A defining attribute of what I have called the »accented style« of exilic and diasporic cinema is the mode of production, distribution, and consumption of this cinema (referred to as mode of production for convenience). This mode of film production takes a number of forms, chief among them are the interstitial and collective modes. In the following, I deal with the interstitial category, identifying several of its key characteristics.

Transnational exilic filmmakers inhabit the interstitial spaces of not only the host society but also the mainstream film industry. It would be inaccurate to characterize them as marginal as scholars are prone to do, for they do not live and work on the borders, margins, or the peripheries of society or the film and media industries. They are situated inside and work in the interstices of both society and media industries. As Homi Bhabha has noted, it is »theoretically innovative and politically necessary« to think beyond singular categories and dominant designations, to focus on »those interstitial moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of ›differences‹« (1994: 269). It is in these interstitial spaces that »minorities translate their dominant designations of difference - gender, ethnicity, class - into a solidarity that refuses both the binary politics of polarity, or the necessity of a homogeneous, unitary ›oppositional bloc‹« (270). To be interstitial, therefore, is to operate both within and astride the cracks and fissures of the system, benefiting from its contradictions, anomalies, and heterogeneity. It also means being located at the intersection of the local and the global, mediating between the two contrary categories which in syllogism are called subalternity and superalternity. As a result, exilic filmmakers are not so much marginal or subaltern as they are interstitial, partial, and multiple. And, they are interstitial, partial, and multiple in terms not only of their identity and subjectivity but also of the various roles they are forced, or chose, to play in every aspects of their films - from inception to consumption.

One of the characteristics of the interstitial mode of production is the financial provisions under which it operates. Filmmakers often have to either invest in their own films or work in technical or routine capacities in the media and entertainment industries. Such forced crossovers tend to blur the boundaries that traditionally separated film, television, and video and the levels of professionalism in each area. Exilic filmmakers are involved in a range of cinematic practices, from professional to amateur and a range of television, from broadcast to narrowcast TV, and from art video to lowcast video to webcast video (via the Internet). Both the intertextuality and the hybridity promoted by such crossovers are commensurate with and constitutive of the filmmakers\' own postcolonial and postmodern exilism and hybridized identities. However, since working in these fields usually does not generate sufficient funds, filmmakers must seek additional financing and co-financing from a range of public and private sources. Perhaps the lion\'s share of their time is spent on financial and producerly functions. Amir Naderi\'s film, Manhattan by Numbers (1993), provides an allegorical, if dystopic, inscription of the arduousness of funds-raising experiences that many exilic filmmakers undergo. In doing this, the film becomes an allegory also of the conditions of exile itself. It focuses on the fruitless efforts of a laid-off journalist to find a moneyed friend to borrow cash to forestall certain eviction from his apartment. Like a filmmaker who is trying to tap into every resource and connection to generate funds, the journalist searches Manhattan from one end to another and places numerous phone calls to mutual friends. But his moneyed friend appears to have vanished like scarce filmmaking resources. The film\'s drama centers on the journalist\'s growing despondency about his inability to locate his friend and the imminence of his homelessness on the heels of his joblessness - a prospect not unfamiliar to exiles and refugees and many exilic filmmakers.

Multilinguality is another characteristic of the interstitial mode which is driven by the multilinguality and cosmopolitaness of the filmmakers and their crew, the stories they make films about, and the audiences whom they address. Multilinguality complexifies the films\' intelligibility and contributes to their accented style. Importantly, in these films language is almost never taken for granted. In fact, it is often a theme and the self-reflexive agent of narration and identify. Raúl Ruiz\'s On Top of the Whale (Het Dak Van de Walvis, 1981) is about an anthropologist traveling to Tierra del Fuego, at the southernmost tip of Chile, to study the language of two remaining members of a Patagonian tribe. As the French anthropologist, in a typical situation of ethnographic field-work, points to everyday objects and asks the Patagonians to name them, he discovers to his dismay that their language consists of only one phrase, yamas gutan. By varying pattern of stress on the syllables, the Patagonians imply different meanings. Even more distressing for him, the meanings derived are not stable as they change almost daily. This by turn disturbing and droll use of the language in the film invokes multiple meanings. The invention of a shifting language can be read as the Patagonians\' resistance against their colonizers. By rendering themselves unintelligible they become a moving target that cannot be fixed long enough to be comprehended and apprehended. The reduction of a tribe to only two surviving members bespeaks of the massacre of indigenous peoples at the hands of their European invaders. The anthropologists\' methodology and their complicity with colonial powers are also ridiculed and criticized. Finally, and more importantly, the film points to the constructedness of all languagesn - a fact that becomes more apparent in exile and displacement where the »natural« context for language is removed.

Multilinguality, like politics, interpenetrates all aspects of the transnational and exilic film practices, not only those aspects that appear on the screen, such as character speech and dialogue and subtitles, but also those, like the multinational composition of the production crew, that are behind the cameras. It also involves the films\' reception as multiple languages serve multiple communities of address, often privileging one over another.

The production process of exilic and diasporic films is convoluted not only by the multiple funding sources, multiple languages used on the set and on screen, multiple nationalities of crew and cast, and the multiple functions that filmmakers perform horizontally (as the films\' director, actor, writer, editor, etc.) and vertically (by involvement in all stages of production, from inception to consumption), but also by the artisanal conditions and the temporal and political constraints under which the films are shot - forming another characteristic. Kurdish filmmaker, Nezamettin Ariç, who lives in Germany, filmed most of his A Cry for Beko (Ein lied für Beko, 1992) in Armenia in the early 1990s near the Armenian-Turkish border. As an exile from Turkey, condemned by its government, he could not film his Kurdish nationalist saga in his country of origin. However, filming in Armenia presented, if not political, then, other, difficulties. As there were no processing labs nearby in Armenia, he had to ship the exposed footage to Leningrad, Russia. For various reasons, the lab did not deliver the footage in time, forcing Ariç, who was operating under a tight temporal and financial budget, to film without seeing any of the dailies until long after the cast and crew had left the location - all this during his debut directorial experience! The telltail signs of these production difficulties are the traces they sometimes leave on the films\' imagery, sound quality, and editing - signs that give the films that certain look and feel of »imperfection« that signifies exile and exilic production.

One major consequence of the difficulties of making and exhibiting films under exilic and artisanal conditions - forming another characteristic - is the very meager output of many of the filmmakers. In tabulating the output of Middle Eastern filmmakers working in exile and diaspora in the West, I discovered that some 300 cinéastes had made a little over 800 films (features and shorts), with an average ratio of 2.3 films per filmmaker - not a high output.

Low output may be a function not only of economic forces and the filmmakers\' interstitial location, but also the antagonistic state-artist relations. Armenian filmmaker, Sergei Paradjanov, provides an example of this relation in the context of internal exile. Born in Georgia, Paradjanov made his early brilliant films in Ukraine during the Soviet era under the centralized state-sponsored mode of production (Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors, 1964, and The Color of Pomegranates, 1969). However, despite such a support, he was accused of homosexuality, currency fraud, Ukrainian nationalism, and incitement to suicide and was forced to spend six years of the 1970s in labor camps. Because of an international campaign on his behalf, Paradjanov was released in 1978, but was blacklisted, blocked from cinema, and rearrested for a time for attempted bribery (the real reason may have been his interviews with foreign journalists). He began making films again only on the eve of Mikhael Gorbachev\'s presidency and reforms. This activity resulted in only two more features (The Legend of the Suram Fortress, 1984, and Ashik Kerib, 1988). All in all, his meager life\'s output was four feature films and a number of documentaries, made in two working periods, separated by fifteen years.

For exilic filmmakers, thus, the dream of transcendence and transformation that their liminality and interstitiality promises must constantly be checked against the realities of state encroachment and free market competition. Some of their output is entertaining even though ironically and parodically critical of the host society. But as artists who often make distressing and dystopian films, exilic filmmakers inhabit a realm of incredible tension and agony, as Iranian filmmaker in Germany Sohrab Shahid Saless, has sarcastically noted:

People like us who make somber and hardly entertaining films are not fortunate. They write letters, come up with treatments, put together scripts that are never filmed and once in a while a good soul appears, gestures to them and says - just like in Kafka: it\'s your turn now. You too can have a chance (1988: 56).

The Kafkaesque situation that Shahid Saless speaks about is certainly real and it becomes more personally painful when national representation in festivals is involved, raising anew for transnational filmmakers such vexing questions as: which »nation« they belong to and which »national cinema« they represent? In a dozen years since the 1973 military coup, Chilean exile filmmakers made over 250 feature films and documentaries - far more than were produced in Chile itself up to 1973 (Peña 1987: 137). Much of this work constituted a »Chilean cinema of resistance.« However, this classification excluded certain exile films, for example, Raúl Ruiz\'s works after Dialogue of Exiles (Dialogue d\'Éxilés, 1974), which had critiqued the exiles (Pick 1987: 41). The politics of exilic filmmakers, which is usually against their home government, often forces them into painful positions which highlights the liminality of their status as exiles, the problematic of their national identity as interstitial artists, the problem of their attempt at representing anybody else but themselves, and the minor status of their films. For example, the Turkish government revoked Yilmaz Güney\'s citizenship after he escaped to Europe to complete his film, Yol (The Way, 1982), which powerfully critiqued Turkish society under military rule. Thus, the most famous Turkish filmmaker and a very popular actor could not represent his own country abroad. Parviz Sayyad, too, could not enter in Cannes Film Festival as an Iranian product The Mission (1983), a sharply anti-Islamic Republic film made in the U.S. Unwillingly, he entered it as a U.S. production. By doing so, he was forced in effect to admit that he represented neither Iranian cinema nor Iranians. Unable to represent his own and unwilling to represent the host country, he was in essence made »homeless.« This kind of homelessness, of course, is not limited to Third World or non-Western films or to their makers in the West and it is not a new phenomenon as an increasing number of transnationally-financed films and filmmakers (including such »international« luminaries as Luis Buñuel) have found it difficult to land a home, so to speak. But theirs is a different story to be told elsewhere.

Exilic and diasporic filmmakers and videomakers and their distributors and exhibitors are working at the intersection and in the interstices of culture industries; transnational, national, federal, state, local, private, ethnic, commercial, and noncommercial funding agencies; and myriad institutions of transmission, reception, and consumption. All of them grapple with the exigencies and reverse magic of interstitiality, which sometimes turns the promised freedom and flexibility of this mode into constraint and limitation.

 

 

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