Ernst Lubitsch. Lecture by Ewa Mazierska about CARMEN

LECTURE & FILM: ERNST LUBITSCH

“Gentle Orientalism in CARMEN”
Lecture by Ewa Mazierska, Lancashire

18.5.2017 at the DFF cinema.

CARMEN is one of the first collaborations between Ernst Lubitsch and Pola Negri. In many ways this is a classic film of the duo, partly because of the fact that the Polish actress plays an oriental character and an outsider (in this case a gypsy) who destroys the life of an honest man through her seduction and sexual attraction. In her lecture Mazierska focuses on Orientalism as a strategy of avoiding cultural and national anchoring for Lubitsch and Negri. This is a representation of foreign characters and foreign places that seem both exotic and familiar. This “gentle Orientalism” became Negri’s speciality in Hollywood.

Ewa Mazierska is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Central Lancashire. She has published over twenty monographs and edited numerous anthologies on film and popular music, including “Relocating Popular Music” (2015), with Georgina Gregory, “From Self-Fulfillment to Survival of the Fittest: Work in European Cinema from the 1960s to the Present” (2015), “Falco and Beyond: Neo Nothing Post of All” (2014) and “European Cinema and Intertextuality: History, Memory, Politics” (2011), as well as monographs on Roman Polanski, Jerzy Skolimowski and Nanni Moretti. She is also editor-in-chief of the Routledge Journal, “Studies in Eastern European Cinema”.

Film: CARMEN
Germany 1918
80 mins.

http://ernst-lubitsch.de