Narratives of Mediterranean migrants in Italian cinema: The camera angle and close-up in Terraferma and Fuocoammare

Abstract

Over the last two decades, Italian cinema has turned its gaze towards the Mediterranean Sea to dismantle the narratives constructed by populist political parties and mainstream European media, which have emphasized the rhetoric of border protection, security and legality through the systematic depersonalization of migrants. Film counter-narratives to this have been effectively developed, and cinema has responded to the materiality and fixity of migrants’ bodies by composing stories in which these migrants recover their sociopolitical agency. This article provides a close analysis of the characterization in Emanuele Crialese’s Terraferma (2011) and Gianfranco Rosi’s Fuocoammare (Fire at Sea) (2016) in relation to technical and stylistic forms of filmic representation. Particular attention is paid to the correlation between the aesthetic level of the films and the social dimension of the characters, which is primarily expressed through framing in which the migrant occupies the central position, establishing a dialectical relationship with the other characters and their social space.