Daniela Berghahn

Far-flung families in film : the diasporic family in contemporary European cinema

Why have films with diasporic family narratives increased in popularity in recent years? How do representations of the diasporic family differ from those of more dominant social groups? How does diasporic cinema negotiate the conventions of film genres commonly associated with the representation of the family? In the age of globalisation, diasporic and other types of transnational family are increasingly represented in films such as East is East, Le Grand Voyage, Almanya - Welcome to Germany, Immigrant Memories, Couscous, When We Leave, Monsoon Wedding and My Big Fat Greek Wedding. While there is a significant body of scholarship on the representation of the family in Hollywood cinema, this is the first book to analyse the depiction of Black and Asian British, Maghrebi French and Turkish German families from a comparative transnational perspective. Drawing on critical concepts from diaspora studies, anthropology, socio-historical research on diasporic families and the burgeoning field of transnational film studies, this book is an essential read for Film Studies scholars and students who are researching families and issues of race and ethnicity in cinema, the media and visual culture.

Locating Migrant and Diasporic Cinema in Contemporary Europe

Migrant and diasporic cinema in contemporary Europe is situated at the interface of the discursive fields of European cinema and World Cinema. The films discussed in this volume play a crucial role in the gradual conflation of these two critical paradigms and are indicative of the World Cinema turn which film studies has witnessed since the late 1980s.1 In this chapter we attempt to demarcate some of the conceptual boundaries of migrant and diasporic cinema in relation to overlapping terminologies and frameworks to be found in a growing corpus of related critical writing. We examine their heuristic value and socio-political implications by drawing attention to the inflections and subtexts of social categorisation (Migrantenkino), racial or ethno-national emphases (cinema du metissage, black and Asian British film, French beur cinema), linguistic or spatial concepts (accented cinema, banlieue films, cinema of double occupancy) and transnational approaches (Third Cinema, black film, cinema of the South Asian diaspora). Representational strategies and aesthetic choices as well as questions of authorship and ownership lie at the heart of our exploration of the ways in which this new type of European cinema has been understood and named.

Queering the family of nation: Reassessing fantasies of purity, celebrating hybridity in diasporic cinema

Abstract This article seeks to explore how the disclosure of queer desire is negotiated in the diasporic family. Focusing on Lola and Bilidikid (Kutlug Ataman, 1998), My Beautiful Laundrette (Stephen Frears, 1985) and Ninas Heavenly Delights (Pratibha Parmar, 2006), it examines the intersectionalities of ‘queerness’ and ‘diaspora’ and suggests that queer diasporic identities function as a master trope of hybridity. ‘Coming out’ in the diasporic family articulates a critique of fantasies of purity, which simultaneously underpin certain traditional models of the family (based on bloodline, gender hierarchies and heteronormativity) and nationalist ideologies (based on ethnic absolutism and other essentializing concepts). The family emerges as a privileged site where the contested belonging of the over-determined Other is negotiated. Are the queer sons and daughters expelled? Can their Otherness be absorbed into a homogenizing family of nation? Or are they able to introduce new structures of family and kinship and thereby queer the family of nation?

Film in der DDR – Daten Fakten Strukturen

that pick up Irish content, mostly via the presence of Irish actors. Where did these films play, I wonder? Did their exhibition pattern fit with what Kinematograph Weekly described as the ‘cloth cap’ market? Others will pursue their own interests – gender, genre, aesthetics, acting styles – and use this initial archaeology as the starting point for their own further research. Chibnall and McFarlane have done British film scholarship another remarkable service.

Rewriting History from the Margins: Diasporic Memory, Shabby Chic and Archival Footage

Since the beginning of the heritage cinema debate in the 1980s, the concept has proven enormously popular and, in the British context, virtually all period films made subsequently have been subsumed under this proliferating critical framework (Monk and Sargeant 2002: 11). That heritage cinema has emerged as such an attractive label is all the more surprising given that it has come under attack for promoting a class-biased, conservative and consensual notion of Englishness. The excessive pictorialism, museum aesthetics, and privileging of mise-en-scene, elaborate costumes and retro fashion over narrative has even provoked some derogatory comments from critics who have dubbed heritage cinema ‘the Laura Ashley school of filmmaking’, the ‘Merchant Ivory “Furniture Restoration” aesthetic’ and the ‘white flannel school’ (cited in Vincendeau 2001: xviii–xix). Perhaps the lively scholarly debates that have surrounded heritage cinema ever since Andrew Higson coined the term spring from the fact that it offers a ‘clear explanatory model [that] makes things look simple […] because it confers a pleasing symmetry onto the seeming chaos of cultural forms’ (Harper 2004: 140). The vibrant critical interest in heritage cinema coincides with the actual growth of this successful production trend. As Randall Halle notes, no other genre flourished as much during the 1990s, the decade when the European Union was founded, as the historical film. This simultaneity, he proposes, points towards a significant dialectical tension, ‘because typically the historical genre has been deployed within the national ensemble precisely as a vehicle for the imagining of the national community’ (Halle 2008: 90). It seems as if becoming part of a larger transnational community had stimulated a growing desire to be securely contained in the smaller community of the nation. The surge of heritage films since the 1990s thus reflects a certain nostalgia to be part of a specific national heritage.

‘De Margin and De Centre’: Repositioning Race and Ethnicity in Diasporic European Cinema

In 1988, Isaac Julien, a black British artist and filmmaker, and Kobena Mercer, an art historian and critic who has widely written on black British art and culture, wrote the introduction to ‘The Last Special Issue on Race’, published in the journal Screen. It was entitled ‘De Margin and De Centre’ and has inspired the title of this chapter and many of the arguments I shall develop. Julien and Mercer argue that the 1980s represent a significant juncture in the cinematic representation of ‘cultural difference, identity and otherness — in a word, ethnicity’ (1988: 2), which emerged as a key issue of contestation and public debate at the time. White and black-authored films at the opposite end of the spectrum of artistic practices, including the big budget film The Colour Purple (Steven Spielberg, 1985) and artisanal productions such as Handsworth Songs (John Akomfrah, 1986) and The Passion of Remembrance (Maureen Blackwood and Isaac Julien, 1986) offer competing versions of black experience and memory. With ‘The Last Special Issue on Race’ Julien and Mercer seek to contribute to the ‘break-up and deconstruction of structures that determine what is regarded as culturally central and what is regarded as culturally marginal’ (1988: 2). According to their programmatic vision, in years to come, cultural discourses and practices on race and ethnicity would no longer be assigned a special issue because that in itself is indicative of their marginalisation.

Ein Kultfilm zum Gruseln

Dieser Aufsatz widmet sich der Rezeption von Das singende, klingende Baum chen (1957) in Grosbritannien und untersucht, wie es dazu kam, dass dieser (un)sozialistische DEFA-Marchenfilm in einem mehr als 40 Jahre wahrenden transnationalen Rezeptionsprozess zu einem Kultfilm wurde.

Coming of Age in ‘the Hood’: The Diasporic Youth Film and Questions of Genre

Since the mid-1980s there has been a surge of European films featuring the identity struggles of adolescents from ethnic minority backgrounds. They include British Asian films such as East Is East (1999, dir. Damien O’Donnell), Bend It Like Beckham (2002, dir. Gurinder Chadha), Anita and Me (2002, dir. Metin Huseyin) and black British films such as Rage (1999, dir. Newton Aduaka), Bullet Boy (2004, dir. Saul Dibb) and the early precursor Pressure (1976, dir. Horace Ove). Turkish German features are Yasemin (1988, dir. Hark Bohm), Geschwister – Kardesler/Brothers and Sisters – Kardesler (1997, dir. Yuksel Yavuz), Aprilkinder/April Children (1998, dir. Yuksel Yavuz), Auslandstournee/Tour Abroad (2000, dir. Ayse Polat) and Karamuk (2004, dir. Sulbiye Gunar). Maghrebi French films include Le The au harem d’Archimede/Tea in the Harem (1985, dir. Mehdi Charef), Le Gone du chaâba/The Kid from the Chaaba (1998, dir. Christophe Ruggia), Le Ciel, les oiseaux…et ta mere!/Boys on the Beach (1998, dir. Djamel Bensalah), La Squale/The Squale (2000, dir. Fabrice Genestal), Samia (2000, dir. Philippe Faucon), L’Esquive/Games of Love and Chance (2003, dir. Abdellatif Kechiche) and Le Grand voyage (2004, dir. Ismael Ferroukhi). Considering a number of these films in more detail, this chapter applies a quintessentially American critical paradigm, genre criticism, to European films about diasporic youth and asks to what extent these films conform to the generic conventions of the ‘teenpic’ or ‘youth film’.

Do the right thing? Female allegories of nation in Aleksandr Askoldov's Komissar (USSR, 1967/87) and Konrad wolf's Der Geteilte Himmel (GDR, 1964)

Nations have traditionally been represented as female allegories, and Mother Russia and the French Marianne, the famous icon of revolutionary France, are prime examples. The enduring convention of allegorical representations of nation, be it in the pictorial arts, literature or film, can be explained by the close affinity between allegory and ideology. As Angus Fletcher aptly puts it in Allegory: theory of a symbolic mode, ‘allegory is the natural mirror of ideology’. It is thus not surprising that allegory is particularly common in highly politicised cultures, which are frequently subject to censorial interference by the state. In such cultural contexts, allegory fulfils a dual, seemingly contradictory function. On the one hand, allegory is used for propaganda while, on the other hand, it is a form of subterfuge to circumvent censorship. This explains why in highly politicised and state-controlled film industries, such as those of East Germany and the Soviet Union, female allegories of nation were a useful encoding strategy, which afforded film-makers a certain degree of ideological latitude. The growing interest in female subjectivity, which manifested itself in a number of Soviet and East German films from the 1960s onwards, transformed the way in which female allegorical figures were constructed. They ceased to be onedimensional personifications of abstract concepts but instead they became psychologically plausible individuals. At the same time, female subjectivity provided further opportunities for ideological unorthodoxy. Whereas films about national