Abstract :
[en] This article attempts to identify and define a specific tendency which has emerged over the past few years within the field of migrant cinema production in Italy, that is, the emergence of what we might call popular migrant cinema or, to use the expression mentioned in the article’s title, African-Italian popular cinema. As the article discusses, the definition of «popular cinema» is controversial and, when we try to apply this concept within the field of migrant cinema, its use becomes even more problematic. In fact, while by using the term «popular cinema» scholars have generally referred to high budget films, produced on an industrial scale, and able to achieve wide circulation and outstanding box-office results, the films analyzed here are usually the result of informal production strategies and limited economic resources, and in most of the cases they manage to achieve very restricted commercial circulation. However, and this is the major point this article intends to make, they are «popular» in their intentions. They are, in fact, films that mimic the global popular cinema style of Hollywood blockbuster films and approach the issue of migration through the lens of mainstream film genres such as gangster movies, thrillers, comedies, melodramas, and even musicals.
Making reference to the work on mimicry and membership by the American anthropologist James Ferguson (2006) and to the recent scholarship on African popular culture (Barber 1987; 1997) and on the Nigerian video phenomenon (cf. Haynes 2000; Bisschoff e Overbergh 2012), this article suggests that the films analyzed here adopt this mimetic narrative strategy in order to claim the right to be part of an international and transnational cinematic arena defined by a shared film language, the language of mainstream film genres, thus attempting to open up the conceptual, narrative and stylistic barriers that have often isolated migrant cinema within a niche (or even, as numerous directors have underlined, a «ghetto») defined by the filmmaker’s biography or by the political significance of the film’s message.
In order to support this argument, the article identifies a sample of analysis by briefly describing four films, Manetti Bros’ Torino Boys (1997), IGB’s Kiki Marriage (2003), Guido Lombardi’s Là-Bas (2011) and Hedy Krissane’s Aspromonte (2012). These films symbolize the four ideal vertexes of the imaginary space within which we can identify the emergent African-Italian popular cinema. In fact, even by being profoundly different, they present a number of aspects which, even though combined in different ways, recur in numerous other films produced in Italy over the past few years.
Torino Boys, for instance, represents the first example of an Italian film about migration which makes an attempt to deal with popular cinema’s film style and which tries to represent migrants’ life through the prism of their everyday (at times even «banal») experience. Interestingly enough, this attempt is made by using as filmic reference the narrative and aesthetic style that characterizes Nigerian Nollywood melodramas (cf. Jedlowski forthcoming).
Kiki Marriage, the first Nigerian video film shot and produced in Italy by a Nigerian film company based in the Peninsula, gives us an insight into the emergence of range of Nigerian video production companies in Italy (cf. Jedlowski 2012a). These companies, by trying to transpose the Nollywood model within a diasporic context, apply a set of narrative and aesthetic patterns which are profoundly different from those applied by Italian films about migration and which signal the emergence of locally-produced migrant and diasporic popular cultures in Italy.
If compared to the first two mentioned films, Là-Bas presents a stronger political and social concern for the situation migrants are often forced to experience in Italy (harsh labor conditions, violence, racism, police harassment, etc.), but tries to conciliate it with an entertainment-oriented film language that might allow the film to reach an audience beyond the limits of the networks along which migrant cinema normally circulates. In this sense, this film signals a specific tendency within the emerging African-Italian popular cinema that tries to make the tradition of socially engaged Italian documentary filmmaking meet with a lighter, rather commercially-oriented film style.
As for Là-bas, Aspromonte is a limit-case within this context. Its inclusion within this discussion is important because it underlines the emerging tendency among a number of directors who dealt with migration in previous films, to move from the underground, interstitial modes of production that characterized their previous works, toward an inclusion into industrial cinema dynamics. This film is, in fact, a commercially-oriented comedy which has little to do with migration, directed by Hedy Krissane, a Tunisian filmmaker based in Italy whose previous works were entirely dedicated to migration issues. In many ways, this films represents Krissane’s attempt to penetrate the Italian cinema industry in order to gain the contacts, the skills and the financial support that, in the future, might allow him to make films that could cross the boundaries of the cinematic «ghetto» within which migrant film production in Italy has been confined until today.
