The mosaic film: nomadic style and politics in transnational media culture

In contemporary media culture the formal, narrative, and stylistic structures that are most pervasive can be described as an aesthetics of the mosaic. Multiple main characters, multiple interwoven story-lines, multiple or fragmented spaces, different timezones or paces seem to be specifically apt for engaging with the migratory nature and politics of our times. In this essay, I will look at Babel (USA: González Iñárritu, 2006), WWW. What a Wonderful World (Morocco/Germany/France: Bensaidi, 2006), and
Kicks (Netherlands: Ter Heerdt, 2007). In relation to these films I will discuss the ways in which an aesthetics of the mosaic is related to migratory movements and contemporary globalized media culture.1 This aesthetics, I will argue, is closely related to transnationalism, which can assume different forms. Its style and politics can be characterized as nomadic, a concept that should be understood in its Nietzschean implications of mixing heterogeneous codes and referring to the Outside world. By means of a nomadic style and nomadic politics these films assert a Deleuzian "becoming-minoritarian" as everyone’s affair.