Epic Cinema Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

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... more

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.