Moving Peoples and Motion Pictures: Migration in Film and Other Media

Abstract

Nearly from the start, cinema has registered, dramatized, and produced images of migration and its attendant anxieties. Indeed, movies have been fuelled by the movements of peoples thanks to the striking stories and images these always engender. After glancing at two distinct efforts in the 1960s in which cinema aimed to capture a mass phenomenon for a mass audience (one from Classic Hollywood, the other from the periphery of India), I will interrogate 21st-century strategies to come to terms with what the art form’s limitations may be. Can cinema get its arms around something so complex, multidimensional, and contested as migration? Jia Zhangke’s success in bringing internal Chinese migration to light may not be easily replicated by filmmakers in other nations faced with migration issues that cluster at their borders. Perhaps other art forms are naturally more capable in this regard. To isolate what cinema has done best, however, I will draw attention to films set on the edges of Europe.