Abstrakt: | 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). |