Stereotype and Multiplicity

Think of organizing your DVD collection. What would be the most easy/quick categorization? Most likely, sorting them alphabetically! Taking their genre or their directors or their stars or their producers etc. into account, as a criterion, surely gets the decision-process longer and harder as one encounters with intersections and creates a need of sub-categories to answer the question ″where to put that one?″. And think of taking the criterion as ″nation″, then one should answer the question: Nation of what/whom? Nation of the director? Nation of the leading actor? Nation of the production company? Related nation of the setting? Related nation of the story?... Probably today, this kind of a categorization gets inextricable with the existent films... But, what about having a section of European Cinema?

In his writing, Thomas Elsaesser shows the difficulties of moving from national cinema to European Cinema which is also hard to define by asserting that today either considering European Cinema as a gathering of national cinemas or regarding directors standing for the nation lacks to explain what it actually is. He explains the reason behind this lack by pointing the change of the meaning ″national″, since in the 1990s West European countries become multi-cultural, their population become transnational and their politics post-national. (p.66) He suggests there is still apperance of ″national cinema″ in films’ signifiers of national, regional or local specificities in Europe as a cultural protection in the competition with Hollywood but this ″national cinema″ is neither essentialist nor constructivist, but it is something joined to the other categories of a movie which uncertainly floats over a film’s ″identity″ (p.70-71).

Reading Elsaesser reminded me Elif Şafak’s talk in TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference in which she tells that when her first novel written in English came out in USA, a literary critic told her that he liked the book but dissapointed in the issue that there were lot of international characters but only one Turkish character and who is a man. She explains that as the novel takes place in a university in Boston it is normal to have international characters in it more than Turkish ones, but she adds that the actual reason of this dissapointment was the expectation to see the manifestation of her identity as a Turkish woman in her novel. She goes on saying that ″We often talk about how stories change the world but we should also see how the world of identity politics affects the way stories are being circulated, read and reviewed. ...Writers are not seen as creative individuals on their own. But as the representatives of their respective cultures. ...When identity politics tries to put labels on us, it is our freedom of imagination that is in danger.″ Moreover, she offers that in creative writing courses today, the very first thing taught to students is writing what they know, she opposes this idea by offering that ″Imaginative literature is not necessarily about writing who we are or what we know or what our identity is about... We should get out of our cultural ghetto and go visit the next one and the next.″

Both literature (a book) and cinema (a film) are the consequences of the creative process of the writer’s or the director’s, the senarist’s who has roots in specific nations and cultures. And for sure it is expected to find echoes and reflections from their nations and cultures in their works. But it is not a ″must″ that films produced or novels written in specific countries obliged to reflect stereotypes of nations, identities and cultures. In artistic process people may find inspiration in their own culture or in other cultures, they may blend and represent both of them etc. Changing attitude, looking from different perspectives, discovering, not sticking to limitations, mixing supports the manifold of art which blossoms in multitude and multiplicity.

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Links:

http://www.ted.com/talks/elif_shafak_the_politics_of_fiction.html