Mobility and Migration in Film and Moving Image Art: Cinema Beyond Europe / Edition 1

by Nilgun Bayraktar

Overview

Mobility and Migration in Film and Moving Image Art explores cinematic and artistic representations of migration and mobility in Europe from the 1990s to today. Drawing on theories of migrant and diasporic cinema, moving-image art, and mobility studies, Bayraktar provides historically situated close readings of films, videos, and cinematic installations that concern migratory networks and infrastructures across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Probing the notion of Europe as a coherent entity and a borderless space, this interdisciplinary study investigates the ways in which European ideals of mobility and fluidity are deeply enmeshed with forced migration, illegalization, and xenophobia. With a specific focus on distinct forms of mobility such as labor migration, postcolonial migration, tourism, and refugee mobilities, Bayraktar studies the new counter-hegemonic imaginations invoked by the work of filmmakers such as Ayşe Polat, Fatih Akin, Michael Haneke, and Tony Gatlif as well as video essays and installations of artists such as Kutluğ Ataman, Ursula Biemann, Ergin Çavuşoğlu, Maria Iorio and Raphaël Cuomo. Challenging aesthetic as well as national, cultural, and political boundaries, the works central to this book envision Europe as a diverse, inclusive, and unfixed continent that is reimagined from many elsewheres well beyond its borders.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781138858831
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	12/07/2015
Series:	Routledge Advances in Film Studies
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Nilgün Bayraktar is an Assistant Professor in the Visual Studies Program at the California College of the Arts. She received her PhD in Performance Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Film & Media Studies from University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on transnational cinema, migratory aesthetics, film/video installations, site-specific art, new media, and performance.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Cinematic and Artistic Takes on Migration and Mobility in Contemporary Europe Part I. Transnational Flows in Cinema 1. Cross-Border Mobility and Confinement in Turkish German Cinema: Countess Sophia Hatun and The Edge of Heaven 2. Performative Encounters and Mediated Memories in Maghrebi French Cinema: Exiles and Hidden Part II. Fragmented Journeys in Moving Image Art 3. Location and Urban Marginality in the Site-Specific Video Installation Küba 4. Tourism and Undocumented Migration in Southern Europe: The Video Essay Sudeuropa 5. Social Infrastructures of Undocumented Mobility in the Multiscreen Video Installation Sahara Chronicle Afterword: Points of Departure

Editorial Reviews

"This is a strong new scholarly voice that will change how we think about European cinema, migration, and the way we conceptualize the relationship between film and screen-based art. Rigorous and sophisticated, Nilgün Bayraktar offers us an elegant tour de force of by-now canonical films of European minority cinema and intriguing video essays and screen-based installations art about mobility into and within Europe." — Barbara Mennel, University of Florida, USA

"The book’s focus on experimental films and video installations, which engage with migration and other forms of transnational mobility but which have so far received less scholarly attention than the feature films of Europe’s diasporic auteurs, makes it a most welcome and important addition to the field of transnational cinema and moving image studies." - Daniela Berghahn, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

From the Publisher