The study of art cinema has emerged as a richly discursive, but, at the same time, a deeply contested terrain in recent film scholarship. This article examines the discourse of art cinema in India through the prism of sound style and aesthetics. It analyses the sonic strategies deployed in the films of Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen and Mani Kaul, in order to identify the dominant stylistic impulses of sound in art cinema, ranging from Brechtian epic realism on one hand to Indian aesthetic theories on the other. Locating sound as a key element in the discourse of art cinema, the article surveys the different modes through which aesthetic philosophies were translated into formal strategies of sound recording, designing and mixing. Using previous scholarship on art cinema in India as the point of departure, this study combines theoretically informed textual analysis with new historical insights on Indian cinema.
Review of: Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space, Priya Jaikumar (2019)
Durham: Duke University Press, 416 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-47800-475-2, p/bk, $29.95
In this article, I unravel the use of tuberculosis as a metaphor in Ritwik Ghatak's Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-Capped Star), and locate it within the indices of loss Ghatak uses in the film to designate the tragic and brutal partition of the Bengal Presidency in 1947. Nita’s illness – which was both her tragedy and salvation – had to be a careful selection; it had to be semiotically proximate to the other meanings and metaphors imputed to Nita. To establish the salience of the use of tuberculosis, I underscore the link between the perception of tuberculosis and the ‘being’ of the protagonist (Nita) it sublimates. I further demonstrate that tuberculosis is the most apt disease, because the metaphors that the disease has been imbued with assimilate into the larger symbolic register that Ghatak uses in the film. I posit that Nita – ‘also’, and perhaps more acutely – suffers from the imperatives of tuberculosis – the characteristics associated with the disease in the popular imagination – rather than the mere pathological condition caused by the pathogen, mycobacterium tuberculosis.
The article explores how Shyam Benegal’s 1985 film Trikaal (Past, Present, Future) navigates the social and psychic map of postcolonial Indian memory to reveal a pattern of persistent dualities and unlikely convergences of time, space and subjectivities. Via the domestic cosmos of a fictional Goan family, the film delves into the transitional and largely neglected phase of Goa’s decolonization from the Portuguese Empire. While situating itself in this specific moment, the film also puts forth an alternative discourse of approaching national history and the boundaries of the self. This is achieved by rerouting memory away from the high street of conventional history, utilizing the critical prism of reflective nostalgia and allowing the shadows of marginality to spill over the entirety of the narrative stage. Ultimately, we encounter a dialectical fabric of national identity dominated by unsettling intersections of past and present, home and abroad, memory and amnesia, power and oppression, romance and horror.
Review of: Love, War, and Other Longings: Essays on Cinema in Pakistan, Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar And Asad Ali (2020)
Karachi: Oxford University Press, 275 pp.,
ISBN 978-0-19070-185-7, p/bk, 750
The contemporary Indian state is exemplified by contradictions. Its workings are marked by a simultaneous retreat and deepening of state power under neoliberalism as well as burgeoning governmentalities that both produce and police political dissent. Such framings of the state problematize received political wisdom on the relations between centre and margin, state and government, citizen and subject. Anthropological approaches to the state map out its complex organizational logics, which are further embedded in the exercise of power and violence. Drawing on such approaches, this article examines the 2012 Indian film Shanghai, directed by Dibakar Banerjee. Based on Greek author Vassilis Vassilikos’ 1966 novel Z, Shanghai represents the contemporary neoliberal Indian state’s workings in the fictitious periurban town of Bharatnagar, slated to become a world-class Special Economic Zone. However, when a left-wing activist opposing land acquisition is fatally injured in an ‘accident’, a state bureaucrat’s investigation unravels how the onward march of pragati (‘progress’) is undergirded by violence. Taking Shanghai as an example of ‘realist fiction’, I examine both representations and realities of the neoliberal Indian state using a thick and nuanced reading of the film’s narrative, cinematic details, context and characters, situating them in anthropological discussions on the state and its margins in contemporary India.
This article analyses Bhooter Bhabisyat, a Bengali political horror satire, as a counter-narrative to Bengali cinema’s monocultural bhodrolok branding. The article argues that Bhooter Bhabisyat is radical in its refusal to follow hegemonic homogenizing musical styles classified into genres such as folk, popular, traditional and modern, which tend to be ethnocentric and class based with serious value judgments about the superiority of certain musical forms over others. Instead, Bhooter Bhabisyat uses a variety of distinct Bengali musical traditions to problematize the historic role of capitalist media that work to homogenize and popularize the dominant culture of the ruling classes. The hybrid songs of the film disrupt a sense of homogeneous bhodrolok class position that Bengali cinema has historically sustained. Through the strategies of musical pastiche, Bhooter Bhabisyat offers a meta-historic narrative about Bengali cinema, which makes possible a critical investigation of the cultural discourses and historical narratives that are discursively embedded within the history of filmic production, circulation and consumption. If film histories are produced by repressing differences between social groups and constructing universal identification, then foregrounding film songs as decolonial storytelling methods that reemphasize local voices and subject matters can lead to an effort to read history from below.
The vulgar representation of time as a precise
and homogeneous continuum has […] diluted the
Marxist concept of history.
(Giorgio Agamben)
The history of all hitherto existing society is the
history of class struggles.
(Karl Marx)
Review of: Dark Fear, Eerie Cities: New Hindi Cinema In Neoliberal India, Sarunas Paunksnis (2019)
New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 172 pp.,
ISBN 978-0-19949-318-0, h/bk, $30
Unruly Cinema: History, Politics, and Bollywood, Rini Bhattacharya Mehta (2020)
Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 233 pp.,
ISBN 978-0-25208-499-7, p/bk, $25
