LAUSR

With Lampedusa in Winter ( A / CH / I 2015) and Fire at Sea (I/F 2016), the Italian and Austrian filmmakers Jakob Brossmann and Gianfranco Rosi more or less simultaneously pursue similar projects: for their cinematic long term observations, both films center on the small Sicilian island of Lampedusa, a focus of mass media interest due to current migration processes and the humanitarian crisis in the Mediterranean Both rely on visual traditions of (neo-)realistic cinema in order to avoid documentary cinema's frequently didactic approach Instead of techniques such as voice-over narration and interviews (expository mode), Brossmann and Rossi most notably employ indirect address and contrastive mon tage, thus enabling the audience to experience ’authentic‘ impressions of everyday life on the island (observational mode). At the same time, however, the films themselves are inevitably part of the hype surrounding Lampedusa as the very symbol of the humanitarian crisis in the Mediterranean The article analyses how, by means of different intermedial references, the two films situate Lampedusa between everyday life and emergency, between cinematic traditions of the Italian post-war era and their anthropological and metamedial transgression