Caramel

Caramel director Nadine Labaki, with the film's poster.

Caramel, a Lebanese film by Nadine Labaki, follows an incredible group of Beirut women through a warm and convincing narrative. Three young women work in a salon in a mixed, middle-class neighborhood of Beirut, where their love lives take center stage. Having just read Hall’s lengthy exploration of theories of representation, it is helpful to look at Caramel through a more critical eye.

Constructionist theories claims that meaning is constructed through language; things don’t mean, rather, we construct meaning through our language system. The scene that I have chosen to look at through this lens is the scene where the three young women and their older friend, Jamal, an aging actress, are taking a cab to a dr.’s office. Nisrine, a Muslim woman about to get married, is withholding a secret from her fiancé: she is not a virgin. The cab ride scene, without sound, would seem vivacious and bubbly, like many other scenes in the film; the girls are laughing, smiling. However, through their conversation we learn that they are on their way to a dr. to perform a procedure that will “make her a virgin” again, a customary requirement for Muslim women before marriage.

Through a constructionist theory, we see that the material world (4 outgoing women in a taxicab) does not construct any meaning. The language system, the conversation they are having about what fake name to assign Nisrine in the dr.’s office, is what gives the scene meaning. Constructionists say the meaning is a cultural construction; the fact that the women need to come up with a fake name is entirely a cultural concept. In a society, particularly for Muslim Nisrine, where modesty and propriety are valued almost above all-else, the women may seem to be jovial; really they are dealing with an intensely controversial issue in Lebanese society: sexuality before marriage.

Nisrine asserts that she wants a French name (which Layale teases her about because she can’t speak French). Nisrine is darker-skinned than the other women, who are Christian, not Muslim. The cultural meaning behind these social cues are without meaning if we ignore the language system. The constructionist representation theory gives insight to these hidden layers, meaningless without a constructed language system.

Representation, Language, and Culture

Stuart Hall, author of Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, believes that “representation connects meaning and language to culture” (15). And while at first glance this statement may confuse or confound ones ideas of representation, language, and culture, Hall goes on to artfully explain, through theories, critiques, and individual thinkers’ opinions, how the processes of production and exchange between members of a culture are irrevocably linked to how these are represented.

Without visual evidence to the various theories Hall explores, his authors may lose themselves in the theoretical aspect. However, his article is laden with images, to which the reader is supposed to apply a particular understanding of representation, such as constructionist theory, which articulates that things themselves don’t mean, rather, we construct meaning around them. In other words, the material world doesn’t convey meaning, the language system does (Hall 24).

In Viola Shafik’s courageous film Planting of Girls, 1998, she explores the controversial topic of female circumcision, or female genital mutilation (FGM) in Egypt. In this film perhaps more than any other we have viewed in the class up until now, representation is crucial to understanding the director’s goal. And while viewers can gain background information on the topic (in the 1990s around 95% of Egyptian women experienced FGM) the framing of the film relates directly to Hall’s examination of representation.

http://aphaih.wordpress.com/2010/02/05/february-6-international-no-tolerance-day-to-female-genital-mutilation/

Just as Hall’s analysis of the famous Velazquez painting, Las Meninas, shows that the image is not a “true” reflection but rather an imitation of reality, so too is Planting of Girls constructed around not only what you can see, but also what you can’t. The framing of Planting of Girls is difficult to understand; while the film was funded partly by UNICEF, there is still some debate about the intended audience of the film. I believe the West is the primary audience, that Shafik is drawing attention to an issue that is seldom understood outside the region. Still, like the theories that Hall draws us through in his chapter on representation, Shafik does not make a clear statement about how her film is to be viewed. Both, I believe, are leaving the ultimate conclusion up to us.