Abstract
This chapter offers a comparative analysis of the figuration of migratory movement in A Seventh Man (1975), a photo-essay reportage produced by the writer John Berger and the photographer Jean Mohr, and Transit (2018), a film by the German director Christian Petzold. It seeks to make sense of the curious figure of the migrant one finds in Petzold’s film (based loosely on Anna Seghers’ 1944 novel by the same name about World War II refugees). As a close reading of the film shows, Transit rejects the coherence of the history or period film genre, plays with multiple generic forms, uses incongruous modes of narration, and introduces a protagonist who pretends to be someone else and whose time is therefore someone else’s time. In these ways, the film ties the figure of the migrant to an experience of time that is essentially one of discontinuity and crisis—time as a superimposition of discordant temporalities. To set in relief the historical novelty of such a migratory figure, the chapter approaches Transit through a reading of A Seventh Man, a text that relates the temporal discord of migratory movement to the Marxist historical schema of combined and uneven development. What is new about Transit, and what the film offers as a distinct problem for the figuration of migration in our own situation, is precisely the waning or even the absence of any such historical schema or shared temporal horizon. Based on this diagnosis, the chapter argues, the task of the figuration of migratory movement today lies in reinventing a shared sense of temporal existence, a collective time that would allow the figure of the migrant to not only inscribe the crises of our present moment but also prefigure future forms of emancipation.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
The authors write, “The subject [of the book] is European. Its meaning is global” (Berger and Mohr 2010, 11). It is important, however, not to understand this “globality” of the book’s meaning in identitarian terms. The reason for the global meaning of the book lies precisely in the fact that the subject of the book (the South European migrant workers) confronts the identity of Europe with its unacknowledged part (exploitation of migrant labor), upon which Europe nevertheless crucially depends. The global meaning stems from the ability of the book to estrange Europe from itself—a dimension that can be seen also in the reception of A Seventh Man, which was largely dismissed and ignored in Europe, but enthusiastically received and translated in the countries of the global South.
- 2.
Indeed, Berger notes that the project of A Seventh Man was initially conceived as a film and that the idea of organizing images and text as “film sequences,” as well as treating individual elements as “close-ups,” carried from this initial conception into the production of the book (Berger and Mohr 2010, 9).
- 3.
This reading of the figure of the migrant in A Seventh Man as a twofold operation proceeds along a similar line as the one pursued by Mauro Resmini in his book on the figures of Italian political cinema of the “Long ‘68”—cinematic figures contemporaneous with the migrant proletarians in Berger and Mohr’sbook. According to Resmini, a figure is “always a figure of the Two: order and chaos, form and the formless, figuration and disfiguration. The relation between the two terms, however, is not of inoperative externality, but of dialectical co-implication.” Following Ernst Bloch’s concept of the tension-figure, Resmini suggests that it is best to understand such dialectical figures as “tentative experiments of legibility of a given historical sequence: since no overarching meaning or orientation is guaranteed by a transcendent principle, the figure must open itself up to the ‘holes and hollow spaces’ that make up history in times of crisis. [Figures] provide a legible image of this disjointed historical time…. By registering the gaps in the historical continuum, tension-figures give shape to the fundamental fault lines that run under its visible surface” (Resmini 2022, 324–3).
- 4.
Hester Baer has described such handling of genre in Petzold’s films as well as in the films of other Berlin School directors as a “disorganization” of generic and temporal conventions of inherited cinematic forms, which allows the filmmakers to perform a kind of “archaeology of genre” and to recombine and “resignify” the genre fragments with the purpose of turning them into “images of the present” (Baer 2021, 278–87).
Bibliography
Bachelard, Gaston. 2016. The Dialectic of Duration, trans. Mary McAllester Jones. New York: Rowman & Littlefield.
Baer, Hester. 2021. German Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalism. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Berger, John, and Jean Mohr. 2010. A Seventh Man: A Book of Images and Words About the Experiences of Migrant Workers in Europe. New York: Verso.
Petzold, Christian, dir. 2018. Transit.
Resmini, Mauro. 2022. Italian Political Cinema: Figures of the Long ’68. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Arsenjuk, L. (2024). Between History and the Discord of Time: The Figure of the Migrant in A Seventh Man and Transit. In: Stan, C., Sussman, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30784-3_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30784-3_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-30783-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-30784-3
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)