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Utopic Horizons i UTOPIC HORIZONS: CINEMATIC GEOGRAPHIES OF TRAVEL AND MIGRATION A thesis submitted to Middlesex University in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Les Roberts School of Arts Middlesex University February 2005 ii Abstract Theoretically grounded in debates surrounding the production of space and mobility in contemporary cultural discourse, this thesis examines the role of film in these deterritorialised landscapes of theory and practice, in particular the shift from place- based geographies of travel and film to those of ‘utopic’ displacement. Focussed primarily on examples from contemporary European film, the thesis also considers the broader geo-historical contexts underpinning travel and filmic practices: for example, cinema’s nascent links with the democratisation of travel and the construction of a touristic ‘mobile virtual gaze’. In so far as these and other examples of ‘travel film’ can be said to discursively centre the ‘voyager-voyeur’ in geographies of home and placement, they invoke an ‘Ulyssean gaze’ of mythic circularity against which the utopic deterritorialisations of migrancy and transnational space are counterposed. It is these utopic horizons of travel – cinematic mobilities that pose dialectical challenges to hegemonic cartographies of place and space – which this thesis sets out to explore. Mapping the utopic gaze in early and ‘classic’ (e)migrant films, I examine the extent to which the frontiers and horizons of utopic travel, predicated in these examples on spatio-temporal distance, could be said to have collapsed in a spatial conflation of presence and absence. In this analysis ellipses in space and time have increasingly displaced the representational spaces of the journey. Looking at a range of examples from contemporary film, I examine the dialectic between a displaced imaginary of utopic hope and the material non-places of transit, refuge and waiting which dominate these cinematic geographies; a dialectic which maps affective spaces of stasis and transition. In the deterritorialised landscapes of postmodernity I argue that it is the agential and embodied mobilities of movement-in-itself – psychogeographic, oblique confrontations with hegemonic space – that constitutes the fullest realisation of the utopic. Far from valorising undialectical tropes of the ‘open road’ or of the rhizomatic, homeless ‘nomad’, these peripatetic, embodied mobilities are the product of a dialectic of stasis and transition in which the conflict between abstract and lived spaces of mobility is brought to the fore. i Acknowledgements I’d like to thank all those who’ve had a hand in making the completion of this thesis possible. Myrto Konstantarakos for her help in getting things started. Anna Pavlakos for alerting me to sources of funding and for steering me through the administrative quagmire. Thanks in particular to the Arts and Humanities Research Board, without whose support this thesis would not have been possible, and to Middlesex University for providing additional financial assistance. I’m grateful to Marina Lambrou for her help with the scholarship award. Thank you to Francis Mulhern for his advice and encouragement, Karl Labiche for help with the images, and to Marc Augé and Réda Bensmaïa for finding the time to reply to my enquiries. I’d also like to acknowledge the work of the British Film Institute, whose staff, library and viewing service have proved invaluable resources. I’d especially like to thank Raynalle Udris, Elizabeth Lebas and Patrick Phillips for their continued support, encouragement, guidance and rigorous supervision. A big thank you also to Jan Udris for comments and for the detailed proof-reading. Thank you to Hazel for all your support and forbearance, for exchanging ideas, reading through drafts and for sharing the journey. And lastly, for their inspiration and blessed distraction, I’m indebted to my children: Ella, whose life so far has spanned the gestation of this thesis, and Marc, whose recent arrival marked the sighting of new beginnings and horizons. ii Contents Figures iv Introduction (‘Trailer’) vi 1. THEORETICAL EXCURSIONS AND THE DISCURSIVE TRAVELLER 1.1 Outline of a Discursive Field 1 1.2 Definitions and Typologies of Travel 5 1.3 The Dialectics of Movement and Fixity 14 1.4 A Spatial Turn 18 1.5 Ideational Displacements: Deterritorialised Spaces of Travel 26 2. ‘MERCHANTS OF LIGHT’: TRAVEL, FILM, AND THE ULYSSEAN GAZE 2.1 Travel and Film: Convergent Practices 37 2.2 Travelling in Comfort 40 2.3 Ulysses’ Gaze 47 2.4 The Travails of Modernity: Dis/placing the Nation 62 3. TERRA NOVA: THE SPATIAL UTOPICS OF TRAVEL 3.1 Ambivalent Trajectories 79 3.2 (E)migration and Early Film 87 3.3 Journeys of Hope 98 3.4 Lost Horizons 110 4. FROM PLACE TO NON-PLACE 4.1 Re-orientations 120 4.2 Non-places and Any-spaces-whatever 127 4.3 Zones of Arrival and Departure 135 4.4 Zones of Stasis 142 4.5 Zones of Transition 154 5. SPACES OF TRANSITION: PERIPATETIC GEOGRAPHIES OF THE ROAD 5.1 The Road Ahead 166 5.2 Wandering 172 5.3 Roads to Nowhere 177 5.4 Spaces of Transition 189 5.5 Cultivating Labours 195 6. CONCLUSION: FROM NON-PLACE TO PLACE 6.1 The Filmmaker-as-traveller 208 6.2 Utopic Space 213 6.3 Cultivating Labours: Cultivating Place 217 Bibliography 221 Filmography 241 iii Figures Figure 1.1 Spatial Dialectics 24 Figure 2.1 Dis/placing the nation: road scene from Traffic Jam. 66 Figure 2.2 Mt. Fuji postcard 66 Figure 2.3 ‘Where the past greets the future’ 66 Figure 2.4 The Pilgrims Way (Bill Brandt, 1950) 72 Figure 3.1 Journey of Hope: stills from Ulysses’ Gaze 98 Figure 3.2 The Expulsion from Paradise (Masaccio, 1425-1428) 100 Figure 3.3 Departure scene from The Emigrants 104 Figure 3.4 The Emigrants’ Last Sight of Home (Richard Redgrave, 1858) 104 Figure 3.5 Postcard from eutopia in Journey of Hope 113 Figure 3.6 Obscured by clouds: mapping outopia in La Vallée 114 Figure 4.1 Departure scene from Voyage to Cythera 152 Figure 4.2 Final scene from Voyage to Cythera 153 Figure 4.3 Horizons and frontiers: asylum seekers in Margate, Kent, 2003 156 Figure 4.4 Flight scene from Last Resort 157 Figure 5.1 Abstract and absolute space in Solaris 179 Figure 5.2 Mobile distraction: road scene from Time Out 187 Figure 5.3 Haptic visuality: road scene from In This World 191 Figure 5.4 Cultivating place: homecoming scene from The Beekeeper 197 Figure 5.5 Re-cultivating the social: opening shots from Vagabond 204 iv The story of a journey is a function of its geography. (Gaston Bachelard) v Introduction (‘Trailer’)1 Then came film and burst this prison world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go travelling.2 At one point in his ethnographic travelogue, Tristes Tropiques, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss makes the following observation: ‘Without deliberate intention on my part, a kind of mental “tracking shot” has led me from central Brazil to southern Asia; from the most recently discovered lands to those in which civilisation first made its appearance’ (1973 [1955]: 181, emphasis added). After more than a century of the moving image the use of a cinematic metaphor as a rhetorical device to express movement through time and space may not in itself seem particularly noteworthy. Yet in setting out the theoretical foundations of this thesis it occurs to me that it is the very transparency of this slippage between different symbolic registers of ‘travel’ that is of significance. This thesis examines the cinematic geographies of travel and migration in European film. At its core lies the relationship between the virtuality of filmic travel and the everyday mobilities (and immobilities) of an increasingly restless world. The ontological dilemmas posed by this relationship, and the question of ‘travel’ more generally, are aptly, if obliquely, captured in Lévi-Strauss’ intriguing turn of phrase. Why, for example, does he deem it necessary to point out the almost unconscious orchestration of the mental tracking shot? A famous line from Wim Wenders’ Euro-road movie Kings of the Road (1976) declares that ‘the Americans have colonised our subconscious’. Can the same be said of cinematic space? Have cinema’s formal modalities of vicarious travel so imprinted themselves on the imagination of the actual (cine-literate) traveller that the real and imaginary mobilities of time and space inherent in travel are themselves intrinsically ‘cinematic’? The displacements that Lévi-Strauss’ actual mobility sets in motion suggest that to conceive of such a journey – to envisage such landscapes – requires the same movement and ellipses in time and space as those that comprise the formal aesthetics of film. Yet perhaps another reason for the significance of this quote is that it represents a reversal of a travel metaphoric that has indeed so imprinted itself on the cultural landscapes of postmodernity that its very ubiquity is, at the same time, that which has ensured its near- absolute transparency. So widespread is the recourse to tropes of travel, displacement, 1 trailer, n. One who travels on foot; one that follows a trail, a tracker; an excerpt of a film, broadcast, etc., used as advance publicity; the blank piece of film at the end of a reel (Oxford English Dictionary; Chambers English Dictionary). 2 Walter Benjamin, quoted in Cresswell and Dixon (2002b: 5). vi mobility and the like in contemporary social theory that when an instance presents itself in which ‘actual’ travel (e.g. ethnographic) generates tropes of virtual displacement (cinematic/ideational) it comes across, by comparison, as something of a novelty. Examples of what may provisionally be termed ‘ideational travel’ typically presuppose a form of ‘sedentary mobility’ in which hitherto fixed categories of knowledge, place or identity succumb to the metaphorical displacements of anti-foundational epistemologies.
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