Table Of ContentCinematic Homecomings
ii
Cinematic Homecomings
Exile and Return in Transnational Cinema
Edited by
Rebecca Prime
Bloomsbury Academic
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First published 2015
© Rebecca Prime and Contributors, 2015
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ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-2447-0
ePDF: 978-1-4411-0107-5
ePub: 978-1-4411-0693-3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cinematic homecomings: exile and return in transnational cinema/edited by
Rebecca Prime.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4411-2447-0 (hardback: alk. paper) 1. Emigration and immigration in motion
pictures. 2. Return migration in motion pictures. 3. Homeland in motion pictures.
4. Nostalgia in motion pictures. I. Prime, Rebecca, 1974– editor.
PN1995.9.E44C567 2014
791.43’6552–dc23
2014023609
Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction Rebecca Prime 1
Part 1 Transatlantic Modes of Production
1 Come Back to Erin: Themes of Exile and Return in the “O’Kalem”
Films Peter Flynn 15
2 Alexander Korda and Peter Lorre: Central European Exile
and the Illusion of Return Catherine Portuges 34
3 From Blacklists to Black Films: The Hollywood Radicals
Return Home Rebecca Prime 51
Part 2 Nostalgic Visions, Imagined Homelands
4 Between Longing and Belonging: Diasporic Return in
Contemporary South Korean Cinema We Jung Yi 73
5 Three Ages of Russian Nostalgia: Nostalghia, Window to Paris,
and Brother 2 Milla Fedorova 90
6 Beyond Return in Turkish Diasporic Cinema Silvia Kratzer 109
Part 3 Exilic Subjectivity and the Politics of Return
7 Staying Home: Cuban Exile Film from Within Mariana Johnson 129
8 Chilean Exile Cinema and its Homecoming
Documentaries José Miguel Palacios 147
9 Burning Straw Men: The 1979 Revolution and Bahman
Farmanara’s Stubborn Cosmopolitanism Matthew Holtmeier 169
Part 4 Revisioning the Past
10 Returning to Rubble: Fritz Kortner’s The Last Illusion
Martina Moeller 191
11 Healing Journeys: Return as Therapy in Walk on Water Ido Ramati 209
vi Contents
Part 5 The Roving Gaze
12 Narratives of Return in the Films of Ousmane Sembene and Djibril
Diop Mambety Malini Guha 229
13 Sleeping with Strangers: Queering Home and Identity in I Don’t
Want to Sleep Alone Kai-man Chang 250
14 A Moroccan Homecoming: The Fabulation of Family and Home in
Izza Génini’s Retrouver Oulad Moumen Stefanie Van de Peer 269
15 Zero Degrees of Separation: Post-Exilic Return in Denis
Villeneuve’s Incendies Claudia Kotte 287
Afterword Dina Iordanova 303
Contributors 310
Index 313
Acknowledgments
This book got its start as a conference panel and I owe a particular debt of grat-
itude to my original co-presenters, Matthew Holtmeier and Catherine Portuges.
Both proved to be invigorating interlocutors and valued collaborators whose
vision and insights have shaped this volume. I am also grateful for the cheerful
support provided by my editor, Katie Gallof, who has overseen the book’s
evolution with equanimity and judiciousness. At Bloomsbury, Mary Al-Sayed
kept a diligent eye on the book’s progress and was always ready with a helpful
answer to my questions.
One of the pleasures of this book has been the opportunity to work with so
many talented scholars and researchers. I have learned much from their work
and am extremely appreciative of their efforts and patience with my seemingly
endless requests for just one more round of edits! I am especially grateful to
Dina Iordanova for her willingness to step in at the last minute and execute the
afterword with such aplomb. Thanks to Kevin Brownlow for prompting me to
get back in touch with Peter Flynn, and to Emily Carman for reconnecting me
with Silvia Kratzer. Janet Bergstrom provided moral support and much practical
assistance. Finally, thanks are due to my husband, David Bloch, for listening.
viii
Introduction
Rebecca Prime
After Exile: the original title for this collection and an apparent oxymoron, given
exile’s connotations of permanence. In literature and history, from Oedipus to
Napoleon, the banishment of exile results in diaspora and death; it is a condition
from which there is no return.
And yet of course, there is. For those forced into exile, changing geopolitical
circumstances can present the possibility of returning home. For those
émigrés and expatriates for whom exile was a self-imposed choice, the door
was never fully shut. And in our contemporary era, the ease of mobility and
communication have rendered exile a somewhat porous construct, determined
less by geographical location than by notions of cultural identity and national
belonging.
Exile may not be irrevocable but it is “inexorably tied to homeland and the
possibility of return,” as Hamid Naficy has observed.1 Given the degree to which
exile and home are mutually defining concepts, it is not surprising that exile
narratives frequently end with a homecoming. The essays in this anthology ask
what happens next, after the return from exile. In homecoming narratives, is
return located in the physical homeland, or rather in the acceptance of a hybrid
identity that transcends national boundaries? After years spent working abroad
in different production contexts, how do filmmakers address the challenges of
postexilic artistic reinvention? Is it possible to speak of a postexilic cinema and if
so, how does it distinguish itself from cinemas of exile and diaspora?
In posing these questions, we are entering the realm of transnational cinema,
a term that has become something of a catch-all within the discipline of film
studies to describe films that cross national borders thematically, theoretically,
or on the level of production. In Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader—an
early addition to the body of scholarly literature taking the measure of what
