Focus Features

A scene from Frozen River

To coincide with the release of Focus Features’ forthcoming Sin Nombre, David Parkinson takes an exhaustive look at the depiction of immigrants in modern world cinema. In the first of six parts, he examines American cinema’s immigrant roots.

American cinema is essentially a migrant art form. Not only were many film industry pioneers of European extraction, but Hollywood was also an interloper's paradise. In addition to cheap land and labour, it also offered constant sunshine and diverse scenery to enable film-makers to shoot outdoors all year round against backdrops that could stand in for anywhere in the world. Furthermore, this new city of dream factories symbolised the realisation of the Manifest Destiny and it was no accident that the Western - the migrant's very own genre - should become a screen staple.

As many of the first film-makers to go west were independents illegally using equipment copyrighted by the Motion Picture Patents Company (which had been formed in December 1908 by such movie heavyweights as Edison, Biograph, Vitagraph and Essanay), Hollywood's proximity to the Mexican border was also deemed a plus point, as producers were able to escape the heavies detailed by the protectionist MPPC to disrupt their activities. Yet, despite their origins and those of the ruling moguls, the studios largely steered clear of such contentious topics as immigration. The Wall Street financiers who bankrolled the studio system permitted the odd drama about newcomers overcoming the odds to make good. But they were more interested in peddling the myth of a socio-economic success story than exploring reality. Indeed, they were almost relieved to invest in talking pictures, as they meant that universally understood outings like Charlie Chaplin's The Immigrant (1916) could no longer speak of privation and injustice to audiences still struggling to master English. 

Even at the height of the Depression, pictures like Mervyn LeRoy's I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932) and William Wellman's Wild Boys of the Road (1933) were rare in their depiction of rail-riding vagrancy and the desperate cross-country search for employment. Periodically, films like George Seaton's Anything Can Happen (1952), Elia Kazan's America, America (1963), Paul Mazursky's Moscow on the Hudson (1984) and George Bazala's Beyond the Pale (1999) examined the melting pot heritage. But, with the nation in the grips of another economic crisis, those film-makers chronicling with the plight of the migrant are more concerned with illegal entry than Ellis Island nostalgia.

I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang

The movie colony recently salved its conscience by Oscar nominating Richard Jenkins and Melissa Leo for their respective performances in Thomas McCarthy's The Visitor (2007), in which a professor tries to help the Syrian émigré he has befriended, and Courtney Hunt's Frozen River (2008), which sees a single mom smuggling illegals across the St Lawrence to make a balloon payment. But the most notable thing about features dealing with America's twilight communities, from Gregory Nava's El Norte (1983) through to Cary Joji Fukanaga's Sin Nombre (2009), is how many have been made by foreign-born or second-generational directors like Ramin Bahrani (Man Push Cart, 2005), Patricia Riggen (Under the Same Moon), Christopher Zalla (Padre Nuestro aka Sangre de mi sangre) and Marco Kreuzpaintner (Trade, all 2007).

While the majority of America's front rank directors have yet to tackle global mobility, filmmakers elsewhere have seized upon the issue and its corollaries to expose the iniquity of everything from people trafficking and the exploitation of illegal workers to prostitution and the trade in human body parts. Few of the films cited in the following survey have enjoyed commercial success, as mainstream audiences often find them too harrowing. But they depict, often with graphic authenticity, the miseries, dangers and indignities endured by our fellow human beings in order to enjoy the rights, benefits and little luxuries that we (in industrial nations) take for granted.

Read Part 2 of David Parkinson's Migrant Cinema in the Age of Globalization >>

American cinema is essentially a migrant art form. Not only were many film industry pioneers of European extraction, but Hollywood was also an interloper's paradise. In addition to cheap land and labour, it also offered constant sunshine and diverse scenery to enable film-makers to shoot outdoors all year round against backdrops that could stand in for anywhere in the world. Furthermore, this new city of dream factories symbolised the realisation of the Manifest Destiny and it was no accident that the Western - the migrant's very own genre - should become a screen staple.

As many of the first film-makers to go west were independents illegally using equipment copyrighted by the Motion Picture Patents Company (which had been formed in December 1908 by such movie heavyweights as Edison, Biograph, Vitagraph and Essanay), Hollywood's proximity to the Mexican border was also deemed a plus point, as producers were able to escape the heavies detailed by the protectionist MPPC to disrupt their activities. Yet, despite their origins and those of the ruling moguls, the studios largely steered clear of such contentious topics as immigration. The Wall Street financiers who bankrolled the studio system permitted the odd drama about newcomers overcoming the odds to make good. But they were more interested in peddling the myth of a socio-economic success story than exploring reality. Indeed, they were almost relieved to invest in talking pictures, as they meant that universally understood outings like Charlie Chaplin's The Immigrant (1916) could no longer speak of privation and injustice to audiences still struggling to master English. 

Even at the height of the Depression, pictures like Mervyn LeRoy's I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932) and William Wellman's Wild Boys of the Road (1933) were rare in their depiction of rail-riding vagrancy and the desperate cross-country search for employment. Periodically, films like George Seaton's Anything Can Happen (1952), Elia Kazan's America, America (1963), Paul Mazursky's Moscow on the Hudson (1984) and George Bazala's Beyond the Pale (1999) examined the melting pot heritage. But, with the nation in the grips of another economic crisis, those film-makers chronicling with the plight of the migrant are more concerned with illegal entry than Ellis Island nostalgia.

I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang

The movie colony recently salved its conscience by Oscar nominating Richard Jenkins and Melissa Leo for their respective performances in Thomas McCarthy's The Visitor (2007), in which a professor tries to help the Syrian émigré he has befriended, and Courtney Hunt's Frozen River (2008), which sees a single mom smuggling illegals across the St Lawrence to make a balloon payment. But the most notable thing about features dealing with America's twilight communities, from Gregory Nava's El Norte (1983) through to Cary Joji Fukanaga's Sin Nombre (2009), is how many have been made by foreign-born or second-generational directors like Ramin Bahrani (Man Push Cart, 2005), Patricia Riggen (Under the Same Moon), Christopher Zalla (Padre Nuestro aka Sangre de mi sangre) and Marco Kreuzpaintner (Trade, all 2007).

While the majority of America's front rank directors have yet to tackle global mobility, filmmakers elsewhere have seized upon the issue and its corollaries to expose the iniquity of everything from people trafficking and the exploitation of illegal workers to prostitution and the trade in human body parts. Few of the films cited in the following survey have enjoyed commercial success, as mainstream audiences often find them too harrowing. But they depict, often with graphic authenticity, the miseries, dangers and indignities endured by our fellow human beings in order to enjoy the rights, benefits and little luxuries that we (in industrial nations) take for granted.

Read Part 2 of David Parkinson's Migrant Cinema in the Age of Globalization >>