Configuring Alterity: Towards a Third Cinema Approach in Gianni Amelio's Lamerica

In Lamerica (1994) Gianni Amelio deals with one of the more problematized realities of social change in late twentieth-century Italy: immigration. His cinema of traumatic realism draws on historic and cinematic antecedents, the heritage of Italian neorealism, and on notions associated with Third Cinema conceptualizations. The migratory journey both as narrative construct and historical necessity is a structural framework central to Amelio's concerns. His 'heritage and renewal' ethic allows him to explore the fragility of identity in an ever-changing world, and the temporal and spatial parallels in Lamerica - where the Italy of 1945 doubles as and mirrors the Albania of 1991 - facilitating an exploration of notions of alterity and the altrove. His is a post-modern cinema of restraint articulated in a 'prosa cinematografica' resonating through the tropes of Third Cinema. It is a socially committed (re)visionary approach to the crisis and rebirth implicated in immigration and identity.