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Sognando Lamerica
Italian cinema and migrations
The presence of migrants in Italy and in Europe nowadays has caused many tranformations in the so-called “reception societies”. One of the cultural mechanism spreading in Italy is about a revaluation of the Italian immigrants of the past. Press, television, cinema and electronic media contribue for a reassessment of the memory of Italian emigration, trying to give rise to feelings of empathy with today’s migrants. This intervention proposes a critical reading of those representations that give shape to the memories of emigration; ethnocentrism, eurocentrism, hierarchic classifications of the self and the other, are discussed in relation with photographic material, films (Lamerica and others) and written material. In this context some objects and places impose themselves as fundamental signs of the imagery showed by cinema: ships departuring and returning, stations, the Mediterranean sea. The cinema seems to be heading south and towards the Mediterranean to identify a meeting and a confrontation space that is both critic to the “European Fortress” and a possibility for the future.
Enrica Capussotti is a temporaly employed researcher at the Univerity of Siena and is involved in cultural studies. She published essays on young people cultures, the history of feminism and of social conflicts. Her works in progress employ oral history and cinema for a narration of migration starting from the 50s of the 20th century.
