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...a glass of beer stands at the window of a nondescript high-rise apartment building looking out at the traffic on a highway. On what seems to be the soundtrack but is actually a stereo playing in the room, a woman's voice chants in English an activist song entitled "Manifesto" about democracy and freedom being violated, taken up halfway through by a man's voice in Spanish. In the bed facing the window, a naked woman (Lubna Azabal) gluttonously eats a bowl of ice cream. After dropping the glass out of the window which unceremoniously crashes below, the man turns off the stereo and proposes in French to the woman that they go to Algeria. This suggestion elicits howls of laughter from the woman and a derisive question asking him what he possibly thinks he will do in Algeria. Before the opening credit sequence begins, a nondiegetic insert, which is really a flash forward, of an extreme long shot of a large group of people moving across a barren and arid landscape appears as the red letters of the film's title are superimposed on the image.
This telling prologue, proposing a constant and unmitigated movement across linguistic, spatial, and formal boundaries, appropriately introduces a postmodern road movie in which the main characters attempt to retrace a previous generation's itinerary of exile. Zano, who proposes the trip, is the orphaned son of a pied noir family having returned to France following the Algerian War of Liberation. Naima is the second-generation daughter of a Magherbian immigrant family who never learned Arabic because her father did not want to talk about his homeland. Along the journey through Spain, Morocco, and Algeria, punctuated with a mix of music from different cultures, the pair meets a host of equally uprooted characters moving across national borders. But as these two characters arrive at the much desired destination--Zano visits the former family apartment and grave of his grandfather in Algiers and Naima participates in "authentic" experiences of her cultural tradition--the return to the generationally removed origin proves to be insufficient and illusory and the film ends openly with the two characters on the road again. As an exploration of the contemporary human condition, Gatlif's film implies that the world is filled with such nomads perpetually and perhaps uncontrollably moving across the porous borders of nations and cultures. (1)
Exiles is just one of a recent wave of internationally acclaimed films that actively situate themselves between nations and cultures. Films like Julie Bertucelli's Depuis qu'Otar est parti / Since Otar Left (2003; Critics Week Grand Prize, Cannes Film Festival), Olivier Assayas's Clean (2004; Best Actress, Cannes Film Festival), Fatih Akin's Gegen die Wand/Head On (2004; Golden Bear, Berlin Film Festival), Ismael Ferroukhi's Le Grand Voyage/The Great Voyage (2004; Luigi De Laurentiis Award, Venice Film Festival), and Gianni Amelio's La Chiavi di Casa /Keys to the House (2004; CinemAvenire and Pasinetti & Sergio Trasatti Awards, Venice Film Festival), among others, equally examine the issue of personal and group identity during and after the process of displacement. Multilingual and multicultural, these films illustrate the transnational and transcultural realities of existence in an era of globalization. Moreover, as a cinematic phenomenon, these films underscore what seems to be a recent trend in world cinema that challenges and rewrites the idea of the institution of film as an element bound by the parameters of national culture.
FILMS ON THE BORDER
Et voila, c'est pas formidable, mais la patronne fait tres bien la cuisine. Labas vous avez des dunes ... derriere les dunes, la frontiere. Et la frontiere passee, c'est la liberte, comme on dit. [This is it, it's not great, but the proprietress is a good cook. Over there are the dunes ... behind the dunes, the border. Once you pass the border, it's freedom, as they say.]
--Le Crime de Monsieur Lange / The Crime of Monsieur Lange (Jean Renoir, 1935)
Cinema, having emerged in the era of the "imagined communities" of late nineteenth-century nationalism, has invariably been conceived of in historical, economic, social, and aesthetic terms as a function of the conjunction of national culture and modernity. As a mode of film practice comprising "a set of stylistic norms sustained by and sustaining an integral mode of production (Bordwell xiv), national cinemas, as they have developed and evolved, particularly in relation and reaction to Hollywood, clearly constitute a more complex cultural practice than simply a group of films produced within the borders of one or another nation-state. Extrapolating beyond production to reception in conventions of distribution, networks of exhibition, and the critical discourses that arise around these patterns of reception, as Andrew Higson has demonstrated, usefully amplifies the national model so as to include specific representational practices involving theme and content which "draw on [national] identities already in circulation" but also "produce new representations of the nation" (6). The consideration of additional culturally specific film practices like the evolution of particular genres and the historically unique intersection of nation and cinema in aesthetic movements (e.g., German Expressionism, Italian NeoRealism, French Nouvelle Vague, etc.) provides a fuller picture of the potential richness and depth of the idea of a national cinema and the politics of location visibly enacted in such a construct. (2)
Despite the very international development of film, the national model of cinema has undeniably dominated the way commentary has conceived of the medium from 1895 to the present. Nonetheless, before the advent of the transnational moment and process of transculturation that invariably results from it, there have been in the history of film moments and movements that to varying degrees seem to elude the national model and challenge aspects of its applicability and validity. While certain culturally coded aesthetics and genres are closely associated with historically unique political, economic, and social realities of a national culture, film history has shown that a number of these styles and forms can nonetheless migrate to other cultures and be appropriated and absorbed into new cinematic traditions. German Expressionism, born of the post-World War I instability of the early Weimar period and exhibiting on the screen a compendium of traits that "testifies to their prominence in the German collective soul" (Kracauer 74), nonetheless furnished a sufficiently malleable and mobile stylistic palette that could be transplanted, in part due to the movement in the 1930s of German emigres and exiles to Hollywood, into a post-World War II American film noir zeitgeist. Italian Neo-Realism, itself referentially echoing French Poetic Realism of the late 1930s and similarly emerging in a period of intense nationalist expression, could be appropriated by Spanish filmmakers in the 1950s following the 1955 National Film Congress in Salamanca and subsequently employed as "an effective vehicle for critiquing Franco's false picture of Spain within the national context as well as an ideal means for overcoming Spain's isolation by expressing its unique cultural identity abroad ..." (Kinder 28). In terms of genres, perhaps the most striking example of the deterrorialization of a culturally coded cinematic form is the spaghetti western (alternatively called the "Euro western" and the "Italian western") produced in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s. At a time when "cinema broke loose of its national moorings, financially and culturally" (Landy 181), the Italian version of a quintessentially American genre, drawing on the model of the "peplum" or "sand-and-sword" epics of the late 1950s and early 1960s, frequently involved the simulation of "Americanness" as directors would invariably disguise "their national identities with English pseudonyms" and employ "one or two recognizably American...
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The Cannes film festival as transnational space., January 01, 2006
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