Postcolonial passages: Migration and cinematic form in Michael Haneke’s Hidden and Alan Gilsenan’s Zulu 9

Abstract

This essay examines two recent cinematic productions from France and Ireland, respectively: Michael Haneke’s Hidden and Alan Gilsenan’s Zulu 9. These two films are considered comparatively in terms of migration, postcolonial identity and global capital. But the essay also focuses on how the formal features of the two cinematic, visual texts act and interact with the primary thematic concerns cited above. Thus, the essay foregrounds technical form as a crucial aspect of any consideration of contemporary postcolonial texts, not just cinematic or visual. The essay explores how different “forms” can co‐exist within one text and charts how these chafe against each other, particularly in Haneke’s Hidden, as competing sides in France’s colonial history come into conflict in the present – it is the issue of form that most explicitly underscores the violent tensions of the past erupting in the present. Likewise, Gilsenan’s much shorter film makes the viewer highly self‐conscious about the ways in which we view the tragedies and the hardships of “the other”. As it is an Irish film, Ireland’s own protracted colonial history obviously bears upon our reactions to this specific and tragic consequence of neo‐colonialism charted by Gilsenan.

Keywords:

• France
• Ireland
• migration
• neo‐colonialism
• cinema

Notes

1. James Clifford writes: “An unruly crowd of descriptive/interpretive terms now jostle and converse in an effort to characterize the contact zones of nations, cultures, and regions: terms such as border, travel, creolization, transculturalism, hybridity, and diaspora” (“Diasporas” 303).

2. Gibbons explored this idea in a panel discussion at the Association of Art Historians conference in Belfast in April 2007.

3. For more on French colonialism and cinema see Sherzer.

4. For more on Ireland, empire and postcolonial studies see Flannery.

5. See Bourdieu.