Queering the Migrant in Contemporary European Cinema


Book Description

This exciting and original volume offers the first comprehensive critical study of the recent profusion of European films and television addressing sexual migration and seeking to capture the lives and experiences of LGBTIQ+ migrants and refugees. Queering the Migrant in Contemporary European Cinema argues that embodied cinematic representations of the queer migrant, even if at times highly ambivalent and contentious, constitute an urgent new repertoire of queer subjectivities and socialities that serve to undermine the patrolled borders of gender and sexuality, nationhood and citizenship, and refigure or queer fixed notions and universals of identity like ‘Europe’ and national belonging based on the model of the family. At stake ethically and politically is the elaboration of a ‘transborder’ consciousness and aesthetics that counters the homonationalist, xenophobic and homo/trans-phobic representation of the ‘migrant to Europe’ figure rooted in the toxic binaries of othering (the good vs bad migrant, host vs guest, indigenous vs foreigner). Bringing together 16 contributors working in different national film traditions and embracing multiple theoretical perspectives, this powerful and timely collection will be of major interest to both specialists and students in Film and Media Studies, Gender and Queer Studies, Migration/Mobility Studies, Cultural Studies, and Aesthetics.




European Cinema in Motion


Book Description

This collection brings together international experts on the cinema of migration and diaspora in postcolonial and postnational Europe. It offers a comprehensive theoretical and analytical discussion of a highly productive creative sector and documents the spectrum of this area of exploration in European, transnational and World Cinema studies.




Conflict and Survival in Contemporary Western European Film


Book Description

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, efforts to improve human rights, social equality, and democracy in western Europe have faced growing challenges that range from economic and medical crises to the resurgence of the tribalist far right. Studying western European cinema reveals how filmmakers have been using their art to reflect on the region’s contemporary problems and potentials. In Conflict and Survival in Contemporary Western European Film, John Alexander Williams and Alexandra Hagen have collected a diverse array of essays that analyzehow filmmakers have portrayed forms of strifeand endurancein the new century. Divided into three thematic sections—historical conflicts and national identities; migrants, natives, and battles over space; and ethical struggles in everyday life—this book offers case studies of historical context, narrative, and form in a range of significant recent films. Showcasing such movies as Days of Glory, A War, Code Unknown, The Edge of Heaven, Toni Erdmann, The Great Beauty, and Weekend, this fascinating collection presents contemporary filmmakers as critical citizen-artists who are directly involved in interrogating the past, present, and future of Europe.




Women and Migration in Contemporary Italian Cinema


Book Description

Women and Migration in Contemporary Italian Cinema: Screening Hospitality puts gender at the centre of cinematic representations of contemporary transnational Italian identities. It offers an intersectional feminist analysis of the ways in which transnational migration has been represented, understood, and constructed in the contemporary cinema of Italy. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s notion of hospitality and in dialogue with postcolonial and decolonial theory, queer studies, and feminist critiques, the six chapters of the book focus on a series of exemplary fiction films from the last twenty years, which both reflect and shape the nation’s responses to the growing presence of transnational migrants in Italian society. The book shows how questions of gender, sexual difference, and reproductivity have been central to Italian filmmakers’ approaches to stories of mobility and displacement. Gender is also enmeshed in the rhetoric and poetic of hospitality that filmmakers propose as a critical framework to condemn Italian border policies and politics. Women and Migration in Contemporary Italian Cinema: Screening Hospitality traces an arc that moves from the embrace of a humanitarian rhetoric of infinite hospitality toward migrants, apparent in films produced in the early 2000s, to a more fluid understanding of Italian identities from a transnational perspective.




Cosmopolitan Aspirations in Contemporary Cinema


Book Description

This book presents cosmopolitanism as a useful methodological approach to understand the transnational synergies present in contemporary cinema. In line with existing literature from the social sciences, the volume aims to contribute to the ‘cosmopolitan turn’ in cinema studies. It considers cosmopolitanism as, among others, a personal and social aspiration of social justice, world citizenship and celebration of difference; a notion to be criticised as elitist, Western, often imperialist, and homogenising; and an actually existing social practice characterised by contradiction, messiness and conflict. The chapters in this volume offer insights into the variety of sometimes contradictory discourses that arise from a cosmopolitan interpretation of a wide variety of film texts. Key topics explored in this book include borders, (im)mobilities, migration, race, class and film aesthetics. This book will be particularly useful to film studies scholars and students looking at transnational, global, world and decolonial cinemas and focusing on topics like borders, migration and multiculturalism in film. This book will also appeal to academic communities studying media, literature, mobilities, geopolitics, sociology and the social sciences in general.




Screen borders


Book Description

Film and television offer important insights into social outlooks on borders in France and Europe more generally. This book undertakes a visual cultural history of contemporary borders through a film and television tour. It traces on-screen borders from the Gare du Nord train station in Paris to Calais, London, Lampedusa and Lapland. It contends that different types of mobilities and immobilities (refugees, urban commuters, workers in a post-industrial landscape) and vantage points (from borderland forests, ports, train stations, airports, refugee centers) are all part of a complex French and European border narrative. It covers a wide range of examples, from popular films and TV series to auteur fiction and documentaries by well-known directors from across Europe and beyond.




Brexit and the Migrant Voice


Book Description

Brexit and the Migrant Voice provides a platform for the perspectives of European citizens and migrants living and working in the UK by assessing their representation in British and European cultural productions (literature, drama, the media) and by foregrounding their attitudes, their fears, and their concerns about Brexit. The book looks at Brexit through the eyes of Britain’s European citizens (‘Europe in Britain’), while also looking at European perceptions of Britain as a nation (‘Britain in Europe’), via a geographical journey – from West to East –across Europe. The book assesses how these countries, their citizens, and their cultural productions engage with the questions and challenges posed by Brexit. It brings together an exciting line-up of European academics and scholars, both early-career and well-established, from a variety of subject disciplines. Some live and work within UK Higher Education Institutions and thus look at Britain from within, while others reside within their countries of origin and look at Britain from the outside. Their chapters assess Brexit via a plethora of cultural outputs – Brexit fiction from their individual countries, opinion pieces, press discussions, but also narratives of compatriots affected by the UK’s decision to leave the European Union. The authors’ individual focal points on fiction, journalism, blog posts, theatre performances, and other cultural productions offer an innovative and comprehensive picture about thoughts on Brexit from around Europe that will fill an important gap in the market. This book will appeal to the academic market at undergraduate, postgraduate, and academic researcher level in a wide variety of disciplines including Literature, Politics and International Relations, European Studies, History, Cultural Studies, Sociology, and Media Studies.




Queer European Cinema


Book Description

Queer European Cinema commences with an overview of LGBTQ representation throughout cinematic history, interwoven with socio-political reality in Europe and beyond, to consider trends including the boarding school film, the gay road movie, and queer horror such as the lesbian vampire tale, before analysing case studies from the ‘low culture’ of pornography to the ‘high culture’ of arthouse cinema. This collection of essays explores borders and boundaries of geography, temporality, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and desire in a range of European films at a time when both LGBTQ politics and the concept of Europe are under intense scrutiny in representation and reality, to demonstrate how LGBTQ film can serve as a political tool to create visibility and acceptance as well as providing entertainment. Chapters include an analysis of both trans and femme identities in Academy Award-winning Boys Don’t Cry alongside German film, Unveiled; the intersection of lesbian visibility and the notion of nation on the Croatian screen at its point of entry into the European Union and during the gay marriage referendum; music and its relation to camp in Italian transnational cinema; European lesbian feminist pornography; and an analysis of liminal spaces and citizenship in queer French-language road movies. This book was originally published as a special issue of Studies in European Cinema.




Border Cinema


Book Description

The rise of digital media and globalization’s intensification since the 1990s have significantly refigured global cinema’s form and content. The coincidence of digitalization and globalization has produced what this book helps to define and describe as a flourishing border cinema whose aesthetics reflect, construct, intervene in, denature, and reconfigure geopolitical borders. This collection demonstrates how border cinema resists contemporary border fortification processes, showing how cinematic media have functioned technologically and aesthetically to engender contemporary shifts in national and individual identities while proposing alternative conceptions of these identities to those promulgated by the often restrictive current political rhetoric and ideologies that represent a backlash to globalization.




Working Women on Screen


Book Description