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In a state of exception: political subjecthood in European film, 1990-2008

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In a state of exception: political subjecthood in European film, 1990-2008

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IN A STATE OF EXCEPTION:

POLITICAL SUBJECTHOOD IN EUROPEAN FILM, 1990-2008

by

Alex Lykidis

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CINEMATIC ARTS-CRITICAL STUDIES)

August 2009

Copyright 2009 Alex Lykidis
ii

Dedication

to

Veronica
iii
Acknowledgments

A dissertation is not so much a demonstration of mastery as it is a leap of faith.
My leap has been made possible by the generosity and guidance of many friends,
colleagues and mentors. Linda Overholt, Alicia Cornish and Sherall Preyer-Sumler
helped me to navigate through the institutional requirements of graduate study, their
humor and good cheer making my time on campus a welcome respite from the solitude of
writing. The collegiality and friendship of Nam Lee, Veena Hariharan, Aboubakar
Sanogo, Jeremy Berg and Michael Price heartened me during my many crises of self-
confidence. I am very grateful to Macarena Gómez-Barris and Dina Iordanova for
providing me with valuable perspectives from outside of my discipline and institution,
and to Anne Friedberg and Curtis Marez for their guidance during the difficult and
uncertain early stages of this project. I am deeply indebted to Janani Subramanian, Ioanna
Uricaru and Jaime Nasser for their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of this
document and for their friendship. My entry into the field of film studies was itself a leap
of faith, and I would not have had the strength to stay the course without the unwavering
encouragement and steadfast support of Charles Warren and Roy Grundmann at Boston
University. I am eternally grateful to David James for inspiring me to be a good teacher
and for making me understand that scholarship is an ethical as well as an intellectual
enterprise. Marsha Kinder, Ruth Wilson Gimore and Priya Jaikumar have expertly
advised me throughout the dissertation process, inspiring me as much through the
example of their superb scholarship as through their comments on my own modest
iv
contributions to the field of film studies. Lastly, without the loving support of my family
and Veronica this dissertation would not have been possible.

v
Table of Contents

Dedication ii

Acknowledgments iii

Abstract vi

Introduction 1
Democratic Politics and Alterity 3
Performative Agency and the Cinematic 10
Methodological Framework 14
Introduction Endnotes 24

Chapter 1. Art Cinema and the Failure of Universalism: Multiculturalism as
Trauma in Michael Haneke’s French-language Films 31
Modes of Address: Insecurity and Ambiguity 35
Modes of Authority: The State and Authorship 53
Chapter 1 Endnotes 66

Chapter 2. National Cinema as Introversion: Peripheral Modernity and
Patriarchal Crisis in Contemporary Greek Films 72
Greece on the Periphery 73
Belated Modernity and Patriarchal Crisis 94
Chapter 2 Endnotes 119

Chapter 3. National Cinema as Extroversion: Metaphors of Identity in
Contemporary Greek Films 126
From Philhellenism to Europeanization: Greece in Europe 126
Travel as a Site of Renewal: Greece in the Balkans 147
Chapter 3 Endnotes 165

Chapter 4. Minority Cinema and Popular Culture: The Politics of Identity
in Tony Gatlif’s Films 172
Identity and Performance 176
History and Narrative 194
Democracy and Realism 211
Transnationalism 229
Chapter 4 Endnotes 236

Conclusion: Figurations of Agency in a State of Exception 247

Bibliography 261
vi

Abstract

The articulation of political subjecthood in contemporary Europe is delimited by
increasingly neoliberal, technocratic and transnational modes of governance that alienate
mass constituencies from democratic practice. The resulting disenfranchisement is
heightened for immigrant and minority subjects denied citizenship rights and living under
the constant threat of deportation. Paradoxically, these marginalized groups find
themselves in the middle of contemporary European debates about the shifting
relationship between national identity, the state and democratic politics, something
reflected in the prevalence of contemporary European films about immigrant and
minority issues. In a period marked by political exclusion, film practice has become an
important arena for the performative assertion of subjecthood and agency. This
dissertation uses a case-study approach to investigate post-1989 cinematic representations
of minority and immigrant subjecthood at three different scales of European political and
film industrial power: France, a major power in European politics boasting the
continent’s largest and most successful film industry; Greece, a peripheral European
nation with an established national film culture that rarely gains international exposure;
and Romanies, the most persecuted and marginalized ethnic group in Europe with a
nascent film practice unable to rely on dedicated state support. Through a comparative
analysis of films by Michael Haneke, Tony Gatlif and several Greek filmmakers
including Panos Karkanevatos and Constantine Giannaris, this study aims to show that
the shifting modalities of political power in contemporary Europe have placed a strain on
vii
traditional definitions of art cinema, minority cinema and national cinema, necessitating
that we reconsider both political agency and film practice, as well as their interrelation.
1
Introduction

Our understanding of political agency in the contemporary period has been
transformed by the shifting relationship between the state and civil society, national and
transnational decision-making bodies and capital and labor. The global flows of workers,
capital and technology and the transnational coordination of elite governance force us to
reconceive the locus and modes of articulation of political power. In Europe, continental
integration has consolidated the hegemonic position of neoliberalism and dampened the
power of political parties and mass constituencies in favor of technocratic decision-
making. The resulting democratic disenfranchisement has delimited the possibilities for
political expression, triggering spasmodic waves of popular violence, protest and
rejections of EU mandates. The increased immigration into and multiculturalism of
European societies have made immigrant and minority subjects frequent scapegoats for
the failure of political parties and governments to represent their constituencies in an era
of increasingly diffuse and technocratic decision-making. Weak states have consolidated
their political bases by rejecting immigrant and minority human rights demands and
imposing draconian immigration controls, producing a de facto hierarchical system of
rights that secures the labor of immigrants without providing them with the benefits of
citizenship. A resurgence of Eurocentric and exclusionary definitions of “European”
identity and history, along with a continued denial of cultural difference and the partiality
of the law, has provided a means by which to legitimate the persecution of immigrants
and minorities, capitalizing on the widespread anxiety over waning national sovereignty
and elite consolidation of power that characterizes the current conjuncture.
2
To understand political agency in this period of circumscribed democratic agon
requires us to reconsider our past assumptions about power and the state. Culture has
become an important site for the articulation of contemporary political contradictions.
Exclusion from political decision-making renders the cultural sphere a privileged site
where symbolic and performative acts can accord subjects a measure of agency denied to
them elsewhere. Cultural practice is also a means by which to intervene in the ideological
legitimations of elite power, since these are frequently framed in cultural terms. The
appropriation of cultural difference under the logic of liberal multiculturalism
necessitates that we look beyond mere assertions of cultural particularism in our search
for the ‘political’ in the ‘cultural’. Despite this, particularism retains the potential to
destabilize established power structures because in Europe elite governance is frequently
legitimated through appeals to universalist discourse. Immigrant and minority subjects
find themselves in the middle of debates about the relationship between alterity, national
identity, the state and democratic politics. The prevalence of recent European films about
immigrant and minority issues reflects this symbolic centrality. A study of these films
will allow us to better understand how Europeans are negotiating the shifting modalities
of political power in the contemporary period.
The dominant categories of cinematic practice in European film studies have
been art cinema and national cinema, and to a much lesser extent minority cinema. These
modes have been conceived primarily in contradistinction to the Hollywood cinema that
has dominated European markets in the postwar period. The Hollywood-European
cinema binary has elided the internal complexity and contradictions of European film
3
practice, something that this study seeks to redress through a case study approach that
considers filmmaking at three scales of European film industrial and political power:
France, a major power in European politics boasting the continent’s largest and most
successful film industry; Greece, a peripheral European nation with an established
national film culture that rarely gains international exposure; and Romani cinema, a
nascent film practice unable to rely on dedicated state support that represents the most
persecuted and marginalized ethnic group in Europe. In each of these cinemas, immigrant
and minority identity is foregrounded in a way that reflects the specific geopolitical and
film industrial positions occupied by its filmmakers and those they represent through
their films. This study seeks to show that the shifting modalities of political power in
contemporary Europe have placed a strain on the traditional definitions of art cinema,
national cinema and minority cinema, necessitating that we reconsider both political
agency and film practice, as well as their interrelation.

Democratic Politics and Alterity
The increasing global flow of people, capital and information has undermined
nation-states’ ability to maintain control over their territoriality and sovereignty.
1
This
has been exacerbated by the dispersal of power from national to transnational, and from
governmental to civil institutions. The result, according to Akhil Gupta and Aradhana
Sharma, is the “privatization of the state”, with governments abdicating their
redistributive responsibilities to international organizations and non-governmental
agencies.
2
Capitalist concentration of wealth resides in the class and national origins of a
4
corporation’s management cadre, rather than its site of production, further weakening the
territorial sovereignty of nation-states. This loss of power has undermined the democratic
legitimacy of elected governments, a process exacerbated by neoliberalism, which has
been either willingly adopted or imposed on governments by international institutions
such as the World Bank and the EU. Neoliberal reforms have led to the weakening of
social welfare policies in favor of deregulation, privatization and regressive tax policies
that have widened social inequalities and weakened the power of governments over civil
society.
3
As Manuel Castells notes, this has created a crisis of faith in democratic
governance: “Since commands from the state cannot be fully enforced, and since some of
its fundamental promises, embodied in the welfare state, cannot be kept, both its authority
and its legitimacy are called into question.”
4
The shift in the balance of power from
nation-states to transnational organizations, and from governments to corporations has
enabled the convergence of economic and political power to create what Michael Hardt
and Antonio Negri ruefully label “a properly capitalist order”. This convergence of forces
has not only de-territorialized governance but also centralized it into “a single
supranational figure of political power” whose legitimation usurps the principle of
territorial inviolability under the weight of juridical universalism.
5

In Europe, the decline of the power of nation-states has led to a reduction in the
power and influence of political parties, which have been replaced at the forefront of
political decision-making by a cadre of civil society elites. According to Peter Mair, this
shift away from political parties is due to several factors: electoral entropy due to
declining levels of participation in elections; voter volatility due to reduced loyalty to
5
political parties evidenced by the increasing number of voters defining themselves as
independents; diminishing distinctions in rival political party identities leading to fewer
real choices for voters; greater political party concern with gaining power rather than
retaining ideological oppositions with rival parties; and reduced political party connection
to broader networks of support such as trade unions and churches, which themselves are
in a period of decline. For Mair, contemporary European political parties “have become
agencies that govern—in the widest sense of the term—rather than represent; they bring
order rather than give voice”.
6

This also holds at the transnational level, with the EU designed to favor
constitutionalism rather than representative politics, limiting the potential of national
governments to overturn or reverse measures adopted at the EU level. According to Scott
Gill, the EU’s democratic deficits are due to the centralization of its authority in the
executive branch (the Council of Ministers and European Commission), the
independence of the European Central Bank, and the shift in power toward the largely
unaccountable EU bureaucracy and international organizations such as the WTO. The
European parliament is the body that is supposed to provide the link between EU
decision-making and the European polity, but it fails to achieve this, according to Gilles
Scott-Smith, because it has limited legislative powers, functioning as an administrative
body, with legislation being undertaken by committees in Brussels rather than the
parliamentary chamber in Strasbourg.
7

New democratic theories have sought to legitimate the increasingly technocratic
forms of governance dominating western political systems by arguing that civil society
6
experts are in a better position to make informed decisions about policy than elected
officials. Western development theorists have long characterized the courts and non-
government agencies as the leading agents of positive change in developing nations,
since these bodies have traditionally been dominated by western-oriented elites more
likely to endorse punitive development policies imposed on developing nations by the
World Bank and WTO. However, in recent years, technocratic decision-making has
increasingly been presented as the preferable mode of governance for western nations as
well. Recent democratic theories of ‘associative democracy’ and ‘participatory
governance’ have de-emphasized conventional democratic modalities in favor of output-
oriented measures of political effectiveness that seek to transcend the interests of
individual nation-states and mass constituencies.
8

The redistribution of political power to non-governmental agencies and
transnational organizations has not led to a decline of the ‘political’ but rather to a
proliferation of the sites of regulation and discipline, now operative at every scale of
human activity. This seems to confirm Michel Foucault’s assessment of modern
governance as “governmentality” in which state power is based on a nation’s population
rather than its territory, making use of instrumentality and knowledge, and reliant on its
security apparatus more so than its laws for the discipline of its subjects.
9

Governmentality signals a shift to a tactical instrumentalization and economization of
state functions.
10
State knowledge becomes increasingly important, spawning the police
state, the field of statistics, and the expansion of the state’s administrative apparatus. The
result of these transformations is the contemporary dominance of technocratic modes of
7
governance.
11
The penetration of ‘governmental’ state power into the private realm is
characterized by Foucault as biopolitics. Giorgio Agamben argues that biopolitics’
increasing encroachment of state sovereignty into the private lives of subjects has created
hierarchical societies that link rights to the nation-state and citizenship. Since not all
human beings are granted these rights; a distinction is drawn between active and passive
rights, and between non-citizens and citizens. Those left outside of the protected realm of
citizenship are subjected to the full force and control of the state over their bodies and
lives .
12
Immigrants and minorities emerge as the exemplary figures of the modern era,
because they embody the disarticulation of rights from birth, wherein citizenship is not
granted to all but has to be earned by some through patriotism.
13

The linkage of rights to citizenship and the systematic denial of citizenship to
certain segments of the population can be understood through Agamben’s notion of the
“state of exception”. Agamben argues that modern political systems, when confronted
with something outside of themselves, internalize it by making it an interdiction. This is a
way to manage, neutralize and control what are perceived to be external threats to the
system. This principle, a relation of exception, takes an even more extreme form when it
comes to sovereignty and the law, since that which is outside the sovereign is not
internalized through an interdiction but rather by the suspension of the law.
14
This state of
exception is constitutive, creating threshold relations between inside/outside, order/chaos,
normal/exceptional that form the basis for the juridical order, helping to localize and
order the space of validity of the law. Agamben describes the state of exception at the
center of law as “a fundamental ambiguity, an unlocalizable zone of indistinction or
8
exception that…necessarily acts against [the law] as a principle of its infinite
dislocation”. This state of exception is increasingly becoming the defining characteristic
of modern politics systems.
15
Agamben contends that the state of exception “has
transgressed its spatiotemporal boundaries and now, overflowing outside [of] them, is
starting to coincide with the normal order” leading to the unconstrained power of states
over the lives of their subjects. Whereas before those without rights were situated outside
of the nation-state (exemplified by the institution of the refugee camp), the differential
accordance of rights has now become the primary means of regulating the internal affairs
of contemporary societies. Immigrants and minorities denied citizenship remain under
constant threat by the extraordinary powers of the sovereign in a permanent state of
exception.
16

Agamben’s theorization of modern governance as a permanent state of exception
allows us to better understand the position of minorities and immigrants in contemporary
Europe. The rights of minority and immigrant subjects are dependent on their position in
relation to a series of competing discourses and interests: national immigration controls
and citizenship laws versus international minority and immigrant rights provisions, the
interests of transnational capital versus those of nation-states, de facto discrimination
along the axes of gender and race versus de jure impartiality and color-blindness. Lydia
Morris argues that what results from this set of discourses and regulations is social
stratification, with citizens, residents and undocumented workers occupying positions on
a sliding scale of rights, with further subdivisions according to gender, race and national
background.
17

9
The state of exception occupied by those denied full citizenship is the result of
what Charles Mills calls the unwritten ‘racial contract’ that has enabled European
political cultures to claim adherence to universal Enlightenment ideals while in effect
instituting a discriminatory system based on exclusion from citizenship.
18
The
legitimation of exclusion in the modern period is based on cultural racism, which uses
racialist notions of national history, psychology and culture to argue for the
incommensurability of certain groups with the requirements for national citizenship.
19

The Maastricht Treaty adopted by EU member states in 1992 reinforced the exclusionary
policies of individual nation-states by restricting the protection of rights to nationals from
EU member states. The EU-sanctioned exclusion of the 13 million non-member TCNs
(third-country nationals) from the rights of citizenship has created new forms of racism
and exclusion – what Étienne Balibar has termed a “specifically ‘European’ racism”. The
member, non-member binary maps all too conveniently onto white, Christian identities
and their “others”, providing the latest mechanism for the enforcement of a racial order
on the European continent.
20

What is the connection between the widespread democratic disenfranchisement
animating European political culture and the specific, and more egregious, experience of
exclusion faced by the continent’s immigrant and minority populations? We can
understand these processes dialectically as a compromise between the interests of
transnational capital and nation-states, providing capital with a large labor force while
allowing nation-states to deprive a large segment of the working population and their
families from the benefits of citizenship. This compromise benefits nation-states by
10
enabling dominant groups to retain their position of social dominance and it benefits
capital by weakening the ability of immigrant and minority workers to challenge unfair
working conditions. Balibar contends that discrimination against immigrants also
provides weakened governments with a means to deny their own impotence and to secure
the electoral support of dominant groups. Balibar calls this phenomenon the “impotence
of the omnipotent”, a form of institutional racism designed to assure citizens of their
rights by taking those rights away from others: “national citizens can be persuaded that
their rights do in fact exist if they see that the rights of foreigners are inferior, precarious,
or conditioned on repeated manifestations of allegiance.”
21

Performative Agency and the Cinematic
The democratic deficits of contemporary European societies require us to
reconceive political agency and its representation. Excluded from elite decision-making
and the electoral process, immigrant and minority subjects have found other avenues for
political expression. In the current conjuncture, performance has emerged as an important
modality of political agency. Performance is here defined as a set of actions conducted in
front of an audience that are reiterated as part of everyday struggle, attaining a symbolic
value that exceeds their practical effects. The audience dynamics of performance signal
the importance of visibility in the articulation of immigrant and minority political agency.
The emphasis on symbolic effects is a response to exclusion from participation in the
democratic process, shifting the terrain of political representation from electoral actions
and elite decision-making to discursive and cultural interventions in civil society aimed at
11
disrupting the ideological legitimations of power. In a permanent state of exception from
juridical equality and state protection, immigrant and minority subjects display agency
through performative acts whose discursive violence destabilizes power relationships in
civil society.
What is the relationship between agency and performance? Subject formation,
Judith Butler argues, is inherently citational: “The expectation of self-determination that
self-naming arouses is paradoxically contested by the historicity of the name itself: by the
history of the usages that one never controlled, but that constrain the very usage that now
emblematizes autonomy.”
22
This dependence on a prior discursive authority creates
feelings of ambivalence towards the social categories that one inherits in the process of
subject formation.
23
Without these prior categories, subject formation is impossible; yet
these categories severely delimit the possibilities for self-determination and self-
representation. Despite these constraints, subjects retain a certain level of agency through
the performative enactment of their identity.
24
According to Butler, subjecthood is
performatively constituted through a set of behaviors that are ritually reiterated.
25

Subjective agency is possible because these performative acts are never perfect
reproductions of the discursive authority they cite.
26
Homi Bhabha has described the
performativity of identity, in the context of colonial discourse, as mimicry. And he too
has located agency in the slippages between the imitative enunciations of subjects and the
official discourse that conditions their moment of enunciation:
The menace of mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing the
ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority… [colonial
mimics are] the figures of a double, the part-objects of a metonymy of
colonial desire which alienates the modality and normality of these
12
dominant discourses in which they emerge as ‘inappropriate’ colonial
subjects. A desire that, through the repetition of partial presence, which is
the basis of mimicry, articulates those disturbances of cultural, racial and
historical difference that menace the narcissistic demand of colonial
authority.

In a period of democratic disenfranchisement and exclusion, Butler’s and Bhabha’s
definitions of agency in discursive and performative terms allow us to re-orient our
understanding of political expression from physical to discursive violence. Discursive
violence aims to disrupt official histories and affirm subjecthood in the face of a juridical
regime that denies one’s existence as a citizen.
Awareness of the cultural and geopolitical specificities of everyday struggle
necessitates that we do not subsume instances of performative agency into binaries of
resistance and capitulation, or into master narratives of revolutionary emancipation.
27
In
understanding representations of political agency, it is important to consider the shifting
valence of the political without collapsing the differences that exist between political and
cultural spheres of action, between the state and civil society, and between democratic
practice and performativity. The centrality of democratic disenfranchisement and cultural
racism in today’s European societies gives the cultural sphere an added importance in
discussions of political agency. And yet it is vital that we do not conflate cultural
performance and political practice, or performativity induced by the state with cultural
performance induced by forces within civil society. The circumscribed possibilities for
political articulation within the cultural realm compel us to pay attention not just to
instances of agency, but also to moments of disempowerment, futility, entrapment, and
apoplexy. At the same time, cultural practice and representation should not be seen as
13
independent of state power, and one of the tasks of this study is to foreground figurations
of the state in representations of civil society. Just as the state informs articulations of
agency in the cultural realm, culture shapes the activities of the state. As Akhil Gupta and
Aradhana Sharma note, states and their boundaries are culturally constructed, and state
cohesion and lagitimacy are produced by how states represent themselves to their
subjects.
28

Language and representation play a vital role in the process of ideological
contestation, according to Stuart Hall, because meaning is not a transparent reflection of
the world in language, but arises through differences between terms and categories, our
systems of reference. Positively marked terms signify because of their position in relation
to what is absent, unmarked, the unspeakable. By revealing these unmarked semantic
fields, contestations of official rhetoric and narratives can disrupt dominant groups’
ability to rule society and reproduce its relations of production.
29
Cinematic language
provides a way to politicize performance and thus render expressions of immigrant and
minority identity comprehensible in political terms. The cinematic representation of
performance can foreground its audience dynamics, thus reminding us of the external
investments that inform the reception of immigrant and minority cultural expression.
Cinematic characterization and narrativity can destabilize the seeming contingency and
inchoateness of performative instances and de-essentialize and de-naturalize immigrant
and minority performativity. Narrative teleology can be used to express the social
constraints, indeed the very mortality, that delimits the political possibilities of cultural
expression. The thematization of encounters between dominant and minority groups can
14
help us understand immigrant and minority performance as a mode of cultural exchange
and political expression. Narration, especially imperfect or incomplete narration, is a
powerful authorial mechanism for the articulation of social and cultural difference,
miring audiences in spectatorial positions of uncertainty that reveal the opacity of
difference and expose the assumptions and biases that structure processes of cross-
cultural reception. The shifting dynamics of point-of-view can be used to position
viewers in a political, not just a spectatorial, relationship to subjects on the screen,
revealing the dialectical relationship between cultural and political modalities of power.
This relationship can be reinforced through cinematic figurations of the state in civil
society, providing a means of understanding how each realm delimits the possibilities for
agency in the other.

Methodological Framework
Any discussion of identity risks reifying social and cultural characteristics that are
products of historical processes under constant transformation and contestation. In order
to avoid this tendency, this study conceives of identity as a structural relation between
groups - a dynamic and complex historical process rather than a fixed and immutable set
of characteristics. This conception is in line with Iris Marion Young’s definition of
identity “as a function of relation, comparison, and interaction” wherein groups are
conceived to “not have identities as such, but rather that individuals construct their own
identities on the basis of social group positioning”, thus eschewing the frequent
essentialism and homogenization of minority and immigrant identities.
30

15
In a relational conceptualization, what makes a group a group is less some set of
attributes its members share than the relations in which they stand to others…
[Structural difference is defined in terms of a] set of relationships and interactions
that act together to produce specific possibilities and preclude others, and which
operate in a reinforcing circle….Though the specific content and detail of the
positions and relationships are frequently reinterpreted, evolving, and even
contested, the basic social locations and their relations to one another tend to be
reproduced…Social structures exist only in the action and interaction of persons;
they exist not as states, but as processes.
31

In this study, political agency is conceived as a space of articulation conditioned by
social, cultural and political institutions and discourses that, while subject to contestation,
are not easily transcended through cultural representation. This is akin to Anthony
Giddens’ definition of structural inequality as a set of constraints “some people encounter
in their freedom and material well-being as the cumulative effect of the possibilities of
their social positions, as compared with others who in their social positions have more
options or easier access to benefits.”
32
As Kwame Anthony Appiah notes, people are
agents who make individual choices out of a set of options determined by their relation to
social group positions made available to them.
33

The increasing contingency, plurality and performativity of political expression
should not be read, as it has by some political theorists, as an immutable characteristic of
postmodern political culture, but rather, as E. San Juan notes, as a response to the
relationship between the state, transnational organizations, dominant discourse, cultural
practice and the structures of capitalism in specific conjunctures.
34
Postcolonial theorists,
such as Walter Mignolo and Dipesh Chakrabarty, counter European postmodernist
theories that essentialize and universalize characteristics of contemporary political
culture. Mignolo argues that cultural enunciation should be analyzed in terms of its geo-
16
historical location in relation to coloniality and its contemporary legacies, while
Chakrabarty provincializes European discourse so that the specificities of non-European
cultures, histories and socio-political modalities can come to the surface.
35
There is no
reason that this attention to geo-historical specificity and international relations of power
should not be applied to the study of European cultural practice as well. While relations
of dominance and exploitation within Europe are not as stark as those between Europe
and other parts of the world, significant differences animate the articulation of political
subjecthood within and between European nations. This study uses a comparative
framework so that the differential constraints on political and cultural expression across a
variety of European political and cultural contexts can come to the fore.
A principal aim of this study is to foreground the shifting relationships between
political and cultural spheres of action, national, transnational and sub-national identities,
the state and civil society, and performance and political agency. The approach taken
here has been inspired by the work of several scholars. Priya Jaikumar’s Cinema at the
End of Empire: A Politics of Transition in Britain and India investigates how shifting
colonial relations of power between Britain and India in the waning days of the British
Empire registered at the level of film genre and style, moving British cinema from the
self-confident, Manichean realism of Sanders of the River, to the conflicted, near-mythic
individualism of Four Feathers, to the modernist self-interrogation of Black Narcissus.
Jaikumar elucidates how British imperial filmmakers at first denied, then attempted to
resolve and finally exposed the contradictions between “imperialist defense of coercion”
and “liberal celebrations of equality”.
36
Jaikumar’s work allows us to understand how
17
film language can register shifts in geopolitical and economic relations of power
between, not just within, nations, exposing the disjunction between the rhetorical
promises and lived realities of particular historical conjunctures.
Colleen Lye’s Racial Form and American Literature, 1893-1945, investigates the
histories and ideologies of imposed racialization of Asian-Americans through a
consideration of the shifting ideologies, ambitions and power dynamics governing United
States-Asian relations. Lye connects U.S. foreign policy and foreign journalistic
discourse, domestic political discourses and opinions, and the ideologies apparent in
literature, and in so doing is able to interweave the stories of American imperialism and
capitalism, in all their domestic and international dimensions. Just as Jaikumar links
national cinema to international relations of power and influence, Lye emphasizes the
global foundations of racialization: how “the domestic signification of Asian Americans
has its counterpart in the global signification of Asia.”
37
By demonstrating how racial
form is at the heart of contradictions between globalism and nationalism, Lye’s approach
provides a model for how to analyze contemporary European cinematic representations
of immigrants and minorities in the face of heightened contradictions between
multiculturalist rhetoric and racist state policy, economic integration and political
exclusion.
Marsha Kinder’s Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in
Spain, discusses the way “Oedipal conflicts within the family were used to speak about
political issues and historical events that were repressed from filmic representation during
the Francoist era”.
38
The “cultural reinscription” of the Oedipal narrative so that it
18
revolves around absent fathers and dominating mothers enabled Spanish filmmakers to
explore the Franco regime’s simultaneous abandonment of its redistributive
responsibilities and ubiquitous, repressive presence in the lives of the Spanish people.
Family narratives and the repression of erotic desire provided Spanish filmmakers with
an allegorical framework for political critique. In the post-Franco era, sexual mobility and
subversion functioned in a similar way, as manifestations of post-dictatorship freedoms
and negotiations of the lingering repressions of patriarchal law. Kinder’s work
demonstrates that relationships in civil society are conditioned by state power, providing
an avenue for political expression in a period of democratic disenfranchisement and
exclusion.
This study will investigate the cinematic representation of political agency in
three different contexts: France, Greece and Romani communities throughout Europe.
The aim is to show is that differences in geopolitical position, legitimations of elite rule,
definitions of citizenship, perceived marginality and territorial violability alter the
dynamics of immigrant and minority representation. In France, discussed in Chapter 1,
universalist legitimations of elite governance and Republican definitions of citizenship
render cultural difference a powerful modality of political resistance. The shift in the
perceived position of French immigrants from social impermanence to cultural
“intransigence” has politicized expressions of cultural difference in civil society. France’s
colonial history and largely uncontested reproduction of elite rule have led immigrant
visibility in civil society to be perceived by dominant groups as a fundamental loss of
agency and as a breakdown of the spatial demarcations and social hierarchies of earlier
19
periods. In contemporary France, immigrants’ violent contestations of bourgeois
positions of privilege in civil society have exposed the contradictions between state
violence and rhetorics of inclusion.
By contrast in Greece, discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, the perceived insufficiency
of dominant political, economic and patriarchal institutions leads to the perception of
immigration as a potential resolution of ongoing crises in Greek society. While
immigrants’ cultural difference is seen as a threat to the purportedly secular
characteristics of French society, in Greece immigrants destabilize the country’s fragile
constructions of territorial nationalism. While in France, immigrant agency manifests
itself through violent contestations in civil society, inscrutable and traumatic for
bourgeois subjects, in Greece immigration is gendered in sexual and domestic terms and
seen as a possible resolution, albeit problematic under the logic of ethnocentrism, of the
country’s perceived inability to socially reproduce itself. While immigrant marginality
destabilizes pretensions of impartiality and equality in the French context, in Greece it
runs parallel to the perception of Greece and its dominant groups as marginal
internationally.
In the case of Romanies, discussed in Chapter 4, the paradox of their social
marginality and symbolic centrality renders questions of representational boundaries and
audience dynamics paramount. The appropriation of Romani culture in national
representations of dominant groups places a burden on Romani artists to both
acknowledge outside investments in their culture and disambiguate these from the
internal demands and interests of their community. The historical reification of Romani
20
statelessness and marginality necessitates a reflexive representation of Romani cultural
performance, as well as a narrativization of Romani performative contingency and
cultural visibility. Because dominant social groups in Europe do not perceive Romani
cultural difference as a threat, but rather invest it with utopian longing and nostalgia,
Romani self-representation has sought to particularize cultural difference. This
particularism is not aimed as a challenge to the purported impartiality and color-blindness
of dominant political cultures, as in France, but as a means of exposing the frequently
elided contradictions between the Romanies’ social marginality in European societies and
their symbolic centrality in European imaginaries. Each of the contexts addressed in this
study reveals a different relationship between between dominant and minority groups and
between political and cultural modalities of agency.
Another aim of this study is to investigate the viability of existing definitions of
European film practice in light of the shifting terrain of the political in contemporary
Europe. European film studies has traditionally emphasized the distinctions between
European cinema and Hollywood cinema, often overlooking their mutual aesthetic
influences and similarities.
39
Political analyses of European films have tended to focus on
filmmakers’ expressions of defiance against American cultural imperialism. For instance,
Jill Forbes and Sarah Street argue that, historically, European filmmakers have responded
to Hollywood dominance through revision of American genres, emphasis on national
historical specificity, or representations of women as metaphors of resistance to
American influence.
40
Over-reliance on the Hollywood-European art cinema dichotomy
has led to the neglect of the uneven dynamics of power animating the relationships
21
between European nations and film industries. This study aims to redress this oversight
through a comparative framework that will analyze the representation of immigrant and
minority issues in three different modes of European film practice and three different
national and subnational contexts.
The conflation of European cinema with authorial and art cinema modes of film
practice has led scholars to overlook the political and ethical dimensions of cinematic
spectatorship. As Thomas Elsaesser notes:
the close alliance of art cinema and the author with the cultural bureaucracies also
entailed – perhaps as an unintended consequence – an almost inevitable elision of
the problems of the political: who were the filmmakers representing, for whom
were they speaking, how could they assume a credible role, without becoming a
caricature of the capricious genius?
41

In this study, questions of representation are paramount, foregrounding the uneven social
dynamics and class, national and ethnic particularities animating the relationships
between European filmmakers and their audiences. European film studies has
traditionally overlooked the relationship between transformations in political practice and
film aesthetics. While there has been an acknowledgement of the waning viability of
national cinema in today’s globalized world, scholars have focused on what European
filmmakers can do to achieve box office success in the new global film marketplace,
rather than on the way contemporary film practice negotiates new modalities of political
agency. For instance, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith argues that in order to be successful,
contemporary European films must not be ‘European’ as such: they must be “either
obstinately local, able to capture audiences in [their] country of origin or within a culture
zone where [their] local characteristics can be appreciated; or…international, potentially
22
appealing in a variety of markets”.
42
By contrast, this study addresses the relationship
between transformations in political subjecthood and cinematic representation, wherein
film practice is conceived as a space of articulation and negotiation of contradictions and
exclusions in the political realm.
The emphasis on art cinema and national cinema in European film studies has
also led to the neglect of subnational cinemas. One scholar who has written extensively
on subnational cinemas is Marvin D’Lugo, who, in his work on Catalonian cinema,
argues that subnational cinema is a mode of practice that inherently destabilizes and
contests national myths and institutions.
43
D’Lugo contends that an important distinction
between national and subnational cinemas is their different relation to state forms, with
subnational cinema “lacking a formal state apparatus through which to authenticate its
‘nationhood’”.
44
This study’s consideration of Romani cinema and its emphasis on
immigrant and minority representation in French and Greek cinema seek to provide
modest contributions to subnational European film studies.
The contention of this study is that the dominant modes of European film practice
– art cinema, national cinema, and minority cinema – are in the process of reinvention
due to the shifting modalities of agency in the political and cultural realms. Chapter 1
discusses the French-language films of Michael Haneke, who mobilizes ambiguous
narration and an antagonistic authorial relationship to audiences in order to foreground
the insufficiencies of universalist discourses and bourgeois perspectives in the
representation of immigrant and minority subjects. Haneke’s cinema helps us to consider
the extent to which art cinema remains a viable mode of representation, given its
23
emphasis on bourgeois interiority, psychologism and discursivity, in the face of violent
contestations of bourgeois power in civil society. Chapter 2 discusses Greek films that
thematize Greek marginality and patriarchal crisis, wherein immigrant and minority
characters are called upon to provide phantasmatic resolutions to the ongoing crises
animating Greek society. These Greek films elucidate the insufficiencies of national
cinema tropes in light of the increasing fragility of territorial nationalism and waning
power of nation-states. Chapter 3 considers Greek films that address Greece’s European
and Balkan identity, wherein travel and alterity are constructed as potential sites of
national renewal. These Greek films help us to better understand the extent to which
national cinema tropes can adequately capture the transnationalism of contemporary
political and cultural practice. Chapter 4 discusses the films of Tony Gatlif, which
foreground the audience dynamics of performance and the narrativity of Romani
characters in order to negotiate external and internal investments in Romani culture and
identity. This chapter considers whether the contemporary centrality of performative
modes of political agency destabilizes traditional definitions of minority cinema that
associate it with oppositionality. The prevailing concern of all these chapters is the
viability and appropriateness of existing categories of European film practice for the
articulation of immigrant and minority agency and identity in an era of democratic
disenfranchisement and political exclusion.
24
Introduction Endnotes

1
Akhil Gupta and Aradhana Sharma : “Introduction: Rethinking Theories of the State in the Age of
Globalization”, The Anthropology of the State: A Reader, ed., Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta (Malden:
Blackwell, 2006), pp. 1-41. Gupta and Sharma note: “The territorial inviolability of nation-states is being
contested by border-transgressing circulations of people, images, money, and goods, and the demands of
separatist ethnic movements. Such phenomena are rendering national borders porous and states’ control
over territories tenuous. State sovereignty is also increasingly challenged by the rise of quasi-“state-like”
institutions, like the World Trade Organization (WTO), that operate and regulate the conduct of states,
economies and people at a supra-national level.“ Gupta and Sharma, p. 6.
2
Gupta and Sharma note: “…the state in the neoliberal moment is contracting in two ways. First, the
transnational organization of global capitalism is forcing a different regime of regulation of national
economies by their respective states. Some forms of regulation, like tariffs on trade, are being weakened
and governed by transnational organizations such as the WTO…Second, states are increasingly unable to
perform their redistributive role: the resources they are able to extract and distribute are becoming
smaller….In such a context, the “privatization” of the state entails a dispersal of the state’s governance and
redistributive functions to non-state and charitable organizations. While this farming out may well signal a
‘degovernmentalization of the state’…it also represents an increased governmentalization of society.”
Gupta and Sharma, p. 22.
3
Masao Miyoshi: “A Borderless World: From Colonialism to Transnationalism and the Decline of the
Nation State”, Postcolonialism, Vol. V, ed., Diane Brydon (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 92-93. This
dispersal of power is not only undemocratic but also inegalitarian, leading to the accentuation of existing
inequalities within and between states As Gupta and Sharma note, supra-state and non-state modes of
governance function “as a disciplinary instrument that spreads government power transnationally and can
potentially strengthen the hegemony of Northern states….reinforc[ing] geopolitical inequalities between
nation-states”. Gupta and Sharma, pp. 21, 24
4
Manuel Castells: End of Millennium, 2nd edition (Malden: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 377-378. Castells goes
on to say: “Because representative democracy is predicated on the notion of a sovereign body, the blurring
of boundaries of sovereignty leads to uncertainty in the process of delegation of people’s will.” Castells, p.
378.
5
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri: Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 8-9. Hardt
and Negri assert that supranational institutions such as the United Nations were originally conceived as a
mechanism by which to achieve a contractual internationalism that nonetheless preserves the sovereignty of
individual nation-states. However, in practice, these very same supranational institutions have provided the
means by which to supersede this international order, and replace it with an imperial world order, what they
term Empire. In Empire, ethics, morality and justice are cast in universal, absolute dimensions and power
spirals centripetally toward increasing centralization and globalization. Hardt and Negri argue that “what
used to be conflict or competition among several imperialist powers has in important respects been replaced
by the idea of a single power that overdetermines them all, structures them in a unitary way, and treats them
under one common notion of right that is decidedly postcolonial and postimperialist”. The juridical concept
that underlies the contemporary moment harkens back to the pre-Renaissance period in which two notions
were united: 1) a notion of right that exhausts space, encompasses all of civilization and 2) a notion of right
that exhausts historical time, suspends history, and summons past and future within its own ethical order.
An example of this unified principle in action is the notion of the “just war” which is increasingly being
used to justify pre-emptive attacks on sovereign nations. The prerequisite for a just war is the banalization
(reduced to an object of routine police repression) and absolutization (vilified as an absolute threat to the
ethical order) of the enemy. Transnational frameworks and institutions such as U.N. peacekeeping forces,
25

universalist human rights rhetoric, and civilizational antinomies provide the ideal mechanism by which to
achieve this absolutization and banalization. Hardt and Negri, pp. 9, 12.
6
Peter Mair: “Ruling the Void? The Hollowing of Western Democracy”, New Left Review, vol. 42, Nov.-
Dec. 2006, pp. 28-48. Mair defines the failure of party politics in contemporary Europe as a mutual
withdrawal from the interactive relationship between leaders and citizens that political parties had once
made possible: “But in what sense are parties failing? First, as has been well attested, parties are no longer
managing to engage the ordinary citizen. Not only are citizens voting in fewer numbers and with less sense
of partisan consistency, they are also increasingly reluctant to commit themselves to parties, whether in
terms of identification or membership. In this sense, citizens are withdrawing from conventional political
involvement. Second, the party can no longer adequately serve as a base for the activities and status of its
own leaders, who increasingly direct their ambitions towards, and draw their resources from, external
public institutions. Parties may provide a necessary platform for political leaders, but this increasingly
serves as a sort of springboard from which to reach other locations. In sum, parties are failing as a result of
a mutual withdrawal, whereby citizens retreat into private life or more specialized and often ad hoc forms
of representation, while party leaderships retreat into institutions, drawing their terms of reference ever
more readily from their roles as governors or public-office holders. The traditional world of party
democracy—as a zone of engagement in which citizens interacted with their political leaders—is being
evacuated.” Mair, pp. 32-33.
7
Scott Gill: “A Neo-Gramscian Approach to European Integration”, A Ruined Fortress? Neoliberal
Hegemony and Transformation in Europe, ed., Alan W. Cafruny and Magnus Ryner (Lanham: Rowman
and Littlefield, 2003), p. 66; Gilles Scott-Smith: “Cultural Policy and Citizenship in the European Union:
An Answer to the Legitimation Problem?”, A Ruined Fortress? Neoliberal Hegemony and Transformation
in Europe, ed., Alan W. Cafruny and Magnus Ryner (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), pp. 265-
266.
8
Peter Mair notes that theories favoring technocratic decision-making are underwritten by a strong
antipathy toward democratic party politics and mass constituencies: “For Philip Pettit, for example, who
discusses the issue of democratic renewal in the context of deliberation and depoliticization, the issue
comes on the agenda because ‘democracy is too important to be left to politicians, or even to the people
voting in referendums.’ For Fareed Zakaria, in his more popular account, renewal is necessary because
‘what we need in politics is not more democracy but less.’” Mair, p. 29. Peter Mair goes on to say: “This
can be seen in the emphasis on stake-holder involvement rather than electoral participation that is found in
both ‘associative democracy’ and ‘participatory governance’, and in the emphasis on the sort of exclusive
debate that is to be found in ‘deliberative’ and ‘reflective’ democracy. In neither case is there real scope
afforded to conventional modalities of mass democracy. The new stress on ‘output-oriented legitimacy’ in
discussions of the European Union polity, and the related idea that democracy in the EU requires ‘solutions
that are “beyond the state” and, perhaps, also beyond the conventions of Western-style representative
liberal democracy’, are equally geared away from mass involvement…In this view it is not elections as
such that make for democracy, but rather the courts, in combination with other modes of non-electoral
participation. With respect to the developing countries, as much of the ‘good governance’ literature implies,
the formula is very clear: ngos + judges = democracy. That is, while an emphasis on ‘civil society’ is
acceptable, and while a reliance on legal procedures is essential, elections as such need not be.” Mair, pp.
28-30.
9
Michel Foucault: “Governmentality” The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed., Graham
Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991), p. 104. Foucault
argues that the territorial sovereignty of administrative states displayed a fundamental circularity between
the ends of sovereignty and the exercise of sovereignty: The sovereign’s power is based on his pursuit of
the common good and the common good is defined as obedience to the laws by subjects, the submission to
the power and sovereignty of the ruler by the ruled. Governmental states signaled a shift from this circular
logic of sovereignty to the notion of “government” and its “disposition of things” in which the state acts in
a way that ensures the multiple aims of its subjects are achieved. Foucault, pp. 94-95.
26

10
In contemporary Europe, this economization of political subjecthood is evidenced by the fact that the
definition of European citizenship only in terms of those rights that affect economic integration, such as
freedom of movement and residence. “The extension of these rights in the interests of solidarity and
cohesion, for instance in the direction of redistribution… is not going to happen under current conditions.”
Scott-Smith, p. 277. As Bastiaan van Apeldoorn etal note, the legitimacy problems that the EU and its
member states face is the product of “the contradictions in modern western European society between its
ideals of democracy, equality, and self-expression and the at best only partial realization of these ideals,
against the backdrop of alienating, often oppressive, and stratifying practices of the capitalist market and
bureaucracies.” Bastiaan van Apeldoorn, Henk Overbeek and Magnus Ryner: “Theories of European
Integration: A Critique”, A Ruined Fortress? Neoliberal Hegemony and Transformation in Europe, ed.,
Alan W. Cafruny and Magnus Ryner (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), p. 34.
11
Foucault, pp. 96, 100-101.
12
Giorgo Agamben: Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press,
1995), pp. 126-133. Giorgio Agamben identifies the “politicization of bare life” as the fundamental
characteristic of political modernity. He argues that the disciplining of bodies achieved through biopower
has facilitated the major events of the 20th century: totalitarianism, concentration camps, genocide and the
development of capitalism. Agamben describes the double-bind of rights-based politics in the modern era
in this way: “every decisive political event [was] double-sided: the spaces, the liberties, and the rights won
by individuals in their conflicts with central powers always simultaneously prepared a tacit but increasing
inscription of individuals’ lives within the state order, thus offering a new and more dreadful foundation for
the very sovereign power from which they wanted to liberate themselves.” Agamben, pp. 4, 121.
13
Agamben’s arguments are echoed by Étienne Balibar who argues that the linkage of human rights –
political, social, security – to national belonging has been, the primary source of contemporary European
problems: “This is why the democratic composition of people in the form of the nation led inevitably to
systems of exclusion”, between majority and minority, between nations, and between ‘native’ and
‘foreigner’. These exclusions are based on the internalization of borders and the adoption of cultural
nationalism, which was made possible by the historical conflation of two notions: ethnos, an imagined
community enabled by the construction of fictive ethnicity through the “nationalization of societies and
people and thus of cultures, languages, genealogies”, and demos, “‘people as the collective subject of
representation, decision making, and rights.” Étienne Balibar: We, the People of Europe?: Reflections on
Transnational Citizenship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 8.

14
Agamben notes: “This exception does not subtract itself from the rule; rather, the rule, suspending itself,
gives rise to the exception and, maintaining itself in relation to the exception, first constitutes itself as a
rule.” Agamben, p. 18.
15
Ibid, p. 20. Agamben claims that the exemplary institution of the modern era is the camp and its
exemplary figure of the refugee, but it can be argued that minorities and immigrants are also exemplary
figures of the modern period because their disenfranchisement from the benefits of full citizenship situates
them in a permanent “state of exception”.
16
Ibid, p. 38. Echoing Hannah Arendt, Agamben notes that “the fates of human rights and the nation-state
are bound together such that the decline and crisis of one necessarily implies the end of the other. The
refugee must be considered for what he is: nothing less than a limit concept that radically calls into
questions the fundamental categories of the nation-state, from the birth-nation to the man-citizen link, and
that thereby makes it possible to clear the way for a long-overdue renewal of categories in the service of a
politics in which bare life is no longer separated and excepted, either in a state order or in the figure of
human rights” Agamben, p. 134.
17
Lydia Morris: Managing Migration: Civic Stratification and Migrants’ Rights (London: Routledge,
2002).
27

18
Charles W. Mills.: The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). Mills argues that
underlying the egalitarian social contract of Enlightenment political philosophy was a Racial Contract that
restricted the applicability of these egalitarian principles to whites only, thus resolving the contradictions
between western political thought and practice. Mills defines the Racial Contract as “the differential
privileging of the whites as a group with respect to the nonwhites as a group, the exploitation of their
bodies, land, and resources, and the denial of equal socioeconomic opportunities to them.” Whereas in the
social contract, there is transformation from a state of nature – ruled by animal-like instincts and self-
interest – to citizenship – governed by restraint, bound by justice and laws – a transformation that
supposedly applies to all men equally - in the Racial Contract, white men who are “(definitionally) already
part of society encounter non-whites who are not, who are savage residents of a state of nature….These the
white men bring partially into society as subordinate citizens or exclude on reservations or deny the
existence of or exterminate.” Mills, pp. 11-13. Mills argues that the Racial Contract resolves the
contradictions of the social contract by setting up a hierarchy of personhood: “The evolution of the modern
version of the contract, characterized by an antipatriarchalist Enlightenment liberalism, with its
proclamations of the equal rights, autonomy, and freedom of all men, thus took place simultaneously with
the massacre, expropriation, and subjection to hereditary slavery of men at least apparently human. This
contradiction needs to be reconciled; it is reconciled through the Racial Contract, which essentially denies
their personhood and restricts the terms of the social contract to whites.” This distinction between the
abilities and hence the rights of whites and nonwhites can be traced through the writing of all four of the
major contractarian philosophers: Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Kant. Mills, pp. 64, 72.
19
Tzvetan Todorov argues that cultural racism is similar in effect to earlier, now debunked and untenable,
forms of racism: “Modern racialism, which is better known as ‘culturalism’ originates in the writings of
Renan, Taine and LeBon; it replaces physical race with linguistic, historical, or psychological race. It
shares certain features with it ancestor, but not all; this has allowed it to abandon the compromised term
‘race’ [while continuing] to play the role formerly assumed by racialism. In our day racist behaviours have
clearly not disappeared, or even changed; but the discourse that legitimises them is no longer the same;
rather than appealing to racialism, it appeals to nationalist or culturalist doctrine”. Quoted in Kenan Malik:
The Meaning of Race: Race, History and Culture in Western Society (New York: NYU Press, 1996), p.
143.
20
Balibar, pp. 44-45.
21
Ibid, pp. 36-37.
22
Judith Butler: “Critically Queer”, The Routledge Reader in Politics and Performance, ed., Lizbeth
Goodman and Jane de Gay (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 169.
23
Butler derives her definition of ambivalence from psychoanalytic theory’s contention that “no subject
emerges without a passionate attachment to those on whom he or she is fundamentally dependent [one’s
parents or guardians]…this situation of primary dependency conditions the political formation and
regulation of subjects and becomes the means of their subjection.” The ambivalence by which we both love
our parents but also need to distance ourselves from them in order to come into our own as adults, also
structures the subject’s relationship to his desire for subordination; a desire that always threatens to dissolve
the relative autonomy achieved by the subject but is also necessary for subject formation. See Judith Butler:
The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 7, 10.
24
Butler states that “what is enacted by the subject is enabled but not finally constrained by the prior
working of power. Agency exceeds the power by which it is enabled…agency is the assumption of a
purpose unintended by power, one that could not have been derived logically or historically, that operates
in a relation of contingency and reversal to the power that makes it possible, to which it nevertheless
belongs. This is, as it were, the ambivalent scene of agency, constrained by no teleological necessity.” Ibid,
p. 15.
25
For Butler, the constraints of existing discursive regimes bear punitively upon the articulation of identity;
performativity, in this sense, is a mechanism by which to achieve subjective agency under the most adverse
28

conditions: “[identity is constructed] under and through constraint, under and through the force of
prohibition and taboo, with the threat of ostracism and even death controlling and compelling the shape of
the production”. Judith Butler: Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York:
Routledge, 1993), p. 95.
26
Homi Bhabha: “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse”, October, vol. 28,
Spring 1984, p. 129.
27
Ranajit Guha’s criticisms of historical distortions of subaltern agency in the Indian context are instructive
here Guha notes that in addition to British colonial historians’ dismissal of peasant protests as inchoate
barbarism, some Indian historians have also distorted the political motivations and objectives of peasant
insurgents by force-fitting them into their preferred frameworks of meaning, into a corpus of politics
external to peasant experience and consciousness. Bourgeois historians have interpreted peasant
insurgencies as proto-expressions of national liberation movements and Marxist historians have seen them
as early signs of proletarian discontent against capitalism. These tendencies have led to misrecognitions of
indigenous motivations and beliefs, often religious in nature, as products of either fanaticism or
manipulation of mass constituencies by their leaders. Guha notes that “shallow radicalism…[fails] to
conceptualize insurgent mentality except in terms of an unadulterated secularism. Unable to grasp
religiosity as the central modality of peasant consciousness in colonial India”. (81) Dominant
historiographies also frequently ignore contradictions brought on by localism, territoriality and sectarianism
that divide and compromise mass movements Ranajit Guha: “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency”, Selected
Subaltern Studies, ed., Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1988), pp. 45-84. Josefina Maria Saldaña-Portillo echoes Guha’s criticisms in her discussion of
revolutionary and bourgeois developmentalist distortions and misreadings of indigenous agency in Latin
America. Saldaña-Portillo argues that liberal and revolutionary definitions of testimonio. focus on sincerity,
on unmediated access to the real, and thus subsume the authorial ‘I’ into the collective ‘we’, denying
indigenous subjects’ authorial intentionality, desire, artifice, and power to manipulate representation for
political ends. These definitions also deny the particularity of testimonial texts and the concrete materiality
of their authors’ situations. By assuming resistance, they reaffirm Requerimiento binaries of indigenous
abjection vs. subaltern resistance. Saldaña-Portillo instead seeks to transcend these binaries of agency vs.
representation, “I” versus “we”, literariness vs. authenticity. She calls attention to the artifice of the literary
that triggers a readerly response of solidarity; the performative slippages between agent and author,
between I and we, lead to the unraveling of the excess of normative interpellation – allowing for a critique
and reworking of the regimes of subjection that have been imposed on indigenous people by revolutionary
thinkers such as Mario Payeras. Saldaña-Portillo thus locates the testimonio performance in a space of
ambivalence between the margins and the center of hegemony. Maria-Josefina Saldaña-Portillo: The
Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of Development (Durham: Duke University Press,
2003), p. 190.
28
Akhil Gupta and Aradhana Sharma identify the problem aptly: “…culture…has not been accorded a
central or even crucial place in processes of state formation…both (neo) Marxist and (neo) Weberian
accounts tend to see culture as produced by the state, but do not see states as effects of cultural
processes….culture…is often essentialized as a system of elite or expert ideas….Many comparative and
classificatory analyses of states, such as those that rank states as “weak” of “strong”, effectively strip the
unit of analysis – the state – from its cultural moorings…[We need to] pay careful attention to the cultural
constitution of the state – that is, how people perceive the state, how their understandings are shaped by
their particular locations and intimate and embodied encounters with state processes and officials, and how
the state manifests itself in their lives.” Gupta and Sharma, pp. 10-11.
29
Stuart Hall: “Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Post-Structuralist Debates”,
Critical Studies in Mass Communication, vol. 2, no. 2, June 1985, pp. 104-107. Wendy Brown, in her
discussion of Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, situates agency in our ability to
interrupt historical processes that act upon us. Actuality, for Benjamin, is “the interruption of one
trajectory of history and the inauguration of another – an interruption and transformation of the very
29

temporality of politics…the spirit and metaphor not only of revolutionary politics but also of everyday
politics”. Wendy Brown goes on to say: “The hopefulness that a progressive view of history offers is both
delusional and ultimately conservative, precluding a politics devoted to bringing about a ‘state of
emergency’ that can break with this present or ‘blast open the continuum of history’” Wendy Brown:
Politics Out of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 157, 162-163.
30
Iris Marion Young: Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 82, 91.
31
Ibid, pp. 90, 93, 95.
32
Ibid, p. 98.
33
Ibid, pp. 101-102.
34
E. San Juan Jr.: Racism and Cultural Studies: Critiques of Multiculturalist Ideology and the Politics of
Difference (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).
35
Walter D. Mignolo: Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border
Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Dipesh Chakrabarty: Provincializing Europe:
Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
36
Priya Jaikumar: Cinema at the End of Empire: A Politics of Transition in Britain and India (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2006).
37
Colleen Lye: America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893-1945 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2005), p. 2.
38
Marsha Kinder: Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1993), p. 13.
39
Thomas Elsaesser argues that European cinema has been traditionally associated with art, authorship,
exhibition in art houses and state television, reliance on critics as arbiters of taste, state financing, an
artisanal mode of production, place-based, context-dependent, and with national meanings and
protectionism. Whereas Hollywood has been associated with entertainment, stars, exhibition in
multiplexes and cable television, reliance on advertising and marketing, risk capital and studio financing,
an industrial mode of production, a state of mind accessible from everywhere, imperial, hegemonically
imposed through information industries, entertainment and communication. Thomas Elsaesser: European
Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), pp. 491-492.
These distinctions overlook the historical connections between Hollywood and European cinema,
especially in terms of the migration of talented filmmakers to and from Hollywood, the influence of
European aesthetic innovations such as the Italian epic or Italian neo-realism on Hollywood, or the attempts
by some European film studios in certain conjunctures to model themselves on Hollywood’s mode of
production and style and star-based marketing. Jill Forbes and Sarah Street ed.: European Cinema: An
Introduction (New York: Palgrave, 2000), p. 42; Elsaesser, p. 494.
40
Forbes and Street, p. 41.
41
Elsaesser, p. 490.
42
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and Steven Ricci ed.: Hollywood and Europe: Economics, Culture, National
Identity, 1945-95 (London: BFI., 1998), p. 11.
43
D’Lugo notes: “These films do not easily fit into our conventional notions of autonomous national
cinema, nor do they adhere to the folkloric prescriptions of regional, ethnographic film. Rather, they reflect
the larger historical problematic of a number of marginal cinemas, that is, the filmic production of ‘sub-
national’ cultural or ethnic groups whose self-realization as cultures threatens the coherence and possibly
30

even the integrity of political units within which they exist”. Marvin D’Lugo: “Catalan Cinema: Historical
Experience and Cinematic Practice”, The European Cinema Reader, ed., Catherine Fowler (London:
Routledge, 2002), p. 164.
44
D’Lugo argues that regional cinemas should be defined in terms of their “shared cultural-historical
traditions and textual coherencies across a significant body of different filmic texts over time – that in other
contexts would lead us to consider it as a national cinema.” However, we also need to consider subnational
cinemas as always in ‘conversation’ with national cinemas and discourses. D’Lugo notes how the new
Catalan cinema of the 1960s did not promote Catalan autonomy and regionalism as much as the importance
of Catalan culture and modernity to the revitalization of the Spanish nation (and nationhood) as a whole.
D’Lugo, pp. 165, 167.
31
Chapter 1. Art Cinema and the Failure of Universalism:
Multiculturalism as Trauma in Michael Haneke’s French-language Films

Michael Haneke’s French-language films, Code Unknown (2000), Time of the
Wolf (2003), and Caché (2005) are all concerned with the increased immigration into and
multiculturalism
1
of contemporary western European societies, and France in particular.
And yet, these films seem qualitatively different from other contemporary European films
about immigration and multiculturalism, such as Stephen Frears’ Dirty Pretty Things
(2002) or Michael Winterbottom’s In This World (2002). Haneke himself provides a clue
as to the nature of this difference when he says: “The interest of the spectator comes from
the precision of what’s shown. [My characters live] in a predominantly bourgeois milieu–
this is the milieu I know best. And I speak of what I know.”
2
What Haneke is admitting to
here is that his work manifests a consistent and pervasive class (and racial) particularism.
His French-language films revolve around the lives of white, affluent western Europeans
affected by the multiculturalism of their society more so than on the lives of immigrants
or minorities. This is why this chapter will be focus on the impact of multicultural
encounters on Haneke’s bourgeois protagonists rather than on the representation of
immigrants and minorities per se.
While always representing bourgeois existence as fragile and under assault,
Haneke’s cinema has increasingly externalized the catalysts for the breakdown of
bourgeois social order. In Haneke’s German-language films, the danger posed to
bourgeois protagonists emerges claustrophobically from within their own familial and
class ranks, with no external force able to either threaten them or rescue them from self-
32
destruction. In his French-language films, by contrast, Haneke situates the threat to
bourgeois existence in the real or imagined agency of immigrant or minority characters.
The traumatic multicultural encounters in the French-language films can therefore be
seen as more precise formulations of the dynamics of bourgeois crisis and anxiety that
have concerned Haneke throughout his career. While Haneke’s earlier films display a
pervasive and deliberately claustrophobic monoculturalism, there is one sequence of
Benny’s Video (1992) which seems to foreshadow the traumatic multiculturalism of the
French-language films.
Benny’s Video is about a boy from a white, middle-class family who is obsessed
with violent video imagery and commits a heinous murder. Towards the end of the film,
Benny travels with his mother to Egypt while his father covers up the murder Benny has
committed back in Austria. The trip seems to be designed to absolve Benny of any guilt
or shame he might feel about his heinous act, and to strengthen the strained bonds of trust
between the family members. The first few scenes of the sequence establish the insularity
of Benny and his mother from the landscape and people of Egypt. In scenes reminiscent
of another Austrian film, Peter Kubelka’s Unsere Afrikareise (1966), Haneke juxtaposes
images in which Europeans are isolated from the landscape and the people of Africa with
sounds that are unable to encompass the complexity of the assembled scene. While on a
tour bus, Benny is framed off from the landscape he gazes at disinterestedly, and in a
later scene, Benny’s mother asks him to get out of the way as she films a row of
buildings, signaling how in her mind Benny does not belong in the same shot with
something indicative of the local culture. Her 360˚ pan shows the ambition of her gaze,
33
her desire to capture everything, to provide a comprehensive record of the local
landscape. The droning voice of the tour guide on the bus functions similarly to the
cackling and crude exclamations of the safari participants in Unsere Afrikareise,
demonstrating the insufficiency of European discourse to capture the local realities of
Africa.
In the final scenes of the Egypt sequence, sound is used contrapuntally to signal
the dialectic tension between bourgeois subjectivity and those forces which mark the
limits of that subjectivity. While resting in his hotel room, Benny flips through the
television channels, finally settling on a station playing western liturgical/choral music
(we assume that Benny chooses this because it is the least unfamiliar of sound options
available to him). With a cut, we are taken to a bustling public marketplace, but the
liturgical music continues, shifting from diegetic to non-diegetic sound, an expression,
perhaps, of Benny's desire to extend the insularity and protectedness of the hotel room to
the much more unstable and threatening space of the public marketplace. The liturgical
music functions to contain the unruly sounds of the market, to colonize the foreign space
with European culture. Here, as in the earlier scenes, the local population is kept in the
background, captured primarily in long or full shots, marking the success of the
containment that the sound bridge initiated. Two scenes later, we are back in the hotel
room and this time Benny has chosen an Arabic-language pop song to listen to on TV,
the first moment when the local culture threatens to overwhelm the aural or visual
economy of the film. At the end of this scene, Benny’s usually stoic and impassive
mother breaks down uncontrollably. This is an enigmatic moment, and we can certainly
34
interpret her breakdown as a delayed reaction to the heinousness of Benny’s crime and to
her complicity in its cover-up. But her breakdown may also be seen as a response to the
failed demarcation of European space from non-European space, reminiscent of the final
scene of Ousmane Sembene’s Black Girl (1966), and a harbinger of the traumatic
multicultural encounters that will come to dominate Haneke’s later work.
This chapter will concern itself with the representation of such encounters in three
of Haneke’s French-language films: Code Unknown, Time of the Wolf, and Caché. Code
Unknown traces the consequences of a public altercation on the lives of several characters
– Amadou, a young Frenchman of African descent, Maria, a homeless Romanian woman
with no residency papers, and Anne, a white, middle-class actress. Time of the Wolf
follows the Laurents (Georges and Anne, and their children Ben and Eva), a white,
middle-class family that loses its patriarch and becomes destitute in a post-apocalyptic
setting. Caché shows what happens when a set of enigmatic videotapes arrive at the
doorstep of a white, middle-class family, also called the Laurents (Georges and Anne,
and their son Pierrot). I will discuss the extent to which the representation of
multicultural encounters in these films both reflect and challenge the assumptions of
contemporary French anti-immigrant discourse. The destabilization of bourgeois order
within the diegesis of these films is mirrored by Haneke’s deliberately ambiguous
narrational style, which mires spectators in levels of uncertainty similar to those
experienced by his bourgeois characters. I will consider how the unease felt by Haneke’s
bourgeois characters and spectators relates to the much more profound insecurity
experienced by immigrants, undocumented workers and minorities in contemporary
35
France. The ambiguity of Haneke’s cinema can be explained as a reflection of real-world
uncertainties or as a result of authorial expressivity, and in the final part of the chapter I
will discuss the stakes of these possible explanations for the immigrant and minority
issues of interest to us here.

Modes of Address: Insecurity and Ambiguity
Whereas in the Egypt sequence of Benny’s Video, bourgeois crisis is triggered by
cultural difference in the most diffuse and sublimated way, the representation of
multicultural encounters in Haneke’s French-language films explicitly references
contemporary anti-immigrant discourses and debates. In the period between 1945 and
1970, French postwar reconstruction and high rates of economic growth kept the demand
for immigrant labor high. Immigrants were encouraged to come to France through a
series of immigration initiatives coordinated by the ONI, the National Immigration
Office, or entered the country on tourist visas and gained legal residency by obtaining
work upon arrival. In both cases, they were not allowed to obtain French citizenship,
without which they were not able to combat the discrimination they faced in matters of
housing, employment, health care and education. Despite their importance to the French
economy, immigrants during this period were without political representation or legal
recognition, neglected by the state and largely invisible to the rest of French society.
3

It was amidst the economic downturn of the 1970s that immigrants gained
notoriety and became the focus of French political discourse. During this time, a series of
laws was passed aimed at establishing centralized and more restrictive immigration
36
protocols, expedited repatriations and assimilation of immigrants into the dominant
culture.
4
By the 1990s, it had become clear that, across party lines, immigration controls
and assimilationism were the twin pillars of immigration policy in France. Because these
increasingly draconian immigration controls had to be legitimated before the public, the
representation of immigrants and their situation suddenly became an important tool for
both the government and the opponents of its policies—and thus extremely political.
Opponents of immigration described it as an ‘invasion’, a notion expressed in a 1991
article written by ex-President Valery Giscard d’Estaing in which he stated: “the type of
problem with which we are now faced has moved from one of immigration to one of
invasion.”
5
This type of rhetoric has led the French public, when asked in polls, to
routinely overestimate the number of immigrants in the country, to falsely assume that
their number continues to increase, and to want fewer of them to remain in France.
6

In Haneke’s cinema, the bourgeois household is susceptible to invasion and under
the constant threat of dissolution, but in the German-language films, it either destroys
itself or is assailed by members of its own class. The Seventh Continent (1989) is about a
white, middle-class family whose members decide to destroy all of their possessions and
commit collective suicide; Funny Games (1997) is about a white, middle-class family
whose members are terrorized in their summer home by two sadistic bourgeois youths;
71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994) is about a white, middle-class couple
who adopt a Romanian boy, introducing cultural difference into the bourgeois home for
the first time, but in an unthreatening way and on the family’s own terms. In Haneke’s
French-language cinema, by contrast, home invasions are both traumatic for bourgeois
37
characters and triggered by social and cultural difference. We presume that the working-
class family which breaks into the Laurents’ country home in Time of the Wolf does so
because the apocalyptic conditions that prevail in the diegesis have undermined the
historical compromises maintaining class-based social hierarchies. The sanctity of the
bourgeois home is violated in Caché as well, as a set of videotapes sent to the Laurents
instills panic and precipitates the unearthing of colonial-era injustices.
French political discourse has not only defined immigration as an invasion, but
also as a threat to national cohesion, identity and security, as Jane Freedman describes:
Immigration has become an issue that is now perceived very much in terms of
‘security’, both in terms of the need to limit entrance to the country and in terms
of the push to further integrate settled immigrants and ethnic minority
communities…Immigration has been linked with economic difficulties –
unemployment and deficits in the welfare budget, rising crime, the threat of
terrorism. More fundamentally, perhaps, immigration has been seen as a threat to
the very basis of national social and political cohesion, undermining French
national identity and thus calling the nation-state itself into question.
7

As a proportion of the overall population, the number of immigrants has remained
relatively stable since the 1970s. But immigrants of non-European origin now make up a
greater percentage of the total immigrant population, and it is this which has precipitated
the rhetoric of insecurity at the heart of French political discourse. Immigrants of non-
European origin are deemed less assimilable and hence less desirable, and are referred to
as immigrés (immigrants) or clandestins (‘illegals’) instead of the less pejorative
étrangers (foreigners) reserved for immigrants of European origin.
8
The representation of
immigration and multiculturalism through the language of insecurity, unassimilability
and illegality, apart from legitimating the exclusionary policies of the French state, has
led to widespread discrimination against immigrants and minorities in civil society.
9

38
The perception of non-European immigrants as unassimilable is embodied in
Haneke’s French-language cinema by immigrant or minority characters whose seemingly
inscrutable agency confounds their bourgeois counterparts. In Caché, Georges’ zealous
pursuit of the person sending him the videotapes culminates in two meetings with Majid,
the son of an Algerian couple who had worked for Georges’ family. We find out that
when they were both children, Georges’ parents adopted Majid after his own parents
disappeared, but Georges conspired to have Majid expelled from his family. In their first
meeting, Georges vehemently accuses, insults and threatens Majid, but Majid does not
reciprocate, calmly professing his innocence and reminding Georges of their shared past.
Majid is incited by Georges to respond with violence and aggression, but instead greets
him with openness, something that Georges misconstrues as stonewalling. In their second
meeting, Majid’s decision to commit suicide comes as a complete shock to Georges, who,
we now realize, has severely underestimated the tragic impact of his childhood actions on
Majid’s life. In Time of the Wolf, Eva befriends an unnamed boy who confounds her by
refusing to follow the laws of the encampment she is staying in. The boy prefers to live a
feral existence on its outskirts, wary of all strangers and fiercely independent. In a pivotal
moment in his relationship with Eva, under threat of being captured, he decides to kill the
goat that he has taken from the camp. To Eva, the boy seems inexplicably anti-social and
selfishly focused on his own survival. Eva seems incapable of comprehending or even
imagining the lifelong persecution and marginalization that have likely shaped this boy’s
behavior. These examples illustrate how, by evacuating social experience from its
historical determinants, bourgeois protagonists in Haneke’s cinema misperceive
39
immigrant and minority characters as unassimilable, as unredeemably anti-social and
self-destructive.
The perception of non-European immigrants as unassimilable is also, according to
Max Silverman, the result of the “confrontation between [colonial] structures
(institutions/ideologies) and the post-colonial migration of people and products”.
10
The
legacies of colonialism is particularly important in understanding the treatment of people
of Algerian descent living in France.
11
During the colonial period, Algerians were legally
designated as second-class citizens in their own country and ghettoized so as to minimize
their contact with the French colonizers. Algeria was governed by a spatial, economic,
political and psychological Manicheanism, famously analyzed by Frantz Fanon in The
Wretched of the Earth.
12
In the postcolonial period, the continued migration of people
from the ex-colonies, especially Algeria, their reunification with their families, and their
heightened economic and political power have undermined colonial-era hierarchies and
contributed to the anxiety felt by the French public. Feelings of insecurity are therefore
not only the result of a carefully orchestrated campaign by the dominant classes to
legitimate exclusionary state policies but also a response to the loss of colonial privileges.
The postcolonial breakdown of colonial-era social hierarchies is evident in
Haneke’s cinema when bourgeois characters are forced to occupy spaces shared by
people of different ethnic and class backgrounds. In Code Unknown, the anonymity and
neutrality of the public sphere is challenged when Anne is verbally abused by a young
Arab man in a subway car. In an attempt to escape from him, she moves to another part
of the car but the man follows her and continues to taunt her. With the subway train in
40
motion, Anne is forced to sit uncomfortably next to her antagonist. The futility of her
attempt to escape is accentuated by the fact that her new location is in the foreground of
the profilmic space, whereas her initial location was in the background. In other words,
her attempt to escape ironically now forces spectators to witness her abuse from up close,
and to suffer its indignities much more intensely. In Time of the Wolf, there is an even
more radical breakdown of spatial demarcation, since it is not only the public sphere that
becomes a site of multicultural contestation and forced co-habitation, but the private
sphere as well. Georges’ death and the loss of their cabin forces the surviving members of
the Laurent family into destitution, wherefrom they find their way to an encampment at
an abandoned train station. Here they must live in close quarters alongside a diverse
group of people, without any privacy or social separation from them.
The unease over immigration is also a function of the increasing prominence in
contemporary French society of the children and grandchildren of immigrants, who
destabilize older, primarily economic and individualist notions of immigrant identity. In
the period before 1970, immigrants were seen in relation to their labor function, defined
by their status as temporary workers, without families or the rights of citizenship and
under the permanent threat of deportation in the case of loss of employment. Perceived in
this way, immigrants did not seem to pose a threat to the dominant institutions, classes
and cultures of French society. However, many were eventually married or reunited with
their families, and their children became citizens under the right of jus soli, which
automatically grants citizenship to anyone born on French soil. Members of this new
generation typically define themselves in terms of permanent, social, and familial
41
categories rather than temporary, employment-based and individual categories. They
therefore stake a more formidable claim on the rights and privileges associated with
French citizenship than previous generations, whose members were typically isolated,
atomized and without legal recourse. The 1993 repeal of the automatic granting of
citizenship to children of immigrants and the recent emphasis of anti-immigrant discourse
on residential spaces, such as the ghetto and the bidonville (shanty town or slum), rather
than the workplace, signal these shifts in definition and the threat they are seen to pose to
the interests of France’s dominant classes.
13

Immigrant and minority characters are typically perceived by Haneke’s bourgeois
protagonists as isolated figures, disconnected from their familial and communal milieu.
During multicultural encounters, there emerge unforeseen allegiances between minority
and immigrant characters that challenge these anachronistic conceptions of them. In the
opening scene of Code Unknown, Jean (the brother of Anne’s partner) throws a paper bag
at Maria, who is crouched on a street corner. Jean is immediately confronted by Amadou
who insists that Jean apologize to Maria. Jean refuses and an altercation ensues. Jean’s
willingness to brazenly disrespect Maria in public shows that he does not expect to be
confronted about it. By not showing us Amadou until the very moment that he confronts
Jean, Haneke ensures that spectators are as surprised as Jean. Amadou’s intervention in
this scene signals his allegiance with Maria, bridging racial, gender, national and
citizenship status distinctions. This expression of communal solidarity contradicts
anachronistic conceptions of immigrants and minorities as isolated and atomized. In
Caché, Majid’s son appears in three scenes, and in each instance his appearance comes as
42
a surprise to bourgeois characters and spectators alike. When Pierrot goes missing,
Georges accompanies the police to Majid’s apartment, suspecting that Majid has
kidnapped Pierrot. But Majid is not there and instead a young man opens the door – we
later find out he is Majid’s son. The policemen turn to Georges and ask: “Is this him?”
Georges does not answer, left dumbfounded by this unexpected appearance, which is
evidence of a familial allegiance that undermines Georges’ atomized conception of
Majid. Later, Majid’s son appears unexpectedly at Georges’ office and outside of
Pierrot’s school. In all these appearances, as in the opening of Code Unknown, Haneke
heightens the element of surprise by showing us the location and the bourgeois
protagonist first. In each case, Majid’s son appears in a location we are already familiar
with from previous scenes. In fact, the mise-en-scene of two of these scenes – depicting
the hallway leading up to Majid’s apartment and the steps in front of Pierrot’s school - is
identical to that of their previous iterations. Since it is disconcerting to repeat exactly the
same operation and obtain different results, these scenes animate the disjuncture between
postwar and contemporary definitions of immigrants and minorities, and the anxiety this
shift in definition induces in members of France’s dominant classes.
What all the above examples demonstrate is that multicultural encounters are
experienced by Haneke’s bourgeois characters as sites of a traumatic loss of privilege and
agency. This echoes the representation of immigration in contemporary France through
the modality of loss – of national cohesion, identity, security, and colonial-era privileges.
We have already discussed how the bourgeoisie’s seemingly inalienable rights to private
property, privacy and social dominance are challenged during multicultural encounters.
43
Another bourgeois privilege is the mastery of language, which Haneke’s protagonists
often display when speaking amongst themselves; evident, for example, in the recounting
of the disingenuous anecdote about the old lady and her dog told during the dinner party
scene in Caché. During multicultural encounters, however, these characters tend to lose
their ability to deceive, persuade, charm or intimidate others verbally. In the subway
scene of Code Unknown, Anne is rendered mute by the taunting she has to endure. In
Caché, Georges’ attempt to intimidate a young bicyclist of African descent backfires
when the bicyclist responds equally aggressively and refuses to back down. When
Georges is approached by Majid’s son outside his office, he responds dismissively, but
this too backfires as Majid’s son makes a scene and embarrasses him in front of his co-
workers. Most dramatically, in Time of the Wolf, Georges is killed as he attempts to
negotiate with the man who has broken into his cabin. Both the rational dialogue assumed
in Habermasian communications theory and the more venal applications of rhetorical
mastery common among the bourgeoisie in Haneke’s cinema are short-circuited during
these multicultural encounters.
Let us take a closer look at the opening scene of Time of the Wolf, which
highlights many of the traumatic forms of loss that we have discussed so far. We see the
Laurents drive up to a cabin in the countryside. Upon entering the cabin, they are
confronted by a man with a shotgun, his wife and child by his side.
14
After a brief
exchange, the man with the shotgun shoots Georges dead and orders Anne to take her
children and leave the cabin immediately. The invasion of the Laurents’ country home is
framed by Georges as a violation of his rights, when he tells the man with the gun: “What
44
did you think—that this was not private property?” In the moments leading up to his
death, Georges, remaining calm and level-headed, attempts to reason with the armed
man, believing to the last that he is in control and that he can persuade him to accept a
compromise. His final words are: “I propose this: we bring in our things, we eat—”.
15

Devastatingly, it is at this exact moment that the man decides to kill him. The framing of
the home invasion as a profound violation is partly a function of its position at the
beginning of the narrative, when it is least expected. Camera placement enhances the
unpredictability and inscrutability of the shooter’s actions. The first interior shot shows
the Laurent family entering the cabin in darkness. Positioned in the middle of the cabin,
the camera does not show us the shooter or his family, so we have no forewarning of
what is about to happen. We are as surprised as the Laurents when the shooter first
speaks and begins to make his demands on them. During the verbal exchange before
Georges is killed, the camera is placed in-between the two families, facing one or the
other so that we hardly ever see the two families in the same shot. The in-between camera
placement leaves spectators in a precarious position, showing us only half of the action
and situating us dangerously near the line of fire.
This scene shows us that Haneke imparts on spectators similar levels of anxiety
and uncertainty as those experienced by his films’ bourgeois protagonists. Haneke’s
narrational and compositional style follows in the tradition of ambiguity long associated
with art cinema. For Robert Self, the ambiguity of art cinema foregrounds that which is
repressed in Hollywood films: the excesses, instability, insecurity and ambivalence of
socio-economic relationships and exchanges.
16
The absence of clearly defined characters
45
and situations creates aporias for art cinema spectators to contemplate, if not quite
resolve:
the art film text is consciously indeterminate, refusing to give its materials secure
meaning or to establish the viewer in the position of interpreter. The texts of the
art cinema exist quite explicitly as puzzles to be solved by the viewer, but puzzles
also constructed to prevent easy solution.
17

Some more examples from Haneke’s cinema will help us understand how narrational and
compositional ambiguity leads to anxiety for spectators. Following Georges’ murder in
Time of the Wolf, Anne scrambles to find some food and shelter for her family, a mission
made more difficult by the apocalyptic conditions that prevail in the countryside. The
precariousness of the Laurents’ situation is symbolized in a later scene when Ben’s pet
bird escapes from his clutches; as it flies wantonly around the shed they are staying in, its
provisional freedom after a life of captivity parallels the Laurents’ plight, finding
themselves free from the norms and expectations of their past life but also devoid of its
privileges. Ben’s frantic attempts to recapture the bird constitute a displaced expression
of the family’s anxiety, his nose bleed a symptom of their collective trauma. As Anne
searches for food and later for Ben, who disappears, the screen is cloaked in the darkness
of night, as it is later with morning fog. In the darkness, we are like Anne, attempting to
piece together what is happening on the basis of limited information. The anxiety that we
feel due to our limited vision is heightened by the traumatic sounds that frequently
accompany these moments of darkness, such as during a later scene when we hear the
anguished screams of a woman as she buries her child in the forest at night. Haneke
modulates the level of light in accordance with the level of familiarity felt by his
bourgeois characters during their social encounters. In the first well-lit interior scene of
46
Time of the Wolf, Anne meets Bea (A meets B), a similarly-aged, urbane Parisian woman,
with whom she shares a cigarette and casual conversation.
The ambiguity of Caché stems from a series of narrative enigmas that never get
resolved: How is it possible that Georges walks by the person recording video footage of
his apartment without seeing him or her? Given that both Majid and Majid’s son deny
their involvement in the videotape harassment of Georges, how did anyone manage to get
into Majid’s apartment to record the footage of Majid and Georges’ discussion? If not
Majid or his son, who is the culprit? What was the purpose of sending Georges the
footage? Is Anne having an affair with her boss, Pierre? What do Pierrot and Majid’s son
discuss at the film’s conclusion? By thwarting our investment in narrative coherence,
Haneke situates us in the same predicament as his bourgeois protagonists, struggling to
comprehend an increasingly inscrutable and unpredictable social world.
Haneke also cautions us against making assumptions about what we see and hear,
as narrative events are frequently revisited from a different perspective, destabilizing our
earlier interpretations of them. In Time of the Wolf, Georges’ murderer shows up with his
wife to the encampment where Anne, Eva and Ben are staying. After Anne accuses him
of Georges’ murder, he vociferously denies the charge. His denial sounds so heartfelt that
it perhaps makes us question, even if for a moment, the murder we had earlier witnessed.
If doubts do arise, they are facilitated by the lack of establishing shots in the murder
sequence (other than a brief over-the-shoulder shot early on), which prevents us from
recalling a moment in which both families occupied the same space. In Caché, each
iteration of the video surveillance footage exhibits different ontological properties: video
47
versus film, playback versus ‘live’, footage taken by the harasser versus images of the
diegetic world taken by Haneke. Each new instance of the footage causes us to reconsider
our earlier interpretations, adding to the unsolvable mystery at the heart of the narrative.
What is most destabilizing about each new appearance of the footage is that its
ontological status is not immediately clear to us, and must be reconstructed on the basis
of new information, such as the sound of Georges and Anne’s voices or the signs of
rewinding or fast-forwarding.
There are two scenes in Code Unknown, in which Anne (Juliette Binoche) is
shown pursuing her profession as an actress, which exemplify the ambiguity of Haneke’s
narrational and compositional style. In the first scene, Anne is in a room and we hear the
voice of a man tell her that she has fallen into a trap. The man goes on to tell Anne that
she is a prisoner and that she has been captured because he wanted to see someone die
before his eyes. Even though the opening moments of the scene involve what on
hindsight seem to be screen directions toward an actress, the intensity of Binoche’s
performance (she cries profusely at the end of the scene) and the lack of other markers
that would distinguish the profilmic space as a film production set, make it difficult for us
to be sure what we are watching. In a later scene, we see Anne shoot the scene of being
trapped in a room again, only this time Haneke shows us the cameraman and the set and
we are made to understand that what we had seen before was a rehearsal for this film. A
similar effect is created in a second acting scene in which we see Anne with a man in a
pool. They are playfully interacting underwater when their attention is directed towards
the ledge. We discover that a small boy, their son, is dangling perilously on the ledge and
48
in danger of falling off. Anne and the man rush to the boy and save him from danger. We
soon realize, however, as we see Anne and the man dubbing their dialogue for the scene
in a sound studio, that what we have just witnessed was another one of Anne’s acting
scenes.
By luring us into initially interpreting these acting scenes as diegetic ‘reality’,
Haneke cautions us against mistaking interpretation for objective truth or social
construction for essence. He reveals the role of desire, subjectivity and projection in the
production of knowledge, promoting an epistemological relativism that reminds us of the
opacity of social experience.
18
We realize that we are neither capable of single-handedly
defining complex social realities nor have the right to do so. This challenges the
universalism of European political discourse, which takes two primary contemporary
forms. First, the purported universal validity of ‘European values’ is invoked to
legitimate European expansion. Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande’s definition of European
cosmopolitanism calls for “the constant enlargements of the [European Union] and the
export of its norms and rules.”
19
Cosmopolitan Europe is seen as a transatlantic
partnership with the United States, and associated with the self-legitimating ideologies of
this alliance: “what made the EU possible was precisely the overlapping, and in part the
amalgamation, of America with Europe, hence the synthesis of America and Europe
which stands for freedom, human rights and democracy.”
20
Second, universal human
rights rhetoric is invoked in order to legitimate Western acts of aggression. Moral
justifications for war can be traced back to the earliest periods of imperialism and
colonialism.
21
In the contemporary period, the exemplary moment of humanitarian
49
justification for war was the NATO bombing of Serbia during the Kosovo conflict. This
intervention, according to Danilo Zolo, put an end to the principle of ‘equal sovereignty’
which dates back to the Westphalia peace treaties and ensures that each nation’s borders
are protected under international law from foreign invasion:
In the war for Kosovo, some great powers took upon themselves the prerogative
of using force of arms to uphold values they claim are universal; this brought to a
head the conflict between the particular ‘interests’ and ‘values’ of each state, on
the one hand, and the (pretended) universality of the doctrine of human rights and
its ethical premises, on the other.
22

By providing us with limited narration, revisiting scenes so as to challenge our initial
assumptions and leaving key plot questions unresolved, Haneke reveals the limits of
European universalist paradigms in explaining contemporary multicultural realities.
In the acting scenes of Code Unknown we also find eerie parallels to the
increasing insecurity of immigrants and minorities in French society. In the first acting
scene, Anne is ensnared in a trap under false pretenses. As soon as she enters the room
her right to life, privacy, and freedom are taken away from her. In this way, the scene
mirrors the false postwar promises of the French state, which encouraged immigration in
order to fuel reconstruction and growth but then denied immigrants the rights of
citizenship. In the second acting scene, the precariousness of immigrants’ rights, which
have been alternately granted and taken away through a schizophrenic series of
legislative acts since the 1970s, is symbolized by the child’s near-fall from the balcony.
In another scene we see Anne give an impassioned audition which is followed by a
protracted silence from her adjudicators. While we see the casting director and his staff
convene in deliberation after Anne’s performance, she cannot see them in the dark,
50
evoking the political disenfranchisement of French immigrants and minorities, who are
hyper-visible to the state, but the state as a tool for their empowerment remains
inscrutable and out of reach.
Why do these parallels to the immigrant experience befall Anne? While the
spectatorial impact of these scenes is great, their emotional effect on Anne is revealed to
be minimal as we see her comfortable and laughing in the second iteration of the
imprisonment scene and in the sound studio portion of the pool scene. The diegetic
significance of these scenes, therefore, pales in comparison to the impact of deportation
on Maria or of arrest on Amadou after his altercation with Jean. We are initially lured
into overvaluing our own emotional response, influenced by what we perceive to be
Anne’s powerlessness and distress. But when her distress is revealed to be a sign of her
acting prowess, and is immediately followed by laughter and levity, the difference
between the bourgeoisie’s luxury to rehearse temporary depravation through art and the
constant struggles of those on the margins of society is revealed. The relief felt after
realizing that what we have witnessed are harmless depictions of Anne acting reminds us
of our (and her) privilege at being able to escape these realities once the fiction is over.
This point of contrast is common in Haneke’s cinema, differentiating between the real or
perceived insecurity of bourgeois characters and the more profoundly circumscribed lives
of immigrant or minority characters.
Haneke’s narratives are often punctuated by momentary exposures to societal
suffering on a scale that challenges the solipsism of bourgeois protagonists and spectators
alike. In Caché, Georges and Anne’s frantic search for Pierrot is set against the
51
background of a television news story about coalition forces in Iraq and the Abu Ghraib
prison scandal. In Time of the Wolf, after Georges’ death, Anne and the children visit her
neighbors to ask for their help. After receiving little assistance, they come across an
apocalyptic tableau consisting of a raging bonfire in whose center can be discerned the
carcasses of several horses, suggesting the magnitude of depravation and desperation that
surrounds them. Later, the Laurents’ situation is put in perspective by a Polish couple
repeatedly accused of crimes and threatened with expulsion from the camp, whose young
child dies despite its mother’s public pleas for assistance. Life in the encampment is
contextualized by the unnamed boy living on its outskirts, whose own social location is
even more marginal and precarious. The contrast drawn between the insecurities of
bourgeois existence and the deeper depravations of immigrant or minority experience
allows Haneke to metonymically reconstruct what Lydia Morris has described as the
stratification of rights in contemporary European societies. (see Introduction) It is this
social hierarchy that Haneke allows us to reflect on in those moments when the personal
stories of his bourgeois protagonists are framed against a background of more profound
social devastation and depravation.
In Caché, Haneke induces spectators to become invested in the whodunit
machinations of the narrative, only to systematically unravel this pretense by revealing its
basis in the troubled subjectivity of the film’s protagonist, Georges. This is achieved
through the interweaving of Georges’ childhood memories of Majid into the playback of
the videotape footage sent to Georges. These memory-images, along with the partial
confessions coaxed out of him by his wife, Anne, help us to reconstruct Georges’
52
culpability in the childhood expulsion of Majid from his family. Majid’s story is also
situated in a broader historical context when we discover that his parents were possibly
killed in the infamous slaughter of Algerian immigrants by Paris police on October 17,
1961. All this makes us question the righteousness of Georges’ quest to find his harasser,
culminating in the two meetings between Georges and Majid, when we come to realize
that Georges’ anxiety over his harassment is incommensurate with the unbearable
torment of Majid’s lifelong suffering. Majid does not come across as a harasser but as a
victim, casting doubt on Georges’ memories of Majid as a menacing child and on his
current accusations against him. As in Code Unknown, we are lured into initially over-
valuing the apparent distress of the film’s bourgeois protagonist, only to later realize that
it is a function of bourgeois privilege (the catharsis of acting, the legacies of colonialism).
By miring us in the flawed and incomplete images of the world produced by the
distorted lens of bourgeois consciousness, Haneke exposes the racialist and exclusionary
impulses of French society which are papered over by the pretense of universality of
French Republicanism.
23
As Max Silverman summarizes it:
The idea of a common and trans-historical culture defining the French nation has
been a powerful means of racialising the ‘French people’…[there has been a]
continual presence of an ambivalent discourse of culture in the formation of the
modern French nation-state; its effect has been both to preach inclusion according
to universalist criteria and to practise exclusion through racialising the French
community and its Other.
24

The contemporary rhetoric of insecurity, which has argued for the supposed
unassimilability of immigrants of non-European origin, has further racialized French
national identity. Indeed, despite the seeming colorblindness of Republicanism, French
citizenship has always been predicated on the assumption that immigrants and new
53
citizens will assimilate into the dominant culture. In the 1980s, a consensus was reached
across party lines that immigration was a national crisis whose solution required the state
“to integrate or assimilate immigrants into French society through an application of
universalist principles which reject any type of recognition of community or ethnic
difference.”
25
Both the insistence on assimilation and the rejection of some groups as
unassimilable demonstrate what Alec Hargreaves calls the “hard core of contingency
lurking behind the principled exterior of French republicanism”.
26
It is this hard core of
contingency that the class and racial particularism of Haneke’s cinema brings to the fore.
Georges’ zealous pursuit of Majid, which appears to precipitate his suicide, shows how
the illusion of insecurity at the heart of bourgeois subjectivity motivates retributive
policies and actions that create real-life insecurity for immigrants and minorities. As
Freedman asserts:
Paradoxically, whilst the debate over immigration, has portrayed policies and
legislation designed to limit immigration as safeguarding France’s security, it
might be argued that these same laws and policies have created an increasingly
vulnerable and insecure situation for many of those of immigrant origin currently
living in France. And not only has the security of immigrants been affected
negatively by increasingly exclusionary policies, the very construction of the
discursive boundaries between the French ‘us’ and the foreign ‘them’ in current
rhetoric and debates over immigration [has] had an effect in increasing insecurity
for migrant and ethnic minority communities living on French territory.
27

Modes of Authority: The State and Authorship
While ambiguity has long been associated with art cinema, it is argued that art
films recuperate narrative coherence and mitigate against the radical and destabilizing
potential of their ambiguity through recourse to one of two modes of authority:
verisimilitude and authorship. According to David Bordwell, verisimilitude (Bordwell
54
uses the term ‘realism’) explains textual phenomena as representations of the real world
while authorship explains them as expressions of the filmmaker. Art cinema spectators
interpret textual ambiguity as verisimilitude (life is this way), and if that fails to explain
it, they attribute it to authorial expressivity (this is what the filmmaker is trying to say);
whatever aspect of the text seems excessive under the logic of one meaning system is
assumed to belong to the other.
28

Under the logic of verisimilitude, ambiguity is explained as a reflection of real-
life uncertainties and instabilities. The uncertainty and instability of our lives are a
function of many factors, including levels of material scarcity and economic exploitation,
spatial arrangements and social hierarchies, and relations to natural environment and
political authority—the state and its accordant institutions and laws. As we will see, the
state plays a particularly important role in the production of uncertainty and instability in
Haneke’s cinema, but not in the way we might expect. To understand this better we need
to consider the extent to which Haneke’s cinema reflects the symbiotic relationship
between the dominant classes and the state in contemporary France.
29

The close relationship between the state and France’s dominant classes dates back
to pre-revolutionary times, when the loyalty of the noble classes was obtained through the
sale of tax collection, military and fiscal offices. In this way, the state “absorbed ever
greater layers of the population into its orbit: political accumulation was thus a defining
feature of the ancien régime state.”
30
The expansion of the state bureaucracy in the
Napoleonic era did nothing to loosen the bonds between the state and the nobility. New
state positions were dominated by previous office holders, with mobility for the lower
55
orders of civil servants severely limited.
31
When, in the 1850s, the French state was
finally oriented toward capitalist development (its parasitic taxation of the peasantry and
expansionist war campaigns having impeded capitalist development until then), it shifted
its allegiance from the nobility to the bourgeoisie.
32
Other than a brief period of crisis in
the period after World War I, the bourgeoisie has enjoyed unrivalled access to state
offices and privileges ever since.
33
As Ezra Suleiman states,
the gradual democratization of [French] society has scarcely affected the ways in
which the society’s elites are selected, the nature of the elites’ organizations and
their dominant position in the society. The post-aristocratic ruling groups, as we
will see, have managed to preserve themselves and their institutions and to remain
singularly unaffected by the profound transformations that have been making their
mark on the society.
34

The reproduction of bourgeois power has relied on the close ties between elite
schools, the grandes écoles, and state civil service institutions, the grands corps. In the
postwar period, there has been greater coordination between corporate and state elites, as
an increasing number of white-collar workers move from public to private sector
positions, a practice known as pantouflage, creating a direct pathway for elites from the
grandes écoles to the leading economic, political and cultural institutions of French
society.
35
The integration of economic and political interests is also a legacy of
colonialism, whose political regimes were explicitly constructed to protect and promote
the elite economic interests of the metropole. The importance of the grandes écoles is
evidence of a postwar shift in the primary mechanism by which the French state secures
the interests of the dominant classes, according to Pierre Bourdieu, relying more on
ideological than on repressive state apparatuses (in Althusser’s terms):
56
physical coercion and repression [gave way] to the milder dissimulated
constraints of symbolic violence, with the police and prison system, privileged by
adolescent denunciation and its extensions in scholarly discourse, becoming less
important in the maintenance of the social order than the school and authorities of
cultural production.
36

The postwar trend away from repressive mechanisms of rule ended in the 1970s and
1980s, when elite political consensus mandated stricter immigration controls, loss of
rights, repatriation and assimilation for immigrants and undocumented workers (sans-
papiers). This system of exclusions has led to heightened levels of societal violence, a
vicious cycle of police order, institutional, ideological and structural violence, and
reactive violence by the victims of state repression. This violence has been fueled in part
by the repatriation and reintegration of colonial settlers, many of whom instilled in the
postcolonial French state the virulently racist and hierarchical “administrative methods
and habits” acquired during colonial rule.
37

What we see, therefore, is that the close relationship between the dominant classes
and the state has been a constant feature of modern French history, a stability owed in
large part to the close coordination between private and public sectors. Heightened levels
of state violence have ensured that the increasing multiculturalism of French society does
not threaten this close relationship and the privileges it provides. In Haneke’s cinema,
this closeness is repeatedly called into question, with bourgeois characters often unable to
rely on the state apparatus to secure their interests. In Time of the Wolf, the apocalyptic
events that form the film’s distant backdrop have destroyed traditional state structures,
forcing survivors to establish their own institutions of law and order, administration and
welfare. While the ad hoc state that emerges retains many of the characteristics of prior
57
state forms, such as their propensity for the abuse of power, it also proves to be a less
reliable ally to bourgeois interests. When Anne accuses the man who shot Georges of his
murder, she has no proof other than her own eyewitness testimony, and is unable to
persuade the camp’s ad hoc judiciary to punish him in any way. In Caché, Georges has
difficulty convincing the police to take any pre-emptive measures in response to the
threatening videotapes and drawings he has received in the mail. When Anne suggests
that Georges take a police officer along with him when he visits Majid’s apartment,
Georges responds: “They’ll just say: ‘Try knocking on the door and if someone jumps out
and tries to kill you come see us again.” After Pierrot’s disappearance, Georges tells
Anne: “The police aren’t interested except in the kidnapping. For the tapes we need
proof. We would have to follow bureaucratic channels – reports, lawyers. The cops don’t
care if it’s linked.” We might also interpret Georges’ pronouncements of police
indifference as a reticence on his part to get the police involved, perhaps fearing that they
would somehow take Majid’s side. These examples illustrate that the feelings of
insecurity and uncertainty induced by Haneke’s films are partially a result of the removal
of the state as a site of authority at the service of bourgeois characters.
Haneke’s cinema, however, also highlights the persecutory role of the state in the
lives of immigrant and minority populations. In 71 Fragments of a Chronology of
Chance, a homeless Romanian boy lives outside the purview of the state, escaping police
capture and scavenging for food and shelter. But he is eventually captured and adopted
by a white, middle-class couple who think of him as more compliant than their previous
foster child. When his adopted mother is killed in the climactic scene of the film, the boy
58
is left in her car waiting helplessly. His stasis amidst the violent energy of the rest of the
scene signals the precarious suspension of immigrants between state parochialism and
state abandonment, between assimilation and exclusion. In Code Unknown, the state
intervenes in ways that exacerbate the social, economic and political inequalities between
the characters in the film. This is most evident in Amadou’s arrest, Jean’s non-arrest and
Maria’s deportation at the film’s outset. In Caché, during his search for the truth, George
adopts a para-state role, zealously pursuing Majid, pronouncing him guilty of harassment
and ultimately impelling him to a (self-imposed) sentence of capital punishment. The
irony is that Georges’ vigilantism only heightens his feelings of anxiety and guilt.
The representation of the state in Haneke’s cinema, therefore, takes two primary
forms: an abnegation of its historical affiliation as the instrument of the dominant classes
and a confirmation of its historical function as persecutor of immigrant and minority
populations. How can we make sense of this seemingly contradictory representational
schema? By decoupling state oppression of immigrant and minority populations from
elite interests, Haneke is contesting the ethical and practical merits of relying on the state
to preserve colonial-era social inequalities and divisions. State oppression of immigrant
and minority characters does little to prevent the traumatic multicultural confrontations
experienced by Haneke’s bourgeois protagonists. The police is conspicuously absent
when Anne is confronted on the subway in Code Unknown, during Georges’ altercation
with the bicyclist in Caché, or after Georges is killed in Time of the Wolf. In Haneke’s
cinema, the state is incapable of neutralizing the charged encounters, exchanges and
contestations that animate an increasingly multicultural civil society.
38
By disarticulating
59
bourgeois feelings of insecurity from the exclusionary and persecutory policies of the
state, Haneke dismantles one of the principal arguments of contemporary French anti-
immigrant discourse.
39

The other mode of authority that we can use to explain the ambiguities of
Haneke’s cinema is authorship. Under the logic of authorship, ambiguity is explained as a
manifestation of authorial expressivity. What matters here is authorship as a function of
the text, rather than as an expression of a biographical personality.
40
In what recognizable
ways does authorship manifest itself textually? It can be thought of as any instance of
agency that cannot be attributed to the diegesis or any act of direct communication with
spectators. Examples of this include self-conscious acts of narration, excessive extra-
narrative elements, and stylistic deviations from the conventions of realism, all of which
may be interpreted as authorial commentary.
41

The most conspicuous moments of authorial commentary in Haneke’s French-
language films are his codas: the sounds of rhythmic drumming as a deaf boy signs to an
unseen audience in Code Unknown, the shots of the countryside taken from inside a
moving train in Time of the Wolf, and the shot of the front steps to Pierrot’s school in
Caché. These are some of the most discussed and analyzed scenes in Haneke’s entire
oeuvre.
42
All three codas seem to represent the possibility of transcending the conflicts
and depravations that have dominated the films up to that point. In Code Unknown, the
sounds of rhythmic drum play, evoking an earlier scene in which deaf children play the
drums together, and the confidence with which the boy signs to his unseen audience
suggest a possibility for cooperation and understanding despite the obstacles to
60
communication. In Time of the Wolf, the view from inside a moving train suggests that
the Laurents and other camp residents might have managed to leave the camp, the beauty
and lushness of their view giving us hope that it will deliver them from their life of
scarcity. In Caché, the conversation between Pierrot and Majid’s son provides us with
hope that the younger generation will resolve the seemingly insurmountable differences
that have divided their parents. All three codas can be seen as expressions of the
characters’ desires to reach such a point of transcendence, a mark of their utopian longing
more so than a prediction that this state can or will ever be reached.
Haneke’s codas are cautious articulations of an ideal set of values, practices and
outcomes - cooperativeness, dialogue, delivery from want. The universalist ambitions of
these codas seem to go against the rigorous particularism and epistemological relativism
of the rest of the narratives. They run the risk of replicating the pernicious use of
universalist rhetoric in contemporary European political discourse, which we have
already discussed, by transcending their own social location in order to comment on
society as a whole. This will to transcendence is a common characteristic of art cinema.
Fernando Solanas describes ‘Second Cinema’ as the filmmaking practice of the middle
classes, the petit bourgeoisie. The middle classes are defined by their inbetweenness, in
terms of their position in the class structure and their attitudes towards the governing
ideologies and institutions of capitalist society.
43
The inbetweenness of art cinema
filmmakers is expressed in their lack of political commitment and in the language of
objectivity used to critically analyze their work:
[The] appeal to objectivity is a theme within the critical reception of Second
Cinema and is symptomatic of this Cinema’s base in the middle class. The claim
61
to see ‘both sides’ corresponds remarkably closely to their social position, caught
as they are between capital and labour...[For Second Cinema] knowledge about
the world is generated at a higher level by not unequivocally committing to a
position or cause. Lurking behind the critics’ valorisation of ‘balance’,
‘objectivity’, ‘distance’ and other such terms, lies an old distinction between art
and politics…
44

Is there a way to read the universalism of Haneke’s codas as anything other than a
disavowal of the political? It can be argued that the values embodied in these codas are
dialogic and contingent, dependent on an engagement with difference, rather than on its
collapse as is the case with assimilationism. In line with Immanuel Wallerstein’s call that
we “universalize our particulars and particularize our universals simultaneously and in a
kind of constant dialectical exchange”, Haneke’s codas can be seen as one side of a
dialectic, the other side of which is the consistent class particularism of his narratives,
which immerse us claustrophobically in the fears and anxieties of bourgeois characters.
45

By showing us the limits of bourgeois subjectivity and the structural inequalities of
French society, and only situating their transcendence in the indeterminate futuricity of
his codas, Haneke challenges the egalitarian pretensions of French Republicanism
without entirely giving up on universalist principles.
Haneke’s authorship also manifests itself as an antagonist to the interests of his
bourgeois protagonists. The acting scene in Code Unknown in which Anne becomes
‘imprisoned’ is indicative of this antagonism because it conflates three figures: Haneke,
the director of the film Anne is acting in, and the man who is imprisoning the character
played by Anne. The confusion over whether Anne is acting or not during this scene
creates a corresponding confusion over the ‘author’ of the camera’s gaze: is it Haneke,
the director of the film Anne is acting in, or her imprisoner? The director’s instructions
62
come from an unseen off-screen location, similar to the one occupied by her imprisoner,
and also by Haneke as the director of Code Unknown. The director reads out the lines of
the imprisoner character, thus further conflating their two identities. In this way, Haneke
associates the scene’s acts of imprisonment and deception with his authorial mark on the
text.
Haneke’s authorship is antagonistic to the bourgeois protagonist in Caché as well.
If we are to revisit the unresolved questions from the film listed earlier, we will see that
many of them are concerned with the placement of the camera that is recording the
footage sent to Georges by his harasser. How does Georges walk right past the camera
without noticing the camera operator? How is there a camera in Majid’s apartment
recording the conversation between Georges and Majid, given that Majid and his son
profess non-involvement in the tapings? These questions can be resolved if the operator
of the camera taking the footage is Haneke himself (which, of course, he is, in his
capacity as director of Caché). Indeed, Haneke encourages such an interpretation by
including an iteration of the same static shot of Georges and Anne’s apartment near the
end of the film, after Georges’ confrontation with Majid’s son, that is not explained in the
narrative as one of the harassing tapes. More broadly, a conflation between Haneke and
Georges’ harasser occurs due to the alternation between footage taken by the harasser and
this same footage being viewed by Georges or Anne, such as between the two iterations
of the footage taken at night, shown to us first as it is being recorded and then a second
time as it is played back by Georges. This suggests that Haneke has access to this footage
independently of Georges, since we do not only see the tapes sent to Georges but also are
63
privy to the original instances of their recording. We can conclude that Haneke is either
the harasser or knows who he/she is and chooses not to tell us.
Haneke’s construction of an antagonistic authorial textual presence runs the risk
of leaving audiences with a false sense of plenitude. The ambiguity of Haneke’s narration
destabilizes narrative coherence and implicates audiences in the ethical ramifications of
his narratives. The construction of Haneke as antagonist to his bourgeois characters re-
inscribes coherence into the text, comforting us with the thought that, in the final
instance, Haneke will heroically intervene to restore ethical order. This is in line with the
idea that art cinema, despite is emphasis on ambiguity, is a closed system: “[t]he art film
produces order [by providing] clues toward narrative clarity either in the expressive
vision of an author or in the sense of psychological verisimilitude.”
46
For scholars such as
Pamela Falkenberg, this distinguishes art cinema from avant-garde and modernist
cinema. These cinemas’ radical interrogation of signification is reduced in art cinema to
an ambiguity that is always recuperated under the logic of authorship or verisimilitude:
“Perceptual play (the modernist characteristic par excellence) is rewritten as a fresh
coherence. Ambiguity is the reduction of perceptual play to the terms of a unity.”
47

For our purposes, the problem with Haneke’s antagonistic authorial presence lies
elsewhere: it prevents us from recognizing the insufficiencies of art cinema for the
representation of immigrant and minority issues. The power of Haneke’s cinema stems
from its class and racial particularism, which challenges the pretense of universality of
European political discourse and French Republicanism, reveals the limits of bourgeois
paradigms in explaining multicultural realities, and reconstructs the stratification of rights
64
in contemporary European societies.
48
On the one hand, this class specificity, by denying
audiences access to the subjectivities of immigrant and minority characters, who occupy
marginal positions within Haneke’s narratives, stifles the potentially deleterious
implications of identification that seeks to collapse rather than understand difference.
49

On the other hand, the immersion in bourgeois subjectivity precludes a whole universe of
possibilities for the representation of European immigrants and minorities. As Paul
Gilroy says with regard to Caché,
When the Majids of this world are allowed to develop into deeper, rounded
characters endowed with all the psychological gravity and complexity that is
taken for granted in ciphers like Georges, we will know that substantive progress
has been made towards breaking the white, bourgeois monopoly on dramatizing
the stresses of lived experience in this modernity.
50

Yet such well-rounded depictions have their own problems, given the inability of
empathetic identification to articulate the ethical responsibilities of spectatorship across
axes of difference.

As Michele Aaron notes, empathetic identification induces self-
righteous feelings of “moral-ideological rectitude” in spectators, preventing them from
understanding how they are implicated and ethically responsible for what they are
witnessing on screen.
51

What is sorely missing from the landscape of European cinema is the existence of
viable minority cinemas that can go beyond both Haneke’s class and racial particularism
and the empathetic identification central to Stephen Frears’ films, for instance. What
matters is that each of these modes of representation acknowledges its own limitations. It
is this acknowledgement that is short-circuited by the construction of Haneke as a heroic,
antagonistic presence in his films. It is important that we interpret Haneke’s cinema
65
through the prism of its particularism, which by its own inadequacies brings to our
attention the conspicuous absence and neglect of minority cinemas in Europe. The limits
of bourgeois subjectivity in Haneke’s films should be seen as a refraction of the
limitations of art cinema itself.
66
Chapter 1 Endnotes

1
I am using the term ‘multiculturalism’ to denote the racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity of a particular
society, and the phrase ‘multicultural encounters’ to denote the meeting between two or more people of
different racial, ethnic, or cultural backgrounds. My use of the term ‘multiculturalism’ should not be
confused with ‘multicultural policies’ of specific nation-states, which typically encompass state support for
minority cultural and arts programs, educational and language initiatives and media, legal recognition of
minority group rights, favorably differential treatment of minority groups based on their distinct cultures
and traditions, and the promotion of greater representation of minorities in government, education and other
fields. These policies have, for the most part, not been adopted in France, whose Republican definition of
citizenship is hostile to any communal or group-based articulations of identity and rights. For more on
multiculturalism, see Amy Guttman ed.: Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). For more on the hostility to multiculturalism in France, see
Alec Hargreaves: “Multiculturalism”, Political Ideologies in Contemporary France, ed., Christopher Flood
and Laurence Bell (London: Pinter, 1997); Jean Loup Amselle: Affirmative Exclusion: Cultural Pluralism
and the Rule of Custom in France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003); David Blatt: “Immigrant
Politics in a Republican Nation”, Post-Colonial Cultures in France, ed., Alec G. Hargreaves and Mark
McKinney (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 40-55; Joëlle Zask: “The Question of Multiculturalism in
France”, Culture, Politics and Nationalism in the Age of Globalization, ed., Renéo Lukic and Michael Brint
(Burlington: Ashgate, 2001), pp. 113-144.
2
Excerpt from French-language interview with Michael Haneke conducted by Serge Toubiana , included in
the ‘special features’ of The Seventh Continent DVD (author’s translation).
3
Max Silverman: Deconstructing the Nation: Immigration, Racism, and Citizenship in Modern France
(London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 46-49.
4
These laws were the Marcellin-Fontanet circulars of Jan and Feb 1972 which linked the right to residency
to active employment, leading to the expulsion (without the right to appeal) of long-time French residents
who became unemployed; the suspension of immigration in the 5 July 1974 circular and the suspension of
the right to family reunification which had previously allowed family members to join their spouse/parent
in France if he or she was already a resident (this circular was deemed unconstitutional in 1975 and
replaced with a circular implementing stricter criteria for family reunification); the1977 Stoleru repatriation
law and the 1980 Bonnet law against illegal immigration aimed at reducing the numbers of immigrants in
the country through forced or financially incentivized repatriation and through the predication of residence
permit renewal on active employment; the 1983 ‘aide a la reinsertion’ policy aimed at precipitating
voluntary repatriation; a 1984 decree predicating family reunification on “proof of adequate housing and
financial resources”; the Pasqua Laws of 1986 and 1993 which gave greater powers to police and prefects
to carry out expulsions, made criteria for residence permit renewals and family reunification even stricter,
limited immigrants’ access to health care and social security benefits, and eliminated the automatic granting
of French nationality to children of immigrants born in France. See Silverman, pp. 53-57, 60-67; Jane
Freedman: Immigration and Insecurity in France (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 34-46.
5
quoted in Freedman, p. 17.
6
Ibid, p. 17.
7
Ibid, p. 8.
8
Freedman cites an 1988 opinion poll showing that “whilst European immigrants (from Italy, Spain, or
Portugal) are rated [by the French public] as integrating very easily, those from North and Sub-Saharan
Africa are judged as being very difficult to integrate into French society”. Ibid, p. 17.
67

9
Ibid, pp. 15-20. Freedman describes this as a ‘de facto exclusion’: “the high levels of unemployment
suffered by those of African or Asian origin, the lack of access to equal health care, the absence of political
representatives are all signs of this de facto exclusion.” Ibid, pp. 19-20.
10
Max Silverman notes that the social, cultural and economic gains made by immigrants from the ex-
colonies have “been accompanied by an increased effort to distance them from the idea of France and
present them as a problem. The line separating ‘two worlds’ – the ‘metropole’ and the colonies, the
dominant and the dominated – has become increasingly blurred in this period.” Silverman contends that
this breakdown of colonial-era hierarchies and demarcations is “a source of profound anxiety” for France’s
dominant classes. Silverman, pp. 107, 110.
11
For more on the legacies of French colonialism, see Alec G. Hargreaves ed.: Memory, Empire, and
Postcolonialism: Legacies of French Colonialism (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005). For more on the
postcolonial relationship between Algeria and France, see Patricia M. E. Lorcin ed.: Algeria and France,
1800-2000: Identity, Memory, Nostalgia (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2006).
12
Frantz Fanon: The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), pp. 37-43.
13
Silverman, pp. 109-111.
14
The intruders in this scene do not appear to be of a different ethnic, racial or national background than
the Laurents, but they do seem to be of a different social class. In the apocalyptic conditions that prevail in
Time of the Wolf, the stability of the social hierarchy that preserves class distinctions has broken down. So
while this home invasion does not constitute a multicultural encounter per se, it replicates the social
dynamics that inform multicultural confrontations in the rest of Haneke’s cinema, namely the rise in power
of marginalized groups and the experience of this by the bourgeoisie as a traumatic loss of rights and
privileges.
15
All dialogue excerpts are based on the French-language dialogue as it is heard in the DVD releases of the
films (based on subtitles and author’s translations).
16
Robert Self: “Systems of Ambiguity in the Art Cinema”, Film Criticism, vol. 4 , Fall 1979, pp. 77-78.
17
Self, pp. 76-78.
18
For more on the position of epistemological relativism within multiculturalism debates, see Satya P.
Mohanty: Literary Theory and the Claims of History: Postmodernism, Objectivity, Multicultural Politics
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp. 14-15.
19
Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande: Cosmopolitan Europe (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), p. 10.
20
Ibid, p. 26. Displaying an idealism that overestimates the capacity of international institutions to ensure
social and economic justice, Beck and Grande support a ‘cosmopolitan Europe’ despite recognizing that
European integration to date has fallen far short of this vision. They note that “although the process of
European integration exhibited a cosmopolitan moment from the beginning, nevertheless thus far it has
produced merely a deformed cosmopolitanism. These deformations have numerous causes: the egoism of
the member states, economic self-interest and the asymmetries in influence on political decisions in the EU,
the technocratic policy approach of supranational institutions and the weakness of actors from civil society.
Consequently, European cosmopolitanism has until now been shaped from above rather than from below,
technocratically rather than democratically”. Ibid, p. 20.
21
Immanuel Wallerstein states: “The intervenors, when challenged, always resort to a moral justification –
natural law and Christianity in the sixteenth century, the civilizing mission in the nineteenth century, and
68

human rights and democracy in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries.” Immanuel Wallerstein:
European Universalism: The Rhetoric of Power (New York: The New Press, 2006), p. xiv.
22
Danilo Zolo: Invoking Humanity: War, Law and Global Order (London: Continuum, 2002), pp. 83-84.
23
As Alec Hargreaves states: “In abolishing the system of Estates, which had institutionalized personal and
social inequalities on a group basis, [the 1789 Declaration] asserted instead the principle of universalism,
i.e. the equal treatment of all individuals whatever their origins”. Yet social equality existed in France only
in theory, with women denied the vote until 1944 and the practice of slavery in the colonies contradicting
the rhetorical universalism of Republicanism until 1848. In the interwar period, wartime mortality and low
fertility combined with anti-Semitism to fuel anxieties about the ability of the nation to regenerate itself
without losing its cultural identity, culminating in the institutionalized racism of the Vichy regime. In the
postwar period, Republican universalism sat uneasily alongside the racial hierarchies informing the
treatment of colonized subjects in Algeria and the other colonies. Hargreaves, 1997, p. 186; See also Erik
Bleich: “Anti-racism without races: politics and policy in a ‘color-blind’ state”, Race in France:
Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Politics of Difference, ed., Herrick Chapman and Laura L. Frader
(New York: Bergahn Books, 2004), p. 168; Herrick Chapman and Laura L. Frader: “Introduction”, Race in
France: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Politics of Difference, ed., Herrick Chapman and Laura L.
Frader (New York: Bergahn Books, 2004), pp. 2-5.
24
Silverman, p. 9.
25
Freedman, pp. 2-3. The brief flirtation of the French Left with multiculturalist ideas, with the notion that
minority groups have a ‘right to be different’, ended when this rhetoric was hijacked by the Right in the
1980s to argue for an exclusionary definition of French culture and identity. For more on this, see
Hargreaves, 1997, p. 194.
26
The headscarves affair of 1989 (affaire de foulards) brought these issues to the fore. The controversy was
triggered by the refusal of a headmaster in Creil, a Paris suburb, to allow three Maghrebi (of North African
descent) girls to wear headscarves to school, arguing that this violated the secular principles of the French
Republic. The affair soon took on national prominence, and was presented in the media and political
establishment as one pitting Enlightenment ideals of universalism, individualism, secularism, rationalism,
progressivism against those of Muslim particularism, communalism, fundamentalism, irrationalism and
oppression of individual rights (especially those of women). As Alec Hargreaves notes, the exclusion of
these Maghrebi girls from school, and the widespread support this exclusion received in France,
demonstrates how de-culturation is a prerequisite of assimilation under the logic of French Republicanism:
“The wish of young people of immigrant origin to participate in the life of the nation through its
educational system was not enough; they must first renounce emblems of cultural particularity that jarred
with historically conditioned notions of French universalism.” Yet the notion that French schools are
secular is itself a construction, belied by the historical relationship between the Catholic Church and the
French state that has “made Catholicism an ‘invisible’ religion in France and ‘more equal than the others’”.
The headscarves affair therefore demonstrated the underlying ethnocentrism of French Republican
definitions of citizenship. Hargreaves puts it well: “The openness of the republican tradition stops where
cultural differences begin…While seemingly open to outsiders, the ideology of assimilation is indeed
deeply ethnocentric.” See Silverman, pp. 114-115; Hargreaves, 1997, pp. 183, 197-198; Freedman, pp.
131-141.
27
Freedman, p. 8.
28
David Bordwell: “Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice”, Film Criticism, vol. 4 , Fall 1979, p. 60.
69

29
As Ezra Suleiman remarks, “few societies have succeeded in institutionalizing their elite-forming
mechanism to quite the degree that France has.” Ezra N. Suleiman: Elites in French Society: The Politics
of Survival (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 4.
30
Colin Mooers: The Making of Bourgeois Europe: Absolutism, Revolution and the Rise of Capitalism in
England, France and Germany (London: Verso, 1991), p. 56.
31
Ibid, pp. 74-75. Mooers notes that the hierarchy of civil service positions under Napoleon mirrored the
class divisions of French society. Napoleon created new noble titles primarily for military officers, who
were given “grants of property from either the imperial domain or from conquered territories acquired
through the nearly constant warfare which marked the regime.”
32
Ibid, pp. 95-96.
33
The reduced birthrates in the aftermath of World War I threatened the reproduction of French elites, the
currency crisis reduced their wealth, and the radicalization of the working-class under the Popular Front
loosened their grip on political power. See Jean-Pierre Rioux: “A Changing of the Guard? Old and New
Elites at the Liberation”, Elites in France: Origins, Reproduction and Power, ed., Jolyon Howorth and
Philip G. Cerny (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), pp. 78-79.
34
Suleiman, p. 4.
35
Ibid, pp. 11-12, 229.
36
Pierre Bourdieu: The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1996), pp. 386-387.
37
For more on the colonial legacies and heightened violence of the French state, see Étienne Balibar: We,
the People of Europe?: Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2004), pp. 35-42.
38
Haneke represents charged social encounters as inevitable components of contemporary multicultural
society, instances during which societal inequalities are negotiated and, where possible, reconfigured. This
is reminiscent of Homi Bhabha’s critique of liberal discourses of multiculturalism for recognizing cultural
differences only after they contain them within an ethnocentric grid. Bhabha argues that societies which
celebrate cultural differences will have to live with the necessary incommensurability of these differences
and the antagonism that this will engender. He supports a notion of politics based on uneven, multiple and
sometimes antagonistic identities that acknowledge and grapple with, rather than ignore and deny, the
existence of social inequality and injustice. See Jonathan Rutherford: “The Third Space: Interview with
Homi Bhabha”, Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed., Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence &
Wishart, 1990).
39
The decoupling of state power from bourgeois interests in Haneke’s cinema is in line with much
contemporary scholarship on the relative autonomy of the state. While liberalism assumes that democratic
states reflect the interests of all sectors of society, and that this is ensured by the egalitarianism of
democratic processes, Marxist thinkers have long argued that the state is primarily determined by and
acting in the interests of the dominant classes. Structuralists such as Nicos Poulantzas amended this
orthodox Marxist position by arguing that the state remains relatively autonomous from class fractional
interests so that it can unify and politically organize the dominant classes. The expansion of scholarship on
the state to include considerations of culture, gender, race and sexuality tends to support the description of
the state as relatively autonomous. For instance, the work of Stanley Greenberg shows how racial ideology
often becomes a form of state dogma above and beyond the interests of capital. For Stuart Hall the state is
pluricentered and multidimensional, not necessarily serving the interests of one class fraction, but rather a
70

site where the multiple political and related networks of power are condensed and transformed into a
practice of regulation, normalization and domination over particular classes and other social groups. See
David Held: “Central Perspectives on the Modern State”, The Idea of the Modern State, ed., Gregor
McLennan, Stuart Hall and David Held (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1984), pp. 59-60; Akhil
Gupta and Aradhana Sharma ed.: The Anthropology of the State: A Reader (Malden: Blackwell, 2006);
Stanley B. Greenberg: Race and State in Capitalist Development (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1980), p. 390; Stuart Hall: “Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Post-structuralist
Debates”, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, vol. 2 no. 2, June 1985, pp. 92-96.
40
This textual definition of authorship is described by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith as a subcode: “[t]he author
(external to the text) records his presence through the signs of this sub-code, to which the reader (also
external to the text) can then attribute codic pertinence, or not, as the case may be”. Stephen Heath
describes authorship as a textual effect: “the sole interest here is in the author as an effect of the text and
only in so far as the effect is significant in the production of the filmic system” See Geoffrey Nowell-
Smith: “Six Authors in Pursuit of The Searchers”, Theories of Authorship: A Reader, ed., John Caughie
(London: Routledge and Kegan, 1981), p. 222; Janet Staiger: “Authorship Approaches”, Authorship and
Film, ed., David A. Gertsner and Janet Staiger (New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 48.
41
David Bordwell discusses how instances of ambiguous narration “can tease us with fragmentary,
indecipherable images that announce the power of the author to control what we know.” V.F Perkins
observes that extra-narrative elements are often read as authorial commentary since they seem to serve no
other purpose: “we know the scene is intended to work as ironic comment simply because it has no other
function in the film. It does not advance the plot. It tells us nothing about the characters…We notice the
meaning because the scene gives us nothing else to notice.” David Bordwell notes that any “[s]tylistic
devices that gain prominence with respect to classical norms – an unusual angle, a stressed bit of cutting, a
striking camera movement, an unrealistic shift in lighting or setting, a disjunction on the sound track, or
any other breakdown of objective realism which is not motivated as subjectivity – can be taken as the
narration’s commentary.” See David Bordwell: “Authorship and Narration in Art Cinema”, Film and
Authorship, ed., Virginia Wright Wexman (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003), pp. 43, 49;
V.F. Perkins: “Direction and Authorship”, Auteurs and Authorship: A Film Reader, ed., Barry Keith Grant
(Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), p. 70.
42
See, for instance, Mark Cousins: “After the End: Word of Mouth and Caché”, Screen, vol. 48, no. 2,
Summer 2007, p. 223.
43
Paul Willemen describes the petit bourgeoisie, from whose ranks art cinema filmmakers typically
emerge, as “unhappily capitalist” and Solanas and Octavio Getino call it “‘the youthful, angry wing of
society”. Despite their discontent, art cinema filmmakers are seen as “trapped inside the fortress” of
dominant discourse and commodity culture, their critical positions institutionalized and incapable of
bringing about substantive change. See Paul Willemen: “The Third Cinema Question: Notes and
Reflections”, Questions of Third Cinema, ed., Jim Pines and Paul Willemen (London: BFI Publishing,
1989), p. 10; Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas: “Towards a Third Cinema”, Movies and Methods,
Vol. 1, ed., Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California, 1976), p. 52.
44
Mike Wayne: Political Film: The Dialectics of Third Cinema (London: Pluto Press, 2001), pp. 12-13.
45
Wallerstein, p. 49. Wallerstein’s call for a continuous dialectical exchange between particularism and
universalism echoes Satya Mohanty’s contention that we must respect cultural difference while retaining a
moral universalism, constructed out of the diverse experiences and points-of-view of all members of
multicultural societies. These universal values need to be worked out through epistemic cooperation rather
than be imposed on minority cultures by dominant groups. Mohanty, p. 240.
46
Self, p. 79.
71

47
Pamela Falkenberg: “‘Hollywood’ and the ‘Art Cinema’ as a Bipolar Modeling System: A Bout de
Souffle and Breathless”, Wide Angle, vol. 7, 1985, p. 50.
48
What is important about Haneke’s cinema is that by applying a particularist lens to the representation of
bourgeois Europeans it counters the tendency of European discourse to invest European values and
histories with universal significance while containing non-Europeans within particularist paradigms.
Immanuel Wallerstein relates the history of Oriental studies, an academic discipline that asserted
essentialist particularisms about the non-Western world, while arguing that modernity - the customs, values
and practices that emerged out of the capitalist world-system – were universal values that needed to be
spread to the rest of the world. As such, the Orient was defined in relation to Western modernity, and
essentialized in a fixed and subordinate relation to it: “Among the specificities of the capitalist world-
economy was the development of an original epistemology, which it then used as a key element in
maintaining its capacity to operate.” This epistemology reified binary distinctions, “notably the one
between universalism (which it claimed that the dominant elements incarnated) and particularism (which it
attributed to all those who were being dominated).” Wallerstein, pp. 47-48. See also Edward W. Said:
Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
49
The emphasis on bourgeois characters is most attenuated in Code Unknown, but even in this film the
most attention is paid to Anne and her family.
50
Paul Gilroy: “Shooting Crabs in a Barrel”, Screen, vol. 48, no. 2, Summer 2007, p. 234.
51
Michele Aaron: “The films that trace each gradient of the moral high ground to intone the grandeur of
their protagonists’ actions, be they noble or dastardly, underwrite their moving tales with cast-iron
allegiances between the spectator and the tragic but triumphant hero…Just as ethical reflection was
connected to recognition of the other, and a taking of responsibility for this recognition and of one’s own
desires, so such films are unethical precisely because they seem to foreclose recognition and responsibility
as well.” Michele Aaron: Spectatorship: The Power of Looking On (London: Wallflower, 2007), pp. 113-
114.

72
Chapter 2. National Cinema as Introversion:
Peripheral Modernity and Patriarchal Crisis in Contemporary Greek Films

Most contemporary Greek films receive funding from the Greek Film Center,
which supports experimental, documentary and art films, as well as some more popular
fare. A few Greek filmmakers, such Olga Malea (not discussed in this study), have
achieved domestic commercial success, but the majority of contemporary Greek
filmmakers receive limited domestic distribution and no international distribution for
their films. A few filmmakers, such as Theo Angelopoulos and Pantelis Voulgaris, have
achieved international critical acclaim and are able to obtain funding from non-Greek
production companies. The films of Constantine Giannaris have achieved international
distribution in part because of their gay and immigrant subject matter that transcends
Greek cultural specificities and idioms. The films discussed in the following two chapters
are largely unknown internationally, focused on domestic concerns and employing local
modes of address. Their styles and genres range from melodrama to documentary
realism, experimental reflexivity and popular comedy. The absence of an international,
and in many cases, a sizeable domestic audience, is reflected in these films’ subject
matter, which thematizes the marginality and perceived lack of agency of Greeks in the
contemporary period.
The absence of an international audience has led contemporary Greek filmmakers
to focus on the impact of immigration and increased multiculturalism on the ongoing
crises animating Greek society. For this reason, the next two chapters will first consider
films from the early 1990s, before immigration became a prominent national issue, so
73
that we can better understand the articulation of national crisis in the Greek context. The
subsequent discussions of films from the late 1990s and early 2000s that engage with
immigrant and minority issues will reveal how the crises articulated in the earlier films
are transformed by the introduction of alterity into the field of representation. Whereas
Haneke’s cinema aimed at subverting the universalism of French political discourse, that
assumes epistemological mastery and dominance over immigrant and minority subjects,
we will see that Greek contemporary cinema conceives of immigrant and minority
subjects as a potential source of renewal for Greek social and political institutions
maligned domestically and internationally during this period. The interiority of
contemporary Greek films is mitigated by their engagement with European discourses,
policies and influences on domestic cultural, economic and political practice. These films
express the peripherality of the Greek nation by representing these influences as
unidirectional, a burden on the articulation of agency that induces Greek characters to
perform seemingly futile and symbolic gestures incomprehensible to foreign observers.

Greece on the Periphery
Greece has an endless capacity to disappoint, to fall short of its reputation.
-- Artemis Leontis
1

The history of modern Greece has been marked by a tortuous struggle to reconcile
the country’s contemporary realities with the idealization of Hellenism in the European
imaginary. European travelers to Greece in the early days of its statehood propagated
images of contemporary Greece as a pale imitation of its ancient counterpart, with a
74
language and culture corrupted by Ottoman influences and epitomized by a rural
peasantry whose folk customs seemed to bear no relation to that of the ancients. These
travelers gazed with reverence at the natural landscape and ancient monuments that
concretized their academic Philhellenism, but “the present intruded on their
meditations.”
2
Artemis Leontis describes travelers’ encounter of the Acropolis as a
moment of dissonance - famously related in psychoanalytic terms by Freud after a visit to
Greece - during which ancient ideals and modern realities seem irreconcilable:
the Acropolis becomes for the viewer a place where the highest aesthetic values
of Western culture escape the ravages of time and limitations of ‘local or
nationalist color’ that obstruct modern incarnations. Next to the Acropolis, ‘the
entire world seemed barbarous’
3

With the achievement of national independence, Greece replaced Ottoman rule
with dependency on the West. The nation’s political elites actively modeled Greece’s
nation-building and modernization efforts on western prototypes. As Gregory Jusdanis
notes, this reliance on western European models of development inevitably led to an
internalization of external criticisms of Greek social, cultural and political life that bred
feelings of impotence and insufficiency:
Belated modernization, especially in nonwestern societies, necessarily remains
‘incomplete’ not because it deviates from the supposedly correct path but because
it cannot culminate in a faithful duplication of western prototypes. The imported
models do not function like their European counterparts. Often they are
resisted…Peripheral societies, however, internalize the incongruity between
western originals and local realities as a structural deficiency. The lack of
modernity is seen as a flaw
4

In the 1990s, the drive toward monetary union and greater continental integration
reignited these feelings of insufficiency in Greece as modernization discourse came to be
articulated in the terms prescribed by the major powers and policymakers of the EU.
75
Greece’s membership in the EU came under increasing scrutiny in the post-Communist
period due to its deviation from mandated neoliberal convergence measures and US-
European geopolitical interests in the Balkans. As Kevin Featherstone notes, during the
1990s,
Greek membership became more controversial to her EU partners. International
press reports gave very negative views on Greek policies and performance in
London, Paris and Brussels…A perspective was formed on Greece’s membership
of the EU which established a predisposition to see all fresh actions by her in a
damning light.
5

The criticisms that emanated from the EU during this period centered on Greek economic
policy, enforcement of rules, and policy non-compliance with EU consensus. Most
controversial was Greece’s decision to enact an embargo against FYROM (the Former
Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia) which went against the spirit of political and economic
integration with Eastern Europe that was dominant among EU policymakers during this
period. The treatment of minorities in Greece and the weakness of the Greek economy
also presented problems for Greece’s EU membership. The position of Greece as a
peripheral nation within the European and world capitalist system, and the precariousness
of borders and fear of irredentism in the Balkans after the fall of Communism were
generally not acknowledged.
6
Instead, the blame was placed on Greek political
institutions and attitudes, which reinforced historical feelings of defensiveness,
insufficiency and isolation among Greeks.
7

These feelings of disempowerment manifested themselves in the period’s Greek
cinema in a series of films concerned with forces seemingly outside of the control of their
protagonists, who struggle, often in vain, against the exigencies of their social and
76
physical environments. The introversion of these films signals a crisis in national
confidence and an uneasiness with the external models used to evaluate Greek economic
and political performance. Dimitris Tziovas notes that the question of introversion versus
extroversion has been a primary concern of Greek literary modernism. Extroversion
achieved dominance in historical periods of economic growth, democratic possibility, and
social mobility, such as the early 1930s and 1960s.
8
Despite these periods of
extroversion, as a whole, Greek modernism has been more internally focused, using
modernist style to invigorate the cultural definition of Hellenism rather than to make
universalist claims.
9
The tension between introversion and extroversion has also been
identified in Greek political culture by Nikiforos Diamandouros, who problematically
associates introversion (or, as he calls it, “underdog culture”) with residual Ottoman
cultural influences in Greek society that inhibit modernization efforts.
10

Several contemporary Greek films present stories of adolescence that allegorize
Greece’s purported “immaturity” as a nation, its “imperfect” modernity in the context of
western discourses of development. Dimitris Spirou’s Ο Ψυλλος (The Flea, 1990) follows
the journalistic adventures of Ilias, a diminutive 11-year old boy in a small northern
village, who publishes his own newspaper, “The Flea”, gaining him nationwide
recognition for being the youngest newspaper publisher in Greece. Nikos Grammatikos’
Αποντες (Truants, 1996) follows a group of six male high school friends who see their
friendship strained by adulthood. Giorgos Tsemberopoulos’ Πισω Πορτα (Back Door,
2000) follows Dimitris, a member of a wealthy and politically connected family, whose
adolescence coincides with the years of military dictatorship (1967-1974).
77
In all three films, young male protagonists battle against the constraints imposed
on them by adult society, constructing Greek national identity as an underdog culture
beset by external constraints.
11
In Ο Ψυλλος, Ilias initially battles against the narrow-
minded villagers’ lack of support for his newspaper and then with their shameless
promotion of it once it receives nationwide attention. Within the film’s title lies a hidden
meaning since depending on the way you pronounce ψυλλος it can mean flea or tall,
capturing the film’s denotation of Greekness as a tension between promise and narrow-
mindedness, regional dynamism and cynical self-promotion. Αποντες chronicles how
political differences, relationships with women and career choices erode six male friends’
camaraderie, which was based on the homosociality and irresponsibilities of their
adolescent years (evidenced by the film’s title: “truants”). The pressures of adulthood
brings issues of self-discipline and conformism to the fore, precipitating a series of
personal crises that allegorize contemporary unease with Greece’s efforts towards
European economic convergence and political integration. In Πισω Πορτα, Dimitris’
carefree spirit is tested initially by the death of his father and then by his step-father’s
collusion with the junta regime. After lacing the food of junta officials with LSD at an
official dinner at his house, Dimitris is sent to a brutal prison for boys, where he is
beaten, humiliated and indoctrinated into right-wing nationalist ideology ( forced to
appear, for instance, in ancient Greek war pantomimes meant to invoke ancient Greek
military achievements). Dimitris’ progressive rebelliousness represents “authentic”
Greekness set against the fake patriotism and militarism of junta-era pageantry. Πισω
Πορτα contrasts Dimitris’ father and stepfather, naturalizing the former’s corruption as a
78
builder while presenting the latter’s collaboration with the junta regime as a perversion of
Greek national identity. Dimitris’s father’s death begins the film so that his version of
Greekness (associated with Ottoman political culture by Diamandouros) is rendered
nostalgically as a structure of feeling imperiled by the imperatives of EU-driven
modernization and interference in Greek internal affairs (represented by the US-backed
junta).
In Pantelis Voulgaris’ Υσυχες Μερες του Αυγουστου (Quiet Days of August, 1991)
and Frida Liapa’s Τα Χρονια της Μεγαλης Ζεστης (The Years of Great Heat, 1991), heat
and the annual vacation exodus that empties Athens every August function as metaphors
for Greek feelings of isolation and marginality in Europe. In Τα Χρονια της Μεγαλης
Ζεστης a group of friends and lovers reunite on a Greek beach during the summer of
1988, when extreme heat plagued the country leading to thousands of deaths. The heat is
the protagonist of the film, providing it with its visual vocabulary of perspiration,
bleached sky, dessert sand, dry lips and blinding sunlight. Debilitated by the heat, the
characters are left to their own interiority, leading to reflexive interrogations of memory,
time, love expressed in a series of philosophical dialogues and narration. The beach
becomes a site of unrequited longing that unlocks the unconscious desires and personal
memories of the beach inhabitants; their cries of agony, orgasm, and thirst combining to
pierce the calm of the beach. Anticipating the arrival of one of their friends, unable to
make phone calls due to a bad connection, and isolated on the remote beach, the
inhabitants turn inward, investigating their own pasts and previously repressed desires.
79
The use of overwhelming summer heat as a central character in Τα Χρονια της
Μεγαλης Ζεστης constitutes a progression from the celebratory invocations of natural
landscape of earlier Greek modernism. Dimitris Tziovas notes that these earlier
articulations of landscape sought to nativize Hellenism, linking it to the territory and
people of the modern Greek nation-state, against the aspersions cast by western European
observers (most notoriously, Tyrolean historian Jacob Fallmerayer) that there was no
genealogical link between modern and ancient Greeks: “Apart from myth, the other
salient feature of Greek modernism was its emphasis on landscape and light…It was
often thought that the Greek landscape bore the vestiges of the past, thus providing,
together with language, the always elusive link between antiquity and the present.”
12
In
Τα Χρονια της Μεγαλης Ζεστης the landscape overwhelms the agency of the protagonists,
rather than providing a mechanism for the consolidation of historical continuity and
national identity, it leads to personal introversion and isolation, cutting off the film’s
characters from the outside world. The film’s plural title (“years of great heat”) extends
the symbolic significance of the 1987 heat wave to encompass the broader feelings of
isolation structuring Greek common sense during this period.
This sense of isolation and disconnection is addressed in Υσυχες Μερες του
Αυγουστου as well. The film follows three sets of Athenians in August of 1990: an elderly
woman who has lived alone since she lost her love during World War II develops a
motherly and vaguely erotic connection to a younger woman in her apartment building; a
married bank teller develops a romantic connection to a mysterious woman who calls him
at work; a middle-aged woman, a returning migrant from Germany, befriends a married
80
man, himself a former sailor, after her husband dies. Athens empties in August as most of
the city’s inhabitants leave town for vacation on the Greek isles or at their ancestral
villages. The characters in Υσυχες Μερες του Αυγουστου stay behind in a city that
resembles a ghost town, something that accentuates their feelings of loneliness, but also
reminds them of how the city was years ago when fewer people lived there. In this way,
the emptiness of the city precipitates the desire for temporal and social transcendence.
The heat brings a sensuality, languor and eroticism to Athens which leads the film’s
lonely protagonists to rely on the phone and the radio for company, and on photographs
and memories of past loves. The film aptly captures the uniquely vacuous qualities of
Athens in August that activate deep-seated longings and preoccupations otherwise
drowned out by the frenetic pace of city life. Voulgaris does not diegetically interweave
the three stories (the characters do not meet their counterparts in the other stories),
accentuating the feelings of isolation and alienation that permeate the film. The
sublimated feelings of abandonment felt by the characters who stay in Athens in Υσυχες
Μερες του Αυγουστου provide an allegorical distillation of the perceived marginality of
Greece in the contemporary era.
Voulgaris’ 1998 film Ολα Ειναι Δρομος (It’s a Long Road), is also comprised of
three separate stories, this time about three middle-aged men coping with loss. In the first
story, an archaeologist and professor at the University of Thessaloniki, decides to visit
the Thrace border outpost where his son, Alexis, a year earlier, committed suicide while
stationed there for his mandatory military service. Before he sets out on his visit, he and
his digging team, discover the tomb of a Macedonian man, probably a soldier. The
81
professor drives out to the border camp where Alexis’ died, walking out over the no
man’s land between the Greek-Turkish borders. A Turkish soldier shouts “halt”
repeatedly, to which the professor gives him a wry smile, puts his hands over his head
and asks him whether he remembers Alexis. Back in Thessaloniki, he watches an old
wedding party video, freezing the frame on his son’s image to say to him that all he
wanted was to be his friend.
The second story is about a river guide, an ex-hunter and hunting guide, who
helps a Norwegian bird researcher and her Greek colleagues track down the last known
lesser white bird in the world to the river Evros in northern Greece. The river guide tells
the researchers that the onslaught of poachers and foreign tourist hunters has reduced the
number of birds in the region considerably, recounting the day he shot an oyster catcher,
a bird that always hunts with its mate. He had been watching it for two days and thought
it was alone, but when he shot it, he saw its partner emerge from where it was hidden
behind it. The partner bird flew for miles and miles after him, and its heartrending cry
broke the hunter’s heart so he shot it to put it out of its misery and never hunted again.
The next morning, as the group rises from breakfast, they hear gun shots nearby. A
poacher is using a repeat trigger rifle to shoot birds in large numbers. The river guide
goes out on the boat after him but before he can reach him, he sees him kill the lesser
white. When he finds the hunter, the river guide pretends to be another hunter out for the
hunt. He asks to see his gun, and when the hunter gives it to him, he shoots him dead.
The third story is about a wealthy businessman who is legendary for spending
large sums of money at the local night clubs of a northern Greek city. After his wife
82
leaves him, taking their children with her, fed up with his late nights liaisons with local
prostitutes, the distraught man heads to “Vietnam”, the dingy night club that he frequents
regularly. When he arrives he tells the owner that he wants to break all the plates in the
establishment. Drinking whiskey, he sings ruefully, still wearing his floppy raincoat that
he superstitiously never takes off. Several women working at the club come to his table to
help him break the plates, attracted to him by his money. Some of the newer dancers
discuss among themselves whether or not he actually has money because he looks so
pathetic. A new Bulgarian dancer is coached by the club owner on how to say the only
words she will need to know, according to him, ‘I love you’. When this new dancer visits
the man’s table, he asks her what her name is and she responds, ‘I love you’. After
breaking all the plates, glasses, mirrors, and toilet fixtures in the club, the man decides to
buy the club for 30 million drachmas and then demolish it that night. As all the dancers,
kitchen staff and other customers stand outside, a bulldozer barrels into Vietnam,
destroying it completely as the man sets fire to his tie and raincoat, the club’s bouzouki
band playing by his side.
Ολα Ειναι Δρομος is another example of Greek cinema’s representation of
physical and political geography as a constraining force in contemporary Greek society:
the proximity to Greece’s fortified and ideologically charged national borders precipitates
Alexis’ suicide; the destruction of the wetlands in Evros destroys the biodiversity of the
region by enabling hunting on a catastrophic scale; the bulldozing of the Vietnam club
signals a monumentalization of the Greek custom of celebratory destruction, exhausting
the material limits of personal expression. All three stories take place in the geographic
83
margins of Greek society, where the insufficiencies of Greek territorial nationalism are
most acutely felt. In a decade when Greece almost went to war with both Turkey and
FYROM over territorial and naming disputes respectively, the specter of national loss
haunts Ολα Ειναι Δρομος. In each story, “outsider” figures, a Turkish border guard, a
Norwegian researcher and a Bulgarian dancer, function as elusive interlocutors of the
protagonist’s feelings of personal loss. These “outsider” characters fail to understand the
emotional crises facing the Greek men they encounter, as they remain separated from
them by border fences and military protocol, the civility of academic research, language
barriers and the commercial imperatives of club culture. Frustrated by their lack of
connection with their foreign counterparts, the Greek characters strike out on their own,
speaking to a video image of a dead son, killing a hunter and destroying a night
club..Incapable of communicating or connecting with the outside world, the protagonists
in Ολα Ειναι Δρομος exhibit agency through symbolic or self-destructive gestures,
turning inward in the face of irretrievable personal loss in a way that allegorizes the
disempowering perception of Greece’s isolation and marginality during this period.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s these questions of national marginality and
isolation were reframed by the influx of immigrants into Greek society. The sudden
increase in the rate of immigration challenged the modern construction of Greek
nationhood inscribed in the country’s citizenship laws. The primary ideologue of early
modern Greek nationalism was Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos who conceived of Greek
nationhood in statist, homogenizing and idealist terms based on racial exclusion and
geographic expansion. Central to Paparrigopoulos’ idea of Hellenism was the historical
84
continuity of Greek culture and identity from antiquity through the Byzantine period to
the present day.
13
The disjunction between this homogeneous vision and the multicultural
realities of the Balkans in the wake of Ottoman collapse, as well as territorial insecurity
and fear of irredentism, led Greek political elites to promote an exclusionary definition of
Greek nationhood, which, like those in other Balkan countries, tied membership in the
nation to ethnic identity rather than citizenship rights.
The ethnic definition of nationhood was enforced by the Greek state through a
series of population exchanges, expulsions and policies of assimilation that over time
minimized the presence of self-identifying ethnic or religious minorities within the
nation’s borders, with the exception of the Muslim minority in Thrace which has been
protected by the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923.
14
Victor Roudemetof states that this ethnic
particularist definition of nationality has had serious consequences for minority rights in
the Balkans:
Since in the Balkans nationhood and not citizenship provides for membership in
the nation, concern for minorities implies irredentist activity. …the issue of
inadequate protection of minorities is closely related to the employment of
cultural rather than civic criteria for such membership. Since Greek nation-
building has emphasized national homogeneity, minorities that do not share the
ethnic attributes associated with those who are legitimate members of the Greek
‘imagined community’--that is, with Greek-speaking, Eastern Orthodox
Christians--face sanctions from the local society. In the Greek context, citizenship
rights are extended to an individual via the person's membership in the Greek
nation. Exclusion from membership in the national community de facto justifies
the curtailment of citizenship rights.
15

In addition, until the 1990s, Greece was primarily a country of emigration rather than
immigration and citizenship laws were designed to incorporate the Greeks of the diaspora
into the nation upon their return. The ethnic particularism of Greek citizenship laws,
85
indeed, the Greek state’s refusal to even recognize the existence of ethnic or religious
minorities after 1951 (except for the Muslim minority in Western Thrace), meant that
Greece was completely unprepared to accommodate the arrival of a large wave of
immigrants in the post-Communist period.
16
While contemporary immigration policies
have been progressively more inclusive, Greek citizenship laws retain an ethnocentric
character that continues to exclude immigrants from the benefits of Greek citizenship.
17

As Koundoura notes, the more than half million Greek residents of Albanian descent
currently “have no access to citizenship, only a special Identity Card” and the Greek state
has been internationally chastised for its “breach of the European Human Rights
Convention on ethnic and linguistic minorities” such as the Roma, the Vlachs and the
Slavo-Macedonians.
18
Furthermore, the Greek state continues to impose the teaching of
Greek religion and language on minority schools of the Muslim community of Western
Thrace, thus undermining minority education.
19

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, discourses of national marginality were
recontextualized by the influx of immigrants into Greek society. In several films from
this period, immigrant characters function as catalysts for renewal of a Greek society
debilitated by social anomie and institutional failure. Immigrant characters critically
intervene in the social dynamics of Greek society from its margins, vilified and largely
invisible, their contributions often anonymous or misconstrued within xenophobic
paradigms. In this sense, their narrative centrality in these films attempts to resituate
immigrants at the heart of Greek social practice. Immigrant marginality renders the
complacency of earlier narratives no longer tenable and brings to the fore other peripheral
86
identities and social practices, such as queerness, homelessness and urban youth culture.
And yet, the fact that many immigrant characters in these films view Greece as only an
intermediate stop on their way to western Europe or the US signals the continued
representation of Greece in peripheral terms.
20

The most prolific Greek filmmaker to deal with immigrant and minority issues is
Constantine Giannaris. Giannaris’ short film Μια Θεση στον Ηλιο (A Place in the Sun,
1995), one of the first Greek films to deal with Albanian immigration in the post-
Communist period, tells the story of Ilias, a young gay Greek man who lives in Athens
and cruises the streets at night looking for sex. One night he meets Panagiotis, a young
Albanian man without residency papers and the two men become sexual partners.
Panagiotis is unemployed and his relationship with Ilias quickly develops an economic
component, as Ilias becomes accustomed to giving Panagiotis money for cigarettes, food
and alcohol. The two men’s conversations reveal the shifting power dynamics between
them, involving a constant negotiation of the sexual and economic parameters of their
relationship. What becomes clear is the high level of ambivalence and complexity of their
union, with traditional romantic roles co-existing uneasily with those of gigolo and john,
local host and foreign guest, documented and undocumented resident, and masculine and
feminine gender identities. Panagiotis’ dream is to emigrate to the United States, and at
the end of the film, Ilias and Panagiotis attempt to sneak out of the country without visas
or proper documentation. As the titles roll, we find out from the narration that they have
been arrested. The final image we see is of their police mug shots, concretizing what until
87
then had been the peripheral presence of the state delimiting the possibilities of their
union.
The scenes of eroticism between the Ilias and Panagiotis are intertwined with
lyrical images of Athens, especially the sea and the sky. In this sense, despite the
illicitness of Ilias and Panagiotis’ relationship and their social marginality, the film
establishes Athens as a social space that makes their union possible. Introducing Μια
Θεση στον Ηλιο at the 2007 Athens Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Giannaris noted that
the film establishes Athens as a cosmopolitan city on multiple fronts, enabling a
homosexual lifestyle, however clandestine, that would not be possible in other parts of
Greece, and bringing into contact people of diverse backgrounds. The film links two sets
of outsider identity, aligning them at the end of the film in the two men’s shared goal to
emigrate to the United States, which allows the film to connect Greece’s geopolitical and
economic peripheral status with the internal marginality of Albanian immigrants.
Giannaris’ next film, Απο την Ακρη της Πολης (From the Edge of the City, 1998),
tells the story of Sasha, a young Kazakh immigrant of Greek ethnicity, who prostitutes
himself to wealthy Athenians of both sexes, and spends much of his time cruising around
with other disaffected immigrant youths, who, like him, struggle to reconcile their
prostitution with the hyper-masculine expectations of male street culture. Sasha is straight
and he sleeps with both male and female johns. He is both a sex worker and a pimp,
buying and selling Russian women as if they are property. And as an immigrant of Greek
ethnicity he has a higher social status than immigrants of non-Greek ethnicity. Thus in
terms of his sexuality, ethnicity and occupation, Sasha occupies an intermediate position
88
in Greek society, whose ambiguities precipitate the moral dilemmas that he faces in the
narrative. We witness some of his friends commit suicide and suffer drug-induced deaths
as they struggle to cope with their prostitution and social marginality. Throughout the
film, we catch glimpses of Sasha’s dreams of a proper wedding with a woman from his
ethnic community. After Sasha falls in love with Natasha, a Russian woman whom he
buys from another pimp, he undergoes a moral awakening that leads him to renounce his
involvement in the sex industry. As Sasha and Natasha attempt to flee Athens, Sasha is
confronted by Natasha’s former pimp and is seriously injured in the fight that ensues. The
film thus ends ambivalently, with Natasha and Sasha’s attempted transcendence of their
socio-economic conditions hanging precariously in the balance.
Giannaris portrays the frenzied emptiness of Sasha’s milieu through fast motion
photography, disjointed editing, a pulsating club music soundtrack and a loose narrative
structure punctuated by brief interview segments during which Sasha responds to
questions posed by Giannaris from behind the camera. The disjunction between the
sparse intimacy of the interview segments and the visual excess of the rest of the film
allows Giannaris to interrogate the appropriateness of urban mythologies for the
articulation of minority identity. Giannaris’ tone as a questioner during the interview
segments is very familiar, displaying an unabashed curiosity about Sasha’s sexual desires
and diasporic experiences. Απο την Ακρη της Πολης thus reflexively acknowledges the
prurient interest in immigrant sexualities within Greek society, and the uneven dynamics
of power that structure our access to immigrant subjectivities. Sasha responds to
Giannaris’ questions by looking directly into the camera, sometimes coyly refusing to
89
answer a question. The use of direct address establishes Sasha’s agency as a subject,
politicizing him in a similar way to the function of the mug shots in Μια Θεση στον Ηλιο,
implicitly affirming his claim on the full citizenship rights denied to him by the Greek
state.
21

Giannaris’ Ομηρος (Hostage, 2005), based on a real-life incident, tells the story of
Elion, a young Albanian immigrant from Nea Makri in northern Greece who hijacks a
bus full of passengers. Elion instructs the bus driver to drive to Nea Makri where he
confronts a police man and his wife on their driveway. Eventually the police find out
about the hijacking and surround the bus and Elion receives Kalashnikov rifles and half a
million Euros after negotiations with the police. He instructs the bus driver to drive to
Albania where stand-off with Albanian and Greek police ensues, the bus now also
surrounded by a large number of reporters. Meanwhile, Elion’s mother is tracked down
by the Albanian police and is taken to the bus in order to help negotiators with the
standoff. The Albanian police take a much tougher stand with Elion – we find out that
this is with the blessing and cooperation of the Greek police. After Elion’s mother
delivers a moving plea for him to end the stand-off, Elion moves toward the front of the
bus where he is summarily shot and killed by the police. After the police’s brutal
evacuation of the bus and the senseless shooting of one of the passengers, the shell-
shocked passengers disperse, not understanding what was worse – the hijacking or their
rescue.
Giannaris constructs the bus in Ομηρος as a utopian space of cooperation and
mutual understanding between Elion and the passengers who represent different strata of
90
Greek society. A rabidly racist soldier, who seems to be a drug addict, eventually
befriends an African immigrant. The publicity of the hijacking convinces a married
woman and her younger lover to publicly acknowledge their relationship. Two young
students choose to stay with Elion rather than be reunited with their over-protective and
bickering parents. As the passengers get to know Elion, they begin to empathize with
him, eating with him, rubbing ointment on his hand to soothe the pain he feels from
constantly holding a grenade, giving him advice about how to escape, lighting cigarettes
for him, encouraging him to drink coffee so he can stay awake and berating the
negotiators when they feel they are trying to trick Elion. The passengers’ reliance on
Elion’s emotional and physical well-being given the grenade in his hands and their
discovery of the terrible ordeal he has endured at the hands of the Greek state, symbolize
the economic connectedness and mutual dependency of Albanian immigrants and the rest
of Greek society. A series of flashbacks of Elion’s life reveal that he has been framed for
a crime he did not commit, brutally raped and beaten during interrogation, blackballed by
employers due to his arrest and conviction, and shunned at home in Albania, preventing
him from marrying the woman he loves. The film’s tragic ending compromises the
optimism of its utopian construction of a pluralistic and cooperative social space within
the bus. Introducing Ομηρος at the 2007 Athens Albanian Film Festival, Giannaris
ruefully noted that the film’s pessimistic ending was affirmed by its colossal failure at the
box office. It thus seems that the film’s inversion of the xenophobic media coverage of
the real-life incident (suggested by the film’s title, which posits Elion as the hostage
rather than the hostage taker) did not resonate with Greek audiences.
91
Giannaris’ Δεκαπενταυγουστος (Dekapentavgoustos, 2001), yet another film
about the August vacation exodus from Athens, follows three neighboring couples as
they travel separately out of Athens in mid-August, during the Dekapentavgoustos
holiday weekend, the last holiday of the summer and the weekend with the most traffic
accident fatalities. The first couple is traveling west to Peloponnesus to deep-sea dive; he
is addicted to drugs, and she is cheating on him with his best friend. The second couple is
traveling to Tinos, where the Δεκαπενταυγουστος festival takes place, famed for the
healing powers of the Virgin Mary, because their young daughter has a rare terminal
form of blood cancer. The third couple, she a fertility doctor who wants to have a child
and he an architect who doesn’t want children, travel north to Pilio, where they have a
summer home in the mountains. Each couple is being torn apart either by illness,
deception or irreconcilable plans for the future., and each couple faces a crisis of some
kind on the trip: the first couple kills a pedestrian on the road, the daughter of the second
couple goes missing among the crowds at Tinos, and the third couple picks up an
attractive male hitchhiker who ends up robbing them. The first two stories end positively:
the first couple turns themselves in to the police, and when the second couple finally
finds their daughter, the signs of her illness have miraculously disappeared. The third
story ends badly as the woman has sex with the hitchhiker in order to become pregnant
but when her boyfriend finds out he beats her mercilessly, kicking her in the stomach in
order to prevent the pregnancy.
The stories of the three couples in Δεκαπενταυγουστος are interrupted by scenes
involving an adolescent boy who breaks into the apartments of the traveling couples
92
while they are away. He has handcuffs on so we assume he has escaped from police
custody. As he wanders through the apartments, he casually eats, drinks, bathes, sleeps,
listens to loud music and tries on clothes (eventually putting on a wedding dress and a
man’s hat). He also takes drugs that he finds in one apartment, reads undelivered letters
and watches deeply personal video diary entries. Symbolically, therefore, he bridges the
gaps in communication and understanding that divide the couples. When the police
arrive, he flees by jumping down from the balcony. The striking figure of an adolescent
boy in a wedding gown running through the streets of Athens attracts the attention of an
adolescent Greek girl who invites the boy into her home. Noticing that he is injured from
his fall off the balcony, she bathes him, bandages his wound, and they make love. He
asks her whether she would ever consider being with someone like him. The final scene
shows the boy in a white apartment that we haven’t seen before, calling out his mother
until she finally responds.
In Δεκαπενταυγουστος, as in Ομηρος, an immigrant character positively
intervenes, quite inadvertently, in dysfunctional Greek social relationships. In
Δεκαπενταυγουστος, the intervention is largely symbolic, whereas in Ομηρος it has
practical consequences for the characters in the narrative. In both films, unusual
circumstances (the hijacking of a bus, the annual vacation exodus from Athens) make
points of contact between immigrant and non-immigrant identities possible. Like Απο την
Ακρη της Πολης, these two films portray a Greek society in crisis, whose members are
isolated from each other due to the lure of drugs, miscommunication between genders,
family pressures, and their own cynicism and complacency. None of Giannaris’ films
93
construct phantasmatic integrations of immigrant characters into mainstream society;
indeed, one of the most poignant ironies of his cinema is the fact that immigrant
characters intervene in others’ social relationships from the margins of Greek society,
their proximity to the dominant social class always presented as temporary and
contingent.
Giannaris’ films demonstrate that immigration in the 1990s, while presented in
the media primarily as a criminal and demographic problem, was portrayed in the Greek
cinema of the period as a potential renewal of a society in moral and social crisis. The
perception of multiculturalism as a fundamental loss of agency in French dominant
discourse, so rigorously deconstructed in Haneke’s French-language films, is not
applicable in the Greek context because the perception of a loss of agency predates the
emergence of immigration as a national issue. Instead, marginal spaces and immigrant
identities are explored in Greek cinema as a way to recontextualize earlier perceptions of
national marginalization and isolation. From the margins and in moments of contingency
that collapse existing social distances, immigrants in Giannaris’ films inadvertently
intervene to destabilize the complacency and moral bankruptcy of Greek social practice.
Under the pressure of European integration and convergence, Greek cinema was
characterized in the early 1990s by introversion, so that immigration was not met with
defensiveness over the loss of existing privileges, but as an external variable that might
enable the transcendence of the existing social conditions so maligned in the European
context. The internalization of European development discourses also affected the
representation of Greek gender relations during this period, leading to a displacement of
94
patriarchal crisis onto rural tradition and backwardness, seen as the primary obstacle to
Greek modernization. It is to this conjuncture of patriarchal decline, modernization
discourses and the growing anxiety over Greece’s ability to socially reproduce itself that
we turn next.

Belated Modernity and Patriarchal Crisis
The status of women in Greece reflects the posture of the country itself in
transition – caught, that is, between the forces of modernization and tradition.
-- Nota Kyriazis
22

The history of modern Greece has been marked by a series of violent conflicts and
oppressive regimes, such as the Metaxas and Colonels’ dictatorships, the Balkan Wars,
World Wars and the Greek Civil War, which have caused severe social upheaval that
impeded women’s pursuit of equal rights until the restoration of democracy in 1975.
23
It
was then that national women’s organizations were formed with significant political
influence due to their close association with the major post-junta political parties,
PASOK and New Democracy (ND). The 1975 Constitution instituted the principle of
equality between men and women. In the 1980s, a series of laws deepened and broadened
women’s equality in a process aimed at achieving compliance with international
conventions and EU directives. These laws institutionalized equal treatment of women in
several areas: employment laws mandated equal pay, access to training, opportunities for
promotion and maternity leave; equal access to education was established; insurance was
extended to unpaid family domestic work and service jobs traditionally held by women;
abortion was legalized and stiffer penalties instituted for sexual offenses.
24
During this
95
period, national and regional governmental agencies were established to coordinate the
promotion of women’s rights between the state and civil society, including all the major
women’s organizations. As Anna Karamanou notes, “[f]or the first time the equality of
sexes [was] officially acknowledged by the state as a necessity, not only as a component
of social justice, but also, mainly, as a prerequisite for economic and social
development.”
25
In addition, women’s sections of the major labor unions became more
politically active, leading an effort aimed at increasing the participation of women in
Greek economic and political life, especially in leadership positions.
Despite these improvements in the de jure status of women in Greek society, in
the 1990s their de facto position remained inferior to that of men. Discrimination in the
workplace continued unabated due to widespread sexism, leading to continued disparities
in pay. In the late 1990s, women performed 75% of non-paid labor, received only 68% of
the earnings of men, were barely represented in senior managerial positions, and
occupied the majority of seasonal and temporary jobs. Women also experienced higher
rates of unemployment - twice as high as men in 1997 – and continued to be under-
represented in political life, gaining only a 7% share of local council seats and 10% share
of parliamentary seats in the 1998 and 2000 elections.
26
Greek women’s lower economic
power due to discrimination in the workplace and the increased burden of unpaid work in
the domestic sphere limited their ability to secure political power during this period.
27

A great number of films from the early and mid-1990s chronicle the lives of
women trapped in oppressive patriarchal relations with men, reflecting the disjunction
between women’s de jure and de facto status in Greek society. These films establish a
96
hermeneutics of dread, immersing us claustrophobically in the vicissitudes of doomed
heterosexual relationships. Some of these films feature empowered women who draw the
ire of patriarchal society for their deviation from traditional gender roles, while others
thematize women’s entrapment in abusive relationships due to the patriarchal
expectations of their families or their own investments in obsessive love. In these films,
men’s bad behavior symbolizes the death throes of patriarchy seeking to preserve the
traditional order despite socio-economic developments that make this no longer tenable.
28

In Tasos Psarras’ Η Αλλη Οψη (The Other Side, 1991) a middle-aged lawyer who
is unhappily married and has being seeing another woman for ten years finds out that he
is HIV-positive. The film chronicles the lies, self-delusions and insecurities of its male
protagonist, as we witness his selfish attempts to decide which woman will best take care
of him in the future, eventually deciding to stay with his wife. In Dimitris Yiatzousakis’
Μι Μου Απτου (Touch Me Not, 1996), a young electrician, after splitting up with his wife
when she is three months pregnant, begins to ride the bus compulsively in order to fondle
female passengers. One day, a woman that he molests on a bus accepts his “advances”
and they begin to have an affair including more public acts of fondling. She refuses to
speak to him throughout their relationship. Despite these incongruous dynamics, the
couple stays together and after the man is seriously injured in an accident, the woman
decides to confide in him and starts to speak. Μι Μου Απτου represents male patriarchal
consciousness as fundamentally flawed, akin to sexual molestation, and predicates its
surprisingly “conciliatory” ending on male physical debilitation that provides the
opportunity for female empowerment (represented by the woman’s decision to speak at
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the film’s conclusion). Giorgos Katakouzinos’ Ζωη (Zoe, 1995) tells the story of a young
married couple: Angelos, a 28-year old toy wholesaler and Zoe, an 18-year old aspiring
actress. While Angelos is conservative in his lifestyle and devoted to his work and
family, Zoe is a free spirit, spending much of her time in arcades, shops, on the beach and
at clubs dancing. The couple’s relationship becomes increasingly frayed culminating
shockingly in Angelos’ brutal murder and dismemberment of Zoe that ends the film. Ζωη
foregrounds not only the societal challenge of female employment to the patriarchal
order, but also the change in the forms of employment and cultural lifestyles that have
transformed the Greek economy. Zoe thus represents a double challenge – first, to the
traditional economy and its emphasis on domestic labor and low-paying menial jobs for
women, and second, to patriarchal heteronormativity and its emphasis on marriage, the
subordination of the wife to the husband and (female) monogamy. The discovery of
Zoe’s body is shown at the beginning of Ζωη and brief glimpses of the murder are
interspersed throughout the narrative (a similar device is used to prefigure Dimitris’
imprisonment in Πισω Πορτα), foreshadowing ominously the film’s gruesome
conclusion. The film’s title and ending provide its primary ironies - ζωη is both a
woman’s name and the word for “life” in Greek, and the scene after Zoe’s murder
features images from the couple’s wedding. Here, much more explicitly than in Η Αλλη
Οψη and Μι Μου Απτου the conventional happy ending that affirms heterosexual union is
undermined by the compromised gender relations that have dominated the film up to that
point (and in this case destroyed the union altogether).
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In Fotini Siskopoulou’s Η Ζωη Εναμισυ Χιλιαρικο (Life for Sale, 1995) and
Alexis Bistikas’ Το Χαραμα (Dawn, 1994), representations of doomed heterosexual
relationships are complicated by female economic success and tensions between
intimacy and professionalization. Η Ζωη Εναμισυ Χιλιαρικο tells the story of Andreas, a
hermitic middle-aged novelist who meets Martha, a strong-willed nurse and aspiring
singer. Andreas courts her and they start a torrid love affair that is hampered by Andreas’
inability to open up emotionally or to put the relationship before his literary ambitions.
Increasingly diffident and aloof with Martha, Andreas begins to secretly record his
conversations with her and the couple eventually breaks up. We pick up the story a few
years later when Martha has fulfilled her life-long dream and become a successful singer.
Andreas is on a reading tour as part of the promotion of his new book titled “Martha”.
The film ends with Martha slapping Andreas repeatedly during a book signing,
reprimanding him for selling her life for 1500 drachmas (the cost of the book). Το
Χαραμα tells the story of Nikos, a handsome nightclub singer whose once successful
career has been derailed by his temper, drinking and bad work habits. One day, Nikos
meets Vasso, a modest and level-headed store clerk, and they have an affair. Vasso has a
stabilizing influence on Nikos, and with her help he returns to the stage and Vasso
becomes his back-up singer. But soon, Nikos starts mistreating and cheating on Vasso,
snorting cocaine, getting drunk and causing trouble at the club. When Nikos fails to
appear at the nightclub one night, Vasso headlines in his place with great success. A
music industry executive in attendance decides to sign Vasso to a deal and the nightclub
makes her the permanent headliner - soon thereafter Nikos and Vasso break up. Some
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time later, after Vasso’s career has taken off, Nikos shows up at her locker room,
claiming he is penniless, jobless and alone. He asks Vasso for another chance and she
agrees. They have sex in her changing room and afterwards she tells him that she has no
interest in him but that she will try to get him a job somewhere. The film ends with Vasso
walking confidently on the seaside streets of Athens singing a song about love (the lyrics
of the songs Vasso signs in the latter part of the film thematize her empowerment).
As in Η Ζωη Εναμισυ Χιλιαρικο, the initial emphasis in Το Χαραμα is on male
commercial aspirations, but this is eventually upended by the professional success of the
female protagonist, which enables her to move beyond patriarchal entrapment, reflecting
the relationship between employment discrimination and women’s social inequality in
contemporary Greece. Whereas in Μι Μου Απτου and Η Αλλη Οψη, lonely women are
inexorably drawn back into abusive relationships with men, here female independence is
reconceived positively and linked to professional success. Both films link personal abuse
to commercial exploitation - Bistikas punishes his male protagonist for his hubris
whereas Siskopoulou avoids the ethical lapses of her male protagonist, by not revealing
Martha’s rape by her father (a deeply private personal detail) until Andreas callously
mentions it in his book reading at the end of the film.
Greek gender relations in the 1990s were framed by the ongoing anxiety over
Greece’s level of modernization and convergence with the conditions set for EU
integration. Many Greek political scholars defined Greece’s modernization as belated in
relation to western European countries and hampered by poor political leadership. Under
the logic of these arguments, countries such as Greece that modernized “late” did not
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completely transform their traditional (rural, artisanal, clientelistic, local) elements, thus
leading to greater social inequality and a more authoritarian political culture devoid of the
widespread democratization achieved in fully industrialized societies. Nicos Mouzelis
defines the characteristics of Greece’s “imperfect” modernization as a failure by the state
to modernize agriculture, a lack of coordination between agricultural and industrial
sectors, absence of social transformation because migration to urban centers acts as safety
valve for rural discontent, and an inflated state apparatus that incorporates enough of the
population to prevent change and foster corruption.
29
P. C. Ioakimidis’ description of
Greece’s “imperfect” modernization complements that of Mouzelis by arguing that rural
areas do not hold back urban-driven modernization, but conversely that the bloated
centralized state in Athens inhibits the articulation of regional dynamism.
30
What is
significant about these definitions of Greece’s modernity is their emphasis on rural
backwardness and a residual Ottoman political culture (associated with clientelism and an
inflated state apparatus), which ignores the function of Greece’s peripheral position
within the world capitalist economy in favor of an internalization of spatial and temporal
modalities of backwardness.
31

In accordance with the geographic displacement of the country’s “imperfect”
modernization onto rural areas, contemporary debates about the contradictions of Greek
patriarchy identify the primary source of the problem as rural backwardness. The
resilience of traditional women’s roles is associated with the continued primacy of the
agricultural sector in the Greek economy:
Many writers have accounted for the exceptionally strong bonds that distinguish
the Greek family as a direct derivative of the role that the family has played in
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agricultural production, dating from the Byzantine and Ottoman eras until the
present. In small self-sufficient communities whose boundaries were generally
defined by land morphology, the family was coterminous with the basic work
unit. Survival in these circumstances necessitated strong cooperation between
family members and the implementation of collective strategies at the family and
the community levels.
32

The issue is complicated further by the fact that Greece experienced a massive wave of
internal migration from rural to urban areas in the postwar period, in the wake of Nazi
occupation and civil war. Migration to urban centers did not significantly alter traditional
conceptions of women’s social roles, because women in this group typically only worked
when they were young and unmarried, returning to their domestic roles after marriage.
33

In this way, rural “backwardness” came to be seen as infiltrating urban centers and
inhibiting their modernization. The displacement of patriarchal crisis onto rural
backwardness is part of a broader cultural ambivalence with tradition, which as Roy
Panagiotopoulou explains, is associated with quintessential Greekness at the same time
that it is blamed for inhibiting the country’s modernization:
Modernization is viewed as impersonal, strict, and imported, yet as an inevitable
model that promises to be the only solution to the problems of Greek society.
Tradition is viewed as familiar, local, authentic, and indigenous, yet as
responsible for the profound crisis at every level of Greek social organization.
34

Several Greek films during this period displace national anxieties over the
country’s “imperfect” modernization onto sites of rural and patriarchal crisis. Sotiris
Goritsas’ Δεσπινα (Despina. 1990) tells the story of Despina, a headstrong young woman
who lives in a rural area of Greece (επαρχια) and befriends a flirtatious young Athenian
army officer, Giorgos, who is stationed nearby and whom she asks to take her to
Thessaloniki (Greece’s second largest city). She wants to escape from her father, who has
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practically imprisoned her in his home/café after she tried to run away a few years ago.
Giorgos finds a military jeep and surreptitiously picks Despina up. Their drive is tense
from the start, as Giorgos is looking for a romantic adventure, and Despina is only
concerned with making it to Thessaloniki. As the tension increases, Giorgos reveals that
he is not willing to take Despina as far as Thessaloniki, and eventually they turn around
and head back to her village. After she rejects his advances, and eyes another man at a
roadside cantina who might be able to help her, Giorgos takes her away and attempts to
rape her. After that, she compromises his cover with the army by revealing herself to
Giorgos’ fellow soldiers, and then leaves him at a fairground. She is then stalked and
taunted by two police officers but is rescued by Giorgos. On the run from the army, the
police and her father, the two unlikely lovers wind up on the beach where they make
love. When Giorgos takes Despina back to her home, her father is waiting and in a fit of
rage burns down their house. The film is framed by two sets of narration that tell us
Despina is different from everyone else in επαρχια (we assume this refers to her
determination to escape rural patriarchy) and place the blame on επαρχια and the values
of its inhabitants for Despina’s predicament.
The first two acts of Δεσπινα are rigorously unromantic, deconstructing the tropes
of romantic narratives by showing communication between the sexes as almost
impossible. This leads to a type of critical displeasure in which our investment in the
protagonists’ relationship is systematically undermined by the ideological differences
between them. She is mistrustful of men, and of city men in particular, and he much more
naively is looking for a sexual adventure without considering her predicament. Δεσπινα
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establishes two primary binaries – man/woman, urban/rural – around which the tension
between the protagonists is organized. Despina is in a patriarchal double bind as she
depends on a city man in order to help her escape from the village men who oppress her.
Despite the narration’s condemnation of rural patriarchy, Giorgos’ inability to save
Despina signals the collapse of distinctions between urban and rural patriarchal
structures. While Giorgos’ and Despina’s sexual union on the beach seems to go against
the film’s pessimistic construction of gender relations, the ending re-reaffirms it, with
Despina coming once again under the patriarchal order of the father (who is reaching a
breaking point, on the edge of sanity) and being abandoned by Giorgos who was her hope
for escape. By locating the epicenter of Greek patriarchy in a rural context while at the
same time portraying urban patriarchy as fundamentally incapable of redressing the
situation, Δεσπινα seems to function ambivalently as both an affirmation and a refutation
of the rural displacement of patriarchal crisis prevalent in contemporary Greek discourses
about gender relations.
Laga Giourgou’s Σπιτι στην Εξοχη (Country House, 1994) tells the story of
Antonis, a middle-aged ex-leftist intellectual who becomes embroiled in a murder
investigation during a stay at his ex-wife’s country house on a Greek island. Antonis’ ex-
wife, Sissy, is a successful businesswoman who lives in town, so Antonis has the house
to himself to work on his writing. Antonis discovers that Eleni, the house maid, who is
married with two children, is having an affair with a local soccer player, nicknamed
Maradona. He becomes aware that Eleni and Maradona are meeting to have sex in a shed
on the adjacent property, owned by Lazarus, a cantankerous farmer who abuses his wife,
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Fotini, and illegally sells Greek antiquities. When Lazarus goes missing, Antonis
becomes a suspect in the case after it is discovered that he has recorded Eleni and
Maradona’s conversations. Antonis’s anti-establishment sensibilities make him reluctant
to aid the authorities in their investigation, instead incorporating the murder mystery into
his writing (reminiscent of Η Ζωη Εναμισυ Χιλιαρικο). Eventually Fotini confesses to
murdering Lazarus and the suspicions hanging over Eleni, Maradona and Antonis are
lifted. In the film’s conclusion, Eleni tells her husband that his father raped her and that
their eldest child is his father’s, which leads her husband to shoot his father dead. It is
revealed that Eleni’s rape has been covered up for years by the leading patriarchs of the
town. After rebuffing Sissy’s attempts to rekindle their relationship, Antonis boards a
plane to leave, and we hear him, through the narration, say that through all the death and
grief he has experienced while on the island, it is the pages of the story in his breast
pocket that is the only thing he prizes, and the only thing that keeps him sane.
As in Δεσπινα, Σπιτι στην Εξοχη locates patriarchal crisis in a rural context, with
Antonis representing an urban intellectual class seemingly divorced from and critical of
traditional patriarchal structures. Yet, similar to the portrayal of Giorgos in Δεσπινα,
Antonis is presented as an impotent figure, incapable of helping Eleni escape from rural
patriarchy (at one point, Eleni and Maradona attempt to escape the village but they are
eventually captured). Antonis’ paralysis is visually symbolized by the ridiculous head
bandage he is forced to wear throughout most of his stay after being stung by a wasp.
This paralysis is linked to Antonis’ disillusionment with radical leftism (and its apparent
decline as a viable political movement in Greece), his dependence on his wife for
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financial support, and his interest in writing about rather than helping Eleni and
Maradona in their moment of need. However, eventually Antonis does get involved,
helping to discover Lazarus’ body and facilitating the meeting between Eleni and her
husband during which the truth about her rape emerges. Thus, as in Δεσπινα, Σπιτι στην
Εξοχη vacillates between affirming and refuting the rural displacement of patriarchal
crisis. Unlike Η Ζωη Εναμισυ Χιλιαρικο, the film valorizes Antonis’ use of the personal
tragedies he witnesses to invigorate his writing, and unlike Το Χαραμα, it punishes Sissy
for her economic independence, showing her crying after Antonis’ rejection and
suggesting that her spinsterdom is a function of her excessive devotion to her career.
35

The tension between modernity and tradition might also explain the prevalence of
Greek films that employ, as already discussed, a hermeneutics of dread, in which women
become strongly emotionally invested in flawed men, sometimes beyond the point that
seems credible within the logic of the narrative. Alexandra Halkias, in a discussion of
renowned Greek singer Haris Alexiou’s love song lyrics, describes the construction of
obsessive love and surrender to passion as an expression of what is perceived as authentic
Greekness. In some of Alexiou’s songs (such as one titled “Pillage Me”) love is
naturalized as a form of willing female surrender to male betrayal.
36
This act of surrender
is portrayed as an act of female agency, but as Halkias notes, this can be a chimerical
empowerment since the concession that Greek gender relations always involve betrayal
renders women’s willing submission to untrustworthy men a heteronormative
inevitability devoid of agency. According to Halkias, Greek discourses about love
configure gender relations as an ‘economy of pain’: “In effect, Greek women may
106
aggressively make of the source of their pain a point of pride and, in many cases, of
joy.”
37

This economy of pain is in evidence in Eleni Alexandraki’s Σταγωνα στον Ωκεανο
(A Drop in the Ocean, 1995), which tells the story of Anna, an actress who falls in love
with a mysterious man named Andreas. Anna is in the middle of rehearsals for a play
about nineteenth century Greek painter Eleni Altamoutra when she meets Andreas, a
bartender and pool shark who is on the run from the law. Their intense relationship is
complicated by Andreas’ jealousy and his dismissal of acting as deception and fakery.
Anna, drawn to Andreas’ intensity, passion and obsessive attention on her, begins to
neglect rehearsals and becomes alienated from her friends and family who are weary of
the sullen Andreas. Anna tries in vain to convince Andreas of the merits of theater, art
and poetry. Even though Andreas turns his attention to another woman, Anna stays
devoted to him and with only a week to go before opening night decides to quit the play
in order to prove her love to Andreas. Their relationship finally ends when Anna walks
into Andreas’ bar to find him kissing one of the waitresses. Two years later Anna is
getting ready in her dressing room - we realize that it is finally opening night for the play
she quit years ago. Σταγωνα στον Ωκεανο ends with Anna receiving a congratulatory note
from Achileas Constanides, an admirer of both Anna and Eleni Altamoutra, which reads:
“life is but a moment”. Earlier, we witness a conversation between Achileas and Anna in
which Achileas reveals that he admires Eleni Altamoutra because of her generosity of
spirit and her devotion to love, her courage to make herself vulnerable. This ending is
therefore deeply ambivalent, as it simultaneously confirms Anna’s devotion to her acting
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career and underscores her and Achileas’ valorization of obsessive love and female
surrender to male betrayal.
This reading of the ending is supported by Eleni Altamoutra’s life story, which we
find out involved disguising herself as a man in order to study painting in Italy. There she
fell in love with her instructor, Xevario, who becomes very fond of her, and when during
a trip to Greece he discovers she is a woman, he begins an affair with her and they move
to Naples. There, they paint and are both very happy until one day Xevario elopes with
their nude model, Jane, and a devastated Eleni returns to Greece. She burns many of her
paintings, something that along with her gender contributes to her relative obscurity in
the history of Greek art. Anna is similar to Eleni in many ways, something that becomes
evident not only by the riveting monologue Anna gives as Eleni to open the film but also
by her encounter with Achileas, to whom Andreas introduces Anna as Eleni Altamoutra.
Both women’s obsessive love of a man who betrays them interferes with their artistic
careers. The film’s valorization of obsessive love is undermined by Andreas’ betrayal of
Anna– however, the note that Anna reads at the end of the film suggests that far from
regretting her relationship with Andreas she conceives of it as a valuable experience that
affirms her ability to love. Like other films of the period, romantic relations in Σταγωνα
στον Ωκεανο are represented in claustrophobic terms, but in this case, Anna apparently
submits to her relationship with Andreas not because of patriarchal entrapment but rather
as an idealistic expression of passionate love. This reflects Greek discourses about love
that conceive of the sexual realm as an unregulated space impervious to the control
mechanisms of modernization.
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there is even a long academic history of representing sex as a primitive or raw
space that is somehow outside order and social processes…Sexuality seems to be
imagined as a site where some sort of essence of Greekness is expressed. This
essence is construed as consisting primarily of ‘freedom’ or ‘spontaneity,’ which
is juxtaposed to the disciplines of modernity firmly in operation at other sites, and
a unique capacity for the appreciation of pleasure.
38

This explains why Anna’s emulation of Eleni Altamoutra in Σταγωνα στον
Ωκεανο is based on her obsessive love, artistic self-destruction and susceptibility to male
betrayal. What Σταγωνα στον Ωκεανο demonstrates is that Greek films about gender
relations are complicated during this period by national debates about modernization and
its impact on Greek national identity. In the 1990s, public concern over Greece’s
“imperfect” modernization posited the problem dramatically as a matter of national
survival, which took on a specific valence in national debates about women’s role in
social reproduction. Greece has the highest rate of abortion in Europe, reaching a level
four times greater than the birthrate in the 1990s. The country’s abortion rate came to
dominate public debate during this period, spurring numerous parliamentary inquiries,
proposed legislation and research studies, a public firestorm that came to be known
colloquially as the demografiko (the demographic issue). As Halkias notes, the
demografiko positioned women as ‘imperfect’ national subjects whose reproductive
choices were compromising the nation’s very survival. At a time of great international
pressure over the country’s modernization and societal unease over developments in the
Balkans and the large influx of immigrants, the demografiko displaced racist and
territorialist national anxieties onto women’s bodies.
in the shadow of the concerted public attention being paid to the pressures of
modernization and Prime Minister Simitis’s efforts to improve Greece’s position
with the European Community, Greece has witnessed renewed concern with the
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chronically low birth rate of the country. The peak of this concern occurred in
1993-1995, the same time the autonomy of Macedonia was at issue. Experts in
demography and several politicians (mostly of the right), as well as doctors, have
all contributed to the definition of what is widely seen as Greece’s major national
problem….a pronounced cultural fear of the proliferating and allegedly
potentially invading Muslims – itself a displacement of the suppressed fear that
modern Greece is not holding its own economically, politically, or in the area of
foreign diplomacy – is being linked to a strong, also long-standing preoccupation
with the performance of Greek wombs.
39

The dominant argument in the demografiko took on explicitly religious and ethnocentric
tones, proposing that increasing Greek women’s reproduction would replenish the
nation’s ethnically Greek, Christian population as a bulwark against the threat posed by
the influx of Muslim Albanian immigrants and Turkey’s burgeoning populace on its
eastern border.
40
The association of patriarchy with rural backwardness and the
ethnocentrism of the demografiko demonstrate how the structural inequality experienced
by Greek women in the 1990s was systematically reconfigured either as a product of
residual Ottoman influences or as a moral deficiency in the Greek (female) psyche.
41
In
these ways, Greek public discourse about gender issues reaffirmed ethnocentric
conceptions of nationhood and Eurocentric conceptions of ‘proper’ modernization and
ignored the pervasiveness of patriarchal attitudes in all sectors of Greek society.
42

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the demografiko manifested itself in Greek
cinema in a dialectical relation with the other major national preoccupation of that time:
immigration. The patriarchal crisis that marked earlier films was reframed by increased
immigration and heightened anxiety over the ability of the nation to socially reproduce
itself. During this period, Greek immigration discourses took on a specifically gendered
valence because of the influx of Eastern European women, mainly from Bulgaria and
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Russia, many of whom became incorporated into Greece’s domestic service and sex
industries, reaffirming in this way Greek patriarchal constructions of women’s labor in
either domestic or sexualized terms.
This dichotomy is explored in Vasilis Loules’ short film Ενας Λαμπερος Ηλιος (A
Bright Sun, 2000), which tells the story of Natasha, a young Russian woman who works
in Athens in a series of punishing manual labor jobs as a hotel cleaning lady, dishwasher
and bathroom cleaner. Natasha’s roommate, Olga, is a sex worker who earns much more
money than her. Reluctantly, Natasha decides to become a sex worker herself and the
film chronicles her entry into the industry, taking photographs of herself and meeting
with her first clients. Russian culture is conceived as a private sanctum that provides
spiritual escape from the humiliations of sex work. Throughout Ενας Λαμπερος Ηλιος we
see Natasha study Greek with the use of an audio learning tape, repeating Greek words
spoken on the tape in order to learn their meaning and pronunciation. During sex with
one of her clients, Natasha is asked to speak in Russian, and the film ends with her saying
random words in Russian, mimicking the rhetorical rhythms of the audio learning tape.
Her refusal to speak in Russian in anything other than random words undermines her
client’s instructions, and redirects the humiliations that she endures as a sex worker
within the trajectory of her assimilationist aspirations. But at the same time, the authority
of the male voice’s instructions on the audio learning tape is ironized and undermined by
the instructions given to Natasha by her client, revealing the dehumanizing realities of the
processes of integration into Greek society for many female immigrants.
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The influx of female immigrants is portrayed in the Greek cinema of the period as
a phantasmatic resolution of the patriarchal crisis that grips Greek society. In Dimitris
Indares’ Γαμηλια Ναρκη (Totally Married, 2003) and Laga Giourgou’s Λιουμπη (Lioubi,
2005), the incorporation of young Russian women into the Greek nuclear family initially
promises to fulfill the function of social reproduction that has been compromised by the
disjunction between Greek women’s economic empowerment and patriarchy’s continued
dominance in the domestic sphere. But these films demonstrate that Greek men’s
continued sexism, and their racist treatment of immigrants, makes this resolution of
patriarchal crisis impossible.
Γαμηλια Ναρκη tells the story of Petros and Kostas, two friends in love with the
same woman, Lily, Petros’ wife. Petros and Lily’s marriage is strained by their work
commitments, causing them to neglect their sex life and the parenting of their child,
Nikolas. Kostas hires Irina, a Russian sex worker, for Petros in an apparent attempt to
reinvigorate his sex drive. Petros does not sleep with Irina but rather decides to call
Irina’s pimp pretending to be her lawyer. This enrages the pimp leading Irina to fear for
her life, and in response, Petros invites her to work as Nikolas’ live-in nanny. She agrees
becoming a wonderful nanny to Nikolas. Petros and Kostas pay Irina’s pimp a large sum
to release Irina to them, and to provide her with the proper papers she will need to stay in
Greece legally. To complicate matters, Kostas sleeps with Lily and Petros sleeps with
Irina. Irina falls pregnant and Lily assumes that it is Kostas, and not Petros, who has slept
with her. Lily takes Irina to have a sonogram and brings the results to Kostas to force him
to take responsibility for his actions. But the sonogram has Lily’s name on it, because she
112
used her insurance coverage to pay for it, so Kostas comes to believe that it is Lily who is
pregnant with his child and that she plans to keep it. He visits Petros, Irina and Lily at the
hospital and the truth comes out – he slept with Lily and Petros slept with Irina. And Irina
has a surprise for them too – she is married to Yuri and plans to keep the child. Yuri, a
carnival musician who we have seen earlier gazing lovingly at Irina from afar, shows up
to the hospital and Irina leaves with him.
Λιουμπη begins with Dimitris’ engagement party to Penny, and we meet the rest
of his family – Anna is his pregnant sister who is married to Petros. She has already had
one miscarriage and has a lot invested in this pregnancy. Petros spends most of his time
watching soccer and drinking beer rather than working. Dimitris is much more
responsible and owns a gas station where Petros also works sometimes. Anna’s and
Dimitris’ mother, Eleni, also lives with them – she is sick and can no longer speak or
walk by herself. The engagement party is interrupted by the arrival of Lioubi, a young
Russian woman hired to provide live-in nursing assistance to Eleni. Lioubi turns out to be
a wonderful caretaker for Eleni, and she and Dimitris soon fall in love. As their
relationship becomes more serious, Dimitris begins to neglect Penny who is portrayed as
immature and self-centered in contrast to Lioubi. When Dimitris discovers that Petros has
made advances on Lioubi he becomes outraged and confronts him about it. When Anna
miscarries again, she blames it on the fact that Lioubi was staying in the child’s future
room. Meanwhile, after Dimitris’ break-up from Penny, Lioubi becomes pregnant and
decides to keep the child. Dimitris is unwilling to publicly acknowledge his love for
Lioubi, to tell his family about her, or to take responsibility for her child other than
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through clandestine payments and setting up a house for her far away. Lioubi refuses this
arrangement and when she realizes that he is unwilling to publicly commit to her she
leaves him. The boldest representational aspect of Λιουμπη is that while it initially sets up
Dimitris as the ‘good Greek male’ and Petros as the ‘bad Greek male’, Dimitris’ inability
to commit to Lioubi reveals that they are both essentially the same in terms of their
perception and treatment of women and immigrants.
Both Γαμηλια Ναρκη and Λιουμπη idealize Eastern European women’s abilities as
devoted caretakers and companions to men. Like Natasha in Ενας Λαμπερος Ηλιος, Irina
in Γαμηλια Ναρκη navigates between the twin functions of domestic service and sex work
made available to her in Greek society. In Γαμηλια Ναρκη and Λιουμπη, Greek gender
relations are dominated by male betrayal, deception and irresponsibility. Female
immigrant characters upend the balance of power between the sexes, providing an ideal
against which Greek women are to be judged. As such, they increase the power of Greek
men, who can now choose between them and Greek women, and thus bypass the
contradictions of Greek patriarchy precipitated by Greek women’s socio-economic
empowerment. In both films, unions between immigrant women and Greek men do not
last– but whereas in Γαμηλια Ναρκη a happy ending is manufactured through the almost
magical appearance of Yuri that absolves the Greek man of any responsibility for his
actions, in Λιουμπη, no such man appears and it is made clear that the Greek man is
incapable of thinking of an immigrant woman as someone he could marry openly in
Greek society without losing status. Nevertheless, in Γαμηλια Ναρκη the presence of Yuri
does introduce the notion of a wider immigrant community, and does not isolate the
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immigrant character within a Greek domestic space that precludes any possibility of a
non-dominant collectivity.
Both films pit immigrant women against Greek women, and provide Greek men
access to immigrant women’s bodies, control over their legal status, social identities and
visibility. Whereas Λιουμπη precludes any possibility for female solidarity across ethnic
lines, since Anna is too obsessed with her own pregnancy to support Lioubi, in Γαμηλια
Ναρκη Lily is sympathetic to Irina and helps her during her pregnancy. The perceived
crisis in Greek social reproduction is symbolized by the fact that it is Irina and not Lily
who becomes pregnant in Γαμηλια Ναρκη and by Anna’s inability to bear children in
Λιουμπη. In both films, immigrant female characters choose to raise their children
without the parental involvement of their Greek fathers. This suggests that the
reproduction of Greek society will occur in large part due to the strong parental
commitments of immigrant women, but without the contribution of Greek men until they
learn to cope with the new diversity of Greek society and the declining power of Greek
patriarchy. Thus both films counter the ethnocentric emphasis of the demografiko, which
insists on the reproductive duties of ethnically Greek women as a bulwark against the
influx of immigrants into Greek society. The continued primacy of Greek patriarchal
contradictions inhibiting gender relations in these films suggests that immigration will
not resolve the patriarchal crisis highlighted in earlier films but rather will alleviate the
crisis in social reproduction through the inevitable shift in the ethnic composition of
Greek society.
115
The dynamics of gender representation discussed so far reach full expression in
Panos Karkanevatos’ Χωμα και Νερο (Earth and Water, 1999). The film tells the story of
Nikolas and Konstantina, two young lovers, who try to keep their passionate love affair
secret in a northern Greek village. Nikolas, a shepherd, often sneaks away from his job to
meet with Konstantina by the river or in the forest. When Konstantina becomes pregnant,
her brother takes her to Thessaloniki to get an abortion, warning her that if Nikolas
“knocks her up” again, he will kill him. When she sneaks away to see Nikolas again, her
brother takes a gun and chases after her. Nikolas narrowly escapes detection, nearly
drowning in the river; shaken, he decides to leave for Thessaloniki. There he quickly
finds a job at a night club, accompanying another club worker to Bulgaria, where they
“purchase” and transport two women across the border to work as dancers and prostitutes
in the club. After the Bulgarian men they meet ask for more money, Nikolas instinctively
puts a knife on the throat of one of them and they back off. One of the two women they
bring back is called Elena, and she is reluctant at first to dance or prostitute herself.
Nikolas takes her a hotel, where they stay the night, sleeping separately The next day,
while Nikolas is away, the hotel owner arranges for Elena to strip for a private party full
of young professional men. Elena agrees at first but then backs out. When Nikolas hears
of this he tells Elena that she doesn’t need him anymore and she, dismayed, starts
dancing and (we infer) prostituting herself at the club.
Meanwhile, not knowing that Nikolas is there, Konstantina’s family sends her to
Thessaloniki, where she gets a job as a clothing store assistant and soon becomes bored
and disillusioned with city life. When Nikolas brings back Elena from Bulgaria, they
116
disembark in front of the clothing store where Konstantina works. She sees Nikolas but
says nothing at the time. Later, she sees Elena looking at clothes in the store window and
invites her in to try on a dress which she then buys for her. From Elena Konstantina finds
out where Nikolas is staying and visits him telling him that she loves him. But the next
day he leaves her, saying he has changed a lot. Heart-broken, she returns to the village
hoping that Nikolas will come back to her someday. Ivan, the Bulgarian man that Nikolas
had an altercation with earlier, comes to the city looking for revenge, and the film ends
with Ivan burning down the night club and stabbing Nikolas (we assume, fatally). The
film is punctuated by brief glimpses of Elena’s journey from Bulgaria, her running away
from Ivan, her abuse at the hands of a Greek bank manager who picks her up on the road,
and her taxi ride that at one moment takes her through a herd of sheep.
As in Δεσπινα and Σπιτι στην Εξοχη, Χωμα και Νερο initially situates patriarchal
crisis in a rural context and establishes urban spaces as potential sites of transcendence of
patriarchal oppression. But as in these other films, it soon becomes clear that city life
presents its own problems for Nikos and Konstantina. Whereas in their home village it is
their family’s prohibition of their union that inhibits them, in Thessaloniki it is social
complexity and moral bankruptcy that separates them, miring Konstantina in a dreary
assistant job and bringing Nikolas into contact with the violence and exploitation of the
sex industry. The raw sexual energy and passion of the couple’s clandestine encounters in
the village are contrasted to their lethargy and alienation in the city. In this way, Χωμα
και Νερο articulates the disillusionment in Greek society with both tradition and
modernity. The representation of Bulgarians is dichotomized problematically along
117
gender lines, with Elena presented as someone in need of rescue and Ivan as a violent
antagonist. Social reproduction is impeded in different ways in rural and urban contexts
in the film: Konstantina’s family forces an abortion in her village and induces Nikolas to
flee for the city, where his disillusionment with the sex industry and eventual death
separate him from Konstantina permanently. Immigration is presented as a possible site
of spiritual renewal, as Nikolas’ desire to save Elena from the sex industry gives him
purpose and Elena’s encounter with Konstantina gives her a chance to reunite with
Nikolas. But the sex industry interpellates Elena in such a way that she becomes the
vehicle for the couple’s dissolution rather than their reunification. The film thus shows
how immigrant women’s contingent entry into Greek society, bought and sold in its sex
industry, accentuates rather than mitigates patriarchal inequalities.
43
Karkanevatos
emphasizes the contingency of gendered immigration through brief scenes that repeat
throughout the film from a different character’s perspective, such as Nikolas’ and Elena’s
return from Bulgaria that we later realize occurs outside of Konstantina’s store, or the
passing of a taxi cab through Nikolas’ herd of sheep that we later realize carries Elena.
Nikolas and Konstantina are presented as unusually passionate in their love for each other
(recalling the intensities of Σταγωνα στον Ωκεανο), perhaps even developmentally
challenged (Nikolas attends school with elementary school kids), something that
accentuates the couple’s disorientation once they arrive in the city and their susceptibility
to the intimidation of their families.
The representation of Nikolas and Konstantina as wild naifs in Χωμα και Νερο
suggests a profound ambivalence with the social and cultural markers of modernity,
118
indeed, with the very notion of European civilization as an ideological construct. Yet the
pessimism of the ending of Χωμα και Νερο makes clear that a return to a pre-modern
Greek identity is untenable. While the Greek filmmakers discussed so far responded to
European modernization by turning inward, others found themselves unable to ignore or
deny the external determinants on Greek national identity, making films that wrestle with
Greece’s role in Europe and the Balkans. In these films, characters struggle to reconcile
their identity with external investments in ancient Greek history and continental
directives mandating the Europeanization of Greek economic and political institutions.
By exploring the agency of contemporary Greeks living under the burden of a set of
discourses threatening to overwhelm as subjects, these films exhibit an extroversion not
found in the films discussed so far. The next chapter will be concerned with this cinema
of extroversion that cautiously articulates possible directions for Greece’s future regional
identity.

119
Chapter 2 Endnotes

1
Artemis Leontis: “Ambivalent Greece”, Journal of Modern Greek Studies, vol. 15 no. 1, May 1997a, p.
125.
2
Ibid, p. 128.
3
Leontis, quoted in Dimitris Tziovas: “Beyond the Acropolis: Rethinking Neohellenism, Journal of
Modern Greek Studies, vol. 19 no. 2, Oct. 2001, p. 198.
4
Gregory Jusdanis: Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture: Inventing National Culture (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. xiii.
5
Kevin Featherstone: “Introduction”, Greece in a Changing Europe: Between European Integration and
Balkan Disintegration?, ed., Kevin Featherstone and Kostas Ifantis (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1996), p. 4.
6
The specific challenges of Greece’s geopolitical position and the traumas of its recent history have created
a political culture characterized by defensive nationalism and suspicion of external influences. P.C
Ioakimidis notes that “because of the fluidity of the regional environment and its unstable relationships,
Greece was, and still is, the only member-state of the EU that feels a threat to its territorial integrity, a
threat that forces it to devote almost five percent of its GDP on military expenditures, the highest
percentage in the Atlantic area.” According to James Pettifer, the defensiveness of Greek nationalist
sentiment is due to “the influence of legitimate nationalist feeling in such matters as relations with Turkey
and Cyprus and the frustration wrought by outside manipulation of Greek foreign and security policy in the
recent past. Furthermore northern Europeans often seem wholly ignorant of the trauma of internal upheaval
such as the Civil War (1944-1949) and the Colonels’ dictatorship and the fact that whole segments of the
Hellenic population come from families who were refugees from hostile surrounding countries well within
living memory.” Pettifer goes on to say that the cumulative effect of this “recent history has been to cloak
Greeks in a conservative and defensive frame of mind, resistant to the modernism of the period of capitalist
triumph”. P.C. Ioakimidis: “Greece, The European Union and Southeastern Europe: Past Failures and
Future Prospects”, Greece and the New Balkans: Challenges and Opportunities, Van Coufoudakis, ed.,
Harry J. Psomiades and Andre Gerolymatos (New York: Pella Publishing Company, 1999), p. 176; James
Pettifer: “Greek Political Culture and Foreign Policy”, Greece in a Changing Europe: Between European
Integration and Balkan Disintegration?, ed., Kevin Featherstone and Kostas Ifantis (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1996), pp. 18-19.
7
Greek feelings of insufficiency were identified in the results of Youth and History, a Europe-wide survey
of the conceptions of history among the continent’s high school students. Greek students exhibited a high
level of “rhetorical haughtiness”, a tendency to be over-assertive or exhibit extreme levels of confidence in
one’s opinions. which A-J D. Metaxas interprets as an attempt to mask and compensate for underlying
insecurities about the perception of Greece internationally: “ With this haughtiness they intend to send
proof of ‘cultural equivalence.’ In other words, since Greek students feel that others view them
condescendingly, they formulate responses that are not only culturally equivalent vis-à-vis the position of
other national groups but that go well beyond the responses of these others. They may thus consider that
they can cover the gap and overcome their concern about how others perceive and evaluate them.” A-J D.
Metaxas: “Rhetorical Haughtiness and the Need for Self-assurance: An Analysis of Greek Student
Responses”, Journal of Modern Greek Studies, vol. 18 no. 2, Oct. 2000, pp. 375-376.
8
Dimitris Tziovas: “Mapping Out Greek Literary Modernism”, Greek Modernism and Beyond, ed.,
Dimitris Tziovas (Lanham: Rowan and Littlefield Publishers Inc., 1997b), pp. 32, 35-36. Tziovas notes that
120

“the 1930s and the 1960s [were] two very important and critical decades for Greece unfolding in the wake
of two national catastrophies: Asia Minor and the civil war. In these two periods, marked by two liberal
political figures, Venizelos and George Papandreou, we also witness the results of an earlier and ongoing
social mobility due to the exchange of populations and internal and external migration. In many respects,
and particularly in cultural terms, these two decades were the most vibrant and they shared a number of
similarities. For example, both of them began with periods of economic growth, and ended in dictatorships
which might be perceived as the consequence of the cultural dynamism and ideological pluralism of their
first parts.” Ibid, p. 29.
9
Dimitris Tziovas attributes this difference to the specific historical experience of Greeks since the
foundation of the modern Greek state: “Modernism in Europe has been associated with universal capitalism
and cultural imperialism. In contrast, Greek modernism, experienced as an identity problem, can be seen as
introverted, ethnocentric and anti-colonial. For certain Greek poets to be modernists meant to hellenize
modernity, to advocate a ‘national modernism’. For them, modernism involved an antimodernist strategy,
namely the reactivation of tradition and the adaptation of Western literary trends, such as surrealism, into a
national context.” Dimitris Tziovas: “Introduction”, Greek Modernism and Beyond, ed., Dimitris Tziovas
(Lanham: Rowan and Littlefield Publishers Inc., 1997a), p. 2.
10
Nicos Mouzelis: “Greece in the Twenty-first Century: Institutions and Political Culture”, Greece
Prepares for the Twenty-first Century, ed., Dimitri Constas and Theofanis G. Stavrou (Washington D.C.:
The Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1995), p. 20. “One is a more traditionally oriented, indigenously
based, inward-looking political orientation, hostile to Enlightenment ideas as well as to the institutional
arrangements of Western modernity. The other is a modernizing, outward-looking orientation that tries to
‘catch up’ with the West by adopting Western institutions and values as rapidly as possible…the former [is]
an ‘underdog’ culture, characterized by introvertedness, parochialism, latent authoritarianism (derived
mainly from the Ottoman legacy), a leveling egalitarianism (linked to the prevalence of small producers-
owners in both agriculture and industry), and a xenophobic attitude that leads to ‘a conspiratorial
interpretation of events and…a pronounced sense of cultural inferiority towards the Western world,
coupled with a hyperbolic and misguided sense of the importance of Greece in international affairs and,
more generally, in the history of Western civilization. This cultural outlook – of mostly the least-
competitive social strata and sectors of the economy (small business owners, white-collar workers, state-
protected industrialists) – contrasts with a more Western-oriented, modernizing-universalizing culture that
favors reforms towards ‘a rationalization along liberal, democratic and capitalistic lines.’ This is the
attitude supported by the intelligentsia, the diaspora bourgeoisie, and social elements associated with export
activities.”
11
In all these films, national identity is associated with maleness and homosociality, with women reduced
to roles as peripheral objects of desire.
12
Tziovas, 1997a, p. 4. Artemis Leontis concurs with Tziovas: “Unlike the modernist standard, however,
which explored the primitive roots of exoticized others in its tireless search to reinvent the new, neohellenic
modernism insisted on its own native authenticity. It restored interest in its local forms. It planted its
modernized logos firmly in the topos of Hellas. It reaffirmed its indigenous ties with a Hellenic Hellenic
tradition”. Quoted in ibid, p. 4n.
13
Maria Koundoura: The Greek Idea: The Formation of National and Transnational Identities (London:
Tauris Academic Studies, 2007), p. 98. Maria Koundoura notes: “[Paparrigopoulos] was convinced that the
Greeks needed to subscribe to a higher vision of national unity to override sectional interests and to
promote union with the vast territories not yet liberated and incorporated into the nation-state.” Ibid, p. 88.
For more on Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos and his influence on the formation of modern Greek national
identity, see Victor Roudemetof: “Nationalism and Identity Politics in the Balkans: Greece and the
Macedonian Question”, Journal of Modern Greek Studies, vol. 14 no. 2, Oct. 1996, pp. 282-283.
121

14
Maria Koundoura notes: “Citizenship policy during the first decades of the Greek state was mainly
oriented towards incorporating the heterochthonous homogeneis (aliens of “Greek descent” living abroad)
who were then settling Greece. In the aftermath of the Balkan Wars (1912-1913), and as apart of the ‘Great
Idea’, Greece almost doubled its territory and population. Large allogeneis populations, former Ottoman
subjects, were ‘hostages’ in the expanded Greek territory. At the same time, significant numbers of Greek-
Orthodox populations or Greek speakers left to reside beyond the borders of Greece. Through a process of
population exchange between Greece and Bulgaria in 1919 and Greece and Turkey in 1923, the violent
expulsion of Albanian Chams from Epirus in 1944 and the expulsion of Slav-Macedonians from Northern
Greece during the Civil War, either through its own direct actions or through that of others, like that of the
Nazis and their extermination of the Sephardic Jews of Thessaloniki, Greece minimized the presence of
Greek citizens of non-Greek descent (allogeneis) and assembled a significant number of aliens of Greek
descent (homogeneis) to whom Greek citizenship was granted de jure in the ‘motherland’ (the only
requirement was a three-year residency).” Koundoura, pp. 98-99. According to Victor Roudemetof, the
assimilationist policy of the Greek state “puts Greece at variance with currently existing international
treaties and norms concerning the status of minorities within particular states”. Roudemetof, pp. 266, 272-
273.
15
Roudemetof, pp. 256-257, 274. Greek citizenship is designed to encourage assimilation of ethnic
minorities into Greek national identity and discriminates against religious minorities in favor of the Greek
Orthodox Church. As Stephanos Stavros states, “Greek laws appear to encourage the assimilation of
persons of non-Greek ethnic background. Section 19 of the Code of Citizenship facilitates the severing of
the links between the Greek State and those who do not assimilate… although direct religious
discrimination is not easily tolerated by the majority of Greek courts, most notably the Council of State,
there exists a number of laws which fail to take into account religious diversity” favoring the Greek
Orthodox Church over others in cases such as proselytism. Greek law also does not adequately protect
minorities: “the enjoyment of several constitutional rights can vary depending on ethnic origin, religion and
language. This trend appears to be related, in the first place, to a citizenship policy the principal aim of
which is to protect ethnic homogeneity” The key problem is Section 19 of the Code of Citizenship which
predicates Greek citizenship on assimilation of ethnic difference: “Section 19 allows for the withdrawal of
Greek citizenship from persons who do not belong to the nation and who have left the country with no
intention of returning.” Stephanos Stavros: “Citizenship and the Protection of Minorities”, Greece in a
Changing Europe: Between European Integration and Balkan Disintegration?, ed., Kevin Featherstone and
Kostas Ifantis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), pp. 120-124.
16
The reticence of the Greek state to recognize minorities is evidenced by the fact that censuses after 1951
do not track ethnic, religious or linguistic differences. Christos L. Rozakis cites as reasons for this reticence
the “predominantly conservative social and professional orientations” of Greek civil society and the limited
exposure of its members to “alien cultures and different ways of life; a fact which is due to the limited
mobility of a large part of the society and to the geographical isolation of the country.” Another factor is
the fact that some minorities, especially the Muslim minority in western Thrace, “have been identified with
territorial claims [irredentism] coming from neighbouring countries with whom Greece’s political relations
are tense.” Christos L. Rozakis, “The International Protection of Minorities in Greece”, Greece in a
Changing Europe: Between European Integration and Balkan Disintegration?, ed., Kevin Featherstone and
Kostas Ifantis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), p. 98.
17
During the course of the 1990s, several laws were passed aimed at addressing the pressing immigration
issue, coordinated by a series of government ministries. Maria Koundoura points out that the passing of
immigration policy through these various ministries demonstrates the progression of the conception of the
immigration issue in Greek political culture from a security threat to an unavoidable reality that revolves
around the question of basic human rights.: “Having been primarily a country of emigration rather than
immigration until the 1990s, Greece scrambled to produce legislation on immigration beginning in 1991,
1996-7, and 2001. The bills that came out of these efforts had several homes: the 1991 bill was drafted as a
security measure and was implemented primarily by the Ministry of Public Order; the Employment
122

Ministry played the lead role in the 1996-7 legalizations of immigrants, and the 2001 immigration bill was
the responsibility of the Interior Ministry. This changing locus of policymaking shows the changing way in
which immigrants are viewed by policymakers in Greece: first they are seen as a threat, then as workers,
and finally as people with rights and duties.” Koundoura, p. 98.
18
For more on the legal status and treatment of minorities in contemporary Greece, see Hugh Poulton: The
Balkans: Minorities and States in Conflict (London: Minority Rights Group, 1991), pp. 175-190.

19
Koundoura, pp. 99, 101-102.
20
Several contemporary Greek films feature immigrant characters who view Greece as an intermediate stop
to another destination: in Stavros Ioannou’s Κλειστοι Δρομοι (Roadblocks, 2000) Kurdish refugees living in
Koumoundourou Square, in Athens, yearn to escape to Italy; in Theodoros Nikolaidis’ Cypriot film
Kalabush (2002) Mustafa, a Syrian man on his way to Italy, is abandoned by his smugglers in Cyprus; in
Theo Angelopoulos’ Eternity and a Day (1998), a young Albanian boy who lives on the streets of
Thessaloniki seeks to emigrate to the United States.
21
Giannaris’ association of immigrant marginality with other peripheral elements in Greek society is
echoed in Kalabush, which tells the story of Mustafa, a Syrian man who is abandoned on the shores of
Cyprus by his smugglers. Mustafa befriends Nikolas, a middle-aged man who lives in a junkyard, and a
group of young anarchists who rally to prevent the state from destroying the junkyard. The film constructs
the junkyard as a carnivalesque space, where Nikolas and his friends hold masked parties and are
surrounded by fantastical statues and other commercial detritus. When Mustafa dons an ape costume in
order to evade the police and is mistaken for a baboon that has escaped from the local zoo, the film’s
carnivalesque aesthetic becomes a satire of the dehumanization of immigrants in contemporary Greek and
Cypriot political discourse.
22
Nota Kyriazis: “Feminism and the Status of Women in Greece”, Greece Prepares for the Twenty-first
Century, ed., Dimitri Constas and Theofanis G. Stavrou (Washington D.C.: The Woodrow Wilson Center
Press, 1995), p. 267.
23
Anna Karamanou: “The Changing Role of Women in Greece”, Greece in the Twentieth Century, ed.,
Theodore A. Couloumbis, Theodore Kariotis and Fotini Bellou (London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2003), p.
280. Nevertheless, there were some gains for women’s rights before 1975. In 1930, women were granted
the right to vote in local elections, provided they were literate and over 30 years old. The first women’s
schools and associations were formed in the 1920s, spurred by the influx of educated women after the Asia
Minor population exchange which brought a greater awareness of women’s issues to Greece. Women were
granted full political rights in 1952, with Law 2620/1953 prohibiting all discriminations against women and
facilitating their entry into the Greek civil service. Ibid, pp. 278-279.
24
Kyriazis, pp. 281-283.
25
Karamanou, p. 280.
26
Ibid, pp. 275, 286.
27
As Anna Karamanou notes, the continued under-representation of women in Greek economic and
political life has far-reaching negative consequences: “continuing direct and indirect discrimination and
inequality in the labour market, high unemployment rates, inadequate social infrastructure, unequal
distribution of time and responsibilities between men and women, violence and sexual harassment, the
portrayal of distorted stereotypes by the mass media and the double standards of sexual morality, are all
123

problems that are dialectically connected to the low participation of women in economic and political
power structures.” Ibid, p. 275.
28
In addition to Η Ζωη Εναμισυ Χιλιαρικο, Το Χαραμα, Η Αλλη Οψη, Σταγωνα στον Ωκεανο and Δεσπινα
discussed here, this hermeneutics of dread is in evidence in Menios Ditsas’ Νυχτερινη Εξοδος (Night Exit,
1991) and Nikos Savatis’ and Maritina Passari’s Η Γυναικα που Επιστρεφει (The Woman Who Comes
Back, 1994). In the ending scene of the latter film, the destabilization of the patriarchal order by female
empowerment is visualized as we witness, from the perspective of Stavros, the male protagonist, his
girlfriend, Maria, get into a car with a stranger at a gas station and drive away. This resolves the central
enigma in the film, Maria’s disappearance, which occurs at the beginning of the narrative. This final shot of
the film confirms Maria’s agency in her own disappearance which serves as an indictment of the abusive
Stavros and the patriarchal order that he embodies in the film.
29
Nicos Mouzelis: “The Concept of Modernization: Its Relevance for Greece”, Journal of Modern Greek
Studies, vol. 14 no. 2, Oct. 1996, pp. 219-222. Nicos Mouzelis’s description of Greece’s belated modernity
is an example of the phallocentric language used by many Greek development theorists to describe
“backward” rural areas as antagonists to modernizing forces in urban centers, requiring “penetration” by
them for the sake of economic and political development: “Among the countries that entered the
development race a century or so later than the nations of Western Europe we may include Greece, as well
as several other Balkan, Latin American, and Asian countries. For a variety of reasons, the nation-state in
these latecomers took a form different from that of its Western-European predecessors. In these cases, the
‘modern’ did not manage to become dominant, did not succeed in peripheralizing the ‘traditional.’ Instead,
in these countries the modern and the traditional have come to coexist side by side in unstable equilibrium.
To be more concrete, on the political level the central state did penetrate the periphery, but it failed to
marginalize the prevailing particularistic, clientelistic elements.” Ibid, pp. 219-220, my emphasis. See also
Mouzelis, 1995.
30
P. C. Ioakimidis: “The Europeanization of Greece: An Overall Assessment”, Europeanization and the
Southern Periphery, ed., Kevin Featherstone and George Kazamias (London: Frank Cass, 2001), pp. 78-79.
P. C. Ioakimidis describes Greek political culture until EU accession as being characterized by an “over-
centralization of powers, functions and competencies in the state apparatus located in Athens with very
little regional powers and autonomy. Athens controlled practically everything at the regional level.
Moreover, greater Athens was the residence of almost 45 per cent of the total Greek population and the
location of almost 70 per cent of the total economic activities. Greece was rightly considered the most
centralized unitary state in Europe in the early 1980s.” According to Ioakimidis, the “gigantism” of the
Greek state apparatus is evident in the following economic and political markers: “(1) the over-employment
in the public sector; (2) the high amount of public expenditure as a share of GNP; and (3) the extensive
regulatory role performed by the state and the latter’s overwhelming participation in economic activities.”
Ibid, pp. 76-79.
31
The displacement of anxiety over Greece’s internal marginality onto its own peripheries signals a crisis
of confidence. Dimitris Tziovas notes that a characteristic of the 1930s and 1960s, the periods of greatest
cultural vibrancy in modern Greek history, was regional dynamism: “Another common phenomenon that
characterizes the 1930s and the 1960s is the literary presence and challenge of the regions, and particularly
Thessaloniki, which contributed enormously to the cultural polyphony of the 1930s and 1960s.” Tziovas,
1997b, p. 31.
32
Kyriazis, p. 273.
33
Ibid, p. 275.
34
Roy Panagiotopoulou: “Greeks in Europe: Antinomies in National Identities”, Journal of Modern Greek
Studies, vol. 15 no. 2, Oct 1997, p. 360.
124

35
In some Greek films of this period, moments of female homosociality provide a social alternative to
patriarchal entrapment. In Pericles Hoursoglou’s Ματια απο Νυχτα (Eyes of Night, 2003), an unlikely love
triangle between a middle-aged truck driver, a middle-aged woman and a young drifter is resolved when
the two women, antagonists throughout the narrative, embrace at the end of the film, recognizing their
solidarity against the abuses of the man they both once loved. In H Gynaika Pou Epistrefei, Maria’s
abusive relationship finally ends (albeit violently) when her female friend intervenes to help her escape
from Stavros’ clutches.
36
Alexandra Halkias notes: “The precognition of betrayal, coupled with the strongly stated desire to
nonetheless give all, is the real proof of love. This is what yields the deep sense of tragedy that often
accompanies not only songs of love, but also most stories of love that contemporary Greece tells and lives.
Indeed, an a priori assumption of a lack of trustworthiness, testing it and trials of it, may be a significant
part of the discursive practices animating Greek relationships of all types.” See Alexandra Halkias: The
Empty Cradle of Democracy: Sex, Abortion and Nationalism in Modern Greece (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2004), pp. 148-149.
37
Ibid, p.150.
38
Halkias, pp. 151, 154.
39
Ibid, pp. 78-79. See also Athena Athanasiou: “Bloodlines: Performing the Body of the ‘Demos,’
Reckoning the Time of the ‘Ethnos’”, Journal of Modern Greek Studies, vol. 24 no. 2, Oct. 2006, pp. 229-
256.
40
Alexandra Halkias notes : “The heightened concern over productivity in the economy does not eliminate
the fear of invasion by Turkey but, rather, displaces it so that it is often transmuted into the more modernly
palatable, if Orientalizing, notion that Greece will be overrun by (unmodernly, as this narrative goes)
proliferating Muslims, and other ‘foreigners’ who are more and more immigrating to Greece. The only
protection ‘we’ have from such a prospect, according to this story, is if Greek women do their part to
protect the nation in these dire straits by ceasing to abort [thus] fulfilling what emerges as their civic duty to
be a mother. This complex and always open-ended struggle to be modern, as well as the occasional truces
in the struggle, create a friction between the cultural ‘tectonic plates’ of the social formations and
discursive practices associated with modernity and tradition.” Halkias, p. 5.
41
Alexandra Halkias notes: “the demografiko operates as a powerful reproductive technology that
contributes to the ongoing state-building project of policing particular configurations of race, religion,
gender, and sexuality as properly ‘Greek,’ while excluding others. In addition, positioning the high rate of
abortion and the low rate of births as problems threatening the country’s future welfare serves as an
effective coping mechanism that manages tensions resulting from the new patterns of immigration and
capital consolidation while also inhibiting the interrogation of other sites about the sources of Greece’s
problems.” Halkias, p. 114.
42
It is telling that rarely in the demografiko public debates of the 1990s did anyone bring up the role of
gender inequality as a possible cause for the ‘low’ birth rates. Anna Karamanou notes that the tension
between public and private demands on women’s time has not been adequately addressed in Greek society.
As a result, women must take on too much in order to succeed in both spheres, leading to a “much greater
social and political cost (increasing stress for people, especially for women, diminishing care for people in
need, low fertility rate, increase in the rates of divorce, and reduced productivity).” Karamanou, p. 287, my
emphasis.
43
Χωμα και Νερο joins a host of other contemporary Greek films – Ολα Ειναι Δρομος, Απο την Ακρη της
Πολης (already discussed), Nikos Triantafilidis’ Radio Moscow (1995), Andreas Thomopulos’ Αυριο Θα
Ξερουμε (Dharma Blue Bums, 1997) and Nikos Panagiotopoulos’ Αυτη η Νυχτα Μενει (The Edge of Night,
125

1999) – in thematizing the widespread illegal human trafficking of women, mostly from Russia and
Bulgaria, into Greece, where they are forced to work as dancers and (clandestine) sex workers in night
clubs.

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Chapter 3. National Cinema as Extroversion:
Metaphors of Identity in Contemporary Greek Films

From Philhellenism to Europeanization: Greece in Europe
[The] notion of a continuous passageway from past to present has been both a
blessing and a curse for Greeks, who have profited and suffered from being
represented (and from representing themselves) as the children of antiquity.
-- Gregory Jusdanis
1

Since the inception of the modern Greek nation-state, constructions of Hellenism
have been externally overdetermined due to the central role that ancient Greece has
occupied in the European imaginary. Western discourses on ancient Greece have
systematically idealized its political and cultural characteristics in order to construct the
historical progression of European civilization in the most favorable terms. As William
V. Spanos argues, western Europeans’ Philhellenism in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, their interest in and admiration for ancient Greek culture , was not so much an
expression of solidarity with modern Greeks as it was an effort to fulfill the teleological
imperatives of Eurocentrism as an ideological and historiographic project:
Despite the genuineness of the European nations' Philhellenism, their interest in
the nascent Greek nation-state was informed by a fundamental Eurocentrism. It
undoubtedly had less to do with the amelioration of the Greek condition than with
using the War of Independence for purposes of reestablishing once and for all the
History-ordained primacy of Europe in relationship to the rest of the world, that
is, its metropolitan hegemony on a global scale.
2

The idealism of western Philhellenism ignored the complex political and social realities
of ancient Greece, the central role played by alterity, radical inquiry and agon, as well as
slave ownership, gender inequality and territorial rivalry. As already mentioned, this
idealism meant that modern Greece became the object of intense criticism and proved a
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disappointment to its European observers. More importantly, these idealist conceptions of
ancient Greece have had a profound influence on modern Greeks’ conceptions of
themselves.
The appropriation of ancient Greek history by Eurocentrism has prevented
modern Greeks from adequately dealing with their own past. Maria Koundoura notes that
European constructions of Hellenism have posited Greece in universalist terms, either as
Europe’s past in the form of tradition or as Europe’s future in the form of a utopian
ideal.
3
Ironically, the role of Greece as a structural category of historical analysis central
to constructions of European identity serves to dehistoricize it, situating it as a ‘non-
place’, outside of historical time, essential to our understanding of history yet outside of it
due to its idealization:
Greece as ‘non-place’ is the structural category of historical analysis with which
the West’s myth of progress was rendered into logos…As de Certeau explains,
this ‘non-place’ is indispensable for any orientation but it cannot have a place in
history because it is the principle that organizes history. As such, it is the object
upon which the subject projects the values that constitute it, that is, produces it in
time, without itself ever being in time.
4

This dehistoricization is evident in the arguments propounded by European historians that
modern Greeks are not the genealogical descendants of the ancients. While this has
caused consternation because it deprives modern Greeks of an association with ancient
“glories”, the real problem is that it has reduced Greek history to a set of abstract ideals
that, ironically, have been used by reactionary forces to legitimate authoritarian turns in
Greek political culture.
Central to this legacy of appropriation has been the suppression of Greece’s
Byzantine and Ottoman heritage, which has either been ignored or sited as the reason for
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the differences between ancient and modern Greece. Western scholars have not only
suppressed Greece’s Ottoman and Byzantine heritage but also the Asian and African
influences on ancient Greek culture.
5
At a time when Greece faces a period of heightened
multiculturalism, this has serious consequences. The 1990s was a period of acute social
transformation that re-ignited ethnocentric constructions of Greek nationhood.
6
In the
1990s, the suppression of Greece’s multicultural historical legacy, which is partially a
result of the idealization of ancient Greece in the European imaginary, allowed
ethnocentric constructions of Hellenism to continue to dominate Greek political and
cultural discourse during a period marked by real or imagined geopolitical threats and
lingering anxiety over Greece’s reputation in Europe. As Artemis Leontis notes:
We are most familiar with rather defensive efforts to assert the quiddity of
Greekness by identifying Hellenism with Greeks and Greece….Macedonia is
Greek (not Slavic), Athena is Greek (not Black), the Olympics belong to Greece
(not Coca Cola), the Aegean is Greek (not Turkish), indeed the Pyramids, too,
are Greek (not Egyptian). Even some recent Greek literature occupies the self-
limiting topos of ethnocentrism, a drafty house built on the never soundly tested
principle that exclusivity is security.
7

The Eurocentric appropriation of ancient Greek history has also bolstered the
construction of authoritarian nationalism by anti-democratic forces within Greece. The
reduction of Greek history to a set of abstract ideals (despite the fact that one of these
ideals is “democracy”) has severed it from the notion of popular agon and revolutionary
struggle.
8
Right-wing forces during periods of dictatorship or civil war have used the
construction of ancient Greeks as racially superior progenitors of European civilization to
label left-wing democratic forces as foreign agents (typically, Slavic), whose actions and
principles are incommensurate with ancient Greek ideals. Most disastrously, the neo-
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imperialist glorification of ancient Greece was used by Greek nationalists in the early
1900s to legitimate their expansionist ambitions, which ended in a devastating defeat at
the hands of Turkish forces and a wholesale population exchange that effectively ended
the millennia-old Greek presence in Asia Minor. In these ways, the distortions of western
Philhellenism have transformed not just common perceptions of ancient Greece, but also
it modern counterpart. Eurocentric and neo-imperialist constructions of modern Greece
have provided the ideological means by which Greek political elites have, all too often,
willingly sacrificed the welfare of their society at the altar of history:
This Greece, in short, was conceived to assure its status as a satellite of Europe: a
Europeanized Greece that was at the same time a metaphysical Greece, a
humanist Greece, a nationalist Greece, a racist Greece, and, ultimately…an
imperialist Greece. Like the classical Greece invented by the Enlightenment
custodians of the European Cultural Memory, it was a phantasmic Greece that had
virtually obliterated the anxiety-provoking but also potentially productive
"reality" of an originally far more complex and diversified culture.
9

Perhaps the most telling historical example of the oppressive burden of antiquity
on the construction of Greek nationhood is the case of Makronisos. The island of
Makronisos was developed during the Greek Civil War to house concentration camps for
the incarceration of those deemed by the Greek state to hold left-wing views or have
participated in left-wing activities. More than 40,000 passed through these camps in the
1940s and 1950s (including my maternal grandparents); many were members of EAM or
other Communist-leaning groups instrumental in the resistance to Nazi occupation during
World War II. Their incarceration at Makronisos did not just aim to prevent them from
fighting in the civil war for the Left, but also to indoctrinate them into becoming
ideological fighters for the Right upon their release. Through a brutal regime of torture,
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forced labor and surveillance, prisoners at Makronisos were induced to sign “repentance
statements” in which they renounced their political beliefs. As Yannis Hamilakis notes,
Makronisos was “the first camp of mass torture to be created in western Europe after the
second world war”.
10

One of the camp’s primary functions was propagandistic: “its ‘audience’ was not
simply its inmates but the whole of Greece, and even international opinion.”
11
The
proceedings of the camp were a source of pride for the Greek government and widely
publicized at home and abroad.
12
Prisoners were not just expected to repent but to
produce propagandistic correspondence, poetry and speeches in order to persuade other
Greeks with left-wing views to renounce their positions. Antiquity featured prominently
in this propaganda material: prisoners were forced to stage ancient Greek plays and build
imitations of ancient monuments on the island (including a miniature Parthenon), and
their poetry, correspondence and speeches made frequent reference to the glories of
ancient Greece. The “miracle” of Makronisos was linked to the ”miracle” of ancient
Greek civilization, and it was argued that the individualistic ancient Hellenic spirit was
incompatible with the collectivism of “Slavo-Communism”. In the words of one state
official, every Greek Communist was seen to be “a self-exile from the spirit of the Greek
race.’”
13

The absurdity of proudly invoking Hellenic ideals within the confines of a brutal
concentration camp signals the fundamentally ahistorical function of antiquity in Greek
political discourse. As Hamilakis notes, “Makronisos thus became a fundamental device
for the monumentalization of the whole of Greek society, for the imposition of
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monumental national time upon social time.”
14
Perhaps most surprisingly, the counter-
discourses of unredeemed prisoners replicated the assumptions of Makronisos officials
that Hellenism represented a model for their behavior and was superior to other (foreign)
models – in their minds, the brutality of the Makronisos camps was incompatible with
Hellenic ideals. The recreation of monuments on Makronisos, the constant vigilance of
guards, and the emphasis on public spectacles of redemption instilled a regime of self-
surveillance in the minds of the prisoners that was difficult to escape even after their
release.
‘Remember who you are’ was the recurring motto of the regime and its
intelligentsia in their addresses to the inmates, but also to Greece as a whole. The
moral authority of classical antiquity was the watchful eye upon which inmates
were judged. The discursive and material construction of this mechanism of
surveillance (the ‘new Parthenon,’ the replica of the monument on the island, and
so on) aimed at delivering to the national body, re-shaped individuals who would
have internalized self-surveillance, based on the ‘destiny of the race,’ the
authority of classical antiquity, and its racial and cultural continuity to the present.
Paradoxically, it seems that the victims’ own discourse itself subscribed to the
panopticism of the authority of classical antiquity, and texts such as the manifesto
of the resistance movement echo the theme: ‘don’t put your history to shame’.
15

Eva Stefani’s experimental documentary Acropolis (2001) investigates the
ideological function of Greece’s most famous ancient monument at home and abroad.
The film complicates our understanding of the Acropolis, denying us access to it outside
of discourse by alternating between seven sets of interpretations of the monument 1)
images of Greek female tourist guides to the Acropolis explaining its historical and
cultural significance; 2) sounds of British and Greek orators expounding on the beauty,
significance, and symbolic value of the Acropolis to western civilization; 3) images and
sounds of a young woman, who we assume to be the filmmaker, who takes on the identity
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of the Acropolis and asks what she would say were she not dumb (since buildings can’t
speak); 4) the same female narrator discussing the notion of history, the multiple histories
told of the Acropolis and emphasizing the fact that the Acropolis absorbs all the
discourses and ideologies that people impose upon it without being able to look back, to
represent itself; 5) images of tourists, famous personages of years past, foreign forces,
and local politicians visiting the Acropolis and using it as a backdrop for politically
motivated staged events; 6) stag films featuring women undressing and having sex with
men; 7) nudist colony films featuring women striking classic poses for the benefit of
men. The film’s provocative association of pornography with the representation of the
Acropolis reflects the objectification and imperialism of the gaze in contemporary
constructions of ancient Greece. Stefani’s dumbness as she personifies the Acropolis
expresses the limited agency of modern Greeks in relation to antiquity, their alienation by
a set of discourses that seem to overwhelm them as subjects.
The notion of antiquity as a stultifying force limiting the agency of modern
Greeks is also explored in Tasos Boulmetis’ Βιοτεχνια Ονειρων (Dream Factory, 1990).
The film takes place in a post-apocalyptic modern Greece. After an epidemic, people lose
the ability to dream, except for a select few. One of these runs a dream factory where
people come and tell him their dreams and he, in exchange for a fee, is able to dream
their dreams, which then appear on a screen above his head as he sleeps. The dreams,
many of which involve women walking among ancient ruins, appear in color while the
reality of the post-epidemic world appears in black and white. The film’s antagonist is a
state inspector who monitors the dream factory owner’s progress, and plays a game with
133
him which is based on the assumption that every story or work of art in the world is based
on one of 36 classical myths. Years earlier, before the epidemic, a playwright (played by
the same actor who plays the inspector), in the process of writing a play, recruits an actor
(played by the same actor who plays dream factory owner) to befriend a woman who is
an archaeologist and tour guide in the ancient agora (near the Acropolis). As the actor
becomes involved with the woman, his dream factory owner doppelganger begins to
dream her dreams and not those of his clients, leading to the ruin of his business. The
film’s thematization of the inability to dream appears to be an allegorical critique of
totalitarianism, perhaps a specific reference to junta-era Greece, and the dream factory a
metaphor for the culture industry. The film is most concerned with the relationship
between individual desire and the burden of antiquity. Both Βιοτεχνια Ονειρων and
Acropolis establish a dialectical relationship between antiquity and gendered subjectivity
– in Acropolis, the appropriation of antiquity is likened to the pornographic
objectification of women, whereas in Βιοτεχνια Ονειρων, a romantic relationship both
destroys the commercial enterprise that commodifies dream-making and opens up new
avenues for sense-making beyond the 36 classical myths.
The disjunction between the idealism of discourses about Greek antiquity and the
complex realities of modern Greece is explored in Nikos Koundouros’ Byron: Ballad of a
Daemon (1992). The film fictionalizes Lord Byron’s last days in Messolonghi during the
Greek War of Independence. Byron is slowly losing his mind, gripped by the fever that
will eventually cost him his life. Reminiscent of Robert Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac
(1974), the film does not show any battle scenes, focusing instead on the bathetic figure
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of Byron as he waits for battle, gripped by waves of regret, fear, depravity, vanity and
gnawing uncertainty. Byron admires Greece as some ancient ideal but in Messolonghi he
becomes disillusioned by the realities of Ottoman Greece: the rain and mud, the illiteracy
and Christian fervor of the peasantry, and the in-fighting and disorganization of the
assembled fighters. The film demonstrates how Byron’s vision of Greece is critically
divorced from the complex subjectivities and historical trajectories shaping its current
inhabitants. While he vainly longs for battle so that he can die in glory, the Greek
peasants who surround him in Messolonghi reluctantly and silently face the prospect of
death, providing a stoic backdrop to Byron’s histrionics that metonymizes Byron’s
centrality in official histories of the War of Independence and their relative obscurity.
Byron’s portrayal is grotesque and anti-heroic, as we suffer through his vulgar misogyny,
condescending comments to his Greek assistants (“little Greek boy”, “idiot”, “fool”), and
rants about his looks, weight and health. Koundouros uses jarring close-ups and hand-
held camerawork to ironize the impotence of Byron’s frenzied soul-searching amidst the
oppressive stillness of the war’s interregnum. The diverse foreign forces assembled to
fight are revealed to be mostly mercenaries, there for the gold rather than their love of
Greece; there is no fighting to ennoble or martyr any of them. Byron gives only one
rousing speech, and even this is soured by the ridiculousness of its circumstances – Byron
orating grandiloquently in English under an umbrella in front of the illiterate Greek
villagers assembled. The communality of war is here delayed and displaced off-screen,
forcing us instead to face the hierarchies of master versus servant, Greek versus Western
135
European, poet versus peasant that structure our understanding of Greek history mediated
by the West’s academic Philhellenism.
Several Greek documentaries from the 1990s reassert the agency of contemporary
Greeks in relation to antiquity. Lefteris Charonitis’ Ιδιαιου Μυθοι (Idaean Myths, 1999),
follows the efforts of archaeologist Yiannis Sakellarakis to excavate the Idaeou Andron
site in Crete. The film focuses on Sakellarakis’ outreach to the local community which
attracts a cross-section of unskilled but eager local volunteers to the excavation project.
The majority of the film is spent chronicling these volunteers’ labor, and the debates
about the dig that take place between Sakellarakis and this team. As part of his outreach,
Sakellarakis takes part in the rituals and festivals of the local community, integrating
himself into the society that is hosting him during the excavation. In this way, modern
Greeks’ relation to antiquity is reconceived in materialist terms as a democratic process
of physical labor and intellectual exchange, intimately connected to and enriched by the
experiences of a wide cross-section of contemporary society. The film is driven by
narration that describes Sakellarakis’ project in the third person, providing some critical
distance from his subjectivity in order to represent the excavation project as a
fundamentally collective and social process.
Stavros Ioannou’s documentary Εστιν ουν Τραγωδια (The Origins of Tragedy,
1994), combines hypnotic music, slow-motion photography of contemporary harvest
rituals in Thrace and narration that traces the connections between these rituals and
ancient Dionysian worship and tragic theater. The narration tells us that tragedies derive
etymologically from the Greek word for goat, tragos, showing their connection to
136
Dyonisian worship and ritual, since the goat is the sacred animal of Dionysus. The seats
in the oldest amphitheaters were reserved for Dionysian priests and the festival of
Dionysus held at the foot of Acropolis became the festival of tragic theater, showing the
connection between theatrical audiences and ancient religious worship. In moments of
tension, the enthusiastic bands of Dyonisian worshipers improvised, freeing the
ceremonies from priestly custody and setting the stage for the great playwrights of
ancient tragedy. The holy myths and local histories enacted in these sacred rituals -
procession, struggle, exodus – gave tragedy its most essential quality – plot, in which its
active power and moral center are found. Dionysus’ roving troupe of worshipers later
became the chorus of Greek tragedy. The narration’s calculated discussion of these links
between Dionysian worship and ancient Greek theater is paired with mesmerizing images
of contemporary harvest rituals that resemble to a remarkable degree what is described in
the narration. Εστιν ουν Τραγωδια thus collapses high and low culture distinctions,
providing a historical link between vaunted ancient Greek theater, pre-Christian religious
worship and the agricultural rituals of today. This undermines the categorical separation
of ancient Greek culture from the folk customs of modern Greece’s rural population
central to Western Philhellenism. And as in Ιδιαιου Μυθοι, the film resituates, in
materialist terms, Greeks’ relation to antiquity within the habitus of contemporary
society.
Giorgos Tsampoulopoulos’ Two Suns in the Sky (1991) represents ancient Greek
culture as a struggle between the forces of radical inquiry and alterity on the one hand
and imperial authority and its will to power on the other. The film revolves around the
137
search by Lazarus of Capodoccia, in the 4
th
century A.D. for Timotheon, the most famous
actor in Antioch. After his performances of Euripides’ The Bachia, Timotheon speaks
directly to the audience, encouraging religious tolerance between Christians and pagans,
and rebellion against the arbitrary laws of the emperor. Eventually he manages to incite a
rebellion for which he and his troupe, as well as his most ardent followers, are persecuted
and forced to flee Antioch. Timotheon’s lover and mentor in the acting troupe is
captured, publicly paraded nude, tortured and killed. The rest of the troupe travels to the
land of the Cilicans in Thrace where the actors, and Timotheon in particular, come to be
adored by the local population, many of whom worship Dionysus and are not Christian.
Women from the local villages, known as Meneads, inspired by Timotheon’s acting
troupe, travel to the forest to have orgies and perform ritualistic services in honor of both
Dionysus and Timotheon. Lazarus follows Timotheon to Thrace and the film ends with
Lazarus’ death at the hands of the Meneads.
Two Suns in the Sky, as its title suggests, emphasizes the plurality of ancient
Greek society. It is a powerful statement in favor of religious tolerance, a message made
all the more convincing by the time period in which its story is set – the 4
th
century AD
during the transition from the Roman Empire to the Byzantine Empire, a time in which
the Hellenic world was being torn between East and West, between Christianity and pre-
Christian religions, and between divergent political forces looking to rule over it. The
film serves as a reminder of Greece’s non-Christian heritage, and the violence with which
this past was erased, with non-Christians being persecuted and fighting back against the
religious intolerance of the ruling authorities. Timotheon embodies the struggle for
138
freedom of thought and religious practice, and for active citizenship, one which calls into
question the arbitrary judgments and laws of the state and looks to a higher set of moral
and ethical principles as guides to individual and collective action. Two Suns in the Sky
privileges the arts, and tragic theater in particular, as effective vehicles for political
mobilization and the spread of progressive ideas, but also shows how easily actors can
themselves become idolized, re-inscribing the hierarchical system of worship and
obedience that dominates the religious and political realms.
The fact that the narrator of the story is a servant of Lazarus, the sadistic military
officer who pursues Timotheon throughout the narrative, antagonistically aligns the film
viewer with the authority of the imperial state. This signals Tsampoulopoulos’ indictment
of contemporary audiences and contemporary Greek society, whose religious and
ethnocentric identity is based on the denial of the plurality of Greek religious and cultural
heritage in favor of a singularly Christian national historiography. The film’s portrayal of
ancient Greek identity in terms of agon and radical inquiry is visually expressed through
camera movement, as the camera incessantly pans and tracks across the visual field,
mirroring both Timotheon’s intellectual restlessness and the watchful eye of imperial
authority embodied by Lazarus. The film’s reliance on philosophical dialogue signals an
unease with the conventions of realism which would threaten to subsume Timotheon
under the authority of the film’s point-of-view, which the narration aligns with Lazarus
and the imperial state. Philosophical dialogue distances us from the modernist emphasis
on the individual subject, seen to possess a coherent and inalienable interiority, shifting
the emphasis instead to the de-personalized realm of ideas and in the process
139
undermining the idolization of Timotheon by the Meneads in the narrative. In this way,
Two Suns in the Sky, like Ιδιαιου Μυθοι, subverts the disempowering monumentalization
of ancient Greek culture by associating it with intellectual inquiry and collective agon.
In the 1990s, Greek national identity was conditioned not just by the West’s
academic Philhellenism, whose fervor waned in the postwar period in response to
postcolonial critiques of Eurocentrism, but also by the processes of political, economic
and cultural integration imposed on Greece by EU policymakers. The diffusion of
European norms and values into the common sense of Greek society is described by P. C.
Ioakimidis as ‘Europeanization’. Ioakimidis argues that Greece has undergone a
heightened form of Europeanization because its political elites consider EU “logic,
norms, patterns of behaviour and regulation” as “integral components of the
modernization process”.
16
In many other European countries, EU membership has
functioned as a routine (albeit not uncontested) accommodation of national policies and
interests to continental agreements and modes of cooperation. But since, as already
discussed, many Greek political elites consider the country’s political and economic
institutions to be inherently flawed, Europeanization in Greece is seen as the only
mechanism by which modernization can be achieved. In Greece therefore,
“Europeanization becomes a political or even an ideological programme for change, a
slogan for political reform.”
17

These reforms have by no means been politically neutral; rather they have
committed Greece to political and economic neoliberalism. In the 1980s and 1990s, under
pressure from the EU, both major political parties in Greece, the center-right ND party
140
and the center-left PASOK, shifted ideologically toward neoliberalism.
18
Nicolas
Mouzelis acknowledges, albeit without apparent regret, that EU-imposed neoliberal
reforms have diminished the power of political parties in Greece, as elsewhere in Europe,
in favor of technocratic decision-making undertaken by bureaucrats in Brussels and
Strasbourg.
19
Andreas Moschonas concurs, noting that , “both PASOK and ND have
relied on a technocratic form of modernization, emphasizing the role of experts and state
bureaucrats”.
20
The implementation of a neoliberal agenda has been particularly
contentious in Greece because of the democratic concessions gained by unions, students
and other mass constituencies after the fall of the US-backed military dictatorship in
1974. At a 1995 symposium, held at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of
Government, these concessions were framed as the primary obstacle to neoliberal
transformation of Greek society.
21

The perception of EU-driven modernization as a process of political
disenfranchisement is alluded to in several of the films already discussed. Many of these
feature apocalyptic narratives in which characters’ agency is delimited by environmental,
political or social forces outside of their control. To the list of already discussed films –
Υσυχες Μερες του Αυγουστου, Τα Χρονια της Μεγαλης Ζεστης, Ολα Ειναί Δρομος,
Acropolis, Βιοτεχνια Ονειρων, and Byron: Ballad of a Daemon - can be added Theo
Angelopoulos’ Το Μετεωρο Βημα του Πελαργου (The Suspended Step of the Stork, 1991)
and Panagiotis Maroulis’ Πριν το Τελος του Κοσμου (Before the End of the World, 1996),
which both feature protagonists whose limited agency thematizes the feelings of anomie
and disenfranchisement prevalent in Greece during this period. In Το Μετεωρο Βημα του
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Πελαργου, agency is circumscribed by political borders, symbolized in the film’s
emblematic image of a man standing like a stork with one leg in one national territory
and the other poised to cross the border into the next, whereas in the science-fiction film,
Πριν το Τελος του Κοσμου, mysterious political and economic forces impede the
protagonist’s scientific research that aims to forestall a coming apocalypse. What these
films suggest is that the Eurocentric overdetermination of Greek historical identity and
the imposed convergence of Greek political and economic culture to European norms
have registered in the consciousness of many Greeks as a fundamental loss of agency.
This perception is complicated in the 1990s by the increasing awareness of Greece as a
border zone (as noted, for instance, by Étienne Balibar) with its long shore line drawing
many immigrants from Africa and Asia on their way to other parts of Europe and the
collapse of Communism opening up Greece’s northern borders to immigration from the
Balkans and Eastern Europe.
22

It is within this discursive conjuncture of Europeanization, on the one hand, and
the border zone, on the other, that we can locate the identity crises thematized in Panos
Karkanevatos’ Μεταιχμιο (Border Line, 1993) and Giorgos Zafiris’ Εφημερη Πολη
(Ephemeral Town, 2000). Μεταιχμιο, one of the first Greek films to refer to immigration
in the post-Communist period, tells the story of Yiannis and Stelios Markou, two brothers
living on the border town of Stratoni, near an army barracks. When Stelios, the eldest, is
old enough, he goes to the barracks to perform his mandatory military service. The
Stratoni camp is a dismal place, remote and poorly managed, causing Stelios to fall into a
deep depression. One day, in full view of the other soldiers, he walks out of the barracks
142
and straight into a nearby lake. Stelios’ body is never found and he is presumed dead. The
story resumes years later in Athens, where Yiannis works as a police officer. One day,
Yiannis arrests a man believed to be an undocumented immigrant whose identification
papers bear the name ‘Stelios Markou’. Seeing this as a sign that his brother might be
alive, Yiannis receives permission from his supervisor to travel up north to investigate
further. He visits his father and the army barracks at Stratoni and learns more about the
circumstances of Stelios’ disappearance. His father, obviously still in mourning, is
convinced that Stelios is dead and refuses to help Yannis in his investigation. Meanwhile,
police officials in Athens discover Yiannis’ personal interest in the case and order him to
return to Athens immediately. Refusing to do so, Yiannis instead “loses himself” by
finding a job as a day laborer on a remote farm, where he has a brief affair with a young
woman until, unexpectedly, she asks him to leave. Dejected, he travels to Thessaloniki
where he meets an old sailor who tells him that he knows Stelios and manages to contact
him on another ship. With confirmation that Stelios is alive, Yiannis surprisingly decides
not to pursue him any further and the film ends.
While the hermeneutics of Μεταιχμιο revolve around Stelios’ disappearance, as its
anti-climactic ending makes clear, this is a red herring. Reminiscent of 1970s Hollywood
mysteries such as Arthur Penn’s Night Moves (1975) and Robert Altman’s The Long
Goodbye (1973) (and earlier Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960) and John
Ford’s The Searchers (1956)), the narrative of Μεταιχμιο gradually shifts the focus away
from the missing person to the psychology of the searcher. We come to realize that
Yiannis is as lost as Stelios: separated from his old job, his new love, his father and
143
brother, he sets off by himself, on the “border line” between interiority and sociality. It is
this dual meaning of the border that situates the film within the modalities of both
geographic liminality and loss of political agency; a response to both the increased
immigration into and Europeanization of Greek society. The border camp at Stratoni
takes on a symbolic significance that casts a shadow over the entire narrative, suggesting
a deep ambivalence about Greek territorial nationalism. As in Ολα Ειναί Δρομος, the
border camp is a site of acute disillusionment, a place where the contradictions of
ethnocentric and territorial constructions of Greek nationhood overwhelm the young men
who are stationed there. Stelios’ apparent decision to give his identification papers to an
undocumented immigrant ironizes what, later in the 1990s, will become the primary
paradox of Greek national discourse, oscillating between a self-critical loss of confidence
associated with the notion of “imperfect modernity” and a defensive ethnocentrism
associated with anxiety about increased immigration. Both Yannis and Stelios are
represented as internal exiles from Greek society: the combined weight of Stelios’
disappearance (Stelios’ sudden reappearance in the narrative is chimerical, as we find out
that he lives an anonymous existence at sea) and Yiannis’ growing alienation leads us to
interpret the brothers’ behavior not in terms of psychological realism but as a sign of a
more pervasive national identity crisis. By invoking the figure of the internal exile,
Μεταιχμιο not only alludes to the radical social dislocations of modern Greek history (the
political divisions, dissident imprisonments, emigrations and population exchanges), but
also foreshadows the more explicit connection between immigration and internal
marginalization in the cinema of Constantine Giannaris. Μεταιχμιο was released in 1993,
144
at a time when the full scale of Albanian immigration into Greece was still unknown,
which explains why the film’s disillusionment with Greek society is not mitigated by the
notion of immigration as a source of renewal as in later Greek films.
The figure of the internal exile reappears in Εφημερη Πολη, an atmospheric film
about a man looking for his mother’s house. The film takes place on a sparsely populated
island that attracts many immigrants who use it as a temporary haven before heading off
to the mainland in search of work. We find out that the film’s protagonist, Andreas, has
never met his mother and all that he has to help him on his search are some photographs
of her as a young woman. Andreas’ mother appears on the island as a young woman, but
Andreas never sees her. The film begins in a sleepy town, where nothing much happens,
nothing is remembered or documented, without clear coordinates or any sense of history.
Andreas meets a few people trying to ascertain the whereabouts of his mother’s house but
no one recognizes the woman in the photographs. Andreas’ search is interspersed with
evocative imagery of desolate but lush landscape of the island: calm seas, waving wheat
fields, solitary children in the far distance, and enigmatic figures speaking to the camera
without making any sound. We later find out that these background figures are
immigrants living temporarily on the island. Traveling on foot from the town, after his
bicycle breaks down, Andreas meets Maria, the daughter of one of the men he met in
town earlier. They decide to continue walking together, eventually going on a boat ride
during which Maria remarks that Andreas is always thinking of something else, rather
than living in the moment. He tells her about his mother, and she points him towards the
village of Lithari. Upon arriving in Lithari, Andreas finds the village populated by several
145
immigrant families. One of the figures we have seen earlier in the background approaches
Andreas and invites him to his home to join in the celebration planned in anticipation of
their departure from the island the next day. When Andreas arrives at this man’s home,
we discover that it is constructed with sticks that prop up plastic sheets to protect its
residents from the rain. When the rain does come, everyone stands patiently under the
sheets waiting for the storm to pass. Andreas and his hosts share a meal and then Andreas
watches as everyone embarks on a small boat and sets sail.
Even more explicitly than Μεταιχμιο, Εφημερη Πολη thematizes the national
identity crisis that Greece experienced in the 1990s. The film’s emphasis on landscape
and the collapse of historical and personal memory de-individuates and de-nationalizes
the notion of territorial identity. Significantly, the only moment of coherent historical
recollection occurs at the film’s end, when Andreas’ immigrant host recounts stories of
his family’s journey and past. The film’s ending, reminiscent of Cuaron’s Children of
Men (2006), situates minority subjects at the center of representational space, but unlike
Cuaron’s film, there are no representatives of the dominant culture to accompany them.
In this way, the film combines a growing acknowledgement of the multiculturalism of
Greek society with a lingering concern over Greece’s marginality and Europeanization
which is here, once again, configured through a vocabulary of social alienation and de-
familiarization (the missing brother replaced by the missing mother). The progression of
the immigrant characters from background figures speaking inchoately into the camera to
subjects in their own right, filling the screen at the end of the film, suggests that, as in
Giannaris’ work, immigrants are configured in contemporary Greek cinema not as
146
precipitators of loss of agency but rather as sources of societal renewal. Yet, as in
Giannaris and Karkanevatos’ films, Εφημερη Πολη portrays immigrants on the margins
of a Greek society that is itself marginal and divided from within, identified with figures
of internal exile who wander hopelessly in search of an identity. As such, the film does
not establish a narrative of incorporation as much as a thematization of parallel
liminalities, whose inter-relation remains unresolved, symbolized by the film’s precarious
final image of embarkation.
The role of internal exile and travel in Μεταιχμιο and Εφημερη Πολη foreshadows
the more explicit thematization of travel as a mode of national identity in later Greek
cinema. Whereas internal exile functions as a marker of Greeks’ struggle to account for
the external determinants of their national identity, the 1990s opened up another
geopolitical context for the articulation of a transnational Hellenism: the Balkans. The
fall of Communism in the northern Balkans opened up the region to capitalist penetration
and democratization, presenting Greece with a new set of opportunities and challenges in
the region. Greeks’ perceptions of themselves through the modalities of isolation,
disenfranchisement and marginality rendered travel a form of internal exile in Μεταιχμιο
and Εφημερη Πολη, with characters traveling to nowhere, unable to transcend the
country’s borders, and drawn inexorably to border areas where the contradictions of
Greek territorial nationalism threatened to dissolve their integrity as subjects. By contrast,
Balkan travel narratives display a greater sense of national confidence, signaling a
rediscovery of agency in a region historically associated with multicultural alliances and
Greek social mobility. But it is also the case that the Balkans themselves are not free of
147
discursive overdetermination by European discourses, this time Orientalist, something
that shapes Greeks’ conceptions of their Balkan identity during this period. It is to these
travel narratives that we turn next.

Travel as a Site of Renewal: Greece in the Balkans
[Greece is experiencing] an-other modernity, an experiment on the margins,
which, having internalized the tensions between dominant and minor, periphery
and center, prototype and copy, imitates and also creates, follows but resists.
-- Gregory Jusdanis
23

The ambivalence of Greek cinematic representations of modernity and the West
reflects contemporary definitions of the Balkans as an intermediate space between East
and West, an ambivalence that has appeared in contemporary Greek fiction as well.
24

This cultural construction of the Balkans as an intermediate space emerged in the
nineteenth century as Balkan nationalisms looked to the West for their modernization,
model of nationhood and liberation from the Ottoman Empire, and as Europe came to
regard the Balkans as a part of the East since it was under the control of the Ottoman
Empire but also as a part of the West due to the role of Ancient Greece in the European
imaginary.
25
Unsurprisingly, this intermediate construction of Balkan identity was
particularly pronounced in Greece, whose early attainment of nationhood, historical
centrality in constructions of European identity, and Christian heritage led many of its
political and cultural elites to conceive of themselves as civilizational protectors of a
Europe beset by Eastern threats, “civilizing the East, or rather an East of their own
148
inspiration…consisting of the parts of the Ottoman Empire amenable to
westernization.”
26

In the post-Communist period, the Balkans once again became a region open to
external scrutiny and interference, and Greece found itself presented with a new set of
challenges and opportunities in the region. In the 1990s, Greek Balkan policy went
through two distinct periods. In the first, lasting from 1990-1995, Greece reacted to the
unstable political developments in the region with defensiveness and aggression,
operating in a vacuum created by an incoherent European policy and American
geopolitical ambitions.
27
Old rivalries and suspicions emerged, leading most dramatically
to the embargo against FYROM which alienated Greece from its Balkan neighbors. In the
second period, lasting from 1995-1999, Greek policymakers recognized that Turkish and
FYROM threats to national security were not as strong as previously thought, and the
country moved toward greater regional cooperation and leadership.
28

Ironically, Greek foreign policy in the 1990s was characterized as ‘Balkan’ in the
first period and ‘European’ in the second period, because European conceptions of the
Balkans associate the region with ethnic strife and a tendency toward disintegration.
29
As
Gregory Jusdanis notes,
In the 1990s, for instance, Greece, the subject of intense Orientalist interpretation,
was often portrayed in the media as a nation gripped by primordial tribalism, or as
an unreliable ally, a belated and recalcitrant partner in the path to progress.
Greeks have been characterized by Western politicians and editorialists as unruly
children who must be pulled by the ears out of their Balkan entanglements for
their own good.
30

These Orientalist conceptions were echoed by Greek political observers who saw the
nation’s geopolitical objectives in the Balkans through the prism of European rather than
149
regional strategy priorities. For instance, P. C. Ioakimidis identifies a primary objective
of Greece’s Balkan policy after 1995 to be “the gradual integration of southeast Europe
into a new European architecture, primarily the EU and NATO.”
31

The tension between exogenous and endogenous influences has been a critical
historical factor in the formation of political identities in the Balkans. The pressures and
perceived benefits of western modernization and the western introduction of nationalism
into the region destroyed the points of multicultural solidarity that had been dominant in
the Balkans before the nineteenth century. A similar tension shapes Balkan identities
today as Europe provides a pole for the region’s nascent democracies, interpellating them
individually in relation to the EU and its dominant norms and inhibiting the creation of a
Balkan commonwealth
32
in contradistinction to western European paradigms.
33
The
renewed push for modernization on European terms in the post-Communist Balkans is
leading to an internalization of Orientalist paradigms reminiscent of earlier eras. In the
nineteenth century, western pressures to modernize led many nationalist elites in the
Balkans to suppress the cultural, social and political vestiges of Ottoman influence, which
were seen as inhibiting factors in the process of modernization.
Each Balkan nation was eventually emancipated from [the Ottoman Empire], and
after its emancipation each Balkan nation established its own relationship with the
Ottoman heritage. The difference between this relationship and that with the West
is that this was not an openly avowed and cherished relationship, not a goal to be
achieved. It was, as it were, each Balkan nation’s own ‘secret’: a secret locked up
in everyday language, in everyday behaviour, in the underground of each nation’s
existence, safe from any kind of official ideological schemes.
34

The most famous case of this act of suppression in Greek history was what came
to be known as the Dilessi/Marathon affair. In 1870, three upper-class British travelers
150
were abducted and murdered by a band of brigands in Dilessi, Greece, precipitating a
political crisis which had the British political establishment contemplating war as a
response. In the public relations campaign that followed, Greek political and cultural
elites attempted to absolve the young nation of culpability for the incident by
Orientalizing brigandage, despite its crucial role in the Greek War of Independence,
associating it with the ‘savagery’ of Vlach and Albanian minorities and Turkish
interference in Greece’s internal affairs. The Dilessi affair aptly demonstrates how the
process of modernization in the Balkans was also inexorably a process of westernization
which led to a suppression of the region’s multiculturalism and common Ottoman
heritage. As Rodanthi Tzanelli puts it, “official discourse on Dilessi became a discourse
of separation and purification from the [purportedly] filthy Ottoman elements that
adulterated Neohellenic culture.”
35

The rise of its immigrant population in the 1990s presented Greece with a new set
of challenges and opportunities in the Balkans. Political observers have noted that the
shift in Balkan policy from a politics of mutual suspicion, military rivalry and rhetorical
antagonism will require Greece to adapt its citizenship laws to accommodate its rising
minority population and reorient its ambitions from regional dominance to regional
leadership and cooperation:
To set the example for Balkan cooperation and efforts to democratize, Greece will
also need to develop more responsible social policies in response to its large
immigrant population, which has grown significantly since the end of the Cold
War, including some 350,000 Albanian workers and their families…Greece must
demythologize its regional role and avoid sterile, if not dangerous, claims of
regional ‘penetration’ promoted by the media and various political commentators
…since Athens is not operating from a neo-imperialist perspective in this critical
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region, it must address with maturity and restraint the power disparity between
itself and its Balkan neighbors.
36

The greater acknowledgement of immigrant issues in Greek cinema signals a
reorientation toward Greece’s Balkan history and identity, especially since the majority
of new immigrants have come from neighboring countries in the Balkans, primarily
Albania. But since the Balkans are associated with pre-modern historical rivalries and the
drive toward disintegration in the European imaginary, Greece’s acknowledgement of its
Balkan identity also requires a reconceptualization of what it means to be Balkan.
37

What historical models exist for a multicultural rather than a divisive Balkan
identity? In the Ottoman Empire, the primary means of social differentiation and political
organization was the Rum millet system which recognized religious affiliation rather than
ethnic identity, leading to widespread multicultural alliances across sites of ethnic
difference.
38
In the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, Greek became
the dominant language in the region due to the emergence of a Greek merchant class that
dominated commercial activity in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire. This
reinforced the regional primacy of Greek that had been established through its use in the
Orthodox Churches and elite schools of the region. The creation of a common Balkan
identity built around the Greek language became impossible after the nineteenth century
rise of ethnic nationalisms in the Balkans that precipitated the collapse of the Ottoman
Empire. But as Dimitris Tziovas notes, the function of social mobility as a bridge
between cultures has gained a renewed relevance today amidst the increased migration
between Balkan nations:
152
The impressive growth of commerce in the course of the eighteenth century
produced the phenomenon of the ‘conquering Balkan Orthodox merchant’…One
is tempted to see analogies between the commercial activity of the past with the
migration of today as many Albanians, Romanians and Bulgarians flock into
Greece, seeking a better future. This social mobility might reopen old channels of
cultural communication as more and more people from the Balkans learn Greek as
a form of cultural and social investment, leading to a situation reminiscent of the
eighteenth century.
39

Whereas several contemporary Greek novels propose a return to the multicultural
solidarity that existed before the emergence of ethnic nationalisms in the region, the
period’s Greek cinema is much more ambivalent about Greece’s Balkan identity.
40
Sotiris
Goritsas’ Balkanisateur (1997) tells the story of two Greek men, Stavros and Fotis, who
travel in a rickety Peugeot through the Balkans on their way to Switzerland as part of a
currency exchange get-rich-quick scheme. Along the way, they get involved in the lives
of the currency sellers and car mechanics they meet in ways that challenge their
assumptions about Greece’s position in post-Communist Europe. A box-office success in
Greece, Goritsas’ film received critical acclaim for popularizing the Balkan travelogue,
which had previously been the purview of less accessible Greek filmmakers. It was part
of a broader representational impulse in the Balkans during the 1990s aimed at reversing
the western European gaze and defining Balkan identity outside of and against
stereotypical traditions.
41

Balkanisateur distinguishes itself from other explicitly “Balkan” Greek films
through its humor. Functioning similarly to the black humor in Goran Paskaljević’s
Powder Keg (1998), the humor in Balkanisateur provides a mechanism for self-critique.
Much of the comedy stems from the differential historical knowledge of the film’s
protagonists: Stavros is book-smart while Fotis is street-smart. Their different sources of
153
knowledge trigger a series of funny exchanges during which fallacies in Greek common
sense are exposed and new ways of thinking about contemporary realities pursued. The
plot of Balkanisateur can be read as a poignant allegory of Greece’s uneasiness with EU-
driven neoliberal reforms. It is not accidental that Stavros’ and Fotis’ get-rich-quick
scheme involves currency exchange, an allusion to the supremacy of financial markets in
late capitalism. Their animated negotiations with Bulgarians willing to exchange
Bulgarian currency undermines the impersonality typically associated with financial
transactions. This also spells Stavros and Fotis’ downfall, as it leads them to become
immersed in the lives of those with whom they are negotiating. In one scene, they end up
accompanying a Greek Bulgarian hotel owner to the maternity ward where his wife is
giving birth. By suggesting that Balkan affect stands in the way of (Swiss) calculated
profiteering, Goritsas, much like Emir Kusturica, seeks to invert western European
hierarchies of value and challenge the capitalist ethos of success. At the end of their
journey, Stavros and Fotis have the same amount of money as when they began, and the
film makes clear that the scheme’s failure was less a consequence of their negotiations
than of a misunderstanding with a Swiss bank. In this regard, Balkanisateur joins other
recent films from southern Europe, such as Gianni Amelio’s Lamerica (1994) and Pedro
Almodóvar’s The Flower of My Secret (1995), in displaying a deep ambivalence toward
the EU and western European capitalist institutions. All these filmmakers propose
alternative possible alliances – Almodóvar between Spain and Latin America, Amelio
between Italian and Albanian people (rather than between predatory Italian capital and
Albanian labor), and Goritsas between Greece and Bulgaria. Importantly, these alliances
154
are not based, in an essentialist way, on cultural similarities as much as on shared
structural positions and common histories of marginalization.
42

The principal shortcoming of Balkanisateur is its dangerous conflation of
personal and national pride with sexual conquest. Stavros and Fotis repeatedly
compensate for their bruised egos due to their financial troubles by flirting with the
women they meet on their journey. While their consensual, light-hearted promiscuity
contrasts with the decidedly more vicious and exploitative political economy involving
female Bulgarian sex workers in northern Greece (to which the film only alludes), it still
reinforces masculinist definitions of national identity that detracts from the rest of the
film’s reflexivity about the fallacies of Greek nationalist discourse. In this sense,
Balkanisateur reinforces what Dimitris Tziovas identifies as the tendency in
contemporary Greek society to affirm the European hierarchies of value that separate
Greece discursively from its Balkan neighbors:
the renewed interest in the Balkans and its culture among Greeks seems to arise
out of a sense of superiority and not solidarity. Greek culture since the
Enlightenment has served as a channel of western modernization and intellectual
change for other Balkan countries. Where once it represented for them a window
onto an elusive European modernity today Greeks expect cultural exchange to
follow a similar model in which Greek culture serves to enlighten the cultures of
other Balkan nations – but this uneven model is no longer tenable.
43

The tension in Balkanisateur between its lead characters’ alienation from the impersonal
imperatives of successful financial transactions (associated with western Europe) and
their conception of their journey in terms of sexual conquest signals the ambivalence of
Greek Balkan identity in the 1990s. During this period, Greece’s approach to the Balkans
oscillated between a solidarity with other Balkan nations (especially Yugoslavia/Serbia)
155
based on shared marginality in relation to Western Europe and a sense that Greece is
superior to other Balkan countries due to its strategic position within European
institutions such as the EU and NATO. While this sense of superiority competes
ambivalently with a sense of Balkan solidarity in Balkanisateur, Georgia Farinou-
Malamatari argues that the protagonists fully embrace their role as predatory capitalists in
the novel The Combination: Edessa-Zurich by Sakis Totlis, on which Balkanisateur is
based:
The Greeks see other Balkan peoples, and sometimes themselves, through the
eyes of the West, as they themselves perceive the gaze, with corresponding
expectations of acceptance and reward by the Europeans…Misunderstandings
caused by linguistic and monetary currencies insinuate the unhappy situation
which may result from the unprogrammed infiltration of Greece (a member of the
European Union) into the Balkan Peninsula still in turmoil.
44

In Kostas Korras and Christos Voupouras’ Mirupafshim (1997), the Balkans are
not portrayed as an economically underdeveloped region amenable to Greek capitalist
penetration, but rather as a locus of pre-modern fundamentalisms incompatible with the
liberal values of a western nation such as Greece. The film tells the story of Christos, a
35-year old atheist, ex-leftist history professor living in Athens, who has always found
himself to be at the ideological margins of Greek society. One day he befriends Victor,
and Fuand, twoAlbanian men who he witnesses getting harassed on a public bus. What
impresses him is the honesty, courage, humor and passion with which they approach life
despite the discrimination they face in Greek society. Through a series of shared meals
and conversations, Christos gets to know more about these men, even starts to learn
Albanian and tells his family about his new friends (their reactions to his association with
Albanians are mostly negative). Against the remonstrations of his family, he decides to
156
visit Albania with them. Once there, his support for his friendship with these men is
strained by the traditional customs and beliefs he encounters. The most glaring problem is
the treatment of women – who are regularly beaten, often abducted and raped in order to
induce marriage, do not eat with the men, and are discouraged from getting a higher
education or pursuing a career outside of the home. Another problem is inter-religious
tension, with Muslims pretending to be Christians in order to ingratiate themselves to
Greeks, some Muslim Albanians supporting the idea of a greater Turkey (encompassing
parts of the western Balkans), and both sides – Muslim and Christian - showing distrust
and hatred for the other.
All these problems are crystallized in the figure of Aphrodite, a Christian
Orthodox woman who is abducted from her school at age sixteen and married forcibly to
a Muslim man, who is the brother of one of Christos’ three friends. Aphrodite wants to
pursue a university degree but she is discouraged from doing so and spends all of her
time at home. Unable to freely practice her religion or to see her family, she becomes
deferential to her husband and mother-in-law in all matters. Christos’ experience in
Albania is also soured by the ferocity with which everyone he comes into contact with
attempts to persuade him to help them obtain a visa to Greece. Economic desperation
threatens to undermine his new friendships, as Victor and Fuand begin to compete with
each other, across religious lines, for his affection in order to gain Greek visas for their
family members. Upon his return to Greece, Christos realizes that, despite his ideological
marginality within Greek society, his beliefs and attitudes have been shaped by that
157
society, especially his notion of social justice, the rights of women, the importance of
non-conformity, and tolerance of difference.
Witnessing the religious divisions and sexism of Albanian society orients Christos
out of his idealization of the Albanian minority in Greece, forcing him to recognize this
group in all its complexity. And yet, Christos’ liberal repulsion at the cultural
conservatism of his Muslim hosts in Albania reintroduces a European prism through
which to evaluate, and inevitably hierarchize, the differential responses to post-
Communist modernization in the region. Mirupafshim portrays Greece as a pole of
attraction for impoverished populations of the post-Communist Balkans, but its
categorical distinction between Balkan fundamentalism and Greek liberalism resituates
Greece in the West, its liberalism threatened by the influx of Albanian immigrants rather
than enriched by it. As such, Victor and Fuand’s positive economic contributions to
Greek society are set against their potentially negative social and cultural impact, thus
allowing for an economistic accommodation of immigrants while remaining wary of the
consequences of a full-scale multicultural transformation of Greek society. What this
denies is the decidedly non-secular characteristics of modern Greece, the primacy of the
Christian Orthodox Church in Greek social and political life, and the pre-existing
resistance within Greece to the modernist project as mandated by EU convergence
policies. As in Σπιτι στην Εξοχη, the portrayal of national identity through the figure of an
urban intellectual underscores the tension in Greek society between modernity and
tradition, displacing anxieties about the country’s beleaguered modernization efforts onto
rural or immigrant cultures.
158
The figuration of internal travel and exile reappears in Stavros Tsiolis’ Ο Χαμενος
Θυσαυρος του Χουρσιτ Πασα (The Lost Treasure of Hursit Pasha, 1995), but in contrast to
Μεταιχμιο and Εφημερη Πολη, it does not lead to a dissolution of the protagonists’ social
and national identity, but rather its renewal. The film is a fictionalization of a real-life
incident that occurred in 1993, when a group of eighty prisoners escaped the infamous
Korydallos prison in Athens. In the film, one man escapes first in search of his sweetheart
in Amaliada, but when he forgets to close the door behind him, seventy-nine others
follow. The film follows twelve of these men as they try to evade capture by traveling
across Greece, staying in safe houses and looking for money that will guarantee their
freedom. They all get on a bus and head for Peloponnesus, where they believe the lost
treasure of Hursit Pasha is buried. As they travel, the men’s communality and sense of
adventure attracts women to them – old girlfriends, a woman who is initially abducted
but decides to stay, and local dancers and hostesses. Eventually the men discover the
treasure, but three of the escapees tell the authorities about the gold, thus claiming a 4%
reward and shutting out the other escapees from the loot. Some of the escapees are
eventually captured by Salavrakos, the police detective who has been searching for them
throughout the narrative, while others manage to escape capture.
The action of the film revolves around the negotiation of gender relations, as the
male escapees espouse primarily traditional views about women while acting much more
progressively toward them. For instance, at the film’s outset, a feeble attempt at sexual
assault by one of the escapees is rebuffed with comic ease, capturing the shifting balance
of power between the genders that the male escapees negotiate without apparent
159
resentment. In a later scene, an escapee insults one of the women for being unintelligent,
but immediately apologizes and goes sheepishly after her to seek her forgiveness. This
humorously articulates the men’s transition from patriarchal ideologies rendered
untenable by the social transformation of Greek society that took place during their
incarceration. The escapees negotiate this transition through continuous ideological
debate, wherein each escapee’s views are subject to ironic and critical commentary by
the others. The use of self-critical dialogue situates Ο Χαμενος Θυσαυρος του Χουρσιτ
Πασα in the Romeic tradition of Greek culture. Michael Herzfeld identifies two models
of Greek national identity and culture: the Hellenic and the Romeic.
The Hellenic-Romeic distinction [is structured around] the difference between an
outward-directed conformity to international expectations about the national
image and an inward-looking, self-critical collective appraisal. The outward-
directed model is precisely what we may call political Hellenism; the
introspective image is the essence of the Romeic thesis.
45

Herzfeld describes Romeic expressions as “affectionate or disparaging comment[s] on
some aspect of national culture – in other words, on something very familiar” such as
“the ills of bureaucracy” or “the stereotype of the sexually aggressive male”.
46
The film’s
humor derives from the fact that some of the escapees quixotically cling to residual
constructions of gender relations which are then challenged either by another escapee’s
comments or by the actions of the women they encounter. Whereas in Balkanisateur, the
male protagonists’ questioning of Greek common sense is undermined by their
investment in sexual conquest, in Ο Χαμενος Θυσαυρος του Χουρσιτ Πασα dialogue
becomes the primary site of agency, reducing men’s actions to a set of symbolic gestures
that allegorize their waning social power.
160
The film’s mise-en-scene situates the characters in a set of stylized human
tableaux, reminiscent of Angelopoulos’ cinema, in which characters slowly walk into a
certain configuration within the filmic frame that puts them in a certain conspicuous
social relation to each other. This stylized mise-en-scene expresses the primacy of social
relationships over individual agency in the film, something that is reinforced by the film’s
plot. At several points, the escapees risk arrest because they are drawn into the lives of
those they meet, into the rituals of celebration and mourning and arguments of those they
encounter. The tension between the highly constructed compositions of the protagonists
in social space and their extemporaneous enunciations of Greek common sense recall the
tensions between orality and textuality in earlier Greek modernism:
In the context of Greek modernism, textuality is associated with experimentation,
self-referentiality and artifice, thus providing a connection with Western trends,
but also an intertextual link with earlier texts (Greek or non-Greek). Orality, on the
other hand, tends to be associated with immediacy, simplicity, emotion and, above
all, Greek tradition…Textuality seems to concern surface arrangements, while
orality provides the mystical link with the well of tradition through the special
qualities of the voice and its contrast with the image.
47

In Ο Χαμενος Θυσαυρος του Χουρσιτ Πασα, the escapees’ limited social mobility (the
constant threat or arrest, their criminal recalcitrance, the failure of their get-rich-quick
scheme) is metonymized through their stylized blocking within the frame (“artifice”,
“surface arrangements”), whereas their agency is a function of the affect and local idioms
of their orality (“voice”, “emotion”, “tradition”).
As in Two Suns in the Sky, Greek society is portrayed in the film as a site of
radical inquiry and alterity. Differences in social class, regional identity and personality
are negotiated through elaborate and unusual insults that the escapees hurl at each other.
161
The profanity, vulgarity and creativity of these insults recalls the comedic theater of
Aristophanes, but also infuses the film with references to regional particularities, folk
customs and popular culture. These insults further situate Ο Χαμενος Θυσαυρος του
Χουρσιτ Πασα in the Romeic cultural mode, which favors the demotic language, “full of
acknowledged Turkisms and familiar colloquial expressions” versus ‘katharevousa’, with
its archaic references and purging of Eastern influences.
48
The regional specificities and
compound construction of these insults render them largely untranslatable, reinforcing
the film’s Romeic emphasis on local idioms and internal critique. The film’s valorization
of Romeic versus Hellenic constructions of Greek identity is also evident in its ironic
penultimate scene during which the escapees stumble upon a government-organized
nationalist rally, which embodies all that is antithetical to their ethos of self-criticism, as
we hear speakers expounding on the glories of ancient Greek culture and the superiority
of the Greek “race”. The incongruity of this scene in relation to the rest of the narrative
reinforces the film’s contention that social utopia is only possible outside the reach of the
state, which, through the figure of Salavrakos, eventually destroys the escapees’
communal experiment.
The notion of travel as a site of renewal is evidenced by the absurd density of life-
changing events that occur during Ο Χαμενος Θυσαυρος του Χουρσιτ Πασα, which
features a prison escape, a wedding, several funerals, an abduction, a disappearance, and
a miraculous discovery of treasure. This notion of renewal is reinforced by the
unpredictability of the film’s elaboration of plot and characterization: the escapee with
the most traditional views also displays the most genuine affection for women, the most
162
cautious is also the most outwardly respectful, the shyest is the one who eventually gets
married. And yet, as with Μεταιχμιο and Εφημερη Πολη, the travel in the film does not
transcend Greece’s territorial borders, but rather turns inward, in this case invoking Greek
folk customs, common sense and popular traditions for inspiration. Whereas Mirupafshim
emphasizes Greece’s European identity, its western liberalism, and Balkanisateur
becomes mired in neo-imperialist notions of Greek capitalist penetration of the Balkans,
Ο Χαμενος Θυσαυρος του Χουρσιτ Πασα employs a Romeic cultural mode to suggest that
Greece’s indigenous culture is capable in and of itself to instigate social renewal.
The ambivalence of these travel narratives stems from their negotiation of
Greece’s position in both the Balkans and Europe. Indeed, Balkan travel narratives, while
reflecting Greece’s growing cultural and political extroversion in the region, also invoke
their interiority vis-à-vis Europe. Dimitris Tziovas notes that whereas Greek literary
modernism in earlier periods emphasized the blueness of the Aegean Sea and the
whiteness of marble to emphasize historical continuity with ancient Greece and connote
openness and classical beauty, Balkan cultural imagery emphasizes the region’s
insularity, its “transitory character and incomplete otherness”. The ambivalence of
Balkan cultural imagery stems from its resituation of Hellenism both in the Balkans and
on the periphery of Europe:
In the case of Greece, however, such Balkan cultural imagery contrasts sharply
with the dominant Mediterranean images and metaphors. Bridges, stone houses,
monasteries, rugged mountain terrains and misty landscapes (as represented in a
number of Angelopoulos’s’ films) evoke the sense of an introverted, enigmatic
and melancholic space, while the whitewashed chapels of the Aegean islands, the
sunny beaches and the blue sea, celebrated by poets and artists, suggest open
horizons, brightness and a different attitude to life…This contrasting iconography
163
suggests that the more Greece emphasizes its identity as a Balkan country the
more it underlines its Byzantine and Orthodox heritage.
49

The Greek cinema of the period does not fully escape earlier historical accounts
of Greek identity as “walled in by the state [and] cut off from his historicality as a
transnational citizen”.
50
Perceptions of marginality and isolation and uneasiness with
Europeanization do not allow for a complete break with the modalities of national
introversion. But Greek cinema’s increasing acknowledgement of its internal diversity
and its critical distance from Greek territorial nationalism do suggest that Greek film
culture is beginning to
rethink citizenship at a time when the borders of Europe are multiple, and their
walls, ‘essential for state institutions,’ are ‘profoundly inadequate for an account
of the complexity of real situations,’ of the ‘topology underlying the sometimes
peaceful and sometimes violent mutual relations between identities constitutive of
European history,’ particularly its southernmost tip.
51

Throughout Ο Χαμενος Θυσαυρος του Χουρσιτ Πασα, a Romani musical band
enigmatically follows the protagonists on their journey, providing musical
accompaniment to their moments of joy and sadness, their celebrations and their funerals.
The unexplained arrival of the Romani musicians naturalizes Romani mobility and
marginality. Even though the importance of the band’s music in evoking the emotions of
the characters places the band at the affective center of Ο Χαμενος Θυσαυρος του Χουρσιτ
Πασα, the fact that its members do not participate in the dialogue that is so important to
the negotiation of Greek common sense places Romanies outside of the film’s
reconstruction of Greek national identity.
The essentialist association of Romanies with travel and marginality, outside of
European national cultures, structures contemporary attempts by Romani filmmakers to
164
represent themselves. In the next chapter we will consider the films of Romani filmmaker
Tony Gatlif, whose representation of alterity differs radically from that found in
contemporary Greek cinema. Whereas the vast majority of Greek films today are not
internationally distributed, Gatlif’s films rely on international film festival and art cinema
exhibition circuits. The absence of an international audience renders the question of self-
representation to external audiences a non-issue in contemporary Greek cinema, whereas
the preconceptions about Romani culture and identity render questions of audience
address and representational transparency central to Gatlif’s work. While Greek
filmmakers have been able to rely on endogenous cultural idioms to tell their stories,
Gatlif has had to establish multiple sites of cinematic pleasure and meaning that both
acknowledge and move beyond the expectations of external and internal constituencies.
Even though contemporary Greek cinema is characterized by an ambivalence between
tradition and modernity, Balkan and European identity, introversion and extroversion, its
mode of address is unequivocally self-referential and nationally oriented. By contrast,
due to the absence of an independent Romani state, territorial homeland or dedicated
institutional support structure, Gatlif’s cinema has had to address Romanies’ national,
transnational and regional identities simultaneously, and provide points of identification
for both internal and external audiences. It is to this more profoundly ambivalent cinema
that we turn next.
165
Chapter 3 Endnotes

1
Gregory Jusdanis: “Introduction: Modern Greek! Why?”, Journal of Modern Greek Studies, vol. 15 no. 2,
Oct. 1997, p. 171.
2
William V. Spanos: “Heidegger's Parmenides: Greek Modernity and the Classical Legacy”, Journal of
Modern Greek Studies, vol. 19 no. 1, May 2001, p. 106.
3
Koundoura states: “Consistently throughout the process of modernity’s constitution – either as the
specific ‘antiquity’ or the more general ‘tradition’ – Greece has figured as the universal that Europe needed
to signify either an irreversible break from, or to project a movement forward towards, in its process of
self-totalization.” Koundoura, p. 19.
4
Ibid, pp. 2, 25-26.
5
Gonda Von Steen and Alinda Hector assert that Classical studies in the West have been governed by a
Eurocentric bias that has denied the Eastern influences of ancient and modern Greece: “by confronting the
eastward focus of Greece's religious, economic, and even military life, Western scholars can come to
acknowledge not only that they have made Greece into a reflection of their radical—but nonetheless
wishful—thinking, but also that they have neglected Greece as a permeable zone of contact, an area of
absorption mediating between the ancient Near East and the Western Mediterranean… ‘The fundamental
irritation of modern Greece—its inability to become Periclean Athens—is the most salubrious contribution
to classical scholarship, since it helps us to break through centuries of accreted pseudo-knowledge about
who the ancient Greeks were in relation to us, by requiring an attitude of humility and a respect for
alterity.’” Gonda Van Steen and Aline Hector: “Greek Worlds, Ancient and Modern: To Whom They May
(or May Not) Concern”, Journal of Modern Greek Studies vol. 20 no. 2, Oct. 2002. p. 182. For a
groundbreaking analysis of the Afro-Asiatic influences on Ancient Greek culture, see Martin Bernal: Black
Athena: the Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987).
6
As Peter Bien argues, after the Enlightenment, nationalism replaced religion as the means by which
Greeks (among others) have been able to deny their own mortality – death, fate, contingency – during
periods of social or political upheaval. Throughout the course of modern Greek history, each new political
crisis has precipitated reinventions of national identity and culture: “Greece was first imagined during the
eighteenth-century ferment occasioned by the French Revolution and Greece’s own pre-revolutionary
chagrin. It was then re-imagined after the failure in the nineteenth century of the Enlightenment’s project of
a new Periclean democracy. Finally, it was reimagined yet again after the Asia Minor disaster of 1922, the
Axis occupation of 1941–1944, and Civil War that followed. Perhaps one can say that political vicissitude
serves to open up anew, each time, the chasm of contingency, futility, and meaninglessness that must be
filled by an ever-renewed, ever-redefined nationalism, the modern world’s primary religion.” Peter Bien:
“Inventing Greece”, Journal of Modern Greek Studies, vol. 23 no. 2, Oct. 2005, p. 230.
7
Leontis, 1997a, p. 225. Artemis Leontis contrasts the lingering ethnocentrism of Greek political and
cultural discourse to instances in contemporary Greek literature and the arts that decenter, deconstruct, de-
ethnicize and de-territorialize Hellenism: “The identification of a single people and history with Hellas is
only one of several responses to the need for cultural distinction. Greek literature converges on other topoi,
too. It settles uncomfortably into places neither at the center of the nation nor at an estranged distance from
society but at critical junctures where local, national, and international interests cross paths--where
religious communities compete for power, urban environments undergo sudden transformations, village
economies contend with transnational agricultural policies, migrant laborers share not a history but its
accidents, polyglot residents of Northern Greece wonder how to redistribute justice; and alloethnic
residents of the world wonder how to redistribute cultural capital without losing common ground.”
166

8
William V. Spanos invokes Martin Heidegger’s interpretation of ancient Greek thought as been tainted by
Roman interpretations, which, he argues, replaced its emphasis on radical inquiry and alterity with
imperialist certainty and will to power: “Heidegger claims that the idea of Europe, as we have come to
know it through Winckelmann, Goethe, Schiller, Hegel, Humboldt, Arnold, and so on, was inaugurated, not
by the classical Greeks, but by the Romans. The conventional history of the Western symbolic order--its
thought, languages, representation of the polis, and global politics--does not have its provenance in the
existential actualities of the Greek experience, but in the Roman re-presentation of them. Specifically, its
provenance is "unstable" (but profoundly creative) Greek culture filtered through the eyes of a metropolitan
Roman culture that saw itself not as the heir of Greek civilization, but as an imperial culture that would
"correct" the "fatal flaws" of its errant predecessor. This history of rectification, according to Heidegger,
begins with the Roman's transformation of the destabilizing Greek understanding of truth as a-letheia
("unconcealment" or "un-forgetting") into veritas ("the adequation of mind and thing"). This was an
epochal transformation that reduced an uncentered and originative, or open-ended ("errant"), thinking to a
centered and derivative, or end-oriented, one. That is to say, it was a transformation that reduced an
existential mode of inquiry characterized by dialogic strife (polemos)--Auseinandersetzung --to a
calculative, teleological method committed in advance to correctness and certainty (Heidegger 1959). In
short, whereas the Greeks, not only the Pre-Socratics (Heraclitus, Anaximander, Parmenides), but even
Plato and Aristotle, thought the be-ing (the temporal differentiations) of being as beings-in-the world, the
Romans, committed to the imperative of the adequaetio, thought the anxiety-provoking differential
dynamics of being metaphysically: from the distanced vantage point of the end (meta ta physika). In this
way, they were able to reduce temporality and the differences that temporality always disseminates to a
totalized, spatial, or reified image that could be "comprehended" (from the Latin, prehendere, "to take hold
of"); that is, to see and master the be-ing of being in its totality at any given immediate moment in time (the
volatile realm of "appearances"). This Roman reduction of the temporality of being to a spatial/reified
form, which also posits Identity (the Whole, the One) as the condition for the possibility of difference (the
partial, the many), according to Heidegger, constitutes the founding moment of the cultural identity of the
Occident. What must be underscored is that this Roman mode of inquiry, insofar as it produces knowledge
meta ta physika, is informed by the will to power over the be-ing of being, that is, over alterity. It is in this
sense that the Roman reduction of the Greek's a-letheia to veritas is imperial in essence.” Spanos, pp. 92-
93.
9
Ibid, p. 106.
10
Yannis Hamilakis: “The Other "Parthenon": Antiquity and National Memory at Makronisos”, Journal of
Modern Greek Studies, vol. 20 no. 2, Oct. 2002, p. 311.
11
Ibid, p. 312.
12
Yannis Hamilakis states that Makronisos camp newspapers, magazines and calendars were widely
circulated throughout Greece and English-language leaflets and postcards were created for foreign
distribution. Domestic and foreign notables were invited to visit the camps, photographic exhibits and
parades by “redeemed” prisoners were organized in Athens, and “‘declarations of repentance’ that the
inmates were forced to sign were publicized in the press, sent to the home communities of the inmates, and
read aloud by local priests to the whole congregation in the Sunday mass.” Ibid, p. 313.
13
Ibid, p. 318.
14
Ibid, p. 326. This notion of monumental national time is most powerfully evoked in Theo Angelopoulos’
films. In Landscape in the Mist (1989), a giant severed hand of a statue is pulled out of the sea by a
helicopter as the protagonists stare on in awe and in Ulysses’ Gaze (1995) a giant statue of Lenin’s head is
carried by a boat on a river as the protagonist looks on in apoplexy.
15
Ibid, p. 327.
167

16
Ioakimidis, 2001, p. 74.
17
Ibid, p. 75.
18
Kevin Featherstone notes: “For ND in the mid-1980s, EU membership reinforced the shift away from
state paternalism and ideological vagueness towards a more defined neo-liberal stance, along the lines of
centre-right parties in the EU. EU membership ‘Europeanised’ ND – to use the phrase adopted by
Ioakimidis – as a party that could speak warmly of the ‘social market economy’ and of ‘the Thatcher
experiment,’ both alien to the Greek tradition…For ND modernisation would come via less regulation,
paralelling the philosophy of the single European market programme of 1985…PASOK’s programme
combined less statism with an emphasis on social solidarity. It echoed the policies put forward by the
French socialists after 1984 or the British Labour Party after 1987. Unemployment, Andreas Papandreou
[head of PASOK and prime-minister throughout most of the 1980s] told parliament, ‘cannot be fought by
increasing the public sector, but through growth’. Moreover, ‘Privatisation is not incompatible with our
policies so long as it does not lead to private monopolies, or damage national interests.’” Featherstone, pp.
11-12.
19
Nicos Mouzelis notes: “crucial issues affecting the everyday existence of Greek citizens will be decided
in the absence of the major Greek political forces and…the latter’s role in shaping policy will be less
important than the role of various EC agencies.” Mouzelis, 1995, p. 26.
20
Andreas Moschonas: “European Integration and Prospects of Modernization in Greece”, Journal of
Modern Greek Studies, vol. 15 no. 2, Oct. 1997, p. 339.
21
In his review of The Greek Paradox: Promise vs. Performance, which published the papers presented at
the Harvard symposium, Stathis N. Kalyvas described how the authors interpret post-junta democratic,
redistributive concessions to mass constituencies as the primary obstacle to neoliberal reform: “The
democratic regime that emerged in Greece in 1974 had to integrate ‘large social strata previously excluded
and/or marginalized by the anticommunist state in postwar years’. This, however, implied policies such as
income redistribution that were implemented through public sector expansion and clientelism and that
eventually undermined the country's economy and reinforced its ‘chronic backwardness’… ‘economic
adjustment and international competitiveness were sacrificed for many years on the altar of democratic
consolidation.’” Stathis N. Kalyvas: “The Greek Paradox: Promise vs. Performance (review)”, Journal of
Modern Greek Studies, vol. 15 no. 2, Oct. 1997, p. 399.
22
Balibar, pp. 1-2.
23
Jusdanis, 1991, p. xii.
24
In the novel The dream of the Master-builder Nikitas by Aris Fakinos, Nikitas embraces westernization
by diligently building a bridge, but the change that this brings threatens the traditional ways of life and does
not bring progress or greater cross-cultural communication as he had hoped. Disillusioned, Nikitas blows
up the bridge. As Georgia Farinou-Malamatari notes, Nikitas’ position as builder and destroyer of the
bridge captures Balkan ambivalence toward modernity: “Nikitas is characterized by an intellectual
ambivalence: while he himself builds the bridge, giving western, capitalist characteristics to the place (it is
infinite, desanctified, economic, ‘useful’ for action, etc.), he demands, after the fact, a use of that space that
is based on pre-capitalist characteristics (it should have different densities, be sanctified, sensuous,
ritualized, cosmological, etc.)” Georgina Farinou-Malamatari: “The Representation of the Balkans in
Modern Greek Fiction of the 1990s”, Greece and the Balkans: Identities, Perceptions and Cultural
Encounters since the Enlightenment, ed., Dimitris Tziovas (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 251-252.
168

25
Ellie Scopetea: “The Balkans and the Notion of the ‘Crossroads Between East and West”, Greece and the
Balkans: Identities, Perceptions and Cultural Encounters since the Enlightenment, ed., Dimitris Tziovas
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 171-172.
26
Ibid, p. 176.
27
Van Coufoudakis, Harry J. Psomiades and Andre Gerolymatos: “Greece as a Factor of Stability in the
Post-Cold War Balkans”, Greece and the New Balkans: Challenges and Opportunities, Van Coufoudakis,
ed., Harry J. Psomiades and Andre Gerolymatos (New York: Pella Publishing Company, 1999), p. 424.
28
Dimitris Constas and Charalambos Papasotiriou: “Greek Policy Responses to the Post-Cold War Balkan
Environment”, Greece and the New Balkans: Challenges and Opportunities, Van Coufoudakis, ed., Harry J.
Psomiades and Andre Gerolymatos (New York: Pella Publishing Company, 1999), pp. 236-237. Constas
and Papasotiriou note: “Former perceptions of Greek vulnerability in the Balkans were replaced by a
recognition of Greek structural superiority. Greek foreign policy was thus adjusted accordingly, and
became devoted to the pursuit of Greek leadership in the Balkans with the objective of leading this troubled
region toward economic cooperation, political stability, and integration with the West.”
29
P. C. Ioakimidis notes that between 1990-1995 Greece was perceived by western Europeans to be acting
like a ‘Balkan state’ and between 1995-1999 it was perceived to be acting more like a ‘European state’.
“Commenting upon Greece’s relations with Albania in September 1994, the habitually vitriolic Economist
observed that ‘…despite 13 years in the European Union and handouts worth $6 billion a year, Greece still
seems to belong more to the volatile Balkans than to Western Europe…’…Writing in Kathimerini, in
September 1994, a well-known political analyst remarked that, ‘…Greece is with the one foot in the
European Political Cooperation [framework] and with the other out. This phenomenon is not unrelated to
the confusion that nowadays prevails in Greek foreign policy…’…Thus, the widespread perception at that
time was that Greece, despite more than a dozen years of full membership in the European Union, remained
an essentially ‘Balkan state,’ unable to adjust to EU requirements.” Ioakimidis, 1999, pp. 169-170.
30
Jusdanis, 1997, p. 170. For a seminal analysis of the Orientalization of the Balkans in contemporary
European discourse, see Maria Todorova: Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press,
2009).
31
Ioakimidis, 1999, p. 182.
32
As Victor Roudemetof notes, the idea of a Balkan commonwealth was an active political project in the
middle of the nineteenth century but it was extinguished amid the rise of ethnic nationalism and territorial
rivalry that swept the Balkans at the beginning of the twentieth century. “Early Balkan nationalists such as
Rigas Velestinlis and the Balkan federalists of the 1850-1950 period offered an alternative to the model of
the nation-state. Their goal was to divorce state organization from national groups in order to provide for a
federation or a state where different nations could coexist peacefully. However, these Balkan attempts did
not materialize; indeed, with the 1913 partition of Macedonia among Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece, the
ideology of the homogeneous nation-state triumphed over federalism. As a result of this historical
contingency and of the post-1913 homogenization policies of the Balkan states themselves, nation-building
in Greece, Bulgaria, and Serbia has emphasized ethnicity and religion rather than citizenship as the major
criteria.” Roudemetof, p. 255.
33
Dimitris Tziovas notes: “The idea of Europe played a crucial role in the transformation and eventual
break-up of the common tradition of Balkan culture during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries and it could be argued that it plays a similar role today. Although Europe was received with
considerable excitement and hope, it ‘brought with it the secular political logic of nationalism that
impregnated Balkan politics with violence, suspicion and fear and destroyed the common world of Balkan
orthodoxy’. Given the negative connotations of everything Balkan, Europe serves as a cultural, political
169

and economic ideal and offers an alternative to the idea of a revival of a cultural Balkan commonwealth.”
Dimitris Tziovas: “Introduction”, Greece and the Balkans: Identities, Perceptions and Cultural Encounters
since the Enlightenment, ed., Dimitris Tziovas (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), p. 7.
34
Scopetea, p. 175.
35
Rodanthi Tzanelli states: “In Greek observations during and before the Dilessi crisis, a third pair of
opposites, namely Greece versus Turkey, accompanied the binarisms between civilization and lack of
civilization, Greek society and Vlach/Albanians. Here we observe an initial internalization and eventual
exorcism of a Western discourse of Greek identity. In this Western discourse Neohellenic culture had
appeared to be infected by “Oriental barbarism” after the conquest of Byzantium by the Turks. Greek
“regeneration” was concomitant with the restoration of order, which in the modern state vocabulary
signified public security and competent administration.” Rodanthi Tzanelli: “Haunted by the ‘Enemy’
Within: Brigandage, Vlachian/Albanian Greekness, Turkish ‘Contamination,’ and Narratives of Greek
Nationhood in the Dilessi/Marathon Affair (1870)”, Journal of Modern Greek Studies, vol. 20 no. 1, May
2002, pp. 64-65.
36
Coufoudakis, Psomiades and Gerolymatos, pp. 429-430. See also Stephen F. Larrabee: “Greek Security
Concerns in the Balkans”, Greece and the New Balkans: Challenges and Opportunities, Van Coufoudakis,
ed., Harry J. Psomiades and Andre Gerolymatos (New York: Pella Publishing Company, 1999), pp. 334-
335.
37
Unfortunately, many domestic and international observers of Greek policies associate historical
consciousness with the divisiveness of nationalism. These observers ignore earlier historical models of
multiculturalism, social mobility and peaceful co-existence perhaps because of the widely-held belief that
the pre-nationalist period was dominated by the oppression of living under the yoke of the Ottoman
Empire. For instance, P. C. Ioakimidis asserts that Greek foreign policy in the 1990s was shaped by the
particular burden of history in the Balkans, although he does not acknowledge that what he refers to is only
recent history ignoring the realities of the Ottoman period: “The daunting task confronted by all Balkan
states, indeed all European states, is how ‘to escape history,’ how to escape that is, the burden and the
consequences of history, how to set it aside as a factor shaping interstate, interregional relations. There can
be no doubt that history is a much more important factor as a determinant of political behavior in the region
of the Balkans than anywhere else in Europe…Participation in the EU can be seen as an attempt by
European states ‘to overcome history,’ close a chapter in history and open a new one – to close the chapter
of historical enmities and open that of cooperation and integration. …However, Greece seems to be
profoundly anchored, not only in the concept of history as a source of shaping national identity, but also in
history as an emotional factor influencing foreign-policy objectives and performance. To put it differently,
instead of being the valuable force for sustaining national identity, history operates as a paramount
determinant of foreign-policy orientation”. Ioakimidis, 1999, pp. 178-179.
38
Victor Roudemetof contends that the definition of Greek national identity has undergone a major
transformation in the modern era, shifting in the period between 1839-1852 from one based on religion as
in the rum millet (under the Ottoman Empire) to a secular, ethnic definition: “Although modern Greek
identity has been based on this assumption of continuity, the ‘proper’ geographical boundaries of Greece
and the ethnic characteristics of the Greeks remained vague for some time. Only during the second half of
the nineteenth century did the consolidation of the national narrative take place. As late as 1824, the
Phanariot Theodore Negris identified Serbs and Bulgarians as Greeks, a definition that was closer to that of
the Orthodox religious community of the Rum millet than to the definition of a modern secular Greek
identity. But between 1839 and 1852 an important ideological change occurred. The challenge to the
historical continuity thesis by Fallmerayer (1830), the gradual rise of the Bulgarian national movement, and
the religious revival within the Greek kingdom all collided, suggesting the need for a different evaluation of
Greece's historical past. In the modern Greek Enlightenment, the ancients and the moderns were connected
through a genealogical tie, while the Orthodox and Byzantine past had been undermined. Suppressing
170

Orthodoxy and Byzantinism was a political necessity for people such as Koraes who aimed at transforming
the religiously based identity of the Rum millet into a modern, secular national identity.” Roudemetof, pp.
281-282.
39
Tziovas, 2003, p. 6.
40
Georgia Farinou-Malamatari notes that the novels of Vassilis Gouroyiannis and Sotiris Dimitriou “show
that the people of the Balkans (particularly of Greece and Albania) were shaped by centuries of co-
existence and conflict, by economic exchange, by mutual experiences, beliefs and worldviews. They also
show that new conditions were created by the new borders imposed after the Second World War and its
aftermath in the Balkans, or by the homogenizing politics of nation-states (the Greece of Metaxas, the
Albania of Hoxha). As an antidote to Balkanization these novels suggest the projection of a common
cultural past shared by the inhabitants of the region, which would unite instead of divide. They also endorse
the emergence of a multicultural Greece and other Balkan States, national unities where various ethnic
groups can retain diverse cultural, linguistic and religious backgrounds.” Farinou-Malamatari, p. 260-261.
41
See Dina Iordanova: Cinema of Flames: Balkan Film Culture and the Media (London: BFI Publishing,
2001).
42
The reorientation of Greek identity toward the Balkans as a response to European marginalization is not
new. Dimitris Tziovas notes that in the 1930s and 1940s, the usurpation of Hellenism by political
conservatism and the continued European marginalization of Greek arts and letters pushed Greek
modernists to emphasize Byzantine and Ottoman influences on Greek national culture. Tziovas, 1997, pp.
36-37.
43
Tziovas, 2003, pp. 8-9. Georgia Farinou-Malamatari identifies the representation of Greece as a
privileged intermediary between the Balkans and Europe in contemporary Greek novels by Thodoros
Grigoriadis, Aris Fakinos and Nikos Themelis. She notes that these novels “propose (as an antidote to
Balkanization) either the economic or cultural union of the Balkans, with Greece, because of its ancient and
Byzantine heritage, its successful economy and non-communist past, finding itself closer to the spirit of the
West and consequently in the place of honour.” Farinou-Malamatari, p. 259.
44
Farinou-Malamatari, pp. 255-256.
45
Michael Herzfeld: Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology and the Making of Modern Greece (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1982), pp. 19-20.
46
Ibid, p. 20.
47
Ibid, pp. 33-34.
48
Michael Herzfeld notes that katharevousa is the best example of political Hellenism and its emphasis on
fulfilling a European idealized image of Greekness: “the salient paradox of katharevousa: this supposedly
autochthonous tongue was in fact, to a considerable degree, a response to imported ideals. Greece was
unique among the new European nations in not using the vernacular as the language of its risorgimento,
and this, more than any other aspects of its cultural history, underscores the country’s beholden position.”
Ibid, p. 21.
49
Tziovas, 2003, p. 9.
50
Koundoura, p. 95.
51
Ibid.
171

172
Chapter 4. Minority Cinema and Popular Culture:
The Politics of Identity in Tony Gatlif’s Films

Tony Gatlif has risen to prominence primarily as a Romani filmmaker, making
films about Romanies in France, Spain, Romania and other parts of the world.
1
This
chapter will consider whether Gatlif’s films can be read as minority cinema, and the
extent to which his body of work constitutes a meaningful alternative to the conventions
of contemporary European art cinema and national cinema. The Roma are Europe’s
largest and most persecuted minority, more socially marginalized, impoverished and
politically disenfranchised than any other people on the continent. They have been
disproportionately affected by the rapid marketization and resurgent nationalisms of
Eastern European states, leading to widespread destitution, an increase in racist attacks
and heightened levels of westward migration. Romanies’ statelessness means that they
have been impacted by stricter immigration controls and lack of minority rights
enforcement much more acutely than other groups. As such, they do not have the luxury
of easily transcending their minority status, as some observers have called on them to do.
Rather, they have mobilized politically in order to secure their rights as an ethnic
minority.
Film studies scholarship on minority cinemas has been structured around a
dichotomy between oppositional and popular aesthetic strategies. Both in American and
European minority film studies, initial efforts sought to define minority film practice in
opposition to that of Hollywood, art cinema and other dominant modes. As minority
filmmakers such as Luis Valdez, Spike Lee, Rachid Bouchareb and Isaac Julien entered
173
into (or became incorporated by) the mainstream film industries in their respective
nations, or began to use popular forms in their films, debates broke out among minority
film scholars. Could these popular departures still be situated within minority film
practice? In these debates, ambivalences between oppositional and popular forms were
often treated as unavoidable compromises of earlier ‘purer’ aesthetic traditions. In this
chapter, I want to reclaim these sites of ambivalence in Gatlif’s cinema, arguing that they
be viewed as exemplifications of the complex positionalities of Romanies within cultural
and political fields of action.
Many of the characteristics marking the early phases of American and European
minority cinemas do not seem to apply to the films of Tony Gatlif. His films contain few
instances of explicit political content, without any overt references to contemporary
Romani political mobilizations. His films are not uncompromising politically, often
recycling past mythical portrayals of Romanies. They are known more as showcases for
Romani cultural performance than for their oppositional aesthetic strategies. In the
absence of alternative distribution and exhibition circuits, Gatlif’s films have gained
acclaim in art cinema and film festival circuits, and thus are not made primarily for
Romanies. Yet, in line with later phases of minority film scholarship, which emphasized
the cultural politics and hybrid representational styles of minority film practice, Gatlif’s
films foreground the dynamics of cultural performance rather than concrete political
struggles, oscillate between multiple, often contradictory, aesthetic styles, and seem to
address multiple audiences.
174
This chapter will discuss how Gatlif’s films are informed by relations of power
governing interactions between Romanies and other groups within cultural and political
fields of action. Rather than interpreting Gatlif’s hybrid representational style as a
compromise of earlier minority film traditions, I will consider it as a negotiation of
contradictions informing Romani political and cultural practice. Indeed, Romanies
animate a series of contradictions that characterize the current European conjuncture. The
socio-economic marginalization of Romanies after 1989 has undermined progressive
historical accounts of Eastern European transition to market economies; the persistence
of Romanies’ socio-economic destitution despite their increased political mobilization
has called into question the promises of postsocialist democratization; their embodiment
of European citizenship and cultural difference has exposed the racist foundations of
European immigration and asylum policies; their status as a minority population without
a homeland has forced majority groups to acknowledge the inevitability of European
multiculturalism. These contradictions create sites of ambivalence for Romani self-
representation that can be divided into three categories: identity, history and politics. For
the remainder of this chapter, I will describe these sites of ambivalence, and how they
translate into a politics of representation in Gatlif’s films that can reinvigorate our
understanding of what constitutes minority film practice.
As in earlier chapters, my aim is to draw out the connections between political
and cinematic categories: in this case those between identity and performance, history
and narrative, democracy and realism. I will consider how the density of past
representations of Romanies informs each of these categories: how projective
175
identifications, utopian impulses and social reifications of Romanies in past European
films provide a counterpoint to the politics of representation in Gatlif’s work. Gatlif’s
films constitute a filmmaking practice that brings to the surface the structuring absences
of the films discussed in previous chapters, namely the specific subjectivities and
positionalities of minorities in Europe. In Haneke’s cinema, minorities are seen as outside
forces impinging on bourgeois existence, and in contemporary Greek films as marginal
figures who it is assumed want to assimilate into the dominant national culture. Gatlif’s
films actively delimit and deconstruct outsider perspectives of minorities (as found in
Haneke’s films) through the use of travelogue narratives involving outsider characters
whose access to Romani culture is circumscribed by the mortality and social
precariousness of their Romani counterparts. They also challenge the reification of
minority marginality (as found in Greek cinema) by representing Romani cultural
performance as an ambivalent site of identity formation that expresses the tensions
between affect and commerce, internal and external modes of address, the embrace and
disavowal of Romani performativity. By situating us within Romani historical
experience, Gatlif is able to express the ambivalence of categories such as
transnationalism, statelessness, and nomadism that in previous representations of
Romanies were either uncritically celebrated or condemned. Neither unequivocally
oppositional nor unequivocally popular, Gatlif’s stylistic hybridity enables him to
negotiate international film circuits and the vicissitudes of a nascent Romani film practice
of which he is the only internationally recognized practitioner.

176
Identity and Performance
At times, drama and ceremony clarify but sometimes mystify, yet are always
enmeshed in a play of power. -- David Parkin
2

The plot of Tony Gatlif’s Vengo (2000) revolves around Caco, the patriarch of an
Andalusian Romani family embroiled in a bitter feud with a rival clan, the Caravacas.
Caco undertakes the task of looking after his nephew, Diego, who is physically disabled
and the likely target of the Caravacas’ retribution. In order to lift the spirits of the family
and allay Diego’s fears, Caco defiantly organizes a series of parties attended by famous
Romani flamenco acts at prominent restaurants and night clubs around town, leading to
increasingly ominous and violent encounters with the Caravacas. The film ends with
Caco inciting the Caravacas to murder him and thus spare Diego. The opening sequence
of Vengo begins with a group of well-dressed patrons being rowed across a body of water
and then walking up to a hilltop house. Music is already being played on the boats and as
we follow the guests we see a woman handing out programs. A cut situates us on a patio
where a Romani flamenco band has begun to play. After a few seconds, a seamless cut
brings us inside, with the camera positioned in the center of the performance space. The
audience is standing all around the performers, Tomatito and his band, in an intimate
setting and the music continues. As the performance goes on, a series of cuts reveal the
full semi-circle of performers, which includes not only Tomatito but also a North African
ensemble led by Sheikh Ahmad Al Tuni, who sings in Arabic. Toward the end of the
performance a dramatic cut provides us with an expanded view of the entire space,
revealing that another, much larger audience is seated in chairs in front of the performers.
177
As the film progresses, we realize that this opening scene does not connect in any
discernible way to the rest of the film’s narrative.
This scene prompts us to ask a series of questions: since it does not form part of
the narrative, what purpose does it serve in the film? Why does Gatlif draw our attention
to the moments before the performance begins? Why does the scene feature multiple
audiences, occupying different positions in the filmic space at various distances from the
performers? Why are these audiences revealed to us gradually, and why is the
establishing shot withheld from us for so long? Why does the scene feature performers of
such contrasting styles, and why do they seem to play as much for each other as for the
audiences around them? In order to answer these questions, we need to understand this
scene as a mode of identity formation and cultural communication. We have to consider
the projective identifications with Romani identity in the European imaginary, the
debates taking place about what constitutes Romani identity, the connections between
identity and performance, and the role of performance in Romani social and cultural
history.
The ‘Gypsy’ has been an object of fascination for hundreds of years in European
literature and scholarship. Past representations of ‘Gypsies’ have often been motivated by
the projective identification of dominant groups with Romani culture and identity. The
forms of identification vary by region and are dependent on the particular relations
between Romanies and majority ethnic groups. By looking at three historical examples of
projective identification with Romani identity – from the Balkans, Spain and Hungary -
178
we will begin to understand why there is such a careful articulation of audience dynamics
in the opening scene of Vengo.
The relatively benevolent portrayal of Romanies in the Balkans is a function of
their statelessness, which severs them from the interests of a nation state that could be
seen as a territorial threat or as an economic competitor. The benevolence of their
representation is therefore a function of their perceived powerlessness. Unlike the
representation of some other minorities, the depiction of Romanies in Balkan cinema is
not designed to define the dominant ethnic group as opposite from or superior to
Romanies. Rather Romanies are called upon to symbolize the marginality of Balkan
countries vis-à-vis their more powerful and affluent western European neighbors. Dina
Iordanova notes that the representation of Romanies is used to express dominant groups’
marginalization in a displaced way, inverting the hierarchies of value that organize that
marginalization by reclaiming that which is perceived as the lowest and most abject.
3

In Franco-era Spain, the representation of Romanies served as a means of
absolving the Franco regime of responsibility for the social and economic
‘backwardness’ of rural and marginal elements of Spanish society. Isabel Santaolalla
describes the cinematic representation of Romanies during this period as carrying “the
double mark of criminality or/and quaint folklore, associated with poorly-educated but
picaresque, resourceful individuals, and backward – even primitive – community laws.”
4

The conflation of Romani identity with traditional Spanishness imbricated them into the
larger project of legitimating the Franco-era hermetic isolation of Spanish society from
outside modernizing influences. Romanies therefore have come to paradoxically
179
symbolize both marginality and Spanishness, and are perceived as “both strange and
familiar” in the Spanish popular imaginary. Paul Julian Smith notes that this combination
of strangeness and familiarity has been mobilized in a spate of recent Romani-themed
Spanish films in order to displace and alleviate the discomfort over Spaniards’
“confrontation with [the] radical otherness” of recent immigrants from Africa and Eastern
Europe.
5

Hungary provides a third model for the definition of dominant groups in relation
to distorted portrayals of Romanies. Anikó Imre argues that the “relative flexibility of the
Gypsy image” becomes a useful tool for national cultures attempting to define themselves
in periods of political and cultural transition. After 1989, Hungarian filmmakers have
often included Romani actors or Romani subplots in their films in order to appeal to
international audiences, during a period when Hungarian filmmakers find themselves
“caught between old, national and new, global expectations and conditions of
filmmaking”.
6
In this way, Romanies are accepted into the nation at the representational
level, when it suits national artists seeking approval abroad, but excluded from it socially
and politically at home.
7

The projective identification of dominant groups with Romani culture poses a
specific set of challenges for Romani self-representation. The question is not how to
make Romani culture and identity more visible since it is already hyper-visible, but rather
how to connect it to the interests of Romanies without disassociating it completely from
the investments of dominant groups.
8
It is unreasonable to expect Romani artists to
disavow all aspects of prior representation, since their very legibility as social subjects
180
depends on it. The politics of minority cinema cannot be reduced to the oppositionality of
its aesthetics, as early phases of minority film scholarship seemed to suggest.
9
What
Gatlif does in the opening scene of Vengo is to mediate between internal and external
investments in Romani culture, carving out a space of articulation for Romani self-
representation in the broader culture. He does this by showing us internal (diegetic)
audiences to the performances, thus allowing us to understand the social dynamics
informing the reception of Romani culture. By modulating the relative positions of
Romani performers and audiences, Gatlif is able to metonymically reconstitute and in
turn negotiate the tensions between external and internal investments. To better
understand these tensions we need to engage with the debates raging within the Romani
community about what constitutes Romani identity.
Most definitions of Romani identity are based on common origins, cultural
affinities or shared histories of persecution. All these methods have sought to define
Romanies as a distinct ethnic group. In recent years, there has been a drift away from
single-origin and single-migration theories, acknowledging the importance of
intermarriage and intermixing with majority populations during and after migration. This
new position conceives of Romani ethnic identity as being formed primarily during the
diaspora, not at the point of origin, and in response to persecution and intermixing. The
evidence on origins, whether linguistic or genetic, is speculative and contradictory, the
subject of heated debates. In recent years, some scholars have moved away from origins
altogether, instead defining Romani ethnicity based on customs and rituals.
10
Most
Romanies do not feel strong ties to their original homeland, India in the 10th century, and
181
group themselves in small enclaves based on kinship rather than in larger communities.
According to David Mayall, this has delayed the establishment of the “normal ideological
and institutional mechanisms for asserting common identity”. But today the increasing
unity, recognition and resources of international Romani political organizations have
solidified definitions of Romani ethnicity by making Romanies from across the globe
aware of their common ancestry, culture and interests. This unity has in turn been used to
strengthen the case for ethnic status, and to better combat discrimination. Yet some
scholars have rejected ethnic or nationalist definitions of Romani identity altogether,
including ethnically distinct groups such as Irish Travelers and other nomadic peoples in
their definitions of Romani identity.
11

The definition of Romani identity is therefore a subject of increasing scrutiny
within the Romani community and is open to contestation. The fluidity of definitions,
from linguistic, historical, ethnic, socio-economic and political categories, is manifested
in Gatlif’s films through an ambivalence between different representational styles, a topic
that will be discussed in greater detail in a later section of this chapter. For now, it
suffices to say that Romani identity is presented by Gatlif as a dynamic process of social
construction rather than a fixed essence. This begins to explain why Tomatito and Sheikh
Ahmad Al Tuni seem to be listening and adapting to each other’s play in the opening of
Vengo. But we have not yet identified what intrinsic characteristics of musical
performance enable the articulation of identity as a dynamic and constructed process.
This will help us understand why Gatlif chooses to open Vengo with a musical
182
performance, one disconnected from the rest of the narrative, yet essential in establishing
the politicized spectatorial dynamics that will persist throughout the film.
Subject formation, as already noted, is inherently citational and performative (see
Introduction). Singing, dancing, and sports can play an important role in the articulation
of performative identity, because these types of social and cultural performance are also
iterative, imitative, and communicative acts.

As Elin Diamond states: “Performativity, I
would suggest, must be rooted in the materiality and historical density of performance.”
12

Akin to Butler’s definition of identity as inherently citational, cultural performers are
seen to rely on a set of existing cultural codes, or ideological presuppositions, in order to
effectively communicate with their audience.
13
But performances need not always affirm
social and ideological norms; they can also function as sites for contestation and renewal,
as Diamond asserts:
the terminology of ‘re’ in discussions of performance, as in reembody, reinscribe,
reconfigure, resignify…acknowledges the pre-existing discursive field…[and] the
possibility of materializing something that exceeds our knowledge, that alters the
shape of sites and imagines other as yet unsuspected modes of being…the
fissures, ruptures, and revisions that have settled into continuous re-enactment.
14

This is akin to anthropologist Victor Turner’s description of social and cultural
performances as catalysts for collective identity formation through both consensual and
contestatory practices, wherein cultural performers and their audiences occupy positions
of inbetweenness that enable rule-breaking.
15
And performances do not only serve intra-
cultural functions. Patrice Parvis identifies realist representation and performative
reenactment as the two primary modes of inter-cultural communication. The former
183
imitates the social realities of a culture through narrative and the latter performatively
recreates a culture through ritual or ceremony.
16

Performative identities and cultural performances are therefore closely linked,
displaying a similar propensity for citation, iteration, and contestation of norms. Gatlif
leverages these properties of performance in order to highlight the Romani community’s
internal dynamism and diversity. And he uses the tension between the intra-cultural and
inter-cultural dynamics of performance to delineate the boundaries of Romani identity.
We now have provisional answers for why the opening scene of Vengo features a musical
performance, emphasizes audience dynamics and involves performers of vastly different
musical styles and backgrounds. What remains unclear is why Gatlif only gradually
reveals the multiple audiences of the scene to us, taking the unorthodox approach of
ending rather than starting the scene with an establishing shot. Gatlif is playing with
audience expectations of Romani performativity here, implying that the performance is a
small, semi-private affair before revealing its public scale. The distinction between the
intimate standing audience on stage and the larger seated audience off stage creates a
level of protection for the performers, alluding to the inherent vulnerabilities of Romani
performativity. To understand these vulnerabilities better we need to consider the role of
performance in Romani social and cultural history.
For Romanies, performative reenactment of culture has been an important
vocation and a primary means of contact with majority populations. Alaina Lemon
discusses how Russian Romani performers, for instance, were given special treatment by
Russian authorities starting in the 18
th
century: they were earlier liberated from serfdom,
184
and unlike other Romanies, they were allowed to travel freely, reside in Moscow, and
obtain higher education.
17
However, these privileges have come at a price for Romanies,
who are often defined solely in terms of their performativity. Romanies were often forced
to perform in Nazi concentration camps in order to pacify their fellow prisoners;
18
and
throughout their history, failure to perform for others has had serious consequences for
Romani musicians, as Will Guy recounts:
in a 1930s pogrom in East Slovakia …villagers burned down the nearby Roma
settlement. This was not for the usual reason – retaliation for crop thefts – but
simply because Roma musicians had declined to provide a band for the local
Slovak firemen’s ball.
19

The reception contexts of Romani performances often subsume them within nationalist
narratives, in which Romanies occupy an interstitial space. They are accorded the status
of privileged outsiders to the national culture, devoid of historical agency to shape that
culture from within, but given a platform to comment on it from outside.
20
This
commentary typically takes the form of musical performance, with Romani songs
critically commenting on the vicissitudes of national histories.
21

Even when they do not subordinate Romani performance to the prerogatives of
nationalist historiography, dominant reception contexts often conceive of Romani
musical customs as natural counterparts to Romanies’ ‘carefree’ lifestyle, rather than
important forms of historical recollection, political resistance and cultural education.
Michaela Grobbel describes these intra-cultural social functions of Romani performance,
especially songs which “[i]n the absence of a written tradition…function like epic poems,
transmit communal experiences, and teach children the moral laws of the group.” Romani
performance can also function as a means of historical recollection, commemoration, and
185
political communication. In the Nazi camps, Romanies deployed musical performance as
a means of resistance, using satire to criticize the camp authorities, coded language to
communicate with other prisoners in the presence of guards, and loud singing as a form
of mass defiance.
22

Gatlif’s films have been accused of exoticizing Romanies, reducing them to their
performativity, and sating the desire of international film audiences for ahistorical and
apolitical forms of world music. It is undeniable that Romani cultural performances
enhance the marketability and international appeal of Gatlif’s films, allowing them to
transcend local cultural idioms and connect on an affective level with international
audiences more familiar with Romani music than with Romani histories or politics.
However what our discussion so far has shown is that the representation of musical
performance also enables Gatlif to negotiate the tension between the demands of inter-
cultural and intra-cultural communication, express the fluidity of Romani identity, and
highlight the precariousness of Romani performativity. This politicization of cultural
performance situates Gatlif’s work within the tradition of cultural politics associated with
past instances of minority film practice.
23

We can now return to the opening scene in Vengo and answer our initial set of
questions. Interpreting this scene in terms of its politics of performance is facilitated by
its chronological position in the narrative (or more accurately, outside of the narrative).
Since it is the opening scene, we as spectators know nothing about the plot of the film
and have no way of interpreting what we see in terms of narrative causality. This lack of
context liberates us from the formulas of fictional narrative, compelling us to pay
186
attention to the way the performance is represented, to its performance dynamics, since
the performers are not established as fictional characters.
24

Gatlif’s decision to show the members of the audience arriving, the man rowing
them across the lake or river, and the woman giving out programs is a recognition of how
important pre-performance rituals are to our understanding of the politics of performance.
The time before the performance, when the spectators arrive, take their seats and wait for
the show to start, is called the ‘gathering phase’ in theater studies. Baz Kershaw describes
how the ‘gathering phase’ is an ideologically charged moment in which the power
dynamics between performers and audiences are established:
the gathering phase is designed to produce a special attitude of reception, to
encourage the audience to participate in the making of the performance in a
particular frame of mind. In other words, the conventions of gathering for a
performance are intended to effect a transition from one social role into another,
namely, the role of audience member or spectator. A crucial element in the
formation of the role is the ‘horizon of expectation’ which performative
conventions create for the audience; that is to say, the framework within which a
piece of theatre will be understood as one type of performance event rather than
another.
25

The gathering phases in Vengo, if we expand our understanding of them to include the
moments after a performance as well, shift our “horizon of expectation” away from
abstracted and depoliticized interpretations of Romani performance. This is achieved, in
part, through an emphasis on gendered labor, which draws our attention to the social
structure of Andalusian Romani communities. From the opening moments of the film,
labor is at the forefront as we see an old man straining to pull the oars of the boat
carrying the concert guests. In a later scene, during one of Caco’s parties, close shots of
the faces of the young female flamenco singers are juxtaposed with similar shots of three
187
old widows in black as they clean up and help a drunk Caco into the house. The contrast
between the singers and the widows, in terms of dress color, age, remuneration and
glamour of their labor, signals the shift of women’s symbolic value over time and their
transition from public to private, domestic spaces in patriarchal contexts. This scene
foregrounds the reliance of men on women’s labor, something reinforced by Caco’s
profession as a nightclub/brothel owner.
Gatlif neither denies nor glorifies the commercial imperatives of Romani
performances. In a later moment of the film, Caco talks on the street to the manager for
the singer La Caita. It is not until the end of the scene that Gatlif pulls back from a close
shot of the manager’s face to reveal him sweeping in his orange street cleaner’s uniform.
In this way, Gatlif exposes the paradox of Romani experience, at the forefront of national
culture yet often at the margins of the national economy. In another moment, a tense
encounter between representatives of the rival clans is punctuated with a comic exchange
in which it is revealed that the three Caravacas bodyguards have their own record label:
one designs the CD packaging, the others perform, and so on. This serves as an
acknowledgement of the commercial aspirations of many Romani artists, and as another
instance in which those aspirations are coupled with, perhaps even contradicted by, a
more quotidian form of employment. The rest of the instances of labor in the film are
performed almost exclusively by women, most noticeably perhaps, the
dancers/prostitutes in El Rey, Caco’s nightclub/brothel. Their performances for El Rey’s
patrons, which often include dancing and flamenco singing, provide a fresh, highly
gendered perspective on performativity and reception, and a broader social context for
188
the other Romani performances that populate the film. The assumption that all flamenco
rises from the souls of its performers is here problematized by the obvious financial
imperatives driving these sex workers’ labor.
The presentation of multiple audiences in the opening sequence of Vengo - that
constituted by the performers themselves, that of the intimate bystanders on the stage and
finally that of the larger audience seated in front of the stage - demarcates the boundaries
of reception by establishing a distinction between internal and external audiences.
According to Christopher Murray, this is an inherent characteristic of performance:
“boundaries and their negotiation are what…performance is about”.
26
The impulse to
define the boundaries of ethnic identity is a matter of survival for minority groups such
as the Romanies, fostering solidarity and protecting the culture from appropriation. Carol
Silverman, in her study of American Romanies, observes that they establish their
ethnicity by negotiating their identity in relation to non-members: “The boundary
between Gypsy and [non-Gypsy], then, is central to the process of self-identification.”
27

But the boundaries of ethnic identity are neither fixed nor impermeable, as evidenced by
the history of Romani cultural adaptation to local customs, languages and laws.
28
This
adaptation is a necessary component of most Romani communities, whose members are
compelled to engage with majority populations in order to survive economically and
socially. Silverman states:
Although the Gypsy/non-Gypsy boundary is the cornerstone of Gypsy ethnicity,
there is a great deal of movement of people, goods, and ideas across this
boundary. In fact, Rom survival depends on crossing this boundary to negotiate a
viable niche in the greater non-Gypsy milieu. Successful interaction with non-
Gypsies is crucial for survival because Rom depend economically and materially
on non-Gypsies.
29

189

In the opening scene of Vengo, Gatlif’s cuts between the North African and ‘Gitano’
performers reveal that they are not only performing together but also acting as each
other’s audience. This dialogic interplay between the two sets of performers restages the
process of cultural adaptation that Silverman considers central to Romani social history.
It also alludes to the originary influence of Arab culture on flamenco, the historical
connections between Spanish and North African Romani communities, and the potential
for future inter-ethnic political and cultural alliances. Finally, it serves to de-essentialize
and to re-politicize flamenco by presenting it as an active, contingent and fluid process of
identity formation rather than a static continuation of past traditions.
A subsequent scene in Vengo reveals the precariousness of Romani
performativity. Caco, Diego and other family members and friends are seated around a
table at a restaurant along with a group of flamenco performers. The entire table is
engaged in energetic clapping and singing that reverberates throughout the restaurant. A
group of young payo soldiers are seated at a large table across the room and seem to be
clapping and singing more mutedly to their own tune. As the Romani table continues to
reverberate with festive song, the payo soldiers approach the table one by one. Their
frowns, sullen silence and gradual accumulation around the Romani table make their
presence feel increasingly menacing, even though Caco and the others seem completely
unperturbed. We are left to wonder whether the soldiers are upset that their own song is
being drowned out. Gatlif’s decision to frame the La Caita in close-up accentuates the
tension we feel because now the soldiers are just out of frame escaping our protective
supervision. As the song ends, the tension in the scene reaches its climax, finally deflated
190
by a surprising cry of “hurray for art” by one of the soldiers. As the table bursts into song
once more, the soldiers break into smiles and begin to clap festively.
The vulnerability of La Caita as she sings with her back turned to the party of
slowly encroaching soldiers reminds us of the inherent fragility of all performative
enactments of identity, which Judith Butler describes as follows: “The act of a speaking
body is always to some extent unknowing about what it performs…it always says
something it doesn’t intend…it is not the emblem of mastery or control that it sometimes
purports to be…”
30
But this scene also alludes to the specific history of persecution
suffered by Romanies at the hands of state apparatuses enforcing majority rule (here
symbolized by the soldiers) in Spain and beyond. The historical resonance of this scene is
akin to Frantz Fanon’s definition of colonial ‘alienation’ as a mode of representation that
deliberately foregrounds the psychic damage inflicted by (colonial) histories of
oppression, revealing the ambivalence of identity for those whose representation is
primarily controlled by others:
alienation is, in Fanon’s opinion, used in a way that ‘the colonized adorn
themselves with psychic wounds’, like open sores that are eyesores to the
squeamishness of the colonizers and those who benefit from its institutional
decorum. The deliberate inscriptions or reinscriptions on colonial language are
meant to perform the ‘psychic wounds of colonization’ where body and mind
reside in oppositional locations…It is precisely this alienating factor that Spivak
describes as shouting an ‘impossible no to a structure, which we critique yet
inhabit intimately’, thus stressing the ambivalence and productive
contradictoriness of sites of translation and subjectivity.
31

The character of Diego allows Gatlif to explore this dynamic further. While
Diego’s disability does not prevent him from singing and dancing along with the others,
it does remind viewers of the precariousness of everyday forms of performance.
32
The
191
difficulties Diego’s disability poses for him when he communicates with others (the
impact of which is blunted for foreign audiences by the use of subtitles) allows Gatlif to
problematize the very feature that non-Romani audiences take for granted in Romanies:
their ability to express themselves and to perform. This partial disavowal of the natural
role Romanies are expected to fulfill in the popular imaginary is further delineated by
Gatlif’s decision to cast internationally renowned flamenco dancer Antonio Canales in
the lead role. For audiences familiar with Canales’ work, seeing him in a feature-length
film full of performances without his participation thwarts expectations, as he shifts in
audiences’ minds from performer to dramatic character. Caco’s increasing preoccupation
with loss, inter-communal reconciliation and protection of his family is contrasted to
Diego’s sensitive yet carefree demeanor, further destabilizing the stereotype of the
carefree, apolitical ‘Gypsy’. Instead, we discover that the impetus for the staging of these
performances is an attempt by Caco to retain a sense of normalcy within the family,
despite the external pressures that threaten it with dissolution. This is starkly reminiscent
of the function of Romani performance in Nazi concentration camps, as described by
Grobbel:
Sometimes the performances temporarily sustained their will to live in the
nightmarish concentration camp setting in which they were trapped. As Alvin
Goldfarb states: ‘If the outside world provided no support or sustenance, theater
was another attempt by the victims to sustain one another and to try to preserve a
semblance of normality in an obscenely abnormal universe’.
33

It is therefore clear that other than the opening scene, the performances in Vengo
are private family affairs, designed for internal use rather than commercial consumption
by non-Romani audiences. Bertha B. Quintana describes how Romani performances are
192
often expected and incited by non-Romani audiences at public events in the Andalusian
region of Spain, in ways that reduce Romanies to their performativity and ignore inter-
ethnic differences in culture and musical ability. These incitements reorient Andalusian
Romani performances from intra-cultural social functions to inter-cultural commercial
functions that instrumentalize Romani cultural practice. Quintana has shown that the
economic exploitation of Romanies by Andalusian tourist agencies has led to an
impoverishment of the flamenco tradition and has severed the form from its cultural and
social roots: “For Gitanos, contacts based on “role” (usefulness) run contrary to the
emphasis on affect (feeling) in the intimate society and culture of the Sacro-Monte”.
34

The performances in Vengo, by contrast, emphasize affect, something reinforced later in
the film when Caco asks an acquaintance of his, who is a prostitute, to have sex with
Diego as a favor:
Listen, Catalana. I got a special favor to ask you. It means a lot to me. I’m here
with my nephew. I want you to do something, and do it really well. If you do it,
I’ll never forget it. Not professional. If you do it professionally, don’t bother.
35

In this way, Gatlif’s transformation of Canales from dancer to actor, from performer to
dramatic character, is mirrored by the transformation of performance from external to
internal, commercial to affective functions by Caco within the diegesis. This series of
shifts allows Gatlif to articulate what changes need to occur in the transition from
Romani representation to self-representation, one that increasingly situates performance
within social, political and historical narratives of relevance to the Romani people.
The delineation of multiple audiences for the performances in Vengo allows us to
distinguish between projective investments of others and the political imperatives
193
endogenous to Romani communities. But these reflexive and boundary-setting dynamics
of performance are combined with an open and inclusive mode of address that
encourages audiences to identify with and participate in the rituals of Romani culture.
The presence of soldiers in the restaurant scene and the cut that reveals the seated
audience in the opening scene remind us of the differences between internal and external
reception. Yet in both cases, the camera situates us within the group of performers,
amidst La Caita’s table and away from the soldiers, and (before the cut) in the middle of
the stage where Tomatito and Sheikh Ahmad Al Tuni are performing. Are we therefore
implicated in the reflexive boundary setting of these scenes: are we banished to the
‘outside’ of Romani culture or do we remain ‘inside’, or do we perhaps rest uneasily
somewhere in between?
This representational ambivalence reminds us of the contradictions at the heart of
minority discourse, which often depends on ‘majority’ languages and audiences but is
ultimately defined in contradistinction to them.
36
The tension between affective and
commercial motivations for performance in Vengo is another sign of this ambivalence. In
these ways, Gatlif articulates the dilemmas inherent in any act of self-representation:
what audience should be addressed, how can internal and external audiences be addressed
at the same time, and how can contradictions between competing investments in one’s
culture be resolved or elucidated. Gatlif’s films demonstrate how cultural performance
can be re-contextualized in order to meet the demands of minority politics. The
foregrounding of vulnerability and the partial disavowal of Romani performativity situate
performative agency within the psychology of minority experience and minority/majority
194
interactions. And the emphasis on the ‘gathering phases’ of performance, especially the
role of gendered labor, grounds our understanding of Romani culture in the material
histories of the community.

History and Narrative
…the truth claims of the narrative and indeed the very right to narrate hinge upon
a certain relationship to authority per se. -- Hayden White
37

At the opening of Tony Gatlif’s Gadjo Dilo (1997), we see a young Frenchman,
Stephane, walking on a snowy road in Romania. As night falls, Stephane wanders into a
desolate town square and comes across an elderly Romani man, Izidor, drinking and
protesting loudly: “Let the snow fall, let it bury me, so I no longer have to see gadjos. I
don’t want to see or smell gadjos any more!” Despite his professed disdain for non-
Romanies (gadjos), Izidor seems appreciative of Stephane’s presence. Finally, there is
someone there to listen to his tales of woe. Even though Stephane cannot understand him,
Izidor continues to protest, and we find out that it is because of the recent arrest of his
son, Adriani: “May I die, may I rot if I don’t curse you tonight! You sent my son to
prison and you want me to lie down. For us gypsies, there’s no justice! My son didn’t do
anything to go to jail!” Under pressure from Izidor, Stephane drinks in honor of Adriani,
and soon becomes drunk himself. Stephane attempts to explain to Izidor the reason for
his journey to Romania by playing a song by Nora Luca, a Romani singer, on his tape
player. Stephane is seeking to find Nora Luca, record her songs and bring the recordings
195
back to France. As the music plays, the two men join in an unlikely embrace, filling the
otherwise desolate town square with sounds of protest and reverie.
This sequence raises a host of questions: Why do we meet Stephane before we
meet Izidor and why is the narrative organized around Stephane’s journey? Why, given
Izidor’s claim that he wants nothing to do with non-Romanies, does he so quickly
befriend Stephane? Why does Izidor’s protest about his son’s arrest transition into a more
general complaint about Romani persecution? Why is Stephane so invested in finding
Nora Luca and recording her singing? Why does Stephane get caught up with Izidor’s
plight, despite the language barrier, and drink himself into a stupor alongside Izidor?
In order to answer these questions, we will have to, once again, address a set of
concerns of much broader significance. Izidor’s and Stephane’s behavior in this scene is
indicative of two interrelated impulses shaping the historical relationship between
Romanies and non-Romanies. On the one hand is the utopian investment in Romani
culture and identity that has marked the European imagination for centuries. On the other
hand is the desire by Romanies to communicate the injustices that have marked their
troubled history on the European continent. In order to understand these dual dynamics,
we have to consider the utopianism of past representations, Romani histories of
persecution, their particular forms of historical recollection and commemoration, and the
relationship between historical narrative and political authority.
The representation of Romanies in European cinema has frequently functioned as
a vehicle for utopian critiques of capitalism, modernity and western civilization. In these
distorted portrayals, the supposed defiance and autonomy of Romanies are positioned
196
against the administrative and disciplinary apparatuses of late industrial capitalist
societies. Romanies are associated with criminality, which serves as a challenge to the
laws of the capitalist state; vagabondage, which symbolizes a disavowal of alienated
labor under capitalism; and uncontrollable passions and self-destructive impulses, which
are seen as alternatives to technocratic rationality.
38
In the popular imagination,
Romanies frequently symbolize freedom from the social constraints of modern society.
Anikó Imre says that “[r]omanticized Gypsy freedom is often called upon, worldwide, to
represent a collective or individual desire to escape from the shackles of civilization.”
39

This utopianism predates cinematic representations of Romanies, and can be found in
many canonical works of European literature. Russian writers, such as Pushkin, Gogol,
Tolstoy, Gorky and Bunin, depicted Romanies romantically, as symbols of freedom
whose lifestyles constituted an alternative to the misery of Russian society. Edouard
Chiline notes the influence of Russian literature on the depictions of Romanies in Soviet
cinema. For instance, Mark Donskoi’s Dorogoi Tsenoi/At a Great Cost (1957), made 4
years after Stalin’s death, Romanies “were portrayed as a nation beyond Stalin’s and
Party’s control” and were seen as “free-thinking and open-minded people”.
40

An example of Romanies’ utopian function in Spanish cinema is Pedro
Almodovar’s The Flower of My Secret (1995), wherein Joaquín Cortés’ character steals a
discarded book manuscript from the film’s novelist main character, Leo Macías, and is
thus able to fund his mother’s dance tour, also inadvertently precipitating a cinematic
adaptation of the manuscript by Bigas Luna, literally rescuing it from the dustbin of
history. Romani criminality is presented here as a corrective to the underfunding of the
197
arts, the vicissitudes of the publishing industry and the self-censorship of authors with
high art literary aspirations.
The construction of Romani exotica in contrast to the mundaneness of normative
culture is another component of this utopian impulse, manifesting itself in the visual style
of films as much as in their themes and narrative structures. As Dina Iordanova notes,
“[e]ven when genuinely concerned with the Romani predicament, filmmakers have
exploited the visual richness of their excitingly non-conventional lifestyles.”
41
Gritty
social realism is often combined with flashes of visual splendor and semiotic excess,
which provide an aesthetic framework through which to celebrate and reclaim the low
and abject. Romani exotica, such as that found in Emir Kusturica’s Black Cat, White Cat
(1998), typically features carnivalesque set design and vibrantly colored costumes,
anarchic mise-en-scene, disjointed narratives, and the use of haunting and energetic
music (whose popularity has often exceeded that of the films themselves).
42
Magic
realism is an aesthetic tradition adept at combining social realism with the irrational, the
spiritual and the affective, and therefore able to capture the contradictory symbolic
valences of Romanies in the European imagination. Magic realism is used to represent
Romanies’ spiritual transcendence of their material conditions in films such as
Kusturica’s Time of the Gypsies (1989).
It is in the utopian impulses of these past representations that we can trace
Stephane’s desire to record Nora Luca’s singing and his willingness to imitate, as an act
of solidarity, Izidor’s posture of drunken protest. Nora Luca and Izidor embody the
qualities of defiance, autonomy, and lyricism long associated with Romanies in the
198
European imagination. Gatlif chooses to situate the act of social injustice in the unseen
past, so that the emphasis is placed on Izidor’s response, his stance of indignation. In
previous films about Romanies, such a stance served as an ahistorical affirmation of the
utopian investments in Romani culture, expressing autonomy and resistance to a set of
social forces whose exact relationship to the Romani community was left unexplored. I
will argue that Gatlif re-historicizes this charged moment of encounter between Izidor
and Stephane, but first we should consider how exactly de-historicization has shaped the
representation of Romanies.
Dominant ethnic and national groups in Europe have negotiated “the historical,
political, and ethnic complexities of their own situation [through] an idealizing envy of
Gypsy life seemingly outside of history and beyond the reach of the authorities.” This
process of de-historicization and idealization has enabled novelists and historians to
represent Romanies as either obstacles or utopian alternatives to western narratives of
historical progress.
43
According to Katie Trumpener, Romanies have been conceived as
“a force of historical regression”, as symbols of “both the traditional and the colonial
unconscious of an industrializing, imperialist Europe – the trace memory of the traumatic
cost of improvement and expansion”. Romanies are seen as locked in an eternal present,
devoid of historical memory and outside of historical time.
44
In European literature, they
have been portrayed as figures of crisis whose ahistoricity is contagious:
Anchored themselves in an eternal present, a self-continuity that transcends
context and time, [Romanies] seem able to remove the memory of others at will.
Those who join them…seem not only to forget who they are but to lose all sense
of time… [Romanies] begin to hold up ordinary life, inducing local amnesias or
retrievals of cultural memory, and causing blackouts or flashbacks in textual,
historical, and genre memory as well.
45

199
The issue of de-historicization has been acutely felt by Romanies in the postwar period,
when the Jewish commemoration of the Holocaust outpaced and overshadowed Romani
efforts to publicize their genocidal persecution by the Nazis. For Yosefa Loshitzky, the
fact that only two Romanies have been elected to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council is
indicative of their marginalized position in Holocaust commemoration. The German
government refuses to pay reparations to Romanies claiming that they were persecuted
for social rather than racial reasons, even though the 1935 Nuremberg Laws listed both
Jews and Gypsies as racially distinctive and as threats to the purity of blood of the
German people.
46

Ahistorical representations of the Roma in European cinema often fail to conceive
of alternatives to existing realities or acknowledge Romani historical agency, making
social change for Romanies seem impossibly out of reach.
47
In Kusturica’s films, for
instance, Romani characters exhibit a “feast in time of plague” attitude, seeming to revel
in their own marginality and abjection, encouraging apolitical and fatalistic
interpretations of the socio-economic injustices that underlie the films’ narratives. In her
discussion of East Central European cinema, Iordanova states:
Poverty or social exclusion was often seen as irrelevant, and the Gypsy
protagonists were frequently shown living in a self-contained universe of
celebratory enjoyment. The Romani universe was continuously represented as
inhabited by passionate lovers, as a visually sumptuous microcosm of exuberant
flamboyance, a kingdom of excitingly contagious lifestyle overtaken by intense
vigor and desire for life.
48

In many ways, the opening sequence of Gadjo Dilo conforms to these past
conventions. Izidor impotently protests in an empty town square, gets drunk and engages
in bawdy behavior with Stephane. Fatalism and exuberance are here combined, and the
200
social forces that impinge on Izidor and his community are unseen and little understood,
either by us in the audience or by Stephane. In a later section, I will discuss how Gatlif
incorporates elements of social realism into culturalist celebrations of Romani identity in
order to qualify, if not wholly avoid, the social abstractions of the past. Here, it is enough
to state that the dual dynamics of the scene – Stephane’s utopian investment in Romani
culture and Izidor’s need to have his troubles acknowledged by Stephane – are in
dialectical tension. Utopian investment in Romani identity is ahistorical, whereas
Romanies’ own understanding of their identity is (at least in part) based on their historical
experience of persecution.
The histories of Romanies have been marked by a perverse interplay between
suppression and incitement, celebration and persecution, nostalgic re-imagination and
historical amnesia. While ‘gypsy’ culture has captivated the popular western imagination,
the treatment of Romanies since their migration to Europe from the Indian subcontinent
in the 14
th
century has been particularly brutal and repressive. Starting in the late 15
th

century, authorities in European states initiated an unprecedented process of regulation
and persecution which took many forms including denial of trade, land ownership or
shelter, banishment, deportation and denial of citizenship, suppression of language and
culture, legalized murder and genocide, enslavement, denial of religious participation and
political representation, break-up of families, sterilization and forced assimilation, forced
segregation, forced labor, forced sedentation and declaration of racial inferiority. This
historical trajectory reached its apotheosis during World War II, when between 300,000
and 600,00 Romanies were killed by the Nazis in concentration camps. The postsocialist
201
period has seen a rise in xenophobia and racist nationalisms in both Eastern and Western
Europe, leading to higher levels of violent attacks, deportations, forced sterilizations,
vilification in the media, employment and healthcare discrimination, and educational
segregation against Romanies.
49

The persecution and marginalization of Romani populations has been an
important and often neglected catalyst for the development of Romani culture, whose
much discussed and imagined nomadism, musical and dancing ability, criminality,
traditionalism and endogamy have served as responses to policies of deportation,
disenfranchisement, discrimination, and socio-economic exclusion. In the case of
nomadism, Zoltan Barany states that “[p]ersistent persecution combined with lack of
available land for cultivation and other economic opportunities compelled the Gypsies to
move on in search of more favorable conditions.”
50
Feudal and capitalist labor
requirements were also important catalysts for Romani dispersal and marginalization.
51

Shared histories of persecution have, in many cases, served to unite Romanies. David
Mayall argues that “persecution heightens the sense of difference, strengthens in-group
feeling and creates an ‘us and them’ mentality”. This provides an impetus for
contemporary political struggles to secure Romani ethnicity status and equal rights, in
order to avoid the repetition of past discrimination. But histories of persecution also
threaten ethnic identity by impelling some Romanies to assimilate into majority society in
order to avoid further persecution.
52

Romani histories of persecution are referenced in many of Gatlif’s films, often in
song lyrics or through oral narratives spoken by community elders, situating Gatlif’s
202
work in the tradition of historical revisionism common in past minority film practice.
53

This explains why Izidor’s protest against the local authorities references not only his
son’s arrest but also the social injustices faced by Romanies generally. We now have a
better contextual understanding of Stephane’s utopian identification with Romani culture
and Izidor’s protest against local authorities, but we have not addressed the interaction
between these two forces. We have yet to explain why Stephane’s utopian investment in
Romani culture is redirected toward both a historical understanding of persecution
against Romanies and an affective engagement in Romani lifestyle in the present. In
order to understand this interplay between past and present in the articulation of Romani
identity we have to consider the particular forms of historical recollection and forgetting
in Romani communities.
Romani historical recollection and commemoration have been studied by Paloma
Gay y Blasco (focusing on the Roma of Jarana, Madrid), who notes that Romanies are
loathe to discuss their past in their everyday interactions, preferring instead “present-
centered forms of collective self-representation”.
54
When Romanies do discuss their past,
known as la vida de antes (‘life of before’) in Jarana, they describe it as “permanent and
unchanging”, providing no indication of how their individual ancestors transitioned from
a difficult rural lifestyle to their primarily urban existence today. A similar attitude
informs the commemoration of the dead, known as luto in Jarana. Those observing luto
avoid the favorite foods and activities of the dead, often destroying or hiding their
personal belongings and photographs, and rarely talking about them in public. Luto,
therefore, like the invocation of la vida de antes, is both a commemoration and an
203
obliteration of memory.
55
Blasco does not condemn these circumscribed forms of
historical recollection, instead arguing that, paradoxically, historical forgetting
contributes to the preservation of Romani communities. Since Romani societies are
typically subdivided along kinship lines (as well as those of religion and social class), the
demarcation of luto as a finite and private rather than public custom of commemoration
reduces the longevity of kinship feuds and ensures that long-term memories are based on
communal rather than kinship bonds. Similarly, the description of la vida de antes in
undifferentiated and de-individuated terms allows Romanies to construct a vision of their
past based on their shared histories of oppression rather than on the particularities of
family histories, enabling them to downplay the social divisions caused by their
geographic dispersal and internal diversity.
56

This interplay between historical memory and forgetting establishes a template for
the articulation of historicity in Gadjo Dilo, one in which ahistorical utopian investments
in Romani culture are redirected toward a historical understanding of social injustice and
toward an affective engagement with Romani lifestyles in the present. We can now see
why Izidor refashions Stephane’s interest in Nora Luca toward a concern for his son
Adriani and induces him to stay up and drink in his son’s honor. One last set of questions
remains: why is the opening sequence of Gadjo Dilo (and indeed, the entire narrative)
organized around Stephane and not Izidor, and why do Izidor’s protestations only
become ‘audible’ in the narrative when Stephane is there to hear them. To answer these
questions we have to consider the relationship between historical narrative and political
authority.
204
Historiography is dependent on the development of a historical consciousness and
the means to preserve historical records, which, according to Hegel, are only made
possible through the existence of state authority, through what Hayden White describes
as “the peculiar relation between a public present and a past that a state endowed with a
constitution [makes] possible.”
57
For White, it is narrative which allows us to connect
historiography to the state authority invoked by Hegel as a precondition for historical
consciousness. The level of narrativization in a historical account reflects the relationship
between subjects and the authorities organizing their lives – the state, the law, and other
forms of moral authority. Those who live under relatively stable, effective and reliable
forms of political authority tend to produce historical counts with higher levels of
narrativization. We may therefore interpret the narrative organization of Gatlif’s films as
a reflection of Romanies’ relationship to contemporary modes of political authority.
The post-socialist period has seen an increased reliance of Romanies on external
political institutions in order to secure their economic, political and cultural rights: “Since
the end of the Cold War there has been a dramatic and ongoing expansion in the
Roma/Gypsy related activities of European institutions.” The E.U. has become involved
in the issue of asylum seekers in Western Europe, supported educational initiatives, and
made minority rights for Roma a criterion for Eastern European states seeking accession
into the Union. The Council of Europe passed Resolution 1203 in 1993 “that declared
Gypsies to be ‘a true European minority’ and established a Specialist Group on
Roma/Gypsies in 1995. The High Commissioner on National Minorities (HCNM) has
produced reports on the Roma and in 1995 set up a Contact Point on Roma and Sinti
205
issues, whose mandate was expanded in 1998 to oversee and coordinate legislation about
the Roma at the European and national levels. The limited power of Romani minorities
within individual European nation-states necessitates their interaction with international
institutions such as the E.U. in order to secure their rights.
58

This reliance on external institutions for the advancement of Romani political
interests manifests itself in Gatlif’s cinema in the form of travelogue narratives in which
our encounter with Romani culture is mediated by a non-Romani protagonist. External
political institutions are thus personified by non-Romani characters, whose function is to
motivate Romani historical recollection and social protest, and whose points-of-view and
subjectivities shape our understanding of Romani characters and situations. We have now
begun to answer all of our initial questions about the opening sequence of Gadjo Dilo: we
have a sense of why we are introduced to Stephane before Izidor, why Stephane is
interested in the music of Nora Luca, why Izidor protests not only about Adriani’s arrest
but about social injustice in general, and why Izidor induces Stephane to stay up all night
and drink with him. But to fully answer these questions, we have to consider the entirety
of Gadjo Dilo, and also look at another one of Gatlif’s films, Swing (2002), which has a
similar approach to historicity, external authority and utopian investments in Romani
culture.
Gadjo Dilo and Swing both begin on the road with young non-Romani males on
their way to Romani encampments in search of cultural knowledge. In Swing, Max is a
young boy who wants to learn to play the jazz guitar in the style of the Manouche, like
the famous Django Reinhardt. In Gadjo Dilo, Stephane is a young man who wants to
206
record Romani music like that of Nora Luca, a Romanian Rom singer who was his
father’s favorite musical artist. Both Max and Stephane become strongly influenced by
Romani father figures (Miraldo and Izidor respectively) who teach them about Romani
culture and lifestyle. Their curiosity about Romani culture motivates instances of
historical recollection (primarily by community elders), since, as we have already seen,
Romani history is often told through cultural forms such as singing and oral storytelling.
Initially seeking only cultural knowledge, Max and Stephane soon come to realize
that the affective components of Romani identity are more important than the abstracted
forms of culture in which they had first been interested. They begin to imitate the
behaviors of the Romanies they encounter (in ways akin to Patrice Parvis’ notion of
performative enactment discussed earlier). Max bathes less, starts spitting, disobeying his
grandmother by sneaking out of the house even when he has been grounded, and
gradually learning the Manouche language. Stephane becomes a handyman around the
encampment, spits, plays dice, gets drunk, affectionately insults Izidor by calling him an
old sleazebag to the amusement of the other Roma, breaks plates, and dances in front of a
large crowd of revelers. Max’s and Stephane’s immersion in the Romani ‘lifestyle’
compromises their initial ethnographic investment in Romani cultural knowledge.
At first, Max is very concerned about damaging his guitar as he traipses through
the woods and waterways that surround the Romani encampment. He records in his diary
all that Miraldo tells him and all that he learns from Swing, Miraldo’s precocious
daughter. Max’s notion of culture as an object with long-term value, to be recorded and
protected from harm, is contrasted to Miraldo’s and Swing’s notions of culture as
207
ephemeral, as lived experience. Throughout Swing, performances arise out of and butt up
against everyday life. In one scene, Dr. Lieberman, a friend of Miraldo’s, plucks a barbed
wire fence and along with the sounds of a barking dog creates music that harrowingly
evokes the Holocaust; in another scene, Miraldo encourages his wife to stop peeling
potatoes, pick up her violin and join the rest of the band, recalling the tension between
gendered labor and musical performance elucidated in Vengo. Max’s affective enactment
of Romani identity is most boldly rendered when, towards the end of the movie, he joins
Swing in dancing on large logs with his guitar in hand, now more concerned with the élan
of the moment than with the preservation of his prized musical instrument.
The progression from ethnographic interest to affective empathy with Romani
culture is even more dramatic in Gadjo Dilo. Initially, Stephane is focused on recording
the music of the Roma he encounters. When he hears a beautiful dirge sung at the funeral
of the performer’s father, he organizes a repeat performance indoors in order to properly
record the song. As we hear the song a second time, its impact is dampened by the
evacuation of its emotive context: the funeral. As Stephane records the song, Sabina, the
young Romani woman he eventually falls in love with, performs a sexually suggestive
dance. But instead of being receptive to her overtures, Stephane chastises her for talking
during the recording. In a later scene, a harrowing story about love and loss sung by an
old Romani woman brings Sabina to tears, but Stephane, unable yet to understand the
Romani language, smiles as he records her song, blissfully unaware of its tragic content.
In the film’s final scene, after tragedy has struck the Romani encampment and Izidor’s
family, Stephane emerges sacralized by the experience and decides to destroy all the
208
recordings he has made, burying them in the ground, pouring alcohol over them and
dancing on their ‘grave’ as he had seen Romanies do at the earlier funeral. In this way,
Stephane rejects the long-term value of Romani cultural knowledge in favor of an
empathetic embrace of Romani codes of mourning and historical forgetting.
The historical form that the narratives in Gadjo Dilo and Swing take is that of the
chronicle, in which an external authority is invoked as a means of imparting value on the
narrated events, but closure is ultimately undermined. Hayden White distinguishes
between three forms of historical account: annals, chronicles, and histories. Annals
consist of a list of chronologically ordered events, without any explanation or
narrativization of these events. Chronicles begin to tell a story from the historical record
but fail to achieve narrative closure. Histories create closed narratives out of events told
in chronological order, giving the impression that historical reality presents itself
naturally in narrative form. Each of these types of historical account reflects particular
relationships between human beings and political authority. The annal, with its lack of
narrative and inclusion of years in which nothing happens, is well-suited to express the
indeterminacy and lack of agency of (early) human existence, presenting the world as one
“in which things happen to people rather than one in which people do things.”
59
The
chronicle is only possible when societies are organized under a sovereign authority, for
the truth claims of a chronicle’s narrativization of human history imply the existence of
an authority that will be able to adjudicate between true and false historical accounts:
for there to be a narrative, there must be some equivalent of the Lord, some sacral
being endowed with the authority and power of the Lord…the truth claims of the
narrative and indeed the very right to narrate hinge upon a certain relationship to
authority per se… Unless at least two versions of the same set of events can be
209
imagined, there is no reason for the historian to take upon himself the authority of
giving the true account of what happened.
60

The lack of narrative closure of a chronicle suggests a lack of faith in the sovereign
authority in whose name the chronicle is often written and to whom it is frequently
addressed: “Where there is ambiguity or ambivalence regarding the status of the legal
system…the ground on which any closure of a story one might wish to tell about a past,
whether it be a public or a private past, is lacking”.
61

The lack of narrative closure in Swing and Gadjo Dilo therefore reveals Gatlif’s
profound ambivalence about the relationship between the Roma and the external
authorities invoked by their narratives. The reliance on an external authority is obvious
from these films’ opening scenes: we first see Max and Stephane alone, and as they
encounter Romani culture so do we along with them, not before. Our exposure to Romani
culture is therefore mediated through these outsider characters. The narrative structures of
the films are based on the character development of Max and Stephane, whose growing
empathetic engagement with and enactment of Romani culture organize the otherwise
episodic scenes involving the film’s Roma. Narrative agency is associated with Max and
Stephane who, in order to embrace the contingency and precariousness of Romani
experience, must gradually relinquish their own agency, be willing to lose control and
come to terms with the their own erotic and spiritual drives.
This progression is most clearly rendered in another Gatlif film, Exils (2004),
which ends with a lengthy and remarkably intense scene of reverie in which the French
couple who have visited North Africa are induced into a wild trance by the pulsating
rhythms of the music that surrounds them. The couple’s loss of control and reconnection
210
with their most fundamental impulses and drives is made possible by their immersion in
North African musical culture. In this way, narrative agency is associated with a
voluntary renunciation of conventional thinking and hyper-rationality. But this loss of
agency is counterbalanced by the protagonists’ adoption and ‘ownership’ over Romani
(or in the case of Exils, North African) culture.
The empathetic loss of agency taken on by Max, Stephane and the couple in Exils,
is mirrored and amplified by the deaths that befall the Romani characters in these films.
In Swing, Miraldo suddenly dies and we watch as his caravan and belongings are burned
in accordance with Manouche mourning rituals; in Gadjo Dilo, Izidor’s son Adriani is
killed and the Rom encampment is burned down by vigilantes from the nearby village
(and in Vengo, Caco allows himself to be killed in an act of self-sacrifice aimed at saving
his nephew Diego from the retribution of the rival Caravacas clan). The deaths of these
characters can, of course, be read as reaffirmations of the fatalism of past representations,
but they also function as subversions of the protagonists’ attempts at both appropriation
and affective enactment of Romani culture. The deaths of the protagonists’ father figures
delimit their access to the musical knowledge that was their initial narrative objective and
reveal the limits of their ability to imitate the affective registers of Romani experience,
since their narrative immortality contrasts sharply with the much more precarious fate of
the films’ Romani characters.
The subversion of the two primary forces driving these narratives is what allows
us to characterize the historical form of these films as that of the chronicle. While
outsider characters in Swing and Gadjo Dilo are used to narrativize our otherwise
211
episodic exposure to Romani characters and events, their inability to fully assimilate into
Romani society reveals Gatlif’s ambivalence about the external authorities mediating our
understanding of Romani culture in his films. In this way, Gatlif both acknowledges the
importance of external institutions to the adjudication of Romani claims for social justice,
and signals their ultimate insufficiency in the articulation of a viable Romani politics.

Democracy and Realism
Realism is an issue not only for literature: it is a major political, philosophical and
practical issue and must be handled and explained as such – as a matter of general
human interest. -- Bertolt Brecht
62

The final sequence of Swing begins with a shot of Max’s mother, whom we have
not seen before, waiting impatiently in her car. It is a jarring transition from the emotion
of the previous scene, in which Max and Swing, knee-deep in water, bid a tearful farewell
to Miraldo by sending a piece of his guitar down the river. In Max’s mother’s car, we feel
for the first time “outside”: outside of summer time, outside of the confines of the
Manouche encampment, outside of the intimacy of Max and Swing’s summer romance.
We find out that Max’s mother is waiting to take Max away so they can go on a vacation
to Greece. A cut reveals Max giving as a present to Swing his notebook, in which he
wrote down all of Miraldo’s stories about the Manouche. She accepts it with a meager
protest – “But I can’t read” – and Max walks to his mother’s car and leaves.
What follows is a series of shots whose style is markedly different from that of
the rest of the film. A cut situates us in an urban setting strikingly different from the
bucolic surroundings of the Manouche encampment. A line of faded blue building beams
212
dissect the screen diagonally, and we see Swing walking toward one of them, finally
sitting down facing away from us. The music that has played throughout most of the film
is absent, and we can hear for the first time the muffled whirr of distant sounds of the city
– motorcycles, children playing, a dog barking, a siren, wind as it hits tall buildings. The
camera slowly dollies towards Swing and we hear her gentle sobs. Next to her lies Max’s
notebook, that we now see is titled, “Les Manouches”. Swing gets up, leaving the
notebook behind, and a cut shows us that the building we have been looking at is a badly
dilapidated apartment tenement or perhaps an abandoned school. As she walks into the
building we dolly toward the open doorway, but Swing shuts the door behind her. As the
camera lingers on the shut door, with all its graffiti, scratches, dirt and peeling paint,
Swing’s hand barely visible through a pane of glass, we hear an older woman’s plaintive
song and the credits roll.
Sleep, sleep little girl, Stop being afraid., Leave your body on this earth, Go
amongst the fragrances, Of the flowers and the plants, Amongst the waves and the
light, Sleep, little girl, Don’t be afraid of the sky and the earth.

How do we interpret this ending? One way to understand it is in the context of our
previous discussion about the tension between utopian investments in Romani culture and
Romani historicity. Swing’s rejection of Max’s notebook is not simply a function of her
illiteracy, but also a sign that this gift does not compensate for the end of their summer
friendship. Max’s writing down of Romani oral histories is of no use to Swing, and his
ethnographic interest in Romani culture, made clear by the title of the notebook, stands in
contrast to the affective bond that Swing seeks from him. As in Gadjo Dilo, cultural
preservation is shown to be incommensurate with affective engagement in the present. As
213
the blue door is shut, we as audience members are reminded of the limits of Max’s and
our own ethnographic interest in Romani culture. As the plaintive song plays, we come to
realize who the main subject of the film has been all along – Swing, not Max.
But there is another way to interpret this sequence. We can observe that it
displays a stylistic hybridity between the mythical, fable-like qualities of the rest of the
narrative and a harsh social realism that takes over upon Max’s departure. To what can
we attribute this change in style? I would like to argue that the uneasy co-existence of
realist and non-realist representational codes in Gatlif’s cinema is a reflection and
negotiation of the relationship between Romanies and systems of democratic politics. The
history of film theory is marked by an astonishing consistency among its diverse
practitioners in seeking to connect realism with democratic principles. Robert Stam, in
describing the work of André Bazin, Siegfried Kracauer and Cesare Zavattini, three of
the most important theorists of cinematic realism, notes that
Zavattini also called for a democratization of the cinema, both in terms of its
human subjects and in terms of what kinds of events were worth talking about
…[realism] was linked for Bazin to a political notion of the democratization of
filmic perception…In the background of Kracauer’s analysis was a concern with
the democratic and anti-democratic potentialities of the mass media.
63

Theorists such as Zavattini conceived of Italian neorealism as a means of inserting
into the realm of public discourse the difficulties of everyday existence of the
impoverished masses, seeing it as a democratizing impulse in which a previously under-
represented political constituency was heretofore represented. Early Soviet film theory,
such as that of Kuleshov, Eisenstein and Vertov, also sought to democratize popular
cinema by reorienting it away from bourgeois perspectives toward a concern for the
214
proletarian masses, not simply by a change in style or mode of production (as in Italian
neorealism) but by the complete takeover of the means of cinematic production.
64
The
socialist realism of Soviet and Chinese cinema in the postwar era is considered by many
as a turn against the principles that had come to define realism in earlier periods. Whereas
neorealism’s use of deep focus long takes effected, according to Bazin, a democratic
empowerment of the spectator to scan the image for meaning, socialist realism sought to
impart propagandist messages about national and class identity and revolutionary
struggle, and did not intend for a plurality of interpretations. Whereas early Soviet
realism sought to democratize the means of cinematic production by making them
accessible to mass participation, socialist realism was organized top-down, with rigid
state censorship of content and form. We can see therefore that the rejection of socialist
realism as a legitimate mode of realism is predicated on its disarticulation of the
connection between realist aesthetics and democratic principles.
Poststructuralist critiques of realism argue that it subordinates the plurality of
effects to one dominant discourse, usually associated with the image track and third-
person point-of-view. The existence of a dominant discourse conceals all forms of
contradiction at the formal and political levels, and hollows out the act of spectatorship,
reducing it to something “in which the only activity required is to match one discourse
against the realm of truth”. This ‘realist’ transparency effaces the marks of a film’s mode
of production and authorship, and thus prevents spectators from understanding the
arbitrariness and ideological presuppositions of its representation of reality. Since
‘realist’ films purport to have an indexical relation to reality, viewers are made to accept
215
their representations as immutable and uncontestable.
65
In these ways, poststructuralist
critiques of realism are based on its violation of the democratic contract between masses
and elites, audiences and producers (electorates and political leaders) that the interests of
the former be accurately represented by the latter in such a way as to reflect societal
realities and encourage audiences to participate in the production of knowledge and
power.

This is reminiscent of Brecht’s definition of realism as the elucidation of the
principal causes and contradictions of historical actions and events, exposing the
ideological operations of those in power so as to instigate political action by the
revolutionary classes.
66

For minority artists, inclusion in democratic processes confers value to realism as
a formal strategy by establishing a more egalitarian social and political relationship
between minority and majority groups. If there is faith in the democratic system,
vulnerabilities associated with realist self-representation are outweighed by the potential
benefits of accurately communicating social injustices to others in society. By contrast,
for those denied democratic participation, realism loses much of its value since those it
would seek to accurately represent are politically invisible a priori, and hence
unrepresentable. In this way, the elements of realism in Gatlif’s films can be interpreted
as reflections of the recent proliferation and intensification of Romani political struggles.
Romani political organizations emerged in the 1960s, spurred on by the larger
civil rights, human rights and protest movements of the time. In the mid-1960s, the
Communaute Mondial Gitane (CMG), later called Commite International Tsigane (CIT),
was founded in Paris. The ultimate objective of CMG/CIT was a Romani homeland, but
216
more practically it sought from Germany war reparations for Nazi genocide and
improved treatment by state authorities across Europe. By 1971, Romani political
organizations had formed in more than twenty European countries, coordinated centrally
by CIT. That same year, delegates from these national political organizations met at the
first World Romani Congress in London. Since then, there have been four more meetings
of the World Romani Congress that have established the national name, anthem, and flag
of Romani nationality, set up a permanent body of representatives, recognized by the
United Nations, to coordinate Romani political activities internationally, seek
international recognition for Romani nationality, and promote legal and human rights
issues of importance to the Romani community (such as German reparations).
67
The post-
socialist democratization of Eastern Europe, where most of Europe’s Roma live, has led
to a proliferation of Romani socio-economic, cultural and political organizations, with an
increasing influence, organizational skill, connection to their constituency and
effectiveness in helping Romani communities.
68
While very few Romani members of
parliament have been elected, new Romani political parties and Romani NGOs have had
some success in changing state policies affecting the Roma, coordinating with other
Romani groups internationally, and training activists.
69

The postwar rise of transnational Romani political groups and their postsocialist
entry into electoral politics might lead us to expect that realism would be the dominant
style of Gatlif’ cinema, which is contemporaneous to these political developments. But as
should be clear from our discussion so far, this is not the case. Gatlif’s films often re-
mythify Romani identity, in a way that seems to encourage the utopian investments of
217
dominant groups in Romani culture. In Swing and Gadjo Dilo, Romani characters are
presented against a pastoral backdrop and endowed with an earthy sexuality, as well as a
keen knowledge and appreciation of their natural environment and the ‘simple things’ in
life. An exemplary scene in this regard is one in which Miraldo takes Max, on a tour of
the woods surrounding the Romani encampment, showing him plants, flowers and fruits
that have healing properties. Miraldo’s natural knowledge is contrasted with the
conventional knowledge of Max, who relies on his pharmacist to tell him what plants are
called.
In Gatlif’s films, Romanies are often characterized as spiritually liberated, prone
to impulsive decision-making, seemingly ‘excessive’ displays of emotion, and
spontaneous eruptions of performance. We have already noted this with regard to the
scene in Gadjo Dilo, wherein Izidor convinces Stephane to drink to excess with him in
Adriani’s honor. In Swing, Miraldo and Dr. Lieberman, his doctor friend, start playing
music loudly in the middle of the night outside of a store owned by their friend, Khalid,
inducing him to wake up and join them in their merry drinking and music-making. In
some of Gatlif’s other films, such as Mondo and Je Suis Ne d’un Cigogne (1999), the
notions of exile, immigration, destitution, rebellion and otherness are abstracted from the
specificities of Romani identity. The mythical and magical contours of Mondo’s story
risk reinforcing the social abstraction of past representations that associated ‘Gypsiness’
with timelessness and autonomy.
How can we interpret these non-realist elements in Gatlif’s work? It would be a
mistake to consider them merely as aesthetic shortcomings or necessary compromises.
218
Rather, we should see them as responses to a series of factors conditioning the
articulation of Gatlif’s cinema as minority discourse. The first such factor is the
problematic use of realism in past representations, something that has weakened the case
for its use in Romani self-representation. Realism has often been used in European
cinema as a means of immersing the viewer in the desperate poverty and marginality of
Romani characters and milieus. Films of this type often metonymically substitute, and in
turn confuse, Romani culture for the socio-economic difficulties facing many Romanies,
assigning blame to what it is implied are fixed and hereditary characteristics of the Roma.
Realist depictions in film, television and news reporting often provide essentialist and
static portrayals of Roma that conflate them with their social problems, a process of
reification that stigmatizes and often precipitates racist violence against them. Hungarian
films and television programs provide a contemporary example of this. Anikó Imre notes
that Hungarian films are mostly documentaries showing Romanies in extreme poverty or
the exceptional Romani who has made it out of the economic and cultural ghetto - they
are thus “unable to show the Romani in a positive light”, are regarded skeptically by
Romanies, and “continue to characterize the Gypsies as the quintessential ‘other’”.
70
The
representation of Romanies on Hungarian television is indicative of the way that
dominant media throughout Europe reifies Romani poverty and marginality:
Scapegoating Gypsies offers the state, the media, and the non-Romani public a
rare opportunity to reach national consensus…Gypsy crime and laziness are
recurring topics in news reporting. Unemployment, crime, and other the [sic]
social problems lock images of the Romanies in a ‘thematic ghetto’ of conflict,
often implicitly blaming the victim.
71

219
Realism as an aesthetic strategy is therefore compromised by its association with
past representations of Romanies, in which the immediacy of realist aesthetics caused a
conflation of Romani identity with the social and economic problems afflicting the
community. Another approach to understanding the use of non-realist aesthetics in
Gatlif’s work is to revisit the issue of Romani political enfranchisement. As already
discussed, recent decades have witnessed the emergence of an increasingly well-
coordinated and influential international Romani political movement, and greater Romani
electoral participation in Eastern Europe, where Roma populations are large enough to
have an impact on national politics. Yet this progressive historical narrative of Romani
politics fails to account for the existence of pervasive democratic deficits operative at
every scale of Romani political life.
While the democratization of Eastern European states has provided Romanies
with access to electoral politics, this has done little to alleviate the suffering caused by
rapid marketization, the loss of social supports, and the rise in xenophobia and racism.
The “dismal record …of professed liberal democracies” in Eastern Europe in addressing
these issues facing the Roma, who it is undeniable fared better socially and economically
under Communism, should make us question whether representative politics, on its own,
can achieve the social and economic gains that so many Romanies desire.
72

The initial promise of democratic freedoms and the satisfaction at the long-
awaited recognition of their ethnic identity soon turned sour. Instead, [Romanies]
were left exposed – to the ruthless logic of a fledgling market economy in which
they were made redundant, to the moral vacuum of a legal interregnum in which
they were left defenceless against an upsurge of murderous racism and to
democratically-elected governments which were uninterested in a constituency
without electoral power.
73

220
The inability of representative politics to ensure the social and economic rights of Eastern
European Roma is indicative of a much broader crisis in the legitimacy of democratic
systems in Europe (see Introduction). In the case of the Roma, the democratic deficit of
European politics is felt all the more acutely, manifesting itself in the internal operations
of Romani political organizations, and in their interactions with national and transnational
institutions. Critics charge that Romani political groups are led by a “thin strata of
Romani intellectuals”, whose connection to “state socialist education and political
culture” has allowed a democratic deficit to permeate their political organizations, whose
activities do not interest or influence the lives of the majority of Romanies.
74
Democratic
deficit is felt at the national level as well, with laws protecting Romani rights often not
implemented due to racist resistance from local officials.
75
At the transnational level, the
E.U. bodies charged with overseeing Romani affairs are not populated by Romanies
themselves, but by Brussels bureaucrats disconnected from the aspirations of Romani
political groups.
76
There is a tendency to essentialize Romani cultural identity in E.U.
policy statements and reports, ignoring the socio-economic conditions shaping Romani
experience.
77

So far we have identified two reasons for the limited use of realism in Gatlif’s
films: the legacy of past representations in which realism was used to reify the socio-
economic problems facing Romanies and the democratic deficits of European political
institutions that dampen Romani investment in democratic principles, and hence, in
realism as well. But we can also think of the hybridity of Gatlif’s work, oscillating as it
does between culturalism and realism, as a consequence of something we have touched
221
on earlier: the debates about Romani identity taking place inside and outside the
community. If we revisit these debates, we will find that the primary dividing line is
between ethnic and socio-economic definitions of Romani identity. Realism can be seen
as a style better suited to highlight socio-economic definitions of identity, whereas
culturalism is better suited for ethnic definitions. The ascendancy of ethnic definitions in
these debates thus provides another explanation for the primarily culturalist aesthetics of
Gatlif’s cinema. Revulsion with Nazi racial politics and concern that minority rights
could prove politically destabilizing led postwar Eastern European states to define
Romanies in socio-economic rather than ethnic terms. This placed pressure on Romanies
to assimilate and deny their cultural traditions and histories.
78
In the postsocialist period,
the damage caused by Communist-era assimilationism has been mitigated through
renewed efforts by Romanies to define themselves as a diverse yet united transnational
ethnic group with common origins, traditions and histories. The predominance of ethnic
modes of identification in contemporary Romani politics provides us with an explanation
for the prevalence of culturalist aesthetics in Gatlif’s cinema.
While there have been many benefits to Romani ethnic mobilizations, they have
not been able to solve many of the community’s social and economic problems. At a time
of heightened nationalism and xenophobia, recognition of Romani ethnicity also carries
the danger of greater persecution. The benefits of international recognition as an ethnic
group depend on the E.U.’s willingness to enforce its minority rights protections, which it
has not done to date, fearing that this would jeopardize or delay E.U. enlargement.
Eastern European governments typically prefer ethnic designations because they do not
222
require them to take concrete actions to improve the socio-economic conditions of the
Roma.
79
The E.U. has increasingly focused on political and cultural issues, ignoring the
broader implications of the postsocialist transition and falsely assuming that greater
political participation and a recognition of ethnic status will automatically solve
Romanies’ social and economic problems.
80
These limitations of ethnic politics and the
importance of socio-economic issues to the community suggests that realism remains an
important resource for Romani self- representation.
In our discussion so far, we have been implicitly using a traditional definition of
realism, which has considered it separate from popular forms such as melodrama, myth,
folklore, and cultural performance. But this traditional definition prevents us from seeing
that Gatlif’s cinema mobilizes a form of popular realism that, in many ways, transcends
the emphasis on oppositionality of past minority scholarship. The division of cinematic
realism from popular culture stems from its roots in 19
th
century literary realism, which
sought to distinguish literature and theater from popular melodramatic forms, reorienting
it toward bourgeois sensibilities and values.
81
This 19
th
century legacy disconnected
cinematic realism from the mass constituencies that might enable it to actualize its full
democratic potential as an art form.
82

Contemporary popular forms of realism, such as the social realism of French
banlieue (inner city) films (Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine (1995), most prominently),
create new hybrid forms of representation, infusing realism with melodramatic elements,
combining realistic stories and characters with expressionistic formal strategies, and
submitting global mass cultural forms such as rap music to local uses and
223
interpretations.
83
These popular cinemas reinvigorate the democratic potential of realism
by connecting it more closely to local cultures and mass sensibilities, in the process
negotiating the vicissitudes of global media production and consumption. Julia Hallam’s
description of popular realist films as “Janus-faced” can help us understand the co-
existence of realist and mythic tropes in the final sequence of Swing, and in Gatlif’s
cinema more broadly:
on the one hand, looking out towards the contemporary mediascape, they present
spectacles of Other people and Other places as new fodder for the voracious
appetites of the international media industries; but simultaneously the visual and
aural iconographies of subcultural identities are reclaimed from the sea of global
distribution and repackaged for local consumption.
84

An understanding of popular realism can help us move beyond a formalist definition of
realism associated with the long take, non-professional actors, on-location shooting,
limited use of music, naturalistic lighting and acting, and minimalist plots. Instead, it
allows us to conceive of realism as the elucidation of historical contradiction and
ideological critique, which has been a central preoccupation of past minority film
practice.
85
The engagement with mass sensibilities and popular culture is therefore not
only permissible but necessary in order to capture the full democratic potential of the
medium. In Gatlif’s cinema, realism manifests itself primarily through the exposition of
the socio-economic inequalities marking the dynamics of cultural exchange between
Romanies and non-Romanies.
In Swing and Gadjo Dilo, the main non-Romani characters, Max and Stephane,
are initially interested in gaining cultural knowledge from the Romanies they encounter.
Max wants to be taught how to play the jazz guitar and Stephane wants to record Romani
224
songs. Both encounter patriarchs from the Romani community, Miraldo and Izidor, who
they hope will help impart this cultural knowledge. In exchange, Miraldo and Izidor
attempt to use the communication skills and symbolic value that Max and Stephane
possess in order to improve their relations and interactions with the state and their non-
Romani neighbors. In Swing, Miraldo, who cannot write or read in French, asks young
Max to write letters to the state welfare agency in order to retrieve welfare payments
owed to him; Max agrees and the welfare agency promptly responds agreeing to pay the
full amount to Miraldo. Mandino, a Romani antique salesman that Max buys a guitar
from, leverages his familiarity with Max to do business with Max’s grandmother. In
Gadjo Dilo, Izidor shows off Stephane to non-Romani villagers at a local bar, telling
them that Stephane is interested in learning the Romani language. In this way, Izidor feels
that Stephane’s interest in Romani culture will confer prestige upon him and help him to
gain the respect of the non-Romani townspeople. When Adriani is killed at the end of the
film, Stephane finally realizes the grim realities of Romani social experience. In these
ways, Romani characters in both films redirect the culturalist investments of outsiders
towards social and economic meanings and functions.
Gatlif’s films also articulate the socio-economic inequalities under which cultural
communication takes place between Romanies and non-Romanies Tony Gatlif’s Mondo
(1995) is about a young eponymously named homeless boy whose mysterious arrival in a
southern French town touches the hearts of many of the townspeople, who help to take
care of him. But their hospitality is thwarted by the local police, who eventually capture
Mondo and put him in a foster home, from where he escapes never to return to the town
225
again. Mondo thematizes Romanies’ paradoxical combination of social marginality and
visibility, by highlighting the ‘lookedatness’ of its protagonist: Mondo is approached by a
pervert who tries to entice him with popcorn (he avoids him by hiding under a car);
Mondo sits next to a sleeping homeless man and induces, through his visibility as a cute
child presumably, a passing motorist to give the homeless man some money; while
sleeping at night in his usual hiding place, Mondo is witness to the arrest of an Italian
undocumented worker - a reminder of the cost of visibility; and while sleeping in the park
at mid-day, Mondo dreams that animals and statues are all looking at him and saying:
“Everyone is watching you because your eyes are closed. The insects are speaking to you,
calling you. But you cannot hear them, you have gone far away.” Many of the father
figures that Mondo encounters, such as the street magician he assists, are themselves both
hyper-visible and marginalized socially.
In both Swing and Gadjo Dilo, the uneven power dynamics of cultural
performance are highlighted. Swing ends with a lengthy scene that involves the final
rehearsal and public performance of Romani music by a choir of young non-Romani
women. During the rehearsal, we see the persistence and enthusiasm with which Khalid,
Dr. Lieberman and Miraldo teach the women how to sing Romani songs phonetically,
and we are left to wonder why non-Romani interpreters or mediators of Romani culture
are needed at all. The theme of cultural appropriation is further elucidated when Miraldo
complains that the female singers have gotten top billing and he, Dr. Lieberman and
Khalid have been reduced to supporting roles in the promotional literature about the
performance. In Gadjo Dilo, we witness Izidor’s attempts to fulfill the role of Romani
226
musical virtuoso that Stephane is interested in discovering. After a day or two of not
finding anyone to sing for him, Stephane becomes discouraged and attempts to leave
Izidor’s encampment. But Izidor manages to convince him to stay by playing his violin
beautifully, thus meeting Stephane’s expectations of Romani musical virtuosity.
The social realism of Gatlif’s films is also evident in the symbolic composition of
shots that allows us to understand the position of Romani characters in their social
environment, their precarious or contentious relation to the architectures of modernity, its
technologies and institutions. The neglect of Romani communities by the state is
thematized in many of Gatlif’s films. It is evoked beautifully in the final scene of Latcho
Drom (1993), in which La Caita (who reappears in Vengo) sings on the outskirts of an
abandoned exurban tenement block, the site of an earlier eviction of Romani tenants.
Sitting plaintively on the hills overlooking the tenement below, La Caita strikes a lonely
yet powerful figure, her booming voice echoing harrowingly against the walls of the
buildings far below. Much like in the opening sequence of Gadjo Dilo, the absence of
non-Romanies evokes the historical policies of isolation, marginalization, segregation
and forced resettlement levied against Romanies, rather than suggesting their willful
autonomy and isolation.
In Swing, abandonment is turned to advantage in a scene in which Swing picks
the lock and enters a stream that is owned (but long forgotten) by the electrical company.
It is the only waterway near the encampment with unpolluted water, so Swing and Max
decide to fish for trout there. As they do so, a fast train speeds by to remind us of the
hyper-modernities of other parts of society. The figural depiction of Romanies’
227
relationship to the technologies and architectures of modernity reaches its apotheosis in
the concluding scene of Vengo, wherein a critically wounded Caco stumbles and finally
succumbs from his injuries next to a piece of industrial machinery, whose operation
creates a contrapuntal soundtrack to his last moments on earth.
Looking back at our discussion of Gatlif’s cinema so far, we can identify certain
recurrent themes. The first is socio-cultural exchange which, as we have seen, can take
the form of musical performance, historical recollection or cultural education. While
acknowledging external expectations of Romani performativity, Gatlif reframes musical
performance as a negotiation of the boundaries of communal identity. Historical
recollection and affective engagement in the present reorient utopian investments in
Romani culture away from social abstraction. And the education of outsiders in Romani
culture is exchanged for functions aimed at alleviating socio-economic marginality. In
each case, the uneven power dynamics shaping the process of socio-cultural exchange are
foregrounded and, where possible, reconfigured.
The second recurrent theme is representational ambivalence. The depiction of
musical performance in Gatlif’s work displays an ambivalence between the embrace and
disavowal of performativity, affective and commercial functions, and internal and
external modes of address. Gatlif’s travelogue narratives manifest an ambivalence
between honoring and subverting utopian investments in Romani culture. They also
oscillate between recollections of the past and affective engagements in the present. And
as we have just discussed, Gatlif employs both realist and culturalist aesthetic strategies.
228
The basis for these sites of ambivalence brings us to our third recurrent theme:
the connection between political relations of power and cinematic aesthetic strategies.
The ambivalent representation of musical performance reflects both internal debates
about Romani identity and the pressures imposed by external expectations and projective
identifications. The ambivalent representation of outsider perspectives in Gatlif’s
travelogue narratives reflects the contentious relationship between Romanies and external
political institutions on which they often rely for the protection of their rights. The
ambivalence between historical recollection and affective engagement in the present
reflects the particular forms of historical recollection and commemoration adopted by
Romanies as a means of negotiating their internal social divisions and geographic
dispersal. The ambivalence between social realism and culturalism reflects the tensions
between socio-economic and ethnic definitions of Romani identity, as well as the
contradictions between increased Romani political mobilization and the lingering
democratic deficits facing Romanies at every scale of political activity.

Transnationalism
In this final section, I want to discuss the issue of transnationalism by revisiting
two of the recurrent themes outlined above: representational ambivalence and the
connection between political and cinematic categories. Transnationalism is a favorite
preoccupation of outside observers of Romani culture and is often associated with
Gatlif’s cinema. But many of these observers ignore the very things we have been
concerned with in our discussion of Gatlif’s work so far. They reify transnationalism as
229
an ideal category and invest the Romani experience with the burden of exemplifying
post-national consciousness for the rest of society. This does not do justice to the way
transnationalism actually impacts the lives of Romanies in contemporary Europe. As we
will see, transnationalism has contradictory valences for Romanies, something which
manifests itself in Gatlif’s cinema through an ambivalence about whether to represent
transnationalism as a cultural, social or historical category. Consistent with the approach
taken throughout this chapter, my aim here is to understand this ambivalence as a
negotiation of contradictions in political fields of action.
Romanies, like Kurds and pre-Israel Jews, are stateless in that they are not a
majority in any nation-state; but unlike these other groups, they also do not have any
territory that they can lay claim to as their homeland. Romanies seemingly irreversible
statelessness necessitates transnationalist modes of identity and politics:
Romani activists are stuck with their cosmopolitanism; they cannot cop out from
it with an imitation Zionism or any other kind of ethnic particularism. In fact,
while Jews can still imagine that they have learnt from the Holocaust that only
having a place of their own can protect them from a repetition, for Roma the
lesson is the opposite. For them, the twentieth century Holocaust abolished the
protection of the mehalla, the ghetto, the segregated pariah nomadism, and the
other sanctuaries that emerged as refuges after the holocaust of the sixteenth
century. There is no substitute for having human rights everywhere; this is the
logic of seeking to define Roma as a transnational rather than a national
minority.
86

Statelessness, according to Zoltan Barany, contributes greatly to the limited political
power of contemporary Romani communities: “Gypsies have no homeland, the size of
their communities in every state is proportionately small, they do not control any
significant resources, and they have little political power.”
87
While some observers seek
to celebrate the transnationalism of Romanies, arguing that their presence in Europe
230
destabilizes the continent’s nationalisms in productive ways, Barany reminds us of the
practical limitations of statelessness for Romanies seeking to secure their rights. Beyond
its symbolic value as an embodiment of non-national and transnational culture and
identity, statelessness subjects Romanies to the ahistorical specularization and projective
identifications of external groups.
88

In the postwar period, Romani political organizations such as the International
Romani Union (IRU) have been increasingly organized transnationally, actively lobbying
international organizations such as the United Nations and the EU to apply pressure on
national governments to curb the persecution, marginalization and disenfranchisement of
their Romani minorities.
89
Romani transnationalism today also means migration from
east to west, as many Romanies flee their homes due to the rapid marketization and
resurgent nationalisms of postsocialist societies. Transnationalism, therefore, has multiple
and contradictory valences for today’s Romanies, embodying both socio-economic and
political, imposed and willingly adopted characteristics, something that manifests itself as
an ambivalence in Gatlif’s films between cultural, socio-economic and historical
representations of Romani transnationalism.
In some of Gatlif’s films, nomadism is presented in cultural terms as a state of
consciousness more so than a socio-economic necessity or a historical process. Giordan, a
fisherman that he befriends, tells Mondo that he is a sailor without a ship. Mondo sits
with Giordan and listens to his stories of faraway places, exclaiming in awe: “The Red
Sea must be big,” “Eritrea must be a nice country”. When Mondo falls asleep on a small
boat, he dreams that it is unmoored and that Giordan sees him off on his sea voyage with
231
a “So long Mondo!” When he escapes from state custody at the end of the film, his
elderly friend, Thi Chin, says that she knows he will never return, implying that his
wanderlust and fear of the authorities will make him stay away. Gatlif’s mythologization
of exilic and migratory experience in Mondo leads to social abstraction, but in Gatlif’s
other films cultural definitions of nomadism are combined with socio-economic
explanations for Romani transnationalism.
In Swing, Miraldo shows Max photographs of his family and talks to him about
their past nomadic lifestyle, expressing his desire to spend the last years of his life on the
road, traveling to an undetermined elsewhere. This admission allows us to re-interpret the
intermittent shots of Miraldo’s mother looking ruefully out of the window of her
stationary caravan while smoking cigarettes. Is her forlorn look a sign of her
dissatisfaction with her sedentary lifestyle in the present? The nomadic lifestyle of
Miraldo’s youth is contrasted to the impoverishment that now imposes a sedentary
lifestyle on him and many others in Alsace’s Manouche community. The economic
foundations of contemporary Romani sedentarism are reinforced when we hear that Max
travels with his mother somewhere new every year but Swing has never left her
neighborhood. In this way, we are able to resituate the seemingly abstracted notion of a
nomadic state of mind in Swing within the circumscribed social and economic histories of
the Roma people.
Gatlif also explores the limitations of transnational imaginaries, primarily by
contrasting travelers’ naïve expectations with the harsh realities of their destinations. In
this way, a productive tension is created between cultural and socio-economic definitions
232
of transnationalism In Gadjo Dilo, Izidor assumes that Roma and non-Roma live
harmoniously in France, announcing it to a gathering of non-Romani villagers at a local
bar. In France, Izidor says, there are many Romani lawyers, state prosecutors, colonels,
majors and captains in France: “In France no one calls Gypsies thieves. No one points the
finger at them in France. They travel where they want in their houses on wheels. They
repair everything on earth…Everyone loves them, because on this earth no one works as
well as they do.” This speech is met with disbelieving looks from the assembled crowd,
one of whom retorts acerbically: “You should go there too. You and your whole family”,
to which Izidor poignantly responds, “We’ll go”. This exchange ironically comments on
the utopian potential and practical limitations of transnational imaginaries, which allow
you to conceive of better alternatives to your current existence but also lead you to falsely
assume that these can be achieved simply through migration.
In Latcho Drom, cultural performance, rather than explore the boundaries of
identity as in Vengo, reenacts past histories of Romani migration, using performance to
connect Romanies across time and space. Here, transnationalism is not so much a socio-
economic category as much as a historical process. Latcho Drom is comprised of a series
of musical and dance performances that partially retrace the 14
th
century migration of
Romanies from the Indian sub-continent through North Africa and Anatolia into Europe.
The performances begin in Rajasthan, India, moving to Egypt, Turkey, Romania,
Hungary, Slovakia, France, and ending in Spain. At each location, Gatlif films local
Romanies playing music and dancing as friends and family act as their impromptu
audience. Between these performative elements, in what we have called their ‘gathering
233
phases’, we catch glimpses of the daily lives of the performers and their families, and
witness them traveling (with various modes of transport from camels to trains) from their
current location to an unspecified elsewhere. These travel segments link the different
national/regional performances together and provide the overarching narrative structure
for the film. Although the Romanies are different at each new location, we are
encouraged to interpret these travel sequences as a reenactment of earlier histories of
Romani migration. Latcho Drom is therefore a musical performance anthology; a
documentary with semi-fictionalized and stylized elements that contextualize, narrativize
and historicize Romani cultural performance.
In Latcho Drom, Gatlif emphasizes the historical and social conditions that
shaped the emergence and evolution of Romani cultural practice. Three sequences stand
out in this regard. The first occurs in the Egypt sequence which begins with close and
medium shots of a man and woman hammering a piece of metal into shape. The sounds
made by the hammers of these tool-makers lead a young girl to start dancing and a young
man to start hitting a drum to the rhythm of the hammering. Here Gatlif is consciously
linking cultural performance to local material histories, of labor and industry. The second
sequence occurs in Romania, where we hear for the first time a recognizably political
song lyric, castigating Ceausescu for his despotic rule over Romania during the
Communist era. This song, as well as others that follow, notably one about Auschwitz
sung by an old Hungarian woman with a tattoo on her forearm signaling her status as a
Holocaust survivor, evokes the tortured histories of oppression of the Romani people.
234
The connections between Romanies across different national contexts that Latcho
Drom foregrounds is further delineated in other films, with Gatlif’s Algerian background
leading him to particularly emphasize the relationship between Romani and North
African Arab cultures. We have already encountered this in our discussion of the opening
scene of Vengo, wherein the dialogic performative interactions between Tomatito and
Sheikh Ahmad Al Tuni remind us of the mutual influences of Romani and Arab traditions
in Spanish Andalusian culture. In Swing, this is alluded to in the friendship and collective
performances of Khalid, Dr. Lieberman, and Miraldo. In Exils, the couple’s journey from
Paris to North Africa leads them to encounter a Romani encampment, so that Romanies
and North Africans occupy similar structural roles in the narrative as cultural and
affective influences on the protagonists in their journey southward. The most poignant
and important element of transnationalism in Gatlif’s films is his own mode of
production, in which he uses each new film project as an opportunity to represent a
different Romani community - Alsatian Manouche in Swing, Andalusian Gitanos in
Vengo, Romanian Rom in Gadjo Dilo, etc. - allowing us to better understand both their
commonalities and differences.

235
Chapter 4 Endnotes

1
‘Romanies’ is the preferred term of self-identification among many, but by no means all, of Europeans of
‘Gypsy’ ethnicity. The word ‘gypsy’ derives etymologically from Egyptian and Egypt, which was falsely
assumed to be the point of origin for newly arrived Romanies, and is regarded by many Romanies today as
derogatory. Other acceptable ways of designating Romanies are “Romani’, ‘Romany’, ‘Rom’, or ‘Rrom’
(adjectives) and “Roma” and “Rroma” (proper nouns). Non-Romanies are sometimes referred to as ‘Gadje’
or ‘Gazhe’ by those in the community, although here too regionally specific terms exist, such as ‘payo’,
which is a term used to describe non-Romanies in Spain. For more on this see David Mayall: Gypsy
Identities 1500-2000: From Egipcyans and Moon-men to the Ethnic Romany (London: Routledge, 2004).
2
David Parkin: “Introduction: The Power of the Bizarre”, The Politics of Cultural Performance, ed., David
Parkin, Lionel Caplan and Humphrey Fisher (Providence: Bergahn Books, 1996), p. xxxvi.
3
Dina Iordanova: Cinema of Flames: Balkan Film, Culture and the Media (London: BFI, 2001), pp. 214-
217.
4
Isabel Santaolalla: “The Representation of Ethnicity and ‘Race’ in Contemporary Spanish Cinema”,
Cineaste vol. 29 no.1, 2003, p. 45.
5
Paul Julian Smith: The Moderns: Time, Space and Subjectivity in Contemporary Spanish Culture,
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 162. The case of Spanish cinema shows us how traditionalist
and pastoral definitions of Romanies make them seem, in the case of many national imaginaries, ideal
embodiments of national cultural traditions. This is also the case in Bulgaria, according to Palma Zlateva.
In her discussion of Georgy Yulgerov’s 1997 film, The Black Swallow, she states that those of the film’s
Romanies “who don’t travel around in their carts or swarm the city ghettoes have moved into the old
village houses; they work the land, breed cattle and dance to the Bulgarian horo music. ‘Well, you Gypsies
are more Bulgarian than we are: you alone still preserve our customs!’ Lilyan [the film’s protagonist]
exclaims at one point.” Palma Zlateva: “Tchernata Lyastovitsa”, Framework vol. 44 no.2, 2004, p. 145.
6
Anikó Imre: “Screen Gypsies”, Framework vol. 44 no.2, 2004, p. 19.
7
Imre describes Bence Gyongyossy’s Romani Kris (1997) as a Hungarian film that tries to appeal to
European pretensions and global interests. The film’s director explains his representation of Romanies this
way: “This is what the world is interested in right now”. For foreign audiences, the Romanies in the film
are conflated with Hungarians, and their romanticized representation is mistaken for an authentic one. See
ibid. The use of Romani-themed films to achieve international recognition is also discussed by scholars of
Yugoslav cinema. Vladislav Mijić states: “Narratives centered on Romanies or featuring Romani characters
in important roles have been a recurring theme in Yugoslav…cinema from the 1960s onwards. Some of
these narratives have given Yugoslav filmmakers international prominence and fame, and they helped
advance that cause of Yugoslav national cinema, if there ever was such a thing.” Vladislav Mijic:
“Witnesses and Commentators: Romani Character in Ko to tamo peva”, Framework vol. 44 no.2, 2004, p.
114.
8
By contrast, American minority film studies reasonably assumed that the primary audience for minority
films in the 1970s was the minority community itself. The assumption that minority cinema was made
primarily for internal consumption was based on the existence during this period of alternative distribution
and exhibition circuits for minority media such as television programs, independent production companies,
national film festivals, and national syndicators for public programming, as well as outlets for minority
media advocacy such as newsletters, protest coalitions (against industry practices), academic conferences
and manifestos. Chon A. Noriega: “Between a Weapon and a Formula: Chicano Cinema and Its Contexts”
Chicanos and Film: Representation and Resistance, ed., Chon A. Noriega (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1992b) pp. 143-144.
236

9
Early phases of American and European minority film studies emphasized the oppositionality of minority
cinema. This emphasis was justified by the political struggles informing these cinemas and their initial
reliance on alternative circuits of production, distribution and exhibition. Beur cinema (films made by
French directors of North African, or Maghrebi, descent) emerged amidst the unprecedented campaigns
against racism of the 1980s by SOS Racisme and other anti-racism groups, responding to the increased
xenophobia of public discourse fueled by the electoral successes of the Front Nationale. In Britain, agencies
such as The Greater London Council and Channel 4’s Department of Independent Film and Video
increased their funding of Black British filmmaking, partially as a response to the landmark social protests
of 1981. Carrie Tarr lists the representational objectives of French Beur filmmakers in oppositional terms:
to counter the stereotypical depictions of minorities and colonialist social and civilizational hierarchies that
structured definitions of national identity, to seek the recognition of difference and to make connections
between Beur marginalization and that of other minorities. Jim Pines also emphasizes oppositionality when
he describes how Black British filmmakers sought to represent Black British identity in their own “terms of
reference”, emphasizing the internal diversity, hybrid forms of identity and histories of diaspora and
struggle of the Black community. Carrie Tarr: Reframing Difference: Beur and Banlieue Filmmaking in
France (New York: Palgrave, 2005), pp. 10-12, 15; John Hill: British Cinema in the 1980s: Issues and
Themes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), p. 219; Jim Pines: “The Cultural Context of Black British
Cinema”, Black British Cultural Studies, ed., Baker, Houston A. Jr., Manthia Diawara and Ruth H.
Lindeborg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 185.
10
The common traits of Romani culture are typically identified as nomadism, which at first meant physical
travel but then was expanded to include sedentary populations for which nomadism was a “state of mind”,
the Romany language, social organization such as marriage customs, and political organization such as
Gypsy councils or tribunals called kris. Mayall, pp. 222-224, 229-230.
11
Ibid, pp. 207-210.
12
Elin Diamond: “Performance and Cultural Politics”, The Routledge Reader in Politics and Performance,
ed., Lizbeth Goodman and Jane de Gay (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 69.
13
Baz Kershaw states that “performance can be most usefully described as an ideological transaction
between a company of performers and the community of their audience…Ideology is the source of the
collective ability of performers and audience to make more or less common sense of the signs used in
performance”. Baz Kershaw: “Performance, Community, Culture”, The Routledge Reader in Politics and
Performance, ed., Lizbeth Goodman and Jane de Gay (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 137.
14
Diamond, p. 67.
15
For Turner (as related by Kershaw) cultural performance exhibits “the paradox of rule-breaking-within-
rule-keeping…crucial to the efficacy of performance in its contribution to the formation of (ideological)
communities.” Performers therefore take on “a liminal role.. ‘betwixt and between’ more permanent social
roles and modes of awareness” and spectators also “participate in playing around with the norms, customs,
regulations, laws, which govern [their] life in society.” Kershaw, pp. 138-139.
16
Patrice Parvis notes that “two different modes of representation may occur: either as imitation–more or
less codified–of reality by the action and the stage, or as the carrying out of a stage action, in short, as the
substitute for a ritual or a ceremony. In the first case, therefore, to represent is to display conventions, to
grasp the codification of a culture, charting its rhetorical and stylistic figures, its narrative strategies,
everything that gives a semiotic model to reality by means of a cultural or artistic artifact. But to represent
also means to perform an action, to place aside all these cultural codifications, to achieve a ritualized
action, to persuade both actors and spectators that they are participating in a sacred ceremony. Culture is
thus transmitted as much by showing as by imitation”. Patrice Parvis: “Intercultural Performance in Theory
237

and Practice”, The Routledge Reader in Politics and Performance, ed., Lizbeth Goodman and Jane de Gay
(London: Routledge, 2000), p. 105.
17
It is significant that, as Lemon states, it is the descendants of these early Romani performers in Moscow
who became the Romani intellectuals and artists at the forefront of Soviet cultural life in the 1920s and
1930s. Alaina Lemon: “Russia: Politics of Performance”, Between Past and Future: The Roma of Central
and Eastern Europe, ed., Will Guy (Hertfordshire: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2001), pp. 230, 234.
18
Michaela Grobbel’s analysis of autobiographical literature by German-language Romani authors, Ceija
Stojka and Otto Rosenberg, has shown that Romanies were often forced to perform in Nazi concentration
camps in order to pacify their fellow prisoners: “Some of those performances occurred clandestinely, others
at the behest of the Nazis. Rosenberg remembers a Sinti band accompanying him and other inmates to
forced labor in Woflleben outside Ellrich near Dora-Mittelbau….Stojka mentions a Romany music band in
Buchenwald that had to dress up and walk the inmates to their slave labor in the quarry. The Nazi
commandant of the Westerbork transit concentration camp in Holland forced inmates to perform plays and
cabarets because he believed these performances would keep inmates calm until their deportation to
Auschwitz.” Michaela Grobbel: “Contemporary Romany Autobiography as Performance”, The German
Quarterly, vol. 76 no. 2, Spring 2003, p. 145.
19
Will Guy: “Romani Identity and post-Communist Policy”, Between Past and Future: The Roma of
Central and Eastern Europe, ed., Will Guy (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2001b), p. 10.
20
For Bhabha, the performative enactment of cultural identity puts minority groups in a position of
inbetweenness vis-à-vis the dominant culture that has set the conditions for their subject formation. He
terms the power of minorities to shape their own representation as “interstitial agency”, by which minority
groups “deploy the partial culture from which they emerge to construct visions of community, and versions
of historic memory, that give narrative form to the minority positions they occupy; the outside of the inside:
the part in the whole” This definition of interstitial agency acknowledges the delicate balance that has to be
struck in acts of minority self-representation between majority languages and minority concerns. Homi
Bhabha: “Culture’s In-Between”, Questions of Cultural Identity, ed., Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (London:
Sage, 1996), p. 58.
21
An example of this trope occurs in Šlobodan Šijan’s Who is Singing Over There? (Yugoslavia, 1980), an
allegorical dark comedy about a busload of Serbians traveling from a small town to Belgrade on the eve of
Nazi invasion in 1941. Mijic discusses how the Romanies on the bus occupy a liminal narrative position,
not interacting with the other characters or participating in the events that drive the narrative to its
conclusion. Instead, Romani characters adopt the role of a Greek chorus by singing intermittently an
“ominous song”, which comments on the ironies of the narrative and on the vicissitudes of Serbian history
more generally. Mijic, pp. 115-117.
22
Grobbel, pp. 144-145.
23
In the 1980s, the radical politics and oppositional aesthetics of earlier periods of American minority
struggle were replaced by partial incorporation into mainstream institutions and a shift to cultural politics.
Noriega discusses this change for Chicano/as: “In the late 1970s, Chicano cinema also began to document
or draw upon those social practices that remained after the social protest movement ended: Chicano art,
literature, and music. Cultural production, which had been integral to the Movement as well as to the mise-
en-scene of earlier films, now became the lens through which to envision resistance since the Reagan era”.
Chon A. Noriega: “Introduction”, Chicanos and Film: Representation and Resistance, ed., Chon A. Noriega
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992a), p. xx.
24
The lack of context for the opening performance in Vengo can be seen as Gatlif’s attempt to create a
representational crisis that will instigate critical thinking. Stuart Hall and Awan Amkpa both consider
238

representational crisis to be a necessary prerequisite to ideological contestation in cultural discourse. Hall
discusses crisis in the political realm as a moment of possibility for the emergence of counter-knowledge.
And Amkpa discusses crisis as both the cause and consequence of postcolonial counter-knowledge. See
Stuart Hall: “Deviance, Politics and the Media”, The Routledge Reader in Politics and Performance, ed.,
Lizbeth Goodman and Jane de Gay (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 80 ; Awan Amkpa: “Colonial Anxieties
and Post-Colonial Desires: Theatre as a Space of Translations”, The Routledge Reader in Politics and
Performance, ed., Lizbeth Goodman and Jane de Gay (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 121.
25
Kershaw, p. 138.
26
Christopher Murray: “Introduction to Part Three”, The Routledge Reader in Politics and Performance,
ed., Lizbeth Goodman and Jane de Gay (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 89. Richard Schechner locates the
definition of boundaries in the rules and conventions on which social performances are based.: “In games,
sports, theatre, and ritual…the rules are designed not only to tell the players how to play but to defend the
activity against encroachment from the outside. What rules are to games and sports, traditions are to ritual
and conventions are to theatre, dance and music.” Richard Schechner: “Approaches to Performance
Theory”, The Routledge Reader in Politics and Performance, ed., Lizbeth Goodman and Jane de Gay
(London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 197-198.
27
Carol Silverman: “Negotiating ‘Gypsiness’: Strategy in Context”, The Journal of American Folklore, vol.
101 no. 401, Jul.-Sep. 1988, p. 273. The distinction between Romani and Gadje is important in the realm of
Romani studies and politics as well, with many ‘Romani’ scholars, experts and activists (including me) not
being of Romani ethnicity themselves: Rudko Kawczynski puts it this way: “[a]s far as I know there is
hardly any international panel acting on behalf of the Roma that is not dominated by those "Gypsy experts"
who themselves are not Roma.” Rudko Kawczynski: “The Politics of Romani Politics” retrieved on Nov.
18, 2004 from The Patrin Web Journal: http://www.geocities.com/Paris/5121/politics.htm.
28
Silverman notes that “[a]ny discussion of Gypsy ethnicity must account for the rich interplay between
Gypsy culture and non-Gypsy culture…the Gypsy’s socio-economic relationship with the non-Gypsy
generates a huge repertoire of cross-boundary folklore...Gypsies not only interact with Gazhe culture, they
also freely adopt and adapt many aspects of it, redefine them and incorporate them into their own culture.”
Silverman, pp. 266-267.
29
Ibid, p. 265.
30
Butler, 1997, p. 10. Or as Colin MacCabe notes in his discussion of Lacanian theories of language: “As
speaking subjects we constantly oscillate between the symbolic and the imaginary – constantly imagining
ourselves granting some full meaning to the words we speak, and constantly being surprised to find them
determined by relations outside of our control.” Colin MacCabe: “Theory and Film: Principles of Realism
and Pleasure”, Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed., Philip Rosen (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 184.
31
Amkpa, p. 120.
32
Indeed, theories of performativity, especially in linguistics, often associate it with disease and disability.
Andrew Parker and Eve Sedgwick point out that performative language acts are related to aberration,
disease and queerness (all homophobically conflated) in the work of Paul de Man and J.L. Austin: de Man
describes the performative aspect of any text as having a “necessarily ‘aberrant’ relation to its own
reference” and Austin describes the difference between the theatrical and the social world in the language
of etiology, disease, and lack, rendering theatricality “inseparable from a normatively homophobic
thematizcs of the ‘peculiar’, ‘anomalous, exceptional, nonserious’”. Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick: “Sexual Politics, Performativity, and Performance”, The Routledge Reader in Politics and
Performance, ed., Lizbeth Goodman and Jane de Gay, (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 175.
239

33
Grobbel, p. 145.
34
Berth B. Quintana: “‘The Duende Roams Freely This Night’: An Analysis of an Interethnic Event in
Granada, Spain (1985)”, Gypsies: An Interdisciplinary Reader, ed., Diane Tong (New York: Garland
Publishing,, 1998) p. 172. Carol Silverman echoes Quintana’s research findings, noting that the American
Roma she studied often switch between different roles when interacting with Gadje, according to the
demands of the situation; a process that she calls “impression management”. Silverman states that this
boundary crossing has increased in the advent of American Romani urbanization and sedentarization,
which have reduced the social distance between Romani and gadje communities. Silverman, pp. 265, 269.
35
All excerpts of dialogue in this chapter are based on the English subtitles of the films’ DVD releases.
36
The cultural turn of minority film practice, its incorporation into the mainstream and the concomitant
broadening of its target audience led minority filmmakers to employ hybrid representational forms.
American minority filmmakers in the 1980s often employed a bicultural strategy, locked in an “intertextual
dialogue” between dominant and resistant cultural forms that affirmed the multiethnic nature of American
culture. Referring to the commercially successful Chicano films of the 1980s, such as La Bamba and Born
in East L.A., Chon Noriega identifies a “substructure based upon traditional or popular Chicano and
Mexican forms” (such as testimonio and floricanto) underneath the dominant generic conventions that form
their surface. Noriega describes the Chicano cinema of the period as having “had to mark out a space for
itself between a weapon and a formula, between the political weapon of new Latin American Cinema and
the economic formula of Hollywood.” Whereas hybridity is seen as a later stage of American minority film
practice, Jim Pines maintains that hybridity and heterogeneity were critical components of Black British
cinema from the beginning. Most of the important British films of the 1980s were produced in Black
British workshops and collectives, such as Sankofa Film and Video, the Black Audio Film Collective, and
Ceddo Film/Video Workshop. In order to move away from black-white binaries and exclusionary forms of
British nationalism, filmmakers in these collectives, such as Isaac Julien and John Akomfrah, complicated
the assumptions of colonial-era documentary realism, creating a self-reflexive, experimental, heterogeneous
and critically imaginative form of documentary film practice that used “creative blending of archival
footage, political reportage, and historical symbolism” in order to challenge the “British race-relations
documentary tradition”. Noriega, 1992b, pp. 149, 151, 153; Pines, p. 185.
37
Hayden White: The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p.19.
38
The link between vagabondage and resistance to capitalism is acknowledged and discussed briefly by
Marx. See Karl Marx: Capital: Volume One (London: Penguin Classics, 1976), pp. 896-899.
39
Imre, 21. According to David Mayall, these utopian definitions of Romani culture are echoed in the
writing of Gypsologists such as Fonseca, Stewart and Clébert, who have attempted to identify the essential
characteristics of Romani identity in terms of affect (“loud, outgoing, emotional and passionate”),
inscrutability (“using disguise, misrepresentation and secrecy as a means of survival”), defiance (“style,
panache and charm, a cultivated insouciance and a careful disregard…for the non-Gypsy way”), and
autonomy (“love of freedom, their flight from the bonds of civilisation, their need to live in accordance
with nature’s rhythm and their desire to be their own masters”). Mayall, pp. 233-234. Portrayals of
Romanies in cinema also mobilize idealized conceptions of them. Nevena Daković describes the
romanticized portrayal of the Roma in Yugoslav cinema as a form of “ethno populism” which associates
Romani culture with the “worship of freedom, nomadic romanticism, love confirmed by death, adoration of
music, doomed pride and life, mysterious origins and a past not totally unlike that of Byron’s romantic
heroes or Rousseau’s noble savages”. Nevena Daković: “Shadows of the Ancestors”, Framework vol. 44
no.2, 2004, p. 103.
240

40
Edouard Chiline: “The Celluloid Drom: Romani Images in Russian Cinema”, Framework vol. 44 no.2,
2004, pp. 35, 37.
41
Dina Iordanova: Cinema of the Other Europe: The Industry and Artistry of East Central European Film
(London: Wallflower Press, 2003), 107.
42
See for instance the career of Goran Bregovic, whose musical scores for Emir Kusturica, especially Time
of the Gypsies and Underground (1995) garnered him international acclaim. The popularity of the music
for Yugoslavian Romani-themed films is noted by Nevena Daković, in her discussion of Aleksandar
Petrović’s I Even Met Happy Gypsies (1967). Daković, 105. It is also discussed by Ludmila Cvikova,
referring to the music for Czechoslovak director Dusan Hanak’s Romani-themed Pink-Tainted Dreams
(1976) and Soviet director Emil Loteanu’s Gypsies are Found Near Heaven (1976): “The songs used in
these films became so popular with audiences that they were sung almost in a clichéd manner: with the
accompaniment of guitars while sitting around fireplaces”. Ludmila Cvikova: “Ružové sny”, Framework
vol. 44 no.2, 2004, p. 109.
43
Katie Trumpener describes how a succession of European literary genres and forms represented
Romanies as limit cases to dominant narratives of western historical progress: “Gypsies… simultaneously
become a major epistemological testing ground for the European imaginary, black box, or limit case for
successive literary styles, genres, and intellectual moments. Thus for neoclassicism they are there to
symbolize a primitive democracy; for the late Enlightenment, an obstruction to the progress of civilization;
for Romanticism, resistance and the utopia of autonomy; for realism, a threat that throws the order and
detail of everyday life into relief; for aestheticism and modernism, a primitive energy still left beneath the
modern that drives art itself; and for socialist and postcolonial fiction, finally, a reactionary or resistant
cultural force that lingers outside of the welfare state or the imperial order.” Katie Trumpener: “The Time
of the Gypsies: ‘A People without History’ in the Narratives of the West”, Critical Inquiry, vol. 18,
Summer 1992, p. 369.
44
Ibid, pp. 348, 362-63.
45
Ibid, pp. 356, 364.
46
As Erika Thurner has shown “Jews and Gypsies were equally affected by the racial theories and
measures of the Nazi rulers. The persecution of the two groups was carried out with the same radical
intensity and cruelty.” Erika Thurner, quoted in Josefa Loshitzky: “Quintessential Strangers: The
Representation of Romanies and Jews in Some Holocaust Films”, Framework vol. 44 no.2, 2004, pp. 61-
62.
47
Nevena Daković provides us with a cinematic example of this type of fatalism, describing Aleksandar
Petrović’s I Even Met Happy Gypsies (1967) as being concerned with “the mythical search for the meaning
of life; it does so by introducing circular conceptions of time and space. The story begins and ends in the
town of Sombor in Vojvodina…The time pattern is not linear but rather circular, confirming that the life
quest is futile and that happiness is unattainable.” Daković, p. 106.
48
Iordanova, 2003, p. 158.
49
Romani Rose states: “Since the end of the cold war and the opening up of central and eastern European
countries in 1990, the living conditions of the Roma and Sinti minority have drastically deteriorated as a
result of nascent racism. However, racist-motivated violence and discrimination against Roma and Sinti
have significantly increased in a large number of countries in western Europe [as well]. As The New York
Times correctly observed in a commentary in March 1996, members of the minority are today subjected to
marginalization and racism to an extent that corresponds to the situation of African-Americans in the
United States up until the mid-1950s.” Rose notes that the violence directed against Roma emanates from
241

both civil society and the state: “The authorities in eastern and western Europe have recorded a drastic
increase in racist violence against minorities by neo-Nazis; however, such attacks increasingly emanate
from the security forces themselves.” Contemporary persecution of Romanies does not limit itself to violent
assaults: it also includes cases of forced sterilization, as documented in the Czech Republic and Slovakia;
forced expulsion, such as that of 100,000 Roma in Kosovo in 1999; the segregation of Romani children in
‘special’ schools that provide inadequate levels of education; and continued propagation of racist
stereotypes of Romani criminality in the media and on racist websites. Romani Rose: “Europe’s Largest
Minority Roma and Sinti Demand Equal Rights”, retrieved on May 10, 2008 from UN Chronicle Online
Edition: http://www.un.org/Pubs/chronicle/2006/webArticles/120106_rose.htm.
50
Barany goes on to note that in eastern Europe, “forced settlement was the main state policy toward the
Roma” since the 16th century, which explains why the vast majority of today’s eastern European Romanies
live settled lifestyles. By contrast, in western Europe, states favored expulsion and deportation, which
explains why more Romanies in that part of Europe lead traveling lifestyles than those in the east. Zoltan
Barany: The East European Gypsies: Regime Change, Marginality and Ethnopolitics (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 10-11.
51
Nicolas Gheorghe notes that “the fragmentation of the Gypsy population was reinforced by the legal
treatment of them as property, starting from the Middle Ages.” Andrzej Mirga and Nicolas Gheorghe add
that the “development of capitalism in Western Europe helped to develop modern Romani nomadism in the
form of ‘service nomadism’”. Nicolas Gheorghe quoted in Guy, 2001b, p. 6; Andrzej Mirga and Nicolas
Gheorghe quoted in ibid, p. 7.
52
Mayall, pp. 235-237.
53
Historical themes were very important in the early phases of American and European minority cinemas.
Black Independent Cinema of the 1970s was comprised primarily of the films of UCLA film school
graduates such as Haile Gerima, Charles Burnett, Larry Clark, and Julie Dash, who came to be known as
the Los Angeles school. For Manthia Diawara, one of the key objectives of the Los Angeles school was to
“reconstruct history, celebrating Black writers and activists, and giving voice to people who are overlooked
by television news and mainstream documentaries.” Similarly, Rosa Linda Fregoso describes early Chicano
films, such as Luis Valdez’s I Am Joaquin (1969), as reconstructions of Chicana/o history that traced
Chicana/o cultural identity to the pivotal periods of subjugation - the Spanish conquest of the Americas and
the white-American conquest of the Southwest – and thus linked Chicana/o identity to a nativeness that
predated these two moments of conquest. Chicano/a films of this period sought to provide members of the
Chicano community with an alternative to the distortions and oversights of official histories. Manthia
Diawara: “Black American Cinema: The New Realism”, Black American Cinema, ed., Manthia Diawara
(New York: Routledge, 1993a), pp. 6-8; Rosa Linda Fregoso: The Bronze Screen (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 2.
54
Paloma Gay y Blasco: “‘We Don't Know Our Descent’: How the Gitanos of Jarana Manage the Past”,
The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 7 no. 4, Dec 2001, pp. 631, 633.
55
Ibid, pp. 634-638.
56
Ibid, pp. 639-643.
57
White, p. 29.
58
Martin Kovats: “The Emergence of European Roma Policy” Between Past and Future: The Roma of
Central and Eastern Europe, ed., Will Guy (Hatfield : University of Hertfordshire Press, 2001), pp. 93, 95-
96.
242

59
White, pp. 4-5, 10-11.
60
Ibid, pp. 16, 19-20.
61
Ibid, pp. 14, 21.
62
Bertolt Brecht: “Against Georg Lukács”, New Left Review, no. 84, March-April 1974, p. 45.
63
Robert Stam: Film Theory: An Introduction, (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2000), pp. 73, 77, my
emphasis.
64
Julia Hallam with Margaret Marshment: Realism and Popular Cinema (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2000), p. 26.
65
Colin MacCabe states “Classically, realism depended on obscuring the relation between text and reader
in favor of a dominance accorded to a supposedly given reality; but this dominance, far from sustaining a
‘natural’ relation, was the product of a definite organization which, of necessity, effaced its own
workings…such an organization [whether depicting a dominant or progressive/subversive version of
reality] was fundamentally reactionary; for it posed a reality which existed independently of both the text’s
and the reader’s activity, a reality which was essentially noncontradictory and unchangeable.” Colin
MacCabe: “Theory and Film: Principles of Realism and Pleasure”, Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film
Theory Reader, ed., Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 183, 194.
66
Brecht states: “Realistic means: discovering the causal complexes of society/unmasking the prevailing
view of things as the view of those who rule it/writing from the standpoint of the class which offers the
broadest solutions for the pressing difficulties in which human society is caught/emphasizing the element
of development/making possible the concrete, and making possible abstraction from it.” See Brecht, p. 50.
For more on these debates, see Anil Bhatti: “Realism in Marxism”, Social Scientist, vol. 8, no. 5/6, Dec-
Jan 1979-1980, p. 50.
67
In the first World Romani Congress, held in London in 1971, the label Rom was adopted, as was the
slogan “Gypsies Arise”, and a blue and green with a red wheel flag – all measures aimed at establishing a
unified ethnic Rom identity. The names Tsiganes, Zigeuner, Gitanos and Gypsy were condemned (and
henceforth CIT became known as CIR). During the second World Romani Congress, held in Geneva in
1978, a permanent body, the Romani Union, was established and later gained “consultative status within
the United Nations Economic and Social Council in 1979, [its] delegates were subsequently elected to both
the United Nations Human Rights Commission and UNESCO”. India was confirmed as the mother country
of the Roma, with the Indian state agreeing to this designation, thus clearing the way for Roma to attain
minority ethnicity status in Eastern Europe. During the third World Romani Congress, held in Göttingen in
1981, with the markers of shared transnational identity (flag, anthem, etc.) all firmly established, the “idea
of a separate Romani nation was growing and strengthening”. By the fifth World Romani Congress, held in
Prague in 2000, identity and nationhood were the top priorities, with delegates seeking to “declare
themselves a ‘non-territorial’ nation and to achieve international recognition.” Mayall, pp. 204-206.
68
For more on the diverse functions of Romani social and political organizations in Eastern Europe, see
Barany, p. 210-215.
69
Ibid, pp. 210-215. According to Barany, the objectives of Romani political parties and NGOs in the
postsocialist period have been the “full recognition and the rights befitting a distinctive nationality, civil
rights enforced by effective legal instruments, the modification of existing minority laws, and end to ethnic
discrimination and strict enforcement of antidiscrimination laws, affirmative action programs in the form of
state-supported social and public employment programs, better educational opportunities, more effective
243

social welfare policies, and broadcast time in the state-owned media proportionate to the size of the Romani
population and its fair portrayal therein.” Ibid, p. 216.
70
Imre, p. 18.
71
Ibid, p. 24.
72
Will Guy: “Introduction” Between Past and Future: The Roma of Central and Eastern Europe, ed., Will
Guy (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2001a), p. xvii.
73
Ibid, p. xv.
74
Guy, 2001b, p. 20; Mayall, pp. 209-210.
75
Guy, 2001b, p. 22. The adjudication of asylum cases and design of immigration controls in Western
Europe are two areas where Romanies feel a democratic deficit most acutely. For more on this, see Mít’a
Castle-Kanĕrová: “Roma Refugees: The EU Dimension”, Between Past and Future: The Roma of Central
and Eastern Europe, ed., Will Guy (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2001), pp. 128-130.
76
Kovats, p. 104.
77
In E.U. literature, important historical developments are typically explained through recourse to
essentialist and inaccurate definitions of Romani identity rather than social and economic factors. An
example of this is the description of the increased migration of Eastern European Romanies as a function of
their traditional ‘nomadism’, rather than as a response to the increased racism, social marginalization and
impoverishment of the postsocialist period. Kovats, pp. 99-100.
78
Will Guy describes the contradictory valences of Communist policy on Romani identity: “While
Communist rule had the effect of strengthening social identity of Roma through their increased integration
into the general labour force, it simultaneously endeavoured to destroy their ethnic identity by denying its
existence in the vain hope that Roma would somehow dissolve into wider society.” Guy, 2001b, p. 12.
79
For more on how eastern European states have embraced ethnic definitions of Romani identity in order to
avoid solving the myriad social and economic problems facing their Roma populations, see ibid.
80
Kovats, p. 99.
81
Julia Hallam notes that, setting the basis for all subsequent forms of cinematic realism, early cinema
sought to distance itself from the melodramatic theater tradition of the 19th century by adopting less
expressive acting styles, psychological realism, an emphasis on the mundane and quotidian, complex
characterization, minimal plots and verisimilitude. See Hallam, pp. 18-22.
82
The call to arms against this status quo came from an unlikely source, Bertolt Brecht, who is associated
with avant-garde rather than popular cultural forms. Brecht calls for “the terms popular art and realism [to]
become natural allies. It is in the interest of the people, of the broad working masses, to get a faithful image
of life from literature, and faithful images of life are actually of service only to the people, the broad
working masses, and must therefore be unconditionally comprehensible and helpful to them—in other
words, popular.” Brecht, p. 49.
83
Hallam, pp. 192-196.
84
Ibid, p. 196.
244

85
American and European minority filmmakers of the 1970s and 1980s practiced what bell hooks has
called “a deconstructive film practice”, one that encourages active spectatorship and exposes the
ideological mechanisms of dominant texts. (hooks, 302) Manthia Diawara’s description of Black
Independent Cinema of the 1970s illustrates the link between realism and ideological deconstruction: “‘a
cinema of the real’ in which there is no manipulation of the look to bring the spectator to a passive state of
uncritical identification. The films show a world which does not position the spectator for cathartic
purposes, but one which constructs a critical position for him or her in relation to the ‘real’ and its
representation…[they] use a mixed form of fiction and documentary in which the documentary element
serves to deconstruct the illusion created by the fiction and makes the spectator question the representation
of ‘reality’ through different modes.” bell hooks cites Julie Dash’s Illusions (1982) and the Sankofa
Collective’s A Passion for Remembrance (1986) as examples of deconstructive film practice. These films
do not merely attempt to present the ‘real’, to substitute positive portrayals for past stereotypical ones.
Rather, they are reflexive in that the gendered and racialized economy of gazes is foregrounded in both
films: in Illusions in the fact that the protagonist is passing for white, in Passion, in the use of mirrored
looking and the negotiation of public and private spaces. bell hooks argues that these films “imagine new
transgressive possibilities for the formulation of identity…they provide new points of recognition,
embodying Stuart Hall’s vision of a critical practice that acknowledges that identity is constituted ‘not
outside but within representation’, and invites us to see film ‘not as a second-order mirror held up to reflect
what already exists, but as that form of representation which is able to constitute us as new kinds of
subjects, and thereby enable us to discover who we are’”. See Manthia Diawara: “Black Spectatorship:
Problems of Identification and Resistance”, Black American Cinema, ed., Manthia Diawara (New York:
Routledge, 1993b), p. 219; bell hooks: “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators”, Black
American Cinema, ed., Manthia Diawara (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 302.
86
Thomas Acton and Nicholas Gheorghe: “Citizens of the World and Nowhere: Minority, ethnic and
human rights for Roma during the last hurrah of the nation-state”, Between Past and Future: The Roma of
Central and Eastern Europe, ed., Will Guy (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2001), pp. 68-69.
Acton and Gheorghe’s contention that minority political struggles must necessarily include an international
dimension is reminiscent of the influence of Third Cinema on the work of African-American filmmakers in
the 1970s, who incorporated international perspectives into their work and defined their work as a struggle
as one against ‘internal colonialism’. Ntongela Masilela argues that Haile Gerima’s Bush Mama (1976)
initiates a form of “Third World feminism”, in which the protagonist’s gaining of consciousness is situated
in a remarkably dense and intricate soundtrack of city sounds, that represent the oppressive conditions she
must overcome. The film defines this oppression as internal colonialism, linking it to Third World
struggles, something Gerima learned from Fanon. Bush Mama realizes that “in order to overcome
oppression in America, she must assist in the emancipation of Africa from European colonial and imperial
domination.” Gerima’s earlier film, Harvest: 3000 Years (1975) also places female subjectivity at the
center of the narrative and, by extension, at the center of African history. For Masilela, its concern with
Ethiopian class struggle and history exemplified the internationalism of the Los Angeles school. Ntongela
Masilela: “The Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers”, Black American Cinema, ed., Manthia Diawara
(New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 107.
87
Barany, p. 2.
88
Katie Trumpener, recalling the historical exoticization of Romani culture, states: “In an epoch shaped by
nationalist rhetoric, those peoples who do not claim a land and a written tradition for themselves, who
cannot or do not claim a history, are relegated to nature, without a voice in any political process,
represented only in the glass case of the diorama, the dehumanizing legend of the photograph, the tableaux
of the open-air museum.” Trumpener, p. 379.
89
Will Guy describes the importance of transnational coordination and engagement with transnational
institutions for contemporary Romani politics: “The concept of ‘transnational or non-territorial minority’
and the claim by the Fifth World Romani Congress for recognition of Roma as ‘a full nation without
245

territory’ represent variants of such a fresh approach. By raising the ethnic status of Roma from minority to
nation, with its own parliament, the IRU [International Romani Union] aims to increase its power of
leverage with both national governments and supranational bodies such as the UN and especially the EU.
The hope is that this strategy will lead to increased funding to improve the material conditions of Roma,
thus strengthening their social identity. Such resources would come not only from agreements with national
governments, following the German Sinti model, but also from the EU and other international bodies and
not least in the form of Holocaust reparations.” Guy, 2001b, p. 22.

246
Conclusion: Figurations of Agency in a State of Exception

In Laurent Cantent’s Entre Les Murs (The Class, 2008), Francois Marin (played
by Francois Bégaudeau, who also wrote the script based on his own teaching
experiences), a high school French teacher in a suburb of Paris, struggles to control his
multicultural students. The film chronicles Francois’ efforts to maintain order in what
becomes an increasingly volatile classroom environment. Much of the film shows
Francois in meetings with other teachers and the principal where school regulations are
debated and strategies devised for how to best discipline students who get out of line. The
procedural tone of these scenes contrasts sharply with the animated, emotionally charged
atmosphere of the classroom scenes. The well-meaning but out-of-touch teachers
represent France’s dominant social stratum, their whiteness standing in sharp contrast to
the multiculturalism of the classroom. The teachers’ discussions are centered mostly on
dispassionate considerations of school regulations (representing the law) and questions of
effectiveness (representing governance), whereas confrontations in the classroom
emphasize questions of equal treatment and cultural difference (representing the concerns
animating multicultural discourse). In this way, these two spaces metonymize the tension
between technocratic and democratic political modalities, and between the state and civil
society.
In Entre Les Murs, as in Haneke’s cinema, multiculturalism is experienced by
bourgeois characters as trauma, challenging teachers’ assumptions about the ability of the
state to both protect them from cultural difference (by denying its existence) and provide
them with the authority to deflect ethical challenges in civil society onto the state
247
(through an appeal to the impartiality of the law). As in Haneke’s cinema, Francois’
discursive approach to confrontations falters in the face of violent reactions to his
authority. Violence comes as a shock to bourgeois characters whose belief in the fairness
of the law does not prepare them for violent reactions to their authority. In the climax of
Entre Les Murs, Francois becomes physically involved in an altercation between two
students leading him to cause a student to get injured. The fall-out from this incident
leads to a student’s expulsion, as Francois manages to side-step his own responsibility in
the incident thanks to the support of the school board. In the special meeting convened to
decide the student’s fate, the student’s mother, who doesn’t speak French, pleads her case
to the assembled school officials. Here democracy infiltrates the technocratic structures
of the school in the form of cultural performance: the mother’s linguistic alienation from
the proceedings and her emotionality position her as the “other” to the discursivity and
monoculturalism of the school’s decision-making structures. Her inducement to
“perform” for the school committee in order to save her son predetermines the outcome
of the proceedings, reinforcing her incommensurability with the discursive requirements
of the school’s technocracy. Francois’ reputation among the students, as well as some of
the teachers, is damaged by the incident. He loses his ability to adopt an impartial stance
and approaches students in the playground to defend the school’s expulsion decision.
There he is subjected to the judgment of the students that was unavailable in the special
meeting held earlier. Out of his element, Francois once again loses his cool, frustrated at
the students’ unwillingness to accept the school’s authority or believe in the fairness of
school regulations.
248
The final scene captures the disjunction between France’s monocultural
technocratic political system and the energies animating its multicultural civil society. As
Francois sits in the now empty classroom on the last day of school, the chairs turned up in
anticipation of the summer recess, the sounds of the playground filter in from the open
windows. The energy of the playground stands in sharp contrast to the stillness of the
classroom where Francois sits alone, allowing us to reflect on the film’s French title,
“between the walls” as a spatial metaphor for the limitations of elite governance. This
ending scene undermines the entire premise of Entre Les Murs which problematically
constructs immigration as a disciplinary problem that pits well-meaning adults who
represent the state against unruly children who represent France’s minority and
immigrant classes. The film’s representation of immigration as a disciplinary problem
affirms French political discourse that has presented violent protests in Paris’
multicultural suburbs as criminal actions devoid of politics. The irony is that, in a sense,
this characterization is correct if one properly defines the ‘political’ in France as a realm
increasingly dominated by elite technocrats rather than political parties or mass
constituencies. The empty classroom in Entre Les Murs allows us to reflect on the
democratic bankruptcy of French political institutions, displacing democratic agon onto
the playground outside. By situating democratic struggle off-screen, Cantet metonymizes
the liminality of immigrant and minority political agency in the face of elite consolidation
of political power in the era of neoliberalism.
The mother’s plea for leniency in the school meeting in Entre Les Murs constructs
immigrant and minority expression as a form of specularized performance. How can we
249
understand such performances in political terms? In Haneke’s cinema, immigrant
“performances” are systematically misread by bourgeois characters as self-destructive,
anti-social acts that abnegate rather than affirm political agency. Majid’s suicide in Caché
and the unnamed boy’s killing of the goat and flouting of the encampment’s rules in Time
of the Wolf confound bourgeois characters, undermining narrative logic that has
heretofore focused on police whodunit machinations and post-apocalyptic self-regulation,
respectively. Majid’s son’s confrontation of Georges in Caché functions similarly to the
ethical challenges levied against Francois by his students in Entre Les Murs. In both
cases, immigrant characters display affective “excess” that embarrasses bourgeois
characters and undermines their reliance on the purported impartiality of the law.
Similarly, Georges’ shooting in Time of the Wolf and Anne’s harassment on the subway
in Code Unknown reorient the political from the discursive and legal realms, drawing
bourgeois characters into the violent antagonisms of civil society without recourse to
state protection. The cumulative impact of these moments suggests that exclusion from
technocratic decision-making induces immigrant and minority characters into
emotionally and physically “excessive” performances that render them visible as political
subjects.
The notion of immigrant political subjecthood as necessarily performative is
elucidated in Abdel Kechiche’s La Graine et le Mulet (The Secret of the Grain, 2007).
The film follows Slimane Beji, an aging divorced patriarch of a French-Arab family in
the port city of Sète in southern France. Slimane has worked in the Sète shipyards for
most of his life, but is now given less and less work as the shipyard faces economic
250
difficulties. He decides to open up a restaurant on a boat, combining his life-long passion
for boats with his ex-wife’s talent for Middle Eastern cuisine. The majority of the film
follows the sysiphian efforts of Slimane and Rym, the adolescent daughter of his
girlfriend, to purchase and renovate an old ship and to obtain the requisite permits and
loans that will enable them to open their restaurant. In these scenes, Slimane and Rym’s
idealism is tested by the bureaucratic hurdles they face in their encounters with bank and
city officials. The primary asset of their business venture, the potential interest in their
culinary heritage (Slimane’s wife’s couscous recipe), is untranslatable and intangible,
rendering their business plan unattractive and incomprehensible to the bank and state
officials. The stultifying rationality and monoculturalism of the business and state
representatives that Slimane and Rym encounter is contrasted to the familial affect and
intimacy of scenes showing Slimane’s family gathering to eat together on weekends. The
personal and cultural complexity of the family scenes, that feature humor, pleasure and
shared memories as well as infidelities, resentments, and generational strife, is lost under
the weight of the bureaucratic regulations, official discourse and commercial prerogatives
that predominate in the bank and city planning office scenes. The film debunks the
pretense of impartiality of the French state by showing us the personal friendships, shared
class backgrounds and reinforcing biases of the Sète bank officials, city planners and
politicians encountered by Slimane and Rym.
As in Entre Les Murs, immigrant and minority characters in La Graine et le Mulet
are induced to perform in order to convince the state to make a decision in their favor. In
both films, the perception by state officials that they are impartial and color-blind
251
predetermines the negative outcome of their decisions for immigrant and minority
characters. In this way, both films present democratic processes as largely symbolic and
performative, without any possibility of producing an outcome that upends the societal
balance of power. The failure of political performance pushes immigrants and minorities
to fall back on cultural performance, the one arena where their cultural particularities are
accepted under the logic of liberal multiculturalism. In the tour-de-force climactic scene
of La Graine et le Mulet, Slimane and Rym invite the bank officials, bureaucrats and
politicians as well as their families and friends to a dinner banquet at the restaurant
designed to secure the required permits by convincing the city’s elites that the restaurant
is commercially viable. The plan goes awry when Slimane’s son leaves the banquet to
avoid the wife of a local politician who he is having an affair with. Unbeknownst to him,
the all-important couscous lies in the trunk of his car, depriving Slimane of the center-
piece of the restaurant’s menu. The evening’s bonhommie is also undermined by the
antagonism between Slimane’s girlfriend (Rym’s mother) and Slimane’s ex-wife and
children. Here, the affective intensity and heterogeneity of immigrant cultures threatens
to undermine any effort to effectively penetrate the homogeneous, incestuous elite circles
that control the French state.
As the assembled city officials grow restless at the delayed arrival of the main
course, Rym, who has acted modestly and industriously in support of Slimane throughout
the film, surprisingly goes home, changes into a skimpier outfit and returns to the
restaurant to belly dance for the crowd. Her belly dancing transfixes the guests, and
Kechiche focuses unabashedly on Rym’s beauty and dancing talent in a scene whose
252
length and sensuality radically destabilize the affective register of the film. Rym comes
under the exoticizing and sexualizing gaze of both the city officials and the film’s
audience. As Rym dances, Slimane travels on his motorbike to find his son, but is soon
thwarted by a group of kids who steal his motorbike for a joyride. In full view of
Slimane, they ride happily, unaware of his dire circumstances. As he runs after them, he
becomes exhausted and collapses. In this way, the ending of La Graine et la Mulet
encapsulates the limitations of liberal acceptance of immigrant and minority cultural
practice, showing the exoticization and specularization of their performativity in the
cultural realm. The vibrancy of Rym’s belly dancing is undermined by Slimane’s
incapacitation, symbolizing the failure of immigrants to mobilize the state apparatus for
their benefit. The film thus both indulges audience interest in immigrant culture and
undermines it by juxtaposing the visual pleasure of cultural performance with the futility
of political performance. In this way, La Graine et la Mulet articulates, through its own
visual economy, the double-bind of immigrant cultural visibility in the face of
institutional racism and exclusion.
We have encountered this representational double-bind before in the cinema of
Tony Gatlif, which also simultaneously indulges dominant interest in minority cultural
performance and undermines it through politicized mise-en-scene and a reflexive mode
of address. As in the contrast between Rym and Slimane in the final scene of La Graine
et la Mulet, Gatlif’s cinema reveals the paradox of minority cultural centrality and socio-
economic marginality. In Vengo, La Caita’s manager is also a street cleaner and the
Caravacas bodyguards are also in the music business; in Swing, Miraldo is both a talented
253
guitarist and someone who struggles to secure welfare benefits from the state. In Gatlif’s
films, outside interest in minority culture is circumscribed by the social marginality,
indeed the very mortality, of Romani interlocutors: Vengo, Swing and Gadjo Dilo all
conclude with the death of Romani protagonists, effectively ending outsider characters’
and audiences’ access to Romani culture. In Gatlif’s cinema, Romanies emphasize their
cultural heritage in order to secure social advantages, such as when Miraldo asks Max to
help him write a letter to a welfare agency and Izidor brags about Stephane’s interest in
him to hostile non-Romani villagers. As in the scene of Slimane’s collapse in La Graine
et la Mulet, in Gatlif’s cinema realism as an aesthetic style intervenes in the specular
dynamics of performance to remind audiences of the contradictory position of minorities
in European societies. We see this in the ending of Swing, when Max’s ethnographic
diary of Manouche culture is rejected by Swing as she sits mournfully outside of an
abandoned building in a desolated area previously unseen in the film, and in the ending of
Vengo when Caco dies alone, his economic marginality reinforced by the industrial
machinery that continues to operate around him after his death.
Just as La Graine et la Mulet surprises us by turning Rym into an unlikely
performer and associates its audience’s visual pleasure to Rym’s specularization at the
hands of the assembled city officials, Gatlif’s cinema compromises our access to Romani
performativity by emphasizing the narrativity of performers and showing us internal
audiences that reveal the uneven social dynamics of minority cultural reception. The
staggered delineation of multiple audiences in the opening performance scene in Vengo
politicize the dynamics of reception and create a tension between internal and external
254
investments in minority culture usually elided in representations of Romanies. This
opening performance takes place outside of the narrative in order to emphasize the
tension between Romani performativity and narrativity, the latter an expression of
Romani historicity and the internal interests of the Romani community. These internal
interests are revealed by the function of the rest of the performances in Vengo, which are
designed by Caco for private consumption in order to alleviate the pressure on Diego
resulting from the Caravacas feud. Diego’s disability and the casting of famed dancer
Antonio Canales in the dramatic role of Caco problematize the naturalization of Romani
performativity. As with the city officials in the banquet scene of La Graine et la Mulet,
the Spanish soldiers in the La Caita scene in Vengo provide a figuration of the state that
reminds us of the delimited political potential of minority cultural performance.
External investments also structure the representational dynamics of
contemporary Greek cinema, whose thematization of identity crisis and isolation reflects
EU criticisms of Greek modernization efforts, the democratic disenfranchisement of
imposed convergence policies as well as earlier Philhellenic appropriation of ancient
Greek culture and history. But in contrast to the conspicuous visibility of Romani culture,
Greek cinema functions essentially without an international audience, obviating the
delineation of representational boundaries as in Gatlif’s cinema. For this reason,
performance in Greek cinema manifests itself through contentious dialogue aimed at
internal critique as in Balkanisateur and Ο Χαμενος Θυσαυρος του Χουρσιτ Πασα.
Alternately, performance takes the form of symbolic, seemingly futile gestures
incomprehensible to foreign interlocutors such as the border address and destruction of
255
the nightclub in Ολα Ειναι Δρομος. Feelings of isolation and disempowerment lead to
the depiction of the natural and built environment through the modalities of extreme heat
and monumentalization in Υσηχες Μερες του Αυγουστου, Τα Χρονια της Μεγαλης
Ζεστης and Acropolis. The potential of travel to enable a transcendence of Greece’s
perceived marginality is thwarted in Μεταιχμιο and Εφημερη Πολη, which feature
characters who become internal exiles in Greek society after visits to border areas. And a
large number of Greek films thematize gender relations as doomed from the outset, their
displacement onto rural areas a last-ditch effort to distance the Greek nation from the
patriarchal crisis that consumes it.
The relationship between performance, political agency and alterity differs
according to the position occupied by immigrants and minorities in the contexts discussed
in this study. In Haneke’s cinema, alterity is conceived as violent antagonism in civil
society that destabilizes the pretense of impartiality of French legal and political
discourse and renders bourgeois characters incapable of understanding let alone
countering the shifting social dynamics of French society. Narratives of incorporation are
rendered untenable in Haneke’s cinema because of bourgeois characters’ misrecognition
of minority agency as fundamentally anti-social, self-destructive and devoid of politics.
By contrast, in Greek cinema incorporation is untenable because immigrant marginality is
seen as parallel to the marginality of Greek dominant social groups. Here immigrant
actions are depicted as initially hopeful but ultimately unsuccessful interventions in a
Greek society beset by patriarchal crisis and the contradictions of territorial nationalism.
Haneke’s cinema reflects the shift in the conceptions of French immigrants from their
256
labor function and social impermanence to their symbolic function and cultural
“intransigence”. By contrast, Greek cinema reflects the gendered bifurcation of
immigrant identity in domestic and sexualized terms. For this reason, Greek cinema does
not emphasize the violent antagonistic agency of immigrant and minority subjects in civil
society, but rather presents them as catalysts for a potential (but ultimately phantasmatic)
renewal of Greek mechanisms of social and sexual reproduction. In Gatlif’s cinema, the
symbolic centrality of Romani cultural performance is politicized in order to destabilize
(without denying) the external over-determinations of minority identity so prevalent in
the French and Greek contexts. In all three contexts, the political disenfranchisement and
exclusion of immigrants and minorities is foregrounded through an immersion in either
the fallacies of bourgeois subjectivity, the fantasies of sexual and domestic incorporation
or the specular investments in cultural practice. In each case, performance emerges as a
heretofore unforeseen site of agency that manifests itself either through violence in civil
society, disengagement from familial incorporation or disarticulation of internal and
external investments in minority culture.
Despite their differences, all films discussed in this study reckon with the
democratic bankruptcy of contemporary European politics. Haneke’s cinema heralds the
transition of meaningful democratic agon from the state to civil society, a move that
shifts the terms of engagement from discursive universalism to violent particularism,
displacing bourgeois subjects from their position of assumed epistemological mastery and
social dominance. Art cinema’s traditionally ambiguous modes of address are here taken
to their representational extremes in order to expose bourgeois misconceptions of social
257
difference. Ambiguity in Haneke’s cinema threatens to dissolve narrative coherence
completely, signaling a shift in the political balance of power and the relevance of
rhetorical strategies traditionally used to legitimate that power. Ambiguity mires
audiences in the repeated misunderstandings, solipsism and paranoia of bourgeois
characters, addressing us not as privileged observers of a drama not of our own making
but as co-conspirators in the systematic de-politicization and marginalization of
immigrant and minority subjects. In this way, art cinema is pushed to the brink of
obsolescence, revealed as a mode of address whose emphasis on bourgeois interiority and
psychologism is incapable of capturing the shifting determinations of the ‘political’ in
multicultural European societies.
Similarly, Greek national cinema flirts with its own obsolescence in a series of
films that thematize the absence of an international audience and the perceived
marginalization of contemporary Greek society. In these films, the traditional markers of
the national – landscape, history and culture – are conceived as overwhelming and
alienating forces that disempower characters incapable of transcending Greek territorial
nationalism or external criticisms of Greek modernization. The cinematic mechanisms of
communicating national identity – narrative, characterization, cultural performance – are
here systematically undermined or turned toward interior critique, situating agency in
seemingly futile untranslatable gestures, internal exile and doomed heteronormative
relationships. Historicity, sociality and travel are all conceived as imperiled modalities
incapable of communicating Greek national identity to external audiences or resolving
the contradictions of Greek society. The representational function of national cinema, its
258
raison d’etre in traditional European film studies, is thus systematically destabilized in
contemporary Greek films, whose introversion reflects Greece’s peripheral position in
Europe and its democratic disenfranchisement at the hands of EU policymakers.
Similarly, Gatlif’s films push minority cinema to its definitional limits. The
traditional conception of minority cinema in film studies associates it with oppositionality
and antagonism to dominant representational modes and audiences. By contrast, Gatlif’s
films unabashedly acknowledge and foreground external investments in Romani culture
and identity. Gatlif’s emphasis on performativity and visual pleasure has led critics to
repeatedly misread his films as capitulations to the predilections of international film
festival and art house audiences. What these criticisms overlook is the fact that Romani
statelessness and reliance on transnational political bodies (whether internal or external)
render oppositionality an inadequate framework for understanding Romani
representation. Rather than affirming its liminality as Greek cultural representation does,
Gatlif’s cinema acknowledges Romanies’ paradoxical symbolic centrality and socio-
economic marginality by reconceiving performance in political terms. The exclusion of
minorities and immigrants from the increasingly technocratic European political process,
induces them to perform in both the political and cultural realms as a means of achieving
agency. Gatlif’s cinema signals the obsolescence of traditionally oppositional and realist
modes of minority cinema, introducing performance as the primary representational
framework through which to capture the contradictions of minority and immigrant
political agency in an era of democratic disenfranchisement and exclusion.
259
European art cinemas, national cinemas and minority cinemas are all in the
process of reinvention due to the shifting modalities of the ‘political’ in contemporary
Europe. In its own death throes, cinema is thus resurrected, perhaps for the last time, to
illuminate another death, that of European democratic politics in the era of technocratic
governance.

260
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Asset Metadata

Creator Lykidis, Alex (author)

Core Title In a state of exception: political subjecthood in European film, 1990-2008

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema-Television (Critical Studies)

Publication Date 07/21/2009

Defense Date 06/16/2009

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag art cinema,citizenship and immigration,contemporary European cinema,democratic disenfranchisement,France,Greece,Michael Haneke,minority cinema,national cinema,OAI-PMH Harvest,Roma,Tony Gatlif

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Jaikumar, Priya (committee chair), Gilmore, Ruth Wilson (committee member), Kinder, Marsha (committee member)

Creator Email alexlykidis@hotmail.com,lykidis@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2383

Unique identifier UC1219562

Identifier etd-Lykidis-3074 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-572524 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2383 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Lykidis-3074.pdf

Dmrecord 572524

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Lykidis, Alex

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu