Londres en colère. of ‘translated (wo)men’, cinema and the city of our (dis)content

Abstract

This essay reflects on how contemporary cinema represents the diverseness resulting from different mobilities, with the city becoming the fractured geography of narratives of displacement and melancholia. Being inhabited by polyphony, the city embodies dissonance and potential conflict, thus becoming a site of translation. Translation becomes a key strategy for deciphering and coming to terms with traditions, contradictions and fears resulting from ‘the flux and chaos of the postcolonial world’. Cinema compounds this multiplicity, which unfolds into a polyphony of refractions staging loss in the aftermath of social upheaval. Films such as London River (2009) and Breaking and Entering (2006) are exemplars of the aesthetic attempt to come to grips with the pluralities and partialities that inhabit the global city.