Tra cinema e fotografia: l'immaginario della grande emigrazione transoceanica

Between the 18th and the 19th centuries, as photography was establishing itself as a technical reproduction device available to an ever-growing audience and cinema was taking its first steps, the great transoceanic migration pushed out of the country’s borders millions of people and deeply marked the imaginary of an era. Nourished firstly by literature and popular music and then by the other means of mass communication, this imaginary has built, about a liminal and on the move way of life, a gradation of feelings related to movement and defined by the guilt for abandoning family ties and the fear of an almost unknown elsewhere. This essay will reconstruct the stages of intermedia dialogue between cinema and photography during the large overseas emigration by which the images, concretions of the relationship between life and forms of representation, have “migrated” from one medium to another, adapting to different formats and different discursive systems, and have conveyed to spectators present and past the experience of the migratory phenomena that the country underwent.