Dominic Breiter
Film 301: Migration & Visual Art
Shelleen Greene
12/17/09
MIGRATION
My first case study for the Migration module is Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 film, The Godfather: Part II. Besides being one of my favorite movies and therefore enjoyable enough to write a paper about, the storyline bears obvious ascriptions to the theme of migration.
In the beginning of the film, young Vito Andolini is in hiding from the from the ruthless mafia don responsible for the execution of his entire immediate family. A family takes him in and puts him aboard a ship heading to America. This particular migration is also an example of “exile”. Vito’s old hometown of Corleone, Sicily, is no longer an option for him to inhabit lest he risk immediate discovery and death at the hands of the town’s mafia system. It is like Salgado wrote:
“. . . few people uproot themselves by choice. Most are compelled to become migrants, refugees, or exiles by forces beyond their control, by poverty, repression, or war.”(1)
Aboard the ship to America, we see the huddled conditions of the European immigrants. Little Vito looks all the smaller lost within his shipmates’ hopeful masses, but then the Statue of Liberty -- New York’s fabled icon of salvation—rises into view. At Ellis Island, Vito must wait in a long procession of the day’s arrival to be inspected and have his name registered into the nation’s immigration census—in doing so they accidentally change Vito’s last name to Corleone, confusing “Andolini” for his middle name and his hometown’s title for his last name. The medical examiner then informs him he has smallpox and so he is put into isolation for an unspecified amount of time. The tiny, bland holding cell that we leave young Vito sitting in hints that there are hundreds of other cells just like it holding hundreds of sick immigrants, many of whom can attribute their illness to the trek over aboard the steamship. Records of such voyages describe inhumane living conditions, which lead to a raging spread of disease.
Following the cure of his ailment and release from the holding cell, Vito is adopted by the Abbandando family, fellow immigrants who had set up a grocery store in the part of Manhattan’s lower east side newly dubbed “Little Italy”. The immigrants there make it a joint effort to preserve and uphold long-standing Italian customs and to help one another build their lives in the new country. To do so they must band together and seemingly exclude themselves from New York City’s other existing heritages, who may not respect the Italian heritage despite having established similar cultural subdivisions of their own. It is likely that the Italians would be met with ignorant hostility or discrimination on the “outside”, and so set about providing each other with a resourceful imitation of their homeland. A perfect reference to this situation is addressed in an excerpt from Alex Rota’s essay where he states:
“. . . refugees have been so vilified in the popular press that we may wonder whether this marginalization of individuals who have already endured not inconsiderable trauma might lead to a sense of solidarity amongst them, with the emergence of a sense of a separate community.”(2)
Despite Francis Ford Coppola personally being born in America, I would argue the Godfather films as being a diasporic phase in his filmmaking career. They cover the migration and resettlement of Coppola’s Italian ancestry through the channel of one fictitious family, the Corleones, and their particular path to success in America. Italians flooded into Ellis Island around the late 1800s and early 1900s with intent to secure the American dream for their own beloved families and escape the low wage-high tax epidemic being exercised by the Italian economy. I feel that certain components of the Corleones’ legacy can be translated into the common tale shared by every Italian immigrant: the rise to a sufficient degree of power and sustainment, the unbridled motivation to protect and support one’s family, the neglecting of one’s morals out of necessity to survive or get ahead. Coppola was handed a Hollywood template—a “gangster film”—that he wasn’t overly receptive of in the first place; but he saw the opportunity to make it a resounding testament to his own Italian-American background.
My second case study for migration is another favorite film of mine: John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy. The primary character, Joe Buck, is a Texas born-&-raised cowboy impersonator from the hat to the boots to the accent. He decides to leave the simple, rustic life of his small Texan town to become a prostitute in possibly one of the most contradicting frontiers: New York City. Joe is simultaneously taking on two things that he has no prior experience with whatsoever, those being prostitution and city-life. A large part of the film’s drama is Joe’s unwillingness or inability to make any transition other than his physical relocation, and stubbornly or stupidly tries to rationalize in the Big Apple with a Texas disposition; due to this, he is swindled and taken advantage of on several occasions. It is not until far later in the film when Joe is forced to act coarsely out of necessity for a dying friend, when we see him darkly complete what Hamid Naficy would call a “metaphoric and philosophical journey of identity and transformation”. (3)
Joe Buck could be seen as a migrant worker, leaving the dried-up prospects of his beloved hometown to seek an opportunity towards wealth in the very same city where hundreds of thousands of hopeful migrants planted themselves during the immigration wave of the late 1800s – early 1900s. Although Joe’s cowboy outfit is partly a gimmick to attract prospective female clients and distinguish himself from the other prostitutes, he makes it clear that his appearance is a deeply-rooted and important custom of his upbringing, and he carries it along to New York just as so many migrants brought their own customs and traditional dress.
Like the migrant workers, Joe reaches New York with next-to-nothing—a single suitcase and a treasured portable radio. Work proves more difficult to find than he expected, and New York, it seems, is not quite the land of plenty that’s fantasy had lured him so far from home. Joe gets evicted from his hotel room for not being able to make payment. He lives in poverty, shacking up with a small-time criminal in an abandoned inner city building who has his own idea of the American Dream and how it can be found in a southward migration to Florida.
“Sadness, loneliness, and alienation are frequent themes, and sad, lonely, and alienated people are favorite characters in the accented films.”(4)
Although I would not consider Midnight Cowboy an example of accented cinema, the referenced themes of sadness, loneliness, and alienation brought on by displacement are definitely there. Joe and his newfound friend, Rico, are social outcasts: a crippled thief and an outlandish hooker. There is a scene when they are spotted in a diner by two beatniks and get invited to an underground drug/art party. Here we get to see how the two protagonist outcasts even fail to make a primitive human connection with the supposed “counter-culture”.
The majority of Midnight Cowboy’s plot contains parallels to actual historic migratory hazards. On the climactic Greyhound journey to Florida, Joe stops in at a clothing store to buy Rico and himself some tropical-print shirts. This time, Joe is more determined to integrate into his new society-- as they approach their destination, however, Rico dies of disease.
WORK CITED
(1) Salgado, Sebastiao. “Introduction.” Migrations: Humanity in Transition. New York: Aperture, 2000.
(2) Rotas, Alex. “Is Refugee Art Possible?” Third Text. 18.1 (2004)
(3) Naficy, Hamid. “Situating Accented Cinema.” Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader. Eds. Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden. London and New York: Routledge, 2006.
(4) Naficy, Hamid. “Situating Accented Cinema.” Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader. Eds. Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden. London and New York: Routledge, 2006.
(5) "Italian Immigration." Spartacus Educational - Home Page. Web. 13 Dec. 2009.
(6) "Vito Corleone - All About All." All About All: Online Encyclopedia. Web. 13 Dec. 2009.
