Abstract
With particular reference of Gianni Amelio’s Lamerica (1994) and Ennio De Dominicis’s L’Italiano (2001), this article looks at a number of recent Italian films that ostensibly deal with migration from Albania to Italy in the 1990s. I argue that these films use migration as a means of exploring the nation’s past history of colonial expansion and emigration rather than documenting a current socio-cultural phenomenon. The article begins by analyzing these films in terms of the constitutive role afforded to cinema in the construction of Italian national identity. It then goes on to examine how Italy’s historical relationship with Albania is recalled in ambivalent terms. This ambivalence is projected onto the bodies of the Albanian migrant whose alterity these films construct through an insistence on an essential cultural and physiological difference. The article explores the various strategies that these films employ to remind the spectator of the irreconcilable difference between Italians and Albanians. The avowed humanitarian intentions of these films are compromised by their insistence on the impermeablity of Italian identity.
Highlights
In the last fifteen or so years, a number of film- makers in Italy have used the contemporary phenomeno n of migration to the peninsula both as a means of reflecting on Italian national identity and of setting out the geographical and historical co-ordinates through which it might be investigated
A striking feature of migration patterns to Italy is that most of the new arrivals come from places with which it has no direct historical connection
Many Albanians arrived in Italy with a reasonable knowledge of the Italian language, often, but not exclusively, learned by watching Italian television that was picked up quite in the coastal regions at least.[2]
Summary
In the last fifteen or so years, a number of film- makers in Italy have used the contemporary phenomeno n of migration to the peninsula both as a means of reflecting on Italian national identity and of setting out the geographical and historical co-ordinates through which it might be investigated. A number of recent films have revisited the question of Italian national identity in terms similar to those proposed by Scola : that the contemporary phenomenon of migration to Italy is often combined with a return to the Fascist past.
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