Intercultural translation and situational framing in contemporary African and Arabic feature films
Project director: Prof. Dr. Michaela Ott, Hochschule für Bildende Künste
Research assistance: Sophie Lembcke
(aesthetic theory, film studies, philosophy, translation practice)
The object of study in this subproject are African and Arab feature films from the 21st century and the degree to which they are oriented toward Western narrative traditions, particularly that of Hollywood dramaturgy, in order to translate these into their ‘own’ cultural context, or to reframe them for specific productions of meaning. Feature film productions from this cultural space often conspicuously borrow from western models, whether because they do not possess a film language of their own, or because they have to conform to western narrative conventions in order to have access to financial support and western production help. The local contents must then be translated into borrowed film forms, for instance genre formats. The epistemological advantage of reproducing one’s own questions in Western narrative models consists in the fact that it then becomes possible to compare and analyze the kind of cultural translation and situational framing involved. The working hypothesis is that the film processes of both translation and framing are different from one another/are different in each case. They amount to taking over dramaturgical models, to adapting them situationally and providing them with new contents, to appropriating motifs and protagonist profiles, to using representational techniques or allusions to culturally related or also non-western film languages, to embedding film citations and in case of doubt, even to using various layers of transmission and modes of expression that are already intercultural.
The main research questions are: What processes of appropriation, cultural translation, and situational framing can be observed in detail? Which of the elements that are taken over are combined with which Arab or African expressive traditions, and what kinds of meaning does this create? The subproject also aims to gain insights into contemporary intercultural translation processes as well as into specific processes of framing and meaning making by means of comparison and analysis, for instance in new female self-empowerment or new self-conceptions of the film-producing country.