MOVEMENTS OF PASSAGE

Journeys that feature arrivals or departures to cities are modes of mobility that are characteristic of migrant stories of settlement or passage. John Akomfrah's recent essay film The Nine Muses (2010) for example, presents one such journey narrative whereby the movement of two men into Alaska evokes the affective and sensorial memories of the journey and arrival of black migrants to Britain in the 1940s and 1950s; the Alaskan images, juxtaposed with archival images of arrival and settlement, conjure the mood of isolation, and of coldness, contributing to the depiction of how the journey felt in addition to how it was memorialized through archival imagery. The magisterial landscapes of Alaska, with their imposing natural structures, also endow this journey with an epic quality, reinforced through the use of quotations from canonical British literature in the telling of this story through voice-over narration.

As noted in the Introduction, this chapter operates as an addendum to the narratives of cinematic Paris and London explored in this book. More specifically, this chapter establishes a wider applicability for the methods of reading for space and place developed in the previous chapters, as it pertains to the significance of arrivals and departures to and from cities. As such, this chapter brings together a consideration of In This World and Exils as two examples of films where the interpretive strategies of the earlier chapters provokes a distinctly spatialized analysis of what we can term very loosely here as “the migrant road movie”. The road movie is the generic context that is evoked and revised in these particular films, which is certainly not the case in a film such as The Nine Muses. As such, this chapter is invested in teasing out the forms of genre revisionism at work in both films, where their migrant content offers a substantial reconfiguration of a well-established, internationally practiced, popular genre of filmmaking. These films also serve as test cases for the examination of the road movie in accordance with the definition of world cinema adopted in this book, one that engenders an oscillation between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the specific and the universal.