Intermediality and media reflexivity in Italian cinema of migration

Abstract

Italy has one of Europe’s most complex, multilayered cultures of migration. Mass emigration by Italians is firmly enshrined in collective memory, while Italy’s location on Europe’s geopolitical border has made the island of Lampedusa, a common arrival point for refugees, into an ambivalent symbol of Europe as ‘sanctuary’ and Europe as ‘fortress’. So it is unsurprising that the Italian film industry has produced a (both qualitatively and quantitatively) rich body of work dealing with the theme of migration. Italian cinema of migration offers a new perspective on transcultural European film, questioning from an Italian standpoint the representation of transcultural topics and the use of aesthetic practices such as hybridisation of spatial, temporal and genre boundaries, or interweaving intra-/intermedial and media-reflexive traditions. At first glance, migration appears to be a hetero-referential phenomenon; that is to say, one situated in the real world, outside the medium of film. But as the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann pointedly observed back in the 90s, ‘whatever we know about our society, or indeed about the world in which we live, we know through the mass media’ (Luhmann 2000b, 1). This seemingly banal observation has far-reaching consequences for a study of the Italian cinema of migration: (a) Firstly, as Luhmann noted immediately afterwards, we cannot really trust media sources. (b) Migration cannot be understood in isolation from mass-media coverage. It is a transmedial phenomenon, not specific to any one medium but the subject of reflection across a wide range of different media. (c) Italian cinema of migration and many TV productions seek to establish counter-discourses to the mass-media economy of attention that presents immigration as a threat. Many films make reference to the way the topic is presented in the mass media by critically showing TV news bulletins, newspaper articles or cameras pointed at refugees. (d) This (albeit mass media-influenced) reference to the outside world can quickly lead us to overlook that migration films are also narrative constructs, which in turn are moulded by intelligible formats or genre logics (Lacey 2005, 136) that make implicit or explicit intramedial references to films or genres and/or intermedially show, imitate and/or structurally reflect on other, distinct mediums. These intraand intermedial techniques can (though they need not) serve a media-reflexive function. Whether they do or not depends in particular on the genre. In participatory documentary, for instance, the choice not to use an invisible camera reinforces the documentary mode rather than critically reflecting on it. The use of intraand intermedial references likewise does not necessarily serve to show the constructed character of fictional worlds (Stam 1985, 131–132) but may have become a well-worn convention, making it necessary to experiment with other, newer estrangement effects (Kirchmann and Ruchatz 2014, 18) to achieve selfreflexivity or a critical media analysis. At the same time, some migration films STUDIES IN EUROPEAN CINEMA 2023, VOL. 20, NO. 2, 117–121 https://doi.org/10.1080/17411548.2023.2202956