Narratives of Migration

Abstract

The phenomenon of international migration is not only experienced as a crisis by those leaving their homes, or by the population of the host countries who face such unprecedented masses of newcomers. In this chapter, I argue that the phenomenon of large-scale international migration in a post-2008 Europe creates new challenges for European cinema too, a crisis of cinematic representation. Here I wish to concentrate solely on post-2008 examples of migrating people and host-migrant encounters, paradigms that reveal the symptoms of this cinematic crisis and the struggle for authentic representations. Focusing on three recent films, the Italian Terraferma (2011), Morgen (2010) and Jupiter’s Moon (2017) I explore the ethical, epistemological and cinematic paradoxes of encounters with otherness, and investigate the ways narratives of crisis may (or may not) turn into crisis of narratives.