Session 5(b): Film, Music and Interculturalism

Session 5B: Film, Music and Interculturalism
Chair: Kathy Batha

In-between Cultures: “Calendar”
Sylvie Hermans
Brussels, Belgium

Talking of interculturalism, Josette Féral, in her article “Pluralism in Art or Interculturalism?” wrote that interculturalism brings the idea of a mutual friction of cultures, an interaction, an exchange between cultures. In doing so, she underlines the fact that more than the co-presence of different cultures – what is nothing more than multiculturalism or cultural pluralism- the notion of interculturalism enhances the fusion between different cultures on the mode of a dialogue. So talking of interculturalism and cultural pluralism, she writes the former presupposes the latter with the added awareness that different cultures never sit quietly side by side, they always intermingle or fight among each other.
Considering this aspect, through the analysis of “Calendar” by Canadian director Atom Egoyan, I will try to push further this conception of interculturalism. Indeed, if the film transposes Canadian and Armenian cultures telling the story of a Canadian photographer who is sent to Armenia to take twelve stills for a calendar, I will try to show that it is not only through the simple representation of each culture but also through the dialogue between the different elements used in the film such as language, music and more specifically video and photographic images that Atom Egoyan really translates the relationship between those different cultures.
In other words, I will try to show that interculturalism also concerns relations between different arts at work in the film itself. Culture in this acceptation is no more only a geographical notion, nor a political or a historical one. It is also an artistic, an aesthetic notion. That being the case, I will show how those relations help in this case precisely to reproduce and to translate the relations between several cultures : the Armenian and the Canadian one.
In order to do that, I will base my study on a formalist definition of film. And more particularly on notions such as syncretism and inner speech developed by Boris Eikhenbaum where film is a composite art in which several forms of creation are at work, and in which inner speech is a kind of cement, a king of discursive glue which permits the constitution of a narrative discourse comprehensible for the spectator.
Moreover, using a phenomenological approach, I will confront the different elements –film, video and photography- at work in the film. Starting from a noematical definition of each layer I will analyse from a phenomenological and a spectatorial point of view the consequences of their integration inside the film.
I will then demonstrate how this integration participates to the (re)creation of a space and most of all of a time forever lost for the hero and in doing so, I will show how the use of different layers translates the relationship between the different cultures present in “Calendar”.

L’Auberge Espagnole: Interculturalism in the European Melting Pot
Olivier Beguin
Milan, Italy

There are many films, frequently comedies, that are based on cultural encounters bringing out the national dimension of our identities. These films prove that it is easier to speak a foreign language perfectly, without any accent, than to « speak » another culture without accent. When cultures interact one with another, there is a kind of reaction made of prejudices, stereotypes, clichés, ethnocentrism.
I will just mention a couple of two recent and successful comedies based on cultural encounters that I found interesting.
The film Bend it like Beckham : deals with the way Western and Eastern (Indian) cultures see the role of the woman in the family and in society. Football-mad Jess is 18, smart, beautiful and can “bend” a ball better than any boy she knows. She’s set her heart on playing for a top women’s football team, but there’s one problem : her strict parents want her to settle down with a nice Indian boy and learn how to cook ! « Who wants to cook alu gobi when you can bend a ball like Beckham ?
In The Wedding Banquet (Ang Lee), a rich and young homosexual Chinese immigrant to New York is compelled to hide his relationship with a young white man and to organize a sham wedding with a girl to satisfy his Chinese family. It will end with a strange ménage à trois, bringing up a child conceived by accident on the wedding night.
It was during an oral exam at my University that I heard about the film l’Auberge Espagnole from one of my Erasmus students who was very enthusiastic about the film since it apparently resembled the very important experience she was living. As some spectator have said on the Net « I loved this movie. Anybody who has had international room-mates, or who has traveled abroad for studies will see his/her own story on the screen!!!”. The film seemed advisable to anyone looking back or forward to the experience of leaving home for the first time.
My interest in this comedy was inspired.

The Elusive Truth: Intercultural Music Exchange in ‘Addictive’
Tamara Roberts
Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

In the spring of 2002, black U.S. American singer Truth Hurts began her climb up popular music charts with “Addictive,” produced by DJ Quik. The track features vocals and accompaniment sampled from “Thoda Resham Lagta Hai,” written by Bappi Lahiri and sung by Lata Mangeshkar in the 1981 Hindi film Jyoti. The unauthorized, un-credited and unremunerated sampling of Lahiri’s song has sparked a court battle in which he seeks compensation from Truth Hurts’s record label, Dr. Dre’s Aftermath, and its parent company, Interscope. I do not wish to discuss what is “right” or “wrong” about the musical exchange, but rather to show that it has produced both negative and positive outcomes. I will first discuss what political, ideological and economic work the trial – popularly constructed as a “music war” – is doing by examining the language key players employ, how we can hear imperialism within “Addictive,” and by looking at the song in the context of its accompanying video. Then, I will show what issues of personal musical exchange this metonymic representation of “war” eclipses – that all involved parties have welcomed the exchange and that it has created a point of connection for listeners in the U.S., India and elsewhere. But first, I offer a bit more on the metonymy of war.