Short description:

This book examines the historical and contemporary tensions around mobility and identity in Europe in relation to experimental moving image practices in contemporary art and cinema.

Long description:

Mobility and Migration in Film and Moving Image Art explores cinematic and artistic representations of migration and mobility in Europe since the 1990s. Drawing on theories of migrant and diasporic cinema, moving-image art, and mobility studies, Bayraktar provides historically situated close readings of films, videos, and cinematic installations that concern migratory networks and infrastructures across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Probing the notion of Europe as a coherent entity and a borderless space, this interdisciplinary study underscores the ways European ideals of mobility and fluidity are deeply enmeshed with immobility, forced migration, illegalization, and xenophobia. With a specific focus on diverse forms of mobility such as labor migration, postcolonial migration, refugee mobilities, and tourism, Bayraktar studies the new counter-hegemonic imaginations invoked by the work of filmmakers such as Ayşe Polat, Fatih Akin, Michael Haneke, and Tony Gatlif as well as video essays and installations of artists such as Kutlu? Ataman, Ursula Biemann, Maria Iorio and Raphaël Cuomo, and Ergin Çavuşo?lu. Challenging aesthetic boundaries as well as national, cultural, and political ones, the works central to this book envision Europe as a diverse, inclusive, and unfixed continent that is reimagined from many elsewheres well beyond its borders.

"This is a strong new scholarly voice that will change how we think about European cinema, migration, and the way we conceptualize the relationship between film and screen-based art. Rigorous and sophisticated, Nilgün Bayraktar offers us an elegant tour de force of by-now canonical films of European minority cinema and intriguing video essays and screen-based installations art about mobility into and within Europe." -- Barbara Mennel, University of Florida, USA

"The book?s focus on experimental films and video installations, which engage with migration and other forms of transnational mobility but which have so far received less scholarly attention than the feature films of Europe?s diasporic auteurs, makes it a most welcome and important addition to the field of transnational cinema and moving image studies." - Daniela Berghahn, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

Table of Contents:

Introduction: Cinematic and Artistic Takes on Migration and Mobility in Contemporary Europe  Part I. Transnational Flows in Cinema  1. Cross-Border Mobility and Confinement in Turkish German Cinema: Countess Sophia Hatun and The Edge of Heaven  2. Performative Encounters and Mediated Memories in Maghrebi French Cinema: Exiles and Hidden  Part II. Fragmented Journeys in Moving Image Art  3. Location and Urban Marginality in the Site-Specific Video Installation Küba  4. Tourism and Undocumented Migration in Southern Europe: The Video Essay Sudeuropa  5. Social Infrastructures of Undocumented Mobility in the Multiscreen Video Installation Sahara Chronicle  Afterword: Points of Departure