Immigration and Cinema

Films have appealed to immigrants since the early days of the medium, providing a visual and kinetic form of entertainment that transcended language barriers and captured the dynamism of modern city life. Indeed, the style of many early American films was modeled on the fairground attractions and vaudeville acts popular with working-class and immigrant audiences. While it may seem evident that immigrant experience shaped early American film culture, the manner and scope of its influence has been hotly debated in film studies since the late 1970s. The economic and political crises that marked much of the 20th century created new waves of immigration, especially in the interwar period, that in some cases infused new talent and ideas into established film industries and in others created entirely new film movements. Many film scholars have studied the work of émigré directors in Hollywood and elsewhere, with increasingly sophisticated attempts being made to interpret the style and content of their films in relation to their creators’ industrial marginality and cultural alienation. In the 1990s, film scholars sought to distinguish immigrant films from dominant modes of production, genres, and styles, developing a new critical vocabulary to explain how the exilic, nostalgic, and alienating aspects of immigrant experience could be expressed cinematically. Recent scholarship has begun to address the aesthetic hybridity of immigrant filmmaking, tracking its oscillations between realism and stylization, individualism and communalism, essentialism and performativity, and “high” and “low” cultural forms. Many scholars today are also looking at how gender and sexuality complicate cinematic portrayals of immigrant identity. The study of immigration and cinema intersects with that of transnational and diasporic cinemas (see the article “Transnational and Diasporic Cinema”), the former focusing more on representational strategies and less on modes of production than the latter. In this article, a distinction is made between the work of “émigré filmmakers” who travel abroad but might not explicitly address immigration in their films, “immigrant filmmakers” whose work engages with immigrant issues in some way, and “films about immigration” that deal explicitly with immigration but might not be directed by an immigrant filmmaker. These distinctions reveal the competing investments in immigrant identity, the disarticulation of which is an essential task for scholars seeking to better understand the ethical and ideological implications of immigrant representation.