Rajini's Finger, Indexicality, and the Metapragmatics of Presence

2015

The aim of this project has been to explore the possibility of applying Phenomenology and Classical Indian Theories to cinema with the hope that their systematic application would generate new insights in a deeper understanding of cinema. This need has been felt in the context of the existing film discourse having reached a stage of stagnation, even a “crisis”, in recent times. The reason for this moribund state of contemporary film discourse has been analyzed in my thesis as due to the failure of the existing film theories to incorporate film audiences‟ ordinary experiences of cinema, viz. the romance, the thrills, and the emotions which motivate them to come to the cinema halls all over the world. The film theories have failed to acknowledge the importance of this phenomenon which is built on the audiences‟ embodied experiences of the world and their socio-cultural practices that have grown on top of them which together form, at the very basic level, what constitutes the audiences...

Film and Media Studies, Acta Univ. Sapientiae, Vol.24 (2023), 2023

The experience of the cinema of Ritwik Ghatak (1925-1976), one of the most unusual filmmakers from South Asia, raises a significant issue, of how ritual can be considered a potent medium to have complex intermedial projection into the thick mediality of cinema itself. It would be proposed that intermediality tends to provide a conceptual space to formally delineate the supposed identity of the medium and the process of mediation primarily in terms of the quality of experiential values. This separation would provide cues for the possibility of “intra-medial” complexity, fractures, and ruptures within an otherwise stability-claiming body of a medium, which would further complicate and populate the landscape of intermedial suturing itself. Referring to Gaudreault’s crucial question of whether there is a possibility of any primal thought/narrative in a state untouched by any kind of medium, it would be shown that – to reach the “screaming point” of his arrival at the self-searched form of “epic melodrama” in Meghe Dhaka Tara (Cloud-Capped Star, 1960), Ghatak decisively borrowed an artefact of a forgotten ritual, a fragment of a ritualistic song, to become the experiential core for the film. The recurrent refrain of the song, at times the abstracted melody from the song creates a space of uncanny in-between-ness, with respect to contrary positions of anthropological distance and gaze to a forgotten ritual and, on the other hand, imaginative yet guilt-ridden, painful projection of the secular self, being a part of that ritual itself. This sonic fragment in secular contexts in post-colonial modernity in Bengal, will be used to ask the questions – a) how narrative image representations gradually pave way for the possibility of the occurrence of archetypal image presentations in the unending arc of the idea of cinematic image in a perpetual process of “becoming”; and beyond obvious coordinates of subjectivity, from where the song germinates in the film in terms of experience; b) whether it indicates to the possibility of the existence of an unknowable metaphysical core for cinema, even beyond the formal reach of the maker/s and viewer/s? Keywords: intermediality, Ritwik Ghatak, uncanny, ritual and cinema.

Bioscope South Asian Screen Studies. June 2016

2008

De-Westernizing Visual and Communication Cultures: Perspectives from the Global South, 2020

The author argues that a Westernized approach has so far failed to offer a holistic image of Indian cinema. Hindi and Telugu cinemas together constitute the greater part of the Indian film industry. Since the dawn of the talkie era (1931), both these cinemas have reflected a pan-Indian culture largely drawn from an ancient Indian heritage, including fine arts. However, approaching Indian cinema through the Western theories of psychoanalysis and Marxism since 1980s has resulted in underrating of early Indian cinema and, further, overlooked the contributions of Indian classic cinema to world cinema. As a result, several awkward theories to interpret Indian cinemas have emerged. Murthy offers not only an overview of the lacunae in such theories, but also a de-Westernized approach as a holistic cultural model that subsumes both Indian semiotics and phenomenology. The chapter is predicated on the argument that negotiating the frames of Indian cinema from the perspectives of semiotics and phenomenology is a real challenge that calls for a rich knowledge of ancient Indian heritage, its culture and aesthetics. It thus argues that a de-Westernized approach to Indian Cinema is an ideal way to understand it in its entirety.

Indian cinematic traditions have always relied on eclectic ways of figuration that combine signs and affects of desire and abomination. That is, incarnations often emerge at critical interfaces between good/bad, Indian/western, self/other, virtue/vice, myth/reality, and so on. Such figures are products of discontinuous assembling processes that cut through dyadic arrangements and pass the same character/body/identity via different, often contradictory, moral economies and sign systems. These many-armed, complex modes of figuration carry a special tenacity in Indian cinema for many reasons, but perhaps most importantly because the template of classical realist narration usually has had limited authority over its proceedings. Perpetually caught between the home and the world, between elation and agony, such cinematic entities carry in them the diverse, contending energies of the overall assembling arena of Indian modernity itself. The essays in this volume consider the issue of figuration in the broadest sense, including formations that are supra-individual, animalistic, divine and machinic.

This article considers how 'item numbers,' song sequences that serve as vehicles for sexualized female performance in popular Indian cinema, are re-animated through embodied -danced and sung -performances outside the films themselves. I examine a single song sequence from a 2009 Tamil film and two kinds of re-animations of it: first, the song as conceived and sung by the original playback singer in performance outside the context of the film, and second, as performed by young women in TV shows and in live stage shows. These performances participate in complex projects of selffashioning that exceed the conventions by which female voices are given meaning within the Tamil culture industry.

2018

The thesis focuses on the dilemmas raised by self-reflexive filmmaking through the scrutiny of different metacinematic gestures. This thesis presents a definition of metacinematic gesture as a film segment that exhibits the mediality of cinema and opens up a discourse on its technical, linguistic and organisational implications. This definition and its attendant reflections result from a critical understanding of the notion of gesture for Giorgio Agamben and Walter Benjamin. Subsequently, I propose a grid of intelligibility of different categories for metacinematic gestures: Referential, Realist, Surrealist, Experimental, the Look into the Camera and Productionist. This classification contributes to filling the theoretical gaps within Film Studies literature about metacinema and narrows down the category that this research explores: the productionist. Productionist metafilms expand and reflect on the processual dimension of filmmaking to the extent that the frontstage of production might be said to coincide, or tend to coincide, with its backstage. It is proposed that productionist metafilms serve to reveal and construct a self-reflexive form of directorial subjectivity through the acknowledgement of some specific strategic choices operated on the set. But, the emergence of these subjectivities is mostly influenced by the material conditions of production, the budget, the film crew, the environmental conditions or the limits set by the screenplay. So, the main contribution of this research is to provide a new theorisation of self-reflexivity in films with particular focus on the productionist aspect of metacinema. The last point is explored through the analysis of ten selected productionist metafilms, by highlighting how their unpredictable occurrences are surfaced through a multi-faceted exposure of cinematic mediality. These films produce scenarios and visual articulations which are revelatory of otherwise invisible aspects of the filmmaking process. Finally, this thesis presents its analytical results about filmmaking as endowed with a distinctive degree of linguistic and technical experimentation, but also with precious information of how cinema observes itself as a form of organised work.

Italian Scholars on India General Editor: Raffaele Torella, 2022

New Review of Film and Television Studies, 2019

This article examines Thamizh Padam ('Tamil Film', dir. C. S. Amudhan), a 2010 spoof of the Tamil cinema of south India. While Thamizh Padam mocked near every aspect of mainstream Tamil cinema, its main target was the industry's 'mass heroes', those larger-than-life stars whose image blurs onscreen and offscreen. While recalling Bazin's discussion of the ontological identity of the photographic film image and its object, the auratic presence of the mass hero's image affords a populist political potency that runs counter to Bazin's liberal humanism and realist aesthetics. Drawing on analysis of Thamizh Padam and interviews with its makers, I show how Thamizh Padam attempted to undermine the ontology of the mass-hero's image, its mode of production, and political charge. In its place, Thamizh Padam advocated for a narrative representationalism guided by the director and his script/story. The article concludes by rethiking Bazin's discussion of the ontology of the film image, suggesting that it can be productively reframed by attention to the ontological politics of and for images.