On Tue, 6 Jun 1995, Birgit Kellner wrote: > I admit that conditions of employment did not occur to me, when I > asked "why should actors and their characters be of the same race", because > my question was directed at the output (films as wee see them) rather than > at the input (films how they are made, or how they should be made). Can the two moments be divorced from one another? Can one film text be read in a vacuum, only diegetically? Most importantly, don't you think that what we see in films depends largely on the extradiegetic information we bring to those film texts as readers? And "we" certainly do not all see the same things in films. > Gloria Monti wrote about "misrepresentations". During the last > weeks, I happened to watch two films, both of which involve > "misrepresentations" in some sense, both of which, coincidentally, were > directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and both involve "misrepresentations" within > the realm of white characters > > But where is the "mis" in the misrepresentation? Hitchcock, an > Anglo-American, depicts Germans as he sees or hears them. This doesn't mean > that he has to represent them as they hear or see themselves. Their > foreignness is adequately dealt with (they are distinctly non-American), and > subtle distinctions within the realm of that foreigness are irrelevant, > anyway. The "misrepresentation" shows a certain misinformedness about the > intricacies of German dialects or idioms, which makes infantile know-alls > like myself raise their voices, but that's about all there is to it. In > other words: The "verisimilitude" doesn't matter in this case. Where does it? Let me go back to something you said earlier and which is at the forefront of my concerns with filmic misrepresentations: historical perspective. When I think, discuss, write, teach misrepresentation, I am not addressing European-American characters, unless they are misreprenting minority cultures. In other words, "misrepresentations within the realm of white characters" is not the point here--for me, at least. I am not establishing a hierarchy where some misrepresentations are better than others, I am just invoking history to point out that certain misrepresentations have hurt certain communities--on and off screen. For example, to hear an adult African-American male being addressed as "boy" on the screen has repercussions that the oddly out of place, idiomatically curious, and hilariously mis-accentuated German spoken in *Torn Curtain* does not. It does not for the performers themselves and for the German people. It is Ingrid Bergman--just tp cite one example, who asks: "Who's the boy playing piano?" in Casablanca, referring to Dooley Wilson (I am grateful to Stam&Shohat for this reference). To depict people as one sees or hears them can be extremely dangerous for those people. And I am *not* referring to Hitchcock & Germans. Gloria ---- To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]