Imaginary and Disenchantment in italian cinema of emigration

The Italian emigration experience is an integral part of collective memory and finds strong resonance in a vibrant repository of popular cultural practices. Film, television, music, and literature narrate this modern utopia, characterized by the pursuit of happiness, freedom, and self-determination, but also recount the hardship, misery, and poverty that led to emigration and shaped collective worlds of imagination and memory. Cinema, in particular, gives form to this imaginary topography, often portraying a gradient from manifest scarcity to latent abundance. It visualizes a dreamlike landscape of the unconscious as a mythical paese della chimera, the land of cuccagna or a biblical place of salvation where milk and honey flow. This narrative spans roughly 100 years of film history, accompanying the historical realities of Italian emigration with a cinematographic conglomerate of visions and dreams that both precede and follow its historical dimension. As an overlapping or interfering epistemic order, cinema adheres to redundant deep structures and colorful narrative surfaces, which sediment within the collective consciousness and shape these memory archives. The present study seeks to determine emigration narratives in their correlation with processes of cinematic imagination. The staging of a collective imago (dreamscapes, imaginations, and spaces of possibility) is often underestimated in its contribution to social reality, particularly in Italian academic literature. Yet emigration also addresses an internal movement within the world that, in its cultural function, manifests as a disenchantment with grand narratives of fulfillment. This internal movement, according to the central thesis, can be understood as an (inner) resistance. These resistances, as the resulting premise suggests, can be discerned in the diverse manifestations of (re)productive cinematic imagination. Through a diachronic and cursory examination of Italian film history, both popular and lesser- known emigration films are recontextualized and correlated under this perspective. This cinematic history revolves around the potential of film to reveal, conceal, and disenchant, a triad that can be interpreted as the emotional basis of emigration. Cinematic techniques like for instance the interplay between on- and off-screen, contrapuntal music, decentering, reflections within the cinematic image, and especially the numerous intra- and intermedial references, open horizons, unfold perceptual frameworks, create spaces for desires, hopes, and Italian identity constructs, and at the same time, disenchant these promises elsewhere.