Imaginary Lands and Figures of Exile in Elia Kazan’s AMERICA, AMERICA
In: Diaspora and Memory
Author:
Sylvie Rollet
Sylvie Rollet
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Abstract
Imaginary Lands and Figures of Exile in Elia Kazan’s AMERICA, AMERICA
AMERICA, AMERICA is the place where the filmmaker Elia Kazan has attempted to refound a “hauntless” relationship with Anatolia, his ancestral land. If the film narration, situated between a documentary and a fiction, can appear as a means of remembering a collective and a badly-limbed personal history, it means that the work establishes an “in-between” which keeps away the moviemaker from his living ghosts. The reconstructive virtue of the narration is, in fact, inseparable from the existence of the spectator-witness: the “recomposed memory” of the film thus becomes a shared experience.