Transnational Marseille: film space and layers of history in <i>Transit</i>

This article takes a spatial approach to the study of transnational cinemas. It argues that real places speak to spectators through a film’s mise en scène. It focuses on the film Transit (Christian Petzold, 2018) and frames it within the history of representations of the city of Marseille in the cinema, particularly contemporary cinema. It starts from the historical coincidence of the presence in Marseille of Anna Seghers, the author of the novel on which the film is based (Transit, 1944), and Siegfried Kracauer, the theorist of cinematic realism. Next, the article explores the realist underpinnings of Petzold’s films and their pervasive use of location shooting. Through its mise en scène, its ostensible location shooting and its commitment to a particular realist aesthetic that collapses past and present and constantly evokes the city’s history, Transit opens the door for a panoply of layers from the city’s transnational history. Because of its recent history and its long tradition as a city of transit and métisage, the transnational is enmeshed with the local in Marseille. As a result, the Mediterranean city becomes in the film an instance of ‘actually existing cosmopolitanism’ and ‘messy cosmopolitanism´.