Identity: Beyond Tradition and McWorld Neoliberalism Edited by Brian Michael Goss and Christopher Chávez Identity: Beyond Tradition and McWorld Neoliberalism, Edited by Brian Michael Goss and Christopher Chávez This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2013 by Brian Michael Goss and Christopher Chávez and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-4747-X, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4747-6 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments ..................................................................................... vii Introduction ................................................................................................ ix Brian Michael Goss and Christopher Chávez PART I: MASS MEDIATED IDENTITY Chapter One................................................................................................. 3 “Yob Rule”: The Us and Them Binary in The Daily Telegraph’s Coverage of the 2011 Riots Brian Michael Goss (Saint Louis University – Madrid) Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 27 Imag(in)ed Diversity: Migration in European Cinema Arne Saeys (University of Southampton) Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 47 Total Aliens or Humans Just Like Us? Ambivalent Images of Foreigners in Hybrid Short Stories in Sightseeing Sompatu Vungthong (King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi) PART II: IDENTITY REFRACTED THROUGH NATIONS AND TRANS-NATIONS Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 65 Global Latino: Corporate Advertising Discourses and the Re-imagination of Space Christopher Chávez (University of Oregon) Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 85 ¿Visca España? La Selección, National Metaphor and the 2010 World Cup Mateo Szlapek-Sewillo (University of Adelaide) vi Identity: Beyond Tradition and McWorld Neoliberalism Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 111 Kratos without Demos? European Identity and the Prospects for a Democratic Europe Francisco Seoane Pérez (University of Castilla-La Mancha, Cuenca Campus) Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 133 Politics in the Age of Blogging: The Internet as a New Medium of Change and the Bridge into the Iranian Diaspora Pardis Shafafi (University of St Andrews) Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 155 La Dolce Vita: Creative Re-imaginings of Italianicity Paul Venzo (Deakin University) PART III: SOCIAL ASPECTS OF IDENTITY Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 171 Matchmakers as Socialization Agents in the Process of Reconstructing a New Identity for Jewish Singles Ya’arit Bokek-Cohen (Ariel University of Samaria) Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 191 Rethinking Agency: Pornified Discourses and Shifting Gendered Subjectivities Antonio García Gómez (University of Alcalá de Henares) Contributors............................................................................................. 213 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS As this volume emerged out of an ephemeral event – a conference convened 19-21 April 2012 on the Saint Louis University-Madrid, Spain Campus – we first seek to acknowledge, enduringly and in print, our colleagues on the event’s Organizing Committee. Daniel Chornet and Pamela Rolfe sifted through 170 abstracts while Daniel also designed and maintained the conference’s webpage. We nod with appreciation to our administrators and support staff that furnished assistance and encouragement, notably Dean Paul Vita, Director of Finance Vicky Villarreal and her assistant Jessica Erwin. Fairouz Medjahed (Information Technology) and the team of Fernando Béjar and Ángel García (Marketing and Communications) furnished valuable conference infrastructure such as payment web pages, programs and posters. Juliet Arata and Isabel Hurtado of Library Services scanned documents on command and lent their space to the event. Where getting the space prepared is concerned, Samuel Hernandez’s team of bedeles fashioned a comfortable physical environment. Colleagues who directed panels are also in our debt. Our conscientious panel chairs include Kevin G. Barnhurst, Daniel Chornet, Anne Dewey, “Rad Man” Renzo Llorente, Fabiola Martínez Rodríguez, Anne McCabe, T. Jeff Miley, Kristine Muñoz, and Agustín Reyes Torres. Students who assisted at the event with zeal and distinction include Laura de Socarraz Novoa and Kimberly Cacicedo O’Connor. Our keynote speaker, James Curran, got the conference off to a rousing and provocative opening and maintained a profile throughout the event. The highly positive feedback and the “vibes” that this small-to-medium sized conference generated was a group effort as it engenders considerable cooperation to pull off such an event. In producing this volume, we thank Carol Koulikourdi at Cambridge Scholars Publishing for taking on our project. Friends and colleagues who composed detailed reviews of chapters helped our contributors to “raise their games”. As editors, we thank the following people for agreeing to review chapters and offering their generous and constructive insights in areas of expertise: Shelly N. Blair, Matthew Carlson, Daniel Chornet, Anne Dewey, and Anne McCabe. CHAPTER TWO IMAG(IN)ED DIVERSITY: MIGRATION IN EUROPEAN CINEMA ARNE SAEYS Introduction Mass-mediated images and human migration crosscut international borders today more than ever. At the same time that Hollywood blockbusters are shown on screens around the world, people from various corners of the planet are moving at an increasing speed over longer geographical distances. These global flows undermine the old nationalist myth that nation-states are defined by discrete, homogeneous and territorially bounded cultures. At the macro level, many nation-states have domestic film markets that are dominated by multinational media conglomerates. The global hegemony of Hollywood and the concomitant worldwide spread of American culture have prompted fears of globalization effacing cultural differences. In response to these dynamics, national governments in Europe and elsewhere are trying to protect their domestic film industries in order to exert their power to safeguard national identities. At the international stage, national governments have translated their concerns in the argument that “cultural diversity is as necessary for humankind as biodiversity is for nature” (UNESCO 2001). International discourses defending the conservation of cultural differences between nations, however, become paradoxical when faced with the cultural diversity within nation-states. As immigrants and other subcultural groups within nation-states are also claiming the right to express their cultures, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain that national cultures are homogeneous and territorially bounded units. Due to border-crossing migration and media, the view of the world as a mosaic of distinct cultures is losing ground to multi-connected and transnational conceptions of culture. While much attention has been paid 28 Chapter Two to the global spread of American culture, less obvious are the cultural exchanges and influences emanating from other parts of the world. Although Hollywood remains the most powerful film industry, economic and technological developments have led to the rise of new film industries and new filmmakers in the rest of the world. The success of world cinema via international film festivals and the growing popularity of indigenous productions in many countries challenge the idea of global homogenization by Hollywood. At the same time, European film companies have engaged in international co-productions with Third World filmmakers. Following recent work on transnational, transcultural, intercultural and diasporic cinema (Bergfelder 2005; Ezra and Rowden 2005; Higbee and Lim 2010; MacDougall 1998; Marks 2000; Naficy 2001), I will focus this chapter on the contributions of film directors with a non-Western background to European film production. For a long time, the non-Western Other has been the subject of Eurocentric cultural stereotypes (Saïd 1978). According to Ella Shohat and Robert Stam (1994), “Eurocentrism bifurcates the world into the ‘West and the Rest’ and organizes everyday language into binaristic hierarchies implicitly flattering to Europe: our ‘nations’, their ‘tribes’; our ‘religions’, their ‘superstitions’; our ‘culture’, their ‘folklore’; our ‘art’, their ‘artifacts’; our ‘demonstrations’, their ‘riots’; our ‘defence’, their ‘terrorism’” (p. 2). In their effort to go beyond positing the non-Western Other as a voiceless victim of Western prejudices, Shohat and Stam argue that Third World filmmakers are able to counter Eurocentrism by producing their own images. This can be done by film directors operating in the Third World but also by those directors that moved to the West (Gabriel 1982). The role of Third World filmmakers living in the West has been most extensively theorized by Hamid Naficy in his influential book An Accented Cinema. In the following sections, I will critically analyze the idea of “accented cinema”. First, I will scrutinize several aspects of Naficy’s categorization of displaced filmmakers in terms of exilic, diasporic and ethnic identities. Against the (surely inadvertent) Othering of migrant film directors by labeling them “accented” outsiders, I argue that the work of those film directors needs to be understood as fully embedded in the political economy of European film industries. My critique of “accented cinema” will be illustrated by the examples of Maghrebi and Turkish filmmakers in, respectively, French and German film industries. Comparing those two countries, I want to demonstrate how migrant filmmakers are shaped by – but are also re-shaping – national cinemas in Europe. Imag(in)ed Diversity: Migration in European Cinema 29 An Accented Cinema? In An Accented Cinema, Hamid Naficy (2001) argues that Third World and other displaced filmmakers living in the West translate their personal experiences of exile, diaspora and ethnicity via an “accented mode of production” into an “accented style” of film aesthetics. Contrary to the poststructuralist conviction that “the author is dead”, Naficy wants “to put the locatedness and the historicity of the authors back into authorship” (p. 34).1 His main argument is that “deterritorialized peoples and their films share certain features” (p. 3). Naficy defines the locatedness and historicity of these filmmakers in terms of their orientation to either the homeland, the ethnic community or to the host country. He puts accented filmmakers into three categories: “[E]xilic cinema is dominated by its focus on there and then in the homeland, diasporic cinema by its vertical relationship to the homeland and by its lateral relationship to the diaspora communities and experiences, and postcolonial ethnic and identity cinema by the exigencies of life here and now in the country in which the filmmakers reside” (p. 15). In a second move, Naficy defines “accented cinema” by adopting what may be called an “old school” stylistic approach that constructs a general taxonomy of features based on the formalist techniques used by filmmakers. As features of an accented cinema, Naficy discusses interstitial and collective modes of production, epistolary narratives and chronotopes of utopian homelands, border crossings and claustrophobic life in exile. In addition, Naficy describes the accented cinema as an embedded criticism of the dominant Hollywood cinema. In Hollywood cinema, films are “realistic and intended for entertainment only, and thus free from overt ideology or accent” (p. 23). In this manner, “accented films” are supposed to be highly political and critical of, not to say oppositional to, the classic Hollywood style and the national cinema style of any particular country. In his theorization, Naficy reduces the enormous diversity of filmmakers and their stories to a simple “liminal subjectivity and interstitial location in society and the film industry” (p. 10). I argue that the categorization of accented filmmakers in terms of “inbetweenness” follows from Naficy’s uncritical use of old concepts like exile, diaspora and ethnic identity. In the following section, I will present several critiques of these concepts. The keynotes of An Accented Cinema (exile, diaspora and ethnic identity) are representative of a common way of thinking in postcolonial theories and identity politics (Bhabha 1994; Hall 1994; Rushdie 1992; Saïd 2003). Therefore, the critique that I will direct at Naficy’s work is also a critique of a wider body of literature on postcolonial theories and 30 Chapter Two identity politics. At the same time, I do not want to dismiss the empirical richness of Naficy’s work. His world-spanning overview of displaced filmmakers, with detailed close-ups, is a major work of reference for film studies. Nonetheless, because “accented cinema” is a new category gaining wide acclaim in film studies, I deem it necessary to cross-examine the basic tenets of this framework defined by exile, diaspora and identity. Exilic, diasporic and ethnic filmmaking? In what ways are the concepts of exile, diaspora and ethnic identity uncritically fashioned in Naficy’s conceptualization? Exile, defined as internal or external banishment, has been extensively commented upon by literary critics (Allatson and McCormack 2008; Israel 2000; Kaplan 1996; Ouditt 2002; Rushdie 1992). Modernist art and literature described exile, as both fact and trope, in terms of isolation, solitude and alienation of the individual from an original community: the artist in exile is never “at home.” This distancing has been aestheticized as a necessary precondition to produce high art. Edward Saïd (2003) famously noted: “[E]xile carries with it, I think, a touch of solitude and spirituality” (p. 181). Without dismissing personal testimonies like that of Saïd, Caren Kaplan (1996) observed that “the formation of modernist exile seems to have best served those who would voluntarily experience estrangement and separation in order to produce the experimental cultures of modernism” (p. 28). Kaplan argues that the mystifying metaphor of exile, as contrasted with ordinary travel or tourism, helps to maintain the division between high and low culture – and between art and commerce. Indeed, in line with Kaplan’s observations, one can see that Naficy’s (2001) selection of films emphasizes more experimental styles and techniques (e.g., Trinh T. Minhha, Mona Hatoum). Naficy does not deal with displaced filmmakers working in more popular genres, such as Ang Lee and John Woo, both working in Hollywood. It is clear that more popular filmmakers fit less with the romanticized image of the solipsistic artist in exile creating high art. Exile has been mainly used to describe writers of literature. A complex process like film production even if experimental or low-budget requires the input of many diversely skilled people (Caves 2000). The idea of the individual filmmaker in exile is contradicted even by Naficy’s own observations of the filmmaker’s participation in multiple institutions, transnational co-productions and the use of multisource funding. Another critique of exile comes from anthropology. Categorizing people as exiles or as refugees is based on certain assumptions about the “national order of things” (Malkki 1995). Malkki observes that, “[B]elonging Imag(in)ed Diversity: Migration in European Cinema 31 (identity, community) and not belonging (uprooting, exile) to a place are spiritualized in a broad sense of the word. And this spiritualization can lead to dehistoricization and depoliticization. The idealization or romanticization of exile and diaspora can be just as problematic for anthropology (and literary studies) as is the idealization of homeland and rooted communities in works of refugee studies. Malkki concludes that, “Both forms of idealization take for granted certain categorical forms of thought, and both forms set up […] a ‘conventional opposition of origin and exile’ […]” (1995: p. 515). Exile and diaspora discourses are closely linked to the nation-state model, assuming a natural bond between culture, identity and territory. Naficy argues, for example, that “Like the exiles, people in diaspora have an identity in their homeland before their departure, and their diasporic identity is constructed in resonance with this prior identity” (2001: p. 14). At the same time, the concept of exile seems to have lost ground to diaspora discourses. The use of diaspora, however, shows similar shortcomings in designating migrants. As Soysal Nuhoğlu notes, “Diaspora is the extension of the place left behind, the ‘home’. Thus, there is the presumed rootlessness of immigrant populations in the here and now of the diaspora and their perpetual longing for then and there. This theoretical move, that is, designating immigrant populations as diasporas, ignores the historical contingency of the nation-state, identity and community, and reifies them as natural” (2000: p. 3). Soysal Nuhoğlu argues that diaspora as an analytical tool is “obscuring the new topography and practices of citizenship, which are multi-connected, multi-referential and postnational” (p. 13). Instances of dual citizenship, EU membership, human rights and global cultural industries have changed the conditions in which migrant filmmakers work. While the term “diasporic filmmakers” highlights the relation with an ethnically defined community and homeland, it neglects other potential spaces of movements and activities that are created by globalization. The same critiques apply to postcolonial ethnic and identity filmmaking of which second-generation immigrants are the paradigmatic examples. While Naficy and others (Burns 2007) direct the attention to the ethnic “politics of the hyphen” as a sign of hybridized identities, the global cultural flows and the urban contexts in which migrants realize their cultural projects are neglected. In the end, there is a fundamental contradiction between Naficy’s original argument of “putting locatedness and historicity back into authorship” and his generalizing taxonomy. Only in the short close-ups of filmmakers throughout the book, does Naficy pay attention to the spatial and historical particularity of the filmmakers. His 32 Chapter Two stylistic taxonomy, however, erases the locatedness and the historicity of the filmmakers as soon as they are labeled as “accented filmmakers”. Rather than contextualizing films, Naficy classifies them into reductive categories: “Like all approaches to cinema, the accented style attempts to reduce and to channel the free play of meanings. […] The style designation allows us to reclassify films or to classify certain hitherto unclassifiable films” (2001: p. 38). In a field like film studies where classifications are abundant, one may also wonder, what is the point of creating a new classification? Naficy constructs the category of an “accented cinema” by putting the filmmakers in a liminal nowhere, rather than being part of the host country cinema, part of the home country cinema, or part of the international cinema. The filmmakers are conceptualized as forever “homeless”, outside national and international film categories. In this way, Naficy creates a gap in the already existing film classifications, in order to summon an argument to fill that gap with a brand new classification that he dubs an “accented cinema”. In contrast, consider the example of BelgianPalestinian director Michel Khleifi. His films are discussed in works on Belgian cinema (Mosley 2001; Thomas 1995), in works on Palestinian cinema (Dabashi 2006; Gertz and Khleifi 2008), as well as in works on World Cinema (Chaudhuri 2005). What is the additional value of categorizing Khleifi’s films as well under the heading of “accented cinema”? I think that creating a new film category, simply because the filmmakers have migrated, offers little added value to already existing classifications. Moreover, I believe that labeling filmmakers as “accented” reinforces the Othering of migrant filmmakers by film critics, academics and professionals. In fact, the “accented cinema” puts the filmmakers into a new discursive ghetto. The “accented cinema” is constructed as a stylistic category based on a generalized past of the filmmakers, modeled as a rupture from their natural territory of the nation-state. However, the “accented style” not only fails to account for the personal and professional evolution of the filmmakers over time, but also obscures the role of the “non-accented” political and economic context in contrast to which “accented” film productions are defined. Contextualizing migrant filmmakers If we take the locatedness and the historicity of migrant filmmakers seriously, our conceptual analysis should focus on the political economy of the local film industries in which these filmmakers are creating their projects. Moreover, to illuminate the limitations and opportunities offered Imag(in)ed Diversity: Migration in European Cinema 33 to migrant filmmakers, we need to compare the effects of specific contexts and local conditions on the themes and styles of these filmmakers. What is important is the national context that exerts its power over filmmakers and the image of the nation they produce. In Europe, state-supported film industries predominantly privilege an art cinema that reflects the nation and its history. Rather than excluding migrant filmmakers as “accented” outsiders from these national contexts, I believe it is more productive to understand films by migrant directors as what Mike Wayne (2002: 45) calls “anti-national national films”, films that are situated within a specific national cinema because they deal with the social, political and cultural issues within a particular national territory. At the same time, they are antinational insofar as these films critique the myth of national unity by frequently highlighting the position of minorities and unequal power relations within the nation. In what follows, I will argue that the work of migrant filmmakers needs to be understood in the political economy of the nations in which they are creating their film projects. From the end of World War II till the mid-1970s, European governments recruited guest workers for their postwar industrial revival. While France and the United Kingdom imported workers from their former colonies, the governments of Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Belgium looked for guest workers from Mediterranean countries like Turkey, Morocco, Italy, Spain and Portugal (Castles and Miller 2009). Contrary to the expectations of the destination countries, many guest workers became permanent residents bringing their families with them and creating new communities in the host nations. Nationalist political parties voicing strong anti-immigrant sentiments heavily opposed the presence of non-Western immigrants in European nation-states. More specifically, they singled out immigrants from Muslim countries such as Turkey and from the Maghreb as the scapegoats for many social problems, particularly after the terrorist attacks by Al-Qaeda in the United States, London and Madrid. These anti-immigrant sentiments have been fed and reinforced by the often negative and stereotypical portrayals of immigrants in the media. As Bourdieu (1998) has argued, the media help to reproduce social hierarchies keeping the ruling class in power. Television, newspapers and cinema control, to a great extent, the means of public expression. These mass media enable their producers, directors and journalists to impose their worldviews, their definitions of problems and their solutions on the rest of society. In the media, immigration is often framed as a problem, if not as a threat to the nation. Racism, in addition to more subtle forms of prejudice and discrimination towards immigrants, have been rife in the 34 Chapter Two media (van Dijk 1991). As the media are predominantly controlled by global or national elites, non-Western immigrants have mostly been absent from media production. In order to access the field of media production, one needs not only economic capital but also cultural capital (Bourdieu 1998). As many non-Western immigrants arrive as relatively poor and low-educated guest workers, very few of them have entered the field of media production. In response to this, multicultural initiatives started encouraging the participation of people of non-Western origin in the media. The most well-known initiatives are the equal opportunities and diversity policies urging public broadcasters to employ a certain quota of people from ethnic minorities and the provision of programming to ethnic minority groups, as for example the BBC and Channel Four have been pursuing in the UK. In addition, the children of immigrants have obtained higher levels of education than their parents, which provide them with the cultural capital necessary for high-skilled jobs (Crul, Schneider and Lelie 2012). These factors have lead to the emergence of media practitioners of non-Western origin in European television, newspaper and film industries during the last decades. In the next sections, I will discuss how filmmakers of non-Western origin have entered European film industries. Rather than following the “accented” authorship approach that focuses on the biographies of film directors, I start from a broader socio-historical overview that compares the political and economic development of migration-related films in different countries. Until the 1980s, non-Western immigrants were seen as poor guest workers who were not able to represent themselves in cinema. Therefore, socially engaged “native” European directors were the first to provide portrayals of immigrants. After the 1980s, however, a second generation of filmmakers, born of immigrant parents and raised in European countries, gained access to film schools. Many of these filmmakers aimed to counter the stereotypical depiction of immigrants. Rejecting categorization in terms of their ethnic background, this new generation of filmmakers preferred to highlight socio-economic inequalities in global cities and to force a breakthrough into mainstream cinema. From ethnic to mainstream cinema When Naficy (2001) opposes “accented cinema” to mainstream cinema, he excludes in advance the possibility of “accented” films becoming mainstream. This is a highly problematic assumption, particularly because it reduces “accented” films to a subcultural cinema, deprived of any wider audiences. In order to investigate whether “accented cinema” can be Imag(in)ed Diversity: Migration in European Cinema 35 mainstream, we also need to define what is understood by “mainstream”. Rather than limiting our understanding of mainstream cinema to the globally distributed blockbusters made by major entertainment firms, I posit mainstream cinema to also include local film productions that are commercially successful in specific national markets, as well as art cinema that is critically acclaimed at international film festivals. This more expansive account of mainstream cinema allows for a more dynamic interaction between “accented” and “mainstream” cinema than Naficy’s dichotomy. Particularly in the European context, where low-budget art cinema and popular local cinema are the constituents of national film industries, “accented” films can achieve success as national films. Moreover, it can be argued that “accented” filmmakers even play with an advantage. By accentuating their otherness, they can achieve success in the art cinema circuits, where foreign, if not exotic, films are highly valued. In more popular genres, “accented” filmmakers can substantiate their ethnicity by targeting the growing ethnic markets in European countries. As a cost-intensive product, however, films require a substantial return on investment. Thus, the films should reach the largest possible audiences. Even if there are large immigrant communities, filmmakers would rather target mainstream audiences. By doing so, however, filmmakers must dispense with the rough edges that might alienate potential viewers. In this sense, the work of migrant filmmakers might lose many of the characteristics that make their films “accented”. In the following sections, I will briefly sketch the emergence of filmmakers of Maghrebi origin in France and the rise of filmmakers of Turkish origin in Germany. I have selected those countries because they both present strong film industries and a significant immigrant population. While France is known to host the most productive national film industry in Europe, the country is also home to the second-largest foreign-born population on the continent, with the greater share of immigrants originating from the Maghreb (Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia). The largest foreign-born population in Europe can be found in Germany, where people of Turkish origin constitute the largest non-European immigrant population in Europe (Vasileva 2011). Moreover, France and Germany have often been contrasted for their distinct models of citizenship. In the French “assimilationist” model, children of immigrants born on French soil automatically qualify for French citizenship (jus soli). German citizenship, on the other hand, could until recently only be acquired if at least one parent is a German citizen (jus sanguinis). As a consequence, many children of Turkish immigrants born in Germany have not acquired German citizenship, while children of Maghrebi immigrants in France 36 Chapter Two automatically qualify for French citizenship. Despite these institutional differences, similar tendencies can be observed in both countries. Rather than uncritically celebrating ethnic diversity as something that is spicing up European cinema, filmmakers reject the ethnic categories imposed on them by critics. Moving away from ethnic stereotypes, some filmmakers have even managed to achieve mainstream success with socially engaged films that topped the box offices in France and Germany. These successes indicate the potential of “accented” filmmakers to convey their message to wider audiences beyond ethnic boundaries. From beur to banlieue cinema In the 1980s, French critics denominated a new movement of filmmakers as cinéma beur. Initially used as a self-descriptive slang for French youngsters of Arab descent, the term beur soon became widely used in the French media with reference to the riots in the social housing projects around the big cities and the “March for Equality and against Exclusion” in 1983. In the aftermath of these events, a series of films was identified as beur cinema. From the beginning, definitional problems challenged this new category. Film critic Christian Bosséno (1992) defined a beur film as “one which was made by a young person of North African origin who was born or who spent his or her youth in France and which features beur characters” (p. 49). The problematic character of this definition becomes clear as soon as one thinks about two types of films that are excluded from this strict definition of beur cinema: films made by émigré directors born in North Africa and films by French directors depicting the beur communities. Bosséno’s strict definition of beur films only applies to works like Le Thé au harem d’Archimède (Mehdi Charef 1985) and Bâton Rouge (Rachid Bouchareb 1985) that tell the story of beur youngsters living on the outskirts of Paris and directed by filmmakers who grew up themselves in those neighborhoods where their parents from Algeria had settled. Films such as Le Thé à la menthe (Abdelkrim Bahloul 1984) and Salut Cousin! (Merzak Allouache 1996), about beur characters living in France but directed by Algerians émigrés who came to France only at a later age, are left out of the category of beur cinema in Bosséno’s view. Moreover, films by French directors that are concerned with beur communities, and that include Le gône du chaaba (Christophe Ruggia 1998) and Samia (Philippe Faucon 2000), would not be taken into consideration as beur cinema. In more theoretical terms, Carrie Tarr (2005) argues that “[t]he importance of beur filmmaking surely lies primarily in the shift it operates Imag(in)ed Diversity: Migration in European Cinema 37 in the position of enunciation from which the dominant majority is addressed, focusing on minority perspectives which bring with them the potential for new strategies of identification and cultural contestation” (p. 14). According to Tarr, the ethnic origin of a filmmaker would determine his or her perspective on society, whereby she automatically puts ethnic minorities in opposition to a dominant majority. This is a highly problematic assumption as it supposes that ethnic minority filmmakers would make, by definition, oppositional films while other filmmakers would inevitably be part of the dominant majority. Taking the ethnic origin of film directors as the defining characteristic of their work creates an unnecessary dichotomy between filmmakers who are essentially dealing with the same issues in a socially engaged cinema. Although beur cinema definitely gave voice to ethnic groups in French society, many of its auteurs rejected the label of beur filmmaker. In order to counter the ethnicization of their films, several directors foregrounded multi-ethnic gangs in their films and redirected the attention to the socioeconomic exclusion of all the disadvantaged people living in the social housing projects on the outskirts of large cities. This new series of films was named banlieue cinema, with banlieue referring to the spatial setting of these films on the outskirts of large cities, echoing the black independent “hood films” from New York and Los Angeles. In the mid-1990s, Mathieu Kassovitz achieved international critical acclaim and commercial success with the banlieue film La Haine (1995), which tells the story of a multi-ethnic trio of friends living the aftermath of a riot in an impoverished French social housing estate. The protagonist trio consists of the white-Jewish Vinz, the black Hubert, and the Maghrebian Saïd. The narrative revolves around the rage of the trio because the police brutalized a friend of them. The main character, Vinz, vows that, if the friend dies from his injuries, he will use the gun that he has found to kill a policeman. Stylistically, the film incorporates many influences from American popular culture. In particular, hip-hop culture manifests itself through the use of rap music in the soundtrack of the film and through sequences with DJ-ing, break-dancing and tagging. Besides highlighting the appropriation of African-American urban culture by French immigrant youngsters, the director also included cinephilic references to American films like Howard Hawks’ Scarface (1932), Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980). Although La Haine (1995) is a film that gives a voice to immigrant youngsters in France, the cast, the narrative, the style and the references are all at odds with the idea of “accented cinema” as the expression of ethnicity, diaspora or exile. By inserting the film in global cinematic discourses on urban exclusion and violence, La Haine 38 Chapter Two (1995) effectively avoids the pitfalls of becoming an ethnically labeled film. Remarkably, some critics questioned the legitimacy of Mathieu Kassovitz as a white middle-class filmmaker of Jewish origin to speak about the poor, multi-ethnic banlieues (Vincendeau 2005). These kinds of comments are as reductionist as the accounts that reduce migrant films to the expression of the filmmaker’s ethnicity. Commercially, La Haine (1995) reached a large audience of two million spectators in France during its theatrical release. At the same time, the director won the Best Direction award at the Cannes film festival in 1995. Nevertheless, other banlieue films like Thomas Gilou’s Raï (1995), Jean-François Richet’s Etat des lieux, (1995) and his Ma 6-T va crack-er (1998), all socially engaged urban films denouncing the unemployment and police violence in the Parisian banlieues, did not achieve the same commercial success as La Haine (1995). After La Haine (1995) managed to achieve mainstream success, French film producers and directors started to see the potential of the banlieue film as an economically profitable genre. Following the success of the action film Taxi (1998) and its sequels (starring beur actor Samy Naceri), the French director and producer Luc Besson exploited the banlieue genre commercially with the 2004 action thriller Banlieue 13 and its 2009 sequel Banlieue 13 Ultimatum. From the 1990s onwards, filmmakers like Rachid Bouchareb, Abdellatif Kechiche and Djamel Bensalah continued to make films engaged with Maghrebi immigrants in France. Contrary to the beur cinema of the 1980s, these productions received bigger budgets and achieved some box-office successes. A notable example is Bouchareb’s film Indigènes (released as Days of Glory in English-speaking markets 2006) that tells the story of the Maghrebi soldiers in the French army liberating Europe from the Nazis during the Second World War. Drawing comparisons with Hollywood war films like Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg 1998), Indigènes attracted over three million spectators in France, gained international distribution and an Oscar nomination. Beyond its box-office success, the film also succeeded in changing French legislation with regards to the pensions of war veterans from the French colonies who had been receiving less than one-third of the amount given to their French counterparts (Sandford 2006). Both the commercial success and the social impact of the recent films made by migrant directors in France contradict the marginality of “accented cinema”. Moreover, the same tendencies can be found in other countries. In the United Kingdom, for example, small-scale productions by workshops like Black Audio Film Collective in the 1980s were later followed by big boxoffice successes like East is East (Damien O’Donnell 1999) and Bend It Imag(in)ed Diversity: Migration in European Cinema 39 Like Beckham (Gurinder Chadha 2002), films that portray the generational conflicts between immigrant parents and their British-born children in a comical way (Korte and Sternberg 2004). Although less political than the French examples, the commercial success of these films in the UK exceed the limiting assumptions about “accented cinema”. If examples from France and the UK clearly contradict concepts of an “accented cinema”, what then about Germany? As stated before, Germany is the country with the largest non-European population in Europe, with people of Turkish origin forming the largest immigrant ethnic group not only in Germany, but in Europe as a whole. Despite the presence of millions of Turkish immigrants in Germany, the German authorities have been more reluctant than other nations to grant immigrants citizenship rights and, thus, to recognize Germany as an established site of immigration (Soysal Nuhoğlu 1994). Despite the strict citizenship rules, filmmakers of Turkish origin have developed their projects in Germany, some even achieving international fame, as I will elaborate below. From cinema of duty to international fame While France has mainly been receiving migrants from its former North African colonies, Germany has a large population of Turkish descent as a consequence of its guest worker agreements with Turkey in the 1960s. Among the first films dealing with Turkish immigrants in Germany were Shirins Hochzeit by Helma Sanders-Brahms (1975) and Yasemin by Hark Bohm (1988), films directed by German filmmakers dealing with the oppression of Turkish women by their patriarchal families. The first Turkish émigré director to make films in Germany was Tevfik Ba er, who came to study at a film school in Hamburg. His 40 qm Deutschland (1985) depicts the imprisonment of a Turkish housewife by her husband in an apartment in Hamburg. Although 40 qm Deutschland won the German Bundespreis in 1987, film critic Deniz Göktürk (1999) criticized this “cinema of duty” for its victimization of Turkish women. Despite its claim to provide an understanding of Turkish immigrants, the film taps into the same set of stereotypical images as films like Shirins Hochzeit and Yasemin where Turkish women are portrayed as victims of an archaic patriarchal culture. Both Göktürk (1999) and Burns (2007) mention the Turkish production Berlin in Berlin (1993), directed by Sinan Çetin, as a turning point in the representation of Turkish immigrants in Germany. Through a complex story in which a German photographer ends up as an imprisoned guest in a Turkish family in Berlin, the ethnographic gaze at the Other is reversed. It is now the Turks who are watching the German. 40 Chapter Two From the 1990s onwards, a new generation of Turkish filmmakers born in Germany graduated from film schools in Hamburg and Berlin. In line with the shift from the beur to the banlieue cinema in France, Fatih Akın’s first feature film Kurz und schmerzlos (1997) moved away from the ethnic focus on Turks towards a depiction of an urban multi-ethnic gang in Hamburg. Another second-generation filmmaker, Thomas Arslan followed a similar path of urban filmmaking in his Berlin-trilogy GeschwisterKardesler (1996), Dealer (1998) and Der schöne Tag (2000). Other films – including Aprilkinder (1998) by Yüksel Yavuz, Anam (2001) by Buket Alaku and Urban Guerillas (2003) by Neco Celik – tap into the same imaginary of the urban ghetto film. Barbara Mennel (2002) notes that these films integrate the rather conflicting traditions of European auteurism and American ghettocentrism from black independent “hood films”. So, like the Paris banlieues, Altona in Hamburg and Kreuzberg in Berlin become the locations of transnational ghetto stories authored by migrant filmmakers. Although Deniz Göktürk (1999) pleads for “the pleasures of hybridity”, tackling migration and cultural clashes with a sense of humor and irony, the major breakthrough of Turkish-German cinema came when director Fatih Akın won the Golden Bear for Best Film at the Berlin Film Festival with his drama Gegen die Wand (released as Head-on in English-speaking markets, 2004). Gegen die Wand (2004) tells a tragic love story between two psychologically confused Turkish immigrants living in Hamburg. The narrative starts when the drug-addicted Cahit attempts suicide by driving his car head-on into a wall. He is subsequently taken to a psychiatric hospital where he meets Sibel who asks him to carry out a formal wedding with her so that she can escape from her conservative Turkish family. Although Sibel leads an independent sex life, Cahit falls in love with her, kills one of her lovers and is sent to prison. Upon his release, Cahit travels to Istanbul hoping to find Sibel who has started a new life there. As this film deals explicitly with Turkish immigrants and their homeland, it could qualify for the label of “accented cinema”. I maintain, however, that this complex psychological drama should not be generalized as the story of all Turks in Germany. After the critical success of this film, the director Fatih Akın has become one of the most acclaimed directors of his generation in Germany. In his subsequent films, he explored other genres; for example musical documentary in Crossing the Bridge: the Sound of Istanbul (2005), comedy in Soul Kitchen (2009), as well as another drama in Auf der anderen Seite (2007). With his own production company, Corazón International, Akın started to produce the work of other migrant filmmakers like Özgür Yıldırım with Chicko (2007) and Miraz Bezar with Imag(in)ed Diversity: Migration in European Cinema 41 Min dît (2009). Finally, Turkish-German director Yasemin amdereli scored a huge box-office hit in Germany with Almanya - Willkommen in Deutschland (2011), a historical family film portraying three generations of Turkish immigrants in Germany. The critical and commercial success of the films made by directors of Turkish origin in Germany is once more an argument against the supposed marginality of “accented cinema”. The most powerful objection against the conceptualization of migrant directors as “accented” outsiders, however, comes from director Fatih Akın himself. Although Akın has been hailed as a prominent voice of the Turkish community in Germany, the director rejects the label of an auteur of Turkish immigrant films. In an interview with the Stuttgarter Zeitung, Akın states: “I would like that the label immigrant film becomes meaningless. What kind of absurd genre is that after all? I want people to say: This is a love story, this is a drama, a melodrama – I want people to classify films in such categories” (Taubitz 2004).2 This critique can also be applied to other ways of labeling films in terms of identity politics. Women, gay and black filmmakers may readily bristle at their work being reduced to respectively a chick flick, a queer film or a black film. As Brian Michael Goss (2009) rightly remarks: “Essentializing and reductionist assumptions may underwrite stereotype and caricature, if unwittingly, in reducing the film to the director’s identity without acknowledging any possibility of slippage” between the film on celluloid and the identity behind its production (p. 56). Without ignoring the influence of biographical elements on the work of an artist, we should be aware of the global and local, political and economic frameworks that created the director in the first place – and even more so in the context of a sensitive political issue (migration) and an economically significant art form (filmmaking). Conclusion While cultural diversity has been celebrated as an emancipatory discourse for non-Western immigrants in Europe, a critical analysis of what Hamid Naficy has called an “accented cinema” reveals the problems of categorizing people in terms of their migration background. I have argued that the concept of “accented cinema” leads to the Othering of migrant filmmakers and relegates them to the margins of the film industry. Contrary to the a priori categorization of migrant filmmakers as “accented” outsiders, I have explored the embeddedness of migrant film directors in the national contexts of French and German film industries. While European cinemas used to be described in terms of distinct national 42 Chapter Two identities, the case of migrant filmmakers urges us to rethink the role of film as an expression of national identities. Today, both France and Germany have become key sites of transnational connections between people, goods and cultures from all over the world. While migrant filmmakers in France and Germany have been labeled in ethnic terms (beur or Turkish-German), I argue that the work of these filmmakers needs to be understood in the political and economic context of the nations where they are producing their films and where they are trying to reach audiences beyond ethnic boundaries. Instead of expressing supposed experiences of exile, diaspora or ethnic identity, filmmakers like Fatih Akın explicitly want their films to be understood in terms of genres rather than in terms of the director’s ethnic origin. The recent mainstream success of films by migrant directors illustrates that these films have a universal appeal that makes them transcend the limited confines of ethnic identity. 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