Lo screening del migrate : la rappresentazione dell'alterità nel cinema italiano contemporaneo

Abstract

The present work arises from the consideration that, in recent Italian filmography, the figure of the foreign migrant who comes from the world's South is often represented through a series of cliche connoted by paternalistic or othering tones, that often confine his/her expressive potential in rigid and schematic portraits. Although most of the film directors are inspired by the honest intention to re-evaluate the figure of the immigrant, which is so often neglected or altered by the media, their portrayal does not really provide an in-depth analysis of the so-called Otherness. Furthermore, I have observed that migrants, being subaltern subjects, often have a very marginal role in the film or, using a Spivakian expression, they "cannot speak", simply because they are not allowed to make their voices heard. On the basis of such reflections, I thought it could be of particular interest to carry out an analysis aiming at discovering the origins of the stereotyped representation of the Other as well as of the conscious or unconscious discriminating attitude towards migrants, common to a considerable part of Italian society. The analysis has allowed me to trace such origins back to the repressed memory of the Italian colonial past, in which the need to assert the identity of the Italian people and of a powerful and prestigious "Motherland" (and to justify her colonial enterprises), was best expressed by Fascism and by the fascist propaganda, that became the most powerful instrument of discrimination between the Italian colonizer and the colonized subjects. The racism and prejudices towards contemporary migrants, often discriminated on the basis of their supposed diversity antithetic to the dominant culture, appear paradoxical, because they overlook the fact that Italy too has been a country of emigrants, who had to face the pain of being uprooted as well as the difficulties of integration in the guest country, where they became the object of stereotypes and prejudices. Such an apparent forgetfulness contributes, even in cinema, to a short-sighted, partial and essentialist vision of the immigrant. These representative shortcomings are not found, on the other hand, in the (few) films screening the Italian emigrant who, in the previous century, migrated abroad or from the South to the North of Italy, with the exception of the comedy, which is intrinsically based on stereotypes. Therefore, I have tried to highlight the unpreparedness of Italian cinema in the new confrontation with Otherness, which reflects the unpreparedness of Italian society itself, in spite of some effective and significant exceptions hinting at a partial but substantial progress in the cinematographic path of approaching the Other through a multiethnic perspective. [...]