Two questions demand attention: Why Feuillade? and, Why Hong Kong? In a film about the status of France's national cinema in the 1990s, why make Feuillade's crime serial stand for the quintessential French film of the silent era? And why look to Hong Kong to renew French cinema? Critics have by and large overlooked the first question, and responded to the second by focusing on the figure of Maggie Cheung, analyzing her as the fetishised, oriental other or as a symbol of France's failed encounter with the world. classic, turns into a complex reflection on the origins of French cinema and its future in an increasingly globalized world. What began as a fairly straightforward project, the revival of a silent-era. Matters are complicated, however, when the director, René Vidal (Jean Pierre Léaud), decides to cast a Hong Kong actress, Maggie Cheung, in the role of France's great silent star, Musidora. Irma Vep (Olivier Assayas, 1996) centres on an aging French director's remake of Louis Feuillade's crime serial Les Vampires (1915). His Taste of Cherry (1997), however, does draw on some of the same cultural elements that were borrowed and distorted by the European intellectuals who promulgated the Orientalist and postcolonial world-view Kiarostami, on the other hand, a “real Oriental,” not only rejected the Orientalist paradigm (while simultaneously drawing on its original language and symbols), but also refused to respond to it in the way that other Muslim artists, particularly in the post-Iranian Revolution period, consciously attempted to build a nonwestern cinematic art. Powell appears to have accepted uncritically the notion that the East could be characterized by exotic and sensuous otherness, an attitude that is revealed in his approach to The Thief of Bagdad (1940) as escapist fantasy and Black Narcissus (1946) as a farewell to India. With respect to Orientalism - the philosophical and cultural construction that the West overlaid on the East - Powell and Kiarostami can be profitably compared. They also often comment on the art of film-making and the subject position of the audience as voyeur within their films.
British director Michael Powell (1905-1990) and Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami (1940-) share several technical similarities in their filmmaking, most notably an interest in the visual language of still photography, painting and other visual arts, specifically light and colour.
0 kommentar(er)
