In a short essay from 1967 Words and Pictures, Michel Foucault argues that the relationship between «the sayable» and «the visible» along with their coexistence and isomorphous feature merely depict the author’s culture in a precise moment in history and place . Focusing on the European cinematography on migrations in contemporary Europe, this paper examines migrants’ journeys as conveyed by the cinema industry language. More specifically, this contribution concentrates on Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s Flee (2021) and Ben Sharrock’s Limbo (2020) . These recent movies on migrants’ journeys all share a concern with the plight of current day refugees, that is to say human beings who are fleeing conflict, poverty and terror, some of whom left their home and family behind and undertook a perilous journey, only to arrive on less than welcoming shores. The condition of their country of origin is often characterised by political and/or economic crisis occurring as a direct result of colonial rule, neo-colonialism, or decolonization. One noticeable difference, however, is that global culture, the proliferation of telecommunication infrastructures and new media have substantially affected the act of narrating. From a postcolonial point of view, the migrants’ journey is understood as the act of travelling from their home country to the host country as well as the process associated with it, such as the series of difficulties and the psychological consequences of this passage. The modern migrant’s journey is frequently documented through various multimodal forms: written, spoken, visual or pictorial. As a consequence, the journey narrated in a multimodal form may be conceptualized as an unprecedented mode or language of representation. As the scholar Sten Pultz Moslund points out, the distinguishing feature of current migration storytelling is cultural hybridity which typically manifests itself in tropes and thematizations of the experience of cultural in-betweenness, processes of intermixture, fusions or doublings of two or more cultures or two or more systems of significations . Drawing from humanities studies theory and criticism, Flee and Limbo will be analysed under a crossdisciplinarity method that emphasises, at the same time, how the cinema industry language delivers a narrative of current migrants’ journeys in an alternative but compelling and engrossing manner.
Migrants’ Journeys as Conveyed by the Cinema Industry Language
Maria Festa
2023-01-01
Abstract
In a short essay from 1967 Words and Pictures, Michel Foucault argues that the relationship between «the sayable» and «the visible» along with their coexistence and isomorphous feature merely depict the author’s culture in a precise moment in history and place . Focusing on the European cinematography on migrations in contemporary Europe, this paper examines migrants’ journeys as conveyed by the cinema industry language. More specifically, this contribution concentrates on Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s Flee (2021) and Ben Sharrock’s Limbo (2020) . These recent movies on migrants’ journeys all share a concern with the plight of current day refugees, that is to say human beings who are fleeing conflict, poverty and terror, some of whom left their home and family behind and undertook a perilous journey, only to arrive on less than welcoming shores. The condition of their country of origin is often characterised by political and/or economic crisis occurring as a direct result of colonial rule, neo-colonialism, or decolonization. One noticeable difference, however, is that global culture, the proliferation of telecommunication infrastructures and new media have substantially affected the act of narrating. From a postcolonial point of view, the migrants’ journey is understood as the act of travelling from their home country to the host country as well as the process associated with it, such as the series of difficulties and the psychological consequences of this passage. The modern migrant’s journey is frequently documented through various multimodal forms: written, spoken, visual or pictorial. As a consequence, the journey narrated in a multimodal form may be conceptualized as an unprecedented mode or language of representation. As the scholar Sten Pultz Moslund points out, the distinguishing feature of current migration storytelling is cultural hybridity which typically manifests itself in tropes and thematizations of the experience of cultural in-betweenness, processes of intermixture, fusions or doublings of two or more cultures or two or more systems of significations . Drawing from humanities studies theory and criticism, Flee and Limbo will be analysed under a crossdisciplinarity method that emphasises, at the same time, how the cinema industry language delivers a narrative of current migrants’ journeys in an alternative but compelling and engrossing manner.
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