Film, national cinema,
with newly drawn borders or were forced to
and migration
Giorgio Bertellini
The emergence of motion pictures and the
phenomenon of world migrations are pro­
foundly interrelated: their threads span from
social and economic history to racial politics
and film aesthetics. The historical appearance
of moving pictures in the West coincided, in
fact, with an increasing network of commercial
transactions and movement of goods and
peoples that connected industrially developed
countries with each other and with under­
developed ones. Over the past half­century,
migration patterns have followed ever more
complicated geographical routes. As such they
have more broadly and radically affected con­
temporary media geography and film poetics
even though migrations per se have not had a
comparably transformative impact on all
national film cultures. Still, the world’s film
cultures, when read through the lens of migra­
tion, reveal overlooked historical junctures and
inform fruitful revisionist takes, particularly
with regard to national cinemas’ past and
future significance.
Cinema, migration, and foreigners
The Americas
In the early decades of the 20th century, it
was North and South American cinema that
most radically experienced the dynamics of
transnational and intra­national mobility of
mass populations. Far from pertaining only to
the resettling movements of Europeans, the
migrations to and within the Americas also
involved Asian people, African Americans
moving from the rural US South to northern
urban centers, and native populations who
The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration, Edited by Immanuel Ness.
© 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781444351071.wbeghm235
found themselves “immigrants” in nations
retreat into inland deserts and marginal
regions. Overall, migrants to and within the
Americas inflected national cinemas’ ideologi­
cal, aesthetic, and social fabric, by patterning
films’ subject matter, genres, representational
routines, styles, and stars’ identity – both on
and off screen (Bertellini 2005). For instance,
the study of US cinema’s depiction of Italian
immigrants and Native Americans as primi­
tive, yet sympathetic characters has identified
in the traveling and intermedial aesthetic of the
picturesque – from European art and photog­
raphy to American cinema – one of silent
American films’ defining poetic strategies
(Bertellini 2009). Similarly, migration has
become a key operative concept to discuss the
encounter of silent cinema with black urban
modernity in the US (Stewart 2005).
Furthermore, movie­going among foreign­
ers, native populations, and former slaves – and
their descendants – contributed to defining the
public nature of cinema in the Americas during
the medium’s decisive formative years and its
establishment as the most affordable national
pastime. To foster distinct national film cul­
tures, for instance, film productions in the US,
Brazil, and Argentina matched migrants’
matrix of cultural differences with familiar his­
torical phenomena, whether related to the
closing of the Frontier, the end of colonial
domination, or the peopling of countries’ ter­
ritories. American formulations of cinematic
nation were different from European para­
digms of homogeneous national identity: they
exuded the New World features of modernity
and racial diversity while still employing such
traditional markers as local folklore, history,
and customs. Before and after World War II, both
critics and practitioners claimed that cinema
in North and South America (as well as in Aus­
tralia) welcomed, addressed, and ultimately
2 film, national cinema, and migration
encouraged the synthesis of foreign and “dis­
sonant” cultural constituencies into authentic
New World narratives.
The presence of immigrants in the cinemas
of the Americas, in particular, shaped produc­
tion, representation, and marketing or self­
positioning. Excluded from established lines of
business, immigrant entrepreneurs, particu­
larly but not exclusively Jews from Russia
and Eastern Europe, occupied the posts of
early film producers and exhibitors, and con­
tributed significantly to the development of
all­American (i.e. US, Argentinian, and Brazil­
ian) film narratives. Second, the cinemas of the
Americas, more than other film traditions,
engaged with racial difference as a self­defining
visual and narrative resource. Recasting repre­
sentational routines borrowed from the legiti­
mate stage, vaudeville, minstrelsy, mainstream
literature, and ethnic music, American films
deployed migrations’ racialized subjects into
stories, dramatic and comedic, of sought­after
adaptation and precarious assimilation. This
translated into distinctly American genres. For
the US one may consider the case of slapstick
comedies, immigrant melodramas, gangster
and western films; for Argentina, the gaucho
film; for Brazil, the chanchada musical come­
dies (Lusnich 2005). Third, owing to the
extraordinary diversity of their film audiences,
the North and South American film industries
managed to design and structure their produc­
tions as popular mass entertainments, endowed
with broad international appeal.
Europe
In the case of Hollywood, mass production and
transnational marketability became the key
semiotic and industrial protocols for both
domestic and international dominations, par­
ticularly after the devastation of the European
film industries during World War I. Further,
the widely acknowledged post­1920s contribu­
tions of émigré European directors, stars, cin­
ematographers, and so on, turned Hollywood
into an international matrix of styles and nar­
ratives, at once informing and questioning
Hollywood’s profile as the locus of a national
cinema (Morrison 1998; Smedley 2011). By
contrast, the significant, yet numerically limited,
presence in the interwar period of émigré
Russian filmmakers in 1930s France or of
German directors in the UK has not fueled
comparative discussions about a constitutive
foreign dimension of French and British
national cinema (Phillips 2003; Bergfelder &
Cargnelli 2008).
Post-World War II narratives
After World War II, the narrative of migration
to industrialized Western centers acquired aes­
thetic import within auteur cinema, for
instance in Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His
Brothers (1960) and Elia Kazan’s America,
America (1963), whose film stars – Alain Delon
and Frank Wolff – allowed for uncomfortable
forms of identification. Concurrently, however,
historical processes of political independence
affecting both European colonies and their
imperialistic referents and, much later, the
post­1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe recast
and complicated the notion of migration with
the more politicized ones of exile and diaspora.
Displaced and mobile subjects could not
remain peripheral to Europe’s national film
narratives: they lay bare past imperialistic poli­
cies and practices, making them visible in the
new social and racial landscapes of metropoli­
tan centers’ downtown areas, hearable in new
music trends, and readable in well­regarded
novel literary outputs. The darlings of film fest­
ivals devoted significant screen space to new
immigrants and constructed new subject posi­
tions by casting nonprofessional or little­
known actors and native migrants to convey
representational cogency and realism, as in
Emir Kusturica’s and Tony Gatlif ’s films cele­
brating the Roma (i.e. Time of the Gypsies,
1989; Gadjo dilo, 1997); Gianni Amelio’s and
Bernardo Bertolucci’s sympathetic works on
Albanians and Africans in Italy (Lamerica,
1994; Besieged, 1998); and Mathieu Kassovitz’s
unaccommodating exploration of mixed­race
drama in the Parisian banlieues in La Haine
(1995).
 film, national cinema, and migration 3
New migrations and transnational film
There is, however, another, relatively more
recent strain of film productions whose emer­
gence and reception impinges upon an aes­
thetic map much broader than the traditional
landscape of national film cultures or art
cinema. The process that designed this global
and thus transnational socioaesthetic cartogra­
phy has two obvious constituents. It combines
new migrations – from the Balkans, northern
Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia to
both Western and non­Western locations –
with new modalities of media production and
distribution – independent, nonhegemonic,
para­institutional – that have greatly compli­
cated traditional practices of cinematic narra­
tives and reception. In the influential analysis
of Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large this
rupturing global turn “takes media and migra­
tion as its two major, and interconnected, dia­
critics and explores their joint effect on the
work of the imagination as a constitutive feature
of modern subjectivity” (2005: 3).
In the world’s global cultural economy, in
other words, both historical events and migra­
tory populations have become intertwined as
mass mediated. Far from being simply isolated
national affairs, migrations, migrant image­
makers, and migratory audiences have become,
even when distant from Western metropolitan
centers of media production, stories and
images fully synchronized with international
media offerings. No more exclusively linked to
peripheral subjects, mass mediated migrations
(and diasporas) have become a matrix of global
narratives and taste, featuring new and widely
appealing forms of subjectivity. Not only are
stars inessential to these productions, but their
presence has become unfavorable to forms of
deterritorializing identification that depend on
new conceptions of home, community, and
nation. The work of Homi Bhabha (1990) has
been instrumental in popularizing the key
figuration of these narratives in terms of an
“aesthetic of hybridity” that affects ideas of
subjectivity, social groups, and cultural influ­
ence and distribution. Hybridity also extends
to any plausible definition of “cinema,” to
encompass forms of digital image­making
whose combination of independence institu­
tional affiliation and high production standard
enables new, yet still potentially widespread,
consumption practices. To better understand
the place of these migration­centered works,
one needs to draw its contours alongside two
familiar, yet fast­evolving production and
reception modes.
Deterritorialization, migration, and film
In the last few decades, the deterritorializion of
production and reception within the political
and economic framework of globalization has
designed new multicultural media dynamics
and enhanced novel transnational poetics.
Critics and practitioners have described one
such dynamics as “global Hollywood,” identify­
ing it as a multicentered, yet powerfully hege­
monic reorganization of cultural labor and
capital resources (Miller et al. 2001). A second,
emerging dynamic is “global art cinema,” con­
sisting of a geopolitical expansion of familiar
forms of art cinema practices enhanced by
processes of global media re­mediation (i.e.
film festivals) and digital press coverage (Galt
& Schoonover 2010).
One particular phenomenon of interest in
this case is the growth in number and poetic
consistency of transnationally mobile art direc­
tors. They include, among others, Taiwan’s Ang
Lee, Japan’s Takeshi Kitano, Hong Kong’s John
Woo and Wong Kar Wai, Mauritania’s Abder­
rahmane Sissako, Bolivia’s Jorge Sanjinés, Iran’s
Abbas Kiarostami, and Austria’s Michael
Haneke. Interacting and intersecting with these
two modes of production, a cinematic output
that we may describe as migration­centered
cinema does not repeat the classic articulations
of Third World Cinema or of the so­called
“Third Cinema” (Tercer Cine), understood by
its Latin American founders (Solanas & Getino
1976; Gabriel 1982) as consisting of anticolonial­
ist, subversive, and thus clandestine produc­
tions opposing the tenets of mass entertainment
(Hollywood) and personal expression (European
4 film, national cinema, and migration
art film). As paradigmatically discussed in
Shohat and Stam’s Unthinking Eurocentrism
(1994), movements of people and media works
in a postcolonial world have mobilized the
resilient tropes of empire, racism, and militant
opposition, but they have also opened new
narrative and stylistic possibilities centered, for
instance, on syncretism, self­styling, and intereth­
nic relation.
The most cogent encounters between
cinema and migrations have in fact enriched
and expanded Western film cultures by enter­
taining with them a rapport of critical engage­
ment and linguistic affinity. Referring to
filmmakers who grew up in developing coun­
tries, but work in the West (Trinh T. Minh­ha,
Ghasem Ebrahimiam, Mira Nair, and Ann
Hui), and including Western filmmakers per­
sonally engaged in experiences of displacement
(i.e. Chantal Akerman, Atom Egoyan, Nina
Menkes, and Chris Marker), Hamid Naficy has
introduced the notion of “accented cinema.” In
his words “accent emanates not so much from
the accented speech of the diegetic characters
as from the displacement of the filmmakers
and their artisanal production modes” (2001:
4). Naficy’s influential critical approach,
expanded by others in terms of “intercultural
cinema” or “hyphenated identity cinema,” res­
onates with Fernando Ortiz’s anthropological
concept of “transculturation” and Avtar Brah’s
sociological notion of “diaspora space.”
This new cartography of migrant and
diasporic cinema includes beur cinema, com­
prising the work of filmmakers of Maghrebi
descent who grew up and operate in France
(Tarr 2005); the large catalog of black diasporic
cinema, ranging from African to Caribbean
productions (Martin 1995; Petty 2008); British
South Asian and black film, inaugurated by
Stephen Frears’ My Beautiful Laundrette (1985),
written by British Pakistani Hanif Kureishi,
and recently repopularized by Gurinder Chad­
ha’s Bend It Like Beckham (2001) (Korte &
Sternberg 2004); the Turkish German cinema
exemplified, among others, by Fatih Akin’s
Gegen die Wand/Head-On (2004) and Yueksel
Yavuz’s Kleine Freiheit/A Little Bit of Freedom
(2003) (Eken 2009); the Spanish productions
devoted to African and South American immi­
grants including Chus Gutiérrez’s Poniente
(2002) and Fernando León de Aranoa’s
Princesas/Princesses (2005) (Santaolalla 2010);
and the Hispanic and Chinese transnational
cinema of Benito Zambrano’s Havana Blues
(2005) and Jia Zhangke’s The World (2004)
(Shaw 2007; Lu 1997). Among these produc­
tions one may also include Canadian works
devoted to Japanese and Chinese immigrants,
such as Mina Shum’s Double Happiness (1994),
Kayo Hatta’s Picture Bride (1995), and Ruth
Ozeki Lounsbury’s Halving the Bones (1995),
or revealing exposés of multicultural tensions
among immigrants living in Oslo and Vienna
as in Erik Poppe’s Schpaa (1998) and Barbara
Albert’s Northern Skirts (1999).
Conclusion
Finally, one ought also to consider the question
of migrating films and audiences capable of
creating novel modes of “transnational kinship”
(Ginsburg et al. 2002; Moorti 2003). Paradig­
matic in this instance is the success of Bolly­
wood films in Africa’s video stores (Larkin
2003) or the broad circulation of Indian films
in general among diasporic Indian communi­
ties in the Middle East, Europe, and North
America enabled by the continuous success
of Indian film festivals in Los Angeles, New
York, London, and Florence. In such contexts
spectating migrants design new and untradi­
tional maps of diasporic cultural consumption
that are not accounted for within national film
studies.
The recasting of ideas of “home” and “com­
munity” in transnational terms has not meant
the elimination of these fundamental categor­
ies altogether. On the contrary, without opting
for essentializing solutions, the ambivalence of
migrant and diasporic cinema reproposes key
referential questions. Cinema and migration
may be unified in very symbolic and imagina­
tive terms, but the precise cogency of historical
conditions cannot be easily erased. What has
emerged, instead, is a phenomenon that cul­
tural geographers refer to as “scale jumping,” a
dynamic and reversible movement from local
 film, national cinema, and migration 5
to global that affects characters, settings, lan­
guages, and stories. Defined by a tension
between alienating uprootedness and a new
rootedness in “translocal” sites and behaviors,
immigrants’ mass mediated lives represent the
most modern global “contact zones,” which
are capable of linking distant geographies and
enabling new transcultural experiences. Read
through the optic of migration (and diaspora),
the recent production of migration­centered
films grant global spectators the chance to
recenter their experience of the present with
what Dina Iordanova has termed a “more acute
peripheral vision” (2010: 23).
SEE ALSO: Film and migration, Africa; Film and
migration, East Asia; Film and migration, Latin
America; Film festivals and migration
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