Exile and Migration in Cinema

European mainstream media have placed considerable attention on the so-called “refugee crisis” over the past decades, and increasingly so since 2015, contributing to characterizations of migration as arguably the most “sweeping transformation of collective historical experience since WWII” (Burgoyne & Bayrakdar, 2022). Films from the twentieth century onwards have also ignited discourse on the challenges of portraying acts of migration and migrants themselves, as exemplified by films such as Elia Kazan’s America America (1963) or, more recently, in Gianfranco Rosi’s Fire at Sea (2016). In turn, academic discourses on migration and cinema have shed light on issues relating to the experience of departure, border crossing, and (occasionally) return, either from resulting from successful or denied migration.

However, this working group aims to examine migration from a geographical and environmental perspective. Migration and exile cinema portray delineated spaces, that is, what Marc Augier calls “non-space” or what Edward Soja calls “third space,” both of which testify to the troubling experience of (un)settlement and the kind of hindered mobility associated with migratory practices of the twentieth and twenty-first century. By focusing on natural environments (such as sky, deserts, volcanoes) and elements, by introducing pace and rhythm, by importing different sounds or by mixing different visual traditions — such as cartography or mapping —, cinema offers multifaceted ways of portraying migratory experiences.

Meeting once a month, this working group will reflect on how cinema films spaces of migration and creates knowledge of migratory acts and experiences by investigating space and movement. We question the role of films and the formal devices they use to capture the hybrid nature of moving bodies across unsettling, unwelcoming, or unknown spaces and environments. As a representational medium, how is film an adequate medium and apparatus to record a transitory or static moment linked to the exile condition? How does cinema, as an environmental medium, portray the experience of migration? Is cinema a medium of migration? How does cinema represent the complex status of displacement and of global moving dynamics when its grammar is rooted in delineating a frame and a space? The goal of this working group is to investigate how films, projecting spaces of migration, offer reflection on displacement as a modern condition of our contemporary world, in relation to our understanding of the cinematic medium itself.