Abstract

In this installment of our continuing series of of conversations with authors of new books on cities and urban culture, film scholar Sushmita Banerji interviews Priya Jaikumar on her most recent book Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space (Duke University Press, 2019). Dr. Jaikumar is a Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California and the author of Cinema at the End of Empire: A Politics of Transition in Britain and India (Duke University Press, 2006).

Abstract

Cinema Makes it Safe: Akaler Sandhane and the Problem of Looking This paper shall consider the trifecta of Bengali film directors Satyajit Ray (1921-1992), Mrinal Sen (1923-2018), and Ritwik Ghatak (1925-1976) to map a period in Indian film history when a political cinema was funded, at least in part, by the Indian government. The three directors were a provocative part of the Indian New Wave from the 1950s to the 1970s. They map two distinct definitions of “good political cinema” – from an aesthetically sophisticated cinema to a radical political text – that the state attempted to fund and administer in an attempt to develop cinema as an art form rather than as mass entertainment. In particular this paper shall consider Akaler Shandhaney (In Search of Famine, Sen, 1980) to argue that the film is unique in naming a pernicious relationship of inter-dependence between filmmaking, political speech, and the abject sub-altern. This self-reflexivity allows Sen to explore the exploitative nature of filmmaking and the middle class intellectual. Read in conjunction with Ashani Sanket (Distant Thunder, Ray 1973) and Jukti, Takko Aar Galpo (Reason, Story and Debate, Ghatak, 1977), Akaler Shandhaney calls into question filmmaking and funding practices, revealing the imbrication of national, social and cultural institutions in a complex interplay of aesthetic, ideological, and bureaucratic forces engaged in making “political” cinema possible. This paper argues that Sen uses this moment of self-reflexivity to speak a truth to the necessarily ambivalent and murky business of film making and viewing.

Abstract

Out of Censors: Netflix Original India and the Making of a New Normal This paper shall look three popular Netflix Original India productions Sacred Games (eriesS co-directed by Vikramaditya Motwane, Anurag Kashyap, 2018), Lust Stories (Anthology film co-directed by Anurag Kashyap, Dibakar Banerjee, Karan Johar, Zoya Akhtar, 2018) and Ghoul (Series directed by Patrick Graham, 2018). Each of the directors involved in these three productions have had run-ins with legal and extra-legal forms of censorship and moral policing in directing, producing, and marketing Hindi popular films. The relocation of cinema away from public screenings to the viewership afforded by Netflix has reterritorialized a new form of spectatorship. This allows these filmmakers to tell stories otherwise deemed too risky/risqué and attempt to re/claim a language of social and political critique. This paper shall consider the various strategies used by these immensely popular directors to argue that the relative freedom afforded by a global media-service provider unfettered by Indian legal regulation is mitigated by a language of co-optation. The three productions deal with police corruption, women’s sexuality, and Islamophobia and fascism respectively. All productions circulate in and acknowledge new globalities, changed sexual and power relations of image cultures and the traction afforded to a deterritorialized screening space. Yet these productions are bound by the exigencies of protecting and nurturing a particularly middle-class urban diasporic spectator from the vicissitudes of right-wing backlash on the one hand and an uncomfortable politics on the other.