Jodie Foster .. Does performance art become a salvation for human rupture?

Casablanca -

In the past few years, the name of the American film actress Jodie Foster (1962) has been established as one of the most prominent artistic faces that swept the world cinema.

Despite having a few cinematic filmography (list of films) - compared to French, American and Australian actresses - but it remained influential within the viewer's conscience and his biography in his relationship with the films he watched throughout his life.

The desire for renewal is a key factor in Foster's film career;

Because of her combination of acting, directing and production.

And if the actress's image is strong because it is the original, while directing and producing are just diaries of work, given what Jodie Foster has achieved as an actress inside and outside America.

Which made her beloved within Hollywood cinema and deeply respected in the hearts of many directors such as Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, David Fincher and other directors who made Jodie Foster cinematic glory on the big screen.

Cannes Golden Frond

The French Cannes Film Festival was not the first official body to honor Jodie Foster, but she was previously honored by many international bodies on the occasion of her receiving several awards, the most important of which is the Oscar as best actress in the movie “The Accused” by Jonathan Kaplan, which made her an international actress. She is loved by her fans in various cities of the world.

Despite Foster's absence in television films and series, her presence in her annual programs seems large compared to French actresses.

Thus, the award of the Golden Palm was not arbitrary, as it was related to the central character that the actress had become in the consciousness of the French viewer.

She is a strong intellectual mix that combines French and American and always looks at each other's cultures with the same responsibility and passion that she has for the culture of her country of origin.

There are many French films that made Foster cinematic glory as a child.

This helped her choose her films and directors, especially when it comes to films with important issues of concern to the global meeting.

This secretly contributed to the creation of her cinematic culture and made Jodie Foster affiliated with the French School in Los Angeles in her childhood, where she became fluent in French as if it were her original language, in addition to her great love for her culture, images, arts and imagination.

performance quality

But as far as Foster penetrated into the worlds of cinema, she remained far from American television, with its entertainment and consumption in its relationship to the visual text and its perception of art in general as a means of entertainment and a tool for obscuring the American reality and the horrors, dilemmas and cracks it witnessed since the eighties of the last twentieth century.

Thus, Foster's desire to move away seemed prominent from the beginning of her artistic career, as she does not work with excessive spontaneity within the seventh art, but rather chooses her films very carefully.

The evidence for this is the accumulation of distinguished films in which she was represented or contributed to the preparation, directing and production, all of which repudiate the stereotypical entertainment obsession, which deals with people’s stories and stories as if they were a visual carnival worth watching and enjoying.

This is with the knowledge that her films have political and social dimensions that strike the American reality, either in the form of an imagined biography that reads this cinematic reality and seeks to go beyond it.

Or in the form of a cinematic image condemning the American reality and its institutions, as is the case in her latest movie “The Mauritanian” in 2021 for the Scotsman as Art MacDonald, where Jodie Foster plays the role of a lawyer who works hard to help the detainee Mohamed Weld Slahi (Taher Rahim) in the midst of events September 11, 2001. The film narrates the diaries of a detainee in Guantanamo Bay and monitors the various forms of violence practiced against him over the course of 14 years of imprisonment.

The Mauritanian and the Golden Globes

For her role as a lawyer, which earned her a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress.

Foster plays a complex role, contrary to the nature of her other roles.

Especially since roles of this kind are mixed with cinematic and ideological, towards a more sensitive issue for US intelligence.

It makes the actor/actress first take a position on the character and form an overview of its political/ideological path before accepting the role.

Therefore, Foster looks at us in the character of "Nancy" with a real role stemming from the heart of the body, where the features are more consistent with the cinematic image.

But cinematically, the work remains modest at the level of processing and image sculpting.

Jodie Foster as attorney Nancy Hollander in the movie "The Mauritanian" (communication sites)

Despite director Kevin MacDonald's keenness to be impartial, the film's images and dialogues quickly confirm the amount of tacit criticism that the image stores and directed mainly at the US government, which is working to arrest a person on charges of "terrorism" in the absence of any conclusive evidence confirming his relationship to the events.

But the hidden reason that makes the "Mauritanian" suffer from artistic fragility is the predominance of the text as a tale and its ability to devour all the artistic and aesthetic details of the film.

Because the story (the author) controls the image and makes it dependent on its dynamism, without the image (the director) becoming independent in its work, patterns and aesthetics.

psychological load

As for other films with a psychological tendency, they show how keen Jodie Foster is to play complex roles and more closely aligned with the human condition and his ability to live, freedom and self-determination.

We also find this in David Fincher's Panic Room, where the film is not based on his story, the ingenuity of its writing, or the poetic portrayal of it, but is based only on a character working to protect her daughter from a criminal trying to kill her.

As Venture's camera becomes more connected to Foster, it conveys those feelings and emotions that grip one in the moment of the chase.

In this film, Foster's queens stand out in the performance and her ability to formulate a balanced personality that mixes caution and fear.

This is the most difficult thing that the actor faces, as he is forced to perform physical positions close to each other, without going beyond the limits of others, in order to maintain the dimensions of the structural character within the scene and not create any dissonance in relation to the scale of the scenes and the images before it.

Many critics consider "The Silence of the Lambs" to be Jodie Foster's most important movie role.

Where a young female detective in the US Federal Bureau of Investigation leads a search into the psyche of a murderer.

Thus, she finds herself in the midst of another, more dangerous character named "Hannibal Lecter" (Anthony Hopkins), also famous for murder, violence and cannibalism, until he leads her to the first killer.

But before that, she must respect his views and ask for his sympathy in order to simplify in her hands his experiences with patients and their obsessions.

The film is also originally a novel of the same title by Thomas Harris.

But although the film won more than 4 Oscars and was ranked among the 100 best films in the history of world cinema, Foster's performance strength in this film remains modest, not for poor performance, but because the film is confused at the level of its writing, because its aesthetics are based on something One;

It is "thrill".

Suspense was never an artistic means by which the director begged to create a different cinematic image, and even for director Alfred Hitchcock, suspense is one of the tools of watching.

As for “The Silence of the Lambs,” the suspense takes on a complete dimension and devours the script and the actor’s performance, making them mere things outside the cinematic work. This is due to the strong influence that the concept of suspense exerts on the human imagination at the moment of viewing.