Recently my wife and I watched the old musical film Carmen Jones, revived on TV. The original was made in 1954. Initially I thought that it was an interesting idea. If you are not familiar with it, the film attempts to retell the story of Bizet’s opera Carmen, written in 1875, setting it in the America of the ‘fifties. (The toreador, for example, is transmuted into a boxer.) It didn’t take long, however, for me to come to the belief that the concept was completely absurd.
I suppose that the motivating idea behind the project was the belief that passionate love is a universal experience, and this idea is clearly intended by the transfer of the story not only from nineteenth century Spain to twentieth century America, and to a black caste. The intention is certainly to be applauded, but for me at least this came to be obscured precisely by the authenticity of the American setting.
Almost as soon as I began to watch the film it struck me that the society in which the action was supposed to take place was completely segregated. I have absolutely no problem with the central figures being black. That is not the issue. A society in which there is almost complete “racial” segregation, however, confronted me as truly shocking. Of course I have to recognise that the diversity of contemporary Britain is a long way from being a society in which colour simply does not matter. I have never had experience, however, of a community in which there is segregation. The film begins in the mixed context of a military setting, but as soon as the action moved away from that very specific context the separateness of black and white became the dominant feature of the situation, contradicting starkly the universalistic intentions of the film’s creators.
Was the project simply a failure, in that case, and a perfectly silly idea in the first place? This is possibly the case, but there is another possibility that occurs to me, and I wonder if that was, in fact, in the minds of the film’s creators. Was the decision to locate the story within a completely segregated cultural context a deliberate device intended to make the point that even in a culture as alien as a segregated USA, the universal human responses and passions of the central characters are still to be found in all their original purity?
The question of the transferability of any artistic medium between different cultures is, of course, a general problem. There is a difference, however, between the possible incompleteness of the transfer of meaning between the two settings, and the possibility of a complete loss of meaning in that process. I’m still mulling over that one.
PS: We are leaving for a holiday tomorrow, and will be spending ten days in a cottage in Dorset. There is (as usual) a question over the availability and reliability of any wi-fi connection in such a rural location.