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Other Cultures, Other Worlds
| Article
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17206 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1990 |
2,366 Words |
| Author
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Paul Coates
Paul Coates is professor of literature at McGill University,
Montreal, Canada. |
In recent years several much acclaimed Western films have not only been set in Third World countries but have examined their politics. Such are the projects of Under Fire, The Year of Living Dangerously, and The Killing Fields. In each case we are invited to identify with a Western journalist as he penetrates an alien terrain (whose language he never speaks). It is clear why: The journalist's professional mobility means that in identifying with him the viewer is able to leave the country in question, at the film's end, with the same lack of compunction most journalists display when their story has run its course and their noses - or new assignments - lead them elsewhere. The implication is that Western involvement with Third World countries is only passing phase: When the Westerner leaves the country the people will be able to proceed with their business as independently as before penetration or colonization.
The Third World setting is an exotic backdrop, often selected because labor costs are lower than in the First World and workers far less unionized. Directors such as Werner Herzog or Peter Weir may be drawn to the Third World by its "otherness," but its registration on film translates it into a metaphor for the filmmaker's mystical alienation from his own society. The otherness becomes an enigma we are under no obligation to comprehend. We are free simply to look: The scopic drive receives its fullest gratification through contemplation of the bright colors, the strange vegetation, and, yes, the noble savages. In both The Killing Fields and The Year of Living Dangerously (only for a year is the Nietzschean injunction obeyed) the Western journalist's Asian guide is sentimentally idealized. Their pairing involves a splitting: The guide is guardian of the humane impulses the journalist's trade often for bids him to follow -
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