Lost in transit or ready for takeoff?: Airport Cinema and European identity

Abstract

ABSTRACTTravel cinema has flourished in the era of EU expansion and Schengen open border policies because it provides a fitting template for the exploration of the new possibilities of European identity. This article will focus on a related strand of cinema that is less common for practical and aesthetic reasons. Airport cinema is arguably the exemplar of what an interconnected and transnational ‘European’ cinema is or could be. More broadly, it represents the possibilities of what a properly European identity might look like in the future. The airport – and air travel – is symbolic on various levels of the policies and ideologies of European citizenship construction. The three examples take different approaches to the topic and cover a wide geographic swath of the Continent. In each the airport is a zone of transit and containment, but more than simply a non-place it also becomes the site of an encounter that defines or delineates European identity. In Viagem a Portugal/Journey to Portugal (Sérgio Tréfaut, 2011, Portugal), a Ukranian doctor is detained in the Faro airport because her very presence as an eastern European woman arouses suspicion. In Dual (Nejc Gazvoda, 2013, Slovenia/Croatia/Denmark),a Danish woman meets a Slovenian women who works at the airport during an unplanned layover in Ljubljana. Their relationship and linguistic interactions – in English but also their respective native tongues – symbolizes the uncertain standing of a young generation of Europeans. A final example offers a more playful twist on identity within the context of post-Schengen travel. In L’Italien, by Olivier Baroux (2010, France), the Marseille airport becomes a symbolic border zone between the different identities a Frenchman of Algerian descent. The airport here becomes something similar to what Etienne Balibar theorizes as ‘borderland Europe’, a space where one enjoys the freedom to recreate one’s identity in a positive light.