Abstract

This article aims to outline the three main threads that have marked Italian cinema in the adoption, comparison and modelling of migratory images and imageries, namely: a formed and forming gaze that transforms the multitude of life forms on the move into a horde of indistinct bodies; a humanitarian moral and a look that risk placing the diasporic subjects in an irredeemable position of subalternity and the construction and valorisation of migrant identities. Through these three threads, it is possible to reconstruct the visual history of migratory phenomena – both outwards to the Americas and inwards from North Africa –and highlight two opposing outcomes: on the one hand, the strategies of homologating otherness, posed alternately as a threat to social stability or within a condition of suffering; on the other hand, the formative processes that help to re-establish the migrant’s positive condition as the bearer of elements of creolisation, the promoter of discursive negotiation and translation of identities.