Contrary to the USA, where immigration has been a long-standing target tale for cinematic treatment, European filmmaking has a rather short history of producing and disseminating migration-themed narratives. Its embryonic phase is usually situated at the turn of the 1960s and the 1970s, when militant and political cinema was on the rise and various filmmakers began to make efforts to raise public awareness of immigration as a social reality (Smith 1995; Fenner 2003; Lehin 2005). German playwright and director Rainer Werner Fassbinder was among the first to turn this topic into a major point of interest. After playing the role of the Greek job seeker Jorgos in the eponymous screen adaptation of his theatrical piece Katzelmacher/Troublemaker (1968), he made his international breakthrough with the award-winning interethnic romance drama Angst Essen Seele Aus/Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) featuring El Hedi ben Salem in the role of a guest worker who enters into a marriage with a much older German cleaning lady (Emmi Kurowski). With their shared focus on Gastarbeiter coming in from the Mediterranean basin, both Fassbinder films are solidly anchored in the sociopolitical reality of the early postwar decades, when the economic boom urged various north-western European governments, industries and companies to invite low-skilled workforce from the economically less developed south and from overseas (including former European colonies). It is this early postwar—partly post-decolonisation—influx of guest workers and labour immigrants that lay the rough foundations for what Isolina Ballesteros (2015) has recently called the “immigration cinema in the New Europe”. Not by coincidence, Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is the earliest and oldest European film production taken into account in Ballesteros’s overview of contemporary migration-centred cinema.
If we seek to obtain, however, a broader and more diversified perspective on the development of the subject of migration in European feature film, then Fassbinder’s pioneering work deserves attention not only for the (Mediterranean) immigrant characters it brings to the cinematic screen, but also for those newcomers that remain invisible throughout the narrative. This pertains in particular to an enigmatic figure who—in spite of his diegetic absence—has an indelible imprint on the story and the mise-en-scène of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, namely the deceased Polish husband of the German lead character (referred to as Franciszek Kurowski). Apart from allowing Fassbinder to forge a connection between contemporary German xenophobia and the lingering legacy of National Socialism, the dialogues and scenes that evoke the wartime and postwar fate of Emmi’s first spouse undeniably add more weight and substance to Ali’s portrayal as an ethnic outsider. Likewise, in spite of the fact that the Moroccan guest worker and his “forerunner” from Poland—a forced labourer who decided not to return to his home country after WWII and then married a German girl—come to embody very distinct types and circumstances of expatriation and displacement, Fassbinder puts much effort into exposing the actual congruity and symmetry between their fortunes on German soil (even to the extent that the Arab may be said to serve as Kurowski’s substitute in Emmi’s emasculated German household). At the same time, the shift in ethnic background—from Polish to Moroccan—marks the rise of a new migration regime during the Cold War (at the outset of which the western part of the continent had been cut off from the traditional labour force reservoir offered by its eastern neighbours; Favell and Hansen 2002, 584–85).
Diegetically absent, but discretely looming over the story and the setting of Fassbinder’s film, the figure of Franciszek Kurowski reminds us that the Mediterranean Gastarbeiter of the 1950s and 1960s did not constitute the first cohorts of intra-European and intercontinental migration, but fit into a much larger (and earlier) history of resettlement and displacement across the European continent (involving other axes of mobility than the north-south one and from Third to First World countries). In this book-length study, I intend to take up this subject matter by offering a textual and contextual discussion of those cinematic figures who may be called Franciszek Kurowski’s “on-screen compatriots”: expatriate characters of Polish origin who made their appearance in European feature filmmaking from the early interwar period up to the contemporary moment. The decision to focus on one particular ethnic group has been motivated not only by the long-standing tradition of Polish migration (within Europe and beyond) and the quantitatively significant and qualitatively diversified character of these subsequent migration waves—including exiles, labour immigrants, wartime refugees, displaced persons and Cold War defectors—but also by the enduring visibility of Polish expatriates in a wide variety of representational practices throughout the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In view of their prominent involvement in pre-WWI international migration waves, Poles traditionally belong to Europe’s “Old Migrants”, along with the Italians and the Irish (Lucassen 2005, 27–109), but they have also come to occupy—albeit with some delay—a visible position among the continent’s “new” migrants (post-WWII and post-1989), which turns them into an apt case for longitudinal research.
In a variety of ways, the two productions that bracket the period under research in this book (1918–2017) mark the far-reaching changes the topic of migration has undergone in about 100 years’ time. The earliest film that will be given attention is Eugen Illés ’ UFA production Mania. Ein dramatisch Filmpoem/Mania. A Dramatic Film Poem from 1918, which features the Polish-born actress and film star Pola Negri in the role of a young labourer (Mania Walkowska) employed at a German cigarette factory. Interestingly, the Polish name attributed to Negri’s on-screen persona is barely given any narrative motivation in the film and primarily appears to be a side effect of the actress’s personal background. By way of contrast, the most recent film taken into account in this book is Urszula Antoniak’s Dutch-Polish co-production Beyond Words (2017), which revolves around the attempts of a young Berlin-based lawyer—Michał, played by Polish actor Jakub Gierszał and featured on the cover of this book—to pass as a native German. In striking opposition to Mania, Antoniak’s film turns the unmarkedness of the main character’s migrant identity into the main theme of the film, which is undoubtedly indicative of our changed sensibility about displacement and migration (as “a key dynamic within globalization”, in the words of Castles et al. (2013, xii)).
Objectives and Scope of the Research
By adopting a long-term and transnational approach towards the cinematic treatment of Polish expatriate characters, I seek to explore, first of all, how the topic of migration has gained salience and prominence in European film over the course of a century (although without making claims to representativity). Along with the rise of transnational film studies, the past two decades have seen an increasing academic interest in the expanding body of (self-)representations of migrant and diasporic subjects and communities in European cinema (see Berghahn and Sternberg 2010 for an extensive overview). Some film scholars have focused on the impact of postwar and postcolonial migration waves on distinct contemporary cinemas, such as French beur cinema (Tarr 2005; Higbee 2013), Black and Asian British film (Korte and Sternberg 2004) and German-Turkish cinema (Hake and Mennel 2012; Alkin 2015). Other authors (Loshitzky 2010; Brown et al. 2010; Ballesteros 2015; Rings 2016), in turn, have identified cross-culturally recurring narrative and visual tropes, generic conventions and stylistic patterns which characterise the present-day cinematic treatment of immigrants, refugees and the like. Meanwhile, much less attention has been paid to the diachronic development of this particular strand of narrative cinema. The very limited number of studies that do offer a more longitudinal approach towards the position of migrants and ethnic “outsiders” in European cinema do not venture beyond the national framework (see, for instance, Wright 1998; Marques 2002; Bou Hachem 2008). A rare exception to this tendency is Isabel Santaolalla (2010) who—based on her research on contemporary South European cinemas—discerns three stages of “narrative design and development” in the diachronic development of migration-themed film (from a focus on social problem narratives through increasing variation and contextualisation to cinematic self-representation). Rather than contest the validity of this categorisation, I argue that looking back at interwar and early postwar European filmmaking allows to contextualise and historicise the slowly growing sense of immediacy and urgency that surrounds the portrayal of migrant characters on the silver screen. On the one hand, the initial reluctance to narratively engage with the subject of migration (in striking contrast with Hollywood) suggests that the issue of immigration did not play a formative role in the nation-building processes of European states (while the opposite experience—that of emigration—often did have such an impact, as the modern history of Italy, Ireland and Poland shows). On the other hand, the slowly emerging drive towards immediacy also relates to cinema’s evolution as a twentieth-century medium and its initial reliance on earlier established forms of art and entertainment (literature, theatre, dance, musical, opera, …). From the early postwar decades onwards, the vast body of films discussed in this book helps to disclose a series of motifs which will gain increasing prominence in the narrative and aesthetic repertoire of migration-related filmmaking. While some of these topics—such as the screening motif and the central position of family narratives—have already been discussed in close connection with contemporary European cinema (see, respectively, Loshitzky 2010; Berghahn 2013), other powerful tropes that have gained on-screen visibility (such as the house motif) remain under-researched, not least from a diachronic point of view.
Apart from adding a longitudinal perspective to the nexus between European filmmaking and migration, this study also intends to shed light on the cultural locatedness and specificity of these representational practices. On the one hand, of course, storytelling about foreigners and newcomers is firmly ...