Carmen Returns Home? An Oriental Symbol in the West, an Western Symbol in the East

Carmen is probably the one who has been resurrected more than any other female characters in world art and literature. In the one hundred and seventy years since her first appearance in a novella by Prosper Merimee, but the success of Bizet's 1847 opera has overshadowed the original novel, and has become the original version of most later Carmen adaptations. In the endless adaptations, Carmen has kept appearing almost every year in a new adaptation, in most of which suffering the loss of her richness of her character in the original novella. However, at each resurrection, several of her features remained essentially unchanged: She is a beautiful young woman but taking a light stance on morality; She belonged to a marginalized group (in terms of gender, race, class, origin or lifestyle); She always brings bad luck to men; She has to die when still young; She remains a symbol of the exotic “Eastern” culture. In the 1983 famous film Carmen by the Spanish director Carlos Saura, the heroine retains all the characteristics of Carmen, but she is completely Spanish. In "Prenom Carmen," the award-winning film by the French director Jean-Luc Godard that same year, Carmen became French. In 1997 a four-hour New Year's concert by the Berlin symphony orchestra, titled "A Salute to Carmen" is actually a salute to Spain: Carmen became a symbol of Spain's unique charm. If we go back to the text of Merimee's novella for a close reading, we will find that Carmen there is a carefully woven myth. Behind it there is a complicated cultural attitude on the part of mainstream European culture of both fear and attraction when facing an oriental “internal other”. Paradoxically, starting from the second half of the 20th century, Carmen has kept appearing in the art of Asian countries, she now representing a set of Western ideas. In Europe in the 19th century, Carmen’s "Oriental" sexual freedom was a major challenge to mainstream culture and politics. In the contemporary Asia, Carmen represents a completely different meaning: she has become a symbol of western cultural concepts. All kinds of "Carmen films" produced in Asia reflects the shifting judgment of Eastern culture on this value. Carmen made his eastern debut in 1951 with the Japanese director Keisuke Kinoshita's film, Carmen Goes Home. The next year, Kinoshita made a satirical comedy Carmen. The 1986 debut of Hong Kong director Wang Jiawei's Carmen in Mong kok. A Promise directed by Kim yu-jin of South Korea, was also a variation of Carmen. Carmen Sunset apppeared in 1993 was directed by Zhang Jian in Hong Kong. In 2005, Chinese novelist Li Feng's novella Carmen was a much more complicated rewriting of the Carmen story now set in Mainland China. It can be seen that Asian society tries to refuse the Western values embodied in the image of Carmen, yet the foreign elements in the “Carmen spirit” can hardly be totally excluded in the process of modernization in those countries.
Land: 
China
Thema und Achsen: 
Semiotik und Soziologie
Transpositionen und transmediale Phänomene
Institution: 
Institute of Semiotics & Media Studies, University of Sichuan
Mail: 
luzhenglan@scu.edu.com

Estado del abstract

Estado del abstract: 
Accepted
Desarrollado por gcoop.