The Gate of Tears. Film topographies of Ellis Island

Abstract

Georges Perec perceives the Island of Immigrants at the banks of the Hudson River as a non- -place, a place which does not exist. It is a space which can be associated with many different meanings, referring to memory, identity, hope and despair of millions of people who came through it in order to find themselves in the dream world. The experiences of passengers who after travelling by ship were cast into the unknown world of immigrants from all over the world are still used as themes of films whose action partly takes place on the Oyster Island. The paper is an attempt at ordering the specific topography of the island and confronting it with film images. On the one hand, the island is identified with a diversity of people, languages and cultures. On the other hand, it is a locality resulting from the size and location of the island in relation to the mainland (Manhattan), and builds a kind of temporary locality of people from different parts of the world. Reference to Perec and Bober’s film Recit d’Ellis Island constructs a kind of theoretical framework for the proposed considerations of the topography of the island, being supplemented by the film Ellis by JR, as well as feature films (The Godfather 2 by Francis Ford Coppola, Brooklyn by John Crowley, and other).