In this article, Henda Haouala explores how the Mediterranean is portrayed in cinema, highlighting its central role as a character in its own right. She analyses how this sea, at once mythical and political, embodies universal themes such as identity, solitude, conflict and reconciliation. Through emblematic films, from Cabiria (1914) to Le Grand Bleu (1988), Haouala shows how the Mediterranean becomes a space for reflection on human relationships and geopolitical tensions. She also underlines the paradoxical nature of this sea, both a source of beauty and danger, symbolising the social imbalances between North and South. Ultimately, Haouala’s article shows how cinema uses the Mediterranean to question time, space and human borders.
“The Mediterranean, this ‘filmed expanse’, is a place where time, space, fiction and imaginary intertwine.”
It is perhaps the sea that has most attracted the attention of filmmakers. The Mediterranean is not just a sea: it is life, it is a concept. Brought to the screen, it becomes a character, sometimes protagonist, sometimes antagonist, sometimes conflict, sometimes resolution. And, on other occasions, it is the dramatic climax. But one thing is certain: this maritime territory, known as “between the lands”, would probably be a hero. Behind the camera lens ¡, the Mediterranean appears revolutionary, political and captivating. It is a body, a place of belonging. It is dark shadow and resplendent light. It is a sea that is difficult to film, with waves capable of lifting mountains. It is a story. It is the film set of love stories, human relationships, faces, dramas that the earth carries but that the sea attracts to it like a magnet, without which the world itself would weigh more than ever.
I return initially to the first images recorded by the cinematograph, which amazed viewers. Crossing the Mediterranean was almost a necessity for the Lumière brothers. The other shore embodied mystery, the unknown, the unusual. I remember a short film shot in Algiers featuring a Muslim Bedouin pretending to pray. This film, folkloric and at the same time funny, already embodied the great power of cinema: staging. Other images came from Egypt, representing one of the wonders of the world: the pyramids. The single-focus lens of the Lumière cinematograph immortalised much more than a frame, much more than a film: a unique visual sensation. The cinematograph was a miracle, since it “returned” the world to those people who never left their land, and satisfied the desire to discover what was happening on the southern shore.
However, between the two shores, the Mediterranean embodies an indefinable time, that of here and elsewhere, of the North and the South. In Corps et cadre, Jean-Louis Comolli writes: “In the city as in childhood, cinema represented another time, a time outside of time. And when what is filmed is the Mediterranean, what happens to this time outside of time?”1
The Mediterranean constantly changes its frame. It is in the middle of action, reflection, interrogation. It is the centre of the political, cultural and economic arena. It paints a fragment of a unique world where the sea disregards all conventions, like a rebellious body filmed by the lens of a tormented filmmaker. It is also all these cities explained by cinema, cities “are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.”2 Isn’t that what we like to see and know?
The Mediterranean has always inspired unique cinematographic figures, exalting the power of the imaginary and myth. This is combined with a mythical and philosophical reflection.
What better than Cabiria (1914) by Giovanni Pastrone, filmed in Sicily, Carthage and Cirta and set during the Second Punic War (218-202 BC), to explain the political and economic challenge of the majestic Mediterranean? Cabiria follows a chapter in the history of Carthage, a Mediterranean metropolis par excellence, a great power of the cultural and economic humus of Antiquity.
Always victorious for some, the Mediterranean redistributes powers. It immerses us in a strange state: proud and serene, rebellious and nostalgic. We experience, at our expense, an unknown and yet familiar chapter of history, in a persistent intellectual weightlessness. The Mediterranean, this “filmed expanse”, is a place where time, space, fiction and imaginary intertwine. One thing is certain: land borders do not exist here, because cinema is their beautiful aesthetic escape.
In L’Avventura (1960), his first film shot in southern Italy, Michelangelo Antonioni said: “I felt bad if I had to shoot in the south, because the men who live there are too different from me, I can’t understand them… The characters in the film had to find in this uprooting, in this gap, an additional reason for despair. From this desert burned by the sun, from these volcanic ashes, I would make a kind of ideal solitude, we could say abstract, shaped by landscapes of rocks and sparkling waters in a cold and grey light.”3 This uprooting becomes yet another reason for the characters’ despair. From this sun-scorched desert, from these volcanic ashes, Antonioni constructs the ideal, almost abstract solitude. L’Avventura speaks of isolation in the face of the modern world, which reduces the individual to the state of object − isn’t this also the misfortune of Carthage?
Filmed in natural settings in the Aeolian Islands north of Sicily, L’Avventura has provided the premises for a starting shot of a new era: it deals with the post-industrial human condition and the search for identity. Despite being a difficult production, the film, in keeping with Antonioni’s filmography, is a psychological documentary, of a deeper realism than post-war Italian neorealism. Hence, the sea is shown as a dramatic concept that projects a psychological construction of the characters according to the circumstances, to what surrounds them. The Mediterranean opens onto an unlimited perspective that outlines the nature of the characters, especially that of Sandro played by Gabriele Ferzetti, Claudia (Monica Vitti) and Anna (Lea Massari) where this sea becomes the mirror of their interiority. L’Avventura speaks of solitude, of disillusionment, of indifference, of a real disappearance. “Thus, the comings and goings of the characters across the island adjust to the movements of the waves, tirelessly returning to the assault of the bare rocks; the same vain activity against the same emptiness; the same rise, however, of a kind of restlessness through the storm that is born, the tempest that swells, through the awareness that reaches the characters of a real, inexplicable disappearance.”4 The waves, like the characters, tirelessly return to the assault of an insensitive void.
This theme of solitude in the face of the immensity of space, the description of the mystery and feelings expressed by time and space (the sea) returns twenty-eight years later in Le Grand Bleu (1988) by Luc Besson. Shot in Greece, this unclassifiable film is a portrait of the sea as a divine dimension, a story that explores human complexity through the sea. Jean-Marc Barr plays Jacques Mayol, the “dolphin man” an introverted, solitary freediver who merges with the sea; Jean Reno, Enzo, is his enemy brother, and Rosanna Arquette plays Johanna. The aesthetic choice of the scope format sublimates the Mediterranean. The sea structures the tripartite bond between Jacques, Enzo and Johanna in which Jacques embodies the soul of the great blue. The story is summed up as a tale of a great friendship united by the depths. The film depicts a main character (Jacques Mayol) sculpted with aquatic characteristics: deep, silent, complex and unpredictable. Le Grand Bleu is a fiction that has the character of a documentary film that manages to make the underwater portrait of the Mediterranean in all its splendour an ode to marine beauty, sublimated by the photography of Carlo Varini and the music of Éric Serra. Le Grand Bleu can be seen today as an environmental film, about marine fauna, marine animals and the protection of the oceans. Thirty years later, Lefteris Charitos pays tribute to it in the documentary Dolphin Man, inspired by Mayol’s autobiographical book Homo Delphinus published in 1983. Dolphin Man begins magnificently with an aerial view of the Mediterranean with Jean Marc Barr’s voiceover saying: “The sea is at the origin of life, contemplating it we have a feeling of harmony, it awakens in us the sense of the divine. Imagine now that you are a dolphin, free to live at the mercy of your needs, there is a dolphin that sleeps in each of us.”
The success of Le Grand Bleu deeply marked Jacques Mayol, who explained that he left the Big Blue “like an old lover”. He committed suicide in 2001 at the age of 74. Jacques Chirac paid tribute to him: “Thanks to his exceptional talent, Jacques Mayol had been able to successfully express the aspiration of an entire generation for a world that gives full place to nature, to beauty, to harmony… Jacques Mayol will always be for the Grand Bleu generation the symbol of a search for the absolute, for balance, for eternity.”
In another tone, La Saison des hommes (2000) by Moufida Tlatli, filmed in Djerba, also captures a solitude devoted to the sea. Through a feminine gaze, the Tunisian director speaks of patriarchal seclusion. Aicha, played by Rabiaa Ben Abdallah, wants to break with the traditions that limit her freedom as well as that of her daughters and to reunite with her husband, absent for eleven months out of twelve. In this film, the island of Djerba embodies the refuge, submission, the place of reunion, the destiny of the female characters. The sea is their escape, their only place of freedom. They bathe in it with modesty, laugh, sing. But this sea also symbolises the economic, cultural and psychological difference between men and women, between the North of the country (Tunis) and the South.
This sense of belonging to the Mediterranean is unique. This sea perfectly embodies multiculturalism, the common story of peoples, but it also reveals the imbalances of power that make the South more fragile, especially in recent years with the migrations filmed and explained by many filmmakers, whether in fiction or documentary films.
Io capitano (2023) by Matteo Garrone chooses the immigrants’ point of view and tells another story of the South very different from the one told by Westerners. It tells of the dangerous journey of Seydou, played by Seydou Sarr, and Moussa, played by Mustapha Fall, from the South to the North. The film describes the sea as a threat, a danger, an open-air cemetery: “The Mediterranean is, from now on, the place of tribute to those who have lost their lives there; let an arch of celebration rise at the foot of its shores, open to the winds and open to the tiniest lights; let it spell out all the letters of the word WELCOME, in all languages, in all songs; and let this word uniformly constitute the ethics of the live-world.”5 To dominate this sea, Seydou must become a captain, he who knows neither how to swim nor how to crew a ship. He draws immense courage from the Mediterranean. The film outlines the injustice between South and North, between blacks and whites; the sea, during the film, becomes the very image of this injustice. Io capitano shows that the Mediterranean could be cruel or benevolent, rebellious or resigned, depending on the shore.
The Mediterranean Sea would ultimately be timeless. It is finally outside of time, in all its paradox and immateriality, it is irreversible, it is unique and multiple, it is memory, it is past, it is victory, it is failure. It acts as a narrative reserve, it can be desire, threat or refuge. It can be a shadow coming from death and/or life against the very essence of cinema which projects, by definition, what is alive. Writing about the Mediterranean in cinema is a difficult exercise because this sea does not obey either commentary or criticism qu’à ce qui en serait. Filming the Mediterranean is worth a thousand words, it is designated and interrogated as a separate universe. When filming the Mediterranean, it resists words because it is sublimated by the aesthetic discourse of image and sound. Jean Louis Comolli writes about this: “A landscape, a tree, a forest, a wild boar… the visible world, in a few words, poses a challenge to language, both oral and written, that it is perhaps not pointless to want to highlight. It is precisely because they are absolutely indescribable, because they are not easy to put into words, that images are of interest.”6
1 J.-L. Comolli, Corps et cadre. Cinéma, éthique, politique, Lagrasse, Editions Verdier, 2012, p. 177.
2 I. Calvino, Invisible Cities, Orlando, Harcourt Brace & Company, p. 44.-
3 P. Leprohon, Antonioni, Cinéma d’aujourd’hui, Seghers, p. 61.
4 Ibid., p. 76.
5 P. Chamoiseau, Frères migrants, Paris, Seuil, 2017, p. 13.
6 Op. cit., p. 552.