The expatriate factor

The
expatriate factor
Art history professor’s new book looks at immigrants’
films
…………………………………………………………………

BY ELLEN Y.
CHANG
Rice News Staff

The experiences
of immigrants who are forced to leave their homeland and
suffer feelings of loneliness, isolation and sadness often
are explored by expatriate filmmakers. And now those films
are the focus of a new book, “An Accented Cinema: Exilic
and Diasporic Filmmaking,” by Rice faculty member Hamid
Naficy.

The book takes
an in-depth look at the work of the filmmakers who share
not only personal experiences of being in exile and diaspora,
but also certain stylistic features in their films. It’s
told partly from an insider’s perspective, since Naficy
himself emigrated to the United States at the age of 18
and produced documentary films and educational television
programs for about eight years.

The 368-page
book, to be released in May by Princeton Paperbacks, explores
the stories that the filmmakers are telling and the basis
of their ideas and creativity. Since the 1960s, a new global
cinema has developed that is primarily directed for and
focused on displaced people around the world, said Naficy,
associate professor of art and art history, who recently
was appointed chair of the department.

Despite major
differences such as language, nationality, ethnicity and
religion, there are some things that Naficy has found that
are common among the films, forming what he calls their
“accent.”

One of the common
features of the films is their multilinguality, which makes
the experience of watching them different from other films,
said Naficy, who is teaching a class about the same topic
this semester.

“The movies
are also highly nostalgic,” he said, “They’re
always looking backward.”
Many of the characters are very lost, split and fragmented.
Some of them are in two places at once or often are claustrophobic,
which is a theme that resonates with many immigrants. In
the films, the characters are caught in situations of confinement,
such as in an apartment or a suitcase.

The films juxtapose
the expatriates’ multiple worlds — the host country,
their homeland and other places. Many scenes are depictions
of their lives before and after their exile. This comparative
theme sometimes offers criticism of both home and host cultures
and can take precedence over the plot of the movie, Naficy
said.

“All of
these qualities form the accent,” he said.

During a period
of five years, Naficy studied and wrote about 600 films
produced by filmmakers in exile and diaspora throughout
the world. He studied the work of expatriates in various
countries, such as Turkish filmmakers living in Germany,
Vietnamese filmmakers in the United States, Palestinian
and Iranian filmmakers in Europe and North American and
Argentinean filmmakers in France.

Although they
came from different backgrounds and experienced different
forms of exile and governments, he found that their films
had many similarities.

In writing “An
Accented Cinema,” Naficy said he discovered many new
things about himself. Although he emigrated from Iran to
Los Angeles as a student, he always has had sympathy for
displaced people.

“It’s
been fun,” he said of studying the films. “It’s
been challenging and rewarding because it has allowed me
to expand my ideas about the world and myself.”

Now he said
he has realized that home is more than a physical place,
and it can be in more than just one location. Naficy feels
that home is a mixture of physical and cultural qualities
— the places in which one lives and those one imagines
in literature and art.

“I have
created a third space in which I mix and match from those
two primary homes, but I also borrow from other places I’ve
sojourned and visited. Inhabiting this third space is a
very empowering experience,” he said.

Naficy also
wrote “The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Television
in Los Angeles,” which was published by the University
of Minnesota Press in 1993 and is being used widely as a
textbook in American, European and Australian universities.
He edited “Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media and the
Politics of Place,” published by Routledge in 1995,
and co-edited “Otherness and the Media: The Ethnography
of the Imagined and the Imaged,” published by Harwood
Academic Press in 1993.