Screening Strangers: Migration and Diaspora in Contemporary European Cinema [Paperback]

Yosefa Loshitzky challenges the utopian notion of a post-national New Europe by focusing on the waves of migrants and refugees that some view as a potential threat to European identity, a concern heightened by the rhetoric of the war on terror, the London Underground bombings, and the riots in Paris's banlieues. Opening a cinematic window onto this struggle, Loshitzky determines patterns in the representation and negotiation of European identity in several European films from the late 20th and early 21st centuries, including Bernardo Bertolucci'sBesieged,Stephen Frears'sDirty Pretty Things,Mathieu Kassovitz'sLa Haine,and Michael Winterbottom'sIn This World, Code 46,andThe Road to Guantanamo.

Loshitzky (Univ. of East London, UK) here expands on her earlier fine work on cinema and politics: The Radical Faces of Godard and Bertolucci (CH, Sep'95, 33-0195) and Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen (CH, Jul'02, 39-6318). She works through contemporary European films that foreground migration, with the goal of describing each film's view of 'fortress Europe.' Loshitzky returns to Bernardo Bertolucci in Besieged (1998), while picking out Godardian elements in both Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine (1995) and Michael Winterbottom's 'Camp Trilogy' (In This World, Code 46, The Road to Guantanamo). She also discusses the Swiss film Journey of Hope (1990) and Stephen Frears's Dirty Pretty Things (2002). The range of films Loshitzky takes on is wide, but she makes no claim for comprehensiveness. She notes that she selects 'hegemonic' rather than 'minority discourse' films, i.e., films made by 'hosts' rather than 'strangers.' Given that principle of selection, this reviewer could have done with more unmasking of hegemonic ideology and less letting the films speakhowever criticallyfor themselves. That said, this book is every bit as rewarding as the best recent work on European identity and the cinema, e.g., Rosalind Galt's The New EulS9