This article was downloaded by: [New York University]On: 23 November 2014, At: 22:58Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: MortimerHouse, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Third TextPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ctte20

Journeys of Hope to Fortress EuropeYosefa LoshitzkyPublished online: 11 Dec 2006.

To cite this article: Yosefa Loshitzky (2006) Journeys of Hope to Fortress Europe, Third Text, 20:6, 745-754, DOI:10.1080/09528820601072908

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528820601072908

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) containedin the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make norepresentations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose ofthe Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be reliedupon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shallnot be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and otherliabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to orarising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematicreproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in anyform to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Third Text, Vol. 20, Issue 6, November, 2006, 745–754

Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online © Third Text (2006)http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals

DOI: 10.1080/09528820601072908

Journeys of Hope toFortress Europe

Yosefa Loshitzky

Taylor and Francis LtdCTTE_A_207226.sgm10.1080/09528820601072908Third Text0952-8822 (print)/1475-5297 (online)Original Article2006Taylor & Francis206000000November 2006YosefaLoshitzkyyosefal@blueyonder.co.uk

In recent years Europe’s multicultural struggles have become a promi-nent topic in European cinema. This cinema is clearly utilising issuesrelated to ethno-religious diasporas, racism and migrant culture in orderto reflect, negotiate and construct a new image of the ‘Old World’.Europe, as represented in these films, is no longer predominantly whiteand Christian, but a multicultural, multi-ethnic and multi-religiousdomain. Three evolving genres of films concerning immigration canalready be traced in the emerging diasporic and migrant cinema, eachreferring to a different stage in the migratory tour/route, what might be,ironically, called the grand tour of the migrants, the migratory journeyfrom the homeland to the host country and sometimes back home.

A fitting name for the first genre might be ‘Journeys of Hope’,although very often they turn into journeys of death, as in the emblem-atic Swiss film Journey of Hope (Reise der Hoffnung, Xavier Koller,Switzerland, 1990). Films of this genre portray the hardships experi-enced and endured by refugees and migrants on their way to the Prom-ised Land (the host country in Europe). By concentrating on the refugees’lived experience, this genre challenges and subverts contemporary mediaand public discourse on migrants, which dehumanises and criminalisesthem.1 The second genre might be called ‘In the Promised Land’ andincludes films such as Last Resort (Pawel Pawlikowski, UK, 2000),Beautiful People (Jasmin Dizdar, UK, 1999), L’assedio [Besieged](Bernardo Bertolucci, Italy, 1998), Nordrand [Northern Skirts] (BarbaraAlbert, Austria–Germany–Switzerland, 1999), Jalla Jalla (Josef Fares,Sweden, 2000), Dirty Pretty Things (Steven Frears, UK, 2002) andothers that investigate the encounter with the host society in the receiv-ing country.2 These films usually evolve around issues surroundingracism, miscegenation, cultural difference, economic exploitation andthe like. They are about the process of immediate absorption in the newcountry, representing the reception of the migrants by the host societythat in most cases is more hostile than hospitable. The third genre dealswith the second generation and beyond. It explores the processes anddynamic of integration and assimilation and their counterparts,

1 For further discussion of

the journey motif see

Hamid Naficy,

‘Journeying, Border

Crossing, and Identity

Crossing’, in An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking,

Princeton University Press,

Princeton, NJ–Oxford,

2001, pp 222–87.

2 One of the foundational

films on migration to

Europe is Rainer Werner

Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Germany, 1972.

See Thomas Elsaesser,

Fassbinder’s Germany: History, Identity, Subject, Amsterdam University

Press, Amsterdam, 1996,

pp 13–43, 58–61, 280–1.

CTTE_A_207226.fm Page 745 Thursday, November 30, 2006 12:55 PM

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

22:

58 2

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

746

alienation and disintegration. The films in this category (best exempli-fied, perhaps, by the French genre of the beur and banlieue film,3 as wellas by some British films on Africans and Asians in the UK)4 deal with theexperience of the second generation, children of migrants who are stillmarginalised and oppressed by the host society. These films raise ques-tions about the status of ethno-diasporas in relation to the nationalbody. Are ethno-religious diasporas an integral part of the national bodyor are they foreign to it? Do they threaten the national body or do theytranscend it so as to constitute a transnational body? Ultimately thesefilms raise questions about the politics of belonging and non-belongingand the cultural identity of the ‘New Europe’.

Today’s ‘Europe’ is a phenomenon that cannot be described orexperienced as a coherent whole, but only as a site of negotiation overidentity. I address some of the prominent cultural motifs, metaphors andtropes in a number of significant films of the new migrant and diasporicEuropean cinema, which has become a new site and cinematic arena ofarticulation of Europe’s new sociocultural space, shaped and negotiatedby the experience of displacement, diaspora, exile, migration, nomad-ism, homelessness and border-crossing, ‘putting in flux the idea ofEurope itself’.5 My discussion of these topics attempts to show how thenew European cinema projects and represents both the physical andsociocultural landscapes of Europe that have been significantly altered asa result of migration and diaspora. The tropes and motifs that I discusscross the national borders of their narratives, contexts of production andsociopolitical circumstances, thus transcending the traditionalunderstanding of ‘national cinema’, which is produced within the fixedboundaries of the nation-state and is thought to reflect its imaginedcollectivity. Conversely, the new transnational European films – many ofthem multinational co-productions – which deal with migration anddiaspora are part of an independent, hybrid, transnational cinema that,as Laura Marks observes, expresses the physical and psychologicaleffects of exile, immigration and displacement.6 This genre, in the wordsof Hamid Naficy, ‘cuts across previously defined geographic, national,cultural, cinematic, and meta-cinematic boundaries’.7

THE CINEMA CITYSCAPES OF FORTRESS EUROPE

The European films concerning migration and diaspora are very compel-ling in depicting landscapes of postmodern alienation. They persistentlydeconstruct iconic images of the classical European cities that make foreasily consumed picture-postcard views. The famous monuments andlandmarks of these cities are either absent from the films or stripped oftheir traditional cultural capital, assuming the role of outdated icons inan impoverished urban fabric, a non-place. Many of these films are set inmajor European capitals whose urban landscape, particularly in theirgeographical peripheries and margins, has been transformed by migra-tion and diaspora. Thus for example, Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine(France, 1995), depicts an urban rebellion in a Parisian banlieue,Bertolucci’s Besieged – a cross-race and -class love story – takes place inRome, Beautiful People and Dirty Pretty Things take place in Londonand Northern Skirts in Vienna. These films push the mise-en-scène to the

3 For some major analyses of

the beur and banlieue film

and Mathieu Kassovitz’s

La Haine in particular see

among others Ginette

Vincendeau, ‘Designs on

the Banlieue: Mathieu

Kassovitz’s La Haine

(1995)’, in French Film: Texts and Contexts, eds

Susan Hayward and

Ginette Vincendeau,

Routledge, London–New

York, 2000, pp 310–27.

4 For further reading see the

chapter ‘“Race” and

Cultural Hybridity: My Beautiful Laundrette and

Sammy and Rosie Get Laid’, in John Hill, British Cinema in the 1980s, Clarendon Press, Oxford,

1999, pp 205–18; Karen

Alexander, ‘Black British

Cinema in the 90s: Going

Going Gone’, in British Cinema of the 90s, ed

Robert Murphy, BFI,

London, 2000, pp 109–14;

Barbara Korte and Claudia

Sternberg, eds, Bidding for the Mainstream? Black and Asian British Film since the 1990s, Rodopi,

Amsterdam–New York,

2004

5 Laura Rascaroli, ‘New

Voyages to Italy:

Postmodern Travellers and

the Italian Road Film’,

Screen, 44:1, Spring 2003,

p 74

6 Laura U Marks, ‘A

Deleuzian Politics of

Hybrid Cinema’, Screen,

35:3, 1994, p 245

7 Hamid Naficy, ‘Phobic

Spaces and Liminal Panics:

Independent Transnational

Film Genre’, East/West Film Journal, 8:2, 1994, p

1. For further reading on

transnational cinema see

Elizabeth Ezra and Terry

Rowden, eds,

Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader, Routledge,

London–New York, 2006.

CTTE_A_207226.fm Page 746 Thursday, November 30, 2006 12:55 PM

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

22:

58 2

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

747

geographical and symbolic margins of famous cities and turn them fromglobally recycled iconic images of fantasy and glamour into non-places.Furthermore, by locating the migrants in the midst of the Europeanmetropolis these films truthfully represent the process of hybridising thenation via migration. They comment visually and ideologically on theparallel processes of migration and miscegenation echoing Hardt andNegri’s statement in Empire that circulation is ‘a global exodus, or reallynomadism; and it is a corporeal exodus, or really miscegenation’.8

Oceanic imagery, as Lola Young notes, characterises anti-miscegena-tion discourse in which the self is ‘threatened with dissolution by theinvasion of “waves”, “tides”, and “floods” of immigrants’.9 Nowhere isthe combined phenomenon of miscegenation and immigration moresalient than in contemporary Western Europe’s metropolitan centres,which have become, in the words of Saskia Sassen, hybrid spaces ofclass, ethnicity, nationality and internationality – a ‘Third World Space’within the First World.10 This metropolitan amalgamation of differentspatial and sociocultural worlds, according to Hardt and Negri, is ‘whatallows the multitude to pass from place to place and make its place itsown. This is a common place of nomadism and miscegenation.’11 Thefears of the city being contaminated and polluted through miscegenationby immigrants are particularly powerful with regard to the capital, thecentre of national pride. At the same time, the capital, now also a spaceof miscegenation and multiculturalism, is also perceived ambivalently, asa place that pollutes the country, the ‘body’ of the nation. The city,according to this racist and nationalistic view, poses a danger to thehomogenous and ‘authentic’ national culture. It is the other within. Andindeed, the ethnoscapes of these hybrid cinematic cities are almostdevoid of white ‘indigenous’ Europeans. In Dirty Pretty Things, forexample, there are almost no visible white English people, while theinvisible people (the ‘foreigners’) are to be seen everywhere. Even inBesieged’s romantic Rome with its nostalgic gaze at the city’s mosticonic historical landmark, Piazza di Spagna (the Spanish Steps), thereare spaces (presumably near the Termini and Piazza della Repubblica)where only non-white, foreigners can be seen.

Beautiful People opens on a London city bus, a British ‘icon’ and inthe words of Robin Wood ‘a microcosm of an embryonic multi-racialcommunity’.12 The film’s seven intertwined stories are framed by twocomically violent Bosnians, one a Croatian (Faruk Pruti) and the other aSerb (Dado Jehan) who were neighbours in the same village in Bosnia andnow continue their ‘tribal’ war on a London bus and in London’s streets,injuring each other so badly that they end up in a shared room in hospitalwith a Welsh terrorist. Half of the characters are British, representing theentire British class structure, and half are refugees from the formerYugoslavia. Issues related to multiculturalism, assimilation, integration,social cohesion and the emergence of new hybrid urban families are at theheart of this film. Bosnia, which came to symbolise for the so-called newEurope the dichotomy of multiculturalism versus tribal ethnicism, mate-rialising its worst ghosts and nightmares and casting a shadow on itsdream of creating a transnational, multicultural and multi-ethnic entity,plays a major role in the overall ideological economy of the film. TheEuropean fear of the ‘Bosnia within’, ie, the Balkanisation of Europe, istransformed in Dizdar’s film into a successful experiment in hybridising

8 Michael Hardt and

Antonio Negri, Empire,

Harvard University Press,

Cambridge MA–London,

2000, p 364

9 Lola Young, Fear of the Dark:’Race’, Gender and Sexuality in the Cinema,

Routledge, London–New

York, 1996, p 84

10 Saskia Sassen, ‘Rebuilding

the Global City: Economy,

Ethnicity and Space’, Social Justice, 20:3–4, 1993, p 32

11 Michael Hardt and

Antonio Negri, op cit, p

362

12 Robin Wood, ‘Beautiful People’, CineAction, no

54, January 2001, p 30

CTTE_A_207226.fm Page 747 Thursday, November 30, 2006 12:55 PM

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

22:

58 2

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

748

Bosnia with Britain, the ‘Balkan’ with ‘Europe’, the ‘Savage Barbarian’with the ‘Civilised European’. The threat of Balkanisation, the filmsuggests, can not only be avoided and evaded but even inverted. TheBalkanisation of London, the symbol of ‘Cool Britannia’, does not frag-ment the city or destroy it from within but, on the contrary, enriches andcross-fertilises it. It heals the pathology emanating from the disintegrat-ing British family and brings new hope and a new blood supply to aBritish society in the grip of a severe identity crisis. This hope culminatesin the film’s final scene, where the middle-class British doctor Mouldy ishappily dancing a Balkan dance with his newly adopted Bosnian Muslimfamily who now live as guests in his home. This image of a life-affirmingdance performed by a British/Bosnian family in a shared home is thefilm’s utopian image of the new post-Fortress Europe experiencing thepleasures and delights of multiculturalism.Jasmin Dizdar, Beautiful People, 1999. Hybridising Britain with Bosnia: The wedding of Porcha (Charlotte Coleman), a female doctor, the daughter of an upper-class Tory cabinet minister and Pero (Edin Dzandzanovic), a Bosnian refugee. Courtesy of bfi Stills Sales

The world of hybrid London, a new Babylon of nationalities, ethnici-ties, religions, where the ‘indigenous’ English can also feel like aliens intheir own land, is ultimately embodied in the infant called ‘Chaos’, thebaby of the Muslim couple delivered by Dr Mouldy. Despite the trau-matic circumstances of his ‘origins’ (his Muslim mother was raped by agang of Serbian soldiers), Chaos bears the hope of a new multi-ethnic,multinational and multi-religious Europe, a space once occupied bySarajevo. Bosnia, therefore, embodies for Europe both the utopian hope(ironically based on the past) of multi-ethnic coexistence as well as thecatastrophic potential inherent in a multi-ethnic and religious situation.And indeed at the end of the film Porcha (Charlotte Coleman), a femaledoctor, the daughter of an upper-class Tory cabinet minister who falls inlove with and marries Pero Guzino (Edin Dzandzanovic), a Bosnian refu-gee, chooses to live with her new husband in a hybrid London neigh-bourhood of migrants, asylum seekers and refugees.

Jasmin Dizdar, Beautiful People, 1999. Hybridising Britain with Bosnia: The wedding of

Porcha (Charlotte Coleman), a female doctor, the daughter of an upper-class Tory cabi-

net minister and Pero (Edin Dzandzanovic), a Bosnian refugee. Courtesy of bfi Stills Sales

CTTE_A_207226.fm Page 748 Thursday, November 30, 2006 12:55 PM

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

22:

58 2

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

749

Although London is Europe’s most multicultural capital, even lesscosmopolitan cities such as Vienna, the only European capital of aformer empire that has shrunk since the First World War, have notescaped the processes of hybridisation. Northern Skirts, whose plot takesplace in 1995 in the bleak industrial northern outskirts of Vienna, is, likeBeautiful People, set against the backdrop of the war in Bosnia. The filmcentres around four intertwined stories of five young people of differentethno-national backgrounds (but all from the Balkans) who meet eachother in Vienna. Most of the film is shot in working-class north Viennadominated by tower blocks that recall the cityscape of the banlieue in LaHaine. Like Paris in La Haine, Vienna too is stripped bare of its touristyaura. Vienna in Northern Skirts appears a very brutal, unappealing, non-place, which, although it still serves as Central Europe’s crossroadsbetween East and West, in no way recalls its glorious past as the capitalof the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Northern Skirts portrays Vienna as a city populated by militaristicthugs and brutal and chauvinistic young men. The city suffers fromfreezing cold weather and is inhospitable to foreigners. Even Vienna’sfamous landmarks, its monuments of imperial grandeur, the coffeehouses and its famous cream cakes do not look seductive or glamorous.Fin-de-siècle Vienna is transformed into a non-place of anonymity anddreariness that invokes many other contemporary urban spaces from allover the globe. A significant transition in the film from the periphery ofthe northern outskirts to the centre of famous landmarks occurs duringthe New Year’s Eve celebrations when the marginalised young migrantsfrom Bosnia and Romania ‘invade’, ‘contaminate’ and mark the iconicspaces of Vienna in a similar way to the black/blanc/beur male trio fromthe banlieue in La Haine13 who invade central Paris and its iconic land-mark (the Eiffel Tower).

The political circumstances prevailing in Austria around the time ofthe film’s release provided fertile ground for highlighting the film’smessage. The screening of the film took place seven weeks after a newAustrian government was formed by the conservative Catholic People’sParty and the xenophobic far-right Freedom Party led by the now-infa-mous Jorge Haider. Haider’s populist politics of defamation attemptedto portray ‘foreigners’ – refugees as well as first- or second-generationimmigrants from south-east Europe and the Third World – as a danger-ous threat to the ‘Germanic-Austrian identity’. As if in reaction to thenew government, the ‘invasion’ of the young and gentle Balkan refugeesinto the heart of post-Imperial Vienna in the film implicitly suggests thatAustria should start to envision itself as an actively multicultural terri-tory rather than a ‘pure’ Germanic nation-state.

THE CINEMA LANDSCAPES OF FORTRESS EUROPE

The prominence of the city in the cinemascape of Fortress Europereflects the centrality and importance of the city in the migratory processand migrant experience. Because most contemporary migration toEurope is economically motivated, it is only natural that the city, withthe economic opportunities it has to offer and with its growing diaspo-ras, is the main magnet attracting migrants in search of a better life. Yet

13 Mireille Rosello, Declining the Stereotype: Ethnicity and Representation in French Culture, University

Press of New England,

Hanover, NH–London,

1998, p 2

CTTE_A_207226.fm Page 749 Thursday, November 30, 2006 12:55 PM

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

22:

58 2

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

750

since the city is usually the migrants’ final destination, its appearance inthe films is most often preceded, in reality as well as in these films, byjourneys through the landscapes of Fortress Europe. The journey motifconstitutes one of the most abiding topoi of literature and film world-wide, because the literal journey is also a metaphorical one necessary forthe construction of a new world, a new self. These journeys, thus,become journeys in search of new identity.

The cinematic landscapes of Fortress Europe that these films use as abackdrop for their journeys in time and space are typically trauma-satu-rated rather than healing ones. Journey of Hope, for example, one of thefirst major films on migration to Europe, which won the 1991 Oscar forbest foreign film, takes place in the Swiss Alps, which in this film becomethe geographical and symbolic metaphor of Fortress Europe (despiteSwitzerland not being a full-fledged member of the EU). The film mobil-ises a mythical and epic journey of a refugee family expelled from theSwiss Eden in its attempt to stop the exodus of poor migrants searchingfor the European Promised Land. A traditional space of luxury and priv-ilege for wealthy Europeans, Switzerland, the ‘Paradise beyond themountains’ as Haydar, the Kurdish peasant and protagonist of Journeyof Hope describes it, remains a sealed Paradise with its gates closed tothe poor ‘invaders’ from Asia.

The film tells the story of a Kurdish couple, Haydar and Meryem,who start their journey of hope from a small village in the mountains ofsouth-eastern Turkey in September 1988. They take their seven-year-oldson Mehmet Ali, the brightest of their eight children, on their grandfa-ther’s suggestion that ‘he is a fresh seedling to grow roots in the new soilof your future’ and the one ‘who will save the family’. Their first stopafter leaving their Kurdish homeland is Istanbul and they are stowedaway on a freighter to Genoa. Once in Italy, they are taken to the moun-tains by traffickers and sent on towards Switzerland without guidance inthe snow and cold. Their journey of hope now turns into their worstnightmare. Meryem breaks her leg in the freezing mountains, the childdies of cold, and Haydar is arrested by the Swiss authorities on chargesof negligence. The couple are then detained in Switzerland where theyawait deportation to Turkey.

The most dramatic part of the film occurs in the spectacular sceneryof the Alps, a landscape that has always had an aura of mystery. Span-ning 700 kilometres, through seven different countries, the Alps lie in themiddle of Europe. In the Middle Ages, so many pilgrims crossed them enroute to Rome that the Alpine passes, as Fergus Fleming explains,became multicultural melting pots, attracting travellers from distantIceland and bandits from faraway Palestine.14 The Alpine landscape,which from the end of the nineteenth century has been a healing land-scape of health spas for Europe’s wealthy, becomes in Journey of Hopethe ‘killing fields’ of the Alps.

The Haydar family’s migration fantasy of Switzerland as the ‘Para-dise beyond the mountains’ was built around a postcard sent to them byan uncle who immigrated to Switzerland. This postcard of a sweepingview of the Swiss Alps, partially eaten by their goat in Turkey, fills thewhole frame of one of the shots in the opening scene of the film, fore-grounding the power of seduction held by representation. The postcardmotif runs throughout the film, deconstructing and subverting this image

14 Fergus Fleming, Killing Dragons: The Conquest of the Alps, Granta Books,

London, 2005

CTTE_A_207226.fm Page 750 Thursday, November 30, 2006 12:55 PM

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

22:

58 2

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

751

of Switzerland, and underscoring the important role of mass-producedrepresentations in generating fantasies that become driving forces inglobal geographical mobility.

Spare Parts is one of the few films in the cross-border journey genrethat focuses on the traffickers themselves rather than on the refugees.15

The film takes place in the European wilderness, the mountainousborder zone between Eastern/Central Europe (Slovenia) and WesternEurope (Italy). This landscape becomes Europe’s Wild West, a liminalzone dominated by smugglers, traffickers, criminals and stateless refu-gees. The harsh landscape, used as the backdrop to the refugee drama,also bears silent witness to the tragedy of the traffickers themselves who,like the refugees, are the victims of globalisation and the New Europe.The traffickers are portrayed not necessarily as ‘born’ criminals but asthe products of sociopolitical processes prevailing in the new post-wallEastern Europe (privatisation, decline of social services, etc). But theinhuman immigration and asylum policies of the liberal West Europeanstates are also conveyed as no less significant factors in the brutalisationof the traffickers. During the border crossing in the film from Slovenia toItaly, the trafficker boss tells his young ‘pupil’: ‘Compared to what isdone on the other side of the border – Italy – we are tourist guides.’ Thegradual process of dehumanisation that the traffickers undergo is bestillustrated by the young protagonist’s rite of passage from innocence tothe hard adult world of the super-masculine traffickers.

The problem is not the illegality of the trafficking but the inhumansystem that criminalises the refugees and those who traffic them. Thisrecalls Dirty Pretty Things, which also inverts the criminalisation trope,placing the blame on the system that creates and perpetuates crime. ‘Ipity those people who dream about Europe’, says one of the human traf-fickers in Spare Parts, challenging the migration fantasy that nurturesand drives the exodus of refugees to Europe. This new Europe, the filmsuggests, is perhaps even worse than old racist Europe. Its brutality andcruelty is accordingly played against the backdrop of a no-man’s land, aharsh border crossing zone beyond the boundaries of civilisation.

Last Resort is a film about Tanya, a young Russian woman whoarrives in England with her ten-year-old son. Instead of meeting herfiancé as planned she finds herself in a detention centre for asylum seek-ers in Stonehaven (shot at Margate), a rundown seaside resort town,which also challenges the mask of new Europe through its deconstruc-tion of the ‘Englishness’ of the English landscape. Stonehaven is adeserted and dreary place, a bleak cement desert dotted with emptyvodka bottles. A sign over the ghostly, desolate amusement park, next tothe Tower of Babel high-rise populated by asylum seekers, reads‘Dreamland welcomes you’ in a parody of the inscription at the base ofthe Statue of Liberty, the entry point to America and the mythic symbolof immigration.

Tall watchtowers loom over the detention centre, exercising thecontrolling gaze of panoptic Europe. The high-rise slum, where theasylum seekers are imprisoned, is the postmodern Babel where refugeesfrom all over the world speak many languages. Ironically, the refugeezone, as described by the director who himself passed his childhood inCommunist Poland, resembles a communist-style detention centre.16

Tanya is assigned a dingy flat and informed that she cannot leave it for

15 The film’s humanisation

of the traffickers (especially

the young protagonist),

showing them as victims of

the new Europe, recalls Luc

and Jean-Pierre Dardenne’s

La Promesse, France,

1996.

16 See http://www.bfi.org.uk/

sightandsound/2001_03/

last_resort.html (accessed 3

November 2004)

CTTE_A_207226.fm Page 751 Thursday, November 30, 2006 12:55 PM

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

22:

58 2

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

752

the months that it will take to process her case.‘This city’, Tania says, ‘islike punishment for some mistake that I made’. Tanya and the otherasylum seekers discover that they are virtually imprisoned in the town.The real Margate becomes a paradigm for the desolate English seasideresort town turned penal colony, with borders patrolled by police dogsand kept under surveillance by CCTV cameras to control people desig-nated as criminals by the European immigration authorities. The imageestablished by Palikowski is that of a ghost town – mostly desertedamusement arcades, the gloomy sea, the seagulls, the broken carousel,the shabby houses, the empty bottles of alcohol and busy call boxes (inthe age of the mobile phone) crowded with asylum seekers.

Last Resort, like Dirty Pretty Things, exposes the other and invisibleEngland. It shows fortress England with its post-Orwellian devices ofcontrol and surveillance. Last Resort exposes the apparatus behind theidea of Fortress Europe, its mechanism of control and punishment aimedat repulsing outsider strangers (including those fleeing persecution whohave the right to protection under international law), forcing them to thelast means of survival: the world of crime. The other ‘Little Britain’ ofLast Resort is portrayed by a foreign director whose camera captures theother side of Englishness and English hospitality. Yet, as in Journey ofHope, the inhospitality is attributed only to the anonymous, bureau-cratic and faceless state apparatus and not to ordinary people who canbe decent and welcoming. Tanya, the damsel in distress locked in thetower of detention, is eventually freed by Alfie, the gentle working-classhero of the film.

‘That a Polish film-maker should see the Isle of Thanet as a suitablelocation for a drama of exile, surveillance, containment’, as Sight andSound critic Iain Sinclair rightly wonders, ‘is an intriguing culturalmarker’.17

CONCLUSION: THE REFUGEE GAZE

Related to the deconstruction of the visual rhetoric of the urban andnatural landscapes of postcard Europe is the dialectical relationshipplayed out in these films between the gaze of the refugee, the tourist andthe spectator. As most of these films involve journeys and travel theyhave the potential to produce a virtual tourist’s experience by turning thefilm’s spectators themselves into tourists of the exotic, acting as touristbrochures promoting ‘authenticity’ and ‘idealised typicalities of theother’.18 Michael Winterbottom’s In This World, for example, takesplace along the historical Silk Road as well as in some of Europe’s mostglamorous capitals. Yet the camera gaze identifies with the refugee’sgaze for whom the ‘exotic’ landscape or the historical landmark is not abeautiful spectacle to be consumed and admired but a space that needsto be ‘penetrated’, ‘traversed’ and ‘survived’, and that in most cases isinhospitable and hostile to him or her. In some of these films, such as InThis World and Journey of Hope, the camera gaze deliberately deprivesthe spectator of the scopophilic ‘touristic’ pleasure, subordinating his orher gaze to the refugee’s gaze in pursuit of survival.

In This World follows the journey of teenage Jamal and his cousinEnayatulla from a refugee camp in Afghanistan along the

17 Iain Sinclair, ‘The Cruel

Seaside’, Sight and Sound,

March 2001, available at:

http://www.bfi.org.uk/

sightandsound/2001_03/

last_resort.html (accessed 3

November 2004)

18 John Frow, ‘Tourism and

the Semiotics of Nostalgia’,

October, no 57, Summer

1991, p 144

CTTE_A_207226.fm Page 752 Thursday, November 30, 2006 12:55 PM

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

22:

58 2

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

753

people-smuggling route towards Britain. The youngsters travel in pick-ups, buses and an airless container, through landscapes of primalbeauty – deserts and rocks, debris-littered roads at sunrise, Kurdishmountain passes in darkness. But they scarcely seem to notice thesespectacular landscapes. In only one of the scenes in the film do theyenjoy the landscape. The pair are seen sitting and admiring the view ofthe snowy mountains of Turkey, which they are about to cross on foot.Jamal says: ‘Look at the view, Enayamat!’, to which Enayamatresponds: ‘Look at the snow, it’s nice.’ But, as in Journey of Hope, thetwo youngsters will soon discover that the spectacular snowy moun-tains are deceiving: when they start crossing them, beauty will turn intoa struggle against death and detention. The dialectics of gazes in this isparticularly complex. The spectator’s gaze (mimicking the tourist’sgaze) is negated by the refugee’s gaze. One contradicts the other. Whileone gaze is in search of pleasure (even an involuntary one), the otherseeks survival. The tourist’s gaze searches for difference, exoticism andpoetic stimulation of the eye. It is a consuming gaze driven by the plea-sure principle. The refugee’s gaze, by contrast, is indifferent to the spec-tacular landscape. For him or her, the landscape is an enemy to beovercome and crossed. The spectator’s gaze, on the other hand,oscillates between the two gazes, the pleasure-seeking gaze of thetourist and the refuge-seeking refugee’s gaze. This oscillation betweentourism and ‘poorism’ is used in In This World as a distanciationeffect, resulting in a Brechtian docudrama of alienation.

The complex dialectics of gazes creates the spectator’s moral dilemmain many of the cross-border films, and In This World in particular: Is thespectator entitled to derive pleasure from the other’s suffering? Conse-quently, the spectator of the refugee’s journey film is transformed intothe reflective/analytical spectator in the Brechtian tradition. In Journeyof Hope, the child Mehmet Ali possesses the tourist gaze. After all, thefigure of the tourist is only a mature replica (or, some would argue, cari-cature) of a child in search of pleasure and excitement. Tourism is basedon a temporary disavowal of one’s ‘real’ life, an escape into the fantasyof childhood freedom, the pre-adult pleasure in ‘discovering the world’.Tourism, much like cinema itself, is based on the suspension of disbelief.For a limited period of time reality is disavowed, the reality principle issuspended and the pleasure principle is in absolute control. The kindlorry driver who smuggles Haydar’s family to Switzerland and the childMehmet are seen in Italy taking snapshots of each other licking icecream. For a moment they all pretend to be tourists, rather than ‘illegalimmigrants’ and traffickers. They perform the tourist’s ritual: takingphotos and refreshing themselves with ice cream. At that rare moment ofgrace, the refugees disavow or perhaps revolt against the harsh realityimposed on them, robbing them of their basic humanity, their entitle-ment to the simple pleasures of life taken for granted by innocentsabroad.

Contemporary migrant and diasporic films, on and of FortressEurope, take us into the other side of globalisation in which people aretrafficked like goods for currency. In setting themselves the task ofaccompanying the refugees on their journey, these films have sought toshow the human qualities, the courage and stamina of those described as‘economic migrants’, a term which when set against that of ‘refugee’

CTTE_A_207226.fm Page 753 Thursday, November 30, 2006 12:55 PM

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

22:

58 2

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

754

leads to an ‘insidious distinction’. One of the most iconic scenes of thefilm Journey of Hope shows the desperate, freezing refugees knocking onthe double-glazed glass windows of a heated indoor swimming poolinside an Alpine spa hotel. The owner of the hotel is seen, through theirgaze, swimming in the pool. Because of the pool’s soundproof glass wallshe cannot hear the refugees’ desperate appeal for help. At this dramaticmoment, the film creates a dissolve of two conflicting images, generatedand exchanged between two different gazes, that of the poor,hungry and freezing refugees who survived the harsh winter mountainstorm, and the well-fed white European ‘gatekeeper’ bathing in theheated pool seemingly deaf to the plight of the underprivileged and theirdesperation. Perhaps this shocking image of reflective duality, of privi-lege mirrored by its counter-image of a luxury spa hotel turning into ahospital of potential deportees, of desperate refugees knocking on theglass walls of the space of the rich and comfortable is the ultimate iconicimage of Fortress Europe guarding its visible wealth and comfort againstthe pledge of non-Europeans in search of a better life. This image of‘hospitality’ denied is the image of the New Europe.

CTTE_A_207226.fm Page 754 Thursday, November 30, 2006 12:55 PM

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

New

Yor

k U

nive

rsity

] at

22:

58 2

3 N

ovem

ber

2014