Intra-European Immigration After the Fall of the Berlin Wall in Western European Films

1 Going West: Intra-European Immigration After the Fall of the Berlin Wall in Western European Films BY Sevastiana Anagnostopoulou A thesis submitted for the degree of MASTER OF PHILOSOPHY IN FILM STUDIES at the UNIVERSITY OF EXETER This thesis is available for Library use on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. I certify that all material in this thesis which is not my own work has been identified and that no material has previously been submitted and approved for the award of a degree by this or any other University. Signature: ………………………………………………………….. SEPTEMBER 2015 2 ABSTRACT My dissertation argues that the wave of immigration from Eastern to Western Europe that emerged after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the communist era in what was known as the Eastern bloc, triggered a respective wave of films dealing with the issue. The thesis concentrates on films depicting the specific wave of immigration from the European East to the European West, made by Western European filmmakers who do not share the immigrant experience themselves. In this respect the thesis deals with how this phenomenon of intra-European immigration was perceived and consequently depicted on screen by the West. Through focus on a variety of Western European fiction films, the thesis argues about the new type (and stereotypes) of on screen immigrant characters and the depiction of their integration and relationship with the host nations. The thesis also deals with how the filmic representation of the Eastern European immigrant differentiates from the respective representations of the past phenomena of immigration within and towards Europe (e.g. the post-colonial wave of immigration, the South to North wave of immigration and how fiction films deal with the new dynamics created amongst Europeans). 3 Table of Contents CHAPTER TITLE PAGE Title Page……………………………………………………………………………….1 Abstract………………………………………………………………………………….2 List of Contents…………………………………………………………………………3 1. 1.1. Introduction………………………………………………………………….5 1.2 The filmic selection of the thesis………………………………………….15 1.3. Literature review…………………………………………………………….25 1.4. The corpus of films to be studied………………………………………...31 2 2.1. Chapter 1 The new wave of immigration. The new types of immigrant and emerging stereotypes………………………………………………………………35 2.1.1. Types of migration and migrants………………………………………...40 2.1.2. Emerging stereotypes…………………………………………………….48 2.2. Case studies 2.2.1. Since Otar Left............................................………………………….....53 2.2.2. Eastern Promises…………………………………………………………..65 2.2.3. Mirush……………………………….……………………………………….79 3. 3.1. Chapter 2 The Eastern European immigrant within the host nation. Integration of the new immigrant protagonist………………………………………….92 3.1.1. Love and Marriage…………………………………………………………93 3.1.2. Work…………………………………………………………………………101 3.1.3. Interaction with other immigrant characters……………………………..104 3.1.4. Movement and Journey……………………………………………………110 3.1.5. Shifting the immigrant experience………………………………………..112 4 3.1.6. Crime………………………………………………………………………...113 3.2. Case studies 3.2.1. The Silence of Lorna……………...………………………………………….116 3.2.2. Lilya4Ever………………………..…………………………………………….129 3.3.3. Last Resort………………………..……………………………………………143 4. Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………..157 5. Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………160 6. Filmography……………………………………………………………………………169 5 INTRODUCTION On November 9, 1989, as the Cold War was coming to its end, the spokesman for East Berlin’s Communist Party announced the change of his city’s relations to the West that would ultimately lead to reunification. Starting at midnight on that very same day, citizens of the DDR (GDR) were at last free to cross the country’s borders, many of them to be reunited with family and friends. East and West Berliners flocked to the wall with their main demand chanted as a slogan: “Tor auf” (“Open the gate”). At midnight they flooded through the checkpoints. More than two million East Berliners crossed to the West to celebrate. People used hammers and pick-axes to tear down the wall while cranes and bulldozers began pulling it down section by section. Berlin was finally reunited, after more than four decades of division. A newly sprayed graffito read: “Only today is the war really over”. The reunification of the East and West was made official almost one year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, on October 3, 1990 (McAdams, 1994). The fall of the Berlin Wall was not an isolated event, taking place in a vacuum. It was an emblematic milestone (as was the Wall itself) of the changes occurring in Europe in the years that followed, a consequence of the aftermath of World War II (WWII) that divided Europe into East and West (Lowe, 2012), according to the respective administrative and financial modes that followed reunification. The fall of the Wall flagged the disintegration of the Soviet Union (Kotkin, 2008) and its dominance over the countries of Eastern Europe (with the exception of Yugoslavia and Albania) as a result of the Yalta conference (Harbutt, 2010). Soon the Yugoslav wars erupted, creating a new face and map of the European continent (Lampe, 1996). The disintegration of the Soviet bloc in the Eastern Europe group triggered a new wave of population movements (the one depicted in the filmic corpus of this thesis). The Yugoslav wars added a population violently displaced and consequently a number of asylum seekers, represented in this thesis in the film When You Are Born You Can No Longer Hide (Marco Tullio Giordana, 2005). Furthermore, the gradual enlargement of the European Union, to include some of the countries formerly belonging to the Eastern bloc, progressively changed the status of some of the Eastern European immigrants 6 throughout the years of accession to the EU (Mynz, 1995). For the purposes of this thesis, it is therefore critical to take a look at the specific characteristics of this wave of immigration and the particular circumstances that caused it, since these are precisely the types of immigrant protagonists who feature in the films that will be analysed in subsequent chapters of the thesis. This particular wave of immigration, which in many cases appeared almost as an evacuation (Mazower, 1998), was not controlled or organised, nor did it come in response to a specific demand for labour from a given host nation. In some cases, this movement of migrants from East to West did follow the path of an existing relationship, official or unofficial, between an Eastern European and a Western European country. However, in many cases, the wave of migrants had no specific destination in mind, beyond a generalised desire to gravitate towards “the West”. The phenomenon of migrating to the closest or “easiest” country with the intention of moving to a further one later on, viewing Western European countries as the “gateway” to the USA, or trying to be “reunited” with family members, became a common and repeated feature of this migration from East to West in the decades following the fall of the Berlin Wall (Favell, 2008). Although economic hardship remained the main motivation for migrating, it is obvious that there was a sense of “escape” in this wave of migration during the 1990s and 2000s, triggered by years of oppression that enforced a collective feeling of captivity, as well as an opposite to the anticipated result of the propaganda. As people under the communist regime tended to reject its administrative and financial model, it was a natural consequence for them to also reject the official dialectic of the regime’s propaganda about the West (Lévesque, 1997). According to official state propaganda during the Cold War, the West was the source of all evil,1 but in the collective moral sense this description was actually applied to the communist regime itself. As a result the conclusion reached by the majority of ordinary citizens of Eastern Europe (especially the young) was a unilateral idolisation of the West, capitalism and the free market. In this respect, there were psychological incentives in the choice of destination for would-be immigrants migrating from Eastern to Western Europe, as well as incentives in various 1 For more on Eastern propaganda during the cold war see Peteri, 2010; Caure, 2005. 7 aspects of the personal lives of these soon-to-become immigrants (for example From the Edge of the City [Constantinos Giannaris, 1998], LAmerica [Gianni Amelio, 1994], Lilya4Ever [Lukas Moodysson, 2002]― full case study included in Chapter 2) that dictate an inner relation to a specific country of the West. Factors that motivate specific Eastern European migrants to gravitate towards specific Western European nations include: the ability to speak a specific Western European language (French, English, German, Spanish etc.); the ability or desire to study in the host nation; a family tradition, or long-forgotten ethnic tie, linking the migrant to a specific Western country; a vague idolization of the West; the perception (whether based on reality or rumour) of conditions of work and the possibility of long-term residency in the country of destination and, finally, the presumed tolerance of a given host nation towards “difference” (gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation or religion) (OECD, 2003). Moreover, since this new wave of immigration consisted, at its source, of citizens of non EU countries, it did not always take place through legal procedures. Additionally,

Load more