Description
Transnational Encounters with Cultural Difference in Exotic CinemaThis presentation examines why exoticism is central to thinking about the global dynamics of world cinema. It addresses two key questions: First, what role does exoticism play in the transnational reception of world cinema and, second, how does the performance of exoticism in contemporary world cinema challenge and decentre dominant western values and systems of knowledge?
Offering a theoretical discussion of exoticism, I propose that the exotic gaze is a particular mode of aesthetic perception that is simultaneously anchored in the filmic text and elicited in the spectator in the process of transnational reception. Exoticism, like world cinema and its transnational circulation, is premised on mobility. When exotic world cinema crosses cultural boundaries, hermeneutic obstacles arise that make it difficult for cultural outsiders to fully understand ostensibly obscure films rooted in other cultural contexts. By turning cultural difference into spectacle, relying on the visual allure of sumptuous images and an aesthetics of sensuous indulgence, exotic world cinema compensates for the deficit of culturally specific knowledge that occurs when films are watched across borders.
Exoticism’s emphatic visuality and the visual pleasure it affords are regularly censured because it is regarded as something of an opiate that anaesthetises the audiences’ critical faculties, thereby, precluding intellectual interrogation and critical distance. Certainly, old Eurocentric exotic films use spectacle as a mechanism of concealment, beguiling the spectator to ignore the social injustice, domination and exploitation that structure the west’s relationship with its Others. But the new decentred exoticism of world cinema, inverts this strategy by deploying exoticism’s inherent seductiveness to bring social injustices and new socio-political agendas to public attention.
Period | 22 May 2024 |
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Held at | Janovics Center for Screen and Performing Arts Studies at Babes-Bolai University , Romania |
Degree of Recognition | International |
Keywords
- exotic cinema
- transnational film
- exoticism
- exotic gaze
- cultural difference
- Otherness
Documents & Links
Related content
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Research output
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https://www.exotic-cinema.org/: Encounters with Cultural Difference in Contemporary Transnational Cinema
Research output: Other contribution
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"The past is a foreign country": exoticism and nostalgia in contemporary transnational cinema
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter
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Performing Exoticism and the Transnational Reception of World Cinema
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
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Exotic Cinema: Encounters with Cultural Difference in Contemporary Transnational Film
Research output: Book/Report › Book