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The Postcolonial Self and the Other in Béla Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies

2017; De Gruyter Open; Volume: 14; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1515/ausfm-2017-0002

2066-7779

Lucian Țion,

Literature and Cultural Memory

Abstract This work sets off to offer a polemical response to postcolonialist theories advanced by Homi Bhabha in his seminal work The Location of Culture , particularly to Bhabha’s famous notions of ambivalence and mimicry purportedly used as methods of struggle against colonialism. Reading Béla Tarr’s film Werckmeister Harmonies ( Werckmeister harmóniák , 2000) as an allegory for the colonization of a former colonial agent in the guise of an ambiguously framed post-imperial Hungary now on the eve of Soviet invasion, I turn Bhabha’s notions on their heads, and thus de-stereotype the simplistic hierarchy that sees the colonial agent dominate the colonized subject in a top-down approach. To achieve this, I bring into play Kuan-Hsing Chen’s notion of deimperialization as well as the psychoanalysis of Octave Mannoni in order to show that rather than being a straightforward misreading of the Other by an uninformed Self, the relationship between colonized and colonizer appears more like a failed attempt at acquiring the most basic knowledge of the psychological functioning of the Self on both sides of the colonized/colonizer divide.