Spectacles of Difference: Exotic Cinema by Daniela Berghahn

It is rarely a compliment to be described as “exotic.” Exoticism is rarely a question of self-identification. To be exotic implies isolation from the majority, a remarkable or spectacular difference from the norm that makes ones’ self simultaneously desirable and monstrous. Due to its associations with imperialism and colonial exploitation, the “exotic” carries with it problematic associations in contemporary scholarship, drawing substantial questions on its ethics and practical usefulness. For these reasons, Daniela Berghahn’s recent book Exotic Cinema: Encounters with Cultural Difference in Contemporary Transnational Film provokes complicated feelings through its elucidation of the exotic gaze in contemporary transnational cinema. Berghahn argues that the principles of exoticism persist in contemporary global screen culture and explores how these discourses frame and rearranges expressions of cultural Otherness on screen, and that in the process, these discourses de-subjectify the exoticised Other in favour of the (predominantly white) majority. Yet as with many other academic works by white researchers working within the hegemonic institutions of Western Universities that set out to decolonise their disciplines, the question remains how these goals can be achieved while maintaining their own status and authority as the author. Is it possible to decolonise and de-Westernize the screen studies canon while still maintaining the pre-eminence of Western subjectivities at its centre? This tension sits at the heart of Exotic Cinema but is never fully recognised or resolved, complicating the book’s decolonial credentials.

In the book’s introduction, Berghahn outlines its three key contributions to the field: first, focussing on world cinema to de-Westernize the canon; second, to “reassess Western values and epistemes” that undergird contemporary film discourse, and; third, to interrogate the “regimes of visuality, visuality, such as the imperial, the ethnographic and the exotic gaze, which have colonised our minds and our ways of looking” (p. 1). She does this through simultaneously recuperating and critiquing the concept of exoticism and its presence in contemporary screen culture, identifying both its pleasures and regressive politics. Exoticism, by Berghahn’s definition, encompasses “a particular discursive framework that structures such encounters and that transforms the objective fact of cultural difference into the imaginative construction of the exotic Other” (p.1), which she conceptualises in three forms: “as a discursive construction of cultural difference; as an aesthetic mode of visual alterity; and as a critical framework that is pertinent to the analysis of cinema in a globalised world” (p. 4). As the world has become increasingly networked and encounters with cultural difference become more common, modern subjects – particularly those in the West – use discourses of exoticism to structure – and aestheticize – their experiences of difference.

In Chapter One, Berghahn reviews the Western intellectual history of exoticism and its relationship with colonisation. Tracing its etymological roots to sixteenth century England and the “Age of Discovery,” she outlines how it was first used to denote that which was “alien, introduced from abroad, not indigenous,” but eventually grew to encompass “a stimulating or exciting difference, something with which the domestic could be (safely) spiced” (p.19). Reading Edward Said, Berghahn argues that exoticism diverges from orientalism through its relationship with power: “Orientalism is about the power to dominate whereas exoticism is about the pleasure of difference” (p.26, my emphasis). Pleasure, therefore, becomes a recurrent theme throughout the book, including its treatment of ideology. Exotic spectacles, she writes: 

allow transnational audiences to domesticate the foreign by integrating it into the established aesthetic paradigm of exoticism, which has been made subservient to shifting ideological objectives over the centuries. Since exoticism turns cultural difference into spectacle it is regularly censured because the visual pleasure that spectacle affords is regarded as something like an opiate that anaesthetises the spectator’s critical faculties, thereby precluding intellectual interrogation and critical distance (p.44).

This association between spectacle and uncritical consumption feeds into theories of passive film spectatorship that have been largely questioned over recent decades, and are likely worth further consideration. Screen Studies scholars have largely established that films are rarely considered passively or uncritically, and so this discourse felt slightly out of date.

Chapter Two, “Ethnographic Salvage and Cosmopolitan Exoticism,” is the source of my primary concerns with the book. The author analyses four works “Indigenous” cinema – Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (Zacharias Kunuk, 2001), Ten Canoes (Rolf de Heer & Peter Djigirr, 2006), El abrazo de la serpiente (Embrace the Serpent, Ciro Guerra, 2015), and Tanna (Bentley Dean & Martin Butler, 2015) – and considers their positioning within the global film market. The recent popularisation of Indigenous cinema, she argues, “partly arises from the cultural cachet that authenticity has accrued in contemporary Western societies,” in which “Pronouncing something as authentic validates contemporary consumption practices, ranging from locally harvested food over tourism and arts and crafts” (p. 62). When consumed by what she terms “majority culture” (p. 60) audiences, these works construct an image of autochthonous authenticity missing in contemporary global capitalism, noting that “ethnographic documentaries about Indigenous peoples are widely perceived as authentic, regardless of authorship” (p. 64). She highlights how these films deply an “ethnographic performance style and one dimensional characters” that provokes “a stance of detached observation rather than emotional identification” (p. 73).

In my view, this discussion of Indigenous cinema is flawed in several key respects. First, and in my view most significantly, is that the author’s definition of Indigenous cinema centralises colonial spectators rather than Indigenous producers themselves. She cites Barry Barclay’s concept of Fourth Cinema to describe the “growing visibility and critical acclaim of Indigenous cinema” (p. 59), but does not substantially engage with the details of his definition. Barclay’s Fourth Cinema is not distinguished from the mainstream commercial “First Cinema” by its Indigenous subject matter, but rather by its subjectivity: in Mutiny on the Bounty (Lewis Milestone, 1962), Barclay’s example of First Cinema, the camera is positioned on the ship’s deck and captures the perspective of the ship’s crew as the white man meets the native princess; in his Fourth Cinema, the camera is positioned ashore, held by the Indigenous peoples themselves.¹ This emphasis on Indigenous subjectivity is absent in this chapter, and the author instead centralising the spectatorial habits of (settler audiences). In describing these films, the author writes that “It is not their supposedly universal themes that makes these films intriguing but the detailed insights they give into radically different cultures” (p. 74). The focus here is on detached cosmopolitan spectacles of difference rather than Indigenous expressions of cultural sovereignty or control over their own images. This failure to centralise – or even properly acknowledge the possibility of – Indigenous subjectivity and spectatorship greatly reduces the usefulness of this chapter in a classroom or research context.

Chapter Three shifts from Indigenous cinema to discuss the relationship between the “Tourist Gaze” (originally theorised by sociologist John Urry) and the “Exotic Gaze” proposed by the author.² By analysing Eat Pray Love (Ryan Murphy, 2010), The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (John Madden, 2011) and Hector and the Search for Happiness (Peter Chelsom, 2014), Berghahn analyses how these films play into colonial stereotypes and appeal to Western fantasies of colonial cultural supremacy. The argument here develops some interesting and effective points. Through the spectacular use of colour and performance, these films transform “cultural different into beautiful images [in order to] contain the optional threat of alterity” (p. 113), reinforcing white egocentric consumption and displacing colonial disappointment at the loss of empire. While these arguments are valid and interesting and the author does an excellent job of tracing the historical roots of exotic tourism, the chapter plays into a similar problem as Chapter Two by centralising Western intellectual histories while understating the intellectual histories of colonised peoples themselves. She writes:

Of course, colonialism entailed a two-way exchange insofar as colonised subjects in India and in other colonies developed an imaginary of Europe that was based on the literature, art and other cultural influences to which they were exposed in the colonial contact zone. But it remains questionable whether the scenic snapshots of European tourist attractions stand in this discursive tradition and actually reverse the exotic gaze. It seems to me (even though my interpretation may be compromised by one of the blind spots that come with my European heritage) that a reversal of the exotic gaze in Bollywood cinema which constructs Europe as exotic is irreconcilable with exoticism’s discursive history and its inherent logic of centre and periphery. 

 This refusal to acknowledge non-Western cultural manifestations of exoticism is disappointing, as it closes off a vast reservoir of interesting discussions. How, for example, do Indian spectators exoticize cultural differences with the West? How do Japanese filmmakers frame the “unfamiliar” landscapes of Western spaces in their own work? Or, even more interestingly, how do non-Western or postcolonial cultures imagine one another laterally without the intervention of a (Western) imperial centre? These would have been fascinating discussions, but were disappointingly absent in the argument here.

My misgivings, however, gaze way in Chapter  Four – “‘The Past is a Foreign Country’: Nostalgia and Exoticism” – which provides extremely fertile and interesting discussion. Through analysis of Viceroy’s House (Gurinder Chadha, 2017), Indochine (Régis Wargnier, 1992), and Fa yeung nin wa (In The Mood for Love, Wong Kar-wai, 2000), considers how these filmmakers navigate related issues of exoticism and nostalgia while acknowledging the richness and complexity of non-Western subjectivity. In describing the relationship between the two concepts, Berghahn writes that “exoticism constructs a desired elsewhere, which is nostalgically imagined as geographically and/or temporally remote,” stating that “the spatial trajectory of nostalgia is necessarily homeward bound. […] Exoticism, by contrast, is outward bound” (p. 142-3). Through tight textual analysis and some excellent theoretical discussion, this chapter presents some very interesting (but at times conventional) arguments that make it a useful prescribed text for University coursework units.

Chapter Five, “Exotic Appetites,” improves on the earlier chapters but returns to many of the same assumptions of Western subjectivity and spectatorship. There are elements of cultural essentialism (such as discussion of Taoism and its relationship with food) that could have been elaborated further, but overall, the argument holds together reasonably effectively.

In the absence of a concluding chapter, it is somewhat difficult to determine exactly what the author’s conclusion is on exotic cinema. Much of the argument centres on identifying the cultural persistence of “the exotic” in contemporary transnational cinema and then elaborating on the different ways that exoticism is theorised and applied, but I was not left with a clear sense of whether these concepts were ethical, useful or appropriate. Instead, its argument reads as an exploration of how a particular form of Western spectatorial culture interacts with films from the Global South, and how these cultural tendencies simultaneously marginalise, spectacularise and fetishise expressions of cultural difference. The book has some substantial merits. Its discussion of nostalgia is strong, and its reflection on the tendency of Western audiences and “world cinema” discourses to disempower cultural producers in the Global South is vitally important. However, given its limitations and the structural problem of its positionality, readers should be careful with how it is applied and prescribed in academic contexts.

Daniela Berghahn, Exotic Cinema: Encounters with Cultural Difference in Contemporary Transnational Film (Edinburgh University Press, 2025).