《中国梵高》:关于中西电影及文化中 面容表现的跨文化遗产的假设

在中国与西方的文化交流中,对于彼此美学传统中的非物质文化遗产的关注和借鉴是值得讨论的问 题。在这一过程中,来自中西方的价值观、文化理念、艺术符号不断相遇、碰撞、交流和融合,从而提升了世界文化 遗产的整体价值和意义。纪录片《中国梵高》选取了独特的题材和视角去呈现文化遗产的流动性,以及作为原动力 激发创新创作的神奇过程。在空间距离遥远的不同文化之间,通过某种特定途径对非物质文化遗产的符号共享, 中西方的艺术创作实现了某种共同的跨越时空的“诗意”,意义在差异中产生,同时又获得共鸣,激发新的开创。[关键词]跨文化遗产;非物质文化遗产;想象;艺术符号;电影研究 English abstract: The concept of cultural heritage is rather vague and has undergone numerous modifications over time (cfr. Borelli and Lenzerini 2012). Nevertheless there is a tendency nowadays to identify at the same time a Tangible Cultural Heritage, which refers to all those physical artefacts that have to be conserved in that they are “containers” of the culture from which they originate, and an Intangible Cultural Heritage, understood as a symbolic set of semiotic and aesthetic practices that are equally important for defining a society's identity. Both these definitions, at bottom complementary (an ancient temple is a tangible cultural heritage precisely because of its intangible characteristics: its architecture, spiritual and historical value, etc), are often understood as cultural heritage in a strictly geographical, and sometimes completely nationalistic, sense. While it may be true that the Colosseum is a material indicator of Italy's cultural heritage, as the Great Wall is of China's, do we still feel, in the current era of globalization, that we can consider such works to be cultural goods or properties which belong exclusively to the territories that produced them? The territories are certainly responsible for protecting these works, a duty which China has been taking increasingly to heart (Xiaochun 2016). But do they not perhaps belong to humanity as a whole? Unesco's internet site, indeed, speaks of “World Heritage”, including material, immaterial and even natural assets like mountain or maritime locations of particular merit. What I would like to sustain in this paper, therefore, is that it is nowadays more than ever necessary on the one hand, to nurture the concept and value of Cultural Heritage as an academic and social practice that is important for the preservation of the most precious material or immaterial objects produced by humanity and, on the other, to ask ourselves instead to what extent these assets are not increasingly fruit of a very old, and today more and more evident, cultural exchange. In the West, for example, an artistic tradition known as Chinoiserie (cfr. Impey 1977) has been a consolidated artistic practice since the XVIII Century, founded precisely on the appropriation of styles, themes and objects of Chinese origin, as shown by François Boucher's Chinese Garden, the Palazzina cinese in Palermo, the Medici Porcelain Bottle housed in the Louvre in Paris, and so on. It is evident that these works, produced in certain historical periods in the West, are a Western cultural heritage, but it is equally clear that in the end they are to some respects also a Chinese cultural heritage, and that this constant cultural flow is valid to the present day (cfr. Carter 2017). A particularly relevant case in this sense is that of cinema, which I will analyse focusing primarily on the representation of faces. The film China's Van Goghs (中国梵高), directed in 2016 by Yu Haibo and Kiki Tianqi Yu, shows us how in Dafen, a city in Shenzhen, the reproduction of Van Gogh oil paintings for sale all over the world has been a widespread activity that has provided work for thousands of people for decades, and how the Dutch artist's works are everybody's heritage, each of us being free to interpret them according to our own interpretative outlook and cultural codes.