Abstract
This essay reflects on how contemporary cinema represents the diverseness resulting from different mobilities, with the city becoming the fractured geography of narratives of displacement and melancholia. Being inhabited by polyphony, the city embodies dissonance and potential conflict, thus becoming a site of translation. Translation becomes a key strategy for deciphering and coming to terms with traditions, contradictions and fears resulting from ‘the flux and chaos of the postcolonial world’. Cinema compounds this multiplicity, which unfolds into a polyphony of refractions staging loss in the aftermath of social upheaval. Films such as London River (2009) and Breaking and Entering (2006) are exemplars of the aesthetic attempt to come to grips with the pluralities and partialities that inhabit the global city.
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Notes
- 1.
Around the same time as Rushdie wrote his ‘Imaginary Homelands’, Stuart Hall would define identity as displacement: ‘Identity is formed at the unstable point where the “unspeakable” stories of subjectivity meet the narratives of history, of a culture. And since he/she is positioned in relation to cultured narratives which have been profoundly expropriated, the colonised subject is always “somewhere else”: doubly marginalized, displaced always other than where he or she is, or is able to speak from’ (Hall 1997, p. 135).
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Filmography
Bouchareb, R. (dir.). (2009). London river. Trinity.
Minghella, A. (dir.). (2006). Breaking and entering. Miramax.
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Lopes, A. (2016). Londres en Colère. Of ‘Translated (Wo)men’, Cinema and the City of Our (Dis)content. In: Martins, A., Lopes, A., Dias, M. (eds) Mediations of Disruption in Post-Conflict Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57520-3_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57520-3_12
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