Cinema of Migration in Italy since 1990

The cinema is a central place of the (self) articulation of history. Films participate negotiate and circulate cultural meanings, conveying norms, creating identities, but also potentially changing cultural orders in a performative way by suggesting a sense of possibilities. Following this premise, our research project maps the Italian cinema di migrazione, that is, contemporary Italian films on migration. Since the 1990s, the Italian cinema di migrazione has been responding to a predominantly pejorative mass media coverage on immigration into Italian society by creating a kind of counter-image, but also with dealing critically with Italys own history of colonialism and emigration. One of the central objectives of our research project is to question whether and to what extent these films live up to their claim of providing a counterculture (a cinema dimpegno), that is, to what extent the cinema di migrazione truly challenges regimes of the gaze and of power by showing a different and differentiated Italy beyond the stereotypes of (movie) history. This is a research project in Film Cultural Studies with a decidedly interdisciplinary approach: Italian Studies will be brought into dialogue with Film Studies, with Gender, Intersectional and Labor Studies, with Border Studies and Studies in the collective memory. Our work will be guided by four main aspects: a) First, we inquire into the location of migrant films between the genres of melodrama, road movie and new Heimatfilm. The mere act of cinematographic representation as encountered in the cinema di migrazione transposes migrants from the periphery (in contrast to media coverage) into the centre. The question here is how this centre is shaped in terms of narration and visualisation, and which genre rules the respective productions adhere to. b) The second aspect is directed at intersectionality, starting with the premise that relationships of inequality and repression cannot be reduced to only one identity category. Rather, these appear intertwined, reinforce, mitigate, and change each other. A case in point will be examinations of the interplay of ethnic backgrounds, gender and work as staged in the cinema di migrazione. c) Our third focus is on the question as to what extent these films in their endeavour to deconstruct geographical and ethnic frontiers may really be considered as a form of alternative and transnational (filmic) historiography of italianità. d) Our last area of concern is the collective memory of the American Dream, that is, the medialisation of Italys own emigration. We introduce this historic dimension, which mostly refers to the imaginative (re-) modelling of America as a place of yearning in the commedia allitaliana and contemporary film, as a mode of contrast eliciting further meanings of fictionalised migration in our main corpus of films. In this way, our research project will not only provide a contribution to the Italian cinema di migrazione, but its transnational approach will be able to transpose the importance of seemingly national narratives long neglected in Italy into a global context.

Focusing on Italy means focusing on one of the most distinctive migration cultures in Europe. While Italy's own emigration has long become part of its collective memory, neither postcolonial issues, i.e. Italy's own colonial past, nor contemporary transnational society are discussed constructively enough. At the same time, Italy is located on the geopolitical border of Europe; the Italian island of Lampedusa has long since become the ambivalent epitome of flight and the politics of a "European fortress". The aim of the research project is a cultural studies analysis of contemporary Italian migration cinema since 1990, which we regard as a cinema engagé that repeatedly tries to subvert genre logics as well as apparent medial border between fiction and fact. The project based on the premise that films participate in cultural processes of circulation and negotiation which not only convey norms but thanks to their "sense of possibility" may change cultural orders in a performative way. The theoretical focus was therefore placed on fundamental questions of intersectional politics, collective memory and aesthetics in times of neoliberalism. Our research on migration cinema in Italy is due to four research focuses: A) The focus was on (hybrid) genres, genre rewriting or counter-narration. Sabine Schrader shows that, since the documentary is usually beyond commercial constraints, how documentaries in Italy are particularly experimental. The genre not only deals with the diversity of (post)migration, but also with the diversity of concepts of reality and their mediatization; B) The second focus is due to the impact of intersectional approaches on 'migrant' and 'Italian' identities. Mario V. Casale deconstructs models of masculinity and femininity and debunks the (in)visibilityof the sexual minorities. C) Based on studies of Judith Butler on precarity, Stella Lange discovered the concept of frame in order to grasp media-critical strategies to question the representation of diverse migrating subjects affected by different perceptual and material forms of precarity. The aesthetically motivated frame analysis in film is a decisive point of departure as it enables to analyze the interplay between precarity and media reflexivity. D) Antonio Salmeri does a research on transnational collective memory that recurs to Italy's history of emigration/colonialism. The thesis is, that the cultural function of Italian emigration movies consists in a work of 'disenchantment' of the imaginary of emigration, though witnessing and enabling important processes of (re-)definition of social reality. At the end, there are 37 publications in the context the research project. Two phd-thesis and one post-doctoral thesis are close to completion. Furthermore, it was our endeavour to make the cinema of migrations better known beyond academic discourse and, among other things, we cooperated strongly with the international Innsbruck film festival InnContro from 2018 onwards.