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Mediatheque
Ming Wong 黃漢明
Angst Essen/Eat Fear 吞噬恐懼
2008
This video is an abridged restaging of German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1974 Angst essen Seele auf (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul). Set in post–Second World War Munich, Fassbinder’s film deals with the relationship between Emmi, a sixty-year-old German woman, and Ali, a younger Moroccan immigrant, and the hostility they face towards their marriage from family and friends. Ming Wong stands in for all the characters, donning wigs and costumes, darkening his skin, and adopting various postures and behaviours. The film was edited so that Wong appears on-screen as multiple characters at the same time. As a Singaporean of Chinese descent speaking accented German, Wong performs as people he clearly is not. He made this work shortly after moving to Berlin, and it slyly incorporates elements of his own experience as a recent arrival in Germany. While occasionally comic, the work offers a critical view of representations of identity in society and in the history of cinema. In many of his works, Wong deliberately ‘miscasts’ himself in the re-enactment of iconic twentieth-century films, to explore how concepts of gender, race, and the self are constructed through moving image and performance.
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