![]() ![]() ![]() It also places the viewer in the same position, but only briefly: the association between the viewer, the camera, and the protagonist is broken as the camera returns the viewer (along with the father) to the position of a bystander. ![]() 3 The young protagonist is here literally steamrolled by the train, and the frontal perspective emphasises the violence of the assault. 2 The classic diagonal, familiar from countless films from the Lumière brothers’ L’arrivée d’un train (France, 1895) to train shots in action films such as From Russia with Love (UK/USA, 1963), foregrounds the speed of the train after its deceptively slow first appearance. The intrusion of technology into rural Turkey is signalled by the train, an icon of Western modernity and the regimes of mobility connected to it. 5 George Revill, Railway, London, Reaktion Books, 2012.ģ The scene encapsulates the links between mobility, technological modernity, migration, and film aesthetics that interest us in this article.4 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19 th Cen (.).3 In his article on the famous film by the Lumière brothers, Martin Loiperdinger cites early film the (.).2 See, among others, Matthew Beaumont and Michael Freeman (eds.), The Railway and Modernity: Time, Sp (.).Ultimately, however, we argue that the film not only contributes to (still ongoing) political discussions about Switzerland’s problematic position in relation to European migration policies (Fenner 2003, Laws 2011), but also opens up broader questions about the narrative and aesthetic dimensions of cultural imaginaries pertaining to the entanglement of migration and (im)mobility. Combining recent perspectives on the politics of (im)mobility (see Cresswell 2006) with an attention to the spatial and mobile poetics of cinema (Cresswell and Dixon 2002, Naficy 2002), we show that the film critically engages with the role of geography (notably mountains) in Swiss political and national identity discourses. It traces how the film outlines a trajectory from hypermobile possibilities to an increasing restriction of mobility both on the level of the story and on the level of cinematic form. This article explores the shifting mobilities that structure the portrayal of a Turkish refugee family’s attempt to reach Switzerland illegally through various means of transportation in Xavier Koller’s multilingual Swiss-Turkish film Reise der Hoffnung ( Journey of Hope, 1990). ![]()
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