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diogenes
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Those sneaky filmmakers...
21. May 2018 at 11:47
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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:

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girl-boy [Tahmineh Normatova in The Silence]:

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« Last Edit: 21. May 2018 at 14:45 by diogenes »  
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Cinefan
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Re: Those sneaky filmmakers...
Reply #1 - 25. May 2018 at 21:39
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Nothing worse than finding out that a supposedly boy character has been played by a girl. Or even where a girl or woman has done the voice over to a boy cartoon character. This was always the problem with theatre productions of 'Peter Pan' where a woman traditionally took the part. What about the blasphemous heresy of casting girls in a 'Lord of the Flies' film? I hope William Golding comes back and haunts the film makers.
  
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