the EU to consider border control as a European issue in order to get more financial and political support for its own control efforts (Saddiki 2010). Spain has also used arguments about irregular immigration and about the EU’s pressure and financing as a justification for reinforcing fences around the 180

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two African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla which were granted the status of autonomous cities within the Spanish juridical framework in 1995 and which have the status of frontier zones. However, relevant reports assert that the number of irregular immigrants crossing into Spain through the two towns has increased in the last two decades, despite the construction of fences around them in early 1990s (Saddiki 2010).3 Increased border control and improved democratic relations between the Spanish socialist government and Morocco since 2006 have resulted in the development of a new immigration route between the west coast of Africa and the Canary Islands, a maritime border of more than one thousand square kilometers. The immigrants make their journeys in large fishing boats, or cayucos, that depart from African ports in Mauritania and Senegal and can take more than a week to reach the Canary Islands. Many of those immigrants who survive the dangerous Atlantic Ocean crossing and are caught are taken upon arrival to Spanish detention centers, where officials try to establish their nationality in order to repatriate them if agreements of return have been signed with their countries of origin (Zapata-Barrero & De Witte 2007: 87). Ricard Zapata-Barrero and Nynke De Witte document the dilemma Spain faces when trying to balance concerns about human rights and a strong border patrol and when trying to raise awareness within the EU of the fact that “irregular immigration is not just a Spanish, but a European problem, and that the Spanish border with Africa is also a European border” (2007: 89). However, while some EU member states have shown support for Spain’s call for cooperation, others have criticized Spanish immigration policy and denied the claim that Spain needs support. The absence of a common EU immigration policy is one of the roots of Spain’s immigration problem, and that absence “highlights a lack of vision on political community and borders” (Zapata-Barrero & De Witte 2007: 90). At the same time, these authors show how the Spanish socialist government (2004–2011) pushed for bilateral cooperation with African countries in an effort to press the African countries to control their own borders and accept repatriation in exchange for development assistance (2007: 89). As Said Saddiki argues, [T]oday, there is unanimity among researchers that the only effective solution for irregular immigration is to reduce economic crises in developing and underdeveloped countries, support and encourage political reforms taking place in origin immigration countries, especially in Africa, and to stop all social disturbances and civil wars that have been the main causes of both regular and irregular migration. (2010) While documenting the immigration trends of the early 1990s, when the majority of immigrants crossing to Spain still left from the coast of Morocco, Armendáriz depicts mobility and a lack of stability as positive values that are characteristic of subjects who live in a constant state of transition between inherited and adopted cultural patterns and for whom mobility becomes a way of life. Alou’s journey through Spain shows the immigrant’s mobility as well as his ability to adjust to the seasons and to a demand for service, not 181

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necessarily as negative qualities, but, as Armendáriz shows, as elements of a positive versatility that contrasts with the native citizen’s immobility.4 Armendáriz, in tune with Catherine Wihtol de Wenden’s argument, situates his migrant character within a global mobility pattern that defines identity in terms of constant mobility and proposes circulation as a way of life (Wihtol de Wenden 2007: 59). Armendáriz’s film upholds a utopian definition of free movement without borders that calls for a deterritorialization of the identities played by non-state and transnational cross-border actors and that questions conventional ideas of citizenship by prioritizing instead the concepts of individual and universal rights (Wihtol de Wenden 2007: 60). It exposes not only the porosity and thus the futility of external and sovereignty-based borders but also the internal and invisible boundaries that exist within states, “grounded in people’s legal status, ethnicity, race, community, identity or religious beliefs, which lead to social exclusion and racism” (Wihtol de Wenden 2007: 58–59). The hardships Alou encounters on his journey respond mostly to the internal borders he traverses in his daily interactions with Spaniards and include administrative, racial, cultural, and linguistic obstacles (Kunz & Leinonen 2007: 155). Invisible and racialized borders are elusive and unreachable and ultimately deny Alou, the immigrant, a real sense of belonging in the new society. The impossibility to belong and transcend those invisible borders is articulated by Alou in a dialogue with his friend Mulie and his wife: “Even if you have a job and friends, they will never accept you. I feel their stares right on my face. White people don’t like us.” Jan Kunz and Mari Leinonen pose a question in the title of their 2007 article, “Europe without Borders: Rhetoric, Reality, or Utopia?,” and in the article they answer the question, observing that the talk of a borderless Europe is a reality to some Europeans, such as the professional and academic elite, but is mere rhetoric to most EU citizens, and is as yet only a dream to those nonEU migrants whose freedom to move has been restricted by regulations and laws. The borders in Europe thus appear differently to different groups and individuals, whose perceptions of invisible borders are always subjective. (Kunz & Leinonen 2007: 155) The philosophy of open borders denounces the fact that mobility is unevenly distributed in the world, creating a divide between “citizens” of the developed countries and “undesirables” from less-developed countries. Discussions of the economic and social dimensions of immigration within the movement for open borders also reveal that restricting people’s freedom to circulate leads to higher rates of permanent settlement (Pécoud & Guchteneire 2007: 16). These authors follow an argument previously articulated in several essays by Étienne Balibar in which he reminds us that “there have never existed, anywhere, ‘natural borders,’ that great myth of the foreign policy of nation-states”; rather, “borders are institutions that give the state the possibility of controlling the movements and activities of citizens without themselves being subject to any control” (2004: 109). Since European colonial empires were created, borders have served to separate different categories of 182

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nationals (“citizens” and “subjects”). After colonial empires were dismantled, borders have continued to mean different things to different people and are designed to “actively differentiate between individuals in terms of social class” (Balibar 2002: 82). Borders, according to Balibar’s lucid analysis, are polysemic, ubiquitous, and vacillating; “[T]hey no longer coincide with geographico-politico-administrative borders” (2002: 84), and “they are no longer localizable in an unequivocal fashion […], they do not work in the same way ‘equally’, for all ‘people’” (2002: 91). He points out that there is a disjunction in the way that states, in the era of globalization, “control goods, funds and information, on the one hand, and migratory flows and displacement of human persons, on the other” (2002: 113). It is worth quoting at length part of his argument on “the socially discriminatory function of borders” (original emphasis): Whereas information has become practically “ubiquitous,” and whereas the circulation of goods and currency conversions have been almost entirely “liberalized,” the movements of men are the object of heavier and heavier limitations […] A world that is now broadly unified from the point of view of economic exchange and communication needs borders more than ever to segregate, at least in tendency, wealth and poverty in distinct territorial zones […] The poor at least, need to be systematically triaged and regulated at points of entry to the wealthiest territories. Borders have thus become essential institutions in the constitution of social conditions on a global scale where the passport or identity card functions as a systematic criterion. (Balibar 2002: 113) Balibar finds a flagrant contradiction between this “global apartheid” and the supposedly democratic and social forms of the modern national state. Currently, the situation is at a crossroads, and a democratization of borders which implies that their representation be desacralized, that the way the state and administration use them with respect to individuals becomes the object of a multilateral control, and that the rites and formalities of crossing them become more respectful of fundamental rights—is at the heart of the difficulties, and perhaps at present the aporias, of a reinvention of politics in the context of globalization. (Balibar 2002: 113–14) Retorno a Hansala, A Return Road Movie: Segregating and Profitable Borders The current dual state of borders, noted by Balibar—as being both segregating and profitable—that is inherent to globally integrated capitalism is one of the prevalent themes in Chus Gutiérrez’s film, Retorno a Hansala. The film is structured as a round-trip road movie that inverts the one-way, open-ended direction of the border-crossing movies that 183

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have traditionally focused on migrants’ journeys to their chosen destination. Retorno a Hansala portrays the return trip of Leila, a Moroccan immigrant living in Algeciras, who, with the assistance of an undertaker named Martín, brings the dead body of her brother Rachid back to their village, Hansala, after he drowns in an attempt to cross the “Strait of Death.” The film is inspired by real events that took place in 2003 when 37 Moroccans drowned after a single patera shipwrecked in the Bay of Cadiz off the coast of Rota. Thirteen of those drowned were from Hansala, a small mountain village in the Beni Mellal region inhabited by Berbers who live in extreme poverty and are abandoned by government institutions. One quarter of the half million Moroccans living in Spain and many of those who drown in the Strait come from that region.5 After Gutiérrez read an article about the tragedy, she visited Hansala and interviewed members of the community to document their story. There she found a poor but supportive community that opened its homes to her and collaborated in the casting and production of the film. She has stated that her goal, inspired by Winterbottom’s film In This World, was to imbue the fictional story with an ethnographic tone and real characters.6 Among other things, the film illustrates how illegal border crossing has become a business for different parties that profit from the immigrants and their families: first the traffickers, who in the film charge €3000 to smuggle immigrants across the border, and then the undertaker, who charges the same amount to return their bodies to their families. In this round-trip/return road movie the travelers are an odd couple consisting of Martín, inspired by a real undertaker from El Barrio, a town north of Algeciras, whose only interest in the pateras’ tragedy when the film starts is the profit he can make returning the corpses of the deceased to their families in Morocco; and Leila, who arrived in Spain five years ago, also in a patera, who is by now a legal resident who regularly sends remittances to her family, including her brother Rachid to help him pay for his deadly trip to Spain. The trip starts in Algeciras, where Martín and a grieving Leila embark on the ferry that takes them to Tangier, Morocco, and continues as they drive through the interior of the country until they finally arrive in Hansala. The film reproduces (and offers some variations on) some of the traditional features of the road movie genre: shots of the mountainous landscape and vast horizons, pauses on the journey that allow for introspection and dialogue between the characters, and dangerous situations that create suspense and add to the drama (e.g., thieves attack the two characters on the road and steal Martin’s pickup truck with the coffin inside). The film also works with road movie conventions as it presents a journey of self-exploration, revelation, and realization for both travelers while friendship and (possibly) romance develops between them and as it offers the director an opportunity to engage in social commentary. For Leila, who is returning to Morocco after an absence of five years, the trip becomes a sad and nostalgic journey home to her family, language, and culture as well as a guilt trip for having helped her youngest brother to migrate. For Martín, the trip is a journey of discovery of a different culture and a humble but supportive community, a prospective business, and perhaps a business and romantic partner. 184

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While Martín drives through the Moroccan countryside, Leila, in the passenger seat, is given the point of view. She is often framed looking out the window and is reflected (in frame-within-a-frame shots) in the car’s side view mirror so as to foreground the crucial act of looking (and reminiscing about her country of origin) while traveling. As Laderman points out when analyzing the features of the road movie genre, “[T]his framing reflection technique helps visualize aesthetically the theme of self-exploration as a projection of self through space” (2002: 16). Once Martín and Leila arrive in Hansala, the point of view switches to Martín who, with the audience, becomes the observer of the village dynamics, a sort of improvised “ethnographer” through whose eyes we learn about the region’s poverty, miserable living conditions, and its lack of opportunities for the young, all of which lead so many of them to attempt the dangerous crossing. Reproducing the style and tone of ethnographic documentaries, Martín, who stays in Hansala for a week until the family of the deceased is finally able to put together the money they owe him, is exposed to their culture, customs, and, above all, the community’s hospitality toward him and their strong care and support for each other. Unobtrusive and respectful camera work introduces us to the village activities through Martín’s attentive yet detached point of view: the funeral and burial rituals conducted by men, the board of elders’ deliberations as to how to collect the money they owe him, the women’s daily chores, and Leila’s family’s interactions. In these sequences, music is for the most part absent and dialogues are kept to a minimum, privileging Martín’s gaze as he is taken aback by the villagers’ friendliness, gratefulness, and affection toward him. The authenticity of these scenes is also achieved by respecting the polyphony of linguistic voices. Most of the speech interactions between the villagers in Martín’s presence and between Leila’s parents and Martín remain untranslated, confronting spectators with the feeling of foreignness and bewilderment that immigrants experience on a daily basis when they arrive in the host country. As in many road movies, the trip turns out to be an experience of learning and self-exploration for the two characters, who embody the dichotomy consisting of the Moroccan immigrant and the Spanish national and the prejudices each group holds toward the other. At the end of their trip, both characters have softened their prejudiced opinions about the other in terms of culture and social class and have started to understand and respect each other’s reasons for holding them. Making the Spaniard the bearer of the look reverses a common pattern found in the border-crossing films considered in this chapter—and in immigration films in general—which typically offer the immigrants’ perspective rather than the perspective of the host country and its citizens’ attitudes toward immigrants.7 Through a cinéma vérité approach and a change of perspective, Gutiérrez creates a visual as well as narrative homage to the traditions of humble rural Moroccans while documenting the poverty they endure. Through the eyes of an initially reluctant and prejudiced Martín, the reasons to emigrate looking for a better life are legitimized. In order to visually reinforce the social commentary, Gutiérrez incorporates two recurrent motifs that function as metaphors for the immigrants’ precariousness, anonymity, and lack of identity: drowned bodies or clothes floating or sinking underwater and the 185

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Figure 6.1:  Retorno a Hansala/Return to Hansala by Chus Gutiérrez ( 2008 Muac Films-Maestranla Film) Martin’s nightmare of drowned bodies.

Figure 6.2:  Retorno a Hansala/Return to Hansala by Chus Gutiérrez ( 2008 Muac Films-Maestranla Film) Martin and Leyla with hanging clothes.

hung or displayed clothes of the deceased. The opening scenes take place at night on the surface of a rough sea where somebody, who remains off-screen, is swimming, gasping and out of breath, riding the waves and trying to make it to shore. As the credit titles start to appear, the gasping sound ceases and the camera goes underwater to shoot the bottom of the sea. The scene cuts to a beach in the morning, where a runner finds immigrants’ dead bodies lying on the sand. The opening scene introduces the horrifying subject matter, the drowning of immigrants at sea, yet the emotional component is mitigated through the absence of an on-screen protagonist, and suspense is introduced through the soundtrack of an invisible swimmer in distress. As the film advances, anonymous bodies or clothes sinking underwater reappear as Martín’s recurring nightmare, which reflects his guilt for making a profit out of the dead as well as his process of gaining awareness. The trope of dead bodies and floating clothes visually underlines the deadly fate of the “illegal” immigrant. As Shaharam Khosravi has pointed out eloquently, the Mediterranean Sea has turned into a cemetery for transgressive travelers, and the floating dead bodies washing up the shores of European tourist resorts are evidence of “border-necropolitics” (2010: 20). In her interview with David Walsh (2008), Gutiérrez explains that what impacted her most when she read the news about the real tragedy was the fact that the drowned immigrants’ clothes were taken back to Morocco in an attempt to have them identified by the immigrants’ families. This detail reflects, for one, the material scarcity that rural Moroccans experience, which contrasts with the consumption-driven West where it would be difficult to identify an individual by a single piece of cloth. It also represents the intricate task of locating the families of the deceased, who in most cases don’t carry any identification with them. The second part of this road movie occurs as Martín, Leila, and Said (a young teenager who becomes Martín’s friend and who ends up crossing to Spain in a patera and surviving) drive around the region, stopping in village after village to display the clothes the seventeen drowned immigrants wore when they died, hoping that their families will identify them and will then be able to recover their bodies and give them a proper burial. The image of the clothes hung, spread on the floor, or floating underwater appears as the film’s most powerful dramatic and visual symbol. The return 186

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trip to Hansala is not only about both the ethical and profitable transfer of bodies across the border but also about the immigrants’ ghost identities once they die. In the same way that the immigrants risk their lives to obtain material possessions, they wind up being identified by them. Said’s words to Martín signal this connection: “One day I will have a van like yours, and I will drive it back home full of nice clothes for my family and friends, not the clothes of the dead.” The cyclical and recurrent element inherent to immigration, mentioned in the interview with Armendáriz regarding Las cartas de Alou, is captured here in the character of Said. His compatriots’ fate does not dissuade this nineteen-year-old character from attempting the crossing. Unlike others who are less fortunate, he survives and happily meets up with Martín in Algeciras. Leila also returns to Spain and gets a proposition from Martín to help him carry out the business of returning the bodies. This positive ending of survival and a potential romantic and business partnership, rather than aiming to encourage the dangerous crossing, instead contains the complexity of the problem and provides evidence for Gutiérrez’s social commentary, both about immigration, which by nature will be unstoppable as long as economic deprivation and a lack of human rights keep ravaging the developing world, and about the hypocrisy of governments and institutions that on the one hand create fortresses to control borders and on the other profit from the consequences those inhuman measures create. In This World: Refugee Camps and the Docudrama An emphasis on the long distances traversed, the randomness of border controls, and the immigrants’ relentless desire to make it to their destination characterizes every border crossing film, and this emphasis is compellingly and artistically documented in Michael Winterbottom’s In This World, Gerardo Olivares’ 14 kilómetros, and Costa-Gavras’ Eden à l’Ouest. These three films are also structured as road movies that purposely blur the boundaries between documentary and fiction and expose the odysseys that Middle Eastern and sub-Saharan immigrants endure to make it to Europe. In This World is perhaps the most accomplished example of the blurring of boundaries between documentary and fiction. A docudrama initially intended for television, this film was produced by Revolution Films (a partnership between Winterbottom and producer Andrew Eaton), the Film Consortium, and the BBC, and it was made on one million pounds with a crew of one camera person, one sound technician, and four production people (Bedell 2004). The film won the Golden Bear at the 2003 Berlin Film Festival. It follows the journey of two young Afghani men, fifteen-year-old Jamal and his older cousin Enayat, from the refugee camp of Shanshatoo in northwestern Pakistan to the city of Peshawar on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border to Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Italy, France, and their final stop, London. In the Electronic Press Kit, Winterbottom and scriptwriter Toni Grisoni explain the fiction-turned-into-reality quality of the film. 187

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Their intention was to make a TV-style road movie with digital technology and no dialogues in the script.8 The result is an account of migration as exodus, but above all as “movement blocked and stymied” (Darke 2003). Their actors, Jamal and Enayat, were cast from thousands of refugees that have been stuck at the refugee camps of Shamshatoo and Sangatte since the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2002. Their characterization and itinerary was faithfully based on the experience of real people who make the journey every year and who have made that journey throughout history. In an analysis of the film, Yosefa Loshitzky argues that the real hero of the film is the journey itself. Staged along the historic route of the Silk Road, this journey gains epic and mythic proportions that transcend the here and now, implicitly suggesting that migration is not a new phenomenon of human history but has always been part of a global movement of people (and not only of goods, commodities, and the Western extraterritorial elite as the global free market ideology would like us to believe). (2007: 126) As the actors move along their journey, they mediate and translate for the crew, constantly mixing and dealing with the real smugglers, fixers, and policemen at control points that act as their own characters in real life. The director’s voiceover and the graphic inclusion of animated road maps and expository titles interspersed throughout the narrative offer statistics on the number of people in refugee camps and on the move, and help us visualize the points of departure and arrival as well as the distances covered. The film corrects and expands sensationalist and reductive perspectives on economic migrations provided by the Western press: It shades and develops the often hopeless photofit-journalism of much TV coverage. It does what mass media is incapable of doing—by broadening, deepening, humanising the issue, [...] emphasizing the experience that lies behind the phenomenon of peoplesmuggling and putting us, the viewers, squarely in the migrant’s place. (Darke 2003)

Figure 6.3:  In This World by Michael Winterbottom ( 2004 Sundance Channel LLC) Jamal and Enayat on truck.

Figure 6.4:  In This World by Michael Winterbottom ( 2004 Sundance Channel LLC) Map and truck.

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The film’s documentary nature is maintained through a politicized voice-over, the inclusion of animated maps that chart the pair’s progress, a crisp cut that documents cramped journeys in ramshackle vehicles through inhospitable terrain, and the use of nonprofessional actors who are never introduced in an opening scene but are presented in their daily interactions and as they plan their exodus. The film uses a combination of objective and subjective camera. An objective and distanced camera documents the road conditions, landscape, and interactions between the travelers and the people they encounter. Titles, captions, and subheadings provide the facts affecting real immigrants and contribute to the film’s didacticism, providing the audience with “a reflective distanciation effect” (Loshitzky 2007: 122). Close-up shots are used to create a sense of claustrophobic proximity with the characters when they are located inside enclosed spaces (such as buses, trucks, and a freight container). Winterbottom gives the real-life actors the point of view, letting them improvise not only their dialogues but also their emotions, feelings, and jokes “according to their culture” (Bedell 2004). The film was shot with digital video and then transferred to 35mm using only natural and available light. In a chilling sequence, Jamal and Enayat are guided by Kurdish villagers over snowbound mountains to circumvent a guarded pass into Turkey. The blurry night is filmed with an infrared camera while gunfire is seen and heard in the background. All objects emit a certain amount of black body radiation as a function of their temperatures, and an infrared camera can detect radiation as an ordinary camera does visible light. Winterbottom chooses that technology as the best way to capture images in total darkness and enable strong definition over a great distance. The infrared footage not only reinforces the effect of documentary authenticity but also provides an ironic commentary on border crossing as Winterbottom appropriates a special technology usually applied for night vision in military and antiterrorism, operations, law enforcement, and border patrols. Later on, a scene inside a freight container is shot in shadows and lit only by the characters’ flashlights. In a review of the film, Chris Darke highlights the film’s cinematic “texture of displacement” as follows: Using digital video cameras, Winterbottom and his crew gained an extraordinary degree of access to a world rarely seen on cinema screens, crafting a film that conveys the texture of its context, the sensation of its circumstances. Sometimes rough, blurred, grainy, almost abstract, it conveys to its audience the simple fact of duration: long periods of nervous waiting followed by mad scrambles or surreptitious advances towards the next staging post on the epic journey. (Darke 2003) At the same time, the film’s documentary element is stylized through suspenseful music highlighting crucial moments of the characters’ crossing and the inclusion of two flashback scenes. The first is a sound repetition of the film’s dramatic climax as seen through Jamal’s recollection while he travels by train on his way to Sangatte (Calais), the last point he will reach in France before crossing to the United Kingdom. The tragic zenith takes place when they arrive in Istanbul, where Jamal, Enayat, and a group of people that includes a couple 189

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with a small baby are locked for 40 hours in a sealed freight container placed inside a ship bound for Trieste, Italy. En route, most passengers, unable to get the attention of anybody on board with their screaming and banging, suffocate and die, including Enayat and the baby’s parents.9 The second flashback takes place at the end of the film once Jamal has finally made it to London: after he calls Enayat’s father to inform him that Enayat is not in this world anymore, the camera cuts to “sentimental” shots of children smiling at the camera back in the Shamshatoo refugee camp (Kelly 2003). The scene functions as a playback of the opening scenes and as an evocation of the fate of innocent children who stagnate endlessly at the refugee camp. The audience is reminded of Afghans’ status as perennial war victims and of the epic yet dystopian journeys that might lead them to freedom. The film’s ambivalent and critical position toward the real opportunities refugees have even when they reach their goal is reinforced when the film closes with captions stating that Jamal was refused asylum but granted exceptional leave to remain in the United Kingdom until his eighteenth birthday. The line between fact and fiction is also blurred as the audience is left wondering whether the statement applies to the real Jamal or the actor in the film (Allison 2005). As a way to lighten the drama, counteract the roughness of dangerous border-crossing episodes, and give the film authenticity without authorial intervention, the camera pauses with the characters as they take breaks from traveling, shooting them as they contemplate or admire the landscape, and as they cope with boredom, entertaining banal conversations, and as Jamal teaches English to Enayat. Later, at the Samsatte refugee camp Jamal is shown with a new friend, Yusuf, whom he meets there. Both are shown laughing and playing soccer with other refugees before they successfully stow away under a lorry bound for England.10 Those moments in between crossings function as lyric interludes—enhanced by a cinematography that favors beautiful skies at sunset and dawn—that break the prevalence of shots of the road from both inside and outside of a variety of motor vehicles, and offer a respite from the constant camera movement that mirrors the rough and bumpy road running. These pauses provide insight into the characters and document their resilience and need to connect and form human bonds outside of and despite the external boundaries that constrain them. In these moments Winterbottom follows a typical convention of road movies, in which periodic stationary pauses serve to enhance the main narrative and thematic thrust, the journey itself (Laderman 2002: 15), and to provide a space for the characters’ soul-searching discussions (2002: 253). The two refugee camps, Shanshatoo and Shagatte, are the two mirror-like ends of this road movie. They serve Winterbottom (and the viewer) the purpose of reflecting not only on the distance, the obstacles and the motion needed to get through them but also the inert and motionless nature of refugee camps over the world, stagnant no-man’s lands where refugees keep living their lives regardless of their impotence. As Michel Agier asserts, “[R]efugee camps are the most advanced form of the global treatment of stigmatized identities and undesirable groups” (2008: 61). They occupy space but are not considered official places. Their inhabitants live there for generations but they are not recognized as a community (Khosravi 2010: 70). Their identity is “stateless, placeless, functionless, and paper-less […] Inside the fences of the camp, they are pulped into a faceless mass, having been denied 190

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access to the elementary amenities from which identities are drawn and the usual yarns from which identities are woven” (Bauman 2007: 40). Camp refugees are the embodiment of “human waste,” unable to be recycled; they lose their place on earth and are catapulted into a nowhere”; as Zygmunt Bauman says, “they live in a ‘permanently temporary’” location; in other words, “they are suspended in a spatial void where time has ground to a halt. They have neither settled nor are on the move; they are neither sedentary nor nomadic”; they are “untouchables,” “inthinkables,” and “unimaginables” (Bauman 2007: 45).11 Crossing the African Desert: 14 kilómetros Gerardo Olivares’ film 14 kilómetros ends with a quotation by Spanish novelist and activist Rosa Montero that says, “They will keep coming and they will keep dying because history has shown that no wall can hold back dreams.” These words perfectly reflect the determination that drives these road movies’ characters to make it to Europe in spite of the thousands of kilometers they have to travel and the multiple obstacles they encounter on their trips. Although fourteen kilometers is the actual short distance between the northern coast of Morocco and the southern coast of Spain, Olivares’ film is about the thousands of kilometers its African characters must travel before they arrive at that crossing point. Olivares’ film received the Espiga de Oro at the 52nd Valladolid Film Festival (Seminci), the first Spanish film to ever receive the award. Olivares, a professional documentarian before he made his first fiction film,12 has stated that he came up with the idea for this film when he was filming Caravan (2005), a documentary about the caravans that transport salt across the Tenéré desert. In 14 kilómetros, recreating the desert journey many sub-Saharan Africans make, Buba and his brother Mukela from Mali and Violet from Niger—played by non-professional actors cast on the streets of Mali and Niger—start their migration trip from their respective countries with the goal of ultimately making it to Europe. The first part of the film fluctuates between the characters’ stories and preparations for their trips in both countries, thus showing their living conditions and reasons to migrate. Nineteenyear-old Violet is being forced by her family to marry a lascivious old man from the village (who had abused her when she was younger) against her will in exchange for ten cows and a hundred kilos of salt. Buba is a mechanic and talented soccer player in his native Niamey, Niger, who is encouraged by his trainer and his brother Mukela to migrate to Europe where he could become a soccer star. With the fate of having been born “in the poorest part of the world” and the false promise that “Europe is paradise,” the three characters begin a journey that follows one of the most common routes from sub-Saharan Africa to Europe that includes navigating the Niger River, traversing the Tenéré and Sahara deserts, crossing the borders of Niger, Algeria, and Morocco, and finally, the Strait of Gibraltar to Spain. The three arrive in Agadez, Niger, one of the central immigration hubs in Africa where, as a sign reads at the entrance to the city, “Clandestine immigration to Europe via the Sahara and the Mediterranean” is coordinated. From there the characters begin an odyssey that 191

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Figure 6.5:  14 kilómetros by Gerardo Olivares  2008 Cameo Media SL) Overloaded truck.

involves 3,500 kilometers, most of which take place in the Sahara desert inside crammed buses and by foot. Olivares, like Winterbottom before him, incorporates maps and charts to visualize the routes and distances the characters travel. Before they arrive in Agadez, the camera cuts back and forth between the brothers, Buba and Mukela, riding a bus and Violet navigating along the Niger River. The magnificent scenery of the Malian landscape and the Niger River at sunset is presented through the characters’ eyes in order to highlight their feelings of optimism upon the promise of imminent liberation from oppression and poverty and dreams of success. Things change when they arrive in Agadez, where Violet is robbed of all her possessions and has to work as a prostitute before she can even begin the trip. As they hop on a truck overloaded with people, animals, and bags that will take them to the border with Algeria, an objective camera offers aerial and external shots of the bus crossing the Tenéré desert, the Nigerian section of the Sahara. As they arrive at the border control point between Niger and Algeria, the passengers divide between those going to Algeria and Morocco and others continuing on to Libya. The striking image of this overloaded truck lumbering through the desert with a cargo twice as large as the vehicle, dropping people off at unmarked crossroads in the sand, comes from the director’s real-life experience while filming Caravan and provides one of the strongest visual motifs in the film.13 Without guidance or clear directions about how to make it to Tamanrasset, Algeria, the next hub before continuing to Morocco, Buba, Mukela, and Violet start their road trip through the desert by foot. Their journey is presented through a combination of documentary and fiction as an “odyssey of horror” (Wihtol de Wenden 2007: 54). The ravishing visual scenery of the desert at different hours of the day sublimates and seems at dramatic odds with the characters’ ordeal. It is captured through aerial shots in order to highlight the helplessness of the three minuscule figures contrasted with the desert’s immensity. They are filmed in long and extreme long shots under a scorching sun, covered with sand, and are captured 192

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as mirages, distorted in the distance by the sun and refraction from hot air. These long sequences lack dialogue and are accompanied by location-inspired music by Santi Vega with occasional pieces by African singers such as Youssou N’Dour, El Hadj N’Diaye, Ismael Lo, and Mandela Kanté. When the characters realize, exhausted, that they have walked in a circle for days, they fall asleep under the two acacias where they started the desert portion of their journey. Nomad Tuaregs find them, give them water, bury Mukela, who has died, and take an unconscious Buba and Violet to their camp, where they revive them and take care of them until they recover and are ready to resume their trip. This mobility break in this desert road movie has a dual purpose: it underscores the tragic reality of many immigrants who embark on a journey across the desert, and it provides an opportunity to document the Tuaregs’ culture and philosophy of life, much in the way Gutiérrez does when her characters get to Hansala. Quiet and serene (pseudo-Orientalist) scenes of Tuareg men tending their cattle and women grinding grain and cooking are interspersed with scenes of them caring for their guests and with stunning images of the landscape. Like the villagers’ in Retorno a Hansala, the Tuaregs’ disinterested hospitality and friendliness are revealed to be the highlight of the trip and are contrasted with the heartlessness and greed generally displayed by smugglers and border control officers. Exactly in the middle of the trip, when characters can still change their minds and go back home after Mukabe’s death, the Tuareg elder provides a contrast in perspective, questioning their migratory initiative and offering his wise judgment on the subject: “By leaving you are bleeding Africa dry. With the money you spend on the trip, you could start a business here. The future is here in Africa.” Nomadic life is presented as a refuge and a salvation, a desirable life exempt from the false promises of the West, and nomads’ identities are positively valued and defined in terms of mobility. After their stay with the Tuaregs at an oasis, the rest of the trip is an ordeal defined largely by tense border controls, which show the absurdity of artificial borders in squalid camps in the middle of the desert and constantly expose the corruption of border officers. What Balibar argues when speaking about European borders is shown to be even more relevant in the African context, where borders not only do not apply equally to all people and discrimination is applied in terms of race, ethnicity, and gender, but the borders’ geographic localization is also shown to be a joke. Tragicomic scenes at border crossings ridicule the futile effort to maintain any semblance of control in the geographic immensity of the dessert. In the border crossing ordeals, characters are separated, harassed, and robbed by officers, their advance stymied as Buba keeps being returned to the border between Algeria and Morocco or are both stuck in a squalid and cramped refuge with other Africans in a small town in Morocco, biding time and waiting for the opportunity to cross the Straits. These scenes document a reality: the EU has been shifting pressure to control immigration from its own borders to those of the nearest countries (Libya and Morocco, among others). To that end the European Border Agency was created in 2006 to execute EU immigration policies. About €285 million was allocated for this agency for the 2007–2013 period (apart from the fund of €760 million allocated for repatriation of migrants to their countries 193

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of origin and the €2.2 million allocated for strengthening exterior borders). As Pietro Soddu explains, The agency, perhaps created as part of the development of an European Border Police Corps or a coordinated Coast Guard force, has the assigned task of coordinating between the border forces of member states, preparing risk analyses, and coordinating the repatriation of illegal immigrants. This is a lot of money for the defense of the privileges of what has been called Fortress Europe, with no real attempt to solve the problem at its roots. (2006: 338) Since then, Morocco has started deporting sub-Saharan immigrants beyond its southern border, abandoning them in the desert without shelter or humanitarian aid. Legal advice is reduced, nationalities are not acknowledged, and refugees are not recognized; Morocco’s only official aim is to expel all undesired visitors from the more privileged/desired country (Soddu 2006: 338). Morocco has become a transit country or a “third nation,” an extraterritorial space where immigrants wait for weeks or months and where “they cannot obtain the benefits of the developed world, nor can they claim rights of their own country” (Soddu 2006: 339). The protagonists of 14 kilómetros are almost implausibly relentless and unaware of this political situation; they keep trying to reach Europe. Their repeated efforts underscore the cyclical element typical of these border-crossing trips. After spending part of the trip separated, Buba finally finds Violet at an Asilah brothel, and they are finally able to get on a truck that takes them to the beach where they will board a patera to Tarifa, the southernmost town in Spain. These night sequences are filmed with an infrared camera, with the same goal of creating an effect of veracity and appropriating the border patrol technology that we have seen in Winterbottom’s film. Violet and Buba finally reach the last stage of their trip. The crossing at sea scene cuts to daylight in Tarifa where the police chase them through the woods. A Guardia Civil finds them hidden behind a tree. Suspense and desperation builds as the audience, along with the protagonists, is led to believe that they will be caught and deported once again after their long odyssey, when an unexpected turn provides the film’s positive ending: the Guardia Civil lets them go without reporting them. The inclusion of a compassionate and sympathetic Spanish Guardia Civil—almost an oxymoron due to the repressive role the Guardia had traditionally played in Franco Spain—can be interpreted as an attempt by the director to eliminate Manichaean portrayals of Europeans and immigrants and counteract the greed and cruelty shown by most smugglers and border officers. This ending reveals once again that due to institutional and governmental disregard for basic human rights, immigrants’ fates depend on the occasional kindness and compassion of individual Europeans. It also rewards audiences with a happy, yet open, outcome, since the story ends with more movement and new destinations, and these Ulysses figures must still struggle to reassert their identity while they survive and navigate Fortress Europe. Like Winterbottom before him, Olivares recreates the trip undertaken by thousands of immigrants 194

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every year, exposes the corrupt and arbitrary nature of borders, and reproduces linguistic and cultural polyphony: Hausa, Arabic, and French are spoken in the film, and African music accompanies the travelers, frequently replacing dialogues. These “films without a passport,” in Thomas Elsaesser’s words, transcend state cinematographic borders, even though the immigrants’ road trips end in the European country where the directors come from (2005). Eden à l’Ouest: Modern Ulysses in Fortress Europe Luisa Rivi argues that immigration road movies are inverted journeys that take these new Ulysses from the peripheries to the purported mainland on a trajectory opposite the one depicted by Dante centuries after Homer, which legitimated voyages of discovery and conquest at the dawn of the Renaissance (2007: 114). Eden à l’Ouest by Costa-Gavras, whose protagonist, like Ulysses, is faced with numerous obstacles that constantly hinder his progress, presents a dystopian perspective not only of the voyage’s process and outcome but also of Europeans’ attitudes toward postcolonial Others who trespass Europe’s “fortress” and traverse its allegedly open-border territory. Costa-Gavras privileges the immigrant’s perspective in order to expose Europeans’ (for the most part) benign racism that comes from a fear of an “invasion” of undocumented subjects that would abuse their welfare systems and compromise their homogeneous national identities. Elias, Eden à L’Ouest’s modern Ulysses, lives through a twenty-first-century odyssey that begins, like the Homer’s original, in the Aegean Sea. The anti-hero of this mythical road movie is not returning home to Ithaca but is fleeing the problems of an unknown country to follow his dream of reaching Paris. In the opening scenes, which are filmed with a documentary style at Lavrion, an actual refugee camp in Crete, and are reminiscent of the classic Lamerica by Gianni Amelio, hundreds of illegal immigrants are being crammed into a freighter and figuratively promised Eden, that is, Europe. The choice of the Aegean Sea as the place of departure and border crossing is not only a reference to Costa-Gavras’ original birthplace, Greece, but also to the sea’s mythical, historic, and symbolic significance. A branch of the Mediterranean Sea, the Aegean Sea is located between Greece and Turkey and is remarkable for its large number of islands, of which Crete and Rhodes mark its southern limit, and for being the birthplace of Hellenic civilization and the site of original democracies that allowed contact and exchange between the diverse civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean. The location also accurately represents the actual, not mythical, illegal crossings that take place daily between the Mediterranean coasts. By fictionalizing a common reality, the film shows that the Mediterranean today is “far from being a place of exchange and dialogue” but is instead “one of the major North-South divides” (Wihtol de Wenden 2007: 57)—and it has become the site of a major humanitarian crisis since 2010 after the refugee exodus caused by the Syrian War. The identity, nationality, and language of both the immigrants boarding the cargo hold of the ship and the protagonist Elias remain deliberately unknown throughout the film in an attempt to universalize the story and draw attention to the plight of the lone undocumented 195

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immigrant and critique a materialistically self-absorbed Europe. In Armendáriz’s film, Alou’s peripeteia is individualized, but the universality of his condition as African immigrant is also maintained in the script through the lack of explicit references to his surname, his country, and his mother tongue. Similarly, Elias’ language and nationality in Eden à l’Ouest remain deliberately undefined to emphasize his unknown and undocumented status. In an interview with Oliver Ravanello, included in the film’s press kit, Costa-Gavras explains the choice of the name Elias—“Helios in Greek and a name to be found in all religions”—and the creation of an invented language for the immigrants that results from inverting French: “We invented a language and did everything we could to keep our character from having an identifiable nationality” (Ravanello n.d.). After the cargo ship is identified by the Hellenic Coast Guard, Elias jumps into the water and wakes up on the nudist beach of the Eden Club, a luxury holiday resort in Crete, which is the perfect metaphor for Fortress Europe: a beautiful garden of Eden and a perfect world of plenty with luscious plants, food, drink, and company, inhabited by the multilingual lucky few and surrounded by hidden barbed wires and guarded by men with dogs; a rich playground that needs to be protected from external bodies, such as Elias; a great European prison run like a police state. The first half of the film takes place in this resort where Elias struggles to evade the police and hotel administration’s “hunt” for “clandestine” intruders. Camouflaged with an employee uniform, he is mistaken for a hotel plumber, is sexually harassed by the gay hotel assistant manager, is roped into a variety act by a magician who tells him to look him up in Paris, and is finally seduced into a sexual affair by a lonesome German lady. All these encounters function as metaphors for the vulnerable situations of immigrants who are both rejected as outsiders and yet wanted to do the jobs Europeans reject. Two scenes make explicit reference to the dirty jobs immigrants have to perform: in one, Elias, passing as the hotel plumber, has to unclog the toilet, literally plunging his hands into feces. In another, he is picked in the magician’s show as a volunteer to disappear into the “toilet of death.” Costa-Gavras explicitly refers to the humiliation and degradation to which immigrants are subjected and which they have internalized as part of the price they have to pay for being tolerated and accepted (Ravanello n.d.). The two seduction scenes by the hotel assistant manager and Cristina, the German lady, implicitly refer to the sexual tourism and exploitation that so many Europeans engage in both inside and outside of the European Union’s borders. Cristina—a modern Calypso—hosts Elias in her room as her “boyfriend” and gives him money to escape from the resort. The subplot provided by their sexual encounter metaphorically alludes to the potential alliance between Europeans and immigrants based on mutual convenience. However, it stops short of being mutual as she refuses to meet him later in Hamburg where she has a settled life and a family. Elias serves as her boy toy for a vacation, but his function ends when the vacation does. The film turns into a road movie in its second half, in which Elias hitchhikes through Europe until he reaches Paris, encountering both the abuse and kindness of strangers on his way. The road film format serves the purpose of creating a variety of situations that oppose a Manichean and univocal view of Europeans’ attitudes toward vulnerable immigrants.14 196

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An Italian peasant and single mother feeds him and hosts him in her home after which she awaits passively and hopefully to get his sexual favors; a Greek couple welcome him in their car until they start quarreling and leave him stranded in the middle of the Italian Alps;15 two gay German truck drivers drive him through the French Alps, offering a positive view of homosexuals that counteracts the harassment scene by the hotel assistant manager at the Eden Resort; and Gypsies, eternal immigrants in Europe who are defined by mobility and nomadism, protect him from neo-Nazi attackers. Recruited to work without documents at a recycling plant in France, he works harder and faster than nationals, fueling the resentment of national blue-collar workers who are afraid of being fired and losing their benefits. He starts a revolution in the plant when undocumented workers are denied entrance to the cafeteria facilities, which only nationals are allowed to use. When Elias reaches Paris, the city’s outcasts—French homeless and undocumented immigrants who clean garbage in the street and sell souvenirs to tourists—help him with directions and offer him a space in the tent where they live. Finally a compassionate rich lady offers him an elegant suit that belonged to her late husband. Elias’s change of appearance symbolically tears down a fundamental “internal boundary:” the police do not harass him anymore but rather call him “sir” and protect him when he is about to get trapped in the middle of a Rollerblade parade. As I argued in chapter 1 about the protagonist in the Spanish film El traje/The Suit (2002) by Alberto Rodríguez, as long as Elias shows sartorial signs of improved economic status through the possession of a tailored suit, he alters, at least provisionally, the vulnerable position he holds in European society, or he at least becomes a free urban flanêur who is not constantly scrutinized due to his appearance and underprivileged status. Elias, like Patricio in El traje, ceases to attract suspicious gazes in the streets once he wears his new outfit, demonstrating to himself as well as to the audience that the visibility he can have in the European society is inextricably tied to his appearance. When he finally finds the magician he has been looking for since he arrived in Paris and who promised to help him if he ever made it there, the magician refuses to help him and disappears, but not before giving him his magic wand. The promise of reaching Europe and finding a better life is unfulfilled; Elias’s fate is not resolved via magic intervention. However, his fate, like the magic wand, is in his hands now. Eden à l’Ouest is a mythical road movie and fable that also borrows many of its comic cues from silent movies. Elias, like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, is constantly on the run,

Figure 6.6:  Eden à L’Ouest/Eden Is West by Costa-Gavras ( 2009 Cameo Media SL) Elias on the road.

Figure 6.7:  Eden à L’Ouest/Eden Is West by Costa-Gavras ( 2009 Cameo Media SL) Elias lighting the Eiffel Tower.

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and “he is afraid of all uniforms,” and like silent actors he hardly speaks but communicates everything through gestures and facial expressions (Ravanello n.d.). Although comedy, or tragicomedy, is one of the genres preferred mostly in films made by second-generation immigrant filmmakers who want to problematize the tensions and complexities of diasporic relations, Costa-Gavras declared that he did not want to contribute to “overdramatizing” the issue of immigration and that comedy’s lighter tone was a way to let the issue “breathe” and to approach the story of its “problematic man” from a different angle (Ravanello n.d.). Costa-Gavras’ film is a hybrid product insofar as it gets inspiration from both literature and film and blurs the boundaries of different film genres (silent film, drama, comedy, road movie) and tones (comic and tragic). His film, along with his character, breaks language barriers and traverses diverse landscapes and geographies. As a co-production between France, Greece, and Italy, the film reaches multiple audiences. Recent European immigration cinema, like most “world” and “third” films, is a result of a co-production system that represents a cultural way to dismantle borders grounded in sovereignty and states’ production resources. As Rivi has shown in her study, European Cinema after 1989, co-productions are “hybrids that respond to the new European policies to promote and reflect a cultural diversity” (2007: 8) and have the advantage of benefitting from “access to multiple governments’ subsidies and multiple markets” (2007: 63). Moreover, she writes, co-productions “maintain the national identities of the originating countries while simultaneously expressing a supranational, European belonging” (Rivi 2007:  141). Immigration cinema’s hybrid, transcultural, and diasporic nature is consubstantial to supranational production, subvention, and distribution systems that recognize the transnational character of migration to and within the EU. As is the case in Costa-Gavras’ film, most migrants traverse more than one country en route to their chosen destination, generating immigration policies and influencing the social and cultural configuration of those countries. Co-productions that fund immigration films provide alternatives to sensationalist media accounts and right wing (anti-immigration) political parties, which are responsible for promoting alarmist and unfounded ideas about the “invasion” of Europe by “undesirable” immigrants who allegedly deplete nationals’ resources, are responsible for all social problems, and threaten to alter Europe’s homogeneous racial and cultural identity.16 Co-productions, aside from the obvious financial gains, support the filmmakers’ ethical positions, while they address and potentially reach multinational audiences, thus creating multilateral awareness about the challenges immigrants from the global South face before they decide to migrate and about the global impact of anti-immigration policies. Conclusion Reproducing the endless journeys of countless migrants traveling from the global South to the North, the protagonists of these films (along with their respective film crews) traverse multiple geographical boundaries before they arrive at their destination, thus exposing the 198

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ordeals caused by numerous border controls and ironically contradicting the line used in In This World’s commercial distribution tagline: “The journey to freedom has no borders.” In all of these films, borders are presented to be not only geographical, but also political, social, and linguistic, especially when referring to the internal or invisible boundaries (financial, ethnic, linguistic, and religious) that undocumented immigrants encounter within the European Fortress’ confines. These films provide audiences with both closure (their characters make it to their desired destinations, in spite of the obstacles) and open endings (their fate in Europe is uncertain), with both hope in the opportunities that may open and disenchantment with the journey’s process and false promises, in other words, with the need to still believe in utopias and a reality that proves to be dystopian. The filmmakers’ intent is to offer the immigrants’ perspectives on the process of traveling and adapting to their dire circumstances. Their films focus on nomadism, passages, and spaces in-between and lead white European audiences, like the directors themselves, to comprehend the characters’ prevalent resilience and to reach their own utopian/dystopian conclusions. As the “borderless” nature of globalization does not apply to “undesirables” and contradicts the Fortress Europe approach, these filmmakers’ ethical perspectives consist of defending people’s right to mobility while denouncing the double standard that defines the current function of borders in terms of binary dichotomies: crossing and closure, free flow and stagnation, economic profitability and discrimination, corruption and legality. The road movie genre serves the narrative and visual emphasis on the journey and open-ended outcomes for the films’ traveling protagonists, signifying the circularity and unavoidability of migratory flows. The combination and deliberate blurring of the boundaries between fiction and anthropological documentary provide a testimonial element and seek the audiences’ sympathy with immigrants and their understanding of the urge to develop a politics of borders that is respectful of fundamental human rights. References Allison, D., 2005, “Michael Winterbottom,” in Senses of Cinema 36, viewed December 15, 2013, from http://sensesofcinema.com/2005/great-directors/winterbottom/. Agier, M., 2008, On the Margins of the World: The Refugee Experience Today, transl. D. Fernbach, Cambridge, Polity. Angulo, J., Gómez, C., Heredero, C. F., & Rebordinos, J. L., 1998, Secretos de la elocuencia: El cine de Montxo Armendáriz, Filmoteca Vasca, Fundación Caja Vital Kutxa, Festival de Cine Español de Málaga. Balibar, E., 2002, Politics and the Other Scene, transl. C. Johns, J. Swenson, & C. Turner, London & New York, Verso. Balibar, E., 2004, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, transl. J. Swenson, Princeton & Oxford, Princeton University Press. Bauman, Z., 2007, Liquid Times. Living in an Age of Uncertainty, Cambridge, UK & Malden, MA, Polity. 199

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Bedell, G., 2004, “A Winterbottom’s Tale,” in Observer, viewed December 15, 2013, from http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2004/feb/01/features.review. De la Cal, J. C., 2007, “Inmigración. El milagro de Hansala,” in El Mundo: Suplementos Crónica, viewed December 15, 2013, from http://www.elmundo.es/suplementos/cronica/2007/600/ 1177797601.html. Darke, C., 2003, “The Underside of Globalization: On Michael Winterbottom’s In This World,” in Global Policy Forum, viewed December 15, 2013, from http://www.globalpolicy.org/globaliz/ cultural/2003/0403refugee.html. Elsaesser, T., 2005, European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press. Estrada, J., 2007, “Entrevista a Gerardo Olivares,” in El Mundo, viewed December 14, 2013, from http://www.elmundo.es/metropoli/2007/12/07/cine/1196982007.html. Gott, M., 2014, “West/East Crossings: Positive Travel in Post-1989 French-Language Cinema,” in L. Engelen & K. Van Heukelom (eds.), European Cinema After the Wall. Screening East-West Mobility, pp. 1–17, Lanham, MD & Plymouth, UK, Rowman & Littlefield. Gott, M. & Schilt, T., 2013, Open Roads, Closed Borders. The Contemporary French-Language Road Movie, Bristol, Intellect. Khosravi, S., 2010, “Illegal” Traveller. An Auto-Ethnography of Borders, New York, Palgrave Macmillan. Kelly, R., 2003, “In This World,” Sight and Sound 13(4), 40. Kunz, J. & Leinonen, M., 2007, “Europe without Borders; Rhetoric, Reality or Utopia?” in A. Pécoud & P. De Guchteneire (eds.), Migration without Borders: Essays on the Free Movement of People, pp. 137–160, New York & Oxford, UNESCO Publishing and Berghahn Books. Laderman, D., 2002, Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie, Austin, University of Texas Press. Loshitzky, Y., 2010, Screening Strangers. Migration and Diaspora in Contemporary European Cinema, Bloomington & Indianapolis, Indiana University Press. Oltra, R. J., 1990, “Montxo Armendáriz. ‘La peor forma de violencia es el rechazo,’” Revista Tiempo, pp. 186. Pécoud, A. & De Guchteneire, P., 2007, “Introduction: The Migration without Borders Scenario,” in A. Pécoud & P. de Guchteneire (eds.), Migration without Borders: Essays on the Free Movement of People, pp. 1–30, New York & Oxford, UNESCO Publishing and Berghahn Books. Ravanello, O., n.d., “Interview with Costa Gavras,” viewed December 15, 2013, from http:// www.musiquesdumonde.fr/COSTA-GAVRAS-EDEN-A-L-OUEST,1781. http://thecia.com. au/reviews/e/images/eden-is-west-eden-a-l-ouest-production-notes.pdf. Rivi, L., 2007, European Cinema after 1989: Cultural Identity and Transnational Production, New York, Palgrave Macmillan. Saddiki, S., 2010, “Ceuta and Melilla Fences. A EU Multidimensional Border?”, paper presented at the annual meeting of the Theory vs. Policy. Connecting Scholars and Practitioners, New Orleans, LA, (February 17), viewed December 15, 2013, from http://citation.allacademic. com/meta/p415855_index.html. Sardá, J., 2007, “Gerardo Olivares,” in El cultural, viewed December 15, 2013, from http://www. elcultural.es/version_papel/CINE/21876/Gerardo_Olivares. Sassen, S., 1996, Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization, New York, Columbia University Press. 200

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Soddu, P., 2006, “Ceuta and Melilla: Security, Human Rights and Frontier Control,” European Institute of the Mediterranean (IEMED), pp. 212–214, viewed December 15, 2013, from http://www.iemed.org/anuari/2006/aarticles/aSoddu.pdf. Solidaridad Directa, 2014, viewed January 25, 2014, from http://solidaridadirecta.net46.net/ index.html. Sundance Channel Home Entertainment, 2003, In This World, DVD Special Features. Tarr, C., 2007, “The Porosity of the Hexagon: Border Crossings in Contemporary French Cinema,” Studies in European Cinema 4(1), 7–20. Walsh, D., 2008, “An Interview with Chus Gutiérrez, director of Return to Hansala,” in World Socialist Web Site, viewed December 15, 2013, from http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/09/ guti-s24.html. Wihtol de Wenden, C., 2007, “The Frontiers of Mobility,” in A. Pécoud & P. de Guchteneire (eds.), Migration Without Borders: Essays on the Free Movement of People, pp. 51–64, New York & Oxford, UNESCO Publishing and Berghahn Books. Zapata-Barrero, R. & De Witte, N., 2007,“The Spanish Governance of EU Borders: Normative Questions,” Mediterranean Politics 12(1), 85–90.

Notes   1 See also Carrie Tarr’s (2007) article, in which she analyzes border-crossing films produced in France between 1998 and 2004, including Clandestins/Clandestines (Denis Chouinard and Nicolas Wadimoff, 1998), Loin/Far Away (André Techiné, 2001), Passeurs de Rêves/ Beyond Our Dreams (Hiner Saleem, 2000), Frontières/Frontiers (Mostefa Djadjian, 2002), Hermakonono (Abderrahmane Sissako, 2004), and Depuis qu’Otar est parti/Since Otar Left (Julie Bertuccelli, 2004).   2 My translation.   3 The two towns’ fences are equipped with barbed wire; the security system consists of 106 fixed cameras for video surveillance, an additional microphone cable, and infrared surveillance. Additionally, after recent massive attacks, policemen and Guardia Civil officers have been deployed constantly and helicopters have been used for surveillance of the external border. (See Saddiki 2010). In 2005 coordinated mass assaults against the border fences in the two cities and the death of fourteen immigrants “showed the inefficiency and shortfalls of the security and public order policy introduced by Spain and the EU along its southern border” (Soddu 2006: 212). A wave of mass assaults on the border fences repeated again in February, May and August of 2014 prompting the violent response of the Guardia Civil officers guarding the border.   4 In an interview, Armendáriz clarifies his argument in defense of the immigrants’ mobility and over the citizens’ search for stability:   Question: “Why are you so interested in marginalized characters?”   Answer: “Because I believe that, somehow, they are people for whom the word resignation doesn’t exist; nor does the word accommodation [in the sense of settling down] exist for them. For me, they have certain life values, certain human values that can be positive or 201

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  5

  6   7

  8   9 10

11 12 13 14

negative but that contrast with and in fact call into question many of the values that we have in our society. Their lives, in this sense, seem more interesting to me than those of the people who spend their time looking for a position, for stability” (Oltra 1990: 214, my translation.) The tragedy of “Rota’s patera” prompted compassion and awareness among Spaniards from the Cadiz area, who in 2003 created the association Solidaridad Directa/Direct Solidarity, not to be another NGO, but to be an outlet for spontaneous and volunteer social participation. Since then and with help from two subsidiary organizations, one in Morocco (Asociación para el Progreso y la Cultura/Asociation for Progress and Culture) and the other in Spain (Asociación de Inmigrantes de Hansala/Asociation of Immigrants from Hansala), over two hundred people have collaborated in different activities that include the construction of basic infrastructure in Hansala such as a medical dispensary, a school, and a civic center and have provided scholarships for young boys and girls to attend school and other material aid to families in need. See their Web site, http://solidaridadirecta.net46.net/english.html, and De la Cal’s article (2007). See “En casa de Said” by Gutiérrez in De la Cal (2007) and Walsh’s interview with Gutiérrez (2008). Rezervni Deli/Spare Parts (2003) by Damjan Kozole is another of the few films that focus on human trafficking through the traffickers’ perspective, in this case, at the border between Slovenia and Italy. The film’s protagonists are Ludwig and Rudy, blue-collar workers who are lured into the smuggling scene out of necessity. Without ever seeking to diminish the despicable acts for which they are responsible, the film shows the human side of the smugglers, who are portrayed as complex, weak, and fallible human beings. All the films analyzed in chapter 5 also favor the perspective of the European family over that of immigrants. See DVD Special Features: “Director’s Introduction” and “In This World EPK” (Electronic Press Kit) in Behind the Scenes Footage with Commentary from Winterbottom and Grisoni, Sundance Channel Home Entertainment. Richard Kelly (2003) points out that this scene commemorates the real life tragedy of 58 Chinese immigrants found dead in similar circumstances at Dover in 2000. The Sangatte refugee camp, colloquially dubbed Sans-gate (without gate), was located in the Pas-de-Calais department on the northern coast of France on the English Channel. It was opened to provide basic accommodations for primarily Kurdish, Afghan, and Albanian refugees trying to enter Britain. It was in operation from 1999 to 2002, when it was officially closed. One of the main reasons for its closing was its proximity to the Eurotunnel’s Coquelle terminal, where refugees tried to smuggle themselves into trucks, freight trains, and cars. Welcome (2009) by Philip Lioret is set in the coastal town of Calais and focuses also on the harsh realities of the refugees’ lives at the detention camp while they await their opportunity to clear their status. His documentaries also document historic journeys and road trips: La ruta de las Córdobas/ The Route of the Cordobas (1991), La ruta de los exploradores/The Route of the Explorers (1995), La Ruta Samarkanda/The Samarkand Route (2000), and Caravana/Caravan (2005). See Sardá’s (2007) article and Estrada’s (2007) interview. A similar pattern is to be found in the Swedish television miniseries Det nya landet/The New Country (Geir Hansteen Jörgensen, 2000), also a road movie that follows the journey of two 202

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clandestine immigrants, a fifteen-year-old Somalian boy and a forty-year-old Iranian man who travel the country and expose Swedish attitudes of fear, resentment, and also support toward immigrants. 15 Costa-Gavras explains this scene as follows: “It’s a scene about how fickle we are, how we want to be humane, considerate, and charitable, as long as it doesn’t disturb our comfort or our peace of mind. At that point, our humanism fades, then disappears” (Ravanello n.d.). 16 Costa-Gavras states in his interview with Ravanello that “the immigrant today is never considered beneficial to a country. He is no longer in demand, no longer even a problem— he is a danger. All kinds of media now portray him, directly or indirectly, as a danger— an invasive danger—for society.” Asked if France is less generous toward immigrants now than when he arrived, he says: “I think it became less generous out of fear—a fear of unemployment, of different religions, of different skin colors. A fear fueled by certain politicians, which ultimately made its mark, creating the myth of the invader, a danger to French identity and culture.”

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Chapter 7 Identities In-Between in Diasporic Cinema

T

he experience of diaspora is inextricably linked to separation, dislocation, nostalgia, and collective memory, as well as hope for a better future, and the diasporic subject’s identity is defined by heterogeneity, diversity, and hybridity. The binary paradigm by which the diasporic immigrant is understood to be suspended between two identities and two communities has been deemed by some cultural critics as a product of the 1980s and therefore an outdated characterization of his/her current situation (Jordan 2006). However, I agree with critical arguments that signal the paradigm’s continuing relevance (Elsaesser 2005; Fincham 2008). Thomas Elsaesser has noted that although the hyphenation of national identity produced by migration and exile is most pronounced in “those who do not feel allegiance to the nation-state in the first place, because they are immigrants, refugees or asylum seekers, and 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” (2005: 118), this hyphenated identity also affects second- and third second-generation immigrants: [W]hile sharing the language and possessing the skills to navigate their society, nonetheless [they] 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 […] 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: to the nation-state into which they were born, and to the homeland from which (one or both of) their parents came. (Elsaesser 2005: 118) Diasporic subjects’ unerasable strangeness and feelings of double un-belonging often derive from the difficulties they face in gaining access to the welfare society and in integrating fully into the social fabric. Excluded from the host country’s civil society, these subjects’ identities, political affiliations, and social activities tend to point toward the country of origin. As Betigul Ercan Argun observes, a diaspora is never homogeneous but is a “mélange of groups and factions” (2003: 66); it is constituted both negatively by the experiences of discrimination and positively by identification with a historical heritage and the reconstitution of a lost homeland; it includes “forces of conservation as well as of change” (2003: 66). Different groups and generations within a diaspora may differ in the ways they

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connect to the idea of “home,” sometimes through ghettoization and self-segregation, which often relate to an attempt to reproduce home abroad, sometimes through firm assimilation to the host country and rejection of or indifference to the ancestral home, and sometimes through integration into what Argun has called “transmigrant communities,” which are firmly rooted in the new country but maintain multiple connections to the homeland (2003: 5). Diasporic films document or fictionalize this dual, “transmigrant,” and sometimes conflicting conception of individual and national identity. They expose their characters’ identities as trapped in (or struggling to navigate) dichotomies and as determined by the dialectics of center/periphery, sending/receiving nation, and displacement/assimilation. According to Daniela Berghahn’s illuminating study of the cinematic representation of the diasporic family, diasporic cinema’s genesis “is chronotopically determined by the temporal component of memory and the spatial component of dislocation” and by the dialectical tension between two places (here and there) and two temporalities (present and past) (2013: 64). Diaspora is also depicted in its cinematic representations as a non-homogeneous space. Racism and fear of the Other permeate diasporic communities: one diasporic group resents, fears, or hates another, and old regional loyalties are replaced by new religious or ethnic allegiances that may generate conflicts beyond intergenerational issues. As Arif Dirlik argues, [T]he racialization in contemporary society is a product not just of ruling groups who benefit from racism but of the ruled as well, who find in racial categories, in racialized cultural categories, sources of identity for self-defense or self-assertion and become complicitous with the very racism they would overcome. (2008: 1374) The first generation’s exacerbation of traditional moral and religious values and patterns of behavior associated with the home country appears to be a defensive reaction to discrimination and racism and a means of self-assertion and survival for the diasporic community in a hostile environment. In turn, the second generation’s allegiance to its parents’ homeland is replaced in many of these films by a rejection of and rebellion against constraining norms imposed by patriarchal families and diasporas. Diasporic communities create arenas of division and dissent but also of debate and celebration, and at the same time members of those communities recognize their collective responsibilities both to the home country and to the receiving society (Werbner 2004: 896). Diasporic subjects’ in-betweenness is also perceived as positive insofar as it is the result of the cultural contamination generated between second- or third-generation immigrants and Europeans and the intersection of local traditions and incoming cultural practices. This positive un-belonging or in-betweenness is in line with Homi Bhabha’s (1994) early and by now canonical theoretical work. His proposed categories of “third space”—the interrogative and ambivalent space defined by the blurring of the limitations of existing boundaries and the transgression and subversion of dualistic categorizations of culture 208

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and identity—and “transculturation”—the ability to transverse multiple cultures and to translate, negotiate, and mediate affinity and difference within a dynamic of exchange and inclusion—theoretically enunciate a positive hybridity that opposes essentialism and defines diasporic subjects’ identities. It is in that sense that diasporic subjects are marked by hybridity and heterogeneity—cultural, linguistic, ethnic, and national—and defined by a traversal of the boundaries demarcating nation and diaspora, calling for a rethinking of the rubrics of nation and nationalism (Braziel & Mannur 2003: 5). Iman Mersal poses a question—“Is diaspora only a search for identity? Is it not also a refusal of identity amid a surplus of identity?” (2008: 1582)—to which diasporic films offer a response insofar as they celebrate transnational, intergenerational, and intercultural representations that shy away from univocal identity formations. Autobiographical and coming-of-age narratives occupy a central position in diaspora films, many of which are semiautobiographical narratives or adaptations of autobiographical novels and reflect the writers’ or directors’ experiences of growing up between two cultures and their attempts to reconcile conflicting value systems and traditions. Diasporic films revolve around their protagonists’ search for (or rejection of) ethnic and cultural belonging and frequently center on pivotal moments in which the adolescent protagonist makes a choice between two cultures that will determine his or her adult identity (Berghahn 2010: 239–240). Conflict and tension between parents and their teenage offspring appears to be one of the preferred narrative themes in the films, regardless of their nationality. The widespread use of this theme attests to the universality of the experience and its mainstream appeal. Generational conflict is often conflated with cultural conflict, since protagonists often ascribe a higher value to European culture than to their parents’ culture because they feel the pressure to identify with and assimilate to the host nation. The films’ mission is to expose this pressure and the difficulties characters experience when trying both to assimilate and reconcile with their bicultural identities. Women filmmakers who focus on the position and role of women in diasporas favor the coming-of-age format. Their films typically depict female characters’ journeys of development and self-discovery as they struggle to find their voices and assert their independence in traditional and patriarchal communities. Sometimes these women’s journeys consist of overcoming nostalgia for the past in the homeland and accepting their roles in their new homes and finding home in themselves. Another recurring motif found in coming-of-age films that focus on generational differences in Muslim diasporas is the relationship between Muslim fathers and their European-born daughters. Berghahn’s study (2009) of this pattern in Turkish-German cinema is applicable to other filmic representations of Muslim diasporas throughout Europe. Muslim fathers and brothers in diasporas are likely to resort to draconian means to protect the honor of their wives, daughters, and sisters because the experience of migration, usually from rural areas in their homeland to urban centers in Europe, results in a profound destabilization of identity. The cultural conflict in these cases is not simply between Otherness and Europeanness, between Islam and secularism, but also between rural and urban cultures. Moreover, Muslim men 209

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experience a sense of humiliation that results from working in low-profile jobs and being marginalized in European society, and they overcompensate by reasserting their power in the family context (Berghahn 2009: 59). Still, unconventional and nurturing Muslim fathers can be found in films whose main concern is advocating a cultural hybridity based on the fusion of European middle-class values of education, tolerance, and material success with Muslim family values (Berghahn 2009: 61). The number of diasporic films continues to increase as Europe’s immigrant communities grow and settle and produce new generations of hybrid nationals with access to education and creative resources who are eager to tell their stories. An analysis or even description of the vast variety of products resulting from this phenomenon would exceed the scope and purpose of this already extensive chapter. For that reason I will limit myself to a selection of emblematic and commercial films that have emerged from the earlier and more established diasporic communities in Europe: Arabs in France, South Asians in Britain, and Turks in Germany. Each of these communities has produced internationally successful filmmakers, such as the French-Tunisian Abdellatif Kechiche, British-Asian Gurinder Chadha, and Turkish-German Fatih Akin, among others. These filmmakers have won major international awards (at Cannes and Berlin) as well as national awards and have been successful at the box office as the result of being embraced by both local and international audiences. They are for the most part concerned with issues of identity, belonging, displacement, and generational relationships. Beurs in the French Banlieue The terms beur (Arab in back slang, a term coined by the beurs themselves), and banlieue go hand in hand insofar as they link the marginality pervasive among both second-generation Arabs (beurs) and black immigrants who have been segregated for decades in low income subsidized housing projects (cités) in the suburban areas (banlieues) of France’s major cities. The cités were built in the 1960s as part of a postwar urban planning project using modern giant concrete blocks of apartments, which in many cases replaced the previously existing bidonvilles (shantytowns) where the first generation of Arab immigrants had initially settled. Immigrants moved to the cités with high expectations for their children and working-class French and working-class immigrants lived side by side in the buildings. In the 1980s, as most native French residents progressively moved out of the cités, thanks to a governmentsponsored home buying program and as immigration increased, immigrants from diverse ethnic backgrounds populated the cités. Subsequent inadequate maintenance programs resulted in spatial degradation and in miserable and desolate living conditions, and the cohabitation of people from diverse backgrounds, high rates of unemployment, and the pervasive marginalization of beurs and blacks from mainstream French society produced tensions, instability, and violence (Zissermann & Nettelbeck 1999: 84–85). Fears of Islamic extremism and terrorism in Algeria in the 1990s and the National Front’s exploitation of 210

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such fears contributed to feelings of mistrust between members of traditional French society and residents of immigrant neighborhoods. This mistrust led to an increase in the pressure and racial profiling by the police whose aggressive tactics, in turn, increased hostility and precipitated violence. Alienation, unemployment, poverty, and exclusion, as well as the Chirac government’s passing of laws restricting immigrants’ rights and access to French nationality for the French-born children of foreign parents, led to constant confrontation with the police and resulted in rage and antisocial behavior among youth (Tarr 2005: 7). Violent riots exploded in 1983, 1993, and 2005, leading the government to impose state emergency measures and curfews in large cities. Riots typically start in the cités and, though embraced by the left-leaning intelligentsia, they have not changed a system that overtly discriminates against its beur and non-European population and has not made any effort to promote integration policies or generate job opportunities and social programs for young second- and third-generation French of West African and North African origin (Smith 2005). Within this sociopolitical context, beur cinema refers to films made by and about the beurs or second-generation immigrants of Maghrebi descent, and banlieue cinema refers to films set in the rundown multiethnic working-class neighborhoods on the peripheries of major cities. Though they are not exactly equivalent, both beur and banlieue cinemas converge in the way that they prominently feature Maghrebi-French protagonists. Since the 1980s that convergence has reflected the “historical and political positioning of MaghrebiFrench filmmakers within the banlieue” (Higbee 2007: 38) and has expressed a common social identity shared among Maghrebi-French youth, an identity defined by the discontent and alienation experienced across the immigrant communities of the disadvantaged urban periphery (Higbee 2007: 39). As Alan Riding notes, beur and banlieue cinemas have offered both documentary and fictional views from the immigrants’ perspectives of problems affecting their segregated communities. In addition, these films often provide the French with the only space they have to meet the Others “in their midst” and help report how both French and European society is being irreversibly altered by immigrants and their locally born children and grandchildren (Riding 2005). Carrie Tarr has noted that since the 1980s, beur filmmakers have not been interested in reproducing the realist and melodramatic first-generation films of the 1960s and 1970s “which showed Arabs as the wretched passive victims of French racism” (2005: 29). On the contrary, in their films they seek to counter “the stereotypes of Arabs as confined to the criminal underworld and associated with delinquency, drugs and violence” (Tarr 2005: 29). Beur cinema represents an alternative to France’s reluctance to critique, document, and fictionalize its colonial and postcolonial history and the stigmatization of immigrants from the Maghreb (Tarr 2005: 9). In that sense, Tarr argues, the term beur cinema “suggests both agency in the production of representations by this particular ethnic minority and a challenge to dominant representations of ‘Frenchness’ and ‘Otherness’” (2005: 49). Filmmakers of Maghrebi descent have notoriously faced difficulties in getting their films released and in attracting audiences, and on occasions they have refused to be labeled in 211

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terms of their ethnic origins in an effort to avoid an essentialist conception of their films’ aesthetic merits (Tarr 2005: 13). Nonetheless, the large number of beur films released in the last three decades and the recent national and international success of beur filmmakers, such as the French-Tunisian filmmaker Abdellatif Kechiche and the French-Algerian filmmakers Mehdi Charef, Yamina Benguigui, and Rachid Bouchareb, as well as that of white French filmmakers committed to correcting marginalizing and derogatory representations of beurs and other immigrants, such as Mathieu Kassovitz and Laurent Cantet, among others, prove there is a space for the discussion and denunciation of intolerance and exclusion. Beur and banlieue films are typically characterized by the geographical location in which the story takes place, their protagonists’ immigrant origin, and a gender-biased perspective, insofar as the films often center on interethnic heterosexist masculinity and youthful fraternity and solidarity. These films primarily take place in the periphery of major cities and are based on the dialectics between center and margin, city and banlieue. The films’ emphasis is on the increasingly hybridized youth culture of the French banlieue and on “the common struggle of mixed-race groups against the police and bourgeois society” (Vincendeau 2000: 321). Without any city or public spaces to call their own, the protagonists of banlieue films stagnate in society at large and are trapped in their cités, which are characterized by a gendered division of space and activities in which women are denied subjectivity or relegated to domestic and subordinate roles. In the absence of fathers, figures of authority or other types of masculine role models, young males survive chronic unemployment, boredom, and social discrimination by exerting a dominant masculinity, manifested by their aggressive verbal and body language and occupation of public space (Vincendeau 2000: 316). The result of this assertion of masculinity is the female characters’ absence, silence, commodification, or abuse (Tarr 2005: 50). The films’ visual depiction of space emphasizes the myriad ways in which their “protagonists are blocked and fenced by their surroundings” (Tarr 2005: 20), and this depiction demonstrates that economic inequality and uncontrolled urban planning to a great extent encourage the protagonists’ self-marginalization. From the Cité to the City: Marginalization and Interethnic Masculinity in the Banlieue The aforementioned characterization can be found in two seminal beur/banlieue films of the 1980s and 1990s: Le thé au Harem d’Archimède/Tea in the Harem (Mehdi Charef, 1985) and La haine/Hate (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1996). Charef ’s film is the adaptation of his own novel Le thé au Harem d’Archi Ahmed (1983), whose title is a play on words resulting from a young character’s misspelling of “le théorème d’Archimède” (Archimedes’s Principle) at school. The film won prestigious national awards (the Prix Jean Vigo and the César Award), and its release in 1985, along with Bâton Rouge/Baton Rouge by Rachid Bouchareb, was followed by a special issue of the film journal Cinématographe devoted to “cinema beur,” which gave national and international prominence to the term beur (Berghahn 2013: 34). Le thé au 212

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Harem d’Archimède, a grim depiction of second-immigration youth from “La cité des fleurs” (the Flowers Estate at Nanterre on the outskirts of Paris), depicts one week in the life of two best friends, Madjid, who is beur, and Pat, who is white French, as they aimlessly occupy their free time drinking, consuming drugs, stealing, having sex with lonely and unsatisfied older women, and pimping, everything except helping their economically depressed families. The purpose of the film is first to show that the protagonists’ delinquent behavior is linked to their families’ marginal and dysfunctional lives and is the product of their working-class backgrounds and the unemployment crisis, and second, to draw attention to the fact that interracial bonding between youth who share similarly underprivileged backgrounds is their only possible means of survival. Fathers are absent or drink, and Madjid’s father is paralyzed after a job accident, and women carry the heavy burden of supporting their families by themselves.1 Although both protagonists share the same problems and interests, Madjid, the more intelligent of the two friends, is the constant object of racial discrimination once they leave the cité and venture into Paris to carry out their petty crimes, and he is unable to land a job at the unemployment agency, clearly because he is an Arab. Without jobs and without motivation, Madjid and Pat make a space for themselves in the basements of abandoned buildings and among urban ruins and survive through friendship and loyalty to each other. Tarr has noted that the film’s narrative of despair and its pessimistic outcome are reinforced by the youths’ misogynistic and abusive treatment of both white and beur female characters and are countered by the friends’ alliance in the face of social alienation and against the aggression of white, working-class, middle-aged men (2005: 33). The friends’ partnership in crime overrides their racial differences, and their solidarity is the only flicker of hope provided at the film’s closure after they and their friends steal a Mercedes to exit the banlieue and drive to the sea. The journey and its destination, the sea, appear as a haven from the grimness of their lives in the cité, but the police follow them and find them strolling and relaxing at the beach. As all the others flee the scene, Madjid, depressed because he has just learned that Pat’s sister, whom he fancies, secretly works as a prostitute in Paris, lets himself be apprehended by the police. In the very last scenes, as credits start to roll, Pat, who had managed to escape police persecution, is waiting for the police van to pass by, implying that he will offer to join Madjid. A melodic rendition of the song “Banlieue” by beur composer and singer Karim Kacel provides the musical accompaniment to the closing scenes. The original song’s lyrics (left out of the film’s rendition) address listeners directly, asking them to understand (“put yourself in his shoes”) the situation of a seventeen-year-old male living in the banlieue: his experience of unemployment, delinquency, and police harassment and his feelings of suffocation, boredom, and desire to leave the grayness (“la grisaille”) and hopelessness of his world. The combination of the non-diegetic melodic soundtrack and a cinematography highlighting an open and luminous maritime space, which contrasts vividly with the realist cinematography accentuating the grimness and barrenness of the periphery, seeks the audience’s melodramatic empathy with the youths’ troubles and nihilism, which are blamed on French society. The camaraderie between the working-class white French character and his beur friend offers an idealized version of interethnic interactions in the 213

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banlieue and appeals to both white and beur audiences who identify with the youths’ disaffection. Kassovitz’s first film, Métisse (1993), also centered on a trio of young people of different ethnic backgrounds (black, white, and beur); but unlike Le thé au harem d’Archimède and his own subsequent La haine, this film is a lighthearted comedy that conveys a promise of hybridity and racial harmony (Tarr 2005: 62). La haine also takes place at the banlieue and opens with a scene of riots sparked by a police beating of Ahmed, a young Arab from the cité de la Noé in the banlieue Chanteloup-les-Vignes, outside Paris, and the violent reaction to the beating by his three angry and restless friends, a Jew, an Arab, and a black who are determined to avenge the aggression against their friend. The film was inspired by the death of a sixteen-year-old Zairean who was shot in the head by an inspector in a Parisian police station in 1993 (Tarr 2005: 67). Kassovitz has stated that he was shocked by the absence of public outcry at the police aggression and that he made the film to denounce police brutality and dissect the inner workings and interactions of the center/periphery dialectic. Kassovitz could not have anticipated how realistically his film would foreshadow the violent riots of 2005. As Riding has observed in regard to the 2005 riots, Banlieue movies have always portrayed reality, giving individual faces to well-documented social and economic problems, and they “have also proved more effective in analyzing these problems than have newspapers and politicians, who, of late, have variously expressed shock and surprise, as if the riots were as unpredictable as a natural disaster” (Riding 2005). La haine was immensely successful, critically and commercially, due to its spectacular integration of the ethical and the aesthetic. It was also very controversial because of its explicit attack on the French police.2 The film’s stylized format enhances the audience’s understanding of urgent social issues, and its narrative and viewpoint provide a look at youth disaffection and masculinist gang cultures. The three friends, Vinz, a Jew, Saïd, a beur, and Hubert, a black African, are the victims of geographical, social, and economic alienation, chronic male unemployment, a lack of resources and entertainment, police abuse, and gang violence, all of which are exacerbated by the tension after the riots. In this environment of social desolation in which the family provides no refuge, La haine is both a sublimation and a critique of a tough and rebellious masculinist culture in the hood, where female partners are silenced or absent. The characters’ use of verlan (street back slang) reflects their lack of communication and accentuates their hatred. Their empty and aggressive language is a marker of their rebellion against French society, a tool to express their exclusion and nihilism, and yet it represents another form of self-exclusion. A Beretta M9 gun, the symbolic masculinist “fetish object” (Vincendeau 2000: 315) that the police lose at the riots and that Vinz finds, functions as the film’s dramatic driving force and provides the ultimate irony that pervades its outcome: the object used to repress youth is mistakenly transferred to the objects of that repression, and Vinz’s ultimate death in the film is presented as an irrational mistake caused indirectly by his possession of the gun. In the end, the film seems to argue that repaying violence with violence only causes the youth to die and does nothing to change the system that represses them. 214

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The film’s time and space are reduced to one day in the cité and one night in the center of Paris. The characters’ liminal position between both spaces is defined by countless excluding boundaries. The streets are the only space in which they can be autonomous, a space of resistance and construction of subjectivity and identity. The city center, which the three friends conceive of as a potential escape from the claustrophobic isolation of the cité, proves to be unmanageable and a site of discrimination and exclusion. Upon their return to the cité after their nocturnal journey in the city, the cité, where some freedom, brotherhood, and an autonomous space still existed, turns out to be the site of their ultimate downfall. As the film closes, no possible sense of community or identity exists either inside or outside the cité, and the circle of violence is emphasized by Hubert’s voiceover, which repeats the same words with which the film began: “It’s the story of a society that falls. So far, so good; so far, so good. The important thing is not how you fall, but how you land.” Hatred, resentment, and social chaos are translated to the cinematography via a handheld camera, rapid cuts, and distorted angles that mimic the three characters’ restless mobility and follow their rhythm. Rapid changes and cuts translate the sense of urgency also implicit in the ticking of a digital clock which reappears throughout the film and which marks the youths’ idleness as well as the inevitability of death and circularity of violence. The black and white cinematography, symbolic of a social system structured by gender, social, ethnic, and racial dichotomies, reinforces the social commentary, highlighting the youths’ lack of opportunities and the lack of color in their lives and the urban space they inhabit. The three friends are colorblind, but society is not. Though La haine is highly stylized, it incorporates newsreel footage to evoke a real sense of urban crisis and is shot on real locations, blurring the distinction between documentary and fiction in its attempt to document the 1990s banlieue unrest and connect it with international liberation struggles (Vincendeau 2000: 320).3 Intermediality permeates the film through its reappropriation of the language of mass media (through publicity, comics, and TV) and black American pop culture (through reggae, rap, and hip hop music). The city’s billboards provide a constant remainder of the lack of consumption opportunities in the youths’ lives. Music provides another narrative thread that guides the characters’ actions and defines their identities, since the lyrics mirror their conflictive situations and speak of their preferences. The constant reference, both explicit and implicit, to American films, such as Scarface, Lethal Weapon, Taxi Driver, and Bruce Lee films, establishes a dialogue with and pays tribute to the sources of inspiration (in music, dress, attitude, and language) for these European boys in the hood. As Ginette Vincendeau argues, the film’s “exploitation” and celebration of American culture and American filmmakers “is political in showing the extent to which American culture has colonized French working-class youth culture” (2000: 323). The film’s co-opting of American aesthetics mimics (and critiques) its characters’ obsessive imitation of the language and behavior of international ghetto culture. Ultimately, the collective struggle with which the film opens and the stylization pervading its visual construction lead to a nihilistic conclusion in which the cycle of violence is perpetuated and the social rejection and self-alienation of diasporic youth living on the outskirts of 215

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society remains unaltered, despite the protagonists’ attempts to manage them through interethnic brotherhood and solidarity. From the Streets to the Classroom: Language as Social Marker and Education as the Road to Integration L’esquive/Games of Love and Chance (2003) by Abdellatif Kechiche and Entre les murs/The Class (2008) by Laurent Cantet are diasporic products that provide positive fictional alternatives to partial media representations of the banlieue and narrative resolutions to some of the social, cultural, and gender issues that hinder the progress of disaffected male youth in the cités. On one hand, these two films break with the misogynistic representation of female characters established in previous beur and banlieue films and the binary opposition between active, sexist, and disenfranchised male youth and silent, passive, and abused female youth. On the other hand, both films defend and problematize the correlation between second-generation immigrants’ integration into the French system and the potential breaking of the circle of marginalization and violence through education. L’esquive and Entre les murs eliminate the binary opposition between center and periphery and the one-way movement from the cité to the city that constituted the location and the narrative and visual core of Charef ’s and Kassovitz’s films. L’esquive’s and Entre les murs’ narrative and spatial locations are limited, in the case of L’esquive to the cité and in Entre les murs to the school classroom in the city. The films also introduce the dialectics established between standard French language and its nonstandard (slang) linguistic varieties which are a social marker of disenfranchised suburban youth and which give expression to their community’s identity. The two films present a “pro-integration stance” without totally ignoring the realities of exclusion ingrained in the French school system that directly affect the children of immigrants (Higbee 2007: 41). L’esquive won four Césars in 2005 for best film, director, actress, and screenplay. The space of the action is divided between outdoor locations in the Franc-Moisin housing projects and the classroom where the high school students are rehearsing Marivaux’s play, Le jeu de l’amour et du hasard/Games of Love and Chance for a school performance at the end of the year. As is the norm in banlieue films, the film’s protagonists are an ethnically and racially diverse group of adolescents of immigrant (mainly beur) origin who spend their lives constrained to the reduced space of their cité, where there is not much to do except hang out with their friends and where interracial harmony and friendly loyalty prevails in the absence of role models or paternal authority figures. The male protagonist Krimo’s father as well as his friend Fathi’s brother are in jail, and Krimo’s mother is an exhausted and overworked single mother who supports Krimo on her own and pays weekly visits to her husband in jail. The ethnic and religious identity of the main characters is subtly disclosed through their names (Rachid, Abdelkrim), their use of tchatché (banlieue speak) that includes Arabic imports (such as insh’Allah/God willing and tayyib/alright, then) 216

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(Swamy 2007: 61), and their constant swearing on the Koran. Like their counterparts in previous beur/banlieue films, these characters smoke marijuana, steal cars, and are brutally harassed by the police. In Charef ’s and Kassovitz’s films, the young male characters were in transit between the cité and the city, and the latter, though idealized as a potential escape from marginalization and confinement, turned out to be worse that the periphery which at least offered some protection again social discrimination and racism and remained “the only real space of community and belonging for banlieue youth” (Higbee 2007: 39). In L’esquive the space is limited to the cité, which “is defined by its youth inhabitants rather than the architecture itself ” (Higbee 2007: 41). The film’s action and location alternate between the classroom, where the formal rehearsal of the Marivaux play is guided by the teacher’s instruction, and the streets and empty spaces between housing projects where the characters idly spend their time and which also provide the improvised theater where they rehearse the play on their own in preparation for the upcoming school performance. The cité appears here, as it does in the films analyzed above, as both a colorblind and colorless space. Race and ethnicity are not the source of tensions between its young inhabitants; the outdoor space, shot with a digital camera, is narrowed to a few settings and is visualized as empty, impersonal, and devoid of community activities or recreational areas other than the auditorium where the final school performance takes place. Skies are consistently grey; scenes center on characters’ dialogues and are filmed with medium and close up shots. Kechiche does not include one single panoramic view of the cité, eluding a broader perspective on the space. Many of the scenes take place in front of buildings where characters have conversations with neighbors, friends, and parents through windows and telecoms, emphasizing economic scarcity (cell phone use is limited by the characters’ scarce means; they are always out of credit) and symbolic of their overall entrapment at the housing complex. Notwithstanding this typical rendering of the cité space, as Vinay Swamy has noted, Kechiche brings high art to the banlieue in the form of a play in which “characters are able to meet the challenge on their own terms on familiar territory” instead of traveling to the city in search of legitimacy (2007: 61). In the film, male and female socializing is generally divided by gender (men talk about rivalries with other gangs; women talk about romance and female loyalty), yet women show voice and agency in their heated and confrontational interactions with each other and with men. Most importantly, women lead and are generally more committed to rehearsing and acting in the Marivaux play. Lydia, the leader of the female group, also directs the play’s rehearsals and acting, and her lead part in it as the elusive character or the title mirrors her behavior in real life as she ducks Krimo’s proposal to date her, feeding the film’s (as well as the play’s) dramatic tension along gender lines. In spite of the agency Kechiche gives to his female characters, he does not overidealize the relationships between the cité teenagers, and he makes the “unbalanced gender relations” in the banlieue culture clear (Nettlebeck 2007: 315). In one scene, Fathi orchestrates Lydia’s encounter and conversation with Krimo by bullying and putting down Lydia’s friend, Frida, forcing her to cooperate in his attempt to make Lydia less elusive and end her indecision regarding Krimo’s romantic advances. As 217

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Colin Nettlebeck observes, the violent scene is “a deeply disturbing portrayal of a culturally ingrained assumption of male superiority and right that will not hesitate to resort to force if challenged” (2007: 315). The film’s innovation with regard to other beur/banlieue films resides first in its consideration of the use of language (proper/vernacular), and not only its peripheral location as a determinant factor in the characters’ constructed identity within French society, and second in the role that reading and enacting a French classic literary work may have in the characters’ social and cultural advancement, which means the film thus revisits “one of the fundamental Republican principles—which holds education as key to integration” (Swamy 2007: 59). Swamy notes that although the eighteenth-century author Marivaux is firmly enshrined in the French literary canon, in his day he was often chastised by his contemporaries for his unusual use of language, a tendency that Swamy interprets as one that mirrors “the perceived illegitimacy” of the modern day verlan the film’s characters speak (2007: 60). Swamy argues that the mélange of Arab-inflected suburban back slang and high classical French “puts into question the very divide between high and low cultures and the legitimacy of territorial distinctions traditionally associated with them” (2007: 59). Moreover, as Nettlebeck points out, when compared with Marivaux’s elaborate and opulent classicist language, the young adolescents’ verbal exchanges are “as sophisticated as anything imagined by Marivaux” (2007: 314). Their linguistic dexterity is not only an “expression of an alternative identity” (Strand 2009: 263) but is also “performative and theatrical” (Tarr 2005: 136), establishing a continuity between the adolescents’ interactions and those of the characters in the play. As Dana Strand writes, the characters’ “linguistic acrobatics prove that they can shift with ease from the ritualistic tchatché that secures a niche for them in their adolescent subculture to standard French in conversation with their teachers or parents or friends to the elegant, if idiosyncratic, language of the Marivaux play” (2009: 264). The parallel between film and play is established not only in the love games the film’s young characters play, which mimic the games they are acting in the play, but also in the play’s negation of the possibility of class mobility, which is essentially conditioned by the characters’ social background. In one of the classroom scenes, the teacher in charge of the school production explains the message of the Marivaux play to her students: characters are prisoners of their social conditions, and their language and behavior are inextricably bound to social status. If the Marivaux play provides the subtext for the love games the teenagers play and, above all, appears to be the only educational escape from inertia and paralysis, the play also foreshadows how these children of the immigrant diaspora in the French banlieue may be doomed to remain marginalized by their social and ethnic origins and possibly unable to escape from them. Without contradicting this negative prognosis, the film ends on an ambiguously positive note with the successful performance of the play, which is widely attended by the whole community, and the subsequent party to celebrate the performance. The two scenes of the performance and the party are juxtaposed with a sequence showing Krimo’s exclusion and self-alienation from both the performance and the celebration. 218

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Figure 7.1:  L’esquive/Games of Love and Chance by Abdel Kechiche ( 2003 Lola Films-Noé Productions/2006 New Yorker Films Artwork) Krimo Reads Marivaux’s play.

Figure 7.2:  L’esquive/Games of Love and Chance by Abdel Kechiche ( 2003 Lola Films-Noé Productions/2006 New Yorker Films Artwork) Krimo watches the performance.

The performance scenes take place immediately after a long painful scene in which the police brutalize the group of teenagers. Krimo and Lydia try to resolve the stalemate between them that has ensued after the scheme devised by Fathi and discuss Lydia’s indecision inside a stolen car while their friends wait for them from a distance to give them some privacy. Three police officers (a black male, a white male, and a white female) unexpectedly arrive at the scene and inquire about the car’s provenance, and a brutal confrontation ensues as the police search the car and violently frisk and handcuff the youth, who attempt to resist them. In a wrenching moment, the policewoman slaps Frida’s face with the copy of the Marivaux play that Frida had in her pocket. This action signifies the state forces of authority’s ignorant suppression of youths’ attempts at integration and advancement, which are symbolized by the reading and acting of the play. This gratuitous and unprovoked display of force exceeds the previous exhibit of male violence among the teenagers, and, above all, it emphasizes “the quotidian nature of such violent encounters between the police and the marginalized” in the cités and provides a real-life application of Marivaux’s essentialist rhetoric (Swamy 2007: 63). An abrupt jump cut moves the audience to the happy atmosphere that permeates the performance and subsequent party scenes, providing a relief from the harrowing police scene and providing evidence of the youths’ performative integration into the French canon despite the state’s oppression. The contrasting scenes show the two sides of the state, violent and benevolent (Swamy 2007: 64), and highlight the redemptive effect of acting a classic literary piece in front of an audience as a constructive form of entertainment and success of the school’s integration project. Kechiche uses classical French cultural artifacts subversively, “drawing attention to the ways in which they serve to reinforce attitudes of exclusion” or conversely to “enrich the lives of those participating in them” when reenacted in a contemporary setting (Nettelbeck 2007: 316). In a series of juxtaposed scenes, the camera follows Krimo while he surreptitiously observes the play being performed through the glass doors of the auditorium and, as he later remains holed up in his room, refusing to attend the celebration party and remaining unresponsive to Lydia’s calls from under the window. Krimo’s absence from the play is implicitly the result of his own failure to passionately 219

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impersonate Arlequin’s language and bold and funny demeanor—that is, his inability to cooperate with the school’s attempt to integrate its students into the French canon—as well as the school’s failure to integrate a character suffering from family dysfunction and the absence of a father figure. With this outcome, Kechiche seems to be implying that it is not just the state’s (or the school’s) responsibility to integrate all its subjects, but also that its subjects are equally responsible for their own adaptation. The Marivaux theatrical performance was preceded by the elementary school students’ performance of the twelfth-century-Sufi epic poem, La Conférence des oiseaux/The Conference of the Birds by the Persian poet Farid alDin Attar. The individual and institutional performance that combines Western and Islamic classic texts is presented as a potentially potent means for the children of the cité to escape stagnation and acquire agency. Entre les murs/The Class (2008), based on the 2006 novel by François Bégaudeau, won the Palme d’Or at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival and immediately became an international success. Like L’Esquive, the film stresses the role of education in the advancement of diasporic populations while questioning the insufficiency of the French school system in its attempts to address cultural, gender, and religious differences. This time the film’s action and location are limited to the enclosed world of a Paris high school—a classroom and the building’s entrance, courtyard, and corridors—which functions as a microcosm of interethnic interactions in contemporary France, where, as Cantet says, “issues of equality and inequality—in regards to opportunity, work and power, cultural and social integration and exclusion—play out concretely” (Mangeot 2008). The school, although situated in Paris’ twentieth arrondissement (administrative district), rather than at the banlieue, is a public school whose diverse student body consists mainly of the children of immigrants (beurs, black Africans, and Chinese).4 The film’s dual plot centers on the interaction between a young French teacher, François Marin (played by François Bégaudeau himself) and the 25 thirteen- to fifteen-year-old students in his class, and the faculty meetings and faculty members’ relationships out of the classroom. With the exception of recess in the school’s courtyard, the students’ dialogues and interactions are generally circumscribed to the classroom and are always mediated by their exchanges with the teacher and with the school principal. Even during moments at recess, which mark the transitions in the narrative development, the students are shot at high angles from the building’s glass windows, providing “a bird’s eye view over the court, which gives the impression of a watchtower and reinforces the feeling of confinement” (Tijou 2008). This omniscient perspective, reproducing a sort of Foucauldian Panopticon, facilitates the teachers’ (as well as the spectators’) distant surveillance and naturalistic dissection of students in their element. We are never given the students’ individual or collective views of their school experience (or of their family life and leisure time with friends) since their perception is conditioned at all times by the faculty’s constant scrutiny, evaluation, and discipline. The reduction in perspective matches the filmmaker’s decision to limit the action and location to the school dynamics but also serves the purpose of respecting the students’ privacy and their right to salvage their identity as society’s Others. When the students are 220

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Figure 7.3:  Entre les murs/The Class by Laurent Cantet ( 2008 Sony Pictures Classics) In the classroom.

assigned to write a self-portrait, they resist unveiling any details about themselves, and they do not trust the teacher, who is genuinely curious about their lives. As socially and racially disadvantaged students, stuck in their marginal lives because of societal forces, they are also prisoners behind the school walls (Tijou 2008). The school is a location that highlights the pressure students feel to assimilate to French society and the educational system, as well as the students’ subsequent passive-aggressive rejection of attempts to fit into it. At the same time, the school represents their only hope of salvation from their parents’ social stagnation. Despite the utopian “equality pact established between teacher and students,” hierarchy, authority, and concrete disciplinary action in the last third of the film are a reminder of reality and reproduce the social inequality outside the school walls (Mangeot 2008). The tension between camaraderie and authority, equality and hierarchy, dialogue and discipline constitutes the essence of the classroom exchanges between students and their teacher and the dramatic core of the film. Though Marin creates a friendly and informal atmosphere in the classroom, traces of the dynamics that determine the students’ lives in the outside world constantly emerge: some students, though born in France, refuse to identify as French in their self-portraits and prefer to identify with their immigrant parents’ countries. On one occasion Marin writes an example on the board using the name Bill as the subject of the sentence, and students question his choice of a Western name instead of a more “ethnic” one that would reflect the class’s diversity, proposing Aissata or Fatou as better alternatives. Like L’Esquive, Entre les murs addresses the increasingly diverse nature of French society by viewing the choice between correct and vernacular use of language in traditional French instruction as a fundamental quandary. One class session is devoted to the correct use of the imperfect subjunctive. As the students struggle to conjugate and pronounce it correctly, they denounce the obsolete and archaic nature of the tense and question the need to learn it. Not only is the imperfect subjunctive a tense rarely used by most French people, but it is markedly absent from the students’ informal use of vernacular language (slang and verlan), which is 221

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their generational and social marker. The students’ argument is compelling, and the teacher, although he explains the benefit of mastering different linguistic registers, has to acknowledge the elitist connotation associated with the use of the tense (used mostly by “snobs”). In another scene at a faculty meeting, the history teacher asks Marin to assign literary texts that complement his history lessons. He will be starting with the Enlightenment and suggests that Marin assign one of Voltaire’s novels. Marin finds Voltaire too difficult for his students and instead assigns The Diary of Anne Frank, with the intention of providing them with an apt model for their self-portraits. The young Jewish woman’s narrative serves as an inspiration for the students’ expression of their feelings while also being emblematic of their social, ethnic, and physical segregation. Overall, the film’s ideology regarding the school’s program and pedagogical approach revolves around the dilemma between following a strict traditional methodology that emphasizes the correct use of the French language and knowledge of the French literary tradition and adapting the curriculum to the social and cultural circumstances of its adolescent student body. In other words, the dilemma lies between, on one hand, integration via assimilation and suppression of the students’ foreign language and culture as well as of their slang register, and on the other hand, respect for their cultural background. Language and academic achievement are presented as essential tools for social advancement. In meetings between Marin and the students’ parents, the parents express their hope that education will provide their children with a better future than theirs. Although interactions are restricted to the school space, social malaise emerges through the students’ undisciplined attitudes, which reflect the problematic situations they experience in their homes and which the students and teachers discuss on a few occasions. For example, when the mother of Wei, the Chinese student, is detained and found to be undocumented, the teachers start a collection to help her hire a lawyer to fight the threat of deportation. In another scene, a heated confrontation takes place between Marin and the students after Marin reprimands the two student representatives for their childish behavior during the evaluation committee’s meeting and refers to them as “petasses” (skanks/sluts). Souleymane, whose parents are immigrants from Mali and do not speak French, defends the two students and is thrown out of the class after he defiantly addresses Marin with the informal pronoun “tu.” On his way out, he inadvertently hits a female student in the face with his backpack, causing her to bleed. As Souleymane is about to be tried by a disciplinary committee for this incident—which is just one more instance of his generally disrespectful and undisciplined behavior—and risks being expelled from school, another student warns Marin that if Souleymane is expelled, his father will send him back to Mali. The episode prompts a new dilemma among the teachers: whether to consider discipline and punishment in the abstract and without distinctions or in terms of the reaction and potential consequences that discipline may have on the students and their families. The film attempts to strike an idealistic balance between acknowledging the students’ predicaments and defending the French system’s pedagogical concerns regarding curriculum, rules of behavior, and the balance between praise and discipline. The character of François Marin is placed between these two positions and mediates between students and the system. As a teacher and student coordinator, he is both strict and affectionate. 222

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He disciplines students but allows them to express their doubts, complaints, and even ask intimate personal questions about his own sexuality, and he systematically defends the students at faculty meetings. Overall the film presents a faculty body composed of young white French teachers who are democratic, fair, affectionate, and sensitive to their students’ needs. Although there is division between them, most question the pedagogical advantages of a system solely based on discipline and punishment. Like other beur/banlieue films, Entre les murs is defined by its diasporic characters’ interracial harmony. Students fight and compete with each other inside and outside the classroom but join forces and defend each other when the teacher reprimands them. In addition, the classroom, unlike the streets, provides a space for gender equality. Female students are as active, undisciplined, and vocal as their male classmates, and their male classmates never subject them to misogynistic attitudes. The film’s cast is made up of nonprofessional actors who are actual students from the Françoise Dolto Junior High School in Paris’s twentieth arrondissement, and their outstanding performance is the result of workshops conducted at the school. Cantet favored an experimental approach based on improvisation, allowing students to “come up with their own dialogue” according to requested situations, and he finished the script only after training sessions with them (Mangeot 2008; Tijou 2008). In interviews Cantet has also explained his choice to use three cameras inside the classroom. His aim was to better capture the organic interaction between the teacher and his 25 students. One camera was always on the teacher, another on the students at the center of the scene, and a third one to allow for improvised dialogues that may have come from an unanticipated angle or corner of the classroom. Cantet explains that “the idea was to film the course as a tennis match, which required putting the teacher and students in an equal position” (Mangeot 2008). As Strand explains, “by replacing a predictable shot selection that alternates between two distinctly opposing perspectives with considerably less controlling longer takes recorded by three separate cameras, [Cantet] has succeeded in releasing the viewer from any fixed point of view” (2009: 269). The film’s experimental approach blurs the distinction between documentary and fiction, since the film is almost like a fake documentary in the way it is structured and filmed, with a sober cinematography, a setting and time limited to the school, and the total absence of music and extra lighting that may have worked against the naturalistic visual approach. Kechiche’s and Cantet’s films leave the streets of the banlieue behind and propose classroom dynamics and the reading and acting of literary pieces within the French school system as the means and sites of potential social advancement. In the contained diegetic universe of the two films, the classroom is presented as a site of sharing and collective learning that provides an alternative to the street, which in other films appeared as a site of urban decay, idleness, and delinquency. In both films, the school’s pedagogical dynamics replace gang interaction and provide female protagonists with opportunities for agency and academic excellence, and the correct use of the French language is offered as a necessary complement to street slang. These films also present an opportunity to question and critique the French school system’s methods of integration and, by extension, French society’s deficiencies regarding its minorities’ social integration. 223

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Since the 1990s, women-authored films, as well as some male-authored films with prominent female protagonists and themes (in addition to L’Esquive and Entre les murs), have provided alternatives to the masculinist approach of France’s early banlieue cinema by focusing on female agency and on women’s resources and survival mechanisms in the patriarchal and male-centered ghetto. Films such as Les histoires d’amour finissent mal en général/Love Affairs Usually End Badly (Anne Fontaine, 1993), Souviens-toi de moi/ Remember Me (1996) and Jeunesse dorée/Golden Youth (Zaïda Ghorab-Volta, 2002), Inch’Allah dimanche/God Bless, It’s Sunday (Yamina Benguigui, 2000), Chaos (Caroline Serreau, 2000), L’honneur de ma famille/My Family’s Honor (Rachid Bouchareb, 1997), Marie-Line (Mehdi Charef, 2000), and La graine et le mullet/The Secret of the Grain (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2007), among others, present examples of female solidarity and sisterhood across racial and ethnic lines to challenge patriarchal abuses of power. Some diasporic filmmakers have attempted to correct the second generation’s ignorance (and France’s forgetfulness or denial) of France’s colonial past and its effect on their immigrant families’ and communities’ history by conflating the experiences of first-generation Maghrebis and the memory of the Algerian War of Independence. Such is the case in Sous les pieds des femmes/Where Women Tread (Rachida Krim, 1997), Vivre au paradis/Living in Paradise (Bourlem Gherdjou, 1998), Le Gone du chaâba/The Kid of the Chaaba (Christophe Ruggia, 1998), based on the Azouz Begag’s 1998 autobiographical coming-of-age novel, the documentary Mémoires d’immigrés, l’héritage maghrébin/Immigrant Memories: The Maghrebi Heritage (Yamina Benguigui, 1997–1998), and most recently Rachid Bouchareb’s films Indigenes/Days of Glory (2006) and Hors la loi/Outside the Law (2010), his tributes to North African soldiers’ heroism in World War II, and Algeria’s struggle for independence, respectively. Diverse and Gendered Representations of the South Asian Diaspora in the United Kingdom There is consensus among cultural critics about the risk of understanding the experience of second-generation British Asians exclusively in terms of Asian regional, religious, and cultural homogeneity, the Asian/British culture clash, and generational conflict and tension (Brah 1996; Werbner 2004). Pnina Werbner documents the existence of two alternative South Asian public spheres in Britain: The first is a resistant and yet complicit public arena produced through the entertainment industry—commercial film, novels and other media—that tells a story of cultural hybridity and cosmopolitanism, of intergenerational conflict, inter-ethnic or inter-racial marriage, family politics and excesses of consumption; a cultural arena that makes its distinctive contribution to British and South Asian popular culture by satirising the parochialism and conservatism of the South Asian immigrant generation. (2004: 897) 224

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The second alternative, she continues, is a thriving transnational popular commercial cultural sphere imported from South Asia in which Muslim, Hindu and Sikh artists, actors, musicians and producers are all equally prominent: Bombay movies, cassette pop music, Pakistani dramas beamed on satellite TV3, Sufi devotional qawwali music, classical Indian music and dance, spices, jewellery, traditional clothing. This commercial culture has had little impact beyond the confines of the South Asian community but it nevertheless forms a backdrop to the satirical works produced by South Asian diasporic intellectuals in Britain. (2004: 897) Werbner also distinguishes between the British Islamic and the British South Asian spheres, which seen from an indigenous British perspective provide ambivalent stereotyped images of “Muslims” and “Asians.” While Asians, she says, are perceived to be integrating positively into Britain, contributing a welcome spiciness and novelty to British culture, Muslims are regarded as an alienated, problematic minority: their mosques are depicted as hotbeds of radicalism and anti-Western rhetoric, in extreme cases harbouring Taliban supporters and suicide bombers. (2004: 899) Nonetheless, although this binary characterization has led to the polarization of the South Asian diasporic public sphere in Britain, Werbner finds that “in their films and novels, British South Asian artists and cultural producers celebrate this shared cross-ethnic sensibility, irrespective of religion and national origin” (2004: 900). Their films celebrate tolerance and hybridity set against a background of racist Britain and successfully reach mainstream audiences and a small elite of British South Asian intellectuals (Werbner 2004: 901). Arguably, the real audience of South Asian diasporic films is the South Asian community, even as the films are “portraying it as still locked in the obsolete and reactionary customs and beliefs of the old country,” satirizing “the older generation’s profligate consumption, false ethics, superstitious religiosity, blind prejudices and obsession with honor and status” (Werbner 2004: 901). Indeed, diasporic films offer a satirical take on South Asian family life and its sexual politics “arguing the case for transgressive identities (such as interracial, interethnic, and homosexual identities) and assimilation into liberal Western norms” (Malik 2010: 142). However, in spite of the filmmakers’ and intellectuals’ desire to resist and shock an authoritarian migrant South Asian older generation and induct it into the new realities of diasporic life, their critique appears to have had little impact on either South Asian diasporic politics or familial sexual politics and intergenerational relations. These continue to be highly conservative and dominated by elders. For the majority of South Asians growing up in Britain, marriage, kinship and religion continue to be endogamous, communally focused, 225

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trans-continental and often, once young people establish new families, highly insular and nationally oriented towards the homeland. (Werbner 2004: 903) British audiences’ attraction to new satirical works by South Asian entrepreneurs has allowed young artists “to carve out an increasingly prominent niche in the culture industries in Britain and to subvert racist images, even as these are apparently perpetuated” (Werbner 2004: 902). Clearly, humor, satire, and the comedic provide the biggest appeal for mainstream transnational audiences, functioning in two ways. First, as Werbner explains, “humor defuses potential conflict and blunts racist stereotyping, while glossing over persistent tensions and ambivalences. The accessibility of humor across ethnic divisions enables the colonisation of public space, thus challenging existing distributions of power” (Werbner 2004: 902). Second, these comedies of culture clash have been criticized for relying on stereotypes, which run the risk of perpetuating prejudices and “undermine the powerless and give strength to the powerful” (Jamal 1988: 22). The binary oppositions (East/West) and farcical juxtapositions of comedic convention may run the risk of under-elaborating or reducing complex cultural patterns to clichés and, above all, risk doing the same to characters who promote traditional and patriarchal (read: Muslim) values and who are perceived as obstacles that the members of the younger generation must overcome to have the freedom to define their identity as separate from that of their parents and elders (Collins 2003: 94). Humor works on the basis of cultural difference, creating ambiguous zones that make it difficult to determine at/with whom both white and Asian audiences laugh and to establish a clear boundary between mockery and self-mockery. Inevitably Asian (more than white British) audiences tend to judge the representation of their group’s Otherness as “orientalized” and the object of a “racializing gaze” (Sharma 2009: 25), provoking fierce controversy within the Asian community upon the release of some of the films. Nonetheless, all of the aforementioned aspects found in films that represent the South Asian diaspora are not monolithic and have transformed over the span of three decades. Although generational confrontations and family tensions as well as the younger generation’s struggle to balance loyalty to tradition with assimilation to Western standards continue to be the nucleus of most South Asian comedies, the comedies’ position in the British film industry and the diverse reactions to them from Asian audiences reflect the progress the South Asian diaspora has made in terms of acceptance from and integration into British society and the creative opportunities enjoyed by a new generation of filmmakers. The following films, spanning three decades, have become cultural and commercial icons for their representation of the aforementioned dilemmas: My Beautiful Laundrette (Stephen Frears, 1986), My Son the Fanatic (Udayan Prasad, 1997), East Is East (Damien O’Donnell, 1999), Bhaji on the Beach (Gurinder Chadha, 1993), Bend It like Beckham (Gurinder Chadha, 2003), Anita and Me (Metin Hüseyin, 2002), Nina’s Heavenly Delights (Pratibha Parmar, 2006), and Brick Lane (Sarah Gavron, 2007). All of these films, regardless of their directors’ nationality or ethnicity, were written or adapted from literary texts by writers 226

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from the South Asian diaspora. The screenplays of both My Beautiful Laundrette and My Son the Fanatic were written by and based on stories by Pakistani-British author Hanif Kureishi.5 East Is East reproduces the personal experiences of its screenwriter Ayub KhanDin; Gurinder Chadha’s films are based on her own experiences growing up in the Asian community in London; Anita and Me is based on a 2002 book by Meera Syal, who also plays a role in the film; Brick Lane is based on the 2003 novel by Monica Ali, the daughter of a marriage between a Pakistani father and a British mother; and Nina’s Heavenly Delights is inspired by Parmar’s own experiences and is set at an Indian restaurant that alludes to the restaurant owned by her partner’s Pakistani parents in London and to the catering company (of the same name) once owned by her sister Nina. Chadha’s and Parmar’s films, reflecting the emphasis on domesticity that South Asian culture places on women, combine the female protagonists’ desire to honor traditional gender roles in the private realm (namely by cooking) along with their determination to explore homosocial interactions and homoerotic desire and attain professional success. These films achieved mainstream box office success and international critical acclaim,6 although not without controversy, which emerged mainly from members of the South Asian diaspora who were disappointed by what they deemed were stereotypical and offensive depictions of their community. The unexpected popularity and commercial success of My Beautiful Laundrette among mainstream audiences took everyone by surprise. It portrays the gay love affair between Johnny, a white, working class, ex-“Paki-basher,” and Omar, a middleclass British-Asian. The two had been friends and classmates since they were five years old, but in adulthood they followed different paths, which positioned them on opposite sides of the East/West divide in the conflictive social period of the Margaret Thatcher’s administration. Johnny fell into delinquency and drugs and joined fascist groups that protested violently against the presence of Asian immigrants in their neighborhoods, distancing himself from Omar and his father, an intellectual and writer who was a fundamental influence on him and other white classmates when they were growing up. Omar runs into Johnny after years of not seeing each other and offers Johnny work renovating and running his uncle’s rundown launderette. Their love affair unfolds as they cope with Omar’s family’s questionable business practices and Johnny’s fascist pals who harass both him and Omar as they succeed in their enterprise of running the launderette. The film, which was transgressive and pioneering in its mixed-race gay love story narrative, was critiqued equally by British conservatives for offering a “grim” and “disgusting” view of Britain from the perspective of a left-wing orthodoxy that blamed Thatcherism for British society’s ills and assumed that “capitalism is parasitism, that the established order is imperialist, racist, profiteering, oppressive to women and other minorities” (Stone 1988: 22) and by South Asian critics for providing a “neo-orientalist” view of the South Asian community, indulging in “the caricature and reinforcing of stereotypes […] for a few cheap laughs,” which in turn contributed to the film’s popularity among European audiences, confirming “everything they thought about us but were afraid to say” (Jamal 1988: 21). In his critique, Mahmood Jamal interestingly also condemns the film for making the white 227

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character the “saving grace of the film” and asking audiences to empathize with poor white unemployed “Paki-basher” youth (1988: 21), reversing the spectatorial identification with the marginalized Other generally assumed of audiences of black or diasporic films. Some of the factors that led to the controversy over this and other “black” films released in 1980s Britain (and which are relevant to the films included here), according to Kobena Mercer, had to do with the implicit expectation within liberal intellectual communities that the films’ social realist aesthetic respond to a desire to correct media distortions of the black and Asian experience and “tell it like it is” and to the “burden of representation” imposed on filmmakers and according to which Asian and black characters are read as emblematic of (or “speaking for”) their ethnic groups (1988: 9). Mercer notes that the plurality of “black” identities and experiences and of filmic styles (a plurality already existing in the 1980s) should be considered in light of (and against) the pursuit of authenticity and objectivity when representing Britain’s marginalized communities. As Mercer explains, “[I]t is precisely the variety of representational strategies in contemporary practices that begins to dismantle  the burden of representation” (1988: 11). A newer approach in the critical dialogue with these films “turns on the decision to speak from the specificity of one’s circumstances and experiences rather than the attempt, impossible in any case, to speak for the entire social category in which one’s experience is constituted” (Mercer 1988: 12). Along the same lines, Julian Henriques declares Laundrette a success insofar as it breaks with the realist tradition and proposes that the film be read as a “fantasy expressing the feelings, contradictions and imagination of the characters, rather than any attempt to reflect reality” (1988: 19). Similarly, Stuart Hall praises the film—which he considers the “most riveting and important film produced by a black writer in recent years”—because it resists representing the Asian experience in Britain as “monolithic, self-contained and sexually stabilized” (1988: 30) and puts an end to “the innocent notion of the essential black subject” who cannot be represented any longer “without reference to the dimensions of class, gender, sexuality and ethnicity” (1988: 29). Hall, quoting Kureishi, the film’s screenwriter, concludes his defense of the film, noting that it refuses to become a “cheering film” (Kureishi’s words) because it resists sentimentalizing or idealizing either of the two social and ethnic groups (1988: 30). Almost three decades after the film’s release, it is easier to appreciate the unconventional nature of the film, which self-consciously deviates from the realist mode, refusing to become “representative” of either of the two communities it portrays while at the same time offering a narrative that sticks faithfully to the real sociohistorical circumstances of its moment. Though the film is a dark comedy based on the exaggeration and caricature of all its characters, regardless of their social class or ethnicity, the launderette can be read as a utopian (“beautiful”) metaphor for a hybrid, interracial, and harmonious society.7 The new launderette, the product of the young men’s teamwork, is a space in which the complexities and constraints of a surrounding reality (dirty laundry) are washed and dried and where desire overcomes racial intolerance. In various scenes taking place before and after the launderette’s opening, crucial information and redemptive conversation is aired inside its walls, namely, the past injustices experienced by the Asian community 228

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Figure 7.4:  My Beautiful Laundrette by Stephen Frears ( 1885 Channel Four Television Company, Ltd. Design  2003 MGM Home Entertainment LLC) Omar and Johnny at the launderette’s back office.

Figure 7.5:  My Beautiful Laundrette by Stephen Frears ( 1885 Channel Four Television Company, Ltd. Design  2003 MGM Home Entertainment LLC) Omar and Johnny before the launderette’s opening.

and Johnny’s involvement with them, the disgrace of Omar’s father, Hussein Ali, and his mother’s resulting suicide, Omar’s ambitions and resentment toward Johnny’s past racist actions, and Hussein’s advice to Johnny on the importance of pursuing an education. On the day of the launderette’s official opening, while Omar and Johnny impatiently wait for Omar’s family to arrive, the two engage in lovemaking for the first time in the back office while Omar’s uncle, Nasser, and his white mistress, Rachel, enter the launderette surreptitiously and kiss and dance to the imaginary rhythm of a waltz in the spotless and empty space. Both romantic and sexual interactions, though concealed and reduced in the diegesis to the empty space of the still non-functioning launderette, signifying their rarity and vulnerability, are exposed for the audience to see. While the outside crowds, anxiously awaiting the official opening, observe the dancing and kissing couple through the shop window, the film’s audience is privy to Johnny and Omar’s interactions inside the office. The juxtaposition of shots of the two couples, who are totally absorbed in their illicit affairs, oblivious to what is happening outside and observed by spectators inside and outside the diegesis, allows for a symbolic reading of the launderette as a potential locus of successful miscegenation and the questioning of heteronormativity, a microcosm of a utopian hybrid society, blind to color and ideology. This reading is reinforced by the film’s ending: after a bloody confrontation between Johnny and his friends outside the launderette, Omar cleans Johnny’s wounds in the back office, which leads to a lovemaking scene that is left in ellipsis as the door of the office closes and the film ends. Jamal condemns the script for making Johnny the only moral character of the film: “a white knight in shining armor” (1988: 21). Indeed, it is important to recognize that the ironic inversion of roles by which the white working-class British character cleans and performs a variety of menial tasks for the socially discriminated black Asian character provides the white character (and the audience) with moral redemption as Johnny makes up to Omar for his violent, racist past. The inversion of roles also provides a source of humor. As Hassan, “the professional businessman,” says at one point in the film, “There is no question of race 229

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in the new enterprise culture.” That is, employment and social advancement can only occur through interethnic collaboration. More than a decade later, the critical response to East Is East was similarly polarized. Like My Beautiful Laundrette, East Is East was directed by a white (Irish) director and written by the British-Pakistani Ayub Khan-Din, and generated the same expectations in terms of authenticity and representation. The story takes place in North Manchester in the 1970s and centers on the generational conflicts between George Khan, who is married to a white British woman from Yorkshire, and their seven children. The conflicts arise mainly from George’s attempts to arrange marriages for his sons against their wishes. Like My Beautiful Laundrette, East Is East’s “gritty narrative realism” coexists with and is somehow eclipsed by its comedic form, making it a tragicomedy (Sharma 2009: 25), and, as Hall noted referring to Frears’ film, “[it] crosses frontiers between gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality and class” (Hall 1988: 30). The film incorporates a gay subplot as one of the sons the father forces into an arranged marriage is gay. Here, unlike Laundrette and like more recent comedies, the film’s humor is based on differences between Muslim-Asian and English working-class cultures. As happened with My Beautiful Laundrette, critics are divided between those who praise East Is East for its authenticity in recreating immigrant and working class communities in 1970s Manchester and those who object to its stereotypical portrayal of both Muslim and English social groups and condemn it for ridiculing Muslim culture (Collins 2003) and propagating Orientalist representations of Asiannesss (Nobil 1999–2000). In a detailed analysis of the film, Loretta Collins acknowledges the historical revisionism that contextualizes the characters, yet she argues that the representations of the Islamic patriarch and the Muslim community “fit harmoniously with public discourses that celebrate multiculture even as they simultaneously continue to define British society in terms of ‘Englishness,’ belonging, and exclusion” (2003: 93). She observes that in the film, “traditional Pakistani Muslim masculinity is associated with undesirably harsh qualities […] and Pakistani Muslim women are presented in an equally biased, narrow, and negative manner” (2003: 94). For Collins, George Khan embodies a “threatening subalternity:” although the film performs a variety of historical remediations, it does not free him from association with negative images of Pakistani Muslim Otherness that have accrued in the British public sphere (2003: 99). My Son the Fanatic, written by Kureishi, the author of My Beautiful Laundrette, and directed by Udayan Prasad, was released two years before East Is East. A side-by-side analysis of the two films can help clarify not only their commonalities in terms of plot, cast and comedic treatment but also attest to the existence of diverse and opposing representations of the family plot and intergenerational differences that are a common theme in most BritishAsian diaspora films. Both films are tragicomedies that center on the father figure, a working class South Asian immigrant in England, and his struggle to control his family. In addition, the father figure is played in both films by the Indian-British actor, Om Puri, (developing the character he played in Brothers in Trouble (1995), a film also by Prasad which I analyzed in chapter 1).8 Prasad’s protagonist, Parvez, is the opposite of East Is East’s authoritarian, 230

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fanatically religious, and abusive father and husband. Parvez, who has worked as a taxi driver in England for 25 years, is agnostic, progressive, drinks whisky, likes jazz (especially Louis Armstrong), establishes a friendly relationship with a local sex worker, encourages his college-age son Farid to marry a white English woman, and tries to be understanding of everyone’s needs. He is baffled, however, when Farid, his only son becomes a religious zealot and violent fundamentalist. For most of the film, Parvez tries to be patient with his son’s radicalism and allows him to conduct religious meetings in his home and invite a religious leader to live with them. As Parvez struggles to reconcile the duality of duty (to his wife and family) and (sexual) desire within himself, his relationship with Bettina, the sex worker, advances, while his son and radical friends invade the house at his expense and assign themselves the task of imposing strict Islamic moral codes in his home and in the streets. At the film’s conclusion, after his son and fanatic friends insult and attack the local sex workers, Parvez ejects the religious leader and beats his son for violently beating Bettina and for accusing him of moral depravation, and Parvez ends up alone in his home after his wife returns to India. The open ending leaves his struggle to reconcile his duty to his wife and family with his desire for Bettina unresolved. Parvez provides an alternative to the archetypal immigrant father who represents tradition and imposes it on his family as a way to preserve his culture and who finds solace in the Muslim community as a site of protection against the prevalent prejudice he encounters daily in British society. Although East Is East’s George Khan married an English woman, he presents an extreme example (and a caricature) of this archetype. His fear and rejection of modernity and the violent effect that fear has on his family derives from his vulnerable position as an immigrant living in one of the worst anti-immigration periods in England. East Is East is set in 1971, three years after Enoch Powell, a conservative member of Parliament for Wolverhampton South West, delivered his infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech before a conservative association, attacking the government’s proposed anti-discriminatory Race Relations Bill.9 In his speech, Powell argued that the ordinary English citizen felt like a persecuted minority in immigrant areas of the country, predicted that by 2000, 10 percent of the population would be of immigrant descent, and called for an immediate reduction in immigration and the implementation of a conservative policy of repatriation of those immigrants already in the United Kingdom. Although the speech cost Powell his hopes of a post in a future conservative government, thousands of workingclass white workers staged strikes and marches in support of his views, exacerbating racial tensions and inciting the population to violently attack “black” immigrants. References to Powell’s discourse are inserted in the film to explain George Khan’s vulnerability and justify his violent resistance to his children’s modernization. Within this context, Gayatri Gopinath has offered a more nuanced interpretation of George’s backward traditionalist patriarchal behavior, arguing that “George’s evocation of patriarchal authority attempts to produce a form of immigrant family that is fortified against the patriarchal, racialized definition of an all-white national family of Britain put in place by anti-immigrant legislation” (2005: 83). 231

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In turn, the radicalization of Farid in My Son the Fanatic reflects, or rather, foreshadows the increasing radicalization of Muslim immigrants in Europe, which eventually led to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States and the 2004 London subway bombing. Parvez defends modernity, the rights of women, and religious freedom against his son’s Islamic zeal. While George Khan expels and disowns his eldest (and unbeknownst to him, gay) son for running away from an arranged marriage the day of the wedding, Parvez is the one repudiated by his fanatic son for his “libertine” habits. The characterization of these figures as either the fanatic traditionalist or the assimilated modernist presents two radically opposed types within the Asian community that work against a univocal representation of the Asian male. Further, in My Son the Fanatic the terms in the binary oppositions East/West, tradition/ modernity, and duty/desire are not associated with the Asian-born older generation and the British-born younger generation, respectively, but are inverted within the locus of the Asian family. These films’ characterizations and outcomes illustrate Sanjay Sharma’s argument that South Asian diasporic films “proliferate representations of Asianness, rather than crudely countering ‘negative’ (racist) Asian stereotypes—vis-à-vis ‘positive images’—circulating in a dominant culture” (2009: 22). The tragic denouement of East Is East leaves the Khan family fragmented and in crisis after the father stubbornly insists on having his way. At the conclusion of the film, George Khan’s family asks him to leave the house after he attempts violence against his wife and sons and after their coordinated rebellion. But as he exits the house defeated, his racist English neighbor’s grandson, who throughout the film has befriended and played with the youngest sibling in the family, Sajid, cheers George up with the customary Arabic greeting, “as-salaam alaikum.” A subtle and silent reconciliation between George and his wife takes place next morning as they continue with business as usual at their fish and chip shop. The positive ending sustains the hope that new generations of white British, blind to color and ethnicity, will help command the future of an integrated England and that second- and third-generation of British-South Asians will free themselves from obsolete patriarchal impositions. South Asian Female Filmmakers: Narratives of Development and Self-Discovery Although first-generation South Asian women have been defined through their supposed cultural and social invisibility, passivity and submission to traditional patriarchal customs, and their control of the domestic sphere and the socialization of their children, reality also shows that they have developed their own forms of resistance, taking control of their lives without cutting themselves off from their historical and cultural traditions (Hussain 2005: 25). Subsequent generations of South Asian women born and educated in Britain have attempted to find equilibrium between the two cultures that compose their hybrid and mobile identities. As women they are still symbols of their culture(s) and subject to cultural expectations, such as marriage, loyalty to the family, and filial duty, which have a much 232

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greater impact on their lives than on those of their male counterparts. However, cultural negotiation does not preclude assertion of their ethnic identity. A new generation of South Asian women creators has emerged in the last two decades, confirming the gender advancement enjoyed by women from British-Asian middle-class families. Bhaji on the Beach (Gurinder Chadha, 1993), Anita and Me (Metin Hüseyin, 2002), Bend It like Beckham (Gurinder Chadha, 2003), Nina’s Heavenly Delights (Pratibha Parmar, 2006), and Brick Lane (Sarah Gavron, 2007) present female coming-of-age, self-discovery narratives, which include interethnic, homosocial interactions and lesbian desire in a diasporic framework. As Tarr argues, these films “counteract dominant imagery of migrant and diasporic women as passive victims, constructing strong, active, female subjects whose largely homosocial affective ties enable them to forge visions of changing, transnational, multicultural communities” (2010: 193). Chadha’s films, beginning with her first documentary, I am British, But… (1989), in which British South Asians discuss generational differences between them and their parents, have all addressed issues—family tensions, sexism and racism, and cultural hybridization— affecting the South Asian diaspora and which Chadha herself experienced while growing up in a London suburb. Bhajhi on the Beach, her first fictional feature (analyzed in chapter 2), is a tragicomedy, road movie, and coming-of-age narrative that tackles sexism and racism in both Asian and British communities, focusing on its female protagonists’ process of selfdiscovery and self-affirmation. A day trip to the seaside resort of Blackpool functions as an escape for these characters but also a vehicle through which to unveil complex issues affecting Asian women’s position within the diaspora, such as domestic abuse, the older generation of women’s complicity with female submission and lack of independence, and the racial tensions that exist between South Asian and Afro-Caribbean communities despite their similar colonial histories. Chadha’s second film, Bend It Like Beckham, was immensely popular, benefiting from England’s appetite for football and coinciding with the FIFA World Cup final in June 2002. In the film, Chadha’s British-Asian female protagonist teeters between tradition and modernity: she struggles, on one hand, to defy traditional gender roles and fully integrate into a Western society in which women have a full range of opportunities and can even play in racially integrated professional football leagues, and on the other hand, she struggles to respect her elders and abide by the Asian diaspora’s rules and traditions. The two female teenagers in Bend It Like Beckham are tomboys in an integrated British middle-class suburb: Jules, the only daughter of a white English family, and Jess, one of two daughters of Sikh immigrants from the Punjab region. The two characters, who disregard typical feminine activities associated with girls their age, have androgynous names (Jules for Juliette, and Jess for Jessminder), live to play football, befriend male players, and build a strong homosocial bond that helps them to cope with their families’ opposition to their serious commitment to football. Chadha’s comedy dismantles the notion of the East/West dichotomy as the primary source of humor by establishing a mirror-like structure that highlights the commonalities between 233

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Figure 7.7:  Bend It Like Beckham by Gurinder Chadha Figure 7.6:  Bend It Like Beckham by Gurinder Chadha ( 2003 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment Inc.) Jules’ ( 2003 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment Inc.) Jules and Jess on the field. and Jess’ public display of affection.

the two protagonists’ white and Asian families rather than their differences. Fathers are not the authoritarian and violent patriarchs that we have seen in some of the films previously analyzed in this chapter; on the contrary, they support their daughters’ dreams and negotiate between them and their mothers, while mothers are comedic caricatures who represent traditional views of femininity centered on domesticity and marriage and therefore oppose their daughters’ playing sports. The homosexual component, included in Laundrette and East Is East, is also present here in the character of Tony, Jess’s best friend who is Asian and male. Tony is comfortable with his gay sexuality, though he still hides it from his Asian family. Additionally, the film’s comicality derives from gender bending situations and sexual misunderstandings that are provoked by the girls’ aesthetic choices and affectionate interactions. Their athletic and masculine appearance is criticized by older female characters who define femininity exclusively in terms of physical appearance: their football gear is comically disdained in favor of makeup, push-up bras, high heels, and saris. The girls’ public displays of affection and Jules’ masculine haircut and outfits lead Jess’ sister’s future in-laws to believe that Jess was kissing a “honkie” (English) boy instead of Jules and call off the engagement; a temporary rivalry between the girls that results from a crush they both have on their coach is misunderstood (and comically overdramatized) by Jules’ mother as sign of their lesbian relationship. These situations form the basis for the film’s drama, as they refer to a strong prejudice against interracial as well as lesbian relationships, but they also provide the film with its finest moments of hilarity. The characters’ rebellion against their families’ gender expectations and their determination to continue playing for the all-girl football team, the Hounslow Harriers, and follow their dream of becoming professional footballers, is paired with their respect for their parents and their traditions. When Jess’ mother insists that her daughter learn how to cook traditional Indian food instead of waste her time engaging in masculine activities that will not prepare her for Indian marriage, Jess responds, “Anybody can cook, but who can bend it like Beckham?” As Gopinath has observed, Jess’ gender rebellion is contrasted to her older sister’s contentment with marriage and motherhood and the South Asian home is depicted as “a space of racial and gender subordination that stands in contradiction to 234

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a presumably freer elsewhere” (Gopinath 2005: 128), which is happily granted toward the end of the film when both girls are offered a sports scholarship to study in the United States and play in the professional leagues. Nonetheless, the binary pattern dismantles as the film closes with Jess “reconciling these apparently irreconcilable elements as she scores a goal and makes it back to her sister’s wedding celebration in time” (Gopinath 2005: 128), and with Jess’ parents accepting and supporting their daughter’s desire of studying and playing football abroad.10 Arguably, the film’s popularity has been attributed to this reconciliation between Englishness, football and gender rebellion and South Asianness, domesticity and respect for tradition, as much as to the “containment” and “effacement of queer female eroticism,” which is safely displaced into the gay male figure (Gopinath 2005: 129). If the South Asian female characters of Bhaji on the Beach are running away from their problems (taboo interracial relationships, teenage pregnancy, and domestic abuse), in Bend It Like Beckham they are confronting them (Hussain 2005: 73). Although the journey of self-discovery and the seriousness of the issues following the women on their journey are stronger in Bhaji, in both films the female characters ultimately succeed in navigating the boundaries between the private and public spheres and between Asian and English cultures. Both films present a multicultural England that results from the blending of cultures and the mutual influences between local subcultures. Chadha illustrates such cultural hybridization in the way she respects and represents the characters’ bicultural linguistic, aesthetic, and culinary codes and through the musical soundtrack, with its fusion of British pop and Bhangra. If Bhaji’s seaside setting represents England in the early 1990s (Hussain 2005: 74), football functions in Beckham as a metaphor for racial integration a decade later, providing a space for female rebellion against and response to tradition and social constraints. This metaphor is evident in the title’s double coding: Chadha states that “bending the ball is analogous to bending the rules of one’s culture to achieve your aims” (Hussain 2005: 70–80). As Yasmin Hussain explains, these films’ coming-of-age narratives in which young and old generations come to reconcile their differences are emblematic of the “coming of age of the South Asian diaspora in Britain” (2005: 89). Such reconciliation seems possible, at least, in Chadha’s optimistic comedic fictions. As we saw in Helena Taberna’s documentary, Extranjeras/Foreign Women (2004) (analyzed in chapter 2), the sharing of culinary practices creates sites of sociality and solidarity among immigrant women. As Berghahn notes, drawing on Laura Marks’s study, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (2000), the depiction of cooking and ethnic food is a conspicuously prominent feature in diasporic film, “functioning not only as an expression of cultural memory but also as a marker of ethnic identity and difference” (Berghahn 2013: 142). Like Taberna, Chadha and Parmar, in her film Nina’s Heavenly Delights, emphasize the social and communal function of cooking, recognizing it also as an exercise of the transmission of their heritage and the preservation of a fundamental cultural element in their Asian communities. Nina’s Heavenly Delights is a narrative of selfdiscovery that takes place through the repossession of a familial and cultural heritage. Nina, the protagonist, returns to her family home in Glasgow to attend her father’s funeral after 235

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a three-year absence. She had a very close relationship with her father, developed mostly through the cooking lessons he gave her when she was a child and their collaboration in winning Glasgow’s annual “Best of the West Curry Competition.” But her parents’ insistence that she marry Sanjay, the son of an Indian family friend whom she did not love, compelled her to leave Glasgow and her family in order to escape their imposition. The film opens with Nina’s return to her family and traces her journey as she comes to terms with her lesbian sexuality and finds her place in her family and community. As she tries to save the family restaurant, The New Taj, which was bankrupted by her father’s gambling debts, from being sold to Raj, her ex-fiancé’s father, mother’s suitor, and the owner of another Indian restaurant, she falls in love with Lisa, who is a half owner of the restaurant, and together they participate in and win that year’s “Best of the West Curry Competition.” Nina’s cooking at her deceased father’s restaurant and participation in the competition preserves the memory of the father and gives expression to both the father-daughter relationship in the past and the lesbian relationship between Nina and Lisa in the present. The film’s prologue, which shows a loving father passionately teaching the child Nina the secrets of his cooking and the two sharing their common love of food, provides Nina’s backstory and sets the magical and warm tone and atmosphere for the rest of the film. Parmar has stated that the film is inspired by her own experiences, not so much as the daughter of a working-class immigrant family that arrived in England when “Paki-bashing was at its height” after “Enoch Powell had made his speech about rivers of blood,” but rather of her professional achievement in a twenty-first-century British society in which Asian presence is deep and “very much enshrined in the everyday culture” (Fraser 2003). She decided to locate the film not in England, her adopted homeland, but in Scotland, the birthplace of both her partner and her cowriter, to provide a different look into Asian communities in Britain and, as Parmar explains, “to challenge notions of national identity and ethnicity” by creating characters with universal appeal (Fraser 2003). As Parmar has stated in interviews, the film seeks to be a fairy tale about family, food, and love, a celebration of Indian food and Indian families, and “a romantic feast.”11 The film’s amalgam of culinary tradition and interethnic lesbian romance continues a pattern of representing the Asian diaspora from a transcultural prism that includes gender and sexuality with race and ethnicity. In her interview with Fraser, Parmar explains that her initial motivation for making films came from her desire to document, “challenge[,] and change perceptions of ethnic minorities, of Asian people, of women, of lesbian and gay people” (Fraser 2003). In this, her first feature film, Parmar captures the warmth and hospitality often found in South Asian families: “[I]n my own family, I remember that even when we didn’t have a lot of food in the house, my mother would always keep the house open, and she would always find that little bit extra to feed people” (Fraser 2003). Parmar’s characterization of the Shah family and Nina’s parents, in response to her own experience, defies stereotypical cultural and gender representations. The family is totally integrated into Glasgow society: the father, instead of the mother, taught Nina how to cook, and the mother shies from being the overbearing and finger-wagging Asian mother; their house is open for everyone to enter and feel at ease. 236

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The film’s fairy-tale quality can be found both in the narrative’s progression and outcome and in the normalized and idealized representation of the lesbian relationship between Nina and Lisa. Directing and selling a “Scottish lesbian curry romance” was not without its challenges. Although the treatment of lesbianism is rather subtle and mild, it seemed to be a “stumbling block for financiers.” (Fraser 2003). When Parmar was seeking funds to finance the making of the film, as she explains, the UK Film Council replied that “one of the problems with the story was that ‘lesbianism has had its sell-by date,’ as if lesbians were a brand of cereal!” (Fraser 2003).12 She points out the homophobia implicit in the comment, however hidden by a preoccupation with commercial interests, which is especially significant when considered in light of the notorious dearth of films dealing with lesbianism. Parmar continues and extends to lesbianism the normalized treatment of homosexuality already present in My Beautiful Laundrette, “one of [her] favorite BritishAsian films” (Fraser 2013), and in her own short documentary film, Khush (meaning ecstatic pleasure in Urdu) (1991). In it Parmar interviews lesbians and gay men from the South Asian diaspora, tracing the emerging diasporic queer movement of the late 1980s and early 1990s. In Nina’s Heavenly Delights Parmar effectively normalizes homosexuality in the narrative and in the visual construction of gay characters, interactions, and performances. In My Beautiful Laundrette, the bi-ethnic homosexual relationship was exposed for the non-diegetic audience but remained unknown and unacknowledged by other characters in the film (specifically, the lovers’ families and friends). In Nina’s Heavenly Delights, bi-ethnic homosexual and lesbian relationships are performed and celebrated both privately and publicly within the diegesis. As a sensory experience, cooking is aligned with erotic experience in the film. Parmar favors a synesthetic and “haptic” visuality, as defined by Marks (2000),13 to capture the love story that unfolds between Nina and Lisa, mostly in the kitchen. The protagonists’ love story develops as

Figure 7.8:  Nina’s Heavenly Delights by Pratibha Parmar ( 2007 Regent Releasing) Televised coming out.

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they explore “the sensuous delights of exotic food” (Berghahn 2013: 113). The tasting and smelling of sauces and spices take place simultaneously with—and provide the metaphor for—the physical and erotic pleasures. By placing female homoerotic pleasure and desire in the kitchen, Parmar subverts traditional roles and performances associated with the quintessential domestic feminine space. Her subversion is further strengthened as the protagonists’ homosexual interactions unfold not just in any kitchen but in the restaurant’s kitchen, previously owned and controlled by the family’s deceased patriarch, thus taking over a traditionally masculine space. Although part of Nina’s process of self-assertion is related in the plot to her reluctance to disclose her homosexuality to her mother and the Asian community, the happy and positive outcome involves not only the mother’s blessing of her lesbian relationship but a public coming out in the form of a passionate kiss that celebrates the fact that The New Taj has won the trophy for the third time in the curry competition, which is being televised by the local channel Kurma TV. Additionally, Nina has found a model of homosexual assertion and courage in her best friend from school, Bobbi, who is gay and a drag queen and whose relationship with his white Scottish boyfriend is largely accepted by Nina’s extended family. The film reflects a flagrant contradiction in biased South Asian gender expectations for women, in that Nina fears her mother’s reaction to her lesbianism, though her mother and aunts accept and welcome Bobbi at their home gatherings. The celebration of homosexuality and the queer and drag performances are contained in the film’s fairy-tale-like happy ending: the public and televised validation of the cooking couple’s lesbian identity is followed by a drag performance by the group The Chutney Queens, led and choreographed by Bobbi and his Scottish boyfriend. This diegetic performance, attended by the community, is followed by the whole cast dancing to a version of “Ina Mina Dika,” the feature song in the 1989 Bollywood comedy by the same name, as credits start to appear. This happy and communal rendition of the popular song, which both celebrates and parodies Bollywood musicals, serves also as a performative camp rendition of heterosexuality, homosexuality, and lesbianism, since all the couples in the film, both gay and straight, share the stage at the end. Feminism and the legitimization of homosexuality are carried over through song and dance, which both allude to and transgress the conventions of the emblematic Bollywood genre.14 Anita and Me, by Metin Hüseyin, based on the successful autobiographical novel by Meena Syal, focuses on the experience of the generation of Indians growing up in the 1970s outside the main cities of England. While most Indians at the time lived in cities or the suburbs, Anita’s family is the only Indian family in Tollington, a small rural town in the Black Country region. As much as the film is a representation of a twelve-year-old Indian girl trying to define her bicultural identity in 1972, it is also a tribute to the first generation of Indian immigrants who left their country to provide better opportunities for their offspring and who, although in many cases they were highly educated, had to accept menial jobs to survive in an environment of intense racism and social discrimination. Meena’s journey in this coming-of-age story reflects a development from her initial rejection of her Asianness 238

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and idolization of all things British to her ultimate reconciliation with her ethnic background and successful acceptance of her hybrid identity. Britishness is embodied in the character of her blond-haired, fair-skinned friend Anita, who in the film is the epitome of beauty, rebelliousness, and independence. Meena’s desire to belong in British culture is transferred to her emulation and adoration of Anita. As the two become good friends, Meena rejects the cultural habits (language, fashion, music, and food) and manners of her refined middle-class Asian family to embrace the habits embodied by Anita’s dysfunctional working-class family. The more Meena’s family is stuck in the memory of its Indian past, the more Meena wants to part with a nostalgic definition of identity based on the notion of exclusion and the rhetoric of return. If Anita represents the desirability of whiteness and social inclusion, Meena’s grandmother, who visits from India when her little brother is born, provides the link to an original and “authentic” Asianness devoid of the constraints and resentments that permeate and determine the perspective of members of the diaspora. Her grandmother’s visit also coincides with a traumatic episode that propels her loss of innocence and functions as her rite of passage in her coming-of-age narrative. A dear male family friend is beaten to death by white local boys and in the presence of Anita, who had met him while at Meena’s house for dinner the same night that he was beaten and yet did nothing to prevent it. The racist episode, which once again makes explicit reference to the “Paki-bashing” era resulting from Enoch Powell’s anti-immigration speech, contributes to Meena’s racial awareness. She grows apart from Anita, and her new closeness to her grandmother brings about a reassessment of her ethnic identity. The effectiveness of this coming-of-age film resides in its self-referential and metafictional component, which is obtained not only through the spectators’ awareness of and familiarity with the film’s literary pretext, but also by the emphasis put on the act of writing itself. The film relies on recurrent scenes showing Meena writing and reading her diary (as well as compositions for her writing class and letters to Jackie magazine). Her diary documents the separation between the two cultures that exclude and devalue each other, her interaction with the two communities, and her progressive awareness of racism. A voiceover that guides Meena’s actions and emotions reproduces her diary entries, emphasizing the confusion that rules her life from a humorous perspective. Numerous scenes center on Meena’s writing in diverse locations. For Meena writing is a source of pride, a part of South Asian cultural heritage, a symbol of her family’s emphasis on education and of her potential professional success, a refuge from isolation and displacement, a testimony to her ambivalent relation with the time and place in which she is growing up, and finally, a token of her generous reconciliation with Anita and the world she represents. Meena’s comingof-age is traced visually through the subjective first-person perspective. Through her gaze, the authors of both the novel and the film comment on serious matters from a fresh and comedic perspective. Comicality derives from Meena’s position as an observer of her own culture and her innocent gaze over the things and situations that surround her. However, humor does not preclude the representation of both the relatively benign and explicitly abusive racist attitudes and practices that constantly assail Meena and her 239

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family. Magic and fantastic apparitions make the child’s fears and desires visible and provide an alternative and protective world. The film is set in the 1970s, like East Is East, and like that film, Anita and Me demonstrates nostalgia for the 1970s, a time period that characterizes the film’s visual element, its musical soundtrack, its wardrobe and hairstyles, and its idiomatic use of language. The manifestations of 1970s British culture are at all times comically contrasted with traditional Indian aesthetics, the proper use of English and Punjabi, and Indian elaborate cuisine. A paradox defines the 1970s in Britain: the decade was defined by intense racism against South Asians and other minorities, while at the same time India became a source of inspiration for spirituality, music, and fashion. At the film’s conclusion, the village’s progressive and fashionable vicar leaves the village to travel to India and redefine his spirituality, and Meena’s family moves to another village where Meena will attend an elite women’s school in pursuit of the best available education, which has been emphasized throughout the film as “the passport” to success in a hostile society. Brick Lane is a filmic adaptation by the white British filmmaker Sarah Gavron of Monica Ali’s successful novel of the same name. After a happy childhood spent in rural Bangladesh and her mother’s suicide, Nazneen, the protagonist, is separated from her dear and only sister and sent to London at seventeen to be married to a much older man. The film takes place in East London’s immigrant area surrounding Brick Lane, a street at the heart of a diverse neighborhood that has harbored successive waves of immigrants since the seventeenth century and is an enclave of the Bangladeshi diaspora known as Banglatown. The film narrates Nazneen’s journey of self-discovery leading to her economic independence and her successful assimilation to the nation, and dismantles the notion that Muslim women can be represented only as “victims of Islamic patriarchy” (Sharma 2009: 32).15 Gavron has stated in interviews that her goal in the film was to fictionalize the subjective story of a woman coping with loss (of her mother, her first-born infant son, and the nation), understanding her place in the world, and finding her voice, rather than to represent the Bangladeshi community in London.16 To that end, Nazneen’s voice-over and letters from her sister, which narrate her sister’s adventurous and amorous life in the homeland, are inserted into the narrative to replicate the narrator’s interior monologue in the novel and underline the character’s process of self-discovery. Like the diary in Anita and Me, the voiceover and letters provide insight into Nazneen’s inner feelings and especially her nostalgia for the family and landscape she left behind. The notion of longing is further conveyed through flashback scenes that reproduce Nazneen’s real and imagined happy interactions with her sister in the lush and bright Bangladeshi landscape, which are opposed to scenes filmed in gray colors and inside the claustrophobic space of her London flat. A soundtrack of South Asian music also underscores Nazneen’s connection to her former world. Her characterization as a shy, silent, and subservient wife and mother is countered by a subjective camera that relies on her observant gaze over reality. The cinematography, mise-en-scène, and soundtrack that accompany her emotional journey favor her viewpoint at all times. 240

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The character’s process of emancipation is constructed through the economic selfsufficiency she achieves through her work as an at-home seamstress after her husband is laid off from his job and through her discovery of her sexual self as she has a love affair with a young political activist from the Bangladeshi community. The triangle formed between Nazneen, her husband Chanu, and her lover Karim adds a dramatic component to the film. Karim and Chanu, characters opposed in terms of physical appearance, generation, education, and ideology, are the catalysts in Nazneen’s sexual and political development. Karim provides the youth, beauty, and sensuality that were missing in Nazneen’s life, and both men represent the polarization inside the Muslim community in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States. Like My Son the Fanatic, Brick Lane deals with the rise of integrism in Muslim diasporas in the United Kingdom (and other parts of the West), this time in the context of a concrete historical event. The film, which closely follows Ali’s novel, explicitly portrays the 9/11 attacks and the effects that subsequent Islamophobic reactions have had in Muslim communities. These effects are essential to the film’s narrative and to Nazneen’s emancipation. As the world changes drastically for Muslim communities in Europe, Karim progressively embraces pro-Islamic activism and organizing as a way to fight society’s increasing mistrust of Muslims, while Chanu advocates historical revisionism and restraint and feels it is time to return to the homeland. A central scene in the film takes place in the community center where the two divergent positions are exposed. Chanu responds to the call for Muslim unity as a defense against ethnic and religious discrimination voiced by Karim and other young members of the community, reminding the younger generation that Islam is not a country to fight for and that Muslim-on-Muslim violence caused the slaughter of three thousand Bangladeshis in 1971 as Bangladesh fought for independence from Pakistan. Chanu provides a voice of reason that warns the younger generation against embracing integrism without a proper knowledge of their countries’ past and as a way to reassess their confused identities in conflictive times. As was the case in My Son the Fanatic, two generations are pitted against each other in Brick Lane in terms of their political and religious adherence. Chanu, a sympathetic character with many complexities—he is educated, dignified, experienced, progressive, and historically conscientious, but also naïve and pompous—dismantles the stereotype of the authoritarian and violent South Asian patriarch. His speech at the community center provides the turning point for Nazneen’s ultimate decision to embrace England as her home and be an independent woman in charge of her life and her daughters’ lives. The film ends with the completion of Nazneen’s journey from being a rural girl to becoming an autonomous person who does not need either of the two men in her life, Chanu or Karim, and who remains in England, in charge of the household, as her husband returns to Bangladesh. Her coming-of-age process entails overcoming the notion of loss as a defining component of her identity, expanding her perception of home, and appreciating her own agency and that of her daughters. The film advocates the embrace of “double belonging” and refuses to choose “between essentialism (integrism) and disintegration” (Maalouf 1998: 45). 241

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The Turkish Diaspora in Germany: The Films of Fatih Akin Germany is home to some 2.95 million Turks (as per the BAMF: Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, 2011 report), who constitute the largest ethnic minority in Germany and almost half of the Turkish diaspora in Europe. Berlin is often referred to as the third-largest Turkish city after Istanbul and Ankara. Turks started arriving in Germany in the 1960s with the signing of a labor recruitment agreement between West Germany and Turkey. The Turks’ assimilation into Germany has been made difficult by the fact that Germans and Turks are not bound by a colonial relationship, as is the case with South Asians and the British and North and sub-Saharan Africans and the French. In addition, the Turks’ assimilation to Germany has also been made particularly difficult by the Germans’ early assumption that guest workers could be conveniently used for cheap labor and then returned to their countries of origin and the Germans’ subsequent refusal to acknowledge their country’s permanent status as a receiver of immigration. Historians as well as social and political scientists cite Germany’s ongoing hostility to foreigners, strict concept of citizenship based on jus sanguinis, restrictive naturalization laws, and lack of proper immigration and integration policies as the source of today’s integration problems (Herbert 1990; Bartsch, Brandt & Stenvorth 2010). Only in the last decade have a significant number of Germans advocated integration policies and a non-ideological commitment to immigration, marking the end of a decades-long collective denial of reality (Bartsch et al. 2010). Germany’s aforementioned attitudes regarding immigration have caused Turkish immigrants and their descendants to feel isolated and unwelcome, to seek protection in their own ghettos, and to identify more closely with cultural and political developments in Turkey than in Germany. Argun argues that Turkish culture and politics are still the main reference points for second- and even third-generation German-Turks (2003: 42). She coined the term “Deutschkei” to refer to the transnational entity where Turkey and Germany coalesce and where the reciprocal exchange of culture, bodies, and ideas originating in the two nations takes place, constituting a privileged space to “shape ideas about national identity, citizenship, social integration and democracy in the native setting” (2003: 30). Identification with the homeland and the resulting ghettoizing dynamics may lead to selfsegregation and have serious negative implications for Turks’ social integration in Germany, and yet the myriad cultural and sociopolitical activities taking place in Deutschkei provide countercultural havens for Turkish immigrants and their descendants and have a strong influence on Turkey’s economic development and political landscape. The political activities within the Turkish diaspora have a double function: for one, well-organized leftist groups, which have a larger appeal in Germany than in Turkey, influence homeland politics from abroad, putting pressure on the legal and political system in Turkey, and at the same time, the Turkish government utilizes its European diaspora’s political influence to obtain German support for its bid for EU membership (Argun 2003: 55–56). In the same line of argument, Ruth Mandel maintains that if, on the one hand, “Turkish parental background indelibly marks Turkish Germans as “others” […], as unassimilable 242

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outsiders” (2008: 11), on the other hand, the presence of diasporic Turks in Germany since the 1960s “has had a tremendous impact on shaping German culture and society” (2008: 16). Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, the intimate cohabitation of guest and host communities in the major German capitals has resulted in positive interaction and mutual influencing and “reciprocal transformations” (Mandel 2008: 16). Thus, Mandel insists that “writing a history of transnational Turkish practices, aesthetic sensibilities, and movements across time and space amounts to writing the very history of contemporary Germany” (2008: 16–17). It is clear that Turkish-Germans maintain a strong sense of attachment to the Turkish homeland and, whether it is the first generation of Turks or their German born children, “they nurture strong ties with the Turkish homeland and reiterate the same myth of return” (Mandel 2008: 19). However, Mandel also points out that most recently, for many Turkish-Germans the homeland and the host land have become “mutually constitutive, feeding the imaginary attachment to both places, further complicating the idea of a pure teleology of return” (2008: 20). As she observes, “[A]n acknowledged diasporic social space permits them to develop new articulations of attenuated transnational identifications while localizing themselves within narratives of a positively inflected diaspora” (2008: 20). Within this transnational and transmigrant Turkish-German landscape, there is a new generation of young Turkish filmmakers who were born or grew up in Germany and are based in Hamburg or Berlin. As Berghahn states in her introduction to a special issue of New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film dedicated to Turkish-German cinema, TurkishGerman directors such as Fatih Akin, Ayse Polat, Yüksel Yavuz, Thomas Arslan, Züli Aladag, Sülbiye Günar, Seihan Derim, Yasemin Şamdereli, and several others engage with “issues of identity and belonging” in their films and “play an important role as cultural brokers, and their status within German and Turkish cultures often rests on them being mediators of marginality and alterity” (2009: 7). Furthermore, they are perceived “as the next wave of auteurs whose films are anticipated to win the international acclaim that was hitherto reserved for the auteurs of New German Cinema in the 1970s and early 80s” (Berghahn 2009: 6). Fatih Akin is already considered the main exponent of the new wave of Turkish-Geman auteurs. Interestingly, he rejects the label of a hyphenated identity filmmaker and has stated in interviews that his mission is to move Turkish-German cinema out of the niche assigned to the culture of migrants and guest workers and to make it an integral part of mainstream German culture (Berghahn 2006: 144). In spite of Akin’s reluctance to associate himself with immigration, his films, whether they are road movies, comedies, melodramas, or a mix of genres, have transmigrant protagonists who inhabit the transnational sphere of Deutschkei and whose physical and emotional homecoming journeys generally take place in the reverse direction, from Germany to Turkey: they take Hamburg (Akin’s current residence) as a point of departure and Istanbul (Akin’s birthplace) as their destination.17 Akin’s Turkish-German characters break with the dominant image of the Turk as victim or perpetrator and are defined by questions of belonging and identity, place and displacement. Istanbul is a site of 243

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reconnection with one’s roots and with the self, a destination where healing, reconciliation, and redemption can take place. Critics have noted that the German notion of Heimat is crucial for understanding Turkish-German diasporic cinema in general and Akin’s films in particular (Naficy 2001; Berghahn 2006; Burns 2009). Heimat or the home is presented as “a structuring absence,” a site of desire, escape, or redemption, a “belonging fantasy […] an unattainable utopia (in its literal sense: a no place)” (Berghahn 2006: 146), and is defined by the split between the abstract idea of home and the actual experience of returning home, whereby home becomes a place of no return (Brah 1996: 192). The process of uprooting and an obsession with the past and with protecting the fundamentals of one’s culture and identity leads the exiled and immigrants to idealize the time prior to exodus and departure from the homeland, and yet, upon an actual return, the impossibility of retrieving the past becomes evident. Akin’s characters travel to Istanbul—in many cases a city fundamentally alien to them because they were born in Germany or became estranged from their Turkish upbringing—and, although their trips have life-changing consequences, their rootlessness is rarely resolved on-screen and the possibility of redemption is generally left open. Akin alternates between and blends cinematographic genres (including comedy, road movie, and melodrama) and musical styles (Western pop, rock, punk, jazz, reggae, and Turkish gypsy and folk music). His films’ complex narratives, visual aesthetics, and soundtracks—which provide the perfect complement to the films’ intercultural visions— evince a rich interplay of cultural influences and function as “sound bridges,” and illustrate Akin’s predilection for “transgressing the bounds of cultural determinism” (Burns 2009: 18) and for “crossing generic boundaries” (Burns 2009: 23). Polona Petek and Rob Burns see Akin as the architect of cinematic bridges between the EU and its internal and external Turkish “Others” (an idea explicitly expressed in the title and subject matter of his film Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul), and they argue that soundtracks function in his films as essential modes of “social critique, self-interrogation and, indeed, multicultural mobilisation” (Petek 2007: 182). Akin’s film Gegen die Wand/Head On/Duvara Karsi (2004) won the Golden Bear for best film at the 2004 Berlinale, the first German film in eighteen years to win that award, as well as all of the major awards (best feature film, best director, best actor and best actress in a leading role, and best cinematography) at the German Film Awards and numerous awards in other major national film festivals. The three communities that this film features— Germany, Turkey, and the Turkish diaspora in Germany—claim this film as a significant contribution to their respective film traditions (that is, German national cinema, Turkish national cinema, and Turkish-German diasporic cinema) (Petek 2007: 179). The film’s Turkish-German protagonists, Cahit and Sibel, are characters who have “hit the wall” (as the literal translation from the German title indicates): forty-something Cahit has found refuge in drugs and alcohol to cope with his depression after his wife’s death. Twenty-something Sibel is desperately trying to free herself from her atavistic and oppressive Turkish family, first by attempting suicide and later through a marriage of convenience that she hopes will 244

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allow her to escape her family’s constraints and pursue her hedonistic desires while still appeasing her family’s desire to see her settle down with one of their own. Cahit agrees to marry Sibel to facilitate her liberation. They start as roommates and end up falling in love with each other. The baggage they bring to their encounter and the amour fou or dark passion (kara sevda) that unfolds between them defines their tragic bond, which ultimately leads to transformation and redemption.18 Sibel slits her wrists three times in the course of the film; Cahit tries to kill himself by crashing his car against a wall head-on and survives, and while he is repossessing his life through his love for Sibel, he unintentionally kills Niko, one of Sibel’s former lovers, and is sent to prison.19 After the episode is publicized in the media, Sibel is disowned by her traditional family and, as her brother intends to avenge the shame she has brought upon the family, she runs away to Istanbul, where her cousin Selma hosts her and offers her work as a maid at the hotel she manages. Bored and isolated in Istanbul, Sibel leaves Selma and descends on a path of self-destruction and drug addiction, and in this descent she is raped, beaten, and almost killed. After a long ellipsis, Cahit leaves jail reformed and sober and looks for Sibel in Istanbul, only to find that she has moved on: she also has reformed, lives with her boyfriend, and their daughter. Sibel and Cahit spend two passionate days together and make plans to run away with Sibel’s daughter to Mersin, Cahit’s birthplace, but Sibel backs out at the last minute and never makes it to the bus station. The film remains open ended, concluding as Cahit is about to start the trip that he hopes will reconnect him with his roots. This outcome indicates that this is a journey he needs to travel alone. In Gegen die Wand, neither protagonist conceives of Istanbul initially as a mythical place of salvation. On the contrary, as the film begins, they both reject all things Turkish, and yet fate ironically takes them to Istanbul, which at the end turns out to be the only possible place for them to survive or regain love and emotional stability. Throughout the first part of the film Cahit recurrently refers to Turks not as “us” but rather “them;” he hates “that Turkish crap” (referring to Turkish engagement and wedding traditions); and he says that he has “thrown away” his Turkish language when asked by Sibel’s brother, “Why does your Turkish suck?” Sibel is no less estranged from contemporary life in Turkey than from her previous life as part of the Turkish diaspora in Hamburg. Both characters’ sense of inadequacy in both places (Hamburg and Istanbul) is caused by their respective emotional crises and translates into hedonistic excesses of alcohol and drugs. Cahit and Sibel follow the same path of self-destruction that they performed on various occasions, first by Cahit in Hamburg and then by Sibel, who “becomes Cahit” once she is in Istanbul (Burns 2009: 16). Two of the most pervasive elements Akin uses to construct his unconventional melodrama are the cross-cultural musical soundtrack and the musical and performative leitmotifs used to structure the film’s sections. The film opens with a performance by a Turkish gypsy orchestra lead by famous clarinetist Selim Sesler on the shore of the Golden Horn, on the Asian side of the Bosporus with the Hagia Sophia in the background.20 The band’s performance, filmed with a long shot and a steady camera as the band faces the audience,21 opens and closes the 245

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Figure 7.9:  Gegen die Wand/Head On by Fatih Akin ( 2004 Bavaria GmbH. Artwork & Design  2005 Strand Releasing) Selim Sesler and Turkish gipsy orchestra by the Bosphorus.

film and is divided into six segments that function as musical interludes and as a framing device. Like a Greek chorus, each musical segment introduces a new narrative chapter. This framing device, as critics have noted, can be interpreted as a Brechtian strategy “serving to remind the audience of the constructed [and performative] nature of the narrative” (Suner 2005: 19; see also Petek 2007; Burns 2009) and aligns Gegen die Wand with Fassbinder’s films, in which, as we saw in chapter 1, theatrical and performative strategies are used to reflect on characters’ private and social predicaments and refer to the audience’s presence. The lyrics to the songs, performed by Turkish-German actress and singer Idil Üner, resonate with the action in the film and convey the characters’ emotional states: sadness, longing, madness, and dark passion (kara sevda). In a thorough analysis of the soundtrack’s role in the film, Petek documents the pairing of music and narrative and argues that the fluctuating soundtrack is the only site of multiculturalism in the film. She analyzes the film’s division into three tiers: in the first, which encompasses the time before Cahit and Sibel marry, the soundtrack includes diegetic sounds of the post-punk music popular in Germany in the eighties, such as music by Alexander Hacke, Mona Mur, and other artists associated with the West Berlin experimental group Einstürzende Neubauten (2007: 181). In the second tier, after Cahit and Sibel’s marriage, “the film’s soundscape, just like its protagonists’ identities, becomes increasingly hybrid,” and the clubs they patronize in their nightly outings play music that fuses techno beats with “Oriental” tunes (Petek 2007: 183). In the third tier, after Cahit arrives in Istanbul, the soundtrack is “suffused with ethnic melos and, indeed, pathos” and “the Western sounds are expelled” (Petek 2007: 183). This musical repertoire, Petek argues quoting Slobin, engenders a productive multicultural spectatorial engagement with the film insofar as it is presented as “the axis along which new forms of multicultural bonding, free of the burden of ethnic 246

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heritage, emerge” (Slobin 1994; Petek 2006: 184). Above all, the juxtaposition and variety of Akin’s musical repertoire in this and other films denotes Akin’s hybrid and intercultural musical tastes as a son of the diaspora. The same must be said about the diversity of cultural influences in his films “that challenge the notion of an authentic or fixed cultural identity” and the characters’ shuttling between two languages and cultural codes (Suner 2005: 21). By pairing events and the characters’ actions and emotions that take place sequentially in the two distant, yet irreversibly entangled, cities of Hamburg and Istanbul, Akin dismantles the East/West dichotomy, refusing to validate one side over the other, and locates the characters in transit between two cultures in their process of self-discovery and salvation. Tradition and modernity, repression and liberation, self-containment and hedonism, selfdestruction and reformation coexist in the two cosmopolitan cities, which are made physical counterparts. The protagonists’ cathartic experiences, which purify and transform them, take place simultaneously in the two locations: Cahit’s in a Hamburg prison and Sibel’s in the streets of Istanbul. Their journeys to Istanbul are initially marked, in melodramatic fashion, by coincidence and pathos; as the film closes, the Turkish capital has become their city of choice: the stability that Sibel has encountered there foreshadows the possibility that Cahit will follow that path. The film can only end when Cahit starts his fifteen-hour bus trip to his birthplace in an attempt to reconnect with his roots. As Asuman Suner eloquently puts it, “[T]he protagonists seem to feel equally (not) at home in either culture […] Yet the film presents this not as a problem of non-belonging but rather as an opportunity to construct multiple belongings” (2005: 21). Burns (2006) and Deniz Göktürk (2000) argue that in early Turkish-German cinema, Turkish women are usually depicted in circumstances of extreme oppression—an oppression responding to a cultural dimension—and that the only way in which they can be relieved from subjection to rigid moral codes and granted sexual and moral liberation is by being saved by a Western or Westernized male. Although Akin’s film does not follow that pattern, Sibel’s family indeed fits the archetype of a traditional Turkish family that firmly retains culturally and religiously ingrained oppressive attitudes: they can only allow Sibel to marry one of their own; their public and social identity within the Turkish diaspora depends on the control they have over their women’s lives and sexuality; Sybil’s married brothers brag about frequenting brothels and invite Cahit to go with them and yet are convinced that disowning and killing Sibel for having an extra-marital affair is the only way to save the family’s honor and counter public scandal.22 Clearly, as Victoria Fincham argues, Sibel still needs to define her subjective identity in terms of conflict with and separation from the culturally prescribed identity of the Turkish family (2008: 48). Though it may be true that Sibel is rescued from ostracism by Cahit, a Westernized, nontraditional Turk from the diaspora, ultimately it is Cahit who is redeemed by saving Sibel. Cahit confesses as much to his friend Seref after his release from prison and later to Selma, Sibel’s cousin, upon his arrival in Istanbul, when she is reluctant to reveal Sibel’s whereabouts: “Without Sibel, I would not have been able to make it through.” The reversal of the savior/saved positions, as well as the relocation of the dramatic tension to the characters’ inner conflicts about their subjective, not collective, identities, a tension that 247

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does not result from their discriminated or exploited position in German society, is another illustration of Akin’s intent to defy stereotypical depictions of nation and diaspora. The concept of identity as multiple and in transit and the nostalgia for home and subsequent quest to reconnect with one’s roots similarly permeates the narrative of Auf der anderen Seite/ Seite/Yaşamın Kıyısında/The Edge of Heaven (2007). The film presents hyphenated TurkishGerman characters, a strong doomed lesbian passion, and complex intergenerational relationships taking place again in the cities of Hamburg and Istanbul. In this movie, like in Gegen die Wand, Istanbul is the destination for six characters whose journey from one city to the other has life-changing consequences. Here broad existential concerns advance the narrative and the characters’ motivations and actions, namely, concerns about political activism and ethical commitment, responsibility toward others, and atonement and forgiveness (Akin 2008). Akin has expressed the self-imposed pressure he felt to make another great film after the enormous success of Gegen die Wand (Akin 2008). With Auf der anderen Seite he again managed to attract both mainstream audiences and critics, winning the award for Best Screenplay at Cannes 2007. Akin had experimented with the road movie genre in comedic mode in his 2000 film Im Juli/In July. I see Auf der anderen Seite, which translates literally as “on the other side,” as an unconventional road movie (in melodramatic mode) comprised of a series of round-trips and back and forth journeys between three cities, Bremen, Hamburg, and Istanbul, where “six characters and their destinies intertwine” (Akin 2008). Although Akin, unlike Kutlug Ataman in Lola und Bilidikid, is not interested in exploring either religious and moral fundamentalism or German racism, and his films show a mostly integrated and diverse Germany where Turks contribute greatly to the social fabric, he does establish a clear difference, in both Gegen die Wand and Auf der anderen Seite, between first and second generations of Turkish-Germans in terms of how disparately they conceive of gender roles and sexual interactions. In Gegen die Wand, the repressive and aggressive attitudes of the family’s males toward Sibel’s desire for emancipation set the film’s chain of events in motion and trigger the protagonists’ actions, forcing them to find refuge in Istanbul, which ironically seems to be more progressive than the diaspora. In Auf der anderen Seite, similarly, the militant attitudes of a couple of Turkish moral fundamentalists from the diaspora in Bremen—who at the beginning of the film threaten the Turkish sex worker Yeter with aggression if she does not “repent” and abandon her “immoral” (and profitable) “career”—drive Yeter to accept her former client Ali’s marriage proposal, and she subsequently becomes the object and deadly victim of his jealousy. Her death prompts the various coincidences and tragic denouements that affect the remaining characters. In opposition to the old-fashioned and fiery Ali, his son Nejat is a shy, seemingly asexual, nerdy university professor who feels compelled to atone for his father’s crime by traveling to Istanbul to bury Yeter and find Ayten, Yeter’s daughter, so he can pay for her education. Nejat never finds Ayten—who is a radical anti-government political activist and who has just fled to Hamburg to escape political persecution and find her mother Yeter—but decides to leave his post at Hamburg University and stay in Istanbul, where he buys and manages a German bookstore. While in Hamburg, Ayten meets Lotte, a young idealistic German 248

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who lives with her mother Susanne. Lotte invites Ayten to find refuge in their home, falls in love with her, and follows her to Istanbul, against her mother’s will, when Ayten is refused asylum and repatriated. Lotte gets involved in Ayten’s cause and is tragically killed in the streets of Istanbul. As her mother Susanne, guilt-ridden for not having fully supported Lotte, travels to Istanbul to complete the task her daughter began, Ali is released from prison and deported to Turkey. Once in Turkey, Ali, like Cahit in Gegen die Wand, returns to and settles in his hometown, Trabzon, on the Black Sea. While Susanne grieves for her daughter, occupying her place as Nejat’s roommate and traversing the spaces she inhabited before dying, Nejat travels to his father’s fishing village, on his way passing through a village significantly called Filyos (the birthplace of Akin’s father and where Akin spent his childhood summers), to show forgiveness and make amends with him. Like Cahit in Gegen die Wand, Ali has paid for his macho rage with years in prison. As Burns notes, prison has a transformative and reformative function in the two films and precedes the characters’ journeys to their origins (2009: 25). Nejat, also like Cahit, travels to Istanbul, a city with which he has no emotional connection, to find someone and to atone for his father’s crime, and he decides to stay. Susanne forgives Ayten for encouraging her daughter to get involved in her political struggle, and at the end of the film, they find solace in each other for the loss of Lotte as Nejat, placidly facing the sea, awaits his father, who has gone fishing. All of the characters’ journeys end in Istanbul, but the reconciliation between father and son and their reconnection with the country of origin remains open, as it was the case for Cahit at the end of Gegen die Wand. The film’s nonlinear and complex narrative is based on a system of trios and pairs: the film is divided into three sections (“Yeter’s Death,” “Lotte’s Death,” and “The Edge of Heaven”), is located in three cities, and tells the story of three single parent families with one child each (Yeter and Ayten Öztürk; Ali and Nejat Aksu, Susanne and Lotte Staub) in which the parents

Figure 7.10:  Auf der anderen Seite/The Edge of Heaven by Fatih Akin ( 2007 Corazón International. Artwork and Design  2008 Strand Releasing) Nejat waiting for his father.

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and children are separated from and look for each other. Two political protests and two tragic accidental deaths happen in two cities (“Yeter’s Death” in Bremen and “Lotte’s Death” in Istanbul) and two coffins are flown to and from Hamburg (Yeter’s and Lotte’s); two prison sentences (Ali and Ayten’s), two fights, and two reconciliations (between Ali and Nejat and Susanne and Ayten) take place in both cities; finally, two children travel to Istanbul and two parents follow them there. The characters’ destinies are intertwined through a system of coincidences and missed encounters that comprise the melodramatic nature of the film, fostering suspense. As Ayten arrives in Hamburg to look for her mother, Yeter has just left the city to live with Ali in Bremen. Two consecutive scenes show Ayten and Yeter traveling at the same time and in the same space but in reverse directions, signaling their missed encounter. Upon arriving in Istanbul, Lotte happens to enter Nejat’s bookstore looking for a book about the Turkish legal system to get information relevant to Ayten’s trail. Since she is looking for a room to rent, Nejat, unaware of the fact that she is sentimentally connected to Ayten, for whom he has been looking for months, offers her a room in his apartment. Per Ayten’s request, Lotte reluctantly retrieves Ayten’s pistol and is robbed and shot with it by street urchins. After Lotte dies, Nejat rents the same room to Susanne, who is unaware of the connection between Nejat and Ayten’s mother. The parents, Susanne and Ali, travel to Istanbul on the same day (in Ali’s case, upon his release and deportation), and a shot frames them together as they proceed to immigration and customs at Ataturk Airport. When Nejat travels to the Black Sea to meet his father in a sequence that opens and closes the film, establishing the film’s (and fate’s) circularity, Susanne covers for Nejat at the bookstore, where Ayten visits her after her release from prison. Nejat removes Yeter’s picture from the bookstore’s bulletin board on his way out before traveling, a picture he had posted there as well as all over Istanbul in an attempt to connect with Ayten. As the two women leave the bookstore together and Susanne offers Ayten a place to stay in Nejat’s room, a close-up shot of the empty spot where the picture used to be marks the film’s last negative coincidence and missed encounter. At the film’s conclusion, Nejat is still unaware of the romance that took place between Lotte and Ayten in Hamburg and of Susanne and Ayten’s resulting connection, and Ayten still has to learn about her mother’s death. Yeter, the sex worker, is the only character who is not redeemed, reckoned with, or mourned onscreen. The film implies that it will only be a matter of time before this last drama unfolds and all the coincidences are finally revealed, this time offstage. The slow and partial disclosure of secrets and accidents is consistent with the conventions of melodrama, but Akin makes his melodrama unconventional by leaving the discovery of crucial information and some of the sentimental excess out of the diegesis. Melodrama’s emotional excess is typically linked to grief, mourning, and melancholia, and pathos results from the characters’ inability to accept the irreversibility of time and the characters’ remorse for not having resolved their disagreements with their loved ones in time (Williams 1998). Pathos is concentrated on Susanne’s feelings of guilt about not having supported her daughter in her idealistic determination to help Ayten. However, Susanne’s dejection is contained to 250

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a series of short, fragmented scenes at the Büyük Londra Hotel/Hotel London where she stays upon her arrival in Istanbul. Akin films these scenes with high angle shots and without music in order to create distance and minimize emotional excess.23 Both Susanne and Ayten reconcile with the loss of Lotte and begin the work of mourning, the former by forgiving and continuing the ethical action her daughter began and the latter by renouncing her violent militancy and accompanying Susanne in her grief. Yeter and Lotte are parallel melodramatic victims united in their fate insofar as tragedy was imposed on them by external causes and as a consequence of their ethical actions to protect and support Ayten. In melodrama, objects and spaces take on metaphorical significance, visually enhancing or carrying the full weight of the emotional dynamics of the drama (Elsaesser 1985). Lotte’s diary and room at Nejat’s apartment in Istanbul become essential instruments in Susanne’s work of mourning (and assumingly will be in Ayten’s once she moves in with Susanne). By occupying her daughter’s space and reading her diary, in which her daughter had established a parallel between her idealism and that of her mother when she was young, Susanne reconnects with her daughter. Although objects and spaces emphasize the irretrievability of the past, they also compensate for the loss, providing the only possible way to reverse time and retrieve the past: through such objects and spaces, one can recognize and commemorate the past (Hirsh 1997: 20). A positive outcome derives from the reconciliation between Susanne and Ayten. It not only enables the construction of a communal and shared memory, which is encapsulated in the objects and spaces that symbolize Lotte’s existence, but also opens the possibility of turning lament into ethical action (Williams 1998: 68). The diary and the room are sites of memory, “spaces of connection between memory and post-memory” (Hirsh 1997: 247). The film’s incursion into Turkey’s political arena is encapsulated primarily in Ayten’s commitment to violent militancy and in Lotte’s idealism. Akin includes a May Day demonstration turned violent to contextualize Ayten’s status as a political refugee in Hamburg and her subsequent deportation and imprisonment. In his commentary on the film and in the interview included in Monique Akin’s “The Making of the Edge of Heaven,” Akin explains that the brutal beating of a man during the protest reproduces actual footage of a similar May protest in 1996 in which left-wing radicals brutally beat a policeman on camera. Those images, he says, haunted him for years, and he found a way to process them in the film exposing their absurdity and creating the ultimate irony: the militancy of a violence-prone activist leads to her lover’s death and moves her to renounce radical struggle (Akin 2008).24 Akin’s political stance is also expressed in the film’s allusion to the effects of radiation in the population on the Black Sea Coast of Turkey caused by the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster. When Nejat arrives in the area on his journey to his father’s village, he stops at a gas station. After asking the shopkeeper about a song that is being played in the background, the shopkeeper tells him the story of the singer, Kâzım Koyuncu, a folk-rock singer, songwriter, and political activist from the area who died of cancer at 33, allegedly as a consequence of radiation from Chernobyl. Koyuncu’s song, “Ben Seni In Dub,” provides a musical leitmotif for the film and functions as a tribute both to the singer (revered in the area) and all of the inhabitants of the area who, like him, were the victims of the nuclear disaster. 251

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The German characters, Lotte and Susanne, could be interpreted as critical depictions of Western idealists seeking to appease their guilt by committing to foreign causes in the developing world, and in Lotte’s case, dying for her naïveté. However, ethical action in the film is not just assigned to the two German characters but is understood to be a human obligation not limited by nationality or ethnicity (Akin 2008). The film’s casting also reflects its biculturalism. It includes two living legends, Hanna Schygulla, best known for her roles in Fassbinder’s films, and the famous Turkish actor and director Tuncel Kurtiz; two very important Turkish actresses, Nursel Köse (Yeter) and Nurgül Yeşilçay (Ayten); and TurkishGerman actor Baki Davrak (the protagonist of Lola und Bilidikid). As Berghahn explains, “[B]y casting Schygulla and Kurtiz, Akin wanted to pay homage to the two film histories that have had the most profound impact upon his oeuvre and draw attention to the productive dialogues between these two film cultures” (2009: 8). With Auf der anderen Seite, Akin offers a counterpoint to Ataman’s film, Lola und Bilidikid (analyzed in chapter 4), where homosexuality, transsexualism, and drag performance are correlated with domestic abuse and family disintegration within the Turkish diaspora in Berlin. In this film Akin normalizes lesbianism and dignifies prostitution. The interethnic lesbian relationship between Lotte and Ayten is not questioned or opposed by any of the characters in the film and is never exploited visually. As we saw in British-Asian films, the formation of the diasporic characters’ identities is determined not only by nationality or ethnicity but also by non-traditional definitions of sexuality. In his representation of Yeter, Akin avoids typical representations of the poor prostitute subjugated and threatened by pimps and instead makes her a dignified autonomous sex worker who makes over two thousand euros a month, supports her daughter’s education and living expenses in Istanbul, and is the victim of the zeal of Turkish defenders of morality. The area where Yeter works and where the film begins is filmed in Bremen’s actual red light district, Helenenstrasse, which is run by the women themselves and where most of the sex workers are over forty. The choice to locate the sex worker character in this district offers a progressive alternative to the common figure in Turkish cinema of the “aging whore” (Akin 2008). Akin’s films, with their fictional “transmigrant” (Argun 2003) characters who move back and forth across borders and find in Istanbul a reference point and haven from personal and familial conflicts, are cultural products located in the transnational public sphere of Deutschkei and contribute to intercultural exchange between Turkey and Germany. The depiction of women in Akin’s films also diverges from the traditional depiction of Turkish women, seen in earlier Turkish-German films, as passive victims of oppression (Göktürk 2000). Female filmmakers are still the minority in the new Turkish-German cinema, as the traditionalist and still patriarchal nature of the Turkish diaspora as well as difficulties in integration created by German society pose multiple obstacles for Turkish-German female creators. However, I would like to conclude this section by referring to two films made by female Turkish-German filmmakers: Seyhan Derin’s documentary, Ich bin Tochter meiner Mutter/I Am My Mother’s Daughter (1996), and Yasemin Şamdereli’s comedy, Almanya— Willkommen in Deutschland/Almanya—Welcome to Germany (2011). Both of these films, 252

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like Akin’s films, are thematically and structurally constructed around their protagonists’ return to the homeland in their attempt to connect with their families’ roots and come to terms with their bicultural identities from a gender perspective. Derin’s and Şamdereli’s films are documentary and fictionalized accounts of their own differences with their traditional Turkish parents and specifically explore conflicts between women and their Muslim fathers and the position of women within the Turkish-German diaspora, sharing some narrative and generic formats with their British-South Asian and French-Arab counterparts. The autobiographical documentary format was Derin’s choice for her first film, as was also the case for Gurinder Chadha’s and Yamina Benguigui’s in their respective first films, I’m British but … (1989) and Mémoires d’immigrés, l’héritage maghrébin (1997–98). Derin, who was born in Turkey and grew up in Germany, explores her parents’ migratory experience in her documentary and pays tribute to her mother’s experience, constructing “a feminist counter-narrative to Turkish patriarchal discourses of the family and of women’s roles in it” (Berghahn 2013: 89). Derin’s father emigrated to Germany in the mid-1960s and subsequently asked his wife and children to join him. Her father took to drinking and gambling, had a disabling accident at work, and tried to send his daughters back to Turkey. Derin and her sisters resisted their father’s imposition and stayed in Germany, which resulted in the breakup of her family. In contrast with the daughters’ act of defiance, Derin’s mother remained submissive to her husband’s authority, which she did not question. In her film, Derin exposes the total subordination of her mother (and other Turkish women) under the Turkish patriarchy, giving her a voice and privileging her viewpoint. To understand her mother’s (and Turkish women’s) predicaments in their history of migration to Germany, Derin travels to her mother’s village in Caycuma, Turkey, and documents the story of three generations of women in her own family, giving protagonism to the older generation that remained in Turkey. The film is structured as a return journey to the homeland, “a travelogue that contains [Derin’s] reflections” on her father’s fear of contamination by German society and in particular on his fear that his daughters will marry German men, a fear he reveals in a letter he reads aloud on camera (Fenner 2006: 53). The film also reflects on both her mother’s subordination and her self-assertion (Fenner 2006: 49). As Berghahn shows, Derin’s film project is “an attempt to rebuild the family that her father destroyed through aligning herself with her mother’s lineage and creating a female genealogy” (2013: 93). Derin adopts an ethnographic style to document the lives of rural Turkish women—their constant daily work and routines in the villages and fields—and pursues family reconciliation as well as her own reconciliation with her family’s past. Şamdereli opts for a commercial crossover between the humorous and lighthearted tone of romantic comedy and the road movie format. In Almanya—Willkommen in Deutschland, Hüseyin Yilmaz, who arrived in Germany as part of the “Gastarbeiter” program in 1964 and has finally been granted German citizenship, takes his four adult children and two grandchildren on a road trip to his village in Anatolia, Turkey, so that he can show them the house he has bought there. The family’s dynamics are revealed on the road as they are determined by the grandparents’ migration to Germany and the second- and 253

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third-generation’s struggle to understand and cope with their Turkish heritage. The trip to the homeland serves as the occasion for retelling the Yilmaz family’s migration and assimilation story, which is visualized in flashback and told by Hüseyin’s 22-year-old granddaughter, Canan, to her seven-year-old cousin Cenk. The farcical caricature of national stereotypes is combined with a nostalgic and retro aesthetic achieved through the incorporation of black and white archival footage and fake color footage that document the history of Turkish guest workers and Hüseyin’s arrival in Germany. As Berghahm shows, Şamdereli’s film, told from the third generation’s perspective through Canan’s voiceover and storytelling, is equally respectful of both Turkish and German cultures and their corresponding experiences and above all, is a homage to the generation of migrants that made Germany’s economic miracle possible (2013: 71).25 Like most diasporic films, whether dramatic or comedic, Şamdereli’s film focuses on the first generation’s obsession with the return to the homeland and the second and third generation’s in-betweenness or indifference toward their heritage. After Hüseyin’s death and burial in his original village, the family makes the trip back home to Germany, with the exception of the oldest son, who stays in Anatolia to rebuild the family home. Meanwhile, the youngest of the clan is given the opportunity to speak on behalf of his grandfather at an official event honoring Turkish guest workers hosted by Chancellor Merkel. In the last sequences of the film, young Cenk, proud of his heritage, brings a map of Anatolia to class so that his ancestors’ village, and his own part in their history, can finally be located in Europe’s map. Conclusion A comparison of films from three different diasporas in Europe has led me to conclude that the divide between generations, with their different ways of conceiving of traditions and culture, is still the main source of dramatic tension in diasporic films. Tolerance between the two cultures that constitute the hybrid identities of the films’ characters is sometimes jeopardized by the older generation’s restrictive view of the host culture, a view that poses one of the main obstacles to the children’s formation of an autonomous identity (Fincham 2008: 51). At the same time, most of these films encourage fluid notions of nation and diaspora and, as Berghahn has noted, claim a space for the collective memory of post-labor and postcolonial immigrants, asserting the important role that immigrants, although relegated to the margins of society, have played in shaping modern France, Britain, and Germany. The films encompass nostalgia for a lost origin and yet aim to make the experience of diasporic communities interesting and relevant to mainstream audiences. Often through a retro look, diasporic films elicit a memory shared by majority and minority culture audiences (Berghahn 2013). Dress, music, and cuisine resulting from the amalgamation of the two cultures (the inherited and the adopted) function as cultural artifacts that can be used to reassert diasporic belonging and hybrid identities. In films made by women of immigrant descent who carry the extra burden of being emblems of the homeland’s culture, 254

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the simultaneous accommodation to and questioning of traditions of filial duty constitute the narrative focus. Autobiographical perspectives, coming-of-age narratives, and nostalgic recollections of the past, which in many cases reflect the filmmakers’ own experiences, provide characters with narrative tools through which they can achieve awareness of their biracial/bi-ethnic identities. Hybridity and transculturalism may subvert patriarchy and lead to an acceptance of queer sexualities. The assertion of a transnational identity outside the mainstream transcends both national and gender boundaries and dismantles the invisible borders that live in the minds of people and the border gaze that objectifies the Other.

References Akin, M., 2008, The Making of The Edge of Heaven, Special Features, US DVD, Strand Releasing. Argun, B. E., 2003, Turkey in Germany. The Transnational Sphere of Deutschkei, New York and London, Routledge. Bartsch, M., Brandt, A., & Stenvorth, D., 2010, “Turkish Immigration to Germany: A Sorry History of Self-Deception and Wasted Opportunities,” Spiegel Online, viewed January 11, 2014, from, http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/turkish-immigration-to-germanya-sorry-history-of-self-deception-and-wasted-opportunities-a-716067.html. Berghahn, D., 2006, “No Place Like Home? Or Impossible Homecomings in the Films of Fatih Akin,” New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 4(3), 141–157. Berghahn, D., 2009, “Introduction: Turkish-German Dialogues on Screen,” New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 7(1), 3–9. Berghahn, D., 2009, “From Turkish Greengrocer to Drag Queen: Reassessing Patriarchy in Recent Turkish–German Coming-of-Age Films,” New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 7(1), 55–69. Berghahn, D., 2010, “Coming of Age in ‘the Hood’: The Diasporic Youth Film and Questions of Genre,” in D. Berghahn and C. Sternberg (eds.), European Cinema in Motion, pp. 235–255, London and New York, Palgrave Macmillan. Berghahn, D., 2013, Far-Flung Families in Film: The Diasporic Family in Contemporary European Cinema, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press. Bhabha, H., 1994, The Location of Culture, London, Routledge. Brah, A., 1996, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities, London and New York, Routledge. Braziel, J. E. & Mannur, A., 2003, “Nation, Migration, Globalization: Points of Contention in Diaspora Studies,” in J. E. Braziel and A. Mannur (eds.), Theorizing Diaspora, pp. 1–22, Malden, MA, and Oxford, Blackwell. Bruzzi, S., 2009, “Where Are Those Buggers? Aspects of Homosexuality in Mainstream British Cinema,” in Robert Murphy (ed.), The British Cinema Book, 3rd edn., pp. 133–41, London, BFI/ICA. Burns, R., 2006, “Turkish-German Cinema: From Cultural Resistance to Transnational Cinema?” in David Clarke (ed.), German Cinema since Unification, pp. 127–148, Birmingham, University of Birmingham Press. 255

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Burns, R., 2009, “On the Streets and on the Road: Identity in Transit in Turkish-German Travelogues on Screen,” New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 7(1), 11–26. Chadha, G., 2002, “The Making of Bend It Like Beckham,” Special Features, US DVD, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. Collins, L., 2003, “Pakistani Englishness and the Containment of the Muslim Subaltern in Ayub Khan-Din’s Tragi-comedy Film East is East,” South Asian Popular Culture 1(2), 91–108. Dirlik, A., 2008, “Race Talk, Race and Contemporary Racism,” PMLA 123(5), 1363–1379. Elsaesser, T., 1985, “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations of the Family Melodrama,” in B. Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods, vol. II, pp. 165–189, Berkeley, University of California Press. Elsaesser, T., 2005, European Cinema. Face to Face with Hollywood, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press. Fenner, A., 2006, “‘She’s Got Her Own Way of Asserting Herself ’: Interview with Seyhan Serin,” in H. Kraft and M. McCarthy (eds.), Women in German Yearbook, 22, pp. 43–61, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press. Fincham, V., 2008, “Violence, Sexuality and the Family: Identity ‘Within and Beyond TurkishGerman Parameters’ in Fatih Akin’s Gegen die Wand, Kutlug Ataman’s Lola + Bilidikid and Anno Saul’s Kebab Connection,” German as a Foreign Language Journal 1, 40–72. Fraser, P., 2003, “An Interview with Pratibha Parmar, Director of Nina’s Heavenly Delights,” in Close-Up Film, viewed January 11, 2014, from http://www.close-upfilm.com/features/ Interviews/pratibhaparmer.htm. Göktürk, D., 2000, “Turkish Women on German Streets: Closure and Exposure in Transnational Cinema,” in M. Konstantarakos (ed.), Spaces in European Cinema, pp. 64–76, Exeter, Intellect. Gopinath, G., 2005, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures, Durham and London, Duke University Press. Hall, S., 1988, “New Ethnicities,” in K. Mercer (ed.), Black Film, British Cinema, pp. 27–31, London, BFI/ICA. Henriques, J., 1988, “Realism and the New Language,” in K. Mercer (ed.), Black Film, British Cinema, pp. 18–20, London, BFI/ICA. Herbert, U., 1990, A History of Foreign Labor in Germany, 1880–1980. Seasonal Workers/Forced Laborers/Guest Workers, transl. W. Templer, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press. Higbee, W., 2007, “Re-presenting the Urban Periphery: Maghrebi-French Filmmaking and the Banlieu Film,” Cineaste (Winter), 38–43. Hirsh, M., 1997, Family Frames. Photography, Narrative and Postmemory, Cambridge and London, Harvard University Press. Hussain, Y., 2005, Writing Diaspora. South Asian Women, Culture and Ethnicity, Hampshire, UK and Burlington, VT, Ashgate. Jamal, M., 1988, “Dirty Linen,” in K. Mercer (ed.), Black Film, British Cinema, pp. 21–22, London, BFI/ICA. Jordan, J., 2006, “More than a Metaphor: The Passing of the Two Worlds Paradigm in GermanLanguage Diasporic Literature,” German Life and Letters 59, 488–499. Maalouf, A., 1998, Les Identités meurtrières, Paris, Editions Grasset & Fasquelle.

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Malik, S., 2010, “The Dark Side of Hybridity: Contemporary Black and Asian British Cinema,” in D. Berghahn & C. Sternberg (eds.), European Cinema in Motion, pp. 132–151, London and New York, Palgrave Macmillan. Mandel, R. E., 2008, Cosmopolitan Anxieties: Turkish Challenges to Citizenship and Belonging in Germany, Durham and London, Duke University Press. Mangeot, P., 2008, “An Interview with Laurent Cantet and François Bégadeau,” in Sony Pictures Classics, viewed November 8, 2013, from http://www.sonyclassics.com/theclass/externalLoads/ theclass_presskit.pdf. Marks, L., 2000, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses, Durham, NC, Duke University Press. Mercer, K., 1988, “Recoding Narratives of Race and Nation,” in K. Mercer (ed.), Black Film, British Cinema, pp. 4–13, London, BFI/ICA. Mersal, I., 2008, “Eliminating Diasporic Identities,” PMLA 123(5), 1581–1589. Naficy, H., 2001, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking, Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University Press. Nettelbeck, C., 2007, “Kechiche and the French Classics. Cinema as Subversion and Renewal of Tradition,” French Cultural Studies 18(3), 307–320. Nobil, A., 1999–2000, “Is East … East?” Third Text 13(49), 105–107. Parmar, P., Nina’s Heavenly Delights, Web Site, viewed January 25, 2014, from http://www. ninasheavenlydelights.com/. Petek, P., 2007, “Enabling Collisions: Re-thinking Multiculturalism through Fatih Akin’s Gegen die Wand/Head On,” Studies in European Cinema 4(3), 177–186. Riding, A., 2005, “In France, Artists Have Sounded the Warning Bells for Years,” in The New York Times, viewed November 24, 2013, from http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/24/arts/ design/24ridi.html?_r=0. Sharma, S., 2009, “Teaching British South Asian Cinema—Towards a Materialistic Reading Practice,” South Asian Popular Culture 7(1), 21–35. Slobin, M., 1994, “Music in Diaspora: The View from Euro-America,” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 3(3), 243–251. Smith, C. S., 2005, “Inside French Housing Projects, Feelings of Being the Outsiders,” in The New York Times Online, viewed September 24, 2013, from http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/09/ international/europe/09projects.html?pagewanted=all. Stone, N., 1988, “Through a Lens Darkly,” in K. Mercer (ed.), Black Film, British Cinema, pp. 22–24, London, BFI/ICA. Strand, D., 2009, “Être et Parler: Being and Speaking French in Abdellatif Kechiche’s L’esquive (2004) and Laurent Cantet’s Entre les murs (2009),” Studies in French Cinema 9(3), 259–272. Suner, A., 2005, “Dark Passion,” Sight & Sound 15(3), 18–21. Swamy, V., 2007, “Marivaux in the Suburbs: Reframing Language in Kechiche’s L’esquive (2003),” Studies in French Cinema 7(1), 57–68. Tarr, C., 2005, Redefining Difference: Beur and Banlieue Filmmaking in France, Manchester, Manchester University Press.

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Tarr, C., 2010, “Gendering Diaspora: The Work of Diasporic Women Film-Makers in Western Europe,” in D. Berghahn and C. Sternberg (eds.), European Cinema in Motion, pp. 175–195, London and New York, Palgrave Macmillan. Tijou, B., 2008, “Une année entre les murs,” Special Features, US DVD, Sony Pictures Classics. Vincendeau, G., 2000, “Designs on the Banlieu: Mathieu Kassovitz’s La haine (1995),” in S. Hayward and G. Vincendeau (eds.), 310–327, French Films: Texts and Contexts, London and New York, Routledge. Werbner, P., 2004, “Theorising Complex Diasporas: Purity and Hybridity in the South Asian Public Sphere in Britain,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 30(5), 895–911. Williams, L., 1998, “Melodrama Revised,” in N. Browne (ed.), Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory, pp. 42–88, Berkeley, University of California Press. Zaimoglu, F., 2004, “Lebenswut, Herzhitze,” Der Tagesspiegel, March 10, viewed January 11, 2014 from http://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/lebenswut-herzhitze/497810.html. Zissermann, K. & Nettelbeck, C., 1999, “Social Exclusion and Artistic Inclusiveness: The Quest for Integrity in Mathieu Kassovitz’s La haine,” Nottingham French Studies 36(2), 83–98.

Notes   1 Berghahn adds that the ineffectual condition of fathers in this and other Maghrebi-French films and the confinement of Mahjid’s father to the domestic space “is symptomatic of the crisis of masculinity that has besieged the generation of the fathers and which their sons try to compensate for by hyper-macho posturing, which ultimately cannot mask their own powerlessness” (2013: 122).   2 The film won the prize for best director at Cannes in 1995, and it was a national and international box office success. The script was published as an illustrated book; its soundtrack was released in CD format; and the film was screened for Prime Minister Alain Juppé (Vincendeau 2000: 310; Tarr 2005: 620).   3 Zissermann and Nettelbeck note that Kassovitz and his crew “undertook to live for a period of three months at Chanteloup-les-Vignes, not only to get a better understanding of the people and the place about which his work was to revolve […] but also, and more significantly, to try to avoid the pitfall of exploiting, in the creation of the work of art, the very people whose cause he was wishing to serve” (1999: 92).   4 The twentieth arrondissement contains the districts of Ménilmontant and Belleville and is a working-class and immigrant area.   5 Kureishi wrote also the script for Stephen Frears’ 1987 film, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid.   6 Berghahn notes how, for example, East Is East and Bend It Like Beckham were two of the most commercially successful British films when they came out, grossing 7.2 and 11.5 million pounds at the box office respectively (2013: 41).   7 See Bruzzi’s (2009: 140) and Berghahn’s (2013: 112) readings of the launderette’s microcosmic and utopian function in the film.   8 Om Puri plays also the father in West Is West (2010) by Andy De Emmony, the sequel to East Is East, and in two miniseries for British television (on Channel 4), White Teeth (2002) based 258

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on Zadie Smith’s acclaimed first novel, directed by Julian Jarrold, and Second Generation (2003), written by Neil Biswas and directed by Jon Sen.   9 The title “Rivers of Blood” derives from Powell’s allusion to a line in Virgil’s Aeneid: “As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’” See the complete speech at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ comment/3643823/Enoch-Powells-Rivers-of-Blood-speech.html. 10 Since femininity is equated with domesticity in the South Asian community, learning how to cook is a skill imposed on and expected from Jess. However, the film seems to support the idea that cooking, rather than being an imposition, benefits women and should be added to an education that includes sports and college. One of the special features included in the US DVD distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures reinforces the film’s message that football and college may be compatible with domesticity. In it, Chadha herself cooks her mother’s recipe for aloo gobi (a South Asian curry dish made with potatoes and cauliflower) while both her mother and aunt observe and guide her through  the process. In an earlier film, What’s Cooking (2000), set in Los Angeles, Chadha already establishes the connection between family, generational conflict, and food (Gopinath 2005: 212).   The film’s autobiographical and self-referential tone is suggested in the aforementioned feature and is also established by the director (in interviews and in another special feature, “The Making Of ”), as she explains that the film is tied to her experience, not only through the dilemma Jess faces when juggling two cultures, but also in the locations she chose to shoot the film and the participation and cameo appearances of her own family members. 11 See interview included on the film’s Web site (http://www.ninasheavenlydelights.com/) and in the commentary and Special Features sections of the US DVD, Regent Releasing, 2008. 12 The UK Film Council was created by the Labour Government in 2000 to develop and promote the British film industry. The Council was dissolved in 2011, and the British Film Institute has taken over many of its functions. 13 The haptic or tactile visuality perceives the world as if by touching it, inviting the spectator to see the surface of bodies and objects as a sort of skin, and facilitating the identification between the subject and object of the gaze. Haptic visuality is an “attempt to translate to the audiovisual medium the knowledges of the body, including the unrecordable memories of the senses […] Although cinema is an audiovisual medium, synesthesia, as well as haptic visuality, enables the viewer to experience cinema as multisensory” (Marks 2000: 5). 14 See Gopinath for analysis of Bollywood-inspired song and dance sequences in a variety of diasporic films, and in Parmar’s queer short film, Khush (2005: 114). 15 Sharma provides a detailed account of the controversy surrounding the publication of the novel and the shooting of the film, a controversy that relates to a perceived negative portrayal of Bangladeshis in London’s East End (2009: 28–29). 16 See interview included in the special features section of the US DVD, Sony Picture Classics. 17 Akin has said he made Wir haben vergessen zurückzukehren/We Have Forgotten to Return (2001), a documentary about his own family, to show his parents’ motivations for migrating 259

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and the advancement of their children, in part so that one day his children will know who their grandparents were (Berghahn 2013: 88). 18 In a review of the film for Sight & Sound, Suner describes the concept of kara sevda (dark passion) as passionate love experienced like “an incurable illness, from which the ‘victim’ can never recover and through which s/he will be forever transformed” and which, at the same time, “holds the promise of renewed wisdom and deeper insight” (2005: 20). Berghahn relies on Feridun Zeimoglu’s elaboration of the concept of kara sevda (addiction to catastrophe and dark passion) to explain the characters’ acts of self-mutilation: “That is why Cahit drives head-on against a wall, why his confession that he is in love coincides with an act of self-mutilation and why Sibel slits her wrists several times in the course of the film. A lot of blood flows.” (2006: 155). 19 Fincham rightly argues that “the way Sibel self-harms in each situation is linked to the identity she is trying to reject at the time” and that the various “violent acts against the self allow the perpetrators to ‘kill-off ’ their old identities in preparation for reinventing themselves” (2008: 62). 20 Selim’s band also provides music for the soundtrack to Akin’s documentary Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul (2004). I would also like to point out the significance of placing Hagia Sophia in the background while a traditional Turkish band plays. In this scene, the emblematic landmark, which was once a Byzantine church and later an Ottoman mosque and is now a museum, reinforces the multicultural and interfaith nature of the city of Istanbul. 21 Suner notes the peculiar setting in which the orchestra plays. The musicians stand on a sidewalk covered by traditional Turkish kilims (carpets). The scene “seems to belong to an imaginary past—it could have come from an old album cover—and is both familiar and intimate yet distant and mysterious” (2005: 19). 22 For a recent fictionalized rendition of honor killings in a Turkish German family, see the film Die Fremde/When We Leave (2010) by Austrian female filmmaker Feo Aladag.   Osman’s killing of his transsexual brother, Lola, in Lola und Bilidikid by Kutlug Ataman, has to be understood as well as an honor killing. 23 Another coincidence, this time extradiegetic, is established by Akin when he lodges Susanne at the Büyük Londra Hotel (known in its heyday as the Grand Hotel de Londres), the same hotel where Cahit stayed while he was looking for Sibel and where they spent their two last passionate days together. 24 As explained by the actress (Nurgül Yersilçay) who plays Ayten’s character, the name, if not the leftist ideology, of the political organization remains undisclosed. In order to avoid misunderstandings and political repercussions, Akin abandoned the idea of making explicit reference to the PKK (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan/Kurdistan Workers’ Party), a Kurdish organization, which from 1984 to 2003 fought an armed struggle against the Turkish government for an autonomous Kurdistan and cultural and for political rights for the Kurds in Turkey (Akin 2008). 25 Berghahn argues that the film has a “magical realist touch,” which derives from little Cenk’s imaginative perspective as he tries to grasp the complexities of the migrant experience, comparing it to a fairy tale. For Berghahn, the fairy-tale-like or magical realist component 260

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functions as a device to turn “the relationship between German majority and TurkishGerman minority culture” upside down, inverting the perspective in an attempt to invite Germans “to marvel [and laugh] at their own otherness.” At the end of the film, magical realism’s conflation of the real, the improbable, the imaginary, and the fantastic creates a dislocation of time and space, juxtaposing what was and is. At Hüseyin’s burial and during a subsequent family gathering in the grounds of their Anatolian home, all of the characters are represented simultaneously in their past and present embodiments, reminiscing in each other’s company (2013: 70–71).

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Index of Films 14 kilómetros/14 Kilometers (Gerardo Olivares, 2007) ix, 24, 177, 187, 191–195 35 rhums/35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis, 2008) 125

Brick Lane (Sarah Gavron, 2007) 25, 226, 227, 233, 240–241 Brothers in Trouble (Udayan Prasad, 1996) 23, 34, 45–48, 58, 230 Bwana (Imanol Uribe, 1996) 151, 170, 173

A Agua con sal/Water with Salt (Pedro Pérez Rosado, 2005) 88–89 All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk, 1955) 60 Almanya—Willkommen in Deutschland/ Almanya—Welcome to Germany (Yasemin Şamdereli, 2011) 25, 252, 253–254 Angst essen seele auf/Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer W. Fassbinder, 1974) vii, 23, 34, 35–39, 58, 59, 60, 61 Anita and Me (Metin Huseyin, 2002) 25, 226, 227, 233, 238–240 Apo tin akri tis polis/From the Edge of the City (Constantin Giannaris, 1998) 123 Auf der anderen Seite/The Edge of Heaven (Fatih Akin, 2007) x, 25, 248–252

C Caché/Hidden (Michael 25 Haneke, 2005) ix, 24, 145, 147, 159–163, 172 Clandestins/Clandestines (Denis Chouinard and Nicolas Wadimoff, 1998) 201 Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul (Fatih Akin, 2004) 244, 260

B Bend It like Beckham (Gurinder Chadha, 2003) x, 25, 77, 86, 226, 233–235, 256, 258 Bhaji on the Beach (Gurinder Chadha, 1993) vii, 23, 25, 66, 76–80, 86, 226, 233, 235

E East is East (Damien O’Donnell, 1999) 25, 226, 227, 230–232, 234, 240, 256, 257, 258 Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg, 2007) 23, 94, 103–105, 118

D Das Fräulein/Fraulein (Andrea Staka, 2006) 89 Depuis qu’Otar est parti/Since Otar Left (Julie Bertuccelli, 2004) 201 Det nya landet/The New Country (Geir Hansteen Jörgensen, 2000) 202 Die Fremde/When We Leave (Feo Aladag, 2010) 260 Dirty Pretty Things (Stephen Frears, 2002) 119

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Eden à l’Ouest/Eden is West (Costa–Gavras, 2009) ix, 24, 178, 187, 195–198, 200 El traje/The Suit (Alberto Rodríguez, 2002) 23, 34, 48–54, 56, 58, 61, 197 En la puta calle/Hitting Bottom (Enrique Gabriel, 1997) 61 Entre les murs/The Class (Laurent Cantet, 2008) x, 25, 216, 220–224, 257 Extranjeras/Female Foreigners (Helena Taberna, 2002) viii, 23, 66, 73–76, 86, 87, 235

In This World (Michael Winterbottom, 2002) ix, 24, 177, 184, 187–191, 199, 200, 201, 202 Inch’Allah dimanche/God Willing, It’s Sunday (Yamina Benguigui, 2001) vii, 23, 66–70, 86, 224 J J’ai pas sommeil/I Can’t Sleep (Claire Denis, 1994) viii, 23, 66, 72, 80, 83, 84, 87, 108, 123, 125–129, 130, 132, 139 K Khush (Pratibha Gopinath 2005) 237, 259

F Far from Heaven (Todd Haynes, 2002) 60 Femmes d’Islam/Women of Islam (Yamina Benguigui, 1994) 67 Flores de otro mundo/Flowers from Another World (Icíar Bollain, 1999) viii, 23, 24, 66, 71–72, 77, 79, 80–83, 84, 87, 145, 150, 151, 155 Frontières/Frontiers (Mostefa Djadjian, 2002) 201

L L’esquive/Games of Love and Chance (Abdel Kechiche, 2003) ix, 25, 60, 216–220, 221, 224, 257 La faute à Voltaire/Voltaire is to Blame (Abdel Kechiche, 2001) vii, 23, 34, 39, 43–45, 48, 58, 60 La haine/Hatred (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1996) 25, 212, 214–215, 258 La promesse/The Promise (Jean Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 1996) viii, ix, 24, 145, 147, 156–159, 168, 170, 171 La sconosciuta/The Unknown Woman (Giuseppe Tornatore, 2006) 23, 94, 105–107, 108, 118 Las cartas de Alou/Letters from Alou (Montxo Armendáriz, 1990) 23, 24, 26, 34, 39–43, 170, 177, 179–182, 187 Le Havre (Ari Kaurismaki, 2011) ix, 24, 62, 145, 163–167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172 Le silence de Lorna/Lorna’s Silence (Jean Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2008) 156, 173 Le thé au Harem d’Archimède/Tea in the Harem (Mehdi Charef, 1985) 25, 212–214 Lilya 4–Ever (Lukas Moodysson, 2003) viii, 23, 94, 99–103, 117, 118

G Gegen die Wand/Head On (Fatih Akin, 2004) x, 25, 29, 244–247, 248, 249, 256, 257 H Hermakonono (Abderrahmane Sissako, 2004) 201 Hop (Dominique Standaert, 2002) vii, 23, 34, 48, 54–57, 58, 59, 60 Hors la loi/ Outside the Law (Rachid Bouchareb, 2010) 173, 224 I I Am British But ... (Gurinder Chadha, 1989) 77, 253 Ich bin Tochter meiner Mutter/I Am My Mother’s Daughter (Seyhan Derin, 1996) 25, 252–253 264

Index of Films

Loin/Far Away (André Techiné, 2001) 201 Lola und BilidiKid/Lola and Billy the Kid (Kutlug Ataman, 1999) viii, 23, 123, 129–134, 135, 136, 139, 248, 252, 256, 260 Los novios búlgaros/Bulgarian Lovers (Eloy de la Iglesia 2003) 123

Rezervni Deli/Spare Parts (Damjan Kozole, 2003) 202 S S’en fout la mort/No Fear, No Die (Claire Denis, 1990) 125 Saïd (Llorenç Soler, 1999) 23, 34, 39, 40, 41–43, 58 Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (Stephen Frears, 1987) 258 Se buscan fulmontis/Full Monty Required (Alex Calvo Sotelo, 1999) 61

M Mammoth (Lukas Moodysson, 2008) 119 María llena eres de gracia/Maria Full of Grace (Joshua Marston, 2004) 119 Memoires d’immigrés: l’héritage maghrébi/ Immigrant Memories: The Maghrebi Heritage (Yamina Benguigui, 1997) 67, 224, 253 Métisse (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1993) 214 My Beautiful Laundrette (Stephen Frears, 1986) x, 25, 226, 227–230, 237 My Son the Fanatic (Udayan Prasad, 1997) 25, 226, 227, 230–232, 241

T Taxi (Carlos Saura, 1996) 24, 145, 147, 150, 151–152, 153, 159, 172 Terraferma/Dry Land (by Emanuele Crialese, 2011) 24, 145, 167–169 The Price of Sex (Mimi Chakarova, 2011) viii, 23, 94, 110–116, 117, 118 Touki Bouki (Djibril Diop Mambéty, 1973) 30 Transe/Trance (Teresa Villaverde, 2006) viii, 23, 94, 107–110

N Nina’s Heavenly Delights (Pratibha Parmar, 2006) x, 25, 226, 227, 233, 235–238, 256, 257

U Un novio para Yasmina/A Fiancé for Yasmina (Carmen Cardona, 2008) 89

P Passeurs de Rêves/Beyond Our Dreams (Hiner Saleem, 2000) 201 Poniente/West (Chus Gutiérrez, 2002) viii, 24, 48, 145, 147, 150, 151, 152–155, 159 Princesa/Princess (Henrique Goldman, 2001) viii, 23, 123, 134–138, 139, 140, 141 Princesas/Princesses (Fernando León de Aranoa, 2005) 88–89

V Vivre me tue/Life Kills Me (Jean Pierre Sinapi, 2003) 123 W Wir haben vergessen zurückzukehren/We Have Forgotten to Return (Fatih Akin, 2001) 259 Welcome (Philip Lioret, 2009) 202 West Is West (Andy De Emmony, 2010) 258 What’s Cooking (Gurinder Chadha, 2000) 259

R Retorno a Hansala/Return to Hansala (Chus Gutiérrez, 2008) ix, 24, 177, 183–187, 193 265

Isolina Ballesteros Immigration Cinema in the New Europe examines a variety of films from the early 1990s that depict and address the lives and identities of both first-generation immigrants and children of the diaspora in Europe. Whether they are authored by immigrants themselves or by white Europeans who use the resources and means of production of dominant cinema to politically engage with the immigrants’ predicaments, these films, Isolina Ballesteros shows, are unmappable—a condition resulting from immigration cinema’s re-combination and deliberate blurring of filmic conventions pertaining to two or more genres. In an age of globalization and increased migration, this book theorizes immigration cinema in relation to notions such as gender, hybridity, transculturation, border crossing, transnationalism, and translation.

Isolina Ballesteros is associate professor in the department of modern languages and comparative literature and the film studies program of Baruch College (CUNY). photo © Ignacio Ballesteros

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