In and out of the zoom: The photographic act as frame of precarity in Italy’s postcolonial cinema since 1990

Abstract

ABSTRACT Michele Placido’s Pummarò (1990) and Carmine Amoroso’s Cover Boy (2006) bring the legal, economic, and social precarity of West African and East European migrants in Italy to the screen. This article examines, firstly, how subjects who come from the Global South, or who are marked as such, are framed in their precarity from a Eurocentric perspective and, secondly, how they exercise agency and break free of the colonial, racializing, gender-critical, or classist frames imposed on them. The ‘illegitimate art’ of photography is suited to reflect this two-sided process of precarization and empowerment because it is accessible to diverse social classes. This heterogeneous plurality that produces, mediates, and receives photographs also determines an intersection of gazes that emerge from divergent positionings before and behind the camera. To bridge professional with amateur approaches, my performative analysis combines Philippe Dubois’ artistic concept of the ‘photographic act’ with Ariella Azoulay’s critique to reconsider the contingent and civil potentiality of photography by reimagining the ‘event of photography’. A media-critical relation between photography and film ultimately reveals this interplay of gazes to be a meta-aesthetic gesture by the observing medium of film, which self-critically interrogates its own cinematographic modes of representing precarious subjects.