Entering Through the Golden Door 77

Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 2012 ISSN: 1016-3476 Vol. 21, No. 1: 77–99 Entering through the Golden Door 77

ENTERING THROUGH THE GOLDEN DOOR: CINEMATIC REPRESENTATIONS OF A MYTHICAL MOMENT

YIORGOS KALOGERAS Artistotle University

Greek director Pantelis Voulgaris’ Brides/Nyfes (2004) and Italian director Emmanuele Crialese’s Nuovomondo/The Golden Door (2006) are examples of creative response to the cinematic circulation of Elia Kazan’s America, America (1963), an archetypical white immigration story and movie. The ideological configurations that come into play in these films centre on the representation of one of the most important moments in the American ‘rebirth’ of the immigrant, his/her entrance to the US. This is a mythical moment in American vernacular knowledge of immigration and Americanization and it is the sequence that concludes all three films. In the wake of recent massive immigration to the EU, these films respond by conflating past immigration to the US with recent immigration to ‘Fortress Europe’; while they sensitize their audiences to the possible historical and economic parallels between the two, they also meditate on the crisis of identity that such migrations precipitated.

Elia Kazan’s America, America (1963) marked a turning point in Hollywood’s production of feature film; it introduced a novel epic genre, that of the European immigration to the USA. Three hours long, America, America was the first major studio production of an immigration story of epic proportions filmed by Elia Kazan (1909–2003) in a documentary-like, almost neorealist style. Such a documentary-like approach militated against the epic style of popular films that Hollywood studios produced at the time. Furthermore, this ‘American’ immigration film presented the male protagonist’s pre-immigration story rather than his American experience; thus, the audience was asked to identify with an oriental locale, a pre-industrial reality and an alien history. Given such an unfamiliar context, viewers had to infer the ideological choices of the new immigrant before his transatlantic voyage. How would Kazan be able to produce such an unHollywood-like epic film? Kazan was given free hand in theme and production costs after a series of box office and artistic triumphs he had directed on stage and screen (Kalogeras,

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2009: 64). His work had foregrounded novelty and often grappled with controversy; the list is indicative, Gentlemen’s Agreement (1948), A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), On the Waterfront (1954), Baby Doll (1956), A Face in the Crowd (1958), Splendor in the Grass (1961). It is likely that the producers were hoping for yet another thematically and generically innovative film that would challenge critics and public alike. This time, however, his most personal movie since On the Waterfront faced production difficulties. For political reasons, he was not allowed to shoot the film entirely in Turkey, as he had originally planned (Kazan 1988: 635–645); in the middle of shooting, he was forced to smuggle the already filmed material out of Turkey under threats of confiscation, and had to relocate the entire production outside Athens, Greece. On a personal note, he was not entirely happy with his protagonist Stathis Gialelis (Young, 1999: 277). Even so, the movie was completed but did poorly at the box office, while the critics fell embarrassingly silent (Kazan, 1988: 719). This was not an epic like The Ten Commandments, Ben Hur, El Cid, Cleopatra, and others; it lacked lavish technicolor cinematography, renowed names and a hero with whom one would easily identify. Although the main character was an immigrant, this was a time when white America felt detatched from their new immigrant origins.1 Besides, America, America appeared at a time when the US public was preoccupied with the Vietnam war, and the civil rights movement in the South was focusing people’s attention on race and racialization and away from issues of white ethnicity. Over the years, as the interest of critics and public in the US increased, their original assessment shifted; America, America was viewed as an archetypical immigration film, a testimonial to the new immigrants’ transatlantic voyage. The film was also viewed as an autobiography, and studied by Kazan biographers in order to re-evaluate his notorious 1952 testimony as a friendly witness before the House of Unamerican Activities Committee. As a work of cinematic representation, America, America refocused attention on the new immigrants’ seduction by the American Dream before their arrival on Ellis Island, and was lauded by filmmakers and critics for that reason. Finally, in 1999, the film was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress, as it was deemed ‘culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant’. America, America, now a classic immigration film, fascinated subsequent American movie directors. One of Kazan’s greatest advocates, Martin Scorsese, recently produced a documentary on Elia Kazan A Letter to Elia (2010), while he openly acknowledged the influence of America, America on his own film Italianamerican (1974). Across the Atlantic, America, America

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elicited enthusiastic critical responses in France, Greece and other European countries, while Kazan and his work were championed by French critics and his films were given special screenings. In Greece, America, America was particularly appreciated by a public that felt very close to their recent past under the Ottoman Empire and maintained ties with immigrant relatives in the USA. Throughout Europe, Kazan and his films never lost their advocates, especially after Kazan himself was declared an auteur by the French critics. In the present study, I analyze Greek director Pantelis Voulgaris’ film Brides/Nyfes (2004) and Italian director Emmanuele Crialese’s Nuovomondo/ The Golden Door (2006) as examples of creative response to the cinematic circulation of Elia Kazan’s America, America which I view as an archetypical white immigration story and movie.2 Crucial to my reading of these two films is the fact that both invest thematically in a previous rather than a current wave of immigration. In the wake of massive immigration from Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa to Greece, Italy and the EU in general, I believe that these two mainstream films respond by conflating past immigration to the US with recent immigration to ‘Fortress Europe’; while they sensitize their audiences to the possible historical and economic parallels between the two, they also meditate on the crisis of identity (American, European) that such migrations precipitated.3 The two films have been scripted and directed by non-immigrant, non- ethnic, mainstream artists and present a view of immigration to the US from the so-called ‘home-front’. Produced in Greece and Italy, respectively, these were not independent productions; Hollywood intervened in the production and circulation/distribution of both films. Since both Voulgaris and Crialese were strangers to the US movie market, such an intervention was crucial. Martin Scorsese and Barbara da Fina produced Brides after Kazan himself gave them the script and introduced them to the director. In the case of Nuovomondo, Scorsese endorsed, promoted and introduced the film to a North American market.4 Scorsese’s involvement with both movies reflected, on the one hand, his personal preoccupations as a director who chose to undertake the re-examination of American popular mythology regarding immigration and ethnicity; on the other, Scorsese’s interests reflected the interests of a generation of American filmmakers (Coppola, Cimino, De Palma) who aired their ethnicity and turned ‘the ethnically marked subject position [into] a normative’ «American one» (Jacobson 2006: 128). Scorsese’s endorsement of both movies as well as of America, America upgraded such legitimation of American ethnicity into a transnational context and invited a conversation among three different views of European immigration to the US; the conversation revolved around the Americanization of the European immigrant.

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In working with these three films, I examine the ideological configurations that come into play in the representation of one of the most important moments in the American ‘rebirth’ of the immigrant, his/her entrance to the US. This is a mythical moment in American vernacular knowledge of immigration and Americanization and it is the sequence that concludes all three films. Kazan’s film offers a sequence where the immigrant testifies to his consent and affiliation; it reflects a conservative ethos and politics regarding the filmic transformation of the new immigrants into American citizens; it condones aggressive capitalism and with some reservations the racialization of US society. In the discussion below, I elaborate on the re- articulation of this sequence by Voulgaris and Crialese. Both directors foreground the important role that gender, class, race and able-bodiedness played in the ‘rebirth’ and Americanization of the immigrants. Such aspects of the immigration experience, although present, were sublimated in Kazan’s film in the interests of a more conformist representation of the European immigrant. Thus, I will analyze the two more recent movies, which reflect Hollywood’s presence in Europe, as adaptations and reaccentuations of a source work (America, America), a work that is reinterpreted through new grids and discourses (Stam and Raengo 2005: 45).

Plotting an Immigration Film When originally produced, America, America was promoted as the fictional recreation of Avraam Kazanjoglou’s /Joe Kazan’s personal story of migration from Asia Minor/Anatolia to New York at the end of the nineteenth century. Avraam/Joe was Elia Kazan’s paternal uncle who managed the entire family’s emigration to the US (Kazan 1988, Young 1999: 272). The film was conceived as a black and white docudrama in order to amplify its realism; consequently, the director used either amateur actors like Stathis Gialelis, or New York theatre actors but no Hollywood celebrities. The film tells a story of personal migration in the year 1895, significant in the movie because it marked the first of several massive Armenian massacres in Asia Minor, graphically depicted at the beginning of the film. Therefore, the migration of Stavros, the protagonist, is historically contextualized at a moment of ethnic cleansing and crisis in the Ottoman Empire, while personally motivated by the protagonist’s desire to escape victimization by the Ottoman authorities; his people are considered, in the words of the voice over, ‘a subject race’, a conquered people, under the jurisdiction of the master race, the Ottoman Muslims. The second film Nyfes/Brides also positions its story within a period of historical crisis. The collapse of the Greek front during the Greco-Turkish

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war in Anatolia is imminent (August 1922), while 700 prospective Greek and Russian mail-order brides board S/S King Alexander on their way to New York. The plot revolves primarily around Niki, a seamstress from the island of Samothraki, who has been promised to Prodromos, a Greek immigrant in Chicago. On the boat she falls in love with Norman, an American photographer who had been covering the Greco-Turkish war, and who is returning to his estranged wife and his disgruntled employers; the film also tells the stories of other mail-order brides, some of which end happily, others tragically. The third film Nuovomondo/The Golden Door is introduced and endorsed by Martin Scorsese, who emphasizes its realism and accuracy according to accounts he allegedly heard from his parents and grandparents. The irony is that this film abounds in moments where the real and the fantastic are inextricably intertwined. Filmed in Argentina, Nuovomondo fictionalizes the immigration story of a family of Sicilian peasants, Salvatore Mancuso the father, Fortunata the grandmother, and Salvatore’s two sons, Angelo and Pietro, the latter a mute; the plot includes also an English woman, Lucy Reed, who attaches herself to the Mancusos and eventually marries Salvatore in order to gain entry to New York. The story unfolds in three locations, in the homeland of Sicily, on the boat, and on Ellis Island. Like Brides, Nuovomondo is a film of collective migration. All three films position their characters, either metaphorically or literally between the countries of immigration and the USA; similarly characters move between pre-modernity and modernity, modernity being the desideratum upon arrival in the New World, even though their countries of origin do not shun aspects of modernization exported by the West. When technology, as an instance of imported modernity into the pre-American land, is introduced it is represented as a negative force that disrupts the familial and social canvas of the pre-American homeland. In America, America, for example, the telegram brings the order for the Armenian pogrom; in Brides photography is connected with prostitution, since it is used to entice innocent Russian women who allegedly would marry young Russian Americans, but in reality would be sold in the flesh markets of the USA. Finally, in Nuovomondo, photography as used in the Old Country is associated with the new immigrants’ deception, disorientation and final deracination. Analogously, the distance separating pre-modernity from modernity is graphically indicated via time and space. All three directors select remote and isolated landscapes in Cappadokia, Samothraki and Sicily, from which their protagonists initiate their migrations. As depicted in the films, these locations seem to be on the edges of the known World. Furthermore, all three

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plots begin by positioning the protagonists on top of a mountain and subsequently trace their progress to the sea. As Kazan stated in an interview, such a beginning gave his story the aura of a legend, a characterization that perhaps reflects Voulgaris’ and Crialese’s feelings as well (Kazan 2009: 220). When associated with the Old Country, space is exoticized and distanced as the characters migrate. In the end, the country of origin becomes a lost space belonging to the prehistory of the immigrant: the Anatolian plateau, and Mount Ergeus/Ergigan, Samothraki, Sicily. These spaces are sites to be left behind on the forward movement of the prospective immigrants, but came to be associated with death and the end of time as well. The destruction of the Armenians, the death of the soldiers in the Greek- Turkish war, the clothes of the dead purchased by the Mancusos and also the mock burial of Salvatore all invest the films with a moribund quality associated with the old country. After all, in the immigrant imagination, America as in a vision, appears to be the completion of Anatolia, Greece, and Italy. This semi-religious vision that immigrants associate with America is depicted ironically in all three films. Emigration does not follow from a carefully considered, rational decision, but appears to be a consequence of a sign. In America, America the sign arrives after Stavros’s and Vartan’s discussion of their prospective flight from Anatolia to America. Ironically, the sign materializes as the title of the movie, which seems to spring out of Mount Ergeus, and concretizes the ecstatic cry of the two friends. In Brides, it is Niki’s rubbing her blue earring (blue being a color of good luck in Greek folk tradition) that elicits the message from America, the return of her younger sister which sets in motion Niki’s departure. Finally, in Nuovomondo, Salvatore and Angelo make a pilgrimage to the mountain asking for a divine sign to show them whether or not they should go to America. On top of the mountain, Pietro the younger son appears, bearing retouched photographs from America that depict the ‘marvels’ of Nuovomondo (i.e., gigantic chickens, dollars hanging from the trees, etc). The family immediately interpret this event as the divine sign they have been expecting which settles the question of their emigration. Such beginnings openly contest the European identity of these immigrants; Sicily, the Balkans, and Anatolia, as depicted in the films, are on the margins of Europe. The pre-industrial and superstitious attitudes and societies of the protagonists as represented in these movies are a far cry from the industrialized, rational and capitalist societies of Northern Europe and of the target country which these immigrants seek to enter.5 The three films attach particular significance to the contrast, since what remains at stake and needs to be confirmed at the end of all three films is the immigrants’ whiteness. In fact,

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these films each depict practices prevalent at the beginning of the twentieth century when the new immigrants were categorized with the so-called ‘color nations’. Such categorization was crucial to the eventual American identity which these new immigrants were to form. Their in-betweeness, between the older stock and the color-nations, was to determine their reaction to the ‘color- nations’, as they would have to distinguish themselves from the people of color in order to join the white race (Roediger 2005: 3–34). On the one hand, there is no question that the old country is represented in these films as outside of modernity and modernization; the characters have no choice but to undertake the transatlantic trip because what they leave behind is incompatible with the future they conceptualize for themselves. On the other hand, these three films focus on the transition of the main characters from new immigrants seeking to enter the US into members of the mainstream American society. What is it that this move from a pre- industrial past to a modern and modernized future involves? The three films are quite unambiguous in their answer: the entrance of the new immigrant in the USA and their encounter with modernity and modernization, whether it is represented as identification with capitalism/capitalist structures or race, demands and involves proofs of their whiteness. This is particularly important because as noted above, all three films present the European identity of these immigrants as problematic from a North American point of view. Are the Ottoman Rum, the Greek and the Italian racially compatible with the Anglo-Saxon American citizens? And if so, how? This is not to suggest that all three films offer the same answer. Kazan offers a ‘Roedigerian’ case of an immigrant’s in-betweeness and eventual acceptance of the distinction between himself and the Afro-American; Voulgaris argues for an ethnic categorization of the female immigrant as well as for her fetishization; and Crialese insists on forgrounding the actualities of a dehumanized, logical state that forces the new immigrants into a ‘scientific’ baptism, as will be shown below.

An Ottoman Rum6 Becomes American In America, America, the process of Stavros’ Americanization is indexed on two different occasions. In the first instance, he appears before the immigration authorities on Ellis Island with the assumed name of his Armenian friend Hohanness Gardasian. The latter had left his papers with Stavros and committed suicide since he knew that he would not survive long in the New World as he was suffering from an advanced case of tuberculosis. His sacrifice diverts the danger of deportation for Stavros, who has offended

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his sponsor, the prominent American citizen Aratoon Kebabian, by sleeping with his wife; the suicide of Hohanness Gardasian allows Stavros to enter the new country under an assumed name. In Kazan’s film, Armenians express a militancy that Hohanness does not share. Vartan, Stavros’s close friend, wants to emigrate with him, but later decides to wage war with the Turks during the pogrom and is killed in combat; Garabet, the dock-worker who befriends Stavros, is a labor organizer and dies while promoting unionism and political activism in Constantinople. Garabet questions Stavros’ idea of America as a land of social justice. Hohanness, on the other hand, endorses a millenarian vision of America, a belief in a promised land where he will arrive ‘with the help of God’, as he says. In the scene where he pronounces this vision of America, Hohanness resembles a barefoot itinerant monk rather than a prospective immigrant. By assuming Hohanness’ name, Stavros symbolically assumes his unquestioning attitude toward the new society he is entering. By implication, he has rejected both Vartan’s anarchist militancy and Garabet’s political activism for social equality. Conformity is the ethos that Stavros brings to the new country. His identification with Hohanness leads to his christening as Joe Arness, an Anglo-American name: ‘Well boy, you have been reborn and baptized without the benefit of the clergy’, mocks the immigration officer who anglicized the name (Hohanness=Joe Arness). When the crowd disperses and the immigration officers prepare to leave, the same immigration officer notices Stavros’ discarded harness from his days as a Turkish dock worker. The harness marked Stavros as a slave on the docks of Constantinople, while his new name Arness, sounding very much like harness, marks him as a man beholden to the new country and obligated to comply with the country’s dominant ideology.7 After all, the immigration officer who ‘baptizes’ Stavros as American also calls him and the other boys ‘my little slaves’. This exchange foreshadows another incident that occurs a few minutes later in the film and reveals Stavros’ response to US politics on race and new immigration. The sequence opens in front of Anastis’ shoe shining parlor where a black man is shining shoes. Anastis, who and has brought exploits the Anatolian shoeshine boys to New York, rushes out of his parlor yelling at the Afro-American: ‘Get out of here, we are running a business here.’ The black man withdraws and order is established while the camera moves into Anastis’ establishment with its white customers and employees. We see a smiling Stavros/Joe as part of this smoothly running business in which young Anatolian workers are being exploited. In a brief editorial for Time magazine, Toni Morrison discussed this particular scene and inferred the racial connotations of the incident it depicts. Morrison concludes,

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This interloper [the black man] into Stavros’ place is crucial in the mix of signs that make up the movie’s happy-ending immigrant story: a job, a straw hat, an infectious smile—and a scorned black. It is the act of racial contempt that transforms this charming Greek into an entitled white. Without it, Stavros’ future as an American is not at all assured. This is race talk, the explicit insertion into everyday life of racial signs and symbols that have no meaning other than pressing African Americans to the lowest level of the racial hierarchy.8

Indeed, in this sequence Stavros is distinguished from the Afro-American, as he is ‘inside’ while the latter is ‘outside’; Stavros appears part of a system where the Afro-American has no place and no «business». Stavros/ Joe eagerly accepts his position in this system whereas the black man sullenly walks away. A second instance of disidentification then appears, as the film shows emphatically that Stavros/Joe is not like the black man. His newly acquired American name and identity place him within the exploitative structures of American capitalism, yet as a recently arrived immigrant, he is also positioned on the side of the exploited whites from among the new immigrants. Stavros’ satisfied smile and his future plans to help the rest of the family emigrate indicate that he silently condones the racism and racialization of American society as part of his assimilation within this society. Thus, the film blatantly normalizes the Ottoman Rum’s immigration and position; it designs not only a name, but also an appropriately white identity for Stavros/Joe.9 It has been argued elsewhere that Kazan was never perceived as an ethnic artist even though he dealt with ethnic and racial issues in Gentlemen’s Agreement and Pinky, and wrote several books as well as an astounding autobiography which drew on his Greek/Christian/Anatolian heritage (Kalogeras 1991: 130).10 This was not alone a consequence of the negative connotations that the term ethnic elicited. Kazan often concealed his immigrant past, posing in Hollywood as an Armenian, a Jew, and even a Turk. The film America, America is characteristic of Kazan’s ambivalence toward his roots. He names the character Stavros as Greek, but focuses on Stavros’ formative contacts and relationship to the Armenians, and finally Americanizes him only after Stavros assumes an Armenian name. In other words, Stavros’ ‘entitlement as white’ does not follow his ethnicization: Greek, Greek American, American; Kazan did not envision Stavros/Joe within an immigrant and an ethnic community. In spite of our reading of this film today, Kazan insisted that it described a story of individual progress and personal emigration. Without doubt, the film America, America reflects the conservative and assimilationist politics of Kazan and his times, but also stands at a very ironic chronological divide. The imminent rise of the unmeltable ethnics would give a new meaning to the scene played

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before Anastis’ shoe shine parlor; the sequence would also qualify the reading of the racial and ethnic signs and symbols that circulate in the popular iconography of America, America. The contrast between local Afro-America and recently translocated immigrant that constitutes a nodal point in Kazan’s film is reworked and given a more complex, ironic status in the two European films analysed in this essay. The issue of the new immigrants’ whiteness becomes the main problematic that would determine their place within the USA, but the cinematic resolution of the story with the happy-ending which Kazan has reserved for his film no longer exists. Indeed, in the two European films it is no longer a matter of name-changing which would herald an acquiescence to the country’s dominant ideologies, and the distinction between the dark and the less dark races is no longer an issue. But the two films insist that racial constitution (racial-national) both biologically and culturally is still relevant.

Between Melodrama and Americanization The film Brides/Nyfes presents a woman’s perspective, focusing on racial- national constitution while inviting a re-evaluation of the female immigrant success story. The film bypasses the encounter of the new arrivals with immigration authorities and focuses instead on the scene of recognition between future husband (Prodromos) and mail order wife (Niki). Prodromos identifies the woman he has been assigned to marry, as he realizes that she is not a typical, compliant Greek peasant woman. In this sequence, a mystified Prodromos, gazes as Niki uncovers her iron gray hair; because a Greek woman during that era would not uncover her hair in public, Niki’s gesture indexes her strength and independence while the event that turned her hair gray overnight remains a secret that she never shares with him. The secret is her unconsumated love affair with Norman, the American photographer, and her overnight struggle with the dilemma of choosing between family duty (to arrive in New York as a mail order bride) and the dictates of her heart (to run away with Norman and submit to the promise of an American romance). Niki’s first gesture toward the USA is to renounce romantic love in favor of the dictates of old world patriarchy, filiation over affiliation. This is arguably a gesture that moves her away from integration within mainstream American society and toward the new immigrant enclave. The sequences that follow the recognition scene and conclude the film indicate as much. Niki appears with a modern hairstyle, bright colored clothes and make-up. As a typical female immigrant, she socializes exclusively within the new immigrant community, works with her husband in the latter’s tailor shop,

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and starts a family. All the signs testify to her ascent to a lower middle class status and her accommodation of an entrenched immigrant community that is on its way to becoming ethnic. The film suggests her gradual transformation from Greek to Greek American as Niki’s success story. As Phyllis Pease Chock argues, success in America translates into ability to be self-made; for the new male immigrant self-made means ability to choose (243). Niki’s husband chose to emigrate, to build a business and finally to acquire a mail order bride. But the element of choice is missing from Niki’s story; therefore, like other mail order brides Niki cannot be considered self-made. In the context of US ethnic culture if Niki were to have exercised freedom of choice she would have been anomalous. The film quickly bypasses any possible objection to Niki’s ascent as another American success story, and offers a compromise. The rapid change of sequences that follow the recognition scene imply that her American success involves at least the modernization of her appearance and her affiliation with the immigrant community, which is on its way to becoming American.11 However, the implications of these transformations need to be addressed explicitly. In other words, whereas the heroine accommodates the dress code and ethos of patriarchy as well as of the immigrant community, she lives in the USA. Consequently, it is imperative to explain how the mainstream construction of the immigrant/ethnic woman accords with the logic of the melodrama through which the film casts her story. In the final sequences of the film, the audience is re-introduced to the fetishes used to introduce first Niki (her blue earring) and then Norman (the tree with the rags outside the church in Smyrna). In fact, the two different fetishes originally associated with each character are reversed; Norman wears the earring on his tie, and Niki thinks of the tree. At the beginning of the film, Niki appears on top of the mountain rubbing her blue earring and wishing that her sister would arrive; in the next sequence, Norman appears outside the church, photographing the rag tree which allegedly works miracles for both Christians and Muslims. In the film’s final sequences, Prodromos describes the tree with the rags to Niki who responds, ‘I have been told about it’, meaning that Norman had mentioned it to her while they were on board the boat. This initiates her train of thought that leads to Norman’s photographs of the mail- order brides aboard the S/S King Alexander. The photographs are in a box which also includes his love letter to her where he declares that he will never forget her serious eyes and ‘her hands pin-pricked a thousand times by the needles’. The letter concludes, ‘we’re from different worlds you and I . . . esi ki ego . . . worlds that met by chance, worlds that are star crossed, worlds that can never be together’.

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The film embeds the tragic contradiction in Niki between subservient immigrant female and rejected Other, in a melodramatic framework of heroic self-sacrifice which softens the contradiction. Despite her resistance, the unwritten tenets of her pre-American society have caught up with her in the end. Having compromised her own desires, she embodies the dutiful wife in an arranged marriage, but suffers from the lost opportunity to experience true love. Such is the moral legibility of melodrama upon which the film is built.12 But is her compromise «written in the stars» as Norman’s letter suggests and as the logic of the melodrama requires? A closer reading of the letter suggests a less metaphysical explanation for Niki’s and Norman’s star-crossed romance. The conclusion of the letter and the motif of the fetish are of particular importance; the film muddles the contradictions of Niki’s place as a new immigrant in the US, relegating them to the conventions of melodrama. The final words acknowledge Norman’s acceptance of Niki’s filial duty, but also echo imperceptibly the nativist argument of the danger of miscegenation, suggesting a racial-cultural barrier between American and Greek (‘we’re from different worlds . . . worlds that can never be together’).13 This melodramatic sequence expresses similar nativist ideological presuppositions as do the sequences before the immigration authorities in America, America and Nuovomondo; thus, this film remains faithful to the conventions of melodrama without slighting the prejudices experienced by the new immigrants upon arrival.14 More specifically, the letter’s conclusion that ‘worlds that can never be together’ reflects what Etienne Balibar defines as the immigrant complex,

a racism whose dominant theme is not biological heredity but the insurmount- ability of cultural differences, a racism which, at first sight, does not postu- late the superiority of certain groups or peoples in relation to others but ‘only’ the harmfulness of abolishing frontiers, the incompatibility of life- styles and traditions (21).

Such separation, however, sits uncomfortably with Norman as the issue of unrequited love and romance remains to be resolved and corroborates the stereotypical American attitudes toward the new immigrant; ‘you’re the being I will miss forever’ are Norman’s last words in the letter. By focusing on her hands and her eyes, Norman’s ‘love letter’ to her clearly complies with such stereotypes. Her hands index her status as a laborer, a seamstress laboring through the transatlantic voyage, and in the States next to her husband; her eyes index her exoticism as the foreign but unattainable female, not a femme fatale who might destroy, but a female whose culture can

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potentially contaminate Anglo-Saxon racial purity. The threat which Niki poses is more broadly cultural than personal. Thus, through Norman’s passionate words in the text of his letter, Niki is categorized as a worker and an exoticized/eroticized female:15 exploited, desired and fetishized. In Hayden White’s view of fetishism, Norman ‘is . . . mistaking . . . the form of a thing for its content or . . . a part of a thing for the whole, and [he] elevat[es] either . . . the form or the part to the status of a content or an essence of the whole’ (194). Still, this argues against the film’s generic preference for melodrama. This ‘pathological displacement of libidinal interest and satisfaction to a fetish’ (White 1978: 184) needs to be misplaced in favor of the theme of unrequited love and sacrifice that elevate both Niki and Norman to prototypical hero and heroine who rise above their socio-cultural circumstances by having their platonic affair remain idealized. The film’s last ploy resorts to spectacle to save face. In the early sequences of the film, Norman is depicted as a photographer who stakes his career on the spectacle of War and Death while covering the Greco-Turkish war in Anatolia. It is important to note that his photographs of dead soldiers were rejected by the magazine he worked for as contrived and ultimately unoriginal; therefore, he re-invents his subject by photographing and aestheticizing the mail-order brides aboard the S/S King Alexander. After asking them to appear in their wedding dresses, he watches them waiting to be photographed, exclaiming voyeuristically ‘It’s like snowfall in the spring’. This is certainly an original spectacle that records a new phenomenon in the US history of immigration. The proof of its originality and marketability is provided during the last sequence of the film, when along with Norman we see at close range the cover of the magazine Society on a newspaper stand in a busy street. Of course, the woman shown on the cover is an atypical mail-order bride, although she is depicted as representative. The woman on the cover is Niki, but without a veil, unlike the faces of all the other photographed women that appeared both in the photographing scene and in the pictures kept in the box that Norman gave to Niki. The front cover of Society magazine suggests a conventional Niki who fulfilled the patriarchal duty of the old country by marrying Prodromos; at the same time, it portrays the unconventional Niki who refused to be photographed under the veil of patriarchy, thus asserting her freedom from social constraint. The cover is simultaneously straightforward (Niki is a mail order bride) and ambiguous (a bridal veil does not cover her head thus allowing her hair to be seen), both representative of and unlike mail-order brides. In its ambiguity the cover photograph foreshadows the possibilities

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that entry to the USA may offer the new immigrant women; the entire sequence emphasizes the independence of a Greek American Niki. Then, in an ironic twist, the last image of the film freezes on nothing less than Niki’s blue earring attached to Norman’s tie; could this be a melodramatic reminder that Norman still has tender feelings for Niki? But what is the symbolic value of the earring in the context of the present discussion? Perhaps it reconstitutes the issue of the fetish in its multiple significations. The film takes back what it gives with Niki’s photograph.16 The fetishization of Niki and that of all new immigrant women in the US seem inevitable. As pointed out in Phyllis Pease Chock’s anthropological research, the possibilities of immigrant female self-determination are daydreams and not a fairy tale with a happy ending.17

Lost in the Land of Milk (but not Honey) The ‘immigrant complex’ focuses the dilemmas in Brides; it allows Norman to justify the inevitability of his separation from Niki while observing the conventions of melodrama. In Nuovomondo/The Golden Door the “immigrant complex” receives a more complex treatment. A central figure, Lucy Reed, attaches herself to the Mancuso family in the port city of Palermo and eventually promises herself to Salvatore Mancuso in order to enter the USA. At the beginning of the twentieth century, no emigrating woman was admitted to the USA unaccompanied, allegedly to protect women from the danger of prostitution. The film then recalls a particular American immigration law in order to justify Lucy’s decision, but also in order to amplify the fantastic context of Nuovomondo. Very little is known about the middle- class Anglo-Saxon woman who chooses to travel in steerage with immigrant peasants when she should be in first or second class as the narrative indicates. Furthermore, as the motive for her attachment to the Mancuso family is never clarified, her union remains a playful element in a film that abounds in fantastic moments. The theme of fantasy and unexplained romance shapes the first part of the movie set in Sicily; the longer second part focuses on the immigrants aboard ship en route to the USA. The final section of the film is structured around the Ellis Island sequences where the US authorities select those who would be admitted to the country. This is the tidiest, most realistic part of the film, a part devoid of fantasy; it emphasizes practicality, efficiency and rational selection of the fittest by a state apparatus that bases its selection on presumably scientific data. The new immigrants are forced to participate in several tests that confirm their good health, ‘ablebodiedness’, and intelligence

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(Galusca 2009: 143). The film questions the so-called scientific selection process that reflected nativist anxieties about the Americanization of possibly ‘unclean and unhealthy’ new immigrants. If Kazan’s film indicated the corruption and cynicism of the immigration authorities on Ellis Island, Crialese’s insists on these racist procedures/ tests; for the director, they reveal the American public’s anxieties regarding new immigration. They also expose the actualities of examinations that maintain the fantasy of Anglo-Saxon superiority. Ellis Island is depicted in this film as a space that pathologizes the immigrants and classifies them upon entrance as menial workers at best; Salvatore Mancuso’s speech in the penultimate scene before the final decision of the authorities alludes to this process. Two members of the Mancuso family, Fortunata, the grandmother, and Pietro, the mute son, resist these tests. Fortunata refuses to accept and participate in demeaning procedures which she finds irrational, whereas Pietro fails to carry out orders issued by immigration officials recognizing them as meaningless acts of sequence. Fortunata’s and Pietro’s alleged failures problematize the so-called intelligence tests to which the immigrants are subjected. They also challenge the process of selecting future American citizens on the basis of culturally biased questions and answers. These so- called cognitive tests forcefully collapse people’s lives, feelings and personalities into meaningless and irrelevant identifications. Such bureaucratic efficiency fails to measure Fortunata’s or Pietro’s real intelligence, while Fortunata’s strong character and pre-modern wisdom are perceived as disabilities rather than assets. In the final scenes, the authorities speak to the family and announce that only Salvatore and Angelo would enter the USA; Pietro and Fortunata would return to Sicily, since she has been classified as feeble-minded and he as mute. Salvatore reacts angrily:

How can they be a problem? How are my mother and son a problem with all that land and work you have here? Because he doesn’t speak? It’s for the best. . . . This way, he won’t bore anyone. He’ll never complain. And my mother, look at her. She’s like a young girl. True, she talks a lot, but I’ll keep her indoors and won’t let her out. We’ve come all this way to be parted now?

Arguing against official fears of dependency on the State, he emphasizes Pietro’s potential contribution as a future laborer, and Fortunata’s restriction to the privacy of home. Thus Salvatore’s speech, in spite of its comic effect, smoothes over what authorities perceive as ‘diseased’ and attempts to normalize his family within an American social context. He proposes a configuration

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whereby the men work outside the home and the women tend to the men’s needs at home. In other words, he classifies his people as workers and adherents to patriarchal values. This last speech contrasts sharply with discourse units from the beginning of the film, in which the Mancusos present themselves as members of a semi-pagan community with Fortunata presiding among them as a wise old woman who fully understands her role as a shaman. Salvatore’s response does not conclude the film. In a transition from the realities of Ellis Island to the old country fantasy, Fortunata implicitly resumes her role as the head of the family. Moreover, she relinquishes her voice and transfers it magically to Pietro, the mute son. In this sequence, he turns to his father and brother to tell them that the grandmother wishes to return to Sicily, but wants the rest of them to stay in the USA. Then, the Mancusos face the audience, as the scene fades into total whiteness that anticipates the conclusion of the film.18 In a surrealistic transition, the white background is transformed into a river of milk; Lucy Reed’s first then Salvatore’s, Angelo’s and Pietro’s heads emerge out of it, as the family appears to be swimming in this river of milk. At the same time, and as the final titles fall on the screen, the camera pulls back and more people/immigrants can be seen swimming in the same river of milk, while Nina Simone’s voice sings the spiritual, ‘Sinnerman’. The ending places the destiny of the immigrants in the realm of fantasy. Unlike America, America and Brides, Nuovomondo does not allow the new arrivals to move beyond the immigration authorities and Ellis Island. Entering the USA can be allowed only if the family is separarted and willing to renounce their native culture and family structure as prescribed by tests and medical exams. Hence Ellis Island is characterized as a negative space, as a laboratory where immigrants are made over into American citizens, assuming that they pass the required tests. The Ellis Island sequences force the new immigrants to undergo a scientific ‘baptism’ whereby science serves the racist preconceptions of a state apparatus. On this point the film draws close parallels among science, racism, modernity and the questionable nature of whiteness. The entrance of new immigrants to the US never occurs in the realistic, class-determined, racial terms that Brides and America, America describe; rather, they enter the US only in a regressive fantasy. After all, this scene has appeared earlier in the film as one of Salvatore’s dream visions of America. The last scene of the movie contrasts ironically with what has preceded: the selection process, the intelligence tests and medical examinations, the reliance on quantitative measurements that are mechanically

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conceived and interpreted. The racist, bureaucratic efficiency of modernity is undermined and contrasts with Salvatore’s fantasy of America as the land of milk and honey. The new arrivals are ‘baptized’ in this fantastic space and are metaphorically and ironically “white”washed. In the final analysis, this is not a fantasy of multiculturalism as one might surmise by the culturally diverse crowd that swims with the Mancusos; it is a fantasy of racial reconstitution and redefinition evoked in and imposed on the imagination of the new immigrants by the realities they encountered on Ellis Island. The spiritual ‘Sinnerman’ provides an important albeit perplexing for the viewer commentary on the final scene. What is signified here? After all, this black spiritual indexes apocalypse and millenarianism, but also slavery. Furthermore, with its religious context ‘Sinnerman’ predicates a pre-modern vision of the land and functions as a counterpoint to the last part of the film which emphasizes the tidiness and logic of a modern state. Yet on a more secular and historically specific level it serves another function in this movie. In Nuovomondo, I read the antiphonal and seemingly incongruous exchange between song and image as an appropriate conclusion for the film given the Ellis Island sequences that precede. The use of Nina Simone’s song does not suggest difference, as in Kazan’s movie, between Afro Americans and the new immigrants; instead, it alludes to the similarity of racial lines and issues that connected the new immigrants with Afro Americans at the beginning of the century. As Roediger’s research has shown ‘ethnic’ scarcely differentiated ‘color races’ from more and less white ‘nation-races’. These racial lines and issues subjected both the new immigrants and Afro-Americans in a vicious battle of competition for social survival that, as in Kazan’s movie, has little if anything to do with the rationalized and scientific façade of modernity that the USA predicated for itself and which we witness in the Ellis Island section of Nuovomondo; on the contrary, it depicted USA as a strictly racialized society. Particularly in the last section, Nuovomondo provides a critique of what Katarzyna Marciniak called the time-honored narrative of immigration to the USA (xiii). The new immigrants in this film are represented as forever poised between boundaries that are defined by the actualities of a dehumanized, logical state apparatus which determines what is normal and what pathological along racial lines and the fantasy that has propelled their immigration. On the one hand, they are shown to have responded to the beckoning to the land of the free and plenty and, on the other, they have been subjected to the grueling physical and mental tests that Fortunata and Pietro reject.

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Providing a Symbolic and Temporary Filmic Respite The three films are connected thematically as retrospective portraits of US history: they represent the arrival of new immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century. They also share similarities in terms of production, promotion and circulation as finished products endorsed by Hollywood celebrities and producers. The main focus in this essay is the transformation of the new immigrants into American citizens as this process is outlined in each of the three films. I argue that the inception of transformation is depicted in the final moments of each film, when new immigrants from the South Eastern Mediterranean are asked to testify to their whiteness in one way or another. Three films directed by an American, an Italian, and a Greek, approach this moment from three different perspectives, historical contexts and filming circumstances. All three conceive of this transformation as contingent upon the racial politics of the host country. Hence, all three conclude ambiguously in that respect; none dares to represent the consequences and the actualities involved in the whitening of the new immigrant. Kazan concludes with Stavros’s blissful smile that condones his exploitation, Voulgaris with Niki’s glamorous cover photograph that hides her fetishization. Crialese provides his own symbolic and temporary respite as the final image and sound of his film perpetuates the tantalizing question and alludes to the problem that has no easy answer: at what cost whiteness? But Crialese, unlike Kazan and Voulgaris, knows how to pose this question ironically, and that is the saving grace of his film.

Notes

1. During this period, J. F. Kennedy designated the US as a nation of immigrants, yet the general trend was quite different. In 1964, Theodore Saloutos, professor of history at UCLA, published his magisterial work The Greeks in the United States, Harvard University Press, which argued that Greek immigrants of the early twentieth century were now Americans of Hellenic descent. As noted by Yiorgos Anagnostou ‘this entails a foundational narrative connected with an early twentieth-century middle-class cultural project that posits America as the natural location of the Greek immigrants and reconfigures their identities in relation to normative whiteness.’ (Anagnostou 2009: 81) For an extensive discussion of Saloutos’s project see Kalogeras (1992) ‘Narrating an ethnic group’. 2. Kazan’s emphasis on ethnicity in his novels, autobiography and films has not been addressed adequately (Georgakas 2009: 78). See for example Sam Girgus (1998). While Girgus mentions America, America in his analysis, his major concern is On the Waterfront, with a few side-glances at the former film. Girgus’ choice reflects critics’ discomfort when pressed to decide whether or not a mainstream artist can also be considered ethnic (Kalogeras 1991: 136).

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3. On the issue of ‘Fortress Europe’, see Yosefa Loshitzky’s recent book Screening strangers: Migration and diaspora in contemporary European cinema (2010). Rationalizing her interest in hegemonic rather than minority/diasporic/migrant films, Loshitzky explains: ‘[such a decision] is related to my attempt to explore the crisis of European identity through the emerging dominant discourse of anxiety regarding its new strangers and others within.’ (9). Indica- tive of such anxieties is the recent proliferation of mainstream films in Greece and Italy on immigration and especially the integration of immigrants within ‘Fortress Europe’, for example Konstantinos Giannaris’ Omeros/Hostage (2005). Gianni Amelio’s 1994 film Lamerica draws an appropriate and poignant parallel between immigration to Europe and immigration to the US; the Albanian immigration to Italy after the demise of the communist regime in 1990 is fantasized by an elderly amnesiac as a fulfilment of his youthful dream in the 1930s of immigrating to America. 4. Scorsese was instrumental in orchestrating Kazan’s Life Achievement Award ceremony at the 1999 Oscars. When Elia Kazan was called to the stage to receive his award ‘unnamed people whose careers would not have been possible without Kazan’s achievements sat on their hands and smirked’ (Georgakas 2009: 78). This was in response to the objections that Scorsese’s recommendation created among the members of the Academy as well as the audience. 5. Studies by Maria Todorova and Vesna Goldsworthy clarify Northern European and by extension North American attitudes toward the Balkans. Todorova analyzes Northern European views of the largely agrarian communities of the Balkans as societies fraught with superstition and irrationality. They were valued primarily as components of an open museum of folk culture, reminiscent of the folk cultures from which Northern Europe emerged (Todorova 1997: 111). 6. Rums are the ethnic Greeks of the Ottoman Empire. 7. Karen Van Dyck first alerted me to the similarity of ‘Arness’ and ‘harness’. 8. Although her description of the scene is not entirely accurate [it is not the last scene, most significantly another black man enters the establishment], Morrison analyzes the scene as an instance of racist discourse which is per- petuated through popular culture: ‘[Popular culture] participates freely in this most enduring and efficient rite of passage into American culture: negative appraisals of the native-born black population. Only when the lesson of racial estrangement is learned is assimilation complete. Whatever the lived experience of immigrants with African Americans—pleasant, beneficial or bruising—the rhetorical experience renders blacks as noncitizens, already discredited outlaws.’ 9. As the black man is pushed away from Anastis’ establishment, another enters selling newspapers, yet Morrison does not comment on the second man; in my view, the second black man is not a competitor and therefore a danger to Anastis as is the first one. Thus, his presence does not considerably change or modify Morrison’s conclusion, which speaks to the position of Afro-Americans

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within a fiercely competitive capitalist system. However, Kazan’s treatment of race in this film is ambiguous as the incident of the second black man indicates. As noted by Dan Georgakas the actress Estelle Hemsley who plays Stavros’ grandmother and encourages his non-conformist spirit in the film was an African American (personal communication). 10. Kazan consciously cultivated the ambiguity concerning his ethnic roots. He reveals in his autobiography that he was amused to be called a Turk, a Jew, an Armenian among other things. 11. The reviews of the film emphasize Niki’s pragmatism as opposed to the romanticism of the other women. They also underscore the traditional elements and virtues of the film’s storyline and production values (Harvey; Wong). What reviewers failed to notice is that Haro’s and Olga’s romanticism, although impractical and in Haro’s case self-destructive, enables both women to assert themselves, in the face of patriarchy. 12. In his classic definition of melodrama, Peter Brooks writes: ‘The connotations of the word [melodrama] are probably similar for us all: moral polar- ization, the indulgence of strong emotionalism; extreme states of being, situations, actions; overt villainy, persecution of the good, and final reward of virtue; inflated and extravagant expressions, dark plotting, supreme, breathtaking peripety’ (11). In the logic of Voulgaris’ melodrama and of the immigrant complex, the traditional moral manichaeism between good and evil is transferred to a cultural manichaeism; the extremity of cultural difference between the native, Norman, and non-native, Niki, is unbridgeable. 13. Roediger notes that, ‘When “ethnic” was used as an adjective before and during the 1920s, its meanings scarcely differentiated “color races” from more and less white “nation-races” (21)’. Matthew Jacobson develops a similar argument but focuses more on legal and intellectual sites of transformation from the southern European to the Caucasian. Roediger’s critique of Jacob- son also addresses: ‘the welter of further problems raised when we think of whitening as a process in social history in which countless quotidian activities informed popular and expert understandings of the race of new immigrants, as well as new immigrant understandings of race’ (8). 14. Studying the letter that Niki holds in her hands, one notices that the text ‘worlds that can never be together’ was not written by Norman. This fact can be explained by two possible scenarios: either the unexplained text is an oversight on the part of the director; or since Niki’s face is visible as the words are spoken, it represents her own conclusion based on Norman’s com- ments to her. Certainly, the latter is a more interesting possibility given Niki’s intelligence and depth of character. 15. One of the earliest mainstream short feature films on immigration is Charlie Chaplin’s The Immigrant (1917). The film depicts a Man and a Woman arriving in New York where they seek employment with no success. At a climactic moment in the film, they face physical punishment and expulsion from a restaurant where they have eaten without having money to pay for

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their meal; but an American artist notices them, employs them as models and pays their bill. This stroke of luck ends with their wedding and establishment in America. The aestheticization and fetishization of their foreigness/exoticism is once again the issue and the ironic prerequisite for their entrance in the USA. 16. In another context Laura Mulvey makes the following claim about curiosity and fetishism in films. ‘While curiosity is a compulsive desire to see and to know, to investigate something secret, fetishism is born out of a refusal to see, a refusal to accept the difference the female body represents for the male. These complex series of turnings away, of covering over, not of the eyes but understanding, of fixating on a substitute object to hold the gaze, leave the female body as an enigma and threat, condemned to return as a symbol of anxiety while simultaneously being transformed into its own screen in representation’ (Mulvey 1996: 64) This seems appropriate for the double entendre the final scene of Voulgaris’ movie poses. 17. I owe this last phrase to Laura Mulvey’s discussion of melodrama (Mulvey 1989: 43). 18. The reviews of the film are mixed. Several draw parallels between Nuovomondo and America, America but bypass the ironic tenor of many of the scenes. They are also uncertain of the meaning of the last scene or the significance of Nina Simone’s song (Chocano, Hemphill, Lorefice). One of them miscon- strues the meaning of the final scene as depicting the director’s inability to resolve Mancuso’s dilemma (Papamichael)!

References

Anagnostou, Yiorgos 2009. Contours of white ethnicity: Popular ethnography and the making of usable pasts in Greek America. Athens: Ohio UP. Balibar, Etienne & Immanuel Wallerstein 1991. Race, nation, class: Ambiguous identities. London: Verso. Brooks. Peter 1976. The melodramatic imagination: Balzac, Henry James, melodrama, and the mode of excess. New Haven: Yale UP. Chocano, Carina. Rev. of Golden Door, dir. by Emanuele Crialese. Los Angeles Times, 1 June 2007. March, 22, 2008. http://www.calendarlive.com/printed edition/calendar/ cl-et-golden1jun01,0,747655.story>. Crialese, Emanuele, dir 2006. Golden Door [ Nuovomondo]. Perf. Charlotte Gainsbourg, Vincenzo Amato. Miramax. Galusca, Roxana 2009. From fictive ability to national identity: Disability, medical inspection, and public health regulations on Ellis Island. Cultural Critique 72: 137– 163. Georgakas, Dan 2009. Review of Elia Kazan: The cinema of an American outsider, by Brian Neve and Kazan on directing, Edited with Commentary by Robert Cornfield. Cineaste 35: 77–78.

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Girgus, Sam 1998. Hollywood renaissance: The cinema of democracy in the era of Ford, Capra, and Kazan. New York: Cambridge UP. Goldsworthy, Vesna 1998. Inventing Ruritania. New Haven: Yale UP. Harvey, Dennis. Rev. of Brides, dir. by Pantelis Voulgaris. Variety 17 September, 2004. Dec. 18, 2009 http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117924933.html. Hemphil, Jim. Rev. of Golden Door, dir. by Emanuele Crialese. Reel http:// www.reel.com/movie.asp?MID=143657&buy=closed&Tab=eviews& CID=13#tabs (accessed March 23, 2008). Jacobson, Matthew Frye 1998. Whiteness of a different color: European immigrants and the alchemy of race. Cambridge: Harvard UP. —— 2006. Roots too: White ethnic revival in post-civil rights America. Cambridge: Harvard UP. Kalogeras, Yiorgos 2009. ‘Are Armenians white? Reading Elia Kazan’s America, America.’ Ed. Jopi Nyman. Post-National enquiries: Essays on ethnic and racial border crossings. Cambridge Scholars, 64–76. —— 1991. Greek American literature: Who needs it? Eds. Dan Georgakas and Charles Moskos. New Directions in Greek American Studies. New York: Pella, 129–141. —— 1992. Narrating an ethnic group. Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora 18: 213–234. Kazan, Elia 1988. A life. New York: Knopf. —— dir 1963. America, America. Perf. Stathis Gialelis, Lou Antonio, Linda Marsh. Warner Bros. —— 2009. Kazan on directing. New York: Knopf. Lorefice, Mike. Rev. of Golden Door, dir. by Emmanuele Crialese. Raging Bull Movies 1 Jan., 2008. Dec. 18, 2009 http://metalasylum.com/raging bull/movies/ goldenndoor.html. Loshitzky, Yosefa 2010. Screening strangers: Migration and diaspora in contemporary European cinema. Bloomington: Indiana UP. Marciniak, Katarzyna 2006. Alienhood: Citizenship, exile and the logic of difference. Mineapolis: U of Minnesota P. Morrison, Toni. On the Backs of Blacks. Time, 2 December1993. http://www.time.com/ time/magazine/article/o,9171,979736-1,00.html (accessed October 24, 2008). Mulvey, Laura 1996. Fetishism and curiosity. Bloomington: Indiana UP. —— 1989. Visual and other pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana UP. Papamichael, Stella. Rev. of The Golden Door (Nuovomondo), dir. by Emmanuele Crialese. BBC online 22 June 2007. 18 December 2009 http://www.bbc.co.uk/ films/2007/06/25/the_golden_door_2007_review.shtml. Pease Chock, Phyllis 1995. The self-made woman: Gender and the success story in Greek-American family histories. Eds Carol Delaney and Sylvia Yanagisako. Naturalizing power: Essays in feminist cultural analysis. New York: Routledge: 239–256. Raengo, Alessandra and Robert Stam, eds 2005. Literature and film: A guide to the theory and practice of film adaptation. New York: Blackwell. Roediger, David R. 2005. Working toward whiteness; How America’s immigrants became white: The strange journey from Ellis Island to the suburbs. New York: Basic.

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Saloutos, Theodore 1964. The Greeks in the United States. Cambridge: Harvard UP. Todorova, Maria 1997. Imagining the Balkans. New York: Oxford UP. Voulgaris, Pantelis, dir 2004. Brides [Νυ´ϕες]. Perf. Damian Lewis, Victoria Charalambidou. Greek Film Centre. White, Hayden 1978. The noble savage theme as fetish. In Tropics of discourse: Essays in cultural criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. Wong, Helene. Rev. of Brides, dir. by Pantelis Voulgaris. New Zealand Listener, 24– 30 June, 2006. Dec. 18, 2009. http://www.listener.co.nz/issue/3450/artsbooks/ 6370/nikis_wedding.html. Young, Jeff 1999. Kazan: The master director discusses his films. Interviews with Elia Kazan. New York: Newmarket.

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