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Borat: Putting the Id Back in Identity Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Nancy Condee
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Extract

This forum has attracted six richly varied responses to Larry Charles's film Borat. That Slavic Review would bring together, among others, a political scientist, an anthropologist, a historian, and two ethnographers (if I discern their fields correctly) to discuss a Hollywood film attests both to the journal's vitality and to the film's skill in marshalling interesting questions. In light of the range of issues raised here, my comments attempt, with inconsistent success, to restrict themselves to the questions broached in the preceding essays, rather than supplying an altogether new line of argument.

Type
Borat: Selves and Others
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 67 , Issue 1 , Spring 2008 , pp. 84 - 87
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2008

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References

1. Attributed to Rob Reiner in interviews about his 1984 mockumentary This is Spinal Tap, earlier de facto mockumentaries, such as the 1957 “Swiss Spaghetti Harvest,” were already well known. For articles, reviews, and a list of major mockumentaries, see the University of California, Berkeley, site at http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/iriockumentaries. html (last consulted 1 November 2007). The genre was late to develop in Russian cinema for reasons that need no belaboring, but an excellent, recent Russian example is Aleksei Fedorchenko's 2005 mockumentary Pervye na tune (First on the moon), which won the 2005 Horizons Documentary Award at the Venice International Film Festival and the 2005 Russian Federation Guild of Film Scholars and Critics Award at the Kinotavr Open Russian Film Festival.

2. In fact, Borat's native Kazakh village is the fictional Kuzcek.

3. See, for example, the Motion Picture Association (MPA) web site at http://www. mpaa.org/AboutUs.asp (last consulted 1 November 2007): “Since its early days, the MPA, often referred to now as ‘a little State Department,’ has expanded to cover a wide range of foreign activities falling in the diplomatic, economic, and political arenas. The MPA conducts these activities from its headquarters in Washington, D.C. and from offices in Los Angeles, California; Brussels; Sao Paulo; Singapore; and Toronto.“

4. See the daily and summary returns at Box Office Mojo, an international online reporting service at http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?page=daily&id=borat.htm (last consulted 1 November 2007) andhttp://www.boxofncemojo.com/rnovies/?id=borat. htm (last consulted 1 November 2007).

5. Quoting Laura Bly, “Finding the Real Kazakhstan,” USA Today, 17 November 2006.