Doing some general work on
Sokout/
The Silence (1998) today, and disovered that the actor who plays the boy Khorshid was actually a girl. I absolutely
hate it when that happens!
I've kept the film page - on the ground that Tahmineh Normatova plays a boy so very well - but deleted the 'actor' profile from the database (not that it contained any information anyway). I've added a note to the film profile page so that anyone visiting it in future will know that the performer is female.
Another example of the same (though no correction to the database needed on this occasion), is
Golemata voda/
The Great Water (2004) - the boy Isak is played by a girl, Maja Stankovska.
Here's a question which I just throw out for discussion: does it
matter when a director casts a girl as a boy? My instinct is to say that it does on the ground that how we
perceive people is not just a matter of straightforward visual appearance but of what we
know they are. If a girl is cast as a boy (or vice versa) I think we feel deceived (do we not?).
It's like Wittgenstein's duck-rabbit example (a drawing which can be seen as either a duck or a rabbit). We can see the drawing
as either one thing or another (but not both at the same time), but the actual visual pattern we see (the pattern of lines, the impression on our retinas) remains the same in both cases. This shows that
perception is not the same as
sensation - perception is not just the passive taking-in of a visual appearance but involves seeing something
as something.
Thus a girl can be made to have a visual appearance indistinguishable to that of a boy (as Tahmineh Normatova in
The Silence), and yet we
perceive her differently if we
know she is a girl. Hence, we feel as though the director has tried to deceive us.
duck-rabbit:
(You need to Login or Register to view media files and links) girl-boy [Tahmineh Normatova in
The Silence]:
(You need to Login or Register to view media files and links)