THE IMAGE OF THE OTHER IN CONTEMPORARY CINEMA

images of normality and abnormality

Abstract

A great amount of films can be brought up to question now-a- ays dilemmas around the other’s care. Cinema rises and presents itself to us as a kind of ethics: because it is about seeing, feeling, listening, understanding, thinking and allows series of substantial gazes that also suggest, produce, define, determine, blur, invent, high light, label and limit a set of images and discourses about otherness and relations of otherness. The challenge over the “other’s care” supposes deconstruction of pre-determined and pre-fixed image of the other, of the so called knowledge about the other, of those rational and technical dispositive that describe and label the other. We wish to point out the distinction between “otherness” and “relations of otherness”: one thing turns the other into a simple theme; other thing is to individualize into a subject specific identity marks; and another very different thing is to understand that nothing is, for and in itself, otherwise in relation with something, with somebody. There is no normality. There are only views that normalize everything. There are abnormal ones that resist into believing.