Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.15176/vol53no201
“I Think I Taw a Puddy Tat”: Reverse Faces of the Balkans and Popular Culture
Tomislav Oroz
orcid.org/0000-0002-1645-7254
; Odjel za etnologiju i antropologiju, Sveučilište u Zadru
Abstract
This paper is an attempt to re-think various representations of the Balkans through the analysis of the cat-woman figure in various aspects of popular culture: from Val Lewton's and Jacques Tourneur's film Cat People, to diverse artistic expressions by artists from the Balkans. The film Cat People from 1942 presents an often stigmatized, obscure image of the Balkans, unlike artistic expressions several decades later that experiment with ethnocentric notions of the Balkans. Ontological ambivalence evoked by the character of Irena Dubrovna, the cat-woman offers a place for the renegotiation of spatial and temporal alterity of the Balkans by analyzing its gender, political and class aspects.
Keywords
the Balkans, Cat People, Val Lewton, balkanistic discourses, film, popular culture
Hrčak ID:
170716
URI
Publication date:
16.12.2016.
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