Journal of Modern Italian Studies ISSN: 1354-571X (Print) 1469-9583 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rmis20 Chinese migrants, morality and film ethics in Italian cinema Gaoheng Zhang To cite this article: Gaoheng Zhang (2017) Chinese migrants, morality and film ethics in Italian cinema, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 22:3, 385-405, DOI: 10.1080/1354571X.2017.1321935 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1354571X.2017.1321935 Published online: 21 Jun 2017. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rmis20 Download by: [The University of British Columbia] Date: 21 June 2017, At: 15:14 Journal of Modern ItalIan StudIeS, 2017 Vol. 22, no. 3, 385–405 https://doi.org/10.1080/1354571X.2017.1321935 Chinese migrants, morality and ilm ethics in Italian cinema Gaoheng Zhang university of British Columbia ABSTRACT During 2004–2011, Italian cinema intervened in the ongoing public debates about Chinese immigration to Italy with 15 notable ilms, which provided a window into the moral and ethical practices of the ilmmakers and those of the ictional characters, or interviewees, in their ilms. This migratory phenomenon, in turn, ofered ilmmakers a variety of stimuli and perspectives from which to contemplate the moral stakes in screening Chinese migrants in Italy in ilms. Italian-Chinese ilms, insofar as they address the self–other relationship, lend themselves to an ethical analysis. I show that Italian documentary ilms genuinely feature the lives of Chinese migrants through restrained and socially conscious creative means. In contrast, relevant feature ilms often center on the plight of marginalized native Italian characters, adopting artistic license appropriate to their market-oriented production ethos. KEYWORDS Globalization; migration; Chinese migrants; ilm ethics; morality in ilm During 2004–2011, 15 notable Italian ilms on Chinese migrants, including both iction and documentary ilms, were shown in theaters and ilm festivals as well as released on DVD and online. Some of the iction ilms are commercially viable, such as Questa notte è ancora nostra/The Night is Still Ours (Paolo Genovese and Luca Miniero, 2008), while others are critically acclaimed and award-winning, including Io sono Li/Shun Li and the Poet (Andrea Segre, 2011). Several of the noniction ilms were made using techniques borrowed from the documentary canon. Examples include Quartieri cinesi/Chinese Quarters (Bruno Oliviero, 2008) and Di tessuti e di altre storie/On Fabrics and Other Stories (Teresa Paoli, 2011). Others are innovatively transmedia: Giallo a Milano: Made in Chinatown/Thriller in Milan: Made in Chinatown (Sergio Basso, 2009) maintains a cross-media webpage ailiated with the website of the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.1 CONTACT Gaoheng Zhang gaoheng.zhang@ubc.ca © 2017 Informa uK limited, trading as taylor & francis Group 386 G. ZHANG These cinematic tales of Chinese immigration to, and subsequent settlement in, Italy point to the intense lived experiences in the empirical world. Since the 1980s, Italy and France have received the majority of ‘new Chinese migrants’ (‘xin yimin’) who moved from mainland China to Europe.2 In the early 2010s, Chinese migrants in Italy registered on oicial records numbered about 200,000, but many are still undocumented despite numerous regularization schemes in Italy in the past two decades (Caritas 2014, 10–11). This is the irst time in history that so many Chinese are residing in Italy, and in efect in southern Europe – traditionally signiicant emigrant-sending countries up until the 1970s. As this migration is largely driven by entrepreneurship, it creates signiicant turmoil as well as opportunities for the Italian economy in the age of globalization. Is the ethnic business model based on self-employment adopted by most Chinese migrant workers and entrepreneurs in Italy damaging or contributing to the local economy? Are Italy’s Chinese helping trade between Italy and China to the beneit of the former or the latter? Can Chinese be integrated into the local social fabrics? Can Chinese be assimilated into Italian culture? Are such integration and assimilation desirable? In the public arena, these ongoing debates are mediated, at times molded, by journalism, television, literature, cinema and other media forms. Surveying the conveyance of these issues in the media, we notice that fear and paternalism, and condemnation and admiration, coexist in Italian attitudes toward Chinese migrants. Similarly, a close look at the relevant mediascape leads us to observe that Chinese migrants and pro-Chinese Italian natives contest biased Italian news commentary and protest against harsh public regulations implemented by Italian authorities that ultimately target Chinese migrants. This article discusses the cinematic transmission of recent debates concerning Chinese migrants and Italians. My critical lens on this ilmic production has a speciic focus. I consider how these ilms provide a window into the moral and ethical practices of the ilmmakers and those of the ictional characters or subjects in their ilms. This migratory phenomenon, in turn, ofers ilmmakers a variety of stimuli and perspectives from which to contemplate the moral stakes in screening Chinese migrants in Italy in iction and documentary ilms. In this article, when media ethics and morality are intended broadly, they mean how the self relates, or ought to relate, to the other in a social context mediated by cinema. This is a critical discourse belonging to the realm of ethics, particularly that of the face-to-face relationship between the self and the other theorized by the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1998, 15–16). The Media sociologist Roger Silverstone, among others, applies Levinas’s ethics to media studies (2007), putting critical weight on interpersonal relationships in media transactions. To reformulate Silverstone’s insights, I will be concerned with media morality and representational ethics insofar as they deepen our understanding of how Italian natives – including characters, interviewees and ilmmakers – believe it is right or wrong to act in speciic ways in relation to Chinese migrants, on and of screen. Most often, these Italians simply inhabit and reason from a morality, or a JOURNAL OF MODERN ITALIAN STUDIES 387 set of intersecting moralities, to which they and similarly socially situated other people subscribe (Lukes 2008, 19–27). Rarely do the Italians attempt to interrogate the moral universe of Chinese migrants, forming an ethical self–other relationship as intended by Levinas. With reference to the Italian-Chinese ilms under consideration, I see two levels of moral praxis occur and interact. First, ilm directors depict moral decisions and procedures of their interviewees or characters in the diegesis. Second, activating their own moral capital (Lamont 1992, 181–188, 24–61), ilmmakers engage with the subjects or characters in the material world. When analyzing speciic ilms in what follows, I will consider both praxes, as I begin to unravel what was at stake, morally speaking, for Italian cinema to represent members of the Chinese immigrant community in Italy in 2004–2011. Let me start by explaining the critical implications of analyzing Italian-Chinese ilms by way of morality and ethics. Italian-Chinese ilms, morality and ilm ethics For Silverstone, the morality of the media addresses ‘the generality of orientation and procedure within which the world is constructed by the media and within which the other appears’, whereas media ethics is the application of these principles to speciic social, personal and professional contexts, including ‘the ways in which the relationships between reporters, ilm-makers, storytellers and image producers and their subjects and their viewers and listeners are constructed or assumed’ (Silverstone 2007, 7). In the context of Italian-Chinese ilms, it is best not to view media ethics as a set of prescriptions and prohibitions governing ilmmaking practices and representations, that is, ethics as ethical codes (Nichols 1991, 76–79; Bauman 1994, 4), given the diiculty in extrapolating commonalities from a heterogeneous group of Italian ilms about Chinese migrants. Instead, following Lisa Downing and Libby Saxton (2010, 3), I will focus on ‘what (ilm) ethics might do and where it may be located’ and not merely ‘what it is’. Generally speaking, the moral space in which recent Italian-Chinese iction and documentary ilms meet supports the rights of law-abiding and middle-class Chinese migrants in Italy. When we compare these ilms to most Italian news reports on Chinese migrants, it is reasonable to claim that most of these ilmmakers demonstrate considerable responsibility in their representations, according such basic media justice as screen time and self-representation to Chinese migrants. But the routes to express this moral evaluation difer greatly between the two ilm categories. Of the remaining two sections of this article, one is about the Chinese self in documentaries, and the other is about the Italian self in iction ilms. I use this structure to illustrate the basic contrast between obligation-based and rights-based approaches to justice in communication (Silverstone 2007, 155–157) that I see emerging from recent Italian-Chinese ilms in relation to ilm categories. The obligation-based approach practiced by the bulk of Italian documentaries creates an environment, be it viewed as contrived or forward-thinking, in which Italy’s Chinese are provided with media 388 G. ZHANG hospitality. In contrast, the rights-based approach adopted in most Italian features is concerned with a ilmmaking that does not infringe on the rights of Italians to express their perceptions of Chinese migrants and those of Chinese migrants to counter these Italian perceptions. Inherent in my arguments, then, is an observation about the ethical dimensions of ilm as a medium, that is, how ilms and ethics forge a relationship that is not anchored to the moral coordinates in the material world (Choi and Frey 2014, 1–2). But this remains a secondary concern in this article. What are the main features of the contrast between obligation- and rightsbased approaches, and why did it come into being in Italian cinema during 2004–2011? Whether the ilms focus on Italians or Chinese migrants is a primary factor. While most documentaries genuinely feature the varied lives of Chinese protagonists, iction ilms often center on the social plight of marginalized Italian characters. Another key factor is the artistic means with which the ilms articulate their basic moral attitudes toward Chinese migrants. Compared to the artistic license and market-oriented production ethos of most iction ilms, documentaries adopt more restrained, socially conscious creative measures. Last but not least, the two ilm categories are related to one another, as both tend to interpret a speciic set of issues concerning the Chinese migrant community in Italy, such as the so-called ‘Chinese maia’ and migrants’ illegal business practices, the accounts of which proliferated in the mainstream Italian media from the early 1990s. Consequently, documentary ilms often assume high-minded attitudes vis-à-vis biased views of Chinese migrants in Italian journalism. Feature ilms, instead, launt their controversial and ironic takes on the same issues, thereby indirectly mocking the moralizing tendencies in documentary ilms. Let us look at these dynamics in detail. By putting Chinese migrants with respectable professions at the center of their narratives, Italian documentaries highlight the migrants’ civic presence in Italy. The praise of model Chinese migrants serves documentaries in educating Italians on Chinese customs and history. Counter-sensationalist narratives and a measured use of cinematic techniques in these ilms promote education as a civil, fair-minded and non-intimidating way of critiquing one-sided depictions of Chinese migrants in the Italian mass media. For Bill Nichols, the didactic outcome is characteristic of a documentary ilm that attends adequately to ethics and morality, for the ilmic text ‘provides some measure of the respect accorded others, even in the face of disagreement, and of the trust established with the audience’ (2010, 66). In advancing a didactic agenda, relevant noniction ilms embrace a strongly pro-Chinese outlook that seeks to legitimize the settlement of middle-class Chinese migrants in Italy. This moral project was carried out primarily because elite Chinese migrants in Italy – the subjects of the bulk of relevant documentaries – endorsed it. Apart from several and minor examples, Chinese migrants mattered little to these ilms’ creative process.3 Despite this lack, Chinese JOURNAL OF MODERN ITALIAN STUDIES 389 migrants in Italy were enthusiastic about appearing on screen to dispel lies about their community. They explained their moral choices vis-à-vis economic illegality (e.g. they were forced to devise ways to cope with Italy’s large informal economy and strict tax laws). They also enacted moral procedures to address conlicts with Italians from ethnocultural perspectives (e.g. migrants regarded working overtime to ensure a better future as their right, in line with what they believed to be the distinguishing Chinese ethnic trait of industriousness). Middle-class Chinese migrants in Italy also promoted their businesses covertly yet assuredly in these documentaries. Elite Chinese entrepreneurs and intellectuals posed themselves as opinion-makers on broader migrant–Italian dynamics for both Italian and Chinese migrant audiences. The goal of the elite migrants was to foster greater Italian–Chinese cooperation in order to both stabilize their legitimacy and resourcefulness in mainstream Italian society and to consolidate their powerful position within the Chinese migrant community in Italy. The pro-Chinese, legitimizing discourse in relevant documentaries is not surprising also because the ilms were often commissioned by non-proit associations to promote migrant integration, and were made in collaboration with pro-Chinese Italian journalists, ilmmakers, novelists and scholars, some of whom are versed in Italian and Chinese. The ilm directors under discussion in this article, furthermore, were either emerging artists or established ones who addressed a minority community at the time of the ilm projects. In 2004–2011, the growing topicality of Chinese migrants in the panorama of Italian cinema mirrored these ilmmakers’ mobility from the periphery of the current Italian ilm industry toward its center. In considering this factor, I concur with Michael Renov in noting that the ‘private visions and careerist goals’ of documentary ilmmakers and their production companies related dialectically to ‘the avowed social aims of collective documentary endeavors’ (2004, xviii). As Nichols notes, documentary ethics is ‘an ideological mechanism by which those with power propose to regulate their own conduct’ (1991, 103). The entities with the representational power, including Italian ilmmakers, the commissioning organizations and the production companies, set as their avowed goal the facilitation of incorporating Chinese and other migrants into Italian cinema and society. This ideology needed an often clear-cut pro-Chinese discourse in order to sustain its legitimacy in the mediascape in Italy, for the mass media continued to feed audiences with misinformation and misinterpretation about Chinese immigration to Italy. Engaged in a win-win game, Italian ilmmakers and their Chinese subjects produced a cogent body of knowledge of the Chinese diaspora and migrant transnationalism in Italy. Despite the power imbalance in ilmic representations, as I contend, these Chinese, by virtue of their appearance in the ilms, entered into a ‘contact zone’ with Italian creators and viewers (Pratt 2008, 7–8). To some extent, this situation reversed the longstanding documentary appropriation of the plight of the other/victim, which often led to no notable improvement in their plight (Winston 1988; Pryluck 2005). Italian-Chinese ilms – especially 390 G. ZHANG documentaries – contributed to ameliorating the image of Chinese migrants in the Italian media by the late 2000s. Based on existing cultural studies scholarship on immigration to Italy, few other migrant groups in Italy had such luck. In Italian feature ilms, the artistic explorations of the so-called ‘Chinese maia’, the illegal economic activities of Chinese migrants and romances between Chinese women and Italian men far outweigh social didacticism and legitimation in documentaries. The bulk of narrative ilms depict Italian–Chinese encounters for audience-oriented infotainment. Irony, double entendre, farce, parable and ambiguity abound in most of these iction ilms, resulting in semantically and morally ambivalent representations. Diverse ilm genres – notably including the thriller in Gorbaciof (Stefano Incerti, 2010), the science iction in L’arrivo di Wang/The Arrival of Wang (Manetti Bros., 2011) and the comedy in Questa notte è ancora nostra – are used to approach Chinese criminality and illegality, in which Chinese women often play the role of erotic objects, or that of the conveyers of high morality, or both. But in Italian narrative cinema, Chinese migrants are mostly conduits to foreground Italy-centered concerns, including more nuanced Italian characterizations, intersections of diverse Italian ilm genres, prompts for a critique of Italian politics and vehicles of humor for Italian viewers at the expense of Chinese. When the ilms satirize Italian provincialism, for example, this is not to be read solely as an act in defense of Chinese migrants, but rather as a springboard to probing the plight of Italian characters as victims of globalization who are socially positioned too low to beneit from it. These are manifestations of the Orientalist tendency in much of the cinematic and media depictions of Chinese migrants in Italy (Zhang 2016b). Ultimately, such directorial choices in Italian-Chinese iction ilms attempt to foreclose uneasy moral discussions about their occasional misinterpretation of the Chinese migrant community, apparently Orientalist representations and potential inculcation of audience misunderstanding. In my 2012 interview with Andrea Segre, who wrote and directed Io sono Li – the only Italian narrative ilm in recent memory that genuinely features a Chinese migrant – the ilmmaker underscored his interest in depicting the transformative power of the kind of intercultural encounters that brought unknown sentiments and understandings to both Italian and Chinese migrant characters in his ilm.4 Segre viewed the ilm as a metaphor for what migration had brought to Italy and to the West. I believe Segre’s observations revealed a defense system that sought to discourage a realist and mimetic reading of ilms about Chinese migrants. If such a reading were to be deployed, the ilms would be revealed to fall short of explaining the ine details about migrants’ lives adequately; or worse, the Orientalist depictions of Chinese in some of these ilms would be laid bare. This defense system was conceivably shared by other ilmmakers and articulated diegetically in ilms that are much more semantically ambiguous than Segre’s, such as L’arrivo di Wang. To focus on the Italian self is an attempt to lessen the moral weight of representing the Chinese other. JOURNAL OF MODERN ITALIAN STUDIES 391 But such directorial attempts run counter to the realist impulse inherent in the evaluations of Italian–Chinese cultural encounters by an average viewer in Italy. The average native Italian viewer’s understanding of this migration is largely formed by Italian television and newspapers, while an average Chinese migrant viewer gains knowledge of the migration by way of direct experiences and exposure to Italian and Chinese migrant media coverage. In this context, once feature ilms entered into the public discourse on Chinese migration to Italy, moral questions about ilm realism emerged spontaneously from viewers. Can the ilmmakers justify how they make the Chinese diaspora in Italy into a controversial matter by staging dramatic Italian–Chinese conlicts and cooperation? Do the ilmmakers act responsibly when constraining Chinese migrants to the role of conduits in channeling Italy-centered issues, whether as moralizing accusers of Italian provincialism or economic invaders in globalization in Italy, to quote only the two most salient examples? My detailed analysis of several ilms in the rest of the article will give support to these general remarks. Documentary ilms: the Chinese self We witness a change in the moral concerns and ethical practices concerning the Chinese self in Italian documentaries in relation to Un cinese a Roma/A Chinese in Rome (Gianfranco Giagni, 2004) and Giallo a Milano released in 2009. A pronounced anthropological curiosity for Chinese migrants living in Italy in the former morphed into a militant statement about the legitimacy of their settlement and social mobility in Italy in the latter. This change owed largely to the 2007 riot between Chinese migrants and Italian policemen in Milan’s Chinatown (Zhang 2013a, 2016a). The riot created a watershed moment in Italian perceptions of Chinese migrants because it attracted intense national and international media attention. In relevant media accounts, journalists reinforced or contested many stereotypes of Chinese migrants in Italy, thereby turning them into media topics on this migratory phenomenon. For example, whereas in Un cinese a Roma no mention of the so-called ‘Chinese maia’ exists either to refute or conirm it, a key agenda of Giallo a Milano is to dismantle this mediated stereotype. Un cinese a Roma was the irst documentary to ofer a nuanced portrayal of Chinese migrants in Italy. Giagni’s ilm depicts the existential crisis and the dificulty of settlement of its migrant-protagonist, Li Xiangyang, who worked as a tour guide, actor and screenwriter in Rome. The ilm follows Li’s peregrinations in search of an apartment in the capital city, which the cinematography mirrors by emphasizing the protagonist’s unfocused mobility. Using mostly participatory and observational modes, Giagni’s camera captures Li’s involvements in the community’s social organization. Giagni endeavors to retain for the viewers his excitement of shadowing a Chinese insider, particularly because for the director Chinese form ‘one of the most mysterious, least known and most impenetrable migrant communities in Rome and in Italy’.5 This authorial intent explains why 392 G. ZHANG Un cinese a Roma is marked by a strong anthropological accent in ofering a compendium of details of Chinese migrant lifestyles in Italy. For example, Li’s meeting with Fang Manqing, head of a Chinese-language newspaper published in Italy, Ouhua lianhe shibao/Il Tempo Europa Cina/The Europe-China Times, strikes Giagni as impressive because the event showcases the orderliness, hierarchy and sense of duty in the newspaper’s headquarters, directed by none other than a woman. Further, Li’s activities are carefully documented in their ethnographic details in order to create a cultural identity of Chinese migrants that Italian viewers can easily grasp on their audio-visual guided tour of Rome’s Chinese community. To this educational purpose, Giagni deploys the tried-and-true formula of juxtaposing Italian and Chinese environments in creating common ground between the two cultures. Parallels between the Chinese wedding that Li attended and a typical wedding in southern Italy are accentuated. The ilm’s end marks the climax of the Italian–migrant cross-identiication when a Chinese man sings the Neapolitan song ‘Santa Lucia’ in a Chinese-language translation. Many subsequent relevant documentaries performed the same anthropological and didactic functions by way of portraying supposed representatives (e.g. Li) from the Chinese migrant community, who in fact work in professions that are far from the drab daily routines of the majority of Chinese migrants and entrepreneurs in Italy (Pedone forthcoming). One aspect that often escapes the attention of commenters on this movie, but which is paramount in considering its complexity in depicting the Chinese self, concerns masculinity. Un cinese a Roma is unique among relevant documentary ilms for its emphasis on Chinese masculinities. The depiction of the middle-aged Li as a deiant artist hinges on epiphany about his artistic formation and sexuality. When asked if he was a homosexual, being a bachelor at the age of 50, Li suggested that his friend introduce him to a beautiful girl rather than tease him. When attending a Chinese wedding, Li made three bows before his male friend, explaining this ritualistic gesture as one to obtain consent from the couple’s parents for their marriage. In Piazza Vittorio, Li met a street musician playing the pipa, a musical instrument commonly associated with femininity, or genteel reinement, in the Chinese cultural imaginary. The feminine facial features of this man from Shanghai accentuated Li’s more masculine appearance as a northern Chinese man – likely an intentional contrast Giagni designed. As both men were looking for an apartment, they departed from the ilm together. Giagni interprets Li’s dispersive career and potential homosexuality, or asexuality, as necessary artistic conditions for best practices in the cinematic art. As Un cinese a Roma hastens to tell us, with a degree from Beijing Film Academy, Li loved Ingmar Bergman’s cinema and worked on several Italian ilms, most notably Agata e la tempesta/Agata and the Storm (Silvio Soldini, 2004). The male and ethnographic interests in pre-2007 riot documentaries gave way to an acute sense of social responsibility for countering unwarranted media JOURNAL OF MODERN ITALIAN STUDIES 393 accusations of Chinese migrants in post-riot documentaries including Giallo a Milano. On the surface, Basso’s ilm bears the typical narrative structure of a mystery (i.e. the giallo) about the investigation of a murder that took place in Milan’s Chinatown in late April 2007. In reality, this cinematic premise is only intended to arouse the curiosity of audiences, preparing them for a fast-paced narrative of Chinese migrants from outside Milan’s Chinese neighborhood. Giallo a Milano was screened at many ilm festivals in Italy and, through a ilm contest organized by the Italian Cultural Institute in New York, also in North America. Basso used a cross-media platform to provide more footage and further sociological information on the Chinese community in Milan. The release of the ilm on DVD in Italian and English versions was made possible in 2015 through a crowdfunding campaign. The ilm’s life in circulation evidences what Henry Jenkins calls the convergence culture in our time in which the circulation of media content occurs ‘across diferent media systems, competing media economies and national borders’ (2008, 17–19). Given its narrative complexity and relatively wide circulation, Giallo a Milano is easily the most representative and well known of Italian documentaries that exhibit a high moral concern for Chinese migrants. As such, as I contend, Basso helped to establish the Italian-Chinese documentary ethics. How do Basso’s moral and ethical practices operate? To start with, in framing the ilm around the concept of the crime ilm, Basso’s primary target is to invalidate the criminalization of Chinese migrants in Italian crime reporting. The framework of a giallo questions how to make sense of what we are led to learn about the Chinese in Italy. Each of the 15 ingredients said to be vital to create a thriller appears in the ilm as subsection titles. The sequences that immediately follow these titles often seem to interpret them in an indexical way. This mechanism signals a conventional thriller framing to the experienced viewers. But the real climax of this technique is not the audience’s recognition of the said cinematic or generic characteristics, but the subversion of them in order to reveal the mundanity of some aspects of the lives of Chinese migrants. One ingredient and subsection title, ‘A gang’, refers to criminal gangs formed by young Chinese migrants, a subject familiar to Italian readers of news coverage in that period. Following the title, multiple splitting frames show second-generation young Chinese-Italians playing billiards. Both the agile frame composition and the musical accompaniment recall police chases typical of thrillers. However, these young persons’ conversations focus on their arrivals in Italy and insights into Italian–Chinese cultural diferences. By illing a conventional thriller moment with anticlimactic dialogues, Basso mocks the mass media’s approach to the ‘Chinese maia’ in Italy, which, at one point in the 2000s, was indeed explained as criminal gangs formed by unemployed young Chinese migrants, such as in Alessandro Rossi’s 2003 article in Panorama on 13 November. Within the ilm’s diegesis, Basso also widens topics about Chinese migrants further than is typically discussed in the mass media, a responsible gesture to 394 G. ZHANG examine the world of Chinese migrants in Italy from within its internal logic as well as in comparison with Italian society. Diverse perspectives among Chinese migrants are represented in the ilm, most memorably during the debates between a husband and a wife on the pros and cons of returning to China and on the Italian society’s acceptance of migrants. By featuring individual voices of a heterogeneous assortment of Chinese migrants with respectable professions, the ilm’s focus on the Chinese self is sharpened. Further, Giallo a Milano frequently juxtaposes Chinese and Italian perspectives by intercutting images of Italians and Chinese in the same social contexts. In the opening credits, images of the 2007 riot and a boxing contest point to Italian–Chinese clashes and rivalry. But scenes of a Chinese girl practicing gymnastics with her Italian friends reconcile Chinese migrants and Italians symbolically and powerfully. The intercutting technique not only indicates the two groups’ shared social positioning, but also articulates their clashes and reconciliation cinematically. Through speciic use of documentary modes, Giallo a Milano partially challenges the ethnocultural approach, that is, the tendency to explain the behaviors of an ethnic group by always referring back to its supposedly ixed cultural and ethnic traits. Adding sophistication to most media depictions of Chinese migrants as unthinking conveyers of some ossiied Chinese traits is another way for Giallo a Milano to show empathy and responsibility for its migrant-subjects. In one storyline, a couple lying on a bed revealed intimate thoughts about their lives. These scenes can be easily construed as re-enactments and not documentary observations, for the Italian spectator’s voyeuristic desire to witness the more private moments of Chinese migrants is satisied. But Basso claimed to have obtained the trust of the couple to shoot in their bedroom by irst spending a prolonged period of time getting to know them. This way, Basso accorded respect to his migrant-subjects and in return obtained rare observational footage that dispels the lie of the media image of Chinese migrants as robot-like workers consumed by economic pursuit. Apart from the observational mode, the storyline involving a gay-identiied actor in theater and animation scenes created to protect the identity of a Chinese collaborator with Italian police contribute to the performative mode of the ilm. The poetic dimension of the ilm is manifested as the temporalities and geographies of several storylines are fragmented and then linked together thematically or conceptually. Continuous interviews available on the ilm’s website are reassembled in the ilm through montage to simulate the complexity of migrations in the empirical world. These cinematic techniques destabilize any facile link between appearance and conclusion, which is frequently explained solely in ethnocultural terms in the mass media, and often by Chinese migrants themselves. The overall persuasiveness of Giallo a Milano beneits from the expertise of the ilm’s director, Basso, who studied Chinese before launching a career in ilmmaking. Upon witnessing the 2007 riot in Milan in the irst person, Basso took JOURNAL OF MODERN ITALIAN STUDIES 395 footage from the balcony of an apartment nearby. The footage prompted the conceptualization of Giallo a Milano. During pre-production, Basso consulted the sociologist Daniele Cologna on the Chinese migrant community in Milan in order to better contextualize relevant existing journalistic accounts.6 Cologna’s moral stance vis-à-vis media misrepresentation of Chinese migrants is well documented by his interviews in Italian news, such as the aforementioned article by Rossi in 2003, as well as by the scholar’s own journalistic writings, including an article for Liberazione on 14 April 2007. Basso’s moral and ethical practices speak directly to representational power. At irst glance, Basso successfully distributes the discursive power of explicating the Chinese diaspora among himself, Cologna, the viewers and the many Chinese migrants in his documentary. In reality, the vast majority of Chinese migrants are still spoken for, not only by the Italian outsiders to the community but also by Chinese migrant-subjects selected from the middle to upper registers of a heterogeneous community. Basso pushes the argument on Chinese migrants’ entitlement to settle in Italy to the point where the vast majority of undereducated and economically underprivileged Chinese migrants in Milan evaporated from Giallo a Milano. The elite cohort of Chinese migrant-subjects with respectable professions, or those who have accumulated enough capital to be relatively advanced in their migratory agendas as workers and entrepreneurs of garment workshops and others, then became the spokespeople for the community. The ilm’s focus on elite Chinese migrant-subjects points to the future-oriented and purposefully idealistic agenda of which Basso spoke in our interview. For him, Chinese migrants in Italy were like dreamers, creating a utopia-like, uninished but realizable Italian-Chinese incorporation. Such is the director’s discursive power in conjuring his own moral and ethical worlds, capable of absorbing what appears to be a defect in the ilm’s otherwise sound approach to addressing Chinese migrants. Fiction ilms: the Italian self In posing ‘moral and ethical questions’ such as ‘How much should we trust our neighbors?’ and ‘What is prejudice?’ (Napolitano 2011) in L’arrivo di Wang, Manetti Bros. paid lip service to the media mantra that Chinese economic expansion put Italy in diiculty. In a detention center in Rome, the middle-aged Italian secret agent Curti (Ennio Fantastichini) interrogated the Chinese-speaking extraterrestrial being Wang (voice by Li Yong) for his plan to invade and conquer our planet. Gaia (Francesca Cuttica), a young Italian interpreter of Mandarin Chinese, was sent in for interpretation. Citing tourism as his purpose of visit, the alien claimed to have learned Chinese to facilitate his stay in Italy, believing it to be the local tongue. Curti, however, pressured Wang to confess his scheme to destroy Earth. The ilm encourages audience identiication with Gaia, who perceived the investigation as an act of injustice. She sided with Wang to plead for his release 396 G. ZHANG and eventually helped him escape. At the ilm’s conclusion, however, an apocalyptic scene unfolded before her eyes as Rome was being bombed mercilessly by alien spaceships. Gaia realized Wang’s cunningness and regretted her naïve suspicion of Curti’s judgment. Ultimately, the ilm warns that should human beings and Italians fail to be vigilant, our planet and Italy would be conquered by alien and Chinese forces. And migrations from outer space and from China would enforce alien social orders on civilized planets and law-abiding countries. On one hand, this bizarre conclusion can be interpreted as scapegoating China for Italy’s own failure. The same discourse is re-enacted in many texts about China and Chinese migrants in Italy, such as in Edoardo Nesi’s semi-autographical book Storia della mia gente/Story of My People (2010) about the competition between Italians and Chinese migrants in Prato’s textile and garment industrial district (Zhang 2013b, 13–18). On the other hand, the ilm’s conclusion can be viewed as a timely critique of rampant capitalism and globalization, for which the Chinese economy and Chinese migrant entrepreneurship in Italy are exemplary. This discourse is evident in Yang Xiaping’s novel Come due farfalle in volo sulla Grande Muraglia/Like Two Butterlies Flying on the Great Walls (2011) where she describes how Chinese migrants in Prato are immersed in profit-making to the exclusion of other pursuits (Zhang 2013b, 20). Manetti Bros.’s moral attitudes toward Chinese and their ethical procedures in creating the ilm’s diegesis drew on both discourses, resulting in a morally ambiguous ilm. We arrive at this conclusion because of our analytic focus on Chinese migrants. But I would argue that L’arrivo di Wang enacts a more extensive moral judgment on its Italian characters, for the ilm’s conclusion does not challenge the evils of Chinese aliens but rather begs the question: who is to blame for this outcome, Gaia or Curti? The ilm gives due attention to Gaia’s moral deliberations. Although she was initially taken aback by the alien’s appearance, she soon came to identify with Wang’s plight as a tourist mistaken for a terrorist. Gaia was bewitched by Wang’s pleas based on intercultural communication, which is typical of pro-Chinese media discourse. By releasing Wang, Gaia acted on her developed, but idealistic, moral beliefs about the rights of the aliens/ Chinese/migrants, indirectly triggering the fatal attack on Rome. However, Curti and the Italian police he embodies also failed to recruit Gaia in the ight against alien invasions. With the diferences between Chinese and Italian languages literalized to one between an alien and a human being, the gap between Wang’s moving accounts and Curti’s stormy reactions to these ‘paciist’ slogans widened. When Curti resorted to electric wiring to torture Wang, Gaia’s humanitarian sense reached exploding point. Consider how these depictions would easily bring to mind Italy’s badly managed detention centers for refugees. This science iction ilm is an allegory through which Manetti Bros. critique the inability of Italian police and other authorities to instill trust in Italian citizens in order to collaborate on addressing Chinese globalization. JOURNAL OF MODERN ITALIAN STUDIES 397 By navigating Gaia’s pro-Chinese/civic-bound and Curti’s anti-Chinese/ state-sanctioned arguments, Manetti Bros. conjure a tension between Gaia the transgressor and Curti the restorer of the prevailing social order, with Wang assigned to the mediating role in this tension, a scheme in line with traditional Hollywood crime ilm (Rafter 2006, 3, 213; Manettibros.Film. 2012). L’arrivo di Wang illustrates well the cinematic tendency following the 2007 riot to exploit Chinese criminality and illegality to shed light on Italy-centered issues. The focus on Italians in a story ostensibly about Chinese migrants, such as we have seen in L’arrivo di Wang, is present in the majority of Italian iction ilms about Chinese migrants, including the aforementioned Questa notte è ancora nostra and Gorbaciof. We may venture to postulate that the Italian-Chinese iction ilm ethics is operative when the ilm in question ultimately falls back on a narrative or structure that privileges its Italian characters over Chinese migrant ones, all the while giving substantial screen time to the latter and making them partake signiicantly in the Italian-centric story. There are exceptions to this Italian-centric principle in Italian-Chinese iction ilm ethical practices. Andrea Segre’s Io sono Li announces the name of its Chinese female protagonist in the title, recognizing migrants as individuals and not solely as members of a certain ethnic group. Shun Li (Tao Zhao) is the only rounded Chinese migrant character to have emerged from recent Italian narrative ilms about Chinese migration. Her migratory and emotional journeys in Italy receive the most screen time in the ilm, and her voice in Chinese and in Italian bookends the diegesis. Segre’s ilm distances itself from the Madonna/ whore and Cio-Cio San/Turandot dynamics in portraying Chinese migrant women. Following Renee E. Tajima’s observations (1989, 309, 314), Li is neither the Lotus Blossom Baby type who serves as love interest for white men (e.g. Lila in Gorbaciof) nor the Dragon Lady type who engages in illicit interracial afairs and who is often played by Asian actresses with Caucasian-like physical features (e.g. Jing in Questa notte è ancora nostra). Instead, Li generates a narrative of her own through her love for poetry and letter writing, her work in a Chinese restaurant and her relationship with a long-term migrant isherman from the former Yugoslavia, Bepi (Rade Šerbedžija). Unlike documentaries including Un cinese a Roma and Giallo a Milano, Io sono Li gives voice to a member of the underprivileged class of Chinese migrants in Italy. Segre’s authorial intent as expressed in my interview with him (in 2012) indicates, however, that the ilm exists not to merely ofer a character study of Li, or for Li to stand in as a synecdoche for the Chinese community in Italy. Rather, the story is said to be a metaphor through which to examine how the self can beneit from encounters with the other in the age of migration. This is a ‘tiny’ story in a ‘small’ world challenged by globalization. At the heart of this ilm, Segre claimed, lies an investigation of the fears engendered by the self’s encounters with the other as the self discovers new aspects of its own identity. Crucially, this mechanism applies to both the Chinese migrant self (Li) and to the Italianized/Italian 398 G. ZHANG self (Bepi). For Segre, cinema helps the viewers relect on migration through magical moments, such as Li’s recitation of an ancient Chinese poem at intervals during the ilm. Although Segre’s ilm is anchored to a speciic migratory phenomenon, in these statements he universalizes the processes and values of self-knowledge obtained through interactions with the other. Does Segre imply that Li’s story provides Italian characters in his ilm and Italian viewers in the empirical world with food for thought concerning the social and interpersonal changes caused by Chinese and other migrations to Italy? By way of Li’s story, does Segre also invite Chinese migrant viewers to relect on their own sojourn and integration in Italy? If the answers to these questions are airmative, then I believe Segre activates a more egalitarian way of representing the Chinese migrant self and the Italian self in interaction in Io sono Li. In order to achieve this representational ethics, Segre weaves a poetic register into a socially realist story, using both impulses to approach character building. The realist storyline is focused on Li’s interactions with other Chinese and Italians, while the emotive lives of Li and Bepi partake of the poetic. The opening scene is emblematic of this dynamic. A caption elucidates the importance of Qu Yuan, the Chinese poet celebrated throughout the Chinese-speaking world during the Duanwujie, or the Dragon Boat Festival. In the darkness, Li commemorated Qu Yuan by putting lit paper lanterns in a water-illed bathtub and reciting a verse from the poet’s masterpiece, Li Sao. But a Chinese man burst into the bathroom, turned on the lights, mocked her ritual, urinated in her presence and returned to the majiang table. This scene establishes a recurring pattern in the ilm: while the poetic dimension pertains to Li’s contemplation, the realist mode is applied to quotidian practices of Chinese migrants. The intermingling of the two modes also mirrors Segre’s transition, in a relatively brief period of time, from a sociologist to a documentarist and inally to a iction ilmmaker. The technique of coupling the two registers succeeds to varying degrees. For the sake of Italian audiences who know little about Chinese migration to Italy, Segre tends to have Chinese migrants verbalize what are often unspoken agreements, or banalities, among them. Often Segre’s approach recalls the ethnographic method of a cultural sociologist working on migratory trajectories and migrant labor structures. To accompany this cinematic technique, throughout the ilm, the dialogues in Chinese are subtitled and those in the Chioggia dialect are not; this may be a strategy to ‘familiarize the Other (Chinese) and to defamiliarize the familiar (the Chioggia dialect in place of standard Italian)’ (Chung and Luciano 2014, 195). The content of the details enunciated by the migrant characters in the ilm, however, invites criticism, for it sometimes contradicts sociological literature on Chinese migrants in Italy. The most important such detail – one that motivates the main storyline – concerns how Li traveled to Italy and why she worked slavishly for her authoritarian and bad-mannered Chinese employers. Initially stationed in a garment factory in Rome, Li was asked to leave for Chioggia near JOURNAL OF MODERN ITALIAN STUDIES 399 Venice, where she would remain until she could pay back the expenses accrued from her trip from China to Italy and from the procurement of her permit to stay. In the diegesis, these reasons were given by her employer in Rome in Chinese. Several Chinese employers, who collaborated with one another, then promised to expedite the union with her son for her, but in exchange for unpaid work in a bar in Chioggia, a proposal that she could not refuse. While Chinese human smuggling with the migrant’s consent is documented by empirical research, it would be unusual for a knowing, responsible and reasonably educated Fujianese migrant like Li to need any explanation of the agreement’s minutiae from her employers in Italy. Such details would have already been worked out China (Gao 2010, 169; Pieke 2002, 33; Ceccagno, Rastrelli, and Salvati 2010, 104–105). Further, sociological literature shows that there is rarely a direct link between the smugglers to whom Chinese migrants are indebted for expenses related to the trips to Italy and the partial legalization there, and Chinese employers who exploit them in factories in Italy (Ceccagno, Rastrelli, and Salvati 2010, 123–124, 132–133; Rastrelli 2005). Undoubtedly, it is possible that Li as a Fujianese migrant may be at a disadvantage in using these smuggling networks managed for the most part by migrants from Zhejiang. Although Fujian and Zhejiang are two adjacent coastal provinces in East China, they have diferent emigration histories and networks. If this circumstance should occur, the case of debts being carried forth from the smugglers to the employers would be quite possible. But the ilm is not explicit on this point. Moreover, while Zhao’s perfect Mandarin Chinese accent in the ilm suggests a northern Chinese background to the average Chinese viewer, her character is said to come from Fuzhou, the provincial capital of Fujian. This may be explained away by Li’s educational background, but the ilm does not make this condition clear. The signiicance of this detail is minor in the narrative, albeit out of place in a ilm that generally seeks to be, and is, sociologically accurate. Chinese viewers must also suspend their disbelief, which can be trying in scenes featuring Li’s interior dialogues. These examples of partial inaccuracy in the ilm possibly owed to the particular case study that inspired Segre’s script – a female Chinese bartender in Chioggia. These inaccuracies may have also resulted from the director’s reliance on academic studies of migrations to Italy and of his personal experiences with migrants in non-Chinese contexts. In our interview, Segre indicated that while social and migrant conditions depicted in Io sono Li refer to those around the year 2006 in which the ilm is set, similar ones populated in other foreign communities in Italy and in the Italian emigrant communities in the United States in the 1950s. But the parallels between Chinese immigration to Italy, other foreign immigrations to Italy and Italian emigration worldwide are mostly rhetorical, with the speciic conditions of each migratory low difering signiicantly. When details about Chinese migrants in this ilm are sociologically veriiable, their cinematic treatment needs reconsideration on grounds of the ilm’s 400 G. ZHANG avowed fair-mindedness. Li’s breakup with Bepi led to her departure from Chioggia, to her reunion with her son and – narratively but not causally – to Bepi’s death. Their unconventional relationship, late-night conversations and walks to the lagoon became the talk of the town. The townsfolk began to speak ill of Chinese migrants, trash-talking the ‘Chinese maia’ and Chinese invasion in the West. They believed Li was scheming to be married to the aging Bepi in order to seize his few properties. As the defamation threatened the well-being of Chinese migrants in the town, Li’s employers forbade Li from seeing Bepi. These middle-class Chinese migrant entrepreneurs grew wary of the alarmist anti-Chinese rhetoric prevalent in the mainstream Italian media and in the popular imaginary. If Li had not complied with this request, the penalty for her would have been relocation to a new workplace and starting from scratch again, and as a result, the reunion with her son would have been delayed. Li stopped seeing Bepi and later left Chioggia to work for a wholesale magazine elsewhere in Italy. This narrative detail refers to the high mobility of Chinese migrants in Italy and the agreements they strike with their labor organizers (Ceccagno, Rastrelli, and Salvati 2010, 116, 105, 117–118, 132–133). Despite the general accuracy of this storyline, confusion arises regarding the contrast between the banality of the information and the cryptic way in which these decisions made by the Chinese restaurant owner are cinematically rendered. When Li pled unsuccessfully for leave for half a day, and when she was told not to pursue her relationship with Bepi any further, the male restaurant owner was seen as eating, or getting ready to eat, ice cream. He was also responsible for making work arrangements for Li’s workmate Lian, whose nocturnal peregrinations, tai chi practicing by the lagoon and avid consumption of women’s interest magazines are conspicuous narrative details that beg to be explicated fully for the ilm’s diegesis. These enigmatic episodes, together with the poetic scenes in the ilm, are the magical moments to which Segre referred in our interview, the role of which is to activate the viewer’s moral thinking on migration. If the viewers identify with Bepi the Italian self, is Li the Chinese other a friend or a stranger? If the viewers, instead, identify with Li the Chinese self, should they care for Bepi the Italian other or not? Can such dichotomies always keep their interpretive integrity from the force of circumstances and contingencies? Segre’s original concept in the script for this ilm includes a confrontation between Italian neorealist traits and what he perceived to be the dream-like and subtle qualities of contemporary Chinese cinema.7 With this in mind, does this amalgam of the two ilmic registers produce a contact zone in which Italians and Chinese migrants clash and relate, become both strangers and friends to one another, and nurture both care and narcissism? The ilm argues that this is possible. The ilm’s poetic world reveals the wonders of the lagoon and Chioggia, which served as veiled spaces protecting the blossoming love between the two protagonists. Chinese–Italian cross-identiication here pertains to the couple’s longing JOURNAL OF MODERN ITALIAN STUDIES 401 to be close to their loved ones – Li and her son, and Bepi and his deceased wife – their migrant status, their family backgrounds as ishermen in Pula and in Fuzhou and, most crucially, their love for words, especially for poetry. While obliged to speak in a new language for her job as a bartender, Li expressed her hopes for her son in letters, which she read in Chinese in diegetic interior dialogues. Her letters were tinted with sweet sadness that typiies the verses of Qu Yuan she cited at several points in the ilm. Nicknamed ‘The Poet’, Bepi wrote simple poems dedicated to Li, praising the sensibilities she showed for the changing moods of the breeze and waves. To match the evocative imagery conjured by poetry and letter writing, Luca Bigazzi devised an aesthetically sophisticated cinematography to accompany the couple’s outings on the lagoon. Recalling his work in Gianni Amelio’s La stella che non c’è/The Missing Star (2006), whenever a source of water is featured, Bigazzi adapted the beauty of the Chinese watercolor landscape painting to the ambience of Chioggia and the lagoon, giving another example of Italian–Chinese mixing in Io sono Li. The interactions between the Chinese self and the Italian self on equal footing are also spatialized poetically in the ilm. Thanks to Bigazzi’s cinematography, Segre’s claim that the ilm pays homage to Chioggia – the hometown of his mother – becomes visually comprehensible. Scenes of Li’s arrival at Chioggia and her departure suggest the centrality of this space. A poetic sequence following the ilm’s title features gentle waves on a shore, resting birds and a bright aerial shot of the town’s main canal and its picturesque surroundings; these are the things that came into Li’s purview irst during her irst encounter with this land. In the concluding scene, Bepi’s ishing house burned in red lames and the black contours of Li moved quietly in a boat, with the water and the sky merging into one grey and misty whole. Throughout the ilm, Chioggia and the lagoon were shown in many shades and conditions, memorably including the town in high water, to Li’s amazement. A few ishermen populated Li’s bar; they welcomed the new Chinese management and gossiped about Li and Bepi when they moved closer. In these moments, Segre inscribes Li and other Chinese migrants into the local population, nearly suggesting the amalgamation of the Chinese self with the Italian self. With a didactic agenda that seeks to legitimate the incorporation of elite Chinese migrants into Italian society, relevant noniction ilms set out to examine the transnational lives of Chinese migrants and the beneits they have brought to bear on globalization in Italy. Fiction ilms that draw on popular genres, on the other hand, largely operate in a hybrid, meta-cinematic space in which the ilmmakers experiment with new combinations of prompts culled from Italian, Chinese and American cinematic conventions, in an efort to ofer new content of entertainment. This contrast results from the fact that, with Io sono Li as a notable exception, feature ilm directors depict the moral attitudes of Italians toward Chinese and those of migrants toward natives in order to gain a iner understanding of the Italian selves. The Italian-centric concern is particularly 402 G. ZHANG evident when compared to most documentaries, which express genuine moral concern for Chinese migrants. My ethical analysis of Italian-Chinese ilms during 2004–2011 has put an investigation of the self–other relationship at its center, providing a case study of migration and globalization in cinema and other media. By this analysis, I have also provided an example of how to broaden ontological, epistemological, ideological and cultural studies analyses in classical ilm theories (Casetti 1999) to include an ethical analysis, one that accentuates ‘spectators’ moral engagement and the ethical consequences of producing and consuming ilms’ (Choi and Frey 2014, 1). Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. http://www.corriere.it/spettacoli/speciali/2010/giallo-a-milano/ (accessed 11 December 2015). This evaluation is based on data released in Wenzhou huaqiao shi (Wenzhou Institute of Overseas Chinese and Foreign Nationals of Chinese Origin 1999), 179, 188–189, 192, 195, 206, 214, 220, 228, 231. There are several known examples of participation of Chinese migrants in Italian ilms. Under the supervision of their professor at an institute in Prato, Chinese and other non-Italian students created a series of short documentary ilms, among which Il Caleidoscopio: visioni interculturali/The Kaleidoscope: Intercultural Visions (Luciano Luongo, Ivan D’Alì, and Gianni Bianchi, 2011) is a highlight. Chinese migrant cineaste Li Xiangyang is credited as co-screenwriter for the iction movie Questa notte è ancora nostra. A group of young Chinese made the short ilm titled Come me/Like Me (Luca Mariani, 2012) for ‘Oltre Chinatown/Beyond Chinatown’, a project underway at the Agenzia di Ricerca Sociali Codici/Agency for Research in Social Codes in Milan since 2012. The lack of migrant creative input is emblematic of recent Italian cinema, particularly when compared to British, French and German cinemas where a number of ilmmakers of non-native heritage made signiicant ilms on migrants in their countries (Naicy 2001, 10–17; O’Healy 2013). I interviewed Andre Segre in Rome in the summer of 2012. ‘Un cinese a Roma: Intervista a Gianfranco Giagni’, March 2007, http://archivio. rassegna.it/2007/video/articoli/cinese.htm. Information in this paragraph was obtained through my interview with Basso in Rome in 2012. ‘Shun Li e il Poeta (tit. Provvisorio). Note di regia’, http://andreasegre.blogspot. com/search/label/regia (accessed 11 October 2014). Acknowledgments I would like to thank Chiara Martucci of Docucity at the Università degli studi di Milano for procuring a copy of Un cinese a Roma for me, and Sergio Basso and Andrea Segre for granting me interviews with them. 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