Since at least Charlie Chaplin’s The Immigrant (1917), immigration has been one of American cinema’s great themes. The stories of the newly arrived have been related by a multitude of filmmakers, many of them émigrés themselves or the descendants of émigrés; Elia Kazan’s America America (1963), Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II (1974), Joan Micklin Silver’s Hester Street (1975), Barry Levinson’s Avalon (1990), Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (2002), Ramin Bahrani’s Man Push Cart (2005), and James Gray’s The Immigrant (2013) come readily to mind, but the list could stretch to hundreds. Yet for all the diversity of the protagonists’ origins in such films, there has long been a certain homogeneity to American immigration cinema. One principal reason for this is milieu: most films about immigration are set…
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Cinema Scope (Digital) - 1 Issue, Issue 89 - Winter 2022