Is BM

in Daniela Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg. European Cinema in Motion.
Migrant and
Diasporic Film in Contemporary Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)
Contemporary Cinema | Master Degree Communication Sciences - Cinema and Television | NOVA-FCSH
7
Body Matters: Immigrants in
Universidade Nova de Lisboa | Teacher: Maria Irene Aparício maparicio@fcsh.unl.pt
Recent Spanish, Italian and

Greek Cinemas
Isabel Santaolalla
The increased visibility of migrant groups and individuals is currently per-

haps the most striking feature common to Spanish, Italian and Greek cin-
emas. This development arose in the early 1990s and has since led to a
sizeable body of so-called immigrant films in each country. Shared agendas
in these films, as well as in journalistic and academic debates, legitimate
the kind of wide-angle focus adopted here, particularly at a time when tran-
snational dynamics demand more than ever a discussion of cinema – and,
perhaps especially, European cinema – liberated from the straitjacket of
national boundaries.
Admittedly, stories, characters and situations in films dealing with immi-
gration and diaspora in the three chosen countries are varied, as are the
backgrounds and traditions with which they engage. And yet, even though
a detailed analysis of form and content may show that there are as many
ways of imagining immigrant and diasporic ‘others’ as there are of repre-
senting indigenous subjects, a number of resemblances demand attention.
Notably, films dealing with these issues in all three countries seem to have
followed similar pathways in narrative design and development that could
be summarised as follows: an initial preference in the respective industries
for concentrating on ‘social problem’ narratives and stories of victimisa-
tion, mostly identified with metropolitan locations, and often empathis-
ing with the plight of the immigrant; a subsequent move towards a more
varied range of narrative and aesthetic choices, depicting immigrants no
longer exclusively or primarily as victims, contextualising them in a wider
range of private and public spaces; and, eventually, the emergence of self-
representations by migrant or diasporic film-makers aiming to normalise,
celebrate and/or de-ghettoise minority ethnic stories.
Given that large-scale immigration in the twentieth century only began
in Spain, Italy and Greece around the mid-1980s, this last phase of film
production is still in its infancy in these countries. Southern Europe lags
152
Contemporary Cinema | Master Degree Communication Sciences - Cinema and Television | NOVA-FCSH Immigrants in Spanish, Italian and Greek Cinemas 153
behind, for example, Germany, the United Kingdom and France, where rel-
atively well-established migrant and diasporic communities have become
increasingly media-articulate over the last few decades. Conversely, migrant
communities in Spain, Italy and Greece still have very limited or no access
to and control over the channels of representation, with the result that,
despite isolated cases, the projection of images about the migrant experi-
ence is still almost exclusively the preserve of non-migrant film-makers.1
Sandra Ponzanesi’s view that in Italy ‘films are intentionally made for a
white Italian audience intrigued by the “other” but not yet well equipped
for its understanding’ (2005b: 270) could equally serve as a largely valid
description of Spanish and Greek cinemas.
Comparable historical and geopolitical factors in these countries may
explain the similar pace at which migrations and diasporas are finding
expression on the big screen, as well as the parallels in storylines, charac-
ter types and other aspects of representation. Especially noteworthy among
these is the highly symbolic corporeality of the immigrant. Arguably, this
emphasis on the body is explicable by two factors. Firstly, many films focus
on the hardships of the newly arrived, often undocumented, immigrant
struggling for survival in an intimidating host country, seeking to satisfy
basic physical needs while often enduring racist or xenophobic violence.
Secondly, the immigrant is frequently seen as ethnically – even ‘racially’ –
marked, thus following a long Western tradition in which the term ‘race’ is
applied to non-white people/skin/bodies. As Richard Dyer notes, ‘[a]s long as
white people are not racially seen and named, they/we function as a human
norm. Other people are raced, we are just people’ (1997: 1). As a result, the
immigrant is often over-defined through the body.2
Through analysis of certain aspects of the representation of immigration,
this chapter will attempt to assess whether, beyond merely superficial links,
the cultural and ideological discourses from which those images emerge
and within which they circulate are in any way akin to one another, and
whether the needs and desires to which they may be responding or giving
rise share common ground.
History counts
Although current numbers of immigrants in Spain, Italy and Greece are not
significantly different from those in other European countries, the newness
and suddenness of the flow of incoming migration has taken these coun-
tries somewhat by surprise, rapidly changing their demographic make-up
and forcing questions of individual and communal identity to the forefront
of political, legal and sociocultural discussion.3
Moreover, until recently, all three countries had been the source rather
than the destination of migrants. This significant difference in the migra-
tory history sets Spain, Italy and Greece apart from other European countries.
Contemporary Cinema | Master Degree Communication Sciences - Cinema and Television | NOVA-FCSH 154 Isabel Santaolalla
Additionally, all three have a history of interior migration (e.g. the stream
of Southern Italians from the Mezzogiorno to the industrial North in the
post-World War Two period, or of workers from Andalucía, Murcia and
Extremadura to Cataluña in the 1960s and 1970s). The extent to which atti-
tudes to immigration flows are conditioned by past experiences of interior
and outgoing migration varies from country to country, as does their level
of significance (or lack thereof) within the narrative of the nation.
In all three countries part of that narrative centres on the memory of
former days of glory, of their hegemonic role in Western civilisation – Greece
and Italy in classical times, Spain during the early modern period – and the
impact on the collective imaginary of the subsequent loss of geopolitical
and/or cultural supremacy. Besides, Spain shared with Italy (but not with
Greece) a revival of colonial ambition in Africa in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, which explains the fascination with the ‘Dark
Continent’ that found expression in ‘Africanist’ trends in contemporary
literature and painting, photography and film in both countries (Morales
Lezcano 1990: 30, Ponzanesi 2005a: 165, Wood 2005: 13).
Another important layer in the structure of national identity in these three
countries is their varied and shifting position vis-à-vis Europe. Whereas Italy
was a founder member of the European Community in 1952, Greece and
Spain remained marginal to it for over three decades. Reconfigurations of
national identity in contemporary Spain and Greece are conceivably marked
by this long period of exclusion and the relatively recent accession to ‘first-
class’ European citizenship. Moreover, the common history of dictatorship
in Greece and Spain has played an important role in shaping concepts of
national identity.
All three countries seem to be anxious to some extent over their Western
European credentials, as if their very geographical location, in between
the North–South or West–East divides, threatened their Europeanness. In
Spain, the threat comes from Africa, and, as María Rosa de Madariaga points
out, Spanish hostility towards the ‘Moor’ derives from past history (North
African/Arab presence in Spain during the convivencia and reconquista) and
cultural and geographic proximity:
The Spaniard recognises himself [sic] too well in the other – the Moor – and
this angers and disturbs him, leading him, in an effort to differentiate and
affirm himself, to react violently against him. He must demonstrate to the
other Europeans that the Spaniard is superior, that Africa does not begin
at the Pyrenees. (Madariaga 1988: 585, my translation)
Parallel sentiments are, according to Ponzanesi, traceable in Italy, where

attempts by Italian fascist propaganda to present colonised peoples as dif-
ferent and subordinate ‘others’ were marked by a need to create a distinct
national identity through opposition to black people, precisely because
‘Italy’s close proximity to the black continent was not only motivated geo-
graphically and culturally, but according to many scholars, also genetically’
(2005a: 172).
Unresolved questions of geopolitical identity are also present in Greece,

where the legacy of the Ottoman Empire, later accession to the EU and
the dismantling of communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Balkans
account for the fact that modern Greece is ‘marked by uncertainty as
to whether [it] belongs to the “west” or to the “east” ’ (Lazaridis and
Koumandraki 2001: 298–9).
These complexities of identity in Spain, Italy and Greece are refined
by further determinants. Firstly, Southern Europeans have commonly
been perceived by Northern Europeans and others as somatically simi-
lar (swarthy, hirsute, of compact build). In fact, outsiders sometimes not
only lump together Southern Europeans as a homogeneous group, but
also include them along with Latin Americans in the category of ‘Latins’.
Secondly, these three countries have historically had their own ‘indigenous
others’. In Italy, as Mary Wood notes, ‘the role of the awkward “Other” was
fulfilled by the Mezzogiorno and its inhabitants’ (2005: 142), in Spain by the
Gypsy (Santaolalla 2002) and in Greece partly by long-existing minorities
(e.g. Turks, Pomaks and Roma) and, perhaps more significantly, by the cul-
turally and linguistically distinct ethnic Greek ‘returnees’ from Albania or
the former Soviet Union.
The cinematic gaze and the ‘other’
There is often confusion about and overlap between the concepts of ‘race’
and ethnicity. The traditional definition of ‘race’ is that of a ‘group pre-
senting certain similarities in somatic (biological or physical) character-
istics which set them off from any other group’ (Comas 1958: 18), skin
colour being one identifying attribute. However, this concept has been re-
examined and contested, as deterministic nineteenth-century definitions
have been refuted by genetics, and replaced by the concept of ‘ethnicity’,
defined by cultural and socio-historical factors. Nevertheless, while scien-
tifically obsolete, the term ‘race’ (now demanding inverted commas) is still
in use as a means of referring to those circumstances in which individuals or
groups are perceived as ‘other’ because of somatic difference – which is why
Stuart Hall has referred to ‘race’ as ‘a discursive, not a biological, category’
(1993: 298).4 Writing on film has also moved beyond treating ‘race’ and
ethnicity as mere elements of plot and characterisation, and now considers
them as critical categories (similar to the treatment of ‘gender’ in feminist
criticism). Robert Stam and Louise Spence (1983), for instance, advocate
a methodology that identifies textual practices and intertextual contexts
that turn ethnic difference into an ‘otherness’ that can be exploited within
certain structures of power.
Clearly, the scanning of the ‘racial’ body has a long history, as does the
slippage between the exotic and the erotic.5 Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White
Masks offers a compelling account of the psychopathology underlying
racial relations (1986 [1952]: 141–209). Inheritors of an enduring tradition,

mainstream contemporary Western cultures have tended to scrutinise as
well as simplify and fetishise their ‘racial others’. Edward Said’s ground-
breaking study on Orientalism (1995 [1978]), further developed by Homi
Bhabha (1983) and others, examines how the colonised is constructed by
the coloniser as an ‘other’ who is alien, yet also visible and known.6 Tzvetan
Todorov (1999 [1982]: 3), Julia Kristeva (1991: 1) and Gayatri Spivak (1992:
177) also address this question, and, drawing attention to the indivisibility
of the ‘other’ and the ‘self’ within, call for committed engagement with the
‘other’ without. Even more recently, endorsing but also taking issue with
Roger Silverstone’s Media and Morality (2008 [2007]), Daniel Dayan argues
that, if presumptions cannot be made about the ‘self’, neither should they
be made about the ‘other’ (2007: 120).
It has often been argued that the various ‘racialised’ images to be found
in mainstream European visual culture serve a common purpose, namely
to allow the hegemonic observer to gain a sense of power by gazing at a
fetishised and therefore controllable image of difference. The argument is
apt to some extent, yet also somewhat reductionist, since it conflates many
disparate individuals and/or communities, ignoring the fact that the proc-
ess of fetishisation is ‘as anxious as it is assertive’ and that the knowledge
produced by it is characterised by ambiguity (Bhabha 1983: 19).
In common with other visual art forms, cinema constructs the body
through images that are never innocent of ideology. Representation and
spectatorship are moulded by power relations: looking is active, being looked
at passive. Early identifications of the former as male and the latter as female
have been questioned, originally through recourse to Lacan’s distinction
between the ‘look’ (desiring) and the ‘gaze’ (objectifying), and subsequently
in feminist and queer commentary.7 Being looked at – or, as Laura Mulvey
(1975) put it, the attribute of ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ – has usually been iden-
tified as negative because, read as objectification, it indicates submission
and lack of agency. But ‘being looked at’ may have a positive value. Other
people’s looks may deny us power (because we have to relinquish or share
control over what is being looked at), but, equally, they acknowledge our
existence. The qualification is relevant here because it creates a potentially
ambivalent situation for marginalised groups, whose struggle often includes
appeals for enhanced social and cultural visibility, but who have little con-
trol over the way their images are constructed or looked at. Thus, the issue
of visual dominance is key to this analysis of the cinematic representation
of the foreign and ‘racialised’ body in Spain, Italy and Greece.
Furthermore, the recurrent stories dealing with the predicament of immi-
grant characters may be usefully read in the light of reflections by Lilie
Chouliaraki on media images of ‘distant suffering’ in developed Western

countries (2006), as well as through Jane Arthurs’s later gloss. Arthurs speaks
of the ‘politics of compassion’ emerging from an engagement of the ‘cos-
mopolitan spectator’ with mediated suffering that produces a ‘sense of an

ethical connection with the other that could lead to humanitarian action’
(2007: unpaginated).8 It is, however, possible to argue that, having learnt
ever since Freud not to separate pleasure from pain, we cannot discount the
possibility that the spectator’s empathy with the ordeals of the immigrant
may be complicated by sadomasochistic pleasure in contemplation of the
character’s suffering.
Corporeality, arguably, matters more than interiority when migrant char-
acters are marked as ‘racially’ other. Unsurprisingly, in stories focusing on
the arrival and early stages of life in the host country, the immigrant’s body
often becomes the site of victimisation.9 Thus, while taking heed of the
warnings of Santiago Fouz-Hernández and Alfredo Martínez-Expósito on
the dangers of overinterpretation of the foreign body – that is, the insistence
on reading the foreign body ‘in search of a rationale for its being’ (2007:
164) – it is nevertheless instructive to consider the representation of the
physicality of ‘racially’ and ethnically marked migrant characters in Spain,
Italy and Greece. Such a task invites more general speculation on reception,
the target audience and codes of interpretation. Immigrant-oriented films
in all three countries share common denominators, but local considerations
must also be taken into account. It is in this sense important to bear in mind
that the same meaning can be carried by different signifiers, so that the
emotional or ideological function performed in Spain by an African may
well be fulfilled, for example, in Greece by an Albanian.
Let’s go Latin
In the context of Spanish cinema and the representation of migrant groups,

Latin Americans – especially from the Caribbean – have borne the brunt
of bodily visibility and sexual overload. Of particular interest is the figure
of the black and mulatta Caribbean woman because, beyond her almost
worldwide association with sensuality, she acquires distinctive significance
in Spain: ‘It’s commonly maintained in America that Spain’s best export to
the continent was the creation of the mulatta, and some say that the attrac-
tion felt by the Spaniards for these women is no more than a feeling of guilt
arising from the damage caused by slavery during those centuries’ (Sulé
1999: 7). Thus, if the body of the mulatta is readable as a colonial metaphor,
it is surely possible to interpret her repeated exposure on Spanish screens as
to some extent a re-enactment of an imperial relationship.
Despite their variety, Spanish films featuring Caribbean women share
certain patterns, most commonly their portrayal as reassuringly (because
familiar) exotic, sexually desirable characters. At one end of the spectrum,
the Caribbean woman is reductively characterised as eye candy in unas-

suming comedies such as Adiós con el corazón/Good-bye from the Heart (Spain
2000, dir. José Luis García Sánchez) or Pata negra (Spain/Cuba 2001, dir. Luis
Oliveros).10 At the other end, however, she occupies centre stage in socially
engaged narratives about the hardships of migrant life in contemporary
Spain. Films such as Iciar Bollaín’s Flores de otro mundo/Flowers from Another
World (Spain 1999), Fernando León de Aranoa’s Princesas/Princesses (Spain
2005) and Pedro Pérez-Rosado’s Agua con sal/Salt Water (Spain/Puerto Rico
2005) critically address and challenge discourses surrounding the racialisa-
tion of the Caribbean body.
Flowers from Another World follows the story of three women – Marirrosi
from Bilbao, Patricia from the Dominican Republic, and Milady from Cuba –
who have arrived in a remote and depopulated village following an invitation
by the local men to visit and consider proposals of marriage.11 Though the
stunning physique of Milady is ogled by the male villagers, the film abstains
from aligning itself with that look, avoiding aesthetic choices that would
have emphasised her body at the expense of her subjectivity.
Nevertheless, in the course of the narrative, Milady’s body is marked by
her experiences – in the most literal sense, when she is beaten by her partner
Carmelo. There is no better visual expression of Milady’s progressive alienation
in Spain than the stark contrast between her first and last appearances on the
screen: from a dazzlingly self-assured, towering presence at the village’s central
square as she descends from a four-by-four, to an apprehensive, cowering body,
furtively driven away from the village by a local youth in a battered old car.
Figure 7.1 Flowers from Another World (1999) – The reverse ‘colonisation’ of Spain by
the Cuban Milady (Marilyn Torres)
Princesses follows Caye, a white Spanish prostitute, as she grows pro-

gressively closer to Zulema, an undocumented Dominican woman, also
a sex worker, in Madrid.12 Though viewed from the perspective of Caye,
Zulema’s story probably generates more sympathy from the audience than
Caye’s (Zulema works as a prostitute to provide for a son left behind in the
Dominican Republic whereas Caye’s motivation is – she claims – to save
money for a breast enlargement). The profession of the women demands
that they advertise their sexual availability. Zulema’s caramel-coloured, tall,
slender and curvaceous body, together with her long black hair, her bright
tight-fitting clothes and her swaying sexy walk, singles her out from the
local prostitutes, yet her body is not gratuitously available for the spectator’s
titillation and, in fact, the only moment of nudity occurs when Caye’s but-
tocks are exposed. Notably, however, it is Zulema’s body, even more than
Caye’s, that bears the marks of her oppression: it is not only objectified and
‘used’ by clients, but also condemned to abuse by beatings and infection
with AIDS. As it is her only weapon, Zulema in the end uses her body as
an instrument for revenge by choosing to have unprotected sex – a con-
scious act of aggression – with the man who has repeatedly humiliated and
assaulted her.
Like their female counterparts, Caribbean men, above all Cubans, are typ-
ically portrayed in Spain as sexually potent and eager. Cosas que dejé en La
Habana/Things I Left in Havana (Spain 1997, dir. Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón)
directly addresses the hierarchical undercurrents driving the transatlantic
traffic of ‘desirable’ bodies from Cuba to Spain by telling the parallel sto-
ries of the undocumented Cuban Igor and three sisters newly arrived from
Havana, all of whom contemplate pairing off with a Spaniard as a strategy
for survival in a hostile environment. Although Igor benefits from Spanish
women’s fascination with Cuban men, he eventually foregoes financial
security for love and sex with the young Cuban Nena, a choice that indi-
rectly leads to a beating and repatriation. The film expresses the frustra-
tion caused by common stereotyped perceptions of Cubans through Igor’s
comment to the newly arrived Bárbaro: ‘I’m bored with my role as a Cuban,
cheerful even though dying, always dancing salsa, available whenever a girl
demands sex.’13
An isolated but interesting instance of a sexually overloaded Latin
American character in Italian cinema is found in Henrique Goldman’s
Princesa/Princess (Italy/Spain/France/UK/Germany 2001), a film that, like
Princesses, but more uncompromisingly, attaches the protagonist – the
Brazilian transsexual Fernanda/Fernando – to the world of urban prosti-
tution.14 Her negotiation of a complex sexual identity in Milan is a source
both of tension and pleasure, as much for herself as for her clients, includ-
ing Gianni, the heterosexual man who falls in love with her. Predictably in
a story of prostitution, Fernanda’s body is displayed and abused. But, while
clearly a site of oppression, it is also a vehicle for transgression, and visually
dominates a narrative which avoids glamorisation of power-inscribed sexu-

ality (as exemplified by the scene in which, through Fernanda’s eyes, we see
a male client panting unappealingly as another prostitute fellates him in a
nearby parked car). The film’s open ending, with Fernanda abandoning her
plans to undergo the sex-change operation, leaving Gianni and returning
to her madam, is readable as a conscious attempt to give her a degree of
autonomy. Princesa’s choice may be ambivalent or even misguided (after
all, she returns to selling her body in the streets, and her limited room for
manoeuvre is expressed by the madam’s comment that ‘If you fuck up once
more, I’ll take you to the airport and send you back to the jungle’), but it is,
even so, an act of self-determination.
Out of Africa
In common with Caribbeans and Latin Americans, Africans are also fre-
quently over-defined through their body in the cinema. In Spain, they have
all too often been used as a shorthand for hypersexuality in films like El
rey del mambo/The Mambo King (Spain 1989, dir. Carles Mira) or Torrente 2:
Misión en Marbella/Mission in Marbella (Spain 2001, dir. Santiago Segura),
which, despite their comic mode, provide clumsy, problematic representa-
tions of blackness.15 Sub-Saharan Africans, in fact, tend to be hypersexu-
alised in ways that set them apart even from North Africans. Though a
relatively large number of films depicting immigrant life in Spain feature
North African characters – usually in stories recounting the hardship of the
experience or, in a few cases, inter-ethnic romance (for example in Manuel
Balaguer’s El faro/The Lighthouse, Spain 1998, Llorenç Soler’s Saïd, Spain 1999,
and Antonio Chavarrías’s Susanna, Spain 1996) – attention is not explicitly
drawn to the body of the characters. Still, as external signifiers of ‘otherness’,
the migrants are frequently the target of racist harassment, and their contact
with white women is seen as a threat. It is thus no coincidence that all the
inter-ethnic relationships mentioned above eventually founder.16 Spanish
films such as Imanol Uribe’s Bwana (Spain 1996) and Montxo Armendáriz’s
Las cartas de Alou/Alou’s Letters (Spain 1990) have also touched on anxie-
ties about the potential ‘contamination’ of the nation’s ethnic constitution
through stories focusing on sub-Saharan African characters.
Bwana tells the story of the chance encounter on a deserted Spanish beach
between a Madrilenian family and a semi-naked and famished sub-Saharan
man, who speaks no Spanish and has survived a journey from his homeland
on a raft. Bwana celebrates the allure of the black man’s physique, for exam-
ple through display of his nudity in carefully chosen camera angles and
lighting, and through positive identification with primeval energy, thus
contrasting him with the physically unimpressive, ineffectual white man. At
the same time, the African, unlike the Spanish characters, is denied a voice
or a voice-over monologue and is thus, at best, reduced to the stereotype
of the ‘noble savage’. On one level, the film’s linguistic strategy gestures to
realism as it underscores the lack of a common language to enable commu-
nication between the African and Spanish characters; on another, the black
man lacks any national, familial and psychological delineation. The latter
impedes audience identification, including what Lola Young calls ‘cross-
racial readings’ (1996: 18), and prioritises the subject position of the Spanish
characters, Dori and her husband Antonio. In the light of theories of the
gaze, the erotic specularisation of the black man as an object of display –
but not of psychological or emotional enquiry – nevertheless complicates
audience response. I have argued elsewhere (Santaolalla 1999) that Bwana
both rejects and to a certain extent embraces the discourse that identifies
blackness with physicality and sexuality. The way in which the film tries
to strike a difficult balance between both attitudes is evident in a number
of sequences, including, for instance, the one in which the Spanish woman
Dori dreams that, animal-like, the black man moves on all fours towards
her and starts fondling her while she sleeps; the long shot of the naked body
of the black man, observed by Dori and the spectator, saluting the sun at
dawn, or, perhaps even more pertinently, the scene at the end of the film
in which the black man’s athletic body is tracked by the camera as he runs,
naked, like a hunted animal for his life, only to be caught up with by a group
of skinheads who, we assume, will carry out their threat to castrate him.
In this, as in many other films about victimised male and female immi-
grants, questions of pain and pleasure become entangled. Thus, while
Uribe’s film offers a complex and multilayered critique of contemporary
Figure 7.2 Bwana (1996) – The desirable, sacrificial body of the black African male
(Emilio Buale)
Spain’s unreconstructed attitudes to ethnic difference, the very strategies

through which the discourse of sympathy for the black man is conveyed
may also to a certain extent be seen as problematic.
The approach to otherness in Alou’s Letters differs from that in Bwana.17

Followed on his journey from clandestine arrival by boat on a Southern
beach through a North-bound trek across Spain in search of a better life,
Alou is right from the start portrayed as an ‘other’. The actor’s (Mulie Jarju)
slender, muscular body and black skin are used to single out Alou from vari-
ous other local and migrant characters encountered along the way. Beyond
establishing Alou’s otherness visually, the film also relies on the use of a
voice-over commentary in an African language – Alou’s oral rendering of
the letters he has written to his parents. This device produces a paradoxi-
cal effect of simultaneous nearness (because of the letter’s confessional and
intimate content) and distance (because of the linguistic alienation of the
spectator, which can only be overcome through subtitles). The result is a
delicate balance between detachment and empathy, an appropriate expres-
sion of the encounter with ‘otherness’.
In portraying a love story across the ‘racial’ divide, as well as in other
aspects, Alou’s Letters closely resembles Michele Placido’s Pummarò (Italy
1990), where we follow a young man, Kwa Ku, who travels from Ghana to
Southern Italy and then to the North in search of his brother Pummarò. Like
Alou, Kwa Ku strikes up a doomed relationship with a white woman. Kwa Ku’s
body is not overtly constructed as a sexual object for the audience’s pleasure,
but his mere physicality –his youthful, sexually active body – disturbs others,
above all the racists who threaten him and seek to punish his white Italian
girlfriend for, as Sandra Ponzanesi puts it, ‘having chosen a black guy, for
being a whore and a betrayer of her own community’ (2005b: 274–5).
Clearly, in Pummarò, Alou’s Letters and Bwana, as also in Sud Side Stori/South
Side Story (Italy 2000, dir. Roberta Torre), a statement is being made about
the perceived threat posed by the black body to the ‘body’ of the nation as
a whole. No such fear arises in Bernardo Bertolucci’s L’assedio/Besieged (Italy/
UK 1998), a film about the infatuation of a solitary piano composer living
in Rome, Mr Kinsky, with his African cleaner Shandurai. Although subordi-
nated socially, Shandurai is not so in other ways, especially as she is the focal
point of the narrative: the film begins by showing an episode of political
violence in Shandurai’s unspecified native African country, which provides
the backstory and explains her flight to Italy, at the same time allowing the
spectator to imagine her troubled thoughts and emotions. Shandurai does
not appear to be exaggeratedly objectified by the film, and we understand
her taciturnity better than the solitary pianist’s eccentricity, which, denied
explanation, remains a mystery.
It would seem, though, that, unlike in other areas of popular culture and
the media, eroticised black characters are relatively scarce in Italian cinema.
One wonders whether this absence may be partly due to the iconicity of the
sensuous Southern Italian character type, above all women whose ‘curva-
ceous, fleshy bodies [...] full lips and expressive eyes’ have populated Italian
film screens for decades (Wood 2005: 166), thus perhaps pre-empting any
need for a dark and voluptuous ‘other’. And if, as Wood argues, in view of
the thriving economy of Southern Italy today the ‘Mezzogiorno is no longer
Italy’s “Africa a casa” [Africa at home]’ (2003: 100), one may well wonder
whether the imagery of the ‘other’ in Italian cinema may now have to be
more consistently sought in the ‘other’ from abroad. Indeed, the presence of
black figures would emphasise the whiteness of the dark Southerner, some-
thing that, given ongoing debates in Italy over darker or fairer versions of
female beauty as the appropriate embodiment of contemporary italianità,
would deserve more attention.18
Eastern Promises
The erotic–exotic imaginary in Greece has found inspiration elsewhere,

through historical associations with Turkey and the Middle East (and, to
a lesser extent, Italy) and, lately, Eastern Europe. Among films dealing
with the new immigration in contemporary Greece, those by Constantine
Giannaris have earned wide recognition. Apo tin akri tis polis/From the Edge
of the City (Greece 1998) and Omiros/Hostage (Greece/Turkey 2005) are
especially relevant here as they deal with returnee and migrant characters
in Greece: a Russian Pontiac – Sasha – and his friends in the former, an
Albanian – Elion – in the latter. In both films the male body is often on
display, more openly in From the Edge of the City, which deals with male
prostitution in Menidi, a poor district on the outskirts of Athens. Through
camerawork, costume, mise-en-scène and performance, the body of Stathis
Papadopoulos, who plays the protagonist in both films, is eroticised, thus
departing from usual practices in Italian and Greek cinema, which have
not tended to glamorise the Albanian male. In both cases, however, the
body of the migrant is also made to suffer physical violence: beatings in
From the Edge of the City, sexual abuse and eventual murder in Hostage.
As Dionysios Kapsaskis argues (personal communication), both films are
politically and socially aware, but problematic in the sense that they aim
at audience response blending empathy for the migrant’s plight with desire
for his or her body, which is located at the lower end of unequal relations
of power. Furthermore, as noted by Harry Karahalios, the migrant’s body
is ‘exoticized and in demand yet offered at a cheap price’ (no date: 13). In
From the Edge of the City, for instance, the accessibility of the bodies of the
Russian Pontiacs is defined on two levels: as ethnic Greeks they are only
relatively, rather than wholly, ‘different’ while, as hustlers, they are sexu-
ally active and available. On both counts, these returnees, as represented
by Giannaris, are comparable to the Latin Americans in many Spanish
films: exotic yet familiar, and hypersexualised.
Figure 7.3 From the Edge of the City (1998) – The eroticised spectacle of Pontian mas-
culinity (Stathis Papadopoulous as Sasha)
Here, Sasha, though emasculated economically and by an authoritarian

father (a metaphor for the tyranny he suffers in Greece as a marginalised
newcomer), is also portrayed as strong and desirable, expressing his identity
through bodily display and sexual performance, both straight and gay. His
body combines action and spectacle: the opening scene introduces him on
skates stealing car radios, and then lying in bed at home, exposing his fit
and powerful body. A few minutes later, he wears a T-shirt that reveals the
firm contours of his muscular chest; on his way to work, he performs som-
ersaults and then appears, unlike his fellow workers, naked from the waist
up at the building site; in the shower, his buttocks are on view. These scenes
are compounded by jokes being told elsewhere in the film about Russian
Pontiacs and their outsize sexual members.
In Giannaris’s Hostage the Eastern European male poses a threat to hegem-
onic national masculinity. Loosely based on the 1999 real-life incident of a
bus-hijacking in Northern Greece by an Albanian worker who sought repara-
tion for having been wronged by his Greek employer, the plight of the young
Elion’s last few hours is here dramatised through focus on the physical and
sexual. Elion has shamed a Greek police officer – his employer – through an
affair with his wife that leads to her pregnancy, and the betrayed husband
avenges himself by sexually abusing Elion. As Panayiota Mini argues, Elion
must be punished because he ‘has exceeded his role as a body for labour and
become a body for love and reproduction’ (2006: 75). For this, he must not
only suffer metaphorical castration through rape, but, like the African male
in Bwana, also die.
The fate of the Eastern European man in these films is somewhat paral-
leled by that of his female counterpart. The Eastern European woman (espe-
cially Russian or Albanian, but also Romanian, Bulgarian and Hungarian) is
conventionally identified with marginality, sexual trafficking and prostitu-

tion in Italian and Greek cinemas – as, indeed, more widely.
In From the Edge of the City, though not the main object of visual enquiry,
the Russian prostitute Natasha is defined almost exclusively through her
body. At the brothel, Sasha is on one occasion seen approaching his eye to
a peephole to spy on Natasha at work with a client. Here, audience expec-
tations of sharing Sasha’s voyeuristic point of view are frustrated as the
camera swerves away, but the opportunity for gratification arrives later; her
naked body is accidentally seen in the shower by Sasha and, through his
eyes, by the spectator, with the camera at one point offering a close-up of
her intimate anatomy.
A sordid milieu of prostitution and economic deprivation in Athens is
also the backdrop for O dromos pros ti dissi/The Way to the West (Greece 2003,
dir. Kyriakos Katzourakis), where the ex-USSR protagonist Irina manages to
acquire at least a degree of agency and voice. The film is a blend of fiction
and documentary in which, through close-ups, Irina addresses the specta-
tor, voicing the pain of her oppression, and asks: ‘What do you care about
our stories?’ Such a direct challenge clearly relates to the issue, outlined in
the introductory pages, of the audience’s experience of ‘distant suffering’,
since, as Papatheodorou notes, when Irina speaks into the camera she is
directly undermining ‘our anthropologic curiosity and our philanthropic
tendency’ (2006: 79).
Without resorting to narrative self-consciousness, a number of Italian films
also highlight the limited options available to the underprivileged Eastern
European female immigrant. This is the case, for instance, in Armando
Manni’s Elvjs e Merilijin/Elvis and Marilyn (Italy 1998), Carlo Mazzacurati’s
Vesna va veloce/Vesna Goes Fast (Italy/France 1996), Francesco Munzi’s Saimir
(Italy 2005) and Marco Tullio Giordana’s Quando sei nato non puoi più nas-
conderti/Once You’re Born You Can No Longer Hide (Italy/France/UK 2005).
No such wealth of stories of sexual subjugation of Eastern European
women exists in Spanish cinema.19 In fact, completely different in tone,
and working against the grain of practices described so far, is the lesbian
romantic comedy A mi madre le gustan las mujeres/My Mother Likes Women
(Spain 2002, dir. Daniela Féjerman and Inés París). Here, Eliska is a well-
educated young Czech musician who, seeking opportunities in Spain, falls
in love with Sofía, an older Spanish mother of three. The predictable comic
situations emerging from the daughters’ protests give way, eventually, to
approval of the couple’s liaison, including a male friend’s willingness to
enter a marriage of convenience with Eliska to enable her to remain in Spain
with Sofía. This is a rather light, wish-fulfilment narrative, its value lying
chiefly in de-victimising the Eastern European woman and de-dramatising
homosexual relationships. With a light touch, the film gestures to the sex-
ual dimension of the lesbian affair – for instance, through the lyrics of a
diegetic song that includes the lines ‘my mother has a woman licking her
belly’ [...] ‘woman is the essence of pleasure’ – but prioritises above all its
emotional value, presenting it as worthy enough to justify deception as a
safeguard against the law.
East is East
More than Eastern Europe, Turkey and the Middle and Far East have been
rich sources of exotic/erotic inspiration for Western cultures. Essential con-
tributors to the Orientalisation of Italian screens are Ferzan Özpetek’s films
Hamam/The Turkish Bath (Italy/Turkey/Spain 1997), Harem Suaré (Turkey/
Italy/France 1999) and Le fate ignoranti/The Ignorant Fairies (France/Italy
2001).20 Hamam follows the East-bound journey of Francesco, an unfulfilled
Italian, who, despite all home comforts and sensible pairing with an ideal
companion, travels to Istanbul to sort out a legacy, a move possibly read-
able as the unconscious yearning for a dose of exoticism and excitement. In
Turkey, Francesco succumbs to the spell of old Istanbul and the homosocial
space of the hamam that he has inherited, as well as to the homoerotic
advances of the young Turk Mehmet. His embrace of difference will reward
him with sensual and sexual pleasures not previously experienced, but at
a high price. In this respect, Hamam is reminiscent of Vicente Aranda’s La
pasión turca/Turkish Passion (Spain 1994). Neither film allows the ‘interracial’
affair to succeed: in Hamam, the Italian is murdered by the local mafia,
in Turkish Passion the male Turkish protagonist is castrated and killed by
the humiliated Spanish woman. Both films, however, show the body of
the Turkish male as intensely desiring and desirable, Turkish Passion further
defining him through domineering and aggressive heterosexuality.21
Another film that touches lightly – though also somewhat cynically – on
Western fascination with a ‘sensual’ East is Isabel Gardela’s Tomándote/Two
for Tea (Spain 2000), where a Spanish girl is drawn to a Muslim Indian boy
living in Barcelona and, through him, to the promise of the arcane sexual
wisdom of the Indian tradition, only to discover that what for her was an
aura of enigmatic sexuality only affirms his conservative views on the rela-
tions between the sexes. Also foregrounding the erotic appeal of the Indian,
but devoid of the cynicism of Tea for Two, is Fernando Colomo’s El próximo
Oriente/The Near East (Spain 2006), a cheerful eulogy of cultural and ethnic
hybridity. The focus is on the pairing of Aisha, a Muslim girl of Bangladeshi
origin, and Cain, a shy Spanish young man, who, despite Aisha’s father’s
fierce opposition, strives to marry her in the knowledge that she is pregnant
with the child of his brother Abel. The Near East, with its condoned inter-
ethnic romance, is significant for its inclusion, towards the end of the film,
of the baby born to Spanish and Bangladeshi parents, clearly a metaphor for
Figure 7.4 Discovering the Orientalist realm of the senses – Francesco (Alessandro
Gassman) and Mehmet (Mehmet Günsür) in Hamam (1997)
Spain’s multi-ethnic future. However, in a slightly problematic earlier move,

the film annuls Asian masculinity in two ways: first, by not including any
young Asian men who could compete with the Spanish protagonist for the
favour of the Bangladeshi woman; secondly, by putting an older Asian patri-
arch in a coma, thus removing his threat to the inter-ethnic union and
allowing the females in the Asian family to pursue their dreams of integra-
tion and self-expression.
The Greek film Politiki Kouzina/A Touch of Spice (Greece 2003, dir. Tassos
Boulmetis), for its part, is a heart-warming bitter-sweet tale in which a man’s
return from Athens to Istanbul triggers the memory of his happy childhood
there, and the sudden traumatic separation during mass deportations of
Greeks in the 1960s. The film is germane to this discussion because, even
though it lacks sexual overtones, its huge success in Greece is no doubt partly
attributable to the stereotypical image of the East as an enduring source of
sensual and aesthetic pleasure. This is Orientalism Greek-style, a variant
that is also self-reflective since the characters are both Greek and Turkish.
Migration revisited
A Touch of Spice also reminds Greeks of their own previous diasporas and
enforced homecomings. The Greek Turks who are forcibly repatriated to
Turkey will most probably be connected, in the minds of present-day audi-
ences, with legislation giving special immigration status to ethnic Greek
Russian Pontiacs, as observed in the discussion of From the Edge of the City.
Similarly, Nyfes/Brides (Greece 2004, dir. Pantelis Voulgaris) invites reflec-
tion on the country’s history of emigration through the story of a shipload
of women leaving Europe in 1922 to find husbands in the United States.

Interestingly, the film refuses to glamorise or eroticise them, favouring a
realist aesthetics instead.
The memory of national as well as transnational migrant history has also
remained alive in present-day Italy, attracting the attention not only of
sociologists and cultural commentators but also of film-makers and critics.
Migrations by Southern Italians to the industrial North as portrayed, for
instance, in Luchino Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi fratelli/Rocco and his Brothers
(Italy/France 1960), have been seen as the precursors of current images of
foreign immigrations (Small 2005: 245, Parati 2005). The meanings ascribed
to the distinctive physique of Southerners in these films could well be said
to be mirrored in productions about ‘racially’ marked immigrant groups in
contemporary Italy. Films such as Gianni Amelio’s Lamerica (Italy/France
1994) or Emanuele Crialese’s Nuovomondo/The Golden Door (Italy/France
2006) are not directly dealing with recent immigration in Italy, but through
subtle thematic and visual links between past and present migratory trends
indirectly remind Italians that they, too, were once impoverished and mar-
ginalised by others. In these films, the body of the migrant/immigrant is
not eroticised, but rather presented as vulnerable and victimised.
In Lamerica, a trip to Albania by the brash Italian entrepreneur Gino, who
plans to recruit the feeble-minded, 70-year-old Spiro (mistaking him for an
Albanian) as a dummy chairman for a fraudulent company, turns into a
descent into hell when he has all his possessions stolen. Devoid of his yuppie
trappings, Gino loses his sex appeal and confidence, and is regarded as just
one more body transported illegally to Italy. Only his mastery of Italian sets
Figure 7.5 Lamerica (1994) – Undifferentiated bodies: the Italian Gino (Enrico Lo
Verso) among his ‘undesirable’ Albanian travel companions
him apart from others. His appearance changes gradually and he becomes
ever more identical to his fellow travellers, which is presented in the film as
something clearly undesirable for Gino. His involuntary bodily ‘Albanisation’
mirrors Spiro’s progressive re-Italianisation. Lamerica demonstrates that the

body of the ‘foreigner’ is indistinguishable from that of the ‘native’.
Curiously, these reflections on the hidden ‘otherness’ in the ‘self’ as well
as on the strong links between past and present migrations are largely una-
vailable in Spanish cinema. The experiences of Spanish emigrants abroad
remain mostly unchronicled, as if the memory of those – often traumatic –
experiences had been erased from the collective consciousness.22
Conclusion
Beyond reflection on European attitudes to increased immigration, recent

Spanish, Italian and Greek films use the foreign, ethnically marked body
as a visual and narrative stratagem that pushes to the foreground of cul-
tural debates the thorny question of national identity by exploring not only
changing attitudes towards ethnic difference but also the shifting patterns
of gender and sexuality.
Often, in films from all three countries, the insertion of an ‘other’ in the
film’s narrative acts as a catalyst for change through crisis and suffering. On
the surface, representations of inter-ethnic encounters as well as of violence
against immigrants, their deportation or death seem to lead protagonists
from the majority culture to become aware of the predicaments of migrant
individuals and communities within a largely inhospitable host society.
More often than not, however, their heightened awareness is not about the
marginalisation of the other at all, but about aspects of their own self, per-
sonal life and emotional strains. Audiences, too, undergo a cathartic experi-
ence through the ‘distant suffering’ of the migrant characters. But we might
want to question whether, more problematically, we are also lured into com-
plicity in the film’s sado/masochistic dynamics of pleasure in the contem-
plation of the simultaneously sexualised and suffering ‘foreign’ body.
Notes
I am grateful to Panayiota Mini, Harry Karahalios, Dimitris Papanikolaou, Dionysios
Kapsakis, Carrie Hamilton, Pauline Small and Peter W. Evans for their comments and
input during the writing of this chapter.
1. In Spain only a handful of films have been made by non-Spanish directors, for
example by the Argentinean Adolfo Aristaráin and the Cuban Juan Carlos Tabío,
who are probably better classified as transnationally mobile than as migrant or
diasporic directors. In Italy and Greece the situation is similar, except that in each
case a ‘token’ diasporic film-maker – Ferzan Özpetek, of Italian Turkish origin, and
Constantine Giannaris, with a Pontiac, Greek and British background – enjoys
national and international recognition.
2. For a further discussion of ‘whiteness’ and its ‘invisibility’ see Dyer (1988), hooks
(1992) and Hill (1997).
3. Migrants in Spain come, mostly, from Spanish America (a legacy of Spain’s
sixteenth-century colonisation of the continent), from the Maghreb (the result
of later colonial links and geographical proximity), sub-Saharan Africa and,

more recently, from Eastern Europe. In Italy, the largest migrant groups come
from Eastern Europe (mostly from Albania, an Italian protectorate between 1939
and 1943, as well as from Poland and Romania), compounded by a significant
influx from Africa. Similarly, in Greece, the largest immigrant contingent comes
from ex-communist European countries (above all from Albania, including both
the ‘ethnic Greeks’ who arrived after the opening of the Greek–Albanian frontier
in 1987 and subsequent economic migrants, and from Bulgaria and Poland), fol-
lowed by smaller numbers from Asia and Africa. The above-mentioned ethnic
Greeks from Albania are sometimes referred to as ‘returnees’, a term also applied
to those settling in Greece as a result of the mass ‘forced population exchange’
with Turkey in 1923, following long-standing disputes between the two coun-
tries rooted in Ottoman dominance over Greece. Another major group arrived
between 1988 and 1994, when the political and economic collapse of the USSR
resulted in the ‘repatriation’ of a large number of ethnic Greeks from Pontos on
the Black Sea. Statistical information can be obtained from the MPI Data Hub
(2008).
4. For more works on these two concepts see O’Donnell (1991), Modood (1997),
Young (1999) and Wiegman (2000).
5. This has been addressed, among others, by Figueira (1994), Root (1996),
Santaolalla (2000) and Huggan (2001).
6. The study of ‘difference’ is also central to psychoanalytical discourse. It is argued
that, when the individual confronts the ‘other’ outside the ‘self’, the memory
traces of discarding and ‘othering’ that enabled him/her to develop a sense of
‘oneness’ trigger simultaneous processes of recognition–fascination–desire and
denial–fear–rejection, reminding him/her that ‘difference’ is a constituent part
of the ‘same’. As a result, strategies of fetishisation of the ‘other’ are deployed as
a mechanism for disavowing the fear of difference by means of objectifying and
making it manageable and intelligible, thereby gaining a sense of control over it
(Freud 1977 [1927]).
7. Particularly relevant here, for its analysis of the visual representation of the
‘racialised’ male body, is Kaja Silverman’s Male Subjectivity at the Margins (1992).
8. See also Boltanski (1999) and Silverstone (2008 [2007]).
9. See Peter Brooks’s notion of the ‘aesthetics of embodiment’ as the way in which
the most important meanings in melodrama are inscribed on and with the body
(1994: 17).
10. An interesting exception to the heteronormativity of these films is presented in
Miguel Albaladejo’s Ataque verbal/Verbal Attack (Spain 2000).
11. For detailed analyses of this film see Camí-Vela (2000), Nair (2001), Martínez-
Carazo (2002), Carty (2003), Santaolalla (2004), Kim (2005: 171–203) and
Ballesteros (2005).
12. For a discussion of the significance of intimate inter-ethnic encounters in
Princesses, see Gutiérrez Rodríguez’s chapter in this volume.
13. The Caribbean male body is also central to the very interesting production Vers
le Sud/Heading South (France/Canada 2005, dir. Laurent Cantet).
14. For a discussion of gender and sexual identity in Princess see pp. 208–9 in
Williams’s chapter in this volume.
15. More nuanced films are Alejandro Calvo-Sotelo’s Se buscan fulmontis/Seeking

Fullmontis (Spain 1999) and Alberto Rodríguez’s El traje/The Suit (Spain 2002).
16. For an analysis of intercultural romance in Spanish cinema see Flesler (2004); for
the representation of African immigrant masculinities see Ballesteros (2006).
17. For more detailed analyses of Bwana and Alou’s Letters see Ballesteros (2001:
205–32) and Santaolalla (1999).
18. Stephen Gundle analyses this dispute in his engaging study on feminine beauty
and the idea of Italy (2007: 223–44).
19. Though increasingly a sizeable minority in Spain, Eastern Europeans, in general,
do not feature prominently in the cinema. Until recently, the only two signifi-
cant exceptions were José Luis Borau’s Leo (Spain 2000) and Eloy de la Iglesia’s Los
novios búlgaros/Bulgarian Lovers (Spain 2003). Both link their Eastern European
male protagonists to criminality and sex (an incest-like relationship in the
former, homosexual prostitution and extortion in the latter). In 2009, however,
Myna se va/Myna Leaves (Spain, dir. Sadrac González and Sonia Escolano), a low-
budget, independent film so far only screened at festivals, has added a disturbing
portrayal of sexual violence towards Eastern European female immigrants. The
film includes a sordid, uninterrupted sequence of thirty-three minutes in which
the protagonist, a young girl from an indeterminate Eastern European country
working as an au pair for a wealthy family, is repeatedly raped by a neighbour.
20. For a discussion of Hamam in the context of queer diaspora films, see pp. 207–8
in Williams’s chapter in this volume.
21. Turkish Passion recalls in this respect Virginie Wagon’s Le Secret/The Secret (France
2000).
22. Recent exceptions to the rule are Carlos Iglesias’s Un franco, 14 pesetas/One franc,
14 pesetas (Spain 2006) and Chus Gutiérrez’s Poniente/West (Spain 2002). Only a
handful of films depict Spanish emigrations during different periods; Moyano
confirms this cultural ‘amnesia’ in his book on the topic (2005).
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in Daniela Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg. European Cinema in Motion.

Recent Spanish, Italian and

The increased visibility of migrant groups and individuals is currently per-

Parallel sentiments are, according to Ponzanesi, traceable in Italy, where

Unresolved questions of geopolitical identity are also present in Greece,

The cinematic gaze and the ‘other’

racial relations (1986 [1952]: 141–209). Inheritors of an enduring tradition,

Chouliaraki on media images of ‘distant suffering’ in developed Western

mopolitan spectator’ with mediated suffering that produces a ‘sense of an

In the context of Spanish cinema and the representation of migrant groups,

the Caribbean woman is reductively characterised as eye candy in unas-

Princesses follows Caye, a white Spanish prostitute, as she grows pro-

dominates a narrative which avoids glamorisation of power-inscribed sexu-

Spain’s unreconstructed attitudes to ethnic difference, the very strategies

The approach to otherness in Alou’s Letters differs from that in Bwana.17

The erotic–exotic imaginary in Greece has found inspiration elsewhere,

Here, Sasha, though emasculated economically and by an authoritarian

conventionally identified with marginality, sexual trafficking and prostitu-

Spain’s multi-ethnic future. However, in a slightly problematic earlier move,

of women leaving Europe in 1922 to find husbands in the United States.

mirrors Spiro’s progressive re-Italianisation. Lamerica demonstrates that the

Beyond reflection on European attitudes to increased immigration, recent

of later colonial links and geographical proximity), sub-Saharan Africa and,

15. More nuanced films are Alejandro Calvo-Sotelo’s Se buscan fulmontis/Seeking

Comas, J. (1958) The Race Question in Modern Science. Paris: M. Blondin.

DataHub/ (accessed 16 November 2008).

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