film history and experience of modernity, 1995 (original) (raw)
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This paper posits that the formula for India's popular cinema (a.k.a. ““Bollywood””——the Hollywood of Bombay) has been fundamentally contoured by the psychodynamics of orality, i.e., by the thought processes and personality structures that distinguish a non-writerly mindset and its narrative creations. Analyses of several Bollywood hits from the past halfcentury illustrate how.
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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...
To what extent is cinema, or any technology, an aggrandizing, autonomous force that demands the reorganization of the environment around it according to its own technological needs? In the US, the railway system demanded the alienation of land and the coordination of time as a condition of its technical operation. Air travel commanded an instant redefinition of the concept of property—particularly air rights over individual plots—to facilitate flying from one part of a country to another without trespass. Technology, in this sense, is a standardizing, overcoding force that erodes local difference according to its own technological needs. The dispositif of cinema, in this light, can be seen as such an overcoding. The architectonics and screening practices of cinema are remarkably familiar, often instantly recognizable whether we are looking at 1920s Iowa City, Ibadan, Sunderland, Lucknow or Chiang Mai. Despite massive cultural, political, and religious differences, the cinematic apparatus takes on a familiar shape and any attempt to analyze the emergence and history of technological media has to take this capacity of overcoding into account. The turn toward materialism in the recent critical thought, represented in such diverse domains as the archaeology of media, new materialisms, and actor-network theory, asserts the agentive, deter-minative power of technologies and rejects the idea that technologies and objects " are just there to be used as a white screen on to which society projects its cinema " (Latour, 1993, p. 53). On the other hand, to what extent is this overcoding technology vulnerable and porous to the environments it finds itself growing within? The version of technology presented in the opening paragraph is based on an assumption that the ontology of a machine is formed at its moment of invention, and that once formed, it is simply transported from place to place. This is, particularly, the case with media archaeology whose critical effort is focused on revealing the conditions of possibility from which media emerge rather than the ways in which those media, once existing in the world, continue to mutate and grow. A more infrastructural view of media places emphasis on standardization and extension. The invention, in the work of someone like Gilbert Simondon (1992), is a single phase in an ongoing process of individuation that will have multiple phases. Cinema, in this sense, comes to be. It is a porous instrument whose internal structures are in constant mutual exchange with a host of external forces—other technologies, modes of economic organization, political formations, legal regimes, religious disciplines, and so on.
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.