Sojourner Cinema: Seeking and Researching a New Cinematic Category

One of the most severe tests in moviemaking is communicating with strangers (David Thomson, 2008).¹

Writing about films produced in one nation about people who live in that nation but originated in another, Toby Miller points out that:

we inhabit a worldwide crisis of belonging, a population crisis … of who, what, when and where. More and more people feel as though they do not belong; more and more people are applying to belong; and more and more people are not counted as belonging.²

Interrogating the notion of belonging, films made by, about, and sometimes for, the deterritorialized, dispossessed, dislocated, and displaced “precariat” of the world today depict a globe in flux. While films about displacement, not belonging and dislocation are frequently discussed in terms of postcolonial, transnational, transcultural, and global critical theories, the issue of to which genre they might belong is far from fixed.

Outlining the ontological properties of films variously described as diasporic, exilic, or immigrant, for Hamid Naficy they form “accented cinema,” while for Laura U. Marks they constitute “intercultural cinema.”³ The ontologies of these two filmic categories include “commonalities among exilic filmmakers that cut across gender, race, nationality and ethnicity, as well as across boundaries of national cinemas, genres and authorship.”⁴ They also present ontological distinction, or markers of difference, as any classificatory system must. They exclude filmmakers who are dislocated from their national home but whose national identity is not precarious and whose films are not concerned—or not necessarily concerned—with issues of involuntary diaspora, exile, migrancy, and post-coloniality.

Figure 1.

Dersu Uzala (Akira Kurosawa, SU/JP, 1975).

If the relationship between the world’s border-crossing populations and the nations from and to which they travel is complex, so too is the relationship of films by and about these peoples to national and world cinemas. Although the films and their filmmakers often eschew or disparage national borders, film scholarship tends to classify these films according to the nation where they were made, funded, or which the director calls home. Or else they are located within a global context as world cinema. This is a filmic category from which scholars have tended to exclude films made in the United States and by U.S. filmmakers in another country. As Wikipedia bluntly informs us: “World cinema is a term used primarily in English language speaking countries to refer to the films and film industries of non-English speaking countries. It is therefore often used interchangeably with the term foreign film.”⁵ With more nuance, as Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim argue, the question “What is world cinema?” is:

a deceptively simple question that has proved to be a challenging theoretical problem. In his book Cinemas of the World, James Chapman wonders “whether any general model can adequately take account of the many different filmmaking practices, genres, styles and traditions that have arisen in the global context.”⁶

Adding significant insight to an understanding of national and world cinema genres, Dennison and Lim take a geocritical approach to film studies, that is, a way of analyzing and theorizing film that incorporates the study of geographic space and related notions of mobility, place and displacement, location and dislocation, territory and deterritorialization. This, they explain, has helped to redraw “the theoretical terrain of world cinema by radically reorienting the map away from the hegemony of the world system that privileges Hollywood.”⁷ Informed by Edward Said’s concept of traveling theory,⁸ Dennison and Lim helpfully decenter the globally dominant cinema by focusing on what, and who, have hitherto been pushed to the margins. These films, they argue, form a cinema that shows the trajectories of traveling peoples in a world where the relationship between local and global is seldom harmonious, the boundaries are seldom fixed and, in the interstices between nations, exists much pain, fear and instability.

In this article, I discuss a category of films that in form, content, and production process shares many of the properties of world and national cinemas, as well as...