Liminality, temporality and marginalization in Giorgio Mangiamele’s migrant movies

Giorgio Mangiamele, born in Catania in 1926, migrated to Melbourne in 1952 and constitutes a rare example of CALD involvement in the early development of Australian cinema in the post-war period. His feature film Clay (1965) was the first Australian film to be invited to enter the competition at the Cannes Film Festival. However, despite his significant contribution to the emerging Australian cinematic culture, particularly to the development of ‘art’ cinema, he has received relatively little recognition. Over a thirty year period Mangiamele made fourteen films as director or director/producer. His first productions—The Contract (1953), Unwanted (ca 1957), The Brothers (1958), The Spag (1961) and Ninety-Nine Per cent (1963)—present themes related to the Italian migration experience in Australia in the 1950s depicted in all its immediacy and contemporaneity as an integral feature of the existentialist condition of our times. The only Australian director consistently to deal with such themes at the time, Mangiamele focuses on the dislocation, the alienation, the loneliness and the recall of the home country that constitutes the experience of his emblematic characters struggling to make sense of a society that is in many ways unaccepting. This paper proposes to apply the concepts of liminality and temporality elabourated by Hamid Nacify (2001) to the analysis of the themes related to the Italian Australian diaspora in the films of Giorgio Mangiamele.