The Last Resort “of an Eastern European Refugee by Mistake”: The Cinema Under the Laws of Hospitality and Representation

Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius

Abstract

By taking as the starting point the deconstruction of Jacques Derrida’s conditions of hospitality and its „troubling analogy” to hostility (wordplay: hospitality vs. hostility), Murawska-Muthesius argues that „cinema with an accent”, produced by émigré directors helps to expand inquiry into the ontology of hospitality, revealing its connections with representation. In her article, Murawska-Muthesius proposes to expand Derrida’s reflections on hospitality beyond the tragedy of refugees fleeing persecution and hunger and to apply them to ordinary East European „visitors”, motivated by emotional, rather than socio-political needs. Paweł Pawlikowski’s film Last Resort is seen as a resolute entry into the battlefield of representation, exposing the universal regimes of „worlding” and „gendering” of the female visitor/immi- grant from Eastern Europe, arriving at the threshold of a Better World. The „otherness” of the heroine lies in her Russianness, which implies that the hospitality pacts applicable to the woman mean submission to the rules of representation determined by the host, that is her consent to play the (bogus) role of an asylum seeker and her subsequent surrender to the process of sexualization in the refugee camp.