The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 20.0012 Thursday, 8 January 2009
From: Joseph Egert <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Monday, 5 Jan 2009 17:54:02 -0800 (PST)
Subject: ENA-MOOR-ED, 1960
The following excerpt is from TIME online by Amanda Ripley recalls
Desdemona's infatuation with her 'exotic' Moor:
(http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/08599,1729524-4,00.html):
Mrs. Barack H. Obama
Shortly before she moved to Hawaii, [Ann] saw her first foreign film.
Black Orpheus was an award-winning musical retelling of the myth of
Orpheus, a tale of doomed love. The movie was considered exotic because
it was filmed in Brazil, but it was written and directed by white
Frenchmen. The result was sentimental and, to some modern eyes,
patronizing. Years later Obama saw the film with his mother and thought
about walking out. But looking at her in the theater, he glimpsed her
16-year-old self. "I suddenly realized," he wrote in his memoir, Dreams
from My Father, "that the depiction of childlike blacks I was now seeing
on the screen ... was what my mother had carried with her to Hawaii all
those years before, a reflection of the simple fantasies that had been
forbidden to a white middle-class girl from Kansas, the promise of
another life, warm, sensual, exotic, different." [April 9, 2008]
Plus ca change...
Joe Egert
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