Particle/Wave: Cinema as Conservator in a Diasporic World
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Cinematic narrative remains an influential form in popular culture to depict the struggles of waves of population relocated by diaspora. Because these waves consist of discreet individuals and their idiosyncratic narratives, postmodern literary and cinematic techniques are particularly suited to represent the aftermath of displacement and to avoid imposing a single totalising truth. Cinematic images as they interplay between panorama and foregrounding of the individual narrative, revise the actual to encompass the subject’s need for greater agency and possibly provide assurance that the history of displaced communities matters: a kind of law of conservation of culture in which nothing finally is lost. Narratives of diaspora employ a number of tropes, such as fragmenting and scattering, cleansing, and recollection into a whole. The effectiveness of these tropes can be observed in the classic film of diaspora, The English Patient, and other films, such as Rhapsody in August, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Everything is Illuminated, Gods and Monsters, and more recently, The Way and Melancholia.