Abstract
I have chosen Arizona Dream as an example in order to analyze not only a European director's vision of the U.S., but rather his take on the act ofrepresenting it. Although Kusturica is clearly one of most important film-makers working today, the film has received little critical attention and is almost unknown in the U.S. where it was released in only a handful of theaters and had "a fairly cold reception." 1 What differentiates Arizona Dream from other recent European films that deal with the U.S.-Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America (1984), Wim Wenders's Paris, Texas (1984), Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark (2000)-is that it is Kusturica's only film to do so and its very existence is a matter of contingency, directly linked, as it is, to the director's personal experience. Kusturica would never have made it had he not taught at Columbia where he met David Atkins, a student, who provided him with the basic storyline. 2 The argument I will be defending and that Arizona Dream will serve to illustrate is that, unlike Hollywood films which have often dealt with foreign countries while ignoring their cultural specificities, 3 a film like Arizona Dream does, in effect, deliver a political and cultural analysis of the U.S., but it does so all the while underlining its own un-Americanness through the very elements meant to represent Americanness, thus undermining its own authority to deliver such an analysis. The film's title points at its incapacity to capture the wholeness of the American dream by limiting it to the state where most of the story takes place, emphasizing, then, the narrowness of its scope, or rather, the personal dimension of a film dedicated to the memory of Kusturica's father [0:20]-this could be opposed to the sheer scope of Underground (1995), which starts during World War II and ends during the Balkan wars (1941-1992). Arizona Dream is by no means an attempt to appropriate American culture, and even less to make an American film, and the U.S. it represents is clearly a construct based on an American storyline and a European's vision of the U.S. I will examine three (De)constructing "America": the Case of Emir Kusturica's Arizona Dream (1993) aspects that will be shown to represent America in its diversity-geography, race and cinema-in order to examine how the film constructs an "America" it analyzes and criticizes while simultaneously deconstructing its very artificiality as a cultural and aesthetic construct, using strategies which are characteristic of postmodern aesthetics.
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