Abstracts
YORGOS KALOGERAS
Are Armenians white: Reading Elia Kazan's America, America
After a series of thesis films in the late forties and early fifties, On the Waterfront (1954) constituted for Elia Kazan (1909-2003) the beginning of his venture into the dangerous territory of self-reflection. This period culminated in America, America (1963), an allegedly autobiographical film where Kazan re-invented himself as a writer/director and as an ethnic. The film recreates immigration to the New World as a narrative of displacement that gives rise to its protagonist to an endless desire to return to lost origins. Consequently, America, America appears to be a movie responding to the local socio-political context of the 1960s and the Civil Rights Movement. However, the film raises a number of ethical and aesthetic issues which emanate from the director's personal appearance in the filmic narrative. Such an intervention raises the question of whether this is intended to be a documentary or a work of fiction. If the former is the case, then the protagonist's (Stavros's) identity formation is made to bear direct relevance to the director's. Thus, like Stavros, the director appears to work his way through ethnic and political identities and identifications and inscribe himself as a confirmed postethnic/white in opposition to the identification politics of the Civil Rights movement. But the distance from civil strife that postethnicity predicates parallels another story in the movie; it is the story of the construction of an Anatolian identity which militates against twentieth century nationalisms and which argues for an ethos of socio-political acquiescence, but also of mistrusting authority. Paradoxically, however, this Anatolian identity is conceived by excluding neither its Turkish nor its Hellenic components but its Armenian one. In the end, America, America is a politically conservative movie, but it is also a movie about the socio-political discomfort of the Americanized second generation ethnics.
