- immigrant as a film character -



1. First films that show life of immigrants coming to America are Traffic in Souls (1913) and The Italian (1915). Released near the end of a long period of unrestricted emigration from Europe to the United States, these two films depict hazards that await them in new world, a Darwinian jungle rather than a promised land paved with gold.Despite unfortunate ethnical and other stereotypes, The Italian develops considerable sympathy for the main character, presenting us an unusually complex view of tenement life and multiethnic immigration in America.

2. However, if we try to discover visual and narrative responses to subject of immigration, the theme of "movement" and, much more specific "movement in container" comes to mind. migration implies a movement of specific kind, in specific context: using cheap and/or illegal ways of transport. In Charlie Chaplin's The Immigrant (1917), it is the boat that arrives to New York.

Chaplin gets a lot of laughs, but he also gives us a very accurate picture of the terrible living conditions on the immigrant ships. Most immigrants could afford only steerage class, where they were jammed in like sardines. They suffered from no privacy, bad food, poor ventilation, sickness, and filth on their two-week journey from Europe. There is one thing about these scenes that is not realistic. Real immigrants almost always traveled below deck, at the bottom of the ship. Chaplin put his immigrants on deck because it was a more interesting environment for his story. He needed the ship’s railing and the open sea for his comedy routines. He needed the view from the deck for the scene in which the immigrants see the Statue of Liberty.

Even now, more than before, illegal immigrants have been known to suffocate in shipping containers, boxcars, and trucks, sink in shipwrecks caused by unseaworthy vessels, die of dehydration or exposure during long walks without water. An official estimate puts the number of people who died in illegal crossings across the U.S.-Mexican border between 1998 and 2004 at 1,954.

3. In opposition to this image of the immigrant as a victim, or, sometimes as a danger to the society, in short film Mobile men, Apichatpong Weerasethakul offers us different image of immigrant worker:

"In my recent short film, the main character is played by a migrant worker from Shan state in Burma named Jaai. He is one of the lucky ones who have decent jobs and are contented with the new living condition. But there exist many others who are still living in the opposite circumstances. Mobile Men is a portrait of Jaai. By the act of making the film, I would like to instill and capture his confidence and dignity. It is not about storytelling, but about a man who is full of life. (…) The film honors simple gestures that mark individuality through visual exchanges. I hope the viewers realize that, when the actors and a director are holding a camera and shoot, we are destroying a discriminating barrier. The pickup truck simulates a small moving island without frontiers where there is freedom to communicate, to see, and to share."

4. In documentary films, authors developed different strategies to avoid legal consequences for their characters, illegal immigrants. Their appearance on screen could mean revealing their identities and they could risk expulsion from the country. Most advanced strategy even created a new genre - documentary animation. (Hanna Heilborn and David Aronowitsch).

- cinematographe, biograph, bioscope, film -

What is the nature of cinema, what is it's most important element? Is it a movement, a light, or a life itself? Can there be a film without these elements? And how can we define a basic minimal 

film character corresponding to the nature of cinema?

Let us turn to some etymology for help.

Many names were used for projectors of early films - frequently derived from Greek and Latin, and usually clumsy; such as Vever's Viviograph, Wood's Movendoscope, and the Chronophotographoscope. The names of some machines introduced during this period - the Biograph, Cinematographe/Kinematograph, Bioscope - became generic terms for motion pictures.

Multitude of names for certain new phenomenon (or product, in this case new medium) shows the need to talk about it in particular society. Name acquisition is of great importance, and patent owners struggle for primacy. This process takes sometimes more than few decades, and in some cases term that has lost globally, can win locally. Term "bioscope" has lost by "cinematography" globaly, but it is widely used in South Africa, Sweden (bio), India, Pakistan and Serbia.

Going deeper in analysis, from etymological point of view, each term has different priority if we see it as an attempt to define the phenomenon.

cinematograph (writing with movement) - term used by Lumiere brothers (1896), developed from Gk. kinema "movement" + graphein "to write". "I had the occasion to visit Louis Lumière many times in Paris, but it was one fine day that I was able to divine, without but a word exchanged between the two of us, the birth in his marvellous mind of the general idea of the Cinematograph. Three months after our first brief glimpse, I sent the first role of film to Lyon. To our immense surprise... the Cinematograph was born, projecting life onto a piece of paper set up to act as a screen... and even then, it had all the perfection of the image that we still admire today." (Victor Planchon)

biograph (writing with life) - term used by Georges Demenÿ and Herman Casler, developed from Gk. bios "one's life, course or way of living, lifetime" (as opposed to zoe "animal life, organic life") + graphein "to write". The name Biograph is short for the American Mutoscope and Biography Company, one of the earliest film production companies, established in 1896. Because it held patents on certain types of camera technology, Biograph became, for a time, one of Thomas Edison’s chief rivals. Eventually they teamed up to establish the Motion Picture Patents Company to protect cinema-related patent rights. Biograph’s studios were in New York, and the company produced over a thousand silent films from 1908 to 1916, including numerous early Westerns.

bioscope - (looking at life). Term was used by Max Skladanowsky and Charles Urban. It is constructed from the Greek bios, life + skopeein, to look at, and the Oxford English Dictionary gives its traditional definition as "a view or survey of life". The word was coined by Granville Penn in his 1812 Christian tract The Bioscope, or Dial of Life. Penn's book included a separate card on which was illustrated a dial marked from nought to seventy, marking the ages of man from childhood to decay in decades, with eternity waiting before and after. A pointer was attached for the reader to mark out his current age, and hence to contemplate the lessons in Penn's book on the allotted span of human life and to avoid the belief "that life is a continuous now". This dial was the bioscope, and just as a horoscope was a measure of the heavens at the hour of birth, so the Bioscope was the "general measure of human life".

Since cinema is the term in much wider use than bioscope, globally, we can say that representation of movement is a defining element of new medium, rather than "looking at life". However, there is another term, and it is in widest possible use. It's the term "film".

film - etymology of this word takes us to old english filmen "membrane, thin skin," Sense of "a thin coat of something" is 1570s, extended by 1845 to the coating of chemical gel on photographic plates. By 1895 this also meant the coating plus the paper or celluloid. It is first used for signifying "motion pictures" in 1905. 

In film, the most natural minimal character is light that forms an image, passing through the celuloid membrane.