Film Studies: Events

CFS Talk: Daniela Berghahn, Far-flung Families in Diasporic European Cinema

Tue 2nd April 2013 17:15 to 19:00

Daniela Berghahn

In the age of globalisation, diasporic and other types of transnational family are increasingly represented on film, yet they have been neglected in film studies. This paper emerges from Daniela Berghahn's ongoing research on the topic. She sees the preponderance of family narratives as related to the family's dual function as a prime site of identity formation and as a trope of belonging. As cinema tends to depict social conflicts and historical transitions indirectly through affective relations in the family, the diasporic family on screen crystallises the emotionally ambivalent response to growing family diversity in western societies. Constructed as Other on account of their ethnicity, language and religion, diasporic families are perceived as a threat to the social cohesion of western host societies. At the same time they often embody a nostalgic longing for the traditional family, imagined in terms of extended kinship ties and superior family values.

Daniela Berghahn is Professor of Film Studies in the Media Arts Department at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author of Raumdarstellung im englischen Roman der Moderne (1989) and Hollywood Behind the Wall: The Cinema of East Germany (2005). Her co-edited books include Unity and Diversity in the New Europe (2000) and Millennial Essays on Film and Other German Studies (2002). She led an AHRC-funded international Research Network on 'Migrant and Diasporic Cinema in Contemporary Europe' (www.migrantcinema.net), the findings of which were published in the anthology European Cinema in Motion: Migrant and Diasporic Film in Contemporary Europe (with Claudia Sternberg, 2010) and in a special issue of New Cinemas, 'Turkish German Dialogues on Screen' (2009). She was awarded an AHRC Research Fellowship for a project on The Diasporic Family in Cinema, the main output of which is a monograph entitled Far-flung Families in Film (forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press, 2013).

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